The problem is that magnetic media has a significantly shorter data integrity than what optical media *can* provide.
Under what conditions? Sealed in an air-tight, moisture-proof box? Handled with gloves like any fragile document from the 13th Century?
The cheap media most people buy is about as reliable a hard drive.
Crap. No other word for it.
I've been backing up on hard drives for over four years now - in fact, I now have 8 hard drives purely for dedicated backups (well, I have a 1.5TB media library). Every now and then I need to restore a file that has been accidentally deleted or corrupted and I have yet to go to one of my drives and find it unusable.
Granted its only been four years, and yes, hard drives are not archive grade storage mediums. If I wanted archive quality I'd go back to backing up on tape drives - that is the only proven archive media in the industry today. I've gone back to DVDs and CDs that I haven't used on twelve months and find they are unreadable - let alone four years. I'm sure there are people on/. that have had working hard drives for 7, 8, hell 10 years+.
Even audio CDs don't last more than a couple of years, particularly if you do something ridiculous, such as actually use them. Who here as a pile of audio CDs they bought in the 90s that are degraded beyond use?
I watch most of my videos as XVid AVIs with DVD resolution or less on a projector giving me a screen of over 100 inches (ie 2.5m down here). My projector is only 854x480. Most movies are encoded at 720x304 or there abouts.
And yet, even at 100 inches, it looks fine. Yes, I don't disagree that tripling the resolution to 1080i *should* make it better to watch, but how much. At that size, sitting about 3-4m away my eyes are constantly shifting focus from one side of the screen to the other, and we really can't sit much closer or we'd get a very sore next and miss a hell of a lot.
When designing PAL the designers settled on 480 vertical lines because when sitting at the recommended distance (3 times the width of the screen) the human eye can only see 480 vertical lines. 1080 lines seems like overkill.
High density plastic discs will never compete against external hard drives for serious backups. They are a proven, reliable media with the advantages of constantly being able to rewrite and reuse them as needs change.
I backup all my DVDs onto external hard drives and throw the shiny discs into the closest. The flimsy plastic is really only good for a couple of uses before scratching, fingerprints or other marks degraded them.
HD DVDs would be useful as a transient storage container for transporting data between locations, because its eay to transport and after copying the data to its real location it can be thrown away. But not as a backup. Same as DVDs today.
It's not possible to provide uncontended connectivity to each end user at a sensible price.
Firefly, You've made this statement in a couple of replies to this thread. Its fundamental to your point that if this is true than the connectivity must be artifically controlled in order for the economics to work. If its not true than the logic of QoS is flawed.
So, I ask, is uncontended connectivity really impossible to provide in the US even at limited speeds? Is it economically impossible for an ISP to provide an uncontended 512KB/s line regardless of the content of that throughput?
The reason he ran into trouble with some learned clergy is because he was not being logical and knowledgeable. Without the concept of epicycles, he couldn't back up any of what he was saying.
Galileo pointed a telescope at jupiter, saw four objects that orbited it and concluded that those four objects did not revolve around the Earth and that the Earth was not the centre of the Universe as Copernicus had theorised.
That's pretty logical and needs no epicycle concept. If objects don't revolve around Earth, Earth is not the centre. Problem was the Church couldn't accept this logic as it clashed with their ideology - and ideologies need no logic, only "faith".
[Clap] [Clap]. Love this. That's the whole smegging point of the deigital age. We need nobody in between!
Universal's music and movie distribution division should give up and become an ISP. Then at least that could provide some value-add services to their artists content.
Is if fraud when hard drive companies sell you a "250GB" HDD?
Well, no, actually. A 250MB hard drive is exactly that: 250,000,000,000 bytes. That's the same definition of 1GB (ie 1,000,000,000 bytes) that ALL hard drive manufacturers use, and have been for quite a while. Most will actually state x,000,000,000 bytes. So its fair, and you're are getting what you pay for.
It's the same thing here, you pick the description that makes you look the best.
Only if that description is acturate; Otherwise its fraud. Marketting is about putting the best spin on what you've got to sell. Saying your selling something your not is fraud. And marketing in general strays very close or a touch over the line.
With bandwidith it is reasonable to expect some loss, but you should be able to get at least 90% most times, and then deduct network and traffic overheads. If your only getting 25% of the bandwidth delivered that's a cause for suspictions of being ripped off.
Overselling is a poor excuse, one used by airlines all the time. If I buy a seat on a flight I expect to get one - even if everybody else they have sold a seat to does as well.
The difference is that you can. When was the last time you found a bug in MS Office and actually managed to pay MS to fix it? Unless you are buying millions of units, they won't even listen to you.
As I said, MS will just ignore you. Why won't OpenOffice.org do the same? Reckon I can pay them to add my funky widget to the core distribution? Think not, not unless they agreed a proportion of other users would want it. Same deal: That's not an open vs closed difference, its about managing a stable set of code for distribution to a lot of people.
One of the benefits of OSS is that you can change the source yourself to put in widgets you like. Just like you can with your own code. Paying vendors to change code is always an option and aceptance into the code base depends on the same rules: size of user base, suitablility of new feature, target market etc.
Its just that most OSS projects are so much smaller than the big boys the "size of user base" factor is neglibile and they are more likely to accept change to grow that user base. I've worked at a number of small, closed source, niche shops and we always listened to our customers and incorporated new features if they were useful for the product and user base as a whole.
Many, many companies need software that doesn't provide a special competitive advantage, it just keeps them going.
As do many government departments. But this is about "control" of your software and assests, not about expedience.
Would you rather pay someone to fix a few issues you have with OpenOffice.org, or write your own office suite from scratch?
How is paying OpenOffice.org to fix a few issues with their products any different to paying MS to fix a few issues you have with MS Office? I thought one large difference between OSS and proprietory code was that I (or my team) or change the code. Paying somebody else is always an option, even the vendor themselves.
Perhaps the difference is there is a perception that buying a product like Office from a company like MS implies that I have already paid them enough to get a product I want to work the way I want. It "should" allow me to what I need and there should be few "bugs". Because we don't have that requirement of OSS then we wouldn't mind shelling out a few dollars for them to improve (as opposed to fix) their products.
Or is it that OSS teams are usually way more receptive to adding customers' suggested imrovements, whether money changes hands or not? Historically, the perception is, once you buy a product from a large vendor for lots of $$$ then they collect maintence and upgrade fees regularly but ignore suggested features from existing clients. You can't pay MS to add a particular widget to the Word toolbar, 'cause they'll just ignore you. Is that any different to large OSS projects where 99.9% of the other customers of the product don't need your widget?
Think about it - it would be reduced to a choice between local companies (open-source) and local companies (proprietary).
So you're point is about foreign and national companies. City governments should only invest in companies head-quartered within that city (ie, local economy), eh? It doesn't seem to be about open-source vs closed-sourced, rather national vs local. That's a different discussion.
Yes, both open-source and closed-source products should be weighed appropriately, and yes, I agree, that for products from foreign companies "control" of the code is an issue and should be considered above and beyond money. That's a key discussion about sovereignty and opens-ource has the advantage of "if we go to war with them we can still support our systems".
But only at a national level. Are you worried about your state or city govenment "giving control" of some vital infrastructure software to Redmond or Silicon Valley? Or are you just worried about jobs moving over there (and then on to India)?
--> Why the hell would I want to entrust all my gov't operations, all my military, all my businesses' computing needs to a closed source, foreign (from my point of view) vendor... like, say, MS?
Because its a lot cheaper than writing your own - at least percieved cheaper - as is always the case with software. In the case of operating systems like Solaris, HP, and Windows (yes, even WIndows) the cost of writing from scrtach is enormous. You want your tax dollars funding a couple of thousands programmers, design and govenerment middle management for the next decade?
As typical on/. when the term OSS is thrown around it quickly runs down into a discussion about the free side of OSS. If you write it yourself it's always open source to you, you always matain control, and you don't pay maintenence to anybody. So why is OSS better than in-house?
... as are most of the body shops that install and implement these projects. There only foreign if you live outside the US. Following that logic shouldn't the US governments be supporting their own US economy and buying more software from the big boys?
Re:A lot of Japanese use PS2's as DVD players
on
How the PS3 Hit $600
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· Score: 1
--> I watch movies, listen to music, and play games with my PS2 controller. It's pretty damn easy. And the remote control is smaller than a lot of TV contollers I've seen. PS2 is as close as we've seen to true
To clarify: you watch DVD movies, listen to MP3 music and play PS2 games on your PS2. Right? (I don't own a PS2, so perhaps I'm missing a little functionality)
We watch any movie (DVD, AVI, WMV, OGG), listen to any music, watch TV (mainly digitial, but was with analog), record TV (sorry - "time-shift"), rip DVDs (oops - "format-shift"), read and send email and surf the net from a single box hidden in a cupboard in the corner of the room. Its hooked to a monitor, 80cm TV and a projector (details here: http://blade.dnsalias.net/jsp/Wiki?TVRoom). As its hooked to my network that gives me 4,500 videos and 9,000 songs to choose from any time I feel like it.
But in order to get all that flexibility and control the catch is we use a mouse and a keyboard or microphone. Imagine how big the remote would be? If all I wanted was to watch TV and play the odd DVD and game then sure a PS2 with a remote might fit the bill (ignoring cost). But I want more from my home entertainment system.
--> BlueRay discs at least use a new coating called Durabis which the manufacturer (TDK) claims will stand up to a screwdriver.
Let's hope the claim stands up to the demands of reality. I wonder what the half-life of a new HD Disney flick will be after the kids get a hold of it. Currently I have to make sure I grab the DVD and rip it before the kids try to jam it in the player with their chocolate covered fingers.
I dimly remember such claims when the first CDs came out, including Darryl Sommers jumping all over one whilst remarking how such acting wouldn't effect the ability to play it at all. Oh, those were the days - when the public believed such marketing hype.
Re:A lot of Japanese use PS2's as DVD players
on
How the PS3 Hit $600
·
· Score: 1
Two buttons means you can only do two things. That's not convergence, that's a toaster.
The more functions you expect a device to do, the more complicated interface you have to give the user to control. Otherwise you need 10 devices with two buttons each. You either have a single remote with 25 buttons, to control our HiFi, TV, Video, DVD, etc - or you have one for each device.
Even removing the buttons, keyboard, etc and using the same mechanism humans have always used to get others to do things - ie speech - causes confusion. I'm building a speech interface to mine and yet some people have to spend 3 minutes telling it what to do just to get it "just right".
People are like that. They expect to have a button or two that "just does it the way I want" without wanting to have to specify how. That's one reason they don't like so many buttons on devices.
--> Who wouldn't want a single disc that can store up to 200GB of data?
Depends on how reliable that disc is I think. CDs and DVDs aren't robust enough in the real world to be used as a reliable backup mechanism, nor will HD or BlueRay. After a couple of uses they are scratched and covered in fingerprints no matter how careful you are.
As a distribution mechanism they are fine. Cheap, light, and don't take much room, so they are great to get content out to the masses. But if you want to play your $75 game or watch your $50 HD movie more than a few times you'd better transfer it to something more reliable, else you have a $75 beer coaster.
Re:A lot of Japanese use PS2's as DVD players
on
How the PS3 Hit $600
·
· Score: 1
If convergence is such an important factor why not just buy/use/build a media PC? Then you can add anything you like for minimal price when the cards / drives come out as PC components. Then you have one small box that can do everything.
The computer I watch TV on is my TiVo, DVD player and CD jukebox. Its also my digital TV, PVR and MP3 player. My wife uses the same box to receive emails and surf the web (second monitor in the corner) without the need to go into another room all the time.
I'd rather have one box that can do all that than need 4 or 5. Much, much cheaper and I control what's played or seen not some big fat company making me pay through the nose.
The Media War - love the media hype don't you - is far from over. Hardware and software compaines have barely made a dent in the living room - let alone the rest of the house. Music is still largely listended to on CDs, with MP3s and other formats being confined to MP3 plaing CD players or portable devices. And yes, iPod remains king (though why is a topic often debated on \.).
Apart from a few of us nerds with media centers and the like, most people still watch DVDs on a plain old telli, love their radios, and are happy to be forced fed whatever shows the cable companies pump down the line. At this stage, that's how the vast majority of people wish to be entertained in their home.
I've been writing a Java based distributed home media system for three years now. I have half a dozen descretely placed and hidden boxes throughout my house giving me and mine the ability to listen to any music and watch any video on any room in the house. Visitors love it when the come over and I can show a favourite show on the projector in about 15 seconds, then send the kids upstairs to watch their shows out of our hair. Its great and the future. I built the software and put it online as a downloadable (see url) and have offered to help a number of family and friends to slowly build similar systems.
And yet, nobody is interested. Its not cost nor ability. I've offered to build hardware as needed and my software is friendly and easy to use (so say my wife and kids). Yet, everybody loves my house and wants the same freedom and flexibility. What gives?????
They don't want another "computer", yet are happy to spend $800 on a PVR. You can't even see the computers in my house - apart from the obvious one in the office - and yet there is backlash because of the perception that multi-media is something you do with a computer, and they have enough computers at the office. Nobody realises that your TV, mobile phone, hell your fridge is a computer these days. And the $800 PVR is really a knobbled computer that can be built for about $200.
Nothin' for it, I'll just sit back and watch for the next few years and see what the masses decide they realy want. Either way, I own my lounge room and I plug in what ever hardware or software I want. It should be compatabile with most things or I ain't buying it.
Re:Do we have evidence that Intel coerced...
on
AMD Subpoenas Skype
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· Score: 1
You are right, Anti-competitive practices are perfectly acceptible in a free market. If, I want to bundle my stereo system with a certain type of car because that car company has paid me to do so or vice versa or has some other mutually beneficial deal, that is perfectly acceptible.
Bundling is different to limiting a product that a consumer would reasonable expect to work the same on a different system. I buy an AMD system an expect all programs to work the same as on Intel system except for limitations of the CPU (or other hardware components). I do not expect that some programs are knobbled simply to provide a befenifical deal for the vendors.
Got nothing to do with monpoloist or unfair practices. Its about what the consumer expects when they buy/use a product.
Slashdot Mirror
Under what conditions? Sealed in an air-tight, moisture-proof box? Handled with gloves like any fragile document from the 13th Century? The cheap media most people buy is about as reliable a hard drive.
Crap. No other word for it.
I've been backing up on hard drives for over four years now - in fact, I now have 8 hard drives purely for dedicated backups (well, I have a 1.5TB media library). Every now and then I need to restore a file that has been accidentally deleted or corrupted and I have yet to go to one of my drives and find it unusable.
Granted its only been four years, and yes, hard drives are not archive grade storage mediums. If I wanted archive quality I'd go back to backing up on tape drives - that is the only proven archive media in the industry today. I've gone back to DVDs and CDs that I haven't used on twelve months and find they are unreadable - let alone four years. I'm sure there are people on /. that have had working hard drives for 7, 8, hell 10 years+.
Even audio CDs don't last more than a couple of years, particularly if you do something ridiculous, such as actually use them. Who here as a pile of audio CDs they bought in the 90s that are degraded beyond use?
I watch most of my videos as XVid AVIs with DVD resolution or less on a projector giving me a screen of over 100 inches (ie 2.5m down here). My projector is only 854x480. Most movies are encoded at 720x304 or there abouts.
And yet, even at 100 inches, it looks fine. Yes, I don't disagree that tripling the resolution to 1080i *should* make it better to watch, but how much. At that size, sitting about 3-4m away my eyes are constantly shifting focus from one side of the screen to the other, and we really can't sit much closer or we'd get a very sore next and miss a hell of a lot.
When designing PAL the designers settled on 480 vertical lines because when sitting at the recommended distance (3 times the width of the screen) the human eye can only see 480 vertical lines. 1080 lines seems like overkill.
High density plastic discs will never compete against external hard drives for serious backups. They are a proven, reliable media with the advantages of constantly being able to rewrite and reuse them as needs change.
I backup all my DVDs onto external hard drives and throw the shiny discs into the closest. The flimsy plastic is really only good for a couple of uses before scratching, fingerprints or other marks degraded them.
HD DVDs would be useful as a transient storage container for transporting data between locations, because its eay to transport and after copying the data to its real location it can be thrown away. But not as a backup. Same as DVDs today.
Firefly, You've made this statement in a couple of replies to this thread. Its fundamental to your point that if this is true than the connectivity must be artifically controlled in order for the economics to work. If its not true than the logic of QoS is flawed.
So, I ask, is uncontended connectivity really impossible to provide in the US even at limited speeds? Is it economically impossible for an ISP to provide an uncontended 512KB/s line regardless of the content of that throughput?
Galileo pointed a telescope at jupiter, saw four objects that orbited it and concluded that those four objects did not revolve around the Earth and that the Earth was not the centre of the Universe as Copernicus had theorised.
That's pretty logical and needs no epicycle concept. If objects don't revolve around Earth, Earth is not the centre. Problem was the Church couldn't accept this logic as it clashed with their ideology - and ideologies need no logic, only "faith".
[Clap] [Clap]. Love this. That's the whole smegging point of the deigital age. We need nobody in between!
Universal's music and movie distribution division should give up and become an ISP. Then at least that could provide some value-add services to their artists content.
Well, no, actually. A 250MB hard drive is exactly that: 250,000,000,000 bytes. That's the same definition of 1GB (ie 1,000,000,000 bytes) that ALL hard drive manufacturers use, and have been for quite a while. Most will actually state x,000,000,000 bytes. So its fair, and you're are getting what you pay for. It's the same thing here, you pick the description that makes you look the best.
Only if that description is acturate; Otherwise its fraud. Marketting is about putting the best spin on what you've got to sell. Saying your selling something your not is fraud. And marketing in general strays very close or a touch over the line.
With bandwidith it is reasonable to expect some loss, but you should be able to get at least 90% most times, and then deduct network and traffic overheads. If your only getting 25% of the bandwidth delivered that's a cause for suspictions of being ripped off.
Overselling is a poor excuse, one used by airlines all the time. If I buy a seat on a flight I expect to get one - even if everybody else they have sold a seat to does as well.
As I said, MS will just ignore you. Why won't OpenOffice.org do the same? Reckon I can pay them to add my funky widget to the core distribution? Think not, not unless they agreed a proportion of other users would want it. Same deal: That's not an open vs closed difference, its about managing a stable set of code for distribution to a lot of people.
One of the benefits of OSS is that you can change the source yourself to put in widgets you like. Just like you can with your own code. Paying vendors to change code is always an option and aceptance into the code base depends on the same rules: size of user base, suitablility of new feature, target market etc.
Its just that most OSS projects are so much smaller than the big boys the "size of user base" factor is neglibile and they are more likely to accept change to grow that user base. I've worked at a number of small, closed source, niche shops and we always listened to our customers and incorporated new features if they were useful for the product and user base as a whole.
As do many government departments. But this is about "control" of your software and assests, not about expedience.
Would you rather pay someone to fix a few issues you have with OpenOffice.org, or write your own office suite from scratch?
How is paying OpenOffice.org to fix a few issues with their products any different to paying MS to fix a few issues you have with MS Office? I thought one large difference between OSS and proprietory code was that I (or my team) or change the code. Paying somebody else is always an option, even the vendor themselves.
Perhaps the difference is there is a perception that buying a product like Office from a company like MS implies that I have already paid them enough to get a product I want to work the way I want. It "should" allow me to what I need and there should be few "bugs". Because we don't have that requirement of OSS then we wouldn't mind shelling out a few dollars for them to improve (as opposed to fix) their products.
Or is it that OSS teams are usually way more receptive to adding customers' suggested imrovements, whether money changes hands or not? Historically, the perception is, once you buy a product from a large vendor for lots of $$$ then they collect maintence and upgrade fees regularly but ignore suggested features from existing clients. You can't pay MS to add a particular widget to the Word toolbar, 'cause they'll just ignore you. Is that any different to large OSS projects where 99.9% of the other customers of the product don't need your widget?
So you're point is about foreign and national companies. City governments should only invest in companies head-quartered within that city (ie, local economy), eh? It doesn't seem to be about open-source vs closed-sourced, rather national vs local. That's a different discussion.
Yes, both open-source and closed-source products should be weighed appropriately, and yes, I agree, that for products from foreign companies "control" of the code is an issue and should be considered above and beyond money. That's a key discussion about sovereignty and opens-ource has the advantage of "if we go to war with them we can still support our systems".
But only at a national level. Are you worried about your state or city govenment "giving control" of some vital infrastructure software to Redmond or Silicon Valley? Or are you just worried about jobs moving over there (and then on to India)?
--> Why the hell would I want to entrust all my gov't operations, all my military, all my businesses' computing needs to a closed source, foreign (from my point of view) vendor... like, say, MS?
/. when the term OSS is thrown around it quickly runs down into a discussion about the free side of OSS. If you write it yourself it's always open source to you, you always matain control, and you don't pay maintenence to anybody. So why is OSS better than in-house?
Because its a lot cheaper than writing your own - at least percieved cheaper - as is always the case with software. In the case of operating systems like Solaris, HP, and Windows (yes, even WIndows) the cost of writing from scrtach is enormous. You want your tax dollars funding a couple of thousands programmers, design and govenerment middle management for the next decade?
As typical on
... as are most of the body shops that install and implement these projects. There only foreign if you live outside the US. Following that logic shouldn't the US governments be supporting their own US economy and buying more software from the big boys?
--> I watch movies, listen to music, and play games with my PS2 controller. It's pretty damn easy. And the remote control is smaller than a lot of TV contollers I've seen. PS2 is as close as we've seen to true
To clarify: you watch DVD movies, listen to MP3 music and play PS2 games on your PS2. Right? (I don't own a PS2, so perhaps I'm missing a little functionality)
We watch any movie (DVD, AVI, WMV, OGG), listen to any music, watch TV (mainly digitial, but was with analog), record TV (sorry - "time-shift"), rip DVDs (oops - "format-shift"), read and send email and surf the net from a single box hidden in a cupboard in the corner of the room. Its hooked to a monitor, 80cm TV and a projector (details here: http://blade.dnsalias.net/jsp/Wiki?TVRoom). As its hooked to my network that gives me 4,500 videos and 9,000 songs to choose from any time I feel like it.
But in order to get all that flexibility and control the catch is we use a mouse and a keyboard or microphone. Imagine how big the remote would be? If all I wanted was to watch TV and play the odd DVD and game then sure a PS2 with a remote might fit the bill (ignoring cost). But I want more from my home entertainment system.
--> BlueRay discs at least use a new coating called Durabis which the manufacturer (TDK) claims will stand up to a screwdriver.
Let's hope the claim stands up to the demands of reality. I wonder what the half-life of a new HD Disney flick will be after the kids get a hold of it. Currently I have to make sure I grab the DVD and rip it before the kids try to jam it in the player with their chocolate covered fingers.
I dimly remember such claims when the first CDs came out, including Darryl Sommers jumping all over one whilst remarking how such acting wouldn't effect the ability to play it at all. Oh, those were the days - when the public believed such marketing hype.
Two buttons means you can only do two things. That's not convergence, that's a toaster.
The more functions you expect a device to do, the more complicated interface you have to give the user to control. Otherwise you need 10 devices with two buttons each. You either have a single remote with 25 buttons, to control our HiFi, TV, Video, DVD, etc - or you have one for each device.
Even removing the buttons, keyboard, etc and using the same mechanism humans have always used to get others to do things - ie speech - causes confusion. I'm building a speech interface to mine and yet some people have to spend 3 minutes telling it what to do just to get it "just right".
People are like that. They expect to have a button or two that "just does it the way I want" without wanting to have to specify how. That's one reason they don't like so many buttons on devices.
--> Who wouldn't want a single disc that can store up to 200GB of data?
Depends on how reliable that disc is I think. CDs and DVDs aren't robust enough in the real world to be used as a reliable backup mechanism, nor will HD or BlueRay. After a couple of uses they are scratched and covered in fingerprints no matter how careful you are.
As a distribution mechanism they are fine. Cheap, light, and don't take much room, so they are great to get content out to the masses. But if you want to play your $75 game or watch your $50 HD movie more than a few times you'd better transfer it to something more reliable, else you have a $75 beer coaster.
If convergence is such an important factor why not just buy/use/build a media PC? Then you can add anything you like for minimal price when the cards / drives come out as PC components. Then you have one small box that can do everything.
I'd rather have one box that can do all that than need 4 or 5. Much, much cheaper and I control what's played or seen not some big fat company making me pay through the nose.
The Media War - love the media hype don't you - is far from over. Hardware and software compaines have barely made a dent in the living room - let alone the rest of the house. Music is still largely listended to on CDs, with MP3s and other formats being confined to MP3 plaing CD players or portable devices. And yes, iPod remains king (though why is a topic often debated on \.). Apart from a few of us nerds with media centers and the like, most people still watch DVDs on a plain old telli, love their radios, and are happy to be forced fed whatever shows the cable companies pump down the line. At this stage, that's how the vast majority of people wish to be entertained in their home. I've been writing a Java based distributed home media system for three years now. I have half a dozen descretely placed and hidden boxes throughout my house giving me and mine the ability to listen to any music and watch any video on any room in the house. Visitors love it when the come over and I can show a favourite show on the projector in about 15 seconds, then send the kids upstairs to watch their shows out of our hair. Its great and the future. I built the software and put it online as a downloadable (see url) and have offered to help a number of family and friends to slowly build similar systems. And yet, nobody is interested. Its not cost nor ability. I've offered to build hardware as needed and my software is friendly and easy to use (so say my wife and kids). Yet, everybody loves my house and wants the same freedom and flexibility. What gives????? They don't want another "computer", yet are happy to spend $800 on a PVR. You can't even see the computers in my house - apart from the obvious one in the office - and yet there is backlash because of the perception that multi-media is something you do with a computer, and they have enough computers at the office. Nobody realises that your TV, mobile phone, hell your fridge is a computer these days. And the $800 PVR is really a knobbled computer that can be built for about $200. Nothin' for it, I'll just sit back and watch for the next few years and see what the masses decide they realy want. Either way, I own my lounge room and I plug in what ever hardware or software I want. It should be compatabile with most things or I ain't buying it.