All new Replay units still have the commercial skip functionality. The only difference is that a very tiny bit of user input is now required to access the feature.
The old version used to work auto-magically skipping all the commercials with no user input.
The new version does exactly the same thing, only it requires the user to push a button at the start of every commercial break. Not every commercial mind you, just every 2 to 5+ minute commercial segment. And just one button...
But that one button is enough to make it the previously-automagic feature a "manual" function. And I suppose no one in the entertainment industry thinks such a feature is worth litigating. After all, it's really nothing more than a FFF (fantastic fast forward). Remember, Replay units never deleted commercials, they just made insert points and skipped them in the video stream, you could always go back and watch them if you liked.
Since the new version is little more than a manual FFF, I gather the entertainment industry would have very hard time trying to prove in court that the all-too-similar Fast Forward on VCR's has been illegal all this time.
Tivo and Replay TV own a majority of the patents covering this technology, so it's not at all surprising they are attempting to receive their due licensing fees.
Tivo and Replay TV have a patent sharing agreement among themselves, but it does not carry over to other manufacturers. Between them they own enough patents to have virtual control over the technology.
The reason I suspect they're moving now is because many of the big cable and satellite companies have built PVR functionality to their set top boxes. The nationwide releases of such products from Comcast and Echostar has already started. If it goes well, as I suspect it will, the rest of the cable world will not be far behind.
If Tivo and Replay were to allow their technology to be "rented away" in cable company set top boxes, it would likely put Tivo and Replay out of business.
I expect Replay and Tivo will both try to receive license payments from any cable companies rolling out cable-box PVR's. As well they should, they each have a very full patent portfolio covering the technology.
Bottom line, why in the world should the big cable and satellite companies get a free ride, and not have to pay for technology they didn't even develop?
Because no matter what happens in regards to licensing, the cable co's are going to make one heck of a lot of money renting these set-top PVR's. So why shouldn't the legitimate patent holders, Replay and Tivo, at least receive some licensing fees for having developed the technology in the first place? That's what patents are all about after all.
I've had both Replay TV's and Tivo's. Having used both, I sold my Tivo and have only Replay TV's. This is a horrible marketing mess Replay has made for themselves, but it doesn't change my opinion of the great devices they make.
I've recommended Replay to my friends, most of whom now have one, I've bought them for family members. None of us have ever had any technical issues with any of them. However, a certain proportion of any electronic device is going to fail, I know of people with failed Tivo's and most any other electronic brand.
As for the utter stupidity of this pricing change, it just shows that Dennon (Replay's owner) marketing people have absolutely no clue regarding the consumer electronics channel. Quite obviously all of their retailers didn't screw this up at the same time. This is definitely Dennon's fault. They almost certainly sent out misleading or faulty information to their retail supply chain. This is a boondoggle of tremendous proportions.
Why didn't they just eat the fees and give everyone a lifetime supplied Replay for the discount price of $150? Doing some rough math, if they had 20,000 units in the retail channel (a fair guess), it would have cost the struggling Replay unit a $6 million dollar charge. The marketing manager should be fired either way, but taking a 6 million dollar charge is not the sort of thing tiny electronics companies (compared to Sony, Panasonic, etc.) can afford to do.
However, I have very little sympathy for the initial poster or the other whiners in this thread. Sure, I enjoy the "killer deal" as much as anyone, I'm a charter member of Fatwallet. But I don't whine when these deals don't pan out. This is just like the hundreds of other "killer deals" posted on Fatwallet each year, Some of them pan out, most of them don't. Everyone who bought this in reading about in on a "Hot Deals" site, knew it was a too-good-to-be-true deal, and should just return the unit, get all of their money back and move along to the next one.
All that aside, just because Replay has some complete idiots making their marketing decisions doesn't mean their boxes are bad or the company is evil. The boxes work wonderfully and do amazing things, I'd take one over a Tivo any day of the week. I'd also take a Replay over those clunky, expensive roll-your-own PVR's. Replay TV's are just good, solid devices that work out of the box.
My oldest Replay has been running 24/7 for over 4 years without a single problem, ever.
Cell phone batteries do not need cost $50. Even very nice ones don't cost that much. In the mass quantities they purchase, I suspect the Ipod battery costs Apple less than $15, perhaps much less.
If you're accustomed to paying that much for a battery, I can only suppose you tend to purchase batteries and cell phone accessories at your local cell phone store.
Those stores typically have quite reasonable deals on the actual cell phones, but they charge ridiculous amounts for phone accessories. It's the "movie theater" business model. Sell the tickets at cost in order to profit on the popcorn sales. Many local cell phone stores charge up to a 500% mark-ups on cell phone accessories.
If you shop the net, OEM lithium cell phone batteries can often be had in the 15 to 20 dollar range. Even cheaper for non-OEM, aftermarket models.
And to correct one of your other mistakes, lithium ion batteries do not have a memory effect. They simply have a finite number of charge/discharge cycles. Battery Faq
You also suggest it's the user's problem if they keep their Ipod away from a charging source for too long? I see... That must be why all cell phones have built in, non-replaceable batteries requiring users to bring the phone home all the time in order to recharge it... Apple has done most of the Ipod design very well, but as regards batteries, they have failed the ease of use test.
And since clearly a good part of this $99 fee is pure profit to Apple, every time another unit is sent in for service, it furthers Apple's incentive to continue building devices featuring non-replaceable batteries. Nasty cycle that.
Reading through the FAQ, it seems this thing is going to use a common fuel, "Jet A" for both the aircraft engine and the automotive engine.
Uh, how many gas stations carry "Jet A"?
One could buy a very nice aircraft and a dozen road vehicles, each stationed at a variety of airports for the amount of money this thing will cost. $400K? Don't think so, this thing will probably be closer to a million by the time it's ready.
One thing for sure, if they do manage to get one running we'll see it in an upcoming James Bond movie. And just like most gadgets in Bond movies, it will be the first, last and only time we'll ever see it.
BTW, Moller's Sky Car has been advertising for venture investors for over 20 years now, still not a single working prototype has been built. I remember seeing the magazine ad's begging for money in an issue of Popular Science in the early 80's.
And why I still don't recommend it to my users.
Wi-Fi's not ready for prime time. It's terribly open to abuse, especially so for those that live in high density housing. The odds may be low, but it's not worth going to jail or being sued by the RIAA/MPAA for the shenanigans of the guy next door. Run a bit of cable and be done with it.
There will have to be some serious sorting of the encryption issues before I even consider recommending it.
Actually I can only suppose *you* didn't read the article.
The engineers didn't use the safety flight reporting system. They didn't "push the button", they didn't say the words "safety of flight issue" where it needed to be said.
Had they really felt there was a safety of flight issue, one could say the engineers involved were criminally tentative. However I don't believe they ever had confidence of a safety of flight issue. I think they were just covering their asses in paperwork. And this story provides no evidence to prove otherwise.
Aside from all of that, it's never mentioned in this article that when intelligence imaging systems were used to inspect on orbit shuttle condition in previous missions, the photos were totally unusable. Those systems weren't built to resolve the detail necessary to determine shuttle condition, and at the time of this incident, Ron Dittimore clearly explained this to the media. He said there was no anticipation that any such imaging would have served any purpose at all, and that is why it wasn't done.
Sure it would have been nice to have had the imaging. But the precedent suggests this entire line of inquiry is likely a complete red herring. And that even had these engineers tenative complaints been taken to the highest levels, the imaging probably wouldn't have confirmed anything at all. The mission would have continued and the failure would still have occured.
Space is dangerous. Loss of missions and loss of life are part of the business. We lose more jet fighter pilots in training accidents every year than we've every lost in space accidents. Yet I don't hear the media crying about how unsafe our fighter planes are. Neither do I see any congressional investigations regarding the jet fighter safety.
The public and the elected officials accept the fact that military operations are dangerous, even in peacetime. And recent polls now suggest the American public similarly accepts the great level of danger associated with space travel. This congressional inquiry and the media reporting on it are well behind that curve.
If NASA managers listened to every issue brought forward by each of their thousands of engineers, spaceships would never leave the earth.
It's in each of these engineers best interest to list every problem that could possible occur in the systems they design and maintain. That way if the problem happens in one of their systems, they can cover their ass with paperwork. Just because they issued a low-level memorandum doesn't mean these engineers actually had any level of confidence that the problem would occur. It just meant they were covering their ass.
NASA has an escalation process, if these engineers *really* felt there was a problem, all they had to do was push that button. But to push the button is to put your clout on the line. Push it too often by mistake and you will rightly be taken out of the process. No company or organization can afford an employee that continually cries wolf.
So if anyone is to blame for this, it's not the managers. It's the engineers that wrote memo's about it to cover their ass but didn't think the problem was important enough to push the escalation button.
The managers are so inundated with engineers thinking up possible error scenarios they can't possible take them all seriously. Of course, when a shuttle goes down, those same engineers drag out the paper trail covering their butt and program managers are left to swing.
Congress should be ashamed of this inquiry and so should most of America. Space travel is dangerous. Live with the danger or get out of the business.
What amazingly good news. Woot!
For any who've not yet seen it, be sure to pick up the DVD of the first (and only, grumble) season when it hits the shelves this December. The DVD *will* have the unaired episodes and lots of commentary and gag reels and all shown in the correct order (Fox sucks so bad it isn't funny). Amazon was pre-soldout last I checked.
For any who don't know why Firefly didn't make it, one phrase should answer it "Fox are Idiots". The idiots at Fox preempted the show for sports programming more for over half of it's episodes. Then there was the 2-hour premiere which cost something like 6 million dollars. The premiere introduced all the characters and set the story. Fox execs decided they didn't want to show the premiere first, they wanted it to be the 10th episode of the season. and had to be reworked into a "flashback episode" for that context... What a bunch of wankers, but we all know that already.
The article says Universal bought a rights transfer from Fox, perhaps they'll never again influence anything to do with it. One can only hope that when the movie is successful they'll give thought to bringing back the show.
A movie is nice and all, and it's Great that Firefly is back. But a movie will only give us 2 hours of Firefly a year. Compared to the 15 or more hours a year of Firefly we'd have if the TV show comes back. More = better.
WOOT
A cheap hard drive filled with downloaded game ISO's...
Cheap, effective and probably better and faster than running the game from it's original media.
Another possibility, running them from a networked computer holding the ISO's, probably slower though.
Actually DVD burners would not required to "backup" all PS2 titles, many titles are on CD, especially a lot of earlier titles.
And yes, mod chips have been out for awhile, but if you'd ever really looked into them, you'd realize why they haven't made a dent in Sony's market.
The better mod chips require a user to soldier up to 23 wires throughout the PS2 system. These are all surface mount soldier points, as such they're extremely delicate, some less than a millimeter across. A standard soldier iron, or newby soldier jockey could very likely destroy his PS2 in the process. And most of these chips don't come pre-wired, so you also have to soldier all those wires to the actual mod chip.
Very tedious work indeed, only hardware junkies need apply. It's no wonder piracy hasn't been a problem for Sony thus far.
But this exploit changes things dramatically. It only requires a $30 PS2, USB memory card reader/writer and an old, crappy, bargain bin PS1 title, available for $5 anywhere.
And although at first glance it may seem to require the pirate to have a DVD burner, that's not the case. The pirate only need need know someone that has a CD/DVD burner and is willing to make a copy for them, perhaps for a small fee. With games selling for $50 each, this will be a very tempting prospect to many people.
If this plays out, it really drops the barrier to entry for PS2 piracy, probably by many powers of magnitude in regards to the current level. I could even see this effecting Sony's bottom line. Whether this would spur an early release of PS3 is a tougher call, many of those decisions are made so far in advance they're diffucult to move. But there's no doubt, it's things like this that force release dates to move up.
Then I guess you don't justify RIM suing everyone and their brother for "violating" their similar patents?
RIM is as bad as any company out there in attempting to enforce silly patents to keep competitors from developing similar products.
Since I haven't seen this in person yet, I can't guarantee I could copy it. But from the available information it looks trivial to duplicate.
If I can see a difference in the gloss with my eyes then I can take a photo or scan that difference. Maybe not if it were a hologram, but this doesn't look holographic at all.
Once I have the gloss part scanned I can use a difference filter over the regular image, leaving me a clean channel of just the gloss.
How to apply a glossy mask? Well making a conventional mask and spraying it with acrylic clear coat spray paint comes to mind.
Or just loading one of my ink-jet ink cartridges with clear coat glossy ink jet ink (yes, it's available).
So it looks kind of difficult for the average Joe to duplicate, but dead easy for anyone with digital printing experience.
As others have pointed out, you are entirely wrong.
Basic Kevlar vests have no (zero, zilch, nothing) in the way of reinforcing plates. They're simply made of many layers of woven Kevlar cloth.
Sure, that won't stop a rifle bullet at close range, but it will stop nearly any pistol bullet and does wonders with shrapnel.
Ceramic plates are a mostly new addition to the bullet proof vest thing. But most cops I know only go with the basic cloth-type vest. It's a lot lighter and they're not too likely to be shot with a rifle anyway.
I've often thought with very little work, the makers of applications like Kazaa could totally spoof packet shapers.
One would think with many colleges foisting these regulations on their student networks, some enterprising student programmers would have already developed work arounds.
The first reason Kazaa destroys all the other file-sharing methods is that it has all the users. The number one rule of P2P: More users equal more files. Sounds simple but a lot of people miss the obviousness of it.
Most Open-P2P services lose this battle immediately by not interoperating with each other. And every new Open-P2P implementation just further fragments the available user and file base into ever smaller fiefdoms. Not to mention the Open-P2P user base is not the average user, but the super user.
The other place the Open-P2P implementations really miss the boat is in the default user setup. The default settings of Kazaa share all of the files a user downloads with other Kazaa users. It also defaults the user to allow unrestricted downloads at unlimited speed from his machine. Sure, these settings can be changed, but that's not the point. Kazaa caters to the least common denominator computer user, truth is, that's most users.
But most Open-P2P implementations shoot themselves in the foot from the instant they are downloaded. They default the user to "not" share all downloaded files, then let them choose the transfer speeds. They also add in tons of "features" and settings that mystify the average user. Average users don't know from nodes and really don't want to know. They want to get files and not have to mess with settings. Kazaa works out of the box, while most Open-P2P implementations take a lot of wrangling just to get working. But the real key is that most users never change their default settings. So most Kazaa users share everything they download, thus there are always more files-per-user on Kazaa's system than any of the Open-P2P systems.
Then there's IRC and the Newsgroups. IRC has been DDOS'd into irrelevance and even when it wasn't, sitting in file que's for days on end was not my idea of fun. Newsgroups are still with us, for now. But many ISP's offer very spotty service and as binary use grows, I suspect even our dear old newsgroups may come under heavy fire from the MPAA/RIAA.
Bottom line, having tried all the various flavors and methods of file accumulation, Kazaa kicks everything else's ass. Using Kazaa-lite and a handful of Kazaa specific search and download enhancement utilities, there's almost nothing I can't find on the service. The Open-P2P providers aren't even close.
The only way any Open-P2P will get close to Kazaa is by emulating it, then bettering it. If I were building an Open-P2P system to try and beat Kazaa, first I'd copy it, the back-end, the front-end, the "lack" of settings, everything. Then I'd concentrate on features designed to get around all forms of ISP restrictions and MPAA/RIAA manipulations. I'd implement things like port swapping, encryption, IP spoofing, tunneling, reputation systems, cloaking shared data to elude packet shapers and anything else I could think of.
I'd make it all automatically activate when necessary and have all the college users overnight. All those college users with all that bandwidth would give the system the inertia it would need to succeed. Once you have inertia, you have the files, and when have the files, the users will come. And when the MPAA/RIAA really start moving against the ISP's and Kazaa, a system like this could take Kazaa's crown.
Slashdot Mirror
All new Replay units still have the commercial skip functionality. The only difference is that a very tiny bit of user input is now required to access the feature.
The old version used to work auto-magically skipping all the commercials with no user input.
The new version does exactly the same thing, only it requires the user to push a button at the start of every commercial break. Not every commercial mind you, just every 2 to 5+ minute commercial segment. And just one button...
But that one button is enough to make it the previously-automagic feature a "manual" function. And I suppose no one in the entertainment industry thinks such a feature is worth litigating. After all, it's really nothing more than a FFF (fantastic fast forward). Remember, Replay units never deleted commercials, they just made insert points and skipped them in the video stream, you could always go back and watch them if you liked.
Since the new version is little more than a manual FFF, I gather the entertainment industry would have very hard time trying to prove in court that the all-too-similar Fast Forward on VCR's has been illegal all this time.
Tivo and Replay TV own a majority of the patents covering this technology, so it's not at all surprising they are attempting to receive their due licensing fees.
Tivo and Replay TV have a patent sharing agreement among themselves, but it does not carry over to other manufacturers. Between them they own enough patents to have virtual control over the technology.
The reason I suspect they're moving now is because many of the big cable and satellite companies have built PVR functionality to their set top boxes. The nationwide releases of such products from Comcast and Echostar has already started. If it goes well, as I suspect it will, the rest of the cable world will not be far behind.
If Tivo and Replay were to allow their technology to be "rented away" in cable company set top boxes, it would likely put Tivo and Replay out of business.
I expect Replay and Tivo will both try to receive license payments from any cable companies rolling out cable-box PVR's. As well they should, they each have a very full patent portfolio covering the technology.
Bottom line, why in the world should the big cable and satellite companies get a free ride, and not have to pay for technology they didn't even develop?
Because no matter what happens in regards to licensing, the cable co's are going to make one heck of a lot of money renting these set-top PVR's. So why shouldn't the legitimate patent holders, Replay and Tivo, at least receive some licensing fees for having developed the technology in the first place? That's what patents are all about after all.
I've had both Replay TV's and Tivo's. Having used both, I sold my Tivo and have only Replay TV's. This is a horrible marketing mess Replay has made for themselves, but it doesn't change my opinion of the great devices they make.
I've recommended Replay to my friends, most of whom now have one, I've bought them for family members. None of us have ever had any technical issues with any of them. However, a certain proportion of any electronic device is going to fail, I know of people with failed Tivo's and most any other electronic brand.
As for the utter stupidity of this pricing change, it just shows that Dennon (Replay's owner) marketing people have absolutely no clue regarding the consumer electronics channel. Quite obviously all of their retailers didn't screw this up at the same time. This is definitely Dennon's fault. They almost certainly sent out misleading or faulty information to their retail supply chain. This is a boondoggle of tremendous proportions.
Why didn't they just eat the fees and give everyone a lifetime supplied Replay for the discount price of $150? Doing some rough math, if they had 20,000 units in the retail channel (a fair guess), it would have cost the struggling Replay unit a $6 million dollar charge. The marketing manager should be fired either way, but taking a 6 million dollar charge is not the sort of thing tiny electronics companies (compared to Sony, Panasonic, etc.) can afford to do.
However, I have very little sympathy for the initial poster or the other whiners in this thread. Sure, I enjoy the "killer deal" as much as anyone, I'm a charter member of Fatwallet. But I don't whine when these deals don't pan out. This is just like the hundreds of other "killer deals" posted on Fatwallet each year, Some of them pan out, most of them don't. Everyone who bought this in reading about in on a "Hot Deals" site, knew it was a too-good-to-be-true deal, and should just return the unit, get all of their money back and move along to the next one.
All that aside, just because Replay has some complete idiots making their marketing decisions doesn't mean their boxes are bad or the company is evil. The boxes work wonderfully and do amazing things, I'd take one over a Tivo any day of the week. I'd also take a Replay over those clunky, expensive roll-your-own PVR's. Replay TV's are just good, solid devices that work out of the box.
My oldest Replay has been running 24/7 for over 4 years without a single problem, ever.
Cell phone batteries do not need cost $50. Even very nice ones don't cost that much. In the mass quantities they purchase, I suspect the Ipod battery costs Apple less than $15, perhaps much less.
If you're accustomed to paying that much for a battery, I can only suppose you tend to purchase batteries and cell phone accessories at your local cell phone store.
Those stores typically have quite reasonable deals on the actual cell phones, but they charge ridiculous amounts for phone accessories. It's the "movie theater" business model. Sell the tickets at cost in order to profit on the popcorn sales. Many local cell phone stores charge up to a 500% mark-ups on cell phone accessories.
If you shop the net, OEM lithium cell phone batteries can often be had in the 15 to 20 dollar range. Even cheaper for non-OEM, aftermarket models.
And to correct one of your other mistakes, lithium ion batteries do not have a memory effect. They simply have a finite number of charge/discharge cycles. Battery Faq
You also suggest it's the user's problem if they keep their Ipod away from a charging source for too long? I see... That must be why all cell phones have built in, non-replaceable batteries requiring users to bring the phone home all the time in order to recharge it... Apple has done most of the Ipod design very well, but as regards batteries, they have failed the ease of use test.
And since clearly a good part of this $99 fee is pure profit to Apple, every time another unit is sent in for service, it furthers Apple's incentive to continue building devices featuring non-replaceable batteries. Nasty cycle that.
Reading through the FAQ, it seems this thing is going to use a common fuel, "Jet A" for both the aircraft engine and the automotive engine. Uh, how many gas stations carry "Jet A"? One could buy a very nice aircraft and a dozen road vehicles, each stationed at a variety of airports for the amount of money this thing will cost. $400K? Don't think so, this thing will probably be closer to a million by the time it's ready. One thing for sure, if they do manage to get one running we'll see it in an upcoming James Bond movie. And just like most gadgets in Bond movies, it will be the first, last and only time we'll ever see it. BTW, Moller's Sky Car has been advertising for venture investors for over 20 years now, still not a single working prototype has been built. I remember seeing the magazine ad's begging for money in an issue of Popular Science in the early 80's.
And why I still don't recommend it to my users.
Wi-Fi's not ready for prime time. It's terribly open to abuse, especially so for those that live in high density housing. The odds may be low, but it's not worth going to jail or being sued by the RIAA/MPAA for the shenanigans of the guy next door. Run a bit of cable and be done with it.
There will have to be some serious sorting of the encryption issues before I even consider recommending it.
Actually I can only suppose *you* didn't read the article.
The engineers didn't use the safety flight reporting system. They didn't "push the button", they didn't say the words "safety of flight issue" where it needed to be said.
Had they really felt there was a safety of flight issue, one could say the engineers involved were criminally tentative. However I don't believe they ever had confidence of a safety of flight issue. I think they were just covering their asses in paperwork. And this story provides no evidence to prove otherwise.
Aside from all of that, it's never mentioned in this article that when intelligence imaging systems were used to inspect on orbit shuttle condition in previous missions, the photos were totally unusable. Those systems weren't built to resolve the detail necessary to determine shuttle condition, and at the time of this incident, Ron Dittimore clearly explained this to the media. He said there was no anticipation that any such imaging would have served any purpose at all, and that is why it wasn't done.
Sure it would have been nice to have had the imaging. But the precedent suggests this entire line of inquiry is likely a complete red herring. And that even had these engineers tenative complaints been taken to the highest levels, the imaging probably wouldn't have confirmed anything at all. The mission would have continued and the failure would still have occured.
Space is dangerous. Loss of missions and loss of life are part of the business. We lose more jet fighter pilots in training accidents every year than we've every lost in space accidents. Yet I don't hear the media crying about how unsafe our fighter planes are. Neither do I see any congressional investigations regarding the jet fighter safety.
The public and the elected officials accept the fact that military operations are dangerous, even in peacetime. And recent polls now suggest the American public similarly accepts the great level of danger associated with space travel. This congressional inquiry and the media reporting on it are well behind that curve.
If NASA managers listened to every issue brought forward by each of their thousands of engineers, spaceships would never leave the earth.
It's in each of these engineers best interest to list every problem that could possible occur in the systems they design and maintain. That way if the problem happens in one of their systems, they can cover their ass with paperwork. Just because they issued a low-level memorandum doesn't mean these engineers actually had any level of confidence that the problem would occur. It just meant they were covering their ass.
NASA has an escalation process, if these engineers *really* felt there was a problem, all they had to do was push that button. But to push the button is to put your clout on the line. Push it too often by mistake and you will rightly be taken out of the process. No company or organization can afford an employee that continually cries wolf.
So if anyone is to blame for this, it's not the managers. It's the engineers that wrote memo's about it to cover their ass but didn't think the problem was important enough to push the escalation button.
The managers are so inundated with engineers thinking up possible error scenarios they can't possible take them all seriously. Of course, when a shuttle goes down, those same engineers drag out the paper trail covering their butt and program managers are left to swing.
Congress should be ashamed of this inquiry and so should most of America. Space travel is dangerous. Live with the danger or get out of the business.
What amazingly good news. Woot! For any who've not yet seen it, be sure to pick up the DVD of the first (and only, grumble) season when it hits the shelves this December. The DVD *will* have the unaired episodes and lots of commentary and gag reels and all shown in the correct order (Fox sucks so bad it isn't funny). Amazon was pre-soldout last I checked. For any who don't know why Firefly didn't make it, one phrase should answer it "Fox are Idiots". The idiots at Fox preempted the show for sports programming more for over half of it's episodes. Then there was the 2-hour premiere which cost something like 6 million dollars. The premiere introduced all the characters and set the story. Fox execs decided they didn't want to show the premiere first, they wanted it to be the 10th episode of the season. and had to be reworked into a "flashback episode" for that context... What a bunch of wankers, but we all know that already. The article says Universal bought a rights transfer from Fox, perhaps they'll never again influence anything to do with it. One can only hope that when the movie is successful they'll give thought to bringing back the show. A movie is nice and all, and it's Great that Firefly is back. But a movie will only give us 2 hours of Firefly a year. Compared to the 15 or more hours a year of Firefly we'd have if the TV show comes back. More = better. WOOT
A cheap hard drive filled with downloaded game ISO's... Cheap, effective and probably better and faster than running the game from it's original media. Another possibility, running them from a networked computer holding the ISO's, probably slower though.
Seems to me it's not so good.
e adid=7852
It requires a very specific type of USB to USB cable...
http://ps2dev.sourceforge.net/naplink/
writing to a memory card requires another app as well, one that's beta and hasn't been updated in half a year.
http://www.ps2newz.net/forums/printthread.php?thr
To top it off, there are mentions of having to use the "knife method", of disc-swap in order to get it working at all.
http://ps2dev.org/kb/kb.asp?T=593
And it requires a direct connect to a PC.
Not that it's a bad app or anything. But for this use, a $30 memory card writer seems a better solution.
Actually DVD burners would not required to "backup" all PS2 titles, many titles are on CD, especially a lot of earlier titles.
And yes, mod chips have been out for awhile, but if you'd ever really looked into them, you'd realize why they haven't made a dent in Sony's market.
The better mod chips require a user to soldier up to 23 wires throughout the PS2 system. These are all surface mount soldier points, as such they're extremely delicate, some less than a millimeter across. A standard soldier iron, or newby soldier jockey could very likely destroy his PS2 in the process. And most of these chips don't come pre-wired, so you also have to soldier all those wires to the actual mod chip.
Very tedious work indeed, only hardware junkies need apply. It's no wonder piracy hasn't been a problem for Sony thus far.
But this exploit changes things dramatically. It only requires a $30 PS2, USB memory card reader/writer and an old, crappy, bargain bin PS1 title, available for $5 anywhere.
And although at first glance it may seem to require the pirate to have a DVD burner, that's not the case. The pirate only need need know someone that has a CD/DVD burner and is willing to make a copy for them, perhaps for a small fee. With games selling for $50 each, this will be a very tempting prospect to many people.
If this plays out, it really drops the barrier to entry for PS2 piracy, probably by many powers of magnitude in regards to the current level. I could even see this effecting Sony's bottom line. Whether this would spur an early release of PS3 is a tougher call, many of those decisions are made so far in advance they're diffucult to move. But there's no doubt, it's things like this that force release dates to move up.
Then I guess you don't justify RIM suing everyone and their brother for "violating" their similar patents? RIM is as bad as any company out there in attempting to enforce silly patents to keep competitors from developing similar products.
Since I haven't seen this in person yet, I can't guarantee I could copy it. But from the available information it looks trivial to duplicate. If I can see a difference in the gloss with my eyes then I can take a photo or scan that difference. Maybe not if it were a hologram, but this doesn't look holographic at all. Once I have the gloss part scanned I can use a difference filter over the regular image, leaving me a clean channel of just the gloss. How to apply a glossy mask? Well making a conventional mask and spraying it with acrylic clear coat spray paint comes to mind. Or just loading one of my ink-jet ink cartridges with clear coat glossy ink jet ink (yes, it's available). So it looks kind of difficult for the average Joe to duplicate, but dead easy for anyone with digital printing experience.
As others have pointed out, you are entirely wrong. Basic Kevlar vests have no (zero, zilch, nothing) in the way of reinforcing plates. They're simply made of many layers of woven Kevlar cloth. Sure, that won't stop a rifle bullet at close range, but it will stop nearly any pistol bullet and does wonders with shrapnel. Ceramic plates are a mostly new addition to the bullet proof vest thing. But most cops I know only go with the basic cloth-type vest. It's a lot lighter and they're not too likely to be shot with a rifle anyway.
I've often thought with very little work, the makers of applications like Kazaa could totally spoof packet shapers.
One would think with many colleges foisting these regulations on their student networks, some enterprising student programmers would have already developed work arounds.
The first reason Kazaa destroys all the other file-sharing methods is that it has all the users. The number one rule of P2P: More users equal more files. Sounds simple but a lot of people miss the obviousness of it.
Most Open-P2P services lose this battle immediately by not interoperating with each other. And every new Open-P2P implementation just further fragments the available user and file base into ever smaller fiefdoms. Not to mention the Open-P2P user base is not the average user, but the super user.
The other place the Open-P2P implementations really miss the boat is in the default user setup. The default settings of Kazaa share all of the files a user downloads with other Kazaa users. It also defaults the user to allow unrestricted downloads at unlimited speed from his machine. Sure, these settings can be changed, but that's not the point. Kazaa caters to the least common denominator computer user, truth is, that's most users.
But most Open-P2P implementations shoot themselves in the foot from the instant they are downloaded. They default the user to "not" share all downloaded files, then let them choose the transfer speeds. They also add in tons of "features" and settings that mystify the average user. Average users don't know from nodes and really don't want to know. They want to get files and not have to mess with settings. Kazaa works out of the box, while most Open-P2P implementations take a lot of wrangling just to get working. But the real key is that most users never change their default settings. So most Kazaa users share everything they download, thus there are always more files-per-user on Kazaa's system than any of the Open-P2P systems.
Then there's IRC and the Newsgroups. IRC has been DDOS'd into irrelevance and even when it wasn't, sitting in file que's for days on end was not my idea of fun. Newsgroups are still with us, for now. But many ISP's offer very spotty service and as binary use grows, I suspect even our dear old newsgroups may come under heavy fire from the MPAA/RIAA.
Bottom line, having tried all the various flavors and methods of file accumulation, Kazaa kicks everything else's ass. Using Kazaa-lite and a handful of Kazaa specific search and download enhancement utilities, there's almost nothing I can't find on the service. The Open-P2P providers aren't even close.
The only way any Open-P2P will get close to Kazaa is by emulating it, then bettering it. If I were building an Open-P2P system to try and beat Kazaa, first I'd copy it, the back-end, the front-end, the "lack" of settings, everything. Then I'd concentrate on features designed to get around all forms of ISP restrictions and MPAA/RIAA manipulations. I'd implement things like port swapping, encryption, IP spoofing, tunneling, reputation systems, cloaking shared data to elude packet shapers and anything else I could think of. I'd make it all automatically activate when necessary and have all the college users overnight. All those college users with all that bandwidth would give the system the inertia it would need to succeed. Once you have inertia, you have the files, and when have the files, the users will come. And when the MPAA/RIAA really start moving against the ISP's and Kazaa, a system like this could take Kazaa's crown.