Hmmm... all of your links contain content from this year.
Are you an idiot? What about 2002/11 don't you understand in that link? Let me spell it out for you: in 2002, Jim Heid published a book called "The Macintosh Digital Hub".
Here you go: Macworld 2002 Keynote. After 30 seconds of googling, I was able to find that article, which places the original reference from Apple as Steve Jobs' Macworld 2001 keynote. Or here are live notes from the 2001 Macworld keynote (which was in January, 2001, I might add).
Also, "years" means more than one. Look it up.
"Microsoft has been working on a digital hub strategy for close to 10 years." Ha. I worked at WebTV. I did presentations in the Microsoft Home. Their strategy has been all over the map. They have tried everything they can to weasel their way out of the computer room and into the living room. I wouldn't call it much of a strategy. Apple's Digital Hub strategy has been pretty focused and consistent: they want to manage all of your digital media, from music to photos to DVD. Apple says a lot of things that are inconsistent ("no video ipod"), but unlike Microsoft or Intel, if you actually follow what they *do* and not what they say, they are very consistent and have a very coherent strategy.
Yes, a 21" monitor at close range is not the ideal viewing platform for this video.
That said, you don't understand digital video if you don't understand how video at 320x240 could look better than video at 720x480. When looking at compressed video, the resolution is almost useless (after all, my video was 1024x768 when I played it full-screen). The most important characteristics are bitrate and codec (in that order). The bitrate of the Apple videos are about 650kb/s, while the bitrate of a 350MB encode of an hour-long drama like Lost, 24, etc. is about 1000kb/s. However, those are encoded with DivX, XviD, or a couple of other variants of MPEG-4, while Apple uses the far superior h.264 (MPEG-4 Part 10). So that closes the gap considerably.
The third most important characteristic, and again, far more important than resolution (within reason - 64x48 video is going to be resolution-limited with regard to video quality no matter what the bitrate) would be the source video. And here again Apple is far superior. The DivX releases are taken from cable or broadcast signals and these have undergone at least one analog to digital conversion and very likely several. Both transmission methods throw out a lot of data, especially color information, even with digital cable. Then it is recorded to a computers hard drive, typically encoded as a high bit-rate MPEG-2 file (again losing data - even if it is straight DV, you are losing data) and then encoded again to the DivX format for final distribution. Compare that to Apple, which should be able to take the original HD digital masters and convert them directly to the digital format.
Probably the fourth most important characteristic is going to be processing time. Most modern video codecs are asymmetric, in that encoding is far more expensive than decoding. And encoding video is a very computationally intensive process. There is a general tradeoff in terms of computational time and video quality. You quickly run into diminishing returns, but you can spent a lot of time optimizing your encoding, especially along the time scale (compressing using elements from previous/subsequent frames; this is usually limited by the decoders minimum requirements). Apple can probably throw a lot more processing power at the problem than anybody encoding TV broadcasts.
So, yes, the resolution is only 320x240 and that sucks, but the quality is pretty high and the added detail allows it to scale well. The tiling is definitely more pronounced when scaled to full-screen in the Apple video, but the DivX versions have a lot more mosquito noise, which isn't surprising when you realize they are encoding with four times the number of pixels but only two thirds more kb/s.
Overall, the edge goes to the DivX video, but it is a lot closer than most people would intuitively think. Remember, I'm not comparing this to analog TV, which is guaranteed to be better than its DivX equivalent, I am comparing it to a 350MB DivX version. Also, remember that the blurring of interlaced analog television sets tends to make motion video look better than it does on much less forgiving progressive computer monitors. If you really want to compare it to analog TV, you should watch it on an analog TV set, which is what I am going to do tonight.
No, it is 4:3. Another strike against it. Like I said, this is no where near ideal, but I think it is worth checking out and I might support it (i.e., start getting Lost) just so we can get closer to that ideal. The quality isn't great, but it is good enough for now and within a year, if this goes well, we should see some huge shifts in content. Unlike the RIAA, the TV studios have a *huge* incentive to do this. Their shows are already paid for, so this is pure profit for them. And this could be huge for small cable channels that produce their own content. Obviously HBO is a prime candidate, but I think that Comedy Central would make a ton of money with the Daily Show (and perhaps the Colbert Report). I know a bunch of people like me who don't get cable or don't have Comedy Central, but love the Daily Show and beg me to show them any I've downloaded. I would much prefer to download them legally, especially since I could get a few friends to pitch in to defray the costs. This could allow shows that aren't commercially viable in a broadcast or cable environment to get made. This is going to be a huge shift in content creation, because viewers are going to start deciding what gets made, not advertisers. If this were available a couple of years ago, Firefly, the Family Guy, and Futurama would never have gone off the air.
Are you a Brit? I'm pretty sure that the streaming used some location-based technology (if a table of IP blocks and their country is technology) that only made it available to people living in Great Britain (not even Canada could get it). Also, if you had a license, you could watch next weeks episode a week before it aired. Cool, but not an option for me. Luckily, I found it on BitTorrent (actually, that is how I first found it and got hooked). Going back and watching the first series, I didn't like it as much as the second, although it was still pretty good. I think I liked the original radio episodes better than the first series. But "Milky Joe", God, that is pure comedy gold!
I would love to be able to get first run BBC shows here in the U.S. (other than by downloading them illegally), and Think Secret said Apple had a media event later today scheduled at the BBC, so I am really hoping that is the case. My dream scenario is that the BBC prices their stuff cheaper than Hollywood and I, the consumer, get better quality, cheaper goods and some real competition, while the Beeb gets access to a huge new market and massive amounts of basically cost-free revenue (they've already made the shows). But they could probably price them higher and I'd still buy them. I do a lot of Amazon.co.uk shopping....
Oh, and btw, play them in Quicktime Player. For buying, downloading, and keeping track of your video, iTunes is great, but it blows for playback. I think the only thing that the update did was change the name to iTunes 6 and add the Video source. It was cool that the Video source had the Decemberists video for "16 Military Wives" that I downloaded from their site and added to iTunes in 4.8 as well as the Morcheeba video I got through iTunes (at about the same time), but the integration is seriously lacking. Same with the iTMS. I wonder how last minute this was? I had thought they were planning this since video was introduced earlier this summer with 4.7 or 4.8, but this is absolutely a 1.0 release lacking Apple's usual polish. Perhaps podcasting sucked up a lot of resources and this was way down the priority list. Still, the iPod w/ video was in development for a while, they knew this was coming. The iTMS stuff could be fixed later today or next week, but I think it is obvious that iTunes is not meant for video playback. I think all new machines will be shipping with Frontrow (at least all the Intel ones). I wonder when they will make it available for older machines?
No, I don't think it would. The G4s are frontside bus bandwidth constrained, not memory bus bandwidth constrained. The higher latencies in DDR2 could actually slow things down, although that is probably irrelevant if your memory controller runs 5 cycles in the time your frontside bus does one. The only win would be if DDR2 is more battery efficient (probably, but I don't know) and you could get an extra 1% of battery life. Otherwise, there are hopefully some component upgrades like a slightly faster processor that is more battery efficient, 7200RPM HD, better video card, higher-rez screen, etc. that they could bump. But the G4 is pretty much at the end of what you can do to squeeze out any more performance.
Apple would love to release PowerBooks, although not at this event. This was all about video and the start of their campaign to win the living room (Frontshow on Mac mini - 'nuff said). They will be updating PowerMacs within the week (maybe a bit longer) to catch them up to the now better-spec'd iMacs and if they don't release PowerBooks then, it is simply because they can't. They could be selling a ton more if they were competitive, which is what will happen next year (compatible won't hurt, either).
They definitely need to up the video resolution (and they will, once the new video iPod comes out next year and they start integrating this with Frontrow), but I'm watching the first episode of Lost full-screen on my iBook and I have to say, the quality is about the same as the 350MB versions I get over BitTorrent. I thought it was going to be crap, but I am pretty impressed. I won't buy much more (maybe Lost, if I pick up the first season on DVD), because they really need to raise the resolution to at least TV levels (640x480 or 720x480) and I don't want to have to buy it twice, but for just 2 bucks, I think everyone should check it out. Plus, it only uses 40% of my processor, which isn't bad at all.
I have been waiting for this for so long! Now if I could just get the Daily Show, Peepshow, or The Mighty Boosh....
Because Apple's contract is up. They negotiated a contract for 2 (or has it been 3?) years and now they have to re-negotiate the contract. Then the record companies can use this to force the next contract re-negotiation to raise prices (kind of like IP "parity" - Australia grants 200 year copyrights so now we have to too stay even - except we tack on an extra 50 years and now Australia...). Also, iTMS has like 85% of the market, so the recording companies have to take them down a peg. They want competition amongst distributors, a typical divide and conquer strategy. If they were solely reliant on digital distribution, they would be fucked, because Apple could basically dictate terms to them. They want a bunch of digital distributors with small percentages of the market so that if any of them get out of line, they can destroy them with out affecting their bottom line. It is very similar to Microsoft, in that they encourage fierce competition amongst hardware manufacturers, leading to lower prices and razor-thin margins, while maintaining a monopoly on the software needed for that hardware, ensuring they can enforce high prices and even higher margins.
I really hope Apple holds out, because otherwise we are going to be screwed, ceding all market power to the RIAA.
That is very different from Goodyear, Firestone, Michelin, and all the other tire companies getting together and setting prices, which is what the music industry seems on the edge of doing. Your example is simply MSRPs enforced by MAP agreements. The key point is that it is one manufacturer in an industry, not the entire industry.
Huh? What would Lucent have done if they didn't have a patent? Think about it. The solution is to close the loophole, not destroy the only leverage the little guys had. The problem with the patent system is how it has been exploited by big companies, but don't through the baby out with the bathwater.
And this is exactly why Apple can't open up their DRM scheme. As soon as they do, all leverage over rights, pricing, etc. goes to the RIAA. If Apple won't raise prices, then the RIAA can switch to someone who will. The RIAA wants the distributors to be the commodity, racing to the bottom, like it has always been. Apple's system turns that model on its head and even forces the publishers to start to compete. Yes, it isn't an ideal system (competition at both levels would be nice), but at least Apple is a benevolent dictator instead of the "let them eat cake" RIAA.
Your information on steel is completely false. My brother is a structural engineer and I was just talking about this with him the other day. He is working on a project for a guy that wants to build a first floor (like a daylight basement) and then put a manufactured home on top of it. Due to codes, they would have to use steel I-beams and that massively increases the cost of building it. Steel is both much more expensive in materials and labor. The plus is that it is very strong and allows you to do fun things like cantilevering. There is a reason why steel is used to build large skyscrapers and commercial buildings and not homes.
What about using the keyboard? The shortcut ^F2 will move the keyboard focus to the menu bar and you can navigate through the menus using the arrow keys (and letters, but that seems to be a little buggy). You might have to turn on full keyboard access to enable this shortcut, but this might provide a solution to your legitimate problem. I use multiple monitors sometimes and it is a pain.
However, I think a better and more consistent solution would be to provide an option to just mirror the menu bar at the top of each screen. Those secondary screens always look naked without it. I could see this possibly confusing some people, so it would be disabled by default, and it would be useful to differentiate the secondary screens, so the Apple menu could only show up on the primary screen, but I could see it being very useful to those people who use multiple monitors as part of their work flow.
I loved this line from the Think Secret writeup, which references the New York Times article:
The phone, the Times said, will allow users to "listen to the songs, presumably through headphones," as opposed to listening to them through salami sandwiches, as originally presumed.
Uhh, XP is at Service Pack 2 and OS X86 is at a beta or alpha stage. For an OS whose key apps are mostly emulated and which is solely for developers, running on an architecture it wasn't compiled for (Celeron, no SSE3), "just as fast" sounds pretty damn good.
Apparently you haven't been to BitTorrent.com recently. Bram has setup a search engine for torrents, which makes it very easy to find torrents for infringing content. Bram has always publicly downplayed the illegal uses of BitTorrent, so it would be a tougher case, but he was in a much better position when he himself didn't enable people to find illegal content.
Of course, the real difference is that BitTorrent is open source and there are a ton of clients. While they could take Bram or any BitTorrent site down, they aren't going to be able to control the protocol anymore than they can control the Internet.
The parent poster was referring to Verisign's control of the.com TLD and their abuse of it. Specifically, their attempt to redirect web traffic for any.com domain that wasn't registered to their ad servers, called SiteFinder. Read the link before posting. He was supporting your position.
But there is one company/database that controls what is allowed into the root servers, broken up by TLD. The root servers are redundant, not decentralized. They are all replications of a single database and as that central database goes, so go the root servers. And Verisign is a perfect example of why we *don't* want a centralized system.
I think you're right that NetFlix is sending signals to Amazon that they want to be bought out, but I think you are wrong that there is no future in shipping. Downloading is undoubtedly the future, but not the immediate future. I think we are still a few years away before it starts to take off and with HD/BluRay, discs will continue to play a huge role for the foreseeable future.
NetFlix is afraid that Amazon will enter the market against them, leveraging their massive infrastructure, and they want to preempt that battle. It is very likely they would be a very good fit and provide a nice revenue boost to Amazon's bottom line.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm... all of your links contain content from this year.
Are you an idiot? What about 2002/11 don't you understand in that link? Let me spell it out for you: in 2002, Jim Heid published a book called "The Macintosh Digital Hub". Here you go: Macworld 2002 Keynote. After 30 seconds of googling, I was able to find that article, which places the original reference from Apple as Steve Jobs' Macworld 2001 keynote. Or here are live notes from the 2001 Macworld keynote (which was in January, 2001, I might add).
Also, "years" means more than one. Look it up.
"Microsoft has been working on a digital hub strategy for close to 10 years." Ha. I worked at WebTV. I did presentations in the Microsoft Home. Their strategy has been all over the map. They have tried everything they can to weasel their way out of the computer room and into the living room. I wouldn't call it much of a strategy. Apple's Digital Hub strategy has been pretty focused and consistent: they want to manage all of your digital media, from music to photos to DVD. Apple says a lot of things that are inconsistent ("no video ipod"), but unlike Microsoft or Intel, if you actually follow what they *do* and not what they say, they are very consistent and have a very coherent strategy.
So, basically, people are biased towards good things.
Ask a stupid question....
That said, you don't understand digital video if you don't understand how video at 320x240 could look better than video at 720x480. When looking at compressed video, the resolution is almost useless (after all, my video was 1024x768 when I played it full-screen). The most important characteristics are bitrate and codec (in that order). The bitrate of the Apple videos are about 650kb/s, while the bitrate of a 350MB encode of an hour-long drama like Lost, 24, etc. is about 1000kb/s. However, those are encoded with DivX, XviD, or a couple of other variants of MPEG-4, while Apple uses the far superior h.264 (MPEG-4 Part 10). So that closes the gap considerably.
The third most important characteristic, and again, far more important than resolution (within reason - 64x48 video is going to be resolution-limited with regard to video quality no matter what the bitrate) would be the source video. And here again Apple is far superior. The DivX releases are taken from cable or broadcast signals and these have undergone at least one analog to digital conversion and very likely several. Both transmission methods throw out a lot of data, especially color information, even with digital cable. Then it is recorded to a computers hard drive, typically encoded as a high bit-rate MPEG-2 file (again losing data - even if it is straight DV, you are losing data) and then encoded again to the DivX format for final distribution. Compare that to Apple, which should be able to take the original HD digital masters and convert them directly to the digital format.
Probably the fourth most important characteristic is going to be processing time. Most modern video codecs are asymmetric, in that encoding is far more expensive than decoding. And encoding video is a very computationally intensive process. There is a general tradeoff in terms of computational time and video quality. You quickly run into diminishing returns, but you can spent a lot of time optimizing your encoding, especially along the time scale (compressing using elements from previous/subsequent frames; this is usually limited by the decoders minimum requirements). Apple can probably throw a lot more processing power at the problem than anybody encoding TV broadcasts.
So, yes, the resolution is only 320x240 and that sucks, but the quality is pretty high and the added detail allows it to scale well. The tiling is definitely more pronounced when scaled to full-screen in the Apple video, but the DivX versions have a lot more mosquito noise, which isn't surprising when you realize they are encoding with four times the number of pixels but only two thirds more kb/s.
Overall, the edge goes to the DivX video, but it is a lot closer than most people would intuitively think. Remember, I'm not comparing this to analog TV, which is guaranteed to be better than its DivX equivalent, I am comparing it to a 350MB DivX version. Also, remember that the blurring of interlaced analog television sets tends to make motion video look better than it does on much less forgiving progressive computer monitors. If you really want to compare it to analog TV, you should watch it on an analog TV set, which is what I am going to do tonight.
No, it is 4:3. Another strike against it. Like I said, this is no where near ideal, but I think it is worth checking out and I might support it (i.e., start getting Lost) just so we can get closer to that ideal. The quality isn't great, but it is good enough for now and within a year, if this goes well, we should see some huge shifts in content. Unlike the RIAA, the TV studios have a *huge* incentive to do this. Their shows are already paid for, so this is pure profit for them. And this could be huge for small cable channels that produce their own content. Obviously HBO is a prime candidate, but I think that Comedy Central would make a ton of money with the Daily Show (and perhaps the Colbert Report). I know a bunch of people like me who don't get cable or don't have Comedy Central, but love the Daily Show and beg me to show them any I've downloaded. I would much prefer to download them legally, especially since I could get a few friends to pitch in to defray the costs. This could allow shows that aren't commercially viable in a broadcast or cable environment to get made. This is going to be a huge shift in content creation, because viewers are going to start deciding what gets made, not advertisers. If this were available a couple of years ago, Firefly, the Family Guy, and Futurama would never have gone off the air.
WTF? How was my response to my post "Flamebait"?
This is almost as good as drive through liquor stores!
Way to kick New Orleans while they're down.
Are you a Brit? I'm pretty sure that the streaming used some location-based technology (if a table of IP blocks and their country is technology) that only made it available to people living in Great Britain (not even Canada could get it). Also, if you had a license, you could watch next weeks episode a week before it aired. Cool, but not an option for me. Luckily, I found it on BitTorrent (actually, that is how I first found it and got hooked). Going back and watching the first series, I didn't like it as much as the second, although it was still pretty good. I think I liked the original radio episodes better than the first series. But "Milky Joe", God, that is pure comedy gold!
I would love to be able to get first run BBC shows here in the U.S. (other than by downloading them illegally), and Think Secret said Apple had a media event later today scheduled at the BBC, so I am really hoping that is the case. My dream scenario is that the BBC prices their stuff cheaper than Hollywood and I, the consumer, get better quality, cheaper goods and some real competition, while the Beeb gets access to a huge new market and massive amounts of basically cost-free revenue (they've already made the shows). But they could probably price them higher and I'd still buy them. I do a lot of Amazon.co.uk shopping....
Oh, and btw, play them in Quicktime Player. For buying, downloading, and keeping track of your video, iTunes is great, but it blows for playback. I think the only thing that the update did was change the name to iTunes 6 and add the Video source. It was cool that the Video source had the Decemberists video for "16 Military Wives" that I downloaded from their site and added to iTunes in 4.8 as well as the Morcheeba video I got through iTunes (at about the same time), but the integration is seriously lacking. Same with the iTMS. I wonder how last minute this was? I had thought they were planning this since video was introduced earlier this summer with 4.7 or 4.8, but this is absolutely a 1.0 release lacking Apple's usual polish. Perhaps podcasting sucked up a lot of resources and this was way down the priority list. Still, the iPod w/ video was in development for a while, they knew this was coming. The iTMS stuff could be fixed later today or next week, but I think it is obvious that iTunes is not meant for video playback. I think all new machines will be shipping with Frontrow (at least all the Intel ones). I wonder when they will make it available for older machines?
No, I don't think it would. The G4s are frontside bus bandwidth constrained, not memory bus bandwidth constrained. The higher latencies in DDR2 could actually slow things down, although that is probably irrelevant if your memory controller runs 5 cycles in the time your frontside bus does one. The only win would be if DDR2 is more battery efficient (probably, but I don't know) and you could get an extra 1% of battery life. Otherwise, there are hopefully some component upgrades like a slightly faster processor that is more battery efficient, 7200RPM HD, better video card, higher-rez screen, etc. that they could bump. But the G4 is pretty much at the end of what you can do to squeeze out any more performance.
Apple would love to release PowerBooks, although not at this event. This was all about video and the start of their campaign to win the living room (Frontshow on Mac mini - 'nuff said). They will be updating PowerMacs within the week (maybe a bit longer) to catch them up to the now better-spec'd iMacs and if they don't release PowerBooks then, it is simply because they can't. They could be selling a ton more if they were competitive, which is what will happen next year (compatible won't hurt, either).
They definitely need to up the video resolution (and they will, once the new video iPod comes out next year and they start integrating this with Frontrow), but I'm watching the first episode of Lost full-screen on my iBook and I have to say, the quality is about the same as the 350MB versions I get over BitTorrent. I thought it was going to be crap, but I am pretty impressed. I won't buy much more (maybe Lost, if I pick up the first season on DVD), because they really need to raise the resolution to at least TV levels (640x480 or 720x480) and I don't want to have to buy it twice, but for just 2 bucks, I think everyone should check it out. Plus, it only uses 40% of my processor, which isn't bad at all.
I have been waiting for this for so long! Now if I could just get the Daily Show, Peepshow, or The Mighty Boosh....
Uhh, the contract has/is expiring.
Because Apple's contract is up. They negotiated a contract for 2 (or has it been 3?) years and now they have to re-negotiate the contract. Then the record companies can use this to force the next contract re-negotiation to raise prices (kind of like IP "parity" - Australia grants 200 year copyrights so now we have to too stay even - except we tack on an extra 50 years and now Australia...). Also, iTMS has like 85% of the market, so the recording companies have to take them down a peg. They want competition amongst distributors, a typical divide and conquer strategy. If they were solely reliant on digital distribution, they would be fucked, because Apple could basically dictate terms to them. They want a bunch of digital distributors with small percentages of the market so that if any of them get out of line, they can destroy them with out affecting their bottom line. It is very similar to Microsoft, in that they encourage fierce competition amongst hardware manufacturers, leading to lower prices and razor-thin margins, while maintaining a monopoly on the software needed for that hardware, ensuring they can enforce high prices and even higher margins.
I really hope Apple holds out, because otherwise we are going to be screwed, ceding all market power to the RIAA.
That is very different from Goodyear, Firestone, Michelin, and all the other tire companies getting together and setting prices, which is what the music industry seems on the edge of doing. Your example is simply MSRPs enforced by MAP agreements. The key point is that it is one manufacturer in an industry, not the entire industry.
Huh? What would Lucent have done if they didn't have a patent? Think about it. The solution is to close the loophole, not destroy the only leverage the little guys had. The problem with the patent system is how it has been exploited by big companies, but don't through the baby out with the bathwater.
And this is exactly why Apple can't open up their DRM scheme. As soon as they do, all leverage over rights, pricing, etc. goes to the RIAA. If Apple won't raise prices, then the RIAA can switch to someone who will. The RIAA wants the distributors to be the commodity, racing to the bottom, like it has always been. Apple's system turns that model on its head and even forces the publishers to start to compete. Yes, it isn't an ideal system (competition at both levels would be nice), but at least Apple is a benevolent dictator instead of the "let them eat cake" RIAA.
Your information on steel is completely false. My brother is a structural engineer and I was just talking about this with him the other day. He is working on a project for a guy that wants to build a first floor (like a daylight basement) and then put a manufactured home on top of it. Due to codes, they would have to use steel I-beams and that massively increases the cost of building it. Steel is both much more expensive in materials and labor. The plus is that it is very strong and allows you to do fun things like cantilevering. There is a reason why steel is used to build large skyscrapers and commercial buildings and not homes.
However, I think a better and more consistent solution would be to provide an option to just mirror the menu bar at the top of each screen. Those secondary screens always look naked without it. I could see this possibly confusing some people, so it would be disabled by default, and it would be useful to differentiate the secondary screens, so the Apple menu could only show up on the primary screen, but I could see it being very useful to those people who use multiple monitors as part of their work flow.
Yeah, that's why I don't post much. I'm socially awkward even in writing.
Uhh, XP is at Service Pack 2 and OS X86 is at a beta or alpha stage. For an OS whose key apps are mostly emulated and which is solely for developers, running on an architecture it wasn't compiled for (Celeron, no SSE3), "just as fast" sounds pretty damn good.
Apparently you haven't been to BitTorrent.com recently. Bram has setup a search engine for torrents, which makes it very easy to find torrents for infringing content. Bram has always publicly downplayed the illegal uses of BitTorrent, so it would be a tougher case, but he was in a much better position when he himself didn't enable people to find illegal content.
Of course, the real difference is that BitTorrent is open source and there are a ton of clients. While they could take Bram or any BitTorrent site down, they aren't going to be able to control the protocol anymore than they can control the Internet.
The parent poster was referring to Verisign's control of the .com TLD and their abuse of it. Specifically, their attempt to redirect web traffic for any .com domain that wasn't registered to their ad servers, called SiteFinder. Read the link before posting. He was supporting your position.
But there is one company/database that controls what is allowed into the root servers, broken up by TLD. The root servers are redundant, not decentralized. They are all replications of a single database and as that central database goes, so go the root servers. And Verisign is a perfect example of why we *don't* want a centralized system.
I think you're right that NetFlix is sending signals to Amazon that they want to be bought out, but I think you are wrong that there is no future in shipping. Downloading is undoubtedly the future, but not the immediate future. I think we are still a few years away before it starts to take off and with HD/BluRay, discs will continue to play a huge role for the foreseeable future.
NetFlix is afraid that Amazon will enter the market against them, leveraging their massive infrastructure, and they want to preempt that battle. It is very likely they would be a very good fit and provide a nice revenue boost to Amazon's bottom line.