If that $499 Blu-Ray player was available now, if a decent sized-catalog of Blu-Ray content was widely available, if Blu-Ray added convenience and features (beyond HD quality), and if HD-DVD didn't already exist at a less expensive price, then maybe. As it is, the only people willing to pay $500 - $600 for a Blu-Ray player that also plays the newest games will be the ones who want to buy a PS3 anyway, for the games. I don't think they're going to persuade a lot of non-gamers to buy in to PS3 just for the movies. $500 is still a hell of a lot for a movie player, unless you're really passionate about wanting that HD, and upconverting DVD players won't do it for you. Sony has priced themselves into a situation where only serious hard-core gamers will buy the PS3 for games, and only serious hardcore movie people will want Blu-Ray enough to spend that much on a player... but if they're that serious, they'd buy a dedicated, standalone, higher-quality player that's not trying to do a million different things. Why do you think Sony's Blu-Ray capable PS3 can do games and BR movies for half the cost of their own BR player? There's something to think about.
The price point for a Blu-Ray player is a lot different than where DVD players were in 3/2000, too. I don't recall the prices of standalone DVD players then, but according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD:
By early of 1999 the price of a DVD player had dropped below $300 US.
By 2000, when DVD was a little more established and video rental stores had reasonable selections of DVDs, I'm sure they were a less expensive than that.
Sony just seems convinced that we're all going to buy into PS3/Blu-Ray because it's the newest, biggest and baddest stuff out there... but we don't really need that. There's still some good movies that haven't ever made their way onto DVD yet. A lot of people out there aren't willing to step into a new format, re-buy all of their movies again, and wait for years for their favorite movies to come out again.
The PS2 won wide acceptance in part because it was a very cheap (at the time) DVD player.
There's a few differences, though. DVD was already doing well on its own before the release of the PS2. Hollywood Video and Blockbuster already carried a good selection of DVD titles. DVD also didn't have any real competition from other formats, like Blu-Ray has now. HD-DVD players were out before Blu-Ray players, at half the cost. The fact that the Toshiba HD-DVD player costs $450 on Amazon vs. $700 for the Samsung Blu-Ray player vs. $1000 for the Sony Blu-Ray player makes you wonder who would be excited about Blu-Ray?
Also, DVD was following the same change that had already happened to music: going from cassette tapes to shiny discs, with all of the coolness of nice looking video, good sound, the convenience of being able to jump around to different tracks on the album/chapters of the movie. People had already seen the big change that going to a digital disc added to music, and were excited to see the same thing for movies. Plus, DVDs added the capability for extra features, extra languages/commentary tracks, subtitles in multiple languages, games, etc. The only real thing for the movie-watching population to get excited about with Blu-Ray is HD, with minor improvements in special features. The average home movie-viewer is not going to see a real paradigm shift, or an increase in convenience or features with Blu-Ray that they didn't already get with DVD. Now, music has gone to more media-agnostic formats. MP3's and other compresseed music formats can exist on your computer's hard drive and be transfered to a portable player through a USB connection, or they can be burned on a disc to play on an MP3 CD player. Media Center PCs and other more appliance-like media servers play MP3/wma/AAC music files. Many of the portable players use flash and thus have no moving parts. No skipping, no discs to scratch. It's all so convenient! Do that to the movie experience, but still manage to increase the video/audio quality, along with the features, and there you'll have a format people will be interested in.
Then build that into your gaming machine, and you'll have something people will buy in lieu of a stand alone player. Maybe the early rumors about the PS3 being a PVR/Media Center type of device would have been a better strategy than Blu-Ray.
OLED is just barely coming out for small-screen devices right now... devices which don't use up the lifetime of the OLEDs too quickly. Kodak had one model of camera with an OLED screen a couple of years ago, which I don't think ever made it to the US, and then I don't think there were any devices using OLEDs at all, until just now, there's finally some that are using them.
OLED monitors would be awesome, and I think they're still going to get here eventually, but don't wait to replace your old dying CRT just for that. I did see a prototype 15" OLED monitor at the Sanyo booth at CES 2003, it was super-thin, and the picture was gorgeous. I hope that they do get around to the monitor market sooner than later.
It seems that the tilt features on the controllers are a bit sensitive and tweaky, so perhaps rumble breaks tilt sensing.
That was the official explanation, IIRC, but it seems pretty weak to me. Why would they remove a feature that has been used in all the consoles since the N64, to throw in a feature that seems so hastily dropped in, for no good reason, with no planned solid applications for it? With the Wii, the motion/position sensing is the center of the design for the whole system, it's the reason to get a Wii. For the PS3, the tilt sensor is a last-minute add-on, replacing something that has been used a lot, and noone knows what it will be used for, other than flying a plane (I've never heard of a real pilot using a game controller with a tilt sensor in a real plane... I thought they had yokes or joystick-like controls).
My question is, if the rumble affects the tilt, why not put the hardware for both features in there, and allow the developers to choose one or the other to be used at a given moment, with some type of interlock, so they can't both be used at the same time? Either a game could be all-rumble or all-tilt, or else it could switch back and forth at different parts of the game. I know cost is an obvious reason, but isn't this a system that's supposed to offer more? The price is certainly a lot higher. Physical space is a constraint, but not only is Nintendo able to throw in rumble, a much better motion/position/orientation sensing system, but even a stinking speaker in the controller for that much more immersive feedback. So Sony they can't really blame space limitations, either.
Inigo Montoya: You are wonderful.
Man in Black: Thank you; I've worked hard to become so.
Inigo Montoya: I admit it, you are better than I am.
Man in Black: Then why are you smiling?
Inigo Montoya: Because I know something you don't know.
Man in Black: And what is that?
Inigo Montoya: I... am not left-handed.
[Moves his sword to his right hand and gains an advantage]
Man in Black: You are amazing.
Inigo Montoya: I ought to be, after 20 years.
Man in Black: Oh, there's something I ought to tell you.
Inigo Montoya: Tell me.
Man in Black: I'm not left-handed either.
I wonder how many of the Founding Fathers spoke out against the Bill of Rights as a solution without a problem? Sometimes Regulation needs to step in to prevent our rights from getting regulated away.
When the Zune is introduced, it will have a new DRM system, incompatible with the PlaysForSure that Microsoft has been pushing and that many of their partners in WMA are using (from the Wikipedia article on Zune). This is similar to Apple's iPod, which uses FairPlay DRM, which Apple won't license to anyone. The Zune won't support Apple's DRM, and the iPod won't support Microsoft's.
The other thing that's funny about that is Apple's troubles with iTunes songs in France. France used to be able to look at PlaysForSure and say "See, they're playing music on different manufacturer's devices..." Now they can't point to Microsoft as the good guys.
How about waiting to see if there actually is a problem? Right now there is nothing to fix. Nobody has implemented tiered service yet. Nobody has targeted packets to slow them down yet.
A) If the telecoms don't intend to implement tiered services, then how are they going to pay for all of this magical, mythical, better Internet, which net-neutrality would supposedly prevent? They argue that they won't be able to "upgrade the Internet", but doesn't that directly imply that they want to use a non-neutral internet? It's funny since part of their defense against net neutrality is "There's not proof that anyone has been implementing tiered services."
B) It has happened. A couple of months ago, the Vonage forums had one post with many, many pages of replies about difficulties using Vonage with Comcast Internet in areas where Comcast also offered VoIP service.
C) Once the problem arises, it will be too late to do anything about it. The Guv'ment is deciding, with the help of lobbyists on both sides, whether to allow it or not. Whichever way they decide will determine the way the businesses of the Internet will align their business models. There's no simple way to go back and regulate, when everyone will have already been building the Internet in the wrong direction.
D) One of the inital cool things about the "Intarweb" was that any kid in his basement could have a website, and so could big corporations, governments, churches, schools, and anyone else. Not only will a tiered Internet take small-time folks out of the game almost entirely, it will also force the big corporations and everyone else align with specific providers for their sites to be available, or to be useable. You don't have AT&T? Sorry you can't go to Amazon.com. You don't get your Internet service from Comcast? Sorry, you can't read Slashdot. You'll have to read Comcast's own "News for nerdy Comcast subscribers". How does that not sound wrong to you?
Does someone have to actually explain to you that the GP is a joke/troll? Just because someone includes technological jargon like signaling or if they discuss their career, doesn't make that person serious. Anyone who has the slightest concept of a bit won't really believe that a computer would play a bit-for-bit copy of a song any different from the original. Of course an encrypted file has to be decrypted at some point in the process, at which point it is exactly the same as the original (someone else replying to this troll mentions "lossless encryption"... they showed that they know less than the original troll, as encryption has to be lossless. It's not the same as compression.) The computer doesn't know that the one file was ever encrypted. The GP knows that. Most of us here on Slashdot know that.
Congratulations to all who bit at this troll, and took it hook, line, and sinker.
I'm just glad that my 2 year-old laptop (P4, 2.66GHz, 512MB, 32 MB NVidia 5100) barely meets the minimum requirements for minesweeper and solitaire (I get an "Experience Index" of 1.0)... it's too bad it doesn't meet the recommended requirements for it, though. It definitely won't run fancy Aero-Glass.
Nevermind that it handles XGL/Compiz very, very well in Linux, for some reason it's not up to par for the "optimal experience" in displaying windows and playing very basic games.
Haven't we all been paying extra surcharges on our phone bills for the last 10 years to subsidize the growth of the Internet, so that we can all download movies and talk on our VoIP lines all day? If the content providers are paying for their own connections, and consumers are paying for their own connections, and we get to the point where that's not cutting the mustard (in spite of all of those phone bill surcharges that should have helped the US infrastructure for the Internet, but haven't really done much), then that pricing needs to be restructured. Maybe consumers should pay for what they use. Maybe my grandma shouldn't have to pay the same $45 bill for cable Internet that my teenage neighbor pays, who downloads movies and music all day. If the ISPs can't deal with the efforts to change how they work, and they don't want to continue how they are, then maybe they shouldn't be in the business of providing Internet access. You can't enter a new business with massive growth, then play the victim because that business involves costs (which were supposedly already being susbsidized on our phone bills).
My favorite part of the NCTA's argument comes from the Q&A link on TFA's site:
If this legislation is such a bad idea, who's behind it?
Some of the loudest proponents of network neutrality regulation are large companies, like Google and Yahoo!, that are seeking to lock their market dominance in place. These companies flourished in large part because cable operators, telephone companies, and wireless providers have invested billions in building a broadband infrastructure that supports their business model. Now that they have achieved a leadership position in the marketplace, they want to foreclose any new business model that would enable new entrants to challenge them. The reality is that companies such as these, which may have started as entrepreneurs and innovators, have gotten so large that they cling to the status quo.
Damn those entrepreneurs and innovators!
They make it seem as if the companies who really are fresh and have found novel and innovative ways to help people use the Internet are the crusty old monopolies who are afraid of change. Seems like they've got it backwards... It's not like they'd get it backwards on accident, though. They know exactly how to twist the truth around to get sympathy. I'd also like to know how neutrality prevents new entrants in the market to challenge Google and Yahoo... I would say it makes it harder for Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T to get an unfair leg-up on entering those markets that they don't have any business being in, but I don't see how it discourages legitimate competition.
The other thing that bothers me about the whole anti net-neutrality is the whole argument that There is no evidence of harm or market failure to justify imposing common carrier regulation on cable's broadband service. So why are they so afraid of the legislation? Isn't saying there's "no evidence" the same thing as saying "I didn't do it, nobody saw me, you can't prove anything!"? If they were innocent, shouldn't they just say "We haven't done anything bad, and we won't in the future"? Saying they haven't been non-neutral, but that they need to prevent neutrality in order to provide for the growth of the Internet, and to prevent "leechers" like Google and Yahoo from abusing the telecoms, is pretty much a direct admission that they most definitely plan on being non-neutral, if they haven't already.
I may be wrong on this one, but perhaps Circuit City has purchased a license to the CSS keys, that would allow them to decrypt and re-encrypt DVD's without "circumventing" the copy protection...just a possibility.
Considering the fact that Kaleidescape did license CSS for their media server, and they still got sued by the DVD CCA for making and selling a product that allows users to make a copy of a DVD onto a very closed and locked-down server (from which you cannot copy a movie to another computer), I'd say you are wrong on this one.
So basically the audio quality will be somewhere between CD and DVD-Audio quality (so it's less good than a product which has, for the most part, been a complete failure among the general music purchasing population), but we're promised the possibility of extra features, like pre-ripped, iTunes compatible tracks (which wouldn't work with non-iPod players) and ringtones (WOW! we should be so lucky to get annoying ringtones with our music!) and videos which are probably available elsewhere on the internet anyhow.
I prefer to use GAIM, but I have the latest MSN client installed, also. I want to IM my friend on his Yahoo account, but as far as I can tell, it will only work from the MSN client, not from GAIM, unless I want to setup a Yahoo account, which I don't.
So... what about GAIM? In other words, when will GAIM be able to use the MSN protocol to talk to Yahoo users?
The fact that WV Beta 2 runs slower on my 2.66 GHz P4 with 512 MB RAM than XP runs on my 7 year old 600 MHz P3 is really pretty pathetic. There's a big difference between the minimum system requirements and what will actually run well. It's funny how this OS has been delayed for years, had many features stripped out, and it still crawls on semi-recent hardware, whereas I can get equivalent eye candy with any Linux distro, and it all runs quite speedily on that same P4. I got sick of trying to deal with Vista after a couple of hours, then switched back to Ubuntu, and have no plans to try Vista again any time soon.
The one improvement I saw, though, was being able to browse my local workgroup/domain with one click instead of having to click though "My Network Places --> Entire Network --> Microsoft Windows Network --> [Domain Name]". That was nice. But not worth the DRM, slowness, and everything being completely rearranged.
Clean Flicks (and possibly the other companies invovlved in the lawsuit) will let you pay them for an edited copy of a movie you already own. Is this illegal, too? If I edit my own movies in my own homes, is that illegal?
A DJ from a Salt Lake area radio station wrote a book about how censorship leads to anarchy and chaos, becuase in his fictional story, a fat guy who owns a video rental store starts editing movies, then customers start bringing in home movies to have ex-wives edited out, and somehow it turns into violence and craziness. I hate it when people make these stores out to be "censorship", when the only people who are subject to the censorship are the ones who want it to begin with. When people talk about the evil religious right pushing their censorship on the rest of the world in conjunction with these stores, they're no better for trying to get rid of the editing, than the people who are trying to censor the material to begin with. Both are trying to control what people are exposed to. At least in the case of the DVD editing, it's self-censorship instead of pushing it on everyone else.
In our family, we rent movies from Clean Flicks, and we have enjoyed it quite a bit. When we rent from Clean Flicks, we do it knowing that it's an edited disc we're getting. Their logo appears on the disc, on the case, and it appears sometimes during the movie. I don't think anyone could go into a Clean Flicks store and rent a movie without knowing that it has been edited, and is not the original film, so there's no deception involved here.
These movie editing stores have gotten us to watch movies we wouldn't have otherwise. As much as the studios/directors want to believe that the sex/nudity/violence, is crucial to their creative vision, most of the time, it's all just a cheap way to pretend that the movie is more "realistic" or whatever. I can enjoy a movie more without it.
Net neutrality proponents worry that telecom, wireless and cable companies might one day favor their own content and applications over others. They want Congress to pass a new law to ban that practice by regulating the price of broadband service and the way it's sold.
a) It's not just worry, it's happening already. VOIP is one example. Not to mention, one of the initial arguments for "Net Competition" as Cleland calls it, was because Google, eBay, Amazon, and other big content providers were getting a "free ride" by using the ISP's connection to the end users. That's how one of the telecom execs phrased it, I don't remember exactly who the quote came from. It sounds pretty clear that even though this lobbyist and the astroturf websites out there claim this is all about being able to keep the internet free of congestion, it's really only to keep real content providers out of the way of the telco's content.
b) Who was ever asking for the price of broadband to be regulated? The only people wanting to be able to set new prices that aren't currently set is the telcos, wanting to charge content providers.
Now, net competition proponents, like me, believe that the best way to guard a free and open Internet is to maintain the free and open competition that exists today, not create a new government-monitored, socialized Internet.
c) Since when does Competition mean letting the gatekeepers to the world of the content become the offerers of the content, able to pick and choose how the content is delivered to the consumers?
d) He wants to block regulation that will keep things the way they are. He is not asking to be able to "maintain the free and open competition that exists today." The telcos are just realizing now that they can easily blow away their competition in markets they've never competed before. They are the ones that want to change how they do business. The intent of the regulation would be to resist that change.
e) The government was central to the creation of the Internet. Remember DARPA?
First, net neutrality is really a misnomer. It's really just special interest legislation, dressed up to sound less self-serving. Did you know Microsoft, Google and Yahoo are lobbying for net neutrality?
f) "net competition" is really a misnomer. See above.
g) Just because special interests are lobbying for it doesn't mean that there's no good foundation for it. It's still net neutrality, and it's still important to the way the Internet works today.
h) Did you know that AT&T and Verizon are lobbying for "net non-neutrality"? Seriously, he's trying to make this into a war between the telcos/wannabe content providers and the real content providers, and acting as if the telcos are on the side of the users, and completely ignoring the fact that the whole reason why users want to "be on the interweb" is because of the content. That's why people use the Internet. It's not to move bits through the telco pipes. I don't pay my power bill to support my power company, I pay it because I need the juice generated by the power plants.
Finally, net neutrality legislation would be a lousy trade off for consumers. The consumer benefits would be small, but the cost to consumers would be huge. Price regulation would destroy any economic incentive to innovate and invest in the private networks that make up the Internet. Over time, we would end up with a slower Internet and higher broadband prices and taxes for consumers, less broadband choice and slower broadband deployment to all Americans. And it would also mean less privacy for all Americans, as net neutrality would require more government monitoring and surveillance of Internet traffic.
i) In what measure would the benefits be small, and the cost large?
j) Again, the telcos are the only ones talking about setting prices on anything.
k) Haven't we already been paying the telcos to invest in and
Scott Cleland: Amazingly, the proponents of this radical change in policy don't even have any real evidence of a problem, only unsubstantiated assertions about hypothetical problems.
It's called a concern. If I hand some firecrackers and some matches to my 6-year-old and turn him loose, I don't have any real evidence of a problem, only unsubstatiated assertions about hypothetical problems.
Scott Cleland should browse over to the Vonage forum sometime and check out the many, many posts about "unsubstantiated assertions" involving ISPs such as Comcast, who are pushing their own VOIP service and throttling real VOIP services. Cleland might as well be saying "If you let us whittle the whole internet down to just the content and services the ISP's can provide, we promise that there won't be any problem with the whole Internet being whittled down to just the content and services the ISP's provide. Really, I promise. Neither I nor my clients would have any problem with that at all."
The way I remember things, in WMP version something or other, MS included support for a few stores, but defaulted to Napster. Sortly after that, didn't Microsoft try an MSN music store, suddenly making that the default over the 3rd party stores in WMP? Then there's a bunch of news about this MS/MTV Urge online music store, I wasn't sure where that leaves the MSN service. It sounds like they're grasping at straws, trying the same things over and over again.
I agree about WMP being lousy... I've tried to use it do sync music with my small (256MB) mp3 player. It's incredibly frustrating to try and get your music ready to copy to the mp3 player. I never use WMP to transfer my music now, I just do it through Explorer, or on Linux, but then I don't have control over the overall order of music. It seems that music within a single folder gets played all together and in the intended order, but I don't know what order the folders will be played. On my sister's non-iPod mp3 player, she can't make the music play in the order she wants, even if she creates a playlist in WMP, and syncs based on that. I never used to understand why non-Apple products don't get as much attention as iPod/iTMS (it seems like a simple thing to copy music to an mp3 player, how bad could everyone be screwing it up?), but now that I have one of the non-Apple players, I can see what a frustrating experience it can be.
I'm not really expecting a brilliant turnaround in Microsoft's next attempt at doing the same thing, the same way, all over again... (what was Benjamin Franklin's definition of insanity, again?)
OK, you all have a good point. Some DVD players and many video processors upconvert to whatever super-awesome resolutions you want. But my intended point is still correct, which is that the content available for DVD players (not HD-DVD players) is not available in resolutions greater than 720x480 (or 720x576 for PAL).
As for WMV HD, the Wikipedia article cited contains the following line:
The technology was considered a stepping stone to true high definition optical disc formats (HD-DVD and Blu-Ray) and Microsoft never intended the discs to be played on anything but personal computers.
So I don't consider WMV-HD to be HD content that's playable on a standalone DVD player.
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The price point for a Blu-Ray player is a lot different than where DVD players were in 3/2000, too. I don't recall the prices of standalone DVD players then, but according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD:
By 2000, when DVD was a little more established and video rental stores had reasonable selections of DVDs, I'm sure they were a less expensive than that.
Sony just seems convinced that we're all going to buy into PS3/Blu-Ray because it's the newest, biggest and baddest stuff out there... but we don't really need that. There's still some good movies that haven't ever made their way onto DVD yet. A lot of people out there aren't willing to step into a new format, re-buy all of their movies again , and wait for years for their favorite movies to come out again .
The PS2 won wide acceptance in part because it was a very cheap (at the time) DVD player.
There's a few differences, though. DVD was already doing well on its own before the release of the PS2. Hollywood Video and Blockbuster already carried a good selection of DVD titles. DVD also didn't have any real competition from other formats, like Blu-Ray has now. HD-DVD players were out before Blu-Ray players, at half the cost. The fact that the Toshiba HD-DVD player costs $450 on Amazon vs. $700 for the Samsung Blu-Ray player vs. $1000 for the Sony Blu-Ray player makes you wonder who would be excited about Blu-Ray?
Also, DVD was following the same change that had already happened to music: going from cassette tapes to shiny discs, with all of the coolness of nice looking video, good sound, the convenience of being able to jump around to different tracks on the album/chapters of the movie. People had already seen the big change that going to a digital disc added to music, and were excited to see the same thing for movies. Plus, DVDs added the capability for extra features, extra languages/commentary tracks, subtitles in multiple languages, games, etc. The only real thing for the movie-watching population to get excited about with Blu-Ray is HD, with minor improvements in special features. The average home movie-viewer is not going to see a real paradigm shift, or an increase in convenience or features with Blu-Ray that they didn't already get with DVD. Now, music has gone to more media-agnostic formats. MP3's and other compresseed music formats can exist on your computer's hard drive and be transfered to a portable player through a USB connection, or they can be burned on a disc to play on an MP3 CD player. Media Center PCs and other more appliance-like media servers play MP3/wma/AAC music files. Many of the portable players use flash and thus have no moving parts. No skipping, no discs to scratch. It's all so convenient! Do that to the movie experience, but still manage to increase the video/audio quality, along with the features, and there you'll have a format people will be interested in.
Then build that into your gaming machine, and you'll have something people will buy in lieu of a stand alone player. Maybe the early rumors about the PS3 being a PVR/Media Center type of device would have been a better strategy than Blu-Ray.
OLED is just barely coming out for small-screen devices right now... devices which don't use up the lifetime of the OLEDs too quickly. Kodak had one model of camera with an OLED screen a couple of years ago, which I don't think ever made it to the US, and then I don't think there were any devices using OLEDs at all, until just now, there's finally some that are using them.
OLED monitors would be awesome, and I think they're still going to get here eventually, but don't wait to replace your old dying CRT just for that. I did see a prototype 15" OLED monitor at the Sanyo booth at CES 2003, it was super-thin, and the picture was gorgeous. I hope that they do get around to the monitor market sooner than later.
It seems that the tilt features on the controllers are a bit sensitive and tweaky, so perhaps rumble breaks tilt sensing.
That was the official explanation, IIRC, but it seems pretty weak to me. Why would they remove a feature that has been used in all the consoles since the N64, to throw in a feature that seems so hastily dropped in, for no good reason, with no planned solid applications for it? With the Wii, the motion/position sensing is the center of the design for the whole system, it's the reason to get a Wii. For the PS3, the tilt sensor is a last-minute add-on, replacing something that has been used a lot, and noone knows what it will be used for, other than flying a plane (I've never heard of a real pilot using a game controller with a tilt sensor in a real plane... I thought they had yokes or joystick-like controls).
My question is, if the rumble affects the tilt, why not put the hardware for both features in there, and allow the developers to choose one or the other to be used at a given moment, with some type of interlock, so they can't both be used at the same time? Either a game could be all-rumble or all-tilt, or else it could switch back and forth at different parts of the game. I know cost is an obvious reason, but isn't this a system that's supposed to offer more? The price is certainly a lot higher. Physical space is a constraint, but not only is Nintendo able to throw in rumble, a much better motion/position/orientation sensing system, but even a stinking speaker in the controller for that much more immersive feedback. So Sony they can't really blame space limitations, either.
Quotes copied shamelessly from imdb.com
:s/Man in Black/Link/g
Inigo Montoya: You are wonderful.
Man in Black: Thank you; I've worked hard to become so.
Inigo Montoya: I admit it, you are better than I am.
Man in Black: Then why are you smiling?
Inigo Montoya: Because I know something you don't know.
Man in Black: And what is that?
Inigo Montoya: I... am not left-handed.
[Moves his sword to his right hand and gains an advantage]
Man in Black: You are amazing.
Inigo Montoya: I ought to be, after 20 years.
Man in Black: Oh, there's something I ought to tell you.
Inigo Montoya: Tell me.
Man in Black: I'm not left-handed either.
I wonder how many of the Founding Fathers spoke out against the Bill of Rights as a solution without a problem? Sometimes Regulation needs to step in to prevent our rights from getting regulated away.
When the Zune is introduced, it will have a new DRM system, incompatible with the PlaysForSure that Microsoft has been pushing and that many of their partners in WMA are using (from the Wikipedia article on Zune). This is similar to Apple's iPod, which uses FairPlay DRM, which Apple won't license to anyone. The Zune won't support Apple's DRM, and the iPod won't support Microsoft's.
The other thing that's funny about that is Apple's troubles with iTunes songs in France. France used to be able to look at PlaysForSure and say "See, they're playing music on different manufacturer's devices..." Now they can't point to Microsoft as the good guys.
No, I think he means "embrace and extend" DRM
How about waiting to see if there actually is a problem? Right now there is nothing to fix. Nobody has implemented tiered service yet. Nobody has targeted packets to slow them down yet.
A) If the telecoms don't intend to implement tiered services, then how are they going to pay for all of this magical, mythical, better Internet, which net-neutrality would supposedly prevent? They argue that they won't be able to "upgrade the Internet", but doesn't that directly imply that they want to use a non-neutral internet? It's funny since part of their defense against net neutrality is "There's not proof that anyone has been implementing tiered services."
B) It has happened. A couple of months ago, the Vonage forums had one post with many, many pages of replies about difficulties using Vonage with Comcast Internet in areas where Comcast also offered VoIP service.
C) Once the problem arises, it will be too late to do anything about it. The Guv'ment is deciding, with the help of lobbyists on both sides, whether to allow it or not. Whichever way they decide will determine the way the businesses of the Internet will align their business models. There's no simple way to go back and regulate, when everyone will have already been building the Internet in the wrong direction.
D) One of the inital cool things about the "Intarweb" was that any kid in his basement could have a website, and so could big corporations, governments, churches, schools, and anyone else. Not only will a tiered Internet take small-time folks out of the game almost entirely, it will also force the big corporations and everyone else align with specific providers for their sites to be available, or to be useable. You don't have AT&T? Sorry you can't go to Amazon.com. You don't get your Internet service from Comcast? Sorry, you can't read Slashdot. You'll have to read Comcast's own "News for nerdy Comcast subscribers". How does that not sound wrong to you?
Does someone have to actually explain to you that the GP is a joke/troll? Just because someone includes technological jargon like signaling or if they discuss their career, doesn't make that person serious. Anyone who has the slightest concept of a bit won't really believe that a computer would play a bit-for-bit copy of a song any different from the original. Of course an encrypted file has to be decrypted at some point in the process, at which point it is exactly the same as the original (someone else replying to this troll mentions "lossless encryption"... they showed that they know less than the original troll, as encryption has to be lossless. It's not the same as compression.) The computer doesn't know that the one file was ever encrypted. The GP knows that. Most of us here on Slashdot know that.
Congratulations to all who bit at this troll, and took it hook, line, and sinker.
I'm just glad that my 2 year-old laptop (P4, 2.66GHz, 512MB, 32 MB NVidia 5100) barely meets the minimum requirements for minesweeper and solitaire (I get an "Experience Index" of 1.0)... it's too bad it doesn't meet the recommended requirements for it, though. It definitely won't run fancy Aero-Glass.
Nevermind that it handles XGL/Compiz very, very well in Linux, for some reason it's not up to par for the "optimal experience" in displaying windows and playing very basic games.
My favorite part of the NCTA's argument comes from the Q&A link on TFA's site:
Damn those entrepreneurs and innovators!
They make it seem as if the companies who really are fresh and have found novel and innovative ways to help people use the Internet are the crusty old monopolies who are afraid of change. Seems like they've got it backwards... It's not like they'd get it backwards on accident, though. They know exactly how to twist the truth around to get sympathy. I'd also like to know how neutrality prevents new entrants in the market to challenge Google and Yahoo... I would say it makes it harder for Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T to get an unfair leg-up on entering those markets that they don't have any business being in, but I don't see how it discourages legitimate competition.
The other thing that bothers me about the whole anti net-neutrality is the whole argument that There is no evidence of harm or market failure to justify imposing common carrier regulation on cable's broadband service. So why are they so afraid of the legislation? Isn't saying there's "no evidence" the same thing as saying "I didn't do it, nobody saw me, you can't prove anything!"? If they were innocent, shouldn't they just say "We haven't done anything bad, and we won't in the future"? Saying they haven't been non-neutral, but that they need to prevent neutrality in order to provide for the growth of the Internet, and to prevent "leechers" like Google and Yahoo from abusing the telecoms, is pretty much a direct admission that they most definitely plan on being non-neutral, if they haven't already.
Of course... that would still depend on a version of Windows for it to run on.
That was a planned feature for Vista, but of course, it got dropped.
Currently, Bittorrent traffic is suffering from bandwidth throttling ISP's that claim that Bittorrent traffic is cluttering their pipes.
You mean tubes.
I may be wrong on this one, but perhaps Circuit City has purchased a license to the CSS keys, that would allow them to decrypt and re-encrypt DVD's without "circumventing" the copy protection...just a possibility.
0 21219&tid=123
Considering the fact that Kaleidescape did license CSS for their media server, and they still got sued by the DVD CCA for making and selling a product that allows users to make a copy of a DVD onto a very closed and locked-down server (from which you cannot copy a movie to another computer), I'd say you are wrong on this one.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/14/2
So basically the audio quality will be somewhere between CD and DVD-Audio quality (so it's less good than a product which has, for the most part, been a complete failure among the general music purchasing population), but we're promised the possibility of extra features, like pre-ripped, iTunes compatible tracks (which wouldn't work with non-iPod players) and ringtones (WOW! we should be so lucky to get annoying ringtones with our music!) and videos which are probably available elsewhere on the internet anyhow.
No Thanks.
I prefer to use GAIM, but I have the latest MSN client installed, also. I want to IM my friend on his Yahoo account, but as far as I can tell, it will only work from the MSN client, not from GAIM, unless I want to setup a Yahoo account, which I don't.
So... what about GAIM? In other words, when will GAIM be able to use the MSN protocol to talk to Yahoo users?
The fact that WV Beta 2 runs slower on my 2.66 GHz P4 with 512 MB RAM than XP runs on my 7 year old 600 MHz P3 is really pretty pathetic. There's a big difference between the minimum system requirements and what will actually run well. It's funny how this OS has been delayed for years, had many features stripped out, and it still crawls on semi-recent hardware, whereas I can get equivalent eye candy with any Linux distro, and it all runs quite speedily on that same P4. I got sick of trying to deal with Vista after a couple of hours, then switched back to Ubuntu, and have no plans to try Vista again any time soon.
The one improvement I saw, though, was being able to browse my local workgroup/domain with one click instead of having to click though "My Network Places --> Entire Network --> Microsoft Windows Network --> [Domain Name]". That was nice. But not worth the DRM, slowness, and everything being completely rearranged.
Clean Flicks (and possibly the other companies invovlved in the lawsuit) will let you pay them for an edited copy of a movie you already own. Is this illegal, too? If I edit my own movies in my own homes, is that illegal?
A DJ from a Salt Lake area radio station wrote a book about how censorship leads to anarchy and chaos, becuase in his fictional story, a fat guy who owns a video rental store starts editing movies, then customers start bringing in home movies to have ex-wives edited out, and somehow it turns into violence and craziness. I hate it when people make these stores out to be "censorship", when the only people who are subject to the censorship are the ones who want it to begin with. When people talk about the evil religious right pushing their censorship on the rest of the world in conjunction with these stores, they're no better for trying to get rid of the editing, than the people who are trying to censor the material to begin with. Both are trying to control what people are exposed to. At least in the case of the DVD editing, it's self-censorship instead of pushing it on everyone else.
In our family, we rent movies from Clean Flicks, and we have enjoyed it quite a bit. When we rent from Clean Flicks, we do it knowing that it's an edited disc we're getting. Their logo appears on the disc, on the case, and it appears sometimes during the movie. I don't think anyone could go into a Clean Flicks store and rent a movie without knowing that it has been edited, and is not the original film, so there's no deception involved here.
These movie editing stores have gotten us to watch movies we wouldn't have otherwise. As much as the studios/directors want to believe that the sex/nudity/violence, is crucial to their creative vision, most of the time, it's all just a cheap way to pretend that the movie is more "realistic" or whatever. I can enjoy a movie more without it.
Net neutrality proponents worry that telecom, wireless and cable companies might one day favor their own content and applications over others. They want Congress to pass a new law to ban that practice by regulating the price of broadband service and the way it's sold.
a) It's not just worry, it's happening already. VOIP is one example. Not to mention, one of the initial arguments for "Net Competition" as Cleland calls it, was because Google, eBay, Amazon, and other big content providers were getting a "free ride" by using the ISP's connection to the end users. That's how one of the telecom execs phrased it, I don't remember exactly who the quote came from. It sounds pretty clear that even though this lobbyist and the astroturf websites out there claim this is all about being able to keep the internet free of congestion, it's really only to keep real content providers out of the way of the telco's content.
b) Who was ever asking for the price of broadband to be regulated? The only people wanting to be able to set new prices that aren't currently set is the telcos, wanting to charge content providers.
Now, net competition proponents, like me, believe that the best way to guard a free and open Internet is to maintain the free and open competition that exists today, not create a new government-monitored, socialized Internet.
c) Since when does Competition mean letting the gatekeepers to the world of the content become the offerers of the content, able to pick and choose how the content is delivered to the consumers?
d) He wants to block regulation that will keep things the way they are. He is not asking to be able to "maintain the free and open competition that exists today." The telcos are just realizing now that they can easily blow away their competition in markets they've never competed before. They are the ones that want to change how they do business. The intent of the regulation would be to resist that change.
e) The government was central to the creation of the Internet. Remember DARPA?
First, net neutrality is really a misnomer. It's really just special interest legislation, dressed up to sound less self-serving. Did you know Microsoft, Google and Yahoo are lobbying for net neutrality?
f) "net competition" is really a misnomer. See above.
g) Just because special interests are lobbying for it doesn't mean that there's no good foundation for it. It's still net neutrality, and it's still important to the way the Internet works today.
h) Did you know that AT&T and Verizon are lobbying for "net non-neutrality"? Seriously, he's trying to make this into a war between the telcos/wannabe content providers and the real content providers, and acting as if the telcos are on the side of the users, and completely ignoring the fact that the whole reason why users want to "be on the interweb" is because of the content. That's why people use the Internet. It's not to move bits through the telco pipes. I don't pay my power bill to support my power company, I pay it because I need the juice generated by the power plants.
Finally, net neutrality legislation would be a lousy trade off for consumers. The consumer benefits would be small, but the cost to consumers would be huge. Price regulation would destroy any economic incentive to innovate and invest in the private networks that make up the Internet. Over time, we would end up with a slower Internet and higher broadband prices and taxes for consumers, less broadband choice and slower broadband deployment to all Americans. And it would also mean less privacy for all Americans, as net neutrality would require more government monitoring and surveillance of Internet traffic.
i) In what measure would the benefits be small, and the cost large?
j) Again, the telcos are the only ones talking about setting prices on anything.
k) Haven't we already been paying the telcos to invest in and
Scott Cleland should browse over to the Vonage forum sometime and check out the many, many posts about "unsubstantiated assertions" involving ISPs such as Comcast, who are pushing their own VOIP service and throttling real VOIP services. Cleland might as well be saying "If you let us whittle the whole internet down to just the content and services the ISP's can provide, we promise that there won't be any problem with the whole Internet being whittled down to just the content and services the ISP's provide. Really, I promise. Neither I nor my clients would have any problem with that at all."
...pile-of-shittier (new pronoun, and you read it here first).
I think you mean adjective...
The way I remember things, in WMP version something or other, MS included support for a few stores, but defaulted to Napster. Sortly after that, didn't Microsoft try an MSN music store, suddenly making that the default over the 3rd party stores in WMP? Then there's a bunch of news about this MS/MTV Urge online music store, I wasn't sure where that leaves the MSN service. It sounds like they're grasping at straws, trying the same things over and over again.
I agree about WMP being lousy... I've tried to use it do sync music with my small (256MB) mp3 player. It's incredibly frustrating to try and get your music ready to copy to the mp3 player. I never use WMP to transfer my music now, I just do it through Explorer, or on Linux, but then I don't have control over the overall order of music. It seems that music within a single folder gets played all together and in the intended order, but I don't know what order the folders will be played. On my sister's non-iPod mp3 player, she can't make the music play in the order she wants, even if she creates a playlist in WMP, and syncs based on that. I never used to understand why non-Apple products don't get as much attention as iPod/iTMS (it seems like a simple thing to copy music to an mp3 player, how bad could everyone be screwing it up?), but now that I have one of the non-Apple players, I can see what a frustrating experience it can be.
I'm not really expecting a brilliant turnaround in Microsoft's next attempt at doing the same thing, the same way, all over again... (what was Benjamin Franklin's definition of insanity, again?)
OK, you all have a good point. Some DVD players and many video processors upconvert to whatever super-awesome resolutions you want. But my intended point is still correct, which is that the content available for DVD players (not HD-DVD players) is not available in resolutions greater than 720x480 (or 720x576 for PAL). As for WMV HD, the Wikipedia article cited contains the following line:
The technology was considered a stepping stone to true high definition optical disc formats (HD-DVD and Blu-Ray) and Microsoft never intended the discs to be played on anything but personal computers.
So I don't consider WMV-HD to be HD content that's playable on a standalone DVD player.