Not exactly, though you're correct in suggesting this is about code and flags in the kernel code, not about copyright law.
The kernel has a number of symbols that are only accessible to modules that are GPL'd. The USB stack, for example, has a whole suite of symbols marked as "GPLONLY". These symbols provide access to functions provided by that stack. Unless NDISWrapper is identified as GPLONLY by the kernel, it cannot access those symbols. That's why the original patch "broke" NDISWrapper - it wasn't that users were complaining that they were getting the "NDISWrapper taints kernel" message in their dmesg, it was that NDISWrapper wouldn't load because it could no longer access critical symbols necessary for it to run.
It's not that stupid. Remember Republicans are seeing a choice of three candidates this election: Obama, Clinton, and McCain. They hate Clinton. They're not exactly fond of McCain, and Obama's a guy they respect though completely disagree with. An election with Obama and McCain in it will have a result they can live with even if it sucks. An election with Clinton and McCain in it will have a result that's 50% likely to be "I can live with that, but it sucks", and 50% likely to be "I'm moving to Iraq to get away from this madwoman."
If Republicans actually liked McCain, things would be different and, yes, they'd be insane to support a charismatic candidate of the left who stands a real chance of beating "their guy".
It sometimes works, the effectiveness of negative campaigning has been much exaggerated. I thought it interesting that Obama was doing well in Ohio and Texas, over-turning Clinton's massive leads in both states, and actually getting a moderate lead in Texas, until the last few days of the campaign when Obama went largely negative against Clinton (stupidly attacking NAFTA and Clinton's previous support for it), while Clinton actually withdrew her attacks from Obama for the most part, concentrating instead on ridiculing the heavily anti-Clinton media. Suddenly, Clinton was climbing back in the polls, not necessarily to her previous highs, but enough to push her back over the edge in Texas, and get a reasonable margin of victory in Ohio.
The thing is, when you take a look at the morning's headlines, and see "Obama attacks Clinton as 'Desperate'", followed immediately by "Clinton stresses experience, economy" (I can't remember what the exact headline was, it was something like that), one candidate looks like a sleazebag, the other looks like they're taking the high road. Negative campaigning can just have the effect of making you look uninterested in the issues and just in slinging mud. For me, it was a surprising route for a skilled communicator like Obama to take.
A Blu-ray or HD DVD movie generally weighs in at around the 10-15G mark, when compressed with VC-1 or MPEG4, the two decent codecs both formats support. So the answer to the "Who's going to stream 40G" thing is "Not many."
Now, you probably are about to question that. "If that's all, then why do some movies come on dual layer Blu-ray discs" you may ask. And you'd be right. And the answers are:
Most movies come with several sound tracks, including, usually, a Dolby TrueHD track, two or three regular Dolby 5.1 track (one for each language), plus the director's commentaries, etc.
Early Blu-ray movies were compressed with MPEG2.
Some movies are more than two hours long.
Most HD DVDs and Blu-ray discs have some extras on them
Now, if you want, you can halve the video data just by putting out 720p instead of 1080p. That's what Apple is doing with AppleTV. The vast majority of people who own HDTVs do not own TVs that are either large enough or close enough to their seats to see any significant difference between 1080 and 720. Indeed, the majority of LCD TVs for under $1,000 have only 768 lines. So this compression is actually more than acceptable. Restrict yourself to a single Dolby 5.1 soundtrack, and bearing in mind the Internet does its own extras - you don't need to send them - you can deliver HD content over the Internet in nice, easy to swallow (well, easier to swallow) 4-6G pieces.
Apple needs to market the hell out of AppleTV. Microsoft has Xbox Marketplace, with HD content, and now's the time for them to market the hell out of it too. Amazon needs to upgrade their Amazon Unbox system and do the same with HD TiVo.
And bear this in mind: virtually all the content delivery companies - Comcast, Dish Network, et al - are experimenting with video on demand systems of their own. My new Dish Network VIP622 (an HD DVR) does VoD over the Internet. Meanwhile, a DVR will get you high quality, widescreen, movies watchable on terms you're happy with from outlets like HBO and Cinemax - things you'd not have considered in the past as being a better option than DVD, because DVD's quality was so superior to NTSC.
Against this background, a format whose players are currently not even viable, and are stupidly expensive, is going to have severe problems making headway.
That would be bizarre, because the same suite of codecs is used for both Blu-ray and HD DVD. Including Microsoft's VC-1.
The conspiracy theory, that never made any sense, was that Microsoft wanted to create a war to prevent both formats from succeeding before downloads became available. It didn't make sense because the work they did on HD DVD genuinely made it two years ahead of Blu-ray, which has yet to catch up. If Hollywood had switched to HD DVD, the format wars would have ended and Microsoft's work would have made HD DVD a superb contender.
The other conspiracy theory, which makes slightly more sense though it's somewhat overstated, is that Microsoft didn't like the fact that Blu-ray used Java technology, which it does both in its interactive content system and in the BD+ access control system. Even that seems a tad silly, it wasn't as if Microsoft was pushing.NET on HD DVD; the HDi system it co-designed with Disney and Warner Brothers (heh. The two studios whose rejection of HD DVD caused the most damage. How ironic is that?) was essentially XML, JavaScript, and generally standards based, very transparent. And it offered it to the Blu-ray people, who turned it down.
In the end, it's not clear why Microsoft got involved, but the the Windows Media thing is obviously nonsense, and the Michael Bay "divide and conquer" crap makes no sense at all.
Well, those are reasons why it failed. After 35 years of Sony trying to push this technology on us, they're finally giving up. Yet another failure in the same line as Betamax, MiniDisc, UMD, MemoryStick, PlayStation 3, etc. I don't give Blu-ray more than 35 years either...
I'm the opposite. I have always hated CRTs. Black and white CRTs were moderately high quality, but were monochrome, and used rounded tubes that distorted the picture. Colour CRTs, even Trinitrons, have always had lousy picture quality with the masks or aperture grilles and scanlines being clearly visible even several feet away, with flickering, and the same problems as monochrome with rounded tubes.
When we went shopping for an HDTV, as we were looking for something around the 32" mark we took a look at the 30" Samsung (?) CRT flatscreen widescreen TVs, as well as the 32" LCDs. There was no contest. Despite the theoretical improvement in resolution (the 30" CRTs were 1080i, as opposed to 768 lines for the LCDs), the picture quality was obviously worse. The LCD we bought was $50, cheaper, 2" larger, and the quality was clearly higher. It feels like we're watching a cinema screen: I've never met anyone who can genuinely say that of a CRT. In some ways it's too good, MPEG artifacting was clearly visible from our SD Dish Network box, Dish Network clearly compressing the crap out of the signals to just about cover what an off-the-shelf CRT will show and no more. It's like listening to music, compressed via GSM because it was intended to be transmitted down a phone line, on a high end receiver.
I'm really unsure what to make of the attachment many people have to colour CRTs. I was so glad when alternative technologies like LCD and Plasma started being seriously viable for this kind of thing. I'm looking at my LCD now. The picture is gorgeous. No scan lines. No little dots or colour stripes visible. Perfectly flat. Perfect colour. Showing an HD signal. Beautiful. And it's far from the best, far from the best, LCD can offer.
It's the fourth copy control system they're using on Blu-ray discs: On top of AACS, BD+, and ROM-mark, they're making the content as awful as possible.
Managed copy is no panacea, but to argue it automatically sucks is going too far.
The examples you gave are of DVDs that only provide certain types of additional functionality, namely the ability to transfer the content to a portable device. Here's something I'd like in my house (and my wife would love it too): I want a centralized server that I can copy all my DVD and HD DVD content to, and stream to any TV in the house on demand, with the discs stored in a storeroom rather than in the living room.
That's not something you can do with the DVDs you're seeing. And, realistically, it's not something that you can do with (most, CSS-encumbered) DVDs now unless you're a very skilled geek who's prepared to spend a lot of money on over-engineered equipment that was never really intended for that purpose - any company trying to make such equipment can, and has been, be subject to legal sanctions. One company kind-of succeeded with a basic jukebox that connected to a single TV set, but the fact that their equipment was deliberately over-priced and limited was part of why the courts didn't nail them.
But this type of application (and most you can think of that involve copied and transcoded content) is something that's ok with managed copy, which means it's possible that we'll see commodity consumer equipment that does just that. Buy the server, buy a few boxes that hook up to the TV via HDMI, and it's all working, seamlessly.
If HD DVD had succeeded, I'd have expected that equipment to be on the market within a few years. Unfortunately, unlike HD DVD, Blu-ray didn't initially make managed copy mandatory, which makes the whole thing less useful.
I was fairly careful with my wording, but obviously didn't spell it out enough. I said "there's nothing stopping the manufacturers from shipping a tool allowing the user to copy the disc to the laptop's hard drive in a form that's easier to play".
You don't have to make a bit for bit copy. You can re-encode the content into a format that the computer will find less taxing. At the very minimum, if the laptop's screen isn't 1080 lines deep (or is, but isn't 16:9, with 9/16ths of the horizontal resolution being less than 1080), there's no reason to store the picture at that resolution. Likewise you can re-encode it using an easier but less efficient codec. In the case of audio you can even throw a lot of it away, saving the entire thing as stereo PCM so it requires no decoding whatsoever.
Managed copy is whatever resolution you want it to be. Typical implementations right now are aimed at making copies for small devices like the PSP, so a resolution down-convert happens during that process. But Managed Copy itself can be a bit-for-bit copy.
Part of the aim of Managed Copy is to make things like Movie Jukeboxes a possibility. The entire concept would be flawed if you couldn't copy the movie as-is.
Blu-ray discs have optional support for "Managed copy". For those discs that enable it, there's nothing stopping the manufacturers from shipping a tool allowing the user to copy the disc to the laptop's hard drive in a form that's easier to play. The user can build a library of stored content while the laptop is plugged in, and then watch it when it's not. Supporting this feature would also beat carrying around discs everywhere. I can honestly say I've used my laptops to watch full DVDs four or five times in the entire time I've had the capability, it's just not as practical as it appears, and I hate taking discs on vacation with me that I might lose.
HD DVD made "managed copy" mandatory for discs with DRM, but, alas, it's Blu-ray that's the remaining widely supported HD disc format. (I'm not calling it the victor, it still has to beat downloads, and SD.)
This isn't censorship, as the government isn't doing it
Wait, the judiciary has been privatized now? It no longer is a part of the government?
That's new to me. Even using the silly "censorship isn't done by private entities" definition, this is censorship: the government was asked to shut down Wikileaks, and it did just that: it ordered Wikileaks shut down.
Perhaps he's referring to Google, which is on one level nothing more than a search engine and set of related Internet services, but whose problems with connectivity have lead it to increasingly take control over how its packets are delivered. It's buying dark fiber, it's bidding on spectrum, it's experimenting with Wifi networks.
I would like to know what math you use that says a $100 addon will cost 3 times more when fabricated and bundled with something en masse.
The HD DVD add-on was never $100, and I strongly suspect early $200 add-ons were heavily subsidized given they came out at the time that Toshiba and LG were selling their HD DVD players for a minimum of $500.
This strategy would have left their existing customers in the cold, who had no idea an HD DVD version of the X-Box 360 was around the corner, and who would have been locked out of playing games distributed on HD DVD, which in time would probably have been all of them. And, as others keep pointing out, it would have added a fair amount to the cost of the '360. Like around $2-300.
Microsoft doesn't always do things right, but I can't fault them for most of what they did in the HD wars. They didn't force their customers to buy something they were pushing. They added excellent technologies to HD DVD. The one major screw over they did that impacted us as consumers was adding the "Secure Path" crap to Windows.
Toshiba's talking about giving HD DVD one last push as a computer storage format, presumably on the basis that the media is relatively cheap to make. In some ways this would be the worst of all worlds - we get the inferior movie-disk format (Blu-ray) coupled with the inferior data storage format (HD DVD's one downside over BD was the lower capacity per layer.) But, certainly, if, for whatever reason, Toshiba is successful in pushing HD DVD as a data storage format, then Microsoft and Nintendo would be absolutely insane to adopt it as their game distribution format.
Personally though I doubt either would choose blue-laser technology for either. I think computer games lend themselves to online distribution even more so than movies. I think the games industry will jump away from hard media well before the movie industry.
I always wondered whether the HD DVD people (it'd have been them rather than Sony, given HD DVD was "next generation DVD" from the DVD Forum, whereas to some extent Blu-ray was Sony et al looking for an application for blue-laser technology) could have saved a lot of time and money by continuing to use red lasers and designing a six layer red-layer DVD. The drives would then have cost about the same as existing DVD drives, and only the rest of the hardware (an HD DVD or Blu-ray player is pretty much an entire PC, somewhat more powerful than a Wii, complete with flash storage) would have cost a little more.
My guess though is that adding layers, while cheap on the hardware side, does make disk duplication significantly more expensive and complex. Which gets back to the point about three layer HD DVDs. Nobody ever implemented it or shipped a three layer HD DVD, and I suspect it wasn't seen as an optimal solution for publishers to begin with. Despite the lower cost per layer of HD DVD duplication compared to Blu-ray, prices ended up being similar because many Blu-ray discs were single layer, as 25G was more than enough space, whereas virtually all HD DVDs were dual layer.
There will never be an open source Blu-ray player legal for use in the US (though "legal" open source DVD and HD DVD players are of questionable usefulness given there were no HD DVDs shipped without DRM, and the vast majority of DVDs were shipped with DRM.) Blu-ray makes AACS mandatory on pressed blue-laser media, so the DMCA effectively prohibits it.
I cannot fathom why DRM is mandatory, I know some Blu-ray partisans have even gone into a state of denial about it when I've brought it up before, but that's what the situation is.
Our best hope, ironically, is Microsoft throwing their weight around a little. They have a lot of reasons to be pissed about the end results of the HD war. Vista was screwed up mostly because of the secure path initiative, probably the biggest thing to be fucked up as a result of Microsoft trying to get Hollywood on-side. If they were to omit secure path in Windows 7, the AACS LA would either have to liberalize the AACS license, or else see virtually everyone play Blu-ray discs using unauthorized players.
Even if it's only $5, you're still buying an obsolete format that you won't even be able to find a player for in a few years.
Dude, I can find CED players if I look hard enough. HD DVD means I get HD now. I couldn't get a Blu-ray player even if I wanted one, my wife would never let me spend $400 on a glorified DVD player.
$5 is a bizarrely low price for you to claim is too high BTW, that's about what AppleTV charges for a rental. The HD DVD is higher quality and will be playable for years.
I don't understand the hate-on people like you have for HD DVD. It was a very good format, it's a shame it's failed as in pretty much every way except player cost it was superior to DVD, something that isn't (presently) true of Blu-ray (Blu-ray has some advantages over DVD, but also some disadvantages.) But as long as you people act like it's malaria, people like me will end up with HD on the cheap.
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Not exactly, though you're correct in suggesting this is about code and flags in the kernel code, not about copyright law.
The kernel has a number of symbols that are only accessible to modules that are GPL'd. The USB stack, for example, has a whole suite of symbols marked as "GPLONLY". These symbols provide access to functions provided by that stack. Unless NDISWrapper is identified as GPLONLY by the kernel, it cannot access those symbols. That's why the original patch "broke" NDISWrapper - it wasn't that users were complaining that they were getting the "NDISWrapper taints kernel" message in their dmesg, it was that NDISWrapper wouldn't load because it could no longer access critical symbols necessary for it to run.
It's not that stupid. Remember Republicans are seeing a choice of three candidates this election: Obama, Clinton, and McCain. They hate Clinton. They're not exactly fond of McCain, and Obama's a guy they respect though completely disagree with. An election with Obama and McCain in it will have a result they can live with even if it sucks. An election with Clinton and McCain in it will have a result that's 50% likely to be "I can live with that, but it sucks", and 50% likely to be "I'm moving to Iraq to get away from this madwoman."
If Republicans actually liked McCain, things would be different and, yes, they'd be insane to support a charismatic candidate of the left who stands a real chance of beating "their guy".
It sometimes works, the effectiveness of negative campaigning has been much exaggerated. I thought it interesting that Obama was doing well in Ohio and Texas, over-turning Clinton's massive leads in both states, and actually getting a moderate lead in Texas, until the last few days of the campaign when Obama went largely negative against Clinton (stupidly attacking NAFTA and Clinton's previous support for it), while Clinton actually withdrew her attacks from Obama for the most part, concentrating instead on ridiculing the heavily anti-Clinton media. Suddenly, Clinton was climbing back in the polls, not necessarily to her previous highs, but enough to push her back over the edge in Texas, and get a reasonable margin of victory in Ohio.
The thing is, when you take a look at the morning's headlines, and see "Obama attacks Clinton as 'Desperate'", followed immediately by "Clinton stresses experience, economy" (I can't remember what the exact headline was, it was something like that), one candidate looks like a sleazebag, the other looks like they're taking the high road. Negative campaigning can just have the effect of making you look uninterested in the issues and just in slinging mud. For me, it was a surprising route for a skilled communicator like Obama to take.
A Blu-ray or HD DVD movie generally weighs in at around the 10-15G mark, when compressed with VC-1 or MPEG4, the two decent codecs both formats support. So the answer to the "Who's going to stream 40G" thing is "Not many."
Now, you probably are about to question that. "If that's all, then why do some movies come on dual layer Blu-ray discs" you may ask. And you'd be right. And the answers are:
Now, if you want, you can halve the video data just by putting out 720p instead of 1080p. That's what Apple is doing with AppleTV. The vast majority of people who own HDTVs do not own TVs that are either large enough or close enough to their seats to see any significant difference between 1080 and 720. Indeed, the majority of LCD TVs for under $1,000 have only 768 lines. So this compression is actually more than acceptable. Restrict yourself to a single Dolby 5.1 soundtrack, and bearing in mind the Internet does its own extras - you don't need to send them - you can deliver HD content over the Internet in nice, easy to swallow (well, easier to swallow) 4-6G pieces.
Apple needs to market the hell out of AppleTV. Microsoft has Xbox Marketplace, with HD content, and now's the time for them to market the hell out of it too. Amazon needs to upgrade their Amazon Unbox system and do the same with HD TiVo.
And bear this in mind: virtually all the content delivery companies - Comcast, Dish Network, et al - are experimenting with video on demand systems of their own. My new Dish Network VIP622 (an HD DVR) does VoD over the Internet. Meanwhile, a DVR will get you high quality, widescreen, movies watchable on terms you're happy with from outlets like HBO and Cinemax - things you'd not have considered in the past as being a better option than DVD, because DVD's quality was so superior to NTSC.
Against this background, a format whose players are currently not even viable, and are stupidly expensive, is going to have severe problems making headway.
That would be bizarre, because the same suite of codecs is used for both Blu-ray and HD DVD. Including Microsoft's VC-1.
The conspiracy theory, that never made any sense, was that Microsoft wanted to create a war to prevent both formats from succeeding before downloads became available. It didn't make sense because the work they did on HD DVD genuinely made it two years ahead of Blu-ray, which has yet to catch up. If Hollywood had switched to HD DVD, the format wars would have ended and Microsoft's work would have made HD DVD a superb contender.
The other conspiracy theory, which makes slightly more sense though it's somewhat overstated, is that Microsoft didn't like the fact that Blu-ray used Java technology, which it does both in its interactive content system and in the BD+ access control system. Even that seems a tad silly, it wasn't as if Microsoft was pushing .NET on HD DVD; the HDi system it co-designed with Disney and Warner Brothers (heh. The two studios whose rejection of HD DVD caused the most damage. How ironic is that?) was essentially XML, JavaScript, and generally standards based, very transparent. And it offered it to the Blu-ray people, who turned it down.
In the end, it's not clear why Microsoft got involved, but the the Windows Media thing is obviously nonsense, and the Michael Bay "divide and conquer" crap makes no sense at all.
Well, those are reasons why it failed. After 35 years of Sony trying to push this technology on us, they're finally giving up. Yet another failure in the same line as Betamax, MiniDisc, UMD, MemoryStick, PlayStation 3, etc. I don't give Blu-ray more than 35 years either...
I'm the opposite. I have always hated CRTs. Black and white CRTs were moderately high quality, but were monochrome, and used rounded tubes that distorted the picture. Colour CRTs, even Trinitrons, have always had lousy picture quality with the masks or aperture grilles and scanlines being clearly visible even several feet away, with flickering, and the same problems as monochrome with rounded tubes.
When we went shopping for an HDTV, as we were looking for something around the 32" mark we took a look at the 30" Samsung (?) CRT flatscreen widescreen TVs, as well as the 32" LCDs. There was no contest. Despite the theoretical improvement in resolution (the 30" CRTs were 1080i, as opposed to 768 lines for the LCDs), the picture quality was obviously worse. The LCD we bought was $50, cheaper, 2" larger, and the quality was clearly higher. It feels like we're watching a cinema screen: I've never met anyone who can genuinely say that of a CRT. In some ways it's too good, MPEG artifacting was clearly visible from our SD Dish Network box, Dish Network clearly compressing the crap out of the signals to just about cover what an off-the-shelf CRT will show and no more. It's like listening to music, compressed via GSM because it was intended to be transmitted down a phone line, on a high end receiver.
I'm really unsure what to make of the attachment many people have to colour CRTs. I was so glad when alternative technologies like LCD and Plasma started being seriously viable for this kind of thing. I'm looking at my LCD now. The picture is gorgeous. No scan lines. No little dots or colour stripes visible. Perfectly flat. Perfect colour. Showing an HD signal. Beautiful. And it's far from the best, far from the best, LCD can offer.
There was a bug in Service Pack 7, the rest is history.
It's the fourth copy control system they're using on Blu-ray discs: On top of AACS, BD+, and ROM-mark, they're making the content as awful as possible.
Because Cleveland's the straight-man, and thus probably the best character to base a show around.
Managed copy is no panacea, but to argue it automatically sucks is going too far.
The examples you gave are of DVDs that only provide certain types of additional functionality, namely the ability to transfer the content to a portable device. Here's something I'd like in my house (and my wife would love it too): I want a centralized server that I can copy all my DVD and HD DVD content to, and stream to any TV in the house on demand, with the discs stored in a storeroom rather than in the living room.
That's not something you can do with the DVDs you're seeing. And, realistically, it's not something that you can do with (most, CSS-encumbered) DVDs now unless you're a very skilled geek who's prepared to spend a lot of money on over-engineered equipment that was never really intended for that purpose - any company trying to make such equipment can, and has been, be subject to legal sanctions. One company kind-of succeeded with a basic jukebox that connected to a single TV set, but the fact that their equipment was deliberately over-priced and limited was part of why the courts didn't nail them.
But this type of application (and most you can think of that involve copied and transcoded content) is something that's ok with managed copy, which means it's possible that we'll see commodity consumer equipment that does just that. Buy the server, buy a few boxes that hook up to the TV via HDMI, and it's all working, seamlessly.
If HD DVD had succeeded, I'd have expected that equipment to be on the market within a few years. Unfortunately, unlike HD DVD, Blu-ray didn't initially make managed copy mandatory, which makes the whole thing less useful.
I was fairly careful with my wording, but obviously didn't spell it out enough. I said "there's nothing stopping the manufacturers from shipping a tool allowing the user to copy the disc to the laptop's hard drive in a form that's easier to play".
You don't have to make a bit for bit copy. You can re-encode the content into a format that the computer will find less taxing. At the very minimum, if the laptop's screen isn't 1080 lines deep (or is, but isn't 16:9, with 9/16ths of the horizontal resolution being less than 1080), there's no reason to store the picture at that resolution. Likewise you can re-encode it using an easier but less efficient codec. In the case of audio you can even throw a lot of it away, saving the entire thing as stereo PCM so it requires no decoding whatsoever.
Managed copy is whatever resolution you want it to be. Typical implementations right now are aimed at making copies for small devices like the PSP, so a resolution down-convert happens during that process. But Managed Copy itself can be a bit-for-bit copy.
Part of the aim of Managed Copy is to make things like Movie Jukeboxes a possibility. The entire concept would be flawed if you couldn't copy the movie as-is.
Blu-ray discs have optional support for "Managed copy". For those discs that enable it, there's nothing stopping the manufacturers from shipping a tool allowing the user to copy the disc to the laptop's hard drive in a form that's easier to play. The user can build a library of stored content while the laptop is plugged in, and then watch it when it's not. Supporting this feature would also beat carrying around discs everywhere. I can honestly say I've used my laptops to watch full DVDs four or five times in the entire time I've had the capability, it's just not as practical as it appears, and I hate taking discs on vacation with me that I might lose.
HD DVD made "managed copy" mandatory for discs with DRM, but, alas, it's Blu-ray that's the remaining widely supported HD disc format. (I'm not calling it the victor, it still has to beat downloads, and SD.)
Wait, the judiciary has been privatized now? It no longer is a part of the government?
That's new to me. Even using the silly "censorship isn't done by private entities" definition, this is censorship: the government was asked to shut down Wikileaks, and it did just that: it ordered Wikileaks shut down.
Perhaps he's referring to Google, which is on one level nothing more than a search engine and set of related Internet services, but whose problems with connectivity have lead it to increasingly take control over how its packets are delivered. It's buying dark fiber, it's bidding on spectrum, it's experimenting with Wifi networks.
They're, uh, what plants need.
Uhhh, maybe it'll, uh, work if we phut some water from the toilet onnit?
(Why do I think nobody will get the reference?)
The HD DVD add-on was never $100, and I strongly suspect early $200 add-ons were heavily subsidized given they came out at the time that Toshiba and LG were selling their HD DVD players for a minimum of $500.
This strategy would have left their existing customers in the cold, who had no idea an HD DVD version of the X-Box 360 was around the corner, and who would have been locked out of playing games distributed on HD DVD, which in time would probably have been all of them. And, as others keep pointing out, it would have added a fair amount to the cost of the '360. Like around $2-300.
Microsoft doesn't always do things right, but I can't fault them for most of what they did in the HD wars. They didn't force their customers to buy something they were pushing. They added excellent technologies to HD DVD. The one major screw over they did that impacted us as consumers was adding the "Secure Path" crap to Windows.
Toshiba's talking about giving HD DVD one last push as a computer storage format, presumably on the basis that the media is relatively cheap to make. In some ways this would be the worst of all worlds - we get the inferior movie-disk format (Blu-ray) coupled with the inferior data storage format (HD DVD's one downside over BD was the lower capacity per layer.) But, certainly, if, for whatever reason, Toshiba is successful in pushing HD DVD as a data storage format, then Microsoft and Nintendo would be absolutely insane to adopt it as their game distribution format.
Personally though I doubt either would choose blue-laser technology for either. I think computer games lend themselves to online distribution even more so than movies. I think the games industry will jump away from hard media well before the movie industry.
Is it too likely that a Democrat might win this time?
Hey, remember when he stood in 2000, with the full support of the Green movement, because, wait for it, Al Gore wasn't an environmentalist?
I always wondered whether the HD DVD people (it'd have been them rather than Sony, given HD DVD was "next generation DVD" from the DVD Forum, whereas to some extent Blu-ray was Sony et al looking for an application for blue-laser technology) could have saved a lot of time and money by continuing to use red lasers and designing a six layer red-layer DVD. The drives would then have cost about the same as existing DVD drives, and only the rest of the hardware (an HD DVD or Blu-ray player is pretty much an entire PC, somewhat more powerful than a Wii, complete with flash storage) would have cost a little more.
My guess though is that adding layers, while cheap on the hardware side, does make disk duplication significantly more expensive and complex. Which gets back to the point about three layer HD DVDs. Nobody ever implemented it or shipped a three layer HD DVD, and I suspect it wasn't seen as an optimal solution for publishers to begin with. Despite the lower cost per layer of HD DVD duplication compared to Blu-ray, prices ended up being similar because many Blu-ray discs were single layer, as 25G was more than enough space, whereas virtually all HD DVDs were dual layer.
There will never be an open source Blu-ray player legal for use in the US (though "legal" open source DVD and HD DVD players are of questionable usefulness given there were no HD DVDs shipped without DRM, and the vast majority of DVDs were shipped with DRM.) Blu-ray makes AACS mandatory on pressed blue-laser media, so the DMCA effectively prohibits it.
I cannot fathom why DRM is mandatory, I know some Blu-ray partisans have even gone into a state of denial about it when I've brought it up before, but that's what the situation is.
Our best hope, ironically, is Microsoft throwing their weight around a little. They have a lot of reasons to be pissed about the end results of the HD war. Vista was screwed up mostly because of the secure path initiative, probably the biggest thing to be fucked up as a result of Microsoft trying to get Hollywood on-side. If they were to omit secure path in Windows 7, the AACS LA would either have to liberalize the AACS license, or else see virtually everyone play Blu-ray discs using unauthorized players.
Dude, I can find CED players if I look hard enough. HD DVD means I get HD now. I couldn't get a Blu-ray player even if I wanted one, my wife would never let me spend $400 on a glorified DVD player.
$5 is a bizarrely low price for you to claim is too high BTW, that's about what AppleTV charges for a rental. The HD DVD is higher quality and will be playable for years.
I don't understand the hate-on people like you have for HD DVD. It was a very good format, it's a shame it's failed as in pretty much every way except player cost it was superior to DVD, something that isn't (presently) true of Blu-ray (Blu-ray has some advantages over DVD, but also some disadvantages.) But as long as you people act like it's malaria, people like me will end up with HD on the cheap.