However, the studios would prefer not to allow this because it somehow will "lead to piracy", so it is possible that a few years from now they may not support full res video on analog connections any more when they assume that the majority of HDTV owners have HDMI connectors and the studios think they can afford to screw over the owners of older HDTV sets.
HDMI is only "secure" because it has HDCP. We know that: - HDCP is a weak encryption scheme. - There are already easy-to-find HDCP removal devices, at $400 prices. - DVI/HDMI is an extremely high-bandwidth connection : an uncompressed 720p30 HDTV stream, transfers 89 MB/s of data. 1080p60 is 360 MB/s !
Given this, without specialized hardware, there is no way an uncompressed HDTV stream can be saved and reencoded effectively. This hardware, being custom-built, is unlikely to ever reach a low price, and would probably be very close from its analog counterpart processing an YUV stream in terms of price. Thus, DVI-pirating is restricted to very rich pirating circles, and this kind won't hesitate on a $400 expense, because they have a factory in China to press the pirate disks that appear on the Asian markets.
HDCP doesn't concern consumers, because they will never have the kind of hardware that is able to compress raw DVI data. It concerns the professional pirates, but they already have a low-price circumvention device. Thus, as a protection scheme, HDCP is useless.
But as a forced upgrade system, to coerce consumers into renewing otherwise perfectly working hardware, it seems to have a very promising future.
This is an transport layer, not a network layer. It is only necessary in endpoints, such as clients and servers, and it might be a good thing if firewalls understood it. But the routers don't interpret it, so there won't be any change on backbones, except a slight increase in traffic with a few more keep-alive packets.
The PS3 may be a loss leader, but there still is a limit. If the manufacturing cost is $900, and sony sells its console at only $500, it means that the company estimates that it can get at get back those $400 in a way or an other.
Given the fact that the usual margin for the console manufacturer on game sales is 20%, that makes only $12 for each $60 game. Simple maths says that in those conditions, sony would have to sell in average more than 30 games per customer to break even on the machines it sold with a so large discount.
And except for the rare hardcore gamer, how many people buy 30 games for a machine in one generation ?
#13 on the list is "Peter Moore spearheaded the marketing" and most of the actual similarities seem like Marketing aspects of it so I think a better headline would read "How Peter Moore's marketing style resembles Peter Moore's marketing style"
The fact that the chief of marketing for Dreamcast and XBox360 is the same person remains an interesting fact. And since "I've been responsible for launching a console that eventually forced my company out of the hardware buisness" is a far from splendid line on one's resume, I don't expect this man to boast much about it.
But I also expect Mr. Moore will be much more at ease with an "unlimited" marketing budget, compared with the $100 Mn that Sega allocated for the Dreamcast launch, according to the article. Especially when it comes to countering Sony claims of superiority, since those are widely regarded as one of the causes behind the failure of the Dreamcast.
All the states listed are pretty socialist, compared to the US anyway. I wonder if France and Canada and so-forth have subsidised internet from the government.
At least for France, it is quite the contrary. The main reason for the cheap prices we are having right now is because there is a lot of competition between providers, and they fight to provide lower prices and higher bandwidth.
Ironically, this comes also from the fact that the State regulates phone & data services, and actively prevents the privatized incumbent from abusing its monopoly on the local loop to get rid of competitors. Whereas in the US, as I understand it, the FCC decided not set up rules for the broadband market, and the Bells and cable operators have all the freedom they want to get rid of competitors, resulting in higher prices and poor service for the customer.
What kind of storage can you realistically get on SD cards?
The theoretical limit of the format is 4 GB without formatting. Nowadays, it is commonplace to find 1 GB flash cards, or even 2 GB cards, but quite pricy (~60 $ per GB). Read-only cards, when produced in large quantities, would probably be less expensive.
I do realize there are games that are less than a gig The size of a game doesn't make its quality. And we're still talking about portable games, where the UMD is the largest format to date, with only 1.8 GB...
Both of OpenTV and NDS are to be credited for Sky+.
NDS provides the encryption mechanism, while OpenTV provides the MMI, the PVR functionality and the over-the-air application downloading mechanism. Except for this, the core of the system is a standard DVB/S set-top-box.
From the box-office point of view, yes. But if you add revenues for TV licensing, DVD, pay-per-view and merchandising, the numbers are quite different. Box-office accounts for less than a half of a film's revenue.
I live in Australia, where the free trade agreement with America is about to come into force and make region coding legal here.
Or it might be an occasion to ruin it. Region-coding is an artificial separation between markets, thus against free trade. When the European Union observed this case, it concluded that it was a matter of contracts between producers and manufacturers, and could not be struck down because there was no market distortion beween European states.
But in the Australian case, if there is a free trade agreement, either you or US customers can argue that not being able to buy their DVD in the other country, due to collusion between producers and manufacturers, is a restriction to free trade between Australia and the US, maintaining artifical prices. Thus, you have an even better reason to repel this system...
Oh, yeah, IANAL, as you usually said in those cases.
What exactly is the diference between a file format and a codec? Is the file format just the result of the media being acted upon by the codec?
Most multimedia file formats act like containers for differents media streams, with little or no assumption of the format of the media stream - except notably for synchronisation uses. Desirable features for such a file format are streaming capability, error detection and recovery, flexibility and low overhead. Examples for this include AVI, OGM, the QuickTime container format, which has been selected to be the default container for MPEG-4 streams during the normalisation process.
A codec is used for COding-DECoding operation, such as image or audio compression, and is used to translate from and to the media stream format. It works on a single type of data (audio, images, etc...) and operates on only one stream from the media object at a time.
To sum it up, the file format is the method used to organize the different binary streams produced by the different codecs involved in audio/video compression.
All those critical bugs have been detected by reviewers from the "Security Bug Bounty Program", as described on mozilla.org. The Mozilla Foundation has offered a $500 bounty for each security bug found, and already has secured a $10,000 budget to do so.
Thus, all those bugs should not be seen as a proof that the Mozilla code is badly written, but rather that the Mozilla Foundation is aware that secure code is hard to write, and that a good review process is critical to reach this goal.
The subject in the grandparent post is the United Nations, not the European Union.
In the United Nations, there are 6 official laguages, which are English, French, Spanish, (Mandarin) Chinese, Russian and Arabic. Among those 6 languages, English and French are priviledged. All documents are written at least in those two languages, and every administrative employee hired by the UN needs to be able to speak them.
Software regulation alread exists. You don't have the right to copy a program if the license you received did not grant you that right. This is because of the copyright rules, which are a government intervention in a free market. But the price tag that is associated with copyright might be too low for software : it might be fair, as proposed by the article, to ask for an intelligible source code as a counterpart for copyright protection.
In that context, the part of government intervention in the software market would not increase much. But it would probably require a lot of storage space for all that data...
But it's not really a war between opposing sides. It's a war between the furture and the past.
From a marxist point of view, the Cold War was presented exactly the same way. Marx's theory explained that the final outcome of history was communism, and that capitalism had no future.
As of yet, I'm far from convinced, in both cases.
A interresting point to note is also that DVB is valid for either satellite, cable, terrestrial or even DSL digital diffusion. Only the reception front-end system changes, the decoding back-end does not.
As a matter of fact, DVB-S is used by directTV and EchoStar in the US too. But I believe it does not rely on the standard user identification mechanism, hence no interoperability of STBs among providers.
Slashdot Mirror
However, the studios would prefer not to allow this because it somehow will "lead to piracy", so it is possible that a few years from now they may not support full res video on analog connections any more when they assume that the majority of HDTV owners have HDMI connectors and the studios think they can afford to screw over the owners of older HDTV sets.
HDMI is only "secure" because it has HDCP. We know that:
- HDCP is a weak encryption scheme.
- There are already easy-to-find HDCP removal devices, at $400 prices.
- DVI/HDMI is an extremely high-bandwidth connection : an uncompressed 720p30 HDTV stream, transfers 89 MB/s of data. 1080p60 is 360 MB/s !
Given this, without specialized hardware, there is no way an uncompressed HDTV stream can be saved and reencoded effectively. This hardware, being custom-built, is unlikely to ever reach a low price, and would probably be very close from its analog counterpart processing an YUV stream in terms of price. Thus, DVI-pirating is restricted to very rich pirating circles, and this kind won't hesitate on a $400 expense, because they have a factory in China to press the pirate disks that appear on the Asian markets.
HDCP doesn't concern consumers, because they will never have the kind of hardware that is able to compress raw DVI data. It concerns the professional pirates, but they already have a low-price circumvention device. Thus, as a protection scheme, HDCP is useless.
But as a forced upgrade system, to coerce consumers into renewing otherwise perfectly working hardware, it seems to have a very promising future.
I LOVE the new redesign
Just go to the games section, the color scheme looks ugly like that everyday.
Did I miss something?
This is an transport layer, not a network layer. It is only necessary in endpoints, such as clients and servers, and it might be a good thing if firewalls understood it. But the routers don't interpret it, so there won't be any change on backbones, except a slight increase in traffic with a few more keep-alive packets.
The PS3 may be a loss leader, but there still is a limit. If the manufacturing cost is $900, and sony sells its console at only $500, it means that the company estimates that it can get at get back those $400 in a way or an other.
Given the fact that the usual margin for the console manufacturer on game sales is 20%, that makes only $12 for each $60 game. Simple maths says that in those conditions, sony would have to sell in average more than 30 games per customer to break even on the machines it sold with a so large discount.
And except for the rare hardcore gamer, how many people buy 30 games for a machine in one generation ?
#13 on the list is "Peter Moore spearheaded the marketing" and most of the actual similarities seem like Marketing aspects of it so I think a better headline would read "How Peter Moore's marketing style resembles Peter Moore's marketing style"
The fact that the chief of marketing for Dreamcast and XBox360 is the same person remains an interesting fact. And since "I've been responsible for launching a console that eventually forced my company out of the hardware buisness" is a far from splendid line on one's resume, I don't expect this man to boast much about it.
But I also expect Mr. Moore will be much more at ease with an "unlimited" marketing budget, compared with the $100 Mn that Sega allocated for the Dreamcast launch, according to the article. Especially when it comes to countering Sony claims of superiority, since those are widely regarded as one of the causes behind the failure of the Dreamcast.
All the states listed are pretty socialist, compared to the US anyway. I wonder if France and Canada and so-forth have subsidised internet from the government.
At least for France, it is quite the contrary. The main reason for the cheap prices we are having right now is because there is a lot of competition between providers, and they fight to provide lower prices and higher bandwidth.
Ironically, this comes also from the fact that the State regulates phone & data services, and actively prevents the privatized incumbent from abusing its monopoly on the local loop to get rid of competitors. Whereas in the US, as I understand it, the FCC decided not set up rules for the broadband market, and the Bells and cable operators have all the freedom they want to get rid of competitors, resulting in higher prices and poor service for the customer.
What kind of storage can you realistically get on SD cards?
The theoretical limit of the format is 4 GB without formatting. Nowadays, it is commonplace to find 1 GB flash cards, or even 2 GB cards, but quite pricy (~60 $ per GB). Read-only cards, when produced in large quantities, would probably be less expensive.
I do realize there are games that are less than a gig
The size of a game doesn't make its quality. And we're still talking about portable games, where the UMD is the largest format to date, with only 1.8 GB...
Internationalized Domain Names
This is a mechanism used to encode a Unicode name into the few characters accepted into regular DNS names.
Both of OpenTV and NDS are to be credited for Sky+.
NDS provides the encryption mechanism, while OpenTV provides the MMI, the PVR functionality and the over-the-air application downloading mechanism. Except for this, the core of the system is a standard DVB/S set-top-box.
Movies really don't make as much as they used to.
From the box-office point of view, yes. But if you add revenues for TV licensing, DVD, pay-per-view and merchandising, the numbers are quite different. Box-office accounts for less than a half of a film's revenue.
I live in Australia, where the free trade agreement with America is about to come into force and make region coding legal here.
Or it might be an occasion to ruin it.
Region-coding is an artificial separation between markets, thus against free trade. When the European Union observed this case, it concluded that it was a matter of contracts between producers and manufacturers, and could not be struck down because there was no market distortion beween European states.
But in the Australian case, if there is a free trade agreement, either you or US customers can argue that not being able to buy their DVD in the other country, due to collusion between producers and manufacturers, is a restriction to free trade between Australia and the US, maintaining artifical prices. Thus, you have an even better reason to repel this system...
Oh, yeah, IANAL, as you usually said in those cases.
What exactly is the diference between a file format and a codec? Is the file format just the result of the media being acted upon by the codec?
Most multimedia file formats act like containers for differents media streams, with little or no assumption of the format of the media stream - except notably for synchronisation uses. Desirable features for such a file format are streaming capability, error detection and recovery, flexibility and low overhead. Examples for this include AVI, OGM, the QuickTime container format, which has been selected to be the default container for MPEG-4 streams during the normalisation process.
A codec is used for COding-DECoding operation, such as image or audio compression, and is used to translate from and to the media stream format. It works on a single type of data (audio, images, etc...) and operates on only one stream from the media object at a time.
To sum it up, the file format is the method used to organize the different binary streams produced by the different codecs involved in audio/video compression.
All those critical bugs have been detected by reviewers from the "Security Bug Bounty Program", as described on mozilla.org. The Mozilla Foundation has offered a $500 bounty for each security bug found, and already has secured a $10,000 budget to do so.
Thus, all those bugs should not be seen as a proof that the Mozilla code is badly written, but rather that the Mozilla Foundation is aware that secure code is hard to write, and that a good review process is critical to reach this goal.
The subject in the grandparent post is the United Nations, not the European Union.
In the United Nations, there are 6 official laguages, which are English, French, Spanish, (Mandarin) Chinese, Russian and Arabic. Among those 6 languages, English and French are priviledged. All documents are written at least in those two languages, and every administrative employee hired by the UN needs to be able to speak them.
Software regulation alread exists. You don't have the right to copy a program if the license you received did not grant you that right. This is because of the copyright rules, which are a government intervention in a free market. But the price tag that is associated with copyright might be too low for software : it might be fair, as proposed by the article, to ask for an intelligible source code as a counterpart for copyright protection.
In that context, the part of government intervention in the software market would not increase much. But it would probably require a lot of storage space for all that data...
But it's not really a war between opposing sides. It's a war between the furture and the past.
From a marxist point of view, the Cold War was presented exactly the same way. Marx's theory explained that the final outcome of history was communism, and that capitalism had no future.
As of yet, I'm far from convinced, in both cases.
A interresting point to note is also that DVB is valid for either satellite, cable, terrestrial or even DSL digital diffusion. Only the reception front-end system changes, the decoding back-end does not.
As a matter of fact, DVB-S is used by directTV and EchoStar in the US too. But I believe it does not rely on the standard user identification mechanism, hence no interoperability of STBs among providers.