...the Psion pdas were around long before the Newton and the Psion EPOC OS evolved into Symbian OS.
The Psion 3a had a friggin' keyboard for input and that was out a year after the Newton was shown (January 1992 when John Scully coined the term "PDA" at a press conference). The Go PenPoint OS was released in Spring of 1992, a few months after the Newton was first shown but certainly in development at the same time. And what does the EPOC have to do with one-upping the Newton? If you want to talk about predecessors, talk about Momenta or the GRiDPADs.
Be fair and understand that EVERYONE was trying to get on board with pen driven computing by 1991. Bill Gates still thinks it's 1991. We can argue about who came to market first or who's idea it was (CRT based terminals with pen input was around already) and who hired who away. It's all innovation which usually doesn't happen with one company or one person. Everyone was feeding on each other's ideas and utilizing the new LCD displays which were coming out. The Newton, just about the only survivor of that ilk from that era, was in use long after it went out of print. I went to a trade show in 2003 where the attendee credentials were being scanned by a bunch of people standing in the door with Newton 2000s.
This goes to the crux of the matter in that the iPhone is for Apple fan boys. The iPhone does not stand up on its own. It uses old cell phone technology and is feature weak.
It's called "headroom". That's why I'm waiting for iPhone version 2 or 3. For all its flaws, the iPhone still makes practially everything else look like it's coal fired.
Yeah, that's the RIAA tax for you. Everyone at that technology challenged outfit thought the CD Audio recorder would replace the cassette recorder and work the same way. They had absolutely no idea that a COMPUTER could be used for audio recording on plain data disks until it was too late. Still, I'm surprised the regular data CD-R didn't get litigated into oblivion by the RIAA but once the Genie is out of the bottle, oh well. The other approach is the European way (the UK at least) - tax everything as if it was going to be used for music.
On copiers, I used to work for Xerox and have some exposure to the copyright violation issues being raised then. It wasn't anywhere NEAR what's going on now but it was still a background issue. We even had some photosensitive drums inside etched with tiny serial numbers which made permanent records of what machine something was copied on. The Russian Embassy had those.
...government wiretaps should be defeated by playing RIAA music in the background and then letting the RIAA sue the government for supporting terrorism by stealing music
Heh... except you'd be sued for a public performance of a copyrighted work without a license. I could go for watching Congress spontaneously combust on C-SPAN, though.
Deliberately dumb? Not really, just baiting. Don't think the Xerox copier hasn't been considered in copyright infringement litigation. The main point is the MPAA and RIAA are so bent on driving a crowbar between the consumer and the media they control, they'll do anything necessary to limit our historical rights. Part of this is threatening manufacturers with litigation if they don't apply copy protection systems to ordinary items under threat of violating some imaginary clause of the DMCA. Unfortunately, the DMCA is being used to drive out all notions of "fair use" and the eventual "public domain" status of any copyrighted work. Fortunately, the public can supply feedback to the Government on how the DMCA is going.
The granddaddy of this litigation in the modern age was the Betamax Case where Universal and others accused VCR makers of being part of a copyright infringement mechanism. That was struck down and the ruling was later challenged by MGM v. Grokster. That allowed the Betamax ruling to stand but failed to define the limits of what is legal or illegal in the Internet age.
Meanwhile, the MPAA and RIAA were very busy trying to lock down all technical avenues of distribution. They even tried to get copy protection applied to analog audio systems (apply a phase rotation at several frequencies which triggers copy inhibit). I can't find a current link to that but the RIAA gave demonstrations to Congress on how this would reduce the problem of tape copying and off-air recording. Artists countered with their own demonstrations to Congress on how it trashed the audio. The goal was to enact a law to make copying music illegal under any circumstances, including "fair use". The INDUCE Act proposed by Orrin Hatch gives a glimpse into how far this could go.
I have no idea how they let the CD slip out the door without protections but the content controllers (I hesitate to call them providers) have been trying to retrofit restrictions to the CD ever since the CD-R came about for consumers. The MPAA made sure the DVD wouldn't be in the same boat as the CD or the Betamax. The DVD, obviously designed for recording movies, was not to be released in any form without controls approved by the MPAA members. I work with some of the people who were in the room when the first DVD was made in the U.S. What a mess - the MPAA had teams of lawyers ready to sue you for trying to create a mechanism to pirate movies. That's how the DVD was viewed.
Now, there's no shortage of ways to recognize content and disable equipment from use which displeases the MPAA or RIAA. Fortunately, several watchdog groups are pushing back on the laws just as hard to keep some of these historical freedoms and "fair use" alive. Otherwise, we'd get sued for copyright infringement by walking down the street and whistling a song.
Different thought: If the Chinese Government decided to threaten the U.S. effectively ending Western foreign trade, how long until all the Chinese manufacturers and workers end the Chinese Government? It would be over in three days with a brand new Chinese Government. Period. Chinese manufacturers are filthy Capitalists, just like us Americans, with billions of workers who like to eat.
BetaCam is a component format that shares little in common with the consumer-level Betamax.
I wouldn't dismiss the differences so quickly. The first BetaCam machines had transports which were nearly identical to some consumer Betamax machines. The video heads were re-engineered but were the same diameter, the video writing speeds were the same and the fixed head layout was very similar. The threading mechanism was the same containing parts interchangeable with consumer machines.
The major difference was the tape being run at 3X forward speed through the transport to allow for a wider video head track and the addition of video heads and electronics for component video as you pointed out. Otherwise, Betamax and BetaCam were so similar that you could play a BetaCam tape in a Betamax at some forward shuttle speed and get recognizable picture and audio from it.
The thing that killed off the VHS broadcast machines in favor of the Beta transport was the video head writing speed. Beta made a better picture. The test criteria for ABC news for acceptance was that a 3rd generation copy of either contender had to look at least as good as a 1st generation U-Matic (3/4") recording. Beta won, VHS lost.
Cry me a river. No one cares anymore. Just like no one will care in 10 years about HD-DVD/Blu-Ray.
The fact is that Betamax had mildly better video, indescernable to most people.
That's true. Consumers were looking through the marketing filters when they made a choice, though. Betamax actually had a huge advantage over VHS in video sharpness, color noise and audio quality, especially as the battle progressed. Color on VHS looked like a Monet painting - fuzzy water colors. The Beta looked much closer to a direct broadcast signal. Most consumers were buying whatever Billy-Bob down the street had. He had a VHS because the early Beta machines were more expensive than VHS machines (because of the way the tape transports were built). Price usually beats function into second place.
The biggest driving force was the cost of blank tape. The first Beta and VHS tapes cost $22-$24 apiece. You wanted a machine to stretch that cost over as many hours of recording as possible. That got VHS the foothold.
The only time [consumer] Betamax started taking market share back from [consumer] VHS was when Beta-HiFi came out. It took the VHS camp a year to respond and created more expensive "8 head" VHS machines, which the Beta camp could do with two heads. "Gosh, 8 heads MUST be better". No, the VHS format needed that to make a marginally acceptable image at multiple speeds. At the same time, the Beta camp figured out how to make much less expensive tape transports, so cost was erased as a factor.
SuperBeta produced a measurable sharpness increase of 20% but all the VHS camp could do is relax the white clip circuits (VHS-HQ) by 20%. Consumers only saw the "20%" figure and concluded they must be the same thing without actually looking. You could turn SuperBeta on and off and see a real difference. Not so with the VHS-HQ switch. S-VHS was actually more akin to SuperBeta but that came years later and required special [expensive] tape. The VHS camp couldn't even respond to Beta-ED but by then it didn't matter for the consumer. Movie stores started stocking more VHS and that created an avalanche effect driving more consumers toward buying VHS machines. Game over for consumer Beta.
Broadcasters adopted the Beta format over the VHS format for news (originally) because of the dramatic quality differences. The VHS based news recorders were blown off the market within a year by Beta. This started the 25 year dynasty of Broadcast technical progression: BetaCam, BetaCam-SP, Digital BetaCam, BetaCam-SX, BetaCam-IMX, HDCam and HDCam-SR. If you saw the last several Star Wars movies, they were shot with HDCam - a Beta format derivative, not film.
At every turn, the consumer didn't look at quality or function one bit. The Beta transport could skip forward and backward at 20x speed with a viewable picture because of the transport design - something the VHS couldn't do. It made smaller Camcorders when they came out with full recording capacity which the VHS camp couldn't do. With a fresh eyeball, the Beta format was hands down the superior machine with lots of technical headroom, but the consumer ignored the facts and went with the flow. Oh well. Here's an ugly page with some technical differences between Beta and VHS, none of which mattered to consumers.
You can have your two Beta tapes for a movie to my VHS one.
I only recall a few Beta movies on two tapes and those were very early rare birds. The earliest Beta tapes were only one hour long but that was fixed quickly with Beta-II and L-750 tapes (which could do 3+ hours at Beta-II).
Irony? It means something that happens opposite of what's expected or makes sense - which causes amusement. Consumers talk about freedom of choice and yet battle tirelessly to kill off everything other than what they have chosen. They don't really want freedom of choice. They want CHEAP.
Glad to see everyone has made a choice: One format must die completely! The question I constantly get from people eyeballing HD disks is "which one is going to win?", not which one looks better or works better. Logical selection isn't part of the process. Well before there's nearly enough data, large masses of people polarize themselves in one camp or the other spitting puke and venom at the other camp. So much for choice. Even when both camps are firmly entrenched (Mac-Windows, iPod-Zen, 8-track-Cassette, Ford-Chevy), your choice says a lot about who you are.
I went to a tv store specifically to see this difference, to see what all the hype was about. Sure I could notice the difference next to a normal tv, but it was nothing big. I would never, ever pay for that small amount of difference. If you see a huge difference then you must be kidding yourself, seriously.
Can you tell the difference between a 0.35 megapixel camera and a 2 megapixel camera? On the right display you can because that's the difference between HD and SD. The problem with consumer monitors is most of what you were probably looking at couldn't actually resolve the difference between HD and SD video, so there was little difference. That keeps the cost of the display down but isn't really the resolution available in the image. When people see REAL HD for the first time (edit suite with the $30,000 monitor) they're shocked at the clarity. Better consumer displays come very close. The $1,500 monitor isn't going to look the same. Otherwise, stop by the optometrist next time you're out.
The XCode, thousands of pages of driver documentation, Apple Inc. is there for help and there is no HD DVD support.
Funny, though. Apple's DVD Studio Pro outputs HD-DVD assets, not Blu-ray. Apple's DVD player in OS X will play the HD-DVD assets just fine. Why? We started digging into creating Blu-ray disks and were stopped by the licensing required, even for making check disks. I think they wanted $1,500 for the privilege of creating an encrypted Blu-ray asset, even for a throwaway item.
And in 18 months, Paramount will [happily] open the doors to Blu-ray. At these market penetration levels for either format, it doesn't matter much yet but by then they may be tired of having the only next-gen DVDs sitting on the shelves collecting dust. You never know.
Isn't it ironic that the consumer vigorously defends his right to "choice" but won't make a move until the choice is made for him?
I've run other operating systems in production environments populated with the same suckers that use Windows PCs. In the four years that I've been doing so, the number of successfully exploited Macs and Linux PCs is zero.
Ditto here in that timeframe. Out came the PCs and all my trouble went away. Also managed to turn 80 Windows-only users into very happy total Mac heads. You can't even give them a PC.
Re:"The silent majority" is uninformed.
on
Storm Worm Rising
·
· Score: 1
Try to hack my 31337 firewall! [127.0.0.1]
OMG! You managed to copy my entire hard drive! I do need a new firewall
Re:"The silent majority" is uninformed.
on
Storm Worm Rising
·
· Score: 1
Annoying things are hardly a reason to HATE MS though.
Yes they are. A few years ago (3) I realized my whole workday was fixing Microsoft specific problems. Since my IT staff was getting downsized, we couldn't keep up. So we deployed a bunch of Macs. Peace, tranquility and productivity prevailed and nearly the entire staff traded their home PCs for Macs. Now THEY hate Microsoft for wasting all that time.
I might get knocked off slashdot for saying this but look at the OS statistics (next page). Between 2003 and now, the Mac market share started behind Linux, matched it in 2005 and has been steadily climbing away from it ever since. "Linux is about to take the desktop" never felt right. Maybe that will change with the Delbuntu machines - maybe not. Anyone have different stats?
wow... iTunes doesn't sync with any MP3 player besides an iPod.
Damn! You mean iTunes only works on 80% of the music players out there? How limiting!
Where are you getting your assertions from? They're very far off the mark about brutal monopolies but fair enough... I've seen this in people too young to remember the last 15 years of computerdom. For everyone else, it's a given. Find some of the DOJ testimonials of what Microsoft did to countless other companies. These weren't Microsoft resellers doing a shitty job that got killed, these were either business "partners" or competitors with something Microsoft wanted. They wanted it so bad they went on a lawbreaking spree for years. There are also fairly large Apple resellers out there of a serious nature, just no Walmart types.
People wearing headphones do the same thing and a phone in your ear qualifies for half of that. These Europeans and Asians are SHOUTING, not like what you're talking about.
If you see any European or Asian over the age of 45 on the phone, they usually shout. We never had to do that here in the States during the AT&T era. I lived in Germany for three years during that time and traveled around Europe a bit. When I came back, it was clear our phone system was better than anything I had seen or heard in Europe. Also lived in Korea for a year during that time and had to use their phone system. It was simply horrible. Now... it's not. Most of Europe and Asia have an infrastructure much newer than the States and the service quality reflects that.
For the rest, I'm talking about Internet access and how the current consumer bandwidth offerings in the States, as delivered by telcos and cable systems, is laughable when compared to many other places in the world. For cell phone service, I'd prefer to buy a phone and attach it to any carrier I want. You can mostly do that in Europe and Asia, just not here in the States. How about the cell phone as payment device? It's pervasive in many places but mostly just talked about in the States. A host of other features just never made it here.
Personally, I'm in favor of our Muicipal Overlords. I don't think they'll out-deliver the telcos but they'll provide reasonable, level baseline service. Right now, we live in an equivalent world of Coca Cola delivering water to our houses (at whatever prices containing whatever stimulants which make us thirsty) and the Munies trying to provide an alternative.
Slashdot Mirror
The Psion 3a had a friggin' keyboard for input and that was out a year after the Newton was shown (January 1992 when John Scully coined the term "PDA" at a press conference). The Go PenPoint OS was released in Spring of 1992, a few months after the Newton was first shown but certainly in development at the same time. And what does the EPOC have to do with one-upping the Newton? If you want to talk about predecessors, talk about Momenta or the GRiDPADs.
Be fair and understand that EVERYONE was trying to get on board with pen driven computing by 1991. Bill Gates still thinks it's 1991. We can argue about who came to market first or who's idea it was (CRT based terminals with pen input was around already) and who hired who away. It's all innovation which usually doesn't happen with one company or one person. Everyone was feeding on each other's ideas and utilizing the new LCD displays which were coming out. The Newton, just about the only survivor of that ilk from that era, was in use long after it went out of print. I went to a trade show in 2003 where the attendee credentials were being scanned by a bunch of people standing in the door with Newton 2000s.
This goes to the crux of the matter in that the iPhone is for Apple fan boys. The iPhone does not stand up on its own. It uses old cell phone technology and is feature weak.
It's called "headroom". That's why I'm waiting for iPhone version 2 or 3. For all its flaws, the iPhone still makes practially everything else look like it's coal fired.
One Word: Newton.
Yup, history certainly did start with Apple. If cell phones in 1992 didn't weigh 6-10 pounds, it probably would have had that inside as well.
There are Data and Music CDRs.
Yeah, that's the RIAA tax for you. Everyone at that technology challenged outfit thought the CD Audio recorder would replace the cassette recorder and work the same way. They had absolutely no idea that a COMPUTER could be used for audio recording on plain data disks until it was too late. Still, I'm surprised the regular data CD-R didn't get litigated into oblivion by the RIAA but once the Genie is out of the bottle, oh well. The other approach is the European way (the UK at least) - tax everything as if it was going to be used for music.
On copiers, I used to work for Xerox and have some exposure to the copyright violation issues being raised then. It wasn't anywhere NEAR what's going on now but it was still a background issue. We even had some photosensitive drums inside etched with tiny serial numbers which made permanent records of what machine something was copied on. The Russian Embassy had those.
Heh... except you'd be sued for a public performance of a copyrighted work without a license. I could go for watching Congress spontaneously combust on C-SPAN, though.
They're assembled in the same factories, with the same components, and the same failure rates.
I've often wondered why the "same hardware" is worth less when Windows comes pre-loaded on it.
...actually, I don't wonder at all.
Deliberately dumb? Not really, just baiting. Don't think the Xerox copier hasn't been considered in copyright infringement litigation. The main point is the MPAA and RIAA are so bent on driving a crowbar between the consumer and the media they control, they'll do anything necessary to limit our historical rights. Part of this is threatening manufacturers with litigation if they don't apply copy protection systems to ordinary items under threat of violating some imaginary clause of the DMCA. Unfortunately, the DMCA is being used to drive out all notions of "fair use" and the eventual "public domain" status of any copyrighted work. Fortunately, the public can supply feedback to the Government on how the DMCA is going.
The granddaddy of this litigation in the modern age was the Betamax Case where Universal and others accused VCR makers of being part of a copyright infringement mechanism. That was struck down and the ruling was later challenged by MGM v. Grokster. That allowed the Betamax ruling to stand but failed to define the limits of what is legal or illegal in the Internet age.
Meanwhile, the MPAA and RIAA were very busy trying to lock down all technical avenues of distribution. They even tried to get copy protection applied to analog audio systems (apply a phase rotation at several frequencies which triggers copy inhibit). I can't find a current link to that but the RIAA gave demonstrations to Congress on how this would reduce the problem of tape copying and off-air recording. Artists countered with their own demonstrations to Congress on how it trashed the audio. The goal was to enact a law to make copying music illegal under any circumstances, including "fair use". The INDUCE Act proposed by Orrin Hatch gives a glimpse into how far this could go.
I have no idea how they let the CD slip out the door without protections but the content controllers (I hesitate to call them providers) have been trying to retrofit restrictions to the CD ever since the CD-R came about for consumers. The MPAA made sure the DVD wouldn't be in the same boat as the CD or the Betamax. The DVD, obviously designed for recording movies, was not to be released in any form without controls approved by the MPAA members. I work with some of the people who were in the room when the first DVD was made in the U.S. What a mess - the MPAA had teams of lawyers ready to sue you for trying to create a mechanism to pirate movies. That's how the DVD was viewed.
Now, there's no shortage of ways to recognize content and disable equipment from use which displeases the MPAA or RIAA. Fortunately, several watchdog groups are pushing back on the laws just as hard to keep some of these historical freedoms and "fair use" alive. Otherwise, we'd get sued for copyright infringement by walking down the street and whistling a song.
Here are a few other things worth reading:
Xerox is a doomed company then! So are all copy paper manufacturers! As ludicrous as your point is... it's unfortunately very accurate.
Different thought: If the Chinese Government decided to threaten the U.S. effectively ending Western foreign trade, how long until all the Chinese manufacturers and workers end the Chinese Government? It would be over in three days with a brand new Chinese Government. Period. Chinese manufacturers are filthy Capitalists, just like us Americans, with billions of workers who like to eat.
BetaCam is a component format that shares little in common with the consumer-level Betamax.
I wouldn't dismiss the differences so quickly. The first BetaCam machines had transports which were nearly identical to some consumer Betamax machines. The video heads were re-engineered but were the same diameter, the video writing speeds were the same and the fixed head layout was very similar. The threading mechanism was the same containing parts interchangeable with consumer machines.
The major difference was the tape being run at 3X forward speed through the transport to allow for a wider video head track and the addition of video heads and electronics for component video as you pointed out. Otherwise, Betamax and BetaCam were so similar that you could play a BetaCam tape in a Betamax at some forward shuttle speed and get recognizable picture and audio from it.
The thing that killed off the VHS broadcast machines in favor of the Beta transport was the video head writing speed. Beta made a better picture. The test criteria for ABC news for acceptance was that a 3rd generation copy of either contender had to look at least as good as a 1st generation U-Matic (3/4") recording. Beta won, VHS lost.
Cry me a river. No one cares anymore. Just like no one will care in 10 years about HD-DVD/Blu-Ray.
I don't care about those now.
As long as he remains dead, without Syd I'd say.
Pink Floyd will TOO reunite!
Thanks for sharing the noises in your head. Feel free to lash out with any other non sequitur rantings - and push the Prozac to 60mg.
The fact is that Betamax had mildly better video, indescernable to most people.
That's true. Consumers were looking through the marketing filters when they made a choice, though. Betamax actually had a huge advantage over VHS in video sharpness, color noise and audio quality, especially as the battle progressed. Color on VHS looked like a Monet painting - fuzzy water colors. The Beta looked much closer to a direct broadcast signal. Most consumers were buying whatever Billy-Bob down the street had. He had a VHS because the early Beta machines were more expensive than VHS machines (because of the way the tape transports were built). Price usually beats function into second place.
The biggest driving force was the cost of blank tape. The first Beta and VHS tapes cost $22-$24 apiece. You wanted a machine to stretch that cost over as many hours of recording as possible. That got VHS the foothold.
The only time [consumer] Betamax started taking market share back from [consumer] VHS was when Beta-HiFi came out. It took the VHS camp a year to respond and created more expensive "8 head" VHS machines, which the Beta camp could do with two heads. "Gosh, 8 heads MUST be better". No, the VHS format needed that to make a marginally acceptable image at multiple speeds. At the same time, the Beta camp figured out how to make much less expensive tape transports, so cost was erased as a factor.
SuperBeta produced a measurable sharpness increase of 20% but all the VHS camp could do is relax the white clip circuits (VHS-HQ) by 20%. Consumers only saw the "20%" figure and concluded they must be the same thing without actually looking. You could turn SuperBeta on and off and see a real difference. Not so with the VHS-HQ switch. S-VHS was actually more akin to SuperBeta but that came years later and required special [expensive] tape. The VHS camp couldn't even respond to Beta-ED but by then it didn't matter for the consumer. Movie stores started stocking more VHS and that created an avalanche effect driving more consumers toward buying VHS machines. Game over for consumer Beta.
Broadcasters adopted the Beta format over the VHS format for news (originally) because of the dramatic quality differences. The VHS based news recorders were blown off the market within a year by Beta. This started the 25 year dynasty of Broadcast technical progression: BetaCam, BetaCam-SP, Digital BetaCam, BetaCam-SX, BetaCam-IMX, HDCam and HDCam-SR. If you saw the last several Star Wars movies, they were shot with HDCam - a Beta format derivative, not film.
At every turn, the consumer didn't look at quality or function one bit. The Beta transport could skip forward and backward at 20x speed with a viewable picture because of the transport design - something the VHS couldn't do. It made smaller Camcorders when they came out with full recording capacity which the VHS camp couldn't do. With a fresh eyeball, the Beta format was hands down the superior machine with lots of technical headroom, but the consumer ignored the facts and went with the flow. Oh well. Here's an ugly page with some technical differences between Beta and VHS, none of which mattered to consumers.
You can have your two Beta tapes for a movie to my VHS one.
I only recall a few Beta movies on two tapes and those were very early rare birds. The earliest Beta tapes were only one hour long but that was fixed quickly with Beta-II and L-750 tapes (which could do 3+ hours at Beta-II).
Irony? It means something that happens opposite of what's expected or makes sense - which causes amusement. Consumers talk about freedom of choice and yet battle tirelessly to kill off everything other than what they have chosen. They don't really want freedom of choice. They want CHEAP.
Glad to see everyone has made a choice: One format must die completely! The question I constantly get from people eyeballing HD disks is "which one is going to win?", not which one looks better or works better. Logical selection isn't part of the process. Well before there's nearly enough data, large masses of people polarize themselves in one camp or the other spitting puke and venom at the other camp. So much for choice. Even when both camps are firmly entrenched (Mac-Windows, iPod-Zen, 8-track-Cassette, Ford-Chevy), your choice says a lot about who you are.
I went to a tv store specifically to see this difference, to see what all the hype was about. Sure I could notice the difference next to a normal tv, but it was nothing big. I would never, ever pay for that small amount of difference. If you see a huge difference then you must be kidding yourself, seriously.
Can you tell the difference between a 0.35 megapixel camera and a 2 megapixel camera? On the right display you can because that's the difference between HD and SD. The problem with consumer monitors is most of what you were probably looking at couldn't actually resolve the difference between HD and SD video, so there was little difference. That keeps the cost of the display down but isn't really the resolution available in the image. When people see REAL HD for the first time (edit suite with the $30,000 monitor) they're shocked at the clarity. Better consumer displays come very close. The $1,500 monitor isn't going to look the same. Otherwise, stop by the optometrist next time you're out.
The XCode, thousands of pages of driver documentation, Apple Inc. is there for help and there is no HD DVD support.
Funny, though. Apple's DVD Studio Pro outputs HD-DVD assets, not Blu-ray. Apple's DVD player in OS X will play the HD-DVD assets just fine. Why? We started digging into creating Blu-ray disks and were stopped by the licensing required, even for making check disks. I think they wanted $1,500 for the privilege of creating an encrypted Blu-ray asset, even for a throwaway item.
And in 18 months, Paramount will [happily] open the doors to Blu-ray. At these market penetration levels for either format, it doesn't matter much yet but by then they may be tired of having the only next-gen DVDs sitting on the shelves collecting dust. You never know.
Isn't it ironic that the consumer vigorously defends his right to "choice" but won't make a move until the choice is made for him?
"Microsoft is the next SCO. They positioned themselves that way with their patent sabre-rattling..."
Good things are yet to come for those who wait.
So, no music from any artist is released until someone buys the first $3.5 million CD and the rest cost $0.01?
I've run other operating systems in production environments populated with the same suckers that use Windows PCs. In the four years that I've been doing so, the number of successfully exploited Macs and Linux PCs is zero.
Ditto here in that timeframe. Out came the PCs and all my trouble went away. Also managed to turn 80 Windows-only users into very happy total Mac heads. You can't even give them a PC.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall! [127.0.0.1]
OMG! You managed to copy my entire hard drive! I do need a new firewall
Annoying things are hardly a reason to HATE MS though.
Yes they are. A few years ago (3) I realized my whole workday was fixing Microsoft specific problems. Since my IT staff was getting downsized, we couldn't keep up. So we deployed a bunch of Macs. Peace, tranquility and productivity prevailed and nearly the entire staff traded their home PCs for Macs. Now THEY hate Microsoft for wasting all that time.
I might get knocked off slashdot for saying this but look at the OS statistics (next page). Between 2003 and now, the Mac market share started behind Linux, matched it in 2005 and has been steadily climbing away from it ever since. "Linux is about to take the desktop" never felt right. Maybe that will change with the Delbuntu machines - maybe not. Anyone have different stats?
wow... iTunes doesn't sync with any MP3 player besides an iPod.
Damn! You mean iTunes only works on 80% of the music players out there? How limiting!
Where are you getting your assertions from? They're very far off the mark about brutal monopolies but fair enough... I've seen this in people too young to remember the last 15 years of computerdom. For everyone else, it's a given. Find some of the DOJ testimonials of what Microsoft did to countless other companies. These weren't Microsoft resellers doing a shitty job that got killed, these were either business "partners" or competitors with something Microsoft wanted. They wanted it so bad they went on a lawbreaking spree for years. There are also fairly large Apple resellers out there of a serious nature, just no Walmart types.
People wearing headphones do the same thing and a phone in your ear qualifies for half of that. These Europeans and Asians are SHOUTING, not like what you're talking about.
If you see any European or Asian over the age of 45 on the phone, they usually shout. We never had to do that here in the States during the AT&T era. I lived in Germany for three years during that time and traveled around Europe a bit. When I came back, it was clear our phone system was better than anything I had seen or heard in Europe. Also lived in Korea for a year during that time and had to use their phone system. It was simply horrible. Now... it's not. Most of Europe and Asia have an infrastructure much newer than the States and the service quality reflects that. For the rest, I'm talking about Internet access and how the current consumer bandwidth offerings in the States, as delivered by telcos and cable systems, is laughable when compared to many other places in the world. For cell phone service, I'd prefer to buy a phone and attach it to any carrier I want. You can mostly do that in Europe and Asia, just not here in the States. How about the cell phone as payment device? It's pervasive in many places but mostly just talked about in the States. A host of other features just never made it here.
Did the same thing! Ack!
Personally, I'm in favor of our Muicipal Overlords. I don't think they'll out-deliver the telcos but they'll provide reasonable, level baseline service. Right now, we live in an equivalent world of Coca Cola delivering water to our houses (at whatever prices containing whatever stimulants which make us thirsty) and the Munies trying to provide an alternative.