In that situation, it was 20th Century Fox issuing some bald faced lies that Canada is the source of 112% of the world's handicam rips (it isn't) and that it wasn't illegal here (it is) and that if nothing changed they start withholding new theatrical releases (they won't).
All the while ignoring the fact that handicam rips are only actually about 1% of the problem.
Well, thanks to gravity, the accelerometers can do a pretty decent job of determining the orientation (roll and pitch) of a static Wiimote. That's actually how most of the driving games work: you handle the Wiimote as if it's the crossbar in a steering wheel, and the current degree of tilt to either side controls the steering.
I imagine for a glove controller you could get a reasonable amount of information about a hand gesture from that; the lack of yaw data is a limiting factor.
The iTunes store is, to date, entirely geared to selling iPod-playable content to be viewed on iPods screens. The move to 480p was a half-measure, hamstrung by the requirement that those videos still be playable on iPods (i.e., baseline-only H.264 at low bitrates).
Until Steve Jobs is willing to break away from this iPod constraint, there will not be good compression videos sold on iTunes.
The way Spotlight actually presents results is pretty crappy - just a list of filenames, without context, and (as an example) you have to jump through two hoops just to get the location of the file. Spotlight's biggest fault is in awkwardly oversimplified standard UIs Apple offers for it.
I think a desire to have an alternative UI was in fact a driving factor in Google's decision to make this, rather than just a technical constraint.
... as soon as Leopard comes out they'll lose all their customers:
From the article, it says that Apple's introducing an iCal Server, based on interoperability standards from the CalConnect Consortium. From that website, it shows that Google also joined the consortium a couple weeks ago. Leopard's iCal will, no doubt, be a much more groupware-capable client all on its own -- it's not hard to conclude that before long things will be working together quite nicely without the need for third-party syncing tools.
ZFS can basically represent anything that any other filesystem can.
One aspect of its design was to be a really good, seamless backend for NFSv4 setups; it's native ACL is pretty much the NFSv4-style ACL, which was in turn based on the NTFS model, and it's my understand that ZFS has a well-defined method for translating to POSIX-style ACLs / Unix permissions.
So the answer to your question is "probably yes"? I'm no expert.
Well, Apple TV for one. And every HD-DVD and Blu-Ray play is, fundamentally, a H.264-in-MP4 player. There's also iPods and PSPs and such playing lower profile files of the same sort.
Main Profile H.264 is still (comparatively) quite computationally intensive to decode, and it's the main driver for using the mp4 container. You can't just do high-res H.264it with $20 chips yet -- why do you think first-gen HD/BR players are so expensive? -- but as soon as prices come down on those you can be sure as hell that H.264-in-MP4 is something they'll support.
Matroska, on the other hand -- that's what the original comparison here was against -- has afaik never received a hardware implementation. DivX/Xvid in AVI is a terribly ugly hack and it's a wonder that it works on multiple platforms at all. (The extremely widespread availability of ffmpeg-derivative decoders helps a lot.)
The online scene, such as it is, seem to have adopted H.264 in Matroska for HD-resolution encodes. I think this is somewhat unfortunate, since libraries and tools for mp4 (both commercial and open-source) are much more widely available. Time will tell.
As for free/busy information, yes you can see that as well. I believe when you set up an event you can set its visibility - anyone can see anything, only that you are busy, etc. I just double checked. There's three different areas of options that feed into this:
1. Calendar sharing: You can set the access level of each shared user between: i. Owner ii. Able to make changes to events iii. Able to see events iv. Able to see free/busy status
You can also select between iii, iv, and unpublished for the public sharing of a calendar.
2. Per-event option between "available" and "busy"
3. Per-event option between "private", "public", and "default". Events marked as private show up only as "busy" (if marked as such) to others, even those who normally see event details.
One thing Outlook does better than Google Calendar is in recurring events. Google Calendar only gives you a few options (once a week, once a month, every day, etc.) while with Outlook you can pretty much set up an event to occur at whatever interval you want (or pretty close to it). Google's options are quite robust, and able to accommodate just about any need I can think of. The labels are misleading, there's a wealth of options offered when you select one. Example:
"Daily": Repeat every [x] (1 to 14) days "Weekly": Repeat every [x] (1 to 14) weeks on [this arbitrary set of weekdays] "Monthly": Repeat every [x] (1 to 14) months on the [n]th day OR on [this] day of the week in the [nth (1 to 4, last)] week. (e.g., "repeat on the second friday of every fourth month", or "repeat on the 5th day of every second month")
The only thing I can think of that would require multiple events is an event that occurs multiple times within a month, but whose dates are placed relative to the month: something like a paycheck being on the second and last friday of every month.
criticizes studies that conclude any general disparity in skills, and argues that gender disparity seen in such fields does not have a biological basis (or that any biological influence is trivially small), but even it acknowledges that there are several differences in how and how efficiently males/females process certain tasks on a very fine scale. The argument is that these differences generally cancel each other out when you look at aptitude for mathematics as a whole.
5. A number of other recent finds -- the near-live capture of the giant squid last Christmas, for instance -- have been the result of deliberate efforts to try and catch a giant squid. It wasn't just random chance; they're popping up more because we're actively trying to find them more, and such efforts are also increasingly effective with recent, significant improvements in our understanding of such creatures.
There are obviously a wide variety of both cultural and biological factors that influence the likelihood of anyone going into engineering, and the distribution of these differs between men and women. The dramatic rise of technical women in the last century reflects the dramatic changes in cultural views on the role of women. It's impossible to define a specific equilibrium point for the male:female employment ratio because of the constant changes in both cultural views and in the structure of the workplace.
One needs to distinguish between women's interest in, accessibility to, and aptitude for engineering as a profession. I'd like to think we've mostly eliminated any gender bias in accessibility, and I hope we can eliminate any external biases influencing the interest component. But, unpopular as it may sound, there are probably small but statistically significant differences in the average innate interest and aptitude for engineering when taken across the whole female population. This doesn't mean that women can't be outstanding engineers, or that the average female engineer is somehow less skilled than the average male engineer; it just means that if the proportion of the engineering population stabilizes at less than 50%, we shouldn't necessarily be surprised or concerned, and we should not feel obligated to force an even ratio. This is what the previous poster was referring to when he said that engineering is "undemocratic".
I should point out that -- in contrast with the increases of the past century -- over the last six years, female enrollment in undergraduate engineering in North America has been steadily decreasing, in all disciplines, both in absolute numbers and as a proportion total students. There is much confusion and speculation on the reasons for this.
I can't think of a single sex-specific talent or skill in the field of engineering. Are you claiming that males are biologically better at math, logic, spatial relationships, that sort of thing?
There are many recent cognitive and neurological studies that show statistically significant, complex patterns of sex differences in these skills. That doesn't mean one sex is emphatically better than the other -- but they definitely process such information in different ways. These differences no doubt have an influence on the effectiveness of different educational techniques and the interest and motivation one has to enter a field that relies heavily on particular cognitive skills. Females, perhaps, might simply tend to find engineering more boring than males.
In addition to the sibling reply to this post, most of the items you cite as examples of Apple's use of open standards are grossly incorrect.
Unlike Microsoft, Apple supports (and pushes) standard MPEG formats (h264+AAC instead of WMV and WMA).
Apple supports their implementationof H.264, which is a crappy encoder, and a decoder that does not conform to any proper profile in the standard set. Apple does not publicly acknowledge this problem.
Their iWork formats are XML.
Their iWork formats use unpublished, proprietary XML schemas, which they have consistently changed in an ad hoc manner to suit whatever new glitzy features they fancy. Apple does not see this as a problem. (This criticism also applies to Apple's Mail.app, iLife, and iTunes data and database formats.)
There was a period, circa 2003-2004 when they did use intelligent, open standards for many of these things, but since then Apple turned to the dark side; all of their XML formats have shifted to proprietary, semi-broken schemas built to suit a quick'n'dirty implementation of new features rather than any sort of robustness, stability, or interoperability.
OSX supports NFS and SMB.
Their default SMB configuration tends to result in horrible performance when used with WinXP's default SMB settings... which is what the vast majority of OS X users actually use SMB for.
It says 'Cingular' under Rogers because they're both GSM networks and they have a roaming agreement with each other. The "AT&T" thing with Rogers Wireless was a marketing partnership that has since ceased; Rogers is a completely independent company from AT&T and Cingular.
That said, it's almost a certainty that Rogers will be the carrier for the iPhone whenever it is released in Canada, because of the simple fact that Rogers is the only real Canada-wide GSM network (especially since Rogers bought Fido, which was it only competitor in this aspect). It's a safe assumption that Apple is not intending on making a CDMA version of the iPhone, so Rogers is their only real choice for Canadians.
The big question is when. Canada's wireless providers have consistently lagged behind those in the US in the arena of "finally bringing the price of [some new feature] down to sane levels", and Apple is apparently promising a certain level user freedom that wireless providers have traditionally been reluctant to provide. Rogers, for instance, strongly encourages users to get songs on to their music phones via it's own iTunes-like service: "Rogers MusicStore songs start at $1.99 plus a download fee".Start at $2, and then you're still nickel-and-dimed for the bandwidth. I don't think they'll be happy if offering the iPhone means letting Apple undercut them on all their prices.
The fact remains that the quality and efficiency of the compression used by iTunes Store movies is hamstrung by the requirement that the files must be playable using the iPod's (understandably) wimpy decoder. If they used H.264 Main or High profile, rather than the baseline profile forced for iPod compatibility, they could significantly reduce file sizes while maintaining or improving quality.
Appealing to common use of "stealing" is irrelevant -- you could just as well argue that child abuse is stealing, because you're "stealing innocence". (In fact, you might do a better job there, since innocence is actually deprived.)
So, we should restrict ourselves to a more formal definition. All of the relevant definitions for stealing I've found essentially defer to the definition of theft....except for cases where theft is defined an act of stealing. In either case, they express the same concept (from Wikipedia, on theft):
The actus reus of theft is usually defined as an unauthorised taking, keeping or using of another's property which must be accompanied by a mens rea of dishonesty and/or the intent to permanently deprive the owner or the person with rightful possession of that property or its use.
While the mention of 'deprive' section is under a couple qualifiers, looking through all the various legal definitions of theft cited on that page shows that all of them either do include a 'deprive' clause, or exempt information as a form of property.
Of course this doesn't mean that copyright infringement is not wrong, but suggesting that it is theft is grossly inaccurate. Copyright and intellectual property are relatively recent inventions. They were invented because something that seemed wrong was happening, but the legal codes at the time -- which did define and outlaw 'stealing' or 'theft' and related concepts -- could not be applied, so new definitions and new laws were created. If they were simply theft (under some suitable definition of property) then those new laws would have been unnecessary.
iPod screens still aren't larger; the latest ones are the same 320x240 resolution. And from the start, all video-capable iPods have been able to decode 640x480 files (and, I believe, output this on their TV adapter), on the condition that they do not exceed a certain bitrate and only use certain compression codec features (e.g., for 640x480 H.264 low-complexity version of baseline profile, 1.5 Mbps or less).
The only thing that has changed is that Apple has now started to actually sell files of this type.
(Of course, if Apple actually gave the user two files for movies instead -- one iPod-friendly 320x240 file, and one 640x480 file that's much more efficiently compressed with, say, H.264 main profile -- they could save on file size and improve the video quality for higher-end output.
The requirement that every video sold on iTMS be natively playable on the iPod is a very limiting constraint, and it will only grow more significant when they eventually introduce new iPods with more capable video decoders... that don't get used, because everything must target 5G iPod playback as lowest-common-denominator.)
Both FLAC and Apple Lossless are lossless CODECs. The end result (the decoded output) is exactly the same. Why is Apple Lossless "good enough" compared to FLAC? They give you exactly the same result... I guess you only wanted to do some free Apple bashing here.
There's much, much more to an audio format than just the accuracy of its output. Off the top of my head, there's also:
-Computational complexity of encoding and decoding -Compression ratio -Licensing/openness concerns -Software/hardware support for the format -Error tolerance -Other additional features (metadata, streaming, support for better than 16-bit 44kHz audio, etc.)
FLAC is better than Apple Lossless in most of these categories, but (in the grandparent poster's opinion) the difference is small enough that "Apple lossless is good enough."
The regular WinXP should run just fine, as it has on the wide variety of EMT64/AMD64 processors Intel and AMD have released over the past several years. Core 2 is backwards compatible with IA32 just like every Athlon 64 is. Programs running under standard WinXP aren't be able to use the 64-bit extensions or the additional registers (doing so requires "Windows XP x64 Edition").
Beyond MGS4, Kojima says the Nintendo Wii is the most interesting. "As a game designer, it really is the game hardware that I want to work most on," he admits. However, don't expect Solid Snake to be making his rounds on the Wii.
"The way I look at the Metal Gear Solid series is that it's made for the PlayStation platform, and through the years, people have expressed how much they love the series on the PlayStation platform, so if I was going to do a game on Wii or on Xbox 360, I would do a completely different game, not Metal Gear Solid."
The 64-bit version of Vista, will support the standard configuration of 64-bit chips, and EFI, just like XP 64 already does.
Not according to the story: "Although Microsoft has previously said EFI booting would be supported by Vista, Ritz admitted that EFI support won't be seen in any version of Windows until the release of Longhorn Server."
The story is, essentially:
-No launch version of Vista will support EFI. -No 32-bit version of Vista will ever support EFI.
The slashdot blurb is accurate. You are wrong. You complain about FUD, yet everything you say about the Core Duo chips is exactly that.
The down-scaling happens on the content-output side; things like HD-DVD players and Windows Vista will down-scale if they're not outputting to an HDCP-authorized receiver. The TVs themselves don't discriminate.
Actually, Apple laptops are quite popular in Japan. The Mac's marketshare has been consistently higher in Japan than in the US for the better part of a decade.
I wouldn't really say Sony's laptops are better, they have their own faults that generally offset the smaller! faster! advantages.
Slashdot Mirror
In that situation, it was 20th Century Fox issuing some bald faced lies that Canada is the source of 112% of the world's handicam rips (it isn't) and that it wasn't illegal here (it is) and that if nothing changed they start withholding new theatrical releases (they won't).
All the while ignoring the fact that handicam rips are only actually about 1% of the problem.
Well, thanks to gravity, the accelerometers can do a pretty decent job of determining the orientation (roll and pitch) of a static Wiimote. That's actually how most of the driving games work: you handle the Wiimote as if it's the crossbar in a steering wheel, and the current degree of tilt to either side controls the steering.
I imagine for a glove controller you could get a reasonable amount of information about a hand gesture from that; the lack of yaw data is a limiting factor.
The iTunes store is, to date, entirely geared to selling iPod-playable content to be viewed on iPods screens. The move to 480p was a half-measure, hamstrung by the requirement that those videos still be playable on iPods (i.e., baseline-only H.264 at low bitrates).
Until Steve Jobs is willing to break away from this iPod constraint, there will not be good compression videos sold on iTunes.
The way Spotlight actually presents results is pretty crappy - just a list of filenames, without context, and (as an example) you have to jump through two hoops just to get the location of the file. Spotlight's biggest fault is in awkwardly oversimplified standard UIs Apple offers for it.
I think a desire to have an alternative UI was in fact a driving factor in Google's decision to make this, rather than just a technical constraint.
... as soon as Leopard comes out they'll lose all their customers:
From the article, it says that Apple's introducing an iCal Server, based on interoperability standards from the CalConnect Consortium. From that website, it shows that Google also joined the consortium a couple weeks ago. Leopard's iCal will, no doubt, be a much more groupware-capable client all on its own -- it's not hard to conclude that before long things will be working together quite nicely without the need for third-party syncing tools.
ZFS can basically represent anything that any other filesystem can.
One aspect of its design was to be a really good, seamless backend for NFSv4 setups; it's native ACL is pretty much the NFSv4-style ACL, which was in turn based on the NTFS model, and it's my understand that ZFS has a well-defined method for translating to POSIX-style ACLs / Unix permissions.
So the answer to your question is "probably yes"? I'm no expert.
Well, Apple TV for one. And every HD-DVD and Blu-Ray play is, fundamentally, a H.264-in-MP4 player. There's also iPods and PSPs and such playing lower profile files of the same sort.
Main Profile H.264 is still (comparatively) quite computationally intensive to decode, and it's the main driver for using the mp4 container. You can't just do high-res H.264it with $20 chips yet -- why do you think first-gen HD/BR players are so expensive? -- but as soon as prices come down on those you can be sure as hell that H.264-in-MP4 is something they'll support.
Matroska, on the other hand -- that's what the original comparison here was against -- has afaik never received a hardware implementation. DivX/Xvid in AVI is a terribly ugly hack and it's a wonder that it works on multiple platforms at all. (The extremely widespread availability of ffmpeg-derivative decoders helps a lot.)
The online scene, such as it is, seem to have adopted H.264 in Matroska for HD-resolution encodes. I think this is somewhat unfortunate, since libraries and tools for mp4 (both commercial and open-source) are much more widely available. Time will tell.
1. Calendar sharing: You can set the access level of each shared user between:
i. Owner
ii. Able to make changes to events
iii. Able to see events
iv. Able to see free/busy status
You can also select between iii, iv, and unpublished for the public sharing of a calendar.
2. Per-event option between "available" and "busy"
3. Per-event option between "private", "public", and "default". Events marked as private show up only as "busy" (if marked as such) to others, even those who normally see event details. One thing Outlook does better than Google Calendar is in recurring events. Google Calendar only gives you a few options (once a week, once a month, every day, etc.) while with Outlook you can pretty much set up an event to occur at whatever interval you want (or pretty close to it). Google's options are quite robust, and able to accommodate just about any need I can think of. The labels are misleading, there's a wealth of options offered when you select one. Example:
"Daily": Repeat every [x] (1 to 14) days
"Weekly": Repeat every [x] (1 to 14) weeks on [this arbitrary set of weekdays]
"Monthly": Repeat every [x] (1 to 14) months on the [n]th day OR on [this] day of the week in the [nth (1 to 4, last)] week. (e.g., "repeat on the second friday of every fourth month", or "repeat on the 5th day of every second month")
The only thing I can think of that would require multiple events is an event that occurs multiple times within a month, but whose dates are placed relative to the month: something like a paycheck being on the second and last friday of every month.
Google scholar gives some good starting points. A couple quick results:
DC Geary, SJ Saults, F Liu, MK Hoard, Sex differences in spatial cognition, computational fluency, and arithmetical reasoning. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2000.
This paper:
ES Spelke, Sex differences in intrinsic aptitude for mathematics and science: A critical review. American Psychologist, 2005.
criticizes studies that conclude any general disparity in skills, and argues that gender disparity seen in such fields does not have a biological basis (or that any biological influence is trivially small), but even it acknowledges that there are several differences in how and how efficiently males/females process certain tasks on a very fine scale. The argument is that these differences generally cancel each other out when you look at aptitude for mathematics as a whole.
5. A number of other recent finds -- the near-live capture of the giant squid last Christmas, for instance -- have been the result of deliberate efforts to try and catch a giant squid. It wasn't just random chance; they're popping up more because we're actively trying to find them more, and such efforts are also increasingly effective with recent, significant improvements in our understanding of such creatures.
There are obviously a wide variety of both cultural and biological factors that influence the likelihood of anyone going into engineering, and the distribution of these differs between men and women. The dramatic rise of technical women in the last century reflects the dramatic changes in cultural views on the role of women. It's impossible to define a specific equilibrium point for the male:female employment ratio because of the constant changes in both cultural views and in the structure of the workplace.
One needs to distinguish between women's interest in, accessibility to, and aptitude for engineering as a profession. I'd like to think we've mostly eliminated any gender bias in accessibility, and I hope we can eliminate any external biases influencing the interest component. But, unpopular as it may sound, there are probably small but statistically significant differences in the average innate interest and aptitude for engineering when taken across the whole female population. This doesn't mean that women can't be outstanding engineers, or that the average female engineer is somehow less skilled than the average male engineer; it just means that if the proportion of the engineering population stabilizes at less than 50%, we shouldn't necessarily be surprised or concerned, and we should not feel obligated to force an even ratio. This is what the previous poster was referring to when he said that engineering is "undemocratic".
I should point out that -- in contrast with the increases of the past century -- over the last six years, female enrollment in undergraduate engineering in North America has been steadily decreasing , in all disciplines, both in absolute numbers and as a proportion total students. There is much confusion and speculation on the reasons for this.
I can't think of a single sex-specific talent or skill in the field of engineering. Are you claiming that males are biologically better at math, logic, spatial relationships, that sort of thing?
There are many recent cognitive and neurological studies that show statistically significant, complex patterns of sex differences in these skills. That doesn't mean one sex is emphatically better than the other -- but they definitely process such information in different ways. These differences no doubt have an influence on the effectiveness of different educational techniques and the interest and motivation one has to enter a field that relies heavily on particular cognitive skills. Females, perhaps, might simply tend to find engineering more boring than males.
In addition to the sibling reply to this post, most of the items you cite as examples of Apple's use of open standards are grossly incorrect.
Unlike Microsoft, Apple supports (and pushes) standard MPEG formats (h264+AAC instead of WMV and WMA).
Apple supports their implementationof H.264, which is a crappy encoder, and a decoder that does not conform to any proper profile in the standard set. Apple does not publicly acknowledge this problem.
Their iWork formats are XML.
Their iWork formats use unpublished, proprietary XML schemas, which they have consistently changed in an ad hoc manner to suit whatever new glitzy features they fancy. Apple does not see this as a problem. (This criticism also applies to Apple's Mail.app, iLife, and iTunes data and database formats.)
There was a period, circa 2003-2004 when they did use intelligent, open standards for many of these things, but since then Apple turned to the dark side; all of their XML formats have shifted to proprietary, semi-broken schemas built to suit a quick'n'dirty implementation of new features rather than any sort of robustness, stability, or interoperability.
OSX supports NFS and SMB.
Their default SMB configuration tends to result in horrible performance when used with WinXP's default SMB settings... which is what the vast majority of OS X users actually use SMB for.
It says 'Cingular' under Rogers because they're both GSM networks and they have a roaming agreement with each other. The "AT&T" thing with Rogers Wireless was a marketing partnership that has since ceased; Rogers is a completely independent company from AT&T and Cingular.
That said, it's almost a certainty that Rogers will be the carrier for the iPhone whenever it is released in Canada, because of the simple fact that Rogers is the only real Canada-wide GSM network (especially since Rogers bought Fido, which was it only competitor in this aspect). It's a safe assumption that Apple is not intending on making a CDMA version of the iPhone, so Rogers is their only real choice for Canadians.
The big question is when. Canada's wireless providers have consistently lagged behind those in the US in the arena of "finally bringing the price of [some new feature] down to sane levels", and Apple is apparently promising a certain level user freedom that wireless providers have traditionally been reluctant to provide. Rogers, for instance, strongly encourages users to get songs on to their music phones via it's own iTunes-like service: "Rogers MusicStore songs start at $1.99 plus a download fee". Start at $2, and then you're still nickel-and-dimed for the bandwidth. I don't think they'll be happy if offering the iPhone means letting Apple undercut them on all their prices.
The fact remains that the quality and efficiency of the compression used by iTunes Store movies is hamstrung by the requirement that the files must be playable using the iPod's (understandably) wimpy decoder. If they used H.264 Main or High profile, rather than the baseline profile forced for iPod compatibility, they could significantly reduce file sizes while maintaining or improving quality.
From the perspective of the portable games market, the PSP is vastly more similar to the Zune than it is to the iPod.
Appealing to common use of "stealing" is irrelevant -- you could just as well argue that child abuse is stealing, because you're "stealing innocence". (In fact, you might do a better job there, since innocence is actually deprived.)
...except for cases where theft is defined an act of stealing. In either case, they express the same concept (from Wikipedia, on theft):
So, we should restrict ourselves to a more formal definition. All of the relevant definitions for stealing I've found essentially defer to the definition of theft.
The actus reus of theft is usually defined as an unauthorised taking, keeping or using of another's property which must be accompanied by a mens rea of dishonesty and/or the intent to permanently deprive the owner or the person with rightful possession of that property or its use.
While the mention of 'deprive' section is under a couple qualifiers, looking through all the various legal definitions of theft cited on that page shows that all of them either do include a 'deprive' clause, or exempt information as a form of property.
Of course this doesn't mean that copyright infringement is not wrong, but suggesting that it is theft is grossly inaccurate. Copyright and intellectual property are relatively recent inventions. They were invented because something that seemed wrong was happening, but the legal codes at the time -- which did define and outlaw 'stealing' or 'theft' and related concepts -- could not be applied, so new definitions and new laws were created. If they were simply theft (under some suitable definition of property) then those new laws would have been unnecessary.
iPod screens still aren't larger; the latest ones are the same 320x240 resolution. And from the start, all video-capable iPods have been able to decode 640x480 files (and, I believe, output this on their TV adapter), on the condition that they do not exceed a certain bitrate and only use certain compression codec features (e.g., for 640x480 H.264 low-complexity version of baseline profile, 1.5 Mbps or less).
... that don't get used, because everything must target 5G iPod playback as lowest-common-denominator.)
The only thing that has changed is that Apple has now started to actually sell files of this type.
(Of course, if Apple actually gave the user two files for movies instead -- one iPod-friendly 320x240 file, and one 640x480 file that's much more efficiently compressed with, say, H.264 main profile -- they could save on file size and improve the video quality for higher-end output.
The requirement that every video sold on iTMS be natively playable on the iPod is a very limiting constraint, and it will only grow more significant when they eventually introduce new iPods with more capable video decoders
-Computational complexity of encoding and decoding
-Compression ratio
-Licensing/openness concerns
-Software/hardware support for the format
-Error tolerance
-Other additional features (metadata, streaming, support for better than 16-bit 44kHz audio, etc.)
FLAC is better than Apple Lossless in most of these categories, but (in the grandparent poster's opinion) the difference is small enough that "Apple lossless is good enough."
The regular WinXP should run just fine, as it has on the wide variety of EMT64/AMD64 processors Intel and AMD have released over the past several years. Core 2 is backwards compatible with IA32 just like every Athlon 64 is. Programs running under standard WinXP aren't be able to use the 64-bit extensions or the additional registers (doing so requires "Windows XP x64 Edition").
Amen! CBC TV almost never interests me, but I am consistently impressed with the quality and entertainingness of CBC Radio.
To put it another way: CBC TV makes me bored with Canada, while CBC Radio makes me fascinated by and in love with my country.
My biggest complaint is that they don't have more podcasts on their website.
Kojima likes the Wii, but says probably not:
Beyond MGS4, Kojima says the Nintendo Wii is the most interesting. "As a game designer, it really is the game hardware that I want to work most on," he admits. However, don't expect Solid Snake to be making his rounds on the Wii.
"The way I look at the Metal Gear Solid series is that it's made for the PlayStation platform, and through the years, people have expressed how much they love the series on the PlayStation platform, so if I was going to do a game on Wii or on Xbox 360, I would do a completely different game, not Metal Gear Solid."
The 64-bit version of Vista, will support the standard configuration of 64-bit chips, and EFI, just like XP 64 already does.
Not according to the story: "Although Microsoft has previously said EFI booting would be supported by Vista, Ritz admitted that EFI support won't be seen in any version of Windows until the release of Longhorn Server."
The story is, essentially:
-No launch version of Vista will support EFI.
-No 32-bit version of Vista will ever support EFI.
The slashdot blurb is accurate. You are wrong. You complain about FUD, yet everything you say about the Core Duo chips is exactly that.
The down-scaling happens on the content-output side; things like HD-DVD players and Windows Vista will down-scale if they're not outputting to an HDCP-authorized receiver. The TVs themselves don't discriminate.
Mac OS X has no such goofy restrictions (yet?).
Actually, Apple laptops are quite popular in Japan. The Mac's marketshare has been consistently higher in Japan than in the US for the better part of a decade.
I wouldn't really say Sony's laptops are better, they have their own faults that generally offset the smaller! faster! advantages.
That's actually closer to the original idea in the insertcredit.com thread from which the linked article evolved.