Now youre narrowing your expected definition of COMBO drive.
No, my definition of "combo" drive has always been one that uses the same physical transport mechanism, but differs on issues of format and protocol. Sure, others may have a different definition, but this has never been standardized. I would refer to those which use two different mechanisms in a common enclosure as "dual format". Anyway, semantic differences aside...
I find your comparison with Zip drives to be fairly pertinent. Although I think you have the details backwards. The "Super Disk Drives" are more like HD-DVD, in that very few people used them, and even fewer people remember them. A total non-starter. Blu-Ray may work out like Zip drives - briefly popular, but ultimately a short-lived phenomenon and overall failure. Zip drives briefly filled a niche before CD-R became viable. They were standard among certain industries like pre-press and graphics for a while. A little like the way Minidisc had an elusive moment in the sun.
Personally, I think HD-DVD is more like the Magneto-optical drive. When I was at university, our computer graphics lab had these installed instead of Zip drives. I don't think anybody else on the planet had a mass installation of these things. We had to buy extremely expensive MO disks for them, when almost every student already owned at least one Zip disk.
I find the way you equate HD-DVD to the Zip, and Blu-Ray to the "Super Disk" to be quite curious, as the Zip enjoyed a brief popularity that the Super Disk never did, and Blu-Ray is already way more popular than HD-DVD, in a way the Super Disk never was.
The argument here is that combo devices wouldn't make sense because HD DVD is obsolete; you're replying to a long list of examples of obsolete, incompatible devices that are still available.
No, my argument is that it wouldn't make sense because HD-DVD never took off in the first place. The long list of obsolete devices that are still available share one thing in common - they were widely used over a period spanning a number of years. HD-DVD never even came close to those formats in status.
Look, it's like this. The HD DVD and Blu-Ray drives use the same laser, same form factor media, same codecs...
So what? That doesn't mean manufacturers are going to pay extra licensing fees for a format nobody uses. And Toshiba stated they were giving up on it to put an end to the format war. What would dragging it out achieve?
Manufacturing HD discs without retooling DVD manufacturing lines was one of the main benefits of the thing;
That was always a grossly over-inflated argument. It's really not that significant. And again, who is going to manufacture discs for an obsolete format?
I doubt that studios and production houses will shell out for low-run things like independent movies (especially straight-to-video...c'mon, pervs, there's straight-to-video OUTSIDE of porn) and exercise videos.
You're not making sense here. These things do get made, and have always been made on various formats. There's no reason they won't be made on Blu-Ray, and there's no reason to make them on HD-DVD. WRT independent films - those already get distributed on 35mm film to cinemas. That's a lot more expensive than Blu_ray, yet somehow they manage to distribute them globally on film.
I think a lot of people here are really kidding themselves if they think the format has any future whatsoever.
The difference being that DVD and VHS were both the leading formats of their era, and people transitioned from one to the other. Of course, the VHS was recordable, too. Did you ever see a Betamax/DVD player? That's the more appropriate comparison. HD-DVD never even took off, not even to the extent Betamax did.
though as I recall there actually were a few combo 5.25"/3.5" floppy drives made, with two separate slots, two separate read heads and I believe two separate drive motors.
How is that a "combo" drive? Sounds like a "dual" drive to me. I could gaffer-tape a Blu-Ray player to an HD-DVD player, but that wouldn't make it a "combo". For that, they'd have to share the transport mechanism.
I doubt we'll see any more "combo" players released simply because HD-DVD isn't being supported by its parent - or by the content providers - anymore. That'll suppress demand to the point where there just aren't the economies of scale in place to make manufacturing such devices economical. Had both formats continued to persist in the marketplace though, I think we would have seen combo drives become the norm,
Which is precisely my point. Others keep arguing about previous formats that get back-supported - but those formats were entrenched in the market, they were mainstream. HD-DVD never reached that position, so there's little likelihood of such support. The ordinary DVD dominates the market. HD-DVD doesn't. 5.25 and 3.5" floppies similarly had mass domination. Even Betamax was a lot more successful than HD-DVD.
Then, just after you stopped quoting (and apparently reading with a reasonable level of comprehension), I mention a combo drive - a 5.25"/3.5" combo drive, as a matter of fact, which yes, I have seen.
The links you provide have no images... but I would be very surpised if this were a true "combo" more likely you are talking about a "dual" drive, with two drive mechanisms mounted together, not a unit that shares a common transport mechanism.
My point was not that they don't exist now, but they won't be made in the future. Do you really think they are going to keep making them?
Not always (Laser Disc was too large to incorporate into DVD players), but in cases where the form factor of the physical media lends itself, this tends to be the way old technologies get phased out.
Really? Then why do most DVD burners not support DVD-RAM?
Got a link? Sounds to me like it was two drives in a common enclosure, not something where you would use the same mechanism for both formats, which is what we mean by "combo" drive today.
On the question of COMBO drives and floppies, here is a combo drive that reads 3.5 inch floppies, and just about every memory stick type ever conceived.
So how does it read 5.25" floppies? Which was the question, not "can you stick a memory card reader in a floppy drive?"
I can buy an HD-DVD BluRay combo drive today.
For starters, that's not a standalone player that one would use in the living room. It's a computer drive. But anyway, the point is that these are unlikely to be made in the future, as Toshiba has ditched the technology.
I won't say that you didn't really know what the hell you were talking about, or that you just jumped at the opportunity to be an ignorant blathering fanboy.
Fanboy? How could my post be construed as that? If anything, it was anti-fanboy, as I was responding to the delusions of an overly enthusiastic HD-DVD fanboy.
Right, because I couldn't find 5.25" disk drives nearly a decade after it stopped being used as a distribution medium, and just try buying a 3.5" floppy drive today, because that format is dead and replaced by USB memory sticks.
Somebody must have hit you with the stupid stick. The post you were replying to was referring to COMBO players, not being able to get obsolete devices. Did you ever see a 5.25"/3.5" floppy disk combo drive? No? Well, there's your analogy. There is about the same likelihood of seeing HD-DVD/Blu-Ray drives.
And, of course, Blu-Ray players will never offer backwards compatibility with DVD, since it is soon to be a dead format.
Again, idiotic. DVD is an established medium, which everybody uses. It is what people upgrade to Blu-Ray/HD from. Of course it is supported. But a format that is dead, and whose only serious manufacturer has discontinued making? You really think Toshiba is going to revive the corpse just to add it to Blu-Ray players? It would be pointless.
It's weird, because the way to 'upgrade' Macs is generally to plug in a bunch of USB or IEE-1394 devices.
Which, of course, is a complete load of horseshit. One would think you would update your knowledge given how much you talk about Apple products. But maybe your goal is to be purposefully misinformed as a means to trolling?
The Mac Mini is a veritable ocotopus once you've added enough to make it a useful machine. Talk about wire clutter...
Never heard of wireless devices? My Mac Mini is very useful, and it has only two things plugged into it - the HDTV it uses for a display, and an EyeTV tuner. It takes up less space than a DVD player or amplifier, and has no wire clutter. What makes my Mac Mini not useful? Not that the Mac mini is the typical Mac, anyway.
And I have no idea what you're talking about with drop-down menus. It must be a Mac-centric problem, because I've never had any issues in either of the other operating systems I've mentioned.
Why would it be a Mac-centric problem, when every other browser/application on the Mac has drop-down menus that work properly? I'd say that pretty clearly makes it a Firefox-specific (or Firefox for Mac specific) problem. Again, it seems to be about Firefox developers not caring about established interface standards, and just doing it their own way.
Laptops don't have a home key (you need to use modifier keys). Even on keyboards with a home key, its position is not as convenient, and if you are navigating text you are already using the arrow keys anyway.
that doesn't really even make sense (i.e. you are not moving up)
It doesn't make sense? You are traveling upwards through the text - i.e, towards the beginning. If there is no previous line, then the beginning is the beginning of that line of text. It makes perfect sense.
Now that I think about it that way, I'd say that Macs are the ones with the flawed interface.
It's entirely beside the point whether you think it makes sense or is flawed.
If you are writing an application for a particular platform, it is a major error to break behavior that works consistently on that platform. Should application writers switch the corner that the close window button is located on your platform, just because the application writer doesn't like it? Should I disable the middle button in a UNIX/Linux application because I don't like the way users use it?
That you don't think this is a problem is quite amazing, and I guess it illustrates a certain mentality - that our interfaces should be inconsistent mish-mashes. Which has always been a problem with Linux and Windows to a large degree. One of the things that makes the Mac attractive is the much more consistent interface. Although Apple themselves are starting to mess with that, it's still not as bad on other platforms. But apparently the Firefox developers don't give a shit.
..But then there are the people who buy Apple computers because 'all the wires and stuff and Windows and all is soo confusing.'
That sounds pretty intelligent to me. Only a stupid person would say "I love wire clutter, and Windows is so awesome". How does the above preference indicate any kind of mental deficiency?
Re-theme it, copy and paste the icon resource, and they don't notice the change!
Yeah right. Firefox fails because of the way it handles text fields in a totally non-Mac-like way. Have your cursor at the end of a single-line text field (like the URL entry field) and want to go back to edit something at the beginning of the line? In just about every other Mac application, you simply hit the up-arrow once, and it goes to the beginning of the line of text. But not in Firefox, for some reason. Instead, I have to hold down the left-arrow and wait for it to get to the start of the line.
The same thing shits me when using Ubuntu. How can major applications get such basic text navigation so wrong? Changing the "theme" to look like something else isn't going to fix fundamental interface flaws. Firefox also has problems with the behavior of drop-down menus and selecting items in them.
Good point! I wonder why photoshop- it's really not that excellent, it just has some powerful plugins that should be ported to GIMP
That's about the most backwards assessment of Photoshop I've ever heard. Photoshop is not "all about the plug-ins" unless you're a teenager looking for cheesy special effects. Its strength is in the core image-processing engine. I'd vouch that the majority of Photoshop users don't install any additional plugins.
Perhaps you missed the point. It is to make proprietary software obsolete.
Wait... I thought the purpose of FOSS was to use software on your own terms, and have access to the source? Now it's some kind of war against other types of software? That sounds almost as bad as Ballmer's chair-throwing tantrums.
Slashdot Mirror
Forgot link.
No, my definition of "combo" drive has always been one that uses the same physical transport mechanism, but differs on issues of format and protocol. Sure, others may have a different definition, but this has never been standardized. I would refer to those which use two different mechanisms in a common enclosure as "dual format". Anyway, semantic differences aside...
I find your comparison with Zip drives to be fairly pertinent. Although I think you have the details backwards. The "Super Disk Drives" are more like HD-DVD, in that very few people used them, and even fewer people remember them. A total non-starter. Blu-Ray may work out like Zip drives - briefly popular, but ultimately a short-lived phenomenon and overall failure. Zip drives briefly filled a niche before CD-R became viable. They were standard among certain industries like pre-press and graphics for a while. A little like the way Minidisc had an elusive moment in the sun.
Personally, I think HD-DVD is more like the Magneto-optical drive. When I was at university, our computer graphics lab had these installed instead of Zip drives. I don't think anybody else on the planet had a mass installation of these things. We had to buy extremely expensive MO disks for them, when almost every student already owned at least one Zip disk.
I find the way you equate HD-DVD to the Zip, and Blu-Ray to the "Super Disk" to be quite curious, as the Zip enjoyed a brief popularity that the Super Disk never did, and Blu-Ray is already way more popular than HD-DVD, in a way the Super Disk never was.
No, my argument is that it wouldn't make sense because HD-DVD never took off in the first place. The long list of obsolete devices that are still available share one thing in common - they were widely used over a period spanning a number of years. HD-DVD never even came close to those formats in status.
Look, it's like this. The HD DVD and Blu-Ray drives use the same laser, same form factor media, same codecs...So what? That doesn't mean manufacturers are going to pay extra licensing fees for a format nobody uses. And Toshiba stated they were giving up on it to put an end to the format war. What would dragging it out achieve?
Manufacturing HD discs without retooling DVD manufacturing lines was one of the main benefits of the thing;That was always a grossly over-inflated argument. It's really not that significant. And again, who is going to manufacture discs for an obsolete format?
I doubt that studios and production houses will shell out for low-run things like independent movies (especially straight-to-video...c'mon, pervs, there's straight-to-video OUTSIDE of porn) and exercise videos.You're not making sense here. These things do get made, and have always been made on various formats. There's no reason they won't be made on Blu-Ray, and there's no reason to make them on HD-DVD. WRT independent films - those already get distributed on 35mm film to cinemas. That's a lot more expensive than Blu_ray, yet somehow they manage to distribute them globally on film.
I think a lot of people here are really kidding themselves if they think the format has any future whatsoever.
Ugggh. No, let's forget about D-VHS, please!! That's just disturbing.
How the hell are you going to play a burned Blu-Ray disc on an HD-DVD player?
The difference being that DVD and VHS were both the leading formats of their era, and people transitioned from one to the other. Of course, the VHS was recordable, too. Did you ever see a Betamax/DVD player? That's the more appropriate comparison. HD-DVD never even took off, not even to the extent Betamax did.
How is that a "combo" drive? Sounds like a "dual" drive to me. I could gaffer-tape a Blu-Ray player to an HD-DVD player, but that wouldn't make it a "combo". For that, they'd have to share the transport mechanism.
I doubt we'll see any more "combo" players released simply because HD-DVD isn't being supported by its parent - or by the content providers - anymore. That'll suppress demand to the point where there just aren't the economies of scale in place to make manufacturing such devices economical. Had both formats continued to persist in the marketplace though, I think we would have seen combo drives become the norm,Which is precisely my point. Others keep arguing about previous formats that get back-supported - but those formats were entrenched in the market, they were mainstream. HD-DVD never reached that position, so there's little likelihood of such support. The ordinary DVD dominates the market. HD-DVD doesn't. 5.25 and 3.5" floppies similarly had mass domination. Even Betamax was a lot more successful than HD-DVD.
The links you provide have no images... but I would be very surpised if this were a true "combo" more likely you are talking about a "dual" drive, with two drive mechanisms mounted together, not a unit that shares a common transport mechanism.
And, also, HD-DVD/Blu-Ray players that obviously will never exist according to you http://www.google.com/products?q=hd-dvd+blu-ray+combo&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1. So, uh, yeah, your whole argument here was an epic fail.My point was not that they don't exist now, but they won't be made in the future. Do you really think they are going to keep making them?
Not always (Laser Disc was too large to incorporate into DVD players), but in cases where the form factor of the physical media lends itself, this tends to be the way old technologies get phased out.Really? Then why do most DVD burners not support DVD-RAM?
Got a link? Sounds to me like it was two drives in a common enclosure, not something where you would use the same mechanism for both formats, which is what we mean by "combo" drive today.
So how does it read 5.25" floppies? Which was the question, not "can you stick a memory card reader in a floppy drive?"
I can buy an HD-DVD BluRay combo drive today.For starters, that's not a standalone player that one would use in the living room. It's a computer drive. But anyway, the point is that these are unlikely to be made in the future, as Toshiba has ditched the technology.
I won't say that you didn't really know what the hell you were talking about, or that you just jumped at the opportunity to be an ignorant blathering fanboy.Fanboy? How could my post be construed as that? If anything, it was anti-fanboy, as I was responding to the delusions of an overly enthusiastic HD-DVD fanboy.
Somebody must have hit you with the stupid stick. The post you were replying to was referring to COMBO players, not being able to get obsolete devices. Did you ever see a 5.25"/3.5" floppy disk combo drive? No? Well, there's your analogy. There is about the same likelihood of seeing HD-DVD/Blu-Ray drives.
And, of course, Blu-Ray players will never offer backwards compatibility with DVD, since it is soon to be a dead format.Again, idiotic. DVD is an established medium, which everybody uses. It is what people upgrade to Blu-Ray/HD from. Of course it is supported. But a format that is dead, and whose only serious manufacturer has discontinued making? You really think Toshiba is going to revive the corpse just to add it to Blu-Ray players? It would be pointless.
Well, my PS3 boots in 20 seconds or less, and Blu-Rays play as soon as the disc has spun up and mounted - maybe 10 seconds.
Which, of course, is a complete load of horseshit. One would think you would update your knowledge given how much you talk about Apple products. But maybe your goal is to be purposefully misinformed as a means to trolling?
The Mac Mini is a veritable ocotopus once you've added enough to make it a useful machine. Talk about wire clutter...Never heard of wireless devices? My Mac Mini is very useful, and it has only two things plugged into it - the HDTV it uses for a display, and an EyeTV tuner. It takes up less space than a DVD player or amplifier, and has no wire clutter. What makes my Mac Mini not useful? Not that the Mac mini is the typical Mac, anyway.
P.S:
And I have no idea what you're talking about with drop-down menus. It must be a Mac-centric problem, because I've never had any issues in either of the other operating systems I've mentioned.Why would it be a Mac-centric problem, when every other browser/application on the Mac has drop-down menus that work properly? I'd say that pretty clearly makes it a Firefox-specific (or Firefox for Mac specific) problem. Again, it seems to be about Firefox developers not caring about established interface standards, and just doing it their own way.
Laptops don't have a home key (you need to use modifier keys). Even on keyboards with a home key, its position is not as convenient, and if you are navigating text you are already using the arrow keys anyway.
that doesn't really even make sense (i.e. you are not moving up)It doesn't make sense? You are traveling upwards through the text - i.e, towards the beginning. If there is no previous line, then the beginning is the beginning of that line of text. It makes perfect sense.
Now that I think about it that way, I'd say that Macs are the ones with the flawed interface.It's entirely beside the point whether you think it makes sense or is flawed.
If you are writing an application for a particular platform, it is a major error to break behavior that works consistently on that platform. Should application writers switch the corner that the close window button is located on your platform, just because the application writer doesn't like it? Should I disable the middle button in a UNIX/Linux application because I don't like the way users use it?
That you don't think this is a problem is quite amazing, and I guess it illustrates a certain mentality - that our interfaces should be inconsistent mish-mashes. Which has always been a problem with Linux and Windows to a large degree. One of the things that makes the Mac attractive is the much more consistent interface. Although Apple themselves are starting to mess with that, it's still not as bad on other platforms. But apparently the Firefox developers don't give a shit.
..But then there are the people who buy Apple computers because 'all the wires and stuff and Windows and all is soo confusing.'That sounds pretty intelligent to me. Only a stupid person would say "I love wire clutter, and Windows is so awesome". How does the above preference indicate any kind of mental deficiency?
Yeah right. Firefox fails because of the way it handles text fields in a totally non-Mac-like way. Have your cursor at the end of a single-line text field (like the URL entry field) and want to go back to edit something at the beginning of the line? In just about every other Mac application, you simply hit the up-arrow once, and it goes to the beginning of the line of text. But not in Firefox, for some reason. Instead, I have to hold down the left-arrow and wait for it to get to the start of the line.
The same thing shits me when using Ubuntu. How can major applications get such basic text navigation so wrong? Changing the "theme" to look like something else isn't going to fix fundamental interface flaws. Firefox also has problems with the behavior of drop-down menus and selecting items in them.
Helpful hint: the dollar sign goes before the figure, and there is no need for an apostrophe.
Wait, somebody actually attempted to run a Vista server??
It's red! And goes... fast... it's sexy... and stuff. Isn't it?
So, why are other countries doing well, despite having the same conditions to deal with?
Hire a sherpa, and take your desktop, Hi-Fi, portable darkroom and a satellite dish?
If the Linux Mafia did it, wouldn't the source code be freely available? Wait... has anybody checked SourceForge for evidence?
That's about the most backwards assessment of Photoshop I've ever heard. Photoshop is not "all about the plug-ins" unless you're a teenager looking for cheesy special effects. Its strength is in the core image-processing engine. I'd vouch that the majority of Photoshop users don't install any additional plugins.
Wait... I thought the purpose of FOSS was to use software on your own terms, and have access to the source? Now it's some kind of war against other types of software? That sounds almost as bad as Ballmer's chair-throwing tantrums.