Just as soon as these burners hit the markets, I expect Sony to introduce SVDVD (Super Video Digital Video Disk), with a higher bandwidth and a richer, emotionally more intense "look" that is often compared to film.
The format was already announced last march. It's called Blu-ray, and uses a blue (or is it violet?) laser to get higher storage capacity.
Unfortunately, the DVD Consortium, in its "wisdom", has decided to push a competing high definition format that uses the current DVD physical layer (book 1 of the DVD spec,
ECMA-267),
but with higher compression ratios. This seems rather short-sighted.
DVD-RW (or +RW or anything for that matter) we were promised double layer double density double sided.
Can you cite any references? I've been paying attention to DVD since before Toshiba and Sony settled their differences, and I don't remember
ever seeing any claim that double-layer writable was going to be possible, from even a semi-credible source.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but the technology used for CD-R/RW, DVD-R/RW, and DVD+R/RW does not lend itself well to writable double-layer media. The writing techniques would tend to affect both layers simultaneously.
Double-sided media does exist, at least for DVD-R. It's more expensive and harder to find.
What we really need is a high-density rewritable removable media that
isn't pushed by the consumer electronics and motion picture industries. If we're lucky, such a thing could slip under the radar without as much pressure from Hollywood to include nasty DRM crap.
Alright, so it's not as cool as sharks with frickin' lasers, but it's still pretty cool.
So far, though, I've been pretty satisfied with my Pioneer DVR-A03. It supports DVD-R/RW and CD-R/RW. I can't really say that I've missed DVD+R/RW capability.
However, having more vendors shipping DVD-R/RW drives will obviously help drive down the price.
What I really want (aside from the aformentioned sharks) is a laptop DVD-R/RW,
CD-R/RW drive that will fit in my Fujtisu Lifebook P-2040 subnotebook. It came with a Toshiba SD-R2102 combo drive that can read DVD and DVD-R media (I haven't tried other DVD formats), and write CD-R/RW. But being able to burn DVD-R on the go would be a nice improvement.
Even though laptop DVD-R/RW drives have been announced, I'll probably have to wait until Fujitsu offers one for a Lifebook, because they
use a custom bezel. Unless maybe I can use the
bezel from the SD-R2102. Time will tell.
It's clear that he's spouting bullshit to support his point. Why should we pay any attention to his point if he can't offer rational arguments? Can you get meaningful results out of an SN74S181 ALU if you provide bogus inputs?
In any case, if he doesn't like articles about the DMCA, he certainly doesn't have to read them. There are plenty of articles on the front page that I ignore, buy you don't find me whining about it. If he wants articles that are of more interest to him, he's welcome to write them.
--
An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a definite proposition. [...] It isn't just contradiction.
-- Monty Python's Flying Circus
On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
-- Charles Babbage
Software designers can't work outside hardware limitations and also have to cater to people who don't have top of the line PCs,
This is a Good Thing. Most software is bloated and inefficient enough already. If we started devloping software targetting only the fastest processors, it would just be that much more bloated and inefficient.
It boggles the mind that now it takes a >500 MHz processor just to run a word processor with reasonable response. I used to run a word processor on a 7.8 MHz computer, and it was not blazingly fast, but it did OK. Where are all those compute cycles being used?
The key to open hardware, in my opinion, is paradoxical. To have open hardware, your design must be closed, immutable.
That's the only reason why Apple survives, even thrives today, because they control the OS as well as the hardware.
You are confusing success with openness. Apple is (somewhat) successful, but not due to having open hardware. Apple originally started with completely open hardware design back in 1977 with the Apple ][. The schematics, monitor ROM source code, and even some theory of operation information was in the reference manual.
IBM copied this model when they introduced the IBM PC in 1981, and it is largely why the PC market has been successful. However, though the PC was an open design, the clones generally aren't. All they do is maintain some base-level software compatability with the PC. You can't actually get schematics or BIOS listings for most (if not all) current PCs and motherboards. So the hardware is open in terms of bus interface, but not in any larger sense.
But when Apple decided to design and sell business computers, starting with the Apple III, the hardware was closed. Schemtics and hardware documentation were unavailable to customers. This trend continued with the Lisa and Macintosh.
At one point in the Macintosh era, Apple flirted briefly with open hardware (remember CHRP?), then went back to proprietary, undocumented hardware. Current Macintosh models are as proprietary and undocumented as ever. However, the release of Darwin source code mitigates this to some extent.
There are benefits to Apple to having closed hardware. They don't have to engineer for and test for as many different platforms and variations as Microsoft does. But this doesn't directly benefit the consumer.
To have a true open hardware platform, and the consumer benefits that would arise therefrom, we need more than just documented bus electrical specifications (e.g., PCI, AGP, USB). The actual details of the hardware design need to be public, such that a BIOS can be written as Free Software.
Note that even the microprocessor vendors are keeping secrets that impede this. For a while Intel kept the "Appendix H" documentation on the Pentium secret. More recently, it was discovered that some details of how to configure the cache of the Athlon were only available under NDA from AMD.
The whole "trusted computing" mantra of the TCPA and Palladium is offensive to me, because these initiatives do nothing to help me as a consumer have better trust in the machine -- if anything, they are hiding more of the operation of the machine from me.
I've been worried for about five years now that this would result in a very unpleasant change to the PC market. Instead of inexpensive, commodity hardware that can run either proprietary or Free Software, we may soon see a split market, in which the inexpensive hardware can only run proprietary software, and if you want to run Free Software, you have to buy much more expensive hardware.
This assumes that the manufacturing volumes for the open hardware would be considerably lower than for commodity hardware. Perhaps the xBSD and Linux operating systems are being widely enough adopted to prevent the prices of open (or mostly open) hardware from rising too terribly much. Only time will tell.
Of course, if legislation like the CBDTPA actually gets enacted, the situation will be much worse. Then rather than simply having to pay more money for open hardware, we would have to buy it on the black market. It is certainly comforting to know that our elected representatives in Washington are doing such a great job of protecting our freedoms.
Slashdot has gone [...]
to a mess of misinformation about the DMCA, DRM technology, patents, copyrights, and other issues
Are you claiming that the articles are full of misinformation, or that the comments posted to them are? Can you cite some specific examples?
that-- for reasons that escape me-- are fundamentally offensive to a good chunk of the Slashdot audience.
Are you saying that the articles are offensive, or the misinformation, or the general subject matter? What chunk is being offended, and why aren't they protesting like you are?
the Slashdot readership prefers instead to just repeat the same old litanies: DMCA bad, RIAA bad, MPAA bad, DRM bad, MS bad, Linux good, EFF good, RMS good, capitalism = greed, government = corruption, et cetera, et cetera.
Perhaps the reason people repeat these "litanies" is that they are true, and that the truth bears repetition? In any case, it would be much more interesting to hear some reasons why those litanies are wrong, rather than just a complaint that they are repeated.
Do they provide full specs, or do they keep details of the fanciest features secret? How does their support of free software compare to Matrox?
I used to buy Nvidia-based cards (mostly from Asus), and technically they're great, but nowdays I try to only buy documented hardware. I've been wondering for a while which video cards I should buy for a desktop system.
My Fujitsu Lifebook (P2040) has an ATI Rage Pro Mobility of some sort, and it seems to work fine. To get the X Video extension working so I could view CDs, I had to download a new driver that isn't yet in the XFree86 distribution, but it works great.
Evolution has not been observed at all. Scientists have never seen one species evolve from another. While there is a lot of evidence to support evolution, it operates on timescales far too long for direct observation.
the login page uses JavaScript to hash your password to prevent your password being sent in plaintext. The hashing happens when the login form is submited.
So? Isn't the plaintext of the hash sent? An attacker that can eavesdrop can then use a locally modified copy of the Yahoo Mail login page that allows him to enter the hash directly.
took a the first chunk of a metal alloy that he invented, and had it forged into a three-metal set of intertwined bands.
And then his wife traded it to his mistress for some more impressive looking jewelry.
Sorry, couldn't resist making the "Atlas Shrugged" reference. Personally I think that's a much better gift than *anything* store-bought. It's amazingly cool that your grandfather did that, and that your grandmother appreciated it.
Too bad Sony never made the MD a data storage
standard
They did. It was called "MD Data". Sony's marketing department bragged about how it was going to completely replace the floppy disk. Then they priced it ridiculously high and wondered why everyone bought CD-RW drives instead.
Sony does this over and over again. After MD Data went nowhere, they tried the same thing with HiFD.
The 104 is the SAME as the A04 (EXCEPT for the fact that one uses general purpose disks and the other uses disks for authoring, respectively)
No, they both can use General disks, and neither can
use Authoring disks. Only really expensive recorders like the DVR-S101 and DVR-S201 support
Authoring. As far as I can tell, the distinction between Authoring and General media was mostly for the purpose of maintaining a high price for Authoring drives and media and perhaps in an attempt to appease Hollywood. Authoring and General do use
a different frequency laser for writing, though.
The difference between the DVR-A04 and DVR-104 is just that the DVR-A04 is packaged for retail sale with a software bundle, and the DRV-104 is an OEM bare drive.
You can easily give yourself half a million dollars when you have the control over someone else's money. In this case, the SONICblue shareholder's money.
Re:My experience with corporate loans
on
Shake-up At SonicBlue
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Though loan forgiveness is more of a gray area, it seems just as reasonable as, say, option repricing, another common practice.
I do NOT see loan forgiveness as
being "just as reasonable". When options are
repriced, it does not result in a direct financial
loss to the company, though it may result in dilution of shareholder equity.
But if company A lends its
directors or executives money to invest in company B, then forgives the loan (perhaps because company B's stock didn't perform well), company A is out the money!
I don't see why anyone should think it is in company A's interest to forgive the loans. The risks regarding company B's stock were undertaken by the directors or executives of their own free will; let them shoulder the risk as well. If company A wanted to assume the risk, it should have purchased the company B stock directly, rather than lending money to others to do so.
In this particular case, since SONICblue owns a third of RioPort, they would presumably lose only 2/3 of the amount of the loan, but that's still a lot different than option repricing.
They've not in a hurry because they've been allocated another 6 MHz of spectrum
for digital broadcasting. But in 2006 they're
supposed to turn over the 6 MHz they were using
for analog broadcast back to the FCC. They don't
want to do this. They are going to fight it
tooth and nail.
The whole setup is a crock. They shouldn't get
ANY free spectrum. Each available 6 MHz television
broadcast channel in a given market should be
up for auction every five years, except for a
small number (20% or so) to be set aside for
public broadcasting (non-profit).
There are many indepdent stations, so a lot of
areas have more than five. Also there is a lot
of overlap. From my house, I can pick up more
than 15 broadcast stations.
Where do you get "over 100" anyhow? There used
to be 82 (numbered 2-83), but the FCC already
did away with 70-83 some years back, so there are
only 68 now. Part of the FCC's push for digital
television broadcast is that it will enable them
to reclaim more of the band for other uses.
ALso is LWN is it legal for LWN to take donations without being a not-for-profit?
Of course it's legal!
Donations to for-profit concerns aren't tax deductible for the donor, though.
Does thi smean LWN has too treat the "donations," as investments?
No. They have to treat the donations as business
income. However, when they use it for paychecks for their employees, they get to write off the payroll as a business expense. So unless they get so much money donated that they show a profit (which seems unlikely), the business does NOT end up paying tax on it.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, the DVD Consortium, in its "wisdom", has decided to push a competing high definition format that uses the current DVD physical layer (book 1 of the DVD spec, ECMA-267), but with higher compression ratios. This seems rather short-sighted.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but the technology used for CD-R/RW, DVD-R/RW, and DVD+R/RW does not lend itself well to writable double-layer media. The writing techniques would tend to affect both layers simultaneously.
Double-sided media does exist, at least for DVD-R. It's more expensive and harder to find.
What we really need is a high-density rewritable removable media that isn't pushed by the consumer electronics and motion picture industries. If we're lucky, such a thing could slip under the radar without as much pressure from Hollywood to include nasty DRM crap.
So far, though, I've been pretty satisfied with my Pioneer DVR-A03. It supports DVD-R/RW and CD-R/RW. I can't really say that I've missed DVD+R/RW capability.
However, having more vendors shipping DVD-R/RW drives will obviously help drive down the price.
What I really want (aside from the aformentioned sharks) is a laptop DVD-R/RW, CD-R/RW drive that will fit in my Fujtisu Lifebook P-2040 subnotebook. It came with a Toshiba SD-R2102 combo drive that can read DVD and DVD-R media (I haven't tried other DVD formats), and write CD-R/RW. But being able to burn DVD-R on the go would be a nice improvement.
Even though laptop DVD-R/RW drives have been announced, I'll probably have to wait until Fujitsu offers one for a Lifebook, because they use a custom bezel. Unless maybe I can use the bezel from the SD-R2102. Time will tell.
In any case, if he doesn't like articles about the DMCA, he certainly doesn't have to read them. There are plenty of articles on the front page that I ignore, buy you don't find me whining about it. If he wants articles that are of more interest to him, he's welcome to write them.
--
An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a definite proposition. [...] It isn't just contradiction.
-- Monty Python's Flying Circus
On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
-- Charles Babbage
It boggles the mind that now it takes a >500 MHz processor just to run a word processor with reasonable response. I used to run a word processor on a 7.8 MHz computer, and it was not blazingly fast, but it did OK. Where are all those compute cycles being used?
You're right, I missed your point, and still do. You complained about misinformation, but won't explain what misinformation you're complaining about.
IBM copied this model when they introduced the IBM PC in 1981, and it is largely why the PC market has been successful. However, though the PC was an open design, the clones generally aren't. All they do is maintain some base-level software compatability with the PC. You can't actually get schematics or BIOS listings for most (if not all) current PCs and motherboards. So the hardware is open in terms of bus interface, but not in any larger sense.
But when Apple decided to design and sell business computers, starting with the Apple III, the hardware was closed. Schemtics and hardware documentation were unavailable to customers. This trend continued with the Lisa and Macintosh.
At one point in the Macintosh era, Apple flirted briefly with open hardware (remember CHRP?), then went back to proprietary, undocumented hardware. Current Macintosh models are as proprietary and undocumented as ever. However, the release of Darwin source code mitigates this to some extent.
There are benefits to Apple to having closed hardware. They don't have to engineer for and test for as many different platforms and variations as Microsoft does. But this doesn't directly benefit the consumer.
To have a true open hardware platform, and the consumer benefits that would arise therefrom, we need more than just documented bus electrical specifications (e.g., PCI, AGP, USB). The actual details of the hardware design need to be public, such that a BIOS can be written as Free Software.
Note that even the microprocessor vendors are keeping secrets that impede this. For a while Intel kept the "Appendix H" documentation on the Pentium secret. More recently, it was discovered that some details of how to configure the cache of the Athlon were only available under NDA from AMD.
The whole "trusted computing" mantra of the TCPA and Palladium is offensive to me, because these initiatives do nothing to help me as a consumer have better trust in the machine -- if anything, they are hiding more of the operation of the machine from me.
I've been worried for about five years now that this would result in a very unpleasant change to the PC market. Instead of inexpensive, commodity hardware that can run either proprietary or Free Software, we may soon see a split market, in which the inexpensive hardware can only run proprietary software, and if you want to run Free Software, you have to buy much more expensive hardware.
This assumes that the manufacturing volumes for the open hardware would be considerably lower than for commodity hardware. Perhaps the xBSD and Linux operating systems are being widely enough adopted to prevent the prices of open (or mostly open) hardware from rising too terribly much. Only time will tell.
Of course, if legislation like the CBDTPA actually gets enacted, the situation will be much worse. Then rather than simply having to pay more money for open hardware, we would have to buy it on the black market. It is certainly comforting to know that our elected representatives in Washington are doing such a great job of protecting our freedoms.
I used to buy Nvidia-based cards (mostly from Asus), and technically they're great, but nowdays I try to only buy documented hardware. I've been wondering for a while which video cards I should buy for a desktop system.
My Fujitsu Lifebook (P2040) has an ATI Rage Pro Mobility of some sort, and it seems to work fine. To get the X Video extension working so I could view CDs, I had to download a new driver that isn't yet in the XFree86 distribution, but it works great.
Evolution has not been observed at all. Scientists have never seen one species evolve from another. While there is a lot of evidence to support evolution, it operates on timescales far too long for direct observation.
After what creature are Canary Islands named?
--
At least she had good taste.
The correct approach is to use SSL.
Sorry, couldn't resist making the "Atlas Shrugged" reference. Personally I think that's a much better gift than *anything* store-bought. It's amazingly cool that your grandfather did that, and that your grandmother appreciated it.
License key? LICENSE KEY? WE DOAN' NEED NO STEENKIN' LICENSE KEY! :-)
Seriously, though, what are you talking about? And by "environment table" do you mean environment variables? I'm baffled!
Sony does this over and over again. After MD Data went nowhere, they tried the same thing with HiFD.
The difference between the DVR-A04 and DVR-104 is just that the DVR-A04 is packaged for retail sale with a software bundle, and the DRV-104 is an OEM bare drive.
You can easily give yourself half a million dollars when you have the control over someone else's money. In this case, the SONICblue shareholder's money.
But if company A lends its directors or executives money to invest in company B, then forgives the loan (perhaps because company B's stock didn't perform well), company A is out the money!
I don't see why anyone should think it is in company A's interest to forgive the loans. The risks regarding company B's stock were undertaken by the directors or executives of their own free will; let them shoulder the risk as well. If company A wanted to assume the risk, it should have purchased the company B stock directly, rather than lending money to others to do so.
In this particular case, since SONICblue owns a third of RioPort, they would presumably lose only 2/3 of the amount of the loan, but that's still a lot different than option repricing.
The whole setup is a crock. They shouldn't get ANY free spectrum. Each available 6 MHz television broadcast channel in a given market should be up for auction every five years, except for a small number (20% or so) to be set aside for public broadcasting (non-profit).
Where do you get "over 100" anyhow? There used to be 82 (numbered 2-83), but the FCC already did away with 70-83 some years back, so there are only 68 now. Part of the FCC's push for digital television broadcast is that it will enable them to reclaim more of the band for other uses.
Donations to for-profit concerns aren't tax deductible for the donor, though.
No. They have to treat the donations as business income. However, when they use it for paychecks for their employees, they get to write off the payroll as a business expense. So unless they get so much money donated that they show a profit (which seems unlikely), the business does NOT end up paying tax on it.