The existence of two standards was the least of anyone's problems. A much bigger one, IMHO, was the fact that both standards screwed anyone with a TV purchased more than ~2.5 years ago that lacked HDCP. Or, for that matter, anyone with a single HDCP port and more than one thing to plug into it. Or (for one frustrating first night) anyone without a spare HDMI or HDMI-to-DVI cable. The HDCP requirement itself slashed the size of their available market by eliminating a fairly big chunk of people who'd have otherwise been early adopters.
960x540? Give me a break. A PAL DVD ripped to a laptop's or HTPC's hard drive is 720x540. Adding insult to injury, if the TV's native resolution is 1280x720, they aren't even allowed to do a GOOD JOB SCALING it to that resolution after downrezzing it. A well-upscaled SD-DVD has better picture quality on a natively-720p TV than a downrezzed Blu-Ray or HD-DVD disc.
It's ironic... the cheapest crap DVD players from China will play anything vaguely resembling an optical disc with files vaguely resembling a standard published somewhere just fine, but expensive high-end players even choke on discs they're SUPPOSED to be able to play. I had a friend with the exact same problem... the $600+ Denon he had in his living room refused to play anything from a DVD+R, but the $129 no-name player from WalMart in the bedroom worked just fine (this was a few years ago, as you can tell from the prices).
Concerns about 1.1 players aren't completely unfounded thanks to BD+ and its DRM "enhancements". BDA has reserved every right to revise the Blu-Ray standard in a way that would render 1.0 (and possibly 1.1) players unable to play even the main feature. They haven't done it yet... but they could, and consumers (in the US, at least) would have no recourse whatsoever. It says so right on the first or second page of every new player's manual.
> This is like giving away free tickets for the Titanic...Unless you have a better use for the laser.
You mean, like playing home videos recorded on a HDV camcorder and authored as a HD-DVD onto red-laser blank media, for a fraction of what it would cost to accomplish the same thing with Blu-Ray?
Wait a moment... we're not talking about some proprietary standard cobbled together by Sony and used in one or two fringe products that nobody cares about. I think we're actually talking about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TVGOS here.
You're probably right about the encryption rendering it impossible to do as a homebrew project... but on the other hand, TVGOS is popular and widespread enough that someone (say, a company like D-Link or Logitech) will almost CERTAINLY end up buying the right to make and sell a box that fetches future program guide data from an ATSC datastream or online, and outputs a fake NTSC channel to feed legacy devices that only know how to find it there. If consumers start screaming loudly enough NOW (while the set top converter boxes that will be solid in blister-packs at Wal Mart next year are still being designed), it might even make it into THEM as a feature. If ATSC converter boxes are a commodity, vendors will be THRILLED to find a fairly cheap feature they can add to distinguish THEIR boxes from "the rest".
> They are going to stop getting the TV guide and will stop having the ability to set their clock when the analog TV > shutdown completes at the San Francisco PBS station (which broadcasts that data in its vertical interval).
Hmmm. Sounds like a perfect project to publish in Circuit Cellar, MAKE, or Nuts & Volts... use a microcontroller to bitbang a fake NTSC video signal with the desired info encoded in the proper offscreen scanlines, run it through an RF modulator, and mux it into the cable feed with an old satellite diplexer.
IMHO, the NTSC shutdown just might kick off the biggest boom in electronics-as-a-hobby in 25 years by giving people an excuse to hack together things that do stuff just like this... stuff that can be easily done with parts bought from Digikey, but have almost no potential as mass-market consumer products.
We'll know the American public has been completely pwn3d by the RIAA when the statutory penalties for making an unauthorized copy of a song exceed the real-world penalties for physically stealing a CD containing the same song from a store. Oh, wait a minute... um... er... nevermind.
If there's a god, maybe we'll finally get to have a Fry's somewhere between West Palm Beach and Miami now (hint: Fort Lauderdale, Sawgrass Mills area). Or god forbid, one in Broward @ Sawgrass, and one in Miami (Dolphin Mall, or NW 25th St @ SR826 (former Incredible Universe store).
It depends on your part of the country. In urban states like Florida (where getting from Miami to Tampa or Orlando is going to take 4-6 hours regardless of whether you drive or fly), intermediate-speed (110mph) passenger trains are very, VERY viable. You obviously don't want passenger trains sharing a single track with mile-long limestone trains, but at 110mph you can optimize things that make the biggest difference to performance and still get away with grade crossings (vs overpasses for every road that crosses the tracks, at $10-25+ million apiece), throw down new track in an existing corridor for about $2-3 million per mile, and use even Amtrak's creaky old trains.
At 70mph average speed from Miami to West Palm Beach, and 100mph the rest of the way to Tampa or Orlando, you're looking at a cheap 3-hour trip that potentially has trains leaving every 20 minutes during peak travel times, so you wouldn't even have to bother showing up for a specific train... you could just drive to the station when you're ready, and get on the next train. Enable passengers to do their rental car paperwork and get their keys (or at least the code to unlock a key vault at the destination) on the train, along with internet service, food, and big comfy seats with tray tables large enough for a laptop AND mouse, and you have a service that's going to be VERY popular. In fact, FDOT's studies have all shown that Miami-Tampa-Orlando ISR would actually make a PROFIT (the same studies concluded that "True HSR" would attract more riders, but would hemorrhage money forever, and would probably never make enough from ticket revenue to fully cover its capital and operating costs).
IMHO, Maglev isn't going to happen anytime soon, and China is proof. Why? China has the lowest labor and materials costs on Earth, money to burn, a government capable of ramrodding anything it wants past the public, the technology to build the track, trains, and control systems themselves, and a legal system that would let them get away with just about any IP infringement they want to commit. And even THERE, long-distance maglev isn't financially viable. If China, with all those advantages in its favor, can't make it happen, there's no way in HELL it's going to happen in the US or Europe (where EVERYTHING costs more, NIMBYs are almighty, and patents can't be ignored).
That said, I firmly believe the US will have viable long-distance Maglev before Europe does. Why? In the US, it's acceptable to do things half-assed. In Europe, they'll either make it double-tracked and flawless, or they won't build it at all. In contrast, the American railroad industry has a long history of using its cash to extend service into new markets instead of improving reliability within existing ones (I don't think the famed Transcontinental Railroad was EVER fully double-tracked between Chicago and California). So we'll have a single-track Maglev line running from Boston to Miami that's "usually" on-time, but breaks down completely and has delays for HOURS once or twice a year... and they'll have a flawless Maglev line between Paris and Brussels.
Competition might not result in the lowest possible prices... but when it doesn't, it still usually produces better service. Think quickly... would you rather have 384k/64k DSL for $9.95/month... with no option for anything better... or 16mbit/3mbit fiber for $99/month? Or electricity that "usually" works, except for 2 or 3 days a year when there are all-day blackouts, and rolling blackouts for an hour or two per day, for $25/month... or electricity that makes headlines, and gets talked about for years afterward, if it goes outsomewhere for a half hour, for $399/month? Or getting back to the DSL example, maybe 1.54/128k DSL for $19/month... with a 3-5 year waiting list for service if you move (or someone who works for the company screws up and accidentally disconnects your service)?
Both are exaggerated and slightly-contrived cases, but ultimately, people WANT low cost, reliability, and performance. In the real world, you can usually have two out of three. You can have service that's cheap and fast, but unreliable... cheap and reliable, but slow, or fast and reliable, but expensive.
In America, a real competitive market for data delivery would probably look something like this: fiber to either the curb or home, provided by the company that used to be the cable company, and a pair of copper wires... maybe fiber... from the company that used to be the phone company.
* Due to lingering regulation, the company that used to be the phone company would probably be kind of expensive and slower than the other... but more reliable, and still work when the other one didn't. If you called them for service, they'd probably have someone at your house to fix it within 6 hours. They might bill you $299 for the privilege, but your service WILL be fixed quickly. And you'd know EXACTLY how much local loop bandwidth you had from them.
* In contrast, the "other" company would probably outsource your initial 10 calls to India and make you reinstall Windows before they allowed you to talk to someone who knew what to do when a backhoe cuts the cable. They might take 2 weeks to come set you up after you call for an appointment, and the bandwidth available might fluctuate wildly from hour to hour, depending upon what your neighbors were doing. But they'd probably be pretty cheap compared to the "reliable" company. Ultimately, most customers would decide whether they'd rather have reliable delivery of moderate internet speed and the ability to watch 2 hi-def channels of video content throughout the house, or slightly-flaky delivery of fast, bursty internet speed with high latency and the ability to watch and record a half-dozen high-def shows at once.
Unsurprisingly, people with one or the other would probably spend $150/month, and be relatively happy with the mix of services they received. Slashdot users, meanwhile, would probably spend $200/month to get both, with active routing between both networks for redundancy and spend a half hour per day tweaking their BGP setup to shave a millisecond off their ping times to Brunei. Meanwhile, the other 70% of the population who just want to watch TV and send email to their grandkids, would bitch about the failure of competition, because they now have to spend $150/month for stuff they don't care about, and were happier spending less than $60/month (total) for basic phone service and 36 cable channels 20 years ago.
> CD sales are down because what is released on CD is crap.
Actually, I think it's obvious that CD sales are down partly because the huge sales of CDs from a decade ago was an unsustainable once-in-a-lifetime windfall for the recording industry, driven mostly by people buying CDs to replace records they already had, used to have, or "kind of/sort of" wanted to have, but were never sufficiently motivated to buy as LPs or cassettes. CDs were a major improvement over LPs and cassettes, and properly remastered CDs a decade later were a major improvement over the first re-released content.
That can't be said for new formats. Any halfwit can create better-sounding MP3 files from a CD than he could possibly buy in MP3 form to begin with. DVD audio is an incremental improvement over CD audio... but thanks to the DRM, is almost impossible to rip to MP3 for portable use, which pretty much renders it irrelevant to the popular music market. If DVD Audio were as easy to rip as CD audio, sounded at least a little better, and used some of its storage space to make it almost completely immune to even MAJOR scratches (by redundantly encoding high-bitrate compressed copies in multiple places on the disc, with players able to automatically fall back to the redundant compressed copies wherever the uncompressed content were significantly degraded by damange), CDDA would be ancient history by now. But because the industry couldn't get past its control fetish, CDDA will likely remain the preferred source format for purchased music for a few more decades by virtue of being the most flexible source format available to the general public.
> but for the sake of the using the discs for data storage the extra capacity is crucial, at least to me.
Which is why, regardless of what happens in the home consumer electronics arena, Blu-Ray will almost certainly prosper as a medium for data storage on computers. Joe Sixpack might not get a Blu-Ray drive with the computer he buys from Dell, but Isaac I. Tee will have no problem buying a stack of them to use for backups, archival storage, and similar uses.
It was never meant for developers, either. For ${deity}'s sake, it only supported GPRS. Name one developer who's going to spend lots of his own, personal cash on a phone that maxes out at ~38kbit/sec for data. I don't care HOW customizable it is... a phone that only supports GPRS is a paperweight. Of course, they'll blame its failure on Linux, or the niche market, or its price, and totally overlook its REAL failure -- its lack of support for at least EDGE.
I can't wait for the first lawsuit after a Category I hurricane -- projected to make landfall in Miami 2 days before the MTV Video Music Awards (or 2020 Olympics), cross the state, and weaken into a tropical depression by the time it emerges into the Gulf before dissipating 2 days later over Texas as a bad rainstorm -- instead gets kicked back out into the Caribbean, strengthens into a category 5 monster, and utterly destroys Bermuda or North Carolina (this time, moving too fast and hard to meaningfully nudge away).
I don't think anyone would have hesitated to try and kick Andrew back into the sea... but smaller hurricanes blur the issue. ESPECIALLY if they're predicted to fall apart quickly after making landfall, because there's always the risk that they COULD grow, and hit somewhere else bigger & badder than ever. A category I hurricane in Miami is like a snow day in upstate New York. On the other hand, even a little baby Category I hurricane could mess New York City pretty badly (just from supply-chain disruptions ALONE, without even getting into skyscraper damage, subway flooding, or public hysteria & looting afterward).
Sadly, more or less the same as the GreenPhone. In America, at least, it's a GPRS-only paperweight. At least, it is unless I misunderstood the spec that said "2.5G, not EDGE-compatible".
Actually, I've written off Palm (the company) entirely. Garnet is a dead man walking. It's completely unsuitable for anything that requires a responsive, interactive UI during network transfers. I'm sure it'll limp along for years, but it was architecturally obsolete YEARS ago.
IMHO, rewriting PalmOS in Linux fixed the wrong problem. Cobalt wasn't rejected because it was inferior to Linux, CE/WM, or Symbian... it was rejected because the development tools we were forced to use to develop for it were piss-poor non-substitutes for Codewarrior. The "simulator" was a cruel joke, actual hardware wasn't available for developers to buy and play with, and writing "semi-native" apps to take advantage of new Cobalt features (without giving up Codewarrior for the rest) was about as much fun as realmode DOS programming with segmented memory. I'll be thrilled if Alp finally manages to get a decent phone (with Graffiti, of course) into Sprint stores across America... but I'm not holding my breath.
To be honest, the whole Palm downfall feels like Amiga, Part Deux. In both cases, there were large, dedicated communities of users and developers who passionately cared about its future and could do little besides helplessly watch from the sidelines as one catastrophically bad business decision after another destroyed something we loved.
> I hope the signing requirement will be a verifiable registration of your key with Apple > and not a large fee of some sort.
Sadly, it will almost certainly be worse -- it'll probably require payment of a large fee to AT&T, AND require approval of your specific app by AT&T itself. So you can forget freeware, anything remotely controversial, or that doesn't mesh with their Grand ARPU-increasing strategy of the week. (ARPU = Average Revenue Per User)
It's sad, but Windows Mobile is actually the most open platform available to freedom (as in liberty) minded developers and phone owners today. Symbian? Locked up tighter than Tori Spelling's chastity belt during 90210's filming. J2ME? Just as bad. Linux? Either crippled into uselessness by the hardware itself (a.k.a. GreenPhone's glacial GPRS and total lack of EDGE and/or 3G), or locked down even tighter than Symbian (a.k.a. just about every phone made by Motorola). The fact is, phones are one of the few areas where Microsoft uses its might to beat up its customers (the carriers themselves) for a morally worthy cause (the liberty of the phones' purchasers). Not even Sprint & Verizon can robustly defy Microsoft... they might wink at the carrier and ship the phone with certain features disabled by default, but anyone with a registry editor can re-enable them within a matter of minutes.
As for Palm... sigh. Palm. Or maybe Access. As much as I wish them the best (I was a hardcore member of the Palm camp for almost a decade, and have phones all the way back to a zero-day Samsung SPH-i300), I don't think god himself could save them at this point. Short of Access releasing a SDK that allows the latest generation of HTC's PDA phones (Mogul, TyTN, etc) to be reflashed (with or without the carrier's blessing or approval) to get ALP *INSTANTLY* into the hands of the few remaining Palm developers who still care, it's "game over".
Excellent point. Think about how new versions of Windows USED to become universally-deployed within a matter of days following their release:
* People bought a copy, and upgraded every computer they owned. And probably their parents' computer, too, if they were feeling particularly masochistic. Even the old, lame, and barely-running PCs & laptops that nobody would EVER spend $200 or more buying a separate copy of Windows for.
* People upgraded their work computers. This made admins unhappy, but it also forced them to deploy new versions of Windows a lot faster than they'd have otherwise liked, because they knew that the longer they waited, the more guerrilla upgrades they'd have to deal with. Most people who'll install a "free" copy of Windows to their work PC won't spend $200+ of their own money to buy a new copy of Windows for it.
In short, by locking down Windows to a single installation, Microsoft has gained very, very few actual new retail sales compared to what they would have had... but they've lost a HUGE amount of mindshare and free PR. Is there anyone who SERIOUSLY believes that Vista's issues with apps & drivers would have dragged on as long as they have if Vista had become ubiquitous overnight the way Windows95 did? By limiting Vista installations, Microsoft has effectively ensured that Vista represents a minority of Windows users. A minority whose wails have thus far been largely ignored by the next group...... the Technorati Elite. You know, the people who got bitten by Windows Genuine Advantage for installing a virgin corporate copy of XP Pro on computers that probably DID have a Genuine Certificate of Authenticity, but only came with a dysfunctional "System Restore" disc and tons of crapware from the laptop/pc vendor's Strategic Partners of the Week. The guys/girls with at least 3 computers of their own (usually a high-powered desktop, a laptop, and the limping, scavenged remains of their desktop's previous incarnation -- most of whose components are STILL higher-end than currently-available "mainstream" PCs... and probably one or two more computers that mostly sit unused, but occasionally get fired up for some experimental purpose. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY -- not even someone for whom the cost is almost irrelevant -- is going to go out and blow the retail cost of Vista on computers #3 and beyond. And for these users, installing anything less than "Ultimate" (or at least "Professional") is unthinkable, anyway.
THESE are the REALLY dangerous users, because they're the "influencers" who others turn to for advice. And these are the same users who are currently pissed as hell at Microsoft for annoying them with WGA, and want nothing to do with Vista due to its DRM (real or imagined). God forbid, they might even be playing with Ubuntu on one or more machines. So... when Joe Sixpack asks his coworker Joel Aleet what he thinks about Vista, Joel is going to roast Microsoft and Vista, regardless of whether he's ever actually touched Vista. And Joe is going to walk away convinced that Vista is the Spawn of Satan, and when he orders his new PC from Dell, he'll ask to get it with XP. Stir, rinse, and repeat a few hundred thousand times, and you have Vista's current plight.
IMHO, Microsoft had the product breakdown mostly right with Windows XP -- a "Home" edition that's cheap, but lacks networking & management features businesses want, and a "Pro" version with everything else for about 50% more. If they really, REALLY had to, they could add a third level -- "Enterprise" -- that cost a lot more, but with a twist: it would come on the same CD/DVD as "Professional", and simply ask you at installation time which version you had. In other words, enforced purely by legal license rather than by technical means (like a different CD key). Why? Because it's a wonderfully-elegant way of ensuring that TRUE "Enterprise" users pay the higher cost, without burdening or pissing off everyone else. IMHO, the defining trait of an "Enterprise" (vs simply a "business") i
A conviction based entirely on DNA evidence would almost certainly be overturned on appeal in most jurisdictions, because DNA evidence can only conclusively prove that the DNA did NOT come from somebody. At best, it can only suggest that it "might" have come from one of many related individuals. Forget CSI: Miami. It doesn't work like that at all. "DNA Evidence" is basically 3 or 4 steps more sophisticated than refuting paternity based on blood type.
That doesn't mean detectives can't, or don't, rely on DNA evidence to find LEADS in a case. If all the DNA present at a crime scene seems to match, it probably means the victim and perpetrator were both family members. It might possibly be argued by an expert witness at such a trial to support the prosecution's claim that the crime was committed by a relative of the victim. But a prosecutor who tried to argue that DNA irrefutably established a defendant's guilt would be eaten alive by any halfway competent defense attorney, with the judge's enthusiastic support.
When people who speak one language increasingly come to speak another that can't quite convey the shade of meaning they intend, they do something that's been done since the beginning of time -- forcibly integrate the old language with the new one. Most such integrations eventually fall by the wayside. A few survive and become an integral part of the new language. The truly important shades of meaning relevant to modern life go on; the 270 subtly-different words and expressions for "footprints left in the ground" fall by the wayside.
Ultimately, the expanded language can be a positive influence upon its new adopters. Someday, people in India might internalize the difference between a "question" (inquiry arising from personal lack of knowledge) and a "doubt" (uncertainty as to truth or credibility). Or for that matter, properly distinguish between "might" (uncertainty as to likelihood of happening) and "may" (permissive authority to do something, without regard to its actual likeliness).
Electronics-as-a-hobby ALMOST completely died during the 90s... but over the past few years, it's been reborn and growing again thanks to microcontrollers & robots. Check out avrfreaks.net, parallax.com, fpga4fun.com, and other sites dedicated to good 'ol fashioned homebrew electronics. Well, with a few nice improvements, like the 74HCxxx family (runs on just about anything between 2.9 and 6 volts without complaining or frying), ~$180 USB logic analyzers & oscilloscopes (poscope.com). For an example of what Radio Shack SHOULD be selling (in lieu of cell phones, crap stereo equipment, and overpriced computer hardware), check out sparkfun.com.
Happy Days ARE here again. Electronics-as-a-hobby is once again alive and well. Spread the word:-)
Actually, there's another reason why people who grew up during the late 70s/early 80s love microcontrollers so much... they're like the computers we grew up with. A mortal really CAN understand one fully, and individually create something cool... something that's increasingly difficult to do on any kind of meaningful level with regard to mainstream computer software.
There's a good reason why driver support and bugfixes for Vista are taking forever. In the past, programmers and L337 users lived on the razor's bleeding edge, had the latest version of Windows installed MONTHS before it hit the stores, and were STILL there at midnight to buy it the moment it was officially available.
With Vista, that hasn't happened. To a large extent, it's been shunned even worse by the computer elite than by any other single group. There's peer pressure to NOT run Vista, widespread sentiment that it's rotten to the core thanks to Microsoft's deal with the DRM Devil, and general disinterest. That's a big problem for Microsoft, because the bugs people who bought a new laptop with Vista from Dell experience aren't part of the daily lives of the programming priesthood. Vista has become the "other" OS, shunned, scorned, and psychologically written off as irrelevant to their daily lives. The bugs don't annoy the very people in a position to fix them, so they remain and fester. Ditto, for drivers. If programmers aren't personally affected by whether or not some device works under Vista, they're not going to feel the same sense of urgency. Of course, there's always the business motivation... but when you get down to that special something that really drives programmers to spend their weekend fixing something, even though they aren't getting paid overtime... it's just not there.
If Microsoft REALLY wants to save Vista, they need to introduce one more editon: Vista LE ("Liberty Edition") -- $199, bootable from CD, freely installable on any 2 computers owned by the individual, installable and runnable on an unlimited number of virtual machines, as long as the host machine is running Vista as well, and an unlimited number of "floating" installations that can be activated for up to 30 hours at a time, with the catch that if you activate machine #3 for 30 hours and don't de-activate it, you can't activate machine 3b until the original 30 hours have elapsed. Oh, and every last bit of kernel-level DRM including protected audio and video paths COMPILED OUT. Of course, this means you won't be able to run WinDVD or view premium protected content... but nobody who buys VistaLE will really care, because we'd never buy DRM'ed content anyway.
Not really. If you tell someone in the Caribbean, South America, or Central America that you're 'norteamericano', they're going to think you're Mexican. Just like the term 'iberoamericano' -- it technically COULD be a generic Spanish equivalent for "Hispanic" or "Latin American", but it's not -- the only people who EVER use the term to refer to themselves are Mexicans.
The official name of Mexico is "Los Estados Unidos de Mejico" (literally, "The United States of Mexico"). Just try using "EE.UU.", "Los Estados Unidos" (without "de Mejico" at the end), or even "The United States" (without "of America" at the end) to refer to Mexico in a Mexican courtroom. First, you'll be laughed at. Then, if you persist, you'll be charged with contempt of court for being pedantic and annoying the judge.
When the limit of Moore's law is reached insofar as doubling of computing power for a given size, things built from the components in question will simply start getting bigger and drawing more power. The Pentium 4 was just a preview of what's to come. Forget about tech-design fantasies of "computers in a keyfob" that go everywhere. The desktop PC of 2050 will occupy a case that would have given a 1995 power user a serious case of "tower envy", draw more power than the half-dozen halogen floodlights illuminating the back yard to stadium levels, and an active cooling system with outdoor condenser that needs to be connected by refrigerant-containing hoses through a hole in the wall or a partly opened door/window. Of course, it'll have the equivalent of 65,536 discrete CPUs, a terrabyte of onboard ram, up to a petabyte in nonvolatile storage, a GPU subsystem that's more powerful (and draws more power) than the CPU array itself (needed for immersive 3D games if you want to use a haptic bodysuit & gyroscopic G-Force simulator platform along with it).
Believe it. The industry won't come to a halt when exponential growth of component power ends... it'll just embrace the exponential growth of size and power consumption, and convince consumers that they simply MUST have a computer the size of a small refrigerator that renders apps into solid-feeling virtual tablets (haptic glove & visor required for full Genuine Windows Experience) that can float, spin, and (if you angrily hurl one at a wall) smash into a million pieces before turning into pools of mercury and slurping back into the computer in a cute "shatter" effect.
>IANAL, and IANB(ritish), but what I'm wondering is if the legal situation in the UK encourages > businesses to exploit such loopholes in order to avoid their responsibilities like it does in the US.
Actually, this practice was outlawed in the US ~30 years ago by the Magnuson-Moss Act & subsequent decisions by the FTC. Basically, it says that the manufacturer can only use breach of terms (installing unauthorized aftermarket parts, etc) to the extent that the breach itself directly contributed to the problem. So if your car's air conditioner is warranted against breakage for 5 years or 60,000 miles, they can't invalidate your warranty because you used an unapproved replacement battery or had the oil changed anywhere besides the dealer itself. It was originally targeted against abuses by the auto industry, but has rather forcefully been expanded by the FTC into the computer market.
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The existence of two standards was the least of anyone's problems. A much bigger one, IMHO, was the fact that both standards screwed anyone with a TV purchased more than ~2.5 years ago that lacked HDCP. Or, for that matter, anyone with a single HDCP port and more than one thing to plug into it. Or (for one frustrating first night) anyone without a spare HDMI or HDMI-to-DVI cable. The HDCP requirement itself slashed the size of their available market by eliminating a fairly big chunk of people who'd have otherwise been early adopters.
960x540? Give me a break. A PAL DVD ripped to a laptop's or HTPC's hard drive is 720x540. Adding insult to injury, if the TV's native resolution is 1280x720, they aren't even allowed to do a GOOD JOB SCALING it to that resolution after downrezzing it. A well-upscaled SD-DVD has better picture quality on a natively-720p TV than a downrezzed Blu-Ray or HD-DVD disc.
It's ironic... the cheapest crap DVD players from China will play anything vaguely resembling an optical disc with files vaguely resembling a standard published somewhere just fine, but expensive high-end players even choke on discs they're SUPPOSED to be able to play. I had a friend with the exact same problem... the $600+ Denon he had in his living room refused to play anything from a DVD+R, but the $129 no-name player from WalMart in the bedroom worked just fine (this was a few years ago, as you can tell from the prices).
Concerns about 1.1 players aren't completely unfounded thanks to BD+ and its DRM "enhancements". BDA has reserved every right to revise the Blu-Ray standard in a way that would render 1.0 (and possibly 1.1) players unable to play even the main feature. They haven't done it yet... but they could, and consumers (in the US, at least) would have no recourse whatsoever. It says so right on the first or second page of every new player's manual.
> I know Sony's not much better than Microsoft
;-)
Microsoft shows us daily that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Sony, by contrast, is just plain evil.
> This is like giving away free tickets for the Titanic...Unless you have a better use for the laser.
You mean, like playing home videos recorded on a HDV camcorder and authored as a HD-DVD onto red-laser blank media, for a fraction of what it would cost to accomplish the same thing with Blu-Ray?
Wait a moment... we're not talking about some proprietary standard cobbled together by Sony and used in one or two fringe products that nobody cares about. I think we're actually talking about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TVGOS here.
You're probably right about the encryption rendering it impossible to do as a homebrew project... but on the other hand, TVGOS is popular and widespread enough that someone (say, a company like D-Link or Logitech) will almost CERTAINLY end up buying the right to make and sell a box that fetches future program guide data from an ATSC datastream or online, and outputs a fake NTSC channel to feed legacy devices that only know how to find it there. If consumers start screaming loudly enough NOW (while the set top converter boxes that will be solid in blister-packs at Wal Mart next year are still being designed), it might even make it into THEM as a feature. If ATSC converter boxes are a commodity, vendors will be THRILLED to find a fairly cheap feature they can add to distinguish THEIR boxes from "the rest".
> They are going to stop getting the TV guide and will stop having the ability to set their clock when the analog TV
> shutdown completes at the San Francisco PBS station (which broadcasts that data in its vertical interval).
Hmmm. Sounds like a perfect project to publish in Circuit Cellar, MAKE, or Nuts & Volts... use a microcontroller to bitbang a fake NTSC video signal with the desired info encoded in the proper offscreen scanlines, run it through an RF modulator, and mux it into the cable feed with an old satellite diplexer.
IMHO, the NTSC shutdown just might kick off the biggest boom in electronics-as-a-hobby in 25 years by giving people an excuse to hack together things that do stuff just like this... stuff that can be easily done with parts bought from Digikey, but have almost no potential as mass-market consumer products.
We'll know the American public has been completely pwn3d by the RIAA when the statutory penalties for making an unauthorized copy of a song exceed the real-world penalties for physically stealing a CD containing the same song from a store. Oh, wait a minute... um... er... nevermind.
If there's a god, maybe we'll finally get to have a Fry's somewhere between West Palm Beach and Miami now (hint: Fort Lauderdale, Sawgrass Mills area). Or god forbid, one in Broward @ Sawgrass, and one in Miami (Dolphin Mall, or NW 25th St @ SR826 (former Incredible Universe store).
It depends on your part of the country. In urban states like Florida (where getting from Miami to Tampa or Orlando is going to take 4-6 hours regardless of whether you drive or fly), intermediate-speed (110mph) passenger trains are very, VERY viable. You obviously don't want passenger trains sharing a single track with mile-long limestone trains, but at 110mph you can optimize things that make the biggest difference to performance and still get away with grade crossings (vs overpasses for every road that crosses the tracks, at $10-25+ million apiece), throw down new track in an existing corridor for about $2-3 million per mile, and use even Amtrak's creaky old trains.
At 70mph average speed from Miami to West Palm Beach, and 100mph the rest of the way to Tampa or Orlando, you're looking at a cheap 3-hour trip that potentially has trains leaving every 20 minutes during peak travel times, so you wouldn't even have to bother showing up for a specific train... you could just drive to the station when you're ready, and get on the next train. Enable passengers to do their rental car paperwork and get their keys (or at least the code to unlock a key vault at the destination) on the train, along with internet service, food, and big comfy seats with tray tables large enough for a laptop AND mouse, and you have a service that's going to be VERY popular. In fact, FDOT's studies have all shown that Miami-Tampa-Orlando ISR would actually make a PROFIT (the same studies concluded that "True HSR" would attract more riders, but would hemorrhage money forever, and would probably never make enough from ticket revenue to fully cover its capital and operating costs).
IMHO, Maglev isn't going to happen anytime soon, and China is proof. Why? China has the lowest labor and materials costs on Earth, money to burn, a government capable of ramrodding anything it wants past the public, the technology to build the track, trains, and control systems themselves, and a legal system that would let them get away with just about any IP infringement they want to commit. And even THERE, long-distance maglev isn't financially viable. If China, with all those advantages in its favor, can't make it happen, there's no way in HELL it's going to happen in the US or Europe (where EVERYTHING costs more, NIMBYs are almighty, and patents can't be ignored).
That said, I firmly believe the US will have viable long-distance Maglev before Europe does. Why? In the US, it's acceptable to do things half-assed. In Europe, they'll either make it double-tracked and flawless, or they won't build it at all. In contrast, the American railroad industry has a long history of using its cash to extend service into new markets instead of improving reliability within existing ones (I don't think the famed Transcontinental Railroad was EVER fully double-tracked between Chicago and California). So we'll have a single-track Maglev line running from Boston to Miami that's "usually" on-time, but breaks down completely and has delays for HOURS once or twice a year... and they'll have a flawless Maglev line between Paris and Brussels.
Competition might not result in the lowest possible prices... but when it doesn't, it still usually produces better service. Think quickly... would you rather have 384k/64k DSL for $9.95/month... with no option for anything better... or 16mbit/3mbit fiber for $99/month? Or electricity that "usually" works, except for 2 or 3 days a year when there are all-day blackouts, and rolling blackouts for an hour or two per day, for $25/month... or electricity that makes headlines, and gets talked about for years afterward, if it goes outsomewhere for a half hour, for $399/month? Or getting back to the DSL example, maybe 1.54/128k DSL for $19/month... with a 3-5 year waiting list for service if you move (or someone who works for the company screws up and accidentally disconnects your service)?
Both are exaggerated and slightly-contrived cases, but ultimately, people WANT low cost, reliability, and performance. In the real world, you can usually have two out of three. You can have service that's cheap and fast, but unreliable... cheap and reliable, but slow, or fast and reliable, but expensive.
In America, a real competitive market for data delivery would probably look something like this: fiber to either the curb or home, provided by the company that used to be the cable company, and a pair of copper wires... maybe fiber... from the company that used to be the phone company.
* Due to lingering regulation, the company that used to be the phone company would probably be kind of expensive and slower than the other... but more reliable, and still work when the other one didn't. If you called them for service, they'd probably have someone at your house to fix it within 6 hours. They might bill you $299 for the privilege, but your service WILL be fixed quickly. And you'd know EXACTLY how much local loop bandwidth you had from them.
* In contrast, the "other" company would probably outsource your initial 10 calls to India and make you reinstall Windows before they allowed you to talk to someone who knew what to do when a backhoe cuts the cable. They might take 2 weeks to come set you up after you call for an appointment, and the bandwidth available might fluctuate wildly from hour to hour, depending upon what your neighbors were doing. But they'd probably be pretty cheap compared to the "reliable" company. Ultimately, most customers would decide whether they'd rather have reliable delivery of moderate internet speed and the ability to watch 2 hi-def channels of video content throughout the house, or slightly-flaky delivery of fast, bursty internet speed with high latency and the ability to watch and record a half-dozen high-def shows at once.
Unsurprisingly, people with one or the other would probably spend $150/month, and be relatively happy with the mix of services they received. Slashdot users, meanwhile, would probably spend $200/month to get both, with active routing between both networks for redundancy and spend a half hour per day tweaking their BGP setup to shave a millisecond off their ping times to Brunei. Meanwhile, the other 70% of the population who just want to watch TV and send email to their grandkids, would bitch about the failure of competition, because they now have to spend $150/month for stuff they don't care about, and were happier spending less than $60/month (total) for basic phone service and 36 cable channels 20 years ago.
> CD sales are down because what is released on CD is crap.
Actually, I think it's obvious that CD sales are down partly because the huge sales of CDs from a decade ago was an unsustainable once-in-a-lifetime windfall for the recording industry, driven mostly by people buying CDs to replace records they already had, used to have, or "kind of/sort of" wanted to have, but were never sufficiently motivated to buy as LPs or cassettes. CDs were a major improvement over LPs and cassettes, and properly remastered CDs a decade later were a major improvement over the first re-released content.
That can't be said for new formats. Any halfwit can create better-sounding MP3 files from a CD than he could possibly buy in MP3 form to begin with. DVD audio is an incremental improvement over CD audio... but thanks to the DRM, is almost impossible to rip to MP3 for portable use, which pretty much renders it irrelevant to the popular music market. If DVD Audio were as easy to rip as CD audio, sounded at least a little better, and used some of its storage space to make it almost completely immune to even MAJOR scratches (by redundantly encoding high-bitrate compressed copies in multiple places on the disc, with players able to automatically fall back to the redundant compressed copies wherever the uncompressed content were significantly degraded by damange), CDDA would be ancient history by now. But because the industry couldn't get past its control fetish, CDDA will likely remain the preferred source format for purchased music for a few more decades by virtue of being the most flexible source format available to the general public.
> but for the sake of the using the discs for data storage the extra capacity is crucial, at least to me.
Which is why, regardless of what happens in the home consumer electronics arena, Blu-Ray will almost certainly prosper as a medium for data storage on computers. Joe Sixpack might not get a Blu-Ray drive with the computer he buys from Dell, but Isaac I. Tee will have no problem buying a stack of them to use for backups, archival storage, and similar uses.
It was never meant for developers, either. For ${deity}'s sake, it only supported GPRS. Name one developer who's going to spend lots of his own, personal cash on a phone that maxes out at ~38kbit/sec for data. I don't care HOW customizable it is... a phone that only supports GPRS is a paperweight. Of course, they'll blame its failure on Linux, or the niche market, or its price, and totally overlook its REAL failure -- its lack of support for at least EDGE.
I can't wait for the first lawsuit after a Category I hurricane -- projected to make landfall in Miami 2 days before the MTV Video Music Awards (or 2020 Olympics), cross the state, and weaken into a tropical depression by the time it emerges into the Gulf before dissipating 2 days later over Texas as a bad rainstorm -- instead gets kicked back out into the Caribbean, strengthens into a category 5 monster, and utterly destroys Bermuda or North Carolina (this time, moving too fast and hard to meaningfully nudge away).
I don't think anyone would have hesitated to try and kick Andrew back into the sea... but smaller hurricanes blur the issue. ESPECIALLY if they're predicted to fall apart quickly after making landfall, because there's always the risk that they COULD grow, and hit somewhere else bigger & badder than ever. A category I hurricane in Miami is like a snow day in upstate New York. On the other hand, even a little baby Category I hurricane could mess New York City pretty badly (just from supply-chain disruptions ALONE, without even getting into skyscraper damage, subway flooding, or public hysteria & looting afterward).
> What's your take on http://www.openmoko.org/?
Sadly, more or less the same as the GreenPhone. In America, at least, it's a GPRS-only paperweight. At least, it is unless I misunderstood the spec that said "2.5G, not EDGE-compatible".
Actually, I've written off Palm (the company) entirely. Garnet is a dead man walking. It's completely unsuitable for anything that requires a responsive, interactive UI during network transfers. I'm sure it'll limp along for years, but it was architecturally obsolete YEARS ago.
IMHO, rewriting PalmOS in Linux fixed the wrong problem. Cobalt wasn't rejected because it was inferior to Linux, CE/WM, or Symbian... it was rejected because the development tools we were forced to use to develop for it were piss-poor non-substitutes for Codewarrior. The "simulator" was a cruel joke, actual hardware wasn't available for developers to buy and play with, and writing "semi-native" apps to take advantage of new Cobalt features (without giving up Codewarrior for the rest) was about as much fun as realmode DOS programming with segmented memory. I'll be thrilled if Alp finally manages to get a decent phone (with Graffiti, of course) into Sprint stores across America... but I'm not holding my breath.
To be honest, the whole Palm downfall feels like Amiga, Part Deux. In both cases, there were large, dedicated communities of users and developers who passionately cared about its future and could do little besides helplessly watch from the sidelines as one catastrophically bad business decision after another destroyed something we loved.
> I hope the signing requirement will be a verifiable registration of your key with Apple
> and not a large fee of some sort.
Sadly, it will almost certainly be worse -- it'll probably require payment of a large fee to AT&T, AND require approval of your specific app by AT&T itself. So you can forget freeware, anything remotely controversial, or that doesn't mesh with their Grand ARPU-increasing strategy of the week. (ARPU = Average Revenue Per User)
It's sad, but Windows Mobile is actually the most open platform available to freedom (as in liberty) minded developers and phone owners today. Symbian? Locked up tighter than Tori Spelling's chastity belt during 90210's filming. J2ME? Just as bad. Linux? Either crippled into uselessness by the hardware itself (a.k.a. GreenPhone's glacial GPRS and total lack of EDGE and/or 3G), or locked down even tighter than Symbian (a.k.a. just about every phone made by Motorola). The fact is, phones are one of the few areas where Microsoft uses its might to beat up its customers (the carriers themselves) for a morally worthy cause (the liberty of the phones' purchasers). Not even Sprint & Verizon can robustly defy Microsoft... they might wink at the carrier and ship the phone with certain features disabled by default, but anyone with a registry editor can re-enable them within a matter of minutes.
As for Palm... sigh. Palm. Or maybe Access. As much as I wish them the best (I was a hardcore member of the Palm camp for almost a decade, and have phones all the way back to a zero-day Samsung SPH-i300), I don't think god himself could save them at this point. Short of Access releasing a SDK that allows the latest generation of HTC's PDA phones (Mogul, TyTN, etc) to be reflashed (with or without the carrier's blessing or approval) to get ALP *INSTANTLY* into the hands of the few remaining Palm developers who still care, it's "game over".
Excellent point. Think about how new versions of Windows USED to become universally-deployed within a matter of days following their release:
... the Technorati Elite. You know, the people who got bitten by Windows Genuine Advantage for installing a virgin corporate copy of XP Pro on computers that probably DID have a Genuine Certificate of Authenticity, but only came with a dysfunctional "System Restore" disc and tons of crapware from the laptop/pc vendor's Strategic Partners of the Week. The guys/girls with at least 3 computers of their own (usually a high-powered desktop, a laptop, and the limping, scavenged remains of their desktop's previous incarnation -- most of whose components are STILL higher-end than currently-available "mainstream" PCs... and probably one or two more computers that mostly sit unused, but occasionally get fired up for some experimental purpose. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY -- not even someone for whom the cost is almost irrelevant -- is going to go out and blow the retail cost of Vista on computers #3 and beyond. And for these users, installing anything less than "Ultimate" (or at least "Professional") is unthinkable, anyway.
* People bought a copy, and upgraded every computer they owned. And probably their parents' computer, too, if they were feeling particularly masochistic. Even the old, lame, and barely-running PCs & laptops that nobody would EVER spend $200 or more buying a separate copy of Windows for.
* People upgraded their work computers. This made admins unhappy, but it also forced them to deploy new versions of Windows a lot faster than they'd have otherwise liked, because they knew that the longer they waited, the more guerrilla upgrades they'd have to deal with. Most people who'll install a "free" copy of Windows to their work PC won't spend $200+ of their own money to buy a new copy of Windows for it.
In short, by locking down Windows to a single installation, Microsoft has gained very, very few actual new retail sales compared to what they would have had... but they've lost a HUGE amount of mindshare and free PR. Is there anyone who SERIOUSLY believes that Vista's issues with apps & drivers would have dragged on as long as they have if Vista had become ubiquitous overnight the way Windows95 did? By limiting Vista installations, Microsoft has effectively ensured that Vista represents a minority of Windows users. A minority whose wails have thus far been largely ignored by the next group...
THESE are the REALLY dangerous users, because they're the "influencers" who others turn to for advice. And these are the same users who are currently pissed as hell at Microsoft for annoying them with WGA, and want nothing to do with Vista due to its DRM (real or imagined). God forbid, they might even be playing with Ubuntu on one or more machines. So... when Joe Sixpack asks his coworker Joel Aleet what he thinks about Vista, Joel is going to roast Microsoft and Vista, regardless of whether he's ever actually touched Vista. And Joe is going to walk away convinced that Vista is the Spawn of Satan, and when he orders his new PC from Dell, he'll ask to get it with XP. Stir, rinse, and repeat a few hundred thousand times, and you have Vista's current plight.
IMHO, Microsoft had the product breakdown mostly right with Windows XP -- a "Home" edition that's cheap, but lacks networking & management features businesses want, and a "Pro" version with everything else for about 50% more. If they really, REALLY had to, they could add a third level -- "Enterprise" -- that cost a lot more, but with a twist: it would come on the same CD/DVD as "Professional", and simply ask you at installation time which version you had. In other words, enforced purely by legal license rather than by technical means (like a different CD key). Why? Because it's a wonderfully-elegant way of ensuring that TRUE "Enterprise" users pay the higher cost, without burdening or pissing off everyone else. IMHO, the defining trait of an "Enterprise" (vs simply a "business") i
A conviction based entirely on DNA evidence would almost certainly be overturned on appeal in most jurisdictions, because DNA evidence can only conclusively prove that the DNA did NOT come from somebody. At best, it can only suggest that it "might" have come from one of many related individuals. Forget CSI: Miami. It doesn't work like that at all. "DNA Evidence" is basically 3 or 4 steps more sophisticated than refuting paternity based on blood type.
That doesn't mean detectives can't, or don't, rely on DNA evidence to find LEADS in a case. If all the DNA present at a crime scene seems to match, it probably means the victim and perpetrator were both family members. It might possibly be argued by an expert witness at such a trial to support the prosecution's claim that the crime was committed by a relative of the victim. But a prosecutor who tried to argue that DNA irrefutably established a defendant's guilt would be eaten alive by any halfway competent defense attorney, with the judge's enthusiastic support.
When people who speak one language increasingly come to speak another that can't quite convey the shade of meaning they intend, they do something that's been done since the beginning of time -- forcibly integrate the old language with the new one. Most such integrations eventually fall by the wayside. A few survive and become an integral part of the new language. The truly important shades of meaning relevant to modern life go on; the 270 subtly-different words and expressions for "footprints left in the ground" fall by the wayside.
Ultimately, the expanded language can be a positive influence upon its new adopters. Someday, people in India might internalize the difference between a "question" (inquiry arising from personal lack of knowledge) and a "doubt" (uncertainty as to truth or credibility). Or for that matter, properly distinguish between "might" (uncertainty as to likelihood of happening) and "may" (permissive authority to do something, without regard to its actual likeliness).
Electronics-as-a-hobby ALMOST completely died during the 90s... but over the past few years, it's been reborn and growing again thanks to microcontrollers & robots. Check out avrfreaks.net, parallax.com, fpga4fun.com, and other sites dedicated to good 'ol fashioned homebrew electronics. Well, with a few nice improvements, like the 74HCxxx family (runs on just about anything between 2.9 and 6 volts without complaining or frying), ~$180 USB logic analyzers & oscilloscopes (poscope.com). For an example of what Radio Shack SHOULD be selling (in lieu of cell phones, crap stereo equipment, and overpriced computer hardware), check out sparkfun.com.
:-)
Happy Days ARE here again. Electronics-as-a-hobby is once again alive and well. Spread the word
Actually, there's another reason why people who grew up during the late 70s/early 80s love microcontrollers so much... they're like the computers we grew up with. A mortal really CAN understand one fully, and individually create something cool... something that's increasingly difficult to do on any kind of meaningful level with regard to mainstream computer software.
There's a good reason why driver support and bugfixes for Vista are taking forever. In the past, programmers and L337 users lived on the razor's bleeding edge, had the latest version of Windows installed MONTHS before it hit the stores, and were STILL there at midnight to buy it the moment it was officially available.
With Vista, that hasn't happened. To a large extent, it's been shunned even worse by the computer elite than by any other single group. There's peer pressure to NOT run Vista, widespread sentiment that it's rotten to the core thanks to Microsoft's deal with the DRM Devil, and general disinterest. That's a big problem for Microsoft, because the bugs people who bought a new laptop with Vista from Dell experience aren't part of the daily lives of the programming priesthood. Vista has become the "other" OS, shunned, scorned, and psychologically written off as irrelevant to their daily lives. The bugs don't annoy the very people in a position to fix them, so they remain and fester. Ditto, for drivers. If programmers aren't personally affected by whether or not some device works under Vista, they're not going to feel the same sense of urgency. Of course, there's always the business motivation... but when you get down to that special something that really drives programmers to spend their weekend fixing something, even though they aren't getting paid overtime... it's just not there.
If Microsoft REALLY wants to save Vista, they need to introduce one more editon: Vista LE ("Liberty Edition") -- $199, bootable from CD, freely installable on any 2 computers owned by the individual, installable and runnable on an unlimited number of virtual machines, as long as the host machine is running Vista as well, and an unlimited number of "floating" installations that can be activated for up to 30 hours at a time, with the catch that if you activate machine #3 for 30 hours and don't de-activate it, you can't activate machine 3b until the original 30 hours have elapsed. Oh, and every last bit of kernel-level DRM including protected audio and video paths COMPILED OUT. Of course, this means you won't be able to run WinDVD or view premium protected content... but nobody who buys VistaLE will really care, because we'd never buy DRM'ed content anyway.
> It's "norte-americano" (literally "north-american").
Not really. If you tell someone in the Caribbean, South America, or Central America that you're 'norteamericano', they're going to think you're Mexican. Just like the term 'iberoamericano' -- it technically COULD be a generic Spanish equivalent for "Hispanic" or "Latin American", but it's not -- the only people who EVER use the term to refer to themselves are Mexicans.
The official name of Mexico is "Los Estados Unidos de Mejico" (literally, "The United States of Mexico"). Just try using "EE.UU.", "Los Estados Unidos" (without "de Mejico" at the end), or even "The United States" (without "of America" at the end) to refer to Mexico in a Mexican courtroom. First, you'll be laughed at. Then, if you persist, you'll be charged with contempt of court for being pedantic and annoying the judge.
When the limit of Moore's law is reached insofar as doubling of computing power for a given size, things built from the components in question will simply start getting bigger and drawing more power. The Pentium 4 was just a preview of what's to come. Forget about tech-design fantasies of "computers in a keyfob" that go everywhere. The desktop PC of 2050 will occupy a case that would have given a 1995 power user a serious case of "tower envy", draw more power than the half-dozen halogen floodlights illuminating the back yard to stadium levels, and an active cooling system with outdoor condenser that needs to be connected by refrigerant-containing hoses through a hole in the wall or a partly opened door/window. Of course, it'll have the equivalent of 65,536 discrete CPUs, a terrabyte of onboard ram, up to a petabyte in nonvolatile storage, a GPU subsystem that's more powerful (and draws more power) than the CPU array itself (needed for immersive 3D games if you want to use a haptic bodysuit & gyroscopic G-Force simulator platform along with it).
Believe it. The industry won't come to a halt when exponential growth of component power ends... it'll just embrace the exponential growth of size and power consumption, and convince consumers that they simply MUST have a computer the size of a small refrigerator that renders apps into solid-feeling virtual tablets (haptic glove & visor required for full Genuine Windows Experience) that can float, spin, and (if you angrily hurl one at a wall) smash into a million pieces before turning into pools of mercury and slurping back into the computer in a cute "shatter" effect.
>IANAL, and IANB(ritish), but what I'm wondering is if the legal situation in the UK encourages
> businesses to exploit such loopholes in order to avoid their responsibilities like it does in the US.
Actually, this practice was outlawed in the US ~30 years ago by the Magnuson-Moss Act & subsequent decisions by the FTC. Basically, it says that the manufacturer can only use breach of terms (installing unauthorized aftermarket parts, etc) to the extent that the breach itself directly contributed to the problem. So if your car's air conditioner is warranted against breakage for 5 years or 60,000 miles, they can't invalidate your warranty because you used an unapproved replacement battery or had the oil changed anywhere besides the dealer itself. It was originally targeted against abuses by the auto industry, but has rather forcefully been expanded by the FTC into the computer market.