Just ran the test on Firefox 1.5.0.6 under Windows XP. Firefox failed to properly render the Acid2 test. Of course, it is BETTER than what IE6 did. Opera 9.1 properly renders the the Acid 2 test. I have yet to try it in IE7, would need to reboot into Vista for that, I am not installing it in XP
Nero, while it works, is a HORRIBLE way to encode DVDs. There are many alternative solutions.
First, instead of exporting your project in Premiere as an AVI, try exporting it to DVD, or to an MPEG2 format. Adobe Encore is pretty user friendly for creating DVDs, with the menus and interaction and stuff, but it will also rerender your movie to fit your target media.
What I usually use is Canopus Procoder, and it has a Premiere plugin. In Premiere, export to Canopus, then choose DVD. Play with your settings some, I usually set my minimal bitrate to 3.5 meg a second, and my max to sex meg, with my target bitrate being 4.5 meg a second. Do a two pass VBR encode. Set your quality to Mastering. Expect this to take anywhere from 8 hours to 28 hours, depending on speed of processor, how many edits you have in Premiere, and other issues.
Now, use TMPEG DVD Author to write the vob files to DVD.
Yeah, this is not a freeware method, but in my experience, this gives you the highest quality picture available.
Looks more like a PDA that specializes in playing music.
I think Microsoft really came on board rather late into the portable music player market. If this had come out several years ago, it would have been impressive. What advantages does it look like it have over the iPod? Just a slightly bigger screen. Oh, and it will probably play DRM encoded WMAs, but big deal, so do half the MP3 Players currently on the market. Apple dominates this market, I mean, just hang out in a Best Buy sometime, and look at how many people come up and ASK for the iPod verses how many people will even LOOK at the Creative music players. And I have an iPod, I am quite impressed with the thing.
No, I doubt the market for this thing will be even as big as the Market for the Creative products. Why? iPod is too well known, so your people who just want a music player will buy the iPod. Those who want something different and to be kinda geeky will be buying the Creatives and Samsungs and stuff. I will be surprised if Microsoft is able to sell more than a dozen units at my local store, whereas they probably sell 2-3 iPods (or more) a day.
I must agree. I have had to wait upwards of 45 minutes before on I-10 out of El Paso to be checked for Illegals, and forget crossing the Rio Grande between Juarez and El Paso, those can take upwards of two hours. I would hate to be driving my motor home in cities such as Austin, Houston, Las Vegas or LA during rush hour, where getting from South Austin to North Austin can take upwards of an hour and a half on I-35. And the price of gas, it cost $100 round trip recently for round trip from Fort Worth to San Antonio. If I am going much futher than that, I fly. Last Christmas, when I went from Fort Worth to Tucson, round trip gas cost me over $300, and the 15 hour drive there and the 15 hour drive back, plus the wear and tear on my car, suddenly flying looks very inviting. Your $225 Priceline ticket, two hours at the airport (I worked at DFW for a while, this year, and it usually took me no longer than 15 minutes to get through airport security), and the hour and a half in the air tends to be a lot more inviting.
The US has rail and other transportation options, although getting from Fort Worth to Tucson on AmTrak takes anywhere from 18-36 hours (not consistant), and round trip is usually higher than flying, and believe it or not, navigating around DFW International Airport is way easier than trying to navigate around downtown Fort Worth or Dallas. The other option is Greyhound, a great budget way to travel. Problems with Greyhound though involve dingy busstations, homeless people, and usuallly sitting next to some person who is tweaked out on some acid trip.
The rail system in Europe is highly effecient, but still not always the best way to get from one location to the other. For example, you cannot get from Greece to Austria, or any other part of central or western Europe, without going through Macedonia and Yougoslovia, which I do not know how bad it was before, but five years ago, it ment being turned around at the Yougoslovian boarder if you did not have a visa or a bribe. If you do not have a rail pass, which are several hundred dollars for only a couple of weeks of travel, expect to pay $40 USD or more for a simple 90 minute trip between Munich and Salzburg. Flying from London to Munich is dramatically cheaper than taking the Chunnel then taking an Express from Paris to Munich, and even with high speed trains, flying is faster. However, as I had a train pass, I usually felw into Munich and took the Innercity train to the Haptbahnhoft and then the express to Salzburg rather than paying the $30 USD extra to transfer planes in Munich to Salzburg. If I did not have the train pass, however, I would have flown, as it would have been cheaper.
So, yeah, stop complaining about airport security, buy your tickets on Priceline, Travelocity, Orbits, Hotwire or Expedia, and deal with the two hours of airport security and the two hours in the air rather than spending more on gas and over a day or more on the road.
They are going to use CSS to protect audio? Wasn't it cracked like 8 years ago? So, in other words, the format is not out yet, yet the DRM on it has already been cracked? I like this.
I know that I may get trolled down for this, but it looks like Microsoft has actually created a cool piece of software here. Granted, it is NOT true 3D worlds. However, I have taken enough photographs in places that do overlap that I think it will be a fun gimik. There are a couple of things I am wondering about. Will Microsoft be selling this software, or is it bundled with Vista? What type of processor do you need? How long does it take the computer to do the calculating and create these "Virtual 3D worlds"? From the way it sounded, I am supposing that their will be internet connectivity to build bigger worlds based on what other users have taken. What about differences in cameras and color settings, how does the software determine which is true color?
Maybe its because its running on Windows. Truthfully, it seems they cannot upgrade their windows servers fast enough to keep up with the new subscribers. I can rarely log into MySpace anymore, and when I do, it will sometimes take upwards of 30 seconds or more to process that I have clicked a link. Not only do they need to learn how to co-lo, but they need to learn how to load balance.
I went to their site in Firefox in XP, and started clicking around. Bunch of white screens with no content. Either that, or it must take ages to download their player. After five minutes on one screen watching it "transfer" data (still, no buffering), I gave up. I got better things to do than to wait five minutes to watch a music video that I could have seen on youtube in like 5 seconds of buffering, or could have downloaded in 30 seconds from Apple.
Its awful. It looks like someone came up with it in about 5 minutes. The whole Mt. Rushmore thing is totally inappropriate, it might actually drive people AWAY from the product. The ad is totally uninformative. I truthfully think a frontal attack on the big office packages, something along the lines of "Why pay $600 bucks for MS Office when you can get our product which does the same thing for free" or something similar to be much more effective. Shoot, even those AWFUL Sprite commercials are better than this. I would have to say tha this ad is one of the biggest disappointements the open source community has delivered in a while
I have found that many of my friends, most of who are NOT tech savy, understand what HD-DVD is, although they really cannot see the point of upgrading. Most still have SD TVs from the 90s, and really do not see a reason to upgrade. Videophiles make up a small percentage of the market. Everyone I know however who does have an HDTV understands that there are two formats out there.
So what do I think? I think Blu-Ray will win, but not for its technical specifications. Blu-Ray will win because its the format of the PS3, if Sony can deliver it on time, that is, before the Christmas rush. If Sony misses Christmas of 2006 with the release of the PS3, Blu-Ray will be dead. No simpler way of putting it. The PS3 will be the biggest pusher of Blu-Ray there is.
So what if the average consumer does not know the difference between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. So what if the average consumer knows that HD-DVD stands for High Definition DVD and does not know what Blu-Ray is. Your average consumer is not going to be buying these players to begin with. It will be years before the average consumer buys into high def one way or the other, and by then, the early adopters will be the ones who have decided the outcome of the format war.
With that being said, I cannot stress the importance of the PS3 coming out on time. Look at the XBox 360. Many people understand that the PS3 is going to be a better system, but Microsoft has a year head start. The same will be true with the format war. Regardless of wheter the Blu Ray players actually come out in May, until Sony and other manufactorors can produce a player in a similar price range as HD-DVD and until they can push the format on users (with the PS3), HD-DVD is going to have the upper hand. Oh, I do not want to hear about capacities and such, a dual layer can hold 30 gig, and even my transport stream 1080i rip of Return of the King is not that big. HD-DVD uses VC1 compression, which I do not know a lot about, but I am sure uses some type of MPEG4 compression, which will make the movies much smaller than the source transport stream. You can fit a movie and all its extras on an HDDVD without a hit to quality. So with quality side by side, and looking at the price tag, HD-DVD has a major advantage. The PS3 WILL be the deciding factor in this battle. End of comment.
The gameplay between the first and second game is dramatic. The first Kingdom Hearts had a very solid gameplay, and some very difficult levels. The second Kingdom Hearts is more like an interactive movie. So far, I am in the Atlantica level, and I feel I have had more cutscenes than gameplay. The gameplay is overly simplistic, the first game required strategy on most of your oponents, the second game is a button masher. You equip your abilities, and then just lay on the X button. While the story is great, there is just too much of it, too much is revealed too early in the game, and interaction with the enviornment is misrable. The minigames are extreamely easy, I usually beat the scores in the strategy guide with my second or third attempt. With the first Kingdom Hearts, I could not put the game down, with this game, I have not picked it up in two weeks, I have spent more time playing We Love Katamari, which has excellent replay value. Truthfully, Kingdom Hearts 2 would have been a great game if there was less focus on story and more on gameplay, I bought a game, not an interactive movie. The levels are also MUCH smaller than they were in the original Kingdom Hearts, I can usually beat a land in an hour on the new game, whereas I would spend about 4-5 hours a land on the original Kingdom Hearts. And I am not alone with this, I know three other people who have played the game, and 2 of them are more annoyed with the endless story boards than I am. The third thinks its the greatest game ever made. So, in the small community of people I know, 75% of the audience was disappointed in it. This is not to say its not a good game, its just that Square rarely disappoints on delivering sequals, and we were expecting Kingdom Hearts 2 to be at least as good as Kingdom Hearts. I will have to admit, it is MUCH better than Chain of Memories. I am not complaining about graphics or anything on Chain of Memories, for a GBA game, it was excellent, but to go from an RPG to a card battle game was the stupidest move Square ever made.
What would I have done differently in Kingdom Hearts 2 if I was on the design team? Bigger levels for starters, the underworld, China, and Beast's Castle are WAY too small. I mean, the first level is freakin China, they could have done some really amazing stuff with this level. (First level, that is, after the game officially gets started, roughly after about 8-9 hours of play and storyboard, or 2 hours if you skip the story board, I know, we tried both). A little strategy needed on the bosses would have been nice, they are way too easy.The coolest level so far has been timeless river. I would have loved them to do more with this level, the animation and boss fights were simply amazing. I was really disappointed that this level took me 20 minutes to play. Puzzles would be nice. The first game had a few puzzles, the second seems to have none. I have litterally found myself falling asleep late at night playing this game, wake up 10 minutes later, and still be alive. I mean, I can litterally play this game in my sleep.
I know my opinions do not reflect everyones, but I do not think anyone would complain if the game had just a bit more depth to it.
We need to have a Slashdot TV, that goes back to what ZDTV originally started, a Microsoft bashing, tech oriented channel. Bring back shows such as Invent This, Silicon Spin and TechLive. Break apart your call in shows, that is, Call 4 Help be mostly for newbies, and have ScreenSavers be more tech savy questions. Do not confuse the two. Cut the crap interviews with the directors of Stick It and stuff like that. And, most importantly, while video games are a part of technology, lets not confuse the issue and try to say that video games are all there is to technology like G4TechTV did.
I finally went back to Windows on all my machines. I was a member of a LUG for a while, and was utterly bashed on when I became one of the early adoptors of DVD on PCs. At the time, there was no DVD support for Linux. I played with some of the early projects and made one or two contributions to early CVS, but was attacked by fellow Linux users because I was quadruple booting Linux, 98, NT, and BeOS.
I tried going back to Linux about a year ago, and gave up. I was trying to install video drivers, and I asked a couple of people how to do that. I got a RTFM response, to which I responded, I did, and I still have issues.
There is a difference between the Mac and Linux communities I would like to point out. Both communities think they are better than Windows users, and will tend to rub it into Windows users faces. The difference is that Mac users will help each other, whereas the Linux community support is SO bad, that Microsoft started offering it with their new virutal machine software.
I am starting to find that more and more Linux software is being written by snobs too. I wish I could think of the software I was trying out, but the install directions stated simply "Install in the normal way". I spent a greater part of an hour trying to figure out that the normal way ment "make, make install, install" or however it is. Of course, then the program would not install because I did not have the proper libraries, and the website did not tell me where I could obtain these libraries. I hit up on a couple of other Linux newbies, because the Linux "pros" did not "have time to mess with miniscule issues like these". After two days of work and research, we never did get the program running. I booted back into Windows, found a similar program for Windows, installed and was up and running in two minutes.
My problem has seldom been with the Linux OS. The Linux OS is great, it is sturdy, and when properly configured, will run circles around Windows. My problem has ALWAYS been either the lack of information or the overload of information (try reading a man page sometime, the man page for tar alone hurts my head), horrible directions on how to install the program, missing libraries, inability to find Binaries (RPMs usually) for my particular distro (whether it be Fedora, Suse x64 or Mandrake), and almost nonexistant support from the community. Most of my friends and myself know that Linux is a better OS, but refuse to waste our time trying to get a stupid application to work, or a driver installed. I am triple booting on my machines now, but its no longer Windows, Linux, and BeOS, it is now XP Pro, XP x64, and XP Media Center. And that is the way it is going to stay until there is a dramatic change in the Linux community.
Unfortunately, they are not $3.95, and are on HD-VHS, not HD-DVD.
They also have WMV HDDVDs here, but once again, not HDDVD, and not for $3.95.
I can guarentee, though, that Best Buy will have demo units in the store.
Also, the AVS forums state that the Last Samurai has an HD-DVD Demo at the start of the disc, showing off titles such as Harry Potter and Batman Begins.
Maybe you should read the forums before posting comments. The player SUPPORTS ICT, not DEMAND it. ICT allows a company to force lower resolutions on people who are not using HDMI, however the forums state that at least The Last Samarui and The Phantom of the Opera does not support this, they offer the high res experience over Component.
The limitations that are mentioned in the forums, limiting playback to 480P, are for SD DVDs, not HDDVDs, and that is through the component output. If I want to output a SD DVD at 1080i through the component, all I do is load up the PC, nStant Media with DVD Region Free in the background, and, whoala, upconverted DVDs over the Component. As soon as HDCP and ICT is broken, I should be able to do the same thing with HDDVD and Bluray. I have not heard of a company yet that is going to limit the resolution of their discs over the component connection.
You do not have to rebuy the movie if you get another HDDVD player, and your disc is not locked to work only on your player. Truthfully, I fail to see your arguments in this case against the DRM in the device.
Think of it. Microsoft will see it, and want to ship a version of Windows that takes up 500 terabytes of the drive. Then there is the formatting of the drive, so when all is said and done, after formating and the OS, you will only have about 300 terabytes left. Amazingly, though, if he is working on instant access, will this mean the OS will boot up in under a second? Will we need all the ram, as nothing will need to be written to virutal memory?
Mandrake will ship on 50 blue ray discs.
Farcry 3 will take up 4 terabytes, and the 128bit processor upgrade patch will be 400 gigabytes, and another 450 gigabytes for the 128bit exclusive content.
A video driver will now be a gig in size.
Can you imagine the size of a 4 hour long uncompressed 1080p High-Def movie?
Fiber may not be fast enough for us anymore.
JPEG and GIFs will become obsolete as TIFF and RAW and other formats take off. There will be no need to export PSD to other formats.
With this size in drives, Blue-Ray suddenly starts looking to us like floppies are now.
If people are still using MPEG and AVI and JPEG, could you imagine the size of some people's porn collection?
On the plus side, I FINALLY have enough room on the drive to do proper video editing. Seems that no matter how big a drive I get, how many drives I get, I still do not have enough.
The 5G iPod, while it may be a 4G with video capabilities, still plays video. Hence, it IS a video iPod. I have one, use it to watch Aqua Teen Hunger Force on my breaks.
Do we REALLY want a touch screen iPod? I have a hard enough problem keeping my iPod clean. Sounds like an excuse for Apple to sell some type of proprietary cleaning supplies to me.
Truthfully, the only thing that could really make this better is a better battery life when playing videos. You SUPPOSEDLY get two hours on the 30 gig 5G and three hours on the 60 gig 5G. Its annoying, you loose battery life halfway through Sound of Music. Its why most of the videos I keep on there are stuff like South Park, ATHF, and clips from Saturday Night Live, as its almost impossible to watch a movie on there, although I was able to watch all of Song of the South with one charge, but that ment no music before, and plugging it back in to charge when I finished watching the movie. Still, gives me something to do at the laundry mat.
I love this! I mean, if we are making weapons of war, might at well base it on a decent OS. We do not want a Windows Memory dump and the thing come after us, do we?
I do not have to imagine. MSDOS had a lifespan from 1981 through, what, 1995? A 14 year lifespan. Oh, don't give me that crap about different versions, about the only real thing Dos 5 and 6 added was Edit, QBasic, and Doublespace. Oh, and the shortlived MSAV. They added that ANNOYING Dosshell feature. But the primary operating system pretty much remained the same since Dos 3 (well, Dos 4 was a complete loss, we don't talk about that).
Dos 5 and newer also shipped with games. Nibbles and Gorilla forever!
On another note, anyone ever played a Squaresoft game here? They have not used CGI cutscenes since Final Fantasy 9, the cutscenes in Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy X and X-2 were all done in the Playstation.
Big deal about space, and the cost of Blue Ray discs. Both systems will also use DVD and DVD9, and the PS3 will have 50 gig to work with when they use Blue Ray. I mean, if the same game is released on both the PS3 and the XBox 360, there should be no reason that the PS3 game would cost $10 more, as they are both released on the same media. If a game does get big enough that they need to fit it on blue-ray, I wouldn't mind paying the extra few dollars, because it probably means that more work was put into the game (as long as its not like 20 gigs of transport stream video, last thing we need is more cutscenes).
So lets say we DO hit the 8.5 gig barrier within these console's lifecycles. Then what? Well, first, the PS3 will probably get more exclusive titles. Worse case scenario: load your common textures off onto the harddrive, and use disc swapping. I mean, in Final Fantasy when it was on CD, I could usually get in about 12 hours of gameplay before having to swap discs.
Someone mentioned Grand Theft Auto and its huge maps. This stomped me at first too as to how we were going to get past this issue, but then something occured to me: How big, really, can a map be? I mean, what are you planning, to do the entire city of New York, in detail, having each sign have its own unique texture and bitmaps, having detailed layouts of every single building in the game so we can go in each one? Grand Theft Auto should be a game that can be played in a few days, not something you are going to spend the rest of your life playing.
Lets say that games DO get bigger than the DVD9 barrier. We will simply see something that happened back in the days of Genesis and SNES, whereas the Genesis got more sports titles and such, and the SNES got your sidescrollers, adventure games and RPGs. Big deal.
Seems to be a bit of confusion here. The document you pointed out was written in September of 1995, however, the HTML 3 standard, according to the same website, was adopted in March of 1995
It looks like HTML3 is what added tables. That is strange, because I just ran across a website today where the guy was trying to update a table from HTML2 specifications to HTML4.
I KNOW Netscape 2 and the first version of IE supported tables. IE would have come out around Auguest of 95, as it was bundled with Windows 95. I was trying to google the specifications of these early browsers, but I cannot find anything, and archive.org for the netscape site only goes back to netscape 3. Did Netscape 2 and the first versions of IE actually support HTML3? It would not surprise me if they were fully HTML2 compatable and incorporated some HTML3 code before it was approved as a standard, that may be where I am confused.
Okay, I see many people are not being a lot of help. They are quoting statistics and all sorts of other things.
To answer your question: Just program in HTML 2. Its what I do. Supports tables, most of the stuff you want to use (except maybe style sheets), works with just about any browser except NCSA Mosaic and Netscape 1. You want flashy graphics? Just do an image map.
Truthfully, most of you users are going to have Netcape 4, Opera, IE4 or something newer. You could probably get away with programing in HTML 4 and hit 98% of your users.
As for developing apps, depends on who your target audience is. I mean, is there really a reason for designing something like Adobe AfterEffects and have it compatable with Windows 95? If you are running 95, it is most likely because you are running 8-10 year old hardware. Do you really want to do video rendering on a first generation Pentium or a 486 that is maxed out at 16 to 32 meg of ram?
Most apps I see now are for 98SE or newer. I know 2 people who are running 98 first edition, and noone running 95.
Many apps that I know of have seperate versions for 2000 and XP, then XP x64 and 2003 Server, then they will have a 9x version for 95, 98, and ME. Of course, those are internet apps. For most consumer apps, scrap anything older than 98SE. I mean, I am sorry, but 98SE is now seven years old. I am not up for the upgrade every year philosophy that Microsoft seems to have, but seven years is kinda pushing it.
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You know how much many of us has paid to Dish Network to get the DVR upgrade? The HDTV DVR upgrade is around $300. Should we be expecting a refund?
Just ran the test on Firefox 1.5.0.6 under Windows XP. Firefox failed to properly render the Acid2 test. Of course, it is BETTER than what IE6 did. Opera 9.1 properly renders the the Acid 2 test. I have yet to try it in IE7, would need to reboot into Vista for that, I am not installing it in XP
I have ran into this issue before.
Nero, while it works, is a HORRIBLE way to encode DVDs. There are many alternative solutions.
First, instead of exporting your project in Premiere as an AVI, try exporting it to DVD, or to an MPEG2 format. Adobe Encore is pretty user friendly for creating DVDs, with the menus and interaction and stuff, but it will also rerender your movie to fit your target media.
What I usually use is Canopus Procoder, and it has a Premiere plugin. In Premiere, export to Canopus, then choose DVD. Play with your settings some, I usually set my minimal bitrate to 3.5 meg a second, and my max to sex meg, with my target bitrate being 4.5 meg a second. Do a two pass VBR encode. Set your quality to Mastering. Expect this to take anywhere from 8 hours to 28 hours, depending on speed of processor, how many edits you have in Premiere, and other issues.
Now, use TMPEG DVD Author to write the vob files to DVD.
Yeah, this is not a freeware method, but in my experience, this gives you the highest quality picture available.
Looks more like a PDA that specializes in playing music.
I think Microsoft really came on board rather late into the portable music player market. If this had come out several years ago, it would have been impressive. What advantages does it look like it have over the iPod? Just a slightly bigger screen. Oh, and it will probably play DRM encoded WMAs, but big deal, so do half the MP3 Players currently on the market. Apple dominates this market, I mean, just hang out in a Best Buy sometime, and look at how many people come up and ASK for the iPod verses how many people will even LOOK at the Creative music players. And I have an iPod, I am quite impressed with the thing.
No, I doubt the market for this thing will be even as big as the Market for the Creative products. Why? iPod is too well known, so your people who just want a music player will buy the iPod. Those who want something different and to be kinda geeky will be buying the Creatives and Samsungs and stuff. I will be surprised if Microsoft is able to sell more than a dozen units at my local store, whereas they probably sell 2-3 iPods (or more) a day.
Made a typo. In second paragraph, should read "I do not know how bad it is now, but five years ago..."
I must agree. I have had to wait upwards of 45 minutes before on I-10 out of El Paso to be checked for Illegals, and forget crossing the Rio Grande between Juarez and El Paso, those can take upwards of two hours. I would hate to be driving my motor home in cities such as Austin, Houston, Las Vegas or LA during rush hour, where getting from South Austin to North Austin can take upwards of an hour and a half on I-35. And the price of gas, it cost $100 round trip recently for round trip from Fort Worth to San Antonio. If I am going much futher than that, I fly. Last Christmas, when I went from Fort Worth to Tucson, round trip gas cost me over $300, and the 15 hour drive there and the 15 hour drive back, plus the wear and tear on my car, suddenly flying looks very inviting. Your $225 Priceline ticket, two hours at the airport (I worked at DFW for a while, this year, and it usually took me no longer than 15 minutes to get through airport security), and the hour and a half in the air tends to be a lot more inviting.
The US has rail and other transportation options, although getting from Fort Worth to Tucson on AmTrak takes anywhere from 18-36 hours (not consistant), and round trip is usually higher than flying, and believe it or not, navigating around DFW International Airport is way easier than trying to navigate around downtown Fort Worth or Dallas. The other option is Greyhound, a great budget way to travel. Problems with Greyhound though involve dingy busstations, homeless people, and usuallly sitting next to some person who is tweaked out on some acid trip.
The rail system in Europe is highly effecient, but still not always the best way to get from one location to the other. For example, you cannot get from Greece to Austria, or any other part of central or western Europe, without going through Macedonia and Yougoslovia, which I do not know how bad it was before, but five years ago, it ment being turned around at the Yougoslovian boarder if you did not have a visa or a bribe. If you do not have a rail pass, which are several hundred dollars for only a couple of weeks of travel, expect to pay $40 USD or more for a simple 90 minute trip between Munich and Salzburg. Flying from London to Munich is dramatically cheaper than taking the Chunnel then taking an Express from Paris to Munich, and even with high speed trains, flying is faster. However, as I had a train pass, I usually felw into Munich and took the Innercity train to the Haptbahnhoft and then the express to Salzburg rather than paying the $30 USD extra to transfer planes in Munich to Salzburg. If I did not have the train pass, however, I would have flown, as it would have been cheaper.
So, yeah, stop complaining about airport security, buy your tickets on Priceline, Travelocity, Orbits, Hotwire or Expedia, and deal with the two hours of airport security and the two hours in the air rather than spending more on gas and over a day or more on the road.
They are going to use CSS to protect audio? Wasn't it cracked like 8 years ago? So, in other words, the format is not out yet, yet the DRM on it has already been cracked? I like this.
I know that I may get trolled down for this, but it looks like Microsoft has actually created a cool piece of software here. Granted, it is NOT true 3D worlds. However, I have taken enough photographs in places that do overlap that I think it will be a fun gimik. There are a couple of things I am wondering about. Will Microsoft be selling this software, or is it bundled with Vista? What type of processor do you need? How long does it take the computer to do the calculating and create these "Virtual 3D worlds"? From the way it sounded, I am supposing that their will be internet connectivity to build bigger worlds based on what other users have taken. What about differences in cameras and color settings, how does the software determine which is true color?
Still, may be worth poking around with.
Maybe its because its running on Windows. Truthfully, it seems they cannot upgrade their windows servers fast enough to keep up with the new subscribers. I can rarely log into MySpace anymore, and when I do, it will sometimes take upwards of 30 seconds or more to process that I have clicked a link. Not only do they need to learn how to co-lo, but they need to learn how to load balance.
I went to their site in Firefox in XP, and started clicking around. Bunch of white screens with no content. Either that, or it must take ages to download their player. After five minutes on one screen watching it "transfer" data (still, no buffering), I gave up. I got better things to do than to wait five minutes to watch a music video that I could have seen on youtube in like 5 seconds of buffering, or could have downloaded in 30 seconds from Apple.
Its awful. It looks like someone came up with it in about 5 minutes. The whole Mt. Rushmore thing is totally inappropriate, it might actually drive people AWAY from the product. The ad is totally uninformative. I truthfully think a frontal attack on the big office packages, something along the lines of "Why pay $600 bucks for MS Office when you can get our product which does the same thing for free" or something similar to be much more effective. Shoot, even those AWFUL Sprite commercials are better than this. I would have to say tha this ad is one of the biggest disappointements the open source community has delivered in a while
You have a girlfriend? Would you mind sharing her with millions of people around the world?
I have found that many of my friends, most of who are NOT tech savy, understand what HD-DVD is, although they really cannot see the point of upgrading. Most still have SD TVs from the 90s, and really do not see a reason to upgrade. Videophiles make up a small percentage of the market. Everyone I know however who does have an HDTV understands that there are two formats out there.
So what do I think? I think Blu-Ray will win, but not for its technical specifications. Blu-Ray will win because its the format of the PS3, if Sony can deliver it on time, that is, before the Christmas rush. If Sony misses Christmas of 2006 with the release of the PS3, Blu-Ray will be dead. No simpler way of putting it. The PS3 will be the biggest pusher of Blu-Ray there is.
So what if the average consumer does not know the difference between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. So what if the average consumer knows that HD-DVD stands for High Definition DVD and does not know what Blu-Ray is. Your average consumer is not going to be buying these players to begin with. It will be years before the average consumer buys into high def one way or the other, and by then, the early adopters will be the ones who have decided the outcome of the format war.
With that being said, I cannot stress the importance of the PS3 coming out on time. Look at the XBox 360. Many people understand that the PS3 is going to be a better system, but Microsoft has a year head start. The same will be true with the format war. Regardless of wheter the Blu Ray players actually come out in May, until Sony and other manufactorors can produce a player in a similar price range as HD-DVD and until they can push the format on users (with the PS3), HD-DVD is going to have the upper hand. Oh, I do not want to hear about capacities and such, a dual layer can hold 30 gig, and even my transport stream 1080i rip of Return of the King is not that big. HD-DVD uses VC1 compression, which I do not know a lot about, but I am sure uses some type of MPEG4 compression, which will make the movies much smaller than the source transport stream. You can fit a movie and all its extras on an HDDVD without a hit to quality. So with quality side by side, and looking at the price tag, HD-DVD has a major advantage. The PS3 WILL be the deciding factor in this battle. End of comment.
The gameplay between the first and second game is dramatic. The first Kingdom Hearts had a very solid gameplay, and some very difficult levels. The second Kingdom Hearts is more like an interactive movie. So far, I am in the Atlantica level, and I feel I have had more cutscenes than gameplay. The gameplay is overly simplistic, the first game required strategy on most of your oponents, the second game is a button masher. You equip your abilities, and then just lay on the X button. While the story is great, there is just too much of it, too much is revealed too early in the game, and interaction with the enviornment is misrable. The minigames are extreamely easy, I usually beat the scores in the strategy guide with my second or third attempt. With the first Kingdom Hearts, I could not put the game down, with this game, I have not picked it up in two weeks, I have spent more time playing We Love Katamari, which has excellent replay value. Truthfully, Kingdom Hearts 2 would have been a great game if there was less focus on story and more on gameplay, I bought a game, not an interactive movie. The levels are also MUCH smaller than they were in the original Kingdom Hearts, I can usually beat a land in an hour on the new game, whereas I would spend about 4-5 hours a land on the original Kingdom Hearts. And I am not alone with this, I know three other people who have played the game, and 2 of them are more annoyed with the endless story boards than I am. The third thinks its the greatest game ever made. So, in the small community of people I know, 75% of the audience was disappointed in it. This is not to say its not a good game, its just that Square rarely disappoints on delivering sequals, and we were expecting Kingdom Hearts 2 to be at least as good as Kingdom Hearts. I will have to admit, it is MUCH better than Chain of Memories. I am not complaining about graphics or anything on Chain of Memories, for a GBA game, it was excellent, but to go from an RPG to a card battle game was the stupidest move Square ever made.
What would I have done differently in Kingdom Hearts 2 if I was on the design team? Bigger levels for starters, the underworld, China, and Beast's Castle are WAY too small. I mean, the first level is freakin China, they could have done some really amazing stuff with this level. (First level, that is, after the game officially gets started, roughly after about 8-9 hours of play and storyboard, or 2 hours if you skip the story board, I know, we tried both). A little strategy needed on the bosses would have been nice, they are way too easy.The coolest level so far has been timeless river. I would have loved them to do more with this level, the animation and boss fights were simply amazing. I was really disappointed that this level took me 20 minutes to play. Puzzles would be nice. The first game had a few puzzles, the second seems to have none. I have litterally found myself falling asleep late at night playing this game, wake up 10 minutes later, and still be alive. I mean, I can litterally play this game in my sleep.
I know my opinions do not reflect everyones, but I do not think anyone would complain if the game had just a bit more depth to it.
We need to have a Slashdot TV, that goes back to what ZDTV originally started, a Microsoft bashing, tech oriented channel. Bring back shows such as Invent This, Silicon Spin and TechLive. Break apart your call in shows, that is, Call 4 Help be mostly for newbies, and have ScreenSavers be more tech savy questions. Do not confuse the two. Cut the crap interviews with the directors of Stick It and stuff like that. And, most importantly, while video games are a part of technology, lets not confuse the issue and try to say that video games are all there is to technology like G4TechTV did.
I finally went back to Windows on all my machines. I was a member of a LUG for a while, and was utterly bashed on when I became one of the early adoptors of DVD on PCs. At the time, there was no DVD support for Linux. I played with some of the early projects and made one or two contributions to early CVS, but was attacked by fellow Linux users because I was quadruple booting Linux, 98, NT, and BeOS.
I tried going back to Linux about a year ago, and gave up. I was trying to install video drivers, and I asked a couple of people how to do that. I got a RTFM response, to which I responded, I did, and I still have issues.
There is a difference between the Mac and Linux communities I would like to point out. Both communities think they are better than Windows users, and will tend to rub it into Windows users faces. The difference is that Mac users will help each other, whereas the Linux community support is SO bad, that Microsoft started offering it with their new virutal machine software.
I am starting to find that more and more Linux software is being written by snobs too. I wish I could think of the software I was trying out, but the install directions stated simply "Install in the normal way". I spent a greater part of an hour trying to figure out that the normal way ment "make, make install, install" or however it is. Of course, then the program would not install because I did not have the proper libraries, and the website did not tell me where I could obtain these libraries. I hit up on a couple of other Linux newbies, because the Linux "pros" did not "have time to mess with miniscule issues like these". After two days of work and research, we never did get the program running. I booted back into Windows, found a similar program for Windows, installed and was up and running in two minutes.
My problem has seldom been with the Linux OS. The Linux OS is great, it is sturdy, and when properly configured, will run circles around Windows. My problem has ALWAYS been either the lack of information or the overload of information (try reading a man page sometime, the man page for tar alone hurts my head), horrible directions on how to install the program, missing libraries, inability to find Binaries (RPMs usually) for my particular distro (whether it be Fedora, Suse x64 or Mandrake), and almost nonexistant support from the community. Most of my friends and myself know that Linux is a better OS, but refuse to waste our time trying to get a stupid application to work, or a driver installed. I am triple booting on my machines now, but its no longer Windows, Linux, and BeOS, it is now XP Pro, XP x64, and XP Media Center. And that is the way it is going to stay until there is a dramatic change in the Linux community.
Here are your WOW videos
Unfortunately, they are not $3.95, and are on HD-VHS, not HD-DVD.
They also have WMV HDDVDs here, but once again, not HDDVD, and not for $3.95.
I can guarentee, though, that Best Buy will have demo units in the store.
Also, the AVS forums state that the Last Samurai has an HD-DVD Demo at the start of the disc, showing off titles such as Harry Potter and Batman Begins.
Maybe you should read the forums before posting comments. The player SUPPORTS ICT, not DEMAND it. ICT allows a company to force lower resolutions on people who are not using HDMI, however the forums state that at least The Last Samarui and The Phantom of the Opera does not support this, they offer the high res experience over Component.
The limitations that are mentioned in the forums, limiting playback to 480P, are for SD DVDs, not HDDVDs, and that is through the component output. If I want to output a SD DVD at 1080i through the component, all I do is load up the PC, nStant Media with DVD Region Free in the background, and, whoala, upconverted DVDs over the Component. As soon as HDCP and ICT is broken, I should be able to do the same thing with HDDVD and Bluray. I have not heard of a company yet that is going to limit the resolution of their discs over the component connection.
You do not have to rebuy the movie if you get another HDDVD player, and your disc is not locked to work only on your player. Truthfully, I fail to see your arguments in this case against the DRM in the device.
The article fails to mention the where the AVS forums and reviews of the new players are at. They are here
Think of it. Microsoft will see it, and want to ship a version of Windows that takes up 500 terabytes of the drive. Then there is the formatting of the drive, so when all is said and done, after formating and the OS, you will only have about 300 terabytes left. Amazingly, though, if he is working on instant access, will this mean the OS will boot up in under a second? Will we need all the ram, as nothing will need to be written to virutal memory?
Mandrake will ship on 50 blue ray discs.
Farcry 3 will take up 4 terabytes, and the 128bit processor upgrade patch will be 400 gigabytes, and another 450 gigabytes for the 128bit exclusive content.
A video driver will now be a gig in size.
Can you imagine the size of a 4 hour long uncompressed 1080p High-Def movie?
Fiber may not be fast enough for us anymore.
JPEG and GIFs will become obsolete as TIFF and RAW and other formats take off. There will be no need to export PSD to other formats.
With this size in drives, Blue-Ray suddenly starts looking to us like floppies are now.
If people are still using MPEG and AVI and JPEG, could you imagine the size of some people's porn collection?
On the plus side, I FINALLY have enough room on the drive to do proper video editing. Seems that no matter how big a drive I get, how many drives I get, I still do not have enough.
The 5G iPod, while it may be a 4G with video capabilities, still plays video. Hence, it IS a video iPod. I have one, use it to watch Aqua Teen Hunger Force on my breaks.
Do we REALLY want a touch screen iPod? I have a hard enough problem keeping my iPod clean. Sounds like an excuse for Apple to sell some type of proprietary cleaning supplies to me.
Truthfully, the only thing that could really make this better is a better battery life when playing videos. You SUPPOSEDLY get two hours on the 30 gig 5G and three hours on the 60 gig 5G. Its annoying, you loose battery life halfway through Sound of Music. Its why most of the videos I keep on there are stuff like South Park, ATHF, and clips from Saturday Night Live, as its almost impossible to watch a movie on there, although I was able to watch all of Song of the South with one charge, but that ment no music before, and plugging it back in to charge when I finished watching the movie. Still, gives me something to do at the laundry mat.
Why? Linux can multitask!
I love this! I mean, if we are making weapons of war, might at well base it on a decent OS. We do not want a Windows Memory dump and the thing come after us, do we?
I do not have to imagine. MSDOS had a lifespan from 1981 through, what, 1995? A 14 year lifespan. Oh, don't give me that crap about different versions, about the only real thing Dos 5 and 6 added was Edit, QBasic, and Doublespace. Oh, and the shortlived MSAV. They added that ANNOYING Dosshell feature. But the primary operating system pretty much remained the same since Dos 3 (well, Dos 4 was a complete loss, we don't talk about that).
Dos 5 and newer also shipped with games. Nibbles and Gorilla forever!
On another note, anyone ever played a Squaresoft game here? They have not used CGI cutscenes since Final Fantasy 9, the cutscenes in Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy X and X-2 were all done in the Playstation.
Big deal about space, and the cost of Blue Ray discs. Both systems will also use DVD and DVD9, and the PS3 will have 50 gig to work with when they use Blue Ray. I mean, if the same game is released on both the PS3 and the XBox 360, there should be no reason that the PS3 game would cost $10 more, as they are both released on the same media. If a game does get big enough that they need to fit it on blue-ray, I wouldn't mind paying the extra few dollars, because it probably means that more work was put into the game (as long as its not like 20 gigs of transport stream video, last thing we need is more cutscenes).
So lets say we DO hit the 8.5 gig barrier within these console's lifecycles. Then what? Well, first, the PS3 will probably get more exclusive titles. Worse case scenario: load your common textures off onto the harddrive, and use disc swapping. I mean, in Final Fantasy when it was on CD, I could usually get in about 12 hours of gameplay before having to swap discs.
Someone mentioned Grand Theft Auto and its huge maps. This stomped me at first too as to how we were going to get past this issue, but then something occured to me: How big, really, can a map be? I mean, what are you planning, to do the entire city of New York, in detail, having each sign have its own unique texture and bitmaps, having detailed layouts of every single building in the game so we can go in each one? Grand Theft Auto should be a game that can be played in a few days, not something you are going to spend the rest of your life playing.
Lets say that games DO get bigger than the DVD9 barrier. We will simply see something that happened back in the days of Genesis and SNES, whereas the Genesis got more sports titles and such, and the SNES got your sidescrollers, adventure games and RPGs. Big deal.
Stepping down off of my soapbox now.
Seems to be a bit of confusion here. The document you pointed out was written in September of 1995, however, the HTML 3 standard, according to the same website, was adopted in March of 1995
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html3/
It looks like HTML3 is what added tables. That is strange, because I just ran across a website today where the guy was trying to update a table from HTML2 specifications to HTML4.
I KNOW Netscape 2 and the first version of IE supported tables. IE would have come out around Auguest of 95, as it was bundled with Windows 95. I was trying to google the specifications of these early browsers, but I cannot find anything, and archive.org for the netscape site only goes back to netscape 3. Did Netscape 2 and the first versions of IE actually support HTML3? It would not surprise me if they were fully HTML2 compatable and incorporated some HTML3 code before it was approved as a standard, that may be where I am confused.
Okay, I see many people are not being a lot of help. They are quoting statistics and all sorts of other things.
To answer your question: Just program in HTML 2. Its what I do. Supports tables, most of the stuff you want to use (except maybe style sheets), works with just about any browser except NCSA Mosaic and Netscape 1. You want flashy graphics? Just do an image map.
Truthfully, most of you users are going to have Netcape 4, Opera, IE4 or something newer. You could probably get away with programing in HTML 4 and hit 98% of your users.
As for developing apps, depends on who your target audience is. I mean, is there really a reason for designing something like Adobe AfterEffects and have it compatable with Windows 95? If you are running 95, it is most likely because you are running 8-10 year old hardware. Do you really want to do video rendering on a first generation Pentium or a 486 that is maxed out at 16 to 32 meg of ram?
Most apps I see now are for 98SE or newer. I know 2 people who are running 98 first edition, and noone running 95.
Many apps that I know of have seperate versions for 2000 and XP, then XP x64 and 2003 Server, then they will have a 9x version for 95, 98, and ME. Of course, those are internet apps. For most consumer apps, scrap anything older than 98SE. I mean, I am sorry, but 98SE is now seven years old. I am not up for the upgrade every year philosophy that Microsoft seems to have, but seven years is kinda pushing it.