I consider the 360's HD-DVD player to be severely limited. No HDCP or HDMI, no support of HD audio codecs. The PS3 out of the box supports HDMI 1.3 with HDCP and decodes TrueDolbyHD and can pass native HD audio thru to a AVR. Also, Sound and Vision already likes the PS3 as a BluRay Player
I really don't care what Sound and Vision thinks. If I want to know how the PS3 does as a Blu-ray player, I'll talk to someone that actually writes one of the codecs that's used for encoding the titles. He and his partner have written a test disc for a video scaler manufacturer and they are building one for HD-DVD and Blu-ray players as well.
I can formulate a better opinion myself than S&V. Plus, I have another project keeping me busy.
You can buy an adapter which takes VGA and converts to HDMI and/or DVI. HDMI is simply a copy protection layer. Dolby TrueHD isn't a required codec for Blu-ray, and as yet there are 0 titles with TrueHD. Glad they've got the support for it though in Blu-ray.
Anyone remember Netscape?
Sure. They were the first burst of the .com bubble. They failed because they had a bad business model. You can't give away your primary product and then expect to make money
How about Xerox (the orginator of graphical interfaces in the US).
Never "in bed" with Microsoft. The closest to "in bed" with anyone they were with was Apple, thank you very much. They also did the laser printer, and HP took over that market for the most part. Then there's Ethernet, which was also born in the same PARC facility. All this example shows is that Xerox was horrible at going from their PARC demos to usable products coming out of that lab. Relationship to MS is non-existent.
It's too bad that the copying machine market went crazy once the original patents expired and Xerox no longer had a stranglehold on the market.
Congratulations, it only took two examples to come up with your first red herring.
You mean Sun Microsystems? They've struggled because they haven't done a good job of moving forward their proprietary Sparc Architecture which has languished, and they are moving forward with more Intel based solutions.
Any idea how Java Systems has been doing since the lawsuit?
Java is part of Sun Microsystems. It isn't a seperate corporate entity. So Java's overall fate is the same as Sun's. Were you aware that Java is the interactivity layer of Blu-ray disc? Wow, how ironic that you chose that, but it's true. BD-J (Blu-Disc Java) is what is used to provide the interactivity.
To answer your question, the issues with Java have little to do with MS and more to do with implementation complexity. Yep, that's right -- Java has much promise -- write once; run on all platforms. The problem is that the implementation, ie the coding, has proven to be quite a bit more difficult than Sun would have like it to be. So Java hasn't done nearly as well as they would have liked.
I classify this as a red herring for two reasons:
1) It isn't a seperate corporate entity.
2) It's problems lie in the complexity of implementation. JVMs (Java Virtual Machines) to run Java code are present on just about every computing platform.
The problem (once again) is on the revenue side. Give it away for free and there's no revenue base, except from the development tools.
What happened to WordPerfect after M$ refused to provide key links for their OS to WordPerfect?
Actually, what happened is that over time MS provided a better product than Word Perfect (links or not). Whether that is due to the internal links or not, I can't say -- that's both before my time; and outside of my area of expertise.
There is a reason M$ keeps getting sued and the European Union is putting up a fit before they allow Vista in Europe.
The reasons MS is tied up in litigation in Europe -- the reasons have to do with the same business practices they have used in the US and have been sued for here. It's no secret.
Right or wrong; it's worked quite well.
Foolish yes, but wishful thinking on my part. I keep reading how the PS3 and BluRay is in trouble yet Sony is now approaching 1 million in PS3 sales and at my local BestBuy the new Sony BD player is the current hot item.
Yes Toshiba has alot invested in BluRay but I believe their gold mine lies in
SED HDTV not HD-DVD, and of course this is my opionion only. So, don't take this as some kind of HOLY GRAIL. We are just talking about HD players here not the end of the world.
Please. You're the one who's pushing Blu-ray as the savior of the Universe. I'm providing some balancing information vs. the hype with facts.
SED may be too expensive to manufacture. We know that it's late to market, and that cost to manufacture is the reason why.
And that is the only reason HD-DVD is ahead of BluRay right now. I suspect that sometime this winter the numbers are going to start going the other way.
The first gen of Toshiba players were PCs in CE boxes. The cost to manufacture the A1 was likely at a slight loss. The 2nd generation players are typical CE machines; not PCs. So the price reductions will be in generation 3 machines. Still, the gen 2 machines are cheaper than what the Blu-ray players are for.
Nothing is stopping MS from adding an HDMI add-on to the X-Box; it's an inherently extensible platform. Unlike with the PS3; we know that
every HD-DVD add-on is expressly for the purpose of playing HD-DVD movies.
Cheers,
