The $150mil MS invested in Apple a couple of years ago was in non-voting stock. MS has no board or stockholder rights @ Apple. Aside from the name recognition, all MS got was some rights for cross-licensing patents.
> You can't have your cake and eat it too people, if you super cheap flat rate broadband, you just can't expect that they will let you run a 100 channel shoutcast server off it as well.
This is my problem with the rate cap:
@Home has bandwidth problems due to oversubscribed links & folks who run 100-channel icecast servers. (Man, whatever happened to the pr0n?) Customers complain to high heaven because they're getting pitifully slow connectivity. Rather than go after the problem at the source (by extending their anemic peering feeds, upgrading their backbones with AT&T's infusion of cash, and actually doing something about the bandwidth hogs [is running services against @Home's ToS?]), they instead penalize all users, and, as other people have mentioned, no longer satisfy their "50x faster than a modem" advertising.
A global upload cap is simply the wrong solution to the problem. Firm up the ToS, disconnect bandwidth hogs, and for God's sake, upgrade their network! It's not like the bandwidth problems are only happening recently.
(Up until October of last year, I worked in a place which did a lot of peering and other work with @Home's network, and know first-hand just how bad off their backbone is. It may have changed since then, but I doubt it, as they would have needed an infusion of Network Clue(tm) the size of the Eastern Seaboard.)
12THz? 266mhz I/F bus? Almost no heat? Low power consumption? Not to mention the whole article itself...built off of work some US Army egghead did in the 50s, eh? I'm surprised Roswell wasn't mentioned. I mean, this has just *got* to be Grey technology. I suppose that it does great curly fries too.
Been out in Japan for a while. I had the chance to try them out at the Sony Style store in the new Metreon complex in SF yesterday, and I was rather non-plussed. They're ok for TV watching, but I could not use them for serious computer work for 8-hours in a row. The resolution is simply too poor, and the headset too uncomfortable.
As for the article saying that they'd be available in September...um, they're available right now. If I wanted to drop $900 + tax, I could have walked home with one yesterday. Metreon had about 20 in boxes.
One thing that wasn't mentioned is that the Glasstron demoed at PC Expo is only the low-end model. There is a second, higher-end (and much more expensive) Glasstron, the PLM-S700 PC. The PLM-S700 can do up to 832x624, and has a VGA connector in addition to the NTSC/PAL inputs. I haven't been able to take that one for a test drive, but the MSRP on it is $2600. You can see the specs on it at http://www.ita.sel.sony.com/produ cts/av/glasstron/.
Use of alternate angles, tons of added featurettes, DD5.1 sound, the works. Can't wait until next week!
Died a lot earlier than I had expected.
on
DIVX is dead
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· Score: 1
I'm surprised that the industry is ditching Divx so soon...I figured that they'd run the thing into the ground for another 5 years or so at least.
Now the big question is this: Since Divx is dead, will Eisner finally remove his cranium from his rectum and release Di$ney movies on standard DVD? I was pissed when they announced that "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" would be a Divx-only release.
Minidisc is far from dead. Actually, it never was dead, it just took a long time to start to gain acceptance in the United States due to poor pricing policy on the part of Sony. A year and a half ago, you couldn't get an American-version of a Sony Minidisc player/recorder (at the time, Sony was the only manufacturer making North American localized Minidisc equipment. Sharp started up about a year ago, and now everyone's in the market.) for under $500. Now you can get a portable player and a home player/recorder deck for that much.
Supression of anything like this is bad. Just because they're completely out of their minds doesn't mean we have the right to make their work go away. So we don't agree with it? So it's wrong? Ok, it's wrong. Let the scientific method pick apart their arguments in a rational way, rather than Inquisitioning them out of existence.
The late Dr. Carl Sagan, in his Cosmos series, talked about this same kind of thing happening when Immanuel Velikovsky published the first compilation of his astronomical views in Worlds in Collision in 1950. He came up with some wonderful ideas about Venus being a rogue planet that was captured by the Sun's gravitation, the Moon being ejected from Jupiter, an explanation for the sun standing still in Biblical times, and much more.
Sure, the man was completely wrong about many things. He was also right in his theories that in the past, mankind has witnessed global catastrophes of cosmic origin. But rather than prove him wrong, Worlds in Collision was instead banned from numerous academic institutions, and his works suppressed. He is still to this day looked on as a kook more than a scientist who was wrong.
"Do not destroy that which you do not understand."
I've got that exact same service, and just about the same complaints.:) I wish they'd lower their prices to keep in lock-step with PacBell (as then I could upgrade my speed to something a little better), but their technical cluefulness more than makes up for things. I wanted them to delegate my/28 to me for DNS purposes (not a trivial task; you need some decent DNS clue in order to do this), and they set it up for me within a few hours. As for phone support, they never gave you their number? Drop me an e-mail and I can give it out to you.
Let's see...I go to copy a bunch of stuff, and my Xerox machine BSODs on me. Oh yeah, silly me. I didn't use Microsoft(tm)-brand paper in the copier. It'll only crash-and-burn 50% of the time then. Hrm...wonder if it'll be possible to format the printer and install Linux?
Society sees a couple of its members doing something really, really, REALLY bad.
Society doesn't like this. It gives Society a bad name.
Society tries to do whatever possible to convince itself that these Bad People(tm) were never a part of Society to begin with.
The first step is to find "obvious differences" between Society and the Bad People. Well, violent computer games and the goth subculture are in the limelight these days...let's use that!
(cue all those media shots of the items with the Doom logo in evidence bags)
icecast is streaming audio MP3 only, and will prolly stay that way for the time being. It was built specifically as a GPL'd alternative to Nullsoft's Shoutcast. While the principles of streaming are the same, there's a world of difference between a streaming audio server and a streaming audio/video solution.
Granted, icecast could be extended to support video as well, but right now it doesn't.
but lots more. There was a bit on it over at Ain't It Cool News about the DVD, and there's a ton of other features that weren't mentioned. Things like restored footage, an interactive look at the original script (which allows you to go from a bit in the script to the actual movie, to see what changed), actual use of "angles" to show pre and post-production shots. The MST3K bit is not limited to watching them watch the show; the audio of the MST3K bit can be listened to as a separate audio track overlaying the movie. All in all, good stuff. I'm there.
If the author was writing from a American point-of-view from two years ago or so (stress American), then yes, he would be correct in that MD was a commercial failure. As others have pointed out, costs for both the players/recorders and media was prohibitively high until, oh, maybe about 9-12 months ago. Sony was charging ~$500 for their portable player/recorder models, when they could be had in Japan for half that.
Which brings up another point: MDs have been a huge success in Japan since their inception. Europe too. It's only in America where the MD has failed until only recently to catch on, mostly due (once again) to the hideous price barrier.
For those interested in figures, here's a Sony press release on fiscal '97 MD sales. In short, MD player sales in Japan were expected to equal those of CD players in fiscal '97, and almost double (and easily eclipse CD player sales) in fiscal '98.
MD is really getting going, now. While we still don't have the expansive product line that Japan does, you can now get MD models from companies besides Sony, for reasonable prices, and prices on car units are even starting to come down. Pioneer makes a killer MD/CD in-dash combo right now, the unfortunate part is its ~$600 price point. Ouch!
Getting those development tools isn't easy. For the current PSX, not only do you have to sign licensing agreements, but you need to spend several thousand dollars on the toolkit and a special developer's PSX unit. I've read reports that the cost for a PSX2 devel setup is supposed to be comparable. While it is certainly easier for a current Linux developer to make stuff for PSX, it's not going to be that easy. Sony has a seriously vested interest in keeping their system proprietary.
They've been discussing this on NANOG. Apparently NSI is doing some sort of WHOIS upgrade that was supposed to be finished around 0800 EST. Now they're not giving out any ETA. Some domains (like microsoft.com) are visible again, but some are still ugly. Check out yahoo.com. I re-registered my domain just in case...
Actually, the PSX2 actually has an upgraded version of the PSX1 CPU inside it to use as the I/O controller. It's supposed to have a bigger data path, more memory, and be slightly faster. It's not too far of a stretch to see that being used as the emulator.
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The $150mil MS invested in Apple a couple of years ago was in non-voting stock. MS has no board or stockholder rights @ Apple. Aside from the name recognition, all MS got was some rights for cross-licensing patents.
This is my problem with the rate cap:
@Home has bandwidth problems due to oversubscribed links & folks who run 100-channel icecast servers. (Man, whatever happened to the pr0n?) Customers complain to high heaven because they're getting pitifully slow connectivity. Rather than go after the problem at the source (by extending their anemic peering feeds, upgrading their backbones with AT&T's infusion of cash, and actually doing something about the bandwidth hogs [is running services against @Home's ToS?]), they instead penalize all users, and, as other people have mentioned, no longer satisfy their "50x faster than a modem" advertising.
A global upload cap is simply the wrong solution to the problem. Firm up the ToS, disconnect bandwidth hogs, and for God's sake, upgrade their network! It's not like the bandwidth problems are only happening recently.
(Up until October of last year, I worked in a place which did a lot of peering and other work with @Home's network, and know first-hand just how bad off their backbone is. It may have changed since then, but I doubt it, as they would have needed an infusion of Network Clue(tm) the size of the Eastern Seaboard.)
Someone's been on the pipe again, methinks.
As for the article saying that they'd be available in September...um, they're available right now. If I wanted to drop $900 + tax, I could have walked home with one yesterday. Metreon had about 20 in boxes.
One thing that wasn't mentioned is that the Glasstron demoed at PC Expo is only the low-end model. There is a second, higher-end (and much more expensive) Glasstron, the PLM-S700 PC. The PLM-S700 can do up to 832x624, and has a VGA connector in addition to the NTSC/PAL inputs. I haven't been able to take that one for a test drive, but the MSRP on it is $2600. You can see the specs on it at http://www.ita.sel.sony.com/produ cts/av/glasstron/.
Use of alternate angles, tons of added featurettes, DD5.1 sound, the works. Can't wait until next week!
Now the big question is this: Since Divx is dead, will Eisner finally remove his cranium from his rectum and release Di$ney movies on standard DVD? I was pissed when they announced that "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" would be a Divx-only release.
Minidisc is far from dead. Actually, it never was dead, it just took a long time to start to gain acceptance in the United States due to poor pricing policy on the part of Sony. A year and a half ago, you couldn't get an American-version of a Sony Minidisc player/recorder (at the time, Sony was the only manufacturer making North American localized Minidisc equipment. Sharp started up about a year ago, and now everyone's in the market.) for under $500. Now you can get a portable player and a home player/recorder deck for that much.
The late Dr. Carl Sagan, in his Cosmos series, talked about this same kind of thing happening when Immanuel Velikovsky published the first compilation of his astronomical views in Worlds in Collision in 1950. He came up with some wonderful ideas about Venus being a rogue planet that was captured by the Sun's gravitation, the Moon being ejected from Jupiter, an explanation for the sun standing still in Biblical times, and much more.
Sure, the man was completely wrong about many things. He was also right in his theories that in the past, mankind has witnessed global catastrophes of cosmic origin. But rather than prove him wrong, Worlds in Collision was instead banned from numerous academic institutions, and his works suppressed. He is still to this day looked on as a kook more than a scientist who was wrong.
"Do not destroy that which you do not understand."
I've got that exact same service, and just about the same complaints. :) I wish they'd lower their prices to keep in lock-step with PacBell (as then I could upgrade my speed to something a little better), but their technical cluefulness more than makes up for things. I wanted them to delegate my /28 to me for DNS purposes (not a trivial task; you need some decent DNS clue in order to do this), and they set it up for me within a few hours. As for phone support, they never gave you their number? Drop me an e-mail and I can give it out to you.
Let's see...I go to copy a bunch of stuff, and my Xerox machine BSODs on me. Oh yeah, silly me. I didn't use Microsoft(tm)-brand paper in the copier. It'll only crash-and-burn 50% of the time then. Hrm...wonder if it'll be possible to format the printer and install Linux?
Just a few years later than expected.
Society doesn't like this. It gives Society a bad name.
Society tries to do whatever possible to convince itself that these Bad People(tm) were never a part of Society to begin with.
The first step is to find "obvious differences" between Society and the Bad People. Well, violent computer games and the goth subculture are in the limelight these days...let's use that!
(cue all those media shots of the items with the Doom logo in evidence bags)
Granted, icecast could be extended to support video as well, but right now it doesn't.
but lots more. There was a bit on it over at Ain't It Cool News about the DVD, and there's a ton of other features that weren't mentioned. Things like restored footage, an interactive look at the original script (which allows you to go from a bit in the script to the actual movie, to see what changed), actual use of "angles" to show pre and post-production shots. The MST3K bit is not limited to watching them watch the show; the audio of the MST3K bit can be listened to as a separate audio track overlaying the movie. All in all, good stuff. I'm there.
Which brings up another point: MDs have been a huge success in Japan since their inception. Europe too. It's only in America where the MD has failed until only recently to catch on, mostly due (once again) to the hideous price barrier.
For those interested in figures, here's a Sony press release on fiscal '97 MD sales. In short, MD player sales in Japan were expected to equal those of CD players in fiscal '97, and almost double (and easily eclipse CD player sales) in fiscal '98.
MD is really getting going, now. While we still don't have the expansive product line that Japan does, you can now get MD models from companies besides Sony, for reasonable prices, and prices on car units are even starting to come down. Pioneer makes a killer MD/CD in-dash combo right now, the unfortunate part is its ~$600 price point. Ouch!
Getting those development tools isn't easy. For the current PSX, not only do you have to sign licensing agreements, but you need to spend several thousand dollars on the toolkit and a special developer's PSX unit. I've read reports that the cost for a PSX2 devel setup is supposed to be comparable. While it is certainly easier for a current Linux developer to make stuff for PSX, it's not going to be that easy. Sony has a seriously vested interest in keeping their system proprietary.
Tangerine Dream's defunct as a band, IIRC. I don't know about the other members, but Chris Franke keeps himself very busy with his Sonic Images label.
They've been discussing this on NANOG. Apparently NSI is doing some sort of WHOIS upgrade that was supposed to be finished around 0800 EST. Now they're not giving out any ETA. Some domains (like microsoft.com) are visible again, but some are still ugly. Check out yahoo.com. I re-registered my domain just in case...
I'm sure that Intel saw how the DoJ's been dragging Microsoft through the courts, and didn't want to end up the same way.
I meant "slightly faster" about the I/O controller/PSX1 CPU, not about the main CPU or graphics co-processor.
Actually, the PSX2 actually has an upgraded version of the PSX1 CPU inside it to use as the I/O controller. It's supposed to have a bigger data path, more memory, and be slightly faster. It's not too far of a stretch to see that being used as the emulator.
Good lord, that has got to be one of the funniest things I've ever seen. Thank god there's more on the way!