Something that really bothers me, and goes well with what you're saying:
A lot of people say "Well, they should learn how these things work and secure them properly!". Why? Are wireless routers as simple as they could be to set up? Is it unreasonable to assume that the defaults are sane? How about, rather than this current mess, someone adds a way of describing wireless networks, to DHCP. So:
Average user plugs new router into wall. It auto-generates a WEP (because it's well supported, and so a good default) key, and configures itself to use that. User then plugs their laptop into the router, using a standard ethernet cable, and the router tells the laptop about the wireless network as part of the connection setup. Laptop then prompts user if they want to use wireless, user clicks yes, unplugs cable, and is happy.
Wouldn't that be simpler? Safer? Generally all round better for everyone except/. users who might be using network connections of people who don't expect it?
Sorry, really fed up with this elitist attitude you get from computer people; just because you had to spend ages learning to do something, doesn't mean you shouldn't make it easier for other people.
I'm not 100% with the "If it's open, it's okay to connect"... but if you're someone with enough knowledge for re-write images as they go over the network, you should have known better, and if you discovered your neighbors are connecting to your open network, the correct response is to kick yourself for being so lazy, and get your network configured properly.
Well, if you want to produce websites that happen to work on a fairly limited set of browsers, why don't you just makes a PDF and get the whole thing over and done with?
There are very good reasons why you can't just lay a website out however you want, namely, it doesn't make sense if the final render target is something you don't expect. Like, oooh, I dunno, paper.
The web is designed for accessibility. It's intended that anyone can read your site, and that it will degrade fairly well for browsers that support less features. If that's not important to you, fine, but stop claiming you're producing web sites if you're just making large Flash documents.
I think what Ubuntu has done is to improve the usability per currency unit of your choice. So, for people who were borderline on whether Macs were worth the extra for them, Ubuntu now makes more sense. Cool, great, etc.
However, personally, I don't have the time. We use Linux for servers at work (Debian, but we're planning on doing an Ubuntu install for testing, soon), because the fine grain control over the setup is worth time, and because for server apps it more or less works out of the box. For desktops however, we use OS X. When we want to do complex stuff, almost all the control of Linux is there. When we just want to get on with some work, we can, it's great.
I have an Ubuntu install at home. Last time I looked, it didn't play sound, and mplayer tended to work mostly depending on the phase of the moon. I could sit down and fix it... but I have better things to get on with, so I just use my Powerbook instead...
Anyway, yes, point was, if you have the time, or lack the money, or just are curious, go Ubuntu, it's a great distro... but I'll be over with my Mac, hope that's okay:)
What amazes me about every argument against network neutrality is this belief that clearly, their traffic will be given priority. This is clearly nonsense. The traffic from the people with the most money will be given priority, and I have a feeling the people complaining about latency aren't the people paying the most for Internet access...
The "Then double it" rule has always worked well for me. Actual time taken tends to be somewhere between what I originally thought, and the estimate I give, so it looks like I've done the work faster than expected, which is good. Also, if I'm told to rush something, I can generally get it done in well under my original estimate, which makes people happy. Sure, the boss learns fairly quickly that you're giving worst case estimates, but I think that's a lot better than giving best case estimates.
By the time you've got SMTP, e-mail storage, handling and indexing, a web interface and POP3 interface, adding an IMAP interface for the Outlook/Thunderbird/Pine/whatever users is relatively trivial.
I see your point about selling services though, and while it could be handled as a rented application, I can't see that doing so well...
Although this makes me wonder why we haven't yet seen GMail appliances. If Google could supply, much like their search appliances, GMail appliances that you plug into your network, tell them the domains they're handling, point your DNS at them, and leave them alone, they could make a fortune.
Sure, this is not easy... but I still think this is the best way for them to make money from GMail, and I think they can do it...
I thought it was clear, they're aiming this at a target audience of teenagers with large amounts of disposable income (well, their or their parent's), which they really want to spend on incredibly expensive consoles and games (oh, and a 1080p capable HDTV to get the best effect), and free time.
I think they're listening to the same people who told Microsoft to make their controller really big, because that's what the market wanted... there may be a very vocal group that wants really powerful hardware, or that thinks the Playstation 1's controller was just too small, but that doesn't make them a majority, or frankly even a significant part of the market.
I'll say this; I bought an XBox 360 in January. Since then, I've bought 4 games. There are another 3 (Full Auto, Oblivion, Tomb Raider) I'd have bought at £29.99-34.99 (which most console games go for from mail order). Instead, I bought Oblivion and Tomb Raider for the PC, and just forgot about Full Auto.
The idea of spending in excess of £50 on a game is laughable. I don't care if the entire thing is photorealistic, I can't think of any game I've seen recently that's worth it. They're all either far too short (Half-Life 2, F.E.A.R.), or significantly flawed in some way (Oblivion, if you try to play anything except a combat focused character, Vampire: Bloodlines). Not to mention, I see absolutely no reason to pay on the order of £35 extra for the console version of a game, over the PC version. Despite the cries of how much extra work the next gen consoles are, nothing I've seen so far is a massive leap over PC games from the last 18 months or so.
I think also, as systems stop being maintained by one person, and are covered by a group, it has become a lot less easy to simply go "Ah, they meant well, I'll just ignore it". Instead, the entire group has to come to a decision, and no-one wants to be seen as lazy at maintaining security.
I've seen a student here report a security hole (the muppet that originally developed the web app they were using tracked currently logged in user by putting their username in the CGI parameters. Change the name, and you can be whoever you want), and some members of staff still wanted to seem the kicked out (we did manage to talk some sense into them, though). Point is, if it had just gone to the person maintaining the system at the time (me), I'd have patched up the code, thanked them, and forgotten about it.
> and of the other 10%, the vast majority will just think those other browsers are broken and load up yours instead.
I could have sworn it was closer to 20%, and while people who have recently switched to a non-IE browser may think it's a bug in the browser, I really don't think most are going to go "Well, I'm kinda interested in this site, but it doesn't seem to render properly/says I must use IE, so I'll just switch browser". I think most are going to go "Don't care, moving on".
DVD players that specifically come with upscaling as a feature, tend to do a better job than TVs, in my experience. I assume this is because they are working with the original data, and upscaling as they decode, rather than upscaling the decoded MPEG stream...
Did you have a lot of frequently called code in the Java version? Some of the Java VMs (I think Sun's does it) optimise code on the fly, which is deeply funky when it works:)
Someone's been reading too many benchmarks
on
The End of Native Code?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
"Regardless of the negligible performance hit compared to native code"
Yeah... people keep saying that. Okay, lets take the benchmark I hear about most: http://kano.net/javabench/ "The Java is Faster than C++ and C++ Sucks Unbiased Benchmark". Unbiased my foot. "I was sick of hearing people say Java was slow" is not a good way to start an unbiased benchmark. Lets have a few more problems:
This is not Java vs C++. This is Sun's JDK 1.4.2 vs GCC 3.3.1 on a P4 mobile processor.
GCC is not a fast compiler, it's a portable compiler that happens to be fairly fast. A fast compiler might be something like Intel's own compiler: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/4885
Having proven that method calls take almost twice as long under G++: http://kano.net/javabench/graph - the author then several of the tests recursively ( http://kano.net/javabench/src/cpp/fibo.cpp ). When this benchmark came out, various people on/. managed to get around 1,000 times better perfomance (under G++) by switching to a fixed memory usage non-recursive implementation.
Regardless of the negligible performance hit compared to native code, major software houses, as well as a lot of open-source developers, prefer native code for major projects even though interpreted languages are easier to port cross-platform, often have a shorter development time, and are just as powerful as languages that generate native code.
Y'know, I think there's a reason for that...
Particular to Windows programmers, the announcement of MS-Windows Vista's system requirements means that future Windows boxes will laugh at the memory/processor requirements of current interpreted/JIT compiled languages (e.g..NET, Java , Python, and others).
Y'know, a couple of decades ago I was running non-native applications on a 7Mhz system with 1MB RAM (my old A500). They were fast, but not quite as fast as native. I'm now using a system in the region of 500 times faster, in terms of raw CPU, and with 2,048 times more memory. And y'know what, non-native stuff is fast, but not quite as fast as native. Something about code expanding to fill the available CPU cycles, methinks...
The Playstation led the way. It just kicked the competition all over the place, frankly, and I'm glad I bought one.
The PS2 was good. It's backwards compatibility with the previous generation, rocked. However, it was not as powerful as the XBox, IMHO (and I have both). Sure, it didn't involve pouring money down the drain to produce them, but they weren't as powerful.
The PS3 is a freakish processor that no-one seems to like, glued onto the latest NVidia PC chip, with a few tweaks, and a monstrously over-expensive optical drive. It may well be more powerful than the XBox 360 (the Wii is aiming at a whole different market), but it's also $200 more, so we get into serious value for money questions here.
Now, Nintendo is doing something different. They're producing a console that's not as powerful as the competition, but is about half to a third of the cost. I thought they were nuts when I first heard about it, but it looks like they'll actually do well from the idea.
Don't get me wrong, the XBox 360 is not some super piece of kit (I have one, it has far more personality than I want in a console, to start with); what I'm saying is that the PS3 isn't really pushing things, either. Certainly, not in a good way (as in, game orientated, as opposed to dominating the Blu-Ray market orientated).
I love the three way race, but that's why I cheer when Sony keep throwing themselves on landmines; because they were doing so well in the last generation, that a good dose of re-balancing is in order, or we'll lose one of the other competitors.
> they might as well officially raise the white flag in the next-gen DVD format wars. This is the point. Blu-Ray is looking poorly, even before it's out the door. It would be a pity to see them lose the console war as well, because they can't accept most of their players don't care about a Blu-Ray drive.
Executive summary: How about working with Nintendo, rather than buying them, and hey, does it have to be so soon? Also, how about working on selling Mac Pros to gamers.
Full post:
So, let me get this straight... mere months before a major product release, and one which is likely to lose money on each unit sold, they're suggesting Apple should buy Nintendo. Oh yes, that's pure genius. Don't mind me, I'll be rolling around on the floor laughing for a bit. If they want to buy an existing console manufacturer, wouldn't waiting until the next generation was well under way, make sense? So they're not in the middle of a takeover at a business critical moment?
"Consider this: the Mac Mini currently retails for not much more than the forthcoming Sony PlayStation 3 will. The Mac Mini can play high-definition video, edit music and photographs, surf the Web, word process and edit video -- things no console can currently do well, if at all."
Ah yes. Look, it's only _slightly_ more expensive than the console everyone things will die horribly from being catastrophically overpriced, and does lots of things I don't my console to do! Good thing adding a decent graphics chip will surely not further increase the cost.
"What if the Mini could also play Nintendo games? And not just play Nintendo games, but play Nintendo games specifically tailored to the strengths of the Mac Mini's hardware?"
*pause* Intel Extreme graphics... so you're thinking Tetris, then? Also, I'm sure it won't in any way be an issue if Apple buy Nintendo, then go to all the developers working on Wii games, and say "Here's a completely new dev kit, and we're now targetting a mid-2007 launch for a Mac Mini-console crossover at around $700, is that okay?". That'll work well...
Look; I think Apple gaming is a great idea, but I think buying Nintendo would be a nuts way to go about it. How about, just a thought for people, they work with Nintendo. I'm sure Nintendo would have no issue with licensing their back catalogue of games to Apple, to be sold at about the same cost as they'll be going for on the Wii. Nintendo lose money (or make insignificant amounts) on each Wii sold, so they aren't going to be bothered by a hardware sale lost here and there, and they make money from licensed games.
Other thoughts; the Mac Pros should be coming out soon. If Apple can improve availability of graphics cards for the Pro series, I imagine gamers who have been clinging to Windows boxes just for the games, will be eager to buy them, and use Boot Camp. Certainly, that's what I'm planning on doing!
People to look at information posted on social networking sites. Well, duh.
Seriously, the issue is not the NSA is doing this. The issue is the NSA appears to be doing this from publically available information. Or, as the first line of the article puts it:
"I AM continually shocked and appalled at the details people voluntarily post online about themselves." So says Jon Callas, chief security officer at PGP, a Silicon Valley-based maker of encryption software.
I dunno, maybe it's just me, but I prefer being able to buy a license to listen to music, myself, as opposed to being only able to pay for the entire cost of producing the music (in return for a license to do as I wish with it), or not use the music at all.
The model is not perfect; I want to buy a license, and then be able to listen to the music in whatever format I want. I also want to be able to back up my music. I think there are pricing issues as well. However, I don't think it's exactly unfair that I'm paying for someone to have produced the music in the first place.
I'm sorry, I think you're missing some steps here. Okay, lets follow this logically.
You rent from the store, watch, and return. You are now left with the same money you started with, and no DVD. So what incentive does the store have for doing this? Lets assume that their building rental, electricity, advertising, insurance, etc. are paid for by magic pixes; there's still no incentive in it for them, as they can't make any money from it.
What do you get out of it, given you don't have the DVD at the end? Well, y'know, a couple of hours entertainment...
When you rent a DVD, you aren't paying for the DVD. You're paying for an incredibly small slither of the total costs of making the DVD, plus the overheads of making that available to you in a convenient way (as in, having it available to rent when you want it).
Slashdot Mirror
Something that really bothers me, and goes well with what you're saying:
/. users who might be using network connections of people who don't expect it?
A lot of people say "Well, they should learn how these things work and secure them properly!". Why? Are wireless routers as simple as they could be to set up? Is it unreasonable to assume that the defaults are sane? How about, rather than this current mess, someone adds a way of describing wireless networks, to DHCP. So:
Average user plugs new router into wall. It auto-generates a WEP (because it's well supported, and so a good default) key, and configures itself to use that. User then plugs their laptop into the router, using a standard ethernet cable, and the router tells the laptop about the wireless network as part of the connection setup. Laptop then prompts user if they want to use wireless, user clicks yes, unplugs cable, and is happy.
Wouldn't that be simpler? Safer? Generally all round better for everyone except
Sorry, really fed up with this elitist attitude you get from computer people; just because you had to spend ages learning to do something, doesn't mean you shouldn't make it easier for other people.
I'm not 100% with the "If it's open, it's okay to connect"... but if you're someone with enough knowledge for re-write images as they go over the network, you should have known better, and if you discovered your neighbors are connecting to your open network, the correct response is to kick yourself for being so lazy, and get your network configured properly.
Black Cat Networks do services up to 200GB/month:
:)
http://www.blackcatnetworks.co.uk/services/adsl
And native IPv6, incase you're really geeky
Well, if you want to produce websites that happen to work on a fairly limited set of browsers, why don't you just makes a PDF and get the whole thing over and done with?
There are very good reasons why you can't just lay a website out however you want, namely, it doesn't make sense if the final render target is something you don't expect. Like, oooh, I dunno, paper.
The web is designed for accessibility. It's intended that anyone can read your site, and that it will degrade fairly well for browsers that support less features. If that's not important to you, fine, but stop claiming you're producing web sites if you're just making large Flash documents.
Please?
Thanks, saves me saying it.
:)
People, a DDoS is a Distributed Denial of Service. The hint's in the first word, don't use it if it doesn't apply
Yes!
:)
I think what Ubuntu has done is to improve the usability per currency unit of your choice. So, for people who were borderline on whether Macs were worth the extra for them, Ubuntu now makes more sense. Cool, great, etc.
However, personally, I don't have the time. We use Linux for servers at work (Debian, but we're planning on doing an Ubuntu install for testing, soon), because the fine grain control over the setup is worth time, and because for server apps it more or less works out of the box. For desktops however, we use OS X. When we want to do complex stuff, almost all the control of Linux is there. When we just want to get on with some work, we can, it's great.
I have an Ubuntu install at home. Last time I looked, it didn't play sound, and mplayer tended to work mostly depending on the phase of the moon. I could sit down and fix it... but I have better things to get on with, so I just use my Powerbook instead...
Anyway, yes, point was, if you have the time, or lack the money, or just are curious, go Ubuntu, it's a great distro... but I'll be over with my Mac, hope that's okay
What amazes me about every argument against network neutrality is this belief that clearly, their traffic will be given priority. This is clearly nonsense. The traffic from the people with the most money will be given priority, and I have a feeling the people complaining about latency aren't the people paying the most for Internet access...
The "Then double it" rule has always worked well for me. Actual time taken tends to be somewhere between what I originally thought, and the estimate I give, so it looks like I've done the work faster than expected, which is good. Also, if I'm told to rush something, I can generally get it done in well under my original estimate, which makes people happy. Sure, the boss learns fairly quickly that you're giving worst case estimates, but I think that's a lot better than giving best case estimates.
By the time you've got SMTP, e-mail storage, handling and indexing, a web interface and POP3 interface, adding an IMAP interface for the Outlook/Thunderbird/Pine/whatever users is relatively trivial.
I see your point about selling services though, and while it could be handled as a rented application, I can't see that doing so well...
Although this makes me wonder why we haven't yet seen GMail appliances. If Google could supply, much like their search appliances, GMail appliances that you plug into your network, tell them the domains they're handling, point your DNS at them, and leave them alone, they could make a fortune.
Sure, this is not easy... but I still think this is the best way for them to make money from GMail, and I think they can do it...
I thought it was clear, they're aiming this at a target audience of teenagers with large amounts of disposable income (well, their or their parent's), which they really want to spend on incredibly expensive consoles and games (oh, and a 1080p capable HDTV to get the best effect), and free time.
I think they're listening to the same people who told Microsoft to make their controller really big, because that's what the market wanted... there may be a very vocal group that wants really powerful hardware, or that thinks the Playstation 1's controller was just too small, but that doesn't make them a majority, or frankly even a significant part of the market.
I'll say this; I bought an XBox 360 in January. Since then, I've bought 4 games. There are another 3 (Full Auto, Oblivion, Tomb Raider) I'd have bought at £29.99-34.99 (which most console games go for from mail order). Instead, I bought Oblivion and Tomb Raider for the PC, and just forgot about Full Auto.
The idea of spending in excess of £50 on a game is laughable. I don't care if the entire thing is photorealistic, I can't think of any game I've seen recently that's worth it. They're all either far too short (Half-Life 2, F.E.A.R.), or significantly flawed in some way (Oblivion, if you try to play anything except a combat focused character, Vampire: Bloodlines). Not to mention, I see absolutely no reason to pay on the order of £35 extra for the console version of a game, over the PC version. Despite the cries of how much extra work the next gen consoles are, nothing I've seen so far is a massive leap over PC games from the last 18 months or so.
I think also, as systems stop being maintained by one person, and are covered by a group, it has become a lot less easy to simply go "Ah, they meant well, I'll just ignore it". Instead, the entire group has to come to a decision, and no-one wants to be seen as lazy at maintaining security.
I've seen a student here report a security hole (the muppet that originally developed the web app they were using tracked currently logged in user by putting their username in the CGI parameters. Change the name, and you can be whoever you want), and some members of staff still wanted to seem the kicked out (we did manage to talk some sense into them, though). Point is, if it had just gone to the person maintaining the system at the time (me), I'd have patched up the code, thanked them, and forgotten about it.
> and of the other 10%, the vast majority will just think those other browsers are broken and load up yours instead.
I could have sworn it was closer to 20%, and while people who have recently switched to a non-IE browser may think it's a bug in the browser, I really don't think most are going to go "Well, I'm kinda interested in this site, but it doesn't seem to render properly/says I must use IE, so I'll just switch browser". I think most are going to go "Don't care, moving on".
DVD players that specifically come with upscaling as a feature, tend to do a better job than TVs, in my experience. I assume this is because they are working with the original data, and upscaling as they decode, rather than upscaling the decoded MPEG stream...
Did you have a lot of frequently called code in the Java version? Some of the Java VMs (I think Sun's does it) optimise code on the fly, which is deeply funky when it works :)
Yeah... people keep saying that. Okay, lets take the benchmark I hear about most: http://kano.net/javabench/ "The Java is Faster than C++ and C++ Sucks Unbiased Benchmark". Unbiased my foot. "I was sick of hearing people say Java was slow" is not a good way to start an unbiased benchmark. Lets have a few more problems:
Y'know, I think there's a reason for that...
Y'know, a couple of decades ago I was running non-native applications on a 7Mhz system with 1MB RAM (my old A500). They were fast, but not quite as fast as native. I'm now using a system in the region of 500 times faster, in terms of raw CPU, and with 2,048 times more memory. And y'know what, non-native stuff is fast, but not quite as fast as native. Something about code expanding to fill the available CPU cycles, methinks...
You're marked as funny, but my TV has upgradable firmware... ...not that I'm saying that's a good thing...
Sony? Leading the way?
The Playstation led the way. It just kicked the competition all over the place, frankly, and I'm glad I bought one.
The PS2 was good. It's backwards compatibility with the previous generation, rocked. However, it was not as powerful as the XBox, IMHO (and I have both). Sure, it didn't involve pouring money down the drain to produce them, but they weren't as powerful.
The PS3 is a freakish processor that no-one seems to like, glued onto the latest NVidia PC chip, with a few tweaks, and a monstrously over-expensive optical drive. It may well be more powerful than the XBox 360 (the Wii is aiming at a whole different market), but it's also $200 more, so we get into serious value for money questions here.
Now, Nintendo is doing something different. They're producing a console that's not as powerful as the competition, but is about half to a third of the cost. I thought they were nuts when I first heard about it, but it looks like they'll actually do well from the idea.
Don't get me wrong, the XBox 360 is not some super piece of kit (I have one, it has far more personality than I want in a console, to start with); what I'm saying is that the PS3 isn't really pushing things, either. Certainly, not in a good way (as in, game orientated, as opposed to dominating the Blu-Ray market orientated).
I love the three way race, but that's why I cheer when Sony keep throwing themselves on landmines; because they were doing so well in the last generation, that a good dose of re-balancing is in order, or we'll lose one of the other competitors.
> they might as well officially raise the white flag in the next-gen DVD format wars.
This is the point. Blu-Ray is looking poorly, even before it's out the door. It would be a pity to see them lose the console war as well, because they can't accept most of their players don't care about a Blu-Ray drive.
Executive summary: How about working with Nintendo, rather than buying them, and hey, does it have to be so soon? Also, how about working on selling Mac Pros to gamers.
Full post:
So, let me get this straight... mere months before a major product release, and one which is likely to lose money on each unit sold, they're suggesting Apple should buy Nintendo. Oh yes, that's pure genius. Don't mind me, I'll be rolling around on the floor laughing for a bit. If they want to buy an existing console manufacturer, wouldn't waiting until the next generation was well under way, make sense? So they're not in the middle of a takeover at a business critical moment?
"Consider this: the Mac Mini currently retails for not much more than the forthcoming Sony PlayStation 3 will. The Mac Mini can play high-definition video, edit music and photographs, surf the Web, word process and edit video -- things no console can currently do well, if at all."
Ah yes. Look, it's only _slightly_ more expensive than the console everyone things will die horribly from being catastrophically overpriced, and does lots of things I don't my console to do! Good thing adding a decent graphics chip will surely not further increase the cost.
"What if the Mini could also play Nintendo games? And not just play Nintendo games, but play Nintendo games specifically tailored to the strengths of the Mac Mini's hardware?"
*pause* Intel Extreme graphics... so you're thinking Tetris, then? Also, I'm sure it won't in any way be an issue if Apple buy Nintendo, then go to all the developers working on Wii games, and say "Here's a completely new dev kit, and we're now targetting a mid-2007 launch for a Mac Mini-console crossover at around $700, is that okay?". That'll work well...
Look; I think Apple gaming is a great idea, but I think buying Nintendo would be a nuts way to go about it. How about, just a thought for people, they work with Nintendo. I'm sure Nintendo would have no issue with licensing their back catalogue of games to Apple, to be sold at about the same cost as they'll be going for on the Wii. Nintendo lose money (or make insignificant amounts) on each Wii sold, so they aren't going to be bothered by a hardware sale lost here and there, and they make money from licensed games.
Other thoughts; the Mac Pros should be coming out soon. If Apple can improve availability of graphics cards for the Pro series, I imagine gamers who have been clinging to Windows boxes just for the games, will be eager to buy them, and use Boot Camp. Certainly, that's what I'm planning on doing!
People to look at information posted on social networking sites. Well, duh.
Seriously, the issue is not the NSA is doing this. The issue is the NSA appears to be doing this from publically available information. Or, as the first line of the article puts it:
"I AM continually shocked and appalled at the details people voluntarily post online about themselves." So says Jon Callas, chief security officer at PGP, a Silicon Valley-based maker of encryption software.
I dunno, maybe it's just me, but I prefer being able to buy a license to listen to music, myself, as opposed to being only able to pay for the entire cost of producing the music (in return for a license to do as I wish with it), or not use the music at all.
The model is not perfect; I want to buy a license, and then be able to listen to the music in whatever format I want. I also want to be able to back up my music. I think there are pricing issues as well. However, I don't think it's exactly unfair that I'm paying for someone to have produced the music in the first place.
*blink*
I'm sorry, I think you're missing some steps here. Okay, lets follow this logically.
You rent from the store, watch, and return. You are now left with the same money you started with, and no DVD. So what incentive does the store have for doing this? Lets assume that their building rental, electricity, advertising, insurance, etc. are paid for by magic pixes; there's still no incentive in it for them, as they can't make any money from it.
What do you get out of it, given you don't have the DVD at the end? Well, y'know, a couple of hours entertainment...
When you rent a DVD, you aren't paying for the DVD. You're paying for an incredibly small slither of the total costs of making the DVD, plus the overheads of making that available to you in a convenient way (as in, having it available to rent when you want it).
Y'know, I don't remember seeing any reviews of NVIDIA or ATI's kit, at all, so far... so, lets compare when they're out and in being used in games?