"Gamers are getting older"? That's not news, time runs forwards. It'd be more surprising if gamers were getting younger, and I'm damned if I want to go through puberty again.... backwards.
"Casino Royale" is being sold in a bundle with the PS3 in my country. Could this be where many of the sales of that particular movie are coming from? You're right, I think this applies to the UK(?). At any rate, it's notable that companies love to manipulate sales figures to give the impression of market share. (My parents saved a lot of money on their last car because it was "pre-registered" by the makers so they could include it in "on the road" figures. Same unused car, but because it was somehow "second hand"- except it wasn't- they saved a bundle.) Casino Royale may be popular, but I have trouble believing it's really that far ahead without taking the promotion into account; and I've no doubt that Sony included those units in the "Sony's 'Casino Royale' smashed high-def records by shipping 100,00 units to retail"
I think the digg model works much better, the moderation is almost instaneous. Are you on crack? The Digg moderation is *totally* worthless. Half is rabid fanboys downvoting en masse *anything* that attacks their chosen obsession (typically Apple). Combine this with fairly incomprehensible moderation elsewhere (i.e. I look at it and can't fathom why that particular post was moderated that way), and you have a system that's totally useless for its intended purpose.
The lack of nesting makes it harder to filter out irrelevant discussion subtrees; in short, with Digg, you display all messages or you miss out. Slashdot's moderation may be far from perfect, but it's outstanding compared to the adolescent pack mentality on Digg.
Offtopic, my friend landed his helicopter on a lighthouse in England, and burned us a DVD of the video. He sent us it, and my stupid Sony DVD player refused to play it here in Canada. Not due to PAL, but it said Region Error. I thought we were a colony? Doesn't matter, Canada is part of region 1, along with the US; Europe is region 2. That having been said, I don't understand why a self-burned DVD would need to be region-coded by your friend's software.
That having been said, isn't there a region-setting hack available for your DVD player?
This entire thread is complete bullshit. Keys are not revoked via a network jack. Keys are revoked by the simple act of releasing new discs that don't support them. Well, yes; I believe that was the point. WinDVD is able to be updated over the Internet, but this option isn't available for the Samsung DVD player (etc). If that were the only way of updating the firmware, then the industry would be faced with a choice of revoking the keys (i.e. having future releases no longer support that player) or not revoking them, thus leaving the crack open for exploit.
Of course, this is not the case; there are likely other ways of updating firmware on "real" HD-DVD players, but they're likely to be less transparent to consumers.
Can't Slashdot do a minimal amount of copyediting to stories before posting them? "Possibly" "confirmed" appears on its face as a likely contradiction CowboyNeal reports that Slashdot will "definitely maybe" take up your suggestion. Noel Gallagher unavailable for comment.
A pathetic straw man is just as bad, cock gobbler. Someone calls me a "shithead" for no justifiable reason, I'll happily make a point by being as blunt in return. OTOH, you have no such reason except your third-rate AC-ness.
As for the straw man accusation, I didn't put words in the person's mouth; I explained where the implied meanings came from. The argument and its context don't make much sense otherwise, but please feel free to illustrate what the person actually meant if you disagree.
Compared to DRM encumbered files at half the bitrate, and especially compared to the rest of the industry, yes they are a bargin. Considering I already said that in the message you just replied to (""FWIW, I think the increased bitrate and no DRM is easily worth 30% over the standard format"), I'd say we're both in agreement, but that doesn't make you any less stupid. Go re-read the message you replied to; I'm not repeating it here.
Just STFU and go back to what you do best: sucking big, fat cocks. I like that you mention they have to be "big" and "fat". You evidently thought about that quite a bit...
That statement suggests that Oasis wrote songs that *weren't* uninspired and derivative of the Beatles. Oh no, I think Oasis are (and always have been, particularly during the mid-1990s) horrifically overrated and derivative. But it's all relative.
Their lyrics are mostly lousy; over-simplistic and brainless, not in any "genius simplicity" sense, they're just poor.
But for all that, I can accept that some of their stuff is decent if you're into that sort of thing; there are even one or two of their songs that I quite like (or liked, before I got sick of them). And ironically for a bunch of Beatles fetishists, some of their early stuff owes more to the likes of The Who and the Sex Pistols.
But they got into full Beatles-ripoff mode around the time of Be Here Now, their third album which was grossly overhyped, complete with the contrived-Beatles-style-references cover. Even their fans thought it was pretty mediocre. And "All Around the World" is a particularly formulaic and charmless Beatles copy.
Those damn "The 'New' AT&T" commercials with their stupid "all around the world..." theme. It sounds like a bad Oasis song. I'm not in the US, so I haven't seen this advert. However, Oasis *did* do a song called "All around the world" and it's one of their more lacklustre tunes; a somewhat uninspired and derivative Beatles-style song.
30% more isn't twice the price, shithead. I didn't say it was, fuckwit.
The AC's rewording of the comment implied that raising the price of songs with twice the bitrate by "only" 30% was actually a bargain; which is only true if you accept that they were in really worth a lot more than that. Perhaps, oh, I don't know... "something like twice the price". Which was what the argument basically implied.
They're also DRM free. That as may be, I was specifically debunking the AC's dubious argument, which rested entirely on the bitrate. FWIW, I think the increased bitrate and no DRM is easily worth 30% over the standard format (for me); whether or not the base price is worth it is another issue.
Spanking is definitely the way to go. I'm getting this horrible image of a business card or classified ad in my head:-
"I know you've been caught with your pants down using Windows XP. Naughty boys of open source call Mistress Richard now to receive your punishment. Strict discipline."
Next to this is a photo of Richard Stallman clad in PVC and leather, wearing high heels and wielding a whip.
I hear that Bill Gates already pays for this at least once a month.
a) Most rock/punk that I listen to doesn't exactly start off sounding really great and pristine in the first place. Can't say I've tried it with music, but on digital TV I notice that (on the lower bitrate channels), the older, lower-quality videos always seem to suffer much worse than the clean, new material.
d) Everyone consumes music differently (as well they should). [..] The effects of reimporting files are often way more negligible then the effects of the user environment, because in the long run, see c) And...
I doubt anyone that knows me and has worked with me would ever call me "clothears". They would, however, call me "smartass"... and I would totally agree with them!:^) The problem is that all the analysis above wasn't in your original comment; it wasn't even implied. All that contained was the implication that the only problem with DRM-encoded AAC was the inconvenience of ripping it, and that this was overstated. Which may be true for *some* people, but you didn't qualify it like that anyway. If you're going to be a smartass you have to be sure your sarcasm is watertight.:-)
Actually, I haven't looked into it, but I wonder if it's possible to rip the protection off AAC without having to transcode...
I vaguely remember hearing that there were *projects* named A300 and A600 respectively, but that the project named A600 was *not* the same as the machine actually released under the A600 name (i.e. the rebadged A300 project).
This may be bollocks however; I can't remember where I heard it now, and my memory is a little hazy.
This is great! Soon I can stop the relatively painless process of burning all my DRM tunes to audio CD and then re-importing them as nice manageable mp3s. God, that used to take minutes and minutes... ...and reduced the quality, smartass/clothears (delete as appropriate).
A standard is something defined by a standards organisation. Can you please link to a reputable source which clearly supports this definition, and makes clear what constitutes a "standards organisation" anyway?
When you produce a product without any eager customers, your product dies. Nobody (where "somebody" is defined as "a publisher of audio content") was asking for OGG, so why is anybody surprised that it didn't catch on? Whilst in truth there probably *isn't* that much demand for OGG, your suggestion that the publishers are the only driving force is misleading. If enough consumers had wanted OGG for encoding their own rips- even if the publishers didn't support it- it would likely be common on players now, albeit along with MP3/WMA/AAC/whatever.
Sure, but have they ever abused a monopoly to illegaly harm competition? Have they ever *had* a monopoly?
Have they ever made their OS phone home and refuse to update if they decide they don't like your serial key (oops, OS X doesn't use a serial key)? That's because it only runs on Apple's hardware and thus the issue isn't as important to their bottom line; Apple are primarily a hardware company.
That should be read as, "For that matter, Apple's just seen fit to raise the price of songs that are twice as high quality as previous ones by only 30%." This sounds somewhat apologist; your argument seems to rest on the unstated implication that songs with twice the bitrate are worth something like twice the price.
The 600 should have been aborted; it was neither a significant cost drop nor technology improvement. The 600 might have been worthwhile as a budget machine if it had been released at 60% of the actual price. As an A500 replacement, it was rubbish.
For CBM to keep its edge, it needed to release the 1200 at least a year earlier, and should have been with the 3K. Pretty much agrees with what I thought; the A1200 was a nice machine, but was really only keeping pace (at best) with PC specs. The market had already gained momentum away from the Amiga by that stage. Had it come out in mid-91 or earlier, things might've been different.
You want a good laugh? I was actually somewhat worried at the time that the MSN Network would provide serious competition for the Internet. Yeah, I know...
The A600 was, AFAIK, originally meant to be a cut-down budget Amiga known as the A300. It wasn't meant to be a replacement for the A500; I could go into why that was a bad idea. The A1200 was the "true" successor to the A500.
Meanwhile, IIRC, the CD32 did quite well in Europe during its limited lifetime, but it came out less than a year before C= went belly-up for other reasons (notably the owners/management running the company into the ground under practices it's been said would be illegal had the company still been based in the US, not the Bahamas).
CDTV was a massive flop though, and - although I (as an Amiga owner) wouldn't have admitted it at the time- it deserved to be. It was based on old A500/1.3OS tech at a time C= should have had a new Amiga out, and there was no software that really came close to justifying its high price tag for the average consumer. CD-I didn't really do that much better, it just seemed that Philips kept it "alive" by promoting it for longer (guess they had the money, fat lot of good it did them).
DCC has nothing to do with DAT, it was positioned as a competitor for MiniDisc My understanding was that DCC was designed following DAT's failure in the consumer market, with the intention of being cheaper to produce- DAT required spinning heads because of the bandwidth required by all that data, DCC was able to get away with fixed (i.e. cheaper) heads because it compressed the audio.
and lost out basically because you didn't have to rewind MiniDiscs. MiniDisc may have been a success in Japan, but elsewhere any victory was (to the best of my knowledge) very much relative. From what I've heard (might be wrong), MiniDisc is pretty much regarded as a failure in North America.
Here in Western Europe, neither DCC nor MiniDisc were initially successful when they launched in the early-90s. The DCC flopped completely; however, for some reason, MiniDisc enjoyed a period of moderate popularity in Europe during the late-1990s/early-2000s, several years after its launch. Don't know why; maybe the cost came down. It was never massively popular in the way that CDs/LPs/Cassettes were, and it's pretty much been superseded by iPods and other large-capacity MP3 players...
Anyway, DAT at least sold well as a niche product (and it's only a "niche" relative to the massive consumer market). DCC was never intended as anything other than a consumer product, and failed completely; they should have put that on the list instead of DAT.
Nice try, but the PSP already has a working PS1 emulator The GP2X isn't reliant on commercial support, so from that point-of-view it doesn't matter if it remains an obscurity by mainstream standards. In fact, I doubt anyone buying one is expecting otherwise, or is particularly bothered by this.
It's purpose isn't to compete with the PSP and DS (a fight it would inevitably lose badly); it's a niche homebrew machine, and isn't pretending otherwise.
The PSP is *not* a great choice for homebrew. Don't get me wrong, the specs are great, and it would be an outstanding machine if Sony weren't intent on locking it down; but they keep pulling tricks like requiring updates that lock out the loopholes that homebrew relies upon. Sure, you can choose not to upgrade your system (and not run new games) or wait until (inevitably) a new loophole is found, but all this is fiddly. Which is why if hacking/homebrew is your main intent, the PSP is not the ideal choice. Similar arguments apply to the Nintendo DS; I have one and enjoy it, but I would go for the GP2X if hacking/homebrew were my priority.
Slashdot Mirror
"Gamers are getting older"? That's not news, time runs forwards. It'd be more surprising if gamers were getting younger, and I'm damned if I want to go through puberty again.... backwards.
Look elsewhere in the thread; Casino Royale is being bundled with many PS3s.
The lack of nesting makes it harder to filter out irrelevant discussion subtrees; in short, with Digg, you display all messages or you miss out. Slashdot's moderation may be far from perfect, but it's outstanding compared to the adolescent pack mentality on Digg.
That having been said, isn't there a region-setting hack available for your DVD player?
Of course, this is not the case; there are likely other ways of updating firmware on "real" HD-DVD players, but they're likely to be less transparent to consumers.
As for the straw man accusation, I didn't put words in the person's mouth; I explained where the implied meanings came from. The argument and its context don't make much sense otherwise, but please feel free to illustrate what the person actually meant if you disagree. Compared to DRM encumbered files at half the bitrate, and especially compared to the rest of the industry, yes they are a bargin. Considering I already said that in the message you just replied to (""FWIW, I think the increased bitrate and no DRM is easily worth 30% over the standard format"), I'd say we're both in agreement, but that doesn't make you any less stupid. Go re-read the message you replied to; I'm not repeating it here. Just STFU and go back to what you do best: sucking big, fat cocks. I like that you mention they have to be "big" and "fat". You evidently thought about that quite a bit...
Their lyrics are mostly lousy; over-simplistic and brainless, not in any "genius simplicity" sense, they're just poor.
But for all that, I can accept that some of their stuff is decent if you're into that sort of thing; there are even one or two of their songs that I quite like (or liked, before I got sick of them). And ironically for a bunch of Beatles fetishists, some of their early stuff owes more to the likes of The Who and the Sex Pistols.
But they got into full Beatles-ripoff mode around the time of Be Here Now, their third album which was grossly overhyped, complete with the contrived-Beatles-style-references cover. Even their fans thought it was pretty mediocre. And "All Around the World" is a particularly formulaic and charmless Beatles copy.
The AC's rewording of the comment implied that raising the price of songs with twice the bitrate by "only" 30% was actually a bargain; which is only true if you accept that they were in really worth a lot more than that. Perhaps, oh, I don't know... "something like twice the price". Which was what the argument basically implied. They're also DRM free. That as may be, I was specifically debunking the AC's dubious argument, which rested entirely on the bitrate. FWIW, I think the increased bitrate and no DRM is easily worth 30% over the standard format (for me); whether or not the base price is worth it is another issue.
"I know you've been caught with your pants down using Windows XP. Naughty boys of open source call Mistress Richard now to receive your punishment. Strict discipline."
Next to this is a photo of Richard Stallman clad in PVC and leather, wearing high heels and wielding a whip.
I hear that Bill Gates already pays for this at least once a month.
Actually, I haven't looked into it, but I wonder if it's possible to rip the protection off AAC without having to transcode...
I vaguely remember hearing that there were *projects* named A300 and A600 respectively, but that the project named A600 was *not* the same as the machine actually released under the A600 name (i.e. the rebadged A300 project).
This may be bollocks however; I can't remember where I heard it now, and my memory is a little hazy.
You want a good laugh? I was actually somewhat worried at the time that the MSN Network would provide serious competition for the Internet. Yeah, I know...
The A600 was, AFAIK, originally meant to be a cut-down budget Amiga known as the A300. It wasn't meant to be a replacement for the A500; I could go into why that was a bad idea. The A1200 was the "true" successor to the A500.
Meanwhile, IIRC, the CD32 did quite well in Europe during its limited lifetime, but it came out less than a year before C= went belly-up for other reasons (notably the owners/management running the company into the ground under practices it's been said would be illegal had the company still been based in the US, not the Bahamas).
CDTV was a massive flop though, and - although I (as an Amiga owner) wouldn't have admitted it at the time- it deserved to be. It was based on old A500/1.3OS tech at a time C= should have had a new Amiga out, and there was no software that really came close to justifying its high price tag for the average consumer. CD-I didn't really do that much better, it just seemed that Philips kept it "alive" by promoting it for longer (guess they had the money, fat lot of good it did them).
and lost out basically because you didn't have to rewind MiniDiscs. MiniDisc may have been a success in Japan, but elsewhere any victory was (to the best of my knowledge) very much relative. From what I've heard (might be wrong), MiniDisc is pretty much regarded as a failure in North America.
Here in Western Europe, neither DCC nor MiniDisc were initially successful when they launched in the early-90s. The DCC flopped completely; however, for some reason, MiniDisc enjoyed a period of moderate popularity in Europe during the late-1990s/early-2000s, several years after its launch. Don't know why; maybe the cost came down. It was never massively popular in the way that CDs/LPs/Cassettes were, and it's pretty much been superseded by iPods and other large-capacity MP3 players...
Anyway, DAT at least sold well as a niche product (and it's only a "niche" relative to the massive consumer market). DCC was never intended as anything other than a consumer product, and failed completely; they should have put that on the list instead of DAT.
...stole way too much of my childhood. That was Matthew Smith, not Jeff Minter.It's purpose isn't to compete with the PSP and DS (a fight it would inevitably lose badly); it's a niche homebrew machine, and isn't pretending otherwise.
The PSP is *not* a great choice for homebrew. Don't get me wrong, the specs are great, and it would be an outstanding machine if Sony weren't intent on locking it down; but they keep pulling tricks like requiring updates that lock out the loopholes that homebrew relies upon. Sure, you can choose not to upgrade your system (and not run new games) or wait until (inevitably) a new loophole is found, but all this is fiddly. Which is why if hacking/homebrew is your main intent, the PSP is not the ideal choice. Similar arguments apply to the Nintendo DS; I have one and enjoy it, but I would go for the GP2X if hacking/homebrew were my priority.