That may be true for TV series that have their seasons split up across various titles, but most TV series are sold as season box sets. Why wouldn't a company want to put a whole season on one disc? It would make it cheaper for them and they could charge the same amount.
Solid-state drives could be considered a crackpot idea for two reasons: first because regular hard drive technology is insanely cheaper than solid-state and it looks like it will continue that way. Second because for most desktop systems solid state drives are patently unsuitable because of their relatively low rewrite limits compared to standard drives -- most flash chips are only reliable up to 500,000 rewrites, if that sounds like a lot to you, try using flash for your swap partition on your desktop, you're lucky if you can get two years out of it, I'd estimate more like 6 months.
There's nothing to stop other sites from doing the same thing, in fact there already are other sites that do the same thing, i.e. Revver. The reason it won't turn into a war of "who will pay more" is the same reason that these sites have already not supplanted Youtube: market share, Youtube has far and away the most viewers of any video site.
Except in the purchase of blank music CDs, of course, which cost more because you're going to presumably put music on them owned by the RIAA.
Can you post a link to a source on that? I was aware that was the case in Canada, but I though the similar law that had been proposed in the US had not made it through. I may be misremembering though.
You don't have to go outside the music industry to show that what they're doing today will be viewed as foolish by those in the future, they've been doing this for a long time now.
Player Pianos - When these were introduced, they were hated by musicians because they thought it threatened their livelihood, "who's going to pay us to play when you can just get one of these pianos?"
Phonograph Records - Many musicians hated these for the same reason when they first came out, "who's going to pay us to play when you can just buy a record for a couple of bucks?"
Radio broadcasts of records - When radio stations first began broadcasting records instead of live music performances, many musicians again felt this threatened them, "Who's going to buy our records when they can hear them on the radio for free?"
In hindsight it's obvious that none of these technologies were threats to musicians and in fact, in many cases they helped them.
Yeah, I read the WSJ pretty regularly too and I don't mind so much that a lot of their articles get posted to slashdot as I do that they get posted waaaay after they're published in the WSJ. I mean, if you read the WSJ it's like you're getting more than half of the interesting posts on slashdot but a week or two in advance.
I think the possibility of key revocation is extremely unlikely. If the companies behind HD-DVD begin to revoke keys it will only serve to hamper the format's adoption, consumers will not stand for that. Furthermore, I would imagine that such proactive defenses against pirating might result in a class action lawsuit -- if they revoke the keys for a hardware player consumers will be pissed and they'll likely win such a case.
Lucas most likely would have partnered Han with a squadron of Jar Jar's children and a midget in a monkey constume
While this is an unattractive concept for a Star Wars movie, I would definitely pay to see a movie starring Harrison Ford opposite a midget in a monkey costume.
They say it's not really a consumer device, so I would assume, if you had any use for a display like this, you would also be generating whatever content it would be displaying. The use that comes to my mind most easily would be people editing films. If you're working with a very high-def version of a movie that will eventually be transferred to film or projected with a very high-def digital projector, then it would be nice to see what the film is really going to look like with the definition those formats will have.
Another thing though is that media always lags behind the hardware to utilize it.
Herein lies the problem, how often are you going to find two brazilian hookers and a swiss midget in the same place? I would think there are probably more brazilian hookers in Switzerland than Swiss midgets in Brazil, but it's really unlikely either way. I think the best solution to this would be to fly from Switzerland to Brazil with a Swiss midget as your carry-on, that way you're not leaving anything to chance.
To say that TCP is a 30-year old technology as if there was no significant improvement is more than a bit of a misnomer.
Main Entry: misnomer
Pronunciation: "mis-'nO-m&r
Function: noun
1 : the misnaming of a person in a legal instrument
2 a : a use of a wrong or inappropriate name b : a wrong name or inappropriate designation
The only way I can make sense of his statement is that he may be thinking of the idea that IPv4 is obsolete and he's confused that with TCP/IP being obsolete. If that's the case then he's just very confused and underinformed rather than being a complete fool.
Economy of scale will ensure that it's not $600 for long.
Not really, because the real cost of these drives is the cost of flash, which has already seen the benefits of economy scale so it's not going to get much cheaper. I mean, a 32GB flash drive is going to get cheaper, but it will be due to Moore's law, not economy of scale, so a flash drive will never be competitive to a traditional hard drive (except in applications they're already competitive in now).
This is the same thing that happened years ago with modems. For desktop computers it's not that big of a problem because it's still cheap and easy to get cards that work, although kind of a bummer if you can't use something you've already bought. The times when it's a real problem though is with a laptop, if you've bought a laptop and the onboard networking or wireless is like this you're usually just fucked if you want to run linux, you'll have to buy another external interface for USB or Cardbus or whatever -- a real pain with a laptop.
People bring that up whenever there's news about Captchas, but I have to say I don't believe it. When it comes to porn, I'm no slouch and I can count the number of times I've seen sites that give you free access after entering a captcha on one hand. Far more Captchas are compromised because some OCR nerd has figured out how to crack it.
Until there is an open-source way to watch said 'Streaming WMV' it seems to be the worst possible solution.
Maybe if you're Richard Stallman. WMV is far from ideal, but it's better than switching to a format which almost nobody can play without installing additional software.
No. The goal here is to make these videos accessible to as many people as possible, ideally, everyone. While switching to Ogg Theora would help Linux users out because they would be able to watch the video legally, it would ultimately make the videos far less accessible because for everyone not using Linux it's making it harder to watch the videos. Streaming WMV is not the best solution, but it's better than forcing everybody to use poorly supported software that's still in alpha.
What's so illegal about a Flash-based streaming player?
Flash embedded video is not a bad idea, but currently the latest version of flash available for Linux is Flash Player 7 which doesn't have support for all the video features added in Flash 8 and Flash 9. They could do it, they would just have to be mindful of the limitations of Flash 7 when they were setting it up. Either that or set it up as flash video and hope that Adobe releases Flash 9 for Linux soon (they've already got a prerelease available here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer9/)
Loving Choice Adoption in Second Life -- A virtual adoption agency where people wishing to sexually roleplay as children are able to meet pedophile partners.
They will probably last even longer than that because hi-def technology has matured to the point where users couldn't possibly need higher resolution or more pristine sound effects.
I don't think this is entirely true. I was in Best Buy the other day and they had a bluray player hooked up to a very nice 1080i TV -- the first thing that I noticed was that it was strikingly sharp and I was instantly convinced that I will want to purchase a bluray player (or HDDVD if that's the format that wins) once the technology becomes commoditized and players get to a more reasonable price (is room for improvement.
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That may be true for TV series that have their seasons split up across various titles, but most TV series are sold as season box sets. Why wouldn't a company want to put a whole season on one disc? It would make it cheaper for them and they could charge the same amount.
Solid-state drives could be considered a crackpot idea for two reasons: first because regular hard drive technology is insanely cheaper than solid-state and it looks like it will continue that way. Second because for most desktop systems solid state drives are patently unsuitable because of their relatively low rewrite limits compared to standard drives -- most flash chips are only reliable up to 500,000 rewrites, if that sounds like a lot to you, try using flash for your swap partition on your desktop, you're lucky if you can get two years out of it, I'd estimate more like 6 months.
There's nothing to stop other sites from doing the same thing, in fact there already are other sites that do the same thing, i.e. Revver. The reason it won't turn into a war of "who will pay more" is the same reason that these sites have already not supplanted Youtube: market share, Youtube has far and away the most viewers of any video site.
- Player Pianos - When these were introduced, they were hated by musicians because they thought it threatened their livelihood, "who's going to pay us to play when you can just get one of these pianos?"
- Phonograph Records - Many musicians hated these for the same reason when they first came out, "who's going to pay us to play when you can just buy a record for a couple of bucks?"
- Radio broadcasts of records - When radio stations first began broadcasting records instead of live music performances, many musicians again felt this threatened them, "Who's going to buy our records when they can hear them on the radio for free?"
In hindsight it's obvious that none of these technologies were threats to musicians and in fact, in many cases they helped them.Yeah, I read the WSJ pretty regularly too and I don't mind so much that a lot of their articles get posted to slashdot as I do that they get posted waaaay after they're published in the WSJ. I mean, if you read the WSJ it's like you're getting more than half of the interesting posts on slashdot but a week or two in advance.
They've been selling lightning balls at Radio Shack for years now.
I think the possibility of key revocation is extremely unlikely. If the companies behind HD-DVD begin to revoke keys it will only serve to hamper the format's adoption, consumers will not stand for that. Furthermore, I would imagine that such proactive defenses against pirating might result in a class action lawsuit -- if they revoke the keys for a hardware player consumers will be pissed and they'll likely win such a case.
Actually, even better, how about a monkey in a midget costume?
They say it's not really a consumer device, so I would assume, if you had any use for a display like this, you would also be generating whatever content it would be displaying. The use that comes to my mind most easily would be people editing films. If you're working with a very high-def version of a movie that will eventually be transferred to film or projected with a very high-def digital projector, then it would be nice to see what the film is really going to look like with the definition those formats will have.
Another thing though is that media always lags behind the hardware to utilize it.
Pronunciation: "mis-'nO-m&r
Function: noun
1 : the misnaming of a person in a legal instrument
2 a : a use of a wrong or inappropriate name b : a wrong name or inappropriate designation
The only way I can make sense of his statement is that he may be thinking of the idea that IPv4 is obsolete and he's confused that with TCP/IP being obsolete. If that's the case then he's just very confused and underinformed rather than being a complete fool.
I suggest you read up on the situation in France, the "invading mobs of Muslim youths" the parent speaks of has everything to do with poverty there.
This is the same thing that happened years ago with modems. For desktop computers it's not that big of a problem because it's still cheap and easy to get cards that work, although kind of a bummer if you can't use something you've already bought. The times when it's a real problem though is with a laptop, if you've bought a laptop and the onboard networking or wireless is like this you're usually just fucked if you want to run linux, you'll have to buy another external interface for USB or Cardbus or whatever -- a real pain with a laptop.
People bring that up whenever there's news about Captchas, but I have to say I don't believe it. When it comes to porn, I'm no slouch and I can count the number of times I've seen sites that give you free access after entering a captcha on one hand. Far more Captchas are compromised because some OCR nerd has figured out how to crack it.
I can deal with being stupider as long as I can play the holophoner.
Okay, but you asked for it though:
Loving Choice Adoption in Second Life -- A virtual adoption agency where people wishing to sexually roleplay as children are able to meet pedophile partners.