Everytime someone says 'who cares what it looks like' Steve Jobs dies a little bit.
Seriously, though, this is a company that has made it's living on how things look. When they tried to put out standard PC-looking beige boxes, their sales went into the toilet. If it isn't pretty, it can't be an Apple product.
Wrong. By announcing a release date, they cause people who might have otherwise switched to another operating system to continue to wait. This is essentially the same strategy that killed OS/2 Warp. Everyone was waiting for Chicago (Windows 95). This was also brought out in their monopoly trial as one of the offending practices.
In the arcade where I played this game, it was a multi-player game. Everyone had their special boards where they had memorized all the right moves. Personally, I was the only one who could get past the black knight.
How about the Buffalo Terastation. Obviously this wouldn't work if you're looking for hundreds of terabytes. You can't beat the price at less than 70 cents per gig, though.
Isn't this what people have been saying all along? If you offer it online for a reasonable price, people will buy it instead of illegally downloading it.
They've successfully removed their heads from their collective asses. Now lets see if they'll listen when we say we don't want DRM.
I love how patents are supposed to promote innovation. Now instead of spending money on research and development, companies are spending money on lawyers and patent settlements.
The previews for this movie look very good. Unfortunately, they'll probably let Hayden Christiansen actually speak and that will ruin the movie. The action was fine in both of the prequels so far, it was the god-awful script and acting that made me want to repeatedly stab my brain with an ice-pick.
The game takes place in Southern California in the early 90s. This was the height of gang violence in that area and most gangs were made up of blacks or hispanics. I'm sure there were plenty of white people committing crimes at the time but that's not the subject matter of this particular game. Screaming racism in the face of documented history is just silly.
With the shift towards online gaming, this becomes less and less of an issue. With registration servers checking up on each person playing the game, using a downloaded game with a fake serial becomes more difficult. With the popularity of MMORPGs, the entire gaming model might change. We may see games that are free to download but pay-to-play.
No matter what, game companies are going to have to come to the realization that people will always pirate games, copy protection doesn't work, and pissing off the customers with poorly devised protection schemes only loses them customers.
This would be a great place for Linux to break into the gaming market. Knoppix already does all the hardware detecting and such so it would just be a matter of the game developer writing their game for Linux and making it start up automatically. If they started doing this, it would actually have two potential results. 1. An actual linux game market, and 2. a possible future linux based console with a bunch of games already out.
I already do exactly this when I want to watch TV on one of my windows machines using Knoppmyth. Just drop in the disk and boot up the frontend. (Obviously you have to have a backend running someplace else on the network first.)
It all depends on where you want the processing to take place. PHP processes on the server side. Java processes on the client side (generally speaking of course).
Just because I'm running a high screen resolution doesn't mean that I'm running my browser at full screen. I happen to like 1024x768 on my tiny 15" screen at work and I don't want to have to maximize just to see everything. Also, these are windows so they can be any size. If I want to make my browser 865x550, I can do that. The website should adjust to my window size, not the other way around.
Personally I'm glad the porn industry took such a strong interest in the internet. Without them, this fantastic technology would probably have floundered in universities and never grown to be a world-wide phenomenom.
Think about it, the porn industry is always pushing the bounds of technology on the internet. The expansion of high-speed connectivity to homes was mostly because people wanted to surf porn FASTER! Why just download pictures of naked people when you can get videos too!
Not that I look for porn on the internet like all those other perverts or anything.
Is anyone else concerned that the FBI (that is part of the US government, paid for by 'we, the people') is being used as a private police force by these big companies? I seem to remember hearing about FBI raids on companies that make those smart card writers and turning over their customer lists to DirecTV. Things that would be illegal or at the very least difficult and time consuming to these companies can be easily taken care of by the FBI without all the legal hassle. I find this trend not only disturbing but also infuriating.
I'm dealing with this problem right now with our company's in-house developers. All the programs they write require the user to have administrator access to the local machine. I swear if I hear "well it works on my computer" one more time, I'm going to kill someone.
Before I bought my ReplayTV, I looked into exactly these questions. The ReplayTV records in MPEG2 at 720x480 and has sound at 48khz. These are exactly the specs for recording to dvd so there's no transcoding required to burn it to dvd. Also, you can pull stuff off of it without any special hacking to the ReplayTV device itself (not possible on Tivo last time I checked). I record my shows, copy them to my computer, edit out commercials, and burn them to DVD.
As for 'under 30 minutes', it takes a little longer than that. Copying the stuff off takes about 45 minutes for an hour show on my network. Editing takes another 15 minutes or so. Burning to dvd depends on the speed of your burner and how pretty you want to make it (menus and such).
A homebrew solution might be able to do all this and even eliminate the 'pulling the video' step but for simple convenience and ease of use, the ReplayTV is better.
By the way, I've built a MythTV device too that works very well but it doesn't capture in MPEG2 so I only use it for basic timeshifting, not for stuff I want to keep permanently.
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Everytime someone says 'who cares what it looks like' Steve Jobs dies a little bit.
Seriously, though, this is a company that has made it's living on how things look. When they tried to put out standard PC-looking beige boxes, their sales went into the toilet. If it isn't pretty, it can't be an Apple product.
Wrong. By announcing a release date, they cause people who might have otherwise switched to another operating system to continue to wait. This is essentially the same strategy that killed OS/2 Warp. Everyone was waiting for Chicago (Windows 95). This was also brought out in their monopoly trial as one of the offending practices.
In the arcade where I played this game, it was a multi-player game. Everyone had their special boards where they had memorized all the right moves. Personally, I was the only one who could get past the black knight.
Okay...now I feel old again.
How about the Buffalo Terastation. Obviously this wouldn't work if you're looking for hundreds of terabytes. You can't beat the price at less than 70 cents per gig, though.
Isn't this what people have been saying all along? If you offer it online for a reasonable price, people will buy it instead of illegally downloading it.
They've successfully removed their heads from their collective asses. Now lets see if they'll listen when we say we don't want DRM.
"we have ways of interoperating and working effectively with"
Better known as 'a good way to migrate customers away from'.
Any endeavor where a fat guy like me can win a gold medal isn't a sport.
I love how patents are supposed to promote innovation. Now instead of spending money on research and development, companies are spending money on lawyers and patent settlements.
Good for lawyers, bad for innovation.
The previews for this movie look very good. Unfortunately, they'll probably let Hayden Christiansen actually speak and that will ruin the movie. The action was fine in both of the prequels so far, it was the god-awful script and acting that made me want to repeatedly stab my brain with an ice-pick.
"And if we have any time left over, we should probably come up with some kind of story too."
The game takes place in Southern California in the early 90s. This was the height of gang violence in that area and most gangs were made up of blacks or hispanics. I'm sure there were plenty of white people committing crimes at the time but that's not the subject matter of this particular game. Screaming racism in the face of documented history is just silly.
SSSSHHHHH! Don't wake him up...he's having such a lovely dream.
With the shift towards online gaming, this becomes less and less of an issue. With registration servers checking up on each person playing the game, using a downloaded game with a fake serial becomes more difficult. With the popularity of MMORPGs, the entire gaming model might change. We may see games that are free to download but pay-to-play.
No matter what, game companies are going to have to come to the realization that people will always pirate games, copy protection doesn't work, and pissing off the customers with poorly devised protection schemes only loses them customers.
This would be a great place for Linux to break into the gaming market. Knoppix already does all the hardware detecting and such so it would just be a matter of the game developer writing their game for Linux and making it start up automatically. If they started doing this, it would actually have two potential results. 1. An actual linux game market, and 2. a possible future linux based console with a bunch of games already out.
I already do exactly this when I want to watch TV on one of my windows machines using Knoppmyth. Just drop in the disk and boot up the frontend. (Obviously you have to have a backend running someplace else on the network first.)
It all depends on where you want the processing to take place. PHP processes on the server side. Java processes on the client side (generally speaking of course).
How is this different from the VNC web interface? Point your web browser at a port on your machine, put in your password, and you're on your desktop.
Even if this caught on, it would take a while for the dvd landfill to catch up with the AOL disk landfill pile.
Just because I'm running a high screen resolution doesn't mean that I'm running my browser at full screen. I happen to like 1024x768 on my tiny 15" screen at work and I don't want to have to maximize just to see everything. Also, these are windows so they can be any size. If I want to make my browser 865x550, I can do that. The website should adjust to my window size, not the other way around.
Personally I'm glad the porn industry took such a strong interest in the internet. Without them, this fantastic technology would probably have floundered in universities and never grown to be a world-wide phenomenom.
Think about it, the porn industry is always pushing the bounds of technology on the internet. The expansion of high-speed connectivity to homes was mostly because people wanted to surf porn FASTER! Why just download pictures of naked people when you can get videos too!
Not that I look for porn on the internet like all those other perverts or anything.
Is anyone else concerned that the FBI (that is part of the US government, paid for by 'we, the people') is being used as a private police force by these big companies? I seem to remember hearing about FBI raids on companies that make those smart card writers and turning over their customer lists to DirecTV. Things that would be illegal or at the very least difficult and time consuming to these companies can be easily taken care of by the FBI without all the legal hassle. I find this trend not only disturbing but also infuriating.
I'm dealing with this problem right now with our company's in-house developers. All the programs they write require the user to have administrator access to the local machine. I swear if I hear "well it works on my computer" one more time, I'm going to kill someone.
On the contrary, as a Certified Netware Engineer, I'm the first person to tell people not to buy Novell.
Streamsicle is a decent one for Windows. Web based control of playlist. And lets not forget free!
Before I bought my ReplayTV, I looked into exactly these questions. The ReplayTV records in MPEG2 at 720x480 and has sound at 48khz. These are exactly the specs for recording to dvd so there's no transcoding required to burn it to dvd. Also, you can pull stuff off of it without any special hacking to the ReplayTV device itself (not possible on Tivo last time I checked). I record my shows, copy them to my computer, edit out commercials, and burn them to DVD.
As for 'under 30 minutes', it takes a little longer than that. Copying the stuff off takes about 45 minutes for an hour show on my network. Editing takes another 15 minutes or so. Burning to dvd depends on the speed of your burner and how pretty you want to make it (menus and such).
A homebrew solution might be able to do all this and even eliminate the 'pulling the video' step but for simple convenience and ease of use, the ReplayTV is better.
By the way, I've built a MythTV device too that works very well but it doesn't capture in MPEG2 so I only use it for basic timeshifting, not for stuff I want to keep permanently.
This is good marketing if it catches on. You can continue to publish new versions with different songs (similar to DDR and You Don't Know Jack).
Country Music version anyone?