Unless you add a HUGE hard drive, you can only store so much programming in the box. IMO, it's really intended to let you buffer your TV watching, not as a long-term archival of shows.
but it it possible to record shows without the use of the service?
Yes,
can I modify a TiVo to record the
show using the builtin hardware and drop it to a plain file in mpeg or some other format?
No.
Actually, it calls a local number, or an 800 number if no local number is available. I've never noticed my unit staying on the phone for more than about 30 minutes, unless it's getting a software update, or it hasn't called out in a few days. The first call usually takes about 2 hours, though.
I've used Tivo since the first version and have to say that after having gotten used to it, I consider it a must-have piece of gear. However something else that I've also found is that it's really only the basic features that you seem to use. The most important factor is the recording capacity. That being said, the real thing that will put one of these boxes in the forefront will be hours per dollar, Ie maxium recording time for minimum price.
The other thing that needs to be addressed is how they fit in with higher-end home theater gear. The problem that ALL units have right now is that they don't have digital audio capapilities, or component outputs. These will become more important as we see more digital cable and DSS HDTV channels, or channels with 5.1 digital sound. Right now my Tivo is useless when I'm watching a PPV movie on DSS that has digital audio. I can't even stream the video through the Tivo because it has a 3 sec. buffer/delay. So, I have to watch the movie in real-time if I want to enjoy the 5.1 sound.
Other than the lack of hi-def A/V connections the Tivo does everything it needs to do.
I remember when new versions of Netscape brought new features and made the WWW more interactive. Now we've got a better IM client, and a bunch of broken features.
AOL buying Netscape was the beginning of the end of Netscape. Now, it seems that AOL is trying to slowly creep into our PC's, and personally I don't want anything to do with it. The tech-world is caught up in other things right now, but all these things are layered on top of the WWW. After the general novelty wears off (3-4 more years?) I think we'll have a dozen or more good browsers to choose from. If we all _need_ to access the WWW, then eventually we'll see more programmers dedicate time to writing a stable, efficient browser.
My original post was meant to convey that Microsoft has brought a lot of this bashing upon themselves by doing things that are not in the end users best interest. As an example I mentioned an Easter Egg in Excel that ate up about 3-4MB of space (from an era when a 200MB HDD was big, this is about 2% of your drive capacity). I could've provided other examples, but this one sprung to mind first.
I said the same rules don't always apply to Freeware, because it is FREE. Sort of like the "beggars can't be choosers" line. If I _pay_ a company for a spreadsheet, I expect to get a _spreadsheet_. No more, and no less. I expect that product to be resonably efficient and to work as advertised. I do _not_ expect that product to be full of bugs, or other USELESS things that consume resources on my PC that I also _paid_ for.
If I D/L a FREE piece of software, then I should realize that because the author is not getting any income from this software it may not be as stable or efficient as a commercial piece of code (although a lot of freeware is MORE stable than commercial stuff...). I also should recognize that the Freeware code was most likely a project that the author takes personal interest in, and he may have added Easter Eggs to amuse himself. If I don't like the Freeware I can delete it, and I haven't lost anything but time. If I don't like the Payware, I'm stuck. The stupid-ass license prevents me from returning it, and the manufacturer will tell me to piss-off (more or less) if I ask for a more efficient piece of code.
My argument remains the same. Microsoft has made a history of following the dollar, rather than the users requests. By doing so, they have become quite financially successful, but have also brought the wrath of many users upon themselves. I do not belive that MS is the only commercial software company with Easter Eggs, but they are the only commercial software company that is making a console box that is the topic of this story.
Wow, I'm paranoid, and that post even makes me think twice.
When I get my eBook I'm going to buy or build a lead cover for it so that it's contents cannot be remotely altered.
This sounds better to me than Stephen Kings idea of digital publishing. There doesn't seem to be the same grief from the author about the same user reading the same story on different platforms. I bought The Plant online just to support the concept in general, but I never really felt that it was all the way there. It would be cool if publishers caught on to this, I would love to be able to read the first few chapters of a book before deciding to buy it.
I doubt the world, or society in general can last much longer at the rate we're going. Besides, this is a great way for Hawking to gain eternal worship. If he's right, everyone will look back and see him as a visionary. Of course, they won't be able to look back for long, because they'll all be dead.
And, considering that you've been moderated up, perhaps you could give a reason *why* Microsoft "wanted to cause
problems for the PS2," a product currently not competing with any MS products.
First, I wasn't moderated up, I simply posted at "3".
I highly doubt that M$ is just causing problems for the PS/2, that was offered as a paranoid sort of statement. My point was that people are _already_ proclaimin the X-Box as the saviour of the ocnsole-world. However, the X-box is little more than a comples "thought" right now. It doesn't really exist to the public,and we have NO realistic idea when it will exist. However, thousands (hundres of thousands) or sheeple will wait and wait and wait until M$ get's the X Box done. In the mean time, these people aren't buying competitive products because they are buying into the hype of M$. _If_ the X Box is like any other major M$ product lately it will ship Wayyy behind schedule (probably 3 weeks after X Mas), and will only support 3/4 of it's stated features in the first version.
It was hardly a slight simulator. It was more like "asteroids" in the first person. There was no physics modeling or anything like
tht - VERY code light. Calling it a flight simulator is like calling Wolfenstein-3D Quake3.
Okay, fine, it's not a real flight sim. _But_ that doesn't change the fact that it was a useless inclusion.
The previous poster would like you to think that the Easter Eggs are to blame (or even partially to blame) for the bloat in MS software.
No, I would like you to beleive that the Easter Eggs are a painfully obvious sign that M$ and/or it's employees give practically no consideration to the overall size or efficiency of the finished product. If the Easter Eggs are things we can SEE, how many more things that we cannot see do you think there are? I'd be willing to bet that the code in just about any M$ product could be tightened up TREMENDOUSLY. M$ has the manpower and the budget and the experience to create some highly efficient stuff. For as long as they've been around, we should have an office suite that can install in 20MB worth of space, not 200MB.
For the most part, Easter Egss didn't exist until companies, like Microsoft, realized that they had the users by the balls. Look through some programs from the early 80's or late 70's and see how many Easter Eggs you find. I'm not saying that these programs are feature-for-feature indentical in any way to what we have today, but programs from that era were MUCH more tight and efficient than anything we have today.
Ignoring the bloatware and crap that we call software today is simply sticking your head in the sand.
Well.. how many bytes do you think a couple of names take? 20 bytes per name times let's say 150 names.. Voila: 3 KB. This
isn't about cars, it's about software.
Thank you for playing, but I'm sorry that answer is incorrect.
We're not just talking about a couple of names stuck in the code somewhere. We are talking about a moderately functional flight simulater contained in the.exe to display the names. You may have only 150KB of "names" but you've got another 4MB of CRAP to display those names. Take a look at an older version of Office, compare the size of the Excel.exe to the word.exe. For the longest time I used to wonder why Excel had such a huge filesize for the.exe.
Free software is a slightly different argument, the user is not really _paying_ for the software, so s/he has less to complain about "extras" being included in the code.
It's not that I don't think the authors should get recognition for their work, but they could just as easily include their names in the Help->About menu.
The web has gotten to be rather large. I'll bet that there are at least 5,000 pages on category "X" that even the world's most well-rounded category "X" expert has never read, or heard of.
How do we _really_ know that Amazon was the first to come up with 1-click checkout? How do we know that it wasn't first conceived or implemented on some obscure site selling hubcaps for '55 Buicks?
_If_ Amazon (or some other company) was the first one to the patent office with an idea, you can't really blame the patent office for granting an "obvious" patent. Would reactions be different if this patent was held by some 15 year old kid that wanted to license it out? The world is about making money, and patents have value. Personally, I think this is mostly a PR thing for Amazon to continue to grab headlines. This is the sort of thing that they can milk continual mention out of.
It's become evident that the Internet has changed the way that we do almost EVERYTHING. The problem is that the bulk of our lawmakers and governmental bodies are folks who have been for the most part "passed by" by most of this new technology. Do you think that these people _really_ give a shit? I doubt it, they grant the patent, and let the courts sort it out, while the rest of us sit on the edge of our seats, taking bets in office pools on the day that society at large meltsdown on itself from not understanding the technology it created.
Goddammit people - the flight sim in Excel was put there as an easter egg by the programmers, so thier names would show up *somewhere* in the goddamn product. This was not a Microsoft thing, this was not in the design document. It was a nifty little extra put in by the programmers so they could actually leave thier names in the prodcut. For fuck's sake, if you're going to
attack MS, at least attack them for something they did.
Sorry, bloatware is not "nifty little extra".
Excel was shipped by MS, MS paid the programmers to write a spreadsheet. They _didn't_ pay them to spend who knows how long (even if it was only a couple of hours) to add a flight sim to a _spreadsheet_ that offered NO benefits. Of course "MS" didn't do it, "MS" is a corporation, but it's employees _did_ do it, and they're assinine for doing so.
Who decided in the first place that they even _needed_ to have their names on the product? Do you want every guy on the line who builds your car to sign his name somewhere? How about if every guy on the car assembly line drops in a 5lb hunk of steel with his name engraved on it? Then you can carry around an extra 1/2 ton of shit with you WHEREEVER you drive.
So far, the PSX 2 has yet to prove itself. The X Box is already there. I can't wait.:)
It would seem that you are caught in MICROS~1's hypnotic rays. If you'll take a journey down to the local toy store, you will find that the X Box is not "already there". It's no where, it's nt sold yet, and it very well could be a HUGE, elaborate hoax by M$. Maybe there IS no X Box, maybe M$ just wanted to cause problems for the PS2.
I'm not much of a gamer, so my comment may be totally off-base...
Doesn't it seem like the X-box is going to be marketed directly toward a crowd with a large population of anti-MICROS~1 people? Sure, there's lots of people that have never heard of Linux, and think that Bill Gates is a visionary, but that moderate percentage of pro-Linux anti-M$ people just ready to jump on the X-box and hack it _must_ have M$'s attention, at the very least.
The thing that worries me, I remember when M$ release the first version of IE, and thinking "there is NO WAY this thing can be a threat to Netscape". I certainly don't want M$ to become the dominant set-top box company...
This is why you have certification authorities on the Internet, such as Thawte, Verisign, etc. They cross sign your keys and
guarantee that anything cross signed by them is authentic. So naturally, before they cross sign, they verify that the person is
authentic and the key belongs to him. They take responsibility in the case of any bad identity mis-haps.
If somebody digitally signs a new credit card application "for me", and I don't find out for several months, what is Verisign going to "guarantee"? A situation like this could make life such a pain in the ass, that just about any "guarantee" isn't going to do much for me.
Yes, they could, but if their info got "In", then that info can get "out". Personally I wouldn't want to lose my "Palm XII" that had my fingerprint and DNA info stored inside. Next thing I know, my genetic info is being sold to the highest bidder for a new identity.
Manufacturers are the people who tried to establish DIVX as the market standard by selling the players for $50-$100 more
than regular DVD units.
Yeah, but Divx offered $2.00 movie rentals, and you (technically) didn't have to return the movie when you were done. However, Divx didn't really offer any of the benefits of DVD (multiple aspect ratios, etc). Dibx was a brand-new high tech product marketed towards the "couch potatoe" masses. SDMI seems to be heading down the same path. Even if you have a halfway decent CD player you have NO reason to invest in a new player, especially if the new player only gives you the abilty to play SDMI music.
I'm not sure.. there are rules stating what things a cheque needs to have in order to be valid. One of them is a signature from the issuer.
You say "cheque", the rules may be different in your country. I know this because in the US I operate a business, and this is one of the many things that I've learned "The hard way".
On the surface this seems like a great step toward the "Digital Future" (TM)(C)(R)(etc). However, even in Real Life when it comes right down to it, signatures have little value. Think an unsigned check is "worthless"? Think again, simply writing a check and giving it to someone as a payment makes that check a legal instrument and it CAN be cashed sans signature (although quite often the bank may try REALLY REALLY REALLY hard to get a signature before they will honor it). Other documents require a signature only to minimize the possibility that you can dispute the contract terms later.
Digital signatures introduce a HUGE problem, they will lead the Sheeple (those that follow the "herd") to beleive a level of safety has been added to the WWW that isn't really there. It also seems that there is almost NO way to verify the identity of the person who is signing the digital signature. This would also lead on-line merchants to possibly relax a little bit about credit card fraud, when in reality they now have a new form of fraud to look out for.
I don't know what the right answer is, it is probably a smart card reader coupled with a fingerprint scanner as a form of ID. This would probably require a central database of people's info, though (so that you could "sign" for things anywhere, not just at your home PC), and we all know that big databases are a Bad Thing. Perhaps there is a better solution, or perhaps this will end up being an area where Real Life is safer/better than the 'Net.
So these companies are dumping millions of dollars into R&D to develop a "pirate proof" system (note: pirate proof is about as possible as anti-gravity, tele-portation, and Robert Downey Jr staying clean).
If they were to take ALL the money spent on wasted R&D, stoopid court cases, and other bullshit propagnda, and instead use that money to offset the cost of CD's, we wouldn't have a _reason_ to bother with pirating.
I mean, who would rather spend time downloading a dozen MP3's of inferior quality (and some might not even be a complete song), then burning the MP3's to a CD to listen to when you could just buy the whole damn disc for $4.00?
Then, MP3 players would be 1/2 the cost they are now, because the companies that build them wouldn't have to add in $$$ to offset eventual court cases accusing them of promoting the pirating of music.
Personally, I'd gladly go to the local Record Store and spend $50.oo to get a dozen complete CD's, however, when my $50.oo only gets me about 3 discs, then it seems like a waste of money and I tend to buy LESS.
But we all have needs/wants/desires.
I think you're looking for this page.:)
I don't _want_ to carry 5 devices, either. Just like I'd rather only have 1 appliance in my kitchen (combination fridge, oven, and dishwasher), but I realize that these devices serve very different purposes, and wouldn't really integrate all that well.
Personally, I think that the Qualcomm PDA phone's lack of overall success speaks volumes on just how much people "want" these sorts of things. Don't forget that Nokia phone from a few years back that never really went anywhere.
I can see the PalmVII, or variants, offering a GPS, or pseudo-GPS option in the future utilizing current antennas to triangulate your position (more akin to Loran-C rather than true GPS).
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Unless you add a HUGE hard drive, you can only store so much programming in the box. IMO, it's really intended to let you buffer your TV watching, not as a long-term archival of shows.
but it it possible to record shows without the use of the service?
Yes,
can I modify a TiVo to record the show using the builtin hardware and drop it to a plain file in mpeg or some other format?
No.
Actually, it calls a local number, or an 800 number if no local number is available. I've never noticed my unit staying on the phone for more than about 30 minutes, unless it's getting a software update, or it hasn't called out in a few days. The first call usually takes about 2 hours, though.
I've used Tivo since the first version and have to say that after having gotten used to it, I consider it a must-have piece of gear. However something else that I've also found is that it's really only the basic features that you seem to use. The most important factor is the recording capacity. That being said, the real thing that will put one of these boxes in the forefront will be hours per dollar, Ie maxium recording time for minimum price.
The other thing that needs to be addressed is how they fit in with higher-end home theater gear. The problem that ALL units have right now is that they don't have digital audio capapilities, or component outputs. These will become more important as we see more digital cable and DSS HDTV channels, or channels with 5.1 digital sound.
Right now my Tivo is useless when I'm watching a PPV movie on DSS that has digital audio. I can't even stream the video through the Tivo because it has a 3 sec. buffer/delay. So, I have to watch the movie in real-time if I want to enjoy the 5.1 sound.
Other than the lack of hi-def A/V connections the Tivo does everything it needs to do.
I remember when new versions of Netscape brought new features and made the WWW more interactive. Now we've got a better IM client, and a bunch of broken features.
AOL buying Netscape was the beginning of the end of Netscape. Now, it seems that AOL is trying to slowly creep into our PC's, and personally I don't want anything to do with it. The tech-world is caught up in other things right now, but all these things are layered on top of the WWW. After the general novelty wears off (3-4 more years?) I think we'll have a dozen or more good browsers to choose from. If we all _need_ to access the WWW, then eventually we'll see more programmers dedicate time to writing a stable, efficient browser.
My original post was meant to convey that Microsoft has brought a lot of this bashing upon themselves by doing things that are not in the end users best interest. As an example I mentioned an Easter Egg in Excel that ate up about 3-4MB of space (from an era when a 200MB HDD was big, this is about 2% of your drive capacity). I could've provided other examples, but this one sprung to mind first.
I said the same rules don't always apply to Freeware, because it is FREE. Sort of like the "beggars can't be choosers" line. If I _pay_ a company for a spreadsheet, I expect to get a _spreadsheet_. No more, and no less. I expect that product to be resonably efficient and to work as advertised. I do _not_ expect that product to be full of bugs, or other USELESS things that consume resources on my PC that I also _paid_ for.
If I D/L a FREE piece of software, then I should realize that because the author is not getting any income from this software it may not be as stable or efficient as a commercial piece of code (although a lot of freeware is MORE stable than commercial stuff...). I also should recognize that the Freeware code was most likely a project that the author takes personal interest in, and he may have added Easter Eggs to amuse himself. If I don't like the Freeware I can delete it, and I haven't lost anything but time. If I don't like the Payware, I'm stuck. The stupid-ass license prevents me from returning it, and the manufacturer will tell me to piss-off (more or less) if I ask for a more efficient piece of code.
My argument remains the same. Microsoft has made a history of following the dollar, rather than the users requests. By doing so, they have become quite financially successful, but have also brought the wrath of many users upon themselves. I do not belive that MS is the only commercial software company with Easter Eggs, but they are the only commercial software company that is making a console box that is the topic of this story.
Wow, I'm paranoid, and that post even makes me think twice.
When I get my eBook I'm going to buy or build a lead cover for it so that it's contents cannot be remotely altered.
This sounds better to me than Stephen Kings idea of digital publishing. There doesn't seem to be the same grief from the author about the same user reading the same story on different platforms. I bought The Plant online just to support the concept in general, but I never really felt that it was all the way there. It would be cool if publishers caught on to this, I would love to be able to read the first few chapters of a book before deciding to buy it.
And the downward spiral begins...
I doubt the world, or society in general can last much longer at the rate we're going. Besides, this is a great way for Hawking to gain eternal worship. If he's right, everyone will look back and see him as a visionary. Of course, they won't be able to look back for long, because they'll all be dead.
And, considering that you've been moderated up, perhaps you could give a reason *why* Microsoft "wanted to cause problems for the PS2," a product currently not competing with any MS products.
First, I wasn't moderated up, I simply posted at "3".
I highly doubt that M$ is just causing problems for the PS/2, that was offered as a paranoid sort of statement. My point was that people are _already_ proclaimin the X-Box as the saviour of the ocnsole-world. However, the X-box is little more than a comples "thought" right now. It doesn't really exist to the public,and we have NO realistic idea when it will exist. However, thousands (hundres of thousands) or sheeple will wait and wait and wait until M$ get's the X Box done. In the mean time, these people aren't buying competitive products because they are buying into the hype of M$. _If_ the X Box is like any other major M$ product lately it will ship Wayyy behind schedule (probably 3 weeks after X Mas), and will only support 3/4 of it's stated features in the first version.
It was hardly a slight simulator. It was more like "asteroids" in the first person. There was no physics modeling or anything like tht - VERY code light. Calling it a flight simulator is like calling Wolfenstein-3D Quake3.
Okay, fine, it's not a real flight sim. _But_ that doesn't change the fact that it was a useless inclusion.
The previous poster would like you to think that the Easter Eggs are to blame (or even partially to blame) for the bloat in MS software.
No, I would like you to beleive that the Easter Eggs are a painfully obvious sign that M$ and/or it's employees give practically no consideration to the overall size or efficiency of the finished product. If the Easter Eggs are things we can SEE, how many more things that we cannot see do you think there are? I'd be willing to bet that the code in just about any M$ product could be tightened up TREMENDOUSLY. M$ has the manpower and the budget and the experience to create some highly efficient stuff. For as long as they've been around, we should have an office suite that can install in 20MB worth of space, not 200MB.
For the most part, Easter Egss didn't exist until companies, like Microsoft, realized that they had the users by the balls. Look through some programs from the early 80's or late 70's and see how many Easter Eggs you find. I'm not saying that these programs are feature-for-feature indentical in any way to what we have today, but programs from that era were MUCH more tight and efficient than anything we have today.
Ignoring the bloatware and crap that we call software today is simply sticking your head in the sand.
Well.. how many bytes do you think a couple of names take? 20 bytes per name times let's say 150 names.. Voila: 3 KB. This isn't about cars, it's about software. .exe to display the names. You may have only 150KB of "names" but you've got another 4MB of CRAP to display those names. Take a look at an older version of Office, compare the size of the Excel .exe to the word .exe. For the longest time I used to wonder why Excel had such a huge filesize for the .exe.
Thank you for playing, but I'm sorry that answer is incorrect.
We're not just talking about a couple of names stuck in the code somewhere. We are talking about a moderately functional flight simulater contained in the
Free software is a slightly different argument, the user is not really _paying_ for the software, so s/he has less to complain about "extras" being included in the code.
It's not that I don't think the authors should get recognition for their work, but they could just as easily include their names in the Help->About menu.
The web has gotten to be rather large. I'll bet that there are at least 5,000 pages on category "X" that even the world's most well-rounded category "X" expert has never read, or heard of.
How do we _really_ know that Amazon was the first to come up with 1-click checkout? How do we know that it wasn't first conceived or implemented on some obscure site selling hubcaps for '55 Buicks?
_If_ Amazon (or some other company) was the first one to the patent office with an idea, you can't really blame the patent office for granting an "obvious" patent. Would reactions be different if this patent was held by some 15 year old kid that wanted to license it out? The world is about making money, and patents have value. Personally, I think this is mostly a PR thing for Amazon to continue to grab headlines. This is the sort of thing that they can milk continual mention out of.
It's become evident that the Internet has changed the way that we do almost EVERYTHING. The problem is that the bulk of our lawmakers and governmental bodies are folks who have been for the most part "passed by" by most of this new technology. Do you think that these people _really_ give a shit? I doubt it, they grant the patent, and let the courts sort it out, while the rest of us sit on the edge of our seats, taking bets in office pools on the day that society at large meltsdown on itself from not understanding the technology it created.
Goddammit people - the flight sim in Excel was put there as an easter egg by the programmers, so thier names would show up *somewhere* in the goddamn product. This was not a Microsoft thing, this was not in the design document. It was a nifty little extra put in by the programmers so they could actually leave thier names in the prodcut. For fuck's sake, if you're going to attack MS, at least attack them for something they did.
Sorry, bloatware is not "nifty little extra".
Excel was shipped by MS, MS paid the programmers to write a spreadsheet. They _didn't_ pay them to spend who knows how long (even if it was only a couple of hours) to add a flight sim to a _spreadsheet_ that offered NO benefits. Of course "MS" didn't do it, "MS" is a corporation, but it's employees _did_ do it, and they're assinine for doing so.
Who decided in the first place that they even _needed_ to have their names on the product? Do you want every guy on the line who builds your car to sign his name somewhere? How about if every guy on the car assembly line drops in a 5lb hunk of steel with his name engraved on it? Then you can carry around an extra 1/2 ton of shit with you WHEREEVER you drive.
So far, the PSX 2 has yet to prove itself. The X Box is already there. I can't wait. :)
It would seem that you are caught in MICROS~1's hypnotic rays. If you'll take a journey down to the local toy store, you will find that the X Box is not "already there". It's no where, it's nt sold yet, and it very well could be a HUGE, elaborate hoax by M$. Maybe there IS no X Box, maybe M$ just wanted to cause problems for the PS2.
I'm not much of a gamer, so my comment may be totally off-base...
Doesn't it seem like the X-box is going to be marketed directly toward a crowd with a large population of anti-MICROS~1 people? Sure, there's lots of people that have never heard of Linux, and think that Bill Gates is a visionary, but that moderate percentage of pro-Linux anti-M$ people just ready to jump on the X-box and hack it _must_ have M$'s attention, at the very least.
The thing that worries me, I remember when M$ release the first version of IE, and thinking "there is NO WAY this thing can be a threat to Netscape". I certainly don't want M$ to become the dominant set-top box company...
This is why you have certification authorities on the Internet, such as Thawte, Verisign, etc. They cross sign your keys and guarantee that anything cross signed by them is authentic. So naturally, before they cross sign, they verify that the person is authentic and the key belongs to him. They take responsibility in the case of any bad identity mis-haps.
If somebody digitally signs a new credit card application "for me", and I don't find out for several months, what is Verisign going to "guarantee"? A situation like this could make life such a pain in the ass, that just about any "guarantee" isn't going to do much for me.
Yes, they could, but if their info got "In", then that info can get "out". Personally I wouldn't want to lose my "Palm XII" that had my fingerprint and DNA info stored inside. Next thing I know, my genetic info is being sold to the highest bidder for a new identity.
Manufacturers are the people who tried to establish DIVX as the market standard by selling the players for $50-$100 more than regular DVD units.
Yeah, but Divx offered $2.00 movie rentals, and you (technically) didn't have to return the movie when you were done. However, Divx didn't really offer any of the benefits of DVD (multiple aspect ratios, etc). Dibx was a brand-new high tech product marketed towards the "couch potatoe" masses. SDMI seems to be heading down the same path. Even if you have a halfway decent CD player you have NO reason to invest in a new player, especially if the new player only gives you the abilty to play SDMI music.
I'm not sure.. there are rules stating what things a cheque needs to have in order to be valid. One of them is a signature from the issuer.
You say "cheque", the rules may be different in your country. I know this because in the US I operate a business, and this is one of the many things that I've learned "The hard way".
On the surface this seems like a great step toward the "Digital Future" (TM)(C)(R)(etc). However, even in Real Life when it comes right down to it, signatures have little value. Think an unsigned check is "worthless"? Think again, simply writing a check and giving it to someone as a payment makes that check a legal instrument and it CAN be cashed sans signature (although quite often the bank may try REALLY REALLY REALLY hard to get a signature before they will honor it). Other documents require a signature only to minimize the possibility that you can dispute the contract terms later.
Digital signatures introduce a HUGE problem, they will lead the Sheeple (those that follow the "herd") to beleive a level of safety has been added to the WWW that isn't really there. It also seems that there is almost NO way to verify the identity of the person who is signing the digital signature. This would also lead on-line merchants to possibly relax a little bit about credit card fraud, when in reality they now have a new form of fraud to look out for.
I don't know what the right answer is, it is probably a smart card reader coupled with a fingerprint scanner as a form of ID. This would probably require a central database of people's info, though (so that you could "sign" for things anywhere, not just at your home PC), and we all know that big databases are a Bad Thing. Perhaps there is a better solution, or perhaps this will end up being an area where Real Life is safer/better than the 'Net.
So these companies are dumping millions of dollars into R&D to develop a "pirate proof" system (note: pirate proof is about as possible as anti-gravity, tele-portation, and Robert Downey Jr staying clean).
If they were to take ALL the money spent on wasted R&D, stoopid court cases, and other bullshit propagnda, and instead use that money to offset the cost of CD's, we wouldn't have a _reason_ to bother with pirating.
I mean, who would rather spend time downloading a dozen MP3's of inferior quality (and some might not even be a complete song), then burning the MP3's to a CD to listen to when you could just buy the whole damn disc for $4.00?
Then, MP3 players would be 1/2 the cost they are now, because the companies that build them wouldn't have to add in $$$ to offset eventual court cases accusing them of promoting the pirating of music.
Personally, I'd gladly go to the local Record Store and spend $50.oo to get a dozen complete CD's, however, when my $50.oo only gets me about 3 discs, then it seems like a waste of money and I tend to buy LESS.
But we all have needs/wants/desires. :)
I think you're looking for this page.
I don't _want_ to carry 5 devices, either. Just like I'd rather only have 1 appliance in my kitchen (combination fridge, oven, and dishwasher), but I realize that these devices serve very different purposes, and wouldn't really integrate all that well.
Personally, I think that the Qualcomm PDA phone's lack of overall success speaks volumes on just how much people "want" these sorts of things. Don't forget that Nokia phone from a few years back that never really went anywhere.
I can see the PalmVII, or variants, offering a GPS, or pseudo-GPS option in the future utilizing current antennas to triangulate your position (more akin to Loran-C rather than true GPS).