a side by side comparison of HDMI vs. a good set of component cables will result in HDMI having the nicer picture.
This is worded as though there were a double blind test run by a disinterested party with this published result somewhere. Care to share that reference? Or is this just another slashdot claim pulled from nether regions (or are you running that sychrotron in the basement again)? The main distinction between HDMI and DVI/component is that the former plays more directly into the hands of the DRM proponents even though DRM makes no sense for game console output. The PS3 does include BluRay player capability so full resolution playback becomes a legacy issue. Initially we are promised full resolution for component output. If enough people only have component output it becomes less attractive for vendors to cripple future discs by turning off full resolution.
When they search your hard drive they verify the hash of the mp3 you have is a duplicate of a known traded mp3 hash
This is an interesting observation but it seems awfully weak. The source is usually digital and if you use EAC always identical. There are only so many mp3 encoders so if you choose a specific bitrate it all seems rather deterministic. Personally I want to preserve my original CD content so I use lossless compression (usually FLAC) and the first few times I decompressed and compared to the original. It was always identical.
You need a special client to load it and it only loads AAC.
In your overbearing zeal you either don't know what you are talking about or you are lying. In addition to AAC files from iTMS you also have the choices of mp3, AIFF, and Apple lossless. That is just the audio music formats. You also have video and spoken audio (audio books) as choices. In your excitement to declare the king is dead you should be more careful about your accuracy or face being dismissed as an untrustworthy voice motivated more by spite than knowledge.
I assume many are aware of a program called iTunes. With that program you can rip your CD collection in mp3 format (and several other choices) to your hard drive to provide convenient access to the music you have purchased. If your hard drive were examined and these files found would it provide useful evidence for the plaintiff's case? Most home computers in the US have internet access and many people store their music on a computer hard drive. That is what is needed to infringe copyright law but it would not prove it. The judge and all the lawyers involved probably have the same situation, computers with music files and internet access. If discovery of these facts were relevent then everyone would be culpable. In this circumstance it seems to me that a summary judgment for the defendant is completely reasonable.
Furthermore, they typically only service a tiny percantage of the entire population, so your "multiply by millions" argument is off base
I don't know what statistics you are reading but this claim has no basis. In countries like Singapore, South Korea they have both lower cost and higher penetration. The millions figure is exactly right. All the big internet suppliers in the US have essentially monopoly or duopoly positions so that argument doesn't get off the ground either.
If your clsim was that some initial subsidy was all that was provided, I think that would not be unreasonable. For instance back in the 80's the French decided they needed to give a boost to the online market so they subsidized the market by providing the terminals to essentially everyone at low or no cost (Prestel terminals, I believe, was the name). It isn't easy to remember the details but these terminals used 9600 bps terminals and provided mostly textual interface. They became wildly popular for a while. There was a subsidy but just an initial subsidy, not a recurring cost. That is my objection to the claim that price difference for high speed can be easily explained. Connection charges are RECURRING costs. They mount up month after month. There is no way that government subsidies can explain why the US consumer is being screwed on a monthly basis.
On the other hand governments can alter rules and policies which can bring about circumstances where broadband access can be much less expensive to the consumer (we KNOW that is true because we can see it with our own eyes). That is pretty much what has happenned. These other countries have their own broadbandits but the crooks have not been unsuccessful in those countries. I wish the same were true in the US. Technological advances will make their position difficult to maintain but for now its $45/month for a paltry 1.5 Mbit connection.
most of them are using their bandwidth to broadcast something like 4 standard definition channels over the same space of 1 HD channel
Where did you pull this statistic from? In the Twin Cities market we have the usual networks (CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX, PBS and the new UPN/WB hybrid) which all offer HDTV (either 720p or 1080i). There is some limited use of a secondary channel for 24 hour weather but the only true use of multiplexed channels is by PBS to offer 5 channels of SD programming over one channel. A second channel is used by PBS to deliver true HD. In others words basically all the channels have chosen to offer HDTV. There is even one affiliate with local news in HD. Of course you can still view any HDTV picture with a settop box that downconverts to NTSC on your old set (has anyone purchased one of these?). On the other hand for about $100 you can get a receiver for you PC or Mac to view and record full HDTV on your computer monitor. The picture and sound is better than a DVD and the cost is $0 per month.
It may not have been guaranteed by legislation or the FCC but competitive pressure has made a transition to HDTV, not just digital TV, a reality.
Its all plasma, LCD, DLP, etc which are making people want new TVs not HD.
Have you seen a regular NTSC signal on a really big screen? It's not a pretty sight. I remember seeing big screen sets before the era of DVD and HDTV. Even a good laserdisc signal on one of those sets did not exactly inspire much more than a shrug. People may not say much about DVD or HDTV but sales of new plasma, LCD sets are fueled by the higher definition pictures that are available.
DVDs were relased back in 1997, so while I guess '99 is close to that its still nothing to brag about. IIRC, DVDs were the fastest accepted new technology at the time...
But that is the important point about this claim. He was an early adopter of DVD. Eventually DVD took off but it was incredibly slow during its early period. To talk about slow acceptance at this point for next gen DVD is ludicrous in comparison with DVD. Hell, Sony hasn't even introduced its first Blu-ray player making this essentially pre-history for BD. Wait until PS3 is introduced before making even an initial observation.
If it was just a higher quality but still on tape, it wouldn't have caught on as well...
Indeed it did not. It has faded from memory but there was a brief time when pre-recorded DAT tapes were available and they had much the same fidelity of CD's minus the convenience and durability. There was also a brief attempt by Philips at a compressed digital audio tape in competition to Sony's minidisc product. Again the minidisc (in the disc vs tape comparison) was a great success by comparison although even it did not do well in the US market.
For instance, does the government subsidize the cost? My guess is that yes, the government subsidizes the cost to make it cheap to those countries.
Take a hard look at the numbers and see if you believe that factor has any chance of explaining anything. The populations involved are not small so if the subsidy is anything like $500/month (or anything approaching that) as some would suggest then multiple that by millions and consider what is being suggested.
To put this another way, if everyone saturated their pipe, they would have to charge upwards of 10x for your cable or DSL connection as they currently do.
Right, that's why they pay 10x as much in Asian countries that sell much higher bandwidth to the public. Wait a minute, they charge considerably less than American broadband subscribers. What an unfortunate instance of cognitive dissonance. Could it be that our telecom and cable industry are led by a bunch of bandits who pocketed all the public subsidy and tax breaks intended to stimulate the building of a true broadband capability and chose to sell us a pathetic hacked on upgrade over existing copper wire? Numbers don't lie. We can see what people pay elsewhere and what we have to pay. Despite all the misdirection and lies we know the real bandits wear Armani.
Isn't much of this speculation and talk of Apple and the iPod missing the main point? It hasn't been released yet but Microsoft has made it clear that they intend to nudge aside all their previous partners with their own entry in the market. It isn't like Dell entered the market not realizing that Apple had this iPod thing going on. But the entry of Microsoft probably was a rather unpleasant surprise.
Honestly, what does it matter what a bunch of uninvolved spectators believe? Trying to ascribe some deep significance to popular opinion about Poincare's conjecture makes about as much sense. Yes, I think the political game played by Bush and his minions is disgraceful and irresponsible but I also look askance at the sort of rabble rousing implicit in this sort of report. Since when has science had any concern about the opinions of the unschooled? On the other hand does biological science research get more funding from the public anywhere more than the USA? I don't know the comparison for a fact but I do know the NIH has tremendous resources. The vast majority of citizens of any country will have nothing to do with the esoteric pursuit of advanced biological sciences. What does it matter what their opinion is if the relevant institutions are healthy? If people chose to investigate any details of modern high energy physics I doubt if their opinions on the subject would be very enlightened. This is just another opportunity for snooty Europeans to act as though they are oh so much more advanced than those unworthy colonists.
In reality, the scare-o-meter is just another tool...
I thought you were just being silly about the specific way a condition was expressed in a compact form. Instead you seem to be claiming to have found evidence of a nascent police state carelessly showing its hand. There have been developments in the UK and the USA that cause me concern about the health of civil liberties which I think are more important than the struggle with these murderous thugs. But alert levels in general and this instance in particular don't rise to that level. In the current situation the declaration is largely redundant. People will react cautiously regardless of what is declared by any government. In any case declaring that an immediate threat exists despite whatever success there has been to thwart the potential murderers is obvious to all but the most polemically involved. This isn't a screenplay. They don't have perfect knowledge of every facet but there does seem to be evidence of intent of this group of terrorists to commit mass murder. Reacting with anything less than the highest level of alert would be irresponsible.
My point is that "We think we got everyone but we can't be absolutely sure" doesn't constitute a warning level of "An attack is imminent". It's more like "An attack may be imminent"
Your point is nonsense. Please bitch slap yourself to see if you come to your senses. No one cares how you parse some description of threat level. The details of the wording don't matter that much. What matters is that a group that was planning on committing mayhem was detected and an effort made to thwart them. It would be foolhardy to assume the threat has been entirely neutralized. A heightened state of alert for a short period is not unreasonable.
Did you actually bother to read the article? It is always proper to treat any information with a measure of skepticism but your statements seem to imply an almost conspiratorial denial. As if there is no actual struggle in progress. There are some who even take the extreme stance that there was no involvement by Al Quaeda in the murders of 9/11. Your litany would seem to point in that direction though your statement doesn't go that far. But it would not be an enormous stretch to infer that you believe the only real threat to safety comes from those individuals from Scotland Yard, the UK secret services and similar groups. Attributing this belief to you may be mistaken but I suspect that is the source of the animosity you have elicited.
A macbook by default is vulnerable, it's just that Apple was wielding its "beat stick" and told them not to demo it on the internal wireless card.
You're willing to just take them at their word as though it is from an unimpeachable source? What pressure could Apple bring to bear on them that is credible? Did they threaten to short sheet their beds? If they were successfully cowered into submission what about their willingness to immediately flip when the question is asked? The whole demo has an odd aroma about it. Somewhat like a mildly incompetent magic trick. They already admitted they had to cook the demo by altering the configuration of the OS from the default settings and chose to run the demo with an awkwardly included external wireless card.
Don't take this as an implicit claim that security is not an issue with Mac OS X. Security is and has been an issue with Apple for many years. That is why Apple has had security updates for years, not just since Windows apologists have chosen to notice. What I am saying is that this story is a shoddy example of journalism.
Long live laserdisc. I have many laserdisc titles that I've not updated to DVD. You're one up on me with that specific title but it shouldn't be too surprising. You also have a lower slashdot ID.
By the time The Matrix was on DVD, most people already had DVD players
Doesn't anyone else bother to google a few facts before making silly claims. Here is the release information from Amazon:
DVD Release Date: September 21, 1999
Here is a headline from 2 years later:
DVD Market Penetration Reaches One-Third Of U.S. Households (10/11)
October 11, 2001
Would the witness like to reconsider his testimony in light of this new evidence? Seriously, I think this makes it fairly clear that when The Matrix was released the DVD format was not yet a mass market item. It still had two years to go before it reached one third of the market. The link for that article is here
It's hard to think of a DVD that came out over 2 1/2 years into the format as "early in the life of DVD."
Maybe not early in the format's history but early in its history as a mass market product. I know that in retrospect DVD is considered a product that was adopted quickly compared to earlier items like FM radio, color TV, VCR, etc. But those first few years were really slow and I believe limited to early adopters and their willingness to prime the pump by spending big bucks. For instance buying DVD video playback capability for the Mac (a DVD drive and MPEG2 accelerator board) was about $600 to $700 when it first became available in those early days. Of course now you can buy a good dual layer DVD burner drive for Mac or PC for about $50 and good DVD blanks for about $0.25. DVD format did not have to face that sort of competition from the CD/CD-R market so I am skeptical about how quickly either HD format can gain traction.
Everyone was using DVD Waaaaaaaaay before the Matrix
Can't agree with that claim. I remember the goofy DIVX DVD players at around the time had been discontinued so I picked one up for less than $200 (details are fuzzy, could have been less) and the DVD I bought with it was The Matrix. I was probably the first of my group of acquaintances to get a DVD player. I know it was fairly early in the mass market phase because the authoring tools were still fairly shoddy. In particular there was some dodgy code in The Matrix which worked on some units and not on others.
staggering that in such a short time the US has gone from loved to hated
How staggeringly naive can you be? I'm not a fan of the Bush administration but I wouldn't begin to lay blaim on them for the decades of anti-American hatred. Do you refer to the brief period immedately in the aftermath of 9/11 when a few countries whose citizens only had mild antipathy for the US (e.g. many Europeans) suspended that for the slightest moment? Among Muslims in many countries on the other hand Osama became the most common name given to newborn sons and in many cases there was open dancing in the streets in celebration of the slaughter. The unapologetic hatred of Western civilization in general and the US specifically is something only the willfully blind can miss. But for the most part the reasonable way to view it (the rabid hatred) is largely with indifferece. Nothing we do will change it except for some sort of societal form of suicide, much like is expected from the Israelis.
Why do so many jump to the conclusion that this laptop is meant as just another tool to be used to further the usual aims of mass public education? Ever consider the possibility it is meant as a means to bypass the customary limits that a student encounters in school? For instance, have you read any of the books by Seymour Papert: "Mindstorms", "The Children's Machine", or "The Connected Family"? Obviously for many people a laptop is mostly a typewriter on steroids. A useful, if banal tool. But what a waste of potential. The idea of putting a laptop in the hands of young students is to reach someone who might learn something more profound when given the opportunity to explore a universal turing machine. At a slightly less exalted level a student might have the chance to engage in activities of creating and building things that can be much more educational than just listening to lecture.
That same tired old canard trotted out one more time. There is the legalistic answer about deals made and licensing arranged but a more significant recounting of that piece of history is that Apple hired the scientists and engineers from Xerox PARC, like Alan Kay, Larry Tesler and others. This put them in a company that actually had a clue about what was required to accomplish their goal which led to the Lisa and Macintosh. Of course you may be of the opinion that these individuals should be viewed as indentured servants of Xerox who had no right to use ideas that were the property of their former pointy-haired bosses at Xerox. Different stages of personal computing were invented three separate times at Apple: Apple ][, Mac, and OSX (NextStep in Mac drag). That is a remarkable record of creation and it is just some high points. For example both HyperCard and QuickTime could arguably be considered. Another easily overlooked act from the past was that Apple was one of the petitioners to the FCC to allow for unlicensed spectrum that eventually led to WiFi. What the heck, let's not overlook FireWire.
They're not quite in the same league as IBM as far as fundamental contributions (hard drives, relational databases, various Nobel prize researchers, etc) but Apple is no slacker as you would imply. Now for having so little awareness of the history involved, you should go over to the corner and sit quietly.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't be so naive. If it isn't about DRM than why was HDMI added when there was already a digital solution with DVI?
a side by side comparison of HDMI vs. a good set of component cables will result in HDMI having the nicer picture.
This is worded as though there were a double blind test run by a disinterested party with this published result somewhere. Care to share that reference? Or is this just another slashdot claim pulled from nether regions (or are you running that sychrotron in the basement again)? The main distinction between HDMI and DVI/component is that the former plays more directly into the hands of the DRM proponents even though DRM makes no sense for game console output. The PS3 does include BluRay player capability so full resolution playback becomes a legacy issue. Initially we are promised full resolution for component output. If enough people only have component output it becomes less attractive for vendors to cripple future discs by turning off full resolution.
When they search your hard drive they verify the hash of the mp3 you have is a duplicate of a known traded mp3 hash
This is an interesting observation but it seems awfully weak. The source is usually digital and if you use EAC always identical. There are only so many mp3 encoders so if you choose a specific bitrate it all seems rather deterministic. Personally I want to preserve my original CD content so I use lossless compression (usually FLAC) and the first few times I decompressed and compared to the original. It was always identical.
You need a special client to load it and it only loads AAC.
In your overbearing zeal you either don't know what you are talking about or you are lying. In addition to AAC files from iTMS you also have the choices of mp3, AIFF, and Apple lossless. That is just the audio music formats. You also have video and spoken audio (audio books) as choices. In your excitement to declare the king is dead you should be more careful about your accuracy or face being dismissed as an untrustworthy voice motivated more by spite than knowledge.
I assume many are aware of a program called iTunes. With that program you can rip your CD collection in mp3 format (and several other choices) to your hard drive to provide convenient access to the music you have purchased. If your hard drive were examined and these files found would it provide useful evidence for the plaintiff's case? Most home computers in the US have internet access and many people store their music on a computer hard drive. That is what is needed to infringe copyright law but it would not prove it. The judge and all the lawyers involved probably have the same situation, computers with music files and internet access. If discovery of these facts were relevent then everyone would be culpable. In this circumstance it seems to me that a summary judgment for the defendant is completely reasonable.
Furthermore, they typically only service a tiny percantage of the entire population, so your "multiply by millions" argument is off base
I don't know what statistics you are reading but this claim has no basis. In countries like Singapore, South Korea they have both lower cost and higher penetration. The millions figure is exactly right. All the big internet suppliers in the US have essentially monopoly or duopoly positions so that argument doesn't get off the ground either.
If your clsim was that some initial subsidy was all that was provided, I think that would not be unreasonable. For instance back in the 80's the French decided they needed to give a boost to the online market so they subsidized the market by providing the terminals to essentially everyone at low or no cost (Prestel terminals, I believe, was the name). It isn't easy to remember the details but these terminals used 9600 bps terminals and provided mostly textual interface. They became wildly popular for a while. There was a subsidy but just an initial subsidy, not a recurring cost. That is my objection to the claim that price difference for high speed can be easily explained. Connection charges are RECURRING costs. They mount up month after month. There is no way that government subsidies can explain why the US consumer is being screwed on a monthly basis.
On the other hand governments can alter rules and policies which can bring about circumstances where broadband access can be much less expensive to the consumer (we KNOW that is true because we can see it with our own eyes). That is pretty much what has happenned. These other countries have their own broadbandits but the crooks have not been unsuccessful in those countries. I wish the same were true in the US. Technological advances will make their position difficult to maintain but for now its $45/month for a paltry 1.5 Mbit connection.
most of them are using their bandwidth to broadcast something like 4 standard definition channels over the same space of 1 HD channel
Where did you pull this statistic from? In the Twin Cities market we have the usual networks (CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX, PBS and the new UPN/WB hybrid) which all offer HDTV (either 720p or 1080i). There is some limited use of a secondary channel for 24 hour weather but the only true use of multiplexed channels is by PBS to offer 5 channels of SD programming over one channel. A second channel is used by PBS to deliver true HD. In others words basically all the channels have chosen to offer HDTV. There is even one affiliate with local news in HD. Of course you can still view any HDTV picture with a settop box that downconverts to NTSC on your old set (has anyone purchased one of these?). On the other hand for about $100 you can get a receiver for you PC or Mac to view and record full HDTV on your computer monitor. The picture and sound is better than a DVD and the cost is $0 per month.
It may not have been guaranteed by legislation or the FCC but competitive pressure has made a transition to HDTV, not just digital TV, a reality.
Its all plasma, LCD, DLP, etc which are making people want new TVs not HD.
Have you seen a regular NTSC signal on a really big screen? It's not a pretty sight. I remember seeing big screen sets before the era of DVD and HDTV. Even a good laserdisc signal on one of those sets did not exactly inspire much more than a shrug. People may not say much about DVD or HDTV but sales of new plasma, LCD sets are fueled by the higher definition pictures that are available.
DVDs were relased back in 1997, so while I guess '99 is close to that its still nothing to brag about. IIRC, DVDs were the fastest accepted new technology at the time ...
But that is the important point about this claim. He was an early adopter of DVD. Eventually DVD took off but it was incredibly slow during its early period. To talk about slow acceptance at this point for next gen DVD is ludicrous in comparison with DVD. Hell, Sony hasn't even introduced its first Blu-ray player making this essentially pre-history for BD. Wait until PS3 is introduced before making even an initial observation.
If it was just a higher quality but still on tape, it wouldn't have caught on as well...
Indeed it did not. It has faded from memory but there was a brief time when pre-recorded DAT tapes were available and they had much the same fidelity of CD's minus the convenience and durability. There was also a brief attempt by Philips at a compressed digital audio tape in competition to Sony's minidisc product. Again the minidisc (in the disc vs tape comparison) was a great success by comparison although even it did not do well in the US market.
For instance, does the government subsidize the cost? My guess is that yes, the government subsidizes the cost to make it cheap to those countries.
Take a hard look at the numbers and see if you believe that factor has any chance of explaining anything. The populations involved are not small so if the subsidy is anything like $500/month (or anything approaching that) as some would suggest then multiple that by millions and consider what is being suggested.
To put this another way, if everyone saturated their pipe, they would have to charge upwards of 10x for your cable or DSL connection as they currently do.
Right, that's why they pay 10x as much in Asian countries that sell much higher bandwidth to the public. Wait a minute, they charge considerably less than American broadband subscribers. What an unfortunate instance of cognitive dissonance. Could it be that our telecom and cable industry are led by a bunch of bandits who pocketed all the public subsidy and tax breaks intended to stimulate the building of a true broadband capability and chose to sell us a pathetic hacked on upgrade over existing copper wire? Numbers don't lie. We can see what people pay elsewhere and what we have to pay. Despite all the misdirection and lies we know the real bandits wear Armani.
...SanDisk, Samsung, Sony, and Creative
Isn't much of this speculation and talk of Apple and the iPod missing the main point? It hasn't been released yet but Microsoft has made it clear that they intend to nudge aside all their previous partners with their own entry in the market. It isn't like Dell entered the market not realizing that Apple had this iPod thing going on. But the entry of Microsoft probably was a rather unpleasant surprise.
Honestly, what does it matter what a bunch of uninvolved spectators believe? Trying to ascribe some deep significance to popular opinion about Poincare's conjecture makes about as much sense. Yes, I think the political game played by Bush and his minions is disgraceful and irresponsible but I also look askance at the sort of rabble rousing implicit in this sort of report. Since when has science had any concern about the opinions of the unschooled? On the other hand does biological science research get more funding from the public anywhere more than the USA? I don't know the comparison for a fact but I do know the NIH has tremendous resources. The vast majority of citizens of any country will have nothing to do with the esoteric pursuit of advanced biological sciences. What does it matter what their opinion is if the relevant institutions are healthy? If people chose to investigate any details of modern high energy physics I doubt if their opinions on the subject would be very enlightened. This is just another opportunity for snooty Europeans to act as though they are oh so much more advanced than those unworthy colonists.
In reality, the scare-o-meter is just another tool ...
I thought you were just being silly about the specific way a condition was expressed in a compact form. Instead you seem to be claiming to have found evidence of a nascent police state carelessly showing its hand. There have been developments in the UK and the USA that cause me concern about the health of civil liberties which I think are more important than the struggle with these murderous thugs. But alert levels in general and this instance in particular don't rise to that level. In the current situation the declaration is largely redundant. People will react cautiously regardless of what is declared by any government. In any case declaring that an immediate threat exists despite whatever success there has been to thwart the potential murderers is obvious to all but the most polemically involved. This isn't a screenplay. They don't have perfect knowledge of every facet but there does seem to be evidence of intent of this group of terrorists to commit mass murder. Reacting with anything less than the highest level of alert would be irresponsible.
My point is that "We think we got everyone but we can't be absolutely sure" doesn't constitute a warning level of "An attack is imminent". It's more like "An attack may be imminent"
Your point is nonsense. Please bitch slap yourself to see if you come to your senses. No one cares how you parse some description of threat level. The details of the wording don't matter that much. What matters is that a group that was planning on committing mayhem was detected and an effort made to thwart them. It would be foolhardy to assume the threat has been entirely neutralized. A heightened state of alert for a short period is not unreasonable.
Did you actually bother to read the article? It is always proper to treat any information with a measure of skepticism but your statements seem to imply an almost conspiratorial denial. As if there is no actual struggle in progress. There are some who even take the extreme stance that there was no involvement by Al Quaeda in the murders of 9/11. Your litany would seem to point in that direction though your statement doesn't go that far. But it would not be an enormous stretch to infer that you believe the only real threat to safety comes from those individuals from Scotland Yard, the UK secret services and similar groups. Attributing this belief to you may be mistaken but I suspect that is the source of the animosity you have elicited.
A macbook by default is vulnerable, it's just that Apple was wielding its "beat stick" and told them not to demo it on the internal wireless card.
You're willing to just take them at their word as though it is from an unimpeachable source? What pressure could Apple bring to bear on them that is credible? Did they threaten to short sheet their beds? If they were successfully cowered into submission what about their willingness to immediately flip when the question is asked? The whole demo has an odd aroma about it. Somewhat like a mildly incompetent magic trick. They already admitted they had to cook the demo by altering the configuration of the OS from the default settings and chose to run the demo with an awkwardly included external wireless card.
Don't take this as an implicit claim that security is not an issue with Mac OS X. Security is and has been an issue with Apple for many years. That is why Apple has had security updates for years, not just since Windows apologists have chosen to notice. What I am saying is that this story is a shoddy example of journalism.
Long live laserdisc. I have many laserdisc titles that I've not updated to DVD. You're one up on me with that specific title but it shouldn't be too surprising. You also have a lower slashdot ID.
By the time The Matrix was on DVD, most people already had DVD players
Doesn't anyone else bother to google a few facts before making silly claims. Here is the release information from Amazon:
DVD Release Date: September 21, 1999
Here is a headline from 2 years later:
DVD Market Penetration Reaches One-Third Of U.S. Households (10/11)
October 11, 2001
Would the witness like to reconsider his testimony in light of this new evidence? Seriously, I think this makes it fairly clear that when The Matrix was released the DVD format was not yet a mass market item. It still had two years to go before it reached one third of the market. The link for that article is here
It's hard to think of a DVD that came out over 2 1/2 years into the format as "early in the life of DVD."
Maybe not early in the format's history but early in its history as a mass market product. I know that in retrospect DVD is considered a product that was adopted quickly compared to earlier items like FM radio, color TV, VCR, etc. But those first few years were really slow and I believe limited to early adopters and their willingness to prime the pump by spending big bucks. For instance buying DVD video playback capability for the Mac (a DVD drive and MPEG2 accelerator board) was about $600 to $700 when it first became available in those early days. Of course now you can buy a good dual layer DVD burner drive for Mac or PC for about $50 and good DVD blanks for about $0.25. DVD format did not have to face that sort of competition from the CD/CD-R market so I am skeptical about how quickly either HD format can gain traction.
Everyone was using DVD Waaaaaaaaay before the Matrix
Can't agree with that claim. I remember the goofy DIVX DVD players at around the time had been discontinued so I picked one up for less than $200 (details are fuzzy, could have been less) and the DVD I bought with it was The Matrix. I was probably the first of my group of acquaintances to get a DVD player. I know it was fairly early in the mass market phase because the authoring tools were still fairly shoddy. In particular there was some dodgy code in The Matrix which worked on some units and not on others.
staggering that in such a short time the US has gone from loved to hated
How staggeringly naive can you be? I'm not a fan of the Bush administration but I wouldn't begin to lay blaim on them for the decades of anti-American hatred. Do you refer to the brief period immedately in the aftermath of 9/11 when a few countries whose citizens only had mild antipathy for the US (e.g. many Europeans) suspended that for the slightest moment? Among Muslims in many countries on the other hand Osama became the most common name given to newborn sons and in many cases there was open dancing in the streets in celebration of the slaughter. The unapologetic hatred of Western civilization in general and the US specifically is something only the willfully blind can miss. But for the most part the reasonable way to view it (the rabid hatred) is largely with indifferece. Nothing we do will change it except for some sort of societal form of suicide, much like is expected from the Israelis.
Why do so many jump to the conclusion that this laptop is meant as just another tool to be used to further the usual aims of mass public education? Ever consider the possibility it is meant as a means to bypass the customary limits that a student encounters in school? For instance, have you read any of the books by Seymour Papert: "Mindstorms", "The Children's Machine", or "The Connected Family"? Obviously for many people a laptop is mostly a typewriter on steroids. A useful, if banal tool. But what a waste of potential. The idea of putting a laptop in the hands of young students is to reach someone who might learn something more profound when given the opportunity to explore a universal turing machine. At a slightly less exalted level a student might have the chance to engage in activities of creating and building things that can be much more educational than just listening to lecture.
All they did was steal from Xerox.
That same tired old canard trotted out one more time. There is the legalistic answer about deals made and licensing arranged but a more significant recounting of that piece of history is that Apple hired the scientists and engineers from Xerox PARC, like Alan Kay, Larry Tesler and others. This put them in a company that actually had a clue about what was required to accomplish their goal which led to the Lisa and Macintosh. Of course you may be of the opinion that these individuals should be viewed as indentured servants of Xerox who had no right to use ideas that were the property of their former pointy-haired bosses at Xerox. Different stages of personal computing were invented three separate times at Apple: Apple ][, Mac, and OSX (NextStep in Mac drag). That is a remarkable record of creation and it is just some high points. For example both HyperCard and QuickTime could arguably be considered. Another easily overlooked act from the past was that Apple was one of the petitioners to the FCC to allow for unlicensed spectrum that eventually led to WiFi. What the heck, let's not overlook FireWire.
They're not quite in the same league as IBM as far as fundamental contributions (hard drives, relational databases, various Nobel prize researchers, etc) but Apple is no slacker as you would imply. Now for having so little awareness of the history involved, you should go over to the corner and sit quietly.