Hmm, You haven't done any searching for terms like "kindlepid" (which allows you to get the mobi PID fron a Kindle serial number) than, have you? (Hint: Mobi DRM has been broken)
And you're right. topaz books are a different kind of DRM, and have not been broken as far as I know. There don't seem to be many Topaz books at the moment.
For one thing, it's not Microsoft sending the email, it's Volt. And for another, there is no need for any severance packages. Washington is an "at will" state. You can fire, or lay off, anyone, for any reason (or no reason) with no notice, and with no severance, completely legally.
The other side of that is that any employee may quit at any time for any reason with no notice required.
Which is why I strip the DRM off my kindle books, and archive them as an EPub. I do the same with.LIT books I buy. It's a simple procedure, and should be cake for anyone with enough skills to use a linux box:)
But seriously, with the crappy paper they print paperbacks on, their lifespans are only measured in maybe decades. I had to convert my Eddings series to EBook because the paper versions I bought in the late 80's are now crumbling and falling apart.
EBooks I can move from device to device, and storage medium to storage medium for as long as I care to.
Maybe he just wants to watch the TVs in the gym?
on
Obama's "ZuneGate"
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· Score: 1
Most gyms I've been to have a row of TV screens showing news networks (or sports), each broadcasting audio on a specific FM frequency. Last I checked, iPods don't have FM receivers. Zunes do.
Actually, that may be the real reason they're doing this. Essentially, the company is forced to do one of two things, a) capitulate and pay Halliburton to use their own invention, or b) reveal to the world what the secret of their invention is, thereby devaluing it completely, and allowing Halliburton to use it to do whatever they want, since it's not patented.
Think of it in these terms: Coca Cola and KFC have survived and thrived because they have managed to keep their formulae secret. If Halliburton came along and patented the exact formula for Coke, it would essentially negate a hundred years of trade secret protection, and Coke's only option would be to give up, since even if they paid, anyone else would now be able to completely replicate their drink, and it would no longer be covered by Trade Secret protection.
Even suing the company for violating Trade Secrets would be tantamount to admitting that the formula is correct, thus devaluing it.
I'm not sure what Halliburton gets out of patenting the idea of doing these things though, unless...
If Halliburton has a number of trade secrets and they fear that other companies are going to find out what they are and patent them, this could be a form of protection, although it seems pointless for the reasons above, once something is no longer secret, it loses value quickly. Maybe this is a way for them to extract some money from people who expose their trade secrets.
I'd love for this to be true, but as much as Linux has improved on the desktop, it still just plain sucks unless you're a computer geek, and even then.
I installed ubuntu on a laptop that will no longer install windows, and after a few months of using it, I would go back to windows in an instant if it would install. Just getting _anything_ done in Linux requires half an hour of googling, only to find that it's not really supported, and you have to install fifteen other products that _almost_ work.
For instance, mapping network drives. I just couldn't for the life of me get SMB mapped drives to just work (to my FreeBSD server). In the end I just gave up and used scp. Two different versions of windows work beautifully. Permissions just translate across, and I don't even have to think about it.
Microsoft is in no danger from the Linux crowd yet...
Even in the server side, Apache has declined from over 70% of websites in 2005 to less than 50% now, while IIS has increased from ~20% to 35% in the same timeframe.
Better how? I admit I haven't used PG simply because MySQL is what I've always used, and it works perfectly for the tiny projects I tend to futz around with (like my jukebox and website driver etc). I don't use stored procedures, I don't use pretty much any of the "advanced features" like replication, transactions, or pretty much anything that appears to be marked for removal from the Drizzle core. The apps I use are designed to be write rarely, read often, and all I need is good performance on the read, a reasonable relational structure, and the ability to do reasonably complex SQL queries.
So, how, exactly, is PG "much better" than MySQL for me? I've been tempted to switch a number of times, but I never found a reason why it would work better for me.
Why is it remarkable? We live on the same planet...
Now if trees were from Venus and preferred 70F temperatures, that would be remarkable. What's not remarkable is that both trees and humans prefer an environment they evolved in.
Correct, an illegal immigrant is not a citizen, by definition. The previous poster did not say "illegal immigrant" though. When I was an H1B (non-immigrant) visa holder. I had to pay US taxes. I was a _temporary_ resident, but still subject to US taxes, as mentioned above, without representation.
In fact, you can even be taxed by the US as a _non-resident_ alien, if the company you work for is a US company. (One of the reason KBR's subsidiary that controls payroll for workers in Iraq is headquartered in the caribbean)
Note also, that the US government taxes your _worldwide_ income, not just your US income, although there are strange exceptions and other rules.
Um, Sure, openBSD is secure, until you install anything other than the limited subset it comes with. and even without that, they have a couple of security fixes a month from what I remember when on the mailing list. As for OS-X, I don't see how having a huge hole in safari can be classed as "secure". Note that in that competition, it took allowing the install of random third party software before the windows box was compromised. The apple one was compromised by just going to a website.
So, please, hate on Microsoft all you want, just try do it with actual facts.
And you're also not thinking of iPod Touches. They don't have an always connected web connection, and thus have a lot of use for native apps that could have been replicated by a web app. Not the ones that would require a web data stream, but there are a lot of apps that don't. (I was particularly enamoured of Solitaire, A Tip Calculator, and a couple of others when my ipot was hacked.)
1) I have a 1080p screen and at that resolution the PS3's graphics are much better. Except that most PS3 games run at 720p anyway, irrespective of your screen resolution. But I'll give you this one. 2) If you play online games the PS3 is much cheaper over several years. It would take 4 years of live service to equal the price of a PS3. So "much cheaper over several years" is misleading. 3) Cross platform games are better on the PS3. This is the one that makes me laugh the most. Please. Sports games runnung at half the frame rate is better? Virtua Fighter 5 (and other games) without online play, where the other platform has them is better? You have an interesting definition of better. 4) PS3 games have much more to work with aka a HDD, more processing power etc. But they have yet to actually show anything useful with it. 5) Blue-Ray A valid observation, for the 2-5% of users who care about it. The other 95% still have to pay the premium. 6) Up scaling DVD's How is this better? They both do this. 7) It plays enough PS2 games that I don't need a PS2 but I still need the Xbox for a lot of old games. Sure, but at least the 360 now has enough games that you don't _need_ to play the old ones. 8) It upgrades the graphics on old PS2 games. (So it's better than just backwards compatible.) Also something both consoles do, so where's the "better"? 9) The PS3 has a longer lifespan. (Xbox 1 came out a year after PS2 but the 360 came out a year before the PS3. People are still buying more PS2's than 360's.) Making assumpttions based on previous models may not be all that accurate. Sure, Sony would love a 10 year life cycle for the PS3, but if it continues to flop, they may do something else.
Incorrect, actually. Every HD DVD player (and BD I suspect, but I've only seen the PS3) in the market has Component outputs, and the movies work fine through them.
Which players are you aware of? they're obviously not ones based in the Real World(tm)
Really? Damn! Did someone forget to tell me or the rest of the people on our (pretty damn large) team? I mean, seriously, it would be much easier if I didn't have to finish the multiple products I'm currently working on since we're apparently giving up on the format.
I think we're doing pretty well, considering the PS3 outnumbers HD DVD players by probably 5:1. Luckily, people who own the PS3 either are still smarting from the hole in their pocket it left, or are those cheap gamer types who don't watch all that many movies. You may notice that for certain recent titles (Happy Feet, Planet Earth, a couple of the other Warner ones), the HD DVD actually did better than the BD. And then we also get a couple of reasonably popular titles this year that won't be on BD at all, or will only arrive "later", like Heroes, Battlestar Galactica, and The Matrix.
I think one of the best bugs as features came from a bug in Intel processors that didn't reset the segment registers when you cancelled protected mode, resulting in Unreal Mode, a 32 bit flat memory real mode. It got used to good effect by a number of PC Games and Demos.
Aah, but the studios don't care how many players are out there, they care how many _customers_ are out there. The PS3 sales don't tell them that. If you buy a PS3, what is the chance of you buying a BD disc? Well, if the number of gamers who watch DVDs on their PS2 (or even watch DVDs at all) is any indication, it's a pretty low number. Not so with the XBox Addon. If MS sells a million addons, the studios know that there are a million people who will be watching movies, because they bought the drive, and you can't do anything else with it.
There's a lot more certaintly for the studios with the MS approach, and the studios like certainty.
Aah, but you're counting wrong, see. For 10 million people out there (by November), the HD DVD addon will not cost them the price of the 360 + the addon, they already _have_ the 360. So which is easier, paying $600 over 2 years, or paying $600 all at once, for me, I could justify the $400 cost of the 360 last year, and I can easily justify the cost of a ~$200 HD DVD drive this year, but I could not justify the $600 cost of a PS3, it's just too much all at once.
So for the millions of people who already have a HDTV and a 360, they're not looking at $600 to get started watching movies, they're only looking at $200, which is a pretty small barrier to entry, and for the people who don't have a 360, they're not looking at $600 to watch a movie (They can buy the Toshiba for between $400-$500), and they're not looking at $600 to play a game (the 360 is $400). For the PS3, no matter what you want to do, you're looking at $600, up front. Too rich for my blood.
I, like many consumers, don't _care_ what a system can possibly do. I care about what it does do. So far, Sony is requiring all titles on blu-ray to be released in MPEG2. Even Warner, who we know has VC1 encodes of their movies, because they're released on HDDVD, will be forced to do a MPEG2 encode for the blu-ray version. Why this is I don't know, since the Broadcom chip on the Samsung is quite capable of decoding VC1 and H.264 in real time. If I were a guessing man, I'd be betting it's because they're having trouble getting their H.264 codec performant on the PS3.
And yes, while it's not strictly kosher comparing different movies picture quality, those reviews were all done by the same person, and he's clearly happier with the PQ on the HDDVD movies. Until Warner starts releasing their movies on Blu-Ray (Which for some reason they haven't done yet, how strange, and even stranger, they have about 20% of the titles planned for blu-ray as they do for HDDVD) we won't be able to do side-by-side comparisons.
BD-J has not been delayed as such. Studios have just been told not to use it. I know this because I've worked with places doing authoring for both titles. You'll note (or, you won't because nobody seems to have noticed yet) that all the initial Blu-ray titles are BD-MV, which has no animation ability, and only simple menus over video possible.
Also, I'd love to see an embedded java chip than can process video fast enough to provide a secondary video stream, since the Blu-ray spec has no mandatory second video codec, picture in picture is a pipe dream for them (No one will author to an optional spec component)
Put it this way, the studios are not happy with the limitations and quality issues they are having to work with to get blu-ray discs out there. In the end, it's not the consumers that get to choose. Whichever format makes the most studios the happiest will win.
Also it doesn't matter how much the dual layer yields increase if shipped players can't play them. Unless the Samsung somehow can upgrade itself to play double layer discs, it has become the lowest common denominator, and no discs will be released in dual layer until it can.
I don't think 100K units is even remotely a problem. If you'll look at the released Blu-ray movies, you'll note that somehow they mostly have fewer features on them than their supposedly smaller DVD counterparts. The released HDDVD's on the other hand, all have at least the same amount, and some of them have movie length added features.
How could this be? with Blu-ray's huge storage advantage? For that, you need to look closer at what they've actually managed to ship. Shipping: HDDVD - 30GB dual layer discs. VC1 and H.264 encoded movies (at about 18Mb). Leaving about 10-15GB free for added features. Shipping: Blu-Ray - 25GB single layer discs (They _still_ can't replicate dual layer discs with any meaningful yields) with Mpeg2 encoded movies (at about 25Mb). Leaving only 2-3GB free for specials.
Even aside from their lacklustervideoquality inherent in high bandwidth MPEG2, and that Sony has told studios not to use BD-J until at least next year, and that the Samsung player states clearly in it's manual that it cannot play dual layer discs, some people still continue to insist that somehow blu-ray is a better format.
When you compare it to titles that have embeddedvideo special features, something blu-ray can't do at all. And picturequality that just can't be beat by Mpeg2, you can see why the format hasn't died, even with less support currently (it'll come). Of course, it can't hurt that the studios are getting huge amounts of support and help from Microsoft and Toshiba, while Sony, being Sony is giving them the usual cold shoulder.
You're forgetting that _all_ those devices can do is play a single Hi-def stream. HDDVD requires two simultaneous streams, and an interactivity layer. Also the chip they use for decoding h.264 and VC1 are most certainly not in your sub $200 HD players.
Creating a script to install the proprietary code is also not a derivative work. You have used no GPL code in your script, and no GPL code in your drivers. The act of installing or running proprietary code on linux does not violate the GPL.
The only place in that series of steps that could be dangerous would be the automatic installation. If you left it up to the user to run the program that installed your drivers, there would be nothing the GPL could do.
You mean those "3 peripherals" per console that microsoft has already sold haven't caught on? Damn.
History tells us that you don't want to sell something that will split your userbase. A HDDVD movie only drive will not do that, it will simply be a cheap way to get a high def movie player if you already have a 360. It's not even _related_ to the gaming side of the machine.
Stop right there. The BluRay camp has 4 of the 5 big studios on board, and Sony is about to flood the market by trojaning BluRay into what will certainly be (at least initially) a big console release - and they will do it for less than the $1k that either a HD-DVD or BluRay standalone player goes for today. There is no catastrophe other than your fricking ignorant post.
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or anyone even trying to break the DRM
Hmm, You haven't done any searching for terms like "kindlepid" (which allows you to get the mobi PID fron a Kindle serial number) than, have you? (Hint: Mobi DRM has been broken)
And you're right. topaz books are a different kind of DRM, and have not been broken as far as I know. There don't seem to be many Topaz books at the moment.
For one thing, it's not Microsoft sending the email, it's Volt.
And for another, there is no need for any severance packages. Washington is an "at will" state. You can fire, or lay off, anyone, for any reason (or no reason) with no notice, and with no severance, completely legally.
The other side of that is that any employee may quit at any time for any reason with no notice required.
Which is why I strip the DRM off my kindle books, and archive them as an EPub. I do the same with .LIT books I buy. It's a simple procedure, and should be cake for anyone with enough skills to use a linux box :)
But seriously, with the crappy paper they print paperbacks on, their lifespans are only measured in maybe decades. I had to convert my Eddings series to EBook because the paper versions I bought in the late 80's are now crumbling and falling apart.
EBooks I can move from device to device, and storage medium to storage medium for as long as I care to.
Most gyms I've been to have a row of TV screens showing news networks (or sports), each broadcasting audio on a specific FM frequency. Last I checked, iPods don't have FM receivers. Zunes do.
Actually, that may be the real reason they're doing this. Essentially, the company is forced to do one of two things, a) capitulate and pay Halliburton to use their own invention, or b) reveal to the world what the secret of their invention is, thereby devaluing it completely, and allowing Halliburton to use it to do whatever they want, since it's not patented.
Think of it in these terms: Coca Cola and KFC have survived and thrived because they have managed to keep their formulae secret. If Halliburton came along and patented the exact formula for Coke, it would essentially negate a hundred years of trade secret protection, and Coke's only option would be to give up, since even if they paid, anyone else would now be able to completely replicate their drink, and it would no longer be covered by Trade Secret protection.
Even suing the company for violating Trade Secrets would be tantamount to admitting that the formula is correct, thus devaluing it.
I'm not sure what Halliburton gets out of patenting the idea of doing these things though, unless...
If Halliburton has a number of trade secrets and they fear that other companies are going to find out what they are and patent them, this could be a form of protection, although it seems pointless for the reasons above, once something is no longer secret, it loses value quickly. Maybe this is a way for them to extract some money from people who expose their trade secrets.
I'd love for this to be true, but as much as Linux has improved on the desktop, it still just plain sucks unless you're a computer geek, and even then.
I installed ubuntu on a laptop that will no longer install windows, and after a few months of using it, I would go back to windows in an instant if it would install. Just getting _anything_ done in Linux requires half an hour of googling, only to find that it's not really supported, and you have to install fifteen other products that _almost_ work.
For instance, mapping network drives. I just couldn't for the life of me get SMB mapped drives to just work (to my FreeBSD server). In the end I just gave up and used scp. Two different versions of windows work beautifully. Permissions just translate across, and I don't even have to think about it.
Microsoft is in no danger from the Linux crowd yet...
Even in the server side, Apache has declined from over 70% of websites in 2005 to less than 50% now, while IIS has increased from ~20% to 35% in the same timeframe.
Better how? I admit I haven't used PG simply because MySQL is what I've always used, and it works perfectly for the tiny projects I tend to futz around with (like my jukebox and website driver etc). I don't use stored procedures, I don't use pretty much any of the "advanced features" like replication, transactions, or pretty much anything that appears to be marked for removal from the Drizzle core. The apps I use are designed to be write rarely, read often, and all I need is good performance on the read, a reasonable relational structure, and the ability to do reasonably complex SQL queries.
So, how, exactly, is PG "much better" than MySQL for me? I've been tempted to switch a number of times, but I never found a reason why it would work better for me.
Why is it remarkable? We live on the same planet...
Now if trees were from Venus and preferred 70F temperatures, that would be remarkable. What's not remarkable is that both trees and humans prefer an environment they evolved in.
Correct, an illegal immigrant is not a citizen, by definition. The previous poster did not say "illegal immigrant" though. When I was an H1B (non-immigrant) visa holder. I had to pay US taxes. I was a _temporary_ resident, but still subject to US taxes, as mentioned above, without representation.
In fact, you can even be taxed by the US as a _non-resident_ alien, if the company you work for is a US company. (One of the reason KBR's subsidiary that controls payroll for workers in Iraq is headquartered in the caribbean)
Note also, that the US government taxes your _worldwide_ income, not just your US income, although there are strange exceptions and other rules.
IRS page about taxing aliens
So as mentioned above, non-citizens can be taxed. We knew you were talking about "residents", but your statement was incorrect.
Some states even tax non-residents. If, for instance, you live in NJ, but work in NY, you may have to pay NY taxes.
Um, Sure, openBSD is secure, until you install anything other than the limited subset it comes with. and even without that, they have a couple of security fixes a month from what I remember when on the mailing list. As for OS-X, I don't see how having a huge hole in safari can be classed as "secure". Note that in that competition, it took allowing the install of random third party software before the windows box was compromised. The apple one was compromised by just going to a website.
So, please, hate on Microsoft all you want, just try do it with actual facts.
And you're also not thinking of iPod Touches. They don't have an always connected web connection, and thus have a lot of use for native apps that could have been replicated by a web app. Not the ones that would require a web data stream, but there are a lot of apps that don't. (I was particularly enamoured of Solitaire, A Tip Calculator, and a couple of others when my ipot was hacked.)
Er... What?
1) I have a 1080p screen and at that resolution the PS3's graphics are much better.
Except that most PS3 games run at 720p anyway, irrespective of your screen resolution. But I'll give you this one.
2) If you play online games the PS3 is much cheaper over several years.
It would take 4 years of live service to equal the price of a PS3. So "much cheaper over several years" is misleading.
3) Cross platform games are better on the PS3.
This is the one that makes me laugh the most. Please. Sports games runnung at half the frame rate is better? Virtua Fighter 5 (and other games) without online play, where the other platform has them is better? You have an interesting definition of better.
4) PS3 games have much more to work with aka a HDD, more processing power etc.
But they have yet to actually show anything useful with it.
5) Blue-Ray
A valid observation, for the 2-5% of users who care about it. The other 95% still have to pay the premium.
6) Up scaling DVD's
How is this better? They both do this.
7) It plays enough PS2 games that I don't need a PS2 but I still need the Xbox for a lot of old games.
Sure, but at least the 360 now has enough games that you don't _need_ to play the old ones.
8) It upgrades the graphics on old PS2 games. (So it's better than just backwards compatible.)
Also something both consoles do, so where's the "better"?
9) The PS3 has a longer lifespan. (Xbox 1 came out a year after PS2 but the 360 came out a year before the PS3. People are still buying more PS2's than 360's.)
Making assumpttions based on previous models may not be all that accurate. Sure, Sony would love a 10 year life cycle for the PS3, but if it continues to flop, they may do something else.
Incorrect, actually. Every HD DVD player (and BD I suspect, but I've only seen the PS3) in the market has Component outputs, and the movies work fine through them.
Which players are you aware of? they're obviously not ones based in the Real World(tm)
Really? Damn! Did someone forget to tell me or the rest of the people on our (pretty damn large) team? I mean, seriously, it would be much easier if I didn't have to finish the multiple products I'm currently working on since we're apparently giving up on the format.
:)
I think we're doing pretty well, considering the PS3 outnumbers HD DVD players by probably 5:1. Luckily, people who own the PS3 either are still smarting from the hole in their pocket it left, or are those cheap gamer types who don't watch all that many movies. You may notice that for certain recent titles (Happy Feet, Planet Earth, a couple of the other Warner ones), the HD DVD actually did better than the BD. And then we also get a couple of reasonably popular titles this year that won't be on BD at all, or will only arrive "later", like Heroes, Battlestar Galactica, and The Matrix.
The battle is far from over
I think one of the best bugs as features came from a bug in Intel processors that didn't reset the segment registers when you cancelled protected mode, resulting in Unreal Mode, a 32 bit flat memory real mode. It got used to good effect by a number of PC Games and Demos.
probably about the same amount as when you buy a CD from the store. And twice as much as when you buy a used CD.
Aah, but the studios don't care how many players are out there, they care how many _customers_ are out there. The PS3 sales don't tell them that. If you buy a PS3, what is the chance of you buying a BD disc? Well, if the number of gamers who watch DVDs on their PS2 (or even watch DVDs at all) is any indication, it's a pretty low number. Not so with the XBox Addon. If MS sells a million addons, the studios know that there are a million people who will be watching movies, because they bought the drive, and you can't do anything else with it.
There's a lot more certaintly for the studios with the MS approach, and the studios like certainty.
Aah, but you're counting wrong, see. For 10 million people out there (by November), the HD DVD addon will not cost them the price of the 360 + the addon, they already _have_ the 360. So which is easier, paying $600 over 2 years, or paying $600 all at once, for me, I could justify the $400 cost of the 360 last year, and I can easily justify the cost of a ~$200 HD DVD drive this year, but I could not justify the $600 cost of a PS3, it's just too much all at once.
So for the millions of people who already have a HDTV and a 360, they're not looking at $600 to get started watching movies, they're only looking at $200, which is a pretty small barrier to entry, and for the people who don't have a 360, they're not looking at $600 to watch a movie (They can buy the Toshiba for between $400-$500), and they're not looking at $600 to play a game (the 360 is $400).
For the PS3, no matter what you want to do, you're looking at $600, up front. Too rich for my blood.
I, like many consumers, don't _care_ what a system can possibly do. I care about what it does do. So far, Sony is requiring all titles on blu-ray to be released in MPEG2. Even Warner, who we know has VC1 encodes of their movies, because they're released on HDDVD, will be forced to do a MPEG2 encode for the blu-ray version. Why this is I don't know, since the Broadcom chip on the Samsung is quite capable of decoding VC1 and H.264 in real time. If I were a guessing man, I'd be betting it's because they're having trouble getting their H.264 codec performant on the PS3.
And yes, while it's not strictly kosher comparing different movies picture quality, those reviews were all done by the same person, and he's clearly happier with the PQ on the HDDVD movies. Until Warner starts releasing their movies on Blu-Ray (Which for some reason they haven't done yet, how strange, and even stranger, they have about 20% of the titles planned for blu-ray as they do for HDDVD) we won't be able to do side-by-side comparisons.
BD-J has not been delayed as such. Studios have just been told not to use it. I know this because I've worked with places doing authoring for both titles. You'll note (or, you won't because nobody seems to have noticed yet) that all the initial Blu-ray titles are BD-MV, which has no animation ability, and only simple menus over video possible.
Also, I'd love to see an embedded java chip than can process video fast enough to provide a secondary video stream, since the Blu-ray spec has no mandatory second video codec, picture in picture is a pipe dream for them (No one will author to an optional spec component)
Put it this way, the studios are not happy with the limitations and quality issues they are having to work with to get blu-ray discs out there. In the end, it's not the consumers that get to choose. Whichever format makes the most studios the happiest will win.
Also it doesn't matter how much the dual layer yields increase if shipped players can't play them. Unless the Samsung somehow can upgrade itself to play double layer discs, it has become the lowest common denominator, and no discs will be released in dual layer until it can.
I don't think 100K units is even remotely a problem.
If you'll look at the released Blu-ray movies, you'll note that somehow they mostly have fewer features on them than their supposedly smaller DVD counterparts. The released HDDVD's on the other hand, all have at least the same amount, and some of them have movie length added features.
How could this be? with Blu-ray's huge storage advantage? For that, you need to look closer at what they've actually managed to ship.
Shipping: HDDVD - 30GB dual layer discs. VC1 and H.264 encoded movies (at about 18Mb). Leaving about 10-15GB free for added features.
Shipping: Blu-Ray - 25GB single layer discs (They _still_ can't replicate dual layer discs with any meaningful yields) with Mpeg2 encoded movies (at about 25Mb). Leaving only 2-3GB free for specials.
Even aside from their lackluster video quality inherent in high bandwidth MPEG2, and that Sony has told studios not to use BD-J until at least next year, and that the Samsung player states clearly in it's manual that it cannot play dual layer discs, some people still continue to insist that somehow blu-ray is a better format.
When you compare it to titles that have embedded video special features, something blu-ray can't do at all. And picture quality that just can't be beat by Mpeg2, you can see why the format hasn't died, even with less support currently (it'll come). Of course, it can't hurt that the studios are getting huge amounts of support and help from Microsoft and Toshiba, while Sony, being Sony is giving them the usual cold shoulder.
You're forgetting that _all_ those devices can do is play a single Hi-def stream. HDDVD requires two simultaneous streams, and an interactivity layer. Also the chip they use for decoding h.264 and VC1 are most certainly not in your sub $200 HD players.
$500 is an arm and a leg? You need a better ambulance chasing lawyer, I could probably come away with millions for an arm and a leg.
$500 is pocket change for a brand new technology. I was expecting a minimum $1K pricetag, like the first DVD players.
Incorrect!
e gation
Inclusion of proprietary code on the same CD as the open source code is not the same as "creating a derivative work". http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggr
Creating a script to install the proprietary code is also not a derivative work. You have used no GPL code in your script, and no GPL code in your drivers. The act of installing or running proprietary code on linux does not violate the GPL.
The only place in that series of steps that could be dangerous would be the automatic installation. If you left it up to the user to run the program that installed your drivers, there would be nothing the GPL could do.
You mean those "3 peripherals" per console that microsoft has already sold haven't caught on? Damn.
History tells us that you don't want to sell something that will split your userbase. A HDDVD movie only drive will not do that, it will simply be a cheap way to get a high def movie player if you already have a 360. It's not even _related_ to the gaming side of the machine.
Actually, no. The Toshiba HD-A1 is available today for normal retail of $499 (and it includes a HDMI port). Less ($420) if you look around a little.
The PS3 will not be the cheapest HD movie player available. (Even if you don't count the supposed 360 price drop)