Nied

If I don't buy an HDTV, and someone loans me 499K, I can snag a very nice ex-USAF 737: http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/1973-T-43-7...tem170201044910

Meh. It's a -200, get the HDTV instead.

IMHO the ASRAAM is kind of between the Sparrow and Sidewinder.

I was just coming back to say that!

Long range BVR engagement? With the ASRAAM missile?

Oh yes. While the ASRAAM isn't quite as maneuverable as it's contemporaries like the IRIS-T and AIM-9X it is has a much larger motor and much lower drag meaning it's a lot faster and has much longer ranged. Combine that with an extrememly sensetive seeker head (which it shares with the AIM-9X) and it's easily capable of BVR engagements. It definetly won't win any competions against an AMRAAM or Meteor but it's still BVR.

Whoa! I just found out about this today. Needless to say, we end-users in the tanker community didn't see that one coming!

Too bad about the remote-control boom station, though.

Getting up-close and personal with our receivers will be a thing of the past with the new tanker...

/edited: grammar/

To be fair that was going to happen no matter who won the competition as Boeing's proposal had a similar remote camera system. Still I don't know if I entirely trust cameras. Seems to me if you're going to be attaching two aircraft in mid air with a rigid peice of one aircraft, and the pump flamable liquid through that part, you don't want someone watching that through a security camera.

Is India interested in only 1 CV?

I'm curious since that while having 1 CV (super or not) is a boost to naval power, there will be periods where it will be down for lengthy periods. Every machine needs to go down for inspections, repairs (PMs), etc. I know US Navy CVs rotate since there are times where the boat is undergoing scheduled, lengthy rework. With as many CVs as the USN has, it's not a problem. But having only 1 CV, it will be down for certain periods of time, and you won't have its presence out there.

I seem to remember that the Indian Navy is planning to build an indigenous carrier as a follow on to the Gorshkov, so they would eventually be able to have 1 ship out on teh ocean near constantly.

SAT time!

Railfan is to Trainspotter as Trekker is to Trekkie.

Huh, I guess more people are telling 'lies' about BD. Some people appear not happy that early BD players can't properly play 1.1 or 2.0 version BD discs:

http://www.betanews.com/article/Bluray_Ear...into/1199841379

Hopefully some BD enthusiasts can email these poor saps and just tell them they're the victim of lies and just lack first hand knowledge.

I love that the BDA's excuse is that they would have released a finished format if HD-DVD didn't come out first.

They're competing with us it's not fair!

I hate to say it Nied, but it seems you're being intentionally obtuse for the sake of making a smarmy statement. Dangard's theory is more plausible than most I've read in this thread. Why bash it with an inane comment like that?

That did come off snarkier than I intended, sorry about that. The point still stands though, I find it hard to beilieve a few Best Buy or Circuit City employees who are hD-DVD die hards are going to so bungle WB's move to Blu-Ray (especially when given how clearly WB claims consumers are going for Blu-Ray).

Way to misread my post. Gold star. Won't because it makes no sense for them to do so. They're going Bluray, are under contract to support HD DVD until May 2007 and will do so but not in a way that will promote it. They no longer have a vested interest in HD DVD so will do the minimum allowed to complete their contract while promoting their day-and-date Bluray releases. Sure this screws over the current owners of HD DVD players but WB chose Bluray as the format that has the best chance to grow HDM into a mainstream product. ONE format can do this easier then two. Bluray was chosen as that format.

A choice made by WB which now has to be forced on consumers. Do you not see the difference?

neutral[/u] studio, stated that that they would make a decision to go with one format at the end of 2007 Q4 or 2008 Q1 after the holidays. Well consumers voted with their wallets and the results were not in favor of HD DVD. I'm sure if the market said HD DVD would win they'd have gone HD DVD and we'd be hearing the exact same argument except from the BD side.

Actually I've been format neutral, however given Sony's abhorent business practices I wasn't exactly hoping Blu-Ray would win (and yes I'm well aware that there are more companies than just Sony on the BDA but Sony's been the main driver behind the format). WB being the only format neutral studio is actually a good point in my favor. During the VHS Beta war both formats had full studio support and it came down to consumer choice on which one won. This time it came down to which big studio put out the most successful titles (with two big Disney blockbusters as a Blu-Ray exclusives I'm not surprised the numbers are what they were). Although my criticism would be a little more muted had HD-DVD won (I like it's lack of region encoding and extra DRM cruft) I'd still be making these complaints.

Or we can argue that WB got paid out to go Blu. Not substantiated since the head of WB denies it and no outside source has yet to verify the payout. Paramount who went HD DVD though got paid out. There were links within days of that news from NYT or Businessweek quoting insider/high level management sources screaming about the payout(can't remember which but it'd be easy to google). Consumers didn't get a choice from Paramount at all. I'm still pissed I had to get an HD-D3 just to watch Transformers, which they pulled the BD HiDef version just days before release. I guess that payoff they received back then worked.

Now who's bitter? It's interesting how WB's head worded his answer to the payoff question though, he didn't say no, his exact words were "I wish" which gives quite a bit more wiggle room. You are correct that the payoff rumours haven't been substantiated but I wouldn't exactly be shocked if they were.

How about a post from a HighDefDigest thread? They've got a better salesperson example then I did.

That's a more plausible scenario but in the end it's still about WB pushing consumers to Blu-Ray, rather then letting it die off from unpopularity as they have claimed.

It's no longer in WB best interests to release their movies on two competing formats simultaneously. For example: average consumer, who knows nothing about HD or formats wars, goes into a store to buy an HD player and HDTV to play one of their newly released movies. By chance they encounter an HD DVD diehard employee who recommends an HD DVD player for that movie. The customer goes home and is happy with his purchase until June. When he goes back to XXX store he finds out that the next WB movie he wants is no longer available in the format he just invested in. He's now angry that WB was still releasing simultaneous formats when they knew they would be dropping one format. IMO this is why they don't release simultaneously anymore. The fact that they're willing to release the movies 3 weeks later is to appease their HD DVD invested fans for the next six months and to ease their transition over to Bluray.

So WB can't do simultaneous release because some clerk at Best Buy could ruin their entire business strategy? Riiiiight.

The simple fact is that if BD really is the clear choice of consumers as WB has been saying then there really wouldn't be any issue with simultaneous release, buyers would be buying Blu and HD-DVD would be going into the bargain bin. Instead WB chose Blu-Ray for the consumer and to enforce that decision they've got to discourage buyers from purchasing HD-DVD.

Why actively promote HD DVD when they've already gone public in backing Bluray? IMO the only reason they're even slowly releasing HD DVDs now is so they won't get sued for any possible breach of contract they had(until end of May) with the HD DVD group.

No need to actively promote HD-DVD, but why actively sabotage it (as they are doing) if they're so certain that consumers have clearly chosen Blu-Ray?

Well, if the studios were all coming out for HD-DVD when there seemed to be a lot of consumer interest in Blu-ray, I'm sure I'd be suspicious of HD-DVD. But you're absolutely right, if there on was one format, we'd all embrace it and just go back to complaining about DRM in general.

Like I said, my HD-DVD collection never really took off anyway. I'm leaning toward selling my HD-DVD stuff anyway and just replacing my discs with inevitable Blu-ray equivalents, rather than stock up on clearance HD-DVDs.

And hey, maybe a Blu-ray release of Serenity will have a better transfer and the extras from the collector's edition DVD. It sucks when regular DVDs get better stuff than the HD releases.

Oddly enough the opposite was the case for me, other than the Pirates of the Caribbean movies and Pixar's catalog all the movies I've been interested in have come out on HD-DVD or both formats (Matrix, Batman, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Army of Darkness, The Big Lebowski, most of Stanley Kubrick's catalog).

Whatever, I'm still planning on picking up a dual format player, and if HD-DVD really does die I can grab those titles at fire sale prices!

This was a long time in coming but now it's officially out of the bag:

Blu-ray to offer digital copy for PSP

Ugh. This is why I was hoping Blu-Ray wouldn't win. So now I can by a Blu-Ray disc and be locked into watching that movie on a crappy portable game system, and get locked out of most of interactive content unless I have an overpriced gaming system, all brought to you by the people who gave us the rootkit.

Wonderful.

Yeah, and deny us all our fun comparing the two. Of course, they can't really "risk" even one "shoot down" of any plane by a Flanker, or congress will cut all funding. "Why are we paying for this when INDIA can shoot down our billion-dollar planes?"

I'm willing to bet that the Indian Air Force is just as unwilling to risk their relatively expensive MKIs against foreign air forces, lest their parliament start wondering why they're buying MKIs instead of more Mig-21 Bisons or upgraded Mig-23s or something.

India says they're coming to Red Flag, and bringing their MKI's. They are also making a big public fuss that the MKI's radar is so advanced, it will not be used at all, so that its frequency etc cannot be monitored by the Americans.

Yes that's aparently how things have gone in the past few international exercises. Actually the Air Force might handle things the same way the RAF did and not actually have Raptors go up against MKIs in direct combat, but have them work togethere in mixed formations (exactly what the RAF did with their Typhoons).

August 2008, Nellis AFB:

Su-30MKI vs F-22 at Red Flag.

Oh come on you've gotta have a story to go with that David!

WEll I can't speak for that new upscaler but the one in the PS3 is fried gold.

I don't have a response for this, I just wanted to highlight it because it's an awesome turn of phrase.

Also not to sound like a broken record but the PS3 also offers something that appealed to me: wifi. It's connected to my network which means any internet enabled stuff on the future BD discs will work as well as the benefit of getting firmware upgrades automatically from Sony without having to go looking for them.

That's actually one of the reasons I liked the UP5000 as opposed to LG's second gen dual format player (that and the price point), it has an ethernet jack built in. It's not quite as convenient as Wi-Fi but considering the fact that I already have a separate ethernet switch set up by my home theater stack for my Wii and satellite box it's not a big issue. Besides, I've yet to see a non-computer Wi-Fi enabled device support the encryption I use on my network anyway.

But in the end it's all about what you want and from the sound of it you've already made up your mind. I myself am skittish about purchasing the "cutting edge" before it's been out in the field for a while. I have this sad history of feeling like a beta tester when buying cutting edge stuff as most of my experiences have been negative... it taught me the hard way to be patient and wait to see how a product is going to "roll out" before blindly getting in line on launch day and then dealing with all the bugs and "teething" that the launch product has. But then again Samsung seems to have made a name for themselves lately in HD stuff. I have no doubt it's a good player... I'm just skittish about buying the new horse before I've seen it prance around the track a few times.

It's less about me having made up my mind than trying out some of the arguments I've made to myself on someone else. After all if I can't convince another person that this is a good idea I'm probably deluding myself. You do make an excellent points about trawling to see if there are any issues before buying, already I've seen some people talking about some disc incompatibility issues and lack of full support for some HD audio codecs. I don't know if those are show stoppers for me (my receiver doesn't support those codecs and none of the incompatible discs are ones I'm interested in seeing) but I'm still looking to see if something more alarming comes up. Hell, if I had made up my mind I wouldn't have posted anything here!

Thanks for all the replies about the F-16 AMRAAMs - and to think, at one point it was proposed to put Sparrows on the F-18L wingtips...!

Better than mounting them on the landing gear doors!

Personally I'd hold off until it's released and the first consumer reviews start coming in before pre-ordering it. Then again I'm paranoid with buying consumer electronics until they "prove themselves" in the market.

According to CNET it's out now with positive reviews, and the pre-release reviews have been quite positive as well.

Aparently the reason they started mounting AMRAAMs on the wingtips of F-16s (other than it looking really cool) is that the missiles had an easier time locking up a target when they were mounted as far out from the centerline as possible.

What's your guy's opinion of this. I'm thinking of blowing some of my Christmas bonus on something and this looks mighty attractive, I'm not interested in buying a PS3 just to get a Blu-Ray player or a 360 for an HD-DVD player (I'm quite happy with my PC and Wii for gaming) so this looks rather attractive, especially since the DVD upscaling is apparently quite good.

I just realized---does the lift fan cut rear visibility to zero? Isn't that "fighter design no-no #1?"

That's always been the case. Hell didn't everyone here think all F-35 variants were going to be like that for a while because the X-35 was designed that way? I don't think it will be that big of an issue since A) two of the aircraft it's meant to replace are attack aircraft (AV-8B and GR.7/9) and one of the fighters it's meant to replace (SHAR) doesn't exactly have good rear visibility itself; and B) as someone mentioned the helmet is supposed to solve the rest. The JSF helmet definetly looks like it will be really cool, allowing the pilot to see through the whole airplane with thermal sights (and it looks pretty good when modeled by hot redheads).

Because David knows that he is my batty... lol

Yeah but you're the swear word replacement bot's batty.