I often wonder if that testimony by Eisner wasn't partly responsible for the visible hostility between Jobs and Eisner.
I can't remember where I read the account but yes, that testimony was disastrous for the relationship between Eisner and Jobs. A big factor was how dishonest Eisner was about the incident. What was reported was that Jobs asked about whether Eisner was going to attack Apple and heard back from Eisner's people that there would be no attack on Apple. Later when it became clear that Rip, Mix Burn was the focus of Eisner's testimony and only Apple had that advertising campaign that only made things worse. Although the rift between Pixar and Disney might have played some role in Eisner's departure it was probably dwarfed by the billions he transferred from Disney shareholders to his own pocket.
Right now if I were going to buy one I'd go for the Archos since it functions as a DVR
Bzzzzt! Oh, I'm sorry. Thank you for playing but after that build up (*hint* You can buy a better mp3 player for less money than the iPod.) your response was judged to be an answer to the wrong question. Despite the fact that I have not joined the multitudes who own an iPod (my son has a video iPod) I can still see that they have shown better judgment than your answer suggests. The prices listed for the Archos unit you suggest seem to be around $500 give or take $100. My son only spent $300 for his iPod. Last time I checked 500 > 300 and there are many advantages that can be described for the iPod.
Anyway, one of the things he said was (and I am essentially quoting here amazing enough), "either we are going to have DRM or the only content we are going to be able to make is stuff not worth stealing, like what you see on television"
What a hoot. Certainly there is a range of quality in what is available on TV but the assumption that there is some rich vein of non-TV material (movies?) which is so much more valuable is hilarious. There are some movies (very few) that are good and a similar fraction of TV content that is good. The issue of DRM is completely separate. It is part of an attempt to evicerate the balance that the copyright system was designed to provide. Remarkably these DRM efforts seemed destined to fail both technically and commercially. The main beneficiaries seem to be the snake oil salesmen who sell these schemes to gullible media executives.
I suppose it might help if I actually had a floppy disk drive connected to it...;-)
Yeah, I know that particular canard is growing barnacles by now. It was supposed to epitomize how Windows multitasking was real while OS9 and earlier multitasking was fake. I didn't have a Windows machine at the time but now I do and my kids need to format floppies fairly often. My XP box does multitask the process, but just barely. I can't believe it was something that was pointed to with pride. On the other hand my OS X (an old G4 tower) multitasks much more gracefully than my XP. My favorite current comparison example is that you can run any number of video apps on the Mac and will run out of horsepower long before you get into trouble. On the XP if you run more than one video app at the same time you are in for a world of hurt.
Re:Head to head against Winders and *nix
on
MacBook Pro Reviewed
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· Score: 3, Funny
did they figure out how to put in a second mouse button yet?
Give the man a kewpie doll, he has hit a 10 on the lameosity meter. This ranks up there with the claim that you can't format floppies in the background on the Mac. Multitasking in OS X is smoother and more capable than what I get on my XP box and second, you can buy any industry standard USB multibutton mouse and it works just fine in OS X and with all applications. This has not been an issue for many years. It is also worth noting that the screwups I experience are on my PC rather than my Mac.
What you DO need is an understanding of classical mechanics. And I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one here who knows enough classical mechanics to see the faults in their arguments in about 5 seconds.
As you have probably discovered I was mainly arguing that the Nemesis hypothesis in general could not so easily be dismissed rather than claiming to support the specific argument made at the web site. However, I went back to that web site and again I would say even relative to that web site your assertion seems less than persuasive (specifically concerning immediately visible faults). I might add that you would do well to note that there are probably many people here who have studied classical mechanics at the undergradute and graduate level so just trying to pull rank is lame. Also it should be recalled that disputes about the precession of orbits in the past led to the discovery of new planets such as Neptune and Pluto. Also even if there are problems with the arguments put forth on the web site that does not mean the conclusions are necessarily wrong or not worth study. Don't forget that when Wiles presented his proof of Fermat's Last Theorem his proof had a significant error. It took a while to find and about a year for Wiles to use another approach to fix that portion of the proof.
for a long time there was a theory about a planet inside the orbit of Mercury, due to an unexplained irregularity in the orbit of Mercury. Everyone was convinced there was a planet there, even calculated where it was and everything, until eventually Einsteins theory of relativity explained the whole thing and there was no planet.
This is very likely the same thing
This is probably the planet Vulcan hypothesis that was used to explain the advancing perihelion of the orbit of Mercury by adding a planet called Vulcan that had not yet been observed. This was proposed by Le Verrier, a French mathematician in 1859. The calculations he used were the same sort as he used to discover the planet Neptune earlier. Because of the difficulty of observations of planets closer to the sun than Mercury there was more than a little chaos for many years where some would claim to have observed it and others disputing it.
I don't think this is the same since Le Verrier had an observation (advancing perihelion of Mercury's orbit) which he used to calculate where the missing planet should be found. I believe the Nemesis hypothesis is more speculative without the sort of smoking gun that Le Verrier had.
... I would never call it a theory. It's quite possible that our universe is still within the transients period,...
Now you're starting to sound like an eccentric. My point was that there was not any immediately discernable reason from classical mechanics or more comtemporary dynamical systems theory that rule out the Nemesis hypothesis. We already know there are many binary star systems and that in some of these one of the pair is not clearly visible. You don't need any more for an existence proof. The question is what would we have to observe or measure to detect or rule out this possibility.
Like many if not most questions in science it is dealt with by careful observation and measurement rather than ridicule. Some opponents of Kepler's theories argued that the notion that our earth was spinning and revolving around the sun was preposterous to anyone with any sense. After all do you feel like you are hurtling through space at the predicted speeds? Anyone with a smattering of Aristotelean physics could dispose of that nonsense in short order.
You're dealing with a many-body system here. That's inherently chaotic.
Take a look at Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics by Sussman and Wisdom. On page 255 they mention a published result from 1964 by Henon and Heiles. They found some trajectories were chaotic while others are regular. More specifically they found the solutions clustered in phase space into regions of regular and regions of chaotic motion. In other words I believe you are leaning too heavily on popular notions of nonlinear dynamics and chaos (which tends to find chaos everywhere). It is not that I am automatically accepting the Nemesis hypothesis. Only that it is a reasonable theory that would have to be proven or disproven by careful observation.
The Nemesis hypothesis includes the constraint that the Sun and this object are separated on a scale that is larger than the Solar System and the period could well be millions of years. That would make detecting it challenging given the limited time scale over which we have any observational data.
Actually, the understanding of astronomy to explain why this "theory" is utter bullshit isn't really what you need. What you DO need is an understanding of classical mechanics. And I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one here who knows enough classical mechanics to see the faults in their arguments in about 5 seconds.
Do you realize that binary star systems are not at all rare? In many cases one of the pair is not detectable by visible light because it is a brown dwarf or some other hard to detect case. So what in your understanding of classical mechanics makes this sort of investigation utter folly (in under 5 seconds no less). Bear in mind that what appear to be reputable scientists have investigated the possibility but obviously without positive results so far. I imagine that some of these scientists may even match your knowledge of classical mechanics and nonlinear dynamics.
But I'm no longer being payed, so I don't need to think.
Nor apparently to spell correctly. I only bother to offer the correction of paid for payed because your misspelling seemed so reasonable and I didn't want it to gain any traction.
The case may not conform to every requirement you might propose but in the case of Steve Jackson Games v. Secret Service you might find a certain amount of edification. Another case closer to point would be arrest and detention of a foreign citizen visiting the US: U.S. v. Sklyarov. Of course there is case of Jon Johansen which took place in Norway though certainly under the corporate aegis of various US companies. His equipment was confiscated and he was eventually exonerated not just once but twice in court in Norway. The list does go on but that is a start. By the way in all three of those cases the individuals were exonerated.
...Do you have any figures to back up that assertion that it's a "tiny group of people"? Or are you just allowing your own preconceptions to colour your impression of what's going on?...
I can't really speak for this person but what I infer from what he has written is that he is using his own anecdotal evidence. That would correspond to my personal observations. It isn't unusual to know one or two individuals who have a compulsion to collect media (without buying any). It is not something that can be accurately measured like air pressure or parts per million of some pollutant. But we all have our own sample of acquaintences. I'll base my opinion on that sample rather than the self interested claims of one group or another.
By the way I also had a boss who played fast and loose with licensing issues. He would also pontificate against piracy without any acknowledgment about his own personal choices.
I'll try this one more time because I really don't think you are getting it. There is a rather nasty inclination by some techno-snobs to deride people who buy a HD set and claim that DVD's look better on it than it did on their NTSC set. In fact there is usually terminology being slung around but the gist of it is whether the picture quality is really better. I don't know about you but I have never seen a 16 x 9 aspect ratio NTSC set. Ever. I believe they exist but for all practical purposes there are none. So if you view 16 x 9 material on an NTSC set you get to see a rather narrow band along the center of your screen. The resolution you get is far below the available 720 x 480 because of the GEOMETRY. You don't get to see anywhere near as many pixels as there are encoded on the DVD. But if you connect it properly to an ATSC set you do get to see all the available resolution. It really is better than what you can see on an NTSC set.
For that reason I claim that DVD's provide fundamentally more resolution than you can see with an NTSC set. I really don't see how that issue can be argued unless there are widescreen NTSC sets everywhere which I have managed to overlook. On the other hand I can easily see how someone could disagree with my conclusion that HD-DVD and BD are likely to fail in the market because they are not enough better than DVD. There are several aspects to that question but on the issue of quality the important comparison is DVD to HDTV, not NTSC to HDTV. That is why I make the distinction between DVD and NTSC.
So although at this point I think it is clear that we will get HDTV and not just digital TV from the current transition, I don't think it is nearly as likely that we will be getting a higher resolution DVD format as a result.
P.S. Indeed I am not talking about HD content on DVD data discs. I own a couple of them and that is specifically why I doubt the higher resolution formats will get any traction in the market. Those discs require connection to the internet and go through a bullshit license acquisition in order to play. The process is riddled with errors and people who own the discs are often unable to get them to play.
The only prices I ever encountered were in the $40+ range, and often much higher...
You must have been rather late to the game. I suppose there is a good chance that laserdiscs were being sold before you were born. The initial prices were $30 and less but over the years that edged up to $40. I don't recall it going any higher than that but like I said, the market differentiated. I've purchased some of these special editions like the Japanese edition of Bladerunner on eBay. I think it might have been over $200 retail though my standard edition was exactly $30. I can't believe anyone paid those cinephile prices.
Yep, I screwed the pooch. When I was typing 720p and 720i what I meant to type was 480p and 480i. A few years ago FOX was under pressure to bring their programs up to one of the higher def formats of 720p or 1080i instead of the wide screen 480p which they intended to use. When I saw "fastlane" for the first time in FOX's proposed widescreen 480p format I mistakenly thought they had thrown in the towel in there dispute. My impression was that it looked as good as or better than anything else at that time on the other networks. This is very similar to the quality available from a DVD.
My point is that dissing DVD to promote HD formats will fall flat. People will be able to look themselves and see how good DVD is on a 16 x 9 screen. If you view that content on an NTSC screen you get a narrow band in the middle with black bands above and below it. But you go on claiming that DVD is fundamentally tied to NTSC with that little counterexample which is only tied to about 100% of all movies made since 1950.
DVDs raised the bar when they were introduced into the NTSC/PAL/SECAM world. Now that we are in a transition to ATSC we find that DVD content looks even better on ATSC sets. For some odd reason there seems to be an impulse to deny this fortuitous result and snicker at Joe Sixpack who is so pleased with how good his DVDs look on his new plasma screen. Doesn't he realize that he is supposed to upgrade to yet another new format or face dismissive comments about how he doesn't really understand HDTV?
Because of "rental pricing" VHS was often priced at ridiculous levels, at least for the first half year or so of release. LD titles were even more obscenely priced and that pricing never came down...
I try not to be too provocative but you really don't know what you are talking about. Why do you pontificate on a subject about which you know so little? Laserdisc list prices were always in the range from $30 to $40 with few exceptions. As the format matured the producers learned there was a cinephile market that would gladly pay higher prices for special editions of certain titles. You could easily pay over $100 for such editions but in every case I know of you also had the option of purchasing a standard edition of the same title for the standard price.
That was part of the mystery of the marketplace. With VHS you had significantly inferior audio and video quality and (because of details of how the rental market worked) higher prices for popular titles. Laserdiscs being identical in size to LP's were easily stored and took up much less room than bulky VHS cassettes. But market penetration for laserdisc never got above single digits while VHS was everywhere.
If higher cost for LD were historically true then the matter would be more easily understood. Instead there a few other possibilties to consider. Movies had to be split across two or more sides and most people had to manually manage those changes (a few players handled side changes mechanically but that was the exception). The other nasty possibility is that quality doesn't matter very much to most customers. Being able to time shift was more than enough to make VHS the choice.
DVD, unlike laserdisc, is in no fundamental was tied to NTSC. So claiming DVD is 172,800 pixels is only fair if you force its signal through an NTSC bottleneck when connecting to your HD screen. But why would you do that if you have an HD screen?
Then you get into more arcane discussions of how movies and other non-TV sources are stored on a DVD. As best as I can tell it is possible to encode material at 720 x 480 so that if you are not using NTSC at any point you have the potential of the same resolution as 720p. Even if you can't get the full 720p you certainly get 720i without breaking a sweat. So DVD is no worse than half the number of pixels as one of the HD formats.
There will certainly be bragging rights available for BD and HD-DVD owners but if you haven't spent big bucks buying a very large screen the improvement from DVD may be less than compelling. The best bet for retailers might be to invest in some really expensive monitors to help persuade people that the improvements are worth the extra money and reduced convenience. For instance I've read some nasty rumors that BD's will be playable on only one machine. Which would mean there is no rental or used market possibility. If that, or something like it proves true, I won't touch BD with a ten foot pole.
Well, I'm not sure about DVD quality, but on television (especially football games) I notice a clear difference between regular and high-def. What do you make of that?
What I would make of it is that DVD is considerably better than regular TV (ie NTSC). It is true that DVD was designed to work well with NTSC sets since that was the only game in town when DVD was being designed. Many have already noticed that if you bypass NTSC when connecting DVD to your HD screen you get better results because DVD really is better than NTSC.
You're off by about a factor of 4. Laserdiscs aren't quite as high-res as DVDs, but rather close to it. There's no question they're a hell of a lot higher than 320x240.
Well laserdisc is an analog technology so what you get depends on how much you spend. Except that the video is encoded using NTSC standard which is an upper limit on what you can get. I have had several laserdisc players starting with Pioneer's first model (which stopped working quite a few years ago) and several hundred laserdiscs. Not a large collection compared to many others. When I do play discs that I haven't seen for many years I am struck by how limited the picture is compared to DVD's. More specifically I was making the point that a person viewing a DVD on an HDTV screen is quite likely seeing something much better than they have seen before. When you then see the corresponding HDTV signal of the same program my experience is that HDTV is closer to DVD than DVD is to laserdisc. No scientific claim here, just my own anecdotal observation (Fifth Element, Monsters, Inc, etc).
Don't get me wrong. I think HDTV is fantastic. It has taken free, broadcast over-the-air TV from the lowest quality signal you can view to the highest. What a nice bargain. But DVD's can be very good using the new viewing opportunities (ie better than NTSC screens, etc). If the new disc standards play hard to get in any way: price, quality, selection, consumer experience, I can easily see the possibility of neither new disc standard doing much business.
NTSC specifies 480 visible scanlines (525 total), interlaced, which is what broadcast TV, VHS, laserdisc, and DVD have to provide to work with NTSC sets.
Nah, you don't get off that easily, purveyor of the dark side of the force. If average Joe is viewing a DVD widescreen movie on his NTSC monitor he doesn't get to use anywhere near 480 scan lines. Instead he gets huge black bands at the top and bottom of his screen. But on his widescreen HDTV he gets all that resolution back. If there were a non trivial number of widescreen NTSC monitors with more than 700 lines of horizontal resolution you could have your chuckle. But average Jow is right that he gets a better picture with his DVD on an HDTV screen than he used to get with an NTSC set.
But I think you might be confusing the the AACS media content protection systems with the transmission content protection system.
You are right that I was not being precise about who was scrambling whom. While AACS, used for both HD-DVD and Bluray, has not faced any sort of challenge, HDCP has been analyzed and shown to be flawed. As I recall it is a fairly simple matter of linear algebra. You get a few independent HDMI devices and do some number crunching for a few hours and voila you compute a key. I wouldn't be surprised if that explains the device described in Engadget. That would allow legacy displays to use DVI or component video input without making the disc contents available (ie the compressed version). The HDTVxpress board you mention should be able to do the required compression in real time but they certainly don't seem anxious to advertise the price. It could easily be $10,000. That would enable true piracy (ie take someone else's content, manufacture discs and sell them on street corners) without making fair use feasible.
I think one of the things that really helped spur on DVD adoption over VHS wasn't the prettier pictures and better sound, it was the fact that you can do much more with a DVD than you ever could with a cassette. You can skip to whatever scene you want, you can access extras,
Why can't you have extras on VHS?
Tape and processing are expensive. A DVD is just stamped out regardless of amount of content. Economics work in favor of DVD (and earlier there were such features on laserdiscs).
you can change the audio track to your language of choice(if it was on the dvd of course!),
What %age of people do this?
Do you have the odd idea that most people speak English? DVDs are a worldwide product and those people speak many different languages. This is more apparent if you purchase an imported DVD. Many different languages for the same video content.
you can add subtitles, you can get rid of subtitles,
This is also available on VHS as "closed captioning".
See previous comment about the proliferation of languages which don't have the common decency of being English or even use the same writing system (our alphabet or anything resembling it). Closed captioning was a nice but limited approach to the challenge.
All I'm waiting for is someone to produce a device that intercepts the HDMI signal and strips it of any copy protection bits.
Then you will be waiting for a long time. It may prove to be lame but it isn't that lame. It is NOT just a few copy protection bits like the Broadcast Flag. It is an encrypted signal. Assuming the system is not flawed like the similar system for encrypting DVDs that would imply that Bluray and HD-DVD discs are not being published in the same sense as books are published. Books are provided copyright protection for a limited period of time because that encourages new material to be produced which will eventually enrich the public domain. Scrambled content is never intended to enrich the public domain, ever. So why is it provided with copyright protection?
On a practical note it I should mention that the signal on HDMI is not only encrypted, it is also the uncompressed HD signal. So even if you could decrypt it you would not have the storage capacity or processing bandwidth to handle it (eg re-compress). Whatever your datarate is for the disc, the datarate for the signal on HDMI will be about 100x higher. Eventually we will have that sort of storage capacity and corresponding processing capability, but not very soon.
Remember, average Joe thinks that watching a DVD on his new HDTV is "high-definition". I'm serious. There have been polls done, and most people think it's HD.
Before you get too snarky about the issue it is worth noting that a DVD played on an HD set using its DVI (or HDMI) interface really is higher resolution than consumers have had available before. It provides 720 x 480 interlaced and in many cases (ie if the source is not a TV program) that can be deinterlaced quite well. If you use an NTSC interface like S-Video or composite video then the resolution is reduced to NTSC standard but the resolution of material on a DVD is already higher resolution than NTSC provides. So average Joe isn't a chump, DVD does have the ability to provide higher resolution than was available from cable, broadcast, laserdisc, whatever. (For reference although it is an analog standard which makes it difficult to quantify, you would often get about the equivalent of 320 x 240 resolution from an NTSC source like laserdisc. You also have issues of chroma noise and other distractions).
My suspicion is that DVD could prevail over HD-DVD and Bluray just like audio CD has prevailed over SACD and DVD-Audio. Part of the equation is that it is good enough. The other part is that the price of hard drive storage will continue to plummet. At current prices it still seems like an odd suggestion to keep all your DVDs on a hard drive for convenience and avoid wearing out your original disc. But that same sort of suggestion about music from CDs would have seemed outlandish a few years ago. You can easily rip CD's to your hard drive and the same is true about DVDs. That will not be the case for HD-DVD and Bluray (or at least it won't be true initially). If you want to watch a movie on your video iPod or PSP then a DVD will be a useful source but HD-DVD will not. Same issue for viewing it anywhere on your home network. DVD useful, HD-DVD not. Of course you could always keep track of and carry around your original disc until it stops playing properly. At that point you have the option of replacing the defective media with a full price new copy.
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I often wonder if that testimony by Eisner wasn't partly responsible for the visible hostility between Jobs and Eisner.
I can't remember where I read the account but yes, that testimony was disastrous for the relationship between Eisner and Jobs. A big factor was how dishonest Eisner was about the incident. What was reported was that Jobs asked about whether Eisner was going to attack Apple and heard back from Eisner's people that there would be no attack on Apple. Later when it became clear that Rip, Mix Burn was the focus of Eisner's testimony and only Apple had that advertising campaign that only made things worse. Although the rift between Pixar and Disney might have played some role in Eisner's departure it was probably dwarfed by the billions he transferred from Disney shareholders to his own pocket.
Right now if I were going to buy one I'd go for the Archos since it functions as a DVR
Bzzzzt! Oh, I'm sorry. Thank you for playing but after that build up (*hint* You can buy a better mp3 player for less money than the iPod.) your response was judged to be an answer to the wrong question. Despite the fact that I have not joined the multitudes who own an iPod (my son has a video iPod) I can still see that they have shown better judgment than your answer suggests. The prices listed for the Archos unit you suggest seem to be around $500 give or take $100. My son only spent $300 for his iPod. Last time I checked 500 > 300 and there are many advantages that can be described for the iPod.
Anyway, one of the things he said was (and I am essentially quoting here amazing enough), "either we are going to have DRM or the only content we are going to be able to make is stuff not worth stealing, like what you see on television"
What a hoot. Certainly there is a range of quality in what is available on TV but the assumption that there is some rich vein of non-TV material (movies?) which is so much more valuable is hilarious. There are some movies (very few) that are good and a similar fraction of TV content that is good. The issue of DRM is completely separate. It is part of an attempt to evicerate the balance that the copyright system was designed to provide. Remarkably these DRM efforts seemed destined to fail both technically and commercially. The main beneficiaries seem to be the snake oil salesmen who sell these schemes to gullible media executives.
I suppose it might help if I actually had a floppy disk drive connected to it... ;-)
Yeah, I know that particular canard is growing barnacles by now. It was supposed to epitomize how Windows multitasking was real while OS9 and earlier multitasking was fake. I didn't have a Windows machine at the time but now I do and my kids need to format floppies fairly often. My XP box does multitask the process, but just barely. I can't believe it was something that was pointed to with pride. On the other hand my OS X (an old G4 tower) multitasks much more gracefully than my XP. My favorite current comparison example is that you can run any number of video apps on the Mac and will run out of horsepower long before you get into trouble. On the XP if you run more than one video app at the same time you are in for a world of hurt.
did they figure out how to put in a second mouse button yet?
Give the man a kewpie doll, he has hit a 10 on the lameosity meter. This ranks up there with the claim that you can't format floppies in the background on the Mac. Multitasking in OS X is smoother and more capable than what I get on my XP box and second, you can buy any industry standard USB multibutton mouse and it works just fine in OS X and with all applications. This has not been an issue for many years. It is also worth noting that the screwups I experience are on my PC rather than my Mac.
What you said in your first comment was:
What you DO need is an understanding of classical mechanics. And I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one here who knows enough classical mechanics to see the faults in their arguments in about 5 seconds.
As you have probably discovered I was mainly arguing that the Nemesis hypothesis in general could not so easily be dismissed rather than claiming to support the specific argument made at the web site. However, I went back to that web site and again I would say even relative to that web site your assertion seems less than persuasive (specifically concerning immediately visible faults). I might add that you would do well to note that there are probably many people here who have studied classical mechanics at the undergradute and graduate level so just trying to pull rank is lame. Also it should be recalled that disputes about the precession of orbits in the past led to the discovery of new planets such as Neptune and Pluto. Also even if there are problems with the arguments put forth on the web site that does not mean the conclusions are necessarily wrong or not worth study. Don't forget that when Wiles presented his proof of Fermat's Last Theorem his proof had a significant error. It took a while to find and about a year for Wiles to use another approach to fix that portion of the proof.
for a long time there was a theory about a planet inside the orbit of Mercury, due to an unexplained irregularity in the orbit of Mercury. Everyone was convinced there was a planet there, even calculated where it was and everything, until eventually Einsteins theory of relativity explained the whole thing and there was no planet.
This is very likely the same thing
This is probably the planet Vulcan hypothesis that was used to explain the advancing perihelion of the orbit of Mercury by adding a planet called Vulcan that had not yet been observed. This was proposed by Le Verrier, a French mathematician in 1859. The calculations he used were the same sort as he used to discover the planet Neptune earlier. Because of the difficulty of observations of planets closer to the sun than Mercury there was more than a little chaos for many years where some would claim to have observed it and others disputing it.
I don't think this is the same since Le Verrier had an observation (advancing perihelion of Mercury's orbit) which he used to calculate where the missing planet should be found. I believe the Nemesis hypothesis is more speculative without the sort of smoking gun that Le Verrier had.
... I would never call it a theory. It's quite possible that our universe is still within the transients period, ...
Now you're starting to sound like an eccentric. My point was that there was not any immediately discernable reason from classical mechanics or more comtemporary dynamical systems theory that rule out the Nemesis hypothesis. We already know there are many binary star systems and that in some of these one of the pair is not clearly visible. You don't need any more for an existence proof. The question is what would we have to observe or measure to detect or rule out this possibility.
Like many if not most questions in science it is dealt with by careful observation and measurement rather than ridicule. Some opponents of Kepler's theories argued that the notion that our earth was spinning and revolving around the sun was preposterous to anyone with any sense. After all do you feel like you are hurtling through space at the predicted speeds? Anyone with a smattering of Aristotelean physics could dispose of that nonsense in short order.
You're dealing with a many-body system here. That's inherently chaotic.
Take a look at Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics by Sussman and Wisdom. On page 255 they mention a published result from 1964 by Henon and Heiles. They found some trajectories were chaotic while others are regular. More specifically they found the solutions clustered in phase space into regions of regular and regions of chaotic motion. In other words I believe you are leaning too heavily on popular notions of nonlinear dynamics and chaos (which tends to find chaos everywhere). It is not that I am automatically accepting the Nemesis hypothesis. Only that it is a reasonable theory that would have to be proven or disproven by careful observation.
The Nemesis hypothesis includes the constraint that the Sun and this object are separated on a scale that is larger than the Solar System and the period could well be millions of years. That would make detecting it challenging given the limited time scale over which we have any observational data.
Actually, the understanding of astronomy to explain why this "theory" is utter bullshit isn't really what you need. What you DO need is an understanding of classical mechanics. And I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one here who knows enough classical mechanics to see the faults in their arguments in about 5 seconds.
Do you realize that binary star systems are not at all rare? In many cases one of the pair is not detectable by visible light because it is a brown dwarf or some other hard to detect case. So what in your understanding of classical mechanics makes this sort of investigation utter folly (in under 5 seconds no less). Bear in mind that what appear to be reputable scientists have investigated the possibility but obviously without positive results so far. I imagine that some of these scientists may even match your knowledge of classical mechanics and nonlinear dynamics.
But I'm no longer being payed, so I don't need to think.
Nor apparently to spell correctly. I only bother to offer the correction of paid for payed because your misspelling seemed so reasonable and I didn't want it to gain any traction.
The case may not conform to every requirement you might propose but in the case of Steve Jackson Games v. Secret Service you might find a certain amount of edification. Another case closer to point would be arrest and detention of a foreign citizen visiting the US: U.S. v. Sklyarov. Of course there is case of Jon Johansen which took place in Norway though certainly under the corporate aegis of various US companies. His equipment was confiscated and he was eventually exonerated not just once but twice in court in Norway. The list does go on but that is a start. By the way in all three of those cases the individuals were exonerated.
...Do you have any figures to back up that assertion that it's a "tiny group of people"? Or are you just allowing your own preconceptions to colour your impression of what's going on?...
I can't really speak for this person but what I infer from what he has written is that he is using his own anecdotal evidence. That would correspond to my personal observations. It isn't unusual to know one or two individuals who have a compulsion to collect media (without buying any). It is not something that can be accurately measured like air pressure or parts per million of some pollutant. But we all have our own sample of acquaintences. I'll base my opinion on that sample rather than the self interested claims of one group or another.
By the way I also had a boss who played fast and loose with licensing issues. He would also pontificate against piracy without any acknowledgment about his own personal choices.
I'll try this one more time because I really don't think you are getting it. There is a rather nasty inclination by some techno-snobs to deride people who buy a HD set and claim that DVD's look better on it than it did on their NTSC set. In fact there is usually terminology being slung around but the gist of it is whether the picture quality is really better. I don't know about you but I have never seen a 16 x 9 aspect ratio NTSC set. Ever. I believe they exist but for all practical purposes there are none. So if you view 16 x 9 material on an NTSC set you get to see a rather narrow band along the center of your screen. The resolution you get is far below the available 720 x 480 because of the GEOMETRY. You don't get to see anywhere near as many pixels as there are encoded on the DVD. But if you connect it properly to an ATSC set you do get to see all the available resolution. It really is better than what you can see on an NTSC set.
For that reason I claim that DVD's provide fundamentally more resolution than you can see with an NTSC set. I really don't see how that issue can be argued unless there are widescreen NTSC sets everywhere which I have managed to overlook. On the other hand I can easily see how someone could disagree with my conclusion that HD-DVD and BD are likely to fail in the market because they are not enough better than DVD. There are several aspects to that question but on the issue of quality the important comparison is DVD to HDTV, not NTSC to HDTV. That is why I make the distinction between DVD and NTSC.
So although at this point I think it is clear that we will get HDTV and not just digital TV from the current transition, I don't think it is nearly as likely that we will be getting a higher resolution DVD format as a result.
P.S. Indeed I am not talking about HD content on DVD data discs. I own a couple of them and that is specifically why I doubt the higher resolution formats will get any traction in the market. Those discs require connection to the internet and go through a bullshit license acquisition in order to play. The process is riddled with errors and people who own the discs are often unable to get them to play.
The only prices I ever encountered were in the $40+ range, and often much higher...
You must have been rather late to the game. I suppose there is a good chance that laserdiscs were being sold before you were born. The initial prices were $30 and less but over the years that edged up to $40. I don't recall it going any higher than that but like I said, the market differentiated. I've purchased some of these special editions like the Japanese edition of Bladerunner on eBay. I think it might have been over $200 retail though my standard edition was exactly $30. I can't believe anyone paid those cinephile prices.
Yep, I screwed the pooch. When I was typing 720p and 720i what I meant to type was 480p and 480i. A few years ago FOX was under pressure to bring their programs up to one of the higher def formats of 720p or 1080i instead of the wide screen 480p which they intended to use. When I saw "fastlane" for the first time in FOX's proposed widescreen 480p format I mistakenly thought they had thrown in the towel in there dispute. My impression was that it looked as good as or better than anything else at that time on the other networks. This is very similar to the quality available from a DVD.
My point is that dissing DVD to promote HD formats will fall flat. People will be able to look themselves and see how good DVD is on a 16 x 9 screen. If you view that content on an NTSC screen you get a narrow band in the middle with black bands above and below it. But you go on claiming that DVD is fundamentally tied to NTSC with that little counterexample which is only tied to about 100% of all movies made since 1950.
DVDs raised the bar when they were introduced into the NTSC/PAL/SECAM world. Now that we are in a transition to ATSC we find that DVD content looks even better on ATSC sets. For some odd reason there seems to be an impulse to deny this fortuitous result and snicker at Joe Sixpack who is so pleased with how good his DVDs look on his new plasma screen. Doesn't he realize that he is supposed to upgrade to yet another new format or face dismissive comments about how he doesn't really understand HDTV?
Because of "rental pricing" VHS was often priced at ridiculous levels, at least for the first half year or so of release. LD titles were even more obscenely priced and that pricing never came down...
I try not to be too provocative but you really don't know what you are talking about. Why do you pontificate on a subject about which you know so little? Laserdisc list prices were always in the range from $30 to $40 with few exceptions. As the format matured the producers learned there was a cinephile market that would gladly pay higher prices for special editions of certain titles. You could easily pay over $100 for such editions but in every case I know of you also had the option of purchasing a standard edition of the same title for the standard price.
That was part of the mystery of the marketplace. With VHS you had significantly inferior audio and video quality and (because of details of how the rental market worked) higher prices for popular titles. Laserdiscs being identical in size to LP's were easily stored and took up much less room than bulky VHS cassettes. But market penetration for laserdisc never got above single digits while VHS was everywhere.
If higher cost for LD were historically true then the matter would be more easily understood. Instead there a few other possibilties to consider. Movies had to be split across two or more sides and most people had to manually manage those changes (a few players handled side changes mechanically but that was the exception). The other nasty possibility is that quality doesn't matter very much to most customers. Being able to time shift was more than enough to make VHS the choice.
DVD, unlike laserdisc, is in no fundamental was tied to NTSC. So claiming DVD is 172,800 pixels is only fair if you force its signal through an NTSC bottleneck when connecting to your HD screen. But why would you do that if you have an HD screen?
Then you get into more arcane discussions of how movies and other non-TV sources are stored on a DVD. As best as I can tell it is possible to encode material at 720 x 480 so that if you are not using NTSC at any point you have the potential of the same resolution as 720p. Even if you can't get the full 720p you certainly get 720i without breaking a sweat. So DVD is no worse than half the number of pixels as one of the HD formats.
There will certainly be bragging rights available for BD and HD-DVD owners but if you haven't spent big bucks buying a very large screen the improvement from DVD may be less than compelling. The best bet for retailers might be to invest in some really expensive monitors to help persuade people that the improvements are worth the extra money and reduced convenience. For instance I've read some nasty rumors that BD's will be playable on only one machine. Which would mean there is no rental or used market possibility. If that, or something like it proves true, I won't touch BD with a ten foot pole.
Well, I'm not sure about DVD quality, but on television (especially football games) I notice a clear difference between regular and high-def. What do you make of that?
What I would make of it is that DVD is considerably better than regular TV (ie NTSC). It is true that DVD was designed to work well with NTSC sets since that was the only game in town when DVD was being designed. Many have already noticed that if you bypass NTSC when connecting DVD to your HD screen you get better results because DVD really is better than NTSC.
You're off by about a factor of 4. Laserdiscs aren't quite as high-res as DVDs, but rather close to it. There's no question they're a hell of a lot higher than 320x240.
Well laserdisc is an analog technology so what you get depends on how much you spend. Except that the video is encoded using NTSC standard which is an upper limit on what you can get. I have had several laserdisc players starting with Pioneer's first model (which stopped working quite a few years ago) and several hundred laserdiscs. Not a large collection compared to many others. When I do play discs that I haven't seen for many years I am struck by how limited the picture is compared to DVD's. More specifically I was making the point that a person viewing a DVD on an HDTV screen is quite likely seeing something much better than they have seen before. When you then see the corresponding HDTV signal of the same program my experience is that HDTV is closer to DVD than DVD is to laserdisc. No scientific claim here, just my own anecdotal observation (Fifth Element, Monsters, Inc, etc).
Don't get me wrong. I think HDTV is fantastic. It has taken free, broadcast over-the-air TV from the lowest quality signal you can view to the highest. What a nice bargain. But DVD's can be very good using the new viewing opportunities (ie better than NTSC screens, etc). If the new disc standards play hard to get in any way: price, quality, selection, consumer experience, I can easily see the possibility of neither new disc standard doing much business.
NTSC specifies 480 visible scanlines (525 total), interlaced, which is what broadcast TV, VHS, laserdisc, and DVD have to provide to work with NTSC sets.
Nah, you don't get off that easily, purveyor of the dark side of the force. If average Joe is viewing a DVD widescreen movie on his NTSC monitor he doesn't get to use anywhere near 480 scan lines. Instead he gets huge black bands at the top and bottom of his screen. But on his widescreen HDTV he gets all that resolution back. If there were a non trivial number of widescreen NTSC monitors with more than 700 lines of horizontal resolution you could have your chuckle. But average Jow is right that he gets a better picture with his DVD on an HDTV screen than he used to get with an NTSC set.
But I think you might be confusing the the AACS media content protection systems with the transmission content protection system.
You are right that I was not being precise about who was scrambling whom. While AACS, used for both HD-DVD and Bluray, has not faced any sort of challenge, HDCP has been analyzed and shown to be flawed. As I recall it is a fairly simple matter of linear algebra. You get a few independent HDMI devices and do some number crunching for a few hours and voila you compute a key. I wouldn't be surprised if that explains the device described in Engadget. That would allow legacy displays to use DVI or component video input without making the disc contents available (ie the compressed version). The HDTVxpress board you mention should be able to do the required compression in real time but they certainly don't seem anxious to advertise the price. It could easily be $10,000. That would enable true piracy (ie take someone else's content, manufacture discs and sell them on street corners) without making fair use feasible.
I think one of the things that really helped spur on DVD adoption over VHS wasn't the prettier pictures and better sound, it was the fact that you can do much more with a DVD than you ever could with a cassette. You can skip to whatever scene you want, you can access extras,
Why can't you have extras on VHS?
Tape and processing are expensive. A DVD is just stamped out regardless of amount of content. Economics work in favor of DVD (and earlier there were such features on laserdiscs).
you can change the audio track to your language of choice(if it was on the dvd of course!),
What %age of people do this?
Do you have the odd idea that most people speak English? DVDs are a worldwide product and those people speak many different languages. This is more apparent if you purchase an imported DVD. Many different languages for the same video content.
you can add subtitles, you can get rid of subtitles,
This is also available on VHS as "closed captioning".
See previous comment about the proliferation of languages which don't have the common decency of being English or even use the same writing system (our alphabet or anything resembling it). Closed captioning was a nice but limited approach to the challenge.
All I'm waiting for is someone to produce a device that intercepts the HDMI signal and strips it of any copy protection bits.
Then you will be waiting for a long time. It may prove to be lame but it isn't that lame. It is NOT just a few copy protection bits like the Broadcast Flag. It is an encrypted signal. Assuming the system is not flawed like the similar system for encrypting DVDs that would imply that Bluray and HD-DVD discs are not being published in the same sense as books are published. Books are provided copyright protection for a limited period of time because that encourages new material to be produced which will eventually enrich the public domain. Scrambled content is never intended to enrich the public domain, ever. So why is it provided with copyright protection?
On a practical note it I should mention that the signal on HDMI is not only encrypted, it is also the uncompressed HD signal. So even if you could decrypt it you would not have the storage capacity or processing bandwidth to handle it (eg re-compress). Whatever your datarate is for the disc, the datarate for the signal on HDMI will be about 100x higher. Eventually we will have that sort of storage capacity and corresponding processing capability, but not very soon.
Remember, average Joe thinks that watching a DVD on his new HDTV is "high-definition". I'm serious. There have been polls done, and most people think it's HD.
Before you get too snarky about the issue it is worth noting that a DVD played on an HD set using its DVI (or HDMI) interface really is higher resolution than consumers have had available before. It provides 720 x 480 interlaced and in many cases (ie if the source is not a TV program) that can be deinterlaced quite well. If you use an NTSC interface like S-Video or composite video then the resolution is reduced to NTSC standard but the resolution of material on a DVD is already higher resolution than NTSC provides. So average Joe isn't a chump, DVD does have the ability to provide higher resolution than was available from cable, broadcast, laserdisc, whatever. (For reference although it is an analog standard which makes it difficult to quantify, you would often get about the equivalent of 320 x 240 resolution from an NTSC source like laserdisc. You also have issues of chroma noise and other distractions).
My suspicion is that DVD could prevail over HD-DVD and Bluray just like audio CD has prevailed over SACD and DVD-Audio. Part of the equation is that it is good enough. The other part is that the price of hard drive storage will continue to plummet. At current prices it still seems like an odd suggestion to keep all your DVDs on a hard drive for convenience and avoid wearing out your original disc. But that same sort of suggestion about music from CDs would have seemed outlandish a few years ago. You can easily rip CD's to your hard drive and the same is true about DVDs. That will not be the case for HD-DVD and Bluray (or at least it won't be true initially). If you want to watch a movie on your video iPod or PSP then a DVD will be a useful source but HD-DVD will not. Same issue for viewing it anywhere on your home network. DVD useful, HD-DVD not. Of course you could always keep track of and carry around your original disc until it stops playing properly. At that point you have the option of replacing the defective media with a full price new copy.