That's what we're talking about. MD could have been that ultimate ubiquitous storage format, but instead, sony screwed themselves over with incompatibilities, and tons of DRM. Minidisc as far as the specs are concerned is the better format. Had they executed it right, there would be a minidisc reader in every computer, and there would be no need to carry the drive around with you. There was times when USB Sticks had the same problems, with having to install drivers to use them, and not working on most machines. Try sticking that USB stick into a windows 98 machine and see what happens.
Yeah, with CD's I think people chose size over durability. Originally, CDs had caddies, but people didn't want them. This was a mistake. People don't always know what's best for them, that's why you still see stories about people not wearing seatbelts, and dieing in accidents.
It's true because it has a hard plastic case around it, protecting the disc, and you could throw it across the room or rub sandpaper all over both sides without any worrying about doing any damage to the actual data. This also helped protect it from light, which is anohter thing that is known to damage CDs, especially recordables.
Because email wasn't designed to deal with large binary files. It was meant to send text back of forth between two people. Kind of like paper letters, no pictures allowed. That 500 MB file takes 667? megs in email, because of encoding constraints. Oh, and likely your network can't really handle it. If I, and every one of my coworkers downloaded 1 gig of information every time we checked our email, then, the network would slow to a crawl.
Yes, The fact that Minidisc is far more durable than cd's is what has made me really wish sony had actually thought about what they were doing. Minidisc can hold any data, 170? MB worth of data. Had they marketed it not only as a music storage format, but as a general storage format, they would have been unstoppable. In the days of Zip drives and other such wonderful inventions, they had a format that not only was smaller, but had more capacity, and was durable. Oh, and it was much cheaper. Zip disks were quite expensive from what I remember, but maybe that was more due to demand and lack of competition.
Yes, anything that requires hardware modding is just going to be that much harder for regular joes to thwart. I remember with PS1, you could plug a chip into the back, and I think there was a boot disk, and that was it. Gamecube was quite a bit harder, required a hardwired mod chip, plus usings minidvds, or modding hte case for standard DVDs. Oh, there is the Phantasy star online hack, but that required a network connection, and could only boot stuff over the network. A little too complicated for most folks. If you look at the last generation, The order of hackedness is Xbox, PS2, and then GC. The xbox was easy because of the familiar architecture, the PS2 was because there was just so darn many of them, and then the gamecube, which only sold as many as the XBox, and didn't have a familiar architecture, so it just didn't get that much attention.
Yes. Same thing as the original XBox. I don't think DVD player is a major selling point anymore, since most people who would buy a game console already have a dvd player, or 2, or 3.
I currently use google groups when I want to find out the answer to a technical problem. Kind of hard to beat every usenet post ever written. I don't know how i'd get by without it.
The Revo will use standard DVDs. It has a slot load mechanism which is capable of dealing with both Standard DVDs and the Gamecube discs. Not sure of the specifics, but i'm pretty sure there will be no disk adapter or extra hardware to get the GC discs working properly.
Just checked. A 1GB Flash card is retailing for $79.95 CDN at futureshop. The Minidisc 1GB disc can be had for $10.99 CDN. Quite a price difference. Flash media is nice, but minidisc is quite a lot cheaper. If Minidisc ever got up to the volume of flash, they'd probably be available for $5.
If you were making discs from MP3, then you had to use sonic stage, which did a bunch of stuff for DRM. However, if you were going straight from CD to Minidisc, you could use the other program they gave you. Simple burn or something like that. In fact it was so much better than Sonic Stage, that people found it easier to burn their mp3s to a CDRW, or a virtual CD drive, and put the songs on the Minidisc player. A 2-3 step process, using a couple different programs was easier than using Sonic Stage.
None of the Sub $1000 CDN Dells come with anything but an Intel onboard video card. I'm pretty sure those crap cards won't run Aero Glass. Aero glass is the only good feature of windows Vista. Oh, and IE 7, which has tabs. But that's crap anyway, because you could just user Firefox, which has had tabs forever, and has CSS 2 support. There is no reason for the user to run windows Vista except aero glass, and none of the machines that Joe Sixpack will actually buy will even be capable of running vista. And no matter how nice Vista looks, I don't think Dell is going to be able to convince the guy who wants to spend $500, to spend $1500.
In canada, when you use your banks atm machines, you can cash cheques, pay bills, do almost anything you can do at a teller. The only reason I even go to the teller anymore is to get coins. There's still the need for money orders, and other things that only tellers can do, but those reasons are getting fewer and fewer. I'm not sure if it's good or bad. It's a lot more convenient to be able to get go up to a machine 24 hours a day and do your banking. but then again it's lost jobs for those people working as tellers.
I usually don't feel like supporting an artist unless I feel that the album is worth buying. I don't think it's worth supporting an artist who can only produce 1 good song. Also, most the the CD's i've bought recently have been $15. You can often find old stuff for even cheapter, $10. I find that the quality and freedom are well worth the extra cash.
Lets not forget the rest of Nintendo's offerings. Not only is the PSP competing with the DS, it's competing with the GB Advanaced (SP), and the GB Micro.
This makes me wonder. The age of consent in Canada is 14, if I recall correctly (It is less than 18). Yet I am quite sure that the age for buying pornography is 18. I'm pretty sure it's illegal to take pornographic pictures of those under 18. Kind of a very odd how contradictory the laws are. You're allowed to have sex, but not allowed allowed to look at pictures of nude people, or have people look at or take pictures of yourself while naked. However it's no problem if they are looking at you naked in person.
And before the internet, 75% of 9-19 year olds have seen print/film pornography. It's not like porn didn't exist before the internet. Oh, and they messing up the results including the 18 and 19 year olds, who are legally allowed to look at porn.
The iPod could exist just fine. iTunes is another story altogether. There's no problem with MP3 players that have absolutely no DRM on them. The problem is only introduced once you have an online music store. I think the whole online music store is a good thing, but I think the world would be fine without it. It hasn't lowered the price of CDs, or even the cost of music, because the online files are about the same price, minus the actual nicities of having an physical copy. You can buy individual songs, but I don't usually feel the need to support an artist who can only produce 1 or 2 good songs.
I've been thinking about doing this. What specs are necessary for the processor/memory, and what's the best TV Tuner card to get. In terms of easiest to setup, no dropped frames, and best bang for your buck.
I don't think I knew a kid who didn't see pornography when I was growing up. Sure some of the stuff on the web is a little more hardcore, but I don't think it's damaging to them. Kids end up more messed up when the get the feeling that there is something wrong (evil) about nudity, sex, and other related things. I'm not saying kids should have unlimited access, but, if you're that worried about your kids, then be with them when they are using the internet. If they have their own computer "for homework" don't hook it up to the net. There aren't really that many good resources anyway. I survived without the internet, and even when I had it, it was pretty useless as far as research goes (except for the free access my university had to scientific journals). If you really don't trust your children, then make sure you are there watching them.
But that just proves the point. Your inconveniencing the users who aren't 'uber computer gawds', and at the same time not really providing any real protection against pirates. It's like the CD Copy protection used by Sony, EMI, et al. It's annoys the regular users who just want to play the songs on their mp3 player, while the real pirates just use linux of disable cd autorun.
The only difference between the iPod and any other MP3 player is that iPods can play music off iTunes. There's many more mp3 players out that that don't have all this DRM BS on them, and are actually much easier to use because of this. Just rip your cd's the way you regularly would, or download mp3s off irc (if the cd is copy protected, and you misplaced your shift key), and drag and drop the files on there. About as easy as you can get.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what we're talking about. MD could have been that ultimate ubiquitous storage format, but instead, sony screwed themselves over with incompatibilities, and tons of DRM. Minidisc as far as the specs are concerned is the better format. Had they executed it right, there would be a minidisc reader in every computer, and there would be no need to carry the drive around with you. There was times when USB Sticks had the same problems, with having to install drivers to use them, and not working on most machines. Try sticking that USB stick into a windows 98 machine and see what happens.
Yeah, with CD's I think people chose size over durability. Originally, CDs had caddies, but people didn't want them. This was a mistake. People don't always know what's best for them, that's why you still see stories about people not wearing seatbelts, and dieing in accidents.
Flash drives weren't arond at the time. Now of course, 1GB of flash costs around $40, while 1GB of minidisc costs $5.
It's true because it has a hard plastic case around it, protecting the disc, and you could throw it across the room or rub sandpaper all over both sides without any worrying about doing any damage to the actual data. This also helped protect it from light, which is anohter thing that is known to damage CDs, especially recordables.
Because email wasn't designed to deal with large binary files. It was meant to send text back of forth between two people. Kind of like paper letters, no pictures allowed. That 500 MB file takes 667? megs in email, because of encoding constraints. Oh, and likely your network can't really handle it. If I, and every one of my coworkers downloaded 1 gig of information every time we checked our email, then, the network would slow to a crawl.
Yes, The fact that Minidisc is far more durable than cd's is what has made me really wish sony had actually thought about what they were doing. Minidisc can hold any data, 170? MB worth of data. Had they marketed it not only as a music storage format, but as a general storage format, they would have been unstoppable. In the days of Zip drives and other such wonderful inventions, they had a format that not only was smaller, but had more capacity, and was durable. Oh, and it was much cheaper. Zip disks were quite expensive from what I remember, but maybe that was more due to demand and lack of competition.
Yes, anything that requires hardware modding is just going to be that much harder for regular joes to thwart. I remember with PS1, you could plug a chip into the back, and I think there was a boot disk, and that was it. Gamecube was quite a bit harder, required a hardwired mod chip, plus usings minidvds, or modding hte case for standard DVDs. Oh, there is the Phantasy star online hack, but that required a network connection, and could only boot stuff over the network. A little too complicated for most folks. If you look at the last generation, The order of hackedness is Xbox, PS2, and then GC. The xbox was easy because of the familiar architecture, the PS2 was because there was just so darn many of them, and then the gamecube, which only sold as many as the XBox, and didn't have a familiar architecture, so it just didn't get that much attention.
Yes. Same thing as the original XBox. I don't think DVD player is a major selling point anymore, since most people who would buy a game console already have a dvd player, or 2, or 3.
a quick search on froogle search shows that a high-md capaple player can be had for as low as $87. While the media can be had for as low as $4.29.
I currently use google groups when I want to find out the answer to a technical problem. Kind of hard to beat every usenet post ever written. I don't know how i'd get by without it.
The Revo will use standard DVDs. It has a slot load mechanism which is capable of dealing with both Standard DVDs and the Gamecube discs. Not sure of the specifics, but i'm pretty sure there will be no disk adapter or extra hardware to get the GC discs working properly.
Just checked. A 1GB Flash card is retailing for $79.95 CDN at futureshop. The Minidisc 1GB disc can be had for $10.99 CDN. Quite a price difference. Flash media is nice, but minidisc is quite a lot cheaper. If Minidisc ever got up to the volume of flash, they'd probably be available for $5.
If you were making discs from MP3, then you had to use sonic stage, which did a bunch of stuff for DRM. However, if you were going straight from CD to Minidisc, you could use the other program they gave you. Simple burn or something like that. In fact it was so much better than Sonic Stage, that people found it easier to burn their mp3s to a CDRW, or a virtual CD drive, and put the songs on the Minidisc player. A 2-3 step process, using a couple different programs was easier than using Sonic Stage.
eye-catching BBC Radio 1 advert
Wow, that is special. I don't think i've ever had the radio catch my eye.
None of the Sub $1000 CDN Dells come with anything but an Intel onboard video card. I'm pretty sure those crap cards won't run Aero Glass. Aero glass is the only good feature of windows Vista. Oh, and IE 7, which has tabs. But that's crap anyway, because you could just user Firefox, which has had tabs forever, and has CSS 2 support. There is no reason for the user to run windows Vista except aero glass, and none of the machines that Joe Sixpack will actually buy will even be capable of running vista. And no matter how nice Vista looks, I don't think Dell is going to be able to convince the guy who wants to spend $500, to spend $1500.
In canada, when you use your banks atm machines, you can cash cheques, pay bills, do almost anything you can do at a teller. The only reason I even go to the teller anymore is to get coins. There's still the need for money orders, and other things that only tellers can do, but those reasons are getting fewer and fewer. I'm not sure if it's good or bad. It's a lot more convenient to be able to get go up to a machine 24 hours a day and do your banking. but then again it's lost jobs for those people working as tellers.
I usually don't feel like supporting an artist unless I feel that the album is worth buying. I don't think it's worth supporting an artist who can only produce 1 good song. Also, most the the CD's i've bought recently have been $15. You can often find old stuff for even cheapter, $10. I find that the quality and freedom are well worth the extra cash.
Lets not forget the rest of Nintendo's offerings. Not only is the PSP competing with the DS, it's competing with the GB Advanaced (SP), and the GB Micro.
This makes me wonder. The age of consent in Canada is 14, if I recall correctly (It is less than 18). Yet I am quite sure that the age for buying pornography is 18. I'm pretty sure it's illegal to take pornographic pictures of those under 18. Kind of a very odd how contradictory the laws are. You're allowed to have sex, but not allowed allowed to look at pictures of nude people, or have people look at or take pictures of yourself while naked. However it's no problem if they are looking at you naked in person.
And before the internet, 75% of 9-19 year olds have seen print/film pornography. It's not like porn didn't exist before the internet. Oh, and they messing up the results including the 18 and 19 year olds, who are legally allowed to look at porn.
The iPod could exist just fine. iTunes is another story altogether. There's no problem with MP3 players that have absolutely no DRM on them. The problem is only introduced once you have an online music store. I think the whole online music store is a good thing, but I think the world would be fine without it. It hasn't lowered the price of CDs, or even the cost of music, because the online files are about the same price, minus the actual nicities of having an physical copy. You can buy individual songs, but I don't usually feel the need to support an artist who can only produce 1 or 2 good songs.
I've been thinking about doing this. What specs are necessary for the processor/memory, and what's the best TV Tuner card to get. In terms of easiest to setup, no dropped frames, and best bang for your buck.
I don't think I knew a kid who didn't see pornography when I was growing up. Sure some of the stuff on the web is a little more hardcore, but I don't think it's damaging to them. Kids end up more messed up when the get the feeling that there is something wrong (evil) about nudity, sex, and other related things. I'm not saying kids should have unlimited access, but, if you're that worried about your kids, then be with them when they are using the internet. If they have their own computer "for homework" don't hook it up to the net. There aren't really that many good resources anyway. I survived without the internet, and even when I had it, it was pretty useless as far as research goes (except for the free access my university had to scientific journals). If you really don't trust your children, then make sure you are there watching them.
But that just proves the point. Your inconveniencing the users who aren't 'uber computer gawds', and at the same time not really providing any real protection against pirates. It's like the CD Copy protection used by Sony, EMI, et al. It's annoys the regular users who just want to play the songs on their mp3 player, while the real pirates just use linux of disable cd autorun.
The only difference between the iPod and any other MP3 player is that iPods can play music off iTunes. There's many more mp3 players out that that don't have all this DRM BS on them, and are actually much easier to use because of this. Just rip your cd's the way you regularly would, or download mp3s off irc (if the cd is copy protected, and you misplaced your shift key), and drag and drop the files on there. About as easy as you can get.