Why do/.-ers always trot out the betamax to "prove" sony's desire to foist proprietary systems on consumers? First off, sony didn't own any movie studios when they developed the betamax and there were no prerecorded tapes untill several years later. Secondly, they did attempt to license the technology to JVC, who they didn't know at the time was developing a competing format, and did license to Aiwa, NEC, Zenith, Sanyo and Toshiba. Thirdly, how is JVC/Matsushita's VHS format any less proprietary if manufacturers have to pay a license fee to make them?
I'm not saying sony hasn't been stupid about other things, even in addition to the one's you metioned, (Mindisk, 8mm, rootkits, etc) but WTF do you people have against betamax?
Because of walmart throwing a tantrum at rubbermaid and refusing to accept a price increase due to the cost increase of raw materials, Rubbermaid had to close factories, fire people and eventually was bought out by the Newell corp or risk chapter 11.
Newell tried to keep the company afloat, but walmart continued to turn the screws on them, forcing more factory closings, more layoffs, and like you mentioned, manufacturing outsourcing.
The manufacturer is making some big claims about this technology, for bootlegging prevention, not region-encoding. TFA states that this tech is for mass-market (stamped, not burned discs: your home videos will still be accessible) disks to prevent 3rd party mass copying and that it would "eliminate optical disc piracy in the entertainment and IT sectors." Ha! I don't know how this is possible - even if you could force the DVD player manufacturers to put this tech in all their new players, there are already millions upon millions of DVD players out in the wild.
So, yet again, this will only tread on the fair use rights of honest people without preventing the criminals from continuing to make illegal copies.
I used to do the surveys until noticed they all fall in to one of two categories:
1. Radio/tv station wants to see what kind of visibility and reputation they have with consumers. 2. Political party/figure wants to sway your opinion by wording questions to badmouth their opponent.
It's a bit dissapointing because I agree to do the surveys because I hope they are the kind that get quoted in the media, but it just seems like they are either marketing research or propaganda.
One the bright side: legal digital music and video distribution should get cheaper. Those of us who actually pay for our stuff will see a benefit.
I don't see how. Right now the industry has to compete on price with FREE. If they successfully eliminate that competition, why would they lower the prices?
I didn't force them to do crack. How is it I should be forced to pay for their treatment?
You are already paying the cost:
in federal taxes to support the war on drugs
in lives as innocent people get caught in the crossfire of dealer turf wars
in higher medical costs as hospitals raise fees to cover unpaid bills from addicts
in state taxes to support the growing prison system
It's a hard argument to make that legalization would be more costly on society than the status quo.
Look on best buy's site. They are notorious for selling only overpriced cables. Sony's HDMI cable prices beat out monster's by a huge margin and although BB doesn't have as low prices as you can find online, you can still do way better than $100.
"Most consoles also didn't brag about how they can provide the best picture/graphics possible and then not provide that capability straight out of the box."
Sure, there are great new "features". Like the one that allows the tv network to determine how long you can keep your shows before they get autodeleted. And the one that prevents you from recording shows that the tv network doesn't think you should record. How about the one that lets the tv network pick which shows you can copy to your tivo-to-go device? Seems like they are giving the networks all the features.
Re:More like a creative way to get work for free..
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My ReplayTV box has a "commercial detection" feature that is pretty good at skipping commercials without any user intervention. They took it out of later models under pressure from the "entertainment" industry but at least they don't use software update to take features away from existing units the way Tivo does. Don't you love having features you bought and paid for disabled?
Soon after CDROM drives came out for mac, there were XCMD's that could you could use in director to play audio files from a CD, so it could have been easily done.
However, many 3rd party CDROM drives (like one I bought in 1993) came with their own audio CD player software that:
1. allow the user to select music to be played 2. search capabilities such as sorting music tracks by their genre, artist and album attributes. 3. the ability of the software to transfer music tracks to the local hard drive
I do a lot of multimedia and video on the web. One of the problems I have now is that my intenet connection is TOO fast and I can't tell how bad some of my online video would be on a less-than-stellar connection.
Just like anything, YMMV. The last company I worked for had business class comcast for a while but couldn't stand the frequent downtime so the bucked up (like 3x the cost) for SDSL with 50 static IPs. This was a big improvement, but there was still occasional downtime. At home I use comcast with about 5% of the downtime that their SDSL had. There are just too many factors to say that "x" is the only solution.
How about user moderation/karma/feedback levels?
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So if what they are describing is limiting the visibility of pages that are edited by anonymous and new users, whats to prevent the chronic vandalizer? A feedback system like ebay, or even like the karma system her here, where editors' reputations are visible to everyone would allow more insight into the veracity of every edit. A poster upstream suggested "believable" pranks would be hard to spot, but they might be easier to spot if the user had a low reputation value. Reputation points could be either randomly awarded in small batches like here, or in bulk to heavy-contributing users and those with high reputations.
The ISPs themselves don't even know what your data cap is, or at least they haven't decided it in advance. I read about a comcast customer that was cut off when he exceeded "somenumber" of bytes. When he talked to tech support and found out this was why he was cut off, he asked for the value of "somenumber". Tech support said they didn't have a policy outlining "somenumber".
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He also might need one of these
Why do /.-ers always trot out the betamax to "prove" sony's desire to foist proprietary systems on consumers? First off, sony didn't own any movie studios when they developed the betamax and there were no prerecorded tapes untill several years later. Secondly, they did attempt to license the technology to JVC, who they didn't know at the time was developing a competing format, and did license to Aiwa, NEC, Zenith, Sanyo and Toshiba. Thirdly, how is JVC/Matsushita's VHS format any less proprietary if manufacturers have to pay a license fee to make them?
I'm not saying sony hasn't been stupid about other things, even in addition to the one's you metioned, (Mindisk, 8mm, rootkits, etc) but WTF do you people have against betamax?
Oh, right. Then 2nd biggest.
Isn't sony the biggest PS2 developer and publisher?
Because of walmart throwing a tantrum at rubbermaid and refusing to accept a price increase due to the cost increase of raw materials, Rubbermaid had to close factories, fire people and eventually was bought out by the Newell corp or risk chapter 11.
y =646
Here is a bit more detail:
http://www.sprawl-busters.com/search.php?readstor
Newell tried to keep the company afloat, but walmart continued to turn the screws on them, forcing more factory closings, more layoffs, and like you mentioned, manufacturing outsourcing.
Maybe he works for monster cable writing all their scientific marketing BS.
Oh, yeah. Mod up this tired joke.
They show music videos, just not in prime time. Then there is MTV2, MTV Hits, MTV Jams, etc.
The manufacturer is making some big claims about this technology, for bootlegging prevention, not region-encoding. TFA states that this tech is for mass-market (stamped, not burned discs: your home videos will still be accessible) disks to prevent 3rd party mass copying and that it would "eliminate optical disc piracy in the entertainment and IT sectors." Ha! I don't know how this is possible - even if you could force the DVD player manufacturers to put this tech in all their new players, there are already millions upon millions of DVD players out in the wild.
So, yet again, this will only tread on the fair use rights of honest people without preventing the criminals from continuing to make illegal copies.
I see there actually is a name for the propoganda polls
I used to do the surveys until noticed they all fall in to one of two categories:
1. Radio/tv station wants to see what kind of visibility and reputation they have with consumers.
2. Political party/figure wants to sway your opinion by wording questions to badmouth their opponent.
It's a bit dissapointing because I agree to do the surveys because I hope they are the kind that get quoted in the media, but it just seems like they are either marketing research or propaganda.
Actually, the author of TFA is NOT promoting a reputation system as the writeup mistakenly suggests.
I don't see how. Right now the industry has to compete on price with FREE. If they successfully eliminate that competition, why would they lower the prices?
in federal taxes to support the war on drugs
in lives as innocent people get caught in the crossfire of dealer turf wars
in higher medical costs as hospitals raise fees to cover unpaid bills from addicts
in state taxes to support the growing prison system
It's a hard argument to make that legalization would be more costly on society than the status quo.
There is even a pre-built KnoppMyth system you can buy.
Look on best buy's site. They are notorious for selling only overpriced cables. Sony's HDMI cable prices beat out monster's by a huge margin and although BB doesn't have as low prices as you can find online, you can still do way better than $100.
"Most consoles also didn't brag about how they can provide the best picture/graphics possible and then not provide that capability straight out of the box."
No, just THE ONLY OTHER CONSOLE THAT DOES HD
Sure, there are great new "features". Like the one that allows the tv network to determine how long you can keep your shows before they get autodeleted. And the one that prevents you from recording shows that the tv network doesn't think you should record. How about the one that lets the tv network pick which shows you can copy to your tivo-to-go device? Seems like they are giving the networks all the features.
It's not so sinister when they tell you up front.
My ReplayTV box has a "commercial detection" feature that is pretty good at skipping commercials without any user intervention. They took it out of later models under pressure from the "entertainment" industry but at least they don't use software update to take features away from existing units the way Tivo does. Don't you love having features you bought and paid for disabled?
Soon after CDROM drives came out for mac, there were XCMD's that could you could use in director to play audio files from a CD, so it could have been easily done.
However, many 3rd party CDROM drives (like one I bought in 1993) came with their own audio CD player software that:
1. allow the user to select music to be played
2. search capabilities such as sorting music tracks by their genre, artist and album attributes.
3. the ability of the software to transfer music tracks to the local hard drive
Well, 2 out of 3 - Close enough!
I do a lot of multimedia and video on the web. One of the problems I have now is that my intenet connection is TOO fast and I can't tell how bad some of my online video would be on a less-than-stellar connection.
Just like anything, YMMV. The last company I worked for had business class comcast for a while but couldn't stand the frequent downtime so the bucked up (like 3x the cost) for SDSL with 50 static IPs. This was a big improvement, but there was still occasional downtime. At home I use comcast with about 5% of the downtime that their SDSL had. There are just too many factors to say that "x" is the only solution.
So if what they are describing is limiting the visibility of pages that are edited by anonymous and new users, whats to prevent the chronic vandalizer? A feedback system like ebay, or even like the karma system her here, where editors' reputations are visible to everyone would allow more insight into the veracity of every edit. A poster upstream suggested "believable" pranks would be hard to spot, but they might be easier to spot if the user had a low reputation value. Reputation points could be either randomly awarded in small batches like here, or in bulk to heavy-contributing users and those with high reputations.
The ISPs themselves don't even know what your data cap is, or at least they haven't decided it in advance. I read about a comcast customer that was cut off when he exceeded "somenumber" of bytes. When he talked to tech support and found out this was why he was cut off, he asked for the value of "somenumber". Tech support said they didn't have a policy outlining "somenumber".
-1 Modappeal