Has anybody actually bought a CD that they could not rip?
I've never seen one that I couldn't easily rip songs from....
I think some people are missing the point of your question, which is that CD-based DRM is trivially easy to defeat. So the only people it hurts are those who just want to play the CD and can't, because it doesn't conform to spec.
I personally only own a couple DRM-laden CD's (I didn't know before I bought them, but I probably would have bought them anyway). Neither gave me any problem whatsoever ripping with EAC; they ripped just like every other CD. Just as an experiment, though, I did put one of them in my computer and let it autoplay (I know about the rootkit stuff; this was different DRM), and it first tried to install some proprietary player and then it told me I was in the wrong region and couldn't play the disc at all (this was a Japanese CD). I tried to rip it in iTunes and got an error message in Japanese.
So it just depends on what tools you're using. Based on that experience, though, I would probably not even risk playing any CD on my computer anymore; I just rip immediately with EAC.
btw, the CD in question above is PUFFY's "59" - they've released a full-length CD since then that has no DRM at all, on the same record label (ki/oon / Sony). So obviously, EMI in the Netherlands is not the only company getting the message.
This came out back in the days of the IBM Deathstar drives, when IBM was going "But... you're not meant to keep your drives turned on all the time!".
Yeah, which they were rightly pilloried for. It's like a store that advertises itself as being open 24 hours... just not in a row.
The fact is hard drives don't last very long. Or at least, you can't count on them lasting very long - you may get lucky, but most don't make it past ten years, and that's being generous. Meanwhile, none of my DVD's has failed yet or even shown any signs of anything, and I have some of the earliest ever DVD releases, which are ten years old now.
Of course, HD-DVD and BD are totally different from DVD, and they may not prove to be as robust. But people said the same thing about DVD vs. CD and at least to this point, there seems to be no practical difference. Pressed (as opposed to burned) optical discs will probably always be more reliable than hard drives.
The "Daylight" CFL's that I've bought have been a blessing for my wife's SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder). Every winter she gets upset, cranky, and annoyed because the day is only 7 hours of sunlight... We've replaced all but two bulbs (the bathroom light, and the upstairs bathroom light) with "Daylight" CFL's. From what I can tell, these are the best things to come along since sliced bread......
The problem is they don't work for their intended purpose unless they are as bright as daylight. That's the whole point; there's no such thing as "dim" daylight. Put one or two 60 watt equivalent "daylight" bulbs in a room and all you end up with is dim bluish light. This is nasty stuff, and not all that dissimilar to what we all remember from old fluorescent bulbs.
Daylight bulbs can work if you either have a) a bunch of them, or b) a couple of *really* bright ones in a small room. The point is you have to approximate the intensity of daylight, not just the color.
For more pleasing evening light, a regular "soft white" CFL is a better option - there's a reason why these are popular in incandescents too ("daylight" incandescants also exist). These will give off a warm, cozy light - if you get a good one. Some cheaper "soft white" incandescents give off a yellow or even pink-ish light. The best thing to do is to look for a bulb that can reproduce the closest thing to a natural spectrum, but with an emphasis on whichever part of it you're most interested in (i.e. soft white, warm white, daylight, etc.). Reproducing the full spectrum is still a bugaboo for CFL's.
Bigger screen is better. Same resolution is the same. Verdict: Zune.
Bulkier to carry because of bigger screen. Verdict: no points awarded.
You've obviously already made up your mind, because these two arguments make no logical sense.
The only thing a bigger screen with the same resolution lets you do is look at images from further away. So instead of holding the stupid thing at arm's length, now you can hold it at *more* than arm's length. Or, alternatively, maybe you can get a tiny bit bigger image (at the same resolution) if your habit is to press your player up to your nose. But either way, it has never been an advantage to throw a bigger screen in a portable device with the same resolution - how many 17" laptops do you see running at 1024x768? If you're going to increase the bulk of the device, you'd better have a good reason for it.
It's the same logic that determines the proper TV size for a room. If you've already got the right size for your room, there's no point at all in buying a bigger screen with the same resolution. You're not going to see any more detail in the image. You'd need to go up in resolution at the same time you go up in size for your purchase to have any practical effect other than taking up extra space and draining your wallet.
The logical choice in any portable device is to have the highest resolution screen possible in the smallest, lightest form factor. You can make the screen as "big" (relative to your vision) as you want just by how you hold it; what you can't do is adjust the weight, size or balance of the device. Those are chosen for you before you buy.
Buy an iPod and enjoy it. Or, buy a Zune and try to convince yourself that you made the right choice.
Hardly anyone would be willing to pay for the ability to carry around a little 3 1/2" shopping buddy, and the shopping center would lose their shirt if they just handed them out
Ginza's technically a city, not a "shopping center" as the headline here suggests. If I lived in Ginza, I'd be pretty offended at my city being basically labeled one big shopping mall!
(Tokyo itself is not a city; it's a prefecture made up of a couple dozen wards, one of which is Ginza.)
But eBay is synonymous with auctions and nothing else. Same reason why Amazon isn't associated with auctions. The brand has been defined in stone.
Well, it's probably worth remembering that at one time, Amazon.com was "defined in stone" as an online bookstore. That's all they sold, and they were by far the largest book seller online. It was to the point where when Barnes and Noble announced they'd be creating a web site, a lot of analysts wondered why they'd bother - despite BN having dominated the offline book market for years.
Today, I've counted a bunch of comments here, and several quotes in the linked article, saying they'll just "buy on Amazon" rather than look for anything on Ebay Express. So clearly, the definition of Amazon.com has changed in peoples' minds. It can be done.
I agree that it's rare, and that it takes a combination of good luck and savvy strategizing. You have to pick your battles and expand your reach slowly into areas that make sense. But businesses don't always have to stick to their "core" - lots of big companies started out doing one thing and gradually moved into other areas. I mean, IBM used to only make accounting machines; they were synonymous with accounting machines. They gradually moved into typewriters, then computers, then services and more. Nowadays it's those services that are their "core" business - they have almost completely moved away from what made them successful, but they are still successful. The same can be said of any big company that's been around for a while. GE used to just make light bulbs, for another example, but now they make aircraft engines, they have a large financial services arm, etc. and all of these are money-making businesses for them.
Re:Don't know about the validity.
on
Famitsu For Beginners
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· Score: 2, Interesting
But it makes sense. If it is true it answers a lot of questions but raises one last one. Why the fuck do American news media keeping posting their scores? It really does sound like a hype rag.
It is really no different than EGM in any way other than being a) physically bigger, and b) published more frequently. Their "journalistic standards" are no better or worse, their reviews no more or less bought and paid for. Which is to say the NY Times they ain't, but neither are they paid shills.
There's no real meat to Kotaku's "story". What it seems to be is the cynical ramblings of a jaded gamer. No real harm there, I guess; we've got plenty of people here who think EGM gives "courtesy scores" to big games too (and they probably do).
I think the problem is westerners - who don't generally understand the language - go around calling Famitsu things like "the gaming bible", which put it on a pedestal. It is no bible. It is simply a magazine that writes stuff about games. But that pedestal we put them on means any time they do something the slightest bit weird, like, say, giving a game that everybody else seems to think sucks straight 8's or 9's, there's a massive look of bewilderment here. They're human and subject to human foibles like anybody else. They're also just as easily swayed by hype as any of the gaming press here.
What is impressive about Famitsu is just how prolific they are. EGM struggles these days to put together an 80 page pamphlet in a month. Famitsu does about 250 pages in a week. And they also put out system-specific monthly magazines, which borrow staffers from the weekly version. That's pretty amazing, and it makes them worth paying attention to if for no other reason than their obvious dedication to gaming. These guys (and girls) eat, drink, sleep and shit nothing but video games, 24 hours a day.
what does an IPOD have (other than after market accessories) that the Zune does not?
-The ability to act as an external hard drive in a pinch. -A software client that runs on Windows and Macintosh. -Seasons in the market.
A couple additions:
* A huge (and still growing) accessory market * Can interface directly with a large number of cars (not just through an aux-in) * Better software - not just cross-platform, but more polished and less buggy (even as buggy as iTunes 7 was initially, it was nothing compared to some of the horror stories I've seen about the Zune software) * More software options - you don't need to use iTunes if you don't want to * Clickwheel interface * Better size/form factor
And yes, style. The Zune is big and ugly. The iPod is svelte and classy. Sure, that's subjective and you might not agree. Unfortunately for MS, 62+% of the market does agree and only 1.8% of the market feels otherwise.
Also, let's not forget that Apple has several different iPods on the market, and they don't break down sales by model. I think it's entirely possible that MS could do better if they released a nano and/or shuffle type Zune. They still won't catch the iPod, but they could easily triple their 1.8% market share (not that that means much). Apple has a model for every taste, where MS seems to specialize in big ugly brown boxes.
Monopolies produce poor quality products at high prices - that's what monopolies do. So yeah, no reason to hate Microsoft anymore, we know what they are.
Yeah, that makes about as much sense as saying "murderes leave a hell of a mess - that's what murderers do. So yeah, no reason to hate OJ Simpson anymore, we know what he is."
It must have escaped my attention when it became the case that the simple realization that a person or company has committed a crime somehow excuses it.
Microsoft is a convicted monopoly. There is no more reason to hate them required. They will always be a convicted monopolist; you don't somehow get un-convicted after a couple of years. The penalties they had to accept (at least in this country) may have been little more than a slap on the wrist... but that doesn't change what they are. And it's something they only share with a few other companies in the history of this country.
I mean, why hate Enron? Why hate the tobacco industry? Why hate any company?
When it's not just your opinion that they've hurt people, but when it's in fact been proven that they hurt people, then I'd say that's a pretty good reason.
(That doesn't mean I hate Bill Gates; I think he's done a lot of good things. But he has not surrounded himself with the most scrupulous people, and he himself has not always acted scrupulously in business.)
I also don't buy for a second the idea that the Second Amendment is meant for anyone other than private citizens. The Second Amendment says "the right of the people" not "the right of the militia".
You need to read the amendment again.
"A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
Read it. Read it carefully. And most importantly, read it all.
"the right of the people to keep and bear arms" is one clause in a longer sentence specifically relating to the necessity of a well regulated "free state" militia. It is neither the focus of the amendment, nor is it an individual "right" that you can pull out of the amendment. It does not stand on its own; it is not separated by a semi-colon or a period. It is separated by commas, as part of a sentence establishing well regulated militias. It is not a clause that exists in the absence of context.
I realize that various people, including branches of our own government, have interpreted it differently over the years. But it is pretty unambiguous if you ask me, and I don't see how you even could interpret it in any other way than was intended - unless you had some personal or vested interest in misinterpreting it. If you enjoy gun collecting and have spent $50,000 on your gun collection, what are you going to think that amendment says? You're going to think it supports your "right" to have such a gun collection, because you don't want $50,000 worth of stuff taken away from you. You're going to read it in a way that supports your own purposes. And that's the problem - we have so many gun owners in this country that selfishly want to protect their investments and their misguided feelings of personal safety (despite the fact that statistically, you are in more danger of getting shot if you own a gun than if you don't) that it is almost impossible to convince a majority that the 2nd amendment says what it actually says rather than what so many wish it said.
But the purpose of the amendment is to protect the existence of what we now call the National Guard. It was an amendment that protected the rights of the states to have their own militias to act as a check against the federal army. It was a compromise to satisfy the advocates of states rights, many of whom felt a strong national government needed to be balanced by explicit rights given to the states, including militarily.
By the way, those of you talking about DC's murder rate despite its gun restrictions need to realize where it is those guns are coming from. Take a look at the statistics sometime. They're not coming from DC.
You also might want to look at a city like New York, which has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the nation and is also the safest large city in the country. In its case as well, the vast majority of guns confiscated in crimes in New York were legally purchased in places like North Carolina and Virginia, where gun laws are much more relaxed. The theory that tougher gun laws means only criminals have guns is only true when those laws are enacted piecemeal. Even so, you can't argue with the crime statistics. All you need to do is compare New York to, say, Dallas, which is in an area with less restrictive gun laws state-wide and in fact regionally. (Dallas itself has gun restrictions, but like DC, it proves the point that these laws need to be at least regional, and preferably national. I mean, criminals do own cars.) Go ahead and click that link.
The results of tough gun laws - when enacted and enforced properly - speak for themselves, as does the 2nd amendment.
The NPD uses statistical sampling to include these sales.
Look, people. There's a weird and wacky theory out there that's now almost accepted as fact by many that says that NPD reports are inaccurate because only a few stores participate. The thinking further goes that this means the remaining stores, including Wal-Mart, are not counted at all. This is not true.
Last time I looked at an actual NPD report, around 70% of the industry was directly tracked. The rest is counted using sampling. What that adds up to is 100% coverage of retail. It may not be accurate down to the individual unit, but it is about as accurate as a hand count would be, because as complex as the retail industry is, there are always slight over- or under-counts. But it doesn't add up to more than a thousand or so units using either statistical sampling or a hand count.
The NPD reports are also what the game industry itself relies on (that is, in fact, why they exist), so it's kind of ridiculous for someone to call them "useless". If they're good enough for the industry itself, why aren't they good enough for you?
...and the industry has found that at $0.99. The iTMS has been an overwhelming success, despite the fact that everybody on Slashdot hates it because the pricing isn't "fair" and because the product is DRM-laden.
How do you define "overwhelming success"?
We know from simple division that even among iTunes Music Store customers, the average number of purchased tracks is 21. We also know that the number of illegal downloads continues to outnumber legal downloads by 40 to 1. (Both of these stats come from previous - and recent - stories posted here.) People continue to fill up their iPods with music they have obtained elsewhere (legally and illegally). If such a small percentage of music sales can be deemed an "overwhelming success", then what would constitute failure?
I think the music industry has seen these stats, they know these stats, and they also know that even with whatever limited success iTunes and the like has had (and it is "limited" at best, not "overwhelming"), most of that success belongs to Apple, Real, etc. Not to the music industry itself. So they know they've still got big problems.
This sounds a lot like many arguments I hear for lower music prices which end with some form of "artists will just need to accept their new place in society." Why should they want to do that?
Whether they want to or not is not really relevant. The fact may be that they have to.
Look at it this way. In the late 1800's, a lot of people made a lot of money in the railroad business. By around the 1950's, that was no longer possible - the business just wasn't what it was anymore. Media is just like any other business, and in fact the exact same thing is happening to the newspaper and magazine industries right now. You can never count on a business to make you rich forever. How you feel about that as a member of that business matters not at all.
Unless you want to count classical composers who often consorted with kings and queens (but were rarely really rich themselves), the whole notion of getting rich by writing and playing music is an entirely recent phenomenon. It's not something anybody would have assumed 100 or even 50 years ago. It was something people did for the love of the music, and hopefully they did it well enough to make a living. That living was mostly made through playing live, not through sales of media.
Many people think the music industry's run as it currently exists is simply over. It does happen. Industries come and go as times change; they are not static things.
That does not mean music will go away. It just means the current major label-dominated industry itself might, along with the ability to get rich by selling records. Being a musician may become more like any other profession, where the savvy and talented can make a good living provided they continue to work year-round playing live, releasing new music and creating other related merchandise. Labels will still exist - there does need to be someone to do the real production and promotion work - but they may not be dominated by the four majors. The entire industry may look a lot more like the indie record industry of today. eMusic may be the new model. Or, the opposite may happen, and it already sort of is - musicians that want to get rich will need to become "brands", transcending their career in music and turning themselves into full-on multimedia campaigns. Or, there could be some combination of both models, which is probably the most likely scenario. But you won't be able to get rich just selling records for very much longer.
It probably sounds far-fetched to you, but then in 1930 there probably wasn't a man alive that thought there'd come a time when the New York Central wasn't steaming from New York to Chicago six times a day. Things change in business, often dramatically. And new technology is what drives that change.
If my website logs are a reflection of their popularity they are in big trouble. Google beats them at a rate of 100 to 1.
Yahoo is a lot more than just search. Google is too, but the point is your web site results are not reflective of Yahoo's business as a whole. While they do want a bigger piece of the search advertising pie, I don't think even they really consider search their core business anymore. (It never really was to begin with; they were always more of a directory than a search company, though they've tried to change that in recent years.)
All you need to do is go to Yahoo's web site and then go to Google's web site to see their different business models.
Just for one example, though, I bought my house through Yahoo Real Estate, which partnered with Prudential in my area to give local online real estate listings. Google has no such thing (even though with Google Maps, it would seem a natural fit). Yahoo has many facets like this that you probably don't even realize.
They are making 2d-esque games (Sonic Rush, for example) and those are still pretty good
I'd go further than that - Sonic Rush is the Sonic game all these people have been waiting for. It's amazing to me that so many people complain about the current Sonic games and hardly any of these people have bothered playing Sonic Rush. It's rarely even mentioned in any of the talk about recent series entrants.
Sonic Rush is a much more natural evolution of the Sonic series than any of the recent 3D games on home systems. Ironically, Sonic Rush is 3D, in the same way the Klonoa series is - the graphics are mostly cel-shaded 3D, the gameplay basically 2D. This lets the old-school gameplay that Sonic fans want shine through, while still adding some new 3D elements and the fully 3D boss battles.
One of the big sites - it was either GameSpot or GameSpy - called this game the "most significant" Sonic game in many years. I would agree with that if only more people had played it. It is an example of what Sonic games can be in the modern age, although unfortunately for all concerned, it didn't sell particularly well. What lesson does Sega take from that?
If you want good Sonic games, buy the good Sonic games. If you don't buy them, Sega won't make them. And that's what's happening now; Sega is unsuccessfully searching for a new formula, having apparently been convinced that the original formula no longer works in the marketplace.
I read the article and I didn't see "quit whining" anywhere.
The court finds that SCO failed to comply with the court's previous discovery-related Orders and Rule 26(e), that SCO acted willfully, that SCO's conduct has resulted in prejudice to IBM, and that this resultthe (sic) inability of SCO to use the evidence at issue to prove its claims should come as no surprise to SCO.
I would paraphrase that last part as "quit whining". SCO has repeatedly claimed that the court has not provided them with either a) enough time, b) enough leeway in deposition, and c) enough clarity in its orders. That was basically SCO's defense in this motion; that they did all they could given the information that they had from the court. The court has now told them that their defense in this motion doesn't hold water and worse, that they should know it. How else would you paraphrase that?
I realize that was a crude paraphrasing, but a more neutral/appropriate headline might make this a more reputable site.
What is neutral about this? SCO just got their butts whipped by the court, again, as they should have. News itself is rarely objective, and Slashdot has never pretended to be an objective news source. This isn't about providing balanced reporting on the SCO case. This is about SCO being in the wrong, and the court - for the second time - bitch-slapping them for being in the wrong and for knowing they were in the wrong and wasting everybody's time and energy on this case.
You're close. According to this Seattle PI article, in unit sales it was iPod 63%, Zune 9%. In dollar share, it was iPod 72%, Zune 13%. No numbers are given for Sandisk.
And let's not forget that these are launch sales. These are the people buying based on hype; the real MS fanboys and the anti-iPod crowd. What happens now that they've all got their Zunes? Do people really expect this to keep growing?
Let's also not forget that a snapshot of one period of time in the market does not market share make. So 9% of sales for the past month translates to about 0.1% overall market share.
Look at it properly, and these numbers are extraordinarily bad for a product with such heavy marketing and R&D put into it. To spend that much money and capture only 9% of sales in your launch period is nothing to brag about.
To put it in perspective, we just heard yesterday that Nintendo sold 600,000 Wiis in 8 days. That will almost assuredly double the sales of the PS2, Xbox 360 and PS3 for the month (normal sales for consoles are around 200,000-300,000 a month, and we know about Sony's PS3 supply problems).
Now imagine if instead of doubling their competitors' sales at launch, they had instead sold 1/6 the number of PS2's, or about 50,000 units of the 600,000 they put on the market. Would Nintendo be bragging about that? Should they? The Zune is in the same situation.
They didn't do jack with the Xbox. In fact, I'd have to say the whole Xbox project has been a colossal failure by almost any definition.
They spent a total of more than $6 billion on the system. They have so far made back $2 billion of that.
With that $6 billion, they managed to buy 20% of Sony's market share and about 10% of the overall industry's market share. Yes, the PS2 outsold the Xbox by 5:1 worldwide.
The Xbox 360, now, is still being outsold by the PS2, and it's behind the sales curve of the original Xbox. This is 2006. They couldn't beat the PS2 with their old console and they can't beat it with their new console. The 360 is also behind sales projections by about 3 million units - and has been an even worse failure in Japan than the original system.
Now that the PS3 and Wii are on the market, it will be interesting to see what happens, but the 360 has already never once been the best-selling system, and that was with no current-gen competition! It would be like MS putting out the iPod and Sony beating them with a Discman. This is the best MS and their billions can do?
You would *hope* anybody spending $6 billion, losing $4 billion in the process, would end up with more than 10-20% market share. But that's likely to be the pattern with the Zune as well. No doubt we'll get people in here once they've cracked 10% market share labeling the Zune a "success" too.
Both Apple *and* MS would love for you to believe that their codecs can sound twice as good as mp3 at half the bit rate, but unfortunately for them it just isn't true and that double-blind listening test proved it some time ago. Statistically, the difference is not all that great, but in absolute terms, mp3 actually sounds *better* than wma even at the *same* bit rate. You can forget about trying to get wma to sound anywhere near as good as mp3 at a lower bit rate. (Apple's AAC fares a bit better, but not a whole lot.)
There is simply no compelling reason to use anything other than either Vorbis (if you want the absolute best lossy compression at the expense of compatibility) or mp3 (if you want the best lossy compression with the most compatibility). You're a fool to lock yourself into one company's products by using an inferior compression algorithm.
In my own musings, I'd figured sleep was just an energy-saving mode (yes, we are all computers). When we sleep, our body temperature lowers and we're not running around at a relatively unproductive time of the day. Especially when no food is available, a power-saving mode would be a great advantage in waiting out the bad circumstances (think hibernation, listlessness in famines, or siestas b/c it's too hot to work). If you look at reptiles as always being in low-power (cold-blooded) mode, the increased sleep trade-off for mammals and birds seems reasonable.
Of course, you don't need to be asleep to lower your body temperature and save energy. All you need to do is turn down the heat and sit down.
Sleep is a bit more than that. The problem is it's still not well understood. But in REM sleep, your mind is actually incredibly active, not passive or at rest. What it's actually doing and why is what we don't really know yet. What we do know is that people who go for just a few days without sleep often undergo profound, permanent personality changes (and those who go for more than a couple weeks or so without sleep die). There was a famous radio DJ in the 1950's that went without sleep for several days on air - by about the 4th day, he reportedly was seeing spiders everywhere and was babbling pretty much incoherently. His family and friends reported that he was never the same again, and he lost his job and faded into obscurity shortly afterwards.
I'm no scientist, and for all I know these new drugs could prove to work just fine. But from what I do know about sleep, I'm pretty skeptical of the long-term effects of taking these drugs. There is obviously something necessary about sleep that regulates our personalities, maintains our memory and keeps us from literally going nuts - and also that keeps us alive. As we still haven't identified exactly what the mechanism is that does that, I don't really see how all of that could be boiled down into pill form. We've taken an unknown and claimed to have replicated it. Something is missing here.
My sense is these drugs just cover up the symptoms of sleep deprivation, but the effects are nevertheless still there and are cumulative.
So far, everybody's mentioned mostly hardcore gamer games. Gears of War? Please! That ain't a party game.
Samba De Amigo, now there's your prototypical "2+" player game. I realize that probably not a lot of people here have played it, but those of you who have know what I'm talkin' about. That's a party game if there ever was one.
It's better than DDR (which is another good party game) because it's not as technical, i.e. you don't need to be extremely coordinated to play it, and half the fun is just watching other people make fools of themselves. The spectators have almost as much fun as the players. It's fun enough that it appeals to hardcore gamers but it also appeals to non-gamers and even (gasp) girls. In fact, it's the only game some girls I know ever want to play, even still.
And DVD was already the consortium-maintained standard, and not just something proprietary that Sony really really wants to make the standard.
There's no practical difference between the DVD Consortium/Forum and the Blu-Ray Disc Association. This is the DVD Consortium founding member list:
# Hitachi, Ltd. # Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. # Mitsubishi Electric Corporation # Pioneer Electronic Corporation # Royal Philips Electronics N.V. # Sony Corporation # Thomson # Time Warner Inc. # Toshiba Corporation # Victor Company of Japan,
The equivalent list for the BDA:
Apple Computer, Inc. Dell Inc. Hewlett Packard Company Hitachi, Ltd. LG Electronics Inc. Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. Mitsubishi Electric Corporation Pioneer Corporation Royal Philips Electronics Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. Sharp Corporation Sony Corporation Sun Microsystems, Inc. TDK Corporation Thomson Multimedia Twentieth Century Fox Walt Disney Pictures Warner Bros. Entertainment
The only really notable difference is the omission of Toshiba from the BDA list - they are the ones that initiated the push for HD-DVD. In fact, you can see that BDA has more industry support at launch than DVD did, and the only two major DVD Forum members not on the BDA are Toshiba and JVC.
The long and the short of it being that Blu-Ray is no more or less "proprietary" than DVD was. In fact, DVD was promoted most heavily by Philips, Sony and Toshiba, who are now ripping each other's throats apart as enemies on Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD. But they are two competing standards developed through consortiums, just as DVD was; it is not the case that one is proprietary and the other is not.
Slashdot Mirror
Has anybody actually bought a CD that they could not rip?
I've never seen one that I couldn't easily rip songs from....
I think some people are missing the point of your question, which is that CD-based DRM is trivially easy to defeat. So the only people it hurts are those who just want to play the CD and can't, because it doesn't conform to spec.
I personally only own a couple DRM-laden CD's (I didn't know before I bought them, but I probably would have bought them anyway). Neither gave me any problem whatsoever ripping with EAC; they ripped just like every other CD. Just as an experiment, though, I did put one of them in my computer and let it autoplay (I know about the rootkit stuff; this was different DRM), and it first tried to install some proprietary player and then it told me I was in the wrong region and couldn't play the disc at all (this was a Japanese CD). I tried to rip it in iTunes and got an error message in Japanese.
So it just depends on what tools you're using. Based on that experience, though, I would probably not even risk playing any CD on my computer anymore; I just rip immediately with EAC.
btw, the CD in question above is PUFFY's "59" - they've released a full-length CD since then that has no DRM at all, on the same record label (ki/oon / Sony). So obviously, EMI in the Netherlands is not the only company getting the message.
This came out back in the days of the IBM Deathstar drives, when IBM was going "But... you're not meant to keep your drives turned on all the time!".
Yeah, which they were rightly pilloried for. It's like a store that advertises itself as being open 24 hours... just not in a row.
The fact is hard drives don't last very long. Or at least, you can't count on them lasting very long - you may get lucky, but most don't make it past ten years, and that's being generous. Meanwhile, none of my DVD's has failed yet or even shown any signs of anything, and I have some of the earliest ever DVD releases, which are ten years old now.
Of course, HD-DVD and BD are totally different from DVD, and they may not prove to be as robust. But people said the same thing about DVD vs. CD and at least to this point, there seems to be no practical difference. Pressed (as opposed to burned) optical discs will probably always be more reliable than hard drives.
Some cheaper "soft white" incandescents give off a yellow or even pink-ish light.
That should have been CFL's, not incandescents. That's what I get for not using the preview button!
The "Daylight" CFL's that I've bought have been a blessing for my wife's SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder). Every winter she gets upset, cranky, and annoyed because the day is only 7 hours of sunlight... We've replaced all but two bulbs (the bathroom light, and the upstairs bathroom light) with "Daylight" CFL's. From what I can tell, these are the best things to come along since sliced bread......
The problem is they don't work for their intended purpose unless they are as bright as daylight. That's the whole point; there's no such thing as "dim" daylight. Put one or two 60 watt equivalent "daylight" bulbs in a room and all you end up with is dim bluish light. This is nasty stuff, and not all that dissimilar to what we all remember from old fluorescent bulbs.
Daylight bulbs can work if you either have a) a bunch of them, or b) a couple of *really* bright ones in a small room. The point is you have to approximate the intensity of daylight, not just the color.
For more pleasing evening light, a regular "soft white" CFL is a better option - there's a reason why these are popular in incandescents too ("daylight" incandescants also exist). These will give off a warm, cozy light - if you get a good one. Some cheaper "soft white" incandescents give off a yellow or even pink-ish light. The best thing to do is to look for a bulb that can reproduce the closest thing to a natural spectrum, but with an emphasis on whichever part of it you're most interested in (i.e. soft white, warm white, daylight, etc.). Reproducing the full spectrum is still a bugaboo for CFL's.
Bigger screen is better. Same resolution is the same. Verdict: Zune.
Bulkier to carry because of bigger screen. Verdict: no points awarded.
You've obviously already made up your mind, because these two arguments make no logical sense.
The only thing a bigger screen with the same resolution lets you do is look at images from further away. So instead of holding the stupid thing at arm's length, now you can hold it at *more* than arm's length. Or, alternatively, maybe you can get a tiny bit bigger image (at the same resolution) if your habit is to press your player up to your nose. But either way, it has never been an advantage to throw a bigger screen in a portable device with the same resolution - how many 17" laptops do you see running at 1024x768? If you're going to increase the bulk of the device, you'd better have a good reason for it.
It's the same logic that determines the proper TV size for a room. If you've already got the right size for your room, there's no point at all in buying a bigger screen with the same resolution. You're not going to see any more detail in the image. You'd need to go up in resolution at the same time you go up in size for your purchase to have any practical effect other than taking up extra space and draining your wallet.
The logical choice in any portable device is to have the highest resolution screen possible in the smallest, lightest form factor. You can make the screen as "big" (relative to your vision) as you want just by how you hold it; what you can't do is adjust the weight, size or balance of the device. Those are chosen for you before you buy.
Buy an iPod and enjoy it. Or, buy a Zune and try to convince yourself that you made the right choice.
Hardly anyone would be willing to pay for the ability to carry around a little 3 1/2" shopping buddy, and the shopping center would lose their shirt if they just handed them out
Ginza's technically a city, not a "shopping center" as the headline here suggests. If I lived in Ginza, I'd be pretty offended at my city being basically labeled one big shopping mall!
(Tokyo itself is not a city; it's a prefecture made up of a couple dozen wards, one of which is Ginza.)
But eBay is synonymous with auctions and nothing else. Same reason why Amazon isn't associated with auctions. The brand has been defined in stone.
Well, it's probably worth remembering that at one time, Amazon.com was "defined in stone" as an online bookstore. That's all they sold, and they were by far the largest book seller online. It was to the point where when Barnes and Noble announced they'd be creating a web site, a lot of analysts wondered why they'd bother - despite BN having dominated the offline book market for years.
Today, I've counted a bunch of comments here, and several quotes in the linked article, saying they'll just "buy on Amazon" rather than look for anything on Ebay Express. So clearly, the definition of Amazon.com has changed in peoples' minds. It can be done.
I agree that it's rare, and that it takes a combination of good luck and savvy strategizing. You have to pick your battles and expand your reach slowly into areas that make sense. But businesses don't always have to stick to their "core" - lots of big companies started out doing one thing and gradually moved into other areas. I mean, IBM used to only make accounting machines; they were synonymous with accounting machines. They gradually moved into typewriters, then computers, then services and more. Nowadays it's those services that are their "core" business - they have almost completely moved away from what made them successful, but they are still successful. The same can be said of any big company that's been around for a while. GE used to just make light bulbs, for another example, but now they make aircraft engines, they have a large financial services arm, etc. and all of these are money-making businesses for them.
But it makes sense. If it is true it answers a lot of questions but raises one last one. Why the fuck do American news media keeping posting their scores? It really does sound like a hype rag.
It is really no different than EGM in any way other than being a) physically bigger, and b) published more frequently. Their "journalistic standards" are no better or worse, their reviews no more or less bought and paid for. Which is to say the NY Times they ain't, but neither are they paid shills.
There's no real meat to Kotaku's "story". What it seems to be is the cynical ramblings of a jaded gamer. No real harm there, I guess; we've got plenty of people here who think EGM gives "courtesy scores" to big games too (and they probably do).
I think the problem is westerners - who don't generally understand the language - go around calling Famitsu things like "the gaming bible", which put it on a pedestal. It is no bible. It is simply a magazine that writes stuff about games. But that pedestal we put them on means any time they do something the slightest bit weird, like, say, giving a game that everybody else seems to think sucks straight 8's or 9's, there's a massive look of bewilderment here. They're human and subject to human foibles like anybody else. They're also just as easily swayed by hype as any of the gaming press here.
What is impressive about Famitsu is just how prolific they are. EGM struggles these days to put together an 80 page pamphlet in a month. Famitsu does about 250 pages in a week. And they also put out system-specific monthly magazines, which borrow staffers from the weekly version. That's pretty amazing, and it makes them worth paying attention to if for no other reason than their obvious dedication to gaming. These guys (and girls) eat, drink, sleep and shit nothing but video games, 24 hours a day.
what does an IPOD have (other than after market accessories) that the Zune does not?
-The ability to act as an external hard drive in a pinch.
-A software client that runs on Windows and Macintosh.
-Seasons in the market.
A couple additions:
* A huge (and still growing) accessory market
* Can interface directly with a large number of cars (not just through an aux-in)
* Better software - not just cross-platform, but more polished and less buggy (even as buggy as iTunes 7 was initially, it was nothing compared to some of the horror stories I've seen about the Zune software)
* More software options - you don't need to use iTunes if you don't want to
* Clickwheel interface
* Better size/form factor
And yes, style. The Zune is big and ugly. The iPod is svelte and classy. Sure, that's subjective and you might not agree. Unfortunately for MS, 62+% of the market does agree and only 1.8% of the market feels otherwise.
Also, let's not forget that Apple has several different iPods on the market, and they don't break down sales by model. I think it's entirely possible that MS could do better if they released a nano and/or shuffle type Zune. They still won't catch the iPod, but they could easily triple their 1.8% market share (not that that means much). Apple has a model for every taste, where MS seems to specialize in big ugly brown boxes.
Monopolies produce poor quality products at high prices - that's what monopolies do. So yeah, no reason to hate Microsoft anymore, we know what they are.
Yeah, that makes about as much sense as saying "murderes leave a hell of a mess - that's what murderers do. So yeah, no reason to hate OJ Simpson anymore, we know what he is."
It must have escaped my attention when it became the case that the simple realization that a person or company has committed a crime somehow excuses it.
Microsoft is a convicted monopoly. There is no more reason to hate them required. They will always be a convicted monopolist; you don't somehow get un-convicted after a couple of years. The penalties they had to accept (at least in this country) may have been little more than a slap on the wrist... but that doesn't change what they are. And it's something they only share with a few other companies in the history of this country.
I mean, why hate Enron? Why hate the tobacco industry? Why hate any company?
When it's not just your opinion that they've hurt people, but when it's in fact been proven that they hurt people, then I'd say that's a pretty good reason.
(That doesn't mean I hate Bill Gates; I think he's done a lot of good things. But he has not surrounded himself with the most scrupulous people, and he himself has not always acted scrupulously in business.)
I also don't buy for a second the idea that the Second Amendment is meant for anyone other than private citizens. The Second Amendment says "the right of the people" not "the right of the militia".
You need to read the amendment again.
"A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
Read it. Read it carefully. And most importantly, read it all.
"the right of the people to keep and bear arms" is one clause in a longer sentence specifically relating to the necessity of a well regulated "free state" militia. It is neither the focus of the amendment, nor is it an individual "right" that you can pull out of the amendment. It does not stand on its own; it is not separated by a semi-colon or a period. It is separated by commas, as part of a sentence establishing well regulated militias. It is not a clause that exists in the absence of context.
I realize that various people, including branches of our own government, have interpreted it differently over the years. But it is pretty unambiguous if you ask me, and I don't see how you even could interpret it in any other way than was intended - unless you had some personal or vested interest in misinterpreting it. If you enjoy gun collecting and have spent $50,000 on your gun collection, what are you going to think that amendment says? You're going to think it supports your "right" to have such a gun collection, because you don't want $50,000 worth of stuff taken away from you. You're going to read it in a way that supports your own purposes. And that's the problem - we have so many gun owners in this country that selfishly want to protect their investments and their misguided feelings of personal safety (despite the fact that statistically, you are in more danger of getting shot if you own a gun than if you don't) that it is almost impossible to convince a majority that the 2nd amendment says what it actually says rather than what so many wish it said.
But the purpose of the amendment is to protect the existence of what we now call the National Guard. It was an amendment that protected the rights of the states to have their own militias to act as a check against the federal army. It was a compromise to satisfy the advocates of states rights, many of whom felt a strong national government needed to be balanced by explicit rights given to the states, including militarily.
By the way, those of you talking about DC's murder rate despite its gun restrictions need to realize where it is those guns are coming from. Take a look at the statistics sometime. They're not coming from DC.
You also might want to look at a city like New York, which has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the nation and is also the safest large city in the country. In its case as well, the vast majority of guns confiscated in crimes in New York were legally purchased in places like North Carolina and Virginia, where gun laws are much more relaxed. The theory that tougher gun laws means only criminals have guns is only true when those laws are enacted piecemeal. Even so, you can't argue with the crime statistics. All you need to do is compare New York to, say, Dallas, which is in an area with less restrictive gun laws state-wide and in fact regionally. (Dallas itself has gun restrictions, but like DC, it proves the point that these laws need to be at least regional, and preferably national. I mean, criminals do own cars.) Go ahead and click that link.
The results of tough gun laws - when enacted and enforced properly - speak for themselves, as does the 2nd amendment.
IIRC, The NPD doesn't report Wal-Mart sales.
The NPD uses statistical sampling to include these sales.
Look, people. There's a weird and wacky theory out there that's now almost accepted as fact by many that says that NPD reports are inaccurate because only a few stores participate. The thinking further goes that this means the remaining stores, including Wal-Mart, are not counted at all. This is not true.
Last time I looked at an actual NPD report, around 70% of the industry was directly tracked. The rest is counted using sampling. What that adds up to is 100% coverage of retail. It may not be accurate down to the individual unit, but it is about as accurate as a hand count would be, because as complex as the retail industry is, there are always slight over- or under-counts. But it doesn't add up to more than a thousand or so units using either statistical sampling or a hand count.
The NPD reports are also what the game industry itself relies on (that is, in fact, why they exist), so it's kind of ridiculous for someone to call them "useless". If they're good enough for the industry itself, why aren't they good enough for you?
...and the industry has found that at $0.99. The iTMS has been an overwhelming success, despite the fact that everybody on Slashdot hates it because the pricing isn't "fair" and because the product is DRM-laden.
How do you define "overwhelming success"?
We know from simple division that even among iTunes Music Store customers, the average number of purchased tracks is 21. We also know that the number of illegal downloads continues to outnumber legal downloads by 40 to 1. (Both of these stats come from previous - and recent - stories posted here.) People continue to fill up their iPods with music they have obtained elsewhere (legally and illegally). If such a small percentage of music sales can be deemed an "overwhelming success", then what would constitute failure?
I think the music industry has seen these stats, they know these stats, and they also know that even with whatever limited success iTunes and the like has had (and it is "limited" at best, not "overwhelming"), most of that success belongs to Apple, Real, etc. Not to the music industry itself. So they know they've still got big problems.
This sounds a lot like many arguments I hear for lower music prices which end with some form of "artists will just need to accept their new place in society." Why should they want to do that?
Whether they want to or not is not really relevant. The fact may be that they have to.
Look at it this way. In the late 1800's, a lot of people made a lot of money in the railroad business. By around the 1950's, that was no longer possible - the business just wasn't what it was anymore. Media is just like any other business, and in fact the exact same thing is happening to the newspaper and magazine industries right now. You can never count on a business to make you rich forever. How you feel about that as a member of that business matters not at all.
Unless you want to count classical composers who often consorted with kings and queens (but were rarely really rich themselves), the whole notion of getting rich by writing and playing music is an entirely recent phenomenon. It's not something anybody would have assumed 100 or even 50 years ago. It was something people did for the love of the music, and hopefully they did it well enough to make a living. That living was mostly made through playing live, not through sales of media.
Many people think the music industry's run as it currently exists is simply over. It does happen. Industries come and go as times change; they are not static things.
That does not mean music will go away. It just means the current major label-dominated industry itself might, along with the ability to get rich by selling records. Being a musician may become more like any other profession, where the savvy and talented can make a good living provided they continue to work year-round playing live, releasing new music and creating other related merchandise. Labels will still exist - there does need to be someone to do the real production and promotion work - but they may not be dominated by the four majors. The entire industry may look a lot more like the indie record industry of today. eMusic may be the new model. Or, the opposite may happen, and it already sort of is - musicians that want to get rich will need to become "brands", transcending their career in music and turning themselves into full-on multimedia campaigns. Or, there could be some combination of both models, which is probably the most likely scenario. But you won't be able to get rich just selling records for very much longer.
It probably sounds far-fetched to you, but then in 1930 there probably wasn't a man alive that thought there'd come a time when the New York Central wasn't steaming from New York to Chicago six times a day. Things change in business, often dramatically. And new technology is what drives that change.
If my website logs are a reflection of their popularity they are in big trouble. Google beats them at a rate of 100 to 1.
Yahoo is a lot more than just search. Google is too, but the point is your web site results are not reflective of Yahoo's business as a whole. While they do want a bigger piece of the search advertising pie, I don't think even they really consider search their core business anymore. (It never really was to begin with; they were always more of a directory than a search company, though they've tried to change that in recent years.)
All you need to do is go to Yahoo's web site and then go to Google's web site to see their different business models.
Just for one example, though, I bought my house through Yahoo Real Estate, which partnered with Prudential in my area to give local online real estate listings. Google has no such thing (even though with Google Maps, it would seem a natural fit). Yahoo has many facets like this that you probably don't even realize.
They are making 2d-esque games (Sonic Rush, for example) and those are still pretty good
I'd go further than that - Sonic Rush is the Sonic game all these people have been waiting for. It's amazing to me that so many people complain about the current Sonic games and hardly any of these people have bothered playing Sonic Rush. It's rarely even mentioned in any of the talk about recent series entrants.
Sonic Rush is a much more natural evolution of the Sonic series than any of the recent 3D games on home systems. Ironically, Sonic Rush is 3D, in the same way the Klonoa series is - the graphics are mostly cel-shaded 3D, the gameplay basically 2D. This lets the old-school gameplay that Sonic fans want shine through, while still adding some new 3D elements and the fully 3D boss battles.
One of the big sites - it was either GameSpot or GameSpy - called this game the "most significant" Sonic game in many years. I would agree with that if only more people had played it. It is an example of what Sonic games can be in the modern age, although unfortunately for all concerned, it didn't sell particularly well. What lesson does Sega take from that?
If you want good Sonic games, buy the good Sonic games. If you don't buy them, Sega won't make them. And that's what's happening now; Sega is unsuccessfully searching for a new formula, having apparently been convinced that the original formula no longer works in the marketplace.
I would paraphrase that last part as "quit whining". SCO has repeatedly claimed that the court has not provided them with either a) enough time, b) enough leeway in deposition, and c) enough clarity in its orders. That was basically SCO's defense in this motion; that they did all they could given the information that they had from the court. The court has now told them that their defense in this motion doesn't hold water and worse, that they should know it. How else would you paraphrase that?
I realize that was a crude paraphrasing, but a more neutral/appropriate headline might make this a more reputable site.
What is neutral about this? SCO just got their butts whipped by the court, again, as they should have. News itself is rarely objective, and Slashdot has never pretended to be an objective news source. This isn't about providing balanced reporting on the SCO case. This is about SCO being in the wrong, and the court - for the second time - bitch-slapping them for being in the wrong and for knowing they were in the wrong and wasting everybody's time and energy on this case.
You're close. According to this Seattle PI article, in unit sales it was iPod 63%, Zune 9%. In dollar share, it was iPod 72%, Zune 13%. No numbers are given for Sandisk.
And let's not forget that these are launch sales. These are the people buying based on hype; the real MS fanboys and the anti-iPod crowd. What happens now that they've all got their Zunes? Do people really expect this to keep growing?
Let's also not forget that a snapshot of one period of time in the market does not market share make. So 9% of sales for the past month translates to about 0.1% overall market share.
Look at it properly, and these numbers are extraordinarily bad for a product with such heavy marketing and R&D put into it. To spend that much money and capture only 9% of sales in your launch period is nothing to brag about.
To put it in perspective, we just heard yesterday that Nintendo sold 600,000 Wiis in 8 days. That will almost assuredly double the sales of the PS2, Xbox 360 and PS3 for the month (normal sales for consoles are around 200,000-300,000 a month, and we know about Sony's PS3 supply problems).
Now imagine if instead of doubling their competitors' sales at launch, they had instead sold 1/6 the number of PS2's, or about 50,000 units of the 600,000 they put on the market. Would Nintendo be bragging about that? Should they? The Zune is in the same situation.
But look what they did with the XBox
They didn't do jack with the Xbox. In fact, I'd have to say the whole Xbox project has been a colossal failure by almost any definition.
They spent a total of more than $6 billion on the system. They have so far made back $2 billion of that.
With that $6 billion, they managed to buy 20% of Sony's market share and about 10% of the overall industry's market share. Yes, the PS2 outsold the Xbox by 5:1 worldwide.
The Xbox 360, now, is still being outsold by the PS2, and it's behind the sales curve of the original Xbox. This is 2006. They couldn't beat the PS2 with their old console and they can't beat it with their new console. The 360 is also behind sales projections by about 3 million units - and has been an even worse failure in Japan than the original system.
Now that the PS3 and Wii are on the market, it will be interesting to see what happens, but the 360 has already never once been the best-selling system, and that was with no current-gen competition! It would be like MS putting out the iPod and Sony beating them with a Discman. This is the best MS and their billions can do?
You would *hope* anybody spending $6 billion, losing $4 billion in the process, would end up with more than 10-20% market share. But that's likely to be the pattern with the Zune as well. No doubt we'll get people in here once they've cracked 10% market share labeling the Zune a "success" too.
What about it? It lost 4 billion dollars and finished a tiny bit ahead of the Gamecube in market share.
Yeah, MS seems to have perfected the business model of losing billions of dollars and coming in a very distant second.
The Zune's got the Sansa in its sights!
I assume you mean "wma". WMA provides a higher quality sound at a lower file size/bit rate.
Bullshit.
Both Apple *and* MS would love for you to believe that their codecs can sound twice as good as mp3 at half the bit rate, but unfortunately for them it just isn't true and that double-blind listening test proved it some time ago. Statistically, the difference is not all that great, but in absolute terms, mp3 actually sounds *better* than wma even at the *same* bit rate. You can forget about trying to get wma to sound anywhere near as good as mp3 at a lower bit rate. (Apple's AAC fares a bit better, but not a whole lot.)
There is simply no compelling reason to use anything other than either Vorbis (if you want the absolute best lossy compression at the expense of compatibility) or mp3 (if you want the best lossy compression with the most compatibility). You're a fool to lock yourself into one company's products by using an inferior compression algorithm.
In my own musings, I'd figured sleep was just an energy-saving mode (yes, we are all computers). When we sleep, our body temperature lowers and we're not running around at a relatively unproductive time of the day. Especially when no food is available, a power-saving mode would be a great advantage in waiting out the bad circumstances (think hibernation, listlessness in famines, or siestas b/c it's too hot to work). If you look at reptiles as always being in low-power (cold-blooded) mode, the increased sleep trade-off for mammals and birds seems reasonable.
Of course, you don't need to be asleep to lower your body temperature and save energy. All you need to do is turn down the heat and sit down.
Sleep is a bit more than that. The problem is it's still not well understood. But in REM sleep, your mind is actually incredibly active, not passive or at rest. What it's actually doing and why is what we don't really know yet. What we do know is that people who go for just a few days without sleep often undergo profound, permanent personality changes (and those who go for more than a couple weeks or so without sleep die). There was a famous radio DJ in the 1950's that went without sleep for several days on air - by about the 4th day, he reportedly was seeing spiders everywhere and was babbling pretty much incoherently. His family and friends reported that he was never the same again, and he lost his job and faded into obscurity shortly afterwards.
I'm no scientist, and for all I know these new drugs could prove to work just fine. But from what I do know about sleep, I'm pretty skeptical of the long-term effects of taking these drugs. There is obviously something necessary about sleep that regulates our personalities, maintains our memory and keeps us from literally going nuts - and also that keeps us alive. As we still haven't identified exactly what the mechanism is that does that, I don't really see how all of that could be boiled down into pill form. We've taken an unknown and claimed to have replicated it. Something is missing here.
My sense is these drugs just cover up the symptoms of sleep deprivation, but the effects are nevertheless still there and are cumulative.
Cue porn jokes.
And chicken jokes.
Let's just hope nobody thinks to combine the two together.
So far, everybody's mentioned mostly hardcore gamer games. Gears of War? Please! That ain't a party game.
Samba De Amigo, now there's your prototypical "2+" player game. I realize that probably not a lot of people here have played it, but those of you who have know what I'm talkin' about. That's a party game if there ever was one.
It's better than DDR (which is another good party game) because it's not as technical, i.e. you don't need to be extremely coordinated to play it, and half the fun is just watching other people make fools of themselves. The spectators have almost as much fun as the players. It's fun enough that it appeals to hardcore gamers but it also appeals to non-gamers and even (gasp) girls. In fact, it's the only game some girls I know ever want to play, even still.
Miyamoto's birthday today.
It was Miyamoto's birthday yesterday. It's the 17th in Japan.
And DVD was already the consortium-maintained standard, and not just something proprietary that Sony really really wants to make the standard.
There's no practical difference between the DVD Consortium/Forum and the Blu-Ray Disc Association. This is the DVD Consortium founding member list:
# Hitachi, Ltd.
# Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd.
# Mitsubishi Electric Corporation
# Pioneer Electronic Corporation
# Royal Philips Electronics N.V.
# Sony Corporation
# Thomson
# Time Warner Inc.
# Toshiba Corporation
# Victor Company of Japan,
The equivalent list for the BDA:
Apple Computer, Inc.
Dell Inc.
Hewlett Packard Company
Hitachi, Ltd.
LG Electronics Inc.
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.
Mitsubishi Electric Corporation
Pioneer Corporation
Royal Philips Electronics
Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.
Sharp Corporation
Sony Corporation
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
TDK Corporation
Thomson Multimedia
Twentieth Century Fox
Walt Disney Pictures
Warner Bros. Entertainment
The only really notable difference is the omission of Toshiba from the BDA list - they are the ones that initiated the push for HD-DVD. In fact, you can see that BDA has more industry support at launch than DVD did, and the only two major DVD Forum members not on the BDA are Toshiba and JVC.
The long and the short of it being that Blu-Ray is no more or less "proprietary" than DVD was. In fact, DVD was promoted most heavily by Philips, Sony and Toshiba, who are now ripping each other's throats apart as enemies on Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD. But they are two competing standards developed through consortiums, just as DVD was; it is not the case that one is proprietary and the other is not.