I agree. While most internet connections arnt up to delivering HD content atm, PAL/NTSC resolutions are certainly doable for a large portion of broadband subscribers. And personally Im quite happy to settle for @PAL resolutions for 99% of my viewing because I can watch it WHEN I want to and WHERE I want to. As for Blue-Ray/HD-DVD (BOTH of which will attempt to limit the freedoms I currently enjoy)....well sadly a good proportion of the content is just going to be upscaled to 720p (which isnt a great improvement IMO as a PAL viewer with less than 20/20 vision) for which (as is illustrated by this article) we dont really need either Blue-Ray or HD-DVD for!!
Ive see a lot of material now that is billed as HD and quite frankly, I say "meh!"! Call me when I can get TRUE HD content ( e.g. > 1080p60 ) and maybe I'll consider the merrits of any hardformat; However by then, isnt it much more likely that my pipe will have grown from 8Mb to 80Mb+ and I wont really need that new format? Ooop, thats just what the OP was saying isnt it?
Trust me when I say its not worth it. Whereas with music I dont mind if Im listening to one of my favorite tracks for the 100th time; with TV/Video I seldom want to watch something more than once or twice...and that means I eventually have to replace the content. Completely!
Ive been doing this off and on for a number of years with Anime and an iPaq. At first it was fun but it just became a drag encoding new content to watch. And that was free content - it would soon have mounted up to be an expensive way of staying entertained on a 3 hour daily commute. Anyways I eventually just went back to listening to music and reading on my commute (and then I got rid of the commute which was an even better idea!).
Two things I have to say though. 1) What annoyed me more than anything was people on the tube looking over my shoulder at what I was watching; annoying mainly because it could be quite embarrasing watching an anime with some fanservice in it!! 2) What I REALLY want for a commute is an eInk ebook reader. If Apple would actually innovate rather than repackage for the mass-market (yeah yeah) yesterdays tech (and yup I agree, here and gone!) I might actually buy one of their products!!
I tend to agree - as far as I concerned neither technology offers enough of an incentive to upgrade (and also there are FAR too many disincentives...single DRM'd copy? Shove that) and I think the mass market is going to have a similar opinion. Theres beem quite a few technologies doing the rounds lately that may well see us with 1/2-1TB capacity media by 2008!! And quite frankly having seen enough HD content to have had the rose-tinting drop from my glasses..I can already see what the "next big thing" round the corner is...and guess what? 30-50GB just aint going to cut it for that.
is often the better database solution, I'll still be using MySQL. Why? Well a quick search on cwjobs shows 188 jobs requiring MySQL experience vs 7 for postgres!! Its a real shame but having used the best tool (C++ Builder) for my last job and then being unemployed for @2 years because people wanted either VC++ or Unix based C++ experience; I *WONT* be making the same mistake again!
Anyways, that said, Ive already played about with 5.011 and apart from the yukky syntax one has to use to support transactions it seems quite stable. Its might have taken a long time for them to finally make it a "real" database product but it seems good enough for small databases.
One of my next jobs is to test it with 10 million + records and see how it performs though so my assessment may be premature...
Aye agreed - my wife is continually unplugging my MythTV box without powering it down first. Yet to have a issue using Reiser. Ext3 however...NEVER again!
For me the real question is what form of licensing they are using? Ive written some code that parses TV.com, IMDB and a few others to extract episode information and combined this with newzbin and a modified version of torrentocracy so that I have a MythTV based NZBTV channel (well several actually - drama, sci-fi , films etc) WITH episode information (it works quite nicely and will be even better when I integrate a search into it *grin*)
Id LOVE to make the service and plugin available to others however most services attach nasty copyright resrictions to their content and episode guides so I couldnt embed the info in an RSS feed:(
As a veteran of MMORPGs (well...started playing Everquest 1 month after release so I feel that qualifies me) I felt the grip for MANY years with this form of game but EVENTUALLT bordom did set in and my buying habits returned to "normal". I bought MANY MMORPGS (EQ, AO, DAOC, UO, SB, CoH etc etc) in order to try and get the same sort of "rush" I did when I first discovered EQ (the same sort of rush Im sure many are finding with WoW) but in the end, the formuliac copies (of which WoW is just one of many...highly polished but still just a genre clone) just eventually stopped doing it for me....whereas I could still get a rush from moving on to other genres.
Personally now I dip into Guildwars, HL2 and the occassional demo (and have had a lot of satisfaction from my nacent Mamebox with an x-arcade stick ) but MMORPGs...seen it all before! And THAT is what will happen with all those millions of WoW subscribers down the line - they will try (hopefully) other games in the genre but eventually it just wont be fun anymore...
Anyways Im just hoping that this interest in RPGs means Oblivion gets some better sales - these days I cant wait to play games without ****** n00bs KSing from me;)
for slashdotting a site? 2 of 4 comments and it was gone....*sigh*
Seriously though, for a site that has poored thousands of hours into developing its backend, how difficult would it be to ensure that the link is always cached before posting it?
Ahhh I hadnt realised it was actually live!
Well at least the HTML in the decription is well formed but of course they have comitted sin # 1 - or am I failing to see an option to change the no of results return?
And a default of 10 results....xing useless *sigh*
Ive been playing with RSS feeds a lot of late and seen a lot of half-assed solutions. Its ****** annoying to find an RSS feed for an area/site only to find they have commited one of the following ?-ups:-
1) No option to specify the number of results returned, returning to few results by default and putting a low cap on the max. 2) A feed but no "feed from search facility" 3) No pubDate information. 4) Feed intermitantly breaks because someone forgets to encode '&' or '' etc. in one or other fields. 5) Piling a **** load of HTML into the descripiton field (often leads to 4)
and theres more but those are the most annoying sins Ive seen recently.
Anyways this IS Google so I fully expect them to do it technically right...but I also fully expect them to limit the result set to 100 results - which is going to be useless to me and many others who might want RSS off google for more than just sticking into a aggregator!!
When Sony released the PS2, DVD had already been out for 3 years! This was a good thing for Sony in that it gave an extra reason to buy the PS2! This time around Sony are going to be in the vanguard of Blu-ray players but the content is going to be thin on the ground! IMO Few people are going to be buying a PS3 for Blu-ray.
In fact, given that Sony are releasing second for this generation (yes it worked with the dreamcast vs PS2 however many would attribute the dreamcasts failior to Sega DIRE marketing) AND aiming to price the PS3 at the high end; the PS3 may ust fail to influence which format (if either) wins.
I doubt it. The market can absorb one new format maybe every 10 years.
Indeed! Yet here we have an article (and from what I know its the industries intention) to release 2 new formats! IMO the result of this is going to be that BOTH formats fail (commercially) thus opening the way for a successor - hopefully one that has learned a leason and is a little more humble than what were seeing today.
1) A new TV @ £1500 Sterling. 2) A new HD-DVD/blueray player @ £? 3) Copies of Films I possibly already have to play on it @ £? 4) An upgrade to my satalite equipment to receive HD content (2 channels atm?) @ £? 5) An upgraded sat subscripition. @ £?
You know...to me (IMO) the above does NOT lead to:-
6) Profit!!
Why? Because in 5 years time, when all this stuff is priced at a more reasonable level and the quality/quanity of content could justify upgrading...there WILL be a new/better/cheaper format on the horizon (and VERY close to the horizon as well given this tech were talking about now is nearly 2 (lab) years old).
Even worse is MANY consumers (well those of us with better than NTSC) WONT be able to see the real benefits to the upgrade and are NOT going to be replacing that DVD collection; uptake in the mass market is likely to be quite slow.
This is quite probably going to lead to this generation of "technology" being largely shuned in the market place or only occupying a niche in the "videophiles" high end market and eventually going the way of laserdisc!!
So let the release both formats!! It will only quicken the demise for both and HOPEFULLY somewhere in the implosion the draconion copy protection measures will take some of the flak!
Stockwell (where the guy was executed) is the kind of place that if 3 dodgy looking blokes with guns try to stop you, you WOULD run!! The combination of fear and not having English as ones mother tongue is far enough to explain this mans actions.
THe IRA bombings didnt scare me. The Al-Qaeda bombings didnt scare me. The Metropolitan Police with a shoot-to-kill policy...THAT scares me shitless!
But on at least two dates in July 2003, the suit states, Web logs at Healthcare Advocates indicated that someone at Harding Earley, using the Wayback Machine, made hundreds of rapid-fire requests for the old versions of the Web site. In most cases, the robot.txt blocked the request. But in 92 instances, the suit states, it appears to have failed, allowing access to the archived pages.
In so doing, the suit claims, the law firm violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibits the circumventing of "technological measures" designed to protect copyrighted materials. The suit further contends that among other violations, the firm violated copyright by gathering, storing and transmitting the archived pages as part of the earlier trademark litigation.
Wow that is stretching things!! Ive never read the DMCA but to claim that a robots.txt file (which isnt a legally binding mechanism by any means) added to the site after the pages had been indexed had been ignored by the wayback machine was a circumvention of their copyright and a violation of that act...well Id fully expect any judge to have a good laugh at this.
HOWEVER given how poor the US legal system is I wouldnt be suprised to hear that robots.txt gains legal status as a binding document for crawlers!!
If youve ever used the underground extensively youll be aware that a) Its a nightmare getting in/out at many stations at peak hours. b) On off-peak hours gates are often unmanned/broken meaning you can just walk right on. c) Many stations have gates that you can just jump over to enter/exit. d) Once in the underground system you can transfer between lines without going through any gates.
All the above means that any form of scanning system would be so easy to circumvent as to be entirely useless....unless they were to more than TRIPLE the manpower at non-central stations...and trust me that NO-ONE will be happy at seeing these costs passed onto them via ticket price increases.
I currently pay @70 USD per month for my sat TV service (Sky in the UK) . Yet when a show airs Ive normally seen it because Ive downloaded the torrent - and why shouldnt I when I am usually paying for something that Sky have licensed but dont want to let me watch yet because they want it for their spring/autumn/winter season (this is the UK...we dont have summers). Personally Id much prefer to ditch sat TV altogether and subscribe to an internet based service...
As for movies...I gave up downloading them years ago. Quality is VERY hit and miss afair, the number of mislabeled or subbed titles is very high...it just wasnt worth the hassle. But nor do I go to the movies because the appeal of sitting in a theater where 1/2 the time someones head is in the way of the screen, not being able to go and take a leak when I want...well it just isnt there anymore.
So anyways yes, gimme a service where I spend $70-$100 USD per month for cinema AND TV releases that I get to see WHEN they are released or aired and Ill be first in the queue!!
Wheres the future?
on
Longhorn Preview
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I keep on wondering why the OS I was envisioning 10 years ago isnt here now. You know, integrated voice recognition, some basic but workable AI to assist in common repetative tasks, a little high quality speach synthesis as an alternate CHI...instead we have more eye-candy and security updates!! That seems to be all Ive seen from MS since...ooooh 1998....
I know that some of this stuff IS rocket-science (well computer science) and no-one was going to get there over-night but 10 years ago I certainly didnt think that I would have learned to have touch-type before decent voice recognition was integrated into the OS...
It really feels as if the true innovation in IT has stalled...however its much more likely that it has just been strangled to death by patents.
Hmmmm and theres the bullet - Im looking at setting up a *small* business (my business plan has and projected revenues of about 100,000 Euros..but with low costs so its viable and a damn sight better than being a wage slave for the next 30 years). I dont WANT a large business; I dont WANT VC money; and I most CERTAINLY dont want to be sinking 10-20% of my revenue into patents JUST to stop larger companies from bankrupting me via legal action. And even if I DID patent my core business - what if I run afowl of some stupid 1-click type patent that I just hadnt realised I'd be infringing on?
Sorry to sound so wishy-washy but I cant help but feel that this is the death-knoll for the small EU based developer/company attempting to compete with the big-boys (the internet IS a great leveller)....
Slashdot Mirror
"Usenet is not as big as it was, but it's still a great resource for information."
Actually, its bigger than even given that average daily traffic has grown from 4.6GB in 1996, to 2TB today! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet)
I agree. While most internet connections arnt up to delivering HD content atm, PAL/NTSC resolutions are certainly doable for a large portion of broadband subscribers. And personally Im quite happy to settle for @PAL resolutions for 99% of my viewing because I can watch it WHEN I want to and WHERE I want to. As for Blue-Ray/HD-DVD (BOTH of which will attempt to limit the freedoms I currently enjoy)....well sadly a good proportion of the content is just going to be upscaled to 720p (which isnt a great improvement IMO as a PAL viewer with less than 20/20 vision) for which (as is illustrated by this article) we dont really need either Blue-Ray or HD-DVD for!!
Ive see a lot of material now that is billed as HD and quite frankly, I say "meh!"! Call me when I can get TRUE HD content ( e.g. > 1080p60 ) and maybe I'll consider the merrits of any hardformat; However by then, isnt it much more likely that my pipe will have grown from 8Mb to 80Mb+ and I wont really need that new format? Ooop, thats just what the OP was saying isnt it?
(hmmmpph if the above line doesnt display then it would seem slashdot needs some i18n work.....)
You cant HANDLE the Japanese editions?
With weekly Jump magazine weighing in at @ 500 pages the comic section would be bigger than the paper.....
Trust me when I say its not worth it. Whereas with music I dont mind if Im listening to one of my favorite tracks for the 100th time; with TV/Video I seldom want to watch something more than once or twice...and that means I eventually have to replace the content. Completely!
Ive been doing this off and on for a number of years with Anime and an iPaq. At first it was fun but it just became a drag encoding new content to watch. And that was free content - it would soon have mounted up to be an expensive way of staying entertained on a 3 hour daily commute. Anyways I eventually just went back to listening to music and reading on my commute (and then I got rid of the commute which was an even better idea!).
Two things I have to say though. 1) What annoyed me more than anything was people on the tube looking over my shoulder at what I was watching; annoying mainly because it could be quite embarrasing watching an anime with some fanservice in it!! 2) What I REALLY want for a commute is an eInk ebook reader. If Apple would actually innovate rather than repackage for the mass-market (yeah yeah) yesterdays tech (and yup I agree, here and gone!) I might actually buy one of their products!!
$21,250 - Open Secrets
I tend to agree - as far as I concerned neither technology offers enough of an incentive to upgrade (and also there are FAR too many disincentives...single DRM'd copy? Shove that) and I think the mass market is going to have a similar opinion. Theres beem quite a few technologies doing the rounds lately that may well see us with 1/2-1TB capacity media by 2008!! And quite frankly having seen enough HD content to have had the rose-tinting drop from my glasses..I can already see what the "next big thing" round the corner is...and guess what? 30-50GB just aint going to cut it for that.
is often the better database solution, I'll still be using MySQL. Why? Well a quick search on cwjobs shows 188 jobs requiring MySQL experience vs 7 for postgres!! Its a real shame but having used the best tool (C++ Builder) for my last job and then being unemployed for @2 years because people wanted either VC++ or Unix based C++ experience; I *WONT* be making the same mistake again!
Anyways, that said, Ive already played about with 5.011 and apart from the yukky syntax one has to use to support transactions it seems quite stable. Its might have taken a long time for them to finally make it a "real" database product but it seems good enough for small databases.
One of my next jobs is to test it with 10 million + records and see how it performs though so my assessment may be premature...
Aye agreed - my wife is continually unplugging my MythTV box without powering it down first. Yet to have a issue using Reiser. Ext3 however...NEVER again!
For me the real question is what form of licensing they are using? Ive written some code that parses TV.com, IMDB and a few others to extract episode information and combined this with newzbin and a modified version of torrentocracy so that I have a MythTV based NZBTV channel (well several actually - drama, sci-fi , films etc) WITH episode information (it works quite nicely and will be even better when I integrate a search into it *grin*)
:(
Id LOVE to make the service and plugin available to others however most services attach nasty copyright resrictions to their content and episode guides so I couldnt embed the info in an RSS feed
So heres hoping TVIV has a nice OS/GNU license...
You arent alone :)
With a good script and director it has the potential to be a really great kids movie...I just hope they keep whitey and the snarks ;)
Personally now I dip into Guildwars, HL2 and the occassional demo (and have had a lot of satisfaction from my nacent Mamebox with an x-arcade stick ) but MMORPGs...seen it all before! And THAT is what will happen with all those millions of WoW subscribers down the line - they will try (hopefully) other games in the genre but eventually it just wont be fun anymore...
Anyways Im just hoping that this interest in RPGs means Oblivion gets some better sales - these days I cant wait to play games without ****** n00bs KSing from me ;)
Seriously though, for a site that has poored thousands of hours into developing its backend, how difficult would it be to ensure that the link is always cached before posting it?
Ahhh I hadnt realised it was actually live! Well at least the HTML in the decription is well formed but of course they have comitted sin # 1 - or am I failing to see an option to change the no of results return? And a default of 10 results....xing useless *sigh*
Ive been playing with RSS feeds a lot of late and seen a lot of half-assed solutions. Its ****** annoying to find an RSS feed for an area/site only to find they have commited one of the following ?-ups :-
1) No option to specify the number of results returned, returning to few results by default and putting a low cap on the max.
2) A feed but no "feed from search facility"
3) No pubDate information.
4) Feed intermitantly breaks because someone forgets to encode '&' or '' etc. in one or other fields.
5) Piling a **** load of HTML into the descripiton field (often leads to 4)
and theres more but those are the most annoying sins Ive seen recently.
Anyways this IS Google so I fully expect them to do it technically right...but I also fully expect them to limit the result set to 100 results - which is going to be useless to me and many others who might want RSS off google for more than just sticking into a aggregator!!
When Sony released the PS2, DVD had already been out for 3 years! This was a good thing for Sony in that it gave an extra reason to buy the PS2! This time around Sony are going to be in the vanguard of Blu-ray players but the content is going to be thin on the ground! IMO Few people are going to be buying a PS3 for Blu-ray.
In fact, given that Sony are releasing second for this generation (yes it worked with the dreamcast vs PS2 however many would attribute the dreamcasts failior to Sega DIRE marketing) AND aiming to price the PS3 at the high end; the PS3 may ust fail to influence which format (if either) wins.
Indeed! Yet here we have an article (and from what I know its the industries intention) to release 2 new formats! IMO the result of this is going to be that BOTH formats fail (commercially) thus opening the way for a successor - hopefully one that has learned a leason and is a little more humble than what were seeing today.
So to watch this new format I need :-
:-
1) A new TV @ £1500 Sterling.
2) A new HD-DVD/blueray player @ £?
3) Copies of Films I possibly already have to play on it @ £?
4) An upgrade to my satalite equipment to receive HD content (2 channels atm?) @ £?
5) An upgraded sat subscripition. @ £?
You know...to me (IMO) the above does NOT lead to
6) Profit!!
Why? Because in 5 years time, when all this stuff is priced at a more reasonable level and the quality/quanity of content could justify upgrading...there WILL be a new/better/cheaper format on the horizon (and VERY close to the horizon as well given this tech were talking about now is nearly 2 (lab) years old).
Even worse is MANY consumers (well those of us with better than NTSC) WONT be able to see the real benefits to the upgrade and are NOT going to be replacing that DVD collection; uptake in the mass market is likely to be quite slow.
This is quite probably going to lead to this generation of "technology" being largely shuned in the market place or only occupying a niche in the "videophiles" high end market and eventually going the way of laserdisc!!
So let the release both formats!! It will only quicken the demise for both and HOPEFULLY somewhere in the implosion the draconion copy protection measures will take some of the flak!
Stockwell (where the guy was executed) is the kind of place that if 3 dodgy looking blokes with guns try to stop you, you WOULD run!! The combination of fear and not having English as ones mother tongue is far enough to explain this mans actions.
THe IRA bombings didnt scare me. The Al-Qaeda bombings didnt scare me. The Metropolitan Police with a shoot-to-kill policy...THAT scares me shitless!
But on at least two dates in July 2003, the suit states, Web logs at Healthcare Advocates indicated that someone at Harding Earley, using the Wayback Machine, made hundreds of rapid-fire requests for the old versions of the Web site. In most cases, the robot.txt blocked the request. But in 92 instances, the suit states, it appears to have failed, allowing access to the archived pages.
In so doing, the suit claims, the law firm violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibits the circumventing of "technological measures" designed to protect copyrighted materials. The suit further contends that among other violations, the firm violated copyright by gathering, storing and transmitting the archived pages as part of the earlier trademark litigation.
Wow that is stretching things!! Ive never read the DMCA but to claim that a robots.txt file (which isnt a legally binding mechanism by any means) added to the site after the pages had been indexed had been ignored by the wayback machine was a circumvention of their copyright and a violation of that act...well Id fully expect any judge to have a good laugh at this.
HOWEVER given how poor the US legal system is I wouldnt be suprised to hear that robots.txt gains legal status as a binding document for crawlers!!
Oh, as a boy how I dreamed of having my own rocket in my back yard *sigh*
If youve ever used the underground extensively youll be aware that a) Its a nightmare getting in/out at many stations at peak hours. b) On off-peak hours gates are often unmanned/broken meaning you can just walk right on. c) Many stations have gates that you can just jump over to enter/exit. d) Once in the underground system you can transfer between lines without going through any gates.
All the above means that any form of scanning system would be so easy to circumvent as to be entirely useless....unless they were to more than TRIPLE the manpower at non-central stations...and trust me that NO-ONE will be happy at seeing these costs passed onto them via ticket price increases.
I currently pay @70 USD per month for my sat TV service (Sky in the UK) . Yet when a show airs Ive normally seen it because Ive downloaded the torrent - and why shouldnt I when I am usually paying for something that Sky have licensed but dont want to let me watch yet because they want it for their spring/autumn/winter season (this is the UK...we dont have summers). Personally Id much prefer to ditch sat TV altogether and subscribe to an internet based service...
As for movies...I gave up downloading them years ago. Quality is VERY hit and miss afair, the number of mislabeled or subbed titles is very high...it just wasnt worth the hassle. But nor do I go to the movies because the appeal of sitting in a theater where 1/2 the time someones head is in the way of the screen, not being able to go and take a leak when I want...well it just isnt there anymore.
So anyways yes, gimme a service where I spend $70-$100 USD per month for cinema AND TV releases that I get to see WHEN they are released or aired and Ill be first in the queue!!
I keep on wondering why the OS I was envisioning 10 years ago isnt here now. You know, integrated voice recognition, some basic but workable AI to assist in common repetative tasks, a little high quality speach synthesis as an alternate CHI...instead we have more eye-candy and security updates!! That seems to be all Ive seen from MS since...ooooh 1998....
I know that some of this stuff IS rocket-science (well computer science) and no-one was going to get there over-night but 10 years ago I certainly didnt think that I would have learned to have touch-type before decent voice recognition was integrated into the OS...
It really feels as if the true innovation in IT has stalled...however its much more likely that it has just been strangled to death by patents.
Hmmmm and theres the bullet - Im looking at setting up a *small* business (my business plan has and projected revenues of about 100,000 Euros..but with low costs so its viable and a damn sight better than being a wage slave for the next 30 years). I dont WANT a large business; I dont WANT VC money; and I most CERTAINLY dont want to be sinking 10-20% of my revenue into patents JUST to stop larger companies from bankrupting me via legal action. And even if I DID patent my core business - what if I run afowl of some stupid 1-click type patent that I just hadnt realised I'd be infringing on?
Sorry to sound so wishy-washy but I cant help but feel that this is the death-knoll for the small EU based developer/company attempting to compete with the big-boys (the internet IS a great leveller)....
That is VERY good advice, and I didnt know I could do that for so little (I had been told I'd be looking at @7K per patent). Thankyou!