How is it different from every iPhone, iPad, Android phone or tablet or laptops with webcams, recording even your location, video and audio?
Because they don't. Your android phone activates the webcam as requested for activities that use it. They don't run them 24/7 due to the battery sucking nature of them. As I understand it, the Kinect is ALWAYS listening and ALWAYS recording because it is sitting waiting for you to speak the command words, or wave the right gesture. Sure you'd expect that this is just recording to a circular buffer which gets thrown in the bit bucket when it doesn't detect something on the whitelist, but years of experience has taught me that it's not going to be long before some hacker gets into the internals and finds a database that has recorded everything everyone in the room has said for the last few days. Emails will fly around Microsoft's HQ and they'll spin it as merely for "anonymous usage stats" or "essential algorithmic learning" but we'll know that yet again a company was caught doing something no sensible person would believe they would do AGAIN.
In the case of Apple, fans actually boast of the huge profit margins on each phone plus the fact that you can't do anything Apple doesn't allow you to is viewed as Apple protecting you.
True, however if you can't do it, the carriers can't do it to you either. Apple's control had a lot to do with carrier bloatware. We can fix the abused android phones, but consumers would rather it be usable out the box.
This is very, very slowly getting through to the managers, though.
I had a boss not too long ago who simply assumed that everyone who ever bought a product wants to get our newsletter. I warned him that we might end up on blacklists, he chose to belittle my being a scaredy-cat and ignore me.
Last I heard is that he's fighting a losing uphill battle to get off the various spam blacklists because NONE of his emails get to their recipients anymore, and he noticed that it's not building trust in a company when you have to phone a possible business partner who has a commercial spam filter to tell him that he has to dig through his spam for your mail.
Unfortunately most businesses seem to realise this is going to be a problem, and rather than not sending spam in the first place, they just ensure it comes from different mail servers and a different domain to their normal operations.
If you are a business you HAVE to. From the start I made my mailing list completely opt-in. That doesn't stop AOL users from using the spam button instead of the prominent link at the top that gracefully removes them from the list. You can't have customers not receiving order confirmations or order updates or have business email blackholed because some webmail users decide they don't want your mail anymore.
Almost no one can hear a difference between loss-less and any of the codecs at high bit rates (256K+).
I wonder how many of the "I can hear the difference" crowd are comparing old MP3s to lossless rips. I can hear the difference between my old MP3s and modern LAME encoded versions of the same source. Can I tell the difference between modern LAME high bitrate MP3s and FLAC? Only when I know ahead of time which is which!
While it might have been to encourage platform lock in/exclusives, and just to be evil in Sony tradition, it's possible to explain it from a technology standpoint. Warning, pure speculation follows based on a very brief time working in the games industry.
The PS2 was notoriously difficult to utilise compared to the PS1 and the Dreamcast, but over time it managed to hold its own against the more powerful gamecube and xbox. At the risk of hugely oversimplifying what made the PS1 manage to hold on so long was that it had a dedicated vector processor which meant that the competition's (N64, Saturn) faster processors mattered much less. (The N64 used the main CPU for just about everything which made the 90-odd MHz MIPS much less impressive.) The PS2 architecture was an evolution of the PS1 by adding more dedicated vector units rather than going the T&L GPU route which was just about to hit the big time.
The PS3 swapped vector processors for the Cell which was an obvious choice considering. However all ATI and nVidia GPUs have their own vector processing capabilities and I'd imagine that the costs of developing a special PS3 GPU that gave proper emphasis to the Cell were HIGH rather than making a CHEAPER GPU which must have been the intention. So the Cell became half redundant. And with all the compromises that were made to get the costs down it wound up with too much power in one narrow field, no memory bandwidth and no unified memory and a weaker GPU than the 360.
The 360 used a plain architecture that could be leveraged relatively easily from the get go, but has a lower potential for hidden magic. The PS3 was designed to have the potential to blow it out the water but the reality is that no one has found any hidden stores of power. Much like the Itanium, it was only better in theory while in reality it was a struggle even to match the competition. The end result is that developers have to work harder to match the 360 excepting a small number of rendering effects which become easier on the PS3.
Also the default render size for the GPU plugins seems to be 1024x1024. When I ticked the box for Native resolution my framerate in FFX changed from 10fps to a solid 60. And that's on an old E8400 with GT240.
Contrast with Mac's F9, F10, F11 and F12 keys. If your program just happens to use one of those keys, you're shit-out-of-luck (as is the case when trying to debug something in Visual Studio in a virtual machine, for example).
You can use Cmd-F9/10/11/12 to avoid the expose stuff. OS X sees that as a different combination so doesn't fire expose but VMware passes the F-key unmodified to the VM which seems like an oversight but has got me out of a number of jams. If not using vmware YMMV.
Re:I'm sticking with VGA
on
Goodbye, VGA
·
· Score: 1
The default is to overscan on every TV I've seen, but the last few I've bought in recent years allow you to switch off the overscan from the TV menu. Sometimes it's called 1:1, sometimes Native, sometimes Full. Often it's simply listed in the same menu as the 4:3/16:9 widescreen menu thingy.
You'll find that all your HDMI sources like BR players, consoles, etc. will be running scaled up too though it's not so immediately obvious when there's no start menu on screen!
If you watch large teams of programmers, the managment actually force the developers to write slow code, claiming that maintainability is more important than any other factor!
I don't see why it should be one or the other - maintainability is important, as is using optimal algorithms. Fast algorithms can still be written in a clear and understandable manner.
Up to a point, then you've got to make a choice. Keep the high level OOP constructs, or flatten it out to make the compiler's job easier.
THEN you have the next level of optimization, keep the readable code or do it the "clever" way that nets a 40% boost. And as any experienced coder will tell you, clever code is the antithesis of maintainable.
There are lot of problems with portable applications which try to write into the directory where.exe file is installed.
Do portable progs on your fav linux distro do the same? That is, they write their configuration files to/bin or/usr/bin or/usr/local/bin or whatever.
What happens when an app with no root priviledge tries to write its configuration files in/bin? It fails spectacularly of course.
When you are installed on as large a number of computers as Microsoft's OS is, you have to be a little more responsible. Improve the security model to bring it closer to Linux, spectacular! Leave it so that writes to previously okay directories now fail? Terrible.
Maybe I'm over simplifying this, but to me it would seem trivial to remap writes to a user directory. Every time OpenFile is called on Program Files/blah/foo.cfg, open %USERDIR%/Local Settings/App Data/blah/foo.cfg if it exists, if not, copy the one from program files and then open it. Vista already has the compatibility options that correct for misapplications of win32 functions, for me at least my complaint was that their backwards compatibility was really half assed and they've shown no interest in updating it.
Which now that I think about it, seems to be their pattern (X360 Xbox compatibility has stalled, XP never did get a working soundblaster emulator)
And as for the recording "sounding the way it's supposed to sound," that's not true if the record was sourced from digital masters, which is true for all new music. You're just taking digitally recorded music with its limited sampling qualities and adding the fragility of the vinyl format. It's really the worst of both worlds.
It's actually worse than that. They take the digital masters and further filter it as there are certain patterns that a needle in a groove just can't do. If the bass gets too deep, it can leave the surface of the record so they lower it, high frequencies come out tinny, so they filter them too.
If you like the sound of vinyl, then nothing else will do, but from a purely technical standpoint, CD is better in every way it's possible to be better.
An mp3 on a crappy set of iPod earbuds for from a car stereo sounds far better than the same audio source played over a high end amp and high end speakers in a listening room.
it's amazing how a real set of speakers will bring out the "omg that is crap" even in a 192K encoded mp3 file.
This is very true. I recently bought a pair of Shure SE210s and while not high end, they were so far beyond what I'd been using that I'm finding it more difficult to listen to some of my older MP3s from the pre-LAME days.
Clarious helpfully provided a decent link for what you asked, but perhaps a simpler way to demonstrate it is in storage capacity.
An 80min CDR can store just over 700MB, but 80min of audio. 80min at 44.1KHz 16bit Stereo works out around 820MB. Some of your data-CD space is eaten up file file system data, but not 120MB.
That extra space that audio uses for audio is used to store that error detection/correction and seek data I was referring to.
It's probably a lot to do with simply consolidating manufacturing. If they only need one set of equipment, I'd imagine that helps their bottom line. If they can get some marketing led sales out of it from gullible sorts then that's just gravy.
Different encoding scheme, more error correction and most importantly the data has a way to tell the drive where it is for accurate seeking, so a misread can be re-read. Whereas on an audio-cd programs have to do a hack where they guess the position based on the data they are receiving.
Accurate rip software can basically never truly guarantee a bit for bit copy, and have to brute force it to get close. In practice however the end result is close enough that only a purist who doesn't care about the music so much as the warm fuzzy feeling of a accuracy will care.
The worst one I ever had was a black and white scan of a printed screenshot. I asked the guy about it and he apparently had taken the screenshot, pasted it in to Word, printed that and then used an MFP's "scan to email" function to send it to me.
Y'see, that one I don't mind so much. It shows that the person knew what the end result had to be and thought about what they could do to achieve that given what they knew.
It was needlessly complex and not very useful in the end, but when you deal with people who refuse point blank to realise that everything they've been asked to do today is a tiny variation on one common theme and NOT to phone you every
single time for instructions... damned if I'm not going to be impressed if they at least try.
I don't even ask for vector stuff anymore, because every damned time I end up with a PDF or EPS with embedded JPGs.
Snap.
When tasked with organising the artwork for poster sized versions of company logos this very thing turned an afternoon of phone calls and emails into "become an expert at tracing company logos with Illustrator."
I think sometimes it might be the that professions have the perception that someone spent time learning this through apprenticeships or many years at university and are therefore better people than that damned bespectacled nerd who only knows what to do from tinkering with those stupid computers in his parent's basement.
That and while people appreciate their cars or of course, their health, with computers it seems to be more that they HAVE to use it and resent every minute of it.
Sometimes you have to learn how to be stupid to deal with people. Where I work they understand Excel. That's it.
If you want to send any tabulated data whatsoever, it damn well better be in an excel spreadsheet rather than ANYTHING more suited to the task. And when you're butting up against the physical limitations of the excel file format, then it's your data that has to change, not the file format. Grrrrr.
This is very true. When dealing with some incredibly annoying bespoke software at work, you get used to ignoring the endless stream of "error" messages which are not even warnings as it will retry anyway and pop the message back if there is a real problem.
Then something happens and you get a message completely identical to a previous one except for a tiny but critical change. Which you've dutifully clicked away without noticing.
Now the whole thing is brusted and no way to find out what it said. So all that's left to do is swear profusely and decide if it's faster to debug the current foobar as best you can or restore the previous version.
People -- even students who don't have much of an income yet -- will happily spend the price of Spore on a night out, where the pleasure lasts a few hours at most and is then gone forever. But somehow when it's a video game, they assume that it's not worth paying for unless they can retain the potential to play it forever?
A night out can carry no expectations of being long lived whereas a video game only has artificial restrictions. I buy games to play off and on for as long as the hardware lasts. In 20 years time I might just want to play any of Valve's games. The same as it's been over 20 years since Mario Bros and I'll still play that on my real NES.
With PC games there should be a reasonable expectation that if something worked one day on one set of hardware/OS it should work forever even after the developers and publishers have long been fed to the lawyers.
When OSs change and don't run it any more, that's MY problem and I or someone smarter than me will figure out a solution (DosBox or vmware) but I won't buy anything where a third party holds all the cards.
Sometimes I wonder if I'm far too accommodating of manufacturers for things like this. I've been hoarding my consoles and such since the C64 days and all of them, ALL of them have their little foibles that you just know are not going to stand up to normal misuse. So I've trained myself to second guess the design, to the point that I tend to think it was my own stupid fault if I do something and it breaks.
Manufacturers cut corners to save on costs and get the retail price down while securing a nice profit for themselves and retailers. If they built quality, charged more for the difference, you can bet they'd sell far fewer. And it's only people like me who want to keep playing their stuff in 10 years time that care about that. The same insignificant minority that worries about activation servers' longevity.
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How is it different from every iPhone, iPad, Android phone or tablet or laptops with webcams, recording even your location, video and audio?
Because they don't. Your android phone activates the webcam as requested for activities that use it. They don't run them 24/7 due to the battery sucking nature of them. As I understand it, the Kinect is ALWAYS listening and ALWAYS recording because it is sitting waiting for you to speak the command words, or wave the right gesture. Sure you'd expect that this is just recording to a circular buffer which gets thrown in the bit bucket when it doesn't detect something on the whitelist, but years of experience has taught me that it's not going to be long before some hacker gets into the internals and finds a database that has recorded everything everyone in the room has said for the last few days. Emails will fly around Microsoft's HQ and they'll spin it as merely for "anonymous usage stats" or "essential algorithmic learning" but we'll know that yet again a company was caught doing something no sensible person would believe they would do AGAIN.
In the case of Apple, fans actually boast of the huge profit margins on each phone plus the fact that you can't do anything Apple doesn't allow you to is viewed as Apple protecting you.
True, however if you can't do it, the carriers can't do it to you either. Apple's control had a lot to do with carrier bloatware. We can fix the abused android phones, but consumers would rather it be usable out the box.
This is very, very slowly getting through to the managers, though.
I had a boss not too long ago who simply assumed that everyone who ever bought a product wants to get our newsletter. I warned him that we might end up on blacklists, he chose to belittle my being a scaredy-cat and ignore me.
Last I heard is that he's fighting a losing uphill battle to get off the various spam blacklists because NONE of his emails get to their recipients anymore, and he noticed that it's not building trust in a company when you have to phone a possible business partner who has a commercial spam filter to tell him that he has to dig through his spam for your mail.
Unfortunately most businesses seem to realise this is going to be a problem, and rather than not sending spam in the first place, they just ensure it comes from different mail servers and a different domain to their normal operations.
If you are a business you HAVE to. From the start I made my mailing list completely opt-in. That doesn't stop AOL users from using the spam button instead of the prominent link at the top that gracefully removes them from the list. You can't have customers not receiving order confirmations or order updates or have business email blackholed because some webmail users decide they don't want your mail anymore.
Almost no one can hear a difference between loss-less and any of the codecs at high bit rates (256K+).
I wonder how many of the "I can hear the difference" crowd are comparing old MP3s to lossless rips. I can hear the difference between my old MP3s and modern LAME encoded versions of the same source. Can I tell the difference between modern LAME high bitrate MP3s and FLAC? Only when I know ahead of time which is which!
While it might have been to encourage platform lock in/exclusives, and just to be evil in Sony tradition, it's possible to explain it from a technology standpoint.
Warning, pure speculation follows based on a very brief time working in the games industry.
The PS2 was notoriously difficult to utilise compared to the PS1 and the Dreamcast, but over time it managed to hold its own against the more powerful gamecube and xbox. At the risk of hugely oversimplifying what made the PS1 manage to hold on so long was that it had a dedicated vector processor which meant that the competition's (N64, Saturn) faster processors mattered much less. (The N64 used the main CPU for just about everything which made the 90-odd MHz MIPS much less impressive.) The PS2 architecture was an evolution of the PS1 by adding more dedicated vector units rather than going the T&L GPU route which was just about to hit the big time.
The PS3 swapped vector processors for the Cell which was an obvious choice considering. However all ATI and nVidia GPUs have their own vector processing capabilities and I'd imagine that the costs of developing a special PS3 GPU that gave proper emphasis to the Cell were HIGH rather than making a CHEAPER GPU which must have been the intention. So the Cell became half redundant. And with all the compromises that were made to get the costs down it wound up with too much power in one narrow field, no memory bandwidth and no unified memory and a weaker GPU than the 360.
The 360 used a plain architecture that could be leveraged relatively easily from the get go, but has a lower potential for hidden magic. The PS3 was designed to have the potential to blow it out the water but the reality is that no one has found any hidden stores of power. Much like the Itanium, it was only better in theory while in reality it was a struggle even to match the competition. The end result is that developers have to work harder to match the 360 excepting a small number of rendering effects which become easier on the PS3.
Also the default render size for the GPU plugins seems to be 1024x1024. When I ticked the box for Native resolution my framerate in FFX changed from 10fps to a solid 60. And that's on an old E8400 with GT240.
Contrast with Mac's F9, F10, F11 and F12 keys. If your program just happens to use one of those keys, you're shit-out-of-luck (as is the case when trying to debug something in Visual Studio in a virtual machine, for example).
You can use Cmd-F9/10/11/12 to avoid the expose stuff. OS X sees that as a different combination so doesn't fire expose but VMware passes the F-key unmodified to the VM which seems like an oversight but has got me out of a number of jams. If not using vmware YMMV.
The default is to overscan on every TV I've seen, but the last few I've bought in recent years allow you to switch off the overscan from the TV menu. Sometimes it's called 1:1, sometimes Native, sometimes Full. Often it's simply listed in the same menu as the 4:3/16:9 widescreen menu thingy.
You'll find that all your HDMI sources like BR players, consoles, etc. will be running scaled up too though it's not so immediately obvious when there's no start menu on screen!
No, they're talking about activating the game at the point of sale, probably in addition to all the arcane DRM techniques they use.
And how would your console determine it has been activated? By going online.
If you watch large teams of programmers, the managment actually force the developers to write slow code, claiming that maintainability is more important than any other factor!
I don't see why it should be one or the other - maintainability is important, as is using optimal algorithms. Fast algorithms can still be written in a clear and understandable manner.
Up to a point, then you've got to make a choice. Keep the high level OOP constructs, or flatten it out to make the compiler's job easier.
THEN you have the next level of optimization, keep the readable code or do it the "clever" way that nets a 40% boost. And as any experienced coder will tell you, clever code is the antithesis of maintainable.
There are lot of problems with portable applications which try to write into the directory where .exe file is installed.
Do portable progs on your fav linux distro do the same? That is, they write their configuration files to /bin or /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin or whatever.
What happens when an app with no root priviledge tries to write its configuration files in /bin? It fails spectacularly of course.
When you are installed on as large a number of computers as Microsoft's OS is, you have to be a little more responsible. Improve the security model to bring it closer to Linux, spectacular! Leave it so that writes to previously okay directories now fail? Terrible.
Maybe I'm over simplifying this, but to me it would seem trivial to remap writes to a user directory. Every time OpenFile is called on Program Files/blah/foo.cfg, open %USERDIR%/Local Settings/App Data/blah/foo.cfg if it exists, if not, copy the one from program files and then open it. Vista already has the compatibility options that correct for misapplications of win32 functions, for me at least my complaint was that their backwards compatibility was really half assed and they've shown no interest in updating it.
Which now that I think about it, seems to be their pattern (X360 Xbox compatibility has stalled, XP never did get a working soundblaster emulator)
And as for the recording "sounding the way it's supposed to sound," that's not true if the record was sourced from digital masters, which is true for all new music. You're just taking digitally recorded music with its limited sampling qualities and adding the fragility of the vinyl format. It's really the worst of both worlds.
It's actually worse than that. They take the digital masters and further filter it as there are certain patterns that a needle in a groove just can't do. If the bass gets too deep, it can leave the surface of the record so they lower it, high frequencies come out tinny, so they filter them too.
If you like the sound of vinyl, then nothing else will do, but from a purely technical standpoint, CD is better in every way it's possible to be better.
An mp3 on a crappy set of iPod earbuds for from a car stereo sounds far better than the same audio source played over a high end amp and high end speakers in a listening room.
it's amazing how a real set of speakers will bring out the "omg that is crap" even in a 192K encoded mp3 file.
This is very true. I recently bought a pair of Shure SE210s and while not high end, they were so far beyond what I'd been using that I'm finding it more difficult to listen to some of my older MP3s from the pre-LAME days.
Clarious helpfully provided a decent link for what you asked, but perhaps a simpler way to demonstrate it is in storage capacity.
An 80min CDR can store just over 700MB, but 80min of audio. 80min at 44.1KHz 16bit Stereo works out around 820MB. Some of your data-CD space is eaten up file file system data, but not 120MB.
That extra space that audio uses for audio is used to store that error detection/correction and seek data I was referring to.
It's probably a lot to do with simply consolidating manufacturing. If they only need one set of equipment, I'd imagine that helps their bottom line. If they can get some marketing led sales out of it from gullible sorts then that's just gravy.
Different encoding scheme, more error correction and most importantly the data has a way to tell the drive where it is for accurate seeking, so a misread can be re-read. Whereas on an audio-cd programs have to do a hack where they guess the position based on the data they are receiving. Accurate rip software can basically never truly guarantee a bit for bit copy, and have to brute force it to get close. In practice however the end result is close enough that only a purist who doesn't care about the music so much as the warm fuzzy feeling of a accuracy will care.
And I don't want to buy something you've had first. There's more to a game than the bits on a disc.
The worst one I ever had was a black and white scan of a printed screenshot. I asked the guy about it and he apparently had taken the screenshot, pasted it in to Word, printed that and then used an MFP's "scan to email" function to send it to me.
Y'see, that one I don't mind so much. It shows that the person knew what the end result had to be and thought about what they could do to achieve that given what they knew.
It was needlessly complex and not very useful in the end, but when you deal with people who refuse point blank to realise that everything they've been asked to do today is a tiny variation on one common theme and NOT to phone you every single time for instructions... damned if I'm not going to be impressed if they at least try.
I don't even ask for vector stuff anymore, because every damned time I end up with a PDF or EPS with embedded JPGs.
Snap.
When tasked with organising the artwork for poster sized versions of company logos this very thing turned an afternoon of phone calls and emails into "become an expert at tracing company logos with Illustrator."
I think sometimes it might be the that professions have the perception that someone spent time learning this through apprenticeships or many years at university and are therefore better people than that damned bespectacled nerd who only knows what to do from tinkering with those stupid computers in his parent's basement.
That and while people appreciate their cars or of course, their health, with computers it seems to be more that they HAVE to use it and resent every minute of it.
Sometimes you have to learn how to be stupid to deal with people. Where I work they understand Excel. That's it.
If you want to send any tabulated data whatsoever, it damn well better be in an excel spreadsheet rather than ANYTHING more suited to the task. And when you're butting up against the physical limitations of the excel file format, then it's your data that has to change, not the file format. Grrrrr.
This is very true. When dealing with some incredibly annoying bespoke software at work, you get used to ignoring the endless stream of "error" messages which are not even warnings as it will retry anyway and pop the message back if there is a real problem.
Then something happens and you get a message completely identical to a previous one except for a tiny but critical change. Which you've dutifully clicked away without noticing.
Now the whole thing is brusted and no way to find out what it said. So all that's left to do is swear profusely and decide if it's faster to debug the current foobar as best you can or restore the previous version.
Usually 3rd person games where the mouse pivots the viewpoint around the player. Some people like it inverted.
A night out can carry no expectations of being long lived whereas a video game only has artificial restrictions. I buy games to play off and on for as long as the hardware lasts. In 20 years time I might just want to play any of Valve's games. The same as it's been over 20 years since Mario Bros and I'll still play that on my real NES.
With PC games there should be a reasonable expectation that if something worked one day on one set of hardware/OS it should work forever even after the developers and publishers have long been fed to the lawyers.
When OSs change and don't run it any more, that's MY problem and I or someone smarter than me will figure out a solution (DosBox or vmware) but I won't buy anything where a third party holds all the cards.
Sometimes I wonder if I'm far too accommodating of manufacturers for things like this. I've been hoarding my consoles and such since the C64 days and all of them, ALL of them have their little foibles that you just know are not going to stand up to normal misuse. So I've trained myself to second guess the design, to the point that I tend to think it was my own stupid fault if I do something and it breaks.
Manufacturers cut corners to save on costs and get the retail price down while securing a nice profit for themselves and retailers. If they built quality, charged more for the difference, you can bet they'd sell far fewer. And it's only people like me who want to keep playing their stuff in 10 years time that care about that. The same insignificant minority that worries about activation servers' longevity.