The great thing about HD DVD is that you DON'T need any 'special presser'.
HD DVD is fully backwards compatible with standard DVD production lines. The same production line can produce HD DVD and SD DVD. Bluray cannot do this.
Also worth noting that MSRP is not the same this as true cost. HD DVDs are hardly more expensive to produce than SD DVDs. Plus, most HD DVDs (and BDs) are selling for far less than MSRP regardless.
Looking at MSRP where HD DVD is $40 and SD DVD is $20 is a bit misleading when you can find HD DVDs everywhere for $24 and SD DVDs for $15. The true cost differential is much less than the MSRPs portray.
Granted, prices haven't got down to the average bargain DVD prices, and the MSRP is quite a bit higher, but it shouldn't be long as HD DVD can be fabbed using current DVD production lines.
Well mainly because they'd have to pay the license to the DVD forum, while HD DVD is the DVD forums official spec, and it includes DVD back compatibility as part of it, so there is no extra license costs for the HD DVD side.
Also it is entirely possible that DVD forum could just refuse to license to their competitor, meaning no DVD compatibility for sony/BDA. Although I doubt DVD forum would turn down that extra revenue (especially when many of the companies in the DVD forum are also in the BDA), or if it would be legal under antitrust type laws, but just speculating.
But it really is a Sony product, given that the whole purpose behind it was that Sony saw the royalty money Toshiba was making from DVD, and how Sony's royalties from CD were about to run out due to patent expiration, and they wanted to get in on the fun.
Toshiba and the DVD forum wouldn't let them load up the next gen DVD spec with all of their patents, so they basically took their ball and went home, made their own spec with as much of their patents as possible in it, with no regard to the quality and feability of the final product.
The fact that Sony got many other CEs to come with them only speaks to the fact that BD was touted as a higher end, higher quality, more expensive = higher profit margin product.
The fact that Sony got more studio support only speaks to the fact that they loaded even more needless layers of copy protection onto it. More things to patent and get royalties from!
No, the whole reason Bluray exists is because of Sony's greed, so it will always be a Sony product in my eyes. Before the launches of BD and HD DVD, I wasn't sure if it was Sony or Toshiba that was being greedy in the format wars, but after seeing the products, it is clear that HD DVD is the better, more consumer friendly, and just plain cheaper product, so I'm pretty sure the greed was primarily on Sony(and friends)'s side.
They are not artificially raising prices though, it is Sony that is artificially keeping prices low.
Demand at the MSRP is much much higher than the supply, which presents a profit opportunity for people to buy at the low MSRP and sell at the retail price.
Without these 'gougers' many people would simply not be able to get a PS3, as they would all be bought up by store employees and the rest of the first-come crowd.
The resellers ensure that there will be a PS3 available at some price for anyone who can afford it. Would you rather not be able to get one at all because you were number 6 on the list and the store only got 5 units?
Excuse me if I have little sympathy with the 'consumers' who do have the choice of waiting a couple months and getting one at MSRP. When dealing with high demand product launches, some people are going to be left out and not be able to get the product. The question is how you decide who gets it though, market price or first-come/first-serve luck of the draw waiting list type rationing. Maybe the current situation is the best option, a mix between the two, if you are quick and dedicated enough you can get it for MSRP at launch, or if you are rich enough you can pay the market price. Or you can do what the sane 95% do, wait until they are readily available at MSRP.
Dumping is when you sell your product at a lower price in just a certain country or region. As long as you sell your product at a roughly equivalent price everywhere, it's not dumping, and there are no laws against selling at a loss.
Selling at a loss is a standard procedure in the videogame market, all three companies do it to some degree, though nintendo is moving further and further away from the loss leader strategy.
Sony probably lost even more than MS on hardware (in total, not per unit) during the last generation, but because they had the most successful software lineup, they were able to recoup the losses. MS planned to, but the royalties structure didn't enable them to lower costs as much as they had planned because they didn't own the IP on the hardware, so they came up $4 billion short.
For the x360, MS is losing less money per unit and because the IP sturcture on the hardware is different, MS plans to be able to keep up with the price drops without losing more money. Sony will end up taking a massive bath on hardware this generation, even more than MS did last gen.
..says that the HD DVD players are selling just as fast as DVD was in the same point in it's life. Which is impressive to me, as DVD had no competition, and you didn't need a special TV to use it, and it didn't have to deal with massive component shortages iirc.
Reports of HD DVD players selling out as shipments as soon as they come in are common.
Notice how the article has no hard numbers, just one guy from one specialty store in San Antonio saying sales were disappointing. That is hardly conclusive evidence of anything.
HD formats will likely be a niche product for a while, but this article is pure BS and proves nothing. In fact it kind of smells like BD FUD to slow the momentum of HD DVD.
There ARE HD DVD combo discs which are backwards compatible. They have HD on one side/layer, and SD on the other, and the SD part plays in any dvd player.
These discs are more expensive to produce than standard HD DVDs, so there are only a few of them as of now.
BD cannot do this kind of backwards compatibility, due to the different physical structure of the disc.
Here is the list of the currently available combo discs:
WoW has possibly the easiest levelling of any MMORPG there is. The only challenge to levelling in WoW is avoiding all the bored level 60 gankers. Roll on a PVE server, and there is absolutely no challenge at all.
The XP curve in Wow is very linear, as opposed to other games, where the XP to level is on an exponential curve.
You should play anarchy online if you think WoW levelling is 'epic'. AO has 250 levels basically, on a very steep exponential curve. Basically you go from needing 1500 xp to get the first level to 75 million xp to get the 200th. The shadowlands expansion made the first 200 levels much easier, but if you do those first 200 levels on RK (like I and everyone who got there before SL came out) it takes forever. Don't even make me mention AXP, which you can only get from one type of monster, which are on timers so you can only fight them once ever few hours. Getting to alien level 30 is about the biggest grind I've ever seen in any game.
WoW and AO are like total opposite games. WoW is a casual, story based, almost single player type of game until 60 when it turns into raid grind from hell, while AO makes no bones about being a grindfest from the beginning.
It's wierd how I spent years grinding my way through AO just fine, but when I got to 60 in WoW the grinding turned me off immediately. I think it's cause the grinding in wow seems so pointless, you don't get anything from it really, just better gear. It's boring to the max. In AO you get all kind of new skills and fun stuff with every level, and you can buy gear that is competitive with any raid based gear there is fot the most part.
I guess I just don't like the wow bait and switch. I got used to the wow 1-59 gameplay, then hitting 60 was like hitting a brick wall.
Thats the thing, when you sell a bond to yourself it is pointless, as when you pay off that 'debt' to yourself you are just paying yourself. So you have the same amount of money as before, you just move it around.
So those tresury bonds in the SS trust fund are effectively worthless, just like writing IOUs to yourself and sticking them in a jar as a method of saving. When you need the money to pay for something you have effectively just added an extra meaningless step in the proccess, you pay yourself the money to pay for what you want, instead of just paying for what you want directly, its a meaningless shell game.
Bonds have no value until the issuing party sells them to someone else, you can print bonds all day long but they don't mean anything if you keep them. If you sell the bond to someone else, it has value, because they can cash it in. But it doesn't make much sense to print out a bond that says you are going to pay yourself X amount of money at some point in the future, because you can skip printing the bond and just give yourself the money.
Why shouldn't the government default on debt to itself? It ends up with the same amount of money either way.
I haven't talked to ANYONE that was even the slightest bit outraged over a tit. Ooh some old hag showed a tit on tv as a publicity stunt? bug fucking deal.
Objectively, it doesn't matter at all. Neither system is 100 % perfect, it's all about what works best in certain situations, or is more comfortable to the person.
All in all, it's no big deal, schools teach both systems, so it is up to the people to choose which they want to use. Seems to me that americans have chosen to use the metric system for applications where accurate math is required, and the imperial system in the places it works, because in my experience the imperial system usually results in more pleasing number. Subjective I know, but does it really matter what measurement I use to describe how much mountain dew and doritos I want to buy?:)
There isn't any resistance to using it where is should be used, not in any organized way anyway. Metric is used when really accurate measurements are needed, and when the numbers are really really big, or really really small. For consumer goods, imperial works better because it is less likely to have big numbers or small numbers. Oz. are better than grams, gallons better than liters(althourgh we use liters where they fit), and sometimes inches are even better than centimeters. Why buy 400 grams of chips when you can get 14 oz.? Why say you are 1.8 meters when you are really 5 feet 10 inches?
Americans just don't want to go and buy 300 ml of coke or 37 liters of gas. The imperial system works for consumer goods, no reason to change it that I can see.
Americans are not backward because they choose to use the system that fits best into their daily life. Both systems are just as arbitrary, as pretty much any unit of measurement is. The only benefit of the metric system is that it makes math a bit easier.
IMO, the limit is what kind of weapons would an individual infantryman be using in the army. That is everything up to and including machineguns. Maybe grenades and stuff too. The supreme court even said as much in Miller vs. US, which is often trumpeted as a ruling against the 2nd amendment, but in reality all it said was that short barreled shotguns were not considered to be a valid weapon for normal military usage..
You can't very well protect the other 9 amendments in the Bill of Rights without some kinda force, wouldn't you agree? If the government were the only ones to have weapons, do you think they would hesitate to ravage all our other rights? Granted, if the government (and everyone else) didn't have weapons either, then it may be possible to get by without them, but do you really think that will ever happen? The 2nd is the glue that hold the bill of rights together.
"If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no resource left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government..." (James Madison)
Probably because a large majority of Americans beleive he is right (ATM anyway, we are fickle people it seems). Why would he do a complete 180 because a couple hundred thousand people decide they want to try and reenact the 60's because they were born to late. IMO, that's all the protests are, a weak attempt to replay history.
Well, to be fair, you have to realize the scale of the operations. Thousands of bombs dropped, from hundreds of aircraft, and we miss maybe 5-10 times. Four confirmed accidents with cruise missles really is all that we know for sure. The market bombing isn't a sure thing by any means. As for the casualties from friendly fire, I had only heard of 2, aside from the guy who threw the grenades in the tent at the army camp.
Bottom line is that accidents happen, given the scale, of this operation especially.
Submachine guns could have a legitimate use in defense. Not home or self defense maybe, but in defense of your rights against tyranny, which is much more important than either.
And like it has been mentioned before, they only had quill pens and printing presses at the time, so the internet or TV isn't protected speech.
I hate it when people bring up nukes. It is just not reasonable.
The 'arms' refers to the standard types of infantry weapons in the military. Not nukes or tanks or bombs or missiles. Although, grenades might possibly be including, I don't beleive they are issued to every infantryman though. I agree that NRA BS about 'sportsmen' is silly. In fact, that is one of their compromises right there. The (unconstitutional)NFA banned all weapons except those with a 'sporting purpose', so the NRA tries to act like it's only protecting firearms for 'sportsmen', which pisses off a whole lot of gun owners.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you don't need anything special, it uses the same equipment as any DL DVD production line, you just need an extra step for the third layer.
The great thing about HD DVD is that you DON'T need any 'special presser'.
HD DVD is fully backwards compatible with standard DVD production lines. The same production line can produce HD DVD and SD DVD. Bluray cannot do this.
Also worth noting that MSRP is not the same this as true cost. HD DVDs are hardly more expensive to produce than SD DVDs. Plus, most HD DVDs (and BDs) are selling for far less than MSRP regardless.
Looking at MSRP where HD DVD is $40 and SD DVD is $20 is a bit misleading when you can find HD DVDs everywhere for $24 and SD DVDs for $15. The true cost differential is much less than the MSRPs portray.
Well you can already buy HD DVD combo discs for not much more than retail DVDs:
0 GYI3BS/sr=8-3/qid=1158051346/ref=sr_1_3/102-944683 3-5680158?ie=UTF8&s=dvd
http://www.amazon.com/Slither-DVD-HD-Combo/dp/B00
Granted, prices haven't got down to the average bargain DVD prices, and the MSRP is quite a bit higher, but it shouldn't be long as HD DVD can be fabbed using current DVD production lines.
Well mainly because they'd have to pay the license to the DVD forum, while HD DVD is the DVD forums official spec, and it includes DVD back compatibility as part of it, so there is no extra license costs for the HD DVD side.
Also it is entirely possible that DVD forum could just refuse to license to their competitor, meaning no DVD compatibility for sony/BDA. Although I doubt DVD forum would turn down that extra revenue (especially when many of the companies in the DVD forum are also in the BDA), or if it would be legal under antitrust type laws, but just speculating.
But it really is a Sony product, given that the whole purpose behind it was that Sony saw the royalty money Toshiba was making from DVD, and how Sony's royalties from CD were about to run out due to patent expiration, and they wanted to get in on the fun.
Toshiba and the DVD forum wouldn't let them load up the next gen DVD spec with all of their patents, so they basically took their ball and went home, made their own spec with as much of their patents as possible in it, with no regard to the quality and feability of the final product.
The fact that Sony got many other CEs to come with them only speaks to the fact that BD was touted as a higher end, higher quality, more expensive = higher profit margin product.
The fact that Sony got more studio support only speaks to the fact that they loaded even more needless layers of copy protection onto it. More things to patent and get royalties from!
No, the whole reason Bluray exists is because of Sony's greed, so it will always be a Sony product in my eyes. Before the launches of BD and HD DVD, I wasn't sure if it was Sony or Toshiba that was being greedy in the format wars, but after seeing the products, it is clear that HD DVD is the better, more consumer friendly, and just plain cheaper product, so I'm pretty sure the greed was primarily on Sony(and friends)'s side.
They are not artificially raising prices though, it is Sony that is artificially keeping prices low.
Demand at the MSRP is much much higher than the supply, which presents a profit opportunity for people to buy at the low MSRP and sell at the retail price.
Without these 'gougers' many people would simply not be able to get a PS3, as they would all be bought up by store employees and the rest of the first-come crowd.
The resellers ensure that there will be a PS3 available at some price for anyone who can afford it. Would you rather not be able to get one at all because you were number 6 on the list and the store only got 5 units?
Excuse me if I have little sympathy with the 'consumers' who do have the choice of waiting a couple months and getting one at MSRP. When dealing with high demand product launches, some people are going to be left out and not be able to get the product. The question is how you decide who gets it though, market price or first-come/first-serve luck of the draw waiting list type rationing. Maybe the current situation is the best option, a mix between the two, if you are quick and dedicated enough you can get it for MSRP at launch, or if you are rich enough you can pay the market price. Or you can do what the sane 95% do, wait until they are readily available at MSRP.
Dumping is when you sell your product at a lower price in just a certain country or region. As long as you sell your product at a roughly equivalent price everywhere, it's not dumping, and there are no laws against selling at a loss.
Selling at a loss is a standard procedure in the videogame market, all three companies do it to some degree, though nintendo is moving further and further away from the loss leader strategy.
Sony probably lost even more than MS on hardware (in total, not per unit) during the last generation, but because they had the most successful software lineup, they were able to recoup the losses. MS planned to, but the royalties structure didn't enable them to lower costs as much as they had planned because they didn't own the IP on the hardware, so they came up $4 billion short.
For the x360, MS is losing less money per unit and because the IP sturcture on the hardware is different, MS plans to be able to keep up with the price drops without losing more money. Sony will end up taking a massive bath on hardware this generation, even more than MS did last gen.
..says that the HD DVD players are selling just as fast as DVD was in the same point in it's life. Which is impressive to me, as DVD had no competition, and you didn't need a special TV to use it, and it didn't have to deal with massive component shortages iirc.
Reports of HD DVD players selling out as shipments as soon as they come in are common.
Notice how the article has no hard numbers, just one guy from one specialty store in San Antonio saying sales were disappointing. That is hardly conclusive evidence of anything.
HD formats will likely be a niche product for a while, but this article is pure BS and proves nothing. In fact it kind of smells like BD FUD to slow the momentum of HD DVD.
There ARE HD DVD combo discs which are backwards compatible. They have HD on one side/layer, and SD on the other, and the SD part plays in any dvd player.
0 41535?url=search-alias%3Ddvd&field-keywords=combo+ HD+DVD&Go.x=0&Go.y=0&Go=Go
These discs are more expensive to produce than standard HD DVDs, so there are only a few of them as of now.
BD cannot do this kind of backwards compatibility, due to the different physical structure of the disc.
Here is the list of the currently available combo discs:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_d/104-9437046-1
You obviously haven't played many MMORPGS.
WoW has possibly the easiest levelling of any MMORPG there is. The only challenge to levelling in WoW is avoiding all the bored level 60 gankers. Roll on a PVE server, and there is absolutely no challenge at all.
The XP curve in Wow is very linear, as opposed to other games, where the XP to level is on an exponential curve.
You should play anarchy online if you think WoW levelling is 'epic'. AO has 250 levels basically, on a very steep exponential curve. Basically you go from needing 1500 xp to get the first level to 75 million xp to get the 200th. The shadowlands expansion made the first 200 levels much easier, but if you do those first 200 levels on RK (like I and everyone who got there before SL came out) it takes forever. Don't even make me mention AXP, which you can only get from one type of monster, which are on timers so you can only fight them once ever few hours. Getting to alien level 30 is about the biggest grind I've ever seen in any game.
WoW and AO are like total opposite games. WoW is a casual, story based, almost single player type of game until 60 when it turns into raid grind from hell, while AO makes no bones about being a grindfest from the beginning.
It's wierd how I spent years grinding my way through AO just fine, but when I got to 60 in WoW the grinding turned me off immediately. I think it's cause the grinding in wow seems so pointless, you don't get anything from it really, just better gear. It's boring to the max. In AO you get all kind of new skills and fun stuff with every level, and you can buy gear that is competitive with any raid based gear there is fot the most part.
I guess I just don't like the wow bait and switch. I got used to the wow 1-59 gameplay, then hitting 60 was like hitting a brick wall.
To really get to the point, the water is self mostly a nuclear byproduct by weight, along with everything else in the universe that isn't 100% H1.
Granted this nuclear process was billions of years ago, and wasn't man made, but the OP did not specify 'manmade nuclear byproducts'.
the government sold the bonds to itself though.
Thats the thing, when you sell a bond to yourself it is pointless, as when you pay off that 'debt' to yourself you are just paying yourself. So you have the same amount of money as before, you just move it around.
So those tresury bonds in the SS trust fund are effectively worthless, just like writing IOUs to yourself and sticking them in a jar as a method of saving. When you need the money to pay for something you have effectively just added an extra meaningless step in the proccess, you pay yourself the money to pay for what you want, instead of just paying for what you want directly, its a meaningless shell game.
Bonds have no value until the issuing party sells them to someone else, you can print bonds all day long but they don't mean anything if you keep them. If you sell the bond to someone else, it has value, because they can cash it in. But it doesn't make much sense to print out a bond that says you are going to pay yourself X amount of money at some point in the future, because you can skip printing the bond and just give yourself the money.
Why shouldn't the government default on debt to itself? It ends up with the same amount of money either way.
Huh? The DS is supposed to get as much battery life as the SP.
Bump to that..
^^
I haven't talked to ANYONE that was even the slightest bit outraged over a tit. Ooh some old hag showed a tit on tv as a publicity stunt? bug fucking deal.
But there is no real advantage of using these units either.
And I have been used to those units since childhood, I just see nothing wrong with using miles/ounces/gallons/etc. in places where they work.
Objectively, it doesn't matter at all. Neither system is 100 % perfect, it's all about what works best in certain situations, or is more comfortable to the person.
:)
All in all, it's no big deal, schools teach both systems, so it is up to the people to choose which they want to use. Seems to me that americans have chosen to use the metric system for applications where accurate math is required, and the imperial system in the places it works, because in my experience the imperial system usually results in more pleasing number. Subjective I know, but does it really matter what measurement I use to describe how much mountain dew and doritos I want to buy?
There isn't any resistance to using it where is should be used, not in any organized way anyway. Metric is used when really accurate measurements are needed, and when the numbers are really really big, or really really small. For consumer goods, imperial works better because it is less likely to have big numbers or small numbers. Oz. are better than grams, gallons better than liters(althourgh we use liters where they fit), and sometimes inches are even better than centimeters. Why buy 400 grams of chips when you can get 14 oz.? Why say you are 1.8 meters when you are really 5 feet 10 inches?
Americans just don't want to go and buy 300 ml of coke or 37 liters of gas. The imperial system works for consumer goods, no reason to change it that I can see.
Americans are not backward because they choose to use the system that fits best into their daily life. Both systems are just as arbitrary, as pretty much any unit of measurement is. The only benefit of the metric system is that it makes math a bit easier.
IMO, the limit is what kind of weapons would an individual infantryman be using in the army. That is everything up to and including machineguns. Maybe grenades and stuff too. The supreme court even said as much in Miller vs. US, which is often trumpeted as a ruling against the 2nd amendment, but in reality all it said was that short barreled shotguns were not considered to be a valid weapon for normal military usage..
(they can be forgiven for the Second Amendment)>>
;).
You can be forgiven for your ignorance,
You can't very well protect the other 9 amendments in the Bill of Rights without some kinda force, wouldn't you agree? If the government were the only ones to have weapons, do you think they would hesitate to ravage all our other rights? Granted, if the government (and everyone else) didn't have weapons either, then it may be possible to get by without them, but do you really think that will ever happen? The 2nd is the glue that hold the bill of rights together.
"If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no resource left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government..." (James Madison)
Yeah, I just wish more people were aware of jury nullification. Would make the legal system so much better...
Well, all that's fine and good, but this is about trademarks, not copyright.
Trademark doesnt expire, it gets diluted, and this is probably one of the driving reasons behind this lawsuit.
Probably because a large majority of Americans beleive he is right (ATM anyway, we are fickle people it seems). Why would he do a complete 180 because a couple hundred thousand people decide they want to try and reenact the 60's because they were born to late. IMO, that's all the protests are, a weak attempt to replay history.
Well, to be fair, you have to realize the scale of the operations. Thousands of bombs dropped, from hundreds of aircraft, and we miss maybe 5-10 times. Four confirmed accidents with cruise missles really is all that we know for sure. The market bombing isn't a sure thing by any means. As for the casualties from friendly fire, I had only heard of 2, aside from the guy who threw the grenades in the tent at the army camp.
Bottom line is that accidents happen, given the scale, of this operation especially.
Submachine guns could have a legitimate use in defense. Not home or self defense maybe, but in defense of your rights against tyranny, which is much more important than either.
And like it has been mentioned before, they only had quill pens and printing presses at the time, so the internet or TV isn't protected speech.
I hate it when people bring up nukes. It is just not reasonable.
The 'arms' refers to the standard types of infantry weapons in the military. Not nukes or tanks or bombs or missiles. Although, grenades might possibly be including, I don't beleive they are issued to every infantryman though. I agree that NRA BS about 'sportsmen' is silly. In fact, that is one of their compromises right there. The (unconstitutional)NFA banned all weapons except those with a 'sporting purpose', so the NRA tries to act like it's only protecting firearms for 'sportsmen', which pisses off a whole lot of gun owners.