"I know it's a bit late to reply , but - I was under the impression that BluRay wasn't region locked yet?"
Yeah, is a bit late but what the hey!:-) There are some BD movies that aren't region locked and some that are. The packaging doesn't make it clear which are though so some enterprising people have kept lists of movies and their region coding. Casino Royale definitely is region locked. Personally, without a solution that allows me to bypass region coding I won't be buying any time soon even though the PS3 has now been crippled down to a more attractive price. Not enough PS3 exclusives to attract me and a stand-alone BD player is more likely to be cracked to be region free.
"I know the PS3 games are region fre as I have a Japanese PS3 and a mix of US, UK and JP games which all work."
That actually is good to know. Certainly wasn't true with the PS2.
"I've not actually bought any bluray movies yet though, they're expensive and I just don't care enough about HD."
BD movies are significantly more expensive than HD DVD and the picture quality of HD DVD is better many times. The quality difference on my 120" HD projector makes it worthwhile to buy HD DVD. On a small (50") screen HDTV the difference is less noticible compared to an upscaled DVD.
"I'm pretty sure HD-DVD has (or will have) region capabilities, there seems to have been a push on it in the HD-DVD forum (the people who make the standards)."
According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_DVD) there is no region coding in the current specification. Changing it now would be difficult and really, why bother? Region coding was a farce on DVD and only a really really stupid company would think to use them in a high definition format when all TVs now use the same standard worldwide (Sony, I'm looking at you!)
The really annoying thing for me is that region coding has been banned in New Zealand so all DVD players here are region free. Even the PS3 is region free for DVD but not for BD. I don't understand why this is being allowed and expect the law to catch up with them again soon but until then BD just isn't an attractive format. Plenty of films on HD DVD for me to import from the US anyway.
You know, I understand how people complain that HD DVD isn't as open as DVD but to be honest, to me it is more open because I didn't have to worry about buying a region free player. On the other hand, BD is far more locked than DVD since there were region free DVD players available fairly early on but so far none for Blu ray. Until Blu ray is at least as open as DVD (ie can be made region free) then I will go with HD DVD all the way. Sure, it isn't currently as easy to rip them as with DVDs but it took years before DVD could be ripped.
I just don't understand why people are supporting Blu ray......
The other day I was looking at disc prices. The typical price for a BD here in NZ is close to $50. HD DVDs are about $35 and regular DVDs are $30 for comparison. Also, there are no discounts to be had on the PS3 and while the US looks to be getting a new SKU at $399US ($525NZ) we are expected to pay $1200NZ which works out at $910US. Think about that.
The last project I worked on included getting my code running on a cluster using MPI. Compared with the old days when I was working with dedicated parallel supercomputers, each of which had their own perculiar parallel programming languages and having the fun of porting code from C* on a Connection Machine over to MPL on a MasPar, MPI is an improvement. As you say though, it isn't really suited to fine grained parallelism and will always be most useful in tasks which are embarrassingly parallel having a very small communications overhead and repetitive on large data sets. The parallelism is actually rather focussed on the architecture despite your claim to the contrary because you simply can't ignore all the nasty overheads if you want good performance. The nice thing with Occam was that it completely abstracted you from the hardware and you just wrote a very parallel program. The compiler and hardware worked together to run your program in the most efficient way. All I am saying is that although MPI is successful and has helped a great deal in bringing huge processing resources to bear on important problems, it really isn't a good example of the art. Don't get me started on pthreads........
MPI, pthreads and so on are really a poor way of doing parallel programming. The reality is that these languages are all simply serial languages with parallelism bolted on. What you really need to do is use a truely parallel language. Way back in 1990 I learned to program transputers using Occam which was parallel through and through. On that platform it was trivial to write pure parallel code and more to the point, you could write it in a very fine grained way which could easily be serialised to run on a smaller number of processors. In some ways it was similar to MPI but far more potent because of the built in support in the transputer architecture. It is very sad that in the intervening 20 years or so since the transputer was first invented, parallel programming has gone largely nowhere. Attempts at automatic parallelisation of serial code are doomed to failure and threading within serial languages is always going to be a blunt tool. Maybe in another 20 years we will be back where we were in the late 1980's.
I bought a cheap (really cheap actually, NZ$600) Compaq PC the other day. AMD Sempron 3600+ with 512MB RAM, on board graphics, ethernet and sound and an 80GB SATA disc (where the hell they found that I don't know). It also came with a copy of Vista Basic so for a laugh I fired it up to see how it worked.
The long and the short of it is that if I bought this machine to run as a Windows PC it would have gone right back as unfit for purpose. Just getting the thing through its configuration took about 1 hour. Add a couple more hours for downloading and installing updates/patches. Then, restart and it takes 10 mins to get to a usable interface. Start more than one program at once and it slows to a crawl (eg explorer and IE7 at once) and the screen locks up. Simply awful. The shop told me that many people have complained that it was slow and their response was that it was a cheap machine. Well yes, but seriously, XP would function well enough on it. CentOS 5 spins along at a perfectly usable rate. Vista Basic. Nope.
MS has seriously lost the plot with this thing. Sure, stick a lot more RAM in and it will work OK but come on. Why is MS allowing companies to sell these woefully underspecified machines. It has a sticker on it saying it was designed for Vista but it really can't run it well enough for real world use. I know Compaq is to blame too, surely they could have tested these things. Even the lowest spec Mac will run Tiger nicely. Once you bump the RAM up on one of these Compaq things you could have bought a low end Mac mini which would still run better.
This machine should have come with XP. It is not Vista capable.
The moral of this story is to stay away from PC World. They over price all their components and the machines they sell are crap by and large. They exist to take money from the ignorant and their attitude when their product inevitably breaks is dreadful. The anti-linux attitude is old news as I experienced similar treatment at the PC World in Edinburgh when I had a keyboard fail on my laptop with Linux installed. Fortunately I had XP on it too and was able to prove that the fault wasn't due to Linux.
Sadly, PC World has also put a lot of the good little computer stores out of business which is why they can behave so badly.
"What I do wish is that they would've thrown away all this interlaced and NTSC/PAL crap out of the window with the new formats."
Ummm, they did. Every HD DVD I have is 1080p. Sure, there are extras which are in SD and that can be either 480 or 576 line progressive or interlaced. My player converts it all to 1080i which is what I drive both HD TVs (an LCD panel and a DLP front projector.) Oh, and don't start whining about 1080i being all interlaced and that, it is a delivery system and has exactly the same number of pixels and exactly the same resolution as 1080p and for material which originates in 1080p the step to 1080i can be perfectly reversed by the deinterlacer in the display while you get the benefits that you can send a 1080i signal further without degradation than 1080p. For instance, 1080p of my 360 has significant ringing artefacts over a long cable (8m) but 1080i doesn't so 1080i looks better.
Meanwhile, I'm with the original poster. I didn't buy into DVD until it was possible to get a region free hack for a reasonable priced player since I tend to import a lot of movies. HD DVD doesn't need a hack so I am already building a nice collection and enjoying it. So far, BD is region locked so the prices are higher, the quality is no better regardless of the prospect of it being so (in fact most BDs are 25GB discs whereas all HD DVDs are 30GB dual layer) and BD has the dreaded BD+ DRM in addition to AACS and if someone does produce a region free hack, Sony will be agressively all over it just like when people chipped the PS2. No, it doesn't look like I'll be buying a Blu-ray player for a while yet and besides which, HD DVD now has wider industry support than Blu-ray (yay Paramount!)
"I just wish people in other fields, politics, religion, law, philosophy, etc would admit when they are baffled as readily as the scientists do. For all the amount of explanations they offer and advance understanding of nature, these scientists seem to delight on admitting they are baffled at the drop of a hat."
OK, I'll admt it, I'm a scientist (hangs head.)
Anyway, yes, you're right. One of the things that scientists have to learn as part of the scientific method is to admit when they don't know something, or were wrong about it and need to revise their ideas. But this isn't something scientists should be ashamed of, it is something we enjoy because it is all part of the discovery process. Non-scientists seem to have so much trouble understanding the ease with which a scientist will happily admit to being wrong or being surprised or baffled or just plain shocked and stunned. To a scientist, these are all opportunities to do more research and learn more. I love it. There is nothing better than realising that you have discovered something that no-one else in the world has ever seen. I've done it a couple of times and it is a fantastic thrill.
"Technically you're correct, HD DVD doesn't support region coding and Blu-ray does. In reality it's a non-issue because the region encoding for blu-ray is optional and (as far as I know) not a single title has made use of it so far and no studio has any intention of using it."
I buy HD DVDs because I cam import US discs for far less cost than buying them locally (NZ) and I have a much better choice.
As for BD region coding, there are definitely examples. Casino Royale is region coded for instance. There are sites which keep track of discs which are and are not region coded. It looks like the higher sellers will be region locked which means they can charge a premium for them in each market.
Region coding sucks and I will not buy a Blu-ray player until it has been cracked and even then it will likely have to also play HD DVD since I am building up quite a good collection now and they won't spontaneously combust if BD wins in the end just like my LaserDisc collection still plays as well as it did before DVD took over.
"Sure, the Mac penetration may be bigger in the U.S. and if it's your "weapon of choice" then good luck to you. But over here in the UK and Europe, Macs are by far a minority product - in my experience used by people who feel the need to stand out from the crowd and not use Windows but cannot be bothered to put in some effort learning technical skills to be able to tackle Linux."
You're just not looking. I was at a bioinformatics conference recently and Apple had a stand there. They told me how a guy came up to them and asked what they were doing there since noone uses Macs. They told him to look around. It is simply amazing that he thought everyone was using Windows because I swear the whole place was a sea of Apple logos. Definitely more than 50% of all machines so how could he no see them? On our stand it was funny to see people almost walk away in a huff because the demo video we were playing was of our software running on Windows and they assumed it didn't work on a Mac. I kept having to point out that my machine was a Mac and the software runs fine.
FYI, I came to the Mac after years of Linux starting in 1994 and before that SunOS/Solaris/Ultrix/OSF and various BSDs. I use a Mac because the hardware is better and lasts me a lot longer. This iBook G4 is four years old now and it still gets daily use. Before that, the typical lifespan of my laptops was about 1 year. These days my weapon of choice is a first gen MacBook Pro which is 1.5 years old and I expect to get at least another two years of daily service. A real UNIX (espectially now that Leopard is certified) on hardware that lasts. That is why I am seeing so many more Macs about.
IBM counterclaims
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SCO Loses
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Since SCO doesn't own UNIX there is still some fun to come as IBM tears them to pieces. What would be really interesting is if IBM could somehow drag MS into this mess but we all know that isn't likely.
"Both formats still appear to be a blocky, compressed mess to me."
Interesting. I suspect what you are seeing there is poorly set up displays. I run HD DVD on a 120" DLP front projection system and it has none of the blocking that is typical of DVD. In fact, I haven't seen any artefacts whatsoever on HD DVD and that is certainly not true for regular DVD where banding and blocking is very common unless you are talking high bit rate transfers. On displays in shops though it is common for them to have sharpness and contrast settings which are wildly high and this can make even the cleanest of sources look poor. Trust me, on my big screen HD DVD is the closest to a high quality cinematic presentation you are going to see without resorting to 35mm film. In some respects it is actually much better than a real cinema and that is certainly not something I could say about DVD on the same screen.
"I threw my full support behind HD DVD with the Xbox 360 HD DVD player. I have been extremely pleased with the quality, although the menus can be slow to open at times. "
Although I bought HD DVD for my 360 I didn't consider this throwing my whole weight behind it. Sure, I have bought a bunch of HD DVDs because, well, the picture is amazing. I would have bought Blu-Ray if I could have got a player for the same money though, its just that a PS3 was a much more expensive proposition. However, I wouldn't buy a Blu-Ray only player even if I didn't already have an HD DVD drive and some films. I would cover my bases and buy a combi player just as I did when DVD first appeared and I had a large LD collection. My LD/DVD combi player is still going strong and made all the difference in the world to me as I could still buy and play LDs as well as buying DVDs. There are decent priced combi DVD/HD DVD/Blu Ray players coming so in the end whether you buy HD DVD or Blu Ray is simply down to the movie and what platform you choose to buy. Buying a Blu Ray only machine is just silly.
"You should definitely look into getting an antenna hooked up to pull down some over-the-air HD programming"
Given that I am in New Zealand now and the nearest HDTV broadcasts are in Australia which is about 1200Km away I would need one hell of an antenna to pull those in:-)
Seriously though, it doesn't look like NZ is going to be getting OTA HD any time soon so HD DVD or Blu-Ray is the only way to enjoy the readily available HDTVs which people are buying like mad. We don't even get OTA DTT SDTV broadcasts yet although that is supposed to start in 2008. For the moment, the only way to get digital TV is via Sky which is very limited compared with what I used to get in the UK.
Re:Difference?
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Blue Blu-ray
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· Score: 4, Informative
"I believe hd-dvd is on the order of 15-20gb, where a blu-ray disc is 50-60gb. So the blu-ray disc can hold the same length movie, with less compression, and as a result ( theortically ) a better image."
HD DVD is 15GB (I have no idea what a gb is) per layer. Blu-Ray is 25GB per layer. Both can come in dual layer formats and so HD DVD can have up to 30GB and Blu-Ray 50GB. Both support exactly the same video and audio codecs and also AACS DRM although Blu-Ray has an additional layer of encryption which HD DVD lacks although it hasn't be used yet. Blu-Ray is also region encoded whereas HD DVD isn't so you can buy your discs from anywhere in the world if you buy them on HD DVD but you can only buy them within your own region if you buy Blu-Ray.
Picture quality wise there is nothing in it. In all the tests so far, HD DVD has been equal or better where the film is available on both formats. Truth is, a 1080p HD signal can easily fit into 30GB using VC-1. A number of Blu-Ray discs are still using MPEG2 which is less efficient and is why they don't look as good as the HD DVD VC-1 equivalent.
In the end, the technical differences are small enough not to make the slightest difference. Physically, the discs are the same dimensions and a combi drive is practical so there is no reason to believe that a cheap multiformat player won't exist. Samsung is supposed to be releasing their DVD/HD DVD/Blu-Ray combi player in europe for 400 shortly and it will support all formats fully.
Personally, I bought an HD DVD drive for my Xbox 360 so I would have some HD material for my HD TV and HD projector. For the money I would have been daft not to and there were enough films on the format to get me started. Even today, there is little to choose between HD DVD and Blu-Ray when it comes to choice of films. Compared with DVD, HD DVD is definitely clearer and has richer colours and deeper blacks. I have an upscaling HDMI DVD player which helps make DVD look very good, but HD DVD is definitely better. When the combi player becomes available I will buy one and use that instead of my Xbox 360 and also have the option of Blu-Ray.
Software Assurance was always a bad idea. It is clear that if you hand over the money before the work is done then they are far less likely to do the work as quickly as they would if you didn't pay until the work was finished. This is true in the real world (builders or decorators) so why shouldn't it be true with MS? They already have your money and so they don't really need to work hard. Companies should definitely tell them to stick it and buy as and when they feel the need to upgrade. Clearly very little of the software MS has produced since introducing SA6 has been of any value and I suspect the uptake would be much lower if people hadn't already paid up front. Don't be fooled twice is what I say, keep the money in your bank earning interest, not theirs.
I keep seeing the PS3 and keep feeling it is vastly overpriced. At the moment in NZ we are expected to pay $1199 for a PS3 despite the high value of the $Kiwi. At current exchange rates that would make a standard 60GB PS3 $935 US. I know we always get the sh***y end of the stick but nearly double the price for the same piece of hardware is way beyond a joke. I'm sure the price difference is similar in the EU too. Of course, the price of all the other consoles are equally crazy. With the $Kiwi at its highest level ever we seriously need to be seeing some exchange rate price cuts rather than importers taking the piss like this and that goes for all consoles.
"That should have read "My mac lasted longer", as that's just one example. I've got a 4-year-old cheap-ass MSI notebook which still works perfectly, so clearly your assertion doesn't hold much water;)"
Granted, in my experience Macs have lasted longer. I did preface the comment by saying that I use my laptops all the time as my primary machine. Sure, any laptop will last years if you only use it occasionally but for a machine to survive being dragged across the globe as mine are it has to be very well put together. My iBook has stood the test of time, and now my MacBook Pro is doing the same as it is now well over a year old (1st get machine) and going strong.
If you are not as hard on your machine as I am then by all means, get something cheap (assuming you are happy with Windows but that is another matter entirely) but if you want a robust machine with a solid OS then a Mac is a very good choice.
I bought my first Mac laptop four years ago (1st gen iBook G4) having had a long line of Intel and AMD based laptops from the likes of Toshiba, Samsung, Compaq and so on. I bought the iBook out of frustration. Partly the problem was that I wanted to run Linux on the machines and this meant that the cheapest laptops simply couldn't run Linux reliably because of lack of graphics, sound and network drivers for them. To achieve a decent level of Linux compatibility I had to go with mid range or higher machines. The problem was that even when spending £1500 or more, the machines would never last more than a year of use because I was using them as my primary computer. I bought the iBook for £999 figuring that it was cheaper and if it only lasted a year like the previous machines then I was still ahead of the game plus I would have supported hardware under a full UNIX platform. That machine is now four years old and still going strong after the same treatment that all my previous machines received and as a result I have bought two more Macs (a mini with ACD and a 15" MBP).
If you simply don't care about the quality of your machine then by all means go with the lowest priced available, but if you want a machine that will last and be reliable then buy a Mac.
Surely, if the EULA doesn't allow plugins then the software itself shouldn't support them? The fact that it does makes a nonsense of all this. The onus is on MS to disable the functionality that allowed this to happen, not to send the lawyers in.
"Add on top of that the fact that BluRay is outselling HDDVD signifigantly..."
Remember how Betamax was *THE* video tape format early on but lost out to VHS in the long term because VHS machines were more widely and cheaply available. Many people assume it was porn but in fact it was price. HD DVD still has an opportunity to do the same so I don't think the current rates of BD sales are any reason the claim the format has won.
I was in Game yesterday looking for something new to play on my MacBook Pro with Windows XP Pro. Been playing Half Life 2 again and really enjoying it so I thought I would look for something similar. I was appalled at how small the PC game sections are in game shops these days. Worse though, they all seem to be strategy games which really aren't my thing. FPS on a console is worse than horrible so I wanted a PC FPS. Nothing I haven't already played and very little coming. The PC section was about the same size as the Gamecube section.
Looks like PC users won't even be able to hold Games up as the great reason to use Windows instead of OS X for much longer.
Am I the only one who was disappointed when Google beat MS to this? I was hoping that MS would buy them and then force all Windows users to view the ads and kill off things like adblock etc for the Windows platform. This would have been the single biggest win for the non-Windows community ever because it would drive everyone who currently blocks DoubleClick etc off the platform.
Slashdot Mirror
"I know it's a bit late to reply , but - I was under the impression that BluRay wasn't region locked yet?"
:-) There are some BD movies that aren't region locked and some that are. The packaging doesn't make it clear which are though so some enterprising people have kept lists of movies and their region coding. Casino Royale definitely is region locked. Personally, without a solution that allows me to bypass region coding I won't be buying any time soon even though the PS3 has now been crippled down to a more attractive price. Not enough PS3 exclusives to attract me and a stand-alone BD player is more likely to be cracked to be region free.
Yeah, is a bit late but what the hey!
"I know the PS3 games are region fre as I have a Japanese PS3 and a mix of US, UK and JP games which all work."
That actually is good to know. Certainly wasn't true with the PS2.
"I've not actually bought any bluray movies yet though, they're expensive and I just don't care enough about HD."
BD movies are significantly more expensive than HD DVD and the picture quality of HD DVD is better many times. The quality difference on my 120" HD projector makes it worthwhile to buy HD DVD. On a small (50") screen HDTV the difference is less noticible compared to an upscaled DVD.
"I'm pretty sure HD-DVD has (or will have) region capabilities, there seems to have been a push on it in the HD-DVD forum (the people who make the standards)."
According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_DVD) there is no region coding in the current specification. Changing it now would be difficult and really, why bother? Region coding was a farce on DVD and only a really really stupid company would think to use them in a high definition format when all TVs now use the same standard worldwide (Sony, I'm looking at you!)
The really annoying thing for me is that region coding has been banned in New Zealand so all DVD players here are region free. Even the PS3 is region free for DVD but not for BD. I don't understand why this is being allowed and expect the law to catch up with them again soon but until then BD just isn't an attractive format. Plenty of films on HD DVD for me to import from the US anyway.
You know, I understand how people complain that HD DVD isn't as open as DVD but to be honest, to me it is more open because I didn't have to worry about buying a region free player. On the other hand, BD is far more locked than DVD since there were region free DVD players available fairly early on but so far none for Blu ray. Until Blu ray is at least as open as DVD (ie can be made region free) then I will go with HD DVD all the way. Sure, it isn't currently as easy to rip them as with DVDs but it took years before DVD could be ripped.
I just don't understand why people are supporting Blu ray......
The other day I was looking at disc prices. The typical price for a BD here in NZ is close to $50. HD DVDs are about $35 and regular DVDs are $30 for comparison. Also, there are no discounts to be had on the PS3 and while the US looks to be getting a new SKU at $399US ($525NZ) we are expected to pay $1200NZ which works out at $910US. Think about that.
The last project I worked on included getting my code running on a cluster using MPI. Compared with the old days when I was working with dedicated parallel supercomputers, each of which had their own perculiar parallel programming languages and having the fun of porting code from C* on a Connection Machine over to MPL on a MasPar, MPI is an improvement. As you say though, it isn't really suited to fine grained parallelism and will always be most useful in tasks which are embarrassingly parallel having a very small communications overhead and repetitive on large data sets. The parallelism is actually rather focussed on the architecture despite your claim to the contrary because you simply can't ignore all the nasty overheads if you want good performance. The nice thing with Occam was that it completely abstracted you from the hardware and you just wrote a very parallel program. The compiler and hardware worked together to run your program in the most efficient way. All I am saying is that although MPI is successful and has helped a great deal in bringing huge processing resources to bear on important problems, it really isn't a good example of the art. Don't get me started on pthreads........
MPI, pthreads and so on are really a poor way of doing parallel programming. The reality is that these languages are all simply serial languages with parallelism bolted on. What you really need to do is use a truely parallel language. Way back in 1990 I learned to program transputers using Occam which was parallel through and through. On that platform it was trivial to write pure parallel code and more to the point, you could write it in a very fine grained way which could easily be serialised to run on a smaller number of processors. In some ways it was similar to MPI but far more potent because of the built in support in the transputer architecture. It is very sad that in the intervening 20 years or so since the transputer was first invented, parallel programming has gone largely nowhere. Attempts at automatic parallelisation of serial code are doomed to failure and threading within serial languages is always going to be a blunt tool. Maybe in another 20 years we will be back where we were in the late 1980's.
I bought a cheap (really cheap actually, NZ$600) Compaq PC the other day. AMD Sempron 3600+ with 512MB RAM, on board graphics, ethernet and sound and an 80GB SATA disc (where the hell they found that I don't know). It also came with a copy of Vista Basic so for a laugh I fired it up to see how it worked.
The long and the short of it is that if I bought this machine to run as a Windows PC it would have gone right back as unfit for purpose. Just getting the thing through its configuration took about 1 hour. Add a couple more hours for downloading and installing updates/patches. Then, restart and it takes 10 mins to get to a usable interface. Start more than one program at once and it slows to a crawl (eg explorer and IE7 at once) and the screen locks up. Simply awful. The shop told me that many people have complained that it was slow and their response was that it was a cheap machine. Well yes, but seriously, XP would function well enough on it. CentOS 5 spins along at a perfectly usable rate. Vista Basic. Nope.
MS has seriously lost the plot with this thing. Sure, stick a lot more RAM in and it will work OK but come on. Why is MS allowing companies to sell these woefully underspecified machines. It has a sticker on it saying it was designed for Vista but it really can't run it well enough for real world use. I know Compaq is to blame too, surely they could have tested these things. Even the lowest spec Mac will run Tiger nicely. Once you bump the RAM up on one of these Compaq things you could have bought a low end Mac mini which would still run better.
This machine should have come with XP. It is not Vista capable.
The moral of this story is to stay away from PC World. They over price all their components and the machines they sell are crap by and large. They exist to take money from the ignorant and their attitude when their product inevitably breaks is dreadful. The anti-linux attitude is old news as I experienced similar treatment at the PC World in Edinburgh when I had a keyboard fail on my laptop with Linux installed. Fortunately I had XP on it too and was able to prove that the fault wasn't due to Linux.
Sadly, PC World has also put a lot of the good little computer stores out of business which is why they can behave so badly.
"What I do wish is that they would've thrown away all this interlaced and NTSC/PAL crap out of the window with the new formats."
Ummm, they did. Every HD DVD I have is 1080p. Sure, there are extras which are in SD and that can be either 480 or 576 line progressive or interlaced. My player converts it all to 1080i which is what I drive both HD TVs (an LCD panel and a DLP front projector.) Oh, and don't start whining about 1080i being all interlaced and that, it is a delivery system and has exactly the same number of pixels and exactly the same resolution as 1080p and for material which originates in 1080p the step to 1080i can be perfectly reversed by the deinterlacer in the display while you get the benefits that you can send a 1080i signal further without degradation than 1080p. For instance, 1080p of my 360 has significant ringing artefacts over a long cable (8m) but 1080i doesn't so 1080i looks better.
Meanwhile, I'm with the original poster. I didn't buy into DVD until it was possible to get a region free hack for a reasonable priced player since I tend to import a lot of movies. HD DVD doesn't need a hack so I am already building a nice collection and enjoying it. So far, BD is region locked so the prices are higher, the quality is no better regardless of the prospect of it being so (in fact most BDs are 25GB discs whereas all HD DVDs are 30GB dual layer) and BD has the dreaded BD+ DRM in addition to AACS and if someone does produce a region free hack, Sony will be agressively all over it just like when people chipped the PS2. No, it doesn't look like I'll be buying a Blu-ray player for a while yet and besides which, HD DVD now has wider industry support than Blu-ray (yay Paramount!)
"I just wish people in other fields, politics, religion, law, philosophy, etc would admit when they are baffled as readily as the scientists do. For all the amount of explanations they offer and advance understanding of nature, these scientists seem to delight on admitting they are baffled at the drop of a hat."
OK, I'll admt it, I'm a scientist (hangs head.)
Anyway, yes, you're right. One of the things that scientists have to learn as part of the scientific method is to admit when they don't know something, or were wrong about it and need to revise their ideas. But this isn't something scientists should be ashamed of, it is something we enjoy because it is all part of the discovery process. Non-scientists seem to have so much trouble understanding the ease with which a scientist will happily admit to being wrong or being surprised or baffled or just plain shocked and stunned. To a scientist, these are all opportunities to do more research and learn more. I love it. There is nothing better than realising that you have discovered something that no-one else in the world has ever seen. I've done it a couple of times and it is a fantastic thrill.
"Technically you're correct, HD DVD doesn't support region coding and Blu-ray does. In reality it's a non-issue because the region encoding for blu-ray is optional and (as far as I know) not a single title has made use of it so far and no studio has any intention of using it."
I buy HD DVDs because I cam import US discs for far less cost than buying them locally (NZ) and I have a much better choice.
As for BD region coding, there are definitely examples. Casino Royale is region coded for instance. There are sites which keep track of discs which are and are not region coded. It looks like the higher sellers will be region locked which means they can charge a premium for them in each market.
Region coding sucks and I will not buy a Blu-ray player until it has been cracked and even then it will likely have to also play HD DVD since I am building up quite a good collection now and they won't spontaneously combust if BD wins in the end just like my LaserDisc collection still plays as well as it did before DVD took over.
"Sure, the Mac penetration may be bigger in the U.S. and if it's your "weapon of choice" then good luck to you. But over here in the UK and Europe, Macs are by far a minority product - in my experience used by people who feel the need to stand out from the crowd and not use Windows but cannot be bothered to put in some effort learning technical skills to be able to tackle Linux."
You're just not looking. I was at a bioinformatics conference recently and Apple had a stand there. They told me how a guy came up to them and asked what they were doing there since noone uses Macs. They told him to look around. It is simply amazing that he thought everyone was using Windows because I swear the whole place was a sea of Apple logos. Definitely more than 50% of all machines so how could he no see them? On our stand it was funny to see people almost walk away in a huff because the demo video we were playing was of our software running on Windows and they assumed it didn't work on a Mac. I kept having to point out that my machine was a Mac and the software runs fine.
FYI, I came to the Mac after years of Linux starting in 1994 and before that SunOS/Solaris/Ultrix/OSF and various BSDs. I use a Mac because the hardware is better and lasts me a lot longer. This iBook G4 is four years old now and it still gets daily use. Before that, the typical lifespan of my laptops was about 1 year. These days my weapon of choice is a first gen MacBook Pro which is 1.5 years old and I expect to get at least another two years of daily service. A real UNIX (espectially now that Leopard is certified) on hardware that lasts. That is why I am seeing so many more Macs about.
Since SCO doesn't own UNIX there is still some fun to come as IBM tears them to pieces. What would be really interesting is if IBM could somehow drag MS into this mess but we all know that isn't likely.
Still, a good day!
"capitalized the abbreviation for Gigabyte"
:-P
Don't you mean GigaByte?
Annoys me no end when people talk about Gb when they mean GB.
"Both formats still appear to be a blocky, compressed mess to me."
Interesting. I suspect what you are seeing there is poorly set up displays. I run HD DVD on a 120" DLP front projection system and it has none of the blocking that is typical of DVD. In fact, I haven't seen any artefacts whatsoever on HD DVD and that is certainly not true for regular DVD where banding and blocking is very common unless you are talking high bit rate transfers. On displays in shops though it is common for them to have sharpness and contrast settings which are wildly high and this can make even the cleanest of sources look poor. Trust me, on my big screen HD DVD is the closest to a high quality cinematic presentation you are going to see without resorting to 35mm film. In some respects it is actually much better than a real cinema and that is certainly not something I could say about DVD on the same screen.
"I threw my full support behind HD DVD with the Xbox 360 HD DVD player. I have been extremely pleased with the quality, although the menus can be slow to open at times. "
Although I bought HD DVD for my 360 I didn't consider this throwing my whole weight behind it. Sure, I have bought a bunch of HD DVDs because, well, the picture is amazing. I would have bought Blu-Ray if I could have got a player for the same money though, its just that a PS3 was a much more expensive proposition. However, I wouldn't buy a Blu-Ray only player even if I didn't already have an HD DVD drive and some films. I would cover my bases and buy a combi player just as I did when DVD first appeared and I had a large LD collection. My LD/DVD combi player is still going strong and made all the difference in the world to me as I could still buy and play LDs as well as buying DVDs. There are decent priced combi DVD/HD DVD/Blu Ray players coming so in the end whether you buy HD DVD or Blu Ray is simply down to the movie and what platform you choose to buy. Buying a Blu Ray only machine is just silly.
"You should definitely look into getting an antenna hooked up to pull down some over-the-air HD programming"
:-)
Given that I am in New Zealand now and the nearest HDTV broadcasts are in Australia which is about 1200Km away I would need one hell of an antenna to pull those in
Seriously though, it doesn't look like NZ is going to be getting OTA HD any time soon so HD DVD or Blu-Ray is the only way to enjoy the readily available HDTVs which people are buying like mad. We don't even get OTA DTT SDTV broadcasts yet although that is supposed to start in 2008. For the moment, the only way to get digital TV is via Sky which is very limited compared with what I used to get in the UK.
"I believe hd-dvd is on the order of 15-20gb, where a blu-ray disc is 50-60gb. So the blu-ray disc can hold the same length movie, with less compression, and as a result ( theortically ) a better image."
HD DVD is 15GB (I have no idea what a gb is) per layer. Blu-Ray is 25GB per layer. Both can come in dual layer formats and so HD DVD can have up to 30GB and Blu-Ray 50GB. Both support exactly the same video and audio codecs and also AACS DRM although Blu-Ray has an additional layer of encryption which HD DVD lacks although it hasn't be used yet. Blu-Ray is also region encoded whereas HD DVD isn't so you can buy your discs from anywhere in the world if you buy them on HD DVD but you can only buy them within your own region if you buy Blu-Ray.
Picture quality wise there is nothing in it. In all the tests so far, HD DVD has been equal or better where the film is available on both formats. Truth is, a 1080p HD signal can easily fit into 30GB using VC-1. A number of Blu-Ray discs are still using MPEG2 which is less efficient and is why they don't look as good as the HD DVD VC-1 equivalent.
In the end, the technical differences are small enough not to make the slightest difference. Physically, the discs are the same dimensions and a combi drive is practical so there is no reason to believe that a cheap multiformat player won't exist. Samsung is supposed to be releasing their DVD/HD DVD/Blu-Ray combi player in europe for 400 shortly and it will support all formats fully.
Personally, I bought an HD DVD drive for my Xbox 360 so I would have some HD material for my HD TV and HD projector. For the money I would have been daft not to and there were enough films on the format to get me started. Even today, there is little to choose between HD DVD and Blu-Ray when it comes to choice of films. Compared with DVD, HD DVD is definitely clearer and has richer colours and deeper blacks. I have an upscaling HDMI DVD player which helps make DVD look very good, but HD DVD is definitely better. When the combi player becomes available I will buy one and use that instead of my Xbox 360 and also have the option of Blu-Ray.
Software Assurance was always a bad idea. It is clear that if you hand over the money before the work is done then they are far less likely to do the work as quickly as they would if you didn't pay until the work was finished. This is true in the real world (builders or decorators) so why shouldn't it be true with MS? They already have your money and so they don't really need to work hard. Companies should definitely tell them to stick it and buy as and when they feel the need to upgrade. Clearly very little of the software MS has produced since introducing SA6 has been of any value and I suspect the uptake would be much lower if people hadn't already paid up front. Don't be fooled twice is what I say, keep the money in your bank earning interest, not theirs.
I keep seeing the PS3 and keep feeling it is vastly overpriced. At the moment in NZ we are expected to pay $1199 for a PS3 despite the high value of the $Kiwi. At current exchange rates that would make a standard 60GB PS3 $935 US. I know we always get the sh***y end of the stick but nearly double the price for the same piece of hardware is way beyond a joke. I'm sure the price difference is similar in the EU too. Of course, the price of all the other consoles are equally crazy. With the $Kiwi at its highest level ever we seriously need to be seeing some exchange rate price cuts rather than importers taking the piss like this and that goes for all consoles.
"That should have read "My mac lasted longer", as that's just one example. I've got a 4-year-old cheap-ass MSI notebook which still works perfectly, so clearly your assertion doesn't hold much water ;)"
Granted, in my experience Macs have lasted longer. I did preface the comment by saying that I use my laptops all the time as my primary machine. Sure, any laptop will last years if you only use it occasionally but for a machine to survive being dragged across the globe as mine are it has to be very well put together. My iBook has stood the test of time, and now my MacBook Pro is doing the same as it is now well over a year old (1st get machine) and going strong.
If you are not as hard on your machine as I am then by all means, get something cheap (assuming you are happy with Windows but that is another matter entirely) but if you want a robust machine with a solid OS then a Mac is a very good choice.
I bought my first Mac laptop four years ago (1st gen iBook G4) having had a long line of Intel and AMD based laptops from the likes of Toshiba, Samsung, Compaq and so on. I bought the iBook out of frustration. Partly the problem was that I wanted to run Linux on the machines and this meant that the cheapest laptops simply couldn't run Linux reliably because of lack of graphics, sound and network drivers for them. To achieve a decent level of Linux compatibility I had to go with mid range or higher machines. The problem was that even when spending £1500 or more, the machines would never last more than a year of use because I was using them as my primary computer. I bought the iBook for £999 figuring that it was cheaper and if it only lasted a year like the previous machines then I was still ahead of the game plus I would have supported hardware under a full UNIX platform. That machine is now four years old and still going strong after the same treatment that all my previous machines received and as a result I have bought two more Macs (a mini with ACD and a 15" MBP).
If you simply don't care about the quality of your machine then by all means go with the lowest priced available, but if you want a machine that will last and be reliable then buy a Mac.
Surely, if the EULA doesn't allow plugins then the software itself shouldn't support them? The fact that it does makes a nonsense of all this. The onus is on MS to disable the functionality that allowed this to happen, not to send the lawyers in.
"Add on top of that the fact that BluRay is outselling HDDVD signifigantly..."
Remember how Betamax was *THE* video tape format early on but lost out to VHS in the long term because VHS machines were more widely and cheaply available. Many people assume it was porn but in fact it was price. HD DVD still has an opportunity to do the same so I don't think the current rates of BD sales are any reason the claim the format has won.
I was in Game yesterday looking for something new to play on my MacBook Pro with Windows XP Pro. Been playing Half Life 2 again and really enjoying it so I thought I would look for something similar. I was appalled at how small the PC game sections are in game shops these days. Worse though, they all seem to be strategy games which really aren't my thing. FPS on a console is worse than horrible so I wanted a PC FPS. Nothing I haven't already played and very little coming. The PC section was about the same size as the Gamecube section.
Looks like PC users won't even be able to hold Games up as the great reason to use Windows instead of OS X for much longer.
Am I the only one who was disappointed when Google beat MS to this? I was hoping that MS would buy them and then force all Windows users to view the ads and kill off things like adblock etc for the Windows platform. This would have been the single biggest win for the non-Windows community ever because it would drive everyone who currently blocks DoubleClick etc off the platform.
Oh well, I can dream can't I?