Wow, lots of snark, but I don't see any posts to the actual answer yet...

Embarassing, but not catastrophic. A bug relate to the last day of a leap year, as was speculated above. Will resolve itself automatically on Jan 1st.

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Q: Why is this issue isolated to the Zune 30 device?

It is a bug in a driver for a part that is only used in the Zune 30 device.

Q: What fixes or patches are you putting in place to resolve this situation?

This situation should remedy itself over the next 24 hours as the time flips to January 1st.

Q: What's the timeline on a fix?

The issue Zune 30GB customers are experiencing today will self resolve as time changes to January 1.

Q: Why did this occur at precisely 12:01 a.m. on December 31, 2008?

There is a bug in the internal clock driver causing the 30GB device to improperly handle the last day of a leap year.

Q: What is Zune doing to fix this issue?

The issue should resolve itself.

Q: Are you sure that this won't happen to all 80, 120 or other flash devices?

This issue is related to a part that is only used in Zune 30 devices.

Q: How many 30GB Zune devices are affected?

All 30GB devices are potentially affected.

Q: Will you update the firmware before the next leap year (2012)?

Yes.

Theres a bunch of different streams it switches between dynamically. Which one you get can be limited by:

Available bandwidth (we'll send as many bits as won't cause buffering)
Available CPU speed (we don't want you to drop a bunch of frames)
Resolution of the media player (no need to send 1280x720 when the video window is scaled down to 320x240)

All of the above can be switched every couple of seconds, so if you have a heavy CPU process in the background, the data rate will drop during it, and then go back up again after.

To make sure you're not blocked by frame size, you can alt-Enter in IE to take the browser full screen.

Also, to see your current stream, mouse over on the little horizontal bars in the lower right corner.

Lastly, bear in mind this is a pre-beta here. We'll have big improvements by the time it goes 1.0 next year.

Is there a non-targeted form of tax collection you're offering as an alternative :).

Taxation is necessary to pay for public good and services that would otherwise be unfunded. Taxation is also appropriate to fund activities that are more efficiently done by government than without it.

Given that, there's a couple of different axes to figure out: what's the minimum level of taxation to provide a balanced budget over the business cycle with appropriate spending (governments should run a surplus in good times and a deficit in bad times), and what's the right combination of taxes that provides that revenue with a minimal amount of friction to economic growth and other goals. That's why cigarette and gas taxes are a good thing, as they provide revenue while discouraging behavior we want to discourage. If you need to get revenue from somewhere, that's a whole lot better than many alternatives.

An example of a really bad tax would be a gross receipts tax, since it's painful to administer, and hugely distorting as it massively rewards vertical integration, driving out smaller innovative companies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_receipts_tax

Inheritance taxes are another good one. Lots of people seem to hate them for some reason, but it seems like the dead will find being taxes more than most, and enabling the decedents of wealth to remain wealthy without any economic input of their own for generations seems the wrong incentive for future wealth generation.

Anyway, there's often a knee-jerk attitude that all taxes are equally bad, and no tax should ever be added or raised, even to offset lowering other taxes. But we need taxes, and there's differences between them, so we should develop as optimal a tax system as we can.

Oh, the codec side of things was relatively minor. We developed VC-1 and related tools, but have a patent position and a lot of involvement in H.264 as well, and that side of things always supported VC-1 on BD as well.

The bigger effort and team was focused on building the interactive players for the Toshiba and Xbox 360 players. The whole HDi layer was jointly developed by Microsoft and Disney.

As a XML markup + scripting code-behind, it was a lot like a subset of Silverlight, actually.

I worked on the HD DVD team back then, and we manifestly wanted HD DVD to win, and we invested quite a lot in it. However, we didn't bet the Xbox 360 on it the way Sony bet the PS3 on BD (which appears to have been a good choice from the console business perspective). In the end, Sony was willing pay to whatever cost it took for BD to win.

Our interest was much more in delivering great video experiences than in which particular substrate thickness of polycarbonate imaged with a blue-violet laser won in the end.

This is a sample of what I've been working on these days:

http://smoothhd.com/

Still pre-beta, but I don't think that optical media will be the hard or the interesting part of HD video delivery much longer.

As an Oregon resident, I'll state my preference for a higher gas tax for just these reasons.

A gas tax simply aligns with the public externalities of motor vehicles a lot better than just milage, since bigger cars cause more wear. There's no incentive for buying less damaging vehicles this way. Also, gas taxes are easy to collect, while this is more complex. Net revenue will be reduced by the cost of monitoring, plus there's the initial capital cost of getting the whole thing set up.

And while all taxes cause some distortion in the market, it's best to pick ones where the distortion is the least painful or disruptive, or otherwise aligned with society goals. Reducing petroleum imports and carbon emissions are both clear public goals. If consumption is going down, the tax is doing what it should, and so the best thing to do is to raise it to maintain the incentive to get smaller, more efficient vehicles that we saw last summer.

Since governments at all levels need funding, higher gas taxes seem like one of the best options. And a high tax sets a minimum on gas prices, and so a floor for how inefficient a vehicle people are willing to take. A $0.50 gallon tax, split evenly between states and the fed, would pay for a whole lot of economic recovery, give a stable floor to the value of alternative energy, and still be way cheaper than it was a few months ago. Right now, we're seeing state governments cutting services and payroll at the very time we need an expansionist policy nationwide to avoid deflation. The net effect is the federal government will need to borrow and spent even more money to balance out the state cuts before we can even start climbing out of the hole (if state payrolls drop by 500K, that means the fed employment target from the stimulus plan needs to be 3.5M, not 3.0M, to have the same effect).

I'd much rather see our governor recommend raising the gas tax by $0.25, drop this milage/GPS nonsense, and restore funding to education, get the new I-5 bridge started, etcetera.

Guttmann's article hasn't ever been useful for anyone as far as I can tell. Reading it again, I can't think of a single falsifiable prediction he's made that hasn't been falsified :).

I know it's been quoted and linked widely for years, but I can't see any of the predictions of problems he made pre Vista launch that haven't been disproven by reality since.

Get Vista running on a DX9 capable machine.

Open up a reasonable number of apps, with windows scattered around the screen. For extra credit, have them being actually animating something (video playback, whatever)

Open up Task Manager and look at the CPU utilization bars.

Turn off Aero Glass

Grab a big foreground window and shake it like crazy over your other windows.

Turn Aero Glass back on

Repeat shake

Note that without Aero Glass you get a huge CPU spike due to all the rendering that doesn't get offloaded to the CPU, while with Aero Glass you won't see a similar spike in CPU activity.

Yep. H.264 met its goals well. It's just that high performance software playback wasn't one of them :). Baseline profile isn't too bad, but Main and HIgh allow the CABAC entropy coding mode, which isn't amenable to either parallel or GPU processing (unless the video was encoded as independent slices).

I'm biased, but I like VC-1's mix of performance and quality. It's about half the complexity of H.264 (and hence about twice that of MPEG-2), but is within 15% of the bandwidth efficiency of H.264 even at very low bitrates (and converges at moderate-high bitrates).

Well, hard to speculate without you saying what your location is :).

I've worked with digital content distribution in a variety of markets.

But Hulu absolutely needs to do georestriction, since all content licensing contracts with the studios are for specific regions (USA for Hulu, of course). And don't blame this on the studios themselves; the movies are financed by partners in different region pre-paying for exclusive rights. So in many cases the USA-based studios don't have any right to distribute that content in other territories. Hulu's contracts with the studios absolutely will have specific requirements for how they handle georestrictions.

The TV networks took a good 10-15 years to work out the contracts to let them distribute current shows on the internet. In the past, content was created by indepdendent production companies, who licensed it for first broadcast to a network, who then distributed it to their corporate-owned and independently-owned affiliates, and then after a few years the original production company sold them into syndication directly. Now we see the networks funding their programming entirely or in partnership, so they're able to get the rights determined in advance. But it can be a big legal quagmire for older shows created before the current market existed.

It's frustrating how long it's taking, certainly, but these are thorny problems that require a whole lot of stuff to be renegotiated. And it's not just the video; music rights to popular music on the soundtracks can also be a huge challenge as well.

Anyone know what the Wii hardware is capable of for a video experience. As a SD device, it could do 480p60 or 576p50 at best. But the processor is basically a semi souped-up 800 MHz G3, right? My old 800 MHz G4 couldn't play back 480p30 High Profile H.264 and the AltiVec SIMD that the Wii lacks is a big help for that.

Perhaps the ATI video card inherited some DXVA features?

There's some DVD playback, so we know MPEG-2 works, and I could imagine VC-1 or MPEG-4 part 2 (divx/xvid) working for 480p24. But unless there's some dedicated hardware in there, H.264 Main or High profile seems pretty unlikely.

While there's certainly no lack of FPS games on Xbox 360, there's also plenty of accessible family-friendly titles. We've been having great fun over the holidays with the new Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts. The platforming aspects don't appeal to all of the older set, but everyone really gets into the vehicle design aspect of it. Particularly the middle-aged and up men who grew up working on cars.

Rock Band/RB2 is also a big hit, and the singing position is great for those intimidated by controllers.

Xbox.com shows 347 Xbox 360 games rated "E (Everyone)" compared to 181 "M (Mature)" FWIW. If you include the 91 "E10" games, that makes more than twice as many family-friendly titles as Mature.

Yep, that's a whole different workflow when you can do it all together.

Kudos if you can do all steps of the process well. That can result in some absolutely incredible work when a single vision can inform the whole process.

Myself, I've done enough graphic design (production manager for the college student paper, that kind of thing) to realize I'm simply not that good at the aesthetic aspects of it. I was happy to have my words in the hands of a professional.

Hmm. I'm quite sure that Word was capable of doing the above at least as far back as Word '97, when going from .doc to .doc. Sometimes "Smart Quotes" had to be fiddled with to make sure it didn't get autocorrected as it was typed, but that was pretty easy to do. Certainly the Mac made it pretty easy to insert any character in a font like that; I hadnt used WinWord much back then.

My book was a few years later than that, but I definitely used Word and defintely had some text formatting complexities that went fine in the workflow. For example, in video Y' means luma, but Y with a closed single quote doesn't mean anything.

Perhaps your publishers were running some kind of autocorrect macro that messed things up or something (which would be a fine argument for your "never work with them again" plan the second time it happened).

But I don't think Word itself was the problem.

I wrote a book a few years ago.

That was in Office v.X on an old PowerBook (I even started in the original "can't print" beta of Word v.X).

http://www.amazon.com/Compression-Great-Digital-Video-Techniques/dp/157820111X/

And I've got a couple due in 2009 for different publishers, so this has been much on my mind.

Based on a lot of the other comments, people are really focusing on the formatting aspects of the workflow: Latex, FrameMaker and all that. But if you're writing a book for a standard tech publisher, you likely will never even have a direct conversation with whomever does the layout. You turn in structured text and figured to an editor, when then passes it off to layout after editing.

And if it's any kind of a series, they'll be doing formatting according to a well defined template and style that'll map to the styles in the document you give them.

So, the actual workflow is that you get a Word template, and write everything in there. The key thing is to follow the Styles religiously - every paragraph should have one as you type it. Think writing in old school HTML, or XML to someone else's Schema.

Also, try not to even think about formatting; there's no saying what goes on what page based on Page Preview in Word or alternative. If you want a new section, use a section break. This is object-oriented writing, where you're really trying to get the content into the right structure for easy processing later on.

I recommend working in Outline and Normal/Draft mode only, since that's where you see the structure of what you're doing. Personally, I'm a born again believer in outlining. I outline a chapter, and then jump in and write the part of it I'm thinking about at the moment. With the outline there, it's easy to realize I need to introduce a concept earlier in the chapter and then jump there and do a quick sketch of it, since the earlier section already exists in the structure. The act of writing an outline also helps define all the stuff you didn't know you needed to figure out.

But don't be a slave to the outline as it exists; structure can need editing as much as prose. Don't be afraid of moving sections and chapters around as helps you communicate better. That's a lot easier to do early in the process.