Actually, no. You have 80% of your population in urban areas and those still cant get correct connections. In the US, broadband is defined as any link that is both constant and above 128kb/s. In Korea, broadband is a link over 20Mbps both ways.
By your definition, you should be able to get the same type of connection in downtown New York city, but it is not the case...
Call centers are cost centers. Support is part of the purchase cost and with razor thin margins, you can only get bottom support. Compound the low pay with the high technical expectations and you get a recipe for a disaster. Doing it over the phone makes it even worse.
In summary, PCs are complex, the customers are for the most part not very good with it to start with, problems can be very complex, interface is so rich that it is difficult to describe over the phone and tech level needs to be high to diagnose problems when the pay needs to be low to keep margins.
It is an impossible situation. In a few years (yeah, right...), with more savvy customers and maybe video conferencing, you may reach a point where you can diagnose remotely. Or remote access to the computer (hello, security breach).
For those of you that have had the pleasure to diagnose computer problems remotely for your family, you know what i am talking about. This is what the people on the other end of the phone face every day...
Cable is a shared media. The data is basically broadcast to the whole neighborhood at the same time, so I would think that the key is shared too.
So far, even the Pay Per View, which could benefit of unique keys, does not use it. They just use common unused channels and broadcast in the clear. The others in your neighborhood just dont know know when and what (and set top boxes cant tune automatically on those channels), but with a QAM tuner, you can see those streams in clear (although the person paying for it can fast forward, rewind or pause at will, not you), you just dont know what the program is, when it will be ordered or if the suscriber will finish it...
So, basically, with a concerted effort of hackers, it could be possible to get some keys...
What about the regular digital channels, is there a way to dump them without the analog hole? I mean Toon Disney, VH1 Classic, etc. Anything beyond basic cable is premium and hence encrypted (as you are not supposed to have it without paying).
Yes, it seems you are somewhat missing what is happening. So, right now, you have analog cable with an analog tuner feeding your Media Center. Great. Now, what is happening is that the HD revolution is coming. So, instead of your crappy, noisy analog cable, you can access digital channels on the same cable. Those channels can have higher resolution or at least better signal. They are encoded in mpeg2 and wrapped in a QAM signal (different than the ATSC standard for over the air HDTV). Today, you can access the same channels (or even more) than the ones in your basic cable with a QAM tuner, BUT, as soon as you want any of the premium channel (discovery HD, espn HD, HBO...), you will need a set-top box. Why? Because those channels are encrypted to avoid you getting signals you did not pay your local cable company for.
So, to avoid those set top boxes, the cable cards have been designed: they are small cards you can plug in your TV/PC/DVR/Media center that would allow you to decrypt those channels with a key corresponding to your account (so, allowing to decrypt the channels you pay for). Tivo has it and now Vista has it with some ATI cable card tuner. The problem is that cable card is pretty much hit or miss, so all the computer based DVR/Media Center will NOT be able to access the full line-up of HD programming, that you pay for it or not.
Sure, you could go through the "analog hole", however, there is no easy way to digitize a 720p/1080i/1080p signal, so you are back to SD resolutions.
In short, if you want to use a homebrew PVR, you are srewed and limited to over the air HD or non-encrypted QAM channels...
Bombing and radiation is better for wildlife than sub divisions. No, absence of human presence and natural environments are higher factors for wildlife growth than radiation is for the decline. So, as humans do not enter irradiated zones, the wildlife is thriving there.
You can benchmark in existing, released games. Those are the real application and as such the performances observed are relevant. The fact that their current driver is optimized or not does not matter, this is the current status. Of course, as the author talks about pre-release, that does not apply here. The author is quite surprised that *BETA* code of incomplete demos runs better on the hardware of the company that helped the game developer. No foul play here.
In the same vein, you have 3dmark. Those are benchmarks developed in collaboration with ALL the players in the industry: AMD, Nvidia, Intel... They all have plenty of time to optimize their drivers and find bugs or non-optimized path. As this is a synthetic benchmark, results are less relevant.
So, in summary, the author complains that beta code is non optimized for all hardware. A stupid complaint while the solution already exists: benchmark with known benchmark and final code.
If you are *VERY* good with maths and especially statistics, bank may be interested. They need very good models of loans, default, risks and such calculations and are ready to pay for those.
Of course, you need to prove that you are quite brilliant...
I think you missed what they were trying to achieve. The article is a transcript of a radio show. The show revolves around the firing of the AG of New Mexico. This man was the real life protagonist of the events happening in "A few Good Men", where Tom Cruise was playing his part. So, they are tying truth and fiction (based on a true story) about this man. This is the second time this man goes on a quest for the truth. He did it before and it even became a movie. Maybe you'll be more attentive during the second movie they'll make with this event...
At least the rest of the world has figured out what most of us Americans haven't: America's right to privacy is a rapidly disappearing illusion. You are at the same time reading too much and too little in the statement. This is a statement in a court of law. They are not talking about general privacy law, but specific ones. There is a very big difference even in the way the law works in USA and in Europe. For example, in Europe, your data belong to YOU. Privacy laws give you a RIGHT to have those data corrected or removed. In the US, the data belong to the organization collecting it and you have no access to it. Another law in Europe say you cannot share those data to an organization that does not respect those principle. This is what came to bite Mediasentry. There was a similar problem with airlines sharing their passenger information with the Department of Homeland Security as they do not respect that same principle either.
currently Google is the target of some negative image campaigning. What I'm interested in is, where that pushing originates. The whole financial community hates Google. The feeling started when Google snobed them for the IPO (they went with a public auction, preventing the financial institution to get their hands on the first dibs). Google even kicked them by selling shares with a voting power 10x less than the founder's shares. It went worse when Google refused to post any indication of their growth or results past what the stock exchange require (no analyst hint, no prevision). And to compound all that, Google has exceeded the analyst expectations everytime, making them miss the best sale date.
Basically, Google has shown over the year it does not need the financial community as much as they need it and they still resent that.
The difference between Nintendo and the other two, is that Nintendo is a games only company. They rely solely on their hardware and software sales. On the other hand, Sony and Microsoft's consoles are just one division of a much larger conglomerate. And that conglomerate can support the other gaming divisions until they finally do get out of the red, or the stock holders, whatever, demand that division to be sold off or folded. Microsoft's gaming/Zune divsion might have lost 300 million dollars, but the company as a whole took in over 14 billion dollars in revenue. I know it can't go on forever, but Microsoft at least, is committed to this industry, for better or worse.
That used to be true. Sony, for example, treated the gaming division as a small experiment. They changed their tune quickly when the gaming division amounted to over 30% of Sony's PROFIT. So, in fact, the gaming division has been the one propping the rest of the conglomerate up. Movies and music revenue have been falling steadily over the past few years and consumer electronics are razor thin margins and quality is falling too. So, gaming was their cash cow and now that they need to switch it to the new generation, they might be in trouble if they under-deliver.
Microsoft is the opposite. Their gaming division has had only 2 positive quarters since inception and already lost over 5 BILLIONS dollars over its life. Microsoft basically is a software company. They have 2 cash cows: windows and office. The rest are experiments or long term investment. The problem is both that they will need new markets in the future, but that it is very costly for them to get a foot hold in those.
In contrast, Nintendo is a pure gaming company and they have NEVER lost money. Yup, always positive. They have been propped up by their hand-held business, but even their "failing" consoles have been money makers.
And a movie can be even better. A big company wanted its people to understand Internet and asked a video to be created for that purpose. That video is accessible here: http://www.warriorsofthe.net/
This is at the same time entertaining and quite educative, although slightly dated. Show this to people instead of trying to express concepts with words. Highly recommended.
THe best thing to ever happen in the favor of gamers was Jack's soap box jump within hours of Vtech. Blaming games, and saying Cho never would NEVER have "learned to enjoy killing withoutplaying violent video games". Only to later find out, that Cho, well never really played games. Maybe mine sweaper to pass some boring class time.
Jack took a chance and lost. Expecting male college student to play nowadays is about as likely as them drinking (ie: very high). He thought that such a loner would be a gamer and it would not have been unexpected, but it proved wrong this time. Basically, Jack fell the victim of profiling. He classified people and that came back to bite him in the ass.
Let's hope that with all those frivolous actions, he finally lose his Florida license and that we wont hear from him anymore...
I personally think that it says an awfull lot about the game industry that the top scorer for march was God of War 2 for the PS2.
Yes, it says there are about twice the amount of PS2 in the world as the total of ALL next gen systems. Somehow, those customers and those consoles did not vanish overnight when the next gen appeared and as such the people are still buying games for it, especially such a hit as God of War 2. This is the critically acclaimed sequel to a critically acclaimed game. The first one sold millions, the 2nd is seen as at least as good as the first, so why shouldn't it sell millions too, especially with the brand impact they have now? So, nothing particularly surprising to me... Their market is several times bigger and it is a genuine great game, best in class. Of course it will top the charts...
Granted the Wii ain't subsidised, so Nintendo doesn't need to sell X titles per console just to get their money back but still, if the Wii ends up un-used then Nintendo could still end up with a loser. Lots of hardware sales but no software sales.
Loser in what? Xbox was seen as a "winner" last gen, but so far, Ms has LOST 5 BILLIONS $$ to push their gaming division. From a finacial point of view, THIS is a loss. In fact, MS just bought market share. Nintendo has always been profitable, even through the N64 or gamecube years. The wii will continue the tradition. They are making money with the hardware already, so all game sold will be gravy. Especially if the top titles are first party.
Their goal is to increase the market compared to last generations, by targeting new demographics. Sony has proven there are already more than 70 millions of gamers. The wii aims at beating that score. If they can get the largest market, most correct games will sell well, even if each wii owner has less games. This is just statistics...
1) Open junk mail 2) Remove return envelope 3) Fold up the rest of the contents as they arrived and stuff them in the envelope 4) Send it back to them You are not going far enough. A prepaid envelop can be used as a shipping label to ship up to 72 lbs. So, barring anything dangerous or restricted, add items (heavy preferably, like rocks) in a box, make sure it does not move too much in the box, close the lid securely, tabe the return envelop on it and send through the usps. The worst they can do is ban use from using their return address envelop at a post office. Story of a successful revenge: http://www.vertical-visions.com/_temp/postagepaid/ index2.html
Certainly, we don't know how things will go over the next couple of months but if the PS3 keeps up the poor sales that it has had so far in 2007 HD-DVD still has a lot of opportunities to catch up. The problem is that poor sale for a nex gen console is still MILES away from good sales of a nex gen video system. The PS3 is considered a luke warm console by selling over 2.5Millions units in the world. This is over an order of magnitude bigger than ANY single HD player, be it bluray or HD-DVD. Even if only 10% of that crowd use it for movies (and that would be stupid, they just acquired a FREE player with that console, why not use it?), they just TRAMPLED the competition in video. It's all relative and the numbers of the PS3 may be enough to give the advantage to bluray.
SET seems to be an incremental update of DHT or MD5 hashes. Most recent p2p use hashes to recognize files instead of just filename, BUT this makes that music files that are different in their header will come out as different. This method allows just to distinguish between data and meta-data for the file and allo the meta data to be different. Anyway, just my understanding of it. Otherwise, i'm sure they could just do md5 hashes of all your 16k/32k/64k parts of all your shared files and download parts with the same md5 hash even coming from a different file. Might be faster but SU much more computational intensive. Then again, IO is usually more scarce than computing power...
But most users would balk at the complex interface of Gimp. I can use Photoshop routinely for most of what I need and I even tried Gimp and did what I needed successfully, but my wife is just swamped by the options. On the other hand, I introduced her to Picasa and now she can organize her pictures in album, do basic editing and put galleries online on a mouse click and she couldn't be happier. Maybe in time she'll see the limitations of the app and upgrade to something more powerful, but I doubt it. We have to realize that 80% of the people do not want to invest themselves in those tasks. They just want the basics and dont even intend to grow in it. They want to be able to change contrast, balance, change the red eyes and eventually crop, but this will cover 95%+ of their actions.
Any tool that can do that in a user friendly manner will get people to look at it. Picasa did it for her, especially with the easy online gallery option (nothing ranks higher than being able to share your pictures easily).
Steam protection has been cracked, but HL2 was the first game in a long time that NO ONE could play before its release.
Nowadays, as they said, pirates get the GOLD master of any given game and release it while it goes to duplication, so you find pirated images on p2p networks before the original in retail. No one can compete against that. At least, HL2 was available in store before it was on the p2p.
The x360 is a good product for the consummer and sells reasonnably well (10M+ so far if you can trust nexgenwars.com). but it's a financial pit for MS.
So far, their gaming division has only had 1 or 2 positive quarters in its history. Sure, the product is fine and the consummer enjoy it, but the only reason they can sell it is because of windows and office. They are losing money on the hardware (R&D cost not ofset and even bill of material pretty much at cost) and not selling enough software to make up for it.
Their only redeming quality is that they stole market share from Sony and hurt it too. Nintendo, clamored by the crowds to be the loser of the last 2 generations is still making money. They made money of the gamecube and they are making a ton of money of the wii.
So, depending how you judge the products in a console war, the winner can be very different...
One word: Money. You dont sue where the wrong is, you sue where the money is.
As they are using the technology without authorization, ALL licensees from Fraunhofer are guilty of the same infringement. Now, depending on the contract of the license, the licensees *COULD* turn around and sue Fraunhofer for the problem.
Eventually, it will come down to the courts and patent laws. Expect a lenghty battle...
As usual, most people comment without reading the article. The summary is quoting the article, but not the explanation. The audio advantage seen in the blu-ray is about more audio tracks with better formats (or even uncompressed audio), not any encoding/decoding difference.
BD is using its additional space to offer more audio tracks.
On the other hand, the interactivity feature is mandatory on HDDVD and still developing on BD, so the HDDVD gets the edge there. So, those are not so much qualitative judgements as more of a snapshot of the current state of affair. BD leads with better storage (expected) and lags with their BD-java that is not quite understood by the studios yet. As time go, BD should retain the audio advantage while negating any interactivity advantage of HDDVD (provided that both tech should be about equal).
Nothing really surprising here so far. The bigger sale number of BD *is* surprising though, as the player that sold the most *IS* the PS3. Those numbers are showing that people use it as a video player, as Sony had planned.
Only the futur will tell us if this will give them the dominance in video players at the cost of video games and especially if that sacrifice was indeed a paying strategy.
The author makes his point perfectly, although the summary does not make it quite clear. 99% of the movies that are released get pirated. Out of all those pirated movies, only 11% are from bad cam recording. The rest are mostly DVD rips a bit later, DVD rips of advance projection or review copies or again for oscar nominations.
The author point is not that few movies are pirated (as stated, most movies are already available in pirated form), but that the camcording in the movie theater is a marginal form (mostly because of the dreadful results it gives). Most pirated movies are internal leaks.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, no. You have 80% of your population in urban areas and those still cant get correct connections.
In the US, broadband is defined as any link that is both constant and above 128kb/s. In Korea, broadband is a link over 20Mbps both ways.
By your definition, you should be able to get the same type of connection in downtown New York city, but it is not the case...
Call centers are cost centers. Support is part of the purchase cost and with razor thin margins, you can only get bottom support.
Compound the low pay with the high technical expectations and you get a recipe for a disaster. Doing it over the phone makes it even worse.
In summary, PCs are complex, the customers are for the most part not very good with it to start with, problems can be very complex, interface is so rich that it is difficult to describe over the phone and tech level needs to be high to diagnose problems when the pay needs to be low to keep margins.
It is an impossible situation. In a few years (yeah, right...), with more savvy customers and maybe video conferencing, you may reach a point where you can diagnose remotely. Or remote access to the computer (hello, security breach).
For those of you that have had the pleasure to diagnose computer problems remotely for your family, you know what i am talking about. This is what the people on the other end of the phone face every day...
Cable is a shared media. The data is basically broadcast to the whole neighborhood at the same time, so I would think that the key is shared too.
So far, even the Pay Per View, which could benefit of unique keys, does not use it. They just use common unused channels and broadcast in the clear. The others in your neighborhood just dont know know when and what (and set top boxes cant tune automatically on those channels), but with a QAM tuner, you can see those streams in clear (although the person paying for it can fast forward, rewind or pause at will, not you), you just dont know what the program is, when it will be ordered or if the suscriber will finish it...
So, basically, with a concerted effort of hackers, it could be possible to get some keys...
What about the regular digital channels, is there a way to dump them without the analog hole? I mean Toon Disney, VH1 Classic, etc.
Anything beyond basic cable is premium and hence encrypted (as you are not supposed to have it without paying).
Yes, it seems you are somewhat missing what is happening.
So, right now, you have analog cable with an analog tuner feeding your Media Center. Great.
Now, what is happening is that the HD revolution is coming. So, instead of your crappy, noisy analog cable, you can access digital channels on the same cable. Those channels can have higher resolution or at least better signal. They are encoded in mpeg2 and wrapped in a QAM signal (different than the ATSC standard for over the air HDTV). Today, you can access the same channels (or even more) than the ones in your basic cable with a QAM tuner, BUT, as soon as you want any of the premium channel (discovery HD, espn HD, HBO...), you will need a set-top box. Why? Because those channels are encrypted to avoid you getting signals you did not pay your local cable company for.
So, to avoid those set top boxes, the cable cards have been designed: they are small cards you can plug in your TV/PC/DVR/Media center that would allow you to decrypt those channels with a key corresponding to your account (so, allowing to decrypt the channels you pay for). Tivo has it and now Vista has it with some ATI cable card tuner. The problem is that cable card is pretty much hit or miss, so all the computer based DVR/Media Center will NOT be able to access the full line-up of HD programming, that you pay for it or not.
Sure, you could go through the "analog hole", however, there is no easy way to digitize a 720p/1080i/1080p signal, so you are back to SD resolutions.
In short, if you want to use a homebrew PVR, you are srewed and limited to over the air HD or non-encrypted QAM channels...
Bombing and radiation is better for wildlife than sub divisions.
No, absence of human presence and natural environments are higher factors for wildlife growth than radiation is for the decline. So, as humans do not enter irradiated zones, the wildlife is thriving there.
Makes a lot of sense in fact...
Actually, it already exists.
Twice.
You can benchmark in existing, released games. Those are the real application and as such the performances observed are relevant. The fact that their current driver is optimized or not does not matter, this is the current status.
Of course, as the author talks about pre-release, that does not apply here. The author is quite surprised that *BETA* code of incomplete demos runs better on the hardware of the company that helped the game developer. No foul play here.
In the same vein, you have 3dmark. Those are benchmarks developed in collaboration with ALL the players in the industry: AMD, Nvidia, Intel... They all have plenty of time to optimize their drivers and find bugs or non-optimized path. As this is a synthetic benchmark, results are less relevant.
So, in summary, the author complains that beta code is non optimized for all hardware.
A stupid complaint while the solution already exists: benchmark with known benchmark and final code.
If you are *VERY* good with maths and especially statistics, bank may be interested.
They need very good models of loans, default, risks and such calculations and are ready to pay for those.
Of course, you need to prove that you are quite brilliant...
I think you missed what they were trying to achieve.
The article is a transcript of a radio show.
The show revolves around the firing of the AG of New Mexico. This man was the real life protagonist of the events happening in "A few Good Men", where Tom Cruise was playing his part.
So, they are tying truth and fiction (based on a true story) about this man.
This is the second time this man goes on a quest for the truth. He did it before and it even became a movie.
Maybe you'll be more attentive during the second movie they'll make with this event...
At least the rest of the world has figured out what most of us Americans haven't: America's right to privacy is a rapidly disappearing illusion.
You are at the same time reading too much and too little in the statement.
This is a statement in a court of law.
They are not talking about general privacy law, but specific ones.
There is a very big difference even in the way the law works in USA and in Europe.
For example, in Europe, your data belong to YOU. Privacy laws give you a RIGHT to have those data corrected or removed. In the US, the data belong to the organization collecting it and you have no access to it.
Another law in Europe say you cannot share those data to an organization that does not respect those principle.
This is what came to bite Mediasentry. There was a similar problem with airlines sharing their passenger information with the Department of Homeland Security as they do not respect that same principle either.
currently Google is the target of some negative image campaigning. What I'm interested in is, where that pushing originates.
The whole financial community hates Google.
The feeling started when Google snobed them for the IPO (they went with a public auction, preventing the financial institution to get their hands on the first dibs). Google even kicked them by selling shares with a voting power 10x less than the founder's shares.
It went worse when Google refused to post any indication of their growth or results past what the stock exchange require (no analyst hint, no prevision). And to compound all that, Google has exceeded the analyst expectations everytime, making them miss the best sale date.
Basically, Google has shown over the year it does not need the financial community as much as they need it and they still resent that.
Maybe someone would want to make such a clip and put it on Youtube...
Not *QUITE*, but almost:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzG_oHDLZdc
The difference between Nintendo and the other two, is that Nintendo is a games only company. They rely solely on their hardware and software sales. On the other hand, Sony and Microsoft's consoles are just one division of a much larger conglomerate. And that conglomerate can support the other gaming divisions until they finally do get out of the red, or the stock holders, whatever, demand that division to be sold off or folded. Microsoft's gaming/Zune divsion might have lost 300 million dollars, but the company as a whole took in over 14 billion dollars in revenue. I know it can't go on forever, but Microsoft at least, is committed to this industry, for better or worse.
That used to be true. Sony, for example, treated the gaming division as a small experiment. They changed their tune quickly when the gaming division amounted to over 30% of Sony's PROFIT. So, in fact, the gaming division has been the one propping the rest of the conglomerate up. Movies and music revenue have been falling steadily over the past few years and consumer electronics are razor thin margins and quality is falling too. So, gaming was their cash cow and now that they need to switch it to the new generation, they might be in trouble if they under-deliver.
Microsoft is the opposite. Their gaming division has had only 2 positive quarters since inception and already lost over 5 BILLIONS dollars over its life. Microsoft basically is a software company. They have 2 cash cows: windows and office. The rest are experiments or long term investment. The problem is both that they will need new markets in the future, but that it is very costly for them to get a foot hold in those.
In contrast, Nintendo is a pure gaming company and they have NEVER lost money. Yup, always positive. They have been propped up by their hand-held business, but even their "failing" consoles have been money makers.
And a movie can be even better.
A big company wanted its people to understand Internet and asked a video to be created for that purpose.
That video is accessible here:
http://www.warriorsofthe.net/
This is at the same time entertaining and quite educative, although slightly dated.
Show this to people instead of trying to express concepts with words.
Highly recommended.
THe best thing to ever happen in the favor of gamers was Jack's soap box jump within hours of Vtech. Blaming games, and saying Cho never would NEVER have "learned to enjoy killing withoutplaying violent video games". Only to later find out, that Cho, well never really played games. Maybe mine sweaper to pass some boring class time.
Jack took a chance and lost.
Expecting male college student to play nowadays is about as likely as them drinking (ie: very high).
He thought that such a loner would be a gamer and it would not have been unexpected, but it proved wrong this time. Basically, Jack fell the victim of profiling. He classified people and that came back to bite him in the ass.
Let's hope that with all those frivolous actions, he finally lose his Florida license and that we wont hear from him anymore...
I personally think that it says an awfull lot about the game industry that the top scorer for march was God of War 2 for the PS2.
Yes, it says there are about twice the amount of PS2 in the world as the total of ALL next gen systems. Somehow, those customers and those consoles did not vanish overnight when the next gen appeared and as such the people are still buying games for it, especially such a hit as God of War 2. This is the critically acclaimed sequel to a critically acclaimed game. The first one sold millions, the 2nd is seen as at least as good as the first, so why shouldn't it sell millions too, especially with the brand impact they have now? So, nothing particularly surprising to me... Their market is several times bigger and it is a genuine great game, best in class. Of course it will top the charts...
Granted the Wii ain't subsidised, so Nintendo doesn't need to sell X titles per console just to get their money back but still, if the Wii ends up un-used then Nintendo could still end up with a loser. Lots of hardware sales but no software sales.
Loser in what? Xbox was seen as a "winner" last gen, but so far, Ms has LOST 5 BILLIONS $$ to push their gaming division. From a finacial point of view, THIS is a loss. In fact, MS just bought market share. Nintendo has always been profitable, even through the N64 or gamecube years. The wii will continue the tradition. They are making money with the hardware already, so all game sold will be gravy. Especially if the top titles are first party.
Their goal is to increase the market compared to last generations, by targeting new demographics. Sony has proven there are already more than 70 millions of gamers. The wii aims at beating that score. If they can get the largest market, most correct games will sell well, even if each wii owner has less games. This is just statistics...
1) Open junk mail/ index2.html
2) Remove return envelope
3) Fold up the rest of the contents as they arrived and stuff them in the envelope
4) Send it back to them
You are not going far enough.
A prepaid envelop can be used as a shipping label to ship up to 72 lbs.
So, barring anything dangerous or restricted, add items (heavy preferably, like rocks) in a box, make sure it does not move too much in the box, close the lid securely, tabe the return envelop on it and send through the usps.
The worst they can do is ban use from using their return address envelop at a post office.
Story of a successful revenge:
http://www.vertical-visions.com/_temp/postagepaid
Certainly, we don't know how things will go over the next couple of months but if the PS3 keeps up the poor sales that it has had so far in 2007 HD-DVD still has a lot of opportunities to catch up.
The problem is that poor sale for a nex gen console is still MILES away from good sales of a nex gen video system.
The PS3 is considered a luke warm console by selling over 2.5Millions units in the world. This is over an order of magnitude bigger than ANY single HD player, be it bluray or HD-DVD. Even if only 10% of that crowd use it for movies (and that would be stupid, they just acquired a FREE player with that console, why not use it?), they just TRAMPLED the competition in video.
It's all relative and the numbers of the PS3 may be enough to give the advantage to bluray.
SET seems to be an incremental update of DHT or MD5 hashes.
Most recent p2p use hashes to recognize files instead of just filename, BUT this makes that music files that are different in their header will come out as different.
This method allows just to distinguish between data and meta-data for the file and allo the meta data to be different.
Anyway, just my understanding of it.
Otherwise, i'm sure they could just do md5 hashes of all your 16k/32k/64k parts of all your shared files and download parts with the same md5 hash even coming from a different file.
Might be faster but SU much more computational intensive.
Then again, IO is usually more scarce than computing power...
Or you can get GIMP for $0
But most users would balk at the complex interface of Gimp.
I can use Photoshop routinely for most of what I need and I even tried Gimp and did what I needed successfully, but my wife is just swamped by the options.
On the other hand, I introduced her to Picasa and now she can organize her pictures in album, do basic editing and put galleries online on a mouse click and she couldn't be happier. Maybe in time she'll see the limitations of the app and upgrade to something more powerful, but I doubt it. We have to realize that 80% of the people do not want to invest themselves in those tasks. They just want the basics and dont even intend to grow in it. They want to be able to change contrast, balance, change the red eyes and eventually crop, but this will cover 95%+ of their actions.
Any tool that can do that in a user friendly manner will get people to look at it. Picasa did it for her, especially with the easy online gallery option (nothing ranks higher than being able to share your pictures easily).
Steam protection has been cracked, but HL2 was the first game in a long time that NO ONE could play before its release.
Nowadays, as they said, pirates get the GOLD master of any given game and release it while it goes to duplication, so you find pirated images on p2p networks before the original in retail. No one can compete against that. At least, HL2 was available in store before it was on the p2p.
The x360 is a good product for the consummer and sells reasonnably well (10M+ so far if you can trust nexgenwars.com). but it's a financial pit for MS.
So far, their gaming division has only had 1 or 2 positive quarters in its history. Sure, the product is fine and the consummer enjoy it, but the only reason they can sell it is because of windows and office. They are losing money on the hardware (R&D cost not ofset and even bill of material pretty much at cost) and not selling enough software to make up for it.
Their only redeming quality is that they stole market share from Sony and hurt it too. Nintendo, clamored by the crowds to be the loser of the last 2 generations is still making money. They made money of the gamecube and they are making a ton of money of the wii.
So, depending how you judge the products in a console war, the winner can be very different...
One word: Money.
You dont sue where the wrong is, you sue where the money is.
As they are using the technology without authorization, ALL licensees from Fraunhofer are guilty of the same infringement. Now, depending on the contract of the license, the licensees *COULD* turn around and sue Fraunhofer for the problem.
Eventually, it will come down to the courts and patent laws. Expect a lenghty battle...
As usual, most people comment without reading the article.
The summary is quoting the article, but not the explanation.
The audio advantage seen in the blu-ray is about more audio tracks with better formats (or even uncompressed audio), not any encoding/decoding difference.
BD is using its additional space to offer more audio tracks.
On the other hand, the interactivity feature is mandatory on HDDVD and still developing on BD, so the HDDVD gets the edge there. So, those are not so much qualitative judgements as more of a snapshot of the current state of affair. BD leads with better storage (expected) and lags with their BD-java that is not quite understood by the studios yet. As time go, BD should retain the audio advantage while negating any interactivity advantage of HDDVD (provided that both tech should be about equal).
Nothing really surprising here so far. The bigger sale number of BD *is* surprising though, as the player that sold the most *IS* the PS3. Those numbers are showing that people use it as a video player, as Sony had planned.
Only the futur will tell us if this will give them the dominance in video players at the cost of video games and especially if that sacrifice was indeed a paying strategy.
The author makes his point perfectly, although the summary does not make it quite clear.
99% of the movies that are released get pirated. Out of all those pirated movies, only 11% are from bad cam recording. The rest are mostly DVD rips a bit later, DVD rips of advance projection or review copies or again for oscar nominations.
The author point is not that few movies are pirated (as stated, most movies are already available in pirated form), but that the camcording in the movie theater is a marginal form (mostly because of the dreadful results it gives). Most pirated movies are internal leaks.