I have never met anyone with an interest in computer programming who could not already locate any key on the keyboard by muscle memory. I always assumed it was a skill people would already have acquired before deciding to jump into software design. Like, a natural progression from crawling to walking and running.
But if this was a bad assumption, then by all means:) I cannot imagine writing C code without a firm knowledge of where to find {, |, ~, etc...
You can almost certainly re-program it using a JTAG interface... Samsung can do this at the factory if you return it to them. JTAG is not intended for consumer use, though. My old university had a JTAG probe and several adapters to interface with various hardware vendors proprietary interfaces - without this we would have had several multi-thousand dollar bricks in our hardware lab:)
I would hope that Samsung would have the decency to admit a flaw in their design and provide the reprogramming free of charge, but...
Yeah, not to mention the latency involved in writing to EEPROM. You would pretty much have to do it asynchronously to keep it from becoming a bottleneck, which then invalidates the usefulness -- since there is no guarantee that the last log message(s) completely written to UEFI was the last message generated. I implemented something similar in a custom VxWare boot loader, which wrote boot status to on-board flash memory, but it did so synchronously at a limited number of application-defined checkpoints.
I do not like the idea of EEPROM being constantly written whenever the kernel spits out a message. You are spot on, this will inevitably wear the memory out:-\
Do not forget that volcanism and liquid water were also once a factor in weathering. There is no life, that we know of, to speed up erosion - so it is possible that drilling only a few cm will reveal geologic history on different timescale than the equivalent depth on Earth.
Granted the top layer, which is all we have studied up until now will be nothing exciting (likely layers of dust deposited over millennia), but unexposed layers have a lot of historic potential. The layers may even be old enough to portray Mars during a more interesting period, perhaps when it still had a respectable magnetic field and atmosphere.
Apple really doesn't care much for legacy support; Rosetta is not even installed on Mac OS X by default anymore. They constantly make minor changes to their core OS APIs that require writing separate code paths or using separate languages altogether. The OS X window system interface in my graphics engine is 4x as long as the Microsoft Windows interface. And now, to compile the engine as a 64-bit binary on OS X, I have to write an Objective C wrapper to use parts of the OS that are no longer accessible in their 64-bit C APIs.
It has been this way for most of Apple's history and it is frustrating for software developers and consumers alike.
Well, with Microsoft and SONY you have an analogue to Porsche and Audi. Expensive machines that are the best of the best for mass-produced products, and then you have Nintendo who're analogous to Volkswagen. There will always be a market for machines that are simply adequate, all the while most people would definitely prefer the thrills of a higher-end brand. Obviously Germans cannot all drive their high-end luxury brands, so someone has to offer an alternative.
This analogy would work a lot better if the industry still had companies like SNK pushing products like the Neo-Geo at a cost 4x the next closest competition:) But there is always a place for a company who clearly follows a different formula as an alternative to a duopoly of titans.
Everything in Australia is more expensive. Even your cheapest supermarkets charge 2-3x the prices of American supermarkets. The only thing you have going for you is a significantly higher minimum wage (for adults, anyway - you tend to screw teenagers).
I don't know where you pulled those numbers from, but for those exact game types, I paid nowhere near that much at release. I think you need to re-examine your historical pricelists, son.
Of course you didn't - nobody pays future inflation-adjusted prices 20 years in advance unless they are completely insane!
For many years now I have been very disappointed by stagnation, and down-right reversal in DPI trends. 13 years ago I was running a 19" CRT at 2048x1536, now to find a computer display with similar DPI is very difficult; to find a CRT is even more so, despite the venerable technology's superiority in virtually all image quality metrics.
TVs continue to get larger and larger, while 1080p is likely to remain the standard by which they are all measured for several years to come, and penetration of media with a native resolution > 1080 will take even longer. So there is little incentive for mass produced panels (e.g. TVs, and even computer monitors) to improve on DPI; I am glad however, that the emerging mobile device market is not shackling itself to the same philosophy.
TiVo would be obsolete if it publicly allowed modification of its software, because Cable Labs would withdraw TiVo's permission to transfer recordings in any capacity. And this capability is one of the reasons I will never use a cable company or IPTV's inferior DVR solution. The TiVo software is outdated (granted, I do not own a TiVo premiere, because without the OLED front display, I view it as a downgrade), but it still does what it does better than anything else on the market. I do not get why people rag on TiVo for this - all of my TVs all the way back to my 30" SONY Trinitron FD (circa 2004) run a Linux kernel, and none of them are modifiable either, yet nobody ever complains about that. I am sure SONY has sold more TVs running Linux than TiVo has subscribers, and SONY is not the only manufacturer to run Linux, so.... what gives?
I should maybe make that a bit clearer... throttle the bandwidth of a residential connection connecting to another residential host. Remove the throttling when the residential connection connects to a commercial host.
How bout limiting the bandwidth between residentially leased subnets, and only offering full bandwidth to legitimate commercially owned networks? That would go a long way toward preventing piracy the way it is implemented these days (e.g. Bit Torrent, and other p2p protocols).
I was all excited to see what a VoIP program that distinguishes itself as being "free of GNU" really meant. Come to find out, it is just a GNU project with a terrible name.
What CS students need an education in more than anything is Discrete math (graph theory, set theory, number theory, etc...). Calculus is the complete opposite end of the spectrum. While Calculus can be useful, it should take a backseat to discrete math.
I do not know how you got all that from the article... he clearly states that he has no intention of switching APIs.
More or less, all he stated was that Direct3D has been driving the evolution of commodity real-time computer graphics hardware for the better part of a decade now. It is a very attractive API if you can limit yourself to a single platform, and deserves respect. This contrasts his (and virtually everyone elses) views on Direct3D from 15 years ago, when the API was a horrible mess. Direct3D was playing catch-up back then, but the situation has been reversed for a very long time.
The last truly amazing thing I saw (for its time) come out of the OpenGL development pipeline, that could have driven the development of the next generation of GPUs, was ATI's proposal for Uber/superbuffers. Said extension was shot down, and by now the functionality is easily accomplished using a myriad of other extensions. The fact is, Direct3D is the driving force behind what features a new class of hardware will support, and to claim otherwise would be truly foolish. This in no way implies that OpenGL cannot or will not utilize the new functionality, only that Direct3D evolves more quickly.
I completely agree with Carmack, but as Tim Sweeney has stated we are gradually moving to a point where the graphics API is irrelevant. As time goes on, more and more of the GPU is exposed to programability and with each release of DirectX and OpenGL (to a lesser extent), the fixed-function pipeline is shrinking. If the trend continues, we will eventually get to the point where everything is abstracted into programs that run on a GPU and buffers... even state management will become a task managed completely by the engine.
If you work on cross-platform console engines, chances are you already wrap the state machine into irrelevance to make up for differences between APIs. Multi-threading is simpler in DirectX, but that is to be expected from an API whose design only requires it to work on a single platform. If you code close to the metal, of course you will see benefits for a specific combination of API / hardware.
OpenGL has traditionally been a monolithic API that tries to maintain legacy support, while accommodating new hardware through extensions. It has a lot of baggage that DirectX does not have, since DirectX routinely drops legacy portions of its API with each major release. Even so, OpenGL comes in multiple flavors now, with the embedded API being much closer to the feature-set modern commodity hardware offers.
Performance wise, Direct3D has held the crown for many years. Portability wise, OpenGL has always been the king. I do not see this changing anytime soon, the two APIs tackle real-time computer graphics from two very different angles. I, like many engine developers, do not have the luxury of committing to a single API, so it is very difficult to effectively exploit the theoretical advantages of either API.
Would it not make more sense to use a form of ROM, rather than block-erasable EPROM (Flash)? Honestly, how often do you need to rewrite the contents of an entire game?
The real question is how will they be distributing games to the system? If it is, as some have speculated, download-only, I will skip this platform altogether.
If it uses optical storage exclusively, the battery life and load times will likely be even worse than the PSP. What would be nice is if they actually made use of "Magic Gate" to allow optical games to be installed to compliant MemoryStick for better load times and battery life (given of course that the optical disc is present); probably will not happen, but would be nice.
The paper refers to none of these parts of an Operating System, however. You can safely assume that anytime the paper mentions "Operating System," it is talking about the kernel. User-land components have almost nothing to do with _how_ the kernel deals with resource allocation, aside from requesting a subset of the resources.
And there are plenty of Linux-based Operating Systems that do not use GNU, for your information. Embedded devices being the king.
If you need Excel, Word or Outlook (Entourage), you have only one choice - Mac OS... Honestly, why do people assume the Office suite only runs on Windows?
Truth is, Office was first released for the Mac (1989), and later ported to Windows (after Windows became a more widely adopted PC operating system). To this day, Office is released for Mac and Windows.
Some of the applications in the Windows suite are not available in the recent incarnations of the Mac version; but with the exception of Access, they're mostly niche applications.
That's why the Japanese version of the NES (Famicom... family computer) was a traditional top down cartridge loading design; and the last revision of the NES, which was released _after_ the SNES, used a top loading design too. It's been said that Nintendo wasn't brave enough to market the product if it resembled the recently failed (influx of crap games) Atari system, and this is why Nintendo of America redesigned it to look much like a VCR... It's also why they created the Nintendo Rob (a silly little robotic add-on) and initially showed the system with a keyboard, which never received any use. And of course Nintendo of America coined the original "Official Nintendo Seal of Quality," in response to Atari's demise -- 20 years later, however, Nintendo has removed the "of Quality" from their seal:)
They wanted to market it as a computer, yet, the add-on disk drive and keyboard were only utilized in the Japanese device, which looked far more toy-like...
I think Nintendo's designs are pretty sound... when they're not muxed up to satisfy a less-than-brilliant American market, anyway.
I was excited to see that any from of dtrace / strace would officially be ported by Apple. Only to discover that it is only available upon upgrading to OS X 10.5. I will get around to upgrading some time, but DTrace and many of the other improvements (Safari excluded, since you can get Safari 3.0 for OS X 10.4) alone, do not make it worthwhile.
To be honest, though... Is not tracing the system calls of iTunes at runtime (or anytime, for that matter) dangerously close to what might be considered DMCA infringement?
What is known, is that there is a flag running processes may have to prevent tracing (attaching). However, the article does not speculate which applications are given this flag at runtime. Therefore, it may just relate to applications that employ some form of DRM and/or are protected by the DMCA. That would be my best guess, I still want to believe that Apple has not lost sight of the open spirit of Darwin...
I used to get the "red ring of death" from time to time; I thought it was due to overheating, so I moved it somewhere with better ventilation. Turns out it was a problem with the wiring in my house. Apparently the 360's external power supply is _very_ sensitive to brownouts. I've got the power supply in a place where I can see the colored light now - the "red ring of death" doesn't just apply to the XBOX 360 itself:)
I plugged the 360 into my UPS with AVR, and the problem's completely gone. I always thought the AVR stuff they try to push on people buying home theatre equipment was a scam (considering the things can cost $500+ and don't even provide uninterruptible power), but apparently some consumer electronic devices really are anal about line voltage.
Do you have a progressive scan DVD player hooked to your monitor with component video? Well, there's your problem. Get a nice display / player with HDMI output, and you'll notice a huge difference. Component video is fully capable of displaying 1080i, and with the right TV, even 1080p, but upscaling players and displays with HDMI are generally higher quality. I'm guessing the problem here is your display, though. Nevertheless, upscaling the 480p video on a DVD will never look as good as a true HD video.
Unfortunately, some channels, particularly TNT HD, TBS HD and History Channel HD merely warp the corners of their Standard Definition content to reduce the appearance of distortion when stretching the video from 4:3 to 16:9 and upscaling to 720p or 1080i. That video is _not_ true HD, and anyone who's ever seen high quality HD content (i.e. Discovery HD Theater) or Blu-Ray / HD-DVD video, will immediately recognize what these channels are doing.
That thing about HD vs SD content being indistinguishable on small screens is a load of crap. I have a _very_ nice SONY 30" CRT display that looks better than nearly all LCD/plasma/DLP displays less than $5,000 currently on the market. If you have a small display with a good pixel response time, contrast ratio, and dot pitch, the difference between SD and HD video is profound. Particularly if your display supports 1080p, a lot of 1080p displays have post-processing features that do more than just de-interlace and upscale 480i/p, 720p and 1080i content to 1080p.
You can get HD TiVos (cable / ATSC broadcast only) for ~$299 now for the low-end model and $600 for the top of the line with the OLED front display. That's probably the best investment you could make to accompany your new HDTV - having adopted HD years ago, I used to have to watch HD movies and television shows when they aired, or not at all. Quite frustrating, considering I'd had a TiVo for many years before that. If you've got satellite, you can probably get one of their dinky DVRs with HD support for free.
If you're in the market for an ambiguously purposed consumer electronics device, the PlayStation 3 will play Blu-Ray Discs (BDs), DivX video, DVDs, SACDs, CDs, mp3/aac/wma music, display digital photos from SD, CF, Memory Sticks or the internet, browse the web, and of course it plays video games too (just doesn't have any good ones yet), for $400.
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Really?
I have never met anyone with an interest in computer programming who could not already locate any key on the keyboard by muscle memory. I always assumed it was a skill people would already have acquired before deciding to jump into software design. Like, a natural progression from crawling to walking and running.
But if this was a bad assumption, then by all means :) I cannot imagine writing C code without a firm knowledge of where to find {, |, ~, etc...
You can almost certainly re-program it using a JTAG interface... Samsung can do this at the factory if you return it to them. JTAG is not intended for consumer use, though. My old university had a JTAG probe and several adapters to interface with various hardware vendors proprietary interfaces - without this we would have had several multi-thousand dollar bricks in our hardware lab :)
I would hope that Samsung would have the decency to admit a flaw in their design and provide the reprogramming free of charge, but ...
Yeah, not to mention the latency involved in writing to EEPROM. You would pretty much have to do it asynchronously to keep it from becoming a bottleneck, which then invalidates the usefulness -- since there is no guarantee that the last log message(s) completely written to UEFI was the last message generated. I implemented something similar in a custom VxWare boot loader, which wrote boot status to on-board flash memory, but it did so synchronously at a limited number of application-defined checkpoints.
I do not like the idea of EEPROM being constantly written whenever the kernel spits out a message. You are spot on, this will inevitably wear the memory out :-\
Do not forget that volcanism and liquid water were also once a factor in weathering. There is no life, that we know of, to speed up erosion - so it is possible that drilling only a few cm will reveal geologic history on different timescale than the equivalent depth on Earth.
Granted the top layer, which is all we have studied up until now will be nothing exciting (likely layers of dust deposited over millennia), but unexposed layers have a lot of historic potential. The layers may even be old enough to portray Mars during a more interesting period, perhaps when it still had a respectable magnetic field and atmosphere.
Apple really doesn't care much for legacy support; Rosetta is not even installed on Mac OS X by default anymore. They constantly make minor changes to their core OS APIs that require writing separate code paths or using separate languages altogether. The OS X window system interface in my graphics engine is 4x as long as the Microsoft Windows interface. And now, to compile the engine as a 64-bit binary on OS X, I have to write an Objective C wrapper to use parts of the OS that are no longer accessible in their 64-bit C APIs.
It has been this way for most of Apple's history and it is frustrating for software developers and consumers alike.
Well, with Microsoft and SONY you have an analogue to Porsche and Audi. Expensive machines that are the best of the best for mass-produced products, and then you have Nintendo who're analogous to Volkswagen. There will always be a market for machines that are simply adequate, all the while most people would definitely prefer the thrills of a higher-end brand. Obviously Germans cannot all drive their high-end luxury brands, so someone has to offer an alternative.
This analogy would work a lot better if the industry still had companies like SNK pushing products like the Neo-Geo at a cost 4x the next closest competition :) But there is always a place for a company who clearly follows a different formula as an alternative to a duopoly of titans.
Everything in Australia is more expensive. Even your cheapest supermarkets charge 2-3x the prices of American supermarkets. The only thing you have going for you is a significantly higher minimum wage (for adults, anyway - you tend to screw teenagers).
I don't know where you pulled those numbers from, but for those exact game types, I paid nowhere near that much at release. I think you need to re-examine your historical pricelists, son.
Of course you didn't - nobody pays future inflation-adjusted prices 20 years in advance unless they are completely insane!
For many years now I have been very disappointed by stagnation, and down-right reversal in DPI trends. 13 years ago I was running a 19" CRT at 2048x1536, now to find a computer display with similar DPI is very difficult; to find a CRT is even more so, despite the venerable technology's superiority in virtually all image quality metrics.
TVs continue to get larger and larger, while 1080p is likely to remain the standard by which they are all measured for several years to come, and penetration of media with a native resolution > 1080 will take even longer. So there is little incentive for mass produced panels (e.g. TVs, and even computer monitors) to improve on DPI; I am glad however, that the emerging mobile device market is not shackling itself to the same philosophy.
Viva la DPI!
TiVo would be obsolete if it publicly allowed modification of its software, because Cable Labs would withdraw TiVo's permission to transfer recordings in any capacity. And this capability is one of the reasons I will never use a cable company or IPTV's inferior DVR solution. The TiVo software is outdated (granted, I do not own a TiVo premiere, because without the OLED front display, I view it as a downgrade), but it still does what it does better than anything else on the market. I do not get why people rag on TiVo for this - all of my TVs all the way back to my 30" SONY Trinitron FD (circa 2004) run a Linux kernel, and none of them are modifiable either, yet nobody ever complains about that. I am sure SONY has sold more TVs running Linux than TiVo has subscribers, and SONY is not the only manufacturer to run Linux, so.... what gives?
I should maybe make that a bit clearer... throttle the bandwidth of a residential connection connecting to another residential host. Remove the throttling when the residential connection connects to a commercial host.
How bout limiting the bandwidth between residentially leased subnets, and only offering full bandwidth to legitimate commercially owned networks? That would go a long way toward preventing piracy the way it is implemented these days (e.g. Bit Torrent, and other p2p protocols).
I was all excited to see what a VoIP program that distinguishes itself as being "free of GNU" really meant. Come to find out, it is just a GNU project with a terrible name.
What CS students need an education in more than anything is Discrete math (graph theory, set theory, number theory, etc...). Calculus is the complete opposite end of the spectrum. While Calculus can be useful, it should take a backseat to discrete math.
I do not know how you got all that from the article... he clearly states that he has no intention of switching APIs.
More or less, all he stated was that Direct3D has been driving the evolution of commodity real-time computer graphics hardware for the better part of a decade now. It is a very attractive API if you can limit yourself to a single platform, and deserves respect. This contrasts his (and virtually everyone elses) views on Direct3D from 15 years ago, when the API was a horrible mess. Direct3D was playing catch-up back then, but the situation has been reversed for a very long time.
The last truly amazing thing I saw (for its time) come out of the OpenGL development pipeline, that could have driven the development of the next generation of GPUs, was ATI's proposal for Uber/superbuffers. Said extension was shot down, and by now the functionality is easily accomplished using a myriad of other extensions. The fact is, Direct3D is the driving force behind what features a new class of hardware will support, and to claim otherwise would be truly foolish. This in no way implies that OpenGL cannot or will not utilize the new functionality, only that Direct3D evolves more quickly.
I completely agree with Carmack, but as Tim Sweeney has stated we are gradually moving to a point where the graphics API is irrelevant. As time goes on, more and more of the GPU is exposed to programability and with each release of DirectX and OpenGL (to a lesser extent), the fixed-function pipeline is shrinking. If the trend continues, we will eventually get to the point where everything is abstracted into programs that run on a GPU and buffers... even state management will become a task managed completely by the engine.
If you work on cross-platform console engines, chances are you already wrap the state machine into irrelevance to make up for differences between APIs. Multi-threading is simpler in DirectX, but that is to be expected from an API whose design only requires it to work on a single platform. If you code close to the metal, of course you will see benefits for a specific combination of API / hardware.
OpenGL has traditionally been a monolithic API that tries to maintain legacy support, while accommodating new hardware through extensions. It has a lot of baggage that DirectX does not have, since DirectX routinely drops legacy portions of its API with each major release. Even so, OpenGL comes in multiple flavors now, with the embedded API being much closer to the feature-set modern commodity hardware offers.
Performance wise, Direct3D has held the crown for many years. Portability wise, OpenGL has always been the king. I do not see this changing anytime soon, the two APIs tackle real-time computer graphics from two very different angles. I, like many engine developers, do not have the luxury of committing to a single API, so it is very difficult to effectively exploit the theoretical advantages of either API.
Would it not make more sense to use a form of ROM, rather than block-erasable EPROM (Flash)? Honestly, how often do you need to rewrite the contents of an entire game?
The real question is how will they be distributing games to the system? If it is, as some have speculated, download-only, I will skip this platform altogether.
If it uses optical storage exclusively, the battery life and load times will likely be even worse than the PSP. What would be nice is if they actually made use of "Magic Gate" to allow optical games to be installed to compliant MemoryStick for better load times and battery life (given of course that the optical disc is present); probably will not happen, but would be nice.
The paper refers to none of these parts of an Operating System, however. You can safely assume that anytime the paper mentions "Operating System," it is talking about the kernel. User-land components have almost nothing to do with _how_ the kernel deals with resource allocation, aside from requesting a subset of the resources.
And there are plenty of Linux-based Operating Systems that do not use GNU, for your information. Embedded devices being the king.
If you need Excel, Word or Outlook (Entourage), you have only one choice - Mac OS... Honestly, why do people assume the Office suite only runs on Windows?
Truth is, Office was first released for the Mac (1989), and later ported to Windows (after Windows became a more widely adopted PC operating system). To this day, Office is released for Mac and Windows.
Some of the applications in the Windows suite are not available in the recent incarnations of the Mac version; but with the exception of Access, they're mostly niche applications.
That's why the Japanese version of the NES (Famicom ... family computer) was a traditional top down cartridge loading design; and the last revision of the NES, which was released _after_ the SNES, used a top loading design too. It's been said that Nintendo wasn't brave enough to market the product if it resembled the recently failed (influx of crap games) Atari system, and this is why Nintendo of America redesigned it to look much like a VCR... It's also why they created the Nintendo Rob (a silly little robotic add-on) and initially showed the system with a keyboard, which never received any use. And of course Nintendo of America coined the original "Official Nintendo Seal of Quality," in response to Atari's demise -- 20 years later, however, Nintendo has removed the "of Quality" from their seal :)
They wanted to market it as a computer, yet, the add-on disk drive and keyboard were only utilized in the Japanese device, which looked far more toy-like...
I think Nintendo's designs are pretty sound... when they're not muxed up to satisfy a less-than-brilliant American market, anyway.
I was excited to see that any from of dtrace / strace would officially be ported by Apple. Only to discover that it is only available upon upgrading to OS X 10.5. I will get around to upgrading some time, but DTrace and many of the other improvements (Safari excluded, since you can get Safari 3.0 for OS X 10.4) alone, do not make it worthwhile.
To be honest, though... Is not tracing the system calls of iTunes at runtime (or anytime, for that matter) dangerously close to what might be considered DMCA infringement?
What is known, is that there is a flag running processes may have to prevent tracing (attaching). However, the article does not speculate which applications are given this flag at runtime. Therefore, it may just relate to applications that employ some form of DRM and/or are protected by the DMCA. That would be my best guess, I still want to believe that Apple has not lost sight of the open spirit of Darwin...
I used to get the "red ring of death" from time to time; I thought it was due to overheating, so I moved it somewhere with better ventilation. Turns out it was a problem with the wiring in my house. Apparently the 360's external power supply is _very_ sensitive to brownouts. I've got the power supply in a place where I can see the colored light now - the "red ring of death" doesn't just apply to the XBOX 360 itself :)
I plugged the 360 into my UPS with AVR, and the problem's completely gone. I always thought the AVR stuff they try to push on people buying home theatre equipment was a scam (considering the things can cost $500+ and don't even provide uninterruptible power), but apparently some consumer electronic devices really are anal about line voltage.
Unfortunately, some channels, particularly TNT HD, TBS HD and History Channel HD merely warp the corners of their Standard Definition content to reduce the appearance of distortion when stretching the video from 4:3 to 16:9 and upscaling to 720p or 1080i. That video is _not_ true HD, and anyone who's ever seen high quality HD content (i.e. Discovery HD Theater) or Blu-Ray / HD-DVD video, will immediately recognize what these channels are doing.
That thing about HD vs SD content being indistinguishable on small screens is a load of crap. I have a _very_ nice SONY 30" CRT display that looks better than nearly all LCD/plasma/DLP displays less than $5,000 currently on the market. If you have a small display with a good pixel response time, contrast ratio, and dot pitch, the difference between SD and HD video is profound. Particularly if your display supports 1080p, a lot of 1080p displays have post-processing features that do more than just de-interlace and upscale 480i/p, 720p and 1080i content to 1080p.
You can get HD TiVos (cable / ATSC broadcast only) for ~$299 now for the low-end model and $600 for the top of the line with the OLED front display. That's probably the best investment you could make to accompany your new HDTV - having adopted HD years ago, I used to have to watch HD movies and television shows when they aired, or not at all. Quite frustrating, considering I'd had a TiVo for many years before that. If you've got satellite, you can probably get one of their dinky DVRs with HD support for free.
If you're in the market for an ambiguously purposed consumer electronics device, the PlayStation 3 will play Blu-Ray Discs (BDs), DivX video, DVDs, SACDs, CDs, mp3/aac/wma music, display digital photos from SD, CF, Memory Sticks or the internet, browse the web, and of course it plays video games too (just doesn't have any good ones yet), for $400.