Crap. That last part was from an abandoned thought that would have gone in the paragraph above. I forgot to get rid of it. (You mean it's not enough to just hit the preview button, I actually have to read through what I wrote?!)
It's not a hassle, I completely understand. The problem is that I am so often asked to give up root privileges to programs--and this problem was pointed out quite a bit against Vista.
The problem, as pointed out against Vista, is that once you are in the habit of giving access all the time, you might as well be running as root.
As others have already mentioned, you're only giving up root access for programs that have to have administrative access, i.e., programs that modify the system in general for users other than the current user. If you're going to be running those programs, you should understand that you are modifying the system, and be willing to be responsible for that. The only software I'm aware in Ubuntu that requires sudo is the stuff that's actually for real administrative tasks, for managing the computer. Any actual applications for regular users should never require it.
For running graphical programs, there's gksu. From a command prompt, you can type "gksu synaptic" to get the gui sudo password login. For items that are either preinstalled, or ones you've installed yourself, they should have been smart enough to setup the shortcut as gksu {programname}. If they didn't, go to the System Menu -> Preferences -> Menu Layout. Then find the program you need in the list, right click on it and choose properties. Then you can change the shortcut so you never have to worry about it again... but like I said, you shouldn't have had to worry about it to begin with.
The thing that's different for Ubuntu than for Vista, is that Ubuntu doesn't make you explicitly accept mundane changes to your personal preferences or setup. It's only for system-wide things. And if you're installing software for the entire system, you'd better be willing to accept responsibility for it à la sudo. The default repositories for apt/synaptic can be considered reasonably safe (as well as apt and synaptic themselves), so it's alright to grant them access (if you can't trust the basic software from the install, then what can you trust?). When you add your own repos to the list, though, you take on the risk that they're not official, and could possibly have security problems... Which is a good reason to require sudo to add those repos, right?
The other thing about sudo is that not all users are able to use it. By default, only the first user created has that access. That means if you are an admin for a machine, you can save the sudo access for yourself, and leave other users without that... and that should be fine for most people's day-to-day computer usage. A regular user should be able to use the computer with it. It's only when you make changes to the system itself that that changes.
As far as users having to "fix Linux", as with any OS, if you don't like the default prefs, they're always changeable. Ubuntu provides ways to do that, and so do other distros.
I don't know that guy's parents, but thinking of my own parents, or my wife, they want to be able to use computers well, but they aren't in that world all the time. Most people who read slashdot know a lot about computers. We have taken them apart, upgraded them, built new ones. We've looked through the Windows Device Manager (or lspci). We know what all the different parts of a PC are, and how they interact with each other.
For everyone else, it's a magic black box. They know files are kept in there, and maybe that it has fans and gets hot. Oftentimes, they don't know that RAM is the working space for running programs, and that it's a lot faster to access RAM than the hard drive. They don't know the difference between IDE and SATA and SCSI, and they probably haven't even heard those words before. They know how to plug in an iPod, but only if their PC case has USB ports on the front.
Even when someone wants to learn, they'll get beaten down with marketing confusions like 1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes (why wouldn't that be true, as far as they know?), 3 Mb/s = 384kB/s, and 802.11a/b/g/n (these letters are assigned by standards bodies made up of engineers, not by marketing people). In the market for security products, customers really have to pay attention to realize that security by obscurity is very poor security (or worse than none at all in many cases), and even to be able to recognize when obscurity is even being used as the main form of security. The many different encryption algorithms available today are confusing at best (how are my parents supposed to remember that DES, not AES is the one that has been cracked). And then consider the fact that even a very secure algorithm like 256-bit AES can be completely worthless if it is not implemented very carefully. RC4, the algorithm used in the easy to crack WEP wireless encryption scheme, can actually be pretty secure, if it is implemented correctly, which it wasn't for WEP.
In TFA, Schneier points out that even he has a tough time telling if if some of these products are implemented well or not. Computer security is a very complex subject.
"Is that a thumbprint reader? That must be secure, I saw one in a high-tech spy movie in the 80's!" Movies and TV don't help, either.
My Toshiba laptop's DVD drive seems to have a hard time reading disks burned on my desktop under Windows... I've run into the problem while trying to do Linux installs... I'll get part way through the install, then it chokes. Start over and it chokes at a different spot. If I burn the discs under linux on that laptop (using the Nautilus burner in Gnome), they work fine.
Although, interestingly, I tried to make an.iso image of a music CD on that laptop, and the image was bad. I think the drive has some issues.
I'm not anti-gun trolling here, just asking a question... are there any of these killing spree situations that have been stopped by a citizen with a gun in the right place at the right time? What implications are there when armed citizens and police are all in the situation together... does that cause confusion for the police as to who the real criminals are? Are there any specific examples of armed citizens making the situation worse or better?
I'd just like to know... I have seen situations (not these spree-killings) where citizens with concealed carry permits take things into their own hands and potentially endanger a lot of people. I'd be interested in taking the CCP course just to find out what is involved in getting a permit, even though I don't have any plans to ever carry.
I know that here in Utah when the Trolley Square shooting happened back in February, people were saying things would have been better if more people would have been carrying handguns. I'm not sure if that's true or not. My brother-in-law was going to stop by there on his way home from work that day, he would have been near some of the stores where most of the shooting happened, and it would have been close to the same time. It's scary to think that something like this could happen at any random time and at any random place.
On the main Floola page I linked to above, if you scroll down to the "Latest Changes" section, the first item is "huge copy speedup", so it sounds like they've fixed whatever was giving you grief in the latest version... hopefully.
Making Grandma update the firmware on a DVD player just to make it take two minutes longer for a pirate to copy a DVD is stupid.
As many others have said, blocking legitimate users while failing to prevent piracy is incredibly stupid. Also, having to update firmware on a DVD player is incredibly stupid. They're just supposed to work. No updates, no installing software, it's just a magic black box that plays stuff. At the very least they should never have instituted a new anti-piracy program without first testing on a wide range of players, and they should have waited to release these "protected" discs until they had firmware updates for their own players (I don't care if they're different branches of a huge company... if they can't communicate for things like this, they are broken). And the firmware updates should be included on the DVDs that require them, so that they can be installed transparently and without any extra input from the user.
That still doesn't fix the problem for the other manufacturers' players.
When you think about it, though, it does seem very odd that they would invest in a new "anti-piracy" tech so late in the game for DVDs. Especially considering how awful their attempts at CD DRM went. It leads me to believe that maybe their not trying to protect DVD content, but make it seem like to consumers as if there is incompatibility in the DVD world, so we should all update to the new awesome Sony Blu-Ray world, where nothing is ever incompatible, and the sky is always blu, and everything is always perfect. And if that's the case, it's still incredibly stupid.
There are other apps that can transfer music and video to the iPod. I like Floola which can run on Windows, Mac and Linux, and you can keep the binaries on the iPod itself in disk mode, so I can easily copy whatever I want to and from my iPod, from any computer. It will also update the podcasts on the iPod directly (as opposed to iTunes, which updates the podcasts in your library on the computer, then syncs with the iPod to update it).
Why does making it work with iTunes preclude it showing up as a storage volume?
It doesn't. You can have your iPod show up as a storage volume. That's an option. You still can't copy songs to it and have them play on the iPod, but you can get other files on and off the iPod, and you can copy your whole library back off of your iPod.
Some applications, like Floola let you copy songs and videos to and from your iPod without using iTunes (under Win/Mac/Linux), so you're really only tied into iTunes if you want to buy and transfer songs and videos from the iTunes store.
The way I understand it, the movie studios have "promised" not to use that against us for a few more years yet. Not that I believe that promise, but if any discs were already out that make use of it, there would have already been a huge outcry here on slashdot about it.
The XBox 360 can play HD-DVD movies through the add-on drive, and it doesn't even have HDMI, much less support for HDCP. It plays HD-DVD movies just fine(*) through the component connections.
So what discs wouldn't it play again?
(*) Of course, people have reported problems with a few discs, but the same can be said for Blu-Ray and even early DVD releases.
Re:how about the capacity to use OSS to play it ba
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Apple to Offer MGM Movies
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QuickTime will play it, but his question was about OSS software, VLC specifically. Non-Apple software can't play Apple-DRM'ed videos. VLC knows how long the video is, and pretends to play it, but there's no video or audio, just a moving progress bar.
On a related note, was anyone else bothered by Steve Jobs' explanation of why there won't be non-DRM'd movies from the iTunes store? He said that with music, 90% of it is already sold without DRM (i.e., CDs), but that with movies, those are usually sold with DRM. I'm presuming that the DRM he was thinking of was CSS. But CSS only requires that the manufacturer of the DVD player acquire a CSS license. It doesn't require the user to do anything, and it doesn't differentiate between different DVD players. When I play an iTMS music file in iTunes, the software knows which of the 5 authorized computers (authorized via my iTunes account) I'm using to listen to that song. When I play a DVD on my computer, or on my DVD player, there's nothing to check to see who bought the DVD, or if the hardware/software playing the DVD has been linked to my account. That would be DRM. DVDs do not use DRM. They use a weak form of encryption.
And music is not different from DVDs in that regard... I'm sure if the first publishers of CDs would have forseen the future of digital music, with mp3s and CD burners, they would have created a CSS-like system for CDs, too.
You don't really have to look for it. The scheduled releases are (almost) always every 6 months... in either April or October.The only exception I know of has been dapper... which got delayed until June of 2006. But edgy picked back up on the October release schedule. (The 6 month schedule is based on the Gnome release schedule).
That is a good point, and I have had VLC installed on that PC for a little while now... I haven't tried it with DVDs, but even VLC stutters when playing video recorded by my mythbox (using a Hauppage 150 hardware MPEG2 encoder, which should be pretty similar to playing a DVD), and even playing at half resolution. And, for the record, there's now 512 MB of RAM in that P3/600.
Re:It's not about the customers
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Actually, I thought about the Apple TV when I was posting that. It's almost there. Although according to Paul Thurrott, it runs quite hot. I don't really know myself, as I haven't ever seen one running. Of course, he is a big time MS shill, so he can't really be trusted all that much. Can anybody confirm how hot/cool the Apple TV runs?
Re:Why do this?
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AMD's New DRM
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Customers aren't going to be really aware of any problems. Try reading the article summary to you mother or your sister, or some non-techie friend. They'll say "Wha? Huh? What are you talking aboout?" Then explain it to them in terms of how it limits what they can do with media. At least half of them will probably say "Why would I want to do that?".
Now take away the explanations, and tell them that AMD is coming out with some super awesome new AMD MegaLIVE!++ media PC that will automagically buy and download every movie and TV show they ever wanted to watch, and will let them listen to music and watch movies everywhere they go, and it will cure cancer, stop global warming, end our dependence on foreign oil, and bring about world peace. They'll say "That sounds cool, I don't really need it, but if it could be included in the next computer I was going to buy anyway, maybe I'd like that.
The marketing hype isn't going to mention the drawbacks, and it will be louder than any outcry from pissed-off Slashdot-reading customers.
It's not about the customers
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Oh, totally, but my point was what's the business benefit for them to develop this. Their customers by and large are either indifferent or don't want it, AMD aren't a content producer...
I think it's fairly obvious that it's about AMD Live! versus Intel's Viiv. Each of those two brands is trying to be the ultimate living room multimedia PC. I think that customers haven't really caught on (why would we... who needs an expensive fully decked-out hot and noisy desktop PC masquerading as a media appliance in their living room?), but they seem convinced that this is where the market is going with or without the consumer. I think the whole media center PC has very little thought for the customer, and this AMD DRM issue highlights that very well.
It's funny how Vista is being hailed as the future for the media PC... I used to be able to watch DVDs perfectly well on my P3 (600MHz, 128 MB RAM) back when it was running Windows 98. But a few years ago I "upgraded" to XP, and now it won't play the same DVDs. It has a very hard time with most video content. But MS (along with AMD and Intel) wants us to believe that we need the next super-shiny version of their software, which gets less and less efficient with each release, in order to keep up with the time and have the media experience of the future. Sure, HD content requires more horsepower to decode and display, but if they didn't keep fattening up the OS, and the player software, and the whole Media Center environment, it wouldn't need that much more horweposer. From my experience, my 2.6Ghz P4 with 2GB of RAM can't even play videos in the Vista Media Center at all. Any PC related living room media devices should be small, quiet, run cool, and be inexpensive, and not have lots of bright lights. But of course all the hardware manufacturers want to push the latest hot, fast hardware... because it's the fastest. They want your attention to be drawn to the PC so you know how cool it is. Lame.
So to make a long story short, AMD, Intel, Microsoft, and all the rest want to cram the media experience down our throats... This seems to me like it's the equivalent of Circuit City's DIVX, only the players involved are much bigger, and mostly working together to make an inescapable dragnet. They want to make their own brands successful (Win MCE, AMD Live! Viiv), and they know that the average consumer doesn't even know why he or she would care about Viiv or Live. So they want to make all PCs move in this direction, and if they can't get the consumers excited about it, they can at least get the content providers excited about it, so they don't have the same fate as DIVX.
IN 2007, everyone want 1080p,
In 2010 everyone and his sister will need 1080p.
768 lines, is so stupid !
That's the resolution on the current prototype. Within 3 years, I'm sure they'll get to higher resolutions. Besides, for a 21" screen, unless it's being used as a computer monitor, 1280x768 is a perfectly acceptable resolution. So settle down.
I think the lifetime figure indicates when the element reaches half of its original brightness. I'm sure there's some kind of a curve there, so the brightness would stay close to full brightness for most of the time, then start dropping off more significantly towards the end.
I always that that if these displays can be printed out in an inkjet-style process, the manufacturers could make replacement display sheets. When the color/brightness starts to look bad on your display, just take out the old OLED sheet and slide in the new one, so you won't have to replace the entire display with all of the electronics and everything.
It's been discovered, however, that in practically, the luminosity just isn't good enough on large displays. So these might have to have a backlight.
As others have already posted, it doesn't make sense to just put a backlight behind an already emissive display. But also, I did see a 15" prototype OLED screen in the Sanyo booth at CES 2003, and even 4 years ago, the screen looked bright, sharp, and was super-thin, with great contrast and color. If a 15" screen was able to look good on a 15" monitor 4 years ago, I'm sure brightness isn't going to be an issue for a laptop screens.
I'm also not sure how the brightness of the individual elements would be affected by the size of the screen... it's just more pixels, and each pixel would be powered independently, so as long as each pixel can draw the same amount of current at the same voltage when there's a lot of them as when there's just a few, the brightness should be the same. AFAIK, you'd just need a bigger power supply.
SED is kind of exciting because of the wide viewing angle, but otherwise OLED has to be the winner.
What indications are there that SED has a better viewing angle than OLED? My understanding was that OLED had about as ideal of a viewing angle as you can get, since the light is coming directly from the surface of the screen... But there may be some factors I'm not aware of. I just figured that SED and OLED would be the same or close to the same for that criterion.
I did see an OLED prototype screen once at CES 2003 (15" Sanyo, I believe). It was absolutely awesome, and incredibly thin. I would hope that lifetime problems can be resolved, because it promises to be an inexpensive technology... With the inkjet-style manufacturing, maybe the actual OLED part of the TV/display could be a cheap replacement sheet you could buy when the color starts to degrade.
It's fair in the sense that existing customers may get some extra time to find an alternate provider, but as I said, if they can't sign up new customers, it's not likely they can keep going for long, seeing as how they've never been profitable. Even if they do find a way to provide service without infringing, I think the damage is done. The confidence of the customers and of the shareholders is pretty badly shaken now. I don't seem them pulling out of it.
look at http://broadvoice.com/ pretty good service. their system is also quite open, you can byod as well.
They're one of the ones I was thinking of when I worried about other companies getting sued. It's always seemed competitive with Vonage, I would have considered them originally, but Vonage just seemed bigger and safer. Maybe it's time to reconsider... if they won't get sued, and if they can port my Vonage number.
I guess Boot Camp has just barely started supporting Vista, but how much of this could be due to dual-booting OSX and Vista on the same machine? Or from people that beta tested Vista? I tried out the beta, then installed a release copy of Vista on my work laptop, but then I switched back after a couple of months.
The judge gave Vonage two weeks to try to convince him to stay the injunction. Verizon (Charts) then suggested the judge allow Vonage to keep servicing its existing customers if a stay was necessary.
Verizon gets 5.5% royalties off of Vonage's sales, so it's probably just as well for them to keep squeezing some money out of them... it's the best of both worlds for Verizon... no new customers can sign up with Vonage, existing customers will leave Vonage, out of fear of it falling apart completely, and the existing customers that ride it out with Vonage to the end still make some money for Verizon.
The lawyer for Vonage said that "It's the difference of cutting off oxygen as opposed to the bullet in the head," and I think he's pretty much right... Vonage isn't profitable as it is. If they can't get more customers, I don't think they ever can be. Their stock is in the toilet, and existing customers like myself find themselves seriously considering other options. I don't think Vonage will be around much longer unless they can, by some miracle, work around the patents in question, and make a brilliant, hard-fought comeback. Even if they do find a workaround, Vonage's previously tarnished image is now looking downright awful. Not to mention the fact that other big players like AT&T and Comcast might find some different patents they can pull out to try to squeeze more money out of them.
It's been nice knowing you Vonage, but I don't think this relationship is going to work out between us. Bye.
Slashdot Mirror
Crap. That last part was from an abandoned thought that would have gone in the paragraph above. I forgot to get rid of it. (You mean it's not enough to just hit the preview button, I actually have to read through what I wrote?!)
As others have already mentioned, you're only giving up root access for programs that have to have administrative access, i.e., programs that modify the system in general for users other than the current user. If you're going to be running those programs, you should understand that you are modifying the system, and be willing to be responsible for that. The only software I'm aware in Ubuntu that requires sudo is the stuff that's actually for real administrative tasks, for managing the computer. Any actual applications for regular users should never require it.
For running graphical programs, there's gksu. From a command prompt, you can type "gksu synaptic" to get the gui sudo password login. For items that are either preinstalled, or ones you've installed yourself, they should have been smart enough to setup the shortcut as gksu {programname}. If they didn't, go to the System Menu -> Preferences -> Menu Layout. Then find the program you need in the list, right click on it and choose properties. Then you can change the shortcut so you never have to worry about it again... but like I said, you shouldn't have had to worry about it to begin with.
The thing that's different for Ubuntu than for Vista, is that Ubuntu doesn't make you explicitly accept mundane changes to your personal preferences or setup. It's only for system-wide things. And if you're installing software for the entire system, you'd better be willing to accept responsibility for it à la sudo. The default repositories for apt/synaptic can be considered reasonably safe (as well as apt and synaptic themselves), so it's alright to grant them access (if you can't trust the basic software from the install, then what can you trust?). When you add your own repos to the list, though, you take on the risk that they're not official, and could possibly have security problems... Which is a good reason to require sudo to add those repos, right?
The other thing about sudo is that not all users are able to use it. By default, only the first user created has that access. That means if you are an admin for a machine, you can save the sudo access for yourself, and leave other users without that... and that should be fine for most people's day-to-day computer usage. A regular user should be able to use the computer with it. It's only when you make changes to the system itself that that changes.
As far as users having to "fix Linux", as with any OS, if you don't like the default prefs, they're always changeable. Ubuntu provides ways to do that, and so do other distros.
I don't know that guy's parents, but thinking of my own parents, or my wife, they want to be able to use computers well, but they aren't in that world all the time. Most people who read slashdot know a lot about computers. We have taken them apart, upgraded them, built new ones. We've looked through the Windows Device Manager (or lspci). We know what all the different parts of a PC are, and how they interact with each other.
For everyone else, it's a magic black box. They know files are kept in there, and maybe that it has fans and gets hot. Oftentimes, they don't know that RAM is the working space for running programs, and that it's a lot faster to access RAM than the hard drive. They don't know the difference between IDE and SATA and SCSI, and they probably haven't even heard those words before. They know how to plug in an iPod, but only if their PC case has USB ports on the front.
Even when someone wants to learn, they'll get beaten down with marketing confusions like 1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes (why wouldn't that be true, as far as they know?), 3 Mb/s = 384kB/s, and 802.11a/b/g/n (these letters are assigned by standards bodies made up of engineers, not by marketing people). In the market for security products, customers really have to pay attention to realize that security by obscurity is very poor security (or worse than none at all in many cases), and even to be able to recognize when obscurity is even being used as the main form of security. The many different encryption algorithms available today are confusing at best (how are my parents supposed to remember that DES, not AES is the one that has been cracked). And then consider the fact that even a very secure algorithm like 256-bit AES can be completely worthless if it is not implemented very carefully. RC4, the algorithm used in the easy to crack WEP wireless encryption scheme, can actually be pretty secure, if it is implemented correctly, which it wasn't for WEP.
In TFA, Schneier points out that even he has a tough time telling if if some of these products are implemented well or not. Computer security is a very complex subject. "Is that a thumbprint reader? That must be secure, I saw one in a high-tech spy movie in the 80's!" Movies and TV don't help, either.
My Toshiba laptop's DVD drive seems to have a hard time reading disks burned on my desktop under Windows... I've run into the problem while trying to do Linux installs... I'll get part way through the install, then it chokes. Start over and it chokes at a different spot. If I burn the discs under linux on that laptop (using the Nautilus burner in Gnome), they work fine.
.iso image of a music CD on that laptop, and the image was bad. I think the drive has some issues.
Although, interestingly, I tried to make an
I'm not anti-gun trolling here, just asking a question... are there any of these killing spree situations that have been stopped by a citizen with a gun in the right place at the right time? What implications are there when armed citizens and police are all in the situation together... does that cause confusion for the police as to who the real criminals are? Are there any specific examples of armed citizens making the situation worse or better?
I'd just like to know... I have seen situations (not these spree-killings) where citizens with concealed carry permits take things into their own hands and potentially endanger a lot of people. I'd be interested in taking the CCP course just to find out what is involved in getting a permit, even though I don't have any plans to ever carry.
I know that here in Utah when the Trolley Square shooting happened back in February, people were saying things would have been better if more people would have been carrying handguns. I'm not sure if that's true or not. My brother-in-law was going to stop by there on his way home from work that day, he would have been near some of the stores where most of the shooting happened, and it would have been close to the same time. It's scary to think that something like this could happen at any random time and at any random place.
On the main Floola page I linked to above, if you scroll down to the "Latest Changes" section, the first item is "huge copy speedup", so it sounds like they've fixed whatever was giving you grief in the latest version... hopefully.
As many others have said, blocking legitimate users while failing to prevent piracy is incredibly stupid. Also, having to update firmware on a DVD player is incredibly stupid. They're just supposed to work. No updates, no installing software, it's just a magic black box that plays stuff. At the very least they should never have instituted a new anti-piracy program without first testing on a wide range of players, and they should have waited to release these "protected" discs until they had firmware updates for their own players (I don't care if they're different branches of a huge company... if they can't communicate for things like this, they are broken). And the firmware updates should be included on the DVDs that require them, so that they can be installed transparently and without any extra input from the user.
That still doesn't fix the problem for the other manufacturers' players.
When you think about it, though, it does seem very odd that they would invest in a new "anti-piracy" tech so late in the game for DVDs. Especially considering how awful their attempts at CD DRM went. It leads me to believe that maybe their not trying to protect DVD content, but make it seem like to consumers as if there is incompatibility in the DVD world, so we should all update to the new awesome Sony Blu-Ray world, where nothing is ever incompatible, and the sky is always blu, and everything is always perfect. And if that's the case, it's still incredibly stupid.
There are other apps that can transfer music and video to the iPod. I like Floola which can run on Windows, Mac and Linux, and you can keep the binaries on the iPod itself in disk mode, so I can easily copy whatever I want to and from my iPod, from any computer. It will also update the podcasts on the iPod directly (as opposed to iTunes, which updates the podcasts in your library on the computer, then syncs with the iPod to update it).
It doesn't. You can have your iPod show up as a storage volume. That's an option. You still can't copy songs to it and have them play on the iPod, but you can get other files on and off the iPod, and you can copy your whole library back off of your iPod.
Some applications, like Floola let you copy songs and videos to and from your iPod without using iTunes (under Win/Mac/Linux), so you're really only tied into iTunes if you want to buy and transfer songs and videos from the iTunes store.
How is that? Are you talking about the Image Constraint Token?
The way I understand it, the movie studios have "promised" not to use that against us for a few more years yet. Not that I believe that promise, but if any discs were already out that make use of it, there would have already been a huge outcry here on slashdot about it.
The XBox 360 can play HD-DVD movies through the add-on drive, and it doesn't even have HDMI, much less support for HDCP. It plays HD-DVD movies just fine(*) through the component connections.
So what discs wouldn't it play again?
(*) Of course, people have reported problems with a few discs, but the same can be said for Blu-Ray and even early DVD releases.
QuickTime will play it, but his question was about OSS software, VLC specifically. Non-Apple software can't play Apple-DRM'ed videos. VLC knows how long the video is, and pretends to play it, but there's no video or audio, just a moving progress bar.
On a related note, was anyone else bothered by Steve Jobs' explanation of why there won't be non-DRM'd movies from the iTunes store? He said that with music, 90% of it is already sold without DRM (i.e., CDs), but that with movies, those are usually sold with DRM. I'm presuming that the DRM he was thinking of was CSS. But CSS only requires that the manufacturer of the DVD player acquire a CSS license. It doesn't require the user to do anything, and it doesn't differentiate between different DVD players. When I play an iTMS music file in iTunes, the software knows which of the 5 authorized computers (authorized via my iTunes account) I'm using to listen to that song. When I play a DVD on my computer, or on my DVD player, there's nothing to check to see who bought the DVD, or if the hardware/software playing the DVD has been linked to my account. That would be DRM. DVDs do not use DRM. They use a weak form of encryption.
And music is not different from DVDs in that regard... I'm sure if the first publishers of CDs would have forseen the future of digital music, with mp3s and CD burners, they would have created a CSS-like system for CDs, too.
You don't really have to look for it. The scheduled releases are (almost) always every 6 months... in either April or October.The only exception I know of has been dapper... which got delayed until June of 2006. But edgy picked back up on the October release schedule. (The 6 month schedule is based on the Gnome release schedule).
That is a good point, and I have had VLC installed on that PC for a little while now... I haven't tried it with DVDs, but even VLC stutters when playing video recorded by my mythbox (using a Hauppage 150 hardware MPEG2 encoder, which should be pretty similar to playing a DVD), and even playing at half resolution. And, for the record, there's now 512 MB of RAM in that P3/600.
Actually, I thought about the Apple TV when I was posting that. It's almost there. Although according to Paul Thurrott, it runs quite hot. I don't really know myself, as I haven't ever seen one running. Of course, he is a big time MS shill, so he can't really be trusted all that much. Can anybody confirm how hot/cool the Apple TV runs?
Customers aren't going to be really aware of any problems. Try reading the article summary to you mother or your sister, or some non-techie friend. They'll say "Wha? Huh? What are you talking aboout?" Then explain it to them in terms of how it limits what they can do with media. At least half of them will probably say "Why would I want to do that?".
Now take away the explanations, and tell them that AMD is coming out with some super awesome new AMD MegaLIVE!++ media PC that will automagically buy and download every movie and TV show they ever wanted to watch, and will let them listen to music and watch movies everywhere they go, and it will cure cancer, stop global warming, end our dependence on foreign oil, and bring about world peace. They'll say "That sounds cool, I don't really need it, but if it could be included in the next computer I was going to buy anyway, maybe I'd like that.
The marketing hype isn't going to mention the drawbacks, and it will be louder than any outcry from pissed-off Slashdot-reading customers.
I think it's fairly obvious that it's about AMD Live! versus Intel's Viiv. Each of those two brands is trying to be the ultimate living room multimedia PC. I think that customers haven't really caught on (why would we... who needs an expensive fully decked-out hot and noisy desktop PC masquerading as a media appliance in their living room?), but they seem convinced that this is where the market is going with or without the consumer. I think the whole media center PC has very little thought for the customer, and this AMD DRM issue highlights that very well.
It's funny how Vista is being hailed as the future for the media PC... I used to be able to watch DVDs perfectly well on my P3 (600MHz, 128 MB RAM) back when it was running Windows 98. But a few years ago I "upgraded" to XP, and now it won't play the same DVDs. It has a very hard time with most video content. But MS (along with AMD and Intel) wants us to believe that we need the next super-shiny version of their software, which gets less and less efficient with each release, in order to keep up with the time and have the media experience of the future. Sure, HD content requires more horsepower to decode and display, but if they didn't keep fattening up the OS, and the player software, and the whole Media Center environment, it wouldn't need that much more horweposer. From my experience, my 2.6Ghz P4 with 2GB of RAM can't even play videos in the Vista Media Center at all. Any PC related living room media devices should be small, quiet, run cool, and be inexpensive, and not have lots of bright lights. But of course all the hardware manufacturers want to push the latest hot, fast hardware... because it's the fastest. They want your attention to be drawn to the PC so you know how cool it is. Lame.
So to make a long story short, AMD, Intel, Microsoft, and all the rest want to cram the media experience down our throats... This seems to me like it's the equivalent of Circuit City's DIVX, only the players involved are much bigger, and mostly working together to make an inescapable dragnet. They want to make their own brands successful (Win MCE, AMD Live! Viiv), and they know that the average consumer doesn't even know why he or she would care about Viiv or Live. So they want to make all PCs move in this direction, and if they can't get the consumers excited about it, they can at least get the content providers excited about it, so they don't have the same fate as DIVX.
That's the resolution on the current prototype. Within 3 years, I'm sure they'll get to higher resolutions. Besides, for a 21" screen, unless it's being used as a computer monitor, 1280x768 is a perfectly acceptable resolution. So settle down.
I think the lifetime figure indicates when the element reaches half of its original brightness. I'm sure there's some kind of a curve there, so the brightness would stay close to full brightness for most of the time, then start dropping off more significantly towards the end.
I always that that if these displays can be printed out in an inkjet-style process, the manufacturers could make replacement display sheets. When the color/brightness starts to look bad on your display, just take out the old OLED sheet and slide in the new one, so you won't have to replace the entire display with all of the electronics and everything.
As others have already posted, it doesn't make sense to just put a backlight behind an already emissive display. But also, I did see a 15" prototype OLED screen in the Sanyo booth at CES 2003, and even 4 years ago, the screen looked bright, sharp, and was super-thin, with great contrast and color. If a 15" screen was able to look good on a 15" monitor 4 years ago, I'm sure brightness isn't going to be an issue for a laptop screens.
I'm also not sure how the brightness of the individual elements would be affected by the size of the screen... it's just more pixels, and each pixel would be powered independently, so as long as each pixel can draw the same amount of current at the same voltage when there's a lot of them as when there's just a few, the brightness should be the same. AFAIK, you'd just need a bigger power supply.
What indications are there that SED has a better viewing angle than OLED? My understanding was that OLED had about as ideal of a viewing angle as you can get, since the light is coming directly from the surface of the screen... But there may be some factors I'm not aware of. I just figured that SED and OLED would be the same or close to the same for that criterion.
I did see an OLED prototype screen once at CES 2003 (15" Sanyo, I believe). It was absolutely awesome, and incredibly thin. I would hope that lifetime problems can be resolved, because it promises to be an inexpensive technology... With the inkjet-style manufacturing, maybe the actual OLED part of the TV/display could be a cheap replacement sheet you could buy when the color starts to degrade.
It's fair in the sense that existing customers may get some extra time to find an alternate provider, but as I said, if they can't sign up new customers, it's not likely they can keep going for long, seeing as how they've never been profitable. Even if they do find a way to provide service without infringing, I think the damage is done. The confidence of the customers and of the shareholders is pretty badly shaken now. I don't seem them pulling out of it.
They're one of the ones I was thinking of when I worried about other companies getting sued. It's always seemed competitive with Vonage, I would have considered them originally, but Vonage just seemed bigger and safer. Maybe it's time to reconsider... if they won't get sued, and if they can port my Vonage number.
I guess Boot Camp has just barely started supporting Vista, but how much of this could be due to dual-booting OSX and Vista on the same machine? Or from people that beta tested Vista? I tried out the beta, then installed a release copy of Vista on my work laptop, but then I switched back after a couple of months.
From the article at cnn.com:
The judge gave Vonage two weeks to try to convince him to stay the injunction. Verizon (Charts) then suggested the judge allow Vonage to keep servicing its existing customers if a stay was necessary.
Verizon gets 5.5% royalties off of Vonage's sales, so it's probably just as well for them to keep squeezing some money out of them... it's the best of both worlds for Verizon... no new customers can sign up with Vonage, existing customers will leave Vonage, out of fear of it falling apart completely, and the existing customers that ride it out with Vonage to the end still make some money for Verizon.
The lawyer for Vonage said that "It's the difference of cutting off oxygen as opposed to the bullet in the head," and I think he's pretty much right... Vonage isn't profitable as it is. If they can't get more customers, I don't think they ever can be. Their stock is in the toilet, and existing customers like myself find themselves seriously considering other options. I don't think Vonage will be around much longer unless they can, by some miracle, work around the patents in question, and make a brilliant, hard-fought comeback. Even if they do find a workaround, Vonage's previously tarnished image is now looking downright awful. Not to mention the fact that other big players like AT&T and Comcast might find some different patents they can pull out to try to squeeze more money out of them.
It's been nice knowing you Vonage, but I don't think this relationship is going to work out between us. Bye.
So does the Reverse-Synced content have DRM that wasn't there before?