I'm arguing this from the perspective of the average consumer, but I'll share my own reasons for not caring about Blu-Ray at the end of my post.
Firstly, why is it worth so much more? My eyesight isn't 20/20, so differences in resolution mean less to me. Or I'm not perceptive enough to notice them. Even then, why is it worth THAT much more? I've seen Blu-Ray movies in the store that cost nearly double that of the same movie on DVD, surely they're not nearly twice as great of a viewing experience on most people's televisions? Not to mention the players -- $300 gets you an entry level player. That's for 1080P resolution. You can get an 1080P Upconverting player for about $50-100 now, and a Progressive Scan player for about $30. For most movies, is the difference between upscaling and "natively" being in 1080P on the disc that big of a difference in quality? (Most movies, I imagine they just software-upscale before mastering the discs.)
Honestly, the resolution issue is part of why I haven't upgraded yet. I get complimented on my cable box outputting 480i to a front-projector (max resolution 1024x768) and being displayed where a pixel is about the size of a quarter, and people compliment me on my fine HDTV. I haven't bothered to spend the $50 for a special pigtail combination to get native component inputs on the thing with that in mind, I just don't see that much of a difference from when I *did* have it hooked up HD before I moved and lost the cables. The player costs about three days of work for me, and the movies so much more that I'd probably only rent them -- I don't even buy DVDs now because of their price, preferring to use Blockbuster for one-offs. Why should I invest that kind of money into something when the benefit isn't really that big?
Think of it like buying a CD of Red Hat and a support contract to go along with it. That's what is going on here -- Canonical agreed to support certain codecs. In order to fully support them, they need to be in control of their distribution. They offer for sale a support contract for the codecs, which comes with a known-good download of the sotware they are going to support.
That's precisely the reason here. The decrypting of a DVD is protected by several patents, which require licenses to be paid.
Open Source software doesn't pay the licenses, generally. Ergo, the software is illegally implementing patented technologies, and anyone who is using the software without a license is potentially a patent infringement lawsuit defendant -- not just the people who wrote it.
Canonical, by selling licenses, can pay the licensing fees to the people who own the technology, and everyone is happy. Linux users can play all their media and do so within the confines of the law as it stands right now.
Of course, because a loud minority of Linux users are anarchocommunists who don't believe in intellectual property or paying for things, there is some community backlash.
My understanding of small-claims court was that there are no appeals -- you get one shot at it, and whatever sticks, sticks. Mainly to keep the process from bogging down. And of course, taking it to a larger court, there are some damage minimums and so forth.
I've been in the field and on this site for a long time, and I haven't the slightest idea what "TMTOWTDI" represents. That's one hell of an abbreviation.
TrueCrypt, and I imagine most others, stores important information about the encryption algorithm, keys used, and hashing algorithms in a header. A duress password which, when triggered, scrambles that header would basically render the entire drive a block of random noise that could never be decrypted by someone who didn't know the full key and the combination of algorithms which were used to derive it. Ever.
There's a web site, www.privatemdlabs.com which lets you pay online for any test you want, print the test requisition off the Internet -- approved by an actual M.D. and all -- then go to whatever testing center administers the tests and have blood or whatever else drawn. The downside is, it is 100% out of pocket costs -- several hundred for routine tests.
They send you the lab results (uninterpreted) as a PDF and then you can do whatever you want with them.
I have no relationship with this company other than as a customer who has used them once.
I was specifically waiting until the format war ended to buy one, and as soon as I did, the prices went up by about a hundred dollars a player. Not only that, but at every store I've been into, every brand of player is exactly the same and sells for the same price. Sony, Sharp, Samsung, etc. etc. are all $399.99. One has an Ethernet port and it's $469.99 for some reason.
It's been this way almost a year. I almost think there's some collusion going on for price-fixing, since there's no way it can still cost that much per unit to make these devices. Blu-Ray drives for a PC have dropped in price by almost half in the same amount of time.
I thought that because the P2P user doesn't have a license to distribute, any distribution at all is illegal. Even if the distribution is back to the person who owns the rights originally.
Maybe Mr. Beckerman can chime in? Surely this isn't an unresolved question in law still.
I was thinking. Because there is such a strong pressure difference on Venus, wouldn't it be possible to float in the atmosphere there much like a ship floats on water here?
Obviously with bigger floats, possibly filled with things, but it's not like the structure would have to literally hold the thing up by the belt loops or something, the natural physics of the place would help a little bit with properly constructed facilities and equipment.
When you mount the external volume in "hidden-sector-aware" mode, you give it both passwords for the outside and inside container. TrueCrypt decrypts the inside container headers, finds out which sectors it occupies, then configures its filesystem driver to deny writes in those sectors.
If you're mounting your external volume without awareness, it probably means you're doing so under duress and having that data destroyed by an errant overwrite is preferable to keeping it secure. TrueCrypt would happily allow the entire drive (including the area occupied by the hidden volume) to be overwritten if it doesn't know it needs to keep a lookout.
The only sector of any volume that is totally the real weak point of the system is the volume headers. If those are lost, you're screwed. But, you can make encrypted backups of the volume headers as well, so it's not all bad.
My average consumption at my old place was 33 kWh/day, for two people. My new place, seems to be about 17 kWh/day by myself although I haven't had it long enough for the power company to give me a fancy trend report yet. Both places were right around 70 m^2, electric water heater, electric central air (also electric heating but never once used the heater part), electric clothes dryer, electric stove and oven. I think that's part of the problem there, all my major power sinks are electrical.
I'm going to try and get it down to 10 kWh/day. I don't want to be 7x the power consumption of everyone else.
I think I probably use 13,000 kWh/year and I consider myself to be relatively conservative compared with many other people whose power consumption I know. F@H/SETI boxes running 24/7, extra servers running their blogs, etc.
Back in my Geek Squad days, several years ago, the official policy set by the store services manager at my location was that, if a computer with a pirated Windows installation was brought in and we discovered as much (WGA Validation updates were always installed by us during the "repair" phase of service) then we were to call the customer, and the option was that they bought a legit Windows license and the labor to install it or they didn't get their computer back because it was illegal.
It worked most of the time. Only once did the person refuse, and we then did actually give them their computer back without doing any work on it.
I have no idea how people end up with stuff that cheap. I've got Comcast HSI + Comcast Digital Cable with all 11 HD channels. It's around $120/month. I only rent a single HD-DVR. I own my own cable modem.
I respectfully disagree with your point that technology/software companies can't get Americans to fill the jobs. I think what we're seeing right now is the results of a market correction about the value of technology positions.
Older laborers have an idea of their worth that dates back to when their skills were scarce and hard to build. They're the ones with enough experience, but they're too expensive for corporations.
Younger laborers, recent graduates and future graduates, can look around and see that their skills aren't worth that much. (Look at how EA hires developers, there have been a few stories about it here on Slashdot. College grads work long hours for low pay and are happy for the opportunity, until they burn out.) The trouble is these younger people don't have experience, so they get hired more slowly because there exist foreigners who will take college student pay, and have old-timer experience.
Give it a little bit. I imagine that some of the jobs will return to America, as the younger people slowly rack up the experience necessary to be marketable. But they'll still have the same value of their skills.
I speculate based on my knowledge of how chip fabrication works, that if they banned the "high power" versions of a chip, the price of all chips everywhere would skyrocket.
The most efficient running chips at a clock get cut first, less second, ones with defective cache marked down to lower versions and sold like that. If you took out all the ones that work but take more power doing it, you suddenly have a much smaller yield -- meaning a much higher price per unit.
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I'm arguing this from the perspective of the average consumer, but I'll share my own reasons for not caring about Blu-Ray at the end of my post.
Firstly, why is it worth so much more? My eyesight isn't 20/20, so differences in resolution mean less to me. Or I'm not perceptive enough to notice them. Even then, why is it worth THAT much more? I've seen Blu-Ray movies in the store that cost nearly double that of the same movie on DVD, surely they're not nearly twice as great of a viewing experience on most people's televisions? Not to mention the players -- $300 gets you an entry level player. That's for 1080P resolution. You can get an 1080P Upconverting player for about $50-100 now, and a Progressive Scan player for about $30. For most movies, is the difference between upscaling and "natively" being in 1080P on the disc that big of a difference in quality? (Most movies, I imagine they just software-upscale before mastering the discs.)
Honestly, the resolution issue is part of why I haven't upgraded yet. I get complimented on my cable box outputting 480i to a front-projector (max resolution 1024x768) and being displayed where a pixel is about the size of a quarter, and people compliment me on my fine HDTV. I haven't bothered to spend the $50 for a special pigtail combination to get native component inputs on the thing with that in mind, I just don't see that much of a difference from when I *did* have it hooked up HD before I moved and lost the cables. The player costs about three days of work for me, and the movies so much more that I'd probably only rent them -- I don't even buy DVDs now because of their price, preferring to use Blockbuster for one-offs. Why should I invest that kind of money into something when the benefit isn't really that big?
How many stories did he include in his sample of positive/negatively valenced Microsoft stories?
It's entirely possible that the 25% is in fact not a significant (statistically) increase.
Think of it like buying a CD of Red Hat and a support contract to go along with it. That's what is going on here -- Canonical agreed to support certain codecs. In order to fully support them, they need to be in control of their distribution. They offer for sale a support contract for the codecs, which comes with a known-good download of the sotware they are going to support.
That's precisely the reason here. The decrypting of a DVD is protected by several patents, which require licenses to be paid.
Open Source software doesn't pay the licenses, generally. Ergo, the software is illegally implementing patented technologies, and anyone who is using the software without a license is potentially a patent infringement lawsuit defendant -- not just the people who wrote it.
Canonical, by selling licenses, can pay the licensing fees to the people who own the technology, and everyone is happy. Linux users can play all their media and do so within the confines of the law as it stands right now.
Of course, because a loud minority of Linux users are anarchocommunists who don't believe in intellectual property or paying for things, there is some community backlash.
My understanding of small-claims court was that there are no appeals -- you get one shot at it, and whatever sticks, sticks. Mainly to keep the process from bogging down. And of course, taking it to a larger court, there are some damage minimums and so forth.
Wouldn't it go to the House, which is stacked with Democrats?
I've been in the field and on this site for a long time, and I haven't the slightest idea what "TMTOWTDI" represents. That's one hell of an abbreviation.
TrueCrypt, and I imagine most others, stores important information about the encryption algorithm, keys used, and hashing algorithms in a header. A duress password which, when triggered, scrambles that header would basically render the entire drive a block of random noise that could never be decrypted by someone who didn't know the full key and the combination of algorithms which were used to derive it. Ever.
There's a web site, www.privatemdlabs.com which lets you pay online for any test you want, print the test requisition off the Internet -- approved by an actual M.D. and all -- then go to whatever testing center administers the tests and have blood or whatever else drawn. The downside is, it is 100% out of pocket costs -- several hundred for routine tests.
They send you the lab results (uninterpreted) as a PDF and then you can do whatever you want with them.
I have no relationship with this company other than as a customer who has used them once.
Wasn't the reason we moved from R12 to R134A in cooling systems because of the environmental impact of CFCs? These are just CFC polymers.
Indeed.
I was specifically waiting until the format war ended to buy one, and as soon as I did, the prices went up by about a hundred dollars a player. Not only that, but at every store I've been into, every brand of player is exactly the same and sells for the same price. Sony, Sharp, Samsung, etc. etc. are all $399.99. One has an Ethernet port and it's $469.99 for some reason.
It's been this way almost a year. I almost think there's some collusion going on for price-fixing, since there's no way it can still cost that much per unit to make these devices. Blu-Ray drives for a PC have dropped in price by almost half in the same amount of time.
How about (buck-a-scoop) (Chinese food), as in, inexpensive.
I thought that because the P2P user doesn't have a license to distribute, any distribution at all is illegal. Even if the distribution is back to the person who owns the rights originally.
Maybe Mr. Beckerman can chime in? Surely this isn't an unresolved question in law still.
I was thinking. Because there is such a strong pressure difference on Venus, wouldn't it be possible to float in the atmosphere there much like a ship floats on water here?
Obviously with bigger floats, possibly filled with things, but it's not like the structure would have to literally hold the thing up by the belt loops or something, the natural physics of the place would help a little bit with properly constructed facilities and equipment.
When you mount the external volume in "hidden-sector-aware" mode, you give it both passwords for the outside and inside container. TrueCrypt decrypts the inside container headers, finds out which sectors it occupies, then configures its filesystem driver to deny writes in those sectors.
If you're mounting your external volume without awareness, it probably means you're doing so under duress and having that data destroyed by an errant overwrite is preferable to keeping it secure. TrueCrypt would happily allow the entire drive (including the area occupied by the hidden volume) to be overwritten if it doesn't know it needs to keep a lookout.
The only sector of any volume that is totally the real weak point of the system is the volume headers. If those are lost, you're screwed. But, you can make encrypted backups of the volume headers as well, so it's not all bad.
My average consumption at my old place was 33 kWh/day, for two people. My new place, seems to be about 17 kWh/day by myself although I haven't had it long enough for the power company to give me a fancy trend report yet. Both places were right around 70 m^2, electric water heater, electric central air (also electric heating but never once used the heater part), electric clothes dryer, electric stove and oven. I think that's part of the problem there, all my major power sinks are electrical.
I'm going to try and get it down to 10 kWh/day. I don't want to be 7x the power consumption of everyone else.
1700 kWh/year? That's insane.
I think I probably use 13,000 kWh/year and I consider myself to be relatively conservative compared with many other people whose power consumption I know. F@H/SETI boxes running 24/7, extra servers running their blogs, etc.
Back in my Geek Squad days, several years ago, the official policy set by the store services manager at my location was that, if a computer with a pirated Windows installation was brought in and we discovered as much (WGA Validation updates were always installed by us during the "repair" phase of service) then we were to call the customer, and the option was that they bought a legit Windows license and the labor to install it or they didn't get their computer back because it was illegal.
It worked most of the time. Only once did the person refuse, and we then did actually give them their computer back without doing any work on it.
It would've taken a year to read the USA PATRIOT Act aloud.
Actually, that would've been a good thing -- the people hearing it would've actually known behind a doubt what they were stealing from us all.
I have no idea how people end up with stuff that cheap. I've got Comcast HSI + Comcast Digital Cable with all 11 HD channels. It's around $120/month. I only rent a single HD-DVR. I own my own cable modem.
It's insane...
I respectfully disagree with your point that technology/software companies can't get Americans to fill the jobs. I think what we're seeing right now is the results of a market correction about the value of technology positions.
Older laborers have an idea of their worth that dates back to when their skills were scarce and hard to build. They're the ones with enough experience, but they're too expensive for corporations.
Younger laborers, recent graduates and future graduates, can look around and see that their skills aren't worth that much. (Look at how EA hires developers, there have been a few stories about it here on Slashdot. College grads work long hours for low pay and are happy for the opportunity, until they burn out.) The trouble is these younger people don't have experience, so they get hired more slowly because there exist foreigners who will take college student pay, and have old-timer experience.
Give it a little bit. I imagine that some of the jobs will return to America, as the younger people slowly rack up the experience necessary to be marketable. But they'll still have the same value of their skills.
If you're ever in Orlando, I'll buy you a beer. I'm serious, too.
You and me both.
He means your posts exude smug epicaricacy. I don't necessarily agree, but that's the gist of it.
I speculate based on my knowledge of how chip fabrication works, that if they banned the "high power" versions of a chip, the price of all chips everywhere would skyrocket.
The most efficient running chips at a clock get cut first, less second, ones with defective cache marked down to lower versions and sold like that. If you took out all the ones that work but take more power doing it, you suddenly have a much smaller yield -- meaning a much higher price per unit.