Most HD films are going to be fine in the details aspect, simply because, what fails on Blu-Ray is going to fail in the theatre. 35mm film prints are still higher resolution than 1080p; so are 2K and 4K theatrical projectors. Sure, you don't have the time to review every scene, zoom in, etc. in a theatre, but any "seams" you see are simply bad filmmaking, not something most filmmakers are thinking just don't matter.
I already had "300" on DVD... wasn't so compelling I had to get the BD. And sure, you can sometimes see the film gain from lower budget films transferred to BD, but that's actually a plus -- it's more like watching a real 16mm film than a DVD compression of a 16mm film. Most of the films in my ever-expanding BD library are a dramatic improvement over DVD, at least while watching on my 71" DLP from my theatre chairs 12ft away. If they pass that test, I'm good with them... I have no intention of microinspection on either of my 1200p 24" monitors.
It was a brilliant move for the success of Blu-Ray... they got the ultimate in upgradeable players in to majority of viewers' hands, and got the pumps primed for lowering the cost of BD media, dramatically. It wasn't a great move, early on, for their gaming business... they essentially threw the Playstation under the bus in order to win Blu-Ray. Long-term view, it was the right move. Given the evolution of gaming, the PS3 now has a very competitive advantage versus other consoles, and we're already seeing fully loaded BD50s out in the market. PC games can compete with multiple DVDs loaded onto HDDs, but console users lack the HDD space for that, and lack the patience for swapping out discs.
The doubling rate is based on software sales... Blu-Ray is now at about 10% of the market. It took DVD about a year longer to get to that point. It's certain that the DVD rate will beat Blu-Ray at some point, just because there's zero short-term incentive for anyone without HDTV to get into Blu-Ray, while there was good reason for any TV viewer to get a DVD player.
Thing is, it's the software sales that matter to the health of the BD industry overall, and it's pretty clear that people with Blu-Ray players buy more videos than those without. There are plenty of examples in the CE industry of companies doing very healthy business catering to the high-end, whether that's 10% or 1% of a large market. Blu-Ray is already past the tipping point, and whether it maxxes out at 50% or even more of the video market, it has won this round.
Downloads aren't going to be a replacement for Blu-Ray until storage drops another order of magnitude in price, bandwidth goes up similarly, and (most important) ISPs don't think they can charge extra for 100's of gigabytes of downloads per month.
Let's also add in The Internet, now that that's a form of entertainment. Ignoring its capacity to facilitate stealing, you have all sorts of competition for the entertainment hour without consuming additional entertainment dollars (though you have to pay that monthly ISP bill).. online radio, Pandora, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc. Another recurring bill is the satellite/cable/FiOS TV bill every month... dollars spent there don't go to CDs. And many of those come with music subscriptions -- I get 40-50-something channels of Sirius satellite radio on my Dish Network receiver... both detract from potential music sales.
Why buy when it's free, legally? Well, with broadcast, that's usually because "the free stuff sucks". But with many other forms of "free stuff", it's sucking less all the time.
And of course, adults also have other forms of entertainment (which is why CD sales are so targeted at the younger crowd)... live shows, bars and drinking, etc. Kids, too, are spending more on live shows than in the past, largely because artists see those as the way to actually make more money, so there are more tours, more venues, etc.
Sure... now, most people play CDs over and over, but yeah, that's an hour's entertainment. The DVD usually offers 2-3 at least. A video game can give you a good 30-60 hours of entertainment, thus justifying its high price.
And the entertainment dollars are also being sucked up by subscription services. Back in the days of LP and cassette, that's all there was, other than films at the theatre. Kids today can spend on DVD and videogames, but as well, something like World of Warcraft, where they're paying every month. Once you're on your own, most people have a monthly satellite or cable bill, the Internet (and the associated ISP bill), and of course, "grown-up" entertainment like live shows and drinking.
The CD figures smaller and smaller as the world expands.. and the music companies just don't seem to get it. I suppose they're starting too, as the prices are falling.
I wrote a letter to "Wired" stating essentially this... two or three years ago, in response to some article or another discussing music piracy.
When I was a kid (back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth, of course), home entertainment media was pretty much your choice of LP, 45-single, cassette, or 8-track. In short, all products of the Recording Industry. Today, you have CDs, LPs (rarely) and downloads from those guys. But that same entertainment dollar is now also split between electronic gadgets, videos (DVD, Blu-Ray, that one guy still buying VHS), and gaming (console, pocket, online).
Then add in the fact that digital downloads re-introduced the single, and the whole industry plan that removed the single back in the 70s in favor of the whole album is gone... only now, they've grown dependent on selling whole albums. Then add in discounts on digital downloads... I've bought direct form the artist, from eMusic.com, and from Amazon.com. I only buy full albums, but if the digital version is near the CD price, I'll just buy the CD. When I can get an album for $2.00-$4.00, I probably buy the download.
And that's perhaps a good thing in the long run for the music industry. They'll have to adjust, and stop paying their relatively worthless executives so much. The new point of stability has a CD selling for under $10, so that it's seen as competitive with DVDs at $15 or video games at $30-$60.
They also need to acknowledge the actual role of record companies in the 21rst century, and price accordingly. There was a time when these guys were responsible for all sorts of artist development... they hired the backing band, they owned the studios, etc. It was very much the same artist management model use in Hollywood of the 40's and 50's. But today, you don't get a recording contract with a major label until you have a fully produced CD to show them... they're not even remotely part of any creative process at that level (they may get involved pushing established artists... after huge cuts to their rosters, due to cost reductions and mergers, they're more dependent than ever on a few big hits every year, despite the fact you can't really depend on that).
So the Big Label really has a purpose only as a publisher and distributer... the same thing book publishers do. Only, when I buy a Stephen King book, I see his copyright on the backside of the title page. When you buy most CDs, you'll see the record company claiming copyright. That's a projection of just how important they think they are, and when that starts to change, you'll know that there's maybe some hope for the industry. The big labels, or their replacements, will catch onto this... the only question is whether or not a record label still makes any sense, or generates any money, by the time they do. It's easy to see folks like Apple, Wal-Mart, Amazon, Best-Buy, and Starbucks replacing Sony, Warner Bros, EMI, etc. if things keep on their current path.
When DVD players first came out, they ran around $1,000, and these are precisely the things folks said about DVD. Of course, at that time, you might need a better TV to see any difference (most VHS users were sill hooking up via RI, not CVBS or Y/C). You didn't have a stereo in the typical TV room, much less a receiver with a DTS/AC-3 decoder and five speakers, to that was pointless. Computers were still standardizing on CD, and they were not yet fast enough to decode a DVD in software away, so you needed extra hardware to play that DVD if you wanted to. And of course, your all-important VHS tapes didn't work with that expensive new DVD player. And DVDs weren't recordable, and "never would be" (just like CDs...).
So yeah, DVD was initially suspect in the market, too... not the mention the whole Circuit City / DiVX plot to replace it about a year after the first models hit the market, which added to the FUD maybe even more than the BD vs. HD-DVD thing... particularly since DiVX hit after many early adopters had DVD. That helped kill DiVX faster than it might have died otherwise (eg, as an initial competitor to DVD), but it also scared some people away for awhile.
Blu-Ray is hitting the market faster than either DVD or VHS did. Not just in the USA, either... BD had a 2:1 unit sales advantage over HD-DVD here in the USA for most of the "war", but was running more like 4:1 across Europe and the UK.
Most people who would buy Blu-Ray already have the HDTV and the TV-room stereo -- hell, I was two years into my second generation HDTV by the time the Blu-Ray/HDTV wars were over. And pretty much all of the source material put on Blu-Ray or DVD exists in high quality format. Sure, some old TV shows, maybe not. Then again, many were shot on some form of 35mm film, like cinema, and can completely take advantage of the Blu-Ray format.
As for digital downloads, you may ultimately have a fast enough connection to make this practical, but most people won't. It's nice your ISP is rolling out 50Mb/s... where I live (Southern New Jersey), you can't get a wired connection of any sort, and my satellite is 1.5Mb/s down, with a daily high speed limit of 500MB. You may think your ISP has no cap, but as soon as everyone's grabbing 50-500GB per day, you better believe they will -- it doesn't matter how fast your ISP to home link is, they can't support that kind of rate to the internet, certainly not when everyone's doing it.
As for storage, that's also an issue. Let's take a DVD set... I bought "Lost: Season 3" on Blu-Ray last year for $40... that's on six discs, so it's something less than 300GB of storage. I just bought 3TB of HDD space for $200. So that's an extra $20, at today's prices, to store that... making in this case the download cost 50% more, even if the whole network thing were sorted out. And most people won't be dropping that storage into a RAID, so you need a download service that lets you re-download when your HDD fails.
With 25GB BD-Rs hitting the $3.00 range, they're still a bit more expensive, but there no reason the price won't follow the track of DVD and CD before it.
About the only real competition on downloads today anyway are low quality stuff from folks like Apple...they're selling 720p rather than 1080p, with four to eight times the compression, and calling that "HD". Of course, the USA went to much the same thing with digital audio downloads the obvious successor to CD in the marketplace, rather than higher quality formats like SACD or DVD. Of course, Blu-Ray helps here too... eight channels of uncompressed 24-bit audio doesn't suck.
Sure, digital is (well, appears to the user as if it were) all or nothing, for the most part.
But rain fade on satellite is something different... rain simply attenuates RF at higher frequencies, particularly above 10GHz. Lots of things do... 2.4GHz is pretty hard hit by walls, and blocked by a relatively small band of forest. UHF frequencies are largely unaffected by rain. There are other issues in general: much larger fresnel zone radius (which is why rooftop antennas work better than ground-level, all else being equal), more potential interference (highly illegal, but there are many unintentional noise sources), doppler and multipath fading in mobile applications, etc. (those latter being 8VSB-based, not frequency related.. in fact, multipath cancellation is less likely at UHF than higher frequencies).
Of course, "use the internet" presupposes you're wired. If you have access to wired internet, you probably also have cable or FiOS available, which limits weather issues, at least between you and the head-end. Of course, head ends often use satellite downlinks, but they're on C-band satellites, which are more sensitive and lose much less at 3.7â"4.2 GHz downlink than the Ka-Ku band DBS satellites (Dish, DirecTV) at 12.2-12.7 GHz (Ku band) and 26.5-40 GHz (Ka band). Conversely, if you're on satellite TV, there's a good chance you're on satellite for Internet, too. Like me, tragically enough.
They're doing their 3G (eg, UMTS/HSDPA) at 850MHz, 1900MHz, and 2100 MHz, with voice doing 900MHz and 1800MHz as well, for full international voice support.
Some of the carriers do this at the 1.5 year point, just to ensure you're not going to jump ship to another carrier. But of course, this isn't going to really help the die-hard iPhone weenie. Sure, if they're at 1.5 years now, and AT&T would let them jump to a 2.5 year contract and the new phone, great. But what about next June, when they introduce the 64GB iPhone 4 with the OLED screen they should have had now (how you can introduce a high-end PDA, SmartPhone, or PMP without OLED these days is beyond me... but I guess Apple, like its customers, lives in a slightly different world). They'll still have 1.5 years on the contract, and they'll be raising the same fuss and whine they're raising today.
The real answer is, if you can't cope with your high-tech item being replaced in the market way too soon (mine's still NEW!!!), you shouldn't be buying high-tech items. This isn't a "maybe", it is absolutely guaranteed to happen.
There are a number of smaller phone companies in the USA pursuing the same model -- basic phone service, prepaid or at least contract-free with unlimited calling (but big roving fees, since they don't have national coverage)... kind of revolting against the constant upscaling of the cost of cell phones. An iPhone would cost me more per month than driving my car... that should say something about how crazy these $80-$100 per month fees have become.
Most pre-paids in the USA expire in 3 months or so, but you could still keep a phone for a year for about $40, plus the cost of the phone. Of course, here, some carriers charge for received calls too, so you'd have to evaluate that.
And none of that gets you any of the cool smart phone stuff.
The new iPhone will eventually support AT&T's 7Mb/s network, but they haven't even switched it on yet, much less deployed it nation-wide. Chance are, if this upgrade is typical, many buyers will be onto the next iPhone after this before they get full speed coverage in their local areas.
Then there's the iPhone itself... while the current G3 model can connect at 3.5Mb/s or so... does anyone really think they're getting that kind of performance? My Treo, on Verizon's plain old EvDO 1.2a (or whatever) network, routinely outproduced the numerous iPhones that surround me, pretty much all the time (before its untimely death). If anything, their faster CPU will account for more real performance than any network improvements.
When my Palm 700p died last fall, I didn't get all up in Verizon's grill about giving me a new phone. The rule has been the same pretty since wireless companies started -- you get a subsidy on your new phone, whether it's an iPhone or some disposable Nokia soap-bar phone, in return for signing up for a contract... usually 2-years long. Everyone knows this. iPhone users all upset about no discount on the new model (until their contracts expire) are crybabies, nothing more.
And if I were inclined to buy an iPhone (which I'm not... maybe an Android phone, we'll see), I could find much more to complain about. How about the fact that, if you're a serious iPhone user, you recharge you iPhone nearly every day, and yet, you'll get only 300-500 charge/discharge cycles out of that sort of Li-Poly cell. That's not going to outlast your contract. Casual users may do better, but I have yet to meet an iPhone user who doesn't charge nearly every day (and I'm surrounded by them, literally).
There's no case here -- AT&T is doing what every wireless carrier on the planet does. If they budge at all, it would be a business decision... too much bad press, and maybe the rumors of other carriers handling the iPhone soon are true. But I wouldn't hold my breath, and they know very well these guys are pretty much all going to stick with the iPhone, new or old.
Hubbard cats? I would hope not. Hemmingway has his own line of cats (and deservedly so), but a schlock writer like Hubbard? He may well deserve a gang of idiots and morons so stupid they'd believe, not just a religion, but one concocted by a failed sci-fi writer. But he does NOT rate his own brand of cat, sorry. Maybe there's an L. Ron Hubbard cockroach... that's a fitting tribute.
If anyone says Emacs or Vi they are insane and have never done 10k lines of code in a modern environment.
Anyone who thinks 10K lines is a big project hasn't the experience to judge Emacs vs. IDE. I've been using Emacs since 1979... started out on CMU's version of RMS/MIT's TECO Emacs. The thing about Emacs is that it's lead in virtually every kind of integration imaginable. Before any good thing shows up in anyone IDE, it's been proven useful in Emacs for several years already. And none of the drek survives... including the crazy notion that I could need 2GB of RAM just to run an editor and compiler.
Hell, in '88 we were running Emacs and compilers in 1MB of RAM... and we liked it! A year later, I was editing in Emacs on SVr4.1 in 4MB of RAM... and liked that one too.
As for large projects, back in the 90s, I was working on a several-hundred-thousand-line compiler+database project (a three year thing, all my code) that started out in an IDE (ok, they have improved some since those days), but became workable in the IDE. Fortunately, there was an Emacs available (under OS/2 at the time). And that use of Emacs is precisely why I retain fair amnounts of my sanity to this day (and the IDE issues might help explain why I went back to primarily hardware design in my next company).
Then again, I started using Emacs 3 years ago - after briefly considering the purchase of Macsperts new darling child TextMate, basically a modern Emacs rip - and I still can't bear it for longer than 10 minutes - mostly because it so totally doesn't comply with CUAS (Common User Access Standard). Yet then again, Emacs was created when CUAS didn't even exist, so that's no fault on behalf of Emacs.
Well, there you go... you certainly can fault those weenies at IBM for ignoring the established standard (CUAS came at least 10 years after Emacs) when they set forth inflicting their inferior ideas on the world of computing as we know it. But what do you expect from the brainaics that brought us the Microchannel Bus, the "fixed" drive, the freakishly large and pointless CAPS-LOCK key (the DEC keyboard layout was far superior) and CPU buses with backwards bit order and negative addresses (A2, A1, A0, A-1,...), etc.
Yeah... I wouldn't want to you if her drive doesn't last out that five years. On the other hand, if she's like nearly every PC user on the planet, she does nothing much in the way of backups. So you might still get to live another day if you manage to get her on a reasonable backup routine.
As far as drives go, you can't trust much. Sure, they publish MTBF numbers... that means, in the drive test jig, at the test temperature, running 24/7, half the drives they make will die before that number-of-hours and half after that number of hours. You get very little useful information out of that number, other than, on the overall, drives have improved since the 80s:-)
The other thing that's not helpful is environmental stress.... does she leave the machine on all the time, or power-cycle it.. and does the thermal stress of power cycling do more or less damage than just running 24/7. How cool is the drive... if you're running near the limit of the drive's environmental spec, it may only last 1/10th the time of an ideal test.
The very best predictor of drive life is the warranty period.. other than a few deaths due to infant mortality (drives do occasionally die very young, due to defects), virtually every drive a manufacturer makes will last out its warranty period if not mistreated. No help here if it's an OEM drive with a 3-month warranty, but otherwise, it's pretty safe to trust this. Beyond that 3-to-5 year period, though, the older drives are either in a RAID or they get replaced.
That's "format rot"... and yeah, it's a problem. But an inevitable one, as long as we keep making better storage devices. I recently digitized all my analog 8mm videotapes... sure, with some media at 17 years+, it's not going to last much longer in all likelihood (but, being well stored, it was all good this time around). But the main reason was the realization that, not only did the Video8 camera go to that great yard sale in the sky some time ago, but the Digital8 camera (the last thing I have that reads this format) isn't going to last forever. And that format, while it's going to be on eBay for some years yet, is basically dead.
And now we're starting to leave digital tape (DV) behind... with BD-R just arriving in time to provide a $5.00-or-so format for 16GB of video storage or more.
We in the computer business see stuff getting replaced all the time, but the most successful formats are consumer-driven, and have a pretty long life. I mean, CD-R isn't as exciting as it was in the 90s, but my BD-R drives will read and burn one just as easily... and a great deal faster than those 1x CD-R drives did. Some of the pretty-stupid-even-when-introduced flash formats, like SmartMedia, expired long ago, but SD and CompactFlash have kept pretty healthy (and if you're worried about CompactFlash, the SDHC to CF adaptors work fine in most CF-based gear). SDXC devices will support the older formats and hold us at least through the 2TB flash card generation.
The other clue here is that maintaining data isn't an act, it's a process. I have a bunch of stuff on a RAID... that's pretty secure, as long as I'm ready to swap out a dead drive... well, and as long as I'm protected from lightening strikes, etc. Archival-quality optical media is good, too, though it does occasionally fail. But if you have all of your important data from the 80s on a huge array of ST-506 drives, you better bite the bullet, spend that $2.00 and transfer it all to a 1GB SD card before the ST-506 controller's EPROM fails... those UV-eraseable EPROMs are only rated for about 10 years, it may already be too late!!
I do hardware and software (I double-majored)... there are hardware people who only use the "black-box" model... they know a NAND or OR or FPGA or whatever, but would be challenged to know how to bias a transistor, or when you ought to use that transistor, rather than some common gate.
They often get stuck, or turn in relatively poor design. This is the same kind of thing... it's not that everyone NEEDs to stop using off-the-shelf sorts or math op, but everyone programming should understand what it is they're using (same way the hardware guy needs to know the realities of that particular gate implementation, drive characteristics, etc), when a different sort or function might speed things up, why to chose one of the dozen-or-so built-in/library routines, and when one might need to code one's own.
And sure, some of that takes place during optimization... when you have the luxery to optimize.
Ok, I'm not a big fan of the whole idea of proprietary wireless (well, unless it's from MY company), and the extra dongle needed is a pain. But Bluetooth is just involving too much overhead to make a decent mouse.
First of all, there's going to be a relatively huge software stack running on an ARM7TDMI out on that Bluetooth mouse. The end result is that, relative to a proprietary mouse, it's going to suffer from noticable latency and it's going to suck power.
You may or may not be bothered by Bluetooth latency, but it can be significant... 20-40ms, maybe worse depending on their power management. I used amplified Bluetooth for robot and R/C car control years ago, but could not eliminate the latency... faster vehicles were undriveable, compared to even entry-level analog radio. I eventually went to one of the proprietary RF chips (Cypress's "Wireless USB", which has been used by some of the wireless mice), and wound up delivering the lowest latency R/C controller on the market.
The real test is drawing and other types of graphical manipulation. If the latency is noticable, I'll proabably find the mouse bashed against a wall somewhere within a few hours. The Logitechs are indistinguishable from a wired mouse, even for things like Electronics CAD and Photoshop work.
The power sucking used to be a big issue with proprietary mice, too, but going to lower power radio chips, ultra low power 8 or 16-bit microcontrollers, and low-power IR lasers, models like the current Logitech units (I use a VX Nano with my laptop) run acceptably long (months and months). The dongles are now largely contained within the USB plug, so you only get
Interference-wise, it's hard to compete against Bluetooth... 1600 hops per second across the whole 2.4-2.5GHz band is going to deliver a pretty robust link. With that said, the Cypress chips at least a very robust, using 32 or 64 chip-per-bit DSSS on 1MHz channels (my company also implemented a frequency hopping protocol on these, though only 100 hops per second... I rather doubt the mice makers went to this trouble, but you could). They pretty much work even with other 2.4GHz interference sources (Wifi, microwave oven, Nomadio R/C controllers, etc).
Yeah... it can happen. Here's the thing.. a certain class of films get the "Special Edition" treatment -- this can be simultaneous, more expensive releases, or like LOTR, the theatrical release followed up by the SE. I fell for it, I bought both.
Either way, it's a big moneymaker, and unfortunately, it may be called for by the studio whether there's a good reason for it or not.
But in other cases, there very much is a Director's Cut, and as a film buff, I'm happy to at least have the option of seeing the director's real vision, before the studio messes with it.
In the "Watchmen" case, Snyder apparently cut something like 40 minutes to deliver a comercially acceptable film.. but the length of film I'm happy with in the theatre doesn't match the length I can enjoy in my home theater, on the 71" DLP, in a super comfortable recliner, with good coffee or beer or all kinds of things to go with. So I will be buying that BD when it comes out... I already know there's the original intent, stuff he wanted in there, it's not simply being padded to generate sales.
Increasingly, directors are using the power they get with DVD releases for good rather than evil. Long ago, Terry Gilliam got both the Director's Cut and the worst-possible-totally-mucked-up cut of "Brazil" on the Criterion release. Robert Rodriguez does a "film school" and gives out his favorite recipes on his DVDs, along with the Director's Cut.
I agree.. the fact that a lawyer worked for a firm employed by the RIAA, on RIAA cases, hardly makes that person good or evil, qualified or unqualified.. the devil (or angel) is in the details.
There are plenty of tech jobs of questionable morals as well. Should the fact I worked four months at General Electric, in an division that did work on nuclear weapons (and perhaps other death machines), on a simulator that was almost certainly going to be used for this nefarious kind of work, have disqualified me from working on consumer electronics for the next 20+ years?
I would certainly question if the Obama Administration were hiring former RIAA lobbiests to set the administration copyright policies -- just as I questioned when Bush hired oilmen to set environmental and energy policies... they probably tainted, regardless of talent.
As well, if you're really being honest, it was the specific policies of the RIAA that made them "evil"... and I agree with that designation. But don't forget that, legally, they were in the right, at least before they started manipulating and in many cases breaking the law to intimidate grandmothers and thirteen-year-old kids. There were plenty of people who worked on RIAA cases at some time who were not instrumental in defining such policies.
I think it's important to know the difference. If the Obama administration really is hiring any of the real weasels from the RIAA, we (voters, particularly those like me who backed Obama) need to call him on it... but knee-jerk reactions to anyone who ever worked on an RIAA case (and in particular, is still highly qualified and grounded in a much larger body of good work) will simply be "crying wolf", eliminating much chance of anyone listening if/when it's really needed.
Yeah.. actually, this move away from a nebulous "unlimited" use to tiers could well backfire. There are plenty of users with very small usage... my Mom has a DSL connection. She plays online Flash games, surfs the net, and sends email. I probably use in a day what she uses in a month.
If you have one plan, there's no complaint. But once you offer up-tiers, there's every reason for people to ask for down-tiers. This happened in cable/satellite TV, and it's happened in Windows Versioning (in both cases, forced upon the suppliers via both consumer pressure and government intervention).
The ISPs aren't initially doing this based on bandwidth.. they pretty much have the hardware they have, and if you exceed the limits, everyone just goes slower.. no real cost per bit for them. But the immediate future has plenty of really high bandwidth things, like HD video downloads at non-crap quality (not really out there, yet), which could become a "regular user" thing. That would devistate the current ISPs.. they're not ready for 50-500GB downloads being the result of an everyday iTunes or Amazon transaction. So they're laying the groudwork to reject this now.
No, "bandwidth" is the correct term. They're charging you for a rate... 50GB per month, or whatever. The might have saved themselves a little confusion saying something like "aggregate bandwidth", but bandwidth it is.. amount / time.
The problem isn't you downloading a TB per month.. it's when everyone done this, and it drives their network into screaming flames.
The pricing is simply their best way to discourage real unlimited use. They're changing the deal now only because there's a real possibility, with things like HD downloads, that a TB per month could start to be a regular thing among consumers. And they can't handle it yet.. not even close.
And I'd sign up for the $150 unlimited model in a heartbeat if I could get it, particularly if it's actually a $75 plan with a maximum $75 overage charge. I'm paying $110 a month today for satellite. For that, I'm guaranteed about 150GB per month at full speed, as long as I break it up into 500MB/day chunks. Overstep that daily allocation by a byte, and it's down to POTS speeds for 24 hours.
ISPs actually measure bandwidth, but they're thinking GB per month, not Kb per second. Bandwidth is the proper term, it's just not the way you're used to thinking about it.
This was inevitable, and when you're on the fringe of broadband (like me), you've lived with it already. US based 3G data links (I was on Verizon's EvDO for two years) are described as unlimited, but in fact, they have various limits.
Obviously, there's the link-to-cell limit... you can drop instantaneous bandwidth very quickly, depending on the competing traffic. Then there's the aggregate bandwidth... they didn't specify any, but every month, top bandwidth hogs got kicked out of their "unlimited" contracts. In fact, this was well known as being the cheapest way out of the monthly contract ($80/month).
Now I'm on satellite... 500MB per day aggregate bandwidth lets you keep the 1.5Mb/s instantaneous bandwidth. Exceed that, and you get sent into the corner, wearing a POTS-speed dunce cap.
Wired broadband hasn't generally needed bandwidth caps, but that's changing as the net changes. Consider downloads... folks did audio, then video, and now HD video downloads. The average Blu-Ray disc is a 50GB disc, while sets (I have Season 3 of "Lost" around here somewhere) tend toward 300GB or more. Imagine a download sevice offering Blu-Ray quality, rather than the "worse than cable/satellite" HD you get from folks like Apple, or most of the stuff put on bittorrent. If that got even a little popular, it would drive today's ISPs screaming to their knees... they can't even remotely give anything close to their peak performance on any kind of sustained basis.
Their whole model works largely because most of the time, most people aren't using the network at all. But start to get lots of people doing 3-6 day downloads at full rated speed, and that magic vanishes.
They see this coming... it was a big talking point in the Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD wars. That's why they're acting now.
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Most HD films are going to be fine in the details aspect, simply because, what fails on Blu-Ray is going to fail in the theatre. 35mm film prints are still higher resolution than 1080p; so are 2K and 4K theatrical projectors. Sure, you don't have the time to review every scene, zoom in, etc. in a theatre, but any "seams" you see are simply bad filmmaking, not something most filmmakers are thinking just don't matter.
I already had "300" on DVD... wasn't so compelling I had to get the BD. And sure, you can sometimes see the film gain from lower budget films transferred to BD, but that's actually a plus -- it's more like watching a real 16mm film than a DVD compression of a 16mm film. Most of the films in my ever-expanding BD library are a dramatic improvement over DVD, at least while watching on my 71" DLP from my theatre chairs 12ft away. If they pass that test, I'm good with them... I have no intention of microinspection on either of my 1200p 24" monitors.
It was a brilliant move for the success of Blu-Ray... they got the ultimate in upgradeable players in to majority of viewers' hands, and got the pumps primed for lowering the cost of BD media, dramatically. It wasn't a great move, early on, for their gaming business... they essentially threw the Playstation under the bus in order to win Blu-Ray. Long-term view, it was the right move. Given the evolution of gaming, the PS3 now has a very competitive advantage versus other consoles, and we're already seeing fully loaded BD50s out in the market. PC games can compete with multiple DVDs loaded onto HDDs, but console users lack the HDD space for that, and lack the patience for swapping out discs.
The doubling rate is based on software sales... Blu-Ray is now at about 10% of the market. It took DVD about a year longer to get to that point. It's certain that the DVD rate will beat Blu-Ray at some point, just because there's zero short-term incentive for anyone without HDTV to get into Blu-Ray, while there was good reason for any TV viewer to get a DVD player.
Thing is, it's the software sales that matter to the health of the BD industry overall, and it's pretty clear that people with Blu-Ray players buy more videos than those without. There are plenty of examples in the CE industry of companies doing very healthy business catering to the high-end, whether that's 10% or 1% of a large market. Blu-Ray is already past the tipping point, and whether it maxxes out at 50% or even more of the video market, it has won this round.
Downloads aren't going to be a replacement for Blu-Ray until storage drops another order of magnitude in price, bandwidth goes up similarly, and (most important) ISPs don't think they can charge extra for 100's of gigabytes of downloads per month.
Let's also add in The Internet, now that that's a form of entertainment. Ignoring its capacity to facilitate stealing, you have all sorts of competition for the entertainment hour without consuming additional entertainment dollars (though you have to pay that monthly ISP bill).. online radio, Pandora, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc. Another recurring bill is the satellite/cable/FiOS TV bill every month... dollars spent there don't go to CDs. And many of those come with music subscriptions -- I get 40-50-something channels of Sirius satellite radio on my Dish Network receiver... both detract from potential music sales.
Why buy when it's free, legally? Well, with broadcast, that's usually because "the free stuff sucks". But with many other forms of "free stuff", it's sucking less all the time.
And of course, adults also have other forms of entertainment (which is why CD sales are so targeted at the younger crowd)... live shows, bars and drinking, etc. Kids, too, are spending more on live shows than in the past, largely because artists see those as the way to actually make more money, so there are more tours, more venues, etc.
Sure... now, most people play CDs over and over, but yeah, that's an hour's entertainment. The DVD usually offers 2-3 at least. A video game can give you a good 30-60 hours of entertainment, thus justifying its high price.
And the entertainment dollars are also being sucked up by subscription services. Back in the days of LP and cassette, that's all there was, other than films at the theatre. Kids today can spend on DVD and videogames, but as well, something like World of Warcraft, where they're paying every month. Once you're on your own, most people have a monthly satellite or cable bill, the Internet (and the associated ISP bill), and of course, "grown-up" entertainment like live shows and drinking.
The CD figures smaller and smaller as the world expands.. and the music companies just don't seem to get it. I suppose they're starting too, as the prices are falling.
I wrote a letter to "Wired" stating essentially this... two or three years ago, in response to some article or another discussing music piracy.
When I was a kid (back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth, of course), home entertainment media was pretty much your choice of LP, 45-single, cassette, or 8-track. In short, all products of the Recording Industry. Today, you have CDs, LPs (rarely) and downloads from those guys. But that same entertainment dollar is now also split between electronic gadgets, videos (DVD, Blu-Ray, that one guy still buying VHS), and gaming (console, pocket, online).
Then add in the fact that digital downloads re-introduced the single, and the whole industry plan that removed the single back in the 70s in favor of the whole album is gone... only now, they've grown dependent on selling whole albums. Then add in discounts on digital downloads... I've bought direct form the artist, from eMusic.com, and from Amazon.com. I only buy full albums, but if the digital version is near the CD price, I'll just buy the CD. When I can get an album for $2.00-$4.00, I probably buy the download.
And that's perhaps a good thing in the long run for the music industry. They'll have to adjust, and stop paying their relatively worthless executives so much. The new point of stability has a CD selling for under $10, so that it's seen as competitive with DVDs at $15 or video games at $30-$60.
They also need to acknowledge the actual role of record companies in the 21rst century, and price accordingly. There was a time when these guys were responsible for all sorts of artist development... they hired the backing band, they owned the studios, etc. It was very much the same artist management model use in Hollywood of the 40's and 50's. But today, you don't get a recording contract with a major label until you have a fully produced CD to show them... they're not even remotely part of any creative process at that level (they may get involved pushing established artists... after huge cuts to their rosters, due to cost reductions and mergers, they're more dependent than ever on a few big hits every year, despite the fact you can't really depend on that).
So the Big Label really has a purpose only as a publisher and distributer... the same thing book publishers do. Only, when I buy a Stephen King book, I see his copyright on the backside of the title page. When you buy most CDs, you'll see the record company claiming copyright. That's a projection of just how important they think they are, and when that starts to change, you'll know that there's maybe some hope for the industry. The big labels, or their replacements, will catch onto this... the only question is whether or not a record label still makes any sense, or generates any money, by the time they do. It's easy to see folks like Apple, Wal-Mart, Amazon, Best-Buy, and Starbucks replacing Sony, Warner Bros, EMI, etc. if things keep on their current path.
When DVD players first came out, they ran around $1,000, and these are precisely the things folks said about DVD. Of course, at that time, you might need a better TV to see any difference (most VHS users were sill hooking up via RI, not CVBS or Y/C). You didn't have a stereo in the typical TV room, much less a receiver with a DTS/AC-3 decoder and five speakers, to that was pointless. Computers were still standardizing on CD, and they were not yet fast enough to decode a DVD in software away, so you needed extra hardware to play that DVD if you wanted to. And of course, your all-important VHS tapes didn't work with that expensive new DVD player. And DVDs weren't recordable, and "never would be" (just like CDs...).
So yeah, DVD was initially suspect in the market, too... not the mention the whole Circuit City / DiVX plot to replace it about a year after the first models hit the market, which added to the FUD maybe even more than the BD vs. HD-DVD thing... particularly since DiVX hit after many early adopters had DVD. That helped kill DiVX faster than it might have died otherwise (eg, as an initial competitor to DVD), but it also scared some people away for awhile.
Blu-Ray is hitting the market faster than either DVD or VHS did. Not just in the USA, either... BD had a 2:1 unit sales advantage over HD-DVD here in the USA for most of the "war", but was running more like 4:1 across Europe and the UK.
Most people who would buy Blu-Ray already have the HDTV and the TV-room stereo -- hell, I was two years into my second generation HDTV by the time the Blu-Ray/HDTV wars were over. And pretty much all of the source material put on Blu-Ray or DVD exists in high quality format. Sure, some old TV shows, maybe not. Then again, many were shot on some form of 35mm film, like cinema, and can completely take advantage of the Blu-Ray format.
As for digital downloads, you may ultimately have a fast enough connection to make this practical, but most people won't. It's nice your ISP is rolling out 50Mb/s... where I live (Southern New Jersey), you can't get a wired connection of any sort, and my satellite is 1.5Mb/s down, with a daily high speed limit of 500MB. You may think your ISP has no cap, but as soon as everyone's grabbing 50-500GB per day, you better believe they will -- it doesn't matter how fast your ISP to home link is, they can't support that kind of rate to the internet, certainly not when everyone's doing it.
As for storage, that's also an issue. Let's take a DVD set... I bought "Lost: Season 3" on Blu-Ray last year for $40... that's on six discs, so it's something less than 300GB of storage. I just bought 3TB of HDD space for $200. So that's an extra $20, at today's prices, to store that... making in this case the download cost 50% more, even if the whole network thing were sorted out. And most people won't be dropping that storage into a RAID, so you need a download service that lets you re-download when your HDD fails.
With 25GB BD-Rs hitting the $3.00 range, they're still a bit more expensive, but there no reason the price won't follow the track of DVD and CD before it.
About the only real competition on downloads today anyway are low quality stuff from folks like Apple...they're selling 720p rather than 1080p, with four to eight times the compression, and calling that "HD". Of course, the USA went to much the same thing with digital audio downloads the obvious successor to CD in the marketplace, rather than higher quality formats like SACD or DVD. Of course, Blu-Ray helps here too... eight channels of uncompressed 24-bit audio doesn't suck.
Sure, digital is (well, appears to the user as if it were) all or nothing, for the most part.
But rain fade on satellite is something different... rain simply attenuates RF at higher frequencies, particularly above 10GHz. Lots of things do... 2.4GHz is pretty hard hit by walls, and blocked by a relatively small band of forest. UHF frequencies are largely unaffected by rain. There are other issues in general: much larger fresnel zone radius (which is why rooftop antennas work better than ground-level, all else being equal), more potential interference (highly illegal, but there are many unintentional noise sources), doppler and multipath fading in mobile applications, etc. (those latter being 8VSB-based, not frequency related.. in fact, multipath cancellation is less likely at UHF than higher frequencies).
Of course, "use the internet" presupposes you're wired. If you have access to wired internet, you probably also have cable or FiOS available, which limits weather issues, at least between you and the head-end. Of course, head ends often use satellite downlinks, but they're on C-band satellites, which are more sensitive and lose much less at 3.7â"4.2 GHz downlink than the Ka-Ku band DBS satellites (Dish, DirecTV) at 12.2-12.7 GHz (Ku band) and 26.5-40 GHz (Ka band). Conversely, if you're on satellite TV, there's a good chance you're on satellite for Internet, too. Like me, tragically enough.
They're doing their 3G (eg, UMTS/HSDPA) at 850MHz, 1900MHz, and 2100 MHz, with voice doing 900MHz and 1800MHz as well, for full international voice support.
Some of the carriers do this at the 1.5 year point, just to ensure you're not going to jump ship to another carrier. But of course, this isn't going to really help the die-hard iPhone weenie. Sure, if they're at 1.5 years now, and AT&T would let them jump to a 2.5 year contract and the new phone, great. But what about next June, when they introduce the 64GB iPhone 4 with the OLED screen they should have had now (how you can introduce a high-end PDA, SmartPhone, or PMP without OLED these days is beyond me... but I guess Apple, like its customers, lives in a slightly different world). They'll still have 1.5 years on the contract, and they'll be raising the same fuss and whine they're raising today.
The real answer is, if you can't cope with your high-tech item being replaced in the market way too soon (mine's still NEW!!!), you shouldn't be buying high-tech items. This isn't a "maybe", it is absolutely guaranteed to happen.
There are a number of smaller phone companies in the USA pursuing the same model -- basic phone service, prepaid or at least contract-free with unlimited calling (but big roving fees, since they don't have national coverage)... kind of revolting against the constant upscaling of the cost of cell phones. An iPhone would cost me more per month than driving my car... that should say something about how crazy these $80-$100 per month fees have become.
Most pre-paids in the USA expire in 3 months or so, but you could still keep a phone for a year for about $40, plus the cost of the phone. Of course, here, some carriers charge for received calls too, so you'd have to evaluate that.
And none of that gets you any of the cool smart phone stuff.
The new iPhone will eventually support AT&T's 7Mb/s network, but they haven't even switched it on yet, much less deployed it nation-wide. Chance are, if this upgrade is typical, many buyers will be onto the next iPhone after this before they get full speed coverage in their local areas.
Then there's the iPhone itself... while the current G3 model can connect at 3.5Mb/s or so... does anyone really think they're getting that kind of performance? My Treo, on Verizon's plain old EvDO 1.2a (or whatever) network, routinely outproduced the numerous iPhones that surround me, pretty much all the time (before its untimely death). If anything, their faster CPU will account for more real performance than any network improvements.
When my Palm 700p died last fall, I didn't get all up in Verizon's grill about giving me a new phone. The rule has been the same pretty since wireless companies started -- you get a subsidy on your new phone, whether it's an iPhone or some disposable Nokia soap-bar phone, in return for signing up for a contract... usually 2-years long. Everyone knows this. iPhone users all upset about no discount on the new model (until their contracts expire) are crybabies, nothing more.
And if I were inclined to buy an iPhone (which I'm not... maybe an Android phone, we'll see), I could find much more to complain about. How about the fact that, if you're a serious iPhone user, you recharge you iPhone nearly every day, and yet, you'll get only 300-500 charge/discharge cycles out of that sort of Li-Poly cell. That's not going to outlast your contract. Casual users may do better, but I have yet to meet an iPhone user who doesn't charge nearly every day (and I'm surrounded by them, literally).
There's no case here -- AT&T is doing what every wireless carrier on the planet does. If they budge at all, it would be a business decision... too much bad press, and maybe the rumors of other carriers handling the iPhone soon are true. But I wouldn't hold my breath, and they know very well these guys are pretty much all going to stick with the iPhone, new or old.
Hubbard cats? I would hope not. Hemmingway has his own line of cats (and deservedly so), but a schlock writer like Hubbard? He may well deserve a gang of idiots and morons so stupid they'd believe, not just a religion, but one concocted by a failed sci-fi writer. But he does NOT rate his own brand of cat, sorry. Maybe there's an L. Ron Hubbard cockroach... that's a fitting tribute.
Anyone who thinks 10K lines is a big project hasn't the experience to judge Emacs vs. IDE. I've been using Emacs since 1979... started out on CMU's version of RMS/MIT's TECO Emacs. The thing about Emacs is that it's lead in virtually every kind of integration imaginable. Before any good thing shows up in anyone IDE, it's been proven useful in Emacs for several years already. And none of the drek survives... including the crazy notion that I could need 2GB of RAM just to run an editor and compiler.
Hell, in '88 we were running Emacs and compilers in 1MB of RAM... and we liked it! A year later, I was editing in Emacs on SVr4.1 in 4MB of RAM... and liked that one too.
As for large projects, back in the 90s, I was working on a several-hundred-thousand-line compiler+database project (a three year thing, all my code) that started out in an IDE (ok, they have improved some since those days), but became workable in the IDE. Fortunately, there was an Emacs available (under OS/2 at the time). And that use of Emacs is precisely why I retain fair amnounts of my sanity to this day (and the IDE issues might help explain why I went back to primarily hardware design in my next company).
Well, there you go... you certainly can fault those weenies at IBM for ignoring the established standard (CUAS came at least 10 years after Emacs) when they set forth inflicting their inferior ideas on the world of computing as we know it. But what do you expect from the brainaics that brought us the Microchannel Bus, the "fixed" drive, the freakishly large and pointless CAPS-LOCK key (the DEC keyboard layout was far superior) and CPU buses with backwards bit order and negative addresses (A2, A1, A0, A-1, ...), etc.
Yeah... I wouldn't want to you if her drive doesn't last out that five years. On the other hand, if she's like nearly every PC user on the planet, she does nothing much in the way of backups. So you might still get to live another day if you manage to get her on a reasonable backup routine.
As far as drives go, you can't trust much. Sure, they publish MTBF numbers... that means, in the drive test jig, at the test temperature, running 24/7, half the drives they make will die before that number-of-hours and half after that number of hours. You get very little useful information out of that number, other than, on the overall, drives have improved since the 80s :-)
The other thing that's not helpful is environmental stress.... does she leave the machine on all the time, or power-cycle it.. and does the thermal stress of power cycling do more or less damage than just running 24/7. How cool is the drive... if you're running near the limit of the drive's environmental spec, it may only last 1/10th the time of an ideal test.
The very best predictor of drive life is the warranty period .. other than a few deaths due to infant mortality (drives do occasionally die very young, due to defects), virtually every drive a manufacturer makes will last out its warranty period if not mistreated. No help here if it's an OEM drive with a 3-month warranty, but otherwise, it's pretty safe to trust this. Beyond that 3-to-5 year period, though, the older drives are either in a RAID or they get replaced.
That's "format rot"... and yeah, it's a problem. But an inevitable one, as long as we keep making better storage devices. I recently digitized all my analog 8mm videotapes... sure, with some media at 17 years+, it's not going to last much longer in all likelihood (but, being well stored, it was all good this time around). But the main reason was the realization that, not only did the Video8 camera go to that great yard sale in the sky some time ago, but the Digital8 camera (the last thing I have that reads this format) isn't going to last forever. And that format, while it's going to be on eBay for some years yet, is basically dead.
And now we're starting to leave digital tape (DV) behind... with BD-R just arriving in time to provide a $5.00-or-so format for 16GB of video storage or more.
We in the computer business see stuff getting replaced all the time, but the most successful formats are consumer-driven, and have a pretty long life. I mean, CD-R isn't as exciting as it was in the 90s, but my BD-R drives will read and burn one just as easily... and a great deal faster than those 1x CD-R drives did. Some of the pretty-stupid-even-when-introduced flash formats, like SmartMedia, expired long ago, but SD and CompactFlash have kept pretty healthy (and if you're worried about CompactFlash, the SDHC to CF adaptors work fine in most CF-based gear). SDXC devices will support the older formats and hold us at least through the 2TB flash card generation.
The other clue here is that maintaining data isn't an act, it's a process. I have a bunch of stuff on a RAID... that's pretty secure, as long as I'm ready to swap out a dead drive... well, and as long as I'm protected from lightening strikes, etc. Archival-quality optical media is good, too, though it does occasionally fail. But if you have all of your important data from the 80s on a huge array of ST-506 drives, you better bite the bullet, spend that $2.00 and transfer it all to a 1GB SD card before the ST-506 controller's EPROM fails... those UV-eraseable EPROMs are only rated for about 10 years, it may already be too late!!
I do hardware and software (I double-majored)... there are hardware people who only use the "black-box" model... they know a NAND or OR or FPGA or whatever, but would be challenged to know how to bias a transistor, or when you ought to use that transistor, rather than some common gate.
They often get stuck, or turn in relatively poor design. This is the same kind of thing... it's not that everyone NEEDs to stop using off-the-shelf sorts or math op, but everyone programming should understand what it is they're using (same way the hardware guy needs to know the realities of that particular gate implementation, drive characteristics, etc), when a different sort or function might speed things up, why to chose one of the dozen-or-so built-in/library routines, and when one might need to code one's own.
And sure, some of that takes place during optimization... when you have the luxery to optimize.
Ok, I'm not a big fan of the whole idea of proprietary wireless (well, unless it's from MY company), and the extra dongle needed is a pain. But Bluetooth is just involving too much overhead to make a decent mouse.
First of all, there's going to be a relatively huge software stack running on an ARM7TDMI out on that Bluetooth mouse. The end result is that, relative to a proprietary mouse, it's going to suffer from noticable latency and it's going to suck power.
You may or may not be bothered by Bluetooth latency, but it can be significant... 20-40ms, maybe worse depending on their power management. I used amplified Bluetooth for robot and R/C car control years ago, but could not eliminate the latency... faster vehicles were undriveable, compared to even entry-level analog radio. I eventually went to one of the proprietary RF chips (Cypress's "Wireless USB", which has been used by some of the wireless mice), and wound up delivering the lowest latency R/C controller on the market.
The real test is drawing and other types of graphical manipulation. If the latency is noticable, I'll proabably find the mouse bashed against a wall somewhere within a few hours. The Logitechs are indistinguishable from a wired mouse, even for things like Electronics CAD and Photoshop work.
The power sucking used to be a big issue with proprietary mice, too, but going to lower power radio chips, ultra low power 8 or 16-bit microcontrollers, and low-power IR lasers, models like the current Logitech units (I use a VX Nano with my laptop) run acceptably long (months and months). The dongles are now largely contained within the USB plug, so you only get
Interference-wise, it's hard to compete against Bluetooth... 1600 hops per second across the whole 2.4-2.5GHz band is going to deliver a pretty robust link. With that said, the Cypress chips at least a very robust, using 32 or 64 chip-per-bit DSSS on 1MHz channels (my company also implemented a frequency hopping protocol on these, though only 100 hops per second... I rather doubt the mice makers went to this trouble, but you could). They pretty much work even with other 2.4GHz interference sources (Wifi, microwave oven, Nomadio R/C controllers, etc).
Yeah... it can happen. Here's the thing.. a certain class of films get the "Special Edition" treatment -- this can be simultaneous, more expensive releases, or like LOTR, the theatrical release followed up by the SE. I fell for it, I bought both.
Either way, it's a big moneymaker, and unfortunately, it may be called for by the studio whether there's a good reason for it or not.
But in other cases, there very much is a Director's Cut, and as a film buff, I'm happy to at least have the option of seeing the director's real vision, before the studio messes with it.
In the "Watchmen" case, Snyder apparently cut something like 40 minutes to deliver a comercially acceptable film.. but the length of film I'm happy with in the theatre doesn't match the length I can enjoy in my home theater, on the 71" DLP, in a super comfortable recliner, with good coffee or beer or all kinds of things to go with. So I will be buying that BD when it comes out... I already know there's the original intent, stuff he wanted in there, it's not simply being padded to generate sales.
Increasingly, directors are using the power they get with DVD releases for good rather than evil. Long ago, Terry Gilliam got both the Director's Cut and the worst-possible-totally-mucked-up cut of "Brazil" on the Criterion release. Robert Rodriguez does a "film school" and gives out his favorite recipes on his DVDs, along with the Director's Cut.
I agree.. the fact that a lawyer worked for a firm employed by the RIAA, on RIAA cases, hardly makes that person good or evil, qualified or unqualified.. the devil (or angel) is in the details.
There are plenty of tech jobs of questionable morals as well. Should the fact I worked four months at General Electric, in an division that did work on nuclear weapons (and perhaps other death machines), on a simulator that was almost certainly going to be used for this nefarious kind of work, have disqualified me from working on consumer electronics for the next 20+ years?
I would certainly question if the Obama Administration were hiring former RIAA lobbiests to set the administration copyright policies -- just as I questioned when Bush hired oilmen to set environmental and energy policies... they probably tainted, regardless of talent.
As well, if you're really being honest, it was the specific policies of the RIAA that made them "evil"... and I agree with that designation. But don't forget that, legally, they were in the right, at least before they started manipulating and in many cases breaking the law to intimidate grandmothers and thirteen-year-old kids. There were plenty of people who worked on RIAA cases at some time who were not instrumental in defining such policies.
I think it's important to know the difference. If the Obama administration really is hiring any of the real weasels from the RIAA, we (voters, particularly those like me who backed Obama) need to call him on it... but knee-jerk reactions to anyone who ever worked on an RIAA case (and in particular, is still highly qualified and grounded in a much larger body of good work) will simply be "crying wolf", eliminating much chance of anyone listening if/when it's really needed.
Yeah.. actually, this move away from a nebulous "unlimited" use to tiers could well backfire. There are plenty of users with very small usage... my Mom has a DSL connection. She plays online Flash games, surfs the net, and sends email. I probably use in a day what she uses in a month.
If you have one plan, there's no complaint. But once you offer up-tiers, there's every reason for people to ask for down-tiers. This happened in cable/satellite TV, and it's happened in Windows Versioning (in both cases, forced upon the suppliers via both consumer pressure and government intervention).
The ISPs aren't initially doing this based on bandwidth.. they pretty much have the hardware they have, and if you exceed the limits, everyone just goes slower.. no real cost per bit for them. But the immediate future has plenty of really high bandwidth things, like HD video downloads at non-crap quality (not really out there, yet), which could become a "regular user" thing. That would devistate the current ISPs.. they're not ready for 50-500GB downloads being the result of an everyday iTunes or Amazon transaction. So they're laying the groudwork to reject this now.
No, "bandwidth" is the correct term. They're charging you for a rate... 50GB per month, or whatever. The might have saved themselves a little confusion saying something like "aggregate bandwidth", but bandwidth it is.. amount / time.
The problem isn't you downloading a TB per month.. it's when everyone done this, and it drives their network into screaming flames.
The pricing is simply their best way to discourage real unlimited use. They're changing the deal now only because there's a real possibility, with things like HD downloads, that a TB per month could start to be a regular thing among consumers. And they can't handle it yet.. not even close.
And I'd sign up for the $150 unlimited model in a heartbeat if I could get it, particularly if it's actually a $75 plan with a maximum $75 overage charge. I'm paying $110 a month today for satellite. For that, I'm guaranteed about 150GB per month at full speed, as long as I break it up into 500MB/day chunks. Overstep that daily allocation by a byte, and it's down to POTS speeds for 24 hours.
ISPs actually measure bandwidth, but they're thinking GB per month, not Kb per second. Bandwidth is the proper term, it's just not the way you're used to thinking about it.
This was inevitable, and when you're on the fringe of broadband (like me), you've lived with it already. US based 3G data links (I was on Verizon's EvDO for two years) are described as unlimited, but in fact, they have various limits.
Obviously, there's the link-to-cell limit... you can drop instantaneous bandwidth very quickly, depending on the competing traffic. Then there's the aggregate bandwidth... they didn't specify any, but every month, top bandwidth hogs got kicked out of their "unlimited" contracts. In fact, this was well known as being the cheapest way out of the monthly contract ($80/month).
Now I'm on satellite... 500MB per day aggregate bandwidth lets you keep the 1.5Mb/s instantaneous bandwidth. Exceed that, and you get sent into the corner, wearing a POTS-speed dunce cap.
Wired broadband hasn't generally needed bandwidth caps, but that's changing as the net changes. Consider downloads... folks did audio, then video, and now HD video downloads. The average Blu-Ray disc is a 50GB disc, while sets (I have Season 3 of "Lost" around here somewhere) tend toward 300GB or more. Imagine a download sevice offering Blu-Ray quality, rather than the "worse than cable/satellite" HD you get from folks like Apple, or most of the stuff put on bittorrent. If that got even a little popular, it would drive today's ISPs screaming to their knees... they can't even remotely give anything close to their peak performance on any kind of sustained basis.
Their whole model works largely because most of the time, most people aren't using the network at all. But start to get lots of people doing 3-6 day downloads at full rated speed, and that magic vanishes.
They see this coming... it was a big talking point in the Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD wars. That's why they're acting now.