Yeah, I had the same shock. My reaction was either they are using one hell of a compression method that they are keeping top-secret, or using some incredibly low quality files, or using some craptastic framerate. Shoot, Pirates of the Carabian shiped on two BluRay discs, and that is, what, about 100 gig of data (although I think the second disc was only a single layer), and you get like, what, less than a days worth of viewing material? Even in DivX or XVid low res quality, an hour long Dr Who episode is like 300 meg.
What if we are talking about still pictures? I have a 7 megapixel camera, and when I go on vacation, I can easily take a gig worth of pictures in a day. Shoot, I just backed up my pics and vids from 2007-2008, and it BARELY fit on 2 DL DVD+Rs - roughly 17 gig of data, and that was not using the camera every day.
Fit a life into a terabyte? Yeah, i guess its possible, if you consider people doing what they are already doing - taking pictures and videos with their digital cameras and camera phones, as long as we don't start using 21 megapixel cameras to document them in RAW format.
Microsoft looks like they are finally back on their three year lifecycle for OSes. Vista is just over a year old. By the end of next year, it will be almost three years old. And they introduce Windows 7. By the time it gets all patched, and they release Service Pack 1 for it, we will be awaiting Windows 8. There comes a time when you have to bite the bullet and say its time to upgrade, otherwise we would all still be running Windows NT 3.5 for Workstations on our desktops, and Mac OS 7.5. I mean, Apple releases a new OS every 18 months it seems.
100 - 5,000 years : Genuine theology that reflects the true nature of being and the foundation of our civilization Are you saying 100-5,000 so that you can include Mormans as a genuine theology, and not a cult? Because the thread you replied to would have thrown Mormans into a cult. (I think he said anyone who still knows the founder. With Mormans, you can at least claim a grandchild or great grandchild of the founder)
woot! I'd like to see an entire network follow suit... say SciFi or Commedy Central or you pick... but one whole network that just says fuck it, lets let them download the stuff... You mean like the BBC, ABC, and Fox, just to name a few, are already doing? Granted, the American ones are not "downloading" as you can only stream it online, but its a step in the right direction.
I'm still shocked fewer people don't realize Leibniz beat Newton to Calculus [wikipedia.org]. Oh well, great disputes make for great reading. Actaully, not only did I not know this, but am quite surprised that Calculus is not quite older.
Oh well, one could spend countless hours recalling the great debates of science, it's a shame that some of them are about who's name goes in the history books. I think the issue here is to not just discover or invent something, but to find a real-world solution and market it, and to have it generally accepted as true, or useful, or whatever. Lets look at a quite modern example. Most of us here on slashdot will credit Xerox with inventing the Graphic User Interface. However, you would be surprised at how many people blame Microsoft for stealing the idea from Apple, and crediting Apple with its creation. Xerox never marketed it. Apple did. I am sure many people will also credit Apple with creating the first MP3 player, be that untrue. Who will you credit with creating the mouse? I am sure its not these guys, unless you are a true geek. Who do you credit with creating the first television, the person who created the first CRT, or Marconi for his work in radio, or the company who first marketed it? Who do you credit with inventing the compact disc, the person who came up with cutting grooves in a polymer, the person who invented the laser, the person who came up with the idea of reading a disc with a laser, the person who came up with the idea of converting analog sounds to digital?
Edison, while he may not have been the first, did actually play back his recording, and market it.
FTA:
A very interesting feature of the GreenPower drives is IntelliPower, which is a "fine-tuned balance of spin speed, transfer rate, and caching algorithms designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance" according to WD. What this means to potential users is that WD isn't telling us the exact spindle speed of these drives. We know that they are likely spinning at a speed between 5400 and 7200 RPM and that each GreenPower model may use a different, invariable RPM. So, while WD made power the priority with the GreenPower platform, it did so without disregarding solid performance, a wise choice in our opinion. That was my number one concern. If I am putting these in a data center, I would be a lot more worried about drive performance over how much power it consumes. However, if it consumes less power while offering the same performance, I am all for it.
to sudden spikes in memory usage After installing, and logging in, I saw a MAJOR spike in memory usage. I pulled up task manager, and realized that it was still installing something. After about 10 minutes, it finished, and memory usage took a MAJOR dive. I am seeing about 100 meg LESS memory usage than before. Oh, and stuff that was broke started working again - the Sidebar came back, putting my laptop to sleep no longer crashes the video driver, and after defraging (one thing I learned from XP - always defrag after installing a service pack), just general responsiveness seems to better. I installed it on my work laptop first (I work in IT, and yes, I do have a backup, but point is, I needed to evaulate it), as I was having issues with it, and every issue I have had has gone away. Now I am about to go install it on my home computer, which the only issues I have had with it is the Host Process crashing on me, so hopefully SP1 will fix that issue.
And likewise, before installing any major update, make sure you have a backup.
,I am not exactly sure what this graph is showing. I have NEVER had IE7 take up 500 meg of Ram. Shoot, with multiple windows and videos open, I have never had it top 100. I am running it now in Vista, and it is using under 25 meg of ram. Firefox 2.0.12 is using 22 meg of Ram. Yeah, Firefox is using less, but I am seeing no where near the performance difference that they are showing on the graph. Maybe TFA might share some insight.
During intensive browsing with approximately 50 tabs, I have found that Firefox 3 generally consumes less than half of the memory used by Firefox 2.0.0.12. I have never had 50 tabs open at once. I think my limit has been around 20, but I usually do not average more than 5. 50, for real? Does not sound like a real world test to me.
The memory benchmark, which uses the Talos framework and was conducted on Windows Vista, replicates real-world usage patterns by automatically cycling pages through browser windows and then closing them. Firefox 3 used less memory than Firefox 2, Internet Explorer, and Opera, and it also freed more memory than the other browsers when pages were closed. Safari 3 and Internet Explorer 8 could not be benchmarked because they crashed during the test. Once again, I have NEVER had IE7 use as much ram as they are claiming under Vista. I have to question the "replicates real-world usage patterns" thing.
1) The laptop screen saver not waking up *sometimes* and so I have to toggle the laptop in and out of standby to carry on working. This was fixed in an update, and I think there is also a fix for it in SP1, at least I am pretty sure there was one in the RC that was released back before Christmas
2) A wifi driver that blue screens *sometimes* on resuming from standby so if 1) happens I may lose my work in progress. Update your drivers
3) A damn stupid box that pops up every time I run notepad++ warning me about the program. Start Menu, Control Panel, User Accounts, Turn User Account Controls Off
4) Mysterious periods of disk thrashing. Defrag. If this does not fix the issue, you do not have enough Ram. Just remember, minimum system requirements is not the same as optimal system requirements. 512 Ram is going to constantly hit the paging file on your HD, a gig will be sufficient if you are just running Office 2007, a ticketing software package, and the Internet. If you want to do more than that, go to 2 gig or more.
5) Mysterious periods of wifi not connecting. You need to update your driver. If there is not an updated driver, yell at your chipset manufactorer. Vista has been out for over a year, release candidates came out in summer and fall of '06, there is no reason why a manufactorer should not have released a Vista driver yet. Pay attention if you are installing it on a 32 bit or 64 bit OS, and while the XP drivers MIGHT work in XP, you will have issues. You need a Vista driver.
6) A need to buy 1GB more RAM to make the thing stop plodding. Yeah, its annoying, but Ram is cheap. Not saying its an excuse.
7) RDP sessions mysteriously failing and needing a registry key deleted to get things going again Never had this problem, RDP works beautifully for me.
You are not alone. I LOVE Vista. The only machine I have had issues with vista on is my work laptop, and that is due to some crappy Intel graphics driver. However, they released a new version a couple of weeks ago, and I have not had any issues with it since then. Get this, I have had programs that stopped working in XP but work just fine in Vista. Go figure. No, I am triple booting on my home machine (Vista 64 Business, XP 64 Pro, and XP Pro) and dual booting on my work laptop, and pretty much just boot back into XP for those one or two odd programs that do not work right in Vista, and as they are programs I so rarely use in the first place....
Face it, your format lost. Stop whining already, its getting old. As for me, I went purple, having both BluRay and HD-DVD. The HD-DVD format SUCKED! First, hardly no one used the "features" that were available on HD-DVD in the first place. The picture-in-picture thing was basically only used by Universal (none of my other movies have it, with the exception of MAYBE Transformers, still poking through the bonus features), and the web features were a gimic at best, and I have never been able to get them to work right. We were robbed high-res audio and uncompressed audio on movies that should have been audio refrence discs, such as Transformers, because there was not enough room on the disc. These discs scratched way too easily. Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory got scratched in shipping, and 4 out of 6 of the Netflix discs I got on HD-DVD skipped and had A/V sync problems, and one disc scratched so badly that it was not even recognizable by the player. I had 2 discs that managed to hard-lock my HD-DVD player, causing me to have to unplug the thing. So, that means that 1/6 Netflix BluRay discs I got had no problems whatsoever. How many Netflix BluRay discs have I had issues with? 0. I have rented about 25 movies on BluRay from them, never had an issue with a single disc. Why? Because the BluRay format made it madnitory that all manufactorors apply an anti-scratch coating.
So, HD-DVD was cheaper? Looks like you got what you paid for.
Hey, want to know a secret? Vista has more features than Linux. Mmmmhmmm. Must mean that its the better operating system, from your argument.
Lets go back to price. HD-DVD and BluRay players were almost the same price for the most part of the war. If you are talking about those $150 players Toshiba had out, they really only dropped the price of those toward the end, when it looked like they were trying to drop stock. Oh, and BTW, the PS3 is a GREAT BluRay player, stop ditching it, and it is already expected to drop to $299 soon. And when more manufactorors start dumping players on the market, price will go down. What is out there now, Samsung, Sony and LG? I am sure when companies like, oh, APEX or someone decides to start making BluRay players, prices will come down.
And you think that Hollywood chose the format? Before WHV went Blu, Toshiba claimed that they sold about 1 million players world wide. Strangely, Sony was claiming that they had sold about 10 million PS3s worldwide, this does not include stand alone players, and players made by LG and Samsung. Sales figures on media varied from week to week, but it was obvious for months that BluRay movie sales doubled and sometimes tripled the sales of HD-DVD. Consumers made it good and obvious which they prefered way before WHV made their decision.
So stop crying already, realize that not only did your format loose, but it was inferior in more ways than just storage space, and move on with your life. I am getting freakin sick hearing the Toshiba fanboys continued whining.
It's worth checking both Amazon.com and Amazon.de as the European releases covered a slightly different collection of movies to those in the US, due to differing distribution rights; and HD DVD is region free so this really is worth doing. I truthfully saw NOTHING on amazon.de that amazon.com did not have in the realm of HD-DVD. I saw ONE movie on Amazon.fr that did not seem to be anywhere else. Amazon.co.uk I got a bit excited about a few BBC releases, until I saw the price tag, and most, if not all, of those can be found on amazon.com. In fact, in my experience, I saw MORE movies on amazon.com than the others, so I would suggest people in Europe check out the American store, instead of the other way around.
In other news, I have had a PS3 for over a year, and picked up an HD-DVD player for $100 at Best Buy with the two movies in the box and send off for 5 movies (which I am not sure if I will ever see now, not sure if Toshiba pulling out would nullify any offers). Just off of Amazon, I picked up 10 movies for $130, and I am a HUGE BluRay supporter. But who cares, I am picking up high-def movies for cheaper than the DVDs. Sleepy Hollow on BluRay and HD-DVD had the exact same transfer, same features, same audio tracks, yet I got the HD-DVD version for $12, whereas the BluRay version was twice that. Then again, I am also the person who frequents the used bookstore and picks up Laserdiscs for $3 a pop.
Someone in another thread was complaining about the slow startup times of BluRay discs. All I can say is that my PS3 starts up WAY faster than my Toshiba A-3 or whatever its called. The Toshiba takes roughly a minute to load up, then about another 45 seconds to read the discs, if it can read them at all (4 out of 5 HD-DVDs I got from Netflix were so scratched that they skipped really bad, one would not even detect it as an HD-DVD and locked up the player), and then if you have a movie like Transformers, you get another 30 second loading screen trying to download stuff off of the web. I have gotten into the habbit where I will turn the player on and then go to the kitchen. My PS3 on the other hand, takes about 5 seconds to load up, then about another 5 seconds to read the disc. Cars, which had to load content, gave me a loading screen for maybe 15 seconds. Still, I was at the menu screen in cars in less time than it even takes to power up the HD-DVD player.
And I think people who complain about the price of the players and the movies forget about the price we paid for DVDs when they came out, or even worse with VCRs. When 25 years ago, a VCR costs around $500, and a prerecorded movie STARTED at $25, can we really complain about the price of HD Media? Its not like the players have not dropped more than half in price in just a year, and places are always running sales on the media, and you can always pick up stuff for cheap on Amazon, who normally sales stuff at buy one - get one free, or something.
Yeah, but even in stand alone players, they seem to be power hungry and a lot of stuff is done in software, isn't it? I mean, BluRay discs use Java, for instance, for things such as menus. That in itself is hitting a processor of some kind, and if you update Java - you just cannot do that in hardware unless you update firmware, then aren't we back to the fact we are once again handling it in software, kindof?
Okay, I am sure that did not make a lot of sense. Sorry.
Now, we probably could put in hardware the ability to decode the video and audio, but most cards do that anyways. Most video cards for the last decade decode MPEG2 natively, many of the newer cards have at least software assists for MPEG4, Creative sound cards decode DTS and Dolby Digital (do I really need DTS Master Audio or DolbyTrueHD on a Laptop?), so I am not sure why the players are trying to do so much on the processor. Problem with this, what happens in a future firmware update when they decide to introduce a new codec, we are back to using things in software.
I think I just said the same thing twice in two paragraphs. This is what happens when you are writting slashdot comments while trying to do work and trying to tell a person at the same time that their supervisor has to submit the right paperwork for them to get a computer, they can't call the helpdesk to request one.
Sorry. Okay, point I am trying to make, a lot of this is ALREADY done in hardware, or at least, should be, but its not an end all solution. Probably the reason that the laptops draw so much power is Dell is using those crappy Intel graphics card, which, it seems to me would increase CPU usage, instead of putting in the ATI or NVidia cards that do a lot of this on the graphics card.
Then again, I could just be talking out of both sides of my ass.
Pitty the net is so slow. 16 Tbps connection from the phone company to my house, yet download speeds still rarely top 600k a second. Difference between now and before is I can now download 1,000 files in 30 minutes instead of just one file in 30 minutes. Sigh. Of course, with Bittorrent and dedicated Usenet servers, I can get much faster downloads. Hmph, maybe iTunes will start offering downloads at 320kbps on their songs and full 1080p on their movies.
Are you new here? By the time something reaches Slashdot, its always old news. Although this may be the oldest newsstory ever posted on Slashdot, research that is decades old involving something that has been in process for billions of years. I am sure most Slashdotters are geek enough to remember this small tidbit of information from elementary school Astronomy class, or at least from Carl Sagan's Cosmos
1) I thought AIX was a mainframe. Am I wrong? I may be confusing with the AS/400, but I thought AIX was a mainframe built by HP.
2) What is the advantage of running a mainframe over, say, a server farm, or a server farm in beowoulf mode? It seems that several rack-mounted servers would take up less space. Would the only advantage really be in backwards compatability?
3) Doesn't the IBM mainframes run a variant of Unix? If that is true, couldn't you simply port C and Cobol Programs (probably not assembly code) to other *nixes with minor tweaks to the code?
Sorry if these questions had already been answered, but I did not see them anywhere in the comments for this article
I totally agree. My goddaughter is 13, and her parents and I police. Comptuer is in the living room. I am not sitting right next to them watching every thing they type, but at least I know if she is video conferencing, its not with some 50 year old pedeofile. I do not have the password to her myspace, but I am on her friends list so that I can go and check out her friends.
However, she did get her first e-mail address when she was 7. She had her own password, which we knew. She was not allowed to check her e-mail at that age until it was screened.
So, let's just say for a minute that you do sit your sister up with a Debian user account, and she wants her own password that her parents don't know. That's fine, just tell her mom and dad will have root access. Very much like IT. We do not know your password, and we cannot look it up for you, but we can change your password, and if we really need to look at what is on your machine, we can.
Pretty much, any kid that is a minor (This varies from state to state and country to country) should expect that while parents will not go through their personal diary, mom and dad are going to police what they do, and the amount of policing that mom and dad do will go down as the kid gets older and shows maturity enough not to get into trouble. You do not gestapo them until they are 17, but you certainly gestapo them at 7.
And in other news, a cruise ship carrying members of the **AA droped an anchor in the English channel, and another in the Atlantic ocean, cutting off all communication between the UK and the rest of the world. BT says it could take up to a week to restore communications.
I totally agree. This is about an update that was released on Windows Update, and then withdrawn. SP1 has not been released yet to the end user.
This update just installs updates, and is a PREREQUESIT to SP1. Much as you have to install the Microsoft Genuine Advantage tool in XP before you can install Internet Explorer 7. Slashdot really needs to start validating their sources
If they lost them, which they couldn't have (and after Senator Leahy called them out on this they somewhat admitted that they were lost not destroyed), then they've broken the Presidential Records Act. Looks like you did not read all of the Wikipedia article you posted. On November 1, 2001, President Bush signed an ammendment to the Presidential Records Act, known as Executive Order 13233.
Executive Order 13233 limits access to the records of former U.S. Presidents:...reflecting military, diplomatic, or national security secrets, Presidential communications, legal advice, legal work, or the deliberative processes of the President and the President's advisers, and to do so in a manner consistent with the Supreme Court's decisions in Nixon v. Administrator of General Services, 433 U.S. 425 (1977), and other cases... Also
Establishes a process for restriction and public access to these records. Specifically, the PRA allows for public access to Presidential records through the Freedom of Information Act (United States) (FOIA) beginning five years after the end of the Administration, but allows the President to invoke as many as six specific restrictions to public access for up to twelve years. The PRA also establishes procedures for Congress, courts, and subsequent administrations to obtain special access to records that remain closed to the public, following a thirty-day notice period to the former and current Presidents. So in case i am reading this wrong, under the PRA that you are refering to 1) information is not released until 5 years after Bush would retire from office (January of 2014?), he can post specific restrictions for up to 12 years (2021), and if it has to with the military (hmmm, would think that the Iraq war would have anything to do with the military, diplomatic or national security secrets), then is not required to be released under the PRA.
While there has been moves in both the house and the senate to revoke executive order 13233, it is still law. The bill has threatened to be vetoed by Bush, which they could override with a with a majority veto-override vote. However this takes time. As such, the White House, in refrence to e-mails regarding the Iraqi war, currently does not have release anything pertaining to the war to the public. You could probably go one step futher and say that it is, in effect, okay for the White House to delete such records, as they are never required to release them. Even if the act gets revoked, you cannot go back and restore what has already been destroied.
Mac OS X integration got a big boost as well with 3.0, with full support for native widgets in forms and inclusion of the new Mac OS X theme. These improvements could potentially cause some Camino users to switch to Firefox. Wow, I did not know Camino was still around, but I just googled them, and apparently there was a release on February 8th. Makes me wonder what other browsers are still around that I thought was dead.
First, this is nothing new with Office 2007 - it was in Office 2003 and I am pretty sure it is in Office XP as well.
Second, what would you prefer them to use, IE? Apparently even Microsoft understands that you do not want to use IE to render HTML in your programs.
Of course, this begs to question why Outlook just does not have its own built in HTML renderer. My guess is to maintain visual rendering consistancy between your Office products. If an update is made to Word, you do not have to update Outlook as well. Less chance that you would break something in an update.
And its not like its THAT big of a deal. When I first open up Outlook in the morning, and click on new message, it does take a few seconds longer than normal to do it, but after that, its pretty instantanious, so I really do not think much about it.
If you think interoprobility between your applications is bad, you should be preaching to Adobe. Why is it that when I go to edit a menu in Encore, it launches Photoshop? Why when I want to edit a sound byte in Premiere does it launch Soundbooth? Why when I want to edit a webgraphic in Dreamweaver does it launch Fireworks? Because those programs are already built to do that stuff. If I was to incorporate, for example, graphic editing tools into Encore, first it would mean almost doubling the size of my code (Adobe programs are bloated enough as it is, please don't make them any bigger), and then there is more code that you have to maintain, debug, and maintain. Chances are that these two products are not written by the same people, so you would have to utilize more resources. Having a backend transport that your programs in you suite can use to talk to each other is a brilliant idea, as 1) your end user is already familer with the tool and does not have to learn another, 2) it cuts down initial costs of coding, and 3) helps keep your maintanance cost down.
Still think using Word to render HTML in Outlook is a bad idea?
I totally agree. Been running Office 2007 for a year and a half - I was a beta tester, like thousands of others. I was one of the first to install it after it came out, because I needed to evaluate it. We are now preparing to role it out to our users. I do not use Excel myself, but have heard some rave reviews from co-workers who like some of the new features. I use Outlook 2007, Word 2007 and Powerpoint 2007 quite often (Word and Outlook on a daily basis). NEVER had an issue. Even in Powerpoint, when I turn on the option to pull clipart off of Microsoft's website, never had a problem. Insert a video file into a Powerpoint presentation? No problem. Convert a bulleted list into Smart Art? No problem. Insert tables and formulas into Word? Setup Rss Feeds in Outlook? Etc, Etc, etc. I consider myself a Power User of Word, Outlook and Powerpoint, and have NEVER had an issue with Office 2003, 2004 for the mac, 2007, or 2008 doing anything that you mentioned. I would suggest running Spybot or AdAware and stop blaming MS for your bad surfing habits and inability to remove spyware and adware on your own system.
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Yeah, I had the same shock. My reaction was either they are using one hell of a compression method that they are keeping top-secret, or using some incredibly low quality files, or using some craptastic framerate. Shoot, Pirates of the Carabian shiped on two BluRay discs, and that is, what, about 100 gig of data (although I think the second disc was only a single layer), and you get like, what, less than a days worth of viewing material? Even in DivX or XVid low res quality, an hour long Dr Who episode is like 300 meg.
What if we are talking about still pictures? I have a 7 megapixel camera, and when I go on vacation, I can easily take a gig worth of pictures in a day. Shoot, I just backed up my pics and vids from 2007-2008, and it BARELY fit on 2 DL DVD+Rs - roughly 17 gig of data, and that was not using the camera every day.
Fit a life into a terabyte? Yeah, i guess its possible, if you consider people doing what they are already doing - taking pictures and videos with their digital cameras and camera phones, as long as we don't start using 21 megapixel cameras to document them in RAW format.
Microsoft looks like they are finally back on their three year lifecycle for OSes. Vista is just over a year old. By the end of next year, it will be almost three years old. And they introduce Windows 7. By the time it gets all patched, and they release Service Pack 1 for it, we will be awaiting Windows 8. There comes a time when you have to bite the bullet and say its time to upgrade, otherwise we would all still be running Windows NT 3.5 for Workstations on our desktops, and Mac OS 7.5. I mean, Apple releases a new OS every 18 months it seems.
If the children start thinking, who will think of the children?
100 - 5,000 years : Genuine theology that reflects the true nature of being and the foundation of our civilization Are you saying 100-5,000 so that you can include Mormans as a genuine theology, and not a cult? Because the thread you replied to would have thrown Mormans into a cult. (I think he said anyone who still knows the founder. With Mormans, you can at least claim a grandchild or great grandchild of the founder)
Edison, while he may not have been the first, did actually play back his recording, and market it.
And likewise, before installing any major update, make sure you have a backup.
You are not alone. I LOVE Vista. The only machine I have had issues with vista on is my work laptop, and that is due to some crappy Intel graphics driver. However, they released a new version a couple of weeks ago, and I have not had any issues with it since then. Get this, I have had programs that stopped working in XP but work just fine in Vista. Go figure. No, I am triple booting on my home machine (Vista 64 Business, XP 64 Pro, and XP Pro) and dual booting on my work laptop, and pretty much just boot back into XP for those one or two odd programs that do not work right in Vista, and as they are programs I so rarely use in the first place....
Point is, you are not alone
Face it, your format lost. Stop whining already, its getting old. As for me, I went purple, having both BluRay and HD-DVD. The HD-DVD format SUCKED! First, hardly no one used the "features" that were available on HD-DVD in the first place. The picture-in-picture thing was basically only used by Universal (none of my other movies have it, with the exception of MAYBE Transformers, still poking through the bonus features), and the web features were a gimic at best, and I have never been able to get them to work right. We were robbed high-res audio and uncompressed audio on movies that should have been audio refrence discs, such as Transformers, because there was not enough room on the disc. These discs scratched way too easily. Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory got scratched in shipping, and 4 out of 6 of the Netflix discs I got on HD-DVD skipped and had A/V sync problems, and one disc scratched so badly that it was not even recognizable by the player. I had 2 discs that managed to hard-lock my HD-DVD player, causing me to have to unplug the thing. So, that means that 1/6 Netflix BluRay discs I got had no problems whatsoever. How many Netflix BluRay discs have I had issues with? 0. I have rented about 25 movies on BluRay from them, never had an issue with a single disc. Why? Because the BluRay format made it madnitory that all manufactorors apply an anti-scratch coating.
So, HD-DVD was cheaper? Looks like you got what you paid for.
Hey, want to know a secret? Vista has more features than Linux. Mmmmhmmm. Must mean that its the better operating system, from your argument.
Lets go back to price. HD-DVD and BluRay players were almost the same price for the most part of the war. If you are talking about those $150 players Toshiba had out, they really only dropped the price of those toward the end, when it looked like they were trying to drop stock. Oh, and BTW, the PS3 is a GREAT BluRay player, stop ditching it, and it is already expected to drop to $299 soon. And when more manufactorors start dumping players on the market, price will go down. What is out there now, Samsung, Sony and LG? I am sure when companies like, oh, APEX or someone decides to start making BluRay players, prices will come down.
And you think that Hollywood chose the format? Before WHV went Blu, Toshiba claimed that they sold about 1 million players world wide. Strangely, Sony was claiming that they had sold about 10 million PS3s worldwide, this does not include stand alone players, and players made by LG and Samsung. Sales figures on media varied from week to week, but it was obvious for months that BluRay movie sales doubled and sometimes tripled the sales of HD-DVD. Consumers made it good and obvious which they prefered way before WHV made their decision.
So stop crying already, realize that not only did your format loose, but it was inferior in more ways than just storage space, and move on with your life. I am getting freakin sick hearing the Toshiba fanboys continued whining.
In other news, I have had a PS3 for over a year, and picked up an HD-DVD player for $100 at Best Buy with the two movies in the box and send off for 5 movies (which I am not sure if I will ever see now, not sure if Toshiba pulling out would nullify any offers). Just off of Amazon, I picked up 10 movies for $130, and I am a HUGE BluRay supporter. But who cares, I am picking up high-def movies for cheaper than the DVDs. Sleepy Hollow on BluRay and HD-DVD had the exact same transfer, same features, same audio tracks, yet I got the HD-DVD version for $12, whereas the BluRay version was twice that. Then again, I am also the person who frequents the used bookstore and picks up Laserdiscs for $3 a pop.
Someone in another thread was complaining about the slow startup times of BluRay discs. All I can say is that my PS3 starts up WAY faster than my Toshiba A-3 or whatever its called. The Toshiba takes roughly a minute to load up, then about another 45 seconds to read the discs, if it can read them at all (4 out of 5 HD-DVDs I got from Netflix were so scratched that they skipped really bad, one would not even detect it as an HD-DVD and locked up the player), and then if you have a movie like Transformers, you get another 30 second loading screen trying to download stuff off of the web. I have gotten into the habbit where I will turn the player on and then go to the kitchen. My PS3 on the other hand, takes about 5 seconds to load up, then about another 5 seconds to read the disc. Cars, which had to load content, gave me a loading screen for maybe 15 seconds. Still, I was at the menu screen in cars in less time than it even takes to power up the HD-DVD player.
And I think people who complain about the price of the players and the movies forget about the price we paid for DVDs when they came out, or even worse with VCRs. When 25 years ago, a VCR costs around $500, and a prerecorded movie STARTED at $25, can we really complain about the price of HD Media? Its not like the players have not dropped more than half in price in just a year, and places are always running sales on the media, and you can always pick up stuff for cheap on Amazon, who normally sales stuff at buy one - get one free, or something.
Yeah, but even in stand alone players, they seem to be power hungry and a lot of stuff is done in software, isn't it? I mean, BluRay discs use Java, for instance, for things such as menus. That in itself is hitting a processor of some kind, and if you update Java - you just cannot do that in hardware unless you update firmware, then aren't we back to the fact we are once again handling it in software, kindof?
Okay, I am sure that did not make a lot of sense. Sorry.
Now, we probably could put in hardware the ability to decode the video and audio, but most cards do that anyways. Most video cards for the last decade decode MPEG2 natively, many of the newer cards have at least software assists for MPEG4, Creative sound cards decode DTS and Dolby Digital (do I really need DTS Master Audio or DolbyTrueHD on a Laptop?), so I am not sure why the players are trying to do so much on the processor. Problem with this, what happens in a future firmware update when they decide to introduce a new codec, we are back to using things in software.
I think I just said the same thing twice in two paragraphs. This is what happens when you are writting slashdot comments while trying to do work and trying to tell a person at the same time that their supervisor has to submit the right paperwork for them to get a computer, they can't call the helpdesk to request one.
Sorry. Okay, point I am trying to make, a lot of this is ALREADY done in hardware, or at least, should be, but its not an end all solution. Probably the reason that the laptops draw so much power is Dell is using those crappy Intel graphics card, which, it seems to me would increase CPU usage, instead of putting in the ATI or NVidia cards that do a lot of this on the graphics card.
Then again, I could just be talking out of both sides of my ass.
Pitty the net is so slow. 16 Tbps connection from the phone company to my house, yet download speeds still rarely top 600k a second. Difference between now and before is I can now download 1,000 files in 30 minutes instead of just one file in 30 minutes. Sigh. Of course, with Bittorrent and dedicated Usenet servers, I can get much faster downloads. Hmph, maybe iTunes will start offering downloads at 320kbps on their songs and full 1080p on their movies.
Are you new here? By the time something reaches Slashdot, its always old news. Although this may be the oldest newsstory ever posted on Slashdot, research that is decades old involving something that has been in process for billions of years. I am sure most Slashdotters are geek enough to remember this small tidbit of information from elementary school Astronomy class, or at least from Carl Sagan's Cosmos
I agree, I am actually surprised one of the tags on this article is not suddenoutbreakofcommonsense
Couple of questions.
1) I thought AIX was a mainframe. Am I wrong? I may be confusing with the AS/400, but I thought AIX was a mainframe built by HP.
2) What is the advantage of running a mainframe over, say, a server farm, or a server farm in beowoulf mode? It seems that several rack-mounted servers would take up less space. Would the only advantage really be in backwards compatability?
3) Doesn't the IBM mainframes run a variant of Unix? If that is true, couldn't you simply port C and Cobol Programs (probably not assembly code) to other *nixes with minor tweaks to the code?
Sorry if these questions had already been answered, but I did not see them anywhere in the comments for this article
I totally agree. My goddaughter is 13, and her parents and I police. Comptuer is in the living room. I am not sitting right next to them watching every thing they type, but at least I know if she is video conferencing, its not with some 50 year old pedeofile. I do not have the password to her myspace, but I am on her friends list so that I can go and check out her friends.
However, she did get her first e-mail address when she was 7. She had her own password, which we knew. She was not allowed to check her e-mail at that age until it was screened.
So, let's just say for a minute that you do sit your sister up with a Debian user account, and she wants her own password that her parents don't know. That's fine, just tell her mom and dad will have root access. Very much like IT. We do not know your password, and we cannot look it up for you, but we can change your password, and if we really need to look at what is on your machine, we can.
Pretty much, any kid that is a minor (This varies from state to state and country to country) should expect that while parents will not go through their personal diary, mom and dad are going to police what they do, and the amount of policing that mom and dad do will go down as the kid gets older and shows maturity enough not to get into trouble. You do not gestapo them until they are 17, but you certainly gestapo them at 7.
And in other news, a cruise ship carrying members of the **AA droped an anchor in the English channel, and another in the Atlantic ocean, cutting off all communication between the UK and the rest of the world. BT says it could take up to a week to restore communications.
I totally agree. This is about an update that was released on Windows Update, and then withdrawn. SP1 has not been released yet to the end user.
This update just installs updates, and is a PREREQUESIT to SP1. Much as you have to install the Microsoft Genuine Advantage tool in XP before you can install Internet Explorer 7.
Slashdot really needs to start validating their sources
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/937287
While there has been moves in both the house and the senate to revoke executive order 13233, it is still law. The bill has threatened to be vetoed by Bush, which they could override with a with a majority veto-override vote. However this takes time. As such, the White House, in refrence to e-mails regarding the Iraqi war, currently does not have release anything pertaining to the war to the public. You could probably go one step futher and say that it is, in effect, okay for the White House to delete such records, as they are never required to release them. Even if the act gets revoked, you cannot go back and restore what has already been destroied.
First, this is nothing new with Office 2007 - it was in Office 2003 and I am pretty sure it is in Office XP as well.
Second, what would you prefer them to use, IE? Apparently even Microsoft understands that you do not want to use IE to render HTML in your programs.
Of course, this begs to question why Outlook just does not have its own built in HTML renderer. My guess is to maintain visual rendering consistancy between your Office products. If an update is made to Word, you do not have to update Outlook as well. Less chance that you would break something in an update.
And its not like its THAT big of a deal. When I first open up Outlook in the morning, and click on new message, it does take a few seconds longer than normal to do it, but after that, its pretty instantanious, so I really do not think much about it.
If you think interoprobility between your applications is bad, you should be preaching to Adobe. Why is it that when I go to edit a menu in Encore, it launches Photoshop? Why when I want to edit a sound byte in Premiere does it launch Soundbooth? Why when I want to edit a webgraphic in Dreamweaver does it launch Fireworks? Because those programs are already built to do that stuff. If I was to incorporate, for example, graphic editing tools into Encore, first it would mean almost doubling the size of my code (Adobe programs are bloated enough as it is, please don't make them any bigger), and then there is more code that you have to maintain, debug, and maintain. Chances are that these two products are not written by the same people, so you would have to utilize more resources. Having a backend transport that your programs in you suite can use to talk to each other is a brilliant idea, as 1) your end user is already familer with the tool and does not have to learn another, 2) it cuts down initial costs of coding, and 3) helps keep your maintanance cost down.
Still think using Word to render HTML in Outlook is a bad idea?
I totally agree. Been running Office 2007 for a year and a half - I was a beta tester, like thousands of others. I was one of the first to install it after it came out, because I needed to evaluate it. We are now preparing to role it out to our users. I do not use Excel myself, but have heard some rave reviews from co-workers who like some of the new features. I use Outlook 2007, Word 2007 and Powerpoint 2007 quite often (Word and Outlook on a daily basis). NEVER had an issue. Even in Powerpoint, when I turn on the option to pull clipart off of Microsoft's website, never had a problem. Insert a video file into a Powerpoint presentation? No problem. Convert a bulleted list into Smart Art? No problem. Insert tables and formulas into Word? Setup Rss Feeds in Outlook? Etc, Etc, etc. I consider myself a Power User of Word, Outlook and Powerpoint, and have NEVER had an issue with Office 2003, 2004 for the mac, 2007, or 2008 doing anything that you mentioned. I would suggest running Spybot or AdAware and stop blaming MS for your bad surfing habits and inability to remove spyware and adware on your own system.