Mac Windows blah blah... the REAL question to me is how did it get there? as you point out, made in China.
Until I found a new job, I worked for a major Western European telecom company in a US subsidiary that many don't know that they own. I fixed email issues on a Unix based email solution we sold. I don't remember how many times we had to request to get off blacklists because some idiot customer in China/Hong Kong/Taiwan got their PC infected with a spamming virus of some kind and started spewing spam through our service. We would have to talk tough with the customer and warn them that if this continued, we would stop sending their email because we couldn't afford to get blacklisted. Despite all the talk about US infected PCs, and I'm sure it's true, I get the impression that nobody in China/Hong Kong/Taiwan takes PC security seriously at all, so I can't say I'm surprised.
dumb enough not to know the difference between the average and the median?
Smart enough to not post as Anonymous Coward? From dictionary.com: Average - typical; common; ordinary: The average secretary couldn't handle such a workload. His grades were nothing special, only average.
Seems to me that "average" is correct. If this crap got 5 points for being "funny" although wrong, I should get 5 points for being right.
You can't go ordering companies that do business both within and outside the US to take arbitrary actions outside the US in response to civil suits within the US.
Oh really? Are you an attorney who practices in the USA? Or just another Slashdotter who thinks that common sense is how the law works?
Other countries certainly think they can do this very thing. France thinks so. Maybe you don't remember the controversy over Ebay and Nazi items, but a French court ruled that Ebay, a US based business, had to block the ability of anyone with a French IP address to see any Nazi related items. Just because you with no listed qualifications about the law say that it can't be done doesn't convince me that a US court won't indeed try to do that very thing.
..but can someone explain why the stock price is going up based upon this news? MFE
Probably not. I gave up trying to figure out the market a long time ago. Remember that for a long time, SCOX kept going up in value while just about everybody in IT knew that they had absolutely nothing. Even after it should have been clear to even the diehards that SCOX's case was nothing but hot air, the stock still maintained its $4.00+ price. In fact, SCOX is now trading at $2.30 a share as I post this and it was at a low of $1.52 not too long ago. How on earth can you justfify a.78 per share jump in a company that is running out of cash and customers? Yet somehow somebody thinks it still has value.
Me: So a policeman in the USA would shoot a shoplifter if they ran away? American: If they didn't stop, I guess they would.
That guess would be wrong. Deadly force is not permitted to stop someone suspected of committing this kind of crime. However, if the shoplifter was in Brazil, I think the police could use deadly force. I have always been amazed by the Brazilian legal system. There's no death penalty and the maximum penalty for any crime is 30 years, although in practice it's really 29 years because 30 year sentences carry an automatic appeal. However, the cops can legally shoot you if you run away.
The recording industries model is based on owning content they do not make.
I don't remember who it was, but a few years ago someone in the US Congress was quoted as saying that the recording industry was like a bank still owning the house after you paid off the mortgage. I thought that was pretty astute.
Hmm, you have a very different perspective than I. I've always viewed Belgium as one of those countries with disproportionate influence. As the location for the NATO headquarters, they've always been sort of representative of Europe, and now with the headquarters of the EU there as well, it is semi-official.
The original headquarters of NATO was Paris, but it was moved to Brussels after DeGaulle began to withdraw French forces from the NATO command structure to spite the US and UK. This is only a guess, but I have always assumed that Brussels was selected as the headquarters of the EU because of its central location (well, at least in relation to the original members), a history of multilingualism and the fact that having the headquarters there was much less likely to cause resentment than putting it in the UK, France or Germany.
On another, rather important, note, they mention it for HD-DVD. HD-DVD doesn't even _have_ region encoding, so they can't tell me the disc is from the wrong one; that's why I want HD-DVD rather than Blu-Ray.
This statement needs to be changed to say that HD-DVD doesn't have region encoding now. The fact that it is not being imposed now does not mean that it won't be imposed in the future. A web search can provide some interesting comments on this.
The thing that I find most interesting about HD-DVD is that the whole idea of PAL or NTSC discs is going away. At least so far it appears that HD-DVD's standard will be 24 fps video and it will expect the hardware (HD-DVD player and TV) to correctly display the image in whatever format is necessary.
Considering all the FUD that gets commentary and analysis about MS and Vista recently, it would be nice to know exactly where he got the information that Zune would also wrap non-WMA, non-DRMed files in a DRM layer.
As is usual for Slashdot, what the article says and what the submitter says it says are not necessarily the same thing. Basically, the submitter is under the impression that if one use Zune to share a Creative Commons tune, that tune will get wrapped in DRM "goodness" and become unplayable after 3 days or so. However, the article does not explicitly state that Zune can share such songs, so as someone else pointed out, this may be much ado over nothing.
who didn't get anything from that? Who needs lawyers, I can answer every question with a synonym for "depends" myself.
My best friend is a lawyer and he does this stuff all the time too. Lawyers get really really good at learning how to answer every question they get with something evasive. This is in part because the USA is far too litigious and they know that if they answer a question that is true 999.999 times out of 1 million, the 1 in a million guy who is an exception will sue them for not being right in his particular case. The funny thing is, my friend has told me that lawyers like the law to be clear cut and not vague. He has stressed that lawyers hate vagueness. Yet if you ask a lawyer any question, I doubt you'll get anything but a vague answer. Remember, President Clinton was a lawyer, which is why he was able to come up with the incredible "That depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is" defense. I found this exercise rather pointless and frankly, I don't think the lawyers understood some of the questions they were asked, evasive answers or not.
So calling the phone company and pretending to be somebody else to get their records is called Pretexting??? I kinda thought that was called fraud.
Or as another poster said, "lying". Or as I thought, "falsely impersonating another", although mine is a bit wordy. Apparently most of us seemed to think the English language already had this one covered, but for some reason the idiodic press thought it was really cool and neat to invent a new word nobody would understand. Or perhaps this word "pretexting" comes from HP and was used to obfuscate what they did. Given how business and management love Pointy Haired Boss talk, I can't rule that out.
Hybrid discs are actually part of the offcial BD-ROM spec and was one of the selling points last year when all HD DVD came up with was those lame "flippers"...
So don't buy into the Slashdot HD DVD hype, just accept the fact that everything you can do with HD DVD you can do better with BD. Storage capacity is 66% higher and the video interactivity is based on Sun's Java (just like the DVB standard).
Sigh. Another demented Sony lover. OK, I'll bite. Please tell us - where exactly are these BluRay hybrid discs? What's that? There aren't any for sale right now. Right.
Like it or not, the flippers you mock are to date the only high def DVD discs with any kind of DVD playable functionality. Sony has done nothing but demonstate vaporware.
They came up with this for SACD, and that went all of nowhere. You could use the same disc for CD players and SACD. I think the SACD was just a DVD layer anyway. Thanks probably more to licensing than manufacturing costs.
You're partly right and partly wrong. No offense intended, but you're partly wrong because of the kind of music you listen to and the fact that you are certainly an American. (Me too, by the way.) In the USA, Sony hurt the format, which they invented with Philips, by insisting that it was "impossible" to manufacture hybrid SACD discs that could be played on SACD and regular CD players, although at the time smaller classical labels such as Telarc were putting out such discs with no problems. For a long time, Sony released SACD only discs, which meant they were unplayable to people who didn't have an SACD player. For a while, the Rolling Stones 1963-1969 catalog was available entirely as SACD hybrid discs, but sales eventually slowed and their label decided it was better to manufacture CD only discs that could be sold cheaper than SACD hybrids.
In America with pop/rock music, yes, SACD is basically dead. No doubt about it. It survives very well in jazz and classical music circles though. People who like that kind of music are less likely to pirate it and more likely to pay extra for SACD quality. In Europe, the format survives for pop/rock music though.
The details of the SACD layer were deliberately kept secret, but it does appear that a single DVD layer was used in the manufacturing process to provide the SACD layer. It also didn't help that because of piracy concerns, an SACD compatible drive was never made available for PCs. DVD Audio discs can be played on any PC with a DVD drive and a DVD software player that understands the format, such as WinDVD and PowerDVD. DVD Audio got cracked specifically because it was playable on PCs, so Sony and Philips were probably onto something with that decision, but it sure didn't make people want to adopt the format.
Finally sounds like they're making good movies again.
Well, I never watched LOTR (long story, but basically I never read the books and have no interest at all in them or the movies), but I liked the other 2 films you mentioned. The sad thing is that these are all sequels or prequels. That seems to be all that Hollywood can do - sequels, prequels, remakes of foreign films, convert old TV shows into movies, etc. There is a real dearth of original ideas in Hollywood right now.
And, now there's a battle brewing over the appropriate codec? Again, WTH? So now we have 2 competing hardware formats, and at least 2 codecs? Are the studios going to ship with a version of each codec? Are all of our players going to be compatible (sans firmware hoops)?
Actually all BluRay and HD-DVD players supported the VC-1, MPEG-2 and H.264 codecs from the beginning. The problem was that Sony has rushed BluRay prematurely to market and their "genius" (ha ha ha) engineers weren't able to get anything but MPEG-2 working for the first BluRay releases. VC-1 has worked from day 1 on HD-DVD. Firmware updates don't add new codecs to players. Codecs are built into chips already in the player. All firmware updates do is fix problems or add new functionality.
As far as compatibility goes, this is far too vague to answer. I have no idea what you are asking. If you are asking will BluRay and HD-DVD be compatible, well, the answer right now is "no". There are rumors of players being built to support both formats, but one manufacturer backed out of its plans to offer such a player and no one has any for sale yet. I'm not aware of even a target date for such players. HD-DVD and BluRay players do both support DVD, if that's what you're asking. If you are asking if these players support other video formats such as VCD, SVCD and Divx, the answer at this time appears to be "no".
All of this roiling, and a missing piece of the reviews and comparisons. How do these new formats and codecs hold up to and compare with the workhorse DVD of today? Considering today's DVDs have matured quite well, no hassle, no muss, no fuss, it'd be nice to know if the new expensive, complex, and not yet settled new DVD technology is even worth the bother.... Right now, for most, I'm guessing it's not.
Early reviews were that HD-DVD is excellent in terms of sound quality and picture. The first BluRay discs were reviewed as having excellent sound and disappointing picture. The first BluRay discs were apparently not very well encoded under MPEG-2. MPEG-2 is capable of excellent results in high definition, but nobody has yet offered an explanation for the disappointing performance of early BluRay discs. I'm guessing that someone botched the encoding. Maybe they didn't use a high enough bit rate, but that's just a guess.
SULU, then Archer. Sulu was only a captain for one move and came across better.
Uh, I believe you meant movie not move . Sulu also appeared as Captain in one episode of Voyager where Tuvok relived something from his past as a young ensign on Sulu's ship.
Speaking of Sulu, I was able to recently meet George Takei at a SciFi convention and he was extremely nice and friendly. Just a great all around guy.
unny part is that non drm HD quality and resolution mpeg4 content can play on paltry Celeron 2.4ghz processors with 512 meg of ram and a crappy video card.
You are correct sir. The problem with some HD is that VC1 playback takes a lot of CPU power. I have a 3200+ AMD CPU and 2 GB of memory and I can't get VC1 video to playback at normal speeds. The picture quality is fantastic, but the video playback is somewhat slower than it should be, so it's not really watchable. Divx in HD doesn't require as much CPU power and will playback fine on systems such as the one you describe. VC1's demands for tons of CPU power is why Cyberlink is recommending dual core CPUs to play HD-DVD and BluRay on a PC.
I demo real HD content on a HTPC next to a HDDVD to a customer and they love the HTPC's picture over the HDDVD player. BluRay is not even HD quality yet as they do not have dual layer discs available yet so they are EDDVD instead of HDDVD.
I'm not sure I like the way you phrased this. Your statement is accurate but somewhat misleading. BluRay discs are in HD right now. It's my understanding released titles are in 1080p. Maybe it's 1080i and not 1080p, but they are in 1080-something. However, reviewers have reported the quality is not as good as it should be. This is because Sony rushed BluRay to market before it was ready and the only codec they could get working for the first releases was the old MPEG-2 codec. MPEG-2 in HD resolutions is capable of excellent results if you use a high enough bit rate, but apparently the first discs were encoded somewhat sloppily and it's said that the results aren't very impressive. Supposedly Sony finally got VC1 to work under BluRay, so future releases may be better. Your statement about these discs being EDDVD is just wrong. They are in HD format. There's no such thing as EDDVD anyway, so I'm not sure where you came up with that one.
Kind of like how you can't be a great programmer without ever having seen Lisp
Is your name Richard Stallman?:-)
Seriously, none of the programmers I worked with who I thought really knew their stuff ever worked with Lisp, although I suppose many of them may have seen Lisp, so technically you may be right, even though I suspect your definition of seen is not literal.
In general, I'd say that any kind of large-scale vote rigging done by paper ballots would require a conspiricy involving multiple staffers and observers at the polling places. You'd need to physically replace thousands of paper ballots with fake ones. Good luck doing that by yourself. And afterwards, if the results look fishy, there is a good chance that the fraud could be discovered on a recount.
Your comments could be applied to the Ukrainian Presidential runoff of 2004 where massive vote fraud was done despite the presence of international election monitors. I was in Ukraine the day after the election and I remember seeing the election "results" on TV. Imagine if you will a US state in a Presidental election that reports 98% of eligible voters voted and 94% of them voted for one candidate and you have an idea of the bald faced fraud that going on. When the people counting the votes and the people working the precincts are in on the fix, paper ballots can be forged/replaced. The election was re-run basically because the police and military backed the "loser", Viktor Yushchenko, and refused to kill protesters like the outgoing president is alleged to have secretly ordered. It also helped that the Supreme Court shocked everyone and decided that even though the outgoing president had appointed them, they were going to do what was right, not what he wanted them to do, so they ordered a re-vote and a fair result was obtained. So whenever I hear people act like paper ballots can't be rigged, I think of this election.
When my wife (who was a resident of the U.S.) decided to give birth to our daughter in a U.S. clinic, I applied for a visa so I could attend the birth of my first child. Everything was set for the trip, and even though I worked in Austria at that time, had a lot of cash on my account, I was not issues a visa out of concerns that I might not leave the U.S. Oh, btw. I am a Croatian citizen.
I am truly sorry your application failed, but I am going to explain to you why this happened. I am American and my government believes that every person in the world wants to live in our country and would do so if given a chance. If you are a citizen of a country that is not on the "Visa Waiver Program" list (Croatia is not on the list), you are presumed to be a potential illegal immigrant. The fact that your wife willingly lives apart from you in America probably makes you suspicious to the US embassy when you applied for a visa. They probably think that you and your wife had a plan for her to legally immigrate, get pregnant, and then get you a visitor's visa and after your arrival, you never return to Austria. It also hurts you that the people who make the decision about your visa are usually young people in their 20s who work at the US embassy or consolate where you applied for the visa. Unfortunately, the policy of the US Department of State is that if an embassy/consolate worker grants a visa and the visitor doesn't return, it counts against the worker. If enough people illegally stay on visas they approved, they will never be promoted and it will hurt their career. So the system forces them to deny more visas than they approve because if they deny your visa application, you can't hurt them because you can't overstay. Also, as you know there is no appeal process for applicants, so you will never know why your visa was not approved. It was because some young person thought you were too big a risk, probably because your wife chooses to live without you in America. I don't know how much money you have in the bank, but I can promise you that it was not enough. Rich people always get visas to America. Always. Rich people don't overstay visas, so they get them.
It probably won't make you feel any better, but parents of legal immigrants are often denied visitor visas to visit their children in America. I know of cases where American men have married women from countries not on the "Visa Waiver Program" and the woman legally immigrated to America, yet the US government will not give visas to her parents for fear of them being "illegal immigrants". I even know of a case where a woman's mother and father applied for a visitor's visa on different days and the mother's application was rejected and the father's was approved. This makes no sense, yet apparently one embassy/consular officer decided that the mother was a potential illegal immigrant and on another day the a different officer worked on the father's application and decided that he was no risk to give a visa to. It's a constant problem and there is no solution for it other than a reform of the way the US government grants visas. Personally, I think the "Visa Waiver Program" is too restrictive and should be expanded to include all EU countries and a few others. However, this is never going to happen. The US government resists change and as long as the system says to young workers "If you give a visa to someone who doesn't return, we'll hold it against you", then applicants will be denied more than they are approved just to safeguard the careers of those who do the approving.
Who says that users will not be able to put the music on their portable media players or burn the tracks to CD?
The submitter, wild_berry, who, surprise surprise, is yet another Slashdot submitter who fails to understand the articles cited in his own submission. Neither of the articles cited contain any mention of such a restriction.
Right, because scientists in the field of study who are stumped couldn't possibly have already looked into that and discounted it? You Google'd it, that suddenly means you have all the knowledge to tell the experts what is going on?
It appears that this is exactly what has happened. Look for the post below entitled "This is nothing new" and read an article stating that this has been going on for decades, but due to changes in the way fishermen operate today, it has only recently been noticed by the scientists.
Of course, this couldn't be right because scientists are always free of bias and are always correct in their assumptions, right?
IANAL - and that's really the crux of the matter, neither are you, neither are 95% (ass pluck statistic) of Slashdot. If you're worried, take the contract to a lawyer (preferably experienced in intellectual property things), explain to them your concerns, have them examine and make any proposed alterations they think would be necessary.
Don't be pressured into signing something you're not satisfied with, in most civilised countries a (potential) employer cannot hand you a contract and say sign now or sign out, you can and should take the time you need to properly examine the contract, by professionals if necessary.
This is excellent advice. I'd like to add that in my opinion, BenderMan is a little bit delusional. First of all, most people don't stay awake at night dreaming up inventions. In fact, I know plenty of really really smart people who don't do this at all. Secondly, whether his planned patents are truly "valuable" as he claims they are is something we will just have to see. His ego certainly isn't suffering from this delemma.
BenderMan's problem is that he falls into the old trap "I do A. Therefore, everybody else in the world does A too, because I am completely normal and like everyone else." However, I think if BenderMan was as smart as he thinks he is and his ideas were as valuable as he thinks he is, he'd be smart enough to be talking to an attorney rather than asking strangers who aren't attorneys for advice that only attorneys are qualified to give. It might be worth noting that studies have shown that incompetent people are often supremely overconfident in their own abilities and I'm beginning to wonder if BenderMan falls into that category.
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Mac Windows blah blah... the REAL question to me is how did it get there? as you point out, made in China.
Until I found a new job, I worked for a major Western European telecom company in a US subsidiary that many don't know that they own. I fixed email issues on a Unix based email solution we sold. I don't remember how many times we had to request to get off blacklists because some idiot customer in China/Hong Kong/Taiwan got their PC infected with a spamming virus of some kind and started spewing spam through our service. We would have to talk tough with the customer and warn them that if this continued, we would stop sending their email because we couldn't afford to get blacklisted. Despite all the talk about US infected PCs, and I'm sure it's true, I get the impression that nobody in China/Hong Kong/Taiwan takes PC security seriously at all, so I can't say I'm surprised.
Know how dumb the average person is?
dumb enough not to know the difference between the average and the median?
Smart enough to not post as Anonymous Coward? From dictionary.com:
Average - typical; common; ordinary: The average secretary couldn't handle such a workload. His grades were nothing special, only average.
Seems to me that "average" is correct. If this crap got 5 points for being "funny" although wrong, I should get 5 points for being right.
You can't go ordering companies that do business both within and outside the US to take arbitrary actions outside the US in response to civil suits within the US.
Oh really? Are you an attorney who practices in the USA? Or just another Slashdotter who thinks that common sense is how the law works?
Other countries certainly think they can do this very thing. France thinks so. Maybe you don't remember the controversy over Ebay and Nazi items, but a French court ruled that Ebay, a US based business, had to block the ability of anyone with a French IP address to see any Nazi related items. Just because you with no listed qualifications about the law say that it can't be done doesn't convince me that a US court won't indeed try to do that very thing.
Probably not. I gave up trying to figure out the market a long time ago. Remember that for a long time, SCOX kept going up in value while just about everybody in IT knew that they had absolutely nothing. Even after it should have been clear to even the diehards that SCOX's case was nothing but hot air, the stock still maintained its $4.00+ price. In fact, SCOX is now trading at $2.30 a share as I post this and it was at a low of $1.52 not too long ago. How on earth can you justfify a
I don't know the details of the MS case - did MS do it without permission, maybe?
I'm wondering if it's another case of "embrace and extend" so the final PDF wasn't compatible with anything Adobe made.
Me: So a policeman in the USA would shoot a shoplifter if they ran away?
American: If they didn't stop, I guess they would.
That guess would be wrong. Deadly force is not permitted to stop someone suspected of committing this kind of crime. However, if the shoplifter was in Brazil, I think the police could use deadly force. I have always been amazed by the Brazilian legal system. There's no death penalty and the maximum penalty for any crime is 30 years, although in practice it's really 29 years because 30 year sentences carry an automatic appeal. However, the cops can legally shoot you if you run away.
The recording industries model is based on owning content they do not make.
I don't remember who it was, but a few years ago someone in the US Congress was quoted as saying that the recording industry was like a bank still owning the house after you paid off the mortgage. I thought that was pretty astute.
Hmm, you have a very different perspective than I. I've always viewed Belgium as one of those countries with disproportionate influence. As the location for the NATO headquarters, they've always been sort of representative of Europe, and now with the headquarters of the EU there as well, it is semi-official.
The original headquarters of NATO was Paris, but it was moved to Brussels after DeGaulle began to withdraw French forces from the NATO command structure to spite the US and UK. This is only a guess, but I have always assumed that Brussels was selected as the headquarters of the EU because of its central location (well, at least in relation to the original members), a history of multilingualism and the fact that having the headquarters there was much less likely to cause resentment than putting it in the UK, France or Germany.
On another, rather important, note, they mention it for HD-DVD. HD-DVD doesn't even _have_ region encoding, so they can't tell me the disc is from the wrong one; that's why I want HD-DVD rather than Blu-Ray.
This statement needs to be changed to say that HD-DVD doesn't have region encoding now. The fact that it is not being imposed now does not mean that it won't be imposed in the future. A web search can provide some interesting comments on this.
The thing that I find most interesting about HD-DVD is that the whole idea of PAL or NTSC discs is going away. At least so far it appears that HD-DVD's standard will be 24 fps video and it will expect the hardware (HD-DVD player and TV) to correctly display the image in whatever format is necessary.
Considering all the FUD that gets commentary and analysis about MS and Vista recently, it would be nice to know exactly where he got the information that Zune would also wrap non-WMA, non-DRMed files in a DRM layer.
As is usual for Slashdot, what the article says and what the submitter says it says are not necessarily the same thing. Basically, the submitter is under the impression that if one use Zune to share a Creative Commons tune, that tune will get wrapped in DRM "goodness" and become unplayable after 3 days or so. However, the article does not explicitly state that Zune can share such songs, so as someone else pointed out, this may be much ado over nothing.
who didn't get anything from that? Who needs lawyers, I can answer every question with a synonym for "depends" myself.
My best friend is a lawyer and he does this stuff all the time too. Lawyers get really really good at learning how to answer every question they get with something evasive. This is in part because the USA is far too litigious and they know that if they answer a question that is true 999.999 times out of 1 million, the 1 in a million guy who is an exception will sue them for not being right in his particular case. The funny thing is, my friend has told me that lawyers like the law to be clear cut and not vague. He has stressed that lawyers hate vagueness. Yet if you ask a lawyer any question, I doubt you'll get anything but a vague answer. Remember, President Clinton was a lawyer, which is why he was able to come up with the incredible "That depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is" defense. I found this exercise rather pointless and frankly, I don't think the lawyers understood some of the questions they were asked, evasive answers or not.
I'm amazed that the USB Fondu pot didn't make the list!
Maybe they got punished for that incredibly nasty sounding recipe for fondue at the website. It sure killed my desire to have one.
So calling the phone company and pretending to be somebody else to get their records is called Pretexting??? I kinda thought that was called fraud.
Or as another poster said, "lying". Or as I thought, "falsely impersonating another", although mine is a bit wordy. Apparently most of us seemed to think the English language already had this one covered, but for some reason the idiodic press thought it was really cool and neat to invent a new word nobody would understand. Or perhaps this word "pretexting" comes from HP and was used to obfuscate what they did. Given how business and management love Pointy Haired Boss talk, I can't rule that out.
Hybrid discs are actually part of the offcial BD-ROM spec and was one of the selling points last year when all HD DVD came up with was those lame "flippers" ...
So don't buy into the Slashdot HD DVD hype, just accept the fact that everything you can do with HD DVD you can do better with BD. Storage capacity is 66% higher and the video interactivity is based on Sun's Java (just like the DVB standard).
Sigh. Another demented Sony lover. OK, I'll bite. Please tell us - where exactly are these BluRay hybrid discs? What's that? There aren't any for sale right now. Right.
Like it or not, the flippers you mock are to date the only high def DVD discs with any kind of DVD playable functionality. Sony has done nothing but demonstate vaporware.
They came up with this for SACD, and that went all of nowhere. You could use the same disc for CD players and SACD. I think the SACD was just a DVD layer anyway. Thanks probably more to licensing than manufacturing costs.
You're partly right and partly wrong. No offense intended, but you're partly wrong because of the kind of music you listen to and the fact that you are certainly an American. (Me too, by the way.) In the USA, Sony hurt the format, which they invented with Philips, by insisting that it was "impossible" to manufacture hybrid SACD discs that could be played on SACD and regular CD players, although at the time smaller classical labels such as Telarc were putting out such discs with no problems. For a long time, Sony released SACD only discs, which meant they were unplayable to people who didn't have an SACD player. For a while, the Rolling Stones 1963-1969 catalog was available entirely as SACD hybrid discs, but sales eventually slowed and their label decided it was better to manufacture CD only discs that could be sold cheaper than SACD hybrids.
In America with pop/rock music, yes, SACD is basically dead. No doubt about it. It survives very well in jazz and classical music circles though. People who like that kind of music are less likely to pirate it and more likely to pay extra for SACD quality. In Europe, the format survives for pop/rock music though.
The details of the SACD layer were deliberately kept secret, but it does appear that a single DVD layer was used in the manufacturing process to provide the SACD layer. It also didn't help that because of piracy concerns, an SACD compatible drive was never made available for PCs. DVD Audio discs can be played on any PC with a DVD drive and a DVD software player that understands the format, such as WinDVD and PowerDVD. DVD Audio got cracked specifically because it was playable on PCs, so Sony and Philips were probably onto something with that decision, but it sure didn't make people want to adopt the format.
Finally sounds like they're making good movies again.
Well, I never watched LOTR (long story, but basically I never read the books and have no interest at all in them or the movies), but I liked the other 2 films you mentioned. The sad thing is that these are all sequels or prequels. That seems to be all that Hollywood can do - sequels, prequels, remakes of foreign films, convert old TV shows into movies, etc. There is a real dearth of original ideas in Hollywood right now.
And, now there's a battle brewing over the appropriate codec? Again, WTH? So now we have 2 competing hardware formats, and at least 2 codecs? Are the studios going to ship with a version of each codec? Are all of our players going to be compatible (sans firmware hoops)?
Actually all BluRay and HD-DVD players supported the VC-1, MPEG-2 and H.264 codecs from the beginning. The problem was that Sony has rushed BluRay prematurely to market and their "genius" (ha ha ha) engineers weren't able to get anything but MPEG-2 working for the first BluRay releases. VC-1 has worked from day 1 on HD-DVD. Firmware updates don't add new codecs to players. Codecs are built into chips already in the player. All firmware updates do is fix problems or add new functionality.
As far as compatibility goes, this is far too vague to answer. I have no idea what you are asking. If you are asking will BluRay and HD-DVD be compatible, well, the answer right now is "no". There are rumors of players being built to support both formats, but one manufacturer backed out of its plans to offer such a player and no one has any for sale yet. I'm not aware of even a target date for such players. HD-DVD and BluRay players do both support DVD, if that's what you're asking. If you are asking if these players support other video formats such as VCD, SVCD and Divx, the answer at this time appears to be "no".
All of this roiling, and a missing piece of the reviews and comparisons. How do these new formats and codecs hold up to and compare with the workhorse DVD of today? Considering today's DVDs have matured quite well, no hassle, no muss, no fuss, it'd be nice to know if the new expensive, complex, and not yet settled new DVD technology is even worth the bother.... Right now, for most, I'm guessing it's not.
Early reviews were that HD-DVD is excellent in terms of sound quality and picture. The first BluRay discs were reviewed as having excellent sound and disappointing picture. The first BluRay discs were apparently not very well encoded under MPEG-2. MPEG-2 is capable of excellent results in high definition, but nobody has yet offered an explanation for the disappointing performance of early BluRay discs. I'm guessing that someone botched the encoding. Maybe they didn't use a high enough bit rate, but that's just a guess.
SULU, then Archer. Sulu was only a captain for one move and came across better.
Uh, I believe you meant movie not move . Sulu also appeared as Captain in one episode of Voyager where Tuvok relived something from his past as a young ensign on Sulu's ship.
Speaking of Sulu, I was able to recently meet George Takei at a SciFi convention and he was extremely nice and friendly. Just a great all around guy.
unny part is that non drm HD quality and resolution mpeg4 content can play on paltry Celeron 2.4ghz processors with 512 meg of ram and a crappy video card.
You are correct sir. The problem with some HD is that VC1 playback takes a lot of CPU power. I have a 3200+ AMD CPU and 2 GB of memory and I can't get VC1 video to playback at normal speeds. The picture quality is fantastic, but the video playback is somewhat slower than it should be, so it's not really watchable. Divx in HD doesn't require as much CPU power and will playback fine on systems such as the one you describe. VC1's demands for tons of CPU power is why Cyberlink is recommending dual core CPUs to play HD-DVD and BluRay on a PC.
I demo real HD content on a HTPC next to a HDDVD to a customer and they love the HTPC's picture over the HDDVD player. BluRay is not even HD quality yet as they do not have dual layer discs available yet so they are EDDVD instead of HDDVD.
I'm not sure I like the way you phrased this. Your statement is accurate but somewhat misleading. BluRay discs are in HD right now. It's my understanding released titles are in 1080p. Maybe it's 1080i and not 1080p, but they are in 1080-something. However, reviewers have reported the quality is not as good as it should be. This is because Sony rushed BluRay to market before it was ready and the only codec they could get working for the first releases was the old MPEG-2 codec. MPEG-2 in HD resolutions is capable of excellent results if you use a high enough bit rate, but apparently the first discs were encoded somewhat sloppily and it's said that the results aren't very impressive. Supposedly Sony finally got VC1 to work under BluRay, so future releases may be better. Your statement about these discs being EDDVD is just wrong. They are in HD format. There's no such thing as EDDVD anyway, so I'm not sure where you came up with that one.
Kind of like how you can't be a great programmer without ever having seen Lisp
:-)
Is your name Richard Stallman?
Seriously, none of the programmers I worked with who I thought really knew their stuff ever worked with Lisp, although I suppose many of them may have seen Lisp, so technically you may be right, even though I suspect your definition of seen is not literal.
In general, I'd say that any kind of large-scale vote rigging done by paper ballots would require a conspiricy involving multiple staffers and observers at the polling places. You'd need to physically replace thousands of paper ballots with fake ones. Good luck doing that by yourself. And afterwards, if the results look fishy, there is a good chance that the fraud could be discovered on a recount.
Your comments could be applied to the Ukrainian Presidential runoff of 2004 where massive vote fraud was done despite the presence of international election monitors. I was in Ukraine the day after the election and I remember seeing the election "results" on TV. Imagine if you will a US state in a Presidental election that reports 98% of eligible voters voted and 94% of them voted for one candidate and you have an idea of the bald faced fraud that going on. When the people counting the votes and the people working the precincts are in on the fix, paper ballots can be forged/replaced. The election was re-run basically because the police and military backed the "loser", Viktor Yushchenko, and refused to kill protesters like the outgoing president is alleged to have secretly ordered. It also helped that the Supreme Court shocked everyone and decided that even though the outgoing president had appointed them, they were going to do what was right, not what he wanted them to do, so they ordered a re-vote and a fair result was obtained. So whenever I hear people act like paper ballots can't be rigged, I think of this election.
When my wife (who was a resident of the U.S.) decided to give birth to our daughter in a U.S. clinic, I applied for a visa so I could attend the birth of my first child. Everything was set for the trip, and even though I worked in Austria at that time, had a lot of cash on my account, I was not issues a visa out of concerns that I might not leave the U.S. Oh, btw. I am a Croatian citizen.
I am truly sorry your application failed, but I am going to explain to you why this happened. I am American and my government believes that every person in the world wants to live in our country and would do so if given a chance. If you are a citizen of a country that is not on the "Visa Waiver Program" list (Croatia is not on the list), you are presumed to be a potential illegal immigrant. The fact that your wife willingly lives apart from you in America probably makes you suspicious to the US embassy when you applied for a visa. They probably think that you and your wife had a plan for her to legally immigrate, get pregnant, and then get you a visitor's visa and after your arrival, you never return to Austria. It also hurts you that the people who make the decision about your visa are usually young people in their 20s who work at the US embassy or consolate where you applied for the visa. Unfortunately, the policy of the US Department of State is that if an embassy/consolate worker grants a visa and the visitor doesn't return, it counts against the worker. If enough people illegally stay on visas they approved, they will never be promoted and it will hurt their career. So the system forces them to deny more visas than they approve because if they deny your visa application, you can't hurt them because you can't overstay. Also, as you know there is no appeal process for applicants, so you will never know why your visa was not approved. It was because some young person thought you were too big a risk, probably because your wife chooses to live without you in America. I don't know how much money you have in the bank, but I can promise you that it was not enough. Rich people always get visas to America. Always. Rich people don't overstay visas, so they get them.
It probably won't make you feel any better, but parents of legal immigrants are often denied visitor visas to visit their children in America. I know of cases where American men have married women from countries not on the "Visa Waiver Program" and the woman legally immigrated to America, yet the US government will not give visas to her parents for fear of them being "illegal immigrants". I even know of a case where a woman's mother and father applied for a visitor's visa on different days and the mother's application was rejected and the father's was approved. This makes no sense, yet apparently one embassy/consular officer decided that the mother was a potential illegal immigrant and on another day the a different officer worked on the father's application and decided that he was no risk to give a visa to. It's a constant problem and there is no solution for it other than a reform of the way the US government grants visas. Personally, I think the "Visa Waiver Program" is too restrictive and should be expanded to include all EU countries and a few others. However, this is never going to happen. The US government resists change and as long as the system says to young workers "If you give a visa to someone who doesn't return, we'll hold it against you", then applicants will be denied more than they are approved just to safeguard the careers of those who do the approving.
Who says that users will not be able to put the music on their portable media players or burn the tracks to CD?
The submitter, wild_berry, who, surprise surprise, is yet another Slashdot submitter who fails to understand the articles cited in his own submission. Neither of the articles cited contain any mention of such a restriction.
Right, because scientists in the field of study who are stumped couldn't possibly have already looked into that and discounted it? You Google'd it, that suddenly means you have all the knowledge to tell the experts what is going on?
It appears that this is exactly what has happened. Look for the post below entitled "This is nothing new" and read an article stating that this has been going on for decades, but due to changes in the way fishermen operate today, it has only recently been noticed by the scientists.
Of course, this couldn't be right because scientists are always free of bias and are always correct in their assumptions, right?
IANAL - and that's really the crux of the matter, neither are you, neither are 95% (ass pluck statistic) of Slashdot. If you're worried, take the contract to a lawyer (preferably experienced in intellectual property things), explain to them your concerns, have them examine and make any proposed alterations they think would be necessary.
Don't be pressured into signing something you're not satisfied with, in most civilised countries a (potential) employer cannot hand you a contract and say sign now or sign out, you can and should take the time you need to properly examine the contract, by professionals if necessary.
This is excellent advice. I'd like to add that in my opinion, BenderMan is a little bit delusional. First of all, most people don't stay awake at night dreaming up inventions. In fact, I know plenty of really really smart people who don't do this at all. Secondly, whether his planned patents are truly "valuable" as he claims they are is something we will just have to see. His ego certainly isn't suffering from this delemma.
BenderMan's problem is that he falls into the old trap "I do A. Therefore, everybody else in the world does A too, because I am completely normal and like everyone else." However, I think if BenderMan was as smart as he thinks he is and his ideas were as valuable as he thinks he is, he'd be smart enough to be talking to an attorney rather than asking strangers who aren't attorneys for advice that only attorneys are qualified to give. It might be worth noting that studies have shown that incompetent people are often supremely overconfident in their own abilities and I'm beginning to wonder if BenderMan falls into that category.