OK, I'll acknowledge that some people are abandoning their land line and going only wireless, but putting a doorbell on a 3G system strikes me as somewhat absurd. Maybe it will be useful in places where the cell carriers don't rape their customers, but using it in the USA, with the extra account it would require, would be crazy for most people. At the very least it should also have the option to tie into the home's land line rather than use the cell network.
I could "invent" a lot of things, if practical costs of using a wireless network were not a consideration.
Things can go wrong in a crash, period. If you care about them don't use the OS most likely to crash. There are software strategies for minimizing the time data is in write cache unprotected, yet still giving most of the performance benefits. One shouldn't be running a computer without some form of power backup, and I expect that few willing to pay $350 for a drive do, So better to spend just a fraction of the cash on a UPS. And while I'll admit that power supplies might fail, and have even used dual supplies in mission critical applications, I have yet to see one of my own fail (I have seen someone else's bargain basement supply cause crashes), so my thinking is still that there are better ways to spend the money than on this turkey. People buy solid state drives to get away from the issues of hard drives, but this drags back the hard drive concerns at SSD prices.
And before you spent that absurd price on a 10,000 RPM drive I suggest that you look at it's transfer rate as compared to a basic Seagate 7200 RPM drive. My understanding is that the Seagate actually beats out expensive drives like the Raptor. The reason? Because the 10,000 RPM WD drive still uses traditional recording while the Seagate uses perpendicular recording, packing the bits much closer together and thus allowng more to be read in the same time, even at the lower rotational speed.
Now, to be honest, this is the way things were a couple of years ago. Maybe WD updated their technology and I missed hearing about it. But there were plenty of people who thought that they were buying a faster drive when they shelled out 3X as much for a 10,000 RPM drive, and I expect there are still plenty of people who buy based on that 10,000 RPM number alone.
Wow! The very high cost of a solid state drive coupled with the power hunger and mechanical constraints of a hard drive. I find it hard to believe that using SSDs as a cache is wise, but I also question if the money couldn't be better spent adding more DDR3 RAM to the processor and letting it cache the drive (with the obvious options and benefits that brings). I think I would just stick with the 2TB drives that I've been buying recently for well under $100 each rather than this overpriced compromise, even if I had a 4x PCIe slot available (which I don't and I expect few who would have an interest in this do).
I did this long ago, shortly after the HP500 came out and noticed that results were pretty varied in my office. We went to a large office supply store and bought a ream of every type of paper they had. Went back to the office and ran some comparison tests. We found that the difference in paper was significant and the most expensive paper was not the best. And the recycled paper was worse than the cheaper non-recycled paper. We also found that the side that we printed on made a big difference, one side was definitely producing better results than the other. We ended up picking the best paper and telling the office manager to only buy that type for the inkjets. Put up signs to show which side of the paper to load pointing down in the tray. And used all of the reject reams in the copier and the laser jets.
Unless your ISP has received a National Security Letter (or foreign counterpart) ordering it to deep-packet-inspect your OpenDNS queries.
There is still no point in it, as.onion doesn't resolve through normal DNS processes and so "blocking" it at the DNS would have no effect at all. If it did then all.onion references would fail even if not blocked and.onion could never have been used. If you are not using.onion (and Tor) then even if your ISP is doing deep packet inspection looking for.onion references it will not see any valid ones (maybe this posting may trigger a false positive though?), and if you are trying to use TOR and.onion then deep packet inspection may find them no matter what you do on your own DNS "server".
At $110 more than I paid for my LG player, I could take the difference and buy any of the stand-alone media players that I've looked at. And some of them do play ISO files. Even better, I could apply that money towards a media player PC and be able to do everything, browse the web, play standard Hulu and other videos blocked from Google TV, Video conference, DVR, and more. Of course, I could do a lot of that now with an older PC at no significant cost, but I want to go with a new well preforming processor rather than an old K6 or a slow Atom processor so that I avoid needless lags, get that DVR working at HD bandwidths, and can also use the machine and the nice HDTV for gaming as well as for simple browsing and video playback. So yes, I did know about the Sony before I made my choice, but I saw no point in paying that much of a premium for a very limited improvement in features.
There is no point in blocking things like.onion. It will never resolve unless you go out of your way to get to it with proxies and the like (using Tor in the case of.onion). I certainly could understand blocking many country level TLDs in the name of safety if one wished to do so, but this is pointless overkill as I see it.
You mean those things from the last millenium that had the analog tuners, and output in 480i composite video or, if you paid extra, in a signal that separated chroma from luminance (that my HDTV doesn't even support)? No, you couldn't really mean that, that would be too much like trooling.
Out of curiosity which format is missing from the WD for you ?
Sorry, but I don't recall exactly. This was six months ago and I was basing my decision on many reviews that I found on many sites. At lo,t, but far from all, were on Meritline from people who had bought WD boxes. And I know of at least three different WD boxes, and don't think that the newest was even available when I started looking. Not impressed by WDs lack of support for the older units after the new one came out either, just one more reason in my mind to avoid them. Didn't see any other stand alone boxes that I liked either, looked at a lot more than just WD.
Overall I think both the stand alone box and the feature built into an existing appliance approaches are both compromises. I went with the Blu-Ray approach, as it gives me the ability to hook up a drive and play video files as well as play Blu-ray movies (I'm pretty disappointed by the quality of most Blu-Ray movies I've bought or borrowed but that is a different issue). A stand alone PC box will give me all you have, and let me run a DVR and access things that neither of us currently can on our TVs. I'll still get use out of the Blu-Ray/DVD player, if I had bought just a box it would just be redundant. Could put a Blu-Ray drive in the PC too I guess, but that makes little sense since they are still as expensive as what I payed for the stand alone unit.
An old laptop is going to preform like an old laptop. Yea, I've used one too, but that's far from an optimum solution. Good for watching a show on Hulu, but even then can be a bit of a pain. A dedicated box would seem to be a better idea, and hook it up with a wireless keyboard and mouse and even a remote control (If you object to yet another remote control you likely already have or soon will have a universal remote like the Harmony that can treat the computer like another device to remote control). As to boot up time, for the last two decades I've pretty much had at least one computer that is "always on", doing things like checking my e-mail, running scheduled tasks, and the like. Might as well make the media center PC be that box, so boot time becomes a non-issue.
Another point to consider is that if you get your TV over free air and the Internet and don't want to pay Cable or satellite's outrageous fees, you have very few choices for a DVR (my count is zero but I estimate an error of up to +/- 1) unless you build your own out of a TV tuner PC add-on/add-in and easily available software. Add a DVR to a media PC for a one-time fee of less than $30 and avoid paying someone like TiVo month after month.
I can plug in a hard drive to my Blu-Ray player. And it will automatically upscale the content. While I have not had a chance to do a side by side comparison, my research on the WD device indicated that it did not play several formats that my Blu-ray player will (and, in the interest of full disclosure, the Blu-ray player will not play directly from ISO files of DVDs, which I wish it would (as I already have at least one DVD that will no longer play from simple use)). The Blu-Ray players big failing is not playing from other computers on the network, but that might be bypassed by letting another computer pretend to be YouTube.
The real issue is that neither a stand alone box like the WD or a feature built into an appliance like a TV or Blu-Ray can do everything that you really want and expect from the Internet. For that you really need your own computer (even Google TV doesn't do all). So the question should be "cheap limited box, limited built in utility to a component, overpriced Google TV, or build up a PC that will do all you want?"
I looked at stand alone players late last year, but went with a Blu-Ray player because it did pretty much the same things, and also up-scaled my lower res videos to 1080p, and played Blu-Ray discs and up-scaled DVDs. And at pretty much the same cost as all but the worst stand alone units.
What I got was a compromise. It will play many format files, but will not play ISO files. It will stream from a few paces on the web, but far from all that I would wish, and it will not access other computers on the local network to play their files (using sneaker-net to get around that).
The thing is, I have not found any TV, Blu-ray player or stand alone box that will do everything that I want. Even the over priced and over hyped Google TV will not access as much as I would want, it can't even play back basic non-subscription Hulu for example! So I came to understand that to get the normal full web on my new HDTV I would have to actually build a computer based appliance of my own. And will want to find a player that will upscale well to 1080p when given lower quality input. But with the absurd mindset of the content holders claiming that Hulu can stream to a PC and then to my TV, but for some insane reason it would be evil if it streamed to a Blu-ray player, a stand alone media player, or Google TV and then to my same television set, I see no good solution for what I want than to build up my own system, which looks like it will cost about the same or less than the Logitech Google TV gelded offering..
So my advice to/. readers is don't get caught up in the stand-alone appliance or built in to a TV or Blu-ray argument, that is the wrong thing to consider. Consider building your own, which will be able to access Hulu and other things currently locked out of ALL the retail offerings.
One thing worth mentioning here is that I have realized that while my Blu-Ray player can stream from a very very limited set of sites, one of those it can stream from is YouTube. And it has the ability to select from a couple of dozen of different national YouTube countries, as well as a global choice. I eventually realized that if I intercepted the DNS query for one of the less desirable national YouTube sites, I could return the URL of a local machine. And If I were to write a YouTube emulator to run on that machine then it could pretend to be YouTube to the Blu-Ray player and let me stream from a local computer. This is all still theory, but I'm wondering if any Slashdot users have taken it any farther. The DNS look-up should not be too tricky. Just a DNS "server" on a local system that looks up all requests except the YouTube target and passes the result back. then point the router to use that local machine as the DNS server. The YouTube emulation seems to be a bit more work, I'm wondering if anyone has done anything like this or knows of any existing package that would do it. Thanks.
Warner Brothers further stated that Mr. Whitmill failed to use any DRM when creating the tattoo, which would not only have protected the tattoo but also effectively served to keep it out of public domain even after the copyright expires, circumventing the intent of copyright law as spelled out in the Constitution.
How much computing power will be used to mine all of this data? How much energy will be spent on this project? How much CO2 will be released as a result?
Jim Whitehurst, please give details. What is your cut-off point below which, if I were to make a merit-less claim, that you would just pay me to go away rather than bother to involve the lawyers?
If we only had helium 3 we could easily have fusion and a limitless source of energy. Good thing that there are no other technical issues to resolve. So clearly we should take mining equipment to the moon, mine the helium 3 that might be there and then send it back to earth in huge rocket ships, no matter how much energy all of that expends. This message was brought to you by a former U.S. Senator, so you know there is no need to question the logic behind it.
I just checked out the link you gave for the Stargate movie. They were honest about the lack of extras (even the Stargate trailer), but I feel they were much too kind about print quality.
So I remain disappointed in Blu-ray. I still don't know how I can get an accurate and honest evaluation of the quality of a Blu-ray disc prior to purchase, and all in all I don't think that the consumer should expect to do several hours of research on a Blu-ray movie's quality before making an impulse purchase.Maybe I'm being completely unreasonable here, but I think the paying customer should have a right to expect better than DVD video quality when they buy a Blu-ray, and the studios should have enough sense to include at least much extra content as the DVD release, or at the very least let the Blu-ray download the missing content. Disappointing the paying customer just isn't wise. It is, however, just another thing that drives the customer to piracy rather than continuing to make purchases.
You're talking about the difference between renting and owning a copy. But if you are downloading a copy when you want to see the movie than you are most likely downloading not only a low res DVD copy but also a further compressed for lower bandwidth usage version. So you obviously don't care about quality at all, any crap is good enough for you. The discussion here was about (supposedly) higher quality Blu-Ray discs and DVDs, not about renting low quality video.
I bought a HD TV and a Blu-ray player last year. Since then I've purchased several Blu-ray discs, but I've been very disappointed in them. The most recent Blu-ray disc I purchased is the Extended cut of the movie Stargate. But the quality of the movie was awful (very grainy in most scenes) . I also came across a friend who had the extended cut of the DVD so I borrowed it so I could compare the two on the same screen. I couldn't see any significant difference in video quality, but if there was any difference at all it was that mine was grainier. But I certainly did see that the DVD release had a lot more content that the Blu-ray! The DVD had several "extras" including "making off" features and the films trailers, the Blu-ray did not! Curiously the Blu-ray did have English subtitles that the DVD lacked, but the DVD had Spanish subtitles that the Blu-ray lacked.
In theory, Blu-ray is capable of being much better than DVD. But if the studios are not going to provide a quality product, and just up-convert their DVD content and sell it as HD quality, then the format should die. And unfortunately, I know of no way for a consumer to determine if the Blu-ray is well made from an original HD source or just reprocessed low deff DVD content before they actually buy it.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no Nobel for writing. You are likely thinking of the more easily obtained Pulitzer .
OK, I'll acknowledge that some people are abandoning their land line and going only wireless, but putting a doorbell on a 3G system strikes me as somewhat absurd. Maybe it will be useful in places where the cell carriers don't rape their customers, but using it in the USA, with the extra account it would require, would be crazy for most people. At the very least it should also have the option to tie into the home's land line rather than use the cell network.
I could "invent" a lot of things, if practical costs of using a wireless network were not a consideration.
Things can go wrong in a crash, period. If you care about them don't use the OS most likely to crash. There are software strategies for minimizing the time data is in write cache unprotected, yet still giving most of the performance benefits. One shouldn't be running a computer without some form of power backup, and I expect that few willing to pay $350 for a drive do, So better to spend just a fraction of the cash on a UPS. And while I'll admit that power supplies might fail, and have even used dual supplies in mission critical applications, I have yet to see one of my own fail (I have seen someone else's bargain basement supply cause crashes), so my thinking is still that there are better ways to spend the money than on this turkey. People buy solid state drives to get away from the issues of hard drives, but this drags back the hard drive concerns at SSD prices.
And before you spent that absurd price on a 10,000 RPM drive I suggest that you look at it's transfer rate as compared to a basic Seagate 7200 RPM drive. My understanding is that the Seagate actually beats out expensive drives like the Raptor. The reason? Because the 10,000 RPM WD drive still uses traditional recording while the Seagate uses perpendicular recording, packing the bits much closer together and thus allowng more to be read in the same time, even at the lower rotational speed.
Now, to be honest, this is the way things were a couple of years ago. Maybe WD updated their technology and I missed hearing about it. But there were plenty of people who thought that they were buying a faster drive when they shelled out 3X as much for a 10,000 RPM drive, and I expect there are still plenty of people who buy based on that 10,000 RPM number alone.
Wow! The very high cost of a solid state drive coupled with the power hunger and mechanical constraints of a hard drive. I find it hard to believe that using SSDs as a cache is wise, but I also question if the money couldn't be better spent adding more DDR3 RAM to the processor and letting it cache the drive (with the obvious options and benefits that brings). I think I would just stick with the 2TB drives that I've been buying recently for well under $100 each rather than this overpriced compromise, even if I had a 4x PCIe slot available (which I don't and I expect few who would have an interest in this do).
I did this long ago, shortly after the HP500 came out and noticed that results were pretty varied in my office. We went to a large office supply store and bought a ream of every type of paper they had. Went back to the office and ran some comparison tests. We found that the difference in paper was significant and the most expensive paper was not the best. And the recycled paper was worse than the cheaper non-recycled paper. We also found that the side that we printed on made a big difference, one side was definitely producing better results than the other. We ended up picking the best paper and telling the office manager to only buy that type for the inkjets. Put up signs to show which side of the paper to load pointing down in the tray. And used all of the reject reams in the copier and the laser jets.
There is no point in blocking things like .onion.
Unless your ISP has received a National Security Letter (or foreign counterpart) ordering it to deep-packet-inspect your OpenDNS queries.
There is still no point in it, as .onion doesn't resolve through normal DNS processes and so "blocking" it at the DNS would have no effect at all. If it did then all .onion references would fail even if not blocked and .onion could never have been used. If you are not using .onion (and Tor) then even if your ISP is doing deep packet inspection looking for .onion references it will not see any valid ones (maybe this posting may trigger a false positive though?), and if you are trying to use TOR and .onion then deep packet inspection may find them no matter what you do on your own DNS "server".
At $110 more than I paid for my LG player, I could take the difference and buy any of the stand-alone media players that I've looked at. And some of them do play ISO files. Even better, I could apply that money towards a media player PC and be able to do everything, browse the web, play standard Hulu and other videos blocked from Google TV, Video conference, DVR, and more. Of course, I could do a lot of that now with an older PC at no significant cost, but I want to go with a new well preforming processor rather than an old K6 or a slow Atom processor so that I avoid needless lags, get that DVR working at HD bandwidths, and can also use the machine and the nice HDTV for gaming as well as for simple browsing and video playback. So yes, I did know about the Sony before I made my choice, but I saw no point in paying that much of a premium for a very limited improvement in features.
There is no point in blocking things like .onion. It will never resolve unless you go out of your way to get to it with proxies and the like (using Tor in the case of .onion). I certainly could understand blocking many country level TLDs in the name of safety if one wished to do so, but this is pointless overkill as I see it.
A VCR would have been cheaper.
You mean those things from the last millenium that had the analog tuners, and output in 480i composite video or, if you paid extra, in a signal that separated chroma from luminance (that my HDTV doesn't even support)? No, you couldn't really mean that, that would be too much like trooling.
Out of curiosity which format is missing from the WD for you ?
Sorry, but I don't recall exactly. This was six months ago and I was basing my decision on many reviews that I found on many sites. At lo,t, but far from all, were on Meritline from people who had bought WD boxes. And I know of at least three different WD boxes, and don't think that the newest was even available when I started looking. Not impressed by WDs lack of support for the older units after the new one came out either, just one more reason in my mind to avoid them. Didn't see any other stand alone boxes that I liked either, looked at a lot more than just WD.
Overall I think both the stand alone box and the feature built into an existing appliance approaches are both compromises. I went with the Blu-Ray approach, as it gives me the ability to hook up a drive and play video files as well as play Blu-ray movies (I'm pretty disappointed by the quality of most Blu-Ray movies I've bought or borrowed but that is a different issue). A stand alone PC box will give me all you have, and let me run a DVR and access things that neither of us currently can on our TVs. I'll still get use out of the Blu-Ray/DVD player, if I had bought just a box it would just be redundant. Could put a Blu-Ray drive in the PC too I guess, but that makes little sense since they are still as expensive as what I payed for the stand alone unit.
on an old laptop....
An old laptop is going to preform like an old laptop. Yea, I've used one too, but that's far from an optimum solution. Good for watching a show on Hulu, but even then can be a bit of a pain. A dedicated box would seem to be a better idea, and hook it up with a wireless keyboard and mouse and even a remote control (If you object to yet another remote control you likely already have or soon will have a universal remote like the Harmony that can treat the computer like another device to remote control). As to boot up time, for the last two decades I've pretty much had at least one computer that is "always on", doing things like checking my e-mail, running scheduled tasks, and the like. Might as well make the media center PC be that box, so boot time becomes a non-issue.
Another point to consider is that if you get your TV over free air and the Internet and don't want to pay Cable or satellite's outrageous fees, you have very few choices for a DVR (my count is zero but I estimate an error of up to +/- 1) unless you build your own out of a TV tuner PC add-on/add-in and easily available software. Add a DVR to a media PC for a one-time fee of less than $30 and avoid paying someone like TiVo month after month.
I can plug in a hard drive to my Blu-Ray player. And it will automatically upscale the content. While I have not had a chance to do a side by side comparison, my research on the WD device indicated that it did not play several formats that my Blu-ray player will (and, in the interest of full disclosure, the Blu-ray player will not play directly from ISO files of DVDs, which I wish it would (as I already have at least one DVD that will no longer play from simple use)). The Blu-Ray players big failing is not playing from other computers on the network, but that might be bypassed by letting another computer pretend to be YouTube.
The real issue is that neither a stand alone box like the WD or a feature built into an appliance like a TV or Blu-Ray can do everything that you really want and expect from the Internet. For that you really need your own computer (even Google TV doesn't do all). So the question should be "cheap limited box, limited built in utility to a component, overpriced Google TV, or build up a PC that will do all you want?"
I looked at stand alone players late last year, but went with a Blu-Ray player because it did pretty much the same things, and also up-scaled my lower res videos to 1080p, and played Blu-Ray discs and up-scaled DVDs. And at pretty much the same cost as all but the worst stand alone units.
What I got was a compromise. It will play many format files, but will not play ISO files. It will stream from a few paces on the web, but far from all that I would wish, and it will not access other computers on the local network to play their files (using sneaker-net to get around that).
The thing is, I have not found any TV, Blu-ray player or stand alone box that will do everything that I want. Even the over priced and over hyped Google TV will not access as much as I would want, it can't even play back basic non-subscription Hulu for example! So I came to understand that to get the normal full web on my new HDTV I would have to actually build a computer based appliance of my own. And will want to find a player that will upscale well to 1080p when given lower quality input. But with the absurd mindset of the content holders claiming that Hulu can stream to a PC and then to my TV, but for some insane reason it would be evil if it streamed to a Blu-ray player, a stand alone media player, or Google TV and then to my same television set, I see no good solution for what I want than to build up my own system, which looks like it will cost about the same or less than the Logitech Google TV gelded offering..
So my advice to /. readers is don't get caught up in the stand-alone appliance or built in to a TV or Blu-ray argument, that is the wrong thing to consider. Consider building your own, which will be able to access Hulu and other things currently locked out of ALL the retail offerings.
One thing worth mentioning here is that I have realized that while my Blu-Ray player can stream from a very very limited set of sites, one of those it can stream from is YouTube. And it has the ability to select from a couple of dozen of different national YouTube countries, as well as a global choice. I eventually realized that if I intercepted the DNS query for one of the less desirable national YouTube sites, I could return the URL of a local machine. And If I were to write a YouTube emulator to run on that machine then it could pretend to be YouTube to the Blu-Ray player and let me stream from a local computer. This is all still theory, but I'm wondering if any Slashdot users have taken it any farther. The DNS look-up should not be too tricky. Just a DNS "server" on a local system that looks up all requests except the YouTube target and passes the result back. then point the router to use that local machine as the DNS server. The YouTube emulation seems to be a bit more work, I'm wondering if anyone has done anything like this or knows of any existing package that would do it. Thanks.
Culture should not be owned.
And no reference to convicted rapist Mike Tyson should ever include the term "Culture".
Warner Brothers further stated that Mr. Whitmill failed to use any DRM when creating the tattoo, which would not only have protected the tattoo but also effectively served to keep it out of public domain even after the copyright expires, circumventing the intent of copyright law as spelled out in the Constitution.
Forget the Photoshopped death photos, I'm filing a FOI request for all of that porn.
How much computing power will be used to mine all of this data? How much energy will be spent on this project? How much CO2 will be released as a result?
new data showed that many of the planet's surface features were in the wrong place, sometimes off by as much as 30 kilometers (19 miles).
I find it hard to take seriously any "scientific" paper which refers to Titan as a planet rather than a moon.
Jim Whitehurst, please give details. What is your cut-off point below which, if I were to make a merit-less claim, that you would just pay me to go away rather than bother to involve the lawyers?
If we only had helium 3 we could easily have fusion and a limitless source of energy. Good thing that there are no other technical issues to resolve. So clearly we should take mining equipment to the moon, mine the helium 3 that might be there and then send it back to earth in huge rocket ships, no matter how much energy all of that expends. This message was brought to you by a former U.S. Senator, so you know there is no need to question the logic behind it.
I just checked out the link you gave for the Stargate movie. They were honest about the lack of extras (even the Stargate trailer), but I feel they were much too kind about print quality.
So I remain disappointed in Blu-ray. I still don't know how I can get an accurate and honest evaluation of the quality of a Blu-ray disc prior to purchase, and all in all I don't think that the consumer should expect to do several hours of research on a Blu-ray movie's quality before making an impulse purchase .Maybe I'm being completely unreasonable here, but I think the paying customer should have a right to expect better than DVD video quality when they buy a Blu-ray, and the studios should have enough sense to include at least much extra content as the DVD release, or at the very least let the Blu-ray download the missing content. Disappointing the paying customer just isn't wise. It is, however, just another thing that drives the customer to piracy rather than continuing to make purchases.
You're talking about the difference between renting and owning a copy. But if you are downloading a copy when you want to see the movie than you are most likely downloading not only a low res DVD copy but also a further compressed for lower bandwidth usage version. So you obviously don't care about quality at all, any crap is good enough for you. The discussion here was about (supposedly) higher quality Blu-Ray discs and DVDs, not about renting low quality video.
I bought a HD TV and a Blu-ray player last year. Since then I've purchased several Blu-ray discs, but I've been very disappointed in them. The most recent Blu-ray disc I purchased is the Extended cut of the movie Stargate. But the quality of the movie was awful (very grainy in most scenes) . I also came across a friend who had the extended cut of the DVD so I borrowed it so I could compare the two on the same screen. I couldn't see any significant difference in video quality, but if there was any difference at all it was that mine was grainier. But I certainly did see that the DVD release had a lot more content that the Blu-ray! The DVD had several "extras" including "making off" features and the films trailers, the Blu-ray did not! Curiously the Blu-ray did have English subtitles that the DVD lacked, but the DVD had Spanish subtitles that the Blu-ray lacked.
In theory, Blu-ray is capable of being much better than DVD. But if the studios are not going to provide a quality product, and just up-convert their DVD content and sell it as HD quality, then the format should die. And unfortunately, I know of no way for a consumer to determine if the Blu-ray is well made from an original HD source or just reprocessed low deff DVD content before they actually buy it.
What a nice advertisement for an article that costs $18.