Posts by B Bauer

HD media future may be Blu, but it's not rosy

Blu-Ray vs DVD

I really question whether there will ever be mass adoption of Blu-Ray, unless the price difference over DVD is negligible. I've been watching HDTV over the air for about five years. Things I've noticed:

1. People over-emphasize resolution. Most people can't tell which stations are 1080i and which are 720p (even though they insist that they need 1080p!). A lot of the PBS shows are upscaled 480p, and people don't realize that either.

2. The optimal use of HD is long, wide zooms. Its extremely noticeable with sports, because you're often watching the entire width of the field/court/etc. Extended zooms in movies typically only last a few seconds. The rest of the time, the difference is minimal. Take a look at the "see the difference" videos at Best Buy and you'll notice the most noticeable difference is in those short segments of wide zooms.

3. Films are often "softened" with grain, which negates a lot of the clarity of high definition.

I was an early adopter of HD; I spent $300 for just a tuner. I feel it was worth it for sports and some nature/travel shows (that also feature wide zooms), but for most material the biggest gain is the improved color, not the resolution. I've done comparisons of HD vs DVD (when channels were showing movies I own), and I don't find the difference very impressive (usually not even noticeable). Even if my DVD player played Blu-Ray disks now, I'd still find it hard to justify the extra cost of the disks.

Billy Bragg: Why should songwriters starve so others get rich?

Downloading as preview

I'm glad he at least acknowledged (in the second audio) that there are music lovers that download this stuff just to see if they like it enough to buy it. Those defending the death of free downloading usually act like we don't exist.

For example, I have purchased 234 paid downloads in the past 3 months. I've bought CDs as well. Nearly all were discovered via "illegal" downloads. I will never buy a song that I haven't heard - I've been burned too many times by that. 30-second samples usually are such a poor representation of the song that I don't even count that as having heard that song. There were some other albums that I couldn't preview in full, so I didn't risk buying them. This latter case seems to be what the major music labels wants, so its no surprise they're failing.

I hardly bought any music in the 1990s. I had no chance to preview most of them (other than a couple of songs), so of course I was disappointed most of the time.

My advice would be to avoid downloading from labels that have shown themselves willing to sue their customers, like those in the RIAA. If that means you don't buy it...well, its their call.

Why I downgraded from Vista to XP

Be careful about XP on laptops

I bought a Compaq lappy, planning on putting XP on it. No big deal, I figured, I've installed XP on several machines in the past. I first checked the website for the appropriate drivers...they were all there. It all got harder after that.

If the laptop has an SATA drive (likely), you'll have to boot off a floppy disk, or create a modified XP install disk (not easy). After that was solved, I tried installing the drivers for undiscovered hardware. Several of the drivers on the website didn't work. An HP support guy was quite helpful in trying to get me drivers to try, but in some cases (eg audio) there simply weren't any. The laptop had several components for which XP drivers didn't exist. I had to return it and pay a hefty restocking fee.

Now RIAA says copying your own CDs is illegal

Nothing new

The RIAA is suing Howell over his dissemination of material on Kazaa.

The legal brief is online:

http://www.ilrweb.com/viewILRPDFfull.asp?filename=atlantic_howell_071207RIAASupplementalBrief

I would expect they would make mention of CD rips being "unauthorized", as they did in the Thomas case and the DMCA triennial review (though it might have occurred outside the legal brief). They seem to make mention of it whenever possible, but won't go so far as risking a legal judgment.

Dell's laptop customisation options not very customisable

Same thing here

I talked to an actual Dell person (Indian accent), and was also told I couldn't use a single DIMM. Of course, I can toss out their memory and add new for much less money than their upgrades. So I just closed the ticket.

Oddly enough, that same Dell person called ME today to tell me my laptop has shipped, two weeks ahead of schedule.