There is no "bricking" risk because CHDK does not alter the firmware, it gets booted from the memory card. Put another memory card without the CHDK file and its gone.
To get the point, i think you need to make a death threat to the President. If you live in the States, you will get a visit.../. will also be forced to take some action, removing your comment and canceling your account, aside from handling any personal data including logs, etc. Thats the kind of law and regulation Chavez is talking about.
Sure, it seems Pat Roberson can call for the assassination of foreign dignitaries on TV (who cares about international laws in the US anyway), but what if he chose Obama as the target for his threat? Feel free to put this to the test.
He then quotes the German Chancellor Angela Merkel saying she said "Internet cannot be something free" (an opinion) and says there should be regulations and laws, which each country should make. He then goes on and talks about a guy arrested in Colombia for saying Uribe's son was in danger of being killed, and in the United States to people threatening President Obama (on internet).
"It is not apparent at this time exactly what kind of controls Chavez has in mind or whether those controls will be similar to the controls in Iran that have been used to silence opposition movements." This is Reuters doing, or their journalist view, it is not mentioned in the speech and its pure bias attempting to lead the reader opinion on the matter.
What he did say was that this particular site has been repeatedly infringing the law (Venezuelan) and calls the General Attorney for action against the administrator and participants of this forum (IMO this will mean nothing if the guys/site reside outside the country).
If you know Spanish, or know someone you trust that knows spanish, watch the video. This is yet another example of why corporate media is criticized by Chavez which in turn criticizes him in a never ending duel.
Dec 2002 to Mar 2003: Disrupting and attempting destruction of the oil industry, depriving everyone of fuel. Most of the saboteurs were fired and the government acquired more control of the industry. Dec 2002 to Mac 2003: Owners lock-out attempting to force Chavez a resign, did nothing against the government, deprived people from food and basic consumables. It showed the dangers of leaving everything in private hands, the government started implementing state owned production, distribution, and now retail of goods. In short, backfired horribly to opposition interests. Dec 2004: Opposition parties decide to retire all their candidates to the National Assembly, as a form of "protest", then proceed to cry the following years for not having any representation; get a little breath from former Chavez supporters turning sides (cheating their voters), but still almost non existent presence in the unicameral legislative branch. 2005 etc: Call to block streets near your home. Of course this works mostly in opposition zones, which makes them self isolated for a couple of days, rest of the country ignores them and lives normally. 2006+ attempts to try Ukraine style "orange" revolt (The Albert Einstein Institute method used in many countries) to use "pacific" methods to overthrown ("anti-us") governments. Unfortunately the Venezuelan "students" didn't get the "pacific" part too well, and ended igniting fires, destroying property and even using firearms, losing what little support from the civic society might have left in them.
I could go on, but you either get it or won't at this point. Opposition fails because of its own stupid mistakes, funny thing is they get openly funded by US Tax payers, in the form of National Endowment for Democracy (bi-partisan institution to fund "pro-american" groups in the world) USAID and such. http://www.venezuelafoia.info/english.html
If the USA used a fraction of the funds they waste all over the world funding parties and movements, and instead used it to solve their own social domestic issues, the effects of the economic crash would have been all gone by know, and wouldn't need people crashing planes against public buildings to show their discontent.
So, wanting to take legal action against a "single" site suddenly becomes "kill open forums"?
If a forum and its members belong to a different country, the local laws won't do a thing. If some members or the hosting is within the country, it is their fault from breaking local laws.
"Chavez To Limit Internet Freedom" on this basis is sensationalist crap.
Call us again then a firewall or nationwide filter becomes mandatory, in the mean time get lost.
There is no seizing of consoles, that is a lie. However, this stupid law is true. In short, any sale, rent, distribution or even promotion of video games with any sort of "violence" in it, can get you 3 to 5 years in jail.
It is explained in the law proposal that this is meant to protect the children from violence, but there is no exception for adults. Yes, for ages 18+ porn is legal, prostitution is legal, bearing firearms (with permit) is legal, but video games? no sir.
Most game software companies will be unable to sell their products, the most affected are of course console games.
Article 3.1 War videogame: Those videogames or programs usable in personal computers, arcade systems, video(game)consoles, portable devices or mobile phones and any other electronic or telematic device, which contain information or symbolism images promoting or inciting violence or use of weapons.
Article 14 Any who import, manufacture, sell, rent or distribute war videogames or war toys, shall be penalized with prison from 3 to 5 years.
Do a revolution: call for a People's National Constituent Assembly, tear down corpocracy and bi-partisan power. Instate direct democracy, down with lobbies and corrupt representation. While you are at it, fix copyright, socialize Health Care and Education and have a decent State run system instead of wasting money in wars. Perhaps forbid military forces from invading foreign nations, and stop active undercover messing all over the planet. We might even achieve World Peace then.
How is this better than the physical book? If you tell me your are giving away many literary works at once in the device, i might understand it, but for a single book, its pointless, and looks much bulkier and heavier than well printed book. Plus, it needs power, so it needs sun, and/or batteries (even heavier).
One brand: Hanlin Get it, use it, forget the rest.
Those things don't even waste power when displaying a page, only when you change it. It's like an "Etch A Sketch" of sorts: no backlight, no refreshing; you need ambient light the same way you need it for real books. Supports all common formats, ARM9 running Linux. No DRM, no wifi connecting on your back to delete your stuff, simple usb mass storage transfer: connect, copy and go, no software nonsense, and it has an SD slot...
There is no way you can discriminate against a type of content vs another. This is an all or nothing game. If you are able to stop child porn, you are able to stop dissidence. That said, TOR is not well suited for bulk transfers (it is very slow), and you can filter outgoing ports, so you could block web, but allow IRC. It is even better not to be an exit node, and not let your address published, and be a so called "bridge node", rather than completely stopping TOR.
Remember, if the tool allows you to infringe the law in your country, others will be able to infringe the law in theirs.
Governments want complete control of the Internet, and anonymous p2p tools will prevent this. Expect outlawing of "unauthorized" software and hardware by the state, and massive dissidence from the people turning to these "illegal" tools in response. Things will probably deteriorate to some kind of fast filtered net, and a slow underground one running on top of it, kind of what the Chinese have, but on a worldwide level, with each country justifying their deeds, "for the sake of the children", "for national security", blah blah.
TOR needs to evolve, people should stop using it to access the "normal" net and put more content inside the "hidden services" (Freenet style), also the "bridge node" system needs more refining and decentralization. Perhaps other anonymous p2p tools will do better, time will tell.
Last thing, you wouldn't be able to watch the riots if you made it impossible for bulk transfer to occur, and that means "the other" type of videos must flow as well. Its all or nothing, no exception.
Actually the law is not like that in US, thats why its crazy. If ONLY the author were the copyright holder and the only one with those rights, it would made some sense. However, the US system allows "transfer of ownership", thats the death trap. The original US copyrights lasted 14 years, and were meant to put a stop to perpetual rights of printer guilds in UK. Today, these "printer guilds" (corporations) have restored their hereditary powers. For this reason, if you are not going to fix it, we are going to ignore it, or even better, legalize non-profit sharing and put an end to the abuse.
You keep your US only Hulu and your DRMed iTunes, i keep my worldwide p2p file sharing sites and my anonymous p2p networks. If artists want money, they better start touring or taking direct donations, i don't believe in third parties "owning" content and exploiting said artists beyond their lives. Or the corporate state imposing their rule to the world.
You are wrong. A device like that, would cost like 900$, the ARM netbooks are going for 200$ or maybe less, these are completely different markets.
Also take in consideration the total failure the iPhone is in Japan, the leader in mobile technology.
Kindle is, frankly, junk. But have you seen other brands, such as chinese Hanlin? The point in ebooks is not just their small size, they also use a display that doesn't use backlight and doesn't draw power unless you change the content. It looks very much like a printed page on a fax machine.
Ironically, Verbatim is currently one of the best DVD-R brands. Back in the day, TDK was great as they used Taiyo Yuden, not anymore... And yes, i even had a gold verbatim cd-r develop a hole on its own (i think they used something different than Cyanide with the gold, as the bottom didn't gave the distinct green look). Thats very old before Verbatim switched to their blueish cheaper material, some of which failed one way or another anyway.
In any case Dvdisaster is a must, and the most streamlined safe way to add redundancy and recover from failure when you know its time to reburn or copy to a hopefully better storage format. There are many alternative methods using quickpar which might work, but you need a standardized (read as blocks, not necessarily in order) way to access your media, which is also identical across the various platforms dvdisaster runs on. Even if you only had.par2 files made against a disc image, i would use dvdisaster adaptive reading strategy to read what it can from the disc, but since dvdisaster can also make (and recover from) redundancy data just fine, why bother with more tools and complex steps?
Your games are not really lost as they are online anyway, but some people actually burned unrecoverable personal data that no one else has. Sure the gold layer might have lasted a hundred years, but nobody ever mentioned anything about the other materials attached to it...
# Texas Instruments OMAP3530 with Micron 256MB (RAM) + 256MB (NAND) Memory # 8.9 inches 1024x600 A+ screen # Main storage: 8GB SD card -- we decided to change from Micro SD to standard SD, so that you can easily upgrade it # Internal USB wifi 802.11 b/g/n powered by a Ralink 3070 chipset # Internal USB bluetooth class 2.1 # FCC, CE, UL-certified, 5V, 3.5A power adapter # 8.9 inches pressure sensitive touch screen # US Qwerty 24cm-large keyboard -- around 95% of the size of a standard keyboard # Cirque Touchpad # Two Owolff high-quality internal stereo speakers # 3D accelerometer # Two internal batteries 6000 and 12000 mAh -- it can be replaced with a screw driver # 7 USB ports: three external, four internal, three of them may be reserved for wifi, bluetooth and keyboard # Bi-color silver/black case -- see photos -- with a beautiful dark-red back cover (we decided to go only for red for the first batch as it really jumps out, you won't regret it). # Secured attachment system of tablet into keyboard # Independent magnet system for the tablet -- we don't want your Touch Book to un-magnetize all your credit cards while carrying it in your bag!
Today there is a lot of obsolete junk, so it's kinda pointless but lets talk about Betamax a little.
Betamax was probably killed more by aggressive Sony royalties than by its technical merits. In my country, the Betamax format was still in wide use when Sony decided to kill it on 1992, despite not being used so much in US or Europe by then. I have 3 Betamax machines in working condition and plenty of tapes... If you look at the technical merits, Betamax had the advantage in everything but duration length. Furthermore Betamax improved quality while retaining backward compatibility, SuperBeta and the EDBeta mode you mention, achieved S-VHS type definition and remained playable in older equipment. I have betamax tapes with japanese TV recordings from the 80ies and they still play, today. EDBeta stored stereo in its own section of the tape, and didn't suffer from the head align problems of Hifi VHS which recorded the audio on top of the video. There are more subtleties such as end of tape marked with metallic stripe instead of plastic, meant, a VHS deck would panic and stop if there was a hole in middle of playing, while Betamax would continue to the real end.
Laserdisc was expensive, perhaps too expensive for Americans, but still affordable for Japanese. It was an analog optical format, with large 12" discs which were fragile and hard to handle, only sporting 30 to 60mins of video per side. Yet, unsurpassed in quality at its time, until the advent of DVDs.
Muse is quite frankly heroic. Yes, it used 3 times more analog bandwidth, but Japan had Widescreen HDTV 20 years ago. How is that for leading progress? I don't think there are many people there worried about junking their 20 year old equipment, and there are converter boxes... Remember that it is 2009 now, when you finally have to use digital, 20 years after.
Japan is still like 3 years ahead in technology, in things like mobile phones. The iPhone is junk they don't want, even given for free. The game console market has been dominated by Japanese companies after the American crash in 84 for many years until Microsoft went to try its share with the X-Box.
Look at the technical problems ATSC gives, compared to all other systems; look at how many countries are adopting ATSC compared to the other formats, but you made your choice (or more likely, few corporations did it for you) and you are entitled to. But one day, you will travel to another place, and wonder why it took so much effort to set up your tv and orient your outdoor antenna back home where elsewhere people can even use rabbit ears and bare wires indoor or watch tv with their mobile phones everywhere, and in better quality.
I think by then MRAM will be ready to take over all memory needs and possibly mass storage needs.
MRAM is: Fast like SRAM, less power hungry than DRAM (no refresh!), and keeps its state like flash, but without degrading when written to... Its obvious this will make all other types obsolete.
How old was ToR? I remember losing sleep playing AD&D Treasure of Tarmin on the Intellivision II (yeah, giving me the see thru walls while changing direction bug;)
Call it what you will, but ATSC is junk. You cannot be too close from transmitter, you must use an external antenna and point directly to transmitter, and even at optimal conditions the thing fails. What low density rural needs is satellite, not sacrifice urban reception, and make everyone suffer pointing antennas. But of course, the US is not known for choosing the technically better solution, just the solution that would benefit certain lobbies most.
Take a look at these tests made in Brazil a decade ago: http://www.set.com.br/artigos/nab.pps IMO Japan (as usual) has the very best system. Brazil did the smart thing, taking the japanese system and update its codec to use mpeg4 (from mpeg2) which has better features for transmission and more quality per bandwidth ratio. Also the Europeans are updating their standard to implement the "low bandwidth" mobile device channel idea from the Japanese system (1seg).
China is developing their own Digital TV standard.
My country is currently testing the different digital standards (We still use NTSC), but one thing has been clear so far: No ATSC (been dropped from further testing already).
Well lets see... China has the largest amount of american debt purchased as US treasury bonds and such, so it is in fact the largest foreign investor... US companies go bankrupt and the Chinese happily buys them at cheap price to keep them afloat with huge load of backing fonds from home to support them for decades.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no "bricking" risk because CHDK does not alter the firmware, it gets booted from the memory card. Put another memory card without the CHDK file and its gone.
Hmm let's see, Venezuela kicked out foreign oil companies, except: Chevron Corporation, Repsol YPF, Mitsubishi Corporation, Inpex, Suelopetrol CA, Eni, PetroVietnam, Petronas, ONGC, Indian Oil Corporation, Oil India, CNPC, Rosneft), Gazprom Neft, Lukoil, TNK-BP, Surgutneftegaz. And that leaves us... Uh, Esson (which retired) out of the cake. Yeah right, thats the whole world he kicked.
Good thing you warned us about misinformation there. Giving examples eh?
How about you follow that link and learn about the one in April 11, 2002 against Chavez?
To get the point, i think you need to make a death threat to the President. If you live in the States, you will get a visit... /. will also be forced to take some action, removing your comment and canceling your account, aside from handling any personal data including logs, etc. Thats the kind of law and regulation Chavez is talking about.
Sure, it seems Pat Roberson can call for the assassination of foreign dignitaries on TV (who cares about international laws in the US anyway), but what if he chose Obama as the target for his threat? Feel free to put this to the test.
Here is the source, and Chavez doesn't mention filters or firewalls, he says people should get prosecuted using the law and constitution:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xckilm_ch%E1vez-pide-actuar-contra-nd_news
He then quotes the German Chancellor Angela Merkel saying she said "Internet cannot be something free" (an opinion) and says there should be regulations and laws, which each country should make. He then goes on and talks about a guy arrested in Colombia for saying Uribe's son was in danger of being killed, and in the United States to people threatening President Obama (on internet).
"It is not apparent at this time exactly what kind of controls Chavez has in mind or whether those controls will be similar to the controls in Iran that have been used to silence opposition movements." This is Reuters doing, or their journalist view, it is not mentioned in the speech and its pure bias attempting to lead the reader opinion on the matter.
What he did say was that this particular site has been repeatedly infringing the law (Venezuelan) and calls the General Attorney for action against the administrator and participants of this forum (IMO this will mean nothing if the guys/site reside outside the country).
If you know Spanish, or know someone you trust that knows spanish, watch the video. This is yet another example of why corporate media is criticized by Chavez which in turn criticizes him in a never ending duel.
http://www.laht.com/article.asp?CategoryId=10717&ArticleId=344086
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/601
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/aug/07/something-fishy-in-venezuela/?feat=home_editorials
Dec 2002 to Mar 2003: Disrupting and attempting destruction of the oil industry, depriving everyone of fuel. Most of the saboteurs were fired and the government acquired more control of the industry.
Dec 2002 to Mac 2003: Owners lock-out attempting to force Chavez a resign, did nothing against the government, deprived people from food and basic consumables. It showed the dangers of leaving everything in private hands, the government started implementing state owned production, distribution, and now retail of goods. In short, backfired horribly to opposition interests.
Dec 2004: Opposition parties decide to retire all their candidates to the National Assembly, as a form of "protest", then proceed to cry the following years for not having any representation; get a little breath from former Chavez supporters turning sides (cheating their voters), but still almost non existent presence in the unicameral legislative branch.
2005 etc: Call to block streets near your home. Of course this works mostly in opposition zones, which makes them self isolated for a couple of days, rest of the country ignores them and lives normally.
2006+ attempts to try Ukraine style "orange" revolt (The Albert Einstein Institute method used in many countries) to use "pacific" methods to overthrown ("anti-us") governments. Unfortunately the Venezuelan "students" didn't get the "pacific" part too well, and ended igniting fires, destroying property and even using firearms, losing what little support from the civic society might have left in them.
I could go on, but you either get it or won't at this point. Opposition fails because of its own stupid mistakes, funny thing is they get openly funded by US Tax payers, in the form of National Endowment for Democracy (bi-partisan institution to fund "pro-american" groups in the world) USAID and such. http://www.venezuelafoia.info/english.html
If the USA used a fraction of the funds they waste all over the world funding parties and movements, and instead used it to solve their own social domestic issues, the effects of the economic crash would have been all gone by know, and wouldn't need people crashing planes against public buildings to show their discontent.
So, wanting to take legal action against a "single" site suddenly becomes "kill open forums"?
If a forum and its members belong to a different country, the local laws won't do a thing.
If some members or the hosting is within the country, it is their fault from breaking local laws.
"Chavez To Limit Internet Freedom" on this basis is sensationalist crap.
Call us again then a firewall or nationwide filter becomes mandatory, in the mean time get lost.
There is no seizing of consoles, that is a lie. However, this stupid law is true. In short, any sale, rent, distribution or even promotion of video games with any sort of "violence" in it, can get you 3 to 5 years in jail.
It is explained in the law proposal that this is meant to protect the children from violence, but there is no exception for adults. Yes, for ages 18+ porn is legal, prostitution is legal, bearing firearms (with permit) is legal, but video games? no sir.
Most game software companies will be unable to sell their products, the most affected are of course console games.
I oppose this law and the constitution (art. 74) allows a referendum to revoke it. The question is, will enough people get together to start this?
Here is the law in the official print (in spanish).
Key excerpts from this law (forgive my translation):
Article 3.1
War videogame: Those videogames or programs usable in personal computers, arcade systems, video(game)consoles, portable devices or mobile phones and any other electronic or telematic device, which contain information or symbolism images promoting or inciting violence or use of weapons.
Article 14
Any who import, manufacture, sell, rent or distribute war videogames or war toys, shall be penalized with prison from 3 to 5 years.
Please read Joe Stack suicide note. The terror is the system, Wake up!
How is this better than the physical book? If you tell me your are giving away many literary works at once in the device, i might understand it, but for a single book, its pointless, and looks much bulkier and heavier than well printed book. Plus, it needs power, so it needs sun, and/or batteries (even heavier).
Thanks but no thanks.
One brand: Hanlin
Get it, use it, forget the rest.
Those things don't even waste power when displaying a page, only when you change it. It's like an "Etch A Sketch" of sorts: no backlight, no refreshing; you need ambient light the same way you need it for real books. Supports all common formats, ARM9 running Linux. No DRM, no wifi connecting on your back to delete your stuff, simple usb mass storage transfer: connect, copy and go, no software nonsense, and it has an SD slot...
There is no way you can discriminate against a type of content vs another. This is an all or nothing game. If you are able to stop child porn, you are able to stop dissidence.
That said, TOR is not well suited for bulk transfers (it is very slow), and you can filter outgoing ports, so you could block web, but allow IRC. It is even better not to be an exit node, and not let your address published, and be a so called "bridge node", rather than completely stopping TOR.
Remember, if the tool allows you to infringe the law in your country, others will be able to infringe the law in theirs.
Governments want complete control of the Internet, and anonymous p2p tools will prevent this. Expect outlawing of "unauthorized" software and hardware by the state, and massive dissidence from the people turning to these "illegal" tools in response. Things will probably deteriorate to some kind of fast filtered net, and a slow underground one running on top of it, kind of what the Chinese have, but on a worldwide level, with each country justifying their deeds, "for the sake of the children", "for national security", blah blah.
TOR needs to evolve, people should stop using it to access the "normal" net and put more content inside the "hidden services" (Freenet style), also the "bridge node" system needs more refining and decentralization. Perhaps other anonymous p2p tools will do better, time will tell.
Last thing, you wouldn't be able to watch the riots if you made it impossible for bulk transfer to occur, and that means "the other" type of videos must flow as well. Its all or nothing, no exception.
Actually the law is not like that in US, thats why its crazy. If ONLY the author were the copyright holder and the only one with those rights, it would made some sense. However, the US system allows "transfer of ownership", thats the death trap. The original US copyrights lasted 14 years, and were meant to put a stop to perpetual rights of printer guilds in UK. Today, these "printer guilds" (corporations) have restored their hereditary powers. For this reason, if you are not going to fix it, we are going to ignore it, or even better, legalize non-profit sharing and put an end to the abuse.
You keep your US only Hulu and your DRMed iTunes, i keep my worldwide p2p file sharing sites and my anonymous p2p networks. If artists want money, they better start touring or taking direct donations, i don't believe in third parties "owning" content and exploiting said artists beyond their lives. Or the corporate state imposing their rule to the world.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srLm8vrddac
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Snlp1yTmeyM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZm6qM0KPpg
http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/
You are wrong. A device like that, would cost like 900$, the ARM netbooks are going for 200$ or maybe less, these are completely different markets.
Also take in consideration the total failure the iPhone is in Japan, the leader in mobile technology.
Kindle is, frankly, junk. But have you seen other brands, such as chinese Hanlin? The point in ebooks is not just their small size, they also use a display that doesn't use backlight and doesn't draw power unless you change the content. It looks very much like a printed page on a fax machine.
The trick to /. is to use the "Plain Old Text" editing mode, as it accepts html tags just fine and the text will appear the way you intended.
Ironically, Verbatim is currently one of the best DVD-R brands. Back in the day, TDK was great as they used Taiyo Yuden, not anymore... And yes, i even had a gold verbatim cd-r develop a hole on its own (i think they used something different than Cyanide with the gold, as the bottom didn't gave the distinct green look). Thats very old before Verbatim switched to their blueish cheaper material, some of which failed one way or another anyway.
In any case Dvdisaster is a must, and the most streamlined safe way to add redundancy and recover from failure when you know its time to reburn or copy to a hopefully better storage format. There are many alternative methods using quickpar which might work, but you need a standardized (read as blocks, not necessarily in order) way to access your media, which is also identical across the various platforms dvdisaster runs on. Even if you only had .par2 files made against a disc image, i would use dvdisaster adaptive reading strategy to read what it can from the disc, but since dvdisaster can also make (and recover from) redundancy data just fine, why bother with more tools and complex steps?
Your games are not really lost as they are online anyway, but some people actually burned unrecoverable personal data that no one else has. Sure the gold layer might have lasted a hundred years, but nobody ever mentioned anything about the other materials attached to it...
http://freshtech.wordpress.com/2008/01/27/kindle-vs-hanlin-ereader-v3-comparison/
Did i mention this chinese eReader uses Linux? Just so you knew...
Why people buy Kindles when there is a myriad of asian counterparts that can do the same much better, without DRM or remote control whatsoever, and able to render .pdf, graphic formats and other ebook formats?. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlin_eReader http://www.jinke.com.cn/Compagesql/English/embedpro/index.asp
http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/
# Texas Instruments OMAP3530 with Micron 256MB (RAM) + 256MB (NAND) Memory
# 8.9 inches 1024x600 A+ screen
# Main storage: 8GB SD card -- we decided to change from Micro SD to standard SD, so that you can easily upgrade it
# Internal USB wifi 802.11 b/g/n powered by a Ralink 3070 chipset
# Internal USB bluetooth class 2.1
# FCC, CE, UL-certified, 5V, 3.5A power adapter
# 8.9 inches pressure sensitive touch screen
# US Qwerty 24cm-large keyboard -- around 95% of the size of a standard keyboard
# Cirque Touchpad
# Two Owolff high-quality internal stereo speakers
# 3D accelerometer
# Two internal batteries 6000 and 12000 mAh -- it can be replaced with a screw driver
# 7 USB ports: three external, four internal, three of them may be reserved for wifi, bluetooth and keyboard
# Bi-color silver/black case -- see photos -- with a beautiful dark-red back cover (we decided to go only for red for the first batch as it really jumps out, you won't regret it).
# Secured attachment system of tablet into keyboard
# Independent magnet system for the tablet -- we don't want your Touch Book to un-magnetize all your credit cards while carrying it in your bag!
Today there is a lot of obsolete junk, so it's kinda pointless but lets talk about Betamax a little.
Betamax was probably killed more by aggressive Sony royalties than by its technical merits. In my country, the Betamax format was still in wide use when Sony decided to kill it on 1992, despite not being used so much in US or Europe by then. I have 3 Betamax machines in working condition and plenty of tapes... If you look at the technical merits, Betamax had the advantage in everything but duration length. Furthermore Betamax improved quality while retaining backward compatibility, SuperBeta and the EDBeta mode you mention, achieved S-VHS type definition and remained playable in older equipment. I have betamax tapes with japanese TV recordings from the 80ies and they still play, today. EDBeta stored stereo in its own section of the tape, and didn't suffer from the head align problems of Hifi VHS which recorded the audio on top of the video. There are more subtleties such as end of tape marked with metallic stripe instead of plastic, meant, a VHS deck would panic and stop if there was a hole in middle of playing, while Betamax would continue to the real end.
Laserdisc was expensive, perhaps too expensive for Americans, but still affordable for Japanese. It was an analog optical format, with large 12" discs which were fragile and hard to handle, only sporting 30 to 60mins of video per side. Yet, unsurpassed in quality at its time, until the advent of DVDs.
Muse is quite frankly heroic. Yes, it used 3 times more analog bandwidth, but Japan had Widescreen HDTV 20 years ago. How is that for leading progress? I don't think there are many people there worried about junking their 20 year old equipment, and there are converter boxes... Remember that it is 2009 now, when you finally have to use digital, 20 years after.
Japan is still like 3 years ahead in technology, in things like mobile phones. The iPhone is junk they don't want, even given for free. The game console market has been dominated by Japanese companies after the American crash in 84 for many years until Microsoft went to try its share with the X-Box.
Look at the technical problems ATSC gives, compared to all other systems; look at how many countries are adopting ATSC compared to the other formats, but you made your choice (or more likely, few corporations did it for you) and you are entitled to. But one day, you will travel to another place, and wonder why it took so much effort to set up your tv and orient your outdoor antenna back home where elsewhere people can even use rabbit ears and bare wires indoor or watch tv with their mobile phones everywhere, and in better quality.
I think by then MRAM will be ready to take over all memory needs and possibly mass storage needs.
MRAM is: Fast like SRAM, less power hungry than DRAM (no refresh!), and keeps its state like flash, but without degrading when written to... Its obvious this will make all other types obsolete.
How old was ToR? I remember losing sleep playing AD&D Treasure of Tarmin on the Intellivision II (yeah, giving me the see thru walls while changing direction bug ;)
Call it what you will, but ATSC is junk. You cannot be too close from transmitter, you must use an external antenna and point directly to transmitter, and even at optimal conditions the thing fails. What low density rural needs is satellite, not sacrifice urban reception, and make everyone suffer pointing antennas. But of course, the US is not known for choosing the technically better solution, just the solution that would benefit certain lobbies most.
Take a look at these tests made in Brazil a decade ago: http://www.set.com.br/artigos/nab.pps
IMO Japan (as usual) has the very best system. Brazil did the smart thing, taking the japanese system and update its codec to use mpeg4 (from mpeg2) which has better features for transmission and more quality per bandwidth ratio. Also the Europeans are updating their standard to implement the "low bandwidth" mobile device channel idea from the Japanese system (1seg).
China is developing their own Digital TV standard.
My country is currently testing the different digital standards (We still use NTSC), but one thing has been clear so far: No ATSC (been dropped from further testing already).
Well lets see... China has the largest amount of american debt purchased as US treasury bonds and such, so it is in fact the largest foreign investor...
US companies go bankrupt and the Chinese happily buys them at cheap price to keep them afloat with huge load of backing fonds from home to support them for decades.
0wned?