@J D

I understand what a backup camera is for; I have one. But it doesn't make any sense to me to put the monitor in the front of the car when you should be turned around and looking backward whenever you are backing up. Shouldn't the monitor be in the back?

About 1/2 the time when my camera lets me see something I wouldn't see otherwise it is because it has moved into my path as I am moving, not just beforehand. Having the camera in the front means you can only safely check it before you start moving. Putting it in the back means you can see it the whole time you are in motion.

By putting it in the front they are almost encouraging people to not turn around when backing up.

I'm not sure why everyone keeps putting the display for back up cameras in the dash... aren't you supposed to be looking backward when backing up?

I put the LCD for my backup cam in my headliner above the rear window. It works so much better than having one in the front.

http://www.thebaseonline.com/ridgeline/IMG_0469_sm.jpg

@Jason102 It would be ridiculous to expect that a company provide coverage everywhere regardless of terrain and population density. But the problem with AT&T's network is that they aren't providing good coverage where every other carrier else is. If all other providers are able to do it, it seems reasonable that AT&T would be able to do it as well instead of asking customers to pony up the dough on a box to fix their problem.

Actually I feel a bit vindicated by it. The story didn't pass the smell test. Now that word is out that this guy didn't have anything to do with Windows 7's design, it makes the original author look silly, not me. They may not have made up the guy or his statement, but they certainly implied that he was involved in the design of the product, or at the very least that he was qualified to comment on the situation. If you look hard enough you'll be able to find someone in any organization that will make bonehead comments.

And to answer your first question, generally I don't visit the site any longer. But Engadget was citing AppleInsider as the original source on this one, so I had to see what they had to say.

I do have to agree with his stability statement. My Mac has to be rebooted at least once a week due to lockups while sleeping. My Windows PCs only get rebooted when Windows Updates or software installation requires it. I have even skipped updates on occasion and had PCs run for months without a restart.

After an exorbitant number of completely bogus and fallacious posts that have come from AppleInsider over the years, I don't trust them as a worth news source any longer. They really ought to be called AppleInciter now, because it seems like an unacceptably high percentage of their stories seem to be designed to incite hate for anything that comes from anyone but Apple, no matter how good that technology may be. I'm not going to go so far as making an accusation, but I wouldn't be surprised if they made this guy and/or his statements up. Publicly admitting theft of intellectual property can open up a company for lawsuits, and I highly doubt MS would allow any of their employees to make such a statement publicly.

Aside from that, Windows 7 doesn't look very much like OS X. And user interface ideas have been "borrowed" in both directions.

Again, the storage capacity argument is moot. Nobody is using the extra storage for movies, because it just isn't necessary. Blu-ray has the capability for higher bitrates on video (40 vs 29 Mbps), but that's like saying your car can do 200 MPH when the speed limit is 55; 20 Mbps is more than enough for essentially pristine reproduction of HD video. Both formats have more than enough bandwidth for both extremely high quality video and audio.

The higher capacity also brings with it problems. The data is more densely packed on the disc, making it more prone to damage, and harder to make discs that work properly. Just yesterday my copy of Monsters, Inc. (brand new) already started skipping and freezing on both of my Blu-ray players.

The local storage capability is mandatory with Blu-ray, but nobody is actually implementing it internally. I can't even think of a single Blu-ray player that comes with internal storage besides the PS3. Most require you to buy a USB flash drive, making a lot of interactive features unavailable on most players. (Go read your manual; it probably doesn't have it.) All HD-DVD players all had it built-in.

Both HD-DVD disc and hardware manufacturing costs were lower because it was a less complicated format. The discs themselves were more similar to DVD, and easier to make. The lack of BD+ encryption required less powerful hardware to decode the bitstream. Of course HD-DVD was going to be cheaper. It was a simpler format.

We can talk specs all day long, but it isn't going to change the fact that HD-DVD was a better designed format and it didn't require three (four?) versions to finally get the feature set right. Having three (four?) versions of Blu-ray and some of its features be optional has fractured the market, creating a mess. You never know if the features on a disc are going to work on a given player. And that isn't just a theoretical argument either; I have run into several discs that have portions that do not play properly on my current model Samsung BD-P1600. The problems do pop up in the real world. It's an ugly situation that could have been avoided if the designers of Blu-ray had done a better job designing before releasing the product.

Blu-ray ultimately won out because of a back alley deal with a content provider (Warner). Not because of technical merit.

I was going to let this go, but when such blatantly wrong information is being published I can't just sit back and watch.

In what way did Blu-ray 1.1 or 2.0 surpass HD-DVD's specs?

If you say capacity I'm going to thump you on the head because even 20GB is more than enough to produce an extremely high quality title in HD with either VC-1 or AVC. Even single layer HD-DVD would have been good enough for most movies, though few of those were made. And we certainly aren't seeing tons of bonus material on current Blu-ray discs taking advantage of the extra capacity; manufacturers are still including extra discs for that (with many titles, like Disney's newest, coming on no less than 4 discs for 1 movie!) There were certainly HD-DVD discs that included just as much bonus material all on a single disc without sacrificing video quality (ever see King Kong on HD-DVD?), and many had the DVD version on the flip side to boot, requiring fewer resources to manufacture, and fewer discs to deal with.

Unless you count the extra layer of anti-consumer copy protection, I don't see how even the latest incarnation of Blu-ray surpasses HD-DVD in any of its specs. The picture and audio quality certainly hasn't changed. And the two formats are identical in that respect, with both using the exact same codecs, frame rate, and resolution.

Let's look at what each version of Blu-ray added: 1.1 made PiP and secondary audio stream capability mandatory, and added optional local storage. HD-DVD had all three from launch. 2.0 added internet connectivity. HD-DVD had that from the beginning too. Still not seeing advantage from Blu. More of a catching up.

Not only are several of the added features optional, most manufacturers are leaving at least some of them out, so capabilities vary from one player to the next (very few, for example, have any internal local storage, and require a separate purchase of a USB thumb drive). A feature that works on one player might not be included or work on another. It's a mess! I have inconsistent performance between my two players (some bonus features on some discs work on one but not the other), and it is frustrating.

Aside from the specs, the actual HD-DVD players had much better DVD upscaling than even the newest Blu-ray decks. My HD-A30 makes the picture on both of my Blu-ray players look downright horrendous on DVDs, and it wasn't the best model made.

But even with all of that said, neither format was very forward looking. Neither planned for aspect ratios other than 4:3 or 16:9, or alternate video resolutions. Or 3D. A properly designed format would have natively supported 2.00:1, 2:35:1, or any other aspect ratio used by the film industry. Or a way to add supplemental data into the data stream without breaking the existing format, so features like 3D could be added without changing the spec.

The only people I can see liking Blu-ray better are the movie studios, as (on paper) it protects their IP better. For consumers, HD-DVD would have been a much better choice. It was less restrictive, offered more capabilities, and it would have been far less confusing. And it was less expensive to boot.

Don't get me entirely wrong here, I'm not entirely a Blu-ray hater. Like I said, I have two current model players, and more than 40 discs, so at this point I've invested into the format. But to say that Blu-ray is a better spec than HD-DVD was is just ignoring reality.

I read the article. My point is that HD-DVD had this and other features designed in from the beginning. I don't care if managed copy may not have been free. The point is that it was there as part of the original spec, and should it have been enabled, it would have worked on all discs, even those already in the wild. It didn't take four revisions of the format to include features that should have been there from day one, managed copy just being one of them.

Blu-ray was released way too early. It wasn't done yet.

A great example of this is that the original 1.0 players won't play many current titles. If that isn't broken, I don't know what is.