The more I read into the article (and links), the more I wonder if "their most basic cable programming", "basic service tier", and "accelerate cable operators’ transition to all-digital networks" means more than just encrypting Clear QAM. What I'm afraid of is if this means that the standard definition "basic cable" and "expanded basic cable" services that cable companies still pump out for non-HDTVs will be digitized (as per the transition phrasing) and encrypted, too. Sort of a cable version of the analog to digital broadcast switch, complete with digital converter boxes (though without government coupons this time).
My MythTV backend currently records local network HDTV broadcasts through antenna/HDHomeRun, and has an analog SD tuner for expanded basic cable, which I'd hate to see come to an end like this. It may not have been good looking picture, but analog TV at its end represented hard earned progress and freedom from where television had almost gone, we'd completely moved away from the oppression of cable boxes and could build personal video recorders to allow all manner of viewing options and flexibility, and then we simply allowed them to take almost all of that away from us when they switched to encrypted digital services; if this last bastion of television freedom gets snuffed out so soon, it would be very sad tidings. Needless to say, I'm not interested in subscribing to TV services that don't allow me to watch and record however I see fit and with whatever operating system I choose (cablecard, I'm looking at you on this one), so this would be the end of premium TV for me, something I'd never wanted it to come to.
"The days of plugging a TV into the wall and getting cable are coming to an end", indeed.
As mentioned in my own post, I pay for Netflix, and bought some of my PS3's primarily for Netflix streaming, but I cannot access what I am paying for since they needlessly require a PSN login before allowing Netflix functionality.
But still, 'free' service or not, Sony is entrusted with a lot of responsibility for the information they actively sought from us. I don't play online games, but at some point they required I give them personal info, which I begrudgingly did. And don't kid yourself, they find that information valuable in various ways, just reference "The Social Network" (not really a fan of the movie, but it does show how coveted freely given information can be). Also, I swear I've seen a fair amount of ads scroll by on my PS3, they may not be charging us directly, but they're still making money off of us with the service. They broke their subscribers' trust and they shouldn't be allowed to move on as if nothing has happened without addressing the people they've harmed.
They could start with untangling the Netflix app from the PSN. There are so many occurrences of backward compatible PS3's dying after firmware updates that I feel I'm rightly cautious against upgrading willy-nilly and take time to research whether there are many problems being reported on each firmware release, but Sony has other ideas. In their effort to combat piracy (which they themselves actually spurred on by removing the "Install OtherOS" launch feature, and I'm still not happy about that) they made what otherwise would be a PSN independent Netflix app require a successful PSN log-on before functioning, in the hopes of forcing people to choose upgrading to keep Netflix functionality rather than staying on an older firmware and running unsigned code, but that's not the only people it hurts. I haven't done anything wrong from Sony's point of view with my PS3's, but am constantly faced with restricted access to Netflix service. I started buying extra PS3's back when Netflix required the streaming disc, and while a bit clunky, it worked brilliantly and functioned regardless of whether I was completely up to date on firmware. I just want to go back to that level of functionality, the less-restricted functionality the system had when I bought the rest of the way in, and as I recall, OtherOS still worked, and a whole heck of a lot more USB devices were recognized, what a great time to have owned a PS3, shame it was so short lived. (And no, I don't mean I want the disc method again, just less restrictions on the app would be fine.)
Some people are having luck using Netflix while PSN is down (further showing just how 'important' PSN is to Netflix functionality), but sadly I didn't upgrade to the latest firmware till a few days into the PSN problems and for some reason I can't get Netflix to work at all. Way to go Sony, you suck.
So, have we finally figured out why it is called Windows 7? Is it in fact because it runs 7 out of 10 viruses? I see a pattern here... I can't wait for Windows 10 !
Though you have to consider that Sony didn't give us this Linux install method out of the goodness of their hearts, but to placate most of the crackers that would try to get Linux onto the system. Instead they have people trying to work within the constraints that Sony set for Linux. I almost wish that they hadn't given us the Linux install option as they did, because by now perhaps someone would have hacked in a much more usable Linux.
By the way, though this has nothing to do with what I was saying above, I just want to say aloud how much their partitioning options suck. You are only able to pick whether Linux or PS3 gets stuck with 10gb to work with, that's it... pathetic.
What I find amazing is that the telecoms claim to have had no choice but to do this, yet it is known that not long ago they threatened the government that they would pull the plug because the government was behind on payments for the wiretapping. How is it that they can decide to stop doing something if they're not paid, but still have no choice in the matter? This is all just blatantly wrong yet they're getting off the hook, and that has to be one of the most aggravating parts of this whole thing.
So, is it just me or does it sound strangely like Bill Gates is saying that a large pool of talented people working together makes a better product, faster... sort of like a certain software approach we all love...
I wonder if a bit of encyclopedia competition in the Chinese market would make Jimmy agree with Google's compromise... If Google ducked out of China completely, and M$ and Yahoo! did not, then billions of Chinese people would be lost by Google to their less-idealistic (or moral) competitors.
Actually, I was trying to exaggerate--fairly obviously--about the limited reasons to use a DVDR in such a situation. I expected someone anonymous troll would jump all over the statement, anyways.
Also, are you saying they put together the same looped scenes as featured in the DVDR on a presumably pressed Bluray disc? Did they subsequently stick to just the normal bitrate those scenes would have on a commercial Bluray release of the movie, or could they perhaps have filled that massive disc with just those scenes... packing it with excessive information to really show up a lowered definition DVD? If they're willing to be a little tricky on one half of the demo, what's to stop them from taking it the next step further?
Oh well, now I'm really rumor mongering, time to move on...
The site proving that this was a side-by-side bluray vs dvd demo, states that "the difference in quality is instantly noticeable", and it should be obvious why... Someone previously mentioned that compressing a movie to DVDR reduces quality significantly (depending on the method used), but I think Sony took it a step further and overcompressed to a DVDR so they could make SURE that the movie was low quality, probably far lower quality than a normal backup. That is the only reason they could have wanted to use a DVDR in such a situation; they wanted to make Bluray look really good. How else would the difference in quality be so "instantly noticeable" on a laptop screen (and in an assumably short viewing period for the people herded by it)?
I switched to diet drinks a number of years ago (4 or 5) because a doctor recommended I cut back on sugar for some concentration related problems I had. As another person wrote, they lost a bit of weight, but that didn't last (I'm not a large guy, but there is a tad bit of gut that I would notice disappear...), this is largely because aspartame inhibits the digestion of carbs. So it really isn't the "diet" drink that the companies claim them to be. I am glad that I stopped drinking the gallons of sugar I was before, but am very upset that I have been consuming something as unhealthy as aspartame for as long as I have and in the quantities that I have. Just because it might not cause cancer doesn't mean that it is safe.
Aspartame, like MSG, is an "excitotoxin", which is increasingly believed to be a very dangerous nurological agent. Getting cancer, maybe, someday, way in the future, isn't that scary... but IMMEDIATE NUROLOGICAL EFFECTS including substantial loss of brain cells (not to mention birth defects in your children) certainly gets my attention.
Let me quote a quick summary from http://www.pamrotella.com/health/excitotoxins.html "Aspartame (often called Nutrasweet) is a controversial food additive used to sweeten "diet" products artificially. The product has a long history of causing severe health problems. Along with MSG (monosodium glutamate) and MSG-like food additives, aspartame is in a class of compounds known as "excitotoxins". These excitotoxins basically excite brain cells until they die. In other words, each serving of MSG or aspartame has the potential to cause a little bit of brain damage, which becomes cumulative and could eventually lead to Alzheimer's Disease, Parkinson's, or other neurological diseases.
Aspartame is especially controversial, as laboratory tests BEFORE it was approved showed that it caused brain lesions, cancer, death, and a number of other serious health problems. The substance was originally rejected by the FDA, but later Donald Rumsfeld (the current Secretary of Defense) went to work for Searle with the goal of having aspartame approved. Since its approval, brain cancer rates have risen, although a portion of those cases may be due to the explosion of cell phone usage at around the same time. Aspartame is the substance the FDA receives most complaints about, with a range of known side effects including birth defects, cancer, and death."
Someone needs to mention these things before others follow the same uninformed advice I did. Just because companies are allowed to sell you something like aspartame and MSG it doesn't mean that it is safe for you, or that they have your best interests in mind. MSG is getting harder and harder to avoid... this "safe" substance is so safe that companies are HIDING it in almost all foods by using loopholes in product labeling. Just look and see if you have anything (I'm certain you do) that contains "Natural [anything] Flavor", Hydroloyzed [anything], Aspartame, Caseinate, bouillon or Stock, Citric Acid, Malt [extract/flavoring], anything enzyme or protein fortified, Spices, etc. the list goes extensively on.
I've recently started to cut as many excitotoxins from my regular diet as I can (man, it is tough to find anything without them). And I actually feel healthier than I use to (and I thought I felt pretty good before, so this is an interesting thing...)
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The more I read into the article (and links), the more I wonder if "their most basic cable programming", "basic service tier", and "accelerate cable operators’ transition to all-digital networks" means more than just encrypting Clear QAM. What I'm afraid of is if this means that the standard definition "basic cable" and "expanded basic cable" services that cable companies still pump out for non-HDTVs will be digitized (as per the transition phrasing) and encrypted, too. Sort of a cable version of the analog to digital broadcast switch, complete with digital converter boxes (though without government coupons this time).
My MythTV backend currently records local network HDTV broadcasts through antenna/HDHomeRun, and has an analog SD tuner for expanded basic cable, which I'd hate to see come to an end like this. It may not have been good looking picture, but analog TV at its end represented hard earned progress and freedom from where television had almost gone, we'd completely moved away from the oppression of cable boxes and could build personal video recorders to allow all manner of viewing options and flexibility, and then we simply allowed them to take almost all of that away from us when they switched to encrypted digital services; if this last bastion of television freedom gets snuffed out so soon, it would be very sad tidings. Needless to say, I'm not interested in subscribing to TV services that don't allow me to watch and record however I see fit and with whatever operating system I choose (cablecard, I'm looking at you on this one), so this would be the end of premium TV for me, something I'd never wanted it to come to.
"The days of plugging a TV into the wall and getting cable are coming to an end", indeed.
As mentioned in my own post, I pay for Netflix, and bought some of my PS3's primarily for Netflix streaming, but I cannot access what I am paying for since they needlessly require a PSN login before allowing Netflix functionality.
But still, 'free' service or not, Sony is entrusted with a lot of responsibility for the information they actively sought from us. I don't play online games, but at some point they required I give them personal info, which I begrudgingly did. And don't kid yourself, they find that information valuable in various ways, just reference "The Social Network" (not really a fan of the movie, but it does show how coveted freely given information can be). Also, I swear I've seen a fair amount of ads scroll by on my PS3, they may not be charging us directly, but they're still making money off of us with the service. They broke their subscribers' trust and they shouldn't be allowed to move on as if nothing has happened without addressing the people they've harmed.
They could start with untangling the Netflix app from the PSN. There are so many occurrences of backward compatible PS3's dying after firmware updates that I feel I'm rightly cautious against upgrading willy-nilly and take time to research whether there are many problems being reported on each firmware release, but Sony has other ideas. In their effort to combat piracy (which they themselves actually spurred on by removing the "Install OtherOS" launch feature, and I'm still not happy about that) they made what otherwise would be a PSN independent Netflix app require a successful PSN log-on before functioning, in the hopes of forcing people to choose upgrading to keep Netflix functionality rather than staying on an older firmware and running unsigned code, but that's not the only people it hurts. I haven't done anything wrong from Sony's point of view with my PS3's, but am constantly faced with restricted access to Netflix service. I started buying extra PS3's back when Netflix required the streaming disc, and while a bit clunky, it worked brilliantly and functioned regardless of whether I was completely up to date on firmware. I just want to go back to that level of functionality, the less-restricted functionality the system had when I bought the rest of the way in, and as I recall, OtherOS still worked, and a whole heck of a lot more USB devices were recognized, what a great time to have owned a PS3, shame it was so short lived. (And no, I don't mean I want the disc method again, just less restrictions on the app would be fine.)
Some people are having luck using Netflix while PSN is down (further showing just how 'important' PSN is to Netflix functionality), but sadly I didn't upgrade to the latest firmware till a few days into the PSN problems and for some reason I can't get Netflix to work at all. Way to go Sony, you suck.
So, have we finally figured out why it is called Windows 7? Is it in fact because it runs 7 out of 10 viruses? I see a pattern here... I can't wait for Windows 10 !
Though you have to consider that Sony didn't give us this Linux install method out of the goodness of their hearts, but to placate most of the crackers that would try to get Linux onto the system. Instead they have people trying to work within the constraints that Sony set for Linux. I almost wish that they hadn't given us the Linux install option as they did, because by now perhaps someone would have hacked in a much more usable Linux. By the way, though this has nothing to do with what I was saying above, I just want to say aloud how much their partitioning options suck. You are only able to pick whether Linux or PS3 gets stuck with 10gb to work with, that's it... pathetic.
"Han and Chewie? It's a Life Day Miracle!"
What I find amazing is that the telecoms claim to have had no choice but to do this, yet it is known that not long ago they threatened the government that they would pull the plug because the government was behind on payments for the wiretapping. How is it that they can decide to stop doing something if they're not paid, but still have no choice in the matter? This is all just blatantly wrong yet they're getting off the hook, and that has to be one of the most aggravating parts of this whole thing.
So, is it just me or does it sound strangely like Bill Gates is saying that a large pool of talented people working together makes a better product, faster... sort of like a certain software approach we all love...
I think you mean:
"that's just how it is"(TM)
Does anyone else recall that Gates has been knighted by the British Empire and should ineligible for U.S. public office because of it?
A limited November release followed by a full January 2007 release sounds pretty close to Vista's schedule. Hopefully this won't suck as badly.
I wonder if a bit of encyclopedia competition in the Chinese market would make Jimmy agree with Google's compromise... If Google ducked out of China completely, and M$ and Yahoo! did not, then billions of Chinese people would be lost by Google to their less-idealistic (or moral) competitors.
Lets see how much he'd like a Chinapedia...
This dumb? Not always.
Actually, I was trying to exaggerate--fairly obviously--about the limited reasons to use a DVDR in such a situation. I expected someone anonymous troll would jump all over the statement, anyways.
Also, are you saying they put together the same looped scenes as featured in the DVDR on a presumably pressed Bluray disc? Did they subsequently stick to just the normal bitrate those scenes would have on a commercial Bluray release of the movie, or could they perhaps have filled that massive disc with just those scenes... packing it with excessive information to really show up a lowered definition DVD? If they're willing to be a little tricky on one half of the demo, what's to stop them from taking it the next step further?
Oh well, now I'm really rumor mongering, time to move on...
Standard definition is far below DVD in quality, hence SDTV being worse than EDTV (followed, of course, by HDTV). And football can burn in Hell...
The site proving that this was a side-by-side bluray vs dvd demo, states that "the difference in quality is instantly noticeable", and it should be obvious why... Someone previously mentioned that compressing a movie to DVDR reduces quality significantly (depending on the method used), but I think Sony took it a step further and overcompressed to a DVDR so they could make SURE that the movie was low quality, probably far lower quality than a normal backup. That is the only reason they could have wanted to use a DVDR in such a situation; they wanted to make Bluray look really good. How else would the difference in quality be so "instantly noticeable" on a laptop screen (and in an assumably short viewing period for the people herded by it)?
Aspartame, like MSG, is an "excitotoxin", which is increasingly believed to be a very dangerous nurological agent. Getting cancer, maybe, someday, way in the future, isn't that scary... but IMMEDIATE NUROLOGICAL EFFECTS including substantial loss of brain cells (not to mention birth defects in your children) certainly gets my attention.
Let me quote a quick summary from http://www.pamrotella.com/health/excitotoxins.html
"Aspartame (often called Nutrasweet) is a controversial food additive used to sweeten "diet" products artificially. The product has a long history of causing severe health problems. Along with MSG (monosodium glutamate) and MSG-like food additives, aspartame is in a class of compounds known as "excitotoxins". These excitotoxins basically excite brain cells until they die. In other words, each serving of MSG or aspartame has the potential to cause a little bit of brain damage, which becomes cumulative and could eventually lead to Alzheimer's Disease, Parkinson's, or other neurological diseases.
Aspartame is especially controversial, as laboratory tests BEFORE it was approved showed that it caused brain lesions, cancer, death, and a number of other serious health problems. The substance was originally rejected by the FDA, but later Donald Rumsfeld (the current Secretary of Defense) went to work for Searle with the goal of having aspartame approved. Since its approval, brain cancer rates have risen, although a portion of those cases may be due to the explosion of cell phone usage at around the same time. Aspartame is the substance the FDA receives most complaints about, with a range of known side effects including birth defects, cancer, and death."
Someone needs to mention these things before others follow the same uninformed advice I did. Just because companies are allowed to sell you something like aspartame and MSG it doesn't mean that it is safe for you, or that they have your best interests in mind. MSG is getting harder and harder to avoid... this "safe" substance is so safe that companies are HIDING it in almost all foods by using loopholes in product labeling. Just look and see if you have anything (I'm certain you do) that contains "Natural [anything] Flavor", Hydroloyzed [anything], Aspartame, Caseinate, bouillon or Stock, Citric Acid, Malt [extract/flavoring], anything enzyme or protein fortified, Spices, etc. the list goes extensively on.
I've recently started to cut as many excitotoxins from my regular diet as I can (man, it is tough to find anything without them). And I actually feel healthier than I use to (and I thought I felt pretty good before, so this is an interesting thing...)
Give some love to Dr. Blaylock's book.