But it can put third party uncopyrightable data on torrent. PII and other facts are not copyrightable, nor is an exhaustive collection of facts (at least in the United States). Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service.
Does confidentiality hinge on whether the information is copyrightable? If not, your argument is flawed. Just because something isn't a copyright violation doesn't- I would assume- automatically make it legal in other respects.
(And no, IANAL, and this whole sub-discussion is probably the usual pointless leading of the blind by the blind that constitutes legal discussions on/. , but that's another kettle of fish).
Ob.-disclaimer: I don't live in the US, and IANAL- but unless I see clear evidence that you are too, you'll excuse my scepticism...
After a bankruptcy, the new holders of the servers can do anything they please with the data on the boxes.
I'm going to say "[citation needed]" here, because it damn well is(!). Even though AFAIK the US is generally more laissez faire and less strict with info in general than the EU- where, as the other poster mentioned, they'd get smacked into a pulp for doing anything approaching what you describe- I'm still not remotely convinced that any new owners would be legally permitted to sell bank account details, HR records et al with no comeback, simply because they happened to have got their hands on some old hard drives that had that info on them.
The info doesn't belong to the liquidated company, but to the company that had hired that company's services. I don't know the legal position with respect to such info, but I'd be damn surprised if it was okay to sell it.
Trade secret? By law, it isn't a trade secret anymore.
"By law?" Are you sure? And if you're implying that it wouldn't be a trade secret because it was leaked (and we accept that what you're saying is true), would this make the original *cause* of that leak- i.e. random-new-owner-of-the-server-hard-drives releasing it, possibly for money- legal?
One of the downsides of cloud computing is that all data [..] can easily be made public to sell to all comers should a cloud provider go bankrupt or change hands. No amount of paperwork can ever go to assure against that.
No paperwork can protect against leaking in the process of a sell-off, or stop someone selling it off, even if it's illegal, so that should be borne in mind. However, the main thrust of your argument, that activity like this *wouldn't* be illegal- is more questionable.
I'm not saying that you're definitely wrong, just that I'm not taking what you're saying on trust... and also that I'd be pretty shocked if it were true(!)
CD-text would have been good, but hey, expecting CDs to work in a 'computer-ish' manner (like reading files) wasn't happening till the mid 90's. I mean, I didn't have a cd-rom in a computer till '95 I think. Before that you looked at CDs as simply music items, like a tape.
Except that we weren't talking about "computer-ish... reading files", 90s style multimedia, et al. We were talking about something *far* more straightforward that would have been very simple to add to the CD specification- a few short strings identifying the track names and artist. That's something that even your technophobic early-1980s consumer would have appreciated and been impressed by, and should have been an obvious "easy add" feature even at the time.
As I mentioned elsewhere, the increase in mastering complexity would have been negligible (probably could have slapped ASCII-style-encoded strings in the subchannels), the space required would have been laughably small next to the 650MB capacity, and early players could simply have ignored the information in favour of simple track numbers if the text displays would have been too expensive and/or complex to implement at its launch. (Or rather, *if* that last reason was why the feature wasn't included, it would have been laughably short-sighted for a format that was otherwise state-of-the-art and cutting edge at its launch)
So IMHO the lack of text *was* a short-sighted failing of the CD spec, albeit a side-issue that doesn't really detract from its main technical achievements per se.
Perhaps, but there is no excuse for not including meta-information like track names. That would only have taken up less than 1Kb
Well, yes, but that's something entirely different to the point you were originally trying to make.
For what it's worth, I *do* however agree on this point 100% and I've made it myself in the past. Some have argued that full-text information displays would have been too expensive/complex to implement when the CD format launched. However, if that *had* been the reason it would have been extremely short-sighted; technology was moving all the time and it should have been doable in the near future- all they had to do was include it in the spec, and the early players could just have ignored the information. (One cynical guess is that perhaps they didn't want their early players to be seen not being able to implement something that was in the CD spec itself).
I seriously doubt that including it would have increased the mastering complexity by a significant amount, and it certainly wouldn't have taken up much of the 650MB of space on the disc, a few kilobytes at most even if they were being generous. (Incidentally, 650MB would have been a shockingly large amount of storage for a consumer product in 1982!)
As others have mentioned, CD Text was meant to be a solution, but (according to Wikipedia) it didn't come out until 1996, 14 years after the format launched and long after it had become established.
320 kbps is not bad, but I once downloaded music in 96kbps. It sounded like absolute shit, of course, but the person who encoded it didn't realize he was doing it seriously wrong.
I'm not really defending 96kbps- at least, not for MP3- because I doubt that you could *ever* get great sound at that bitrate. But using files you downloaded (possibly years ago) as an example is flawed.
I downloaded quite a few tracks during the early-2000s. They were 128kbps- the de facto standard bitrate at that time. Many of them *were* obviously poor quality and demonstrated why 128kbps MP3s were maligned by those who cared about sound quality. But the thing is, I encoded many of my own MP3s at 128kbps, and they were *miles* better. Not hifi, but significantly better.
Why? One major cause was likely the encoder. Apparently a lot of the early MP3 encoders that came with the popular software of the time were very crude and poor-quality. On the other hand, I was using a "lame"-derived encoder (lame was considered one of the best encoders back then). Plus, it's possible that some of them were transcoded and/or re-converted. In short, you can't blame poor sound quality solely on the bitrate, particularly where Napster-era MP3s are concerned.
That said, the guy should probably have realised that they sounded awful. But then, my Dad appeared happy with the (very low) default encoding bitrate of Windows Media Player a few years back, even though *I* could hear artifacts so obvious they showed up clearly even on the sub-£10 speakers that came with the computer.
You seem to forget that the equipment required to decode and handle even uncompressed CD audio would have been very complicated by early-1980s standards. And for any very primitive compression techniques that they could have come up with, you could have used the "wait a bit longer" argument because something better would have come along soon, all the way up to the early-1990s when the compressed MiniDisc media came out.
Oh, except the compression on that is crude by modern standards, so you could argue that they should have waited a bit longer... and a bit longer....
Yes, it would have been an *excellent* idea for them to have postponed the CD by 20 years! *cough*
You weren't around to remember how CDs were originally packaged? The jewel case was put in a 12" long cardboard box [yormeister.be] up until 1993 [latimes.com]
Eh? Is that true?! I live in the UK and bought CDs from the late-1980s onwards, and I don't recall *ever* having seen one inside one of those stupid longbox designs.
The article implies that this was a US-only thing ("[switch to jewel boxes] as is already done in virtually every other country?"), but I'd expect to have at least heard of it anyway. I thought they'd only use packaging like that for stupid, contrived, multi-disc box sets.
I was sitting at some distance from the screen when I read that headline, and I genuinely thought it said "Smell Like an Oric".
I thought some enterprising British company had created some weird-ass fragrance that smelled like retro computer plastic or something. Not entirely unlike this or these guys (*)
Smell like an Orc? Not so much. I thought that (a) your stereotype geek was already pretty competent at that, and (b) it wasn't something that would normally be considered desirable.:-)
(*) Disclaimer; the idea is interesting, but I should warn you that the company's own online shop had some absolutely stinking (ahem) reviews for its poor service according to a website I read a few years back. Might have changed since, I don't know.
MSFT realized the threat and extended XP's life because that was easier than cutting down windows 7 to fit on the first few Netbooks.
Windows 7 wasn't even around when the first wave of netbooks came out circa late-2007, early-2008. In fact, it was two years away at that point.
Windows Vista *was* however. And you probably didn't want to run that on a first-generation netbook at all...
AFAIK it was being caught unaware by the netbook craze that caused them to optimise Windows 7 (*) and make it the first version of Windows that ran faster on existing hardware than its predecessor.
(*) Yes, admittedly Windows 7 is effectively Windows Vista Massively-Improved-A-Lot-of-the-Stuff-that-Sucked-with-the-Original-Release-Second-Edition, but they obviously didn't want the baggage of the now-tainted Vista name.
What's wrong with just burning them? Why would someone ever want to waste 150,000 volts to erase a little bit of data on a single disc when you could erase as many as you can toss in for the low, low energy cost of a single burning log?
Er, I believe that I'm stating the bleeding obvious here when I say "because it's cool and fun".
Really, did you seriously think the guy was doing it that way for any other reason, or seriously suggesting it as a practical solution to your disk-wiping needs?!!
Well this doesn't really "Erase" the data either. The pits are still in the plastic, just apply a new reflective backing and the disk is readable again.
Best is to simply break the disk up either manually or in a shredder.
Yeah, that's what I thought as well. Still, let's be honest, it was pretty good fun, as you'd expect from the same guy that brought you the self-destructing washing machine. (I recognised his voice on this clip straight away, the accent/style/modus-operandi combo is pretty distinctive once you've seen some of his other videos!)
Remember when Seagate bought Maxtor in 2006? You are really having trouble with Maxtor drives that are now branded Seagate.
Oh, SNAP!
I was about to suggest the same thing, because I remember prior to the takeover Seagate seemed to be going through a phase of being pretty reliable- even their cheaper drives- and I was quite happy to buy them. Whereas Maxtor's reputation was... not so good.
When the news came through, my first thought was "uh, oh...", because I knew that exactly what you described was going to happen. Namely that drives from the former-Maxtor factories were going to be rebranded as Seagate, and it would be hard to be sure in advance whether you would get a "true" Seagate or something from the ex-Maxtor plants when ordering. It put me off Seagate.
I was helping my Dad choose replacement drives for his antique computer a year or two back, and it was getting hard to get IDEs even then. Seagates were the only ones easily available in the capacity he was after, so despite my misgivings- which were only theoretical and based on the above reasoning at this point- he went for them, and of course, both failed sooner rather than later. The Western Digitals he currently has seem to be fine.
Of course, the takeover was years ago now, and you'd have expected the two operations to be more fully merged now and the distinction less meaningful. Though one would have hoped that Seagate would bring the ex-Maxtor's standards up, it looks like Maxtor dragged Seagate down...
That's the advantage of the PS3- the BluRay updates just happen.
Well, yeah, but the PS3 is significantly more expensive than the $100 budget price point (i.e. the current bottom of the market) he was using to argue his case. It may be worth it if you're interested in "Infamous 2", "Uncharted 3" and "Sequel 7"- which of course is the PS3's primary selling point!- but not everyone (including myself) is, and if all you want is a Blu-Ray player, you're not going to fork out a large amount of money for a PS3, regardless of how nice its updates are.
Anyway, the reason this is a problem is down to the studios' rabid DRM-regardless-of-how-it-affects-the-consumer approach which is a fundamental feature and flaw of the format rather than of any particular player. This IMHO is likely to become more of a problem as- and if- Blu-Ray becomes more mainstream, as the price falls and it moves out of the current market of tech-savvy people who have the money, inclination and interest to know about and tolerate its foibles. When it gets cheap enough that the random man on the street is able to buy a craptastic all-in-one "Home Theatre" Blu-Ray setup for his rebranded bottom-of-the-range HD TV, he's going to be pissed off when he doesn't understand- nor care- why the new Blu-Ray disc he got doesn't work in his machine, and why he has to mess about with updating it, which will probably cause him problems if his cheapass player isn't user-friendly or the random importer has stopped supplying updates.
Yeah, this is a problem with the cheapass player, but it wouldn't be a problem if it wasn't for the more fundamental problem inherent in the control-freak Blu-Ray format and its placing of copy protection over usability.
Well that and a dvd burner is 20 bucks whereas a bluray burner is about $100
That also applies to the "player sales" figure. If the sales of 20 million units are split by number (as implied), then the DVD unit sales will be worth way less, and- I suspect- cheap, crap-quality replacements (for the last cheap, crap-quality DVD player that the person bought 18 months before), which like its predecessor will likely break and be replaced sooner rather than later.
And because of this high turnover of treated-as-disposable-cheap-crap DVD players, we can assume that such sales represent a significant proportion of current DVD owners/users, and in fact Blu-Ray is doing well to get that high, given that it's more expensive and most units sold at this stage are likely for genuine "new adopters".
So the Blu-Ray sales figure is probably way higher in financial terms, and also probably better in terms of numbers than the original assertion appears to imply on the surface.
Maybe they changed some aspects of his character for the big-budget Hollywood remake (Michael Bay is due to start work on it soon, with an early-2012 release date expected)... God knows many people never forgave Uwe Boll for his "Ivor the Engine" movie;-)
So it's a draw. After all, if you can't hear them scream, who cares if they die a horrible death because the flesh-eating microbes just ate the gonads ??
If there's going to be any ball-eating, Mr. T is going to be the one to do it.
The i7 is effectively a pentium 1 on steroids, but that doesn't make it 18 years old....
The i7 isn't really a Pentium 1 on steroids, they just took care to make it look that way to legacy code. The i7 and all Intel processors from the Pentium Pro/Pentium II (i.e. the original Pentium's immediate successors) onwards have been sort-of-RISC cores with a microcode translation layer on the outside.
Let me rephrase that- you can see the flicker on a 50Hz *CRT* PAL set of the type that were used up until recent years.
That said, CRTs have disappeared en masse in the past few years, and if I wasn't so used to watching my own CRT portable it might have occurred to me that he was likely talking about LCD sets, which makes less sense- either that or he was last in Europe a few years back, since as you point out, LCDs don't "flicker" in that way.
You can see the flicker on a 50Hz PAL TV set on (e.g.) large areas of white. OTOH, IMHO it's not noticeably "jerky" in the way that 24fps film material is on pans and the like.
Video Games, as an art, are relatively young. Film has over a hundred years behind it, while games have merely forty [..] One can hardly expect an adolescent to have the same capacities as a fully grown adult.
Funny that you should compare video games to an adolescent. I've long thought that the industry's current obsession with seeing its own "maturity" and development in terms of comparing itself to the film industry as a sign of its underlying *immaturity*.
Right now the focus seems to be on pretentious, self-congratulatory attempts at cinema-mimicking narrative and emotional depth through self-consciously (*relatively*) big budget, cheesily-written sequences played out via horrid, unconvincing and mannequin-like CGI characters and patting themselves on the back at how "close" they are to cinematic quality (they aren't). It's more reminiscent of a teenager that wants to see themselves as mature, to be associated with those who get more respect... whose wannabe maturity really indicates the lack of just that.
When the video game industry has developed its own conventions, like cinema did when it moved out of the shadow of the theatre, when it realises that video games aren't- or shouldn't be- the same as films and start doing things on their own terms.... then *that* will be when it has grown up.
Somewhere around 2015 to 2020, at our current rate of advances over the last 40 years, we can expect to have storage devices that hold Peta-Bytes of storage.
Here's what I was *going* to say:-
As this is a new technology, past performance of existing technologies isn't necessarily an accurate prediction, even assuming we can accurately extrapolate those. Plus there have been very many cutting-edge and well-hyped technologies that have fallen by the wayside or failed to deliver the miracles promised- this article is the guy's own claims for the technology, so I'll take them with a pinch of sa...(Reads linked article more closely and checks date)
That article dates back to February 2006! That's over five years ago, so we should have had your claimed petabyte storage for a couple of months now!
I think I just proved my own point:-)
But anyway, the "current rate of advances over the last 40 years" is misleading, because hard drive sizes (for example) were growing *much* faster during the 90s and early-2000s than they are today. Still fast, but not quite the explosive speed they were growing at back then.
Even flash memory's seemingly rapid growth four or so years ago seems to have slowed down a little.
In short, it might happen, it might not. We'll have more storage in a few years time, but at current (i.e. past 2-5 years) rates, it's not going to be silly amounts, just a few times more.
see Nikon fans posting crap - usually in the form of gross misinformation to "prove" their choice of camera is better, completely ignoring the fact that they're just tools
Hey, even complete tools are allowed to have opinions!
Slashdot Mirror
But it can put third party uncopyrightable data on torrent. PII and other facts are not copyrightable, nor is an exhaustive collection of facts (at least in the United States). Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service.
Does confidentiality hinge on whether the information is copyrightable? If not, your argument is flawed. Just because something isn't a copyright violation doesn't- I would assume- automatically make it legal in other respects.
/. , but that's another kettle of fish).
(And no, IANAL, and this whole sub-discussion is probably the usual pointless leading of the blind by the blind that constitutes legal discussions on
After a bankruptcy, the new holders of the servers can do anything they please with the data on the boxes.
I'm going to say "[citation needed]" here, because it damn well is(!). Even though AFAIK the US is generally more laissez faire and less strict with info in general than the EU- where, as the other poster mentioned, they'd get smacked into a pulp for doing anything approaching what you describe- I'm still not remotely convinced that any new owners would be legally permitted to sell bank account details, HR records et al with no comeback, simply because they happened to have got their hands on some old hard drives that had that info on them.
The info doesn't belong to the liquidated company, but to the company that had hired that company's services. I don't know the legal position with respect to such info, but I'd be damn surprised if it was okay to sell it.
Trade secret? By law, it isn't a trade secret anymore.
"By law?" Are you sure? And if you're implying that it wouldn't be a trade secret because it was leaked (and we accept that what you're saying is true), would this make the original *cause* of that leak- i.e. random-new-owner-of-the-server-hard-drives releasing it, possibly for money- legal?
One of the downsides of cloud computing is that all data [..] can easily be made public to sell to all comers should a cloud provider go bankrupt or change hands. No amount of paperwork can ever go to assure against that.
No paperwork can protect against leaking in the process of a sell-off, or stop someone selling it off, even if it's illegal, so that should be borne in mind. However, the main thrust of your argument, that activity like this *wouldn't* be illegal- is more questionable.
I'm not saying that you're definitely wrong, just that I'm not taking what you're saying on trust... and also that I'd be pretty shocked if it were true(!)
CD-text would have been good, but hey, expecting CDs to work in a 'computer-ish' manner (like reading files) wasn't happening till the mid 90's. I mean, I didn't have a cd-rom in a computer till '95 I think. Before that you looked at CDs as simply music items, like a tape.
Except that we weren't talking about "computer-ish... reading files", 90s style multimedia, et al. We were talking about something *far* more straightforward that would have been very simple to add to the CD specification- a few short strings identifying the track names and artist. That's something that even your technophobic early-1980s consumer would have appreciated and been impressed by, and should have been an obvious "easy add" feature even at the time.
As I mentioned elsewhere, the increase in mastering complexity would have been negligible (probably could have slapped ASCII-style-encoded strings in the subchannels), the space required would have been laughably small next to the 650MB capacity, and early players could simply have ignored the information in favour of simple track numbers if the text displays would have been too expensive and/or complex to implement at its launch. (Or rather, *if* that last reason was why the feature wasn't included, it would have been laughably short-sighted for a format that was otherwise state-of-the-art and cutting edge at its launch)
So IMHO the lack of text *was* a short-sighted failing of the CD spec, albeit a side-issue that doesn't really detract from its main technical achievements per se.
Perhaps, but there is no excuse for not including meta-information like track names. That would only have taken up less than 1Kb
Well, yes, but that's something entirely different to the point you were originally trying to make.
For what it's worth, I *do* however agree on this point 100% and I've made it myself in the past. Some have argued that full-text information displays would have been too expensive/complex to implement when the CD format launched. However, if that *had* been the reason it would have been extremely short-sighted; technology was moving all the time and it should have been doable in the near future- all they had to do was include it in the spec, and the early players could just have ignored the information. (One cynical guess is that perhaps they didn't want their early players to be seen not being able to implement something that was in the CD spec itself).
I seriously doubt that including it would have increased the mastering complexity by a significant amount, and it certainly wouldn't have taken up much of the 650MB of space on the disc, a few kilobytes at most even if they were being generous. (Incidentally, 650MB would have been a shockingly large amount of storage for a consumer product in 1982!)
As others have mentioned, CD Text was meant to be a solution, but (according to Wikipedia) it didn't come out until 1996, 14 years after the format launched and long after it had become established.
320 kbps is not bad, but I once downloaded music in 96kbps. It sounded like absolute shit, of course, but the person who encoded it didn't realize he was doing it seriously wrong.
I'm not really defending 96kbps- at least, not for MP3- because I doubt that you could *ever* get great sound at that bitrate. But using files you downloaded (possibly years ago) as an example is flawed.
I downloaded quite a few tracks during the early-2000s. They were 128kbps- the de facto standard bitrate at that time. Many of them *were* obviously poor quality and demonstrated why 128kbps MP3s were maligned by those who cared about sound quality. But the thing is, I encoded many of my own MP3s at 128kbps, and they were *miles* better. Not hifi, but significantly better.
Why? One major cause was likely the encoder. Apparently a lot of the early MP3 encoders that came with the popular software of the time were very crude and poor-quality. On the other hand, I was using a "lame"-derived encoder (lame was considered one of the best encoders back then). Plus, it's possible that some of them were transcoded and/or re-converted. In short, you can't blame poor sound quality solely on the bitrate, particularly where Napster-era MP3s are concerned.
That said, the guy should probably have realised that they sounded awful. But then, my Dad appeared happy with the (very low) default encoding bitrate of Windows Media Player a few years back, even though *I* could hear artifacts so obvious they showed up clearly even on the sub-£10 speakers that came with the computer.
You seem to forget that the equipment required to decode and handle even uncompressed CD audio would have been very complicated by early-1980s standards. And for any very primitive compression techniques that they could have come up with, you could have used the "wait a bit longer" argument because something better would have come along soon, all the way up to the early-1990s when the compressed MiniDisc media came out.
Oh, except the compression on that is crude by modern standards, so you could argue that they should have waited a bit longer... and a bit longer....
Yes, it would have been an *excellent* idea for them to have postponed the CD by 20 years! *cough*
You weren't around to remember how CDs were originally packaged? The jewel case was put in a 12" long cardboard box [yormeister.be] up until 1993 [latimes.com]
Eh? Is that true?! I live in the UK and bought CDs from the late-1980s onwards, and I don't recall *ever* having seen one inside one of those stupid longbox designs.
The article implies that this was a US-only thing ("[switch to jewel boxes] as is already done in virtually every other country?"), but I'd expect to have at least heard of it anyway. I thought they'd only use packaging like that for stupid, contrived, multi-disc box sets.
I was sitting at some distance from the screen when I read that headline, and I genuinely thought it said "Smell Like an Oric".
:-)
I thought some enterprising British company had created some weird-ass fragrance that smelled like retro computer plastic or something. Not entirely unlike this or these guys (*)
Smell like an Orc? Not so much. I thought that (a) your stereotype geek was already pretty competent at that, and (b) it wasn't something that would normally be considered desirable.
(*) Disclaimer; the idea is interesting, but I should warn you that the company's own online shop had some absolutely stinking (ahem) reviews for its poor service according to a website I read a few years back. Might have changed since, I don't know.
MSFT realized the threat and extended XP's life because that was easier than cutting down windows 7 to fit on the first few Netbooks.
Windows 7 wasn't even around when the first wave of netbooks came out circa late-2007, early-2008. In fact, it was two years away at that point.
Windows Vista *was* however. And you probably didn't want to run that on a first-generation netbook at all...
AFAIK it was being caught unaware by the netbook craze that caused them to optimise Windows 7 (*) and make it the first version of Windows that ran faster on existing hardware than its predecessor.
(*) Yes, admittedly Windows 7 is effectively Windows Vista Massively-Improved-A-Lot-of-the-Stuff-that-Sucked-with-the-Original-Release-Second-Edition, but they obviously didn't want the baggage of the now-tainted Vista name.
Microsoft have also commented that their tablet "ain't done until Linux won't run".
What's wrong with just burning them? Why would someone ever want to waste 150,000 volts to erase a little bit of data on a single disc when you could erase as many as you can toss in for the low, low energy cost of a single burning log?
Er, I believe that I'm stating the bleeding obvious here when I say "because it's cool and fun".
Really, did you seriously think the guy was doing it that way for any other reason, or seriously suggesting it as a practical solution to your disk-wiping needs?!!
Well this doesn't really "Erase" the data either. The pits are still in the plastic, just apply a new reflective backing and the disk is readable again. Best is to simply break the disk up either manually or in a shredder.
Yeah, that's what I thought as well. Still, let's be honest, it was pretty good fun, as you'd expect from the same guy that brought you the self-destructing washing machine. (I recognised his voice on this clip straight away, the accent/style/modus-operandi combo is pretty distinctive once you've seen some of his other videos!)
Remember when Seagate bought Maxtor in 2006? You are really having trouble with Maxtor drives that are now branded Seagate.
Oh, SNAP!
I was about to suggest the same thing, because I remember prior to the takeover Seagate seemed to be going through a phase of being pretty reliable- even their cheaper drives- and I was quite happy to buy them. Whereas Maxtor's reputation was... not so good.
When the news came through, my first thought was "uh, oh...", because I knew that exactly what you described was going to happen. Namely that drives from the former-Maxtor factories were going to be rebranded as Seagate, and it would be hard to be sure in advance whether you would get a "true" Seagate or something from the ex-Maxtor plants when ordering. It put me off Seagate.
I was helping my Dad choose replacement drives for his antique computer a year or two back, and it was getting hard to get IDEs even then. Seagates were the only ones easily available in the capacity he was after, so despite my misgivings- which were only theoretical and based on the above reasoning at this point- he went for them, and of course, both failed sooner rather than later. The Western Digitals he currently has seem to be fine.
Of course, the takeover was years ago now, and you'd have expected the two operations to be more fully merged now and the distinction less meaningful. Though one would have hoped that Seagate would bring the ex-Maxtor's standards up, it looks like Maxtor dragged Seagate down...
That's the advantage of the PS3- the BluRay updates just happen.
Well, yeah, but the PS3 is significantly more expensive than the $100 budget price point (i.e. the current bottom of the market) he was using to argue his case. It may be worth it if you're interested in "Infamous 2", "Uncharted 3" and "Sequel 7"- which of course is the PS3's primary selling point!- but not everyone (including myself) is, and if all you want is a Blu-Ray player, you're not going to fork out a large amount of money for a PS3, regardless of how nice its updates are.
Anyway, the reason this is a problem is down to the studios' rabid DRM-regardless-of-how-it-affects-the-consumer approach which is a fundamental feature and flaw of the format rather than of any particular player. This IMHO is likely to become more of a problem as- and if- Blu-Ray becomes more mainstream, as the price falls and it moves out of the current market of tech-savvy people who have the money, inclination and interest to know about and tolerate its foibles. When it gets cheap enough that the random man on the street is able to buy a craptastic all-in-one "Home Theatre" Blu-Ray setup for his rebranded bottom-of-the-range HD TV, he's going to be pissed off when he doesn't understand- nor care- why the new Blu-Ray disc he got doesn't work in his machine, and why he has to mess about with updating it, which will probably cause him problems if his cheapass player isn't user-friendly or the random importer has stopped supplying updates.
Yeah, this is a problem with the cheapass player, but it wouldn't be a problem if it wasn't for the more fundamental problem inherent in the control-freak Blu-Ray format and its placing of copy protection over usability.
Well that and a dvd burner is 20 bucks whereas a bluray burner is about $100
That also applies to the "player sales" figure. If the sales of 20 million units are split by number (as implied), then the DVD unit sales will be worth way less, and- I suspect- cheap, crap-quality replacements (for the last cheap, crap-quality DVD player that the person bought 18 months before), which like its predecessor will likely break and be replaced sooner rather than later.
And because of this high turnover of treated-as-disposable-cheap-crap DVD players, we can assume that such sales represent a significant proportion of current DVD owners/users, and in fact Blu-Ray is doing well to get that high, given that it's more expensive and most units sold at this stage are likely for genuine "new adopters".
So the Blu-Ray sales figure is probably way higher in financial terms, and also probably better in terms of numbers than the original assertion appears to imply on the surface.
Yes, there is huge difference between US gov and Chinese gov.
He didn't say that there wasn't. He said that the US government would probably take advantage of a similar opportunity, thats all.
Of course, given the somewhat rudimentary level of your political insight...
You are a fag.
...it's hardly surprising that you don't get that. :-)
I get some American dude that killed people.
That's odd, I always thought the most likely match for "Noggin the Nog" would be some fictitious Norse guy from an old kids' TV series.
;-)
Maybe they changed some aspects of his character for the big-budget Hollywood remake (Michael Bay is due to start work on it soon, with an early-2012 release date expected)... God knows many people never forgave Uwe Boll for his "Ivor the Engine" movie
So it's a draw. After all, if you can't hear them scream, who cares if they die a horrible death because the flesh-eating microbes just ate the gonads ??
If there's going to be any ball-eating, Mr. T is going to be the one to do it.
The i7 is effectively a pentium 1 on steroids, but that doesn't make it 18 years old....
The i7 isn't really a Pentium 1 on steroids, they just took care to make it look that way to legacy code. The i7 and all Intel processors from the Pentium Pro/Pentium II (i.e. the original Pentium's immediate successors) onwards have been sort-of-RISC cores with a microcode translation layer on the outside.
Let me rephrase that- you can see the flicker on a 50Hz *CRT* PAL set of the type that were used up until recent years.
That said, CRTs have disappeared en masse in the past few years, and if I wasn't so used to watching my own CRT portable it might have occurred to me that he was likely talking about LCD sets, which makes less sense- either that or he was last in Europe a few years back, since as you point out, LCDs don't "flicker" in that way.
50 fps is noticeably jerky
Do you mean "jerky" or "flickery"?
You can see the flicker on a 50Hz PAL TV set on (e.g.) large areas of white. OTOH, IMHO it's not noticeably "jerky" in the way that 24fps film material is on pans and the like.
Video Games, as an art, are relatively young. Film has over a hundred years behind it, while games have merely forty [..] One can hardly expect an adolescent to have the same capacities as a fully grown adult.
Funny that you should compare video games to an adolescent. I've long thought that the industry's current obsession with seeing its own "maturity" and development in terms of comparing itself to the film industry as a sign of its underlying *immaturity*.
Right now the focus seems to be on pretentious, self-congratulatory attempts at cinema-mimicking narrative and emotional depth through self-consciously (*relatively*) big budget, cheesily-written sequences played out via horrid, unconvincing and mannequin-like CGI characters and patting themselves on the back at how "close" they are to cinematic quality (they aren't). It's more reminiscent of a teenager that wants to see themselves as mature, to be associated with those who get more respect... whose wannabe maturity really indicates the lack of just that.
When the video game industry has developed its own conventions, like cinema did when it moved out of the shadow of the theatre, when it realises that video games aren't- or shouldn't be- the same as films and start doing things on their own terms.... then *that* will be when it has grown up.
Somewhere around 2015 to 2020, at our current rate of advances over the last 40 years, we can expect to have storage devices that hold Peta-Bytes of storage.
Here's what I was *going* to say:- As this is a new technology, past performance of existing technologies isn't necessarily an accurate prediction, even assuming we can accurately extrapolate those. Plus there have been very many cutting-edge and well-hyped technologies that have fallen by the wayside or failed to deliver the miracles promised- this article is the guy's own claims for the technology, so I'll take them with a pinch of sa...(Reads linked article more closely and checks date)
:-)
That article dates back to February 2006! That's over five years ago, so we should have had your claimed petabyte storage for a couple of months now!
I think I just proved my own point
But anyway, the "current rate of advances over the last 40 years" is misleading, because hard drive sizes (for example) were growing *much* faster during the 90s and early-2000s than they are today. Still fast, but not quite the explosive speed they were growing at back then.
Even flash memory's seemingly rapid growth four or so years ago seems to have slowed down a little.
In short, it might happen, it might not. We'll have more storage in a few years time, but at current (i.e. past 2-5 years) rates, it's not going to be silly amounts, just a few times more.
see Nikon fans posting crap - usually in the form of gross misinformation to "prove" their choice of camera is better, completely ignoring the fact that they're just tools
Hey, even complete tools are allowed to have opinions!
Absolutely true; however, the Daily Mail- right-wing POS though it is- isn't owned by Murdoch.