Oh gosh, what a load of obscurantist nonsense. Yes, the Steinway in my living room produces much better sound than any CD or vinyl record so in a sense analog still occupies the top of the pyramid. But both CD's and records are mechanical contrivances for capturing and reproducing and they both fall short. If you spent enough thousands of dollars on your overpriced tube amplifiers, exotic turntables and wall sized speakers some of the more objectionable distractions from the music killing process of mechanical reproduction could be minimized. Of course it is still mechanical reproduction and you've spent thousands of dollars of which virtually none goes to actual live musicians. At least with CD's you can escape the neurotic care required to preserve records and the ever present analog hiss is less expensive to avoid.
If you care about music then spend less on reproduction (ie CD's rather than high end analog) and more on live music.
Why look forward? It has existed for quite a while. easily more than a year. You just have to log out of the main database and log in to the Mars database. Last time I checked this was only possible to do with the PC client.
And the reality, a week later, when the boss has problems/forgot his super-cool passphrase and you're now locked out of his information, too.
Your idea of reality is deficient. It is possible to have a failsafe key available with the added property that using it causes the individual's passphrase to be reset. So, yes, the sysadmin could unlock mail if a passphrase was forgotten and if he decided to use it without authorization then the individual learns about it when his passphrase stops working. Not a perfect system but much better than many alternatives. You can read about many available and largely unused protocols in Rethinking Public Key Infrastructures and Digital Certificates by Stefan Brands (isbn:0-262-02491-8).
I realize that people who make their living by promoting the use of Windows would take exception to the snide tone of the press release. But isn't this instance of infection almost a nullity? I went to the bother of reading a few articles about the specific virus involved and although it is annoying to have it present at all it looks rather toothless in this circumstance. When you connect an iPod to a PC or Mac it shows up as a drive but customarily you only interact with it through iTunes which will not propagate the virus. Since the iPod appears as a USB drive it doesn't implement the auto-launch capability when it mounts so the user has to actually find and mindlessly launch the virus. I'm sure there are people dumb enough to do this but combined with the scarce presence it all seems like much ado about very little. Is there a greater risk than I've inferred?
Humans are to the best of my knowledge the first species with the potential to inflict both cataclysms on the planet with intention.
Your vision is so hopelessly myopic it is pathetic. For the first time (as far as we can tell) there is a species on Earth that is developing the technology to avert future mass extinctions and violent climate change. We will actually have the ability to detect and prevent many cataclysms. By spreading out and moving off planet to other systems humanity will be able to avoid those disasters that will remain beyond our abilities to prevent. Eventually using one g (constant acceleration at 10 meters per second per second) relativistic flight it could be possible for individuals from our era to travel to other galaxies and millions of years into the future of Earth (using a combination of Lorentz contraction and time dilation, see Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler chapter 6). That's right, if you knew something about the geometry of Minkowski spacetime then you would understand how the geometry of the universe allows the possibility of travel to other galaxies within the time scale of a normal human lifetime.
We don't have the technology now and if we sat around in teepees jacking off we never would. The wonderful thing about human intelligence and imagination is that it represents the universe becoming aware of itself. The seeds of this go back at least to the ancient Greeks. We live in the most intellectually exciting time ever and all you can do is wring your hands over how smelly and ignoble all those unworthy people are.
What a bucket full of misanthropic slop you are throwing around. Also this Malthusian handwringing is so 1970's. Have you read anything on the topic in recent decades? The more realistic question is how we will handle contracting populations that seem increasingly inevitable.
On the more cosmic issue of your mankind loathing I would counter that the arrival of man is the only thing that makes the rest of it even remotely worthwhile and interesting. Just imagine those billions of years of abject boredom that preceded the scant few thousand years of something of interest finally arriving. Assuming mankind's tenure is limited like every other dominant species has been (and I don't take that as inevitable) just imagine how disappointing it would be for a technically advanced species to arrive too late and miss all the excitement. For comparison think of Mars exploration. Great for geologists but infinitely less interesting than if we had found an advanced civilazation, or traces of one, or even single celled lifeforms.
It is also probably worth pointing out that both mass extinctions and extreme climate changes have been part of Earth's history for billions of years. Can't say I'm in favor of either one but pretending humans are uniquely culpable is clearly hubris.
While you had Google running why not look for this page? It looks like extraction of uranium from sea water may not be the pipe dream you imply it must be. I will have to thank you for one discovery. I had read this stuff from Bernard Cohen some time ago and casually associated the name with the Harvard professor whose books I had read as a juvenile. Turns out there is more than one Bernard Cohen who is a science professor. This one is a professor of physics at Pittsburgh University. Nothing wrong with that since, as you correctly assert, what matters are the numbers.
One of the issues usually absent from most discussions of nuclear energy is the stark difference in scale between it and other technologies like fossil fuel. The mammoth size of nuclear reactors with their containment vessels produce a different impression. I still remember an interview of Freeman Dyson by Dick Cavett who asked whether Dyson would prefer to live near a traditional or nuclear power plant with a clear expectation of what his answer would be. When Dyson immediately indicated a preference for the nuclear option you could watch Cavett's jaw drop. Dyson explained the issue of scale and similar considerations but it is doubtful it made much of an impression since it was so counter to the received wisdom which has lead to the carbon disaster we are facing.
That difference in scale is an important part of why the numbers so starkly favor nuclear technology as a sustainable technology. We have dithered for far too long already trying to live in the make believe world of anti-nuclear fanatics. Of course some have belatedly seen the damage that has been incurred and have changed their tune. But it was their near religious anti-nuclear fervor that resulted in the policies that have presented us with such unpleasant prospects and options. Maybe our ability to innovate and improve technology is not up to the task of making nuclear technology replace out dependence on fossil fuel. If not then in some sense we are doomed. But at least we need to try.
Is that the sound of a knee jerking or have you actually bothered to check? Here is a reference that indicates that the uranium supply (economically recoverable) would last billions of years though it does not assume exponential growth or anything similar. It does assume breeder reactor technology. In other words we would have to worry more about the Sun burning out first.
Just for the record I'm another example, as are my three kids, of big fans of Firefly who have no interest in the other series made by Joss. From the anecdotal accounts I've read I suspect that the admirers of Firefly are close to being independent (in the probability theory sense) of the other groups. It is also in a completely different class from Star Trek and Star Wars which are both fantasy rather than science fiction. Nothing is perfect but there hasn't been any science fiction series that is as entertaining or dramatically satisfying (the relationship between Mal and Jayne is worth the price of admission by itself) as Firefly though BSG does a respectable job.
I just finished reading "Broadbandits" so I may be feeling too much venom to express myself clearly enough. What I am saying is that I've had Vonage service for years and it has been just fine. A few times I've tried Skype to Skype and the audio quality was better than I've ever had for POTS or ISDN. My issue is that there appears to be a campaign starting which could result in degrading that service in order to encourage people to only buy VoIP from the pipe supplier, cable or telco. Since I've had the service over an extended period of time (and different ISPs) and have had good results I'm extremely skeptical when people start to trot out reasons why I should expect my Vonage service to be unsatisfactory. It reminds me slightly of Microsoft and their campaign to eliminate DOS clones. With each release of Windows there was always something broken in the DRDOS which helped lead to its demise. Or there is the similar case of Lotus 123. The situation seemed to be that updates to Windows didn't ship until they could break Lotus.
What is bullshit is how a service that worked fine starts to have problems once the monopoly supplier decides to enter the same market. I've been using Vonage for years and they supply a good service. Call quality has been fine but based on reports from others I expect that might be changing now that Time Warner has sold its customers in my area to Comcast. Oh and that 64 Kbps is the channel your packetized audio call gets from the local office for a standard POTS line. That is why modems weren't able to do better than approach 56K of bandwidth. Hell even ISDN only provided 64K per channel with a measely 16K for the signaling channel (I had ISDN service for several years in the 90's). How do you inflate that to 350K? Pull the other one. The issues here aren't technical. The smokescreen is (sometimes) technical and what matters is what the man behind the curtain is doing. As long as the local loop remains a politically allocated monopoly (or duopoly) we're going to be dealing with thuggish mentalities who objectively see "customers" as their rightful property. They've killed off the CLEC's and captured the ISP's. It is not surprising that they've drawn a bullseye on the VoIP companies.
The stench from this pack of lies is toxic. Low latency is what the consumer pays for and expects (for web browsing, for instance). If anything resembling actual market competition existed we would only hear competitors proudly providing and extolling the responsive connection they provide. Instead we usually face a monopoly or at best a duopoly that darky hints that competitive service providers just can't expect that multi-megabit connection to provide 64K voice service. What a steaming pile of crap. If you wanted to claim issues with teleconferencing it would still be problematic but this is just a pack of larcenous thugs flailing about trying to maintain their cosy monopoly position for voice communication.
It would be bad enough if this were an article by an analyst pretending to be a CEO of a multinational corporation. Instead we have someone pretending to be an analyst. Sony may fail to execute successfully in one instance or another but they created and own the playstation franchise which is obviously very valuable. Of course it has to be managed properly and by playing the Blu-Ray card they may have overplayed their hand. We don't know yet and cannot know until it has been purchased and used by consumers for a while.
But with a wildly successful franchise like playstation the last thing that will kill Sony is if they sell too many consoles. There are any number of companies that are large enough to acquire Sony in any circumstance (e.g. any regional telecom) but investors are not likely to be inspired by this sort of management change. The example of Microsoft isn't much better. Running a loss leader division from a company trying to buy its way into the living room isn't an indicator of future success.
Well, I guess we can wait and learn what happens. However, you don't seem to have absorbed the facts that Steve Jobs is on the Board of Directors (the people who hire and fire the CEO) of Disney and more importantly he owns more Disney stock than anyone else. They knew what Walmart's position would be and made their decision. The CEO of Disney was part of the announcement. Of course no one really knows what the market will do. If Disney does well with iTMS then the other movie studios will be clamoring to join just like they did for TV shows and tell Walmart to get stuffed. These myths of corporate invincibility last until markets shift and then invincibility evaporates. For years before Sony released the PlayStation there were a lot of articles and books about how Nintendo was invincible and could never be matched. There was also that whole mythology built up about the invincible Japanese economy in the 80's.
Another angle to consider is that Walmart is not the only one playing this sort of game. It is more subtle but you might notice that although Apple committed to Blu-Ray as an HDTV disc standard it is still not built into any of their Macs. You might expect that to occur right after Sony Studios start to release movies through iTMS.
Unfortunately for Apple, Disney would sooner tell them to jump off a bridge than to ruin a relationship with Walmart.
For your edification you might want to review some relevant facts. The single largest stockholder in Disney is Steve Jobs. In a related fact Steve Jobs is on the Board of Directors of Disney. So you expect Steve Jobs to tell Apple to jump off a bridge?
In any case Disney is a huge company that doesn't need Walmart to be successful. These strong arm tactics are probably very threatening to smaller companies but Disney is not a mom and pop operation.
...won't be supported in the future by a cash-strapped manufacturer...
This is supposed to refer to Microsoft? Are you joking? I am not a fan of Microsoft but the implication that "cash-strapped" might ever apply to them during our lifetime is hilarious. They may decide simply not to continue but it won't be because they are cash-strapped. You should also add to your analysis that, unlike their Windows platform, Microsoft gets a royalty for every unit sold by third parties for XBox.
After all, we practically reinvented the witch trial.
In the approximately 400 years of colonial and subsequent history of the US there was one incident in the seventeenth century at Salem, Massachusetts which resulted from mass hysteria and concluded with a witch trial. Compare that with the centuries long tradition of witch trials in Europe. McCarthy was a brief abberation by an alcoholic demagogue who has been universally vilified. Ironically, unlike the witch trials, there really were Stalinists who had infiltrated but that was mainly a British problem.
There has always been a tradition of permitting unpopular ideas to be explored and advocated. That does not mean those ideas cannot be opposed and those in oppostion always have the temptation to use the power of the state to enforce their view, But book burning took place in Germany, not the US. The Gulag was a Soviet phenomenon. The Cultural Revolution devastated Chinese culture. We really don't have anything comparable despite attempts to escalate the paltry examples we do have.
My point isn't that there has been an absence of this tendency. Our problem today with child pornography stems from the attempt to inappropriately use laws where the police power of the state does not belong. Protecting children by law is tricky enough. In Minnesota we had what was dangerously close to a witch trial some years back over a day care center that proved to be mainly the fabrication of a criminal trying to plea bargain for lenient sentencing. But laws against books and images are just wrong. Such laws will lead to abuse worse than what they are designed to avoid.
This song and dance is getting very old. I think the fundamental error made was allowing any content to be criminalized. You don't have to be in favor of something in order to oppose those who seek to subject it to criminal sanctions. If you want to go after those who commit abuse (not looking at pictures or reading stories) then go ahead. After all they are providing you with the evidence. But outlawing porn is just plain un-American. The idea is that we are supposed to have a free society that doesn't have thought crimes and witch trials. We fail in our attempts to achieve this standard but we should still aspire to that goal.
The big difference between HDMI and DVI is that HDMI always supports HDCP and DVI may or may not. For instance my ATI card has DVI but it does not support HDCP and this is supposed to be the case for about every video card that has been produced. Switching to HDMI insures that the device will always conform to HDCP. In the more particular case of the PS3 the choices are more stark. Component video has all the fidelity of HDTV but it never supports HDCP (the analog hole) while HDMI always supports HDCP. In this discussion the tendency was to always regard the HDMI option as the shiny, digital preferred choice. I was pointing out that there is still much to be said for the option that does not come with the industry mandated DRM. Regarded as a game console there is NO reason to ever have HDCP enabled but remarkably Sony is making the option available to not even having to consider what DRM might do. Plus it even costs less.
All of this is made more complicated by the fact that HDCP is a broken protocol and the signal it is scrambling has such high bandwidth that it would be impervious to economical capture for years. I guess a very simplified summary of the component versus HDMI comparison for PS3 is HDMI is digital includes DRM and is more expensive, component is analog, no DRM, and less expensive. I'm arguing that HDMI is not a clearly better choice.
That is inaccurate. Sometimes a device with DVI is supposed to support HDCP, sometimes it does not. With HDMI there is always support of HDCP. In any case for the PS3 the options are HDMI which always supports HDCP and component video, which has just as much fidelity, but it never supports HDCP.
Also, I fail to see where DVI devices unscramble/decrypt the signal before sending it to the display device.
Just follow the link at the bottom of the wiki page labelled: # DVI HDCP and DVI MAGIC Compatibility-enhancement devices for non-HDCP monitors [5]
As far as being cracked for years, that's not the cable's fault, only the algorithm used in the device. DVI and HDMI are just wires. The whole thing would just be comedy if it did not involve throwing away other people's money for technology that doesn't even work right and was a questionable use of this technology in any case. The bandwidth of the signal being scrambled, which is uncompressed high definition video, is about a gigabit per second. How many years will it be before that is a factor in the home market for realtime capture and recompression? Of course for actual commercial piracy (for whom the high cost of commercial video capture equipment is just a cost of business) the standard was broken years before being deployed so counterfeit hires DVD's will be available in Asia as soon as the market grows to any significant size. So, just to review, it costs producers and consumers extra, will undoubtedly cause currently unanticipated headaches for consumers and does nothing effective against commercial piracy. Sounds like a trifecta.
My point is that people being excited about HDMI and an overpriced built in drive might be misplaced. Component output might be better for your game (which seems unlikely to have the ICT token enabled)and you will probably be able to get a better price for added HD capacity.
Did you bother to follow some of those links? The DVI solution given in the links just unscrambles the signal and delivers it to the DVI device. Also it is worth noting that the basic HDCP protocol has been broken since 2001 so anyone who wants the unscrambled, uncompressed signal will have that option. The principle effect will be to make game consoles cost about $100 more than they otherwise would and, of course, any number of unintended annoyances that will emerge.
No, the main differences between DVI and HDMI are that HDMI has a different (better) connector and can carry audio and additional control data.
That is what I would call a trivial difference which could hardly justify all the sturm and drang of yet another digital connection standard. On the other hand the incessant march to closed DRM standards is unmistakeable: CD -> DVD-Audio, SaCD, DVD -> BluRay, DVD-HD, HDTV (current OTA)_> HDTV over HDCP, DVI ->HDMI. In all cases attempte to eviscerate the essential nature of copyright: publisher is granted enormous advantage for a limited time in exchange for content passing into the public domain. With successful DRM content is locked forever regardless of the law. Of course it is almost a moot point since legislators have been bought for a paltry sum to extend copyright from 14 years to effectively forever. Oh well.
Regardless of the difference in viewpoint I'd just like to add that the availability of the PS3 model without the extra helping of DRM is very appreciated, and for less money. With many years of experience I suspect that I'll be able to swap in a much higher capacity HD for less than the price differential (400 GB drives for less than $100 already and better prices in the future).
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Oh gosh, what a load of obscurantist nonsense. Yes, the Steinway in my living room produces much better sound than any CD or vinyl record so in a sense analog still occupies the top of the pyramid. But both CD's and records are mechanical contrivances for capturing and reproducing and they both fall short. If you spent enough thousands of dollars on your overpriced tube amplifiers, exotic turntables and wall sized speakers some of the more objectionable distractions from the music killing process of mechanical reproduction could be minimized. Of course it is still mechanical reproduction and you've spent thousands of dollars of which virtually none goes to actual live musicians. At least with CD's you can escape the neurotic care required to preserve records and the ever present analog hiss is less expensive to avoid.
If you care about music then spend less on reproduction (ie CD's rather than high end analog) and more on live music.
Does anyone have the tools and ability to create a QTVR panorama from these pictures? I suppose I should also ask if it has already been done.
Why look forward? It has existed for quite a while. easily more than a year. You just have to log out of the main database and log in to the Mars database. Last time I checked this was only possible to do with the PC client.
And the reality, a week later, when the boss has problems/forgot his super-cool passphrase and you're now locked out of his information, too.
Your idea of reality is deficient. It is possible to have a failsafe key available with the added property that using it causes the individual's passphrase to be reset. So, yes, the sysadmin could unlock mail if a passphrase was forgotten and if he decided to use it without authorization then the individual learns about it when his passphrase stops working. Not a perfect system but much better than many alternatives. You can read about many available and largely unused protocols in Rethinking Public Key Infrastructures and Digital Certificates by Stefan Brands (isbn:0-262-02491-8).
I realize that people who make their living by promoting the use of Windows would take exception to the snide tone of the press release. But isn't this instance of infection almost a nullity? I went to the bother of reading a few articles about the specific virus involved and although it is annoying to have it present at all it looks rather toothless in this circumstance. When you connect an iPod to a PC or Mac it shows up as a drive but customarily you only interact with it through iTunes which will not propagate the virus. Since the iPod appears as a USB drive it doesn't implement the auto-launch capability when it mounts so the user has to actually find and mindlessly launch the virus. I'm sure there are people dumb enough to do this but combined with the scarce presence it all seems like much ado about very little. Is there a greater risk than I've inferred?
Humans are to the best of my knowledge the first species with the potential to inflict both cataclysms on the planet with intention.
Your vision is so hopelessly myopic it is pathetic. For the first time (as far as we can tell) there is a species on Earth that is developing the technology to avert future mass extinctions and violent climate change. We will actually have the ability to detect and prevent many cataclysms. By spreading out and moving off planet to other systems humanity will be able to avoid those disasters that will remain beyond our abilities to prevent. Eventually using one g (constant acceleration at 10 meters per second per second) relativistic flight it could be possible for individuals from our era to travel to other galaxies and millions of years into the future of Earth (using a combination of Lorentz contraction and time dilation, see Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler chapter 6). That's right, if you knew something about the geometry of Minkowski spacetime then you would understand how the geometry of the universe allows the possibility of travel to other galaxies within the time scale of a normal human lifetime.
We don't have the technology now and if we sat around in teepees jacking off we never would. The wonderful thing about human intelligence and imagination is that it represents the universe becoming aware of itself. The seeds of this go back at least to the ancient Greeks. We live in the most intellectually exciting time ever and all you can do is wring your hands over how smelly and ignoble all those unworthy people are.
What a bucket full of misanthropic slop you are throwing around. Also this Malthusian handwringing is so 1970's. Have you read anything on the topic in recent decades? The more realistic question is how we will handle contracting populations that seem increasingly inevitable.
On the more cosmic issue of your mankind loathing I would counter that the arrival of man is the only thing that makes the rest of it even remotely worthwhile and interesting. Just imagine those billions of years of abject boredom that preceded the scant few thousand years of something of interest finally arriving. Assuming mankind's tenure is limited like every other dominant species has been (and I don't take that as inevitable) just imagine how disappointing it would be for a technically advanced species to arrive too late and miss all the excitement. For comparison think of Mars exploration. Great for geologists but infinitely less interesting than if we had found an advanced civilazation, or traces of one, or even single celled lifeforms.
It is also probably worth pointing out that both mass extinctions and extreme climate changes have been part of Earth's history for billions of years. Can't say I'm in favor of either one but pretending humans are uniquely culpable is clearly hubris.
While you had Google running why not look for this page? It looks like extraction of uranium from sea water may not be the pipe dream you imply it must be. I will have to thank you for one discovery. I had read this stuff from Bernard Cohen some time ago and casually associated the name with the Harvard professor whose books I had read as a juvenile. Turns out there is more than one Bernard Cohen who is a science professor. This one is a professor of physics at Pittsburgh University. Nothing wrong with that since, as you correctly assert, what matters are the numbers.
One of the issues usually absent from most discussions of nuclear energy is the stark difference in scale between it and other technologies like fossil fuel. The mammoth size of nuclear reactors with their containment vessels produce a different impression. I still remember an interview of Freeman Dyson by Dick Cavett who asked whether Dyson would prefer to live near a traditional or nuclear power plant with a clear expectation of what his answer would be. When Dyson immediately indicated a preference for the nuclear option you could watch Cavett's jaw drop. Dyson explained the issue of scale and similar considerations but it is doubtful it made much of an impression since it was so counter to the received wisdom which has lead to the carbon disaster we are facing.
That difference in scale is an important part of why the numbers so starkly favor nuclear technology as a sustainable technology. We have dithered for far too long already trying to live in the make believe world of anti-nuclear fanatics. Of course some have belatedly seen the damage that has been incurred and have changed their tune. But it was their near religious anti-nuclear fervor that resulted in the policies that have presented us with such unpleasant prospects and options. Maybe our ability to innovate and improve technology is not up to the task of making nuclear technology replace out dependence on fossil fuel. If not then in some sense we are doomed. But at least we need to try.
...and limited [nuclear] fuel supply...
Is that the sound of a knee jerking or have you actually bothered to check? Here is a reference that indicates that the uranium supply (economically recoverable) would last billions of years though it does not assume exponential growth or anything similar. It does assume breeder reactor technology. In other words we would have to worry more about the Sun burning out first.
Just for the record I'm another example, as are my three kids, of big fans of Firefly who have no interest in the other series made by Joss. From the anecdotal accounts I've read I suspect that the admirers of Firefly are close to being independent (in the probability theory sense) of the other groups. It is also in a completely different class from Star Trek and Star Wars which are both fantasy rather than science fiction. Nothing is perfect but there hasn't been any science fiction series that is as entertaining or dramatically satisfying (the relationship between Mal and Jayne is worth the price of admission by itself) as Firefly though BSG does a respectable job.
I just finished reading "Broadbandits" so I may be feeling too much venom to express myself clearly enough. What I am saying is that I've had Vonage service for years and it has been just fine. A few times I've tried Skype to Skype and the audio quality was better than I've ever had for POTS or ISDN. My issue is that there appears to be a campaign starting which could result in degrading that service in order to encourage people to only buy VoIP from the pipe supplier, cable or telco. Since I've had the service over an extended period of time (and different ISPs) and have had good results I'm extremely skeptical when people start to trot out reasons why I should expect my Vonage service to be unsatisfactory. It reminds me slightly of Microsoft and their campaign to eliminate DOS clones. With each release of Windows there was always something broken in the DRDOS which helped lead to its demise. Or there is the similar case of Lotus 123. The situation seemed to be that updates to Windows didn't ship until they could break Lotus.
What is bullshit is how a service that worked fine starts to have problems once the monopoly supplier decides to enter the same market. I've been using Vonage for years and they supply a good service. Call quality has been fine but based on reports from others I expect that might be changing now that Time Warner has sold its customers in my area to Comcast. Oh and that 64 Kbps is the channel your packetized audio call gets from the local office for a standard POTS line. That is why modems weren't able to do better than approach 56K of bandwidth. Hell even ISDN only provided 64K per channel with a measely 16K for the signaling channel (I had ISDN service for several years in the 90's). How do you inflate that to 350K? Pull the other one. The issues here aren't technical. The smokescreen is (sometimes) technical and what matters is what the man behind the curtain is doing. As long as the local loop remains a politically allocated monopoly (or duopoly) we're going to be dealing with thuggish mentalities who objectively see "customers" as their rightful property. They've killed off the CLEC's and captured the ISP's. It is not surprising that they've drawn a bullseye on the VoIP companies.
The stench from this pack of lies is toxic. Low latency is what the consumer pays for and expects (for web browsing, for instance). If anything resembling actual market competition existed we would only hear competitors proudly providing and extolling the responsive connection they provide. Instead we usually face a monopoly or at best a duopoly that darky hints that competitive service providers just can't expect that multi-megabit connection to provide 64K voice service. What a steaming pile of crap. If you wanted to claim issues with teleconferencing it would still be problematic but this is just a pack of larcenous thugs flailing about trying to maintain their cosy monopoly position for voice communication.
It would be bad enough if this were an article by an analyst pretending to be a CEO of a multinational corporation. Instead we have someone pretending to be an analyst. Sony may fail to execute successfully in one instance or another but they created and own the playstation franchise which is obviously very valuable. Of course it has to be managed properly and by playing the Blu-Ray card they may have overplayed their hand. We don't know yet and cannot know until it has been purchased and used by consumers for a while.
But with a wildly successful franchise like playstation the last thing that will kill Sony is if they sell too many consoles. There are any number of companies that are large enough to acquire Sony in any circumstance (e.g. any regional telecom) but investors are not likely to be inspired by this sort of management change. The example of Microsoft isn't much better. Running a loss leader division from a company trying to buy its way into the living room isn't an indicator of future success.
Well, I guess we can wait and learn what happens. However, you don't seem to have absorbed the facts that Steve Jobs is on the Board of Directors (the people who hire and fire the CEO) of Disney and more importantly he owns more Disney stock than anyone else. They knew what Walmart's position would be and made their decision. The CEO of Disney was part of the announcement. Of course no one really knows what the market will do. If Disney does well with iTMS then the other movie studios will be clamoring to join just like they did for TV shows and tell Walmart to get stuffed. These myths of corporate invincibility last until markets shift and then invincibility evaporates. For years before Sony released the PlayStation there were a lot of articles and books about how Nintendo was invincible and could never be matched. There was also that whole mythology built up about the invincible Japanese economy in the 80's.
Another angle to consider is that Walmart is not the only one playing this sort of game. It is more subtle but you might notice that although Apple committed to Blu-Ray as an HDTV disc standard it is still not built into any of their Macs. You might expect that to occur right after Sony Studios start to release movies through iTMS.
Unfortunately for Apple, Disney would sooner tell them to jump off a bridge than to ruin a relationship with Walmart.
For your edification you might want to review some relevant facts. The single largest stockholder in Disney is Steve Jobs. In a related fact Steve Jobs is on the Board of Directors of Disney. So you expect Steve Jobs to tell Apple to jump off a bridge?
In any case Disney is a huge company that doesn't need Walmart to be successful. These strong arm tactics are probably very threatening to smaller companies but Disney is not a mom and pop operation.
...won't be supported in the future by a cash-strapped manufacturer...
This is supposed to refer to Microsoft? Are you joking? I am not a fan of Microsoft but the implication that "cash-strapped" might ever apply to them during our lifetime is hilarious. They may decide simply not to continue but it won't be because they are cash-strapped. You should also add to your analysis that, unlike their Windows platform, Microsoft gets a royalty for every unit sold by third parties for XBox.
After all, we practically reinvented the witch trial.
In the approximately 400 years of colonial and subsequent history of the US there was one incident in the seventeenth century at Salem, Massachusetts which resulted from mass hysteria and concluded with a witch trial. Compare that with the centuries long tradition of witch trials in Europe. McCarthy was a brief abberation by an alcoholic demagogue who has been universally vilified. Ironically, unlike the witch trials, there really were Stalinists who had infiltrated but that was mainly a British problem.
There has always been a tradition of permitting unpopular ideas to be explored and advocated. That does not mean those ideas cannot be opposed and those in oppostion always have the temptation to use the power of the state to enforce their view, But book burning took place in Germany, not the US. The Gulag was a Soviet phenomenon. The Cultural Revolution devastated Chinese culture. We really don't have anything comparable despite attempts to escalate the paltry examples we do have.
My point isn't that there has been an absence of this tendency. Our problem today with child pornography stems from the attempt to inappropriately use laws where the police power of the state does not belong. Protecting children by law is tricky enough. In Minnesota we had what was dangerously close to a witch trial some years back over a day care center that proved to be mainly the fabrication of a criminal trying to plea bargain for lenient sentencing. But laws against books and images are just wrong. Such laws will lead to abuse worse than what they are designed to avoid.
This song and dance is getting very old. I think the fundamental error made was allowing any content to be criminalized. You don't have to be in favor of something in order to oppose those who seek to subject it to criminal sanctions. If you want to go after those who commit abuse (not looking at pictures or reading stories) then go ahead. After all they are providing you with the evidence. But outlawing porn is just plain un-American. The idea is that we are supposed to have a free society that doesn't have thought crimes and witch trials. We fail in our attempts to achieve this standard but we should still aspire to that goal.
I just checked with Mathematica and my user ID is also prime. I'm so happy. (Use FactorInteger[n] to find factors).
The big difference between HDMI and DVI is that HDMI always supports HDCP and DVI may or may not. For instance my ATI card has DVI but it does not support HDCP and this is supposed to be the case for about every video card that has been produced. Switching to HDMI insures that the device will always conform to HDCP. In the more particular case of the PS3 the choices are more stark. Component video has all the fidelity of HDTV but it never supports HDCP (the analog hole) while HDMI always supports HDCP. In this discussion the tendency was to always regard the HDMI option as the shiny, digital preferred choice. I was pointing out that there is still much to be said for the option that does not come with the industry mandated DRM. Regarded as a game console there is NO reason to ever have HDCP enabled but remarkably Sony is making the option available to not even having to consider what DRM might do. Plus it even costs less.
All of this is made more complicated by the fact that HDCP is a broken protocol and the signal it is scrambling has such high bandwidth that it would be impervious to economical capture for years. I guess a very simplified summary of the component versus HDMI comparison for PS3 is HDMI is digital includes DRM and is more expensive, component is analog, no DRM, and less expensive. I'm arguing that HDMI is not a clearly better choice.
That is inaccurate. Sometimes a device with DVI is supposed to support HDCP, sometimes it does not. With HDMI there is always support of HDCP. In any case for the PS3 the options are HDMI which always supports HDCP and component video, which has just as much fidelity, but it never supports HDCP.
Also, I fail to see where DVI devices unscramble/decrypt the signal before sending it to the display device.
Just follow the link at the bottom of the wiki page labelled:
# DVI HDCP and DVI MAGIC Compatibility-enhancement devices for non-HDCP monitors [5]
As far as being cracked for years, that's not the cable's fault, only the algorithm used in the device. DVI and HDMI are just wires.
The whole thing would just be comedy if it did not involve throwing away other people's money for technology that doesn't even work right and was a questionable use of this technology in any case. The bandwidth of the signal being scrambled, which is uncompressed high definition video, is about a gigabit per second. How many years will it be before that is a factor in the home market for realtime capture and recompression? Of course for actual commercial piracy (for whom the high cost of commercial video capture equipment is just a cost of business) the standard was broken years before being deployed so counterfeit hires DVD's will be available in Asia as soon as the market grows to any significant size. So, just to review, it costs producers and consumers extra, will undoubtedly cause currently unanticipated headaches for consumers and does nothing effective against commercial piracy. Sounds like a trifecta.
My point is that people being excited about HDMI and an overpriced built in drive might be misplaced. Component output might be better for your game (which seems unlikely to have the ICT token enabled)and you will probably be able to get a better price for added HD capacity.
Did you bother to follow some of those links? The DVI solution given in the links just unscrambles the signal and delivers it to the DVI device. Also it is worth noting that the basic HDCP protocol has been broken since 2001 so anyone who wants the unscrambled, uncompressed signal will have that option. The principle effect will be to make game consoles cost about $100 more than they otherwise would and, of course, any number of unintended annoyances that will emerge.
No, the main differences between DVI and HDMI are that HDMI has a different (better) connector and can carry audio and additional control data.
That is what I would call a trivial difference which could hardly justify all the sturm and drang of yet another digital connection standard. On the other hand the incessant march to closed DRM standards is unmistakeable: CD -> DVD-Audio, SaCD, DVD -> BluRay, DVD-HD, HDTV (current OTA)_> HDTV over HDCP, DVI ->HDMI. In all cases attempte to eviscerate the essential nature of copyright: publisher is granted enormous advantage for a limited time in exchange for content passing into the public domain. With successful DRM content is locked forever regardless of the law. Of course it is almost a moot point since legislators have been bought for a paltry sum to extend copyright from 14 years to effectively forever. Oh well.
Regardless of the difference in viewpoint I'd just like to add that the availability of the PS3 model without the extra helping of DRM is very appreciated, and for less money. With many years of experience I suspect that I'll be able to swap in a much higher capacity HD for less than the price differential (400 GB drives for less than $100 already and better prices in the future).