Except, everyone already can do anything with music. Almost every song you could want you can find through pirating, and when you pirate you don't have to deal with DRM, you can get the music in any format you want and it will play in any player you want. The goal when selling music digitally is not to attempt to make sure your customers don't pirate, but to make sure that what they're paying for is better than what they don't pay for.
However, the "price" of piracy is that you have to do your own searching and quality control, and time, even your time, is money. Thus, if Apple provided downloads--quality controlled and at a central location--without DRM, they would effectively be making pirated music cheaper. In fact, Apple does allow you to strip the DRM from your music, but it charges you a "price" of a little time and a little loss in quality, by obliging you to burn and re-rip.
I would go further and say that there may be a great deal of overlap between the people that switch to Macs and the people that primarily use consoles for gaming - total end users that like the simplicity of hooking a console to a TV, shoving in a game, and having it just work, and similarly like the simplicity of plopping down in front of their Mac and having it "just work."
The real problem with PC games is that they are designed to be played at a desk with keyboard and mouse. I spend my productivity time doing that; it's not want what I want to do with my leisure time--I want to lounge. What I like about console games is that they are designed to be played with a hand-held controller.
One problem with driving a prosthesis from the movement planning stages of the brain is that you might bypass important movement suppression circuits:
"I swear, officer, I never intended to punch that man--the arm did it by itself! I was just thinking that I'd like to punch him, and all of a sudden the arm... See! It just did it again! Sorry about your nose."
If a set says its HDTV yet it doesn't have a builtin HDTV tuner then its not an HDTV set. What does an HDTV tuner cost these days?
A couple hundred bucks. Actually, they generally say "HDTV ready" if they don't have a built in tuner models. There are some tuner-equipped models out. But these days, a tuner is no longer the indispensable item that it once was, because so many people receive their TV over cable or satellite.
And I thought that using your standrd UHF over the air house antenna wasnt good enough for HDTV otherwise why do I see and hear about all of these HDTV antennas?
Pure marketing. After all, it does work for HDTV, so that makes it a HD antenna, doesn't it? Actually, in many areas all of the digital channels are UHF, so you can get by with a simpler UHF-only antenna.
Oh and while I'm picking nits, what about our good old friend the Broadcast Flag? I'm not exactly thrilled that to get a better screen I have to give up rights I already have with my current equipment.
So far, nobody has seen hide nor hair of it in the wild. Probably a good idea to get a HDCP-equipped TV just in case. Worst case seems to be that you'd be limited to SD resolution (for non HDCP-protected output) on some shows, in which case you'd have exactly the same rights to record shows in SD that you now have with your current equipment.
I already own a sizeable collection of movies in DVD format and some older ones in Laserdisc format. I'm not about to buy the same movie again in Blu-Ray just because its higher resolution. Especially since I don't own a HDTV set and I still fail to see the compelling reason to shell out the extra cash for a set. HDTV still costs too much and is still too confusing for the average consumer not to mention you can hardly get dick-all worth watching on it unless your in a major metropoloitan area or have a cable provider that has dedicated a significant amount of their coax bandwidth to delviering premium HDTV channels.
Which most cable providers are beginning to do. And if you are in an urban area, you can just hook up your HDTV to your existing antenna and enjoy crystal clear pictures comparable to the best that you can get from cable or satellite, and better than you get off your DVD player. While the TV manufacturers are pushing the pricey big flatscreens, CRT-based HDTVs are now very affordable, starting at about $500 (although you still need to shell out for a separate HD tuner/receiver if you want over-the-air HD).
Re:Still no word from the pr0n industry
on
Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD
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· Score: 2, Insightful
DVD is too new, and remarkably well-penetrated into the home-market, for people to be willing to accept an upgrade. Likewise future players will pretty much have to be able to play old DVDs.
All sides agree that the new players will read old DVDs. On the other hand, the advantage of the new, high-resolution DVD disks also having a second, lower-quality copy of the movie that can be read by standard DVD players is less clear. I suppose that it might help sell the new, presumably more expensive DVDs to people who don't yet have the hardware to play them in HD, but are anticipating buying it in the future. But DVDs are so cheap that manufacturers could just bundle a standard DVD into the package. Once the new players start to get cheap, the interest in backwards-compatible disks will fall off rapidly.
I agree; i use a 2-button mouse on my desktop, but I hate dual button-trackpads. It's easier to use a modifier key than to reach for that other button. The nice thing about Apple's one-button mouse standard is that it inhibits over-reliance on the other buttons.
The one thing I miss on a pad is a scroll wheel. "Sidetrack" type solutions are not satisfactory, because I don't want to have to pay attention to where my thumb is on the pad--pads are designed for relative, not absolute motion. Apple's two-finger gesture scrolling seems like a better solution.
The actors were filmed digitally, as was the entire movie. The color information was there when needed, they simply used a color process for the film transfer that was more stylized than realistic. No Ted Turner work there, just standard color work.
I meant black and white movies. I'm not saying we should colorize them and then burn the originals though, which is how you appear to be interpreting it. I'm saying that providing the option of watching an old movie in color may revitalize many old movies and television shows, allowing them to be rehashed and rerun for more corporate profit.
I wouldn't care to watch a classic old movie with added color. Doubtless, in many cases the director would probably have used color if he could have, but the movie he made was made for the constraints that existed at the time.
Nevertheless, colorizing old movies increases their accessibility to younger audiences. Considering that the alternative is often to remake the entire movie, usually with a lesser director, it may often be the lesser evil. And we can hope that some people will enjoy the colorized versions enough to want to see them "in the original."
Besides, the examples on the site appear to be from home movies, not "Citizen Kane." We are not dealing with a great auteur here, and if people would like to see Mom's old home movies in color, why not?
No one is saying this technique is going to be used solely for coloring video that the artist didn't want -- but if you can use this technique for art sake, why not?
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was shot in B&W and then colorized, presumably to give it a "retro-futuristic" look. The device works rather well in the context of the film. I was halfway through the film before I realized what they must have done to give it that otherworldly look.
With Sega becoming a 3rd party developer, Nintendo is the only remaining console manufacturer that is actively trying to innovate and push the medium further. A console manufacturer has more leeway to take risks, because a game may benefit them in more ways than simply sales: by developing new markets, by creating new types of games, by setting an example for developers. Fundamentally, Nintendo is a game design firm that builds hardware to support their own games, and each generation of hardware reflects Nintendo's evolving philosophy of game design.
Sadly, Sony entered the field from the perspective of a hardware manufacturer, not a game maker. They have a game division, but it functions essentially as merely another 3rd party developer. Microsoft has followed Sony's example, rather than Nintendo's. Both sell their systems based upon power, with the emphasis on impressive graphics.
So Nintendo appeals not merely to the graphics fan, but to gamers who are interested in new experiences. To me, the DS is an exciting product. This is something quite unlike any previous game platforms, with a novel input mode--a secondary screen that can be used for display, or as a stylus or touch input pad. What is Nintendo going to do with it that has not been done before? The Metroid demo with stylus input is the first FPS that actually seems to work on a console--and a hand-held at that. I've always found joystick control of FPS to be awkward. Mouse works better, but I don't like to sit at a desk to play games. Nintendo is clearly playing with other interesting ideas--using both screens as a single, tall screen (reproducing the aspect ratio of many older arcade systems). Will there be vertical shooters that take advantage of this? Some classic trackball games are coming out for the system. Such games always suck with a stick--how will they play with a pad. And will Nintendo be able to come up with game types for which a pad is really the method of choice? Succeed or fail, I know that Nintendo will offer me something that I haven't seen before.
So I'm excited about the DS in a way that I can't get excited about Playstation 3 or XBox 2. Ho-hum, more polygons, high resolution, fancier lighting, very nice. Similarly, I'm interested in the new Evolution system precisely because I know that Nintendo will take the opportunity to think up new game ideas, and come up with a system uniquely designed to take advantage of them.
I understand why business analysts might be interested, and competitors, buy why the obsession of fans with these rumors?
Because they are fans, and fans like hearing news about the things that they are enthusiastic about. That's why we call them fans. If you aren't a sports fan, you probably don't understand why some guys like to talk about who might be on the team next season, and how they are likely to do against other teams. Why not wait until next season and simply watch the game? If you are not a car fancier, you probably don't understand why guys are interested in next season's cars. If the cars currently available will get you where you need to go, why not just buy one and be done with it?
The controller reflects a strong game design philosophy, namely that games should have a single action button that you use most of the time. So there is a big, comfortable button, and the others are arranged around it. And since the other buttons have very different shapes/angles, it is virtually impossible to hit the wrong button by mistake. I'd consider it the best currently available controller.
But at the time (late 1970's- early 1980's), Beta tapes could barely hold a full-length feature film. They crapped out at a little under 2 hours. Not so good for home taping.
VHS, on the other hand, had SIX hour tapes. They could easily hold an entire sporting event, several TV episodes, and a film, all on one tape.
Actually, beta had pretty much caught up on tape length well before VHS achieved dominance. When I bought my first VCR, beta and VHS were still neck-and-neck, and 3.25 hour L750 tapes were readily available. And with the higher quality, you could use the lower speed and actually get more time on a beta cassette for decent quality.
If home taping had been the primary use of VCRs, beta would probably still be around. Sony originally marketed VCRs with time shifting in mind as the predominant application. They didn't worry about competition from lower price VHS, because Sony traditionally made high-end products. They didn't make cheap TVs, why should they make cheap VCRs? Sure, they might not have the most sales, but they make it up on margin.
What Sony didn't anticipate, and what ultimately killed beta, was the emergence of the video rental market. People who couldn't figure out how to program a VCR timer could pop in a rental. And the stores quickly found out that they could maximize profits by building their inventory of the most popular format, which was VHS. Pretty soon, people's choice of format became dictated by what their local video store had the best inventory of.
Sony eventually caught on, and started making cut-price betas, but by that time the lead of VHS in the rental market was simply too great.
Almost every media standard Apple had backed early has succeeded overall in the market. Ones that Apple snubbed (or where it has been snubbed e.g. MPEG4) have had real problems getting established, and have mostly failed.
Since when is Apple snubbing, or being snubbed by, MPEG4?
Probably just going to be a PC interface that allows you to watch and schedule stuff on a TiVo box on your nextwork. There is too much DRM stuff going on now for them to be able to let you re-encode and copy shows. Also, that nicely competes with Windows XP Media Center, as you could add it onto your machine by simply buying a TiVo, instead of having to buy an OEM MCE machine.
TiVo has had network scheduling for a long time. And they recently added the ability to copy programs to your PC and (with 3rd party software) burn them to disk.
What's exactly the news here? Yahoo's been doing this for years.
Yeah, but I gave up on Yahoo years ago, because with all of its customization, I couldn't seem to get a news page layout that I liked as much as the default for news.google.
Well, of course it is PR. Google has no obligation to follow its own rules. If I own a store, I may have a rule that customers are not allowed to take money out of the register. That doesn't mean that I can't do it.
Nobody is really harmed by Google's exempting itself from its own regulations, and Google has every right to do so. But somebody at Google obviously took a look at this and said, "You know, we don't need to do this. So let's have some consistency and follow our own rules. Our customers will appreciate it."
I've known people who have claimed first hand experience to the contrary of your statements; though I grant that it's not in the field of EMF research. I take it you are claiming experience in the field of funding EMF research?
I think that it was clear that I was referring to the role of politics in the grant funding process, not solely EMF research. You (and the article) have presented no evidence that politics plays any greater role in EMF research. Indeed, according to the article, when industry sources attempted to interfere with this research, they were rebuffed by the NIH.
Please reread the article once again, and refer to the reference about onerous restrictions placed on the research by the Corporate sponsors. One has to wonder what, pray tell, you consider unbiased.
There is nothing in the article to indicate that everybody who has done industry-funded research was subject to the unspecified "onerous" restrictions that Lai complained about. Indeed, Lai himself did industry funded research (should we therefore discount his results?). Most scientists of my acquaintance would respond exactly as he did if their industry sponsors tried to tell them what to publish.
Yet another similarity between Global Warming and EMF hazards are that both directly effect the lives of myself, my family and friends. It is a pity that the standard scientific approach has let us down on the understanding of Global Warming. Forgive me if I don't trust the scientific community on EMFs; especially since it cannot successfully filter out biased research from corporations.
However, despite your concerns regarding political interference in Federal funding of research, global warming research has continued to receive funding, even though it is not popular with the current administration. I don't know what you mean when you say that the standard scientific approach has "let us down," on global warming, considering that there has been enormous progress in this area over the last few years, both with respect to climate modeling and in developing new methods of climate modeling and deducing historical climate trends.
I said politics, not Congress, plays a role in funding. If you don't think politics plays a role in the academic world, you've clearly have never been near there.
I've submitted grant proposals and have had them funded. I've sat on NIH Study Sections and reviewed grants. I've never seen any indication of politics influencing grant funding decisions. Of course, individual scientists can have scientific biases, and you need stronger preliminary data if going against prevailing wisdom, but my overall experience is that good work gets funded.
The article specifically states otherwise, if you factor in unbiased research.
Accepting funds from a particular source is not evidence of bias. At worst, it is a potential conflict of interest. It certainly is easier to get funding from private interests if your results help their goals. But most scientists that I've known, particularly in academia, feel that their primary obligation is to their data, not to their funding source. So I'd have to see stronger evidence of bias than industry funding to discount a result.
Hardly. But it is apparently much easier to get negative results funded than positive.
You've obviously never tried to get negative results funded. I can pretty much guarantee that Lai showed positive preliminary results in his successful grant application.
But to maintain funding, you have to show progress. And with a phenomenon like this, that is not explained by any known physical process, that means progress toward elucidating the mechanism.
Um... I think you seek out better controls and devise a better experiment that yields less systematic error. One would think zapping chimps with a GSM phone would not be all that difficult to do... I'd rather know than guess. Of course, that takes a lot of the fun and grants off the table when you are done.
And how do you devise such an experiment? Trial and error? Without any kind of theoretical basis, that is pretty much what you are reduced to. Or you could try zapping chimps. But then, millions of people have been using cell phones for years and there is no good statistical evidence for ill effects. So you better plan on using thousands of chimps, and studying them for years (chimps only live 20 years or so--does that matter? We don't know what's really going on, so who can say?).
Do you have any idea how much a chimp costs? Or what the housing and veterinary costs are for a chimp? Lots of luck writing that grant's budget justification!
Science isn't done in a vacume. Politics also often plays a crucial role in determining who gets funding.
Not really. When it comes to biomedical research, funding decisions are made by independent committees of scientists. Once in awhile, Congress will interfere in funding of some unusually controversial research, typically involving sexuality, but that is the exception rather than the rule.
There was an explicit smear campaign docuemented there. That's hardly "some industry objections". It also seems to have been extremely effective, contrary to your statement.
According to the article, somebody complained to NIH that Lai were doing work outside his original proposal. NIH inquired, he faxed back an explanation, and "The NIH accepted his explanation and assured him that all was well." That doesn't sound very effective to me. He also claims that an industry spokesman tried to get the university to fire him, but they didn't. Again, hardly effective.
Finally, your original statement was about how this was like Cold Fusion; you seem to have dropped that claim.
Nope. In terms of the attitude of scientists, they have roughly similar status--some intriguing, but not convincing, results, no good theoretical basis or mechanism, and a strong suspicion that the whole thing may turn out to be artifact. Which is undoubtedly why this sort of research is having a hard time getting funding.
The difference here is that the Cold Fusion research showed rather quickly the results were not reproducible; with RFR, the article mentions how people aren't even trying to reproduce the results.
Actually, the article says that the results are about equally divided. What you are referring to is their claim that nobody has tried to replicate that exact experiment. That's a dodge; Pons and Fleishman used the same defense for their cold fusion experiments. Scientists almost never try to replicate somebody else's experiment exactly, because even if you succeed, it's hard to get it published because it has already been done. But if a phenomenon is robust, you should be able to demonstrate the same phenomenon in a somewhat different way. The cold fusion guys continue to argue to this day that they have a real phenomenon. Who knows? Perhaps they'll turn out to be right. Perhaps these guys will turn out to be right, too.
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Except, everyone already can do anything with music. Almost every song you could want you can find through pirating, and when you pirate you don't have to deal with DRM, you can get the music in any format you want and it will play in any player you want. The goal when selling music digitally is not to attempt to make sure your customers don't pirate, but to make sure that what they're paying for is better than what they don't pay for.
However, the "price" of piracy is that you have to do your own searching and quality control, and time, even your time, is money. Thus, if Apple provided downloads--quality controlled and at a central location--without DRM, they would effectively be making pirated music cheaper. In fact, Apple does allow you to strip the DRM from your music, but it charges you a "price" of a little time and a little loss in quality, by obliging you to burn and re-rip.
I would go further and say that there may be a great deal of overlap between the people that switch to Macs and the people that primarily use consoles for gaming - total end users that like the simplicity of hooking a console to a TV, shoving in a game, and having it just work, and similarly like the simplicity of plopping down in front of their Mac and having it "just work."
The real problem with PC games is that they are designed to be played at a desk with keyboard and mouse. I spend my productivity time doing that; it's not want what I want to do with my leisure time--I want to lounge. What I like about console games is that they are designed to be played with a hand-held controller.
One problem with driving a prosthesis from the movement planning stages of the brain is that you might bypass important movement suppression circuits:
"I swear, officer, I never intended to punch that man--the arm did it by itself! I was just thinking that I'd like to punch him, and all of a sudden the arm... See! It just did it again! Sorry about your nose."
If a set says its HDTV yet it doesn't have a builtin HDTV tuner then its not an HDTV set. What does an HDTV tuner cost these days?
A couple hundred bucks. Actually, they generally say "HDTV ready" if they don't have a built in tuner models. There are some tuner-equipped models out. But these days, a tuner is no longer the indispensable item that it once was, because so many people receive their TV over cable or satellite.
And I thought that using your standrd UHF over the air house antenna wasnt good enough for HDTV otherwise why do I see and hear about all of these HDTV antennas?
Pure marketing. After all, it does work for HDTV, so that makes it a HD antenna, doesn't it? Actually, in many areas all of the digital channels are UHF, so you can get by with a simpler UHF-only antenna.
Oh and while I'm picking nits, what about our good old friend the Broadcast Flag? I'm not exactly thrilled that to get a better screen I have to give up rights I already have with my current equipment.
So far, nobody has seen hide nor hair of it in the wild. Probably a good idea to get a HDCP-equipped TV just in case. Worst case seems to be that you'd be limited to SD resolution (for non HDCP-protected output) on some shows, in which case you'd have exactly the same rights to record shows in SD that you now have with your current equipment.
I already own a sizeable collection of movies in DVD format and some older ones in Laserdisc format. I'm not about to buy the same movie again in Blu-Ray just because its higher resolution. Especially since I don't own a HDTV set and I still fail to see the compelling reason to shell out the extra cash for a set. HDTV still costs too much and is still too confusing for the average consumer not to mention you can hardly get dick-all worth watching on it unless your in a major metropoloitan area or have a cable provider that has dedicated a significant amount of their coax bandwidth to delviering premium HDTV channels.
Which most cable providers are beginning to do. And if you are in an urban area, you can just hook up your HDTV to your existing antenna and enjoy crystal clear pictures comparable to the best that you can get from cable or satellite, and better than you get off your DVD player. While the TV manufacturers are pushing the pricey big flatscreens, CRT-based HDTVs are now very affordable, starting at about $500 (although you still need to shell out for a separate HD tuner/receiver if you want over-the-air HD).
DVD is too new, and remarkably well-penetrated into the home-market, for people to be willing to accept an upgrade. Likewise future players will pretty much have to be able to play old DVDs.
All sides agree that the new players will read old DVDs. On the other hand, the advantage of the new, high-resolution DVD disks also having a second, lower-quality copy of the movie that can be read by standard DVD players is less clear. I suppose that it might help sell the new, presumably more expensive DVDs to people who don't yet have the hardware to play them in HD, but are anticipating buying it in the future. But DVDs are so cheap that manufacturers could just bundle a standard DVD into the package. Once the new players start to get cheap, the interest in backwards-compatible disks will fall off rapidly.
I agree; i use a 2-button mouse on my desktop, but I hate dual button-trackpads. It's easier to use a modifier key than to reach for that other button. The nice thing about Apple's one-button mouse standard is that it inhibits over-reliance on the other buttons.
The one thing I miss on a pad is a scroll wheel. "Sidetrack" type solutions are not satisfactory, because I don't want to have to pay attention to where my thumb is on the pad--pads are designed for relative, not absolute motion. Apple's two-finger gesture scrolling seems like a better solution.
The actors were filmed digitally, as was the entire movie. The color information was there when needed, they simply used a color process for the film transfer that was more stylized than realistic. No Ted Turner work there, just standard color work.
That's not what it says in the documentary on the DVD, or here, where it shows how color was "washed over the black-and-white composite to create the film's unique look."
The entire thing was green-screened in...all the backgrounds were CGI, the actors were real though.
So I don't know if that makes sense...
The actors were filmed in black & white and then colorized
I meant black and white movies. I'm not saying we should colorize them and then burn the originals though, which is how you appear to be interpreting it. I'm saying that providing the option of watching an old movie in color may revitalize many old movies and television shows, allowing them to be rehashed and rerun for more corporate profit.
I wouldn't care to watch a classic old movie with added color. Doubtless, in many cases the director would probably have used color if he could have, but the movie he made was made for the constraints that existed at the time.
Nevertheless, colorizing old movies increases their accessibility to younger audiences. Considering that the alternative is often to remake the entire movie, usually with a lesser director, it may often be the lesser evil. And we can hope that some people will enjoy the colorized versions enough to want to see them "in the original."
Besides, the examples on the site appear to be from home movies, not "Citizen Kane." We are not dealing with a great auteur here, and if people would like to see Mom's old home movies in color, why not?
No one is saying this technique is going to be used solely for coloring video that the artist didn't want -- but if you can use this technique for art sake, why not?
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was shot in B&W and then colorized, presumably to give it a "retro-futuristic" look. The device works rather well in the context of the film. I was halfway through the film before I realized what they must have done to give it that otherworldly look.
With Sega becoming a 3rd party developer, Nintendo is the only remaining console manufacturer that is actively trying to innovate and push the medium further. A console manufacturer has more leeway to take risks, because a game may benefit them in more ways than simply sales: by developing new markets, by creating new types of games, by setting an example for developers. Fundamentally, Nintendo is a game design firm that builds hardware to support their own games, and each generation of hardware reflects Nintendo's evolving philosophy of game design.
Sadly, Sony entered the field from the perspective of a hardware manufacturer, not a game maker. They have a game division, but it functions essentially as merely another 3rd party developer. Microsoft has followed Sony's example, rather than Nintendo's. Both sell their systems based upon power, with the emphasis on impressive graphics.
So Nintendo appeals not merely to the graphics fan, but to gamers who are interested in new experiences. To me, the DS is an exciting product. This is something quite unlike any previous game platforms, with a novel input mode--a secondary screen that can be used for display, or as a stylus or touch input pad. What is Nintendo going to do with it that has not been done before? The Metroid demo with stylus input is the first FPS that actually seems to work on a console--and a hand-held at that. I've always found joystick control of FPS to be awkward. Mouse works better, but I don't like to sit at a desk to play games. Nintendo is clearly playing with other interesting ideas--using both screens as a single, tall screen (reproducing the aspect ratio of many older arcade systems). Will there be vertical shooters that take advantage of this? Some classic trackball games are coming out for the system. Such games always suck with a stick--how will they play with a pad. And will Nintendo be able to come up with game types for which a pad is really the method of choice? Succeed or fail, I know that Nintendo will offer me something that I haven't seen before.
So I'm excited about the DS in a way that I can't get excited about Playstation 3 or XBox 2. Ho-hum, more polygons, high resolution, fancier lighting, very nice. Similarly, I'm interested in the new Evolution system precisely because I know that Nintendo will take the opportunity to think up new game ideas, and come up with a system uniquely designed to take advantage of them.
I understand why business analysts might be interested, and competitors, buy why the obsession of fans with these rumors?
Because they are fans, and fans like hearing news about the things that they are enthusiastic about. That's why we call them fans. If you aren't a sports fan, you probably don't understand why some guys like to talk about who might be on the team next season, and how they are likely to do against other teams. Why not wait until next season and simply watch the game? If you are not a car fancier, you probably don't understand why guys are interested in next season's cars. If the cars currently available will get you where you need to go, why not just buy one and be done with it?
and what is up with that freaky controller?
The controller reflects a strong game design philosophy, namely that games should have a single action button that you use most of the time. So there is a big, comfortable button, and the others are arranged around it. And since the other buttons have very different shapes/angles, it is virtually impossible to hit the wrong button by mistake. I'd consider it the best currently available controller.
But at the time (late 1970's- early 1980's), Beta tapes could barely hold a full-length feature film. They crapped out at a little under 2 hours. Not so good for home taping.
VHS, on the other hand, had SIX hour tapes. They could easily hold an entire sporting event, several TV episodes, and a film, all on one tape.
Actually, beta had pretty much caught up on tape length well before VHS achieved dominance. When I bought my first VCR, beta and VHS were still neck-and-neck, and 3.25 hour L750 tapes were readily available. And with the higher quality, you could use the lower speed and actually get more time on a beta cassette for decent quality.
If home taping had been the primary use of VCRs, beta would probably still be around. Sony originally marketed VCRs with time shifting in mind as the predominant application. They didn't worry about competition from lower price VHS, because Sony traditionally made high-end products. They didn't make cheap TVs, why should they make cheap VCRs? Sure, they might not have the most sales, but they make it up on margin.
What Sony didn't anticipate, and what ultimately killed beta, was the emergence of the video rental market. People who couldn't figure out how to program a VCR timer could pop in a rental. And the stores quickly found out that they could maximize profits by building their inventory of the most popular format, which was VHS. Pretty soon, people's choice of format became dictated by what their local video store had the best inventory of.
Sony eventually caught on, and started making cut-price betas, but by that time the lead of VHS in the rental market was simply too great.
Well, that and Sony wouldn't license Beta Max to the porn companies, so all the porn came out on VHS.
Myth. Back in the early 80's when the VHS vs Beta wars were still hot, video stores had VHS and beta departments, both with adult film sections.
Almost every media standard Apple had backed early has succeeded overall in the market. Ones that Apple snubbed (or where it has been snubbed e.g. MPEG4) have had real problems getting established, and have mostly failed.
Since when is Apple snubbing, or being snubbed by, MPEG4?
Probably just going to be a PC interface that allows you to watch and schedule stuff on a TiVo box on your nextwork. There is too much DRM stuff going on now for them to be able to let you re-encode and copy shows. Also, that nicely competes with Windows XP Media Center, as you could add it onto your machine by simply buying a TiVo, instead of having to buy an OEM MCE machine.
TiVo has had network scheduling for a long time. And they recently added the ability to copy programs to your PC and (with 3rd party software) burn them to disk.
What's exactly the news here?
Yahoo's been doing this for years.
Yeah, but I gave up on Yahoo years ago, because with all of its customization, I couldn't seem to get a news page layout that I liked as much as the default for news.google.
Well, of course it is PR. Google has no obligation to follow its own rules. If I own a store, I may have a rule that customers are not allowed to take money out of the register. That doesn't mean that I can't do it.
Nobody is really harmed by Google's exempting itself from its own regulations, and Google has every right to do so. But somebody at Google obviously took a look at this and said, "You know, we don't need to do this. So let's have some consistency and follow our own rules. Our customers will appreciate it."
I've known people who have claimed first hand experience to the contrary of your statements; though I grant that it's not in the field of EMF research. I take it you are claiming experience in the field of funding EMF research?
I think that it was clear that I was referring to the role of politics in the grant funding process, not solely EMF research. You (and the article) have presented no evidence that politics plays any greater role in EMF research. Indeed, according to the article, when industry sources attempted to interfere with this research, they were rebuffed by the NIH.
Please reread the article once again, and refer to the reference about onerous restrictions placed on the research by the Corporate sponsors. One has to wonder what, pray tell, you consider unbiased.
There is nothing in the article to indicate that everybody who has done industry-funded research was subject to the unspecified "onerous" restrictions that Lai complained about. Indeed, Lai himself did industry funded research (should we therefore discount his results?). Most scientists of my acquaintance would respond exactly as he did if their industry sponsors tried to tell them what to publish.
Yet another similarity between Global Warming and EMF hazards are that both directly effect the lives of myself, my family and friends. It is a pity that the standard scientific approach has let us down on the understanding of Global Warming. Forgive me if I don't trust the scientific community on EMFs; especially since it cannot successfully filter out biased research from corporations.
However, despite your concerns regarding political interference in Federal funding of research, global warming research has continued to receive funding, even though it is not popular with the current administration. I don't know what you mean when you say that the standard scientific approach has "let us down," on global warming, considering that there has been enormous progress in this area over the last few years, both with respect to climate modeling and in developing new methods of climate modeling and deducing historical climate trends.
I said politics, not Congress, plays a role in funding. If you don't think politics plays a role in the academic world, you've clearly have never been near there.
I've submitted grant proposals and have had them funded. I've sat on NIH Study Sections and reviewed grants. I've never seen any indication of politics influencing grant funding decisions. Of course, individual scientists can have scientific biases, and you need stronger preliminary data if going against prevailing wisdom, but my overall experience is that good work gets funded.
The article specifically states otherwise, if you factor in unbiased research.
Accepting funds from a particular source is not evidence of bias. At worst, it is a potential conflict of interest. It certainly is easier to get funding from private interests if your results help their goals. But most scientists that I've known, particularly in academia, feel that their primary obligation is to their data, not to their funding source. So I'd have to see stronger evidence of bias than industry funding to discount a result.
Hardly. But it is apparently much easier to get negative results funded than positive.
You've obviously never tried to get negative results funded. I can pretty much guarantee that Lai showed positive preliminary results in his successful grant application.
But to maintain funding, you have to show progress. And with a phenomenon like this, that is not explained by any known physical process, that means progress toward elucidating the mechanism.
Um... I think you seek out better controls and devise a better experiment that yields less systematic error. One would think zapping chimps with a GSM phone would not be all that difficult to do... I'd rather know than guess. Of course, that takes a lot of the fun and grants off the table when you are done.
And how do you devise such an experiment? Trial and error? Without any kind of theoretical basis, that is pretty much what you are reduced to. Or you could try zapping chimps. But then, millions of people have been using cell phones for years and there is no good statistical evidence for ill effects. So you better plan on using thousands of chimps, and studying them for years (chimps only live 20 years or so--does that matter? We don't know what's really going on, so who can say?).
Do you have any idea how much a chimp costs? Or what the housing and veterinary costs are for a chimp? Lots of luck writing that grant's budget justification!
Science isn't done in a vacume. Politics also often plays a crucial role in determining who gets funding.
Not really. When it comes to biomedical research, funding decisions are made by independent committees of scientists. Once in awhile, Congress will interfere in funding of some unusually controversial research, typically involving sexuality, but that is the exception rather than the rule.
There was an explicit smear campaign docuemented there. That's hardly "some industry objections". It also seems to have been extremely effective, contrary to your statement.
According to the article, somebody complained to NIH that Lai were doing work outside his original proposal. NIH inquired, he faxed back an explanation, and "The NIH accepted his explanation and assured him that all was well." That doesn't sound very effective to me. He also claims that an industry spokesman tried to get the university to fire him, but they didn't. Again, hardly effective.
Finally, your original statement was about how this was like Cold Fusion; you seem to have dropped that claim.
Nope. In terms of the attitude of scientists, they have roughly similar status--some intriguing, but not convincing, results, no good theoretical basis or mechanism, and a strong suspicion that the whole thing may turn out to be artifact. Which is undoubtedly why this sort of research is having a hard time getting funding.
The difference here is that the Cold Fusion research showed rather quickly the results were not reproducible; with RFR, the article mentions how people aren't even trying to reproduce the results.
Actually, the article says that the results are about equally divided. What you are referring to is their claim that nobody has tried to replicate that exact experiment. That's a dodge; Pons and Fleishman used the same defense for their cold fusion experiments. Scientists almost never try to replicate somebody else's experiment exactly, because even if you succeed, it's hard to get it published because it has already been done. But if a phenomenon is robust, you should be able to demonstrate the same phenomenon in a somewhat different way. The cold fusion guys continue to argue to this day that they have a real phenomenon. Who knows? Perhaps they'll turn out to be right. Perhaps these guys will turn out to be right, too.
But I'd give better odds on cold fusion.