I thought Seattle already had a monorail. Didn't Frasier get trapped in it in the special episode they actually filmed in Seattle? Or was that some other non-monorail elevated railway system?
The U.S. military is bracing for future attacks in space
Uh, from whom, exactly? Al-Qaeda isn't known for its lethal space program as far as I know, and I got the impression that a large part of the US saber-rattling (and actual stabbing and hacking) of the last few years was to get the point across that 'If you mess with us, you'll regret it.'
So who's going to attack the US from space? Only a moron with nothing to lose who also happens to have spaceflight capabilities, and that's not exactly a large number of countries.
The Russians? Admittedly they currently pwn spaceflight, but on American dollars - they can barely finance their own operations right now. The Chinese? They don't need to attack militarily, because they're taking the long-term view and happily taking on the outsourcing of everything the US manufactures and buying up the trillion-dollar national debt as a bargaining tool. Iran? India? Pakistan? Don't be fucking ridiculous. Maybe the evil French are going to use an Ariane-5 to launch a Death Star over Washington...
Seriously. A slight change in font sizes when Slashdot's loaded up for the first time that day, and it produces an almost Lovecraftian twinge in the hairs on the back of the neck: something's not right, and that can only lead to something horrible happening any moment...
I used to get an average of one junk call a day (the record was three in one evening!) until I signed onto the Telephone Preference Service and got my phone company (NTL) to activate their 'undocumented feature' - namely, blocking calls from anyone who withheld their number, which almost all telemarketers do to prevent furious victims from calling back. It worked - since then, I think I've had maybe two unsolicited calls in the better part of a year.
Downside? Sometimes genuine calls get stopped, which was kind of annoying for my best friend when she found she could only reach me via her mobile because her landline was blocked...
Because I decide what hardware I pay money for gets connected up to what in my home, not some corporation. 'To use a Blu-Ray player, you must have it connected to a phone/Ethernet socket.' You know what? Fuck that!
It's exactly this kind of paranoid, 'the consumers are our enemy trying to rip us off' thinking that is going to lead to the major electronics corporations losing very large amounts of money for the next several years. And I have no sympathy. They want us to buy new hardware because DVD players have become so cheap they don't really offer much opportunity for profit. Okay, but what reasons are they giving people to want to buy them?
"They have high-definition picture quality!"
So what? 99% of people don't have HD TV, and aren't likely to for at least 5 years, maybe 10, unless HD TV undergoes the same kind of astronomical price-drop that we saw with DVD players. So no advantage there.
"Er, you'll be able to get the definitive versions of your favourite movies!"
So the Original, Special Edition, Director's Cut and Ultimate versions that we've been buying for the past seven or eight years are just chopped liver?
"Oh, um, shit... I know! If you don't buy our pirate-proof new versions of movies you already own on boring old DVD, the terrorists will win!"
And since 9 out of 10 people wouldn't even think to buy pirate copies of DVDs in the first place, they get offended at being accused of being criminals. (And then some of them will think, 'Wait, I can get pirate DVDs? Where?')
Considering the dismal state of cinema at the moment, there's no 'killer app' for BR/HD-DVD. Are millions of people really going to drop the best part of a grand just on a player to watch the new King Kong in HD? I already have all of my favourite movies of all time on DVD. I have no intention of buying some expensive, DRM-crippled, home-phoning piece of kit that won't even offer better image quality without me shelling out thousands of pounds on a new HD TV so that I can watch them again with a sharper picture.
For most people, DVD is 'good enough', and that's how the corporations have made a rod for their own backs. It's the same reason why DVD-A and SACD failed miserably to replace CD. The increase in quality is negligible when weighed against the increase in price. It's not like VHS vs DVD, where all the failings of the old medium (low quality picture, tedious FF and REW, dropout over time, etc) instantly became obvious the first time you watched a DVD. With DVD vs BR/HD-DVD, the only way to tell any difference is to spend the price of a car on a new HD TV set. This may come as a surprise to the electronics companies, but very few people are willing to do that!
Also, slowly but surely, even Joe Public is starting to realise that obtrusive DRM that's there entirely for the studio's benefit is not necessarily a good thing. It might be something as simple as frustration when the tracks he got from Napster don't work on his iPod now, but when he wonders, "Hey, why the hell does my new DVD player need to be connected to the phone line to work? What's that all about? Is it going to add to my bill? What if someone tries to phone when I'm watching a movie?" as well...
And something that the studios don't seem to have considered - right now, they're making a huge amount of unexpected profit from releasing old TV shows on DVD. One problem: they won't be able to do the same on BR/HD, where the selling point is the better picture quality. Most of these shows were edited on video, so bar minor sprucing-up, that's as good as the picture will ever get. Sure, being able to put a whole season of Star Trek or Buffy or whatever on a single disc is convenient... but then trying to charge between 50 and 100 dollars/pounds/euros for just one disc (that looks no better than the DVD version) doesn't look like very good value to the punter, does it?
There is a third possibility. This is that the wars continue, but consumers continue not to care.
DING! We have a winner! Almost everybody will go right along buying individual components as they always have done, and not caring if they're interoperable or not. How many people even bother to buy a universal remote to replace the four or five you'll find in most homes now? (TV, DVD, VCR, CD, cable...)
'Convergence' of entertainment devices in the home has one very big problem - "What if it breaks?" Since the PC has a reputation of being the most complicated and troublesome gadget in the home already, piling in all the functions from every other box is not going to make people feel safe.
If your DVD player packs up, you buy a new DVD player - these days, you can pick them up from the supermarket with your groceries for little more than the price of an actual DVD. But if the DVD player in your super-duper Media Center PC packs up...
And if the computer itself packs up, then you lose all your entertainment systems in one go, not just one element. And what if, in this fabulous all-digital future, you've bought music, movies, TV shows, etc, that exist as nothing more than data on a hard drive? Are they all lost too?
MS can go on about 'educating' the consumer all they want (and the line from some MS guy along the lines of 'the consumer doesn't know what they want until we show them' really was a perfect example of that company's arrogance), but most people are unwilling to put all their eggs in one basket. Especially with hardware that is associated with the words 'crash' and 'virus'.
You have a device that, by its very nature, will have a small display.
Now, how can you possibly make a selection from hundreds, maybe even thousands of choices on such a tiny screen? Some kind of... heirarchical system of sub-menus, perhaps?
This surely is the very definition of an 'obvious' patent - that therefore shouldn't be patentable in the first place! Something like the iPod's scroll wheel, on the other hand, plainly wasn't obvious, otherwise the various players that were on the market beforehand would have thought of it it rather than use rocker switches, mini d-pads, tiny joysticks and all the other godawful control systems used by companies like... well, Creative. The fact that the scroll wheel works so well might explain why Apple has maybe 80% of the market and Creative's lumpy offerings... don't. Sour grapes disguised as a submarine patent?
The patent system in the US is so obviously fucked up, it's beyond belief. Unfortunately, the people in a position to reform it seem to want to make it even worse so that their bribers, uh, 'campaign contributors' are the ones to benefit [see/. patent stories passim]. Seriously, does Washington actually do anything [i]good[/i] any more, or is it now 100% about the kickbacks and pork and 'think of the children (who can get me voted into office)'?
'You can't work in the same industry for X months if you quit, or we sue you' clauses: illegal (what are they going to do, work in Starbucks for six/twelve/twenty-four months?)
'If you go to work for/set up a competing company and use your inside knowledge of your former employer to harm us, then we sue you' clauses: legal.
That way, the burden falls on the first company to prove harmful intent, and doesn't mean that some highly trained guy can't actually work in the field he's suited for because of paranoid small print. Sound fair?
So, if these prices are accurate, an absolute bare-bones UK system (console + a memory card) will cost you £209.99 + £22.99 = £232.98. Which is a fair amount in itself. Then you need a game. Which if what various gaming people have been hinting is true, will be nearer the 50 quid mark than the current 40. So now we're up to £282.97. Just to play one game.
Then, we start moving into "Yeah, but to play Game X you really need the hard drive", and "I'm sorry, sir, but we don't sell the base console, we only sell 'value' packs" territory.
Y'know, I think I can wait a year. Or two. Or three. Hell, I only got a PS2 last year, so maybe I can wait four - and I won't be paying £50 a game by then either.
Unless MS decides that it's time to take the Steam route to eliminate the second-hand market in the meantime...
I'm afraid that to afford all three on launch day (plus a game/memory card for each) you'll have to use every last penny in your retirement fund. Hope you enjoy supermarket own-brand beans!
What, like Microsoft is solely guilty of this kind of lockout? I bought a PS2 last year solely to play GTA:SA on release day (yeah, I'm impatient and shallow, whatever), and in line with my PS1/N64/GameCube experiences I asked for whatever the cheapest memory card was so that I could save my game...
Only to be told that there were no third-party memory cards available. I had to shell out full price for Sony's own card because, so I was told, Sony had locked out unofficial (and cheaper) alternatives. In other words, they had DRM'd flash memory. Cock-knuckles.
But hey, I've bought my PS2 games second-hand since then, so Sony's revenue model can kiss my ass.
Then again, some American conventions are strange as well; like inserting a comma before 'and' in a list, such as 'apples, bananas, and grapes are fruit' compared to the British style 'apples bananas and grapes are fruit'.
Actually, as a Brit I was taught that in lists, commas aren't used before the final 'and'. So the correct UK version should be 'apples, bananas and grapes are fruit'.
But there are people out there who won't touch anything but Adobe Photoshop even to the extent of pirating it.
Woah, wait - you mean there are people out there who've actually bought Photoshop? Next you'll be telling me that there are people who paid money for Word instead of just copying it from their machine at work!
In the comic series The ABC Warriors (specifically the story 'Black Hole'), the Monad was a bloated, ruthless manifestation of all human evil that attempted to destroy the Earth by corrupting and overloading the incredible technological achievement that linked humanity together.
Non-Western SoftCo: We wrote some cool new software. US 'IP-directed' SoftCo: Ha! We have software patents that cover your program! Hand over all your money now! Non-Western SoftCo: Do we look American? Fuck you, and fuck the horse your lawyers rode in on. US 'IP-directed' SoftCo: B-but... you can't talk to us that way! We'll use our bribed, uh, 'lobbied' politicians to stop you entering our market! Joe Public: [Downloads software from non-US site] US 'IP-directed' SoftCo: Shit! Our revenue stream! If only we actually made something! Aiiieeee!
Slashdot Mirror
[Waits for someone even more geeky than me to point out that Klaa blew up one of the Pioneer probes...]
I thought Seattle already had a monorail. Didn't Frasier get trapped in it in the special episode they actually filmed in Seattle? Or was that some other non-monorail elevated railway system?
Uh, from whom, exactly? Al-Qaeda isn't known for its lethal space program as far as I know, and I got the impression that a large part of the US saber-rattling (and actual stabbing and hacking) of the last few years was to get the point across that 'If you mess with us, you'll regret it.'
So who's going to attack the US from space? Only a moron with nothing to lose who also happens to have spaceflight capabilities, and that's not exactly a large number of countries.
The Russians? Admittedly they currently pwn spaceflight, but on American dollars - they can barely finance their own operations right now. The Chinese? They don't need to attack militarily, because they're taking the long-term view and happily taking on the outsourcing of everything the US manufactures and buying up the trillion-dollar national debt as a bargaining tool. Iran? India? Pakistan? Don't be fucking ridiculous. Maybe the evil French are going to use an Ariane-5 to launch a Death Star over Washington...
Seriously. A slight change in font sizes when Slashdot's loaded up for the first time that day, and it produces an almost Lovecraftian twinge in the hairs on the back of the neck: something's not right, and that can only lead to something horrible happening any moment...
Downside? Sometimes genuine calls get stopped, which was kind of annoying for my best friend when she found she could only reach me via her mobile because her landline was blocked...
Shadow, or Vorlon?
It's exactly this kind of paranoid, 'the consumers are our enemy trying to rip us off' thinking that is going to lead to the major electronics corporations losing very large amounts of money for the next several years. And I have no sympathy. They want us to buy new hardware because DVD players have become so cheap they don't really offer much opportunity for profit. Okay, but what reasons are they giving people to want to buy them?
"They have high-definition picture quality!"
So what? 99% of people don't have HD TV, and aren't likely to for at least 5 years, maybe 10, unless HD TV undergoes the same kind of astronomical price-drop that we saw with DVD players. So no advantage there.
"Er, you'll be able to get the definitive versions of your favourite movies!"
So the Original, Special Edition, Director's Cut and Ultimate versions that we've been buying for the past seven or eight years are just chopped liver?
"Oh, um, shit... I know! If you don't buy our pirate-proof new versions of movies you already own on boring old DVD, the terrorists will win!"
And since 9 out of 10 people wouldn't even think to buy pirate copies of DVDs in the first place, they get offended at being accused of being criminals. (And then some of them will think, 'Wait, I can get pirate DVDs? Where?')
Considering the dismal state of cinema at the moment, there's no 'killer app' for BR/HD-DVD. Are millions of people really going to drop the best part of a grand just on a player to watch the new King Kong in HD? I already have all of my favourite movies of all time on DVD. I have no intention of buying some expensive, DRM-crippled, home-phoning piece of kit that won't even offer better image quality without me shelling out thousands of pounds on a new HD TV so that I can watch them again with a sharper picture.
For most people, DVD is 'good enough', and that's how the corporations have made a rod for their own backs. It's the same reason why DVD-A and SACD failed miserably to replace CD. The increase in quality is negligible when weighed against the increase in price. It's not like VHS vs DVD, where all the failings of the old medium (low quality picture, tedious FF and REW, dropout over time, etc) instantly became obvious the first time you watched a DVD. With DVD vs BR/HD-DVD, the only way to tell any difference is to spend the price of a car on a new HD TV set. This may come as a surprise to the electronics companies, but very few people are willing to do that!
Also, slowly but surely, even Joe Public is starting to realise that obtrusive DRM that's there entirely for the studio's benefit is not necessarily a good thing. It might be something as simple as frustration when the tracks he got from Napster don't work on his iPod now, but when he wonders, "Hey, why the hell does my new DVD player need to be connected to the phone line to work? What's that all about? Is it going to add to my bill? What if someone tries to phone when I'm watching a movie?" as well...
And something that the studios don't seem to have considered - right now, they're making a huge amount of unexpected profit from releasing old TV shows on DVD. One problem: they won't be able to do the same on BR/HD, where the selling point is the better picture quality. Most of these shows were edited on video, so bar minor sprucing-up, that's as good as the picture will ever get. Sure, being able to put a whole season of Star Trek or Buffy or whatever on a single disc is convenient... but then trying to charge between 50 and 100 dollars/pounds/euros for just one disc (that looks no better than the DVD version) doesn't look like very good value to the punter, does it?
It's now Jurassic PA-KAAAWWK!
DING! We have a winner! Almost everybody will go right along buying individual components as they always have done, and not caring if they're interoperable or not. How many people even bother to buy a universal remote to replace the four or five you'll find in most homes now? (TV, DVD, VCR, CD, cable...)
'Convergence' of entertainment devices in the home has one very big problem - "What if it breaks?" Since the PC has a reputation of being the most complicated and troublesome gadget in the home already, piling in all the functions from every other box is not going to make people feel safe.
If your DVD player packs up, you buy a new DVD player - these days, you can pick them up from the supermarket with your groceries for little more than the price of an actual DVD. But if the DVD player in your super-duper Media Center PC packs up...
And if the computer itself packs up, then you lose all your entertainment systems in one go, not just one element. And what if, in this fabulous all-digital future, you've bought music, movies, TV shows, etc, that exist as nothing more than data on a hard drive? Are they all lost too?
MS can go on about 'educating' the consumer all they want (and the line from some MS guy along the lines of 'the consumer doesn't know what they want until we show them' really was a perfect example of that company's arrogance), but most people are unwilling to put all their eggs in one basket. Especially with hardware that is associated with the words 'crash' and 'virus'.
What, you mean Voyager's science may not be 100% accurate? You're telling me that gravity isn't radioactive?
('Equinox Part II' and 'One Small Step' are the guilty episodes from above, if you were wondering...)
See you at the party, Spirit!
Now, how can you possibly make a selection from hundreds, maybe even thousands of choices on such a tiny screen? Some kind of... heirarchical system of sub-menus, perhaps?
This surely is the very definition of an 'obvious' patent - that therefore shouldn't be patentable in the first place! Something like the iPod's scroll wheel, on the other hand, plainly wasn't obvious, otherwise the various players that were on the market beforehand would have thought of it it rather than use rocker switches, mini d-pads, tiny joysticks and all the other godawful control systems used by companies like... well, Creative. The fact that the scroll wheel works so well might explain why Apple has maybe 80% of the market and Creative's lumpy offerings... don't. Sour grapes disguised as a submarine patent?
The patent system in the US is so obviously fucked up, it's beyond belief. Unfortunately, the people in a position to reform it seem to want to make it even worse so that their bribers, uh, 'campaign contributors' are the ones to benefit [see /. patent stories passim]. Seriously, does Washington actually do anything [i]good[/i] any more, or is it now 100% about the kickbacks and pork and 'think of the children (who can get me voted into office)'?
Am I the only one who imagined Professor Farnsworth saying that, with a degree of relish?
'If you go to work for/set up a competing company and use your inside knowledge of your former employer to harm us, then we sue you' clauses: legal.
That way, the burden falls on the first company to prove harmful intent, and doesn't mean that some highly trained guy can't actually work in the field he's suited for because of paranoid small print. Sound fair?
For Slashdotters, the possibility is therefore zero.
Then, we start moving into "Yeah, but to play Game X you really need the hard drive", and "I'm sorry, sir, but we don't sell the base console, we only sell 'value' packs" territory.
Y'know, I think I can wait a year. Or two. Or three. Hell, I only got a PS2 last year, so maybe I can wait four - and I won't be paying £50 a game by then either.
Unless MS decides that it's time to take the Steam route to eliminate the second-hand market in the meantime...
I'm afraid that to afford all three on launch day (plus a game/memory card for each) you'll have to use every last penny in your retirement fund. Hope you enjoy supermarket own-brand beans!
Duracell: We piss all over your new batteries!
Researcher: Thanks!
"Heh heh heh. It's funny 'cause I don't know them."
Only to be told that there were no third-party memory cards available. I had to shell out full price for Sony's own card because, so I was told, Sony had locked out unofficial (and cheaper) alternatives. In other words, they had DRM'd flash memory. Cock-knuckles.
But hey, I've bought my PS2 games second-hand since then, so Sony's revenue model can kiss my ass.
Thank Christ for that. I pretty much expect to be dead by then, so I won't have to worry about people finding out about... uh, never mind.
Of course, flying cars, robot servants, cold fusion and cheap space travel will also turn out to be 45-60 years away, so I guess I can't win 'em all.
Actually, as a Brit I was taught that in lists, commas aren't used before the final 'and'. So the correct UK version should be 'apples, bananas and grapes are fruit'.
Woah, wait - you mean there are people out there who've actually bought Photoshop? Next you'll be telling me that there are people who paid money for Word instead of just copying it from their machine at work!
But I'm sure that's just a coincidence.
Non-Western SoftCo: We wrote some cool new software.
US 'IP-directed' SoftCo: Ha! We have software patents that cover your program! Hand over all your money now!
Non-Western SoftCo: Do we look American? Fuck you, and fuck the horse your lawyers rode in on.
US 'IP-directed' SoftCo: B-but... you can't talk to us that way! We'll use our bribed, uh, 'lobbied' politicians to stop you entering our market!
Joe Public: [Downloads software from non-US site]
US 'IP-directed' SoftCo: Shit! Our revenue stream! If only we actually made something! Aiiieeee!
ThiS, of COurse, may have happened already...