Bill Gates, Entertainment God?

ppgreat sent in a wired story about the home of the future sort of story discussing A/V in a Microsoft Media Player 9 future. As seems to always be the case, there's a lot of cool stuff in there, but more than a few eyebrow raises.

Artisan's Terminator 2: Extreme Edition

[NixterAg]

In case you weren't aware, Artisan just released a remastered version of Terminator 2 and has bundled in what it calls the "Extreme Edition". On the second disk, there is a pseudo high-def version of the movie (720P) in WM9 format. It takes a beast of a PC to play it, but it is really, really cool. If you have a good HTPC, you can watch a high-def version of a great movie on your high-def TV. The best thing is that it fits on one DVD with no problem. Sure, it might compress the video a little too much and the sound isn't full-bitrate DTS or DD-EX, but it's at least a taste of what's to come when a HD-DVD standard emerges.

It doesn't matter to me whether it's Microsoft, Apple, or whoever that's doing it. I'm just glad someone is trying to move us forward.

Microsoft haters: this post does not address the fears you have of whether or not Microsoft will take over the living room and it's not meant to.

Smart Ovens

[maggard]

That's one piece of home automation I'd appreciate:

Run a chicken pot pie beneath the barcode reader on the microwave and it sets the time and temperature.

It'd be great to have a barcode describing a pre-made food's heating requirements. Something that the oven (microwave, conventional or convection) could apply against it's own known characteristics and produce the best results that can be expected.

No more "9 minutes in a low-wattage microwave, 5 in a powerful one, rotate 1/4 turn after 3 minutes" just a high density coding letting the oven set itself. Heck if developers were clever the coding could even be stenographically embedded in the packaging artwork so it'd be invisible to the consumer, not distract from the pretty pictures.

Put a self-setting item into a smart-oven, it reads off the directions and 4 cycles and however many minutes later your whatsits comes out perfectly cooked.

Re:Bill don't make any more Win Medias...

[cayenne8]

Yep...but, do you seriously think you'll have the option to turn it off in the future? By definition, DRM cannot be in the control of the consumer for it to work...for the media companies....just food for thought...

Technology sometimes is ahead of praticality

[UnknowingFool]

Instead of traditional locks, there's an electronic kiosk with a touchscreen, a biometric scanner, and a smartcard reader.

In the event of a power failure, you're stuck in the house with no air, heat, or way out.

. . . lights dim, and a recipe shines down from above on your black Corian countertop as the oven begins to preheat.

Just like MS to naturally assume it knows the best course of action for me. I would hope that the house would ask me to do these things just in case I change my mind.

Powered by four PCs running Windows XP, it features dozens of networked monitors, Xboxes, appliances, and consumer electronics devices scattered everywhere.

Exactly how much is all this stuff going to cost me? Why do I need 4 computers? Is there failover/backup capability? I would think 1 main and 1 backup ought to be able to run the house.

Due to limits imposed by the operating system, there's no way to play its stored shows on another screen or TV.

Let me get this straight: I can play copyrighted music in any room but not play free, broadcast TV from any monitor?

Like it or not, the path Microsoft takes will determine the future of digital media - thanks to its dominant desktop market share, the company's actions set the pace for the industry.

That is, until you buy a new washer and dryer and the whole house shuts down until you can prove to MS that you haven't moved houses.

God damn it... clippy have escaped into my kitchen

[nickgrieve]

Break out the food processor and some baking material; your home recognizes RFID tags in the bag of flour and offers to help. "How about focaccia?"

Oh for gods sake... I see that in Bills vision of the future we are all incompetent invalids. Come on... I like living my life, I like, you know... doing things the old way. It gives me pleasure to the little things. I know it all comes down to choice, do what make you happy. But I still see Bills vision of the future as somewhat, soulless.

Re:You've got to hand it to him

[IamTheRealMike]

Without the dirt, money-grubbing, and sliminess that MS stands for, we probably wouldn't be nearly as far along on the development curve

Maybe - but really, which would you prefer? I for one would rather be a few years behind the technology curve and live in the kind of society that encourages sharing, than having the technology we have available today but having all the associated garbage from MS, SCO and the like.

Oh, yeah, Gates is smart. Got to hand it to him. He's not stupid. But that, by itself, is meaningless. I don't perceive being smart as being any more worthy of respect than being attractive, or being wealthy, or being fluent in 8 languages. It's what you do with those assets that matters. Gates hasn't used his smartness well. He used it selfishly in fact. Though I appreciate his business acumen, I don't think I could ever respect him for it.

Re:You've got to hand it to him

[nhavar]

You know you've got to wonder about an alternate reality where Bill Gates and MS didn't exist. Would it be this utopian society where software was cheap and there were plenty of interoperable products and platforms? Or would software be just as expensive, we'd still be arguing PC/MAC, and someone else would be standing there in the void maybe Jobs or Ellison or maybe IBM would be the one we'd be complaining about. Or would it be even worse, more expensive software, more fragmentation and just a bunch of small time jack asses running around being pains in the ass to the community.

Today who made their carreer because of Microsoft? In the absence of MS who would rise to power? I shudder to think if it were Ellison in Gates position or Steve Case....

It reminds me of a story I read where someone travels back in time to avert a disaster and each time a bigger disaster results from the intervention until finally the person goes back and allows the first disaster to take place. Lesser of two evils I guess.

MPAA's attitude

[H0NGK0NGPH00EY]

Did anybody else get this far down in the article?

Scott Dinsdale, an executive VP of the Motion Picture Association of America, told the crowd that Microsoft and HP were using the Media Center Edition to "build a business on someone else's back." Asked to summarize Hollywood's attitude toward the PC, he said, "You don't screw with me, I won't screw with you. Don't play a movie on a PC ever again, and I won't say a word."

Just thought I would point it out, for those too busy to read all the way through.

Not so fast

[golrien]

Problem #1: it won't work because they're a bunch of incompetant clowns. Sorry, but MS have proved themselves again and again to be incapable of making something that works. I don't trust them with a £1,000 computer, let alone a £150,000 house. I'm sure everyone here has had Windows crash for them at least once. Losing a letter to the bank is a pain in the ass, but imagine losing a letter from the bank because your mail server's disk crashed (okay, not a MS-specific problem, but it's a valid concern), or not being able to eat because your oven got a broken barcode and decided it was a fridge? And just *think* of the potential for viruses.

Opportunity to Market

[endofoctober]

The part Gates grasps really well is that such a house with all its 'wiredness' will give him the opportunity to sell marketing space to others. Brilliant as bu$ine$$ strategies go. What he seems to miss, though, is that there are a lot of people who consider their homes a refuge from that "adbot" world. Frankly, I don't want to be marketed to 24/7, and will not live in a home that isn't safe from pop-up ads on my microwave for Swanson dinners et al. I'm selective about what marketing channels I allow in my home, and I'm far from ready to relinquish that control, especially to a monopolistic company like Microsoft.

Re:You've got to hand it to him

[HiThere]

Based upon my memories of the days before MS...

Say that Digital Research had gotten the bid for DOS. No other inserted change needed.

Then computer software companies would consider Apple, and Apple pretty much like the current one, but about 10 times a large, to be the evil monster. And they'd be right. GNU would still have been built, and so would Linux, but they wouldn't have been forced along quite as quickly. The PC Clones might still be the major alterntive to Apple, but perhaps not. Commodore might have done that. Or some development of the S100. It's not clear that without MS IBM would have lost control of the PC clones. But if it hadn't, the PC clones would never have been important. IBM was still extremely mainframe centric. But there were many small, innovative, and rapidly growing alternative computer systems. E.g., if the rate of change had been just slightly slower at that point, Molecular Computer might have developed their workgroup computers as a successful 16 bit system. (And slightly here doesn't mean much at all!)

Or the Amiga might have been able to break out of the animation industry and into the general market, and give Apple legitimate competition. Or Commodore might have done that.

Mr. Gates has done us no favors at all by existing, or by not becoming a stock broker. Not now, and not then. Without him the world would be, and would have been, a better place.

l33t? Not as bad as Big Brother Gates.

[Erris]

I don't trust M$ to browse, I'd never ever trust it with running my house. The wired story, with a little imagination, is an awful nightmare.

nstead of traditional locks, there's an electronic kiosk with a touchscreen...

It's blue with a message for you "Explorer has caused an exception fault ..." This might be because your taxes or some other bill was late or deemed incorrect.

The lights and heat automatically fine-tune to your preference the moment you cross the threshold.

A cross licensing agreement with your power company insures maximum profits for them rather than comfort for you.

A screen on the wall in the foyer reads your email aloud as you hang your coat.

It's hotmail telling you about penis enlargers over and over again. You have 137 new messages since leaving work.

Run a chicken pot pie beneath the barcode reader on the microwave and it sets the time and temperature. Break out the food processor and some baking material; your home recognizes RFID tags in the bag of flour and offers to help. "How about ...

The next sentence is a paid comercial advertisment for food you don't want to buy. What you eat is sold to the highest bidder by Microsoft and they irritate you out loud trying to get you to buy something different. You also had to repeat the word "delete" several times for this while you were hanging your coat and walking to the kitchen before you gave up in disgust and told the computer to "shut up". The computer asked if you were sure.

And digital media is everywhere. "Suspicious Minds" greets you in full-home surround sound. The family's collective music library is accessible from any room, on every device.

True, any "trusted" device will be able to talk to the media server and it will be able to display exactly what M$, RIAA and the MPAA want you to see. Once the hardware lock in is achieved, the eHome experiment will be obsolete. You will only be able to run one version of Word that you pay for by the minute. Options like search and replace costs extra. No material deemed "copyright infringing", including your own media, will work. All your old movies, songs and pictures are now "obsolete" and unnecessary because you can rent anything you want that the media cartels feel it's profitable to make available. It will look very much like cable TV and broadcast radio. Equipment that records music that can be played on such a system will be tightly controled through patenets, copyrights and laws like the DMCA.

Oh yeah, your house will be listening to you. The listening devices can cancel the noises the system creates so that your voices can be recorded loud and clear. Carnivore was just the beginning, though it will still be searching your email, search fees added to your taxes, of course.