You can't generally "bypass" encryption. You either break it through some exploit or by brute force, or you don't. A box like that doesn't have the grunt to brute force it, so unless every phone that supports encryption has an exploit or back door that we don't know about, the device will only see gibberish.
I really don't think that pirating is significantly eating into blu-ray sales. Knowing how to torrent movies, installing software players and codecs, and figuring out the interface between PC and TV/sound system is still a geeky thing. The great unwashed masses want to slap in a disc and go. Or, if they're a little more sophisticated, "play it now".
But you may have a point -- between Netflix, Amazon, and itunes, (and to a much smaller extent, torrents) it's possible that people just aren't buying as many titles on discrete media.
> between a good upconverting player and a lot of crappy blu-ray builds, the difference is minor.
That's a good point. The issue of "upgrading" to Blu-Ray is further polluted by the fact that there is overlap between the best crafted DVDs and the poorest crafted Blu-Ray titles, with the Blu-Ray titles still being significantly more expensive.
Actually, DVD is maximum 480p. You can up-convert it to 720, but that doesn't increase the resolution.
You're right about broadcast TV -- a lot of it is still up-converted NTSC or 720p. Probably will be for awhile. One downside to being backwards-compatible to a lot of lesser resolutions is that there's less motivation to upgrade hardware on the sending end.
Still, a TV capable of 720p would be a significant upgrade over your CRT, no matter what you play on it.
The simple reason is that in the great majority of cases, DVD is good enough and Blu-Ray is overkill. I think the only reason Blu-Ray players account for half of sales is that they're backwards-compatible. I strongly suspect a lot of people buying Blu-Ray players are continuing to buy DVDs for it. Not through some ignorant belief that DVDs will suddenly play in high def, but simply because DVDs are (a) a lot cheaper, (b) have a better selection, and (c) provide an acceptable picture up to at least 46".
Blu-Ray (and HD-DVD) in home video was a solution looking for a problem. Someone thought that since the buying public embraced the DVD as a clear winner over VHS, that they'd embrace the next leap in resolution and features, with the corresponding leap in price. What they did not account for was that they'd already reached the point of diminishing returns.
Now there's talk of another leap to 4K. It's not going to sell, folks, except to a few videophiles with the equipment to tell the difference, technogeeks who must have one of everything, and a handful of mom&pops who get sold on 4K by predatory salescreatures and then are disappointed that they can't tell the difference (and that media costs just jumped another 4X).
I'm saying all this as an early adopter of Laserdisc, DVD, and Blu-Ray who avoided VHS like the plague. And I still only have two Blu-Ray titles, which I bought for A/B comparisons. After noting a tiny increase in detail on a 46" Bravia, I went back to DVDs because they're half the price. (Much less on sale.)
You can see that the studios are starting to realize this, and are trying to entice the public by including both DVD and Blu-Ray media in the same package, so users could be enticed to buy media they can play now and still have an upgrade path when they get around to replacing the player. I dunno how well that's working, but as a marketing ploy it probably works better than asking consumers to leap off the precipice without a clear reason for doing so.
Yes, I know, Blu-Ray on 60" TVs can be startling. But most people don't have that. Of the few that do, many shove their monster TV into a room too small for it, and still have a poor viewing experience for different reasons. (Who voluntarily sits in the front row in the theater?) For the rest of us, 480p is good enough.
Now, this puts the studios in an interesting spot. The big selling point to the media providers was that higher definitions could be locked down to prevent trivial attempts to copy the content. (Of course, pros will continue to break whatever anti-copy measures the manufacturers put in place.) This assumes that Blu-Ray catches on big, (which it didn't) and that the great unwashed masses would love 1080p so much that they wouldn't put up with 480p copies. (Wrong again.) About the only benefit the studios are getting (if you call it that) is that DVDs are so dirt cheap now that it's not worth bothering to steal them.
(Let's not even talk about 1080i. What a piece-o-crap idea that was.)
All that said, I'm about to buy my second Blu-Ray recorder, because the format does have value in another area -- data storage. But I don't expect that market segment to support the format by itself.
I don't see Blu-Ray really taking off until the media (not just the players!) get so dirt cheap that the cost difference with DVD is down in the noise.
I have about 25 years as a sysadmin, and a manager of sysadmin departments. Sometimes my department was corporate admin, and sometimes I was hired as a local admin for a development group within the organization.
What I've observed, from both sides, actually, is that if corporate admin does not meet the needs of its users, little IT departments will (not may, will) spring up all over the company. Many of them will be manned by wannabees who don't know what they're doing and/or don't understand security issues. The trivial example is the department that's tired of requesting that the corporate wifi gets extended into their building, and puts up their own unsecured wifi in order to get their work done. Yes, they had a point. No, they shouldn't have done that.
Some departments will hire a professional and start loading a wiring closet up with servers.
The way to prevent this is not to forbid it. Life finds a way. Instead, take the hint and try to understand what they're trying to do and why, and how this incorporates into the existing infrastructure. Sometimes the answer really is "no", but you will be able to articulate why, and offer alternatives.
If you insist on battling your users over control of your infrastructure, you will lose, because there are more of them than you.
I think the biggest flaw is that manufacturers don't necessarily want to update your existing device -- they want you to buy a new one. So whether the technology exists affordably really doesn't matter.
Either Google music service can make money (ad supported or whatever) or not. Either they're making a profit on the backs of the music industry, stealing the very food from Howard Stringer's grandchildren, or they're not. If not, Google should be able to own the entire industry and make money from it.
Alternately, they could buy the music industry, dissolve the companies, and put the entire catalog on their servers. New content would then come from much smaller, independent producers.
I'm very sensitive to conventional monitors refreshing at 60 hz also, but part of the flicker you're seeing is the 60 hz of the monitor beating against the 60 hz of the overhead fluorescent light.
It's pretty easy to tell if your environment is on a network drive, and you can choose not to use it. Locally they had to rethink putting power users on a network share because of the massive amount of data we use locally, and the fact that there's so much unused space on the C drive of most PCs these days. But, you can't assume that local data is backed up, unless the company makes some provision for that, or you know someone in IT. Moreover, in places where "diagnosis" is limited to re-imaging the system disk, I've seen users buy their own external disks on which to keep their work-related data.
It seems to me the larger the organization, the more difficult it is to get upgrades and the more likely that people will take matters into their own hands.
There used to be a formula for this back in the early days of corporate IT. The less responsive the official organization, the more likely that unofficial services will spring up like little fiefdoms in the company.
I've worked for a company that had an unofficial "parts guy"; someone who would stock many common PC components and offer them for sale out of his cube. Did a brisk business.
What it comes down to is being able to get your work done, and the time you spend fighting with IT is time wasted.
This can be especially challenging after a corporate outsourcing. The helpdesk overseas is trained to avoid cutting a ticket for PC service, because that requires they pull in someone local and that adds to overhead.
Recently I came in Monday and found that I had been the victim of a "drive by upgrade", and my video was not displaying correctly. The usual adjustments weren't helping, so, gritting my teeth, I called the helpdesk in an overseas country that will not be named.
"Hello, my PC video is not displaying correctly. I see that patches were applied over the weekend and I suspect a corrupt..."
"I think I can be helping you. Please take your mouse pointer and put it in a part of the desktop where there is no window, and click the right mouse button."
"I've already tried this, but ok..."
"Please be clicking on the settings tab."
"Ok."
"Move the Screen resolution slider to 1024 by 768 and click Apply."
"Ok."
"Do you see your desktop?"
"Yes, but..."
"Your computer is fixed. Thank you for calling..."
"My computer is NOT fixed! The resolution of this monitor is 1680X1050. Last Friday the PC would display in that resolu..."
"If you can see your desktop, your computer is fixed. I will close the ticket. Have a pleasant day."
It took two days of bitter complaints and trying to make do with a low resolution desktop that was stretched realllly wide, before someone higher up in the organization took notice and arm-twisted the outsource company to send over a PC tech, who had to replace hardware to get it working correctly.
The thing is, if it had failed completely (or if I had said "the monitor is black" and let it go at that) things would have gone a lot more smoothly. If there's any way an admission can be forced from you that the PC is working, then no effort or expense is necessary.
The way support is set up in some companies, I can understand the temptation to accidentally put your foot on the motherboard. "I'm sorry, I don't know how that happened." Don't drop the computer, though, because you will want PC support to restore your data, and do you really think they're backing up PCs? Effectively, I mean?
> Microsoft is usually damned if they do, damned if they don't. Let's say they added multiple desktop support, a la every other worthwhile OS. Everyone would laugh at MS for being late to the party. If they don't add it, then people will mock them for its omission.
That's true for any feature. And the moral of the story is, don't be late to the party. Their chances of being mocked and laughed at are significantly reduced if they keep up. Instead of sitting on their market share until they noticed the world has passed them by. Again and again.
Microsoft has enough developers to populate a small town. They have shown (usually in Proof of Concept) that they can innovate. Where they repeatedly screw up is in execution.
> You just can't please everyone.
That's true, but they could please more people by leading instead of noticing we've marched past, running to the front of the line, and pretending they've been leading all along.
It's a matter of load balancing. My DroidX currently shows 23 background processes on one core. Two cores would be better. Four cores (assuming reasonable power management) would be even better. Multiple cores don't necessarily make individual tasks go faster; they provide more consistent response. Even non-techies will appreciate that, even if they don't quite understand why it's happening.
When you factor in the full cost of commuting (fuel, maintenance, parking, higher food costs) 10% in some cases would be money ahead. Moreover, the entire time consumed by commuting, including dressing for outdoors, finding the keys, etc, is saved also. For me that would be around 2 additional hours a day I could spend doing something else, like, well, working.
Continuing the original thought, one of the problems of an American watching Dr. Who is that we don't get some of the more obscure British historical references.
All things are relative, and few things suck more than Windows, but I suspect that OSX would be a very frustrating experience for many of the same reasons. A mousey-clicky interface doesn't lend itself well to a touch-only device. You end up having to make up contorted gestures that emulate mouse clicks, instead of devising natural touch motions to get work done.
iOS is not OSX with some touch features, it's a total re-imagining specifically for a touch-only platform.
The multitouch mousepad is kinda cool (I played with it in the store), and perhaps some of the gestures will make their way onto the ipad, but it's still not a substitute for a touch-only paradigm.
As long as Microsoft persists in trying to make the Windows mousey-clicky interface work on a tablet, it'll continue to be a frustrating and barely usable interface. It still baffles me why Microsoft doesn't just go with Surface (or maybe Surface Lite) on tablets.
> Just to poke my anti-socialist friends with a stick, I find it interesting that a publicly funded institute happened apon this discovery and not a private corporation.
Not really. iOS is not OSX with "some tablet-like features". It's a different OS (although perhaps based on a similar kernel) with a different UI paradigm. This is precisely the part Microsoft doesn't get. You don't paste a few features on a desktop paradigm and magically turn it into a good tablet experience. You have to start from square one, and develop a paradigm that works on a touch-only interface.
OSX on a tablet would suck just as bad as Windows 7 "tablet edition" currently sucks on a tablet, and for the same reason -- the paradigms are not compatible. Apple understood that, Google understood that, Microsoft does not understand that. And that is why they fail.
(It's not clear yet to me whether RIM understands that.)
Slashdot Mirror
You can't generally "bypass" encryption. You either break it through some exploit or by brute force, or you don't. A box like that doesn't have the grunt to brute force it, so unless every phone that supports encryption has an exploit or back door that we don't know about, the device will only see gibberish.
I really don't think that pirating is significantly eating into blu-ray sales. Knowing how to torrent movies, installing software players and codecs, and figuring out the interface between PC and TV/sound system is still a geeky thing. The great unwashed masses want to slap in a disc and go. Or, if they're a little more sophisticated, "play it now".
But you may have a point -- between Netflix, Amazon, and itunes, (and to a much smaller extent, torrents) it's possible that people just aren't buying as many titles on discrete media.
> between a good upconverting player and a lot of crappy blu-ray builds, the difference is minor.
That's a good point. The issue of "upgrading" to Blu-Ray is further polluted by the fact that there is overlap between the best crafted DVDs and the poorest crafted Blu-Ray titles, with the Blu-Ray titles still being significantly more expensive.
I think $20 per title is too much...
Actually, DVD is maximum 480p. You can up-convert it to 720, but that doesn't increase the resolution.
You're right about broadcast TV -- a lot of it is still up-converted NTSC or 720p. Probably will be for awhile. One downside to being backwards-compatible to a lot of lesser resolutions is that there's less motivation to upgrade hardware on the sending end.
Still, a TV capable of 720p would be a significant upgrade over your CRT, no matter what you play on it.
The simple reason is that in the great majority of cases, DVD is good enough and Blu-Ray is overkill. I think the only reason Blu-Ray players account for half of sales is that they're backwards-compatible. I strongly suspect a lot of people buying Blu-Ray players are continuing to buy DVDs for it. Not through some ignorant belief that DVDs will suddenly play in high def, but simply because DVDs are (a) a lot cheaper, (b) have a better selection, and (c) provide an acceptable picture up to at least 46".
Blu-Ray (and HD-DVD) in home video was a solution looking for a problem. Someone thought that since the buying public embraced the DVD as a clear winner over VHS, that they'd embrace the next leap in resolution and features, with the corresponding leap in price. What they did not account for was that they'd already reached the point of diminishing returns.
Now there's talk of another leap to 4K. It's not going to sell, folks, except to a few videophiles with the equipment to tell the difference, technogeeks who must have one of everything, and a handful of mom&pops who get sold on 4K by predatory salescreatures and then are disappointed that they can't tell the difference (and that media costs just jumped another 4X).
I'm saying all this as an early adopter of Laserdisc, DVD, and Blu-Ray who avoided VHS like the plague. And I still only have two Blu-Ray titles, which I bought for A/B comparisons. After noting a tiny increase in detail on a 46" Bravia, I went back to DVDs because they're half the price. (Much less on sale.)
You can see that the studios are starting to realize this, and are trying to entice the public by including both DVD and Blu-Ray media in the same package, so users could be enticed to buy media they can play now and still have an upgrade path when they get around to replacing the player. I dunno how well that's working, but as a marketing ploy it probably works better than asking consumers to leap off the precipice without a clear reason for doing so.
Yes, I know, Blu-Ray on 60" TVs can be startling. But most people don't have that. Of the few that do, many shove their monster TV into a room too small for it, and still have a poor viewing experience for different reasons. (Who voluntarily sits in the front row in the theater?) For the rest of us, 480p is good enough.
Now, this puts the studios in an interesting spot. The big selling point to the media providers was that higher definitions could be locked down to prevent trivial attempts to copy the content. (Of course, pros will continue to break whatever anti-copy measures the manufacturers put in place.) This assumes that Blu-Ray catches on big, (which it didn't) and that the great unwashed masses would love 1080p so much that they wouldn't put up with 480p copies. (Wrong again.) About the only benefit the studios are getting (if you call it that) is that DVDs are so dirt cheap now that it's not worth bothering to steal them.
(Let's not even talk about 1080i. What a piece-o-crap idea that was.)
All that said, I'm about to buy my second Blu-Ray recorder, because the format does have value in another area -- data storage. But I don't expect that market segment to support the format by itself.
I don't see Blu-Ray really taking off until the media (not just the players!) get so dirt cheap that the cost difference with DVD is down in the noise.
I have about 25 years as a sysadmin, and a manager of sysadmin departments. Sometimes my department was corporate admin, and sometimes I was hired as a local admin for a development group within the organization.
What I've observed, from both sides, actually, is that if corporate admin does not meet the needs of its users, little IT departments will (not may, will) spring up all over the company. Many of them will be manned by wannabees who don't know what they're doing and/or don't understand security issues. The trivial example is the department that's tired of requesting that the corporate wifi gets extended into their building, and puts up their own unsecured wifi in order to get their work done. Yes, they had a point. No, they shouldn't have done that.
Some departments will hire a professional and start loading a wiring closet up with servers.
The way to prevent this is not to forbid it. Life finds a way. Instead, take the hint and try to understand what they're trying to do and why, and how this incorporates into the existing infrastructure. Sometimes the answer really is "no", but you will be able to articulate why, and offer alternatives.
If you insist on battling your users over control of your infrastructure, you will lose, because there are more of them than you.
I think the biggest flaw is that manufacturers don't necessarily want to update your existing device -- they want you to buy a new one. So whether the technology exists affordably really doesn't matter.
This actually makes a lot of sense. Consider.
Either Google music service can make money (ad supported or whatever) or not. Either they're making a profit on the backs of the music industry, stealing the very food from Howard Stringer's grandchildren, or they're not. If not, Google should be able to own the entire industry and make money from it.
Alternately, they could buy the music industry, dissolve the companies, and put the entire catalog on their servers. New content would then come from much smaller, independent producers.
You are my new favorite writer, and "gibblity gobbilty goo" is my new favorite phrase.
> They [upper management] need to be marketed to since they don't know how to read.
More accurately, they don't know how to read past the headline.
Geeze, someone left a magazine in the executive washroom. Now we have to switch everything over to cloud storage. (I am not kidding.)
I'm very sensitive to conventional monitors refreshing at 60 hz also, but part of the flicker you're seeing is the 60 hz of the monitor beating against the 60 hz of the overhead fluorescent light.
It's pretty easy to tell if your environment is on a network drive, and you can choose not to use it. Locally they had to rethink putting power users on a network share because of the massive amount of data we use locally, and the fact that there's so much unused space on the C drive of most PCs these days. But, you can't assume that local data is backed up, unless the company makes some provision for that, or you know someone in IT. Moreover, in places where "diagnosis" is limited to re-imaging the system disk, I've seen users buy their own external disks on which to keep their work-related data.
It seems to me the larger the organization, the more difficult it is to get upgrades and the more likely that people will take matters into their own hands.
There used to be a formula for this back in the early days of corporate IT. The less responsive the official organization, the more likely that unofficial services will spring up like little fiefdoms in the company.
I've worked for a company that had an unofficial "parts guy"; someone who would stock many common PC components and offer them for sale out of his cube. Did a brisk business.
What it comes down to is being able to get your work done, and the time you spend fighting with IT is time wasted.
This can be especially challenging after a corporate outsourcing. The helpdesk overseas is trained to avoid cutting a ticket for PC service, because that requires they pull in someone local and that adds to overhead.
Recently I came in Monday and found that I had been the victim of a "drive by upgrade", and my video was not displaying correctly. The usual adjustments weren't helping, so, gritting my teeth, I called the helpdesk in an overseas country that will not be named.
"Hello, my PC video is not displaying correctly. I see that patches were applied over the weekend and I suspect a corrupt..."
"I think I can be helping you. Please take your mouse pointer and put it in a part of the desktop where there is no window, and click the right mouse button."
"I've already tried this, but ok..."
"Please be clicking on the settings tab."
"Ok."
"Move the Screen resolution slider to 1024 by 768 and click Apply."
"Ok."
"Do you see your desktop?"
"Yes, but..."
"Your computer is fixed. Thank you for calling..."
"My computer is NOT fixed! The resolution of this monitor is 1680X1050. Last Friday the PC would display in that resolu..."
"If you can see your desktop, your computer is fixed. I will close the ticket. Have a pleasant day."
It took two days of bitter complaints and trying to make do with a low resolution desktop that was stretched realllly wide, before someone higher up in the organization took notice and arm-twisted the outsource company to send over a PC tech, who had to replace hardware to get it working correctly.
The thing is, if it had failed completely (or if I had said "the monitor is black" and let it go at that) things would have gone a lot more smoothly. If there's any way an admission can be forced from you that the PC is working, then no effort or expense is necessary.
The way support is set up in some companies, I can understand the temptation to accidentally put your foot on the motherboard. "I'm sorry, I don't know how that happened." Don't drop the computer, though, because you will want PC support to restore your data, and do you really think they're backing up PCs? Effectively, I mean?
At least they got the font right this time.
> Microsoft is usually damned if they do, damned if they don't. Let's say they added multiple desktop support, a la every other worthwhile OS. Everyone would laugh at MS for being late to the party. If they don't add it, then people will mock them for its omission.
That's true for any feature. And the moral of the story is, don't be late to the party. Their chances of being mocked and laughed at are significantly reduced if they keep up. Instead of sitting on their market share until they noticed the world has passed them by. Again and again.
Microsoft has enough developers to populate a small town. They have shown (usually in Proof of Concept) that they can innovate. Where they repeatedly screw up is in execution.
> You just can't please everyone.
That's true, but they could please more people by leading instead of noticing we've marched past, running to the front of the line, and pretending they've been leading all along.
> Now your porn collection can also double as personal data storage, what an awesome excuse for ever increasing collection!
I wonder if my wife would buy that explanation.
It's a matter of load balancing. My DroidX currently shows 23 background processes on one core. Two cores would be better. Four cores (assuming reasonable power management) would be even better. Multiple cores don't necessarily make individual tasks go faster; they provide more consistent response. Even non-techies will appreciate that, even if they don't quite understand why it's happening.
When you factor in the full cost of commuting (fuel, maintenance, parking, higher food costs) 10% in some cases would be money ahead. Moreover, the entire time consumed by commuting, including dressing for outdoors, finding the keys, etc, is saved also. For me that would be around 2 additional hours a day I could spend doing something else, like, well, working.
You are absolutely right.
Continuing the original thought, one of the problems of an American watching Dr. Who is that we don't get some of the more obscure British historical references.
All things are relative, and few things suck more than Windows, but I suspect that OSX would be a very frustrating experience for many of the same reasons. A mousey-clicky interface doesn't lend itself well to a touch-only device. You end up having to make up contorted gestures that emulate mouse clicks, instead of devising natural touch motions to get work done.
iOS is not OSX with some touch features, it's a total re-imagining specifically for a touch-only platform.
The multitouch mousepad is kinda cool (I played with it in the store), and perhaps some of the gestures will make their way onto the ipad, but it's still not a substitute for a touch-only paradigm.
As long as Microsoft persists in trying to make the Windows mousey-clicky interface work on a tablet, it'll continue to be a frustrating and barely usable interface. It still baffles me why Microsoft doesn't just go with Surface (or maybe Surface Lite) on tablets.
>The nearby Crystal Palace and its transmitter burned down three days after Mr Davis bought the Marconi type–702 set on November 26.
Didn't I see that on Dr. Who?
> Just to poke my anti-socialist friends with a stick, I find it interesting that a publicly funded institute happened apon this discovery and not a private corporation.
Not really. iOS is not OSX with "some tablet-like features". It's a different OS (although perhaps based on a similar kernel) with a different UI paradigm. This is precisely the part Microsoft doesn't get. You don't paste a few features on a desktop paradigm and magically turn it into a good tablet experience. You have to start from square one, and develop a paradigm that works on a touch-only interface.
OSX on a tablet would suck just as bad as Windows 7 "tablet edition" currently sucks on a tablet, and for the same reason -- the paradigms are not compatible. Apple understood that, Google understood that, Microsoft does not understand that. And that is why they fail.
(It's not clear yet to me whether RIM understands that.)