You can't just send somebody some Python code in a medium that isn't whitespace-safe.
What medium?
Indentation preferences vary among programmers, are arbitrary, and some people feel strongly about 4-space, 2 space, tabs, etc. Python uses this as a syntax element and forces everyone working on a particular file to share the same indentation scheme or risk breaking the code. In free-form languages, one guy who forgets to change his 4-space tab into actual spaces isn't going to break things.
That's actually a feature -- it forces everyone to agree on a standard there, and use it.
If, for example, one guy uses tabs and one guy uses spaces, and the tab guy has his tabstop set to 2 or 4, while the spaces guy has left it at 8... well, stuff is going to look weird. Forcing everyone to the same convention is something you should be doing anyway, and I'd rather it happen automatically (by breaking stuff).
re-running the build script was a quicker operation than gmake's re-parsing of the make files.
Erm, make files? Plural? Well, there's your problem...
I forget where, but there is a paper somewhere on the dangers of recursive make, advocating a single makefile instead (with a few includes). And they have a point.
I'm all for replacing Make, but performance isn't the reason.
Try going from C++ to Ruby or JavaScript. Possible, but there's a lot of things that it will take a long time to wrap your head around. (Closures being a simple example...)
But for a real challenge, try going to Erlang, Haskell, or Lisp. Of those, Haskell is probably going to be the weirdest, but I don't have a truly thorough understanding of Lisp yet.
I can understand that this would make people wary of committing code because they might inadvertently give an algorithm to the public domain.
I don't really see how. I mean, if you're worried about giving an algorithm up, maybe you shouldn't be releasing the source in the first place?
Don't take that as a "we don't want your code" argument. It's more of an appeal to your own sanity. If that algorithm really is so critical to your success that you need to patent it, it's probably not something you want other people to know how to implement.
What would happen with the GPL v2 then? The company could order a cease and desist to the open source project because it violated one of their patents, even if they themselves provided the code?
If the project accepted that code, then yeah, pretty much. That's why people are so wary of Mono.
However, there are other rather large changes with the GPLv3 -- mostly, closing loopholes which revolve around the definition of "distribution" and the usefulness of "source code". Distribution is the easier one to explain -- if you're running a website on open source (Apache, etc), you are technically not "distributing" it, even if you get a million hits per day. Because you're not distributing it, you don't need to accept the GPL, and you don't need to give source code to visitors of your site.
As for "source code", the GPL was originally written not because Stallman wants to see the source, but because he wants to be able to modify any program he's running -- the original story is that Stallman made a modification to a printer driver (because they provided source, as a matter of consideration), but later, when the lab got a new printer, it did not come with source, so he could not make that modification.
Linus claims to use the GPL for a different reason: He only wants to be able to see the source -- see what people are doing with his code -- and then re-incorporate any useful changes they made back into the project.
GPLv3 is a problem because it closes some loopholes by which you could get the source code, but not be able to modify that same program and run it on the same hardware. This is the "Tivoization" argument -- Tivo gave you source code, but no actual Tivo player would let you compile and run a modified version. Specifically, the hardware would use checksums to verify that the software had not been modified.
Linus has no problem with Tivo -- in fact, he likes it, because his software gets used for more things, and he still gets source code to play with on non-Tivo devices. Stallman hates Tivo, because he can't buy a Tivo and start tinkering with it, so the source code, while useful, no longer serves that original purpose of the GPL.
Linus believes that there's a difference between hardware and software, and that software shouldn't dictate hardware.
Read my signature.
GPLv3 cannot dictate terms to hardware. All it can dictate is which hardware that software may be run on.
In fact, it cannot even dictate that -- unless you intend to redistribute the software.
So, in a sense, it does limit the poor little TiVos of the world -- they are no longer free to simply take GPL'd code and give nothing back. Obviously, we can't stop them from making a locked-down, DRM'd device, but I'm certainly not going to contribute code towards such a device.
This is not analagous to "Wii Points" or XBox Live Cards, and only barely iTunes.
You see, by the time I'm in a store, they are charging just about exactly as much for this card as they are for the actual CD. The CD is better quality, and easier to use -- I honestly do not see why anyone would get the physical card.
Also, TFA claims that this is required. That would suggest that they're not providing an option for those of us who do have credit cards.
And finally, you don't necessarily need a credit card -- there are services like PayPal, and there are places that will let you mail a check.
E - Voting properly implemented creates Collective Control eliminating the Corrupt Control.
I'd like to hear your description of "properly implemented". Remember that you have to reconcile three things: voter verification, accurate counting, and secret ballot. (Pick two.)
And by the way: Poorly implemented, it does just the opposite. Diebold's systems -- excuse me, Premiere Election Systems -- can have the vote compromised by anyone with access to the appropriate excel/Access database. (Might actually just be Excel.) That means there are a lot of people who are literally only a few keystrokes away from changing the vote.
I can certainly design a voting system that will work, using architecture and methods I have already developed. I think others have as well.
I have tried, and I haven't been able to come up with anything that is better than paper, in any way.
Alright, I get the defense in depth concept, but I don't consider it to be a severe vulnerability that the MBR is writable while Windows is running. I consider that to be a feature, one I wish Microsoft did more of -- for example, I can install Linux from a Linux LiveCD, or I can install a second copy of it on another partition, etc. As far as I can tell, OS X is similarly flexible -- it forces you to type your password, but it can deliver a firmware update from within the OS -- think equivalent to a BIOS update, so even earlier than the MBR.
So, to clarify: It's writable from userland, which is not the same as being writable by any user. If they have Admin access (which means you already clicked a "This program wants to modify your Master Boot Record, are you sure?"), you're already screwed -- kind of like how, on Linux, if they have root, you're already screwed.
In other words, it's possible to modify your Master Boot Record without rebooting your computer. This is a good thing.
What's more, this is not new. All that's new is that it's both in the wild (Blue Pill does the same thing), and that it's a rootkit (MBR Viruses have been around for a very long time now). If someone was trying to apply for a patent, you'd be jumping all over them with prior art...
"Because it equipped with a Linux embedded system, Indicube not only offers a file managing system like a PC, but can decode most codecs sufficient to play HD videos easily."
Because of the initial broken English, I was put a little bit on guard parsing the rest of it. Hmm, do they mean "can decode most (codecs [which are] sufficient to play HD videos) easily"? It almost looks like they're ipmlying "can decode (most codecs) [in a way which is] sufficient to play HD videos easily"?
Because I honestly don't see the point of putting a real HD video on this device. Thus, it's obvious that they mean it can play h.264 and such, which is great, but every new device can do that now, so it's obvious that they're only mentioning HD to try to ride the HD marketing hype.
Note that I also said that I had heard some from co-workers. I did not make up the redrawing block-by-block -- that actually did happen, and it was pretty embarrassing.
Java runs quite happily on a cheap mobile phone these days, I don't think for a second that anything that can decrypt HD video on the fly isn't going to ave the power to run a little java on the side.
Except that there are, in fact, players which absolutely do not support running a little java on the side.
Consider: Maybe they actually don't have the power? Maybe the decoding is somehow done in hardware?
Um, you do know that current HDDVD players can't read that disk and won't be able to even with a firmware upgrade.
Actually, from what I've heard, it will require at most a firmware upgrade. But we don't know that yet.
Bluray on the other hand has 100GB (quad layer) discs which should be compatible with most current players albeit requiring a firmware update.
I don't think we know that, either.
Region coding allows a studio to release the movie on disc in one region while it's still in theaters in another.
I do not believe you're actually defending this.
So what if one region still has it in theaters?
Without it, they usually wait for it to complete its run in theaters
Well, yeah, because they're morons. Doesn't make region coding right or desirable.
But only the players are cheap, movie prices are the same.
So what?
I'm sure I'm not alone in renting most movies anyway.
the persistent storage is required by Profile 1.1 which is now the standard profile. All players which are now being manufactured (new models) must have 256MB of persistent storage.
So early adopters get screwed.
The scripting, I'm assuming you mean HDi, can't really be argued since Bluray went BD-J.
Which, again, was not required.
Internet connection is in Profile 2.0 (along with 1GB persistent storage) and will most likely become the standard profile in about a year.
Which means people will have to code for the lowest common denominator, or risk not working on some players, pissing the early adopters off again -- except "early adopters" now includes everyone rushing out to buy them now, assuming the format war is over.
In other words: They are playing catch-up, technologically.
It's like the Xbox 360 -- developers can't assume you have a hard drive, because some models come without one. Therefore, pretty much all games are forced into supporting running without a hard drive, holding them back.
PS3 games can assume a Blu-Ray disc, so 50 gigs of data, and a hard drive, so 20-60 gigs of storage. Xbox 360 games get a 9 gig DVD, and that's it.
Personally I could care less about internet connectivity but I guess some people like that...
There are actually some pretty exciting things we could do with Internet connectivity -- things we were doing on HD-DVD, but that's probably not happening now.
As to your question HOW, I don't think there is one way that suit's all, if you catch my drift.
Which tells me that whatever ways exist, they aren't logical. Were they logical, you could simply point me to a logical argument, and that would be the end of it.
Suffice it to say, without flooding you with stuff, that Jesus could not have been a good moral teacher if he were not God, because that would have made him a LIAR. He claimed on several occasions to be God, and a moral man of sound mind would not do that and knowingly mislead thousands.
People are not black and white, and lunatics are the least predictable.
Jesus taught people to love their neighbor, for one. Does that mean that if I believe in loving my neighbor, I must believe Jesus was God?
Let's not forget: Maybe it was a metaphor, and maybe Jesus even did his best to make it clear it was a metaphor. There's plenty of room for misinterpretation and downright revisionist history by the time the Gospels were actually written. Or maybe he was entirely sane, and made the claims he did because he was deliberately engineering a religion around himself -- not out of megalomania, but to make sure people didn't forget the lessons he taught.
But I suspect you know this, at least somewhat:
And no, he does not adhere to Young Earth Creationism, if you were wondering...
The Bible is either true, or it's not. You decide.
You see, it's possible for parts of it to be true, just as it's possible for parts of Jesus' life to be true, or even parts of Jesus' psyche to be sound.
But there was a lot of setup you had to do to make that happen, some of it involving a network connection to the TV that not a lot of people have.
That is true. But I think there's a valid question of whether it's easy once you do have such a device. And I think that there's a market for cheap set-top boxes there.
You've lost the plot man. I'm talking HD media which even for TV is not going to fit in that 4 GB DVD. And transferring that volume of data is slow for just about anyone in the US right now, and for many many years to come.
Well, let's suppose, for a moment, that it your movie requires the full size of, say, HD-DVD. 30 gigs means on it would take eight 4-gig DVDs, right?
Which means at that quality, it would fit about one episode of Sanctuary.
That's all assuming you do no transcoding. I'd think if you're lending it to your friend, you could afford to do that. After all, if they end up liking it a lot, they can just get it themselves, right?
Two, you 100MBit connection is throttled somewhere around the ISP.
Define "throttled". If you mean the bottleneck due to upstream, well, they are starting to build that, too. They're planning to deliver IPTV over it, so I assume they realize the kind of infrastructure they need.
No question. My question is how soon will media companies get that right? Seems like a long wait to me. It seems likley to take many years.
I'm willing to wait, and in the mean time, I'm willing to support the concept by buying Sanctuary episodes, and any similarly good production I can get in DRM-free, downloadable form.
I agree, for some movies - but that's not a model that can really replace ownership for people, not anytime soon.
Not completely, but I do argue that for most people, most of the time, rentals make more sense.
I've bought DVD's directly from small companies as well, and plan to continue doing so with Blu-Ray.
Except for, you know, the licensing fees to Sony, AACS, and Microsoft. Buying online means, at worst, a licensing fee from MS or Apple for the codec, but arguably, most of it will go to bandwidth.
But that just can't happen. Firstly, because there really is no concept of "renting" DRM-free data files, because the customer never has to give it back at the end of the rental period. So you've got your assumption that people won't keep many files around.
You're right. I speak only of that concept to set the price, because otherwise, you'll get the reverse happening -- I often rent DVDs and rip them.
I don't know about others, but there's only so many times I can watch a movie. I have owned a total of maybe three DVDs, ever, because there are just not that many movies I can watch obsessively enough for it to be worth it not to just rent them.
There's simply no way you can get Hollywood to sell people DRM-free movies for less than the price of the blank media to back them up, even if you could somehow afford the bandwidth costs on top of that.
I do believe you can afford the bandwidth costs.
And therein lies the pity -- I know Hollywood will never go for it. And I know that it would only really work if it launched with a huge library, thus discouraging people from simply dumping all five movies an indie release would start with to their existing hard drives and leaving.
Rome didn't have enough nukes to destroy the globe
If that's a measure of our military might, well, Rome didn't have anyone matching theirs. So you know what, I'm going to continue to link to another generic Wikipedia article, because you obviously need to read them.
And really, the fact that it isn't Rome is what makes the USA so special. Rome burned itself out expending all its military power to overthrow the world.
This really, honestly doesn't sound familiar to you?
Oh, right. We were "liberating" them.
The US is powerful, rich, socially stable, innovative, fat and happy.
No thanks to you, or whoever the original AC was. Do "socially stable" societies denigrate and repress large chunks of the population? Have you completely forgotten crap like Gitmo, the "Patriot" Act, and the DMCA?
It's recognized around the world as the place you go to follow your dreams. It truly is the land of opportunity. Only jaded U.S. liberals and Eurotrash disagree.
You just answered yourself. Apparently "Around the world" means "everywhere except Europe". Oh, and India.
That's right -- used to be, if you were an Indian looking to move up in the world, you came here. Now, you stay in India, and watch Americans lose their jobs to you.
You don't get all the interactive features if you go DRM-free -- you get a lot of them, but not all. But it is an option, and with a standard 9-gig DVD, too.
Were it not for the licensing crap -- that is, if I could just take the HD-DVD spec I've got here and release it to the Internet -- I imagine you'd already be seeing high-quality open source implementations. As it is, if you're willing to pay ludicrously high fees for software like Scenarist, that and a dual-layer DVD burner will give you high-def content, which will actually work on your retail HD-DVD player.
Easier. To play HD content from a disc I just place a disc in a player, and it's playing.
Wow, you get discs out of thin air? How'd you manage that?
To get HD content online I have to decide to buy it from somewhere (and have an internet connection to my system at the TV). Then I have to wait for it to buffer enough to start watching.
That's not "downloading", that's "streaming".
But let's try a fair comparison, then, shall we? To play HD content from a disc, I just drive out to Wall-Mart, buy a disc, bring it hope, break open the shrink wrap, put it in a player, and it's playing. Or I go on Netflix, add them to my queue, wait for them in the mail, open the package, open the disc, put it in the player, and it's playing -- and then I have to remember to mail it back afterwards.
To get HD content online, I have to decide to buy it from somewhere (just like the above), wait for it to download (a hell of a lot faster than mailing), press play, and it's playing.
And then I have to watch a greatly compressed video/audio experience that makes buying a decent HD set a waste.
It is too bad that there isn't more quality HD stuff online, then. But that's not a discussion of "easier" -- that's a discussion of "better quality" -- and high-quality stuff certainly does exist.
If I downloaded the content legally and want to share it with a friend I can't do that.
Erm, where are we talking about? There's at least one high-quality, un-DRM'd show online right now. (Exclusively online, actually.)
If I downloaded it legally I load them a hard drive (!).
Or you could just send it to them over the Internet. Or burn it to a disc -- but it can be any disc, really, even a 4 gig DVD.
If I have physical media, I just loan them a disc
Then they scratch it, and you have to buy a brand-new copy of the disc.
Online downloads? Cheap indeed but either they are (a) very cheap and the media expires shortly, or (b) actually rather expensive for the same non-portable highly compressed content I mentioned before.
Not much online right now, but there are at least some that are, again, portable and of decent quality.
probably get them faster than a torrent and cheaper than legal online HD media.
Fiber is coming. Actually, in my hometown, it's here -- 100 mbits to the home. Just did the math, and that means at most an hour and a half to download 50 gigs of data -- assuming it's a full Blu-Ray disc (most BR movies are only 25 gigs). Unless you live right next to NetFlix, or you're getting some 10 or 15 discs per day, that pretty much has you beat.
Cheap? Well, that Sanctuary link seemed reasonable, though certainly not as cheap -- but NetFlix is rental, and Sanctuary is to own. $8.75 for four episodes, which are, on average, 15 mins -- so less than $20 for a movie's worth, which is cheaper than new DVDs.
The trouble is, there isn't really anyone doing "rentals" without DRM, and they are not doing the DRM particularly well. DRM done right can actually facilitate more mobility and flexibility. I can burn Steam games to DVDs, make as many copies as I want, or I can simply download the Steam client somewhere else, login, and re-download the entire game.
But at least right now, I think there's a big window for someone who wants to "rent" DRM-free movies over the Internet. Make it cheap enough, and basically assume that a full-quality copy of it will take too much space for now, so people will only keep 5-10 movies around, if that. Do it right, and by the time the technology catches up, people will already be in the habit of buying this stuff legitimately.
Oh, one parting shot: With digital distribution, you aren't necessarily sending money to a network, to the MPAA, to Sony -- depending on how it's done, you certainly can send it straight to the people responsible.
And by the way: There is a triple-layer HD-DVD format, which is one gig higher than the highest (dual-layer) Blu-ray disc. (Blu-ray has no triple-layer discs.)
Also, how are the video formats a loss? The video is exactly the same, except that Blu-Ray has a higher bitrate. It's the DRM, region coding (or lack thereof), and interactivity that's different.
Oh, they tried. Maybe not Microsoft, but the other backers...
And the only reason HD-DVD doesn't have region coding is, they couldn't agree on how to do it. (Probably on how to split the regions.)
But the fact is, they didn't. Which means that they now can't add it without forcing an upgrade to every player out there, which they're not going to do. Which means that, good intentions or not, HD-DVD is region-free, and for some discs, DRM-free. (Blu-Ray requires AACS and allows BD+, HD-DVD allows AACS or nothing at all.)
Slashdot Mirror
What medium?
That's actually a feature -- it forces everyone to agree on a standard there, and use it.
If, for example, one guy uses tabs and one guy uses spaces, and the tab guy has his tabstop set to 2 or 4, while the spaces guy has left it at 8... well, stuff is going to look weird. Forcing everyone to the same convention is something you should be doing anyway, and I'd rather it happen automatically (by breaking stuff).
Erm, make files? Plural? Well, there's your problem...
I forget where, but there is a paper somewhere on the dangers of recursive make, advocating a single makefile instead (with a few includes). And they have a point.
I'm all for replacing Make, but performance isn't the reason.
The universe doesn't support threading? Or just runs on an immensely large, but single-core, CPU?
Try going from C++ to Ruby or JavaScript. Possible, but there's a lot of things that it will take a long time to wrap your head around. (Closures being a simple example...)
But for a real challenge, try going to Erlang, Haskell, or Lisp. Of those, Haskell is probably going to be the weirdest, but I don't have a truly thorough understanding of Lisp yet.
I don't really see how. I mean, if you're worried about giving an algorithm up, maybe you shouldn't be releasing the source in the first place?
Don't take that as a "we don't want your code" argument. It's more of an appeal to your own sanity. If that algorithm really is so critical to your success that you need to patent it, it's probably not something you want other people to know how to implement.
If the project accepted that code, then yeah, pretty much. That's why people are so wary of Mono.
However, there are other rather large changes with the GPLv3 -- mostly, closing loopholes which revolve around the definition of "distribution" and the usefulness of "source code". Distribution is the easier one to explain -- if you're running a website on open source (Apache, etc), you are technically not "distributing" it, even if you get a million hits per day. Because you're not distributing it, you don't need to accept the GPL, and you don't need to give source code to visitors of your site.
As for "source code", the GPL was originally written not because Stallman wants to see the source, but because he wants to be able to modify any program he's running -- the original story is that Stallman made a modification to a printer driver (because they provided source, as a matter of consideration), but later, when the lab got a new printer, it did not come with source, so he could not make that modification.
Linus claims to use the GPL for a different reason: He only wants to be able to see the source -- see what people are doing with his code -- and then re-incorporate any useful changes they made back into the project.
GPLv3 is a problem because it closes some loopholes by which you could get the source code, but not be able to modify that same program and run it on the same hardware. This is the "Tivoization" argument -- Tivo gave you source code, but no actual Tivo player would let you compile and run a modified version. Specifically, the hardware would use checksums to verify that the software had not been modified.
Linus has no problem with Tivo -- in fact, he likes it, because his software gets used for more things, and he still gets source code to play with on non-Tivo devices. Stallman hates Tivo, because he can't buy a Tivo and start tinkering with it, so the source code, while useful, no longer serves that original purpose of the GPL.
Read my signature.
GPLv3 cannot dictate terms to hardware. All it can dictate is which hardware that software may be run on.
In fact, it cannot even dictate that -- unless you intend to redistribute the software.
So, in a sense, it does limit the poor little TiVos of the world -- they are no longer free to simply take GPL'd code and give nothing back. Obviously, we can't stop them from making a locked-down, DRM'd device, but I'm certainly not going to contribute code towards such a device.
Neither of those is actually, actively, intentionally dishonest. Black-hat SEO is.
This is not analagous to "Wii Points" or XBox Live Cards, and only barely iTunes.
You see, by the time I'm in a store, they are charging just about exactly as much for this card as they are for the actual CD. The CD is better quality, and easier to use -- I honestly do not see why anyone would get the physical card.
Also, TFA claims that this is required. That would suggest that they're not providing an option for those of us who do have credit cards.
And finally, you don't necessarily need a credit card -- there are services like PayPal, and there are places that will let you mail a check.
The electronics may be dirt-cheap, but the licenses are not.
Well, as you say, they think "I'm going to rent a DVD". So, HD-DVD, to them, means "High-Def DVD", not "High Definition Digital Versatile Disk".
You see, they don't know or care what DVD stands for, but they know what it is, and they know what HD is.
But it is a lot easier to say "Blu-Ray".
I'd like to hear your description of "properly implemented". Remember that you have to reconcile three things: voter verification, accurate counting, and secret ballot. (Pick two.)
And by the way: Poorly implemented, it does just the opposite. Diebold's systems -- excuse me, Premiere Election Systems -- can have the vote compromised by anyone with access to the appropriate excel/Access database. (Might actually just be Excel.) That means there are a lot of people who are literally only a few keystrokes away from changing the vote.
I have tried, and I haven't been able to come up with anything that is better than paper, in any way.
Alright, I get the defense in depth concept, but I don't consider it to be a severe vulnerability that the MBR is writable while Windows is running. I consider that to be a feature, one I wish Microsoft did more of -- for example, I can install Linux from a Linux LiveCD, or I can install a second copy of it on another partition, etc. As far as I can tell, OS X is similarly flexible -- it forces you to type your password, but it can deliver a firmware update from within the OS -- think equivalent to a BIOS update, so even earlier than the MBR.
So, to clarify: It's writable from userland, which is not the same as being writable by any user. If they have Admin access (which means you already clicked a "This program wants to modify your Master Boot Record, are you sure?"), you're already screwed -- kind of like how, on Linux, if they have root, you're already screwed.
In other words, it's possible to modify your Master Boot Record without rebooting your computer. This is a good thing.
What's more, this is not new. All that's new is that it's both in the wild (Blue Pill does the same thing), and that it's a rootkit (MBR Viruses have been around for a very long time now). If someone was trying to apply for a patent, you'd be jumping all over them with prior art...
Because of the initial broken English, I was put a little bit on guard parsing the rest of it. Hmm, do they mean "can decode most (codecs [which are] sufficient to play HD videos) easily"? It almost looks like they're ipmlying "can decode (most codecs) [in a way which is] sufficient to play HD videos easily"?
Because I honestly don't see the point of putting a real HD video on this device. Thus, it's obvious that they mean it can play h.264 and such, which is great, but every new device can do that now, so it's obvious that they're only mentioning HD to try to ride the HD marketing hype.
Note that I also said that I had heard some from co-workers. I did not make up the redrawing block-by-block -- that actually did happen, and it was pretty embarrassing.
Except that there are, in fact, players which absolutely do not support running a little java on the side.
Consider: Maybe they actually don't have the power? Maybe the decoding is somehow done in hardware?
That's what I'm doing. Right now, in fact.
But I figured I'd get a last rant in.
Actually, from what I've heard, it will require at most a firmware upgrade. But we don't know that yet.
I don't think we know that, either.
I do not believe you're actually defending this.
So what if one region still has it in theaters?
Well, yeah, because they're morons. Doesn't make region coding right or desirable.
So what?
I'm sure I'm not alone in renting most movies anyway.
So early adopters get screwed.
Which, again, was not required.
Which means people will have to code for the lowest common denominator, or risk not working on some players, pissing the early adopters off again -- except "early adopters" now includes everyone rushing out to buy them now, assuming the format war is over.
In other words: They are playing catch-up, technologically.
It's like the Xbox 360 -- developers can't assume you have a hard drive, because some models come without one. Therefore, pretty much all games are forced into supporting running without a hard drive, holding them back.
PS3 games can assume a Blu-Ray disc, so 50 gigs of data, and a hard drive, so 20-60 gigs of storage. Xbox 360 games get a 9 gig DVD, and that's it.
There are actually some pretty exciting things we could do with Internet connectivity -- things we were doing on HD-DVD, but that's probably not happening now.
Which tells me that whatever ways exist, they aren't logical. Were they logical, you could simply point me to a logical argument, and that would be the end of it.
People are not black and white, and lunatics are the least predictable.
Jesus taught people to love their neighbor, for one. Does that mean that if I believe in loving my neighbor, I must believe Jesus was God?
Let's not forget: Maybe it was a metaphor, and maybe Jesus even did his best to make it clear it was a metaphor. There's plenty of room for misinterpretation and downright revisionist history by the time the Gospels were actually written. Or maybe he was entirely sane, and made the claims he did because he was deliberately engineering a religion around himself -- not out of megalomania, but to make sure people didn't forget the lessons he taught.
But I suspect you know this, at least somewhat:
The Bible is either true, or it's not. You decide.
You see, it's possible for parts of it to be true, just as it's possible for parts of Jesus' life to be true, or even parts of Jesus' psyche to be sound.
That is true. But I think there's a valid question of whether it's easy once you do have such a device. And I think that there's a market for cheap set-top boxes there.
Well, let's suppose, for a moment, that it your movie requires the full size of, say, HD-DVD. 30 gigs means on it would take eight 4-gig DVDs, right?
Which means at that quality, it would fit about one episode of Sanctuary.
That's all assuming you do no transcoding. I'd think if you're lending it to your friend, you could afford to do that. After all, if they end up liking it a lot, they can just get it themselves, right?
Define "throttled". If you mean the bottleneck due to upstream, well, they are starting to build that, too. They're planning to deliver IPTV over it, so I assume they realize the kind of infrastructure they need.
I'm willing to wait, and in the mean time, I'm willing to support the concept by buying Sanctuary episodes, and any similarly good production I can get in DRM-free, downloadable form.
Not completely, but I do argue that for most people, most of the time, rentals make more sense.
Except for, you know, the licensing fees to Sony, AACS, and Microsoft. Buying online means, at worst, a licensing fee from MS or Apple for the codec, but arguably, most of it will go to bandwidth.
You're right. I speak only of that concept to set the price, because otherwise, you'll get the reverse happening -- I often rent DVDs and rip them.
I don't know about others, but there's only so many times I can watch a movie. I have owned a total of maybe three DVDs, ever, because there are just not that many movies I can watch obsessively enough for it to be worth it not to just rent them.
I do believe you can afford the bandwidth costs.
And therein lies the pity -- I know Hollywood will never go for it. And I know that it would only really work if it launched with a huge library, thus discouraging people from simply dumping all five movies an indie release would start with to their existing hard drives and leaving.
Fine, I was technically wrong.
However, my point still stands -- those don't even begin to cover what's considered "fair use".
If that's a measure of our military might, well, Rome didn't have anyone matching theirs. So you know what, I'm going to continue to link to another generic Wikipedia article, because you obviously need to read them.
This really, honestly doesn't sound familiar to you?
Oh, right. We were "liberating" them.
No thanks to you, or whoever the original AC was. Do "socially stable" societies denigrate and repress large chunks of the population? Have you completely forgotten crap like Gitmo, the "Patriot" Act, and the DMCA?
You just answered yourself. Apparently "Around the world" means "everywhere except Europe". Oh, and India.
That's right -- used to be, if you were an Indian looking to move up in the world, you came here. Now, you stay in India, and watch Americans lose their jobs to you.
You don't get all the interactive features if you go DRM-free -- you get a lot of them, but not all. But it is an option, and with a standard 9-gig DVD, too.
Were it not for the licensing crap -- that is, if I could just take the HD-DVD spec I've got here and release it to the Internet -- I imagine you'd already be seeing high-quality open source implementations. As it is, if you're willing to pay ludicrously high fees for software like Scenarist, that and a dual-layer DVD burner will give you high-def content, which will actually work on your retail HD-DVD player.
Wow, you get discs out of thin air? How'd you manage that?
That's not "downloading", that's "streaming".
But let's try a fair comparison, then, shall we? To play HD content from a disc, I just drive out to Wall-Mart, buy a disc, bring it hope, break open the shrink wrap, put it in a player, and it's playing. Or I go on Netflix, add them to my queue, wait for them in the mail, open the package, open the disc, put it in the player, and it's playing -- and then I have to remember to mail it back afterwards.
To get HD content online, I have to decide to buy it from somewhere (just like the above), wait for it to download (a hell of a lot faster than mailing), press play, and it's playing.
It is too bad that there isn't more quality HD stuff online, then. But that's not a discussion of "easier" -- that's a discussion of "better quality" -- and high-quality stuff certainly does exist.
Erm, where are we talking about? There's at least one high-quality, un-DRM'd show online right now. (Exclusively online, actually.)
Or you could just send it to them over the Internet. Or burn it to a disc -- but it can be any disc, really, even a 4 gig DVD.
Then they scratch it, and you have to buy a brand-new copy of the disc.
Not much online right now, but there are at least some that are, again, portable and of decent quality.
Fiber is coming. Actually, in my hometown, it's here -- 100 mbits to the home. Just did the math, and that means at most an hour and a half to download 50 gigs of data -- assuming it's a full Blu-Ray disc (most BR movies are only 25 gigs). Unless you live right next to NetFlix, or you're getting some 10 or 15 discs per day, that pretty much has you beat.
Cheap? Well, that Sanctuary link seemed reasonable, though certainly not as cheap -- but NetFlix is rental, and Sanctuary is to own. $8.75 for four episodes, which are, on average, 15 mins -- so less than $20 for a movie's worth, which is cheaper than new DVDs.
The trouble is, there isn't really anyone doing "rentals" without DRM, and they are not doing the DRM particularly well. DRM done right can actually facilitate more mobility and flexibility. I can burn Steam games to DVDs, make as many copies as I want, or I can simply download the Steam client somewhere else, login, and re-download the entire game.
But at least right now, I think there's a big window for someone who wants to "rent" DRM-free movies over the Internet. Make it cheap enough, and basically assume that a full-quality copy of it will take too much space for now, so people will only keep 5-10 movies around, if that. Do it right, and by the time the technology catches up, people will already be in the habit of buying this stuff legitimately.
Oh, one parting shot: With digital distribution, you aren't necessarily sending money to a network, to the MPAA, to Sony -- depending on how it's done, you certainly can send it straight to the people responsible.
Subject says it.
And by the way: There is a triple-layer HD-DVD format, which is one gig higher than the highest (dual-layer) Blu-ray disc. (Blu-ray has no triple-layer discs.)
Also, how are the video formats a loss? The video is exactly the same, except that Blu-Ray has a higher bitrate. It's the DRM, region coding (or lack thereof), and interactivity that's different.
Oh, they tried. Maybe not Microsoft, but the other backers...
And the only reason HD-DVD doesn't have region coding is, they couldn't agree on how to do it. (Probably on how to split the regions.)
But the fact is, they didn't. Which means that they now can't add it without forcing an upgrade to every player out there, which they're not going to do. Which means that, good intentions or not, HD-DVD is region-free, and for some discs, DRM-free. (Blu-Ray requires AACS and allows BD+, HD-DVD allows AACS or nothing at all.)