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10 Failed Technology Trends of 2005
mikemuch writes "ExtremeTech's Loyd Case muses on ten trends of 2005 that never panned out. He points the finger at analysts like himself for waxing glowy-eyed at technologies like the BTX form factor and the 64-bit version of Windows XP. On DRM and the Sony rootkit fiasco: 'Hint to the music publishers: It's not going to work. There have been easy workarounds to every system that's been tried, and the more stringent the copy protection, the greater the risk of having angry customers who won't buy CDs. I suggest you start investigating new business models, as the old ones ride off into the sunset.'"
Here's the list:
• The BTX Form Factor
• High-Definition Video on the PC
• High Fidelity Digital Audio
• Windows XP Professional x64 Edition
• High Definition Optical Drives
• Copy Protection for Music CDs
• iPod Competitors Emerge
• The Digital Home
• Google's Gmail Service
• Dual Graphics Cards
Spreading a rather thin article over a multitude of pages so we can be sure to see all the ads.
Win XP 64 is still not ready for prime time. The problem is drivers. To get an HP printer to work requires hacks, finding drivers is no fun at all. Since 80% of all the computers I've built in the last 6 months are AMD 64's for home use, this is a problem. If they insist on Windows, they get the 32 bit version. If there smart, they get Suse 10.0 which is a 64bit OS and works out of the box with very few driver issues, (high end video cards will always be a pain it seems).
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
He makes a jab at the iPod by talking about how larger capacity players add video capability, while ignoring fidelity by not offering lossless. While it isn't the longer-running FLAC format, the iPod does support Apple Lossless, which is just an extension of the standard MPEG4 Lossless Audio format. It works great, and my iPod Video certainly doesn't have a problem playing those as well. :P
- oZ
// i am here.
As it turns out, driver availability has been the main Achilles' heel. While graphics cards, chipsets, and audio drivers have been readily available, drivers for newer printers, webcams, and other common peripherals have been MIA.
I bought a laptop with a Turion64 processor and secured a copy of XP64 Pro from my work (the surprised tech had to dig in his desk for it). I got it up and running, but....
No drivers. No trackpad driver, no video driver, no sound, nada. Not even on the manufacturer's site.
Well, good thing Ubuntu64 works just fine.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
The original CD (ROM), and original DVD (ROM), were both excellent, universal, and well liked formats.
What happened with the writables in the DVD space is an object lesson. Unfortunately, one now being emulated by the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray folks.
Here is a link to the print version of the article, less clicks and only one ad! http://www.extremetech.com/print_article2/0,1217,a =168194,00.asp
Why do you need to send an EXE attachment? Seems like a sane thing to forbid.
Before Microsoft started allowing email to execute code, email viruses were impossible. It seems like a very good policy for google to try and restore something like the original restrictions on email to stop the virus problem. SFTP, WebDAV, etc are for transferring programs... Windows should just make them easy to use like Apple's iDisk and you can just send a URL.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
I just don't think he's been paying attention, besides, you can get a gmail address WITHOUT an invite nowadays:
https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount
The link is in my gmail sig, which I now use exclusively for email.
I don't get it.
Tell me, did you just pull that comment out of your arse, or what?
BTX is NOT Intel proprietary, it is a freely-licensable formfactor just like ATX before it (see www.formfactors.org if you don't believe me). Far from attempting to "corner the formfactor market", Intel would be delighted if AMD-based motherboards appeared in BTX.
And what's all this shite about "..the standoffs are 2cm offset from the ATX standard.."? Have you even seen a BTX board? No? Well don't go spouting such rubbish, then. BTX is an attempt to significantly improve the airflow through the system case, and does this very well indeed, by putting the hottest components at the front, right behind the ambient temperature air intake. Sheesh, I really despair. You remind me of the people who, back when ATX was introduced, whinged about that, too. In fact, I seem to recall that the complaints about ATX at the time were along the same lines.. "it's an attempt by Intel to lock us into their form-factor", "Baby AT is still perfectly good enough for me".
Now, go off and read the BTX spec, then come back when you think you can talk sensibly with the grown-ups.
No you can't:
. py?answer=27440
http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer
Does creating a Google Account give me a Gmail account?
Unfortunately not. Gmail is currently in a limited release, so you need to get invited by another Gmail user in order to sign up. If you are interested in Gmail, you may want to check the About Gmail page periodically for updates. If, on the other hand, you already have a Gmail account, you can use your Gmail username and password to sign in to your Google Account.
Fair enough, turns out you need a cell phone:
http://mail.google.com/mail/help/landing.html
Thanks for correcting me, I need to update my links now.
I don't get it.
I'm one of those early adopters / evangelists they lost. Since I've got both an AMD64 CPU and a MSDN universal subscription (via work), I gave it a spin. Several times... Drivers were OK for me - Nvidia video card and nforce 4 chipset both had pretty solid driver support. I've also got 4G of RAM, and it picked it all up without any issues. Should have been an easy sell.
Things fell apart once I started to install programs. Can't remember if it was Rational Application Developer or some other tool/program, but it had problems with the changes they made for the legacy (32-bit) install. Had my normal stack worked - LDAP, DB, App Server, and IDE just worked, I'd be pounding out more 64-bit specific C/C++ code as well. Games were also problematic. Installing stuff is all end user problems. Had things worked reasonably well in XP-64 and/or 2003-64, I would have used it for my primary Win development system and made sure things degraded nicely to Win32 platforms. To be fair, there were plenty of growing pains on the 64-bit Linux side of the fence, but those were a good bit easier to sort out. That, and many people had already pounded that road smooth before I got there. Had things also worked well with legacy applications, I would have also recommended friends and family that have AMD64 to take advantage of the *free* (plus a bit of shipping) offer Microsoft made to swap out copies of WinXP with WinXP-64 this spring. Instead, people got the same 'don't go there' speech I gave them when WinME came out.
I would not use it, nor would I recommend those I give a damn for use it. AMD absolutely nailed the legacy support, making 32-bit OS's run on a 64-bit platform. Had Microsoft been able to do the same, you would have seen a ground swell. As is, I'd say others agree WinXp-64/Win2003-64 is half baked as well.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
I think GMail checks the contents of a .zip for executables.
.inf); trying to hide the file in a .tar.gz or .zip didn't work; I ended up having to compress it then rename the executable. (Though compressing it twice, and passwording the latter might also have worked.)
At least, I had trouble mailing inform source code (.inf) because gmail thought it was a Windows registry file (also
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100% pure freak
I did the test. I did it while I was at audio engineering school. In fact the whole class did the test. through a crappy alesis amplifier and some maudio (budget) monitors the entire class new the difference between mp3 and cd and Saccd from six test pieces with a >90% recognition rate. This was done at 128 to 320 encoding.
Once you have done some critical listening it is simply not that hard to do. We did it in the classroom so its not like it was coming through some genelecs coming out of an SSL or something like that.
Whatever dude. Take a chill pill.
I can tell the difference between the two easily. Cymbals particluarly will warble and shimmer - you can hear the resolution of the limited audio bands in the top end. Bass response of mp3 at any rate is always bad, careful A/Bing should show that. Having said that I archive non-important stuff at 224kbps AAC and can detect practically no audible difference between that and master (perhaps something in the bass-end but hardly anything). Mp3 is just not as good as AAC anyway. Of course iPods can play lossless audio (ALE) with no problems. The article misrepresented the difference between audio compression and digital compression. This seems to be a hard concept for people to grasp and the author doesn't seem to either. Clue: audio compression affects the dynamics (squashing all the ampliudes to the same kind of level), digital compression reencodes the signal into freq bands but doesn't (usually) affect the dynamic range. 16bits is completely adequate for a master recording and no real difference can be noted at 24bit in any normal listening environment. What would be good though is a higher sampling rate like 96KHz. People would notice that. On 96KHz systems the filtering can be soft slowly tapering down to nothing to prevent aliasing. At 44.1KHz a 'brickwall' filter has to be used which tends to produce a constrained sound.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
What about the iMac G5? it's not a "Power User" machine and sells quite well.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Did you do the test?
.wav and .mp3 consistently at 256 KBps CBR (encoded with LAME). Cymbals started to sound "swishy" -- they start to pick up unpleasant patterns.
.wav and MP3 at a lower bitrate (but I don't remember the precise results, and in any case, that wasn't a double-blind test).
A double-blind test, yes (A friend ran a program that randomly played a clip, then I called out what I thought, and then he told me what it was). I had decent headphones, but nothing amazing from an audiophile standpoint (about $70, Radio Shack, closed circumaural), and I'm certainly no musician. The test clip I was using had drums and cymbals. I could tell the difference between
With Vorbis, I could tell the difference all the way up to the maximum quality setting (to my surprise). With Vorbis, cymbals didn't sound different (to my ear, at least), but percussion sounds slightly different -- a little bit flatter, maybe.
I still preferred Vorbis, because the MP3 artifacts sounded *unpleasant* -- swishy cymbals sound bad -- but Vorbis's artifacts don't.
Note that I was using CBR with LAME (because at the time I was interested in CBR results), though that isn't what I'd use in real life.
When listening on my little computer multimedia speakers (about $25) I've found that I can't distinguish between
Note that this was two years or so ago, and both encoders may have improved since then.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.