Maybe it's also that line-doubling DVD players can be had for less than a hundred dollars.
I totally agree with fyngyrz. Shoot, even on my old 32 inch HDTV, I could tell the difference, and now I have upgraded to a 42 inch.
Upconversion may be fine on some animated movies that have a REALLY high-quality encode on the DVD, but when comparing an upconverted movie, such as Independance Day, or Coyote Ugly, or i Robot, the BluRay version, there is no comparison. The difference in audio - that is, Dolby Digital 5.1 versus Dolby TrueHD or DTS Master Audio, alone is enough wow many people, and the visual difference - wow! So please, do not compare upconverted DVDs with BluRay.
My problem is that people keep comparing BluRay to DVD NOW. DVD was introduced, what, in 1995? I got mine in 1999, and I was the first person I knew who got DVD - four years after its introduction. DVD really did not start taking off mainstream until around 2000 or 2001. The first BluRay players, on the other hand, came out not even two years ago, I think, and I think the sales of PS3s alone should show that there is a demand for BluRay. Two years after its introduction, and half of my coWorkers have PS3s that they watch BluRay movies on. I could not say the same about DVD two years after its introduction.
Compare the number of BluRay and PS3 players sold in the past two years to the number of DVD players sold in their first two years, then tell me if BluRay is a failure. I bet you will be surprised.
I loved COBOL in college. Because of how tedious the structure was, it made for actually reading the code and following logic very easy. I took our college to state in the COBOL programing competetion. Our professor stressed how important COBOL was.
And I get out of college, and cannot find a single COBOL programing job because they taught us COBOL on PCs, not on mainframes, and they will not hire COBOL programmers with no mainframe experience
Maybe the issue is so few people are booting Vista, using the Enterprise or Ultimate Edition, who are actually trusting Microsoft to encrypt the entire harddrive. Shoot, I am running it, and did not even know this feature existed - I use TrueCrypt.
A microscope that can isolate cancer cells - all on its own - no nanotechnology needed?
And if the microscope is implanted in the human body, what are we looking at? Is it going to incorporate some transmitter to communicate with doctors? I don't know, this "autonomous" thing sounds really far fetched to me.
I actually at first thought you ment open source video editing tools, at which point, i was going to say good luck.
I have had similar experiences trying to find multi-core 64 bit video encoders / converters / editors. The problem actually is not usually the application, but the codec. The codec has to be written to take advantage of multi-core systems and 64 bit extensions, not just the program using the codecs. I think XVid is one of the few codecs that actaully has this ability, but if I remember right, the 64 bit code project is not as active as the main project and is usually several versions behind. I actually finally went back to the 32 bit codec as it was less buggy.
While using the 64-bit version of Vista, the workload seems to get balanced out between the cores as well. I am not sure if that is due to how the processor works, how the OS works, or how the software works, but all the video editing tools I have used seem to balance the workload over both cores rather well. This is true when using Adobe Premiere, Canopus Procoder, XMpeg, and other encoders / decoders. So while it may not be OPTIMIZED for it, it certainly does take advantage of it. Of course, your milage may vary.
go directly to Firefox running in a modified Kiosk mode that effectively turns the browser into the operating system for the device. Add Gears for offline syncing of Google docs, email, etc., and Skype for communication and you have a machine that will be almost as useful as a desktop but cheaper and more portable than any laptop or tablet PC
What alternative reality are they living in? First, if we have an embeded Firefox in a kiosk mode, wouldn't that keep me from patching and upgrading the browser? Then, you are basically telling me that all I need to do on a computer is browse the web, and online word processing and e-mail, and VoIP? Shoot, the iPhone does more than that, and sells for the same price. And I certainly would not claim its as good as a desktop. Shoot, my desktop has more power than my maxed-out laptop, and I do video editing and 3D rendering, gaming, and multimedia. If I am using Google Mail, this probably means that I cannot sync to my exchange server.
And what is wrong with just taking a cheap tablet off of ebay and throwing Linux on it?
Also, Firefox is not an operating system. An operating system and a browser are not even remotely connected, no matter how much BS from Microsoft you have read. This is probably going to be a modified Linux build, boot directly into X, and then launch Firefox. For them to make Firefox into an operating system would require a HUGE rewrite of Firefox, and, as I said earlier, would keep them from being able to do patches and such.
So I was trying to find that "custom firmware", but could not find it anywhere on the page. All the emulators on dcemu that the engadget article pointed to all seemed to use the Elf SD emulator, which is like a hack to Zelda: Twilight Princess. That is why I got so excited about the custom firmware headline - I was hoping I would not have to jump through all these hoops just to get a SNES emulator to work. That would be so cool - I just want to put all my ROMS on a disc, and play them using the classic controler for the Wii.
One of the main reasons I still have my DreamCast around. Freakin easy to homebrew.
wraps them in an ASF container, and adds links to further copies of the malware, all without modifying the.MP3 extension
So, if I get this right, it converts the MP3 file to a WMA (bad enough, you loose sound quality going from one format to another), puts it into an ASF container that has a link to download some malicious code, then renames the extension back to.mp3.
Windows Media Player will at least inform you if the media format is actually of a different format than the extension. I get those from time to time on P2P networks - something with a.mpg extension that is actually an AVI or, sometimes, even a JPEG.
My experience if you try opening up a file, a wma or asf, file in VLC, it actually will error out if it is trying to download a codec or something. In otherwords, VLC does not execute the code.
Not sure what WinAmp does, have not used it in years.
And then my virus scanner is usually pretty good at scanning on download, and sometimes even quarenteens files before the download finishes. I always scan the download directory before checking anything out in it, and then only open stuff in VLC.
Also, beware of any MPEG, AVI, or MP3 that is under a meg. And don't be stupid enough to download.zip,.rar,.exe,.scr,.wmv,.wma,.asv, or.asf files off of P2P networks.
the same as it meant for RoadRunner, Sprint, AT&T and Verizon customers -- the end of the newsgroups."
I have been an AT&T customer for years, and have not used the AT&T usenet servers in probably 3 years. AT&T always limited their newsgroup transfer rates to around 150k a second, and only had about a 3 day retention. There are many premium servers out there, take your pick. I have used many of the big ones, and each has its strengths and weaknesses. Just google Usenet. Supernews, EasyNews, NewsHosting.com. Pay your $20 bucks a month, get unlimited downloads, speeds as fast as your connection can handle (I get around 5 and a half meg a second transfer rates on my 6 meg DSL connection), most offer encryption and tunneling nowdays, and many have retention days of over 90 days (I think Supernews is claiming around a 200 day retention time now). On the PC, use a binary grabber such as NewsBin Pro (I love this program). Why would I ever go back to using my ISPs usenet servers.
Not sure what exactly you are trying to do, but there are several small Linux distros that boot off of a single floppy disc. Do a slight rewrite and get it to boot off the harddrive. An OS that is under 2 meg on a HD should run relatively fast, although you will be greatly limited by what you can do.
and will that have a positive effect on desktop Linux adoption? Hard to tell, but it's good to see that normal people (not just us geeks) are choosing to go with a different OS, rather than staying with the headache-inducing Windows.
WTF does buying a Mac have to do with Linux adoption? I have 3 PCs and 3 Macs, so I cannot say I am an Apple or a PC fanboy. I run OSX, Windows XP, Vista, and Linux. So, I am not biased in any way.
That being said, I cannot think of anyone I know who has a Mac because they want "a diffrent OS". In fact, many of the Mac users I know who have Intel Macs are running BootCamp or Parallels or VMWare so that they can run Windows Apps.
No, people buy Macs because of witty advertising, the "cool" factor, ease of use, and tend to be more friendly when doing graphic and video editing. Go up to your average Mac user, and ask them if they are willing to try out Linux, and see what kind of response you get.
The connections that some people make! Price of oil fell $10 a barrel yesterday because demand went down. Maybe I could say that I sure am glad that more people are driving Hydrogen powered cars and are sticking it to the oil companies.
We have some HPs with that issue - you can get an XP license, but the hardware does not have XP drivers.
Besides, didn't you say your guy wanted something flashy? Vista is certainly that.
I just get kinda pissed off about people who ditch Vista who have never used it, who have only used early betas, or are trying to run it on underpowered systems, or who complain its too different.
Linux gets ditched by people who have never used it, find it complicated, have not used it in years, and who complain that such and such hardware is not supported by Linux. That does not mean its a bad OS.
I am quite happy with Vista. Two years ago, I was dual-booting between XP and Linux. Now, I run Vista Business exclusively. I find it far more stable than XP, when something does bomb out in it, it is usually able to recover without any ill-effects, and in my experience, on newer machines, with both XP and Vista, Vista way outperforms XP.
In fact, in the IT department I work in, we have been so happy with Vista and Office 2007, we started rolling it out to our users back in May. After they get past the first 5 minutes of "oh my gosh, its different", they usually figure out where everything is, and claim that they will never go back to XP and Office 2003. They LOVE it.
Getting back on subject, what do you need to do to get a computer with XP? Should have bought it before June 30th. Its not as if that came as a surprise to anyone. I mean, that was not even three weeks ago.
HP home laptops all are Vista only, but if you go to Small Business or Large Business, they have the option to order with XP preinstalled. I have ordered business class machines from both HP and Dell before for home users, and have never been asked if we were really a business, so I have not had to "fib" about anything.
At first glance, I do not see a way to order XP at Gateway.
Just suck it up guys. Windows 3.0, 3.1 and 3.11 are dead. 95 is dead. NT is dead. 98 and ME are Dead. 2000 is dead (much to many people's dismay). And now, XP is dead.
BTW, as long as we are trying to get computers with XP preinstalled, perhaps you can also tell me how I can buy an analog TV after February of next year. Let me know where I can find LPs and 8tracks and LaserDiscs, and where I can buy an HD-DVD player.
I mean, sorry to be a butt, but you guys know that the June 30th deadline was coming. If you are a business, you can still get XP through your Microsoft Licensing Agreements.
Yeah, unfortunately that would require me to log into their website (imap rules) and then to wade through about 3,000 messages about buying Viagra or looking at the prettiest girls on the internet to find the one or two that are not spam.
I do know that Frontbridge has an issue where they keep blocking my subscriptions from HDNet and Facebook, and I have to keep telling them that its not spam, so I guess I could assume that GMail may have similar issues.
I definately agree. I have had no issue with increased spam in my inbox, and as I never check the spam box, I cannot say one way or the other. Me getting one or two spam messages in my inbox every couple of weeks does not say to me that there is an issue with their spam filter.
I truthfully am surprised satelite is this bad. You just said it, you are limited by the speed of light. Speed of light is, what, 176,000 miles per second, roughly. Satelites are stationed at 36,000 miles above the earth. Let's for kicks add another 4,00 miles onto that for the distance to Northern Canada (sorry, its right after lunch, don't feel like doing the math right now). So, lets say 40,000 miles one way. Lets say the ISP offering this is, oh, in San Francisco, so, what, 39,000 miles, if that. So, 40,000 + 39,000 is 79,000 miles. San Francisco is one of the major internet hubs, so let's say you ping Google. Roughly about 450ms one way, so probably around 900ms roundtrip.
VoIP? Really should not be an issue, if the person you are calling is on a landline. You have what, a one second delay? I get that sometimes with my cell phone. Now what would be hard is if you are using VoIP to contact your other offices who are also using satelite and VoIP. Now we start to approach a two second delay.
Then you have to worry about dropped packets. Isn't satelite reception that far north only capable of recieving around 50% of a satelite signal?
No, I think the best option here may be a bit costly upfront, and that is microwave. It works for companies that need a fast connection who are on the outskirts of cities here. I am not for sure what the line of site is on microwave, and how far away you are from a city that has a decent internet connection, so you may need repeaters, but at least then it will be a dedicated connection, and it should significantly lower your ping time, although do not expect fiber speeds.
Don't really care, I have PS1 games that would not work on my (now broken) PS2, but work fine on the PS3. Chrono Trigger is one that stands out in my mind.
I find this kind of hard to believe, the idea that you will get exploited before patching. On unpatched XP, after connecting to Internet, I go and download Firefox, which takes under a minute. Install, close IE. Open Firefox, go download AVG or Avast. Install, update, reboot. Relaunch Firefox, download Spybot, and install, update, and imunize system. Run Windows Updates, install SP3.
Maybe because Toshiba never produced a single decent HD-DVD player, and the discs will scratch to the point of being unplayable if you just look at them wrong.
Also, there were some early movies that were released on both platforms where the HD-DVD actually costs more than the BluRay discs. The only reason you can pick up HD-DVDs now for $12 (I picked up six at that price two weeks ago) is because they are clearing out the discs.
But this is offtopic. The article is not about HD-DVD vs BluRay, but Xbox vs PS3. I also have both of those, mainly because I had the PS3 first to play older PSX and PS2 games, and I wanted a BluRay player, but also wanted to play Viva Pinata and Beautiful Katamari. My experience with games that are released on both systems are quite interesting. Early PS3 games were usually Xbox 360 ports. As such, you rarely saw a difference between the two, and when you did, the Xbox outperformed the PS3. However, on newer games, I have seen the PS3 have better framerates and sharper colors. It is really annoying playing the exact same game on both systems, to have the Xbox drop frames at a crucial moment.
As for the Final Fantasies, if you do not have a PS2 or an XBox, the PS3 would probably still be your best option for playing the older games. Last I checked, Final Fantasy 7 and 9 did not play on the Xbox. And I am still looking forward to Little Big Planet.
I would not say that their server side products are really that much better or more secure. Its jsut that most servers are used for running one or two specialized programs, and are administered by people who (generally) know what they are doing. I mean, how many server admins are going to remote desktop into the Server 2003 Enterprise Exchange server and open up Internet Explorer, turn off all the extreme security features that are on Internet Explorer (I finally installed firefox on one of our servers, could not even download an update to our program we ran on the server otherwise), the goto Smiley Central, and while there, click on the popup that says "Your Computer may not be protected, click here to fix" and install WinAntivirus 2009 on it?
While there may be some differences in the code to be better utilized to run Server apps, a 2003 Server can be compromised about as easily as an XP or Vista machine.
Well, I guess by association, I now also hate Open Source, Microsoft, Eee, OLPC, NASA, MIT, Comcast, Yahoo, RIAA, MIAA, ThePirateBay, Sweeden, and Intel
So, let me get this straight, you are saying that Microsoft should give away, open source, or public domain perfectly working software? Why would they want to do that? Dropping support will force legacy houses to finally upgrade both hardware and software, meaning more money in Microsoft's pocket. As long as they were still licensing the software, Microsoft was still making money, despite the fact that the software was 15 years old.
Now, if a company goes belly up, then I agree that the software should become Public Domain. I mean, I am no expert in copyright, but is a copyright still valid if the entity that owns the copyright no longer exists?
Not necessaraly. When I first got into digital photography, my little point and shoot Nikon was 1.2 megapixels, with a Nikor lense. Wonderful pictures. The high end cameras, such as the D1, I believe at the time only shot 6 or 7 megapixels. People were saying you probably would not see that high of a megapixel in a consumer based camera because of the lenses. I now have a 7.1 megapixel Nikon L12 point and shoot that, if you know how to take photographs, produce photos similar to those early high-end Nikon cameras (minus the ability to change out lenses, you are limited to the built in zoom lense which is like 3x or 4x, and the higher ISO settings). Point is, if you understand how your camera works, you can take professional quality pictures with your point and shoot.
The main thing is you have GOT to understand the differences in camera manufactorors. My $170 Nikon 7.1 megapixel camera BLOW AWAY the consumer level Olympus 10 megapixel cameras that most of my friend have. They have trouble understanding why, but it seems as if the Nikon has a better CCD sensor than the Olympus low-end cameras (zoom in and look at how much noise is in the picture), and the Nikon delivers MUCH better color and sharpness to the pictures, which I attribute to the Nikor lense. And lastly, if you are shooting in JPEG format, a camera really must have the option to set your compression level. JPEG is not a bad image format to shoot in if you do not compress the crap out of it. Granted, it will never be as good as RAW or TIFF, but that does not mean that JPEG is bad. I can easily blow my shots up to 30x40 posters, and they look great. People are blown away when I tell them that I shot that with a point and shoot camera saving the image in JPEG.
The Nikor lense is a wonderful thing, and Nikon has done a great job at putting high-quality lenses in consumer level cameras. I could easily see Nikon coming out with point and shoot cameras in the 20 and 30 megapixel range in the next couple of years. Kodak's EasyShare cameras are currently pretty good, and I could see Kodak getting there. The other manufactorors I think need to work on what they have now, because the consumer level Fujis, Cannons, Olympus, Polariods, etc that I have had a chance to play with are CRAP, and most, as you said, are due to crappy lenses and cheap ccd sensors.
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Maybe it's also that line-doubling DVD players can be had for less than a hundred dollars.
I totally agree with fyngyrz. Shoot, even on my old 32 inch HDTV, I could tell the difference, and now I have upgraded to a 42 inch.
Upconversion may be fine on some animated movies that have a REALLY high-quality encode on the DVD, but when comparing an upconverted movie, such as Independance Day, or Coyote Ugly, or i Robot, the BluRay version, there is no comparison. The difference in audio - that is, Dolby Digital 5.1 versus Dolby TrueHD or DTS Master Audio, alone is enough wow many people, and the visual difference - wow! So please, do not compare upconverted DVDs with BluRay.
My problem is that people keep comparing BluRay to DVD NOW. DVD was introduced, what, in 1995? I got mine in 1999, and I was the first person I knew who got DVD - four years after its introduction. DVD really did not start taking off mainstream until around 2000 or 2001. The first BluRay players, on the other hand, came out not even two years ago, I think, and I think the sales of PS3s alone should show that there is a demand for BluRay. Two years after its introduction, and half of my coWorkers have PS3s that they watch BluRay movies on. I could not say the same about DVD two years after its introduction.
Compare the number of BluRay and PS3 players sold in the past two years to the number of DVD players sold in their first two years, then tell me if BluRay is a failure. I bet you will be surprised.
I loved COBOL in college. Because of how tedious the structure was, it made for actually reading the code and following logic very easy. I took our college to state in the COBOL programing competetion. Our professor stressed how important COBOL was.
And I get out of college, and cannot find a single COBOL programing job because they taught us COBOL on PCs, not on mainframes, and they will not hire COBOL programmers with no mainframe experience
Maybe the issue is so few people are booting Vista, using the Enterprise or Ultimate Edition, who are actually trusting Microsoft to encrypt the entire harddrive. Shoot, I am running it, and did not even know this feature existed - I use TrueCrypt.
A microscope that can isolate cancer cells - all on its own - no nanotechnology needed?
And if the microscope is implanted in the human body, what are we looking at? Is it going to incorporate some transmitter to communicate with doctors? I don't know, this "autonomous" thing sounds really far fetched to me.
I actually at first thought you ment open source video editing tools, at which point, i was going to say good luck.
I have had similar experiences trying to find multi-core 64 bit video encoders / converters / editors. The problem actually is not usually the application, but the codec. The codec has to be written to take advantage of multi-core systems and 64 bit extensions, not just the program using the codecs. I think XVid is one of the few codecs that actaully has this ability, but if I remember right, the 64 bit code project is not as active as the main project and is usually several versions behind. I actually finally went back to the 32 bit codec as it was less buggy.
While using the 64-bit version of Vista, the workload seems to get balanced out between the cores as well. I am not sure if that is due to how the processor works, how the OS works, or how the software works, but all the video editing tools I have used seem to balance the workload over both cores rather well. This is true when using Adobe Premiere, Canopus Procoder, XMpeg, and other encoders / decoders. So while it may not be OPTIMIZED for it, it certainly does take advantage of it. Of course, your milage may vary.
go directly to Firefox running in a modified Kiosk mode that effectively turns the browser into the operating system for the device. Add Gears for offline syncing of Google docs, email, etc., and Skype for communication and you have a machine that will be almost as useful as a desktop but cheaper and more portable than any laptop or tablet PC
What alternative reality are they living in? First, if we have an embeded Firefox in a kiosk mode, wouldn't that keep me from patching and upgrading the browser? Then, you are basically telling me that all I need to do on a computer is browse the web, and online word processing and e-mail, and VoIP? Shoot, the iPhone does more than that, and sells for the same price. And I certainly would not claim its as good as a desktop. Shoot, my desktop has more power than my maxed-out laptop, and I do video editing and 3D rendering, gaming, and multimedia. If I am using Google Mail, this probably means that I cannot sync to my exchange server.
And what is wrong with just taking a cheap tablet off of ebay and throwing Linux on it?
Also, Firefox is not an operating system. An operating system and a browser are not even remotely connected, no matter how much BS from Microsoft you have read. This is probably going to be a modified Linux build, boot directly into X, and then launch Firefox. For them to make Firefox into an operating system would require a HUGE rewrite of Firefox, and, as I said earlier, would keep them from being able to do patches and such.
So I was trying to find that "custom firmware", but could not find it anywhere on the page. All the emulators on dcemu that the engadget article pointed to all seemed to use the Elf SD emulator, which is like a hack to Zelda: Twilight Princess. That is why I got so excited about the custom firmware headline - I was hoping I would not have to jump through all these hoops just to get a SNES emulator to work. That would be so cool - I just want to put all my ROMS on a disc, and play them using the classic controler for the Wii.
One of the main reasons I still have my DreamCast around. Freakin easy to homebrew.
wraps them in an ASF container, and adds links to further copies of the malware, all without modifying the .MP3 extension
So, if I get this right, it converts the MP3 file to a WMA (bad enough, you loose sound quality going from one format to another), puts it into an ASF container that has a link to download some malicious code, then renames the extension back to .mp3.
Windows Media Player will at least inform you if the media format is actually of a different format than the extension. I get those from time to time on P2P networks - something with a .mpg extension that is actually an AVI or, sometimes, even a JPEG.
My experience if you try opening up a file, a wma or asf, file in VLC, it actually will error out if it is trying to download a codec or something. In otherwords, VLC does not execute the code.
Not sure what WinAmp does, have not used it in years.
And then my virus scanner is usually pretty good at scanning on download, and sometimes even quarenteens files before the download finishes. I always scan the download directory before checking anything out in it, and then only open stuff in VLC.
Also, beware of any MPEG, AVI, or MP3 that is under a meg. And don't be stupid enough to download .zip, .rar, .exe, .scr, .wmv, .wma, .asv, or .asf files off of P2P networks.
the same as it meant for RoadRunner, Sprint, AT&T and Verizon customers -- the end of the newsgroups."
I have been an AT&T customer for years, and have not used the AT&T usenet servers in probably 3 years. AT&T always limited their newsgroup transfer rates to around 150k a second, and only had about a 3 day retention. There are many premium servers out there, take your pick. I have used many of the big ones, and each has its strengths and weaknesses. Just google Usenet. Supernews, EasyNews, NewsHosting.com. Pay your $20 bucks a month, get unlimited downloads, speeds as fast as your connection can handle (I get around 5 and a half meg a second transfer rates on my 6 meg DSL connection), most offer encryption and tunneling nowdays, and many have retention days of over 90 days (I think Supernews is claiming around a 200 day retention time now). On the PC, use a binary grabber such as NewsBin Pro (I love this program). Why would I ever go back to using my ISPs usenet servers.
Not sure what exactly you are trying to do, but there are several small Linux distros that boot off of a single floppy disc. Do a slight rewrite and get it to boot off the harddrive. An OS that is under 2 meg on a HD should run relatively fast, although you will be greatly limited by what you can do.
and will that have a positive effect on desktop Linux adoption? Hard to tell, but it's good to see that normal people (not just us geeks) are choosing to go with a different OS, rather than staying with the headache-inducing Windows.
WTF does buying a Mac have to do with Linux adoption? I have 3 PCs and 3 Macs, so I cannot say I am an Apple or a PC fanboy. I run OSX, Windows XP, Vista, and Linux. So, I am not biased in any way.
That being said, I cannot think of anyone I know who has a Mac because they want "a diffrent OS". In fact, many of the Mac users I know who have Intel Macs are running BootCamp or Parallels or VMWare so that they can run Windows Apps.
No, people buy Macs because of witty advertising, the "cool" factor, ease of use, and tend to be more friendly when doing graphic and video editing. Go up to your average Mac user, and ask them if they are willing to try out Linux, and see what kind of response you get.
The connections that some people make! Price of oil fell $10 a barrel yesterday because demand went down. Maybe I could say that I sure am glad that more people are driving Hydrogen powered cars and are sticking it to the oil companies.
We have some HPs with that issue - you can get an XP license, but the hardware does not have XP drivers.
Besides, didn't you say your guy wanted something flashy? Vista is certainly that.
I just get kinda pissed off about people who ditch Vista who have never used it, who have only used early betas, or are trying to run it on underpowered systems, or who complain its too different.
Linux gets ditched by people who have never used it, find it complicated, have not used it in years, and who complain that such and such hardware is not supported by Linux. That does not mean its a bad OS.
I am quite happy with Vista. Two years ago, I was dual-booting between XP and Linux. Now, I run Vista Business exclusively. I find it far more stable than XP, when something does bomb out in it, it is usually able to recover without any ill-effects, and in my experience, on newer machines, with both XP and Vista, Vista way outperforms XP.
In fact, in the IT department I work in, we have been so happy with Vista and Office 2007, we started rolling it out to our users back in May. After they get past the first 5 minutes of "oh my gosh, its different", they usually figure out where everything is, and claim that they will never go back to XP and Office 2003. They LOVE it.
Getting back on subject, what do you need to do to get a computer with XP? Should have bought it before June 30th. Its not as if that came as a surprise to anyone. I mean, that was not even three weeks ago.
So, I just did a build your own laptop on Dell's website and do not see an option to get XP. Same is ture on the Business Models Vostro and Latitude. However, on their main page, if you go to Large Business, and then to the Latitude laptops, there is still the option to get XP preinstalled.
HP home laptops all are Vista only, but if you go to Small Business or Large Business, they have the option to order with XP preinstalled. I have ordered business class machines from both HP and Dell before for home users, and have never been asked if we were really a business, so I have not had to "fib" about anything.
At first glance, I do not see a way to order XP at Gateway.
Just suck it up guys. Windows 3.0, 3.1 and 3.11 are dead. 95 is dead. NT is dead. 98 and ME are Dead. 2000 is dead (much to many people's dismay). And now, XP is dead.
BTW, as long as we are trying to get computers with XP preinstalled, perhaps you can also tell me how I can buy an analog TV after February of next year. Let me know where I can find LPs and 8tracks and LaserDiscs, and where I can buy an HD-DVD player.
I mean, sorry to be a butt, but you guys know that the June 30th deadline was coming. If you are a business, you can still get XP through your Microsoft Licensing Agreements.
Yeah, unfortunately that would require me to log into their website (imap rules) and then to wade through about 3,000 messages about buying Viagra or looking at the prettiest girls on the internet to find the one or two that are not spam.
I do know that Frontbridge has an issue where they keep blocking my subscriptions from HDNet and Facebook, and I have to keep telling them that its not spam, so I guess I could assume that GMail may have similar issues.
I definately agree. I have had no issue with increased spam in my inbox, and as I never check the spam box, I cannot say one way or the other. Me getting one or two spam messages in my inbox every couple of weeks does not say to me that there is an issue with their spam filter.
I truthfully am surprised satelite is this bad. You just said it, you are limited by the speed of light. Speed of light is, what, 176,000 miles per second, roughly. Satelites are stationed at 36,000 miles above the earth. Let's for kicks add another 4,00 miles onto that for the distance to Northern Canada (sorry, its right after lunch, don't feel like doing the math right now). So, lets say 40,000 miles one way. Lets say the ISP offering this is, oh, in San Francisco, so, what, 39,000 miles, if that. So, 40,000 + 39,000 is 79,000 miles. San Francisco is one of the major internet hubs, so let's say you ping Google. Roughly about 450ms one way, so probably around 900ms roundtrip.
VoIP? Really should not be an issue, if the person you are calling is on a landline. You have what, a one second delay? I get that sometimes with my cell phone. Now what would be hard is if you are using VoIP to contact your other offices who are also using satelite and VoIP. Now we start to approach a two second delay.
Then you have to worry about dropped packets. Isn't satelite reception that far north only capable of recieving around 50% of a satelite signal?
No, I think the best option here may be a bit costly upfront, and that is microwave. It works for companies that need a fast connection who are on the outskirts of cities here. I am not for sure what the line of site is on microwave, and how far away you are from a city that has a decent internet connection, so you may need repeaters, but at least then it will be a dedicated connection, and it should significantly lower your ping time, although do not expect fiber speeds.
Don't really care, I have PS1 games that would not work on my (now broken) PS2, but work fine on the PS3. Chrono Trigger is one that stands out in my mind.
I find this kind of hard to believe, the idea that you will get exploited before patching. On unpatched XP, after connecting to Internet, I go and download Firefox, which takes under a minute. Install, close IE. Open Firefox, go download AVG or Avast. Install, update, reboot. Relaunch Firefox, download Spybot, and install, update, and imunize system. Run Windows Updates, install SP3.
I have yet to be exploited before patching.
Maybe because Toshiba never produced a single decent HD-DVD player, and the discs will scratch to the point of being unplayable if you just look at them wrong.
I could power my PS3 up and load the movie, be through the warnings and have the movie started in less time than it took to even power up my HD-DVD player. Then you had LONG loading times, and there would be a couple of second delay between the time you hit a button and the time the player actually responded. Then there was the space issue. Paramount actually said the reason there was no high-resolution audio on Transformers was because there was not enough disc space.
Also, there were some early movies that were released on both platforms where the HD-DVD actually costs more than the BluRay discs. The only reason you can pick up HD-DVDs now for $12 (I picked up six at that price two weeks ago) is because they are clearing out the discs.
But this is offtopic. The article is not about HD-DVD vs BluRay, but Xbox vs PS3. I also have both of those, mainly because I had the PS3 first to play older PSX and PS2 games, and I wanted a BluRay player, but also wanted to play Viva Pinata and Beautiful Katamari. My experience with games that are released on both systems are quite interesting. Early PS3 games were usually Xbox 360 ports. As such, you rarely saw a difference between the two, and when you did, the Xbox outperformed the PS3. However, on newer games, I have seen the PS3 have better framerates and sharper colors. It is really annoying playing the exact same game on both systems, to have the Xbox drop frames at a crucial moment.
As for the Final Fantasies, if you do not have a PS2 or an XBox, the PS3 would probably still be your best option for playing the older games. Last I checked, Final Fantasy 7 and 9 did not play on the Xbox. And I am still looking forward to Little Big Planet.
I would not say that their server side products are really that much better or more secure. Its jsut that most servers are used for running one or two specialized programs, and are administered by people who (generally) know what they are doing. I mean, how many server admins are going to remote desktop into the Server 2003 Enterprise Exchange server and open up Internet Explorer, turn off all the extreme security features that are on Internet Explorer (I finally installed firefox on one of our servers, could not even download an update to our program we ran on the server otherwise), the goto Smiley Central, and while there, click on the popup that says "Your Computer may not be protected, click here to fix" and install WinAntivirus 2009 on it?
While there may be some differences in the code to be better utilized to run Server apps, a 2003 Server can be compromised about as easily as an XP or Vista machine.
"Baby, I swear that you are the only one!"
Funny, I thought it was pronounced Viagra.
So, if we rename Mars Warwar, and Women are from Venus and Men are from Mars, we could have some really interesting war stories.
Well, I guess by association, I now also hate Open Source, Microsoft, Eee, OLPC, NASA, MIT, Comcast, Yahoo, RIAA, MIAA, ThePirateBay, Sweeden, and Intel
So, being single, married, and a polygamist is all the same?
So, let me get this straight, you are saying that Microsoft should give away, open source, or public domain perfectly working software? Why would they want to do that? Dropping support will force legacy houses to finally upgrade both hardware and software, meaning more money in Microsoft's pocket. As long as they were still licensing the software, Microsoft was still making money, despite the fact that the software was 15 years old.
Now, if a company goes belly up, then I agree that the software should become Public Domain. I mean, I am no expert in copyright, but is a copyright still valid if the entity that owns the copyright no longer exists?
Not necessaraly. When I first got into digital photography, my little point and shoot Nikon was 1.2 megapixels, with a Nikor lense. Wonderful pictures. The high end cameras, such as the D1, I believe at the time only shot 6 or 7 megapixels. People were saying you probably would not see that high of a megapixel in a consumer based camera because of the lenses. I now have a 7.1 megapixel Nikon L12 point and shoot that, if you know how to take photographs, produce photos similar to those early high-end Nikon cameras (minus the ability to change out lenses, you are limited to the built in zoom lense which is like 3x or 4x, and the higher ISO settings). Point is, if you understand how your camera works, you can take professional quality pictures with your point and shoot.
The main thing is you have GOT to understand the differences in camera manufactorors. My $170 Nikon 7.1 megapixel camera BLOW AWAY the consumer level Olympus 10 megapixel cameras that most of my friend have. They have trouble understanding why, but it seems as if the Nikon has a better CCD sensor than the Olympus low-end cameras (zoom in and look at how much noise is in the picture), and the Nikon delivers MUCH better color and sharpness to the pictures, which I attribute to the Nikor lense. And lastly, if you are shooting in JPEG format, a camera really must have the option to set your compression level. JPEG is not a bad image format to shoot in if you do not compress the crap out of it. Granted, it will never be as good as RAW or TIFF, but that does not mean that JPEG is bad. I can easily blow my shots up to 30x40 posters, and they look great. People are blown away when I tell them that I shot that with a point and shoot camera saving the image in JPEG.
The Nikor lense is a wonderful thing, and Nikon has done a great job at putting high-quality lenses in consumer level cameras. I could easily see Nikon coming out with point and shoot cameras in the 20 and 30 megapixel range in the next couple of years. Kodak's EasyShare cameras are currently pretty good, and I could see Kodak getting there. The other manufactorors I think need to work on what they have now, because the consumer level Fujis, Cannons, Olympus, Polariods, etc that I have had a chance to play with are CRAP, and most, as you said, are due to crappy lenses and cheap ccd sensors.