The problem with most players is probably not their random-generators, but the fact that they ranomize every song-change, not keeping track of what has already been played. This leads to the probability of hearing one or more songs several times before all the songs in the player has been played. What needs doing is ranomizing a playlist and then keeping to that until all songs has been played, then randomizing a new one. Tadaa! No song is played twice in one pass! =)
Most probably tons of graphics, video and audio. If it's simply code, a rough estimate would be that they'd need 6 - 10 times the amount of code, compared to XP. This seems ridiculous. On the other hand, if they've been adding even more useless animations while copying, searching, configuring, booting for the first time, etc, and all this at higher framerate, with more colours and higher resolution...
Eyecandy is what makes XP and OSX as large as they are, and eyecandy-centric linux-distributions are generally much larger than more productivity-centric ones... Since MS probably has included high-res eyecandy in even the most obscure, used once every century configuration-wizards, I'd guess this is where most of the bloat comes from.
Ever since Win95, I've wished for a "Install without animations/audiofiles" option... With every new version, it becomes even more attractive to find an alternative installation-solution.
That's the same as saying that you've got a 200Mbps ethernet-port in you computer. Somewhere in the specifications there should be stated if it's a async, full- or half-duplex line
I only subscribe to 4Mbps but it's full-duplex, so I can use 4 up and 4 down at the same time. Those who subscribe to more than that (there's 6, 8 and 10Mbps subscriptions too) are getting a bit screwed though. The ethernet-ports that we connect to are configured for 10Mbps half-duplex...
xDSL is almost always async though and if the ratios are too skewed, you might not be able to use all your down-bandwidth.
---I really think *both* HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are doomed. Aside from better picture quality, the reason to upgrade is...
This is only true in a video-player.
In a game-console or a personal-computer, you also get the benefit or more space. A BD can hold 25 or 50GB and a HD-DVD 15 or 30GB and apparently even more layers are possible once the formats have matured. Since PC, PS2 and XBOX-games have started to require more than one DVD, this is a benefit for games. If I want to make a backup of everything I want to keep in the event of a HD-failure, it'd take ~20 DVD's and I'd want at least two copies of that...
The saying is true. Data is a gas and even multi-layer BD-discs will have to be replaced by something with larger capacity in the future.
---HD-DVD/Blu-Ray will have all the widespread adoption and universal acceptance that the post-CD physical audio media has had : Limited use only by the most discriminating users.
Most post-CD media has had *worse* quality than CD's or high quality MP3 (eg. MD, DCC), been sequential (DAT, DCC) or been expensive and almost impossible to purchase with prerecorded audio (DAT, DCC, Audio-DVD and, to some extent, MD) Also, most music-publishers wasn't hell-bent on pushing the consumers onto any of the new media, being happy with the "dirt-cheap to produce" cd's. In this case, the giants of movie-publishing *are* hell-bent on pushing us away from the cracked DVD-format onto any other media, as long as it has a strong enough DRM. Expect to se a radical drop in availible DVD-releases once the number of sold HD-DVD- or BD-units has reached a critical mass.
All new technologies are expensive at launch, so we'll have to wait a few years to see where the cost will land. The biggest problem facing HD-DVD and BD, once their price has droped, is the fact that there is two virtually equivalent formats on the market. As long as they are invisible to the mass-consumer, the user-hostile DRM-schemes will only be a issue with informed consumers, and even those will have to cave in sooner or later if they want o be able to buy the latest movies...
How is that any different than a standard gas tank?
A standard gas tank isn't filled with billions of possibly breathable glass/palladium particles. Try breathing glass-dust for a while, that's possibly what you, the rescueworkers, the paramedics and everyone else close by would be doing after an accident with a tank-breach. With most other fules, your main worry would be fire and as soon as you're away from the vehicle, you're safe. With this stuff, you'd possibly crawl unharmed out of your vehicle and then suffocate on glass spheres or maybe get lung fibrosis for the rest of your life. Unless, of course, the glass/palladium-spheres are harmless to the lungs or too heavy to become airborne. I don't know. But anyway, it probably would be one hell of a job to get rid of them if there's a spill.
"but my prefered method of gaming is a complicated Flight Simulator flying with other people on the internet, communicating to them via VoIP."
If you want that, you probably want a PC, not a game-console and thus the whole "Sometimes incompatible consoles vs. Always compatible consoles" argument is irrelevant. But even if you do want to play advanced Flight-sims on your console, wouldn't it be simpler to *not* have to check for compatability before buying a game?
If there's an NDA, the person who gave access to the service-manual to SomethingAwful _could_ face legal problems, depending on the NDA. But this isn't something that should effect SomethingAwful
It could still be a copyright infringement, though.
I would assume that apple own the rights to their service-manuals. You probably have to pay for them, like you have to with lots of other service-manuals. I don't know US law regarding this since I'm not a US citizen, but it'd make sense if copying small parts of a copyrighted work is ok for private use. It'd also make sense if it isn't ok to publish parts of a copyrighted work without the copyright-holders permission. Or at least not against the expressed will of the copyright-holder. But, of course, I'm just speculating here, since I don't know the ins and outs of US copyright law...
I'd rather say that it's like car manufacturers producing a car that can only be operated by _one_ driver and that could only run on roads approved by the oil-companies.
"At least it's better then Apple's Firewall (turned off by default, PITA to block outbound traffic)."
Not to mention that most linux-distributions comes without any easily appliable firewall-scripts pre-defined. Learning how to create a secure firewall is not a trivial task for a new user. Hell, it's not even trivial for relatively experienced users. It certainly requires quite a bit of "technical knowledge".
What Microsoft really should do, though, is to let the installer _ask_ what kind of firewall to install.
And while they're at it, let the installer ask for a user skill-level and act accordingly.
Novice: As today... Ask nothing. Install hundreds of MB of useless junk with weird settings. Moderate: Let the user choose, say, not to install Moviemaker, MSN, etc and to choose level of firewall and such. Expert: Let the user choose exactly what to install or not, except for stuff that is critical for the OS to boot and run applications.
One would guess, though, that an eventual commercial mass-market version version would be a bit more slim and have over-all a more polished design than a university research-prototype. ^_^
I'd say that the cost of the actual hardware isn't that big a deal. Unless something really wierd happesn to the console-industry, the pricetag will soon drop. The pricetag on the games will not...
If you buy a console for yourself, you'd be buying games that appeal to you. In my own case that would probably mean between zero and two games per year. (I'm picky. Most games are crap.) Even if you're a big-spender in games, you're only buying games for one person.
In a family, the kids probably won't want the same games as each other, the parents won't want the same games as each other and the kids and parents won't want the same games either.
So you'd be buying a lot of games...
It's the games that have to get affordable if the console is to be family friendly.
TFA is wrong. The actual press-release says 20 megabytes per second. The author of the article is yet another person who have problems with bits and bytes.
Unfortunately, the rule "Storage transfer-rate = Bytes per second, Communication transfer-rate = Bits per second" isn't always true. It's usually a pretty good hint at what unit to use though.
The cpu might not have to do all the work by itself, but the system is still affected. The cpu still has to feed data to the gpu, the busses are stressed alot more than they would be without the eye-candy, the OS-installation is larger than without and last, but definately not least, the gpu can never run in low-power mode, resulting in a hotter laptop with lower battery-time.
And if you have one of the earlier macs that's compatible with OSX, the graphics-hardware isn't really up to the job.
Re:A lot less than meets the eye
on
Region-free PS3
·
· Score: 1
PAL/NTSC will still be significant, unless they release the PS3 *really* late. It will be many years before the majority of the customers have high-definition tv's.
Re:A lot less than meets the eye
on
Region-free PS3
·
· Score: 1
And there are more than a few ps2-games that let you choose pal/ntsc, first booting into the default mode of your ps2. Since pal has higher resolution than ntsc, bitmaps created for ntsc will fit on a pal-screen. Thus you can take any ntsc-game, even 2D ones, and just set the display to pal and everything will work. Unless you've been an idiot and used the refreshrate as a timer.
In the light of these news, I'd say that it would be lunacy for any game-producer to not make their ps3-games both pal and ntsc compatible from the start.
Cool. I didn't bother to research the subject before my comment. I simply remembered how hard it was to bind separate shells to a specific gfx-card/keyboard when I last tried it in 1998 and assumed that it would be even harder to bind something to a specific monitor on a specific card. Never tried it in X though...
Does this work on one gfx-card with several monitors attached too? Just wondering since the "it's trivial" comment of jericho4.0 was about a four 2 x monitor card setup resulting in eight virtual workstations.
You forgot to mention that in windows, there normally are no functions for supporting eight keyboards/mouses and locking them to a specific screen and logging on as a different user per screen on a multi-head setup. Windows simply isn't a multi user OS. I haven't tried it, but I'd wager you'd have to go through hell and back to get this working in linux too.
But my guess is that he didn't want to use the one eight-header as a multi-user computer but instead have eight monitors per workstation at the lab.
At the lab where I work we have one workstation with four monitors and a couple of single-monitor setups in the controll-room, and there are real benifits to having that much extra space to work with.
"Now if only they could do something about those pesky power cords..."
Easy. Buy a few containers of surplus batteries cheap. ^_^
Seriously, though, it should be possible to create a open standard em-charge desk-cover that would power anything you put on it, like monitor, mouse, keyboard, printer, mobilephone, portable harddrive, etc. Not exactly cordless, but at least it's only one cord for everything ontop of the desk. There already exist such pads, but they are proprietary and small.
Well, it may not be as hard a task as it may seem at first glance. Swedens entire population is lower than that of a internationally big city. One problem is that we are scattered thoughout a very large area, which means that alot of energy gets lost during transportation. Changing all the scattered, oil-heated houses into electrical-heating would require a massive rebuilding of the powergrid. Cities are mostly centrally heated anyway, but then there's also the problem of how people are going to afford changing their cars to non-fossil-fuled in 14 years...
OSX will most probably only have driver-support for the hardware in apples own computers, so you'd have to get a laptop/desktop with exactlly the same specs for it to have even a chance at working. Windows and Linux have support for all kinds of hardware, so they're much more likely to run on apple hardware than OSX is to run on generic hardware.
Wouldn't the analogy for buying apple hardware and then running windows be the other way around? =) Buying a BMW and then changing the "user interface", like steeringwheel, seats, etc, to that from an escort, still keeping the "hardware" like chassie, engine and exteriour look. And I would also argue against using an escort in the analogy, since if you choose the right model, it's one hell of a car.
But anyway, I don't think people will buy a intel mac just to run windows. They'll probably buy it to be able to run OSX but install windows and/or linux on a second partition to use software that's exclusively availible for those platforms. If you're outside the graphics, publishing or music industries, OSX is a bit starved in the software department. I sold my Powerbook G4 because I couldn't run more than a third of the software I needed to use it in school-related work, so it was a useless piece of titanium alloy standing on a shelf most of the time.
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Well, an elevator *could* kill you, say, if you're standing in an elevator-shaft. =)
Wouldn't do much good since neither the US nor the "Bad Guys(TM)" would sign it.
Just take a look at the land-mine ban.
I meant that most portable mp3-players, as in ipods and other mp3-gadgets, doesn't seem to do this.
The problem with most players is probably not their random-generators, but the fact that they ranomize every song-change, not keeping track of what has already been played.
This leads to the probability of hearing one or more songs several times before all the songs in the player has been played.
What needs doing is ranomizing a playlist and then keeping to that until all songs has been played, then randomizing a new one.
Tadaa! No song is played twice in one pass! =)
And, yes, there are players that do this.
...gives a new meaning to SWAT-team, doesn't it. ^_^
"OMG! Spy-cams!"
"Call in the SWAT-team!"
Just what exactly is adding the bloat?
Most probably tons of graphics, video and audio.
If it's simply code, a rough estimate would be that they'd need 6 - 10 times the amount of code, compared to XP. This seems ridiculous.
On the other hand, if they've been adding even more useless animations while copying, searching, configuring, booting for the first time, etc, and all this at higher framerate, with more colours and higher resolution...
Eyecandy is what makes XP and OSX as large as they are, and eyecandy-centric linux-distributions are generally much larger than more productivity-centric ones...
Since MS probably has included high-res eyecandy in even the most obscure, used once every century configuration-wizards, I'd guess this is where most of the bloat comes from.
Ever since Win95, I've wished for a "Install without animations/audiofiles" option... With every new version, it becomes even more attractive to find an alternative installation-solution.
That's the same as saying that you've got a 200Mbps ethernet-port in you computer.
Somewhere in the specifications there should be stated if it's a async, full- or half-duplex line
I only subscribe to 4Mbps but it's full-duplex, so I can use 4 up and 4 down at the same time.
Those who subscribe to more than that (there's 6, 8 and 10Mbps subscriptions too) are getting a bit screwed though.
The ethernet-ports that we connect to are configured for 10Mbps half-duplex...
xDSL is almost always async though and if the ratios are too skewed, you might not be able to use all your down-bandwidth.
I'm a bastard. ^_^
---I really think *both* HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are doomed. Aside from better picture quality, the reason to upgrade is...
This is only true in a video-player.
In a game-console or a personal-computer, you also get the benefit or more space.
A BD can hold 25 or 50GB and a HD-DVD 15 or 30GB and apparently even more layers are possible once the formats have matured.
Since PC, PS2 and XBOX-games have started to require more than one DVD, this is a benefit for games.
If I want to make a backup of everything I want to keep in the event of a HD-failure, it'd take ~20 DVD's and I'd want at least two copies of that...
The saying is true. Data is a gas and even multi-layer BD-discs will have to be replaced by something with larger capacity in the future.
---HD-DVD/Blu-Ray will have all the widespread adoption and universal acceptance that the post-CD physical audio media has had : Limited use only by the most discriminating users.
Most post-CD media has had *worse* quality than CD's or high quality MP3 (eg. MD, DCC), been sequential (DAT, DCC) or been expensive and almost impossible to purchase with prerecorded audio (DAT, DCC, Audio-DVD and, to some extent, MD)
Also, most music-publishers wasn't hell-bent on pushing the consumers onto any of the new media, being happy with the "dirt-cheap to produce" cd's.
In this case, the giants of movie-publishing *are* hell-bent on pushing us away from the cracked DVD-format onto any other media, as long as it has a strong enough DRM.
Expect to se a radical drop in availible DVD-releases once the number of sold HD-DVD- or BD-units has reached a critical mass.
All new technologies are expensive at launch, so we'll have to wait a few years to see where the cost will land. The biggest problem facing HD-DVD and BD, once their price has droped, is the fact that there is two virtually equivalent formats on the market.
As long as they are invisible to the mass-consumer, the user-hostile DRM-schemes will only be a issue with informed consumers, and even those will have to cave in sooner or later if they want o be able to buy the latest movies...
How is that any different than a standard gas tank?
A standard gas tank isn't filled with billions of possibly breathable glass/palladium particles.
Try breathing glass-dust for a while, that's possibly what you, the rescueworkers, the paramedics and everyone else close by would be doing after an accident with a tank-breach.
With most other fules, your main worry would be fire and as soon as you're away from the vehicle, you're safe.
With this stuff, you'd possibly crawl unharmed out of your vehicle and then suffocate on glass spheres or maybe get lung fibrosis for the rest of your life.
Unless, of course, the glass/palladium-spheres are harmless to the lungs or too heavy to become airborne.
I don't know. But anyway, it probably would be one hell of a job to get rid of them if there's a spill.
"but my prefered method of gaming is a complicated Flight Simulator flying with other people on the internet, communicating to them via VoIP."
If you want that, you probably want a PC, not a game-console and thus the whole "Sometimes incompatible consoles vs. Always compatible consoles" argument is irrelevant.
But even if you do want to play advanced Flight-sims on your console, wouldn't it be simpler to *not* have to check for compatability before buying a game?
If there's an NDA, the person who gave access to the service-manual to SomethingAwful _could_ face legal problems, depending on the NDA.
But this isn't something that should effect SomethingAwful
It could still be a copyright infringement, though.
I would assume that apple own the rights to their service-manuals.
You probably have to pay for them, like you have to with lots of other service-manuals.
I don't know US law regarding this since I'm not a US citizen, but it'd make sense if copying small parts of a copyrighted work is ok for private use.
It'd also make sense if it isn't ok to publish parts of a copyrighted work without the copyright-holders permission. Or at least not against the expressed will of the copyright-holder.
But, of course, I'm just speculating here, since I don't know the ins and outs of US copyright law...
I'd rather say that it's like car manufacturers producing a car that can only be operated by _one_ driver and that could only run on roads approved by the oil-companies.
"At least it's better then Apple's Firewall (turned off by default, PITA to block outbound traffic)."
Not to mention that most linux-distributions comes without any easily appliable firewall-scripts pre-defined.
Learning how to create a secure firewall is not a trivial task for a new user.
Hell, it's not even trivial for relatively experienced users.
It certainly requires quite a bit of "technical knowledge".
What Microsoft really should do, though, is to let the installer _ask_ what kind of firewall to install.
And while they're at it, let the installer ask for a user skill-level and act accordingly.
Novice: As today... Ask nothing. Install hundreds of MB of useless junk with weird settings.
Moderate: Let the user choose, say, not to install Moviemaker, MSN, etc and to choose level of firewall and such.
Expert: Let the user choose exactly what to install or not, except for stuff that is critical for the OS to boot and run applications.
One would guess, though, that an eventual commercial mass-market version version would be a bit more slim and have over-all a more polished design than a university research-prototype. ^_^
I'd say that the cost of the actual hardware isn't that big a deal.
Unless something really wierd happesn to the console-industry, the pricetag will soon drop.
The pricetag on the games will not...
If you buy a console for yourself, you'd be buying games that appeal to you.
In my own case that would probably mean between zero and two games per year. (I'm picky. Most games are crap.)
Even if you're a big-spender in games, you're only buying games for one person.
In a family, the kids probably won't want the same games as each other, the parents won't want the same games as each other and the kids and parents won't want the same games either.
So you'd be buying a lot of games...
It's the games that have to get affordable if the console is to be family friendly.
TFA is wrong. The actual press-release says 20 megabytes per second.
The author of the article is yet another person who have problems with bits and bytes.
Unfortunately, the rule "Storage transfer-rate = Bytes per second, Communication transfer-rate = Bits per second" isn't always true.
It's usually a pretty good hint at what unit to use though.
Depends on how you look at it.
The cpu might not have to do all the work by itself, but the system is still affected.
The cpu still has to feed data to the gpu, the busses are stressed alot more than they would be without the eye-candy, the OS-installation is larger than without and last, but definately not least, the gpu can never run in low-power mode, resulting in a hotter laptop with lower battery-time.
And if you have one of the earlier macs that's compatible with OSX, the graphics-hardware isn't really up to the job.
PAL/NTSC will still be significant, unless they release the PS3 *really* late.
It will be many years before the majority of the customers have high-definition tv's.
And there are more than a few ps2-games that let you choose pal/ntsc, first booting into the default mode of your ps2.
Since pal has higher resolution than ntsc, bitmaps created for ntsc will fit on a pal-screen.
Thus you can take any ntsc-game, even 2D ones, and just set the display to pal and everything will work.
Unless you've been an idiot and used the refreshrate as a timer.
In the light of these news, I'd say that it would be lunacy for any game-producer to not make their ps3-games both pal and ntsc compatible from the start.
Cool. I didn't bother to research the subject before my comment. I simply remembered how hard it was to bind separate shells to a specific gfx-card/keyboard when I last tried it in 1998 and assumed that it would be even harder to bind something to a specific monitor on a specific card.
Never tried it in X though...
Does this work on one gfx-card with several monitors attached too?
Just wondering since the "it's trivial" comment of jericho4.0 was about a four 2 x monitor card setup resulting in eight virtual workstations.
You forgot to mention that in windows, there normally are no functions for supporting eight keyboards/mouses and locking them to a specific screen and logging on as a different user per screen on a multi-head setup.
Windows simply isn't a multi user OS.
I haven't tried it, but I'd wager you'd have to go through hell and back to get this working in linux too.
But my guess is that he didn't want to use the one eight-header as a multi-user computer but instead have eight monitors per workstation at the lab.
At the lab where I work we have one workstation with four monitors and a couple of single-monitor setups in the controll-room, and there are real benifits to having that much extra space to work with.
"Now if only they could do something about those pesky power cords..."
Easy. Buy a few containers of surplus batteries cheap. ^_^
Seriously, though, it should be possible to create a open standard em-charge desk-cover that would power anything you put on it, like monitor, mouse, keyboard, printer, mobilephone, portable harddrive, etc.
Not exactly cordless, but at least it's only one cord for everything ontop of the desk.
There already exist such pads, but they are proprietary and small.
Well, it may not be as hard a task as it may seem at first glance.
Swedens entire population is lower than that of a internationally big city.
One problem is that we are scattered thoughout a very large area, which means that alot of energy gets lost during transportation. Changing all the scattered, oil-heated houses into electrical-heating would require a massive rebuilding of the powergrid.
Cities are mostly centrally heated anyway, but then there's also the problem of how people are going to afford changing their cars to non-fossil-fuled in 14 years...
OSX will most probably only have driver-support for the hardware in apples own computers, so you'd have to get a laptop/desktop with exactlly the same specs for it to have even a chance at working.
Windows and Linux have support for all kinds of hardware, so they're much more likely to run on apple hardware than OSX is to run on generic hardware.
Wouldn't the analogy for buying apple hardware and then running windows be the other way around? =)
Buying a BMW and then changing the "user interface", like steeringwheel, seats, etc, to that from an escort, still keeping the "hardware" like chassie, engine and exteriour look.
And I would also argue against using an escort in the analogy, since if you choose the right model, it's one hell of a car.
But anyway, I don't think people will buy a intel mac just to run windows. They'll probably buy it to be able to run OSX but install windows and/or linux on a second partition to use software that's exclusively availible for those platforms. If you're outside the graphics, publishing or music industries, OSX is a bit starved in the software department.
I sold my Powerbook G4 because I couldn't run more than a third of the software I needed to use it in school-related work, so it was a useless piece of titanium alloy standing on a shelf most of the time.