This is where you fly off the deep end. Sony intentionally injured you financially? what?
My investment in games - many dollars - won't run on this new hardware. the injury isn't financial in the sense of todays dollars, it is in curtailing benefits from money already spent. They didn't have to do that; they did anyway; so I walk away, which I also didn't have to do.:)
Perhaps you don't understand what a straw man is. Because the actual fad, as it were, is to stand them up as if they were relevant arguments, when in fact they are not. In this case, I never said that Sony affected my finances; the straw argument entered into an ad homonym attack based on a strawman's assertion that I had. What I actually said was that my investment in game software was affected, which of course it was. Pretty straightforward stuff for slashdot. Rather than bother with a rebuttal to an attack against something I didn't say, I just pointed out the childish nature of the attack. Don't feed the trolls and all that.
No need to thank me, glad to help you out with basic 'net info.
Hmmm, since Dec last year (Vita was released Dec in Asia), their stock's been on the rise. You were saying?
I was saying they haven't caught up to where they were when they released the earlier machines, is what I was saying. Nice try, though.:)
Whereas if that was sold to you, you'll only buy the hardware, and possibly new Vita games
Completely wrong. If the new hardware ran our existing games, three things would happen. First, I'd buy the new hardware. Second, I'd continue to buy new games on UMD, as the format would not be dead. Third, new games would continue to come out on UMD, further extending the whole cycle.
But this isn't what happened... so I neither buy new games, thus funneling royalties to them, or new hardware from them.
(if you're so held up on old games, I question how much time you have for new games).
"Held up"? You mean, interested? Regardless, the one doesn't follow from the other. All my time is free time; I'm retired, well off, and spend the vast majority of my day pursuing one form or another of elective activity. Which activities I choose are wide open to attempts to retrieve me as a consumer, as I have both the funds and the time to invest. I do things like buy machines for the immediate family and the grandkids too. Consequently everyone has iPads, etc.
When a company abandons compatibility, they leave me open to choose any nextgen system, as there's no particular reason to stick with them (and there is also the fact that they have annoyed me.) So I'll probably pick something new and shiny from someone else, and now my money is going elsewhere. They decided it wasn't worth keeping me, which is fine -- they can do that. But I can also wander off, and there isn't a darned thing they can do about that, either.
Personally, I'm looking forward to the next real game changers. Some that might qualify would be real AI and robots, ultracaps capable of replacing batteries, political landscape shifts such as the adoption of the idea that the communications infrastructure is as important as, and for the same reasons, as the transport infrastructure with associated rights of passage and removal from commercial interests, just as private toll roads are almost unknown today, a space elevator or other means of inexpensive space travel, a confluence of insulation, local power generation, and storage to free the "average" home and vehicle from the power grid and oil interests, real 3d display technology... web innovations are rarely, at least recently, of a great deal of interest to me. Maybe it's just me, though.
most people's ps3s can't play ps2 games. you're one of the lucky few.
It wasn't luck. It was an advertised feature of the initial run of consoles, and it is *why* I bought the PS3. In retrospect, that and the ability to play Blurays are its main value to me. None of the PS3 games has really tripped my trigger the way some of the PS2 games did -- The original Maximo, The first Crash Bandicoot, SSX... So far, of the games I've tried, they're really pretty but they're short on gameplay and long on useless crap like "cinema sequences." Meh.
let me guess, you're about 22?
Lol. Stay away from Vegas. I'm 55.
you've been spoiled. most consoles aren't backwards compatable, and never have been.
Hmmm. Not sure that my at least somewhat thoughtful buying choices have "spoiled" me. It more spoils any chance of me giving more money to Sony and Microsoft. Now they face the iPad; and so far, it's been backwards compatible as well. Interesting choice, isn't it? And yes, assuming the iPad3 keeps up with that tradition, I'll be getting one of those, too. Now, if Apple were to break all my apps with the iPad3, I wouldn't buy... but you know, Apple isn't stupid, so I don't think that's going to happen. But... maybe the iPad3 will be "all-new" and have its own special app store and.... nah.:)
the 360 will play -some- original xbox games, but again it's doing it via emulation and it's often quite buggy.
Yeah, they lied about that -- the claim was made that it would be backwards compatible, and they simply failed to honor the claim. Worst (for me) is that the 360 doesn't play the game I'm most often interested in playing -- Mechassault -- so an original XBox remains crowbarred into my theater system. It'll be a sad day if that can't be replaced when it dies.
Honestly, if you're still playing an un-hacked PSP, I'm wondering what you see in the device...
I'm not interested in hacked devices or illegal emulations. I don't steal, and I don't run flaming down the nearest antisocial path when I don't get my way. What I see in the device is simply gameplay that I enjoy. As a consumer, I vote with my wallet. No more, no less.
So by not replacing you are scrapping your investment yourself when you could replace the broken PSP with a working model (secondhand). Since you are not going to replace Sony has made the right decision
Boy, are you confused. First of all, I might indeed buy a used PSP, but that does absolutely nothing for Sony -- they earn no income from it. Only the previous PSP owner receives my money. I'm certainly not going to buy any more UMD's -- the format is dying on the vine and the number of machines that can run them drops by the day, specifically thanks to Sony. Again, no income for Sony. Most importantly, if Sony had made the new machine UMD-capable and game-compatible, I'd have bought it no question. When it comes time to buy a NEW machine, it'll be from someone else, because Sony has lost my trust. And I should point out that the reason that they had my trust in the first place was that my PS2 ran my PS1 games, and my PS3 ran my PS2 games. It seemed that they understood the issue. And yes, I bought all three machines, though only the PS2 and PS3 are setup in the home (no need for a PS1, you see, though we still can, and still do, play the games.)
So no. Sony made the wrong decision. In every way.
I put money into the PSP (several for the family), but I put far more money into UMD games. That money returns entertainment for all of us. It would return entertainment for much longer if compatibility were in place. However, the moment the PSP is replaced with an incompatible system, the entertainment value of that money drops to zero.
That is the sense in which I mean "investment" here.
When I have to replace the PSPs, since I no longer have compatibility concerns about the UMD (and therefore PSP) investment, my choice can be made even-handedly between Sony and anyone else, or no one else -- because my previous spending no longer has any leverage on my choice. And we can add to this a great dissatisfaction with Sony, so the odds are strongly against my choosing anything they might have to offer.
Perhaps it'll be easier to understand if I change context:
What if I bought a camera, and then a bunch of lenses for it. Then the camera manufacturer decided to make a replacement camera body, but that body couldn't use the lenses I'd purchased. First of all, the money I spent on the lenses... won't help me with the new body. At all. Second, I'm annoyed with the camera manufacturer. Third, when it comes time to choose a new camera because my original body no longer suffices for some reason, the lenses no longer figure in -- my investment (there it is again) in lenses has no positive leverage on my thinking, they can no longer work, so I am free to choose a camera without concern for compatibility, and you can be pretty sure it won't be the same camera manufacturer.
Microsoft put backwards compatibility above everything else for the better part of a decade, look how well that worked for them.
As far as I know, the results of that effort are that they have the most OS's in place; the most commonly used office suite; and that software I compiled back in 1995 still runs fine, delivering me results without further work. Mind you, I'm running XP in a VM on my Mac now, but I *am* running XP, and I purchased it legitimately. Specifically because it still works.
So if you were being snarky... fail. And I'm primarily a Mac user.
Maybe it can't even play original PSP games because of the different processor architecture
Well, that would be an additional mistake by Sony; because, as I said, since their choices obsolete my investment, my choice is to wander off elsewhere.
If you want to play your old PSP games, use your PSP
Oh, I do. Bought and paid for. But when it croaks, as it inevitably will, it won't be replaced by a Sony device, you see.
there are some considerations for making a device backwards compatible more complex then ensuring the same media type is used in both platforms
I don't care. What I care about is that I have all these games that won't run. Sony chose incompatibility; they chose poorly: I choose to abandon Sony.
Also, this will probably cut down on piracy big time
I highly doubt it, but again, it has become irrelevant to me: Sony intentionally did me a large financial injury, and I decline to do further business with them.
...they removed the drive from the PSP. After spending considerable $$$ on games on those tiny disks, they made them unreadable and unplayable on their new hotness... and that was the end of my relationship with them.
Any console manufacturer that tosses compatibility in the trash is saying "hey, feel absolutely free to take a look at all the competition and see if there's something better!" at the very same time you're steaming mad at them for turning your investment into a waste.
Before you make that claim, are you going to drink your own medicine and present us with some evidence?
Absence of evidence is key evidence of absence. There is precisely as much evidence for a "god or gods" as there is for the Easter Bunny or the healing power of pyramids -- none. This is after thousands of years and numerous concepts of god or gods, and after numerous controlled experiments. The conclusion to be drawn is the same: no such thing actually exists. On the other hand, if you have actual evidence, put it on the table: You're the one making a positive assertion for a presently evidence-free contention.
Have you conducted long-term studies that show that prayer is useless?
Seems like you have a bit of a double standard, don't you think?
No. Science does not require repeating experiments in order to discuss their results unless those results are in doubt -- and these aren't. Nor does it require supporting theory for baseless ideas. You are in the precise position of asking me to try to prove that the land of Oz, and its wizard, do not exist. What, do you imagine, would serve as evidence of this state of non-existence, other than a complete lack of evidence for such a thing, which I have already pointed to, and identified for you as a key indicator?
On the other hand, since you seem to be taking the position that Oz and the Wizard do exist in the face of this known lack of supporting evidence, I can certainly reasonably ask you to show me why you think I should take you seriously. I don't really expect a good answer, but it remains a good question.
Just code "Prince of Nigeria" for 1 bit and you've got (17*8==136):1 compression. Continue with that line of thinking... "expand your manhood", "Pass this along to a friend", "Dear beloved in Christ", etc.
Related anecdote: Way back when, as relatively innocent SW listeners, some friends and I thought it would be awesome to listen in on phone calls. They were all over; radiotelephone, on C-band satellite, etc. You just had to figure out where they were. Well, after about an hour of actual listening, we determined without a shadow of a doubt that exposing yourself to other people's phone calls seemed like a sure way to reduce your own intelligence by orders of magnitude. It was outright painful. Of course, now that cellphones are everywhere and exposing yourself to (half of) other people's phone calls is simply a matter of standing in line at Subway, we all know this.
But... compared to phone calls, general email is sure to be worse, judging by my spam folder and the ratio of spam to actual mail.
Of course, if you'd like to go down another step, Twitter has utterly worthless yuck in sets of up to 140 characters waiting to leave nasty little footprints all over your brain, lol...
And then there is the ultimate collection of drivel: Facebook.
Movie studios don't buy oxygen-free copper cables, yet they do not hesitate to buy flexible film editing solutions, even if they cost a bit more. I wonder why is that...
Digital film editing, until recently, was a separate category from digital video editing. So until recently, you'd have been moving the goalposts there. However, instead, the goalposts have moved out from under the film editing people, and they're going to find (or have already found) that video editors have well and thoroughly encroached upon their area of expertise. Because the difference, such as it is, was defined by resolution and bit depth, and nothing more. HD and modern computers have walked right across that bridge. My recent vintage desktop can edit film resolutions just fine.
And actually, there are quite a few Hollywood types that do buy into audiophile nonsense -- from the wholly imaginary superiority of tubes in hi-fi roles, to ridiculous cables, to silly LP worship (notable exceptions being when the specific recording isn't available on higher performance media, or has been compressed or otherwise compromised to what would otherwise be a much higher quality format), to whatever other fakery and foolery is the current fad.
Sometimes people simply trust the wrong advisors. For instance, let's say you have a 24-bit image, obtained from a good quality source. You have a need to adjust its basic contrast, brightness, exposure. There are those out there that will point you to Photoshop and insist that such is the only right answer. But in fact, you can make these adjustments just as well, and for free, with the GIMP. Having bought Photoshop on what is really not very good advice (presuming the above was your only need), you are now in possession of a very powerful tool you have little use for. Likewise, there are people out there who will hand you an amazingly detailed series of (wholly incorrect) justifications for tube amps "over" semiconductor designs for hi-fi reproduction (not talking about musical amps used in distortion regimes -- that's something else entirely.) You'll pay more, and you'll get less, than you could have if you knew what you were doing, or, if your advisor knew what they were doing (or wasn't trying to swindle you.) That's the way of the world. None of which changes the fact that commodity items sold at rarified price levels generally aren't justifiable when the smoke clears.
You do not realize just how many markets you're writing off here. At the niche levels (e.g. something highly specialized, and/or that meets regulatory requirements)...
We're talking about video editing software. I'm not writing off any "niche" markets. And as I indicated, 10k is possible if the software justifies it. Video editing software, however, is pretty much commodity stuff. Premiere. Final Cut. etc. Not to mention a whole slew of lesser known tools, all priced to undercut those two.
If you go back and read my post, you'll see that I'm not against 10k software; I'm just not behind the idea that video editing software can reasonably land in the category (or, for that matter, that crummy software would land there either -- hence my comments about usability, reliability and so on.)
I'm not writing anything reasonable off. It's just that this case... simply isn't reasonable.
But hey, you're okay - at least you get your stuff for free, right? And there's no cost to anyone, because you wouldn't have bought it in any case. Screw this guy if he goes bankrupt...
Speak for yourself. I've been writing commercial software for decades. There are exactly zero copies of stolen software on any machine in my house, and likewise, in my business. There are zero copies of stolen music; zero copies of stolen videos, dvds, bds... I've never even returned a library book late. I grew up the son of an author and a literary agent, currently own that literary agency, and I have thoroughly respected intellectual property since before most people here were even born. IMHO, a solid appreciation of the value of IP is the basis for one of the most sound underpinnings of a healthy society -- and it's really too damned bad that recent generations have lost that appreciation, generally speaking.
HOWEVER, that doesn't mean that IP that is overpriced ($10k video editing software, lol) is worthy of the price being asked. It just means I won't buy it unless I'm absolutely cornered. There is zero chance that I would steal it. And yes, it's stealing, despite the protestations to the contrary of the entitlement-bewildered children around here. As far as I'm concerned, the only IP that anyone is entitled to for free is IP the authors willingly made available for free.
There is video enhancement software - not editing - for dealing with surveilance video that the starting price is $50,000.
LOL... yes, and there are wooden knobs that sell for hundreds of dollars that "enhance" your audio, too. As PT Barnum said, there's a sucker born every minute.
For free or under $100, you can do noise reduction and clarification by image stacking. You can warp and you can morph standard likenesses, and you can do aging estimation. You can apply all manner of noise reduction algorithms and tricks. You can add and remove hair. You can change color; remove objects; focus stack; do image subtraction of geometrically aligned fields to locate motion in otherwise complex and initially unmatched images, even when those fields are ultra high resolution. You can develop an excellent 3D pan around a subject's face where you only have a few 2D frames to work with. You can use window and level to slide a high contrast region through the (otherwise) normal contrast range and spot tiny variations in contrast that indicate anything from broken bones and tumors in xrays to the fact that the subject is wearing underwear. You can selectively illuminate dark corners, pull detail out of shadows and highlights, geometrically normalize images in nonlinear reflections such as a car bumper or someone's sunglasses (though you'd better have a high resolution source, or your result will be made from too few pixels to be very useful), You can identify and track faces, you can apply any of the above *to* video so that the effects and actions themselves track; and of course, every "standard" effect such as myriad ways to sharpen, blur, remove isolated pixel / streak / chunk, luma-tracking blurring, dejitter, bring many basic layer modes (70+) and channel controls into play as required... and, of course, much more. Image enhancement has been within reach of the wallet of just about anyone for many years.
Although I retired in 2011, I wrote this stuff (yes, everything I mentioned above) for a living for decades. For more than a few of those things I mentioned above, my company was the first to market, sometimes by years. So I do actually know what I'm talking about.
$50k is not a reasonable price for image enhancement software. Period. Not these days.
Which is not to say that PT Barnum didn't have it exactly right. I'm sure there *is* $50k image enhancement software, somewhere. That's not even surprising. Wooden knobs adding audio warmth and all that. What is surprising is that there would be buyers.
Specialized software can be very expensive especially when there is no alternative around.
Yes, and as I said, if it was fabulous and specifically addressed a need I couldn't address any other way, then sure, but this is video editing software. There is FInal Cut. There is Premiere. There are other lesser known and very inexpensive options. You could buy a Macpro AND several kinds of video AND audio editing software for $10k, and still have enough left over for a night with a high-end escort. We're not talking about the custom software that keeps the B2 bomber stable, or a specialized chemical plant controller here. It's just.... video editing software.
If I were to pay 10k for software, it had damned certain better not need support -- ever. It had better have the best built in help, the most obvious and intuitive of interfaces, be fast, crash free, and immensely useful. And that's all stuff it would have to demonstrate BEFORE anyone could get me to pay for it. Not that such conditions would stop most others from stealing it outright.
A $10k price for "video editing software" is like a 10k price for "word processing software." It just isn't going to work out.
The legislation they just passed for drones says that they must stay *under* a 400 foot limit. I don't think it's in force yet, there is FAA implementation time allowed for, but that's at least the way they're thinking about it -- keeping the drones out of the pilot's way rather than sharing the space. At this point things seem to be unregulated, the whole thing with these little copters is treated as "hobby."
But you offered no evidence that UC capacity will ever be cheaper or smaller than batteries
Sure I did. I pointed to the rising curves of UC capacity. You didn't follow up, that's all.
I don't accept your terms.
That's ok, you're entitled to your opinion. You're just not entitled to your own facts.
First of all, what's the time frame on these cheaper-than-battery UCs?
Other than "in the future", I made no assertion there; nor do I see that one is required to support anything I described.
Secondly, even assuming they are someday cheaper than batteries, that doesn't mean they are cheaper than gas storage
Yeah, it pretty much does. Also, as I said before, this doesn't get solved at the national level, it gets solved at the application level. UCs are modular, scalable solutions (very much like batteries), and very much unlike gas storage designs.
$1000 per capita still seems like a huge extra cost
You have no sense of perspective. People spend more than that in a year on normal billing (some even spend it in a couple of months.) As a one-time cost for a power system component with a MTBF lifetime greater than the owner's, it's nothing.
that would be spent just to reduce storage losses and/or to avoid building nuclear plants
No. That's not what they're used for at all. They're used like batteries, to time-shift energy availability from time generated to time needed. Solar power and wind power are available on nature's timetable; but that's not when we generally need the power. UCs (and batteries) are used specifically to provide the time (and sometimes location, in the case of vehicles) shift required. Even big plants (nuke, coal, whatever) aren't used efficiently because its capacity at low-load times is wasted; with storage at the other end of grid, UCs could be charged in low-load periods, and discharged during high-load periods, thus balancing the load more evenly and leading to considerably more efficient generation of power with the same usage patterns. Same thing applies in a current-technology car; at the time the car is generating electricity, it doesn't need to start; the battery time shifts that energy so it is available to start the car when the car isn't generating power. For EVs, ideally, the UCs (or batteries) would charge in the evening when the grid load is otherwise low, and then the energy is spent from the UC during the day, when the grid is more heavily loaded. So there we have both portability and time shifting.
Plus, what reason is there to think UCs' energy density will get anywhere near that of compressed hydrogen?
That's not the pivot upon which this turns, any more than the amount of energy available from a chunk of fissioning uranium compared to an ultracap storing electrons is the pivot. The issues are adequacy to the job (no need to store gigawatts for a single home, you see), cost, reliability, size, repair-ability, distributivity, mass production compatibility, power conversion simplicity, aggregate safety issues, weight, speed of charge and speed of discharge... all these things come together and they point straight at UCs as the best of all worlds. Given that capacity rises to the required levels, as I originally stated.
Slashdot Mirror
My investment in games - many dollars - won't run on this new hardware. the injury isn't financial in the sense of todays dollars, it is in curtailing benefits from money already spent. They didn't have to do that; they did anyway; so I walk away, which I also didn't have to do. :)
Perhaps you don't understand what a straw man is. Because the actual fad, as it were, is to stand them up as if they were relevant arguments, when in fact they are not. In this case, I never said that Sony affected my finances; the straw argument entered into an ad homonym attack based on a strawman's assertion that I had. What I actually said was that my investment in game software was affected, which of course it was. Pretty straightforward stuff for slashdot. Rather than bother with a rebuttal to an attack against something I didn't say, I just pointed out the childish nature of the attack. Don't feed the trolls and all that.
No need to thank me, glad to help you out with basic 'net info.
I was saying they haven't caught up to where they were when they released the earlier machines, is what I was saying. Nice try, though. :)
Completely wrong. If the new hardware ran our existing games, three things would happen. First, I'd buy the new hardware. Second, I'd continue to buy new games on UMD, as the format would not be dead. Third, new games would continue to come out on UMD, further extending the whole cycle.
But this isn't what happened... so I neither buy new games, thus funneling royalties to them, or new hardware from them.
"Held up"? You mean, interested? Regardless, the one doesn't follow from the other. All my time is free time; I'm retired, well off, and spend the vast majority of my day pursuing one form or another of elective activity. Which activities I choose are wide open to attempts to retrieve me as a consumer, as I have both the funds and the time to invest. I do things like buy machines for the immediate family and the grandkids too. Consequently everyone has iPads, etc.
When a company abandons compatibility, they leave me open to choose any nextgen system, as there's no particular reason to stick with them (and there is also the fact that they have annoyed me.) So I'll probably pick something new and shiny from someone else, and now my money is going elsewhere. They decided it wasn't worth keeping me, which is fine -- they can do that. But I can also wander off, and there isn't a darned thing they can do about that, either.
Personally, I'm looking forward to the next real game changers. Some that might qualify would be real AI and robots, ultracaps capable of replacing batteries, political landscape shifts such as the adoption of the idea that the communications infrastructure is as important as, and for the same reasons, as the transport infrastructure with associated rights of passage and removal from commercial interests, just as private toll roads are almost unknown today, a space elevator or other means of inexpensive space travel, a confluence of insulation, local power generation, and storage to free the "average" home and vehicle from the power grid and oil interests, real 3d display technology... web innovations are rarely, at least recently, of a great deal of interest to me. Maybe it's just me, though.
Well, then they're 100% good to go. Wait, no they aren't.
It wasn't luck. It was an advertised feature of the initial run of consoles, and it is *why* I bought the PS3. In retrospect, that and the ability to play Blurays are its main value to me. None of the PS3 games has really tripped my trigger the way some of the PS2 games did -- The original Maximo, The first Crash Bandicoot, SSX... So far, of the games I've tried, they're really pretty but they're short on gameplay and long on useless crap like "cinema sequences." Meh.
Lol. Stay away from Vegas. I'm 55.
Hmmm. Not sure that my at least somewhat thoughtful buying choices have "spoiled" me. It more spoils any chance of me giving more money to Sony and Microsoft. Now they face the iPad; and so far, it's been backwards compatible as well. Interesting choice, isn't it? And yes, assuming the iPad3 keeps up with that tradition, I'll be getting one of those, too. Now, if Apple were to break all my apps with the iPad3, I wouldn't buy... but you know, Apple isn't stupid, so I don't think that's going to happen. But... maybe the iPad3 will be "all-new" and have its own special app store and.... nah. :)
Yeah, they lied about that -- the claim was made that it would be backwards compatible, and they simply failed to honor the claim. Worst (for me) is that the 360 doesn't play the game I'm most often interested in playing -- Mechassault -- so an original XBox remains crowbarred into my theater system. It'll be a sad day if that can't be replaced when it dies.
I'm not interested in hacked devices or illegal emulations. I don't steal, and I don't run flaming down the nearest antisocial path when I don't get my way. What I see in the device is simply gameplay that I enjoy. As a consumer, I vote with my wallet. No more, no less.
You enjoying playing with your straw man?
Boy, are you confused. First of all, I might indeed buy a used PSP, but that does absolutely nothing for Sony -- they earn no income from it. Only the previous PSP owner receives my money. I'm certainly not going to buy any more UMD's -- the format is dying on the vine and the number of machines that can run them drops by the day, specifically thanks to Sony. Again, no income for Sony. Most importantly, if Sony had made the new machine UMD-capable and game-compatible, I'd have bought it no question. When it comes time to buy a NEW machine, it'll be from someone else, because Sony has lost my trust. And I should point out that the reason that they had my trust in the first place was that my PS2 ran my PS1 games, and my PS3 ran my PS2 games. It seemed that they understood the issue. And yes, I bought all three machines, though only the PS2 and PS3 are setup in the home (no need for a PS1, you see, though we still can, and still do, play the games.)
So no. Sony made the wrong decision. In every way.
I put money into the PSP (several for the family), but I put far more money into UMD games. That money returns entertainment for all of us. It would return entertainment for much longer if compatibility were in place. However, the moment the PSP is replaced with an incompatible system, the entertainment value of that money drops to zero.
That is the sense in which I mean "investment" here.
When I have to replace the PSPs, since I no longer have compatibility concerns about the UMD (and therefore PSP) investment, my choice can be made even-handedly between Sony and anyone else, or no one else -- because my previous spending no longer has any leverage on my choice. And we can add to this a great dissatisfaction with Sony, so the odds are strongly against my choosing anything they might have to offer.
Perhaps it'll be easier to understand if I change context:
What if I bought a camera, and then a bunch of lenses for it. Then the camera manufacturer decided to make a replacement camera body, but that body couldn't use the lenses I'd purchased. First of all, the money I spent on the lenses... won't help me with the new body. At all. Second, I'm annoyed with the camera manufacturer. Third, when it comes time to choose a new camera because my original body no longer suffices for some reason, the lenses no longer figure in -- my investment (there it is again) in lenses has no positive leverage on my thinking, they can no longer work, so I am free to choose a camera without concern for compatibility, and you can be pretty sure it won't be the same camera manufacturer.
As far as I know, the results of that effort are that they have the most OS's in place; the most commonly used office suite; and that software I compiled back in 1995 still runs fine, delivering me results without further work. Mind you, I'm running XP in a VM on my Mac now, but I *am* running XP, and I purchased it legitimately. Specifically because it still works.
So if you were being snarky... fail. And I'm primarily a Mac user.
Well, that would be an additional mistake by Sony; because, as I said, since their choices obsolete my investment, my choice is to wander off elsewhere.
Oh, I do. Bought and paid for. But when it croaks, as it inevitably will, it won't be replaced by a Sony device, you see.
I don't care. What I care about is that I have all these games that won't run. Sony chose incompatibility; they chose poorly: I choose to abandon Sony.
I highly doubt it, but again, it has become irrelevant to me: Sony intentionally did me a large financial injury, and I decline to do further business with them.
Any console manufacturer that tosses compatibility in the trash is saying "hey, feel absolutely free to take a look at all the competition and see if there's something better!" at the very same time you're steaming mad at them for turning your investment into a waste.
Did you get the optional ring with Klingon ornaments?
Absence of evidence is key evidence of absence. There is precisely as much evidence for a "god or gods" as there is for the Easter Bunny or the healing power of pyramids -- none. This is after thousands of years and numerous concepts of god or gods, and after numerous controlled experiments. The conclusion to be drawn is the same: no such thing actually exists. On the other hand, if you have actual evidence, put it on the table: You're the one making a positive assertion for a presently evidence-free contention.
There's no need for me to repeat those studies; there have been a number of good ones, and all have returned the same result. Here is some discussion of recent results for you.
No. Science does not require repeating experiments in order to discuss their results unless those results are in doubt -- and these aren't. Nor does it require supporting theory for baseless ideas. You are in the precise position of asking me to try to prove that the land of Oz, and its wizard, do not exist. What, do you imagine, would serve as evidence of this state of non-existence, other than a complete lack of evidence for such a thing, which I have already pointed to, and identified for you as a key indicator?
On the other hand, since you seem to be taking the position that Oz and the Wizard do exist in the face of this known lack of supporting evidence, I can certainly reasonably ask you to show me why you think I should take you seriously. I don't really expect a good answer, but it remains a good question.
Just code "Prince of Nigeria" for 1 bit and you've got (17*8==136):1 compression. Continue with that line of thinking... "expand your manhood", "Pass this along to a friend", "Dear beloved in Christ", etc.
Related anecdote: Way back when, as relatively innocent SW listeners, some friends and I thought it would be awesome to listen in on phone calls. They were all over; radiotelephone, on C-band satellite, etc. You just had to figure out where they were. Well, after about an hour of actual listening, we determined without a shadow of a doubt that exposing yourself to other people's phone calls seemed like a sure way to reduce your own intelligence by orders of magnitude. It was outright painful. Of course, now that cellphones are everywhere and exposing yourself to (half of) other people's phone calls is simply a matter of standing in line at Subway, we all know this.
But... compared to phone calls, general email is sure to be worse, judging by my spam folder and the ratio of spam to actual mail.
Of course, if you'd like to go down another step, Twitter has utterly worthless yuck in sets of up to 140 characters waiting to leave nasty little footprints all over your brain, lol...
And then there is the ultimate collection of drivel: Facebook.
Digital film editing, until recently, was a separate category from digital video editing. So until recently, you'd have been moving the goalposts there. However, instead, the goalposts have moved out from under the film editing people, and they're going to find (or have already found) that video editors have well and thoroughly encroached upon their area of expertise. Because the difference, such as it is, was defined by resolution and bit depth, and nothing more. HD and modern computers have walked right across that bridge. My recent vintage desktop can edit film resolutions just fine.
And actually, there are quite a few Hollywood types that do buy into audiophile nonsense -- from the wholly imaginary superiority of tubes in hi-fi roles, to ridiculous cables, to silly LP worship (notable exceptions being when the specific recording isn't available on higher performance media, or has been compressed or otherwise compromised to what would otherwise be a much higher quality format), to whatever other fakery and foolery is the current fad.
Sometimes people simply trust the wrong advisors. For instance, let's say you have a 24-bit image, obtained from a good quality source. You have a need to adjust its basic contrast, brightness, exposure. There are those out there that will point you to Photoshop and insist that such is the only right answer. But in fact, you can make these adjustments just as well, and for free, with the GIMP. Having bought Photoshop on what is really not very good advice (presuming the above was your only need), you are now in possession of a very powerful tool you have little use for. Likewise, there are people out there who will hand you an amazingly detailed series of (wholly incorrect) justifications for tube amps "over" semiconductor designs for hi-fi reproduction (not talking about musical amps used in distortion regimes -- that's something else entirely.) You'll pay more, and you'll get less, than you could have if you knew what you were doing, or, if your advisor knew what they were doing (or wasn't trying to swindle you.) That's the way of the world. None of which changes the fact that commodity items sold at rarified price levels generally aren't justifiable when the smoke clears.
So do oxygen-free copper cables to "audiophiles." Nuff said.
We're talking about video editing software. I'm not writing off any "niche" markets. And as I indicated, 10k is possible if the software justifies it. Video editing software, however, is pretty much commodity stuff. Premiere. Final Cut. etc. Not to mention a whole slew of lesser known tools, all priced to undercut those two.
If you go back and read my post, you'll see that I'm not against 10k software; I'm just not behind the idea that video editing software can reasonably land in the category (or, for that matter, that crummy software would land there either -- hence my comments about usability, reliability and so on.)
I'm not writing anything reasonable off. It's just that this case... simply isn't reasonable.
Speak for yourself. I've been writing commercial software for decades. There are exactly zero copies of stolen software on any machine in my house, and likewise, in my business. There are zero copies of stolen music; zero copies of stolen videos, dvds, bds... I've never even returned a library book late. I grew up the son of an author and a literary agent, currently own that literary agency, and I have thoroughly respected intellectual property since before most people here were even born. IMHO, a solid appreciation of the value of IP is the basis for one of the most sound underpinnings of a healthy society -- and it's really too damned bad that recent generations have lost that appreciation, generally speaking.
HOWEVER, that doesn't mean that IP that is overpriced ($10k video editing software, lol) is worthy of the price being asked. It just means I won't buy it unless I'm absolutely cornered. There is zero chance that I would steal it. And yes, it's stealing, despite the protestations to the contrary of the entitlement-bewildered children around here. As far as I'm concerned, the only IP that anyone is entitled to for free is IP the authors willingly made available for free.
LOL... yes, and there are wooden knobs that sell for hundreds of dollars that "enhance" your audio, too. As PT Barnum said, there's a sucker born every minute.
For free or under $100, you can do noise reduction and clarification by image stacking. You can warp and you can morph standard likenesses, and you can do aging estimation. You can apply all manner of noise reduction algorithms and tricks. You can add and remove hair. You can change color; remove objects; focus stack; do image subtraction of geometrically aligned fields to locate motion in otherwise complex and initially unmatched images, even when those fields are ultra high resolution. You can develop an excellent 3D pan around a subject's face where you only have a few 2D frames to work with. You can use window and level to slide a high contrast region through the (otherwise) normal contrast range and spot tiny variations in contrast that indicate anything from broken bones and tumors in xrays to the fact that the subject is wearing underwear. You can selectively illuminate dark corners, pull detail out of shadows and highlights, geometrically normalize images in nonlinear reflections such as a car bumper or someone's sunglasses (though you'd better have a high resolution source, or your result will be made from too few pixels to be very useful), You can identify and track faces, you can apply any of the above *to* video so that the effects and actions themselves track; and of course, every "standard" effect such as myriad ways to sharpen, blur, remove isolated pixel / streak / chunk, luma-tracking blurring, dejitter, bring many basic layer modes (70+) and channel controls into play as required... and, of course, much more. Image enhancement has been within reach of the wallet of just about anyone for many years.
Although I retired in 2011, I wrote this stuff (yes, everything I mentioned above) for a living for decades. For more than a few of those things I mentioned above, my company was the first to market, sometimes by years. So I do actually know what I'm talking about.
$50k is not a reasonable price for image enhancement software. Period. Not these days.
Which is not to say that PT Barnum didn't have it exactly right. I'm sure there *is* $50k image enhancement software, somewhere. That's not even surprising. Wooden knobs adding audio warmth and all that. What is surprising is that there would be buyers.
And this compares with video editing software... how?
Yes, and as I said, if it was fabulous and specifically addressed a need I couldn't address any other way, then sure, but this is video editing software. There is FInal Cut. There is Premiere. There are other lesser known and very inexpensive options. You could buy a Macpro AND several kinds of video AND audio editing software for $10k, and still have enough left over for a night with a high-end escort. We're not talking about the custom software that keeps the B2 bomber stable, or a specialized chemical plant controller here. It's just.... video editing software.
If I were to pay 10k for software, it had damned certain better not need support -- ever. It had better have the best built in help, the most obvious and intuitive of interfaces, be fast, crash free, and immensely useful. And that's all stuff it would have to demonstrate BEFORE anyone could get me to pay for it. Not that such conditions would stop most others from stealing it outright.
A $10k price for "video editing software" is like a 10k price for "word processing software." It just isn't going to work out.
The legislation they just passed for drones says that they must stay *under* a 400 foot limit. I don't think it's in force yet, there is FAA implementation time allowed for, but that's at least the way they're thinking about it -- keeping the drones out of the pilot's way rather than sharing the space. At this point things seem to be unregulated, the whole thing with these little copters is treated as "hobby."
Mmmm-hmmm. And you don't know what a PAL is. Clearly, your military experience was... other.
Sure I did. I pointed to the rising curves of UC capacity. You didn't follow up, that's all.
That's ok, you're entitled to your opinion. You're just not entitled to your own facts.
Other than "in the future", I made no assertion there; nor do I see that one is required to support anything I described.
Yeah, it pretty much does. Also, as I said before, this doesn't get solved at the national level, it gets solved at the application level. UCs are modular, scalable solutions (very much like batteries), and very much unlike gas storage designs.
You have no sense of perspective. People spend more than that in a year on normal billing (some even spend it in a couple of months.) As a one-time cost for a power system component with a MTBF lifetime greater than the owner's, it's nothing.
No. That's not what they're used for at all. They're used like batteries, to time-shift energy availability from time generated to time needed. Solar power and wind power are available on nature's timetable; but that's not when we generally need the power. UCs (and batteries) are used specifically to provide the time (and sometimes location, in the case of vehicles) shift required. Even big plants (nuke, coal, whatever) aren't used efficiently because its capacity at low-load times is wasted; with storage at the other end of grid, UCs could be charged in low-load periods, and discharged during high-load periods, thus balancing the load more evenly and leading to considerably more efficient generation of power with the same usage patterns. Same thing applies in a current-technology car; at the time the car is generating electricity, it doesn't need to start; the battery time shifts that energy so it is available to start the car when the car isn't generating power. For EVs, ideally, the UCs (or batteries) would charge in the evening when the grid load is otherwise low, and then the energy is spent from the UC during the day, when the grid is more heavily loaded. So there we have both portability and time shifting.
That's not the pivot upon which this turns, any more than the amount of energy available from a chunk of fissioning uranium compared to an ultracap storing electrons is the pivot. The issues are adequacy to the job (no need to store gigawatts for a single home, you see), cost, reliability, size, repair-ability, distributivity, mass production compatibility, power conversion simplicity, aggregate safety issues, weight, speed of charge and speed of discharge... all these things come together and they point straight at UCs as the best of all worlds. Given that capacity rises to the required levels, as I originally stated.