It's a Toshiba drive internally. Rumor at the time was that the 360 Elite would have the HD-DVD drive built in, but that didn't happen. The external can't run 360 game discs, just movies.
When they went on fire-sale I thought it might be useful for having two games available to run on the console at once. I'm glad I didn't pull the trigger on that.
I still have a couple of HD-DVDs but not that drive any longer and if memory serves me right, I was able to connect it to a PC and play a HD-DVD movie in mplayer or something
I still have some swag from when Microsoft was convinced that HD-DVD was going to beat Blu-ray, and become the preferred information delivery mechanism for business and entertainment because the internet was "just a fad."
One of the items is a large, metal, locking suitcase like you'd see in an old spy film with the logos on it. I use it to store important paperwork.
I don't think Microsoft ever believed that HD-DVD was going to beat Blu-Ray. Instead, I think they saw the long view around online video delivery (they had a digital storefront up pretty quickly after the console launched) and backed what they viewed as the losing format in an attempt to split the market and prevent either format from fully establishing itself so that the online transition would happen faster. They also failed to capitalize on the opportunity, largely because they also failed in the personal media player (the Zune was good, but _very_ late to market) and phone markets.
> One of the issues was that Blu-ray Disc companies wanted to use a Java-based platform for interactivity (BD-J based on Sun Microsystems' Java TV standards), while HD DVD companies wanted to use Microsoft's "iHD" (which became HDi).[20]
Microsoft had a direct interest in HD-DVD succeeding as it could sell iHD dev kits and licenses.
Edit ... maybe not, as I read on the article looks like Microsoft didn't actually provide tools so ... not sure then.
Today, paid VOD isn’t a very lucrative market. In 2005, Apple had the music industry in a vice grip with iTunes/iPod, and it seemed like video was going to go the same way. It didn’t happen, not because of the technology, but because of the business model (subscriptions).
Nope, they aren't spending a billion dollars on some wild longshot strategy to try to make streaming a thing when 90% of thr country was on dialup, and the best video codec an average computer could decode was mpeg2 at 480p. Nope.
> The high-definition optical disc format war was a market competition between the Blu-ray and HD DVD optical disc standards for storing high-definition video and audio; it took place between 2006 and 2008 and was won by Blu-ray Disc.
by then, DSL was already well established, and according to this graph https://www.statista.com/statistics/616210/average-internet-... the average internet connection in the US was 3.67 Mbps - much slower than today, but much faster than would be possible if 90% still had 56 kbps. Doesn't make GP's conspiracy theory any more likely, but just for context...
You are right, it seems that about 80% of internet users had broadband in 2008. However, about 40% of people in the US were still not users of the internet and 10% were still on dialup. I don't know if the average speed means much in terms of addressable market for streaming (if 1% of the people in the US have gigabit connections, the average is 10mb even if 99% of people are on dialup), but I couldn't find any statistics on the median internet speed.
> .. and become the preferred information delivery mechanism for business and entertainment because the internet was "just a fad."
Was it not as much a case of network limitations making such delivery impractical, rather than the internet being considered a fad? I was just about on 512Kb DSL at that point (if not, dial up). Downloading games and streaming movies would have been totally impractical.
Was it not as much a case of network limitations making such delivery impractical, rather than the internet being considered a fad?
The internet being a passing fad was just how Microsoft thought in those days. Remember that Windows didn't get built-internet access until around Windows 98, while Macs were on the internet almost a decade earlier. I used a Mac to access USENET at a college in 1989/1990.
It wasn't about bandwidth limitations, but about Microsoft's long-term goal of moving everything to a subscription model. MS was preaching the virtues of "recurring revenue" decades before most of the rest of the tech industry figured that out. Microsoft's philosophy was that people would subscribe to information services like Encarta, that would deliver regular updates on optical disc via the mail.
A lot of people, at the time, believed that Windows would eventually go to a full-subscription model where you'd pay a monthly fee to use Windows, even on your own machine. The notion was that people don't like paying $200 for the next version of Windows, but they would be less unhappy paying $20/month, or even $10/week.
That was ruined by a number of factors, including free Linux, Apple delivering operating system updates for free, and of course, the internet delivering the equivalent of Encarta and all of Microsoft's other planned information subscriptions for free.
> Remember that Windows didn't get built-internet access until around Windows 98, while Macs were on the internet at least half a decade earlier.
IE came bundled with Windows since 95 OSR1, and I'm pretty sure 95 had built-in tcp/ip stack since launch. In contrast Macs got bundled MacTCP in System 7.5 (1994), and Apples early web-browser forays (Cyberdog) were notably short-lived.
Furthermore MS invest heavily on stuff like MSN pretty much from the get-go. And of course can't forget IIS/ASP, one of the most popular web platforms during its heydays.
More relevantly to the topic at hand, Xbox launched with Xbox Live pushing console internet connectivity and multiplayer well ahead the curve.
Are these really signs of company thinking internet being a fad?
> Windows 95 OEM Service Release 1 was the first release of Windows to include Internet Explorer (version 2.0) with the OS. While there was no uninstaller, it could be deleted easily if desired. OEM Service Release 2 included Internet Explorer 3. The installation of Internet Explorer 4 on Windows 95 (or the OSR2.5 version preinstalled on a computer) gave Windows 95 Active Desktop and browser integration into Windows Explorer, known as the Windows Desktop Update. The CD version of the last release of Windows 95, OEM Service Release 2.5 (version 4.00.950C), includes Internet Explorer 4, and installs it after Windows 95's initial setup and first boot are complete.
> Version 1.1 of Winsock was supplied in an add-on package (called Wolverine) for Windows for Workgroups (code named Snowball). It was an integral component of Windows 95 and Windows NT from versions 3.5 and onwards
A company the size of Microsoft making some peripheral investments can dwarf what entire startups might be able to invest.
But it was clearly not central to Microsoft's strategy for a long time. It's not like this is a whacky theory; their plain lack of focus on the Internet is matched by their own corporate statements about how they weren't focusing on it particularly. They got there, but they were slow to the party. They had to be forced. They had to go through some phases of attempting to embrace and extend the entire Internet, which they mostly failed at but did have a pretty good run at with Internet Explorer (though they still lost that one eventually).
Their core strategy was to focus on Windows and Office, but at the time they focused on the network as a threat to those things. They perceived the web as a threat because you don't need an OS if you just have a browser, and for as much as we today do on the web, including Office, they were afraid we'd do even more, like, do literally everything in a browser, and that the future was Chromebooks; specifically, machines with no Windows and no Office. Existential threat to a two-legged Microsoft. Prior to the internet being able to sensibly run an office suite they were also afraid that we'd all switch to some inferior product that was based on what the web could run, and they wouldn't be able to charge anywhere near as much. They saw the internet as an existential threat for a long time, not an opportunity.
So while they knew they couldn't kill the internet as a whole, and they put down some small side-bets that even if they paid off could never have sustained a company the size of Microsoft, they generally were attacking the internet and trying to embrace & extend it. Now they don't do that anymore and they generally understand it as an opportunity as well. But there was a long run where Microsoft saw it as a threat overall, even if they invested here or there. This seems to have come from Steve Ballmer, but that approaches the limits of my knowledge; people who were there could speak to that better.
Not sure the mechanics behind the scenes, but I bought a HD DVD player (and am still bitter that it lost - everything was CSS and JS, not weird bastardized Java), shortly before it was discontinued, and Best Buy sent me a check for $150 or $200 out of nowhere as a result.
And this time the better format won right? Unlike Betamax which I hadn’t realised was actually invented 2 years before VHS and it’s fizzle-out was basically because of Sony patents.
Kinda...
The story (of Betamax) is a bit more complicated than that, the main reason of why it failed is that Sony did not understand the market where it was selling.
Also, the thing about Betamax having superior quality is a bit overblown, while Betamax at speed 1 (or A, I don't remember what it was called) DID have better quality, nobody used it! (and Sony discontinued quite quickly, favouring speed 2 and 3) since the recording time was so low.
(also the professional Betamax format is a completely different beast from the consumer one, at some point it switched to being digital)
Sony have always made strange decisions surrounding storage. Not selling Minidisc as a floppy drive successor, when the competition was gigantic ZIP discs, was a biggie. (I am aware of the NetMD etc, I had one)
Betamax was behind VHS in a critical metric: Original Betamax tapes could only fit an hour of recorded TV, whereas the original VHS tapes could do two hours. This mean that a single VHS tape could fit a whole TV movie, for example, or a whole sports game, whereas Betamax could not. Recording off TV was a major use case for home videotapes in the era before the movie rental market existed, to the point Sony and Universal fought all the way to the Supreme Court to decide the legality of time-shifting, so VHS having double the capacity with identical or nearly-identical picture quality pretty well decided the market.
I don't know about that last bit, go to Walmart and they have most everything new and current on Blu-Ray. Plus the less-compressed video beats the pants off of streaming.
Tons and tons of Movies and TV shows are streaming-only releases nowadays.
Also, a bunch of old movies get restored in HD and released on streaming services only. First example that comes to mind is the classic 1993 comedy Look Who's Talking Now.
Adding insult to injury, a bunch of old movies get remastered physical releases... on DVD only. That's right. SD content encoded with a 30 year old codec.
So if I want to watch a movie from my childhood in HD, more often than not my only legal course of action is to subscribe to a streaming service.
In terms of things that appear in theaters. I don't expect to see Netflix exclusives on the aisles.
And the market for discs isn't what it used to be. The long tail seems nonexistent now, it's a shame old remasters aren't coming through it any more. The last one I bought was the Star Trek TNG remaster, which was on blu-ray (and looked fantastic)
HD-DVD supported H.264 and VC-1 (and MPEG2). Initially there were plenty of VC-1 and MPEG2 releases on Blu-ray as well. HD-DVD simply died before the universal shift to H.264. There was however a difference in max. bitrate (~40 Mbit/s for Blu-ray, ~30 Mbit/s for HD-DVD)
The differences between the two standard were more interesting when it came to sound formats. HD-DVD had mandatory support for Dolby Digital Plus and Dolby TrueHD (allowing the audio on a disc to use these without a fallback). Blu-ray on the other hand supported a higher max. bitrate for DTS-HD Master Audio.
They offer “express replacements” with applecare, I did it for my broken ipad. They overnighted me a new one and I sent the old one back to them in the included box/label.
Isnt this the 4th incident in like a week? Seems like its actually a routine occurence but the media is choosing to fixate/overreport it after the spy baloon.
Either that or china’s genuinely trying to test our response times and protocols in preperation for something down the line
I think policy shifted. I think overflights by balloons are routine. See as evidence reporting that the balloon that started this news cycle was number 4 in the past handful of years, but after the media attention a decision was made to have more of a zero tolerance policy
My understanding was that we may have been filtering these objects out as noise of our sensor arrays, and only just started listening more closely for smaller anomalies.
It's possible this balloon traffic has been relatively routine but we are only recently noticing them and responding to them.
My money says yes, these are routine events. I don't blame the media, though, not directly. I blame the warmongers that have been pushing the anti-China line, starting with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.
It could be a test but is there any doubt worldwide that, of all branches of the US military, the US Air Force is the last thing you want to tangle with?
I don't know about stupid. If you can spend X dollars to "force" your opponent to spend X*10 dollars it can be a viable strategy.
I recall the reported costs of "junk rockets" vs those surface-to-air defenses, which I believe are a similar case of the attack being orders of magnitude cheaper than the defense
Sure, that may be the initial ratio, but if it becomes a regular thing, as in sufficiently regular to strain one of our budgets beyond (substituting a few live target shootings for training exercises), we can rapidly develop an appropriate response.
E.g., when there was a new bunker-buster bomb in the initial Iraq war, one was developed in 28 days. Similarly, the MOAB was developed in about a year. There are plenty of teams of highly skilled and well-equipped engineers who will happily undertake to solve that problem.
Also, weapons systems with higher expected rates of use can benefit from economies of scale-ed up production.
Unless they're sending a million balloons this week, it won't be that kind of problem.
No, it doesn't take "far more resources." All pilots, military or civilian, need to accumulate hours to stay current. Flying to investigate or shootdown a balloon isn't going to take more resources than ordinary training would.
The recovery might be something else, but then again, those groups are constantly training anyway, so I'd venture to guess the difference is negligible.
I think eventually someone like Block, paypal, apple or google will make their own USD-backed stablecoin with low or zero fees and tie it into their existing nfc/payment ecosystem and it will be “trusted” since its from a recognizable tech brand and not some obscure crypto group that only gives product updates on telegram lol
