You never see a company outsourcing its senior management functions to save money. I wonder how much a company like Disney would save if it laid off Eisner and gave his job to an MBA in India.
Ack! I forgot to include something I wanted to say.
The big difference you notice in video quality between American shows and local shows is due to distortions created during the conversion process. If you saw US shows on a US TV you'd see they look nearly as clear as what you're used to.
UK shows aired in the US look pretty bad on my TV as well.
http://hometheater.about.com/cs/television/a/aavid eoresa.htm
It's not that big of a difference. PAL (the standard most of the world outside the US uses) has more scan lines but lower refresh rate. The horizontal resolution is about the same (Difficult to quantify since it's analog but digitizing is frequently done at widths of 704 and 720 pixels)
HDTV signal is digital and a much higher resolution than either PAL or NTSC, but the sets are far more expensive.
When game companies started releasing stuff on CD instead of floppy they stopped including copy protection because A)CD copy hardware was bloody expensive. B) They didn't know how to do it.
These days it's making a comeback. Have you tried making a backup of a game CD lately? You can usually do it without a problem, but not always. Quite frequently you'll have problems. I've been told these sorts of things are not that painful to overcome, but I've never tried.
Also if you've ever dealt with license keys for "Enterprise level" software products you don't know what you'rs missing. (Pain and torture mostly)
DRM (formerly copy protection) will always be popular with weasels in business suits that think they should own everything, but it's ineffective for anything other than pissing off legitimate end users.
When companies sell closed source solutions that other companies build on top of and come to be dependent on it's true there's big risks.
The solution that seems to be suggested here is to build on open source projects. The problem: good luck finding a good, well documented, open source accounting system.
Another solution is code escrow. Before you buy into a system like that make sure the vendor puts the source somewhere where the customers can get it if they fold and grants them the right to do so. There's several companies that provide services like this and if software consumers start insisting on it we can see problems like this become less frequent in the future. Even for closed source projects.
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You never see a company outsourcing its senior management functions to save money. I wonder how much a company like Disney would save if it laid off Eisner and gave his job to an MBA in India.
The big difference you notice in video quality between American shows and local shows is due to distortions created during the conversion process. If you saw US shows on a US TV you'd see they look nearly as clear as what you're used to.
UK shows aired in the US look pretty bad on my TV as well.
http://hometheater.about.com/cs/television/a/aavid eoresa.htm
It's not that big of a difference. PAL (the standard most of the world outside the US uses) has more scan lines but lower refresh rate. The horizontal resolution is about the same (Difficult to quantify since it's analog but digitizing is frequently done at widths of 704 and 720 pixels)
HDTV signal is digital and a much higher resolution than either PAL or NTSC, but the sets are far more expensive.
Software copy protection hasn't gone away entirely.
When game companies started releasing stuff on CD instead of floppy they stopped including copy protection because A)CD copy hardware was bloody expensive. B) They didn't know how to do it.
These days it's making a comeback. Have you tried making a backup of a game CD lately? You can usually do it without a problem, but not always. Quite frequently you'll have problems. I've been told these sorts of things are not that painful to overcome, but I've never tried.
Also if you've ever dealt with license keys for "Enterprise level" software products you don't know what you'rs missing. (Pain and torture mostly)
DRM (formerly copy protection) will always be popular with weasels in business suits that think they should own everything, but it's ineffective for anything other than pissing off legitimate end users.
When companies sell closed source solutions that other companies build on top of and come to be dependent on it's true there's big risks. The solution that seems to be suggested here is to build on open source projects. The problem: good luck finding a good, well documented, open source accounting system. Another solution is code escrow. Before you buy into a system like that make sure the vendor puts the source somewhere where the customers can get it if they fold and grants them the right to do so. There's several companies that provide services like this and if software consumers start insisting on it we can see problems like this become less frequent in the future. Even for closed source projects.