writes get spread out over the cells that make up the disk.
So, when the power fails while the SSD is writing, I lose not only the data that was not written yet, but some other data as well*?
* as I understand, the wear leveling works by moving the data around. I need to write x KB, so, the SSD moves x KB of less often changing data from one location to the other (that is more worn) and the writes the new x KB to the less worn location.
As tedious as reinstalling Windows is, you've now got the perfect opportunity.
Nah, assuming all my hardware and software worked with 7 x64 (though, as I understand, x64 versions of Windows do not support 16bit apps). Installing all the software I installed in the last 4 years would mean that my computer would not work as well for the coming weeks ("Oh, I need to do this, let me start this app real quick, oh, I forgot to install it, hmm... now where is the setup file"). Last time I reinstalled Winows on my main PC was 4 years ago, when I built this PC. That was worth it, because I went from a single core 2.2GHz CPU (Athlon XP 3200+) with Radeon 9800Pro to dual CPU dual core 2GHz (2x Opteron 270) and Radeon HD2900XT. All that for additional couple of GB of RAM (6 out of 8 slots are in use already with 4GB) - not worth it. Well, at least until new games stop supporting WinXP.
As you've placed yourself on the former extreme, you're saying that your personal time to recover from a downtime, and your ability to predict when that will be, is worth less to you than the money it would cost you to mitigate your situation.
I do not have unlimited amount of money. Even though I would like to get very reliable components to have as little downtime as possible, I cannot afford them. So I go for "as little downtime as possible, given this limited amount of money". Hard drives are quite reliable in my experience, so I'm using them. I do not know how long SSDs last (5, 8, 10 years?).
Why on *earth* would you expect that? It's a *completely* different technology, with completely different failure modes.
Well, almost everyone is saying how reliable SSDs are because they have no moving parts to wear out. Also, since I do not really care about the speed, the only reason I would buy a SSD (instead of a cheaper HDD) would be reliability. If that SSD failed before a hard drive that has been already spinning for 7 years, I would be disappointed.
Well, I didn't buy the fastest CPUs for the motherboard at the time, so I can upgrade. The current CPUs are 2x Opteron 270 (dual core 2GHz), I can replace them with 2x Opteron 290 (dual core 2.8GHz), that would be 1.4x faster, since speed depends on the frequency within one family of CPUs.
The seek time of my system HDD is ~3ms average, 5ms end-to-end. Yes, the SSD would be a lot faster, especially for random reads/writes (no, I would not get 500MB/s transfer rate, unless I found a PCI-X SATA3 controller, SCSI is only 320MB/s). However, the computer feels quite responsive now. Though I probably should get a small (4GB or so) SSD for the page file, so that the computer would work as if it had more than 4GB RAM (I do not want to reinstall Windows to 64bit, not because of the 64bit, but because reinstalling would be tedious). Maybe I should get a DRAM based SSD, those should have no problem with writes.
How do modern SSDs handle writes? Do they still wear out soon if you write a lot to it?
As for power and noise, well, my computer uses a lot of power so reducing it by 6W or so won't matter. The computer also has high airflow fans (my room sometimes reaches 40 degrees in the summer, over 30 a lot of times), so the drive cannot be heard anyway (and it's not that loud).
As for reliability, it's rather a moot point as that's what backups are for.
I wonder how "fast" the OS would be if it was running from the tape backup while I waited for the store to get the new hard drive for me (takes about 1 working day, sucks if the drive broke on Friday afternoon). Assuming I could get it to boot from tape, I know LTO5 has a special filesystem to make the tape look like a hard drive. Maybe it would be possible to do something with LTO2 as LTO5 drives are quite expensive.
My computer was not built in 2011, but is still good enough for me and I can upgrade the CPUs to 1.4x faster than the current ones if some game does not run because of the CPUs.
You (probably) don't need 15k RPM drives for bulk data in a workstation or personal computer.
No, the 36GB is for OS+apps and the 146GB is for games.
SSDs are more durable (not as sensitive to shock etc) than hard drives, so putting one in a laptop could be a good idea, but a SSD with laptop IDE connector would probably be even more expensive (as the demand is lower).
As for the responsiveness, I believe you. My computer does not seem slow responding to me, but maybe that is because I am used to it taking that bit of time to do something that would be done instantly with a SSD. But if it's only for that, then I'd rather save the money and buy a new video card (or CPUs) when games become too slow or I want to encode video or do calculations faster. If I had a 3600RPM drive as a system drive, then the lack of responsiveness would annoy me and I would consider spending money on making the PC more responsive.
I have no idea why people insist on their drives being so damn reliable. Shit breaks. You need to have a backup plan.
It's not about the backup, or the data. When I buy something, I want it to last (especially if it is expensive), because I do not like paying for stuff that breaks soon.
Even if I make a backup three times a day, when the drive beaks, my computer crashes. Then, I have to order a new drive and wait a day for it to arrive (hopefully, the drive did not break on Friday afternoon). When it arrives, I have to install it, restore the backup and restart my PC. Oh, I also had to pay for the new drive. Well, I could buy two drives and keep one as a spare, but then I will be paying twice the money for the same space and some part of the hassle still remains. On a desktop, I could use RAID1 but I would still need to buy two drives. Laptops usually do not have the space or the battery capacity to afford RAID1.
Same is true for other devices (for example power supplies). SSDs cost more than HDDs, so I would expect them to last longer (and since my hard drives are quite reliable, a SSD would have to work at least 10 years). As the technology is new, nobody knows how long SSDs will last, so I will have to wait and see.
if you're talking about 15k enterprise drives (yes, I was and I nearly added this comment too) then dollars per gigabyte they compare pretty well to SSD.
I have a 36GB and a 146GB 15k U320 drives, but I paid less than I would have if I had bought SSDs (especially for the 36GB one, which I bought maybe 4 years ago). I do not remember the exact prices I paid, but I compared them at the time and found out that HDDs were cheaper (also, they can be written more times, but I hear that new SSDs also can be written a lot of times).
Buy an SSD for your OS and Apps. Buy multi-TB disks for your bulk data.
This assumes I have a lot of money. If I have enough money to buy a SSD OR a multi-TB HDD, I'd rather buy the HDD. After all, my bulk-storage HDDs are old (newest bought in 2007), and I could replace almost all of them with a single drive (or just add the drive to have more space).
Also, I am sure that a SSD would make my computer load programs faster, but I do not close them all that often. I have firefox running all the time (and restart it when it starts using too much memory or becomes too slow, maybe once every few days), same with other stuff, except games of course, but games do not take long to load either (especially compared to play time).
Here RRP on a Seagate Cheetah 15k.7 600GB SAS hard drive is $914 - this is an enterprise-grade server hard disk. An Intel 320 Series 600GB SSD is $1684 - not even twice as expensive.
Configure you machine with a small (120GB is usually enough) SSD. Put your OS and all your Apps on this disk. Put everything else on a multi-TB spinning disk and you will feel like it's a whole new computer.
Or, buy a hard drive (or a few of them) that costs as much as the 120GB SSD, keep the OS on the current 15kRPM hard drive and not worry about free space for quite some time.
Let's see: A server, some hard/floppy/CD drives, a UPS (made in 1998), some other computers (just occasionally). Well, from the "under $50" category, I guess only the floppy and CD drives remain, but still. I also plan to use my keyboard (Logitech UltraX Flat - I like laptop-style keyboards) for the foreseeable future. I recently replace my mouse, because the old one was wearing out (left clicks didn't always register), but I wil use the current one until it wears out too (though I might have to buy a new mouse just in case - mice that can talk PS/2 seem to be endangered species).
Where I live (a Eastern European country), in my city (2nd largest in the country) only the main streets are cleaned often (a couple times a day maybe), while all smaller streets are cleaned maybe once a day or less. Every time it starts snowing for the first time we hear that whatever budget that was allocated for road cleaning was already used up as it snowed much more than expected (even though it snows about the same every year). So, if it snowed during the night and is below freezing during the day, then expect a lot of fishtailing if your car is RWD. If it does not snow during the day, then the cars somewhat clean the street. Well, at least the snow fills all the potholes. Until spring, when the potholes become even bigger.
When you steal a candy bar from Walmart, the loss is spread to the customers who pay for their purchases.
When you steal a candy bar, the loss is the money Walmart paid to the manufacturer of said candy bar. I don't think anybody paid anything for my copy of $movie.
By your logic, its okay for me to steal your car because I have a screwdriver and I know how to disable alarms and hotwire it. It only took 30 seconds.
Yes. I have stolen many cars, however, I always left the originals in place, so the legit owner does not have to buy another car. However, I had to wait for him to buy a car before I could steal it. Now we both can drive the same car at the same time, to different destinations.
You are permanently depriving them of the time it took to produce the software, and their right to get paid for producing the software.
Now we know why it took Microsoft so long to release a new version of Windows (Vista), and even then it was crap.
Microsoft actually finished it two years after the release of XP, but somebody pirated it so MS had to start all over again. Same thing happened again. Finally, MS managed to create a new copy faster than the pirate could download it, that's why it was crap.
Or at least that's how it would work if downloading actually deprived the author of that time.
Your argument is similar to hiring someone to paint your house, then refusing to pay them after the job is done.
There is a huge difference between this and software/music/movies. The painter has to put in work and time for each and every copy of the "painted house". If I want him to paint my house, he has to spend $x hours painting it. If my neighbor then decides to get his house painted, then the painter has to work for additional $x hours (assuming our houses are about the same size), in total he now had to work ${x*2} hours to paint two houses. On the other hand, let's say I pay somebody to create some software, they spend $x hours doing it. Now my friend also wants that software, the programmer now only has to spend a few seconds making a copy, so, he spent ${x+0.001} hours making two copies, or ${(x+0.001)/2} hours per each copy. If somebody else now wants a copy, the "hours per copy" value goes down even more. So, I can save the programmer those few seconds and make a copy for my friend. Now, let's say I'm the "friend". The programmer has already created the software and put in $x hours irreversibly. Somebody bought and paid for it. If I download a copy for free, it will not cause the programmer to put in additional hours (not even a microsecond) to what he already has put in, presumably for the other clients. And he can still sell the software to others. The painter cannot paint somebody else''s house at the same time he is painting mine, so each copy costs the same, as opposed to software, where the first copy costs $a_lot and all other copies cost $0.
A painter also will not be able to paint one house and then get money for the rest of his life while doing nothing.
ranting about the evils of copyright (but don't you dare steal copyrighted GPL code!)
1. Are these the same people? 2. If copyright didn't exist, even if a company "stole" GPL code, everybody else could "steal" it back. 3. Most of the "GPL piracy" rants are against companies, who take the code, modify and then sell it, getting profit. If someone took a GPL program, modified it and distributed the result for free (but without the source), it probably wouldn't be such a big problem. The same way that a lot of those who support piracy (file-sharing style) are against commercial pirates (those, who would download the pirated content, burn it to a CD/DVD/BD and sell it for more than the blank disk costs).
Really? I didn't know that. Most likely because I use a DVB-C tuner, it outputs S-video, which goes trough my VCR to the capture card in my main PC (so I can watch TV on my monitor). So, I always get analog PAL and for some reason though that the broadcast format stays the same, 50 fields per second, even in digital TV.
The difference is simple - your lock on the house allows you to keep everybody (except you and people who you want to let in or trust enough to give them a copy of the key) out. DRM is different. It is, if you tried to get some technological solution (that does not need guards) to allow me in, but not allow me to also let my friend in at the same time and make this scalable to thousands of people and hundreds of places.
DRM is designed to prevent people, who paid for the content (and should be allowed access to it), from accessing the content in the wrong way (copying it). For audio, it cannot work, for video, it can work in theory, as long as the bitrate is too high for any recording device, for software it can work, but requires the software to run on a server (always online) and this is something people do not always like.
It is all expectations and the perceived cost of making my copy.
I can understand paying $30 for a movie. After all, the projector uses quite a lot of power, the building itself has to be maintained etc, in short, there are costs associated with each showing. I also get exactly what I expected - the ability to see the movie once.If I want to see the movie again, they will have to show it again. I can understand paying $60 in a restaurant. The food had to be prepared, the ingredients cost money and the staff needs salaries, that is, I can kind-of see where that money went. Again, I get exactly what I expected - the food, which, of course, I can only eat once, but to me it is worth the money. If I want to eat there again, they will have to prepare the food again. I can understand paying $a_lot for a vacation because it seems worth it to me, again, I get what I expected. The fact that the vacation does not last forever is not artificial. Also, if I go there again, a lot of the costs will be incurred again.
If I buy a camera, I pay for the R&D costs and the costs of making my camera. The camera is mine forever, well, at least until it wears out (and I hope it is well built, or at least can be repaired) or lost/destroyed (depends on how careful I am). As you see, big part of this depends on me, not the manufacturer. If the manufacturer makes cameras that wear out after 1 year, I will buy a camera from another manufacturer. If I want another camera, it will have to be made again, so the cost of manufacture will be incurred again
Now, we get to games. Games cost a lot to develop, but almost nothing to copy. So, when I buy a copy, I pay for part of the development costs (which were incurred only once per each game, not copy) and the full cost of copying (which is much smaller compared to the development costs, or so everybody says). Also, a game is a finished product, like the camera, so I should not pay for it continuously, because I do not get any continuous service (MMOs are exception). So, I should be able to use it like the camera - buy once, use forever, because it was made only once. Also, if I want to buy another copy of the game,only the small copying costs are incurred, but I can justify it if I really want another copy (to give to a friend perhaps). Also, while I may lose the camera, that depends on me, not some company, as is the case with DRM games. I would not buy a camera that stopped working when the manufacturer went out of business, why should I buy such a game? I have devices that are 40 years old or older. Not only the factory is out of business, but the entire country that made them (the USSR) no longer exists. The devices still work, there is not reason they should stop working.
So, why should I pay continuously for something you did only once (develop the game)?
AVI does not support B frames, back-referencing P frames only. That means no MPEG4, no XviD, no DivX, no H264, and no other halfway modern codecs.
What? Almost all.avi files on TPB are XviD/DivX.
Now sure, you can hack on all sorts of additional functionality that lies outside the AVI spec, but then you're not using AVI.
Oh, OK.
I guess.mp4 would be better (though I had more problems with it, maybe my codec config is wrong or those files were badly encoded). I wonder why the releases are in.avi then. Maybe some players can play these non-standard files, but cannot play other containers (I know that only recent players support mkv)?
Also, broadcast television is variable framerate? For some reason I thought that it is always 50 fields per second (60 in some other countries).
Yea, I can use 1920x1440@85Hz on my CRT monitor and it is not blurry. Also, this resolution requires much higher quality cable (because the pixel clock frequency is very high) than 1920x1080@60Hz
Most likely because you didn't need it that much. As I use a CRT monitor, probably the first thing I would do after finding that limit would be to google for a solution.
Well, sure Linux was more for servers and those who wanted Unix. I just replied to the comparison of Win95 and Linux stability. Yes, Linux did not crash as often, but it also was not as useful for the Win95 users.
As for the dependencies - I remember trying to get some program to run on an old (wasn't old at the time I tried) distribution of Linux and it kept asking me for yet another lib* with the last one being incompatible with pretty much everything else in the system. Then same thing happened later with a newer distribution but the program in question was not in any repository.
But we were comparing Linux to Windows 95. While Windows also does not do any dependency resolution, the software tends to come with all its parts and there are only a few separate dependencies (DirectX, VB Runtime etc), some software even had those in the install disk. This continues even now, so it is possible to use a computer without internet connection. Compared to the Linux way where it is a bit more difficult.
As for Office software, again, the comparison was Win95 vs Linux. So, yes, Linux was more stable than Win95, but was not as useful for those people who used Win95.
Did it support MS.doc and.xls formats? IIRC they were a problem even later. Oh and IIRC there were no package managers at the time, so if you wanted to install a program you had to get a bunch of dependencies. And then a bunch of dependencies of those dependencies and so on...
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writes get spread out over the cells that make up the disk.
So, when the power fails while the SSD is writing, I lose not only the data that was not written yet, but some other data as well*?
* as I understand, the wear leveling works by moving the data around. I need to write x KB, so, the SSD moves x KB of less often changing data from one location to the other (that is more worn) and the writes the new x KB to the less worn location.
As tedious as reinstalling Windows is, you've now got the perfect opportunity.
Nah, assuming all my hardware and software worked with 7 x64 (though, as I understand, x64 versions of Windows do not support 16bit apps). Installing all the software I installed in the last 4 years would mean that my computer would not work as well for the coming weeks ("Oh, I need to do this, let me start this app real quick, oh, I forgot to install it, hmm... now where is the setup file"). Last time I reinstalled Winows on my main PC was 4 years ago, when I built this PC. That was worth it, because I went from a single core 2.2GHz CPU (Athlon XP 3200+) with Radeon 9800Pro to dual CPU dual core 2GHz (2x Opteron 270) and Radeon HD2900XT.
All that for additional couple of GB of RAM (6 out of 8 slots are in use already with 4GB) - not worth it. Well, at least until new games stop supporting WinXP.
As you've placed yourself on the former extreme, you're saying that your personal time to recover from a downtime, and your ability to predict when that will be, is worth less to you than the money it would cost you to mitigate your situation.
I do not have unlimited amount of money. Even though I would like to get very reliable components to have as little downtime as possible, I cannot afford them. So I go for "as little downtime as possible, given this limited amount of money". Hard drives are quite reliable in my experience, so I'm using them. I do not know how long SSDs last (5, 8, 10 years?).
Why on *earth* would you expect that? It's a *completely* different technology, with completely different failure modes.
Well, almost everyone is saying how reliable SSDs are because they have no moving parts to wear out. Also, since I do not really care about the speed, the only reason I would buy a SSD (instead of a cheaper HDD) would be reliability. If that SSD failed before a hard drive that has been already spinning for 7 years, I would be disappointed.
Well, I didn't buy the fastest CPUs for the motherboard at the time, so I can upgrade. The current CPUs are 2x Opteron 270 (dual core 2GHz), I can replace them with 2x Opteron 290 (dual core 2.8GHz), that would be 1.4x faster, since speed depends on the frequency within one family of CPUs.
The seek time of my system HDD is ~3ms average, 5ms end-to-end. Yes, the SSD would be a lot faster, especially for random reads/writes (no, I would not get 500MB/s transfer rate, unless I found a PCI-X SATA3 controller, SCSI is only 320MB/s). However, the computer feels quite responsive now. Though I probably should get a small (4GB or so) SSD for the page file, so that the computer would work as if it had more than 4GB RAM (I do not want to reinstall Windows to 64bit, not because of the 64bit, but because reinstalling would be tedious). Maybe I should get a DRAM based SSD, those should have no problem with writes.
How do modern SSDs handle writes? Do they still wear out soon if you write a lot to it?
As for power and noise, well, my computer uses a lot of power so reducing it by 6W or so won't matter. The computer also has high airflow fans (my room sometimes reaches 40 degrees in the summer, over 30 a lot of times), so the drive cannot be heard anyway (and it's not that loud).
As for reliability, it's rather a moot point as that's what backups are for.
I wonder how "fast" the OS would be if it was running from the tape backup while I waited for the store to get the new hard drive for me (takes about 1 working day, sucks if the drive broke on Friday afternoon). Assuming I could get it to boot from tape, I know LTO5 has a special filesystem to make the tape look like a hard drive. Maybe it would be possible to do something with LTO2 as LTO5 drives are quite expensive.
My computer was not built in 2011, but is still good enough for me and I can upgrade the CPUs to 1.4x faster than the current ones if some game does not run because of the CPUs.
You (probably) don't need 15k RPM drives for bulk data in a workstation or personal computer.
No, the 36GB is for OS+apps and the 146GB is for games.
SSDs are more durable (not as sensitive to shock etc) than hard drives, so putting one in a laptop could be a good idea, but a SSD with laptop IDE connector would probably be even more expensive (as the demand is lower).
As for the responsiveness, I believe you. My computer does not seem slow responding to me, but maybe that is because I am used to it taking that bit of time to do something that would be done instantly with a SSD. But if it's only for that, then I'd rather save the money and buy a new video card (or CPUs) when games become too slow or I want to encode video or do calculations faster. If I had a 3600RPM drive as a system drive, then the lack of responsiveness would annoy me and I would consider spending money on making the PC more responsive.
I have no idea why people insist on their drives being so damn reliable. Shit breaks. You need to have a backup plan.
It's not about the backup, or the data. When I buy something, I want it to last (especially if it is expensive), because I do not like paying for stuff that breaks soon.
Even if I make a backup three times a day, when the drive beaks, my computer crashes. Then, I have to order a new drive and wait a day for it to arrive (hopefully, the drive did not break on Friday afternoon). When it arrives, I have to install it, restore the backup and restart my PC. Oh, I also had to pay for the new drive.
Well, I could buy two drives and keep one as a spare, but then I will be paying twice the money for the same space and some part of the hassle still remains. On a desktop, I could use RAID1 but I would still need to buy two drives. Laptops usually do not have the space or the battery capacity to afford RAID1.
Same is true for other devices (for example power supplies). SSDs cost more than HDDs, so I would expect them to last longer (and since my hard drives are quite reliable, a SSD would have to work at least 10 years). As the technology is new, nobody knows how long SSDs will last, so I will have to wait and see.
if you're talking about 15k enterprise drives (yes, I was and I nearly added this comment too) then dollars per gigabyte they compare pretty well to SSD.
I have a 36GB and a 146GB 15k U320 drives, but I paid less than I would have if I had bought SSDs (especially for the 36GB one, which I bought maybe 4 years ago). I do not remember the exact prices I paid, but I compared them at the time and found out that HDDs were cheaper (also, they can be written more times, but I hear that new SSDs also can be written a lot of times).
Buy an SSD for your OS and Apps. Buy multi-TB disks for your bulk data.
This assumes I have a lot of money. If I have enough money to buy a SSD OR a multi-TB HDD, I'd rather buy the HDD. After all, my bulk-storage HDDs are old (newest bought in 2007), and I could replace almost all of them with a single drive (or just add the drive to have more space).
Also, I am sure that a SSD would make my computer load programs faster, but I do not close them all that often. I have firefox running all the time (and restart it when it starts using too much memory or becomes too slow, maybe once every few days), same with other stuff, except games of course, but games do not take long to load either (especially compared to play time).
Here RRP on a Seagate Cheetah 15k.7 600GB SAS hard drive is $914 - this is an enterprise-grade server hard disk.
An Intel 320 Series 600GB SSD is $1684 - not even twice as expensive.
Is the SSD as reliable as the HDD?
Configure you machine with a small (120GB is usually enough) SSD. Put your OS and all your Apps on this disk. Put everything else on a multi-TB spinning disk and you will feel like it's a whole new computer.
Or, buy a hard drive (or a few of them) that costs as much as the 120GB SSD, keep the OS on the current 15kRPM hard drive and not worry about free space for quite some time.
*there is a 120GB IDE drive for £33 but afaict most modern motherboards don't have IDE.
So, if your motherboard does not have IDE, it is still cheaper to buy an IDE drive and a IDE-SATA adapter.
Let's see:
A server, some hard/floppy/CD drives, a UPS (made in 1998), some other computers (just occasionally). Well, from the "under $50" category, I guess only the floppy and CD drives remain, but still. I also plan to use my keyboard (Logitech UltraX Flat - I like laptop-style keyboards) for the foreseeable future. I recently replace my mouse, because the old one was wearing out (left clicks didn't always register), but I wil use the current one until it wears out too (though I might have to buy a new mouse just in case - mice that can talk PS/2 seem to be endangered species).
Where I live (a Eastern European country), in my city (2nd largest in the country) only the main streets are cleaned often (a couple times a day maybe), while all smaller streets are cleaned maybe once a day or less. Every time it starts snowing for the first time we hear that whatever budget that was allocated for road cleaning was already used up as it snowed much more than expected (even though it snows about the same every year). So, if it snowed during the night and is below freezing during the day, then expect a lot of fishtailing if your car is RWD. If it does not snow during the day, then the cars somewhat clean the street.
Well, at least the snow fills all the potholes. Until spring, when the potholes become even bigger.
When you steal a candy bar from Walmart, the loss is spread to the customers who pay for their purchases.
When you steal a candy bar, the loss is the money Walmart paid to the manufacturer of said candy bar. I don't think anybody paid anything for my copy of $movie.
By your logic, its okay for me to steal your car because I have a screwdriver and I know how to disable alarms and hotwire it. It only took 30 seconds.
Yes. I have stolen many cars, however, I always left the originals in place, so the legit owner does not have to buy another car. However, I had to wait for him to buy a car before I could steal it. Now we both can drive the same car at the same time, to different destinations.
You are permanently depriving them of the time it took to produce the software, and their right to get paid for producing the software.
Now we know why it took Microsoft so long to release a new version of Windows (Vista), and even then it was crap.
Microsoft actually finished it two years after the release of XP, but somebody pirated it so MS had to start all over again. Same thing happened again. Finally, MS managed to create a new copy faster than the pirate could download it, that's why it was crap.
Or at least that's how it would work if downloading actually deprived the author of that time.
Your argument is similar to hiring someone to paint your house, then refusing to pay them after the job is done.
There is a huge difference between this and software/music/movies. The painter has to put in work and time for each and every copy of the "painted house". If I want him to paint my house, he has to spend $x hours painting it. If my neighbor then decides to get his house painted, then the painter has to work for additional $x hours (assuming our houses are about the same size), in total he now had to work ${x*2} hours to paint two houses.
On the other hand, let's say I pay somebody to create some software, they spend $x hours doing it. Now my friend also wants that software, the programmer now only has to spend a few seconds making a copy, so, he spent ${x+0.001} hours making two copies, or ${(x+0.001)/2} hours per each copy. If somebody else now wants a copy, the "hours per copy" value goes down even more. So, I can save the programmer those few seconds and make a copy for my friend.
Now, let's say I'm the "friend". The programmer has already created the software and put in $x hours irreversibly. Somebody bought and paid for it. If I download a copy for free, it will not cause the programmer to put in additional hours (not even a microsecond) to what he already has put in, presumably for the other clients. And he can still sell the software to others.
The painter cannot paint somebody else''s house at the same time he is painting mine, so each copy costs the same, as opposed to software, where the first copy costs $a_lot and all other copies cost $0.
A painter also will not be able to paint one house and then get money for the rest of his life while doing nothing.
ranting about the evils of copyright (but don't you dare steal copyrighted GPL code!)
1. Are these the same people?
2. If copyright didn't exist, even if a company "stole" GPL code, everybody else could "steal" it back.
3. Most of the "GPL piracy" rants are against companies, who take the code, modify and then sell it, getting profit. If someone took a GPL program, modified it and distributed the result for free (but without the source), it probably wouldn't be such a big problem. The same way that a lot of those who support piracy (file-sharing style) are against commercial pirates (those, who would download the pirated content, burn it to a CD/DVD/BD and sell it for more than the blank disk costs).
Really? I didn't know that. Most likely because I use a DVB-C tuner, it outputs S-video, which goes trough my VCR to the capture card in my main PC (so I can watch TV on my monitor). So, I always get analog PAL and for some reason though that the broadcast format stays the same, 50 fields per second, even in digital TV.
The difference is simple - your lock on the house allows you to keep everybody (except you and people who you want to let in or trust enough to give them a copy of the key) out.
DRM is different. It is, if you tried to get some technological solution (that does not need guards) to allow me in, but not allow me to also let my friend in at the same time and make this scalable to thousands of people and hundreds of places.
DRM is designed to prevent people, who paid for the content (and should be allowed access to it), from accessing the content in the wrong way (copying it). For audio, it cannot work, for video, it can work in theory, as long as the bitrate is too high for any recording device, for software it can work, but requires the software to run on a server (always online) and this is something people do not always like.
It is all expectations and the perceived cost of making my copy.
I can understand paying $30 for a movie. After all, the projector uses quite a lot of power, the building itself has to be maintained etc, in short, there are costs associated with each showing. I also get exactly what I expected - the ability to see the movie once.If I want to see the movie again, they will have to show it again.
I can understand paying $60 in a restaurant. The food had to be prepared, the ingredients cost money and the staff needs salaries, that is, I can kind-of see where that money went. Again, I get exactly what I expected - the food, which, of course, I can only eat once, but to me it is worth the money. If I want to eat there again, they will have to prepare the food again.
I can understand paying $a_lot for a vacation because it seems worth it to me, again, I get what I expected. The fact that the vacation does not last forever is not artificial. Also, if I go there again, a lot of the costs will be incurred again.
If I buy a camera, I pay for the R&D costs and the costs of making my camera. The camera is mine forever, well, at least until it wears out (and I hope it is well built, or at least can be repaired) or lost/destroyed (depends on how careful I am). As you see, big part of this depends on me, not the manufacturer. If the manufacturer makes cameras that wear out after 1 year, I will buy a camera from another manufacturer. If I want another camera, it will have to be made again, so the cost of manufacture will be incurred again
Now, we get to games. Games cost a lot to develop, but almost nothing to copy. So, when I buy a copy, I pay for part of the development costs (which were incurred only once per each game, not copy) and the full cost of copying (which is much smaller compared to the development costs, or so everybody says). Also, a game is a finished product, like the camera, so I should not pay for it continuously, because I do not get any continuous service (MMOs are exception). So, I should be able to use it like the camera - buy once, use forever, because it was made only once. Also, if I want to buy another copy of the game,only the small copying costs are incurred, but I can justify it if I really want another copy (to give to a friend perhaps). Also, while I may lose the camera, that depends on me, not some company, as is the case with DRM games. I would not buy a camera that stopped working when the manufacturer went out of business, why should I buy such a game?
I have devices that are 40 years old or older. Not only the factory is out of business, but the entire country that made them (the USSR) no longer exists. The devices still work, there is not reason they should stop working.
So, why should I pay continuously for something you did only once (develop the game)?
So, do not buy the "professional" version (ADV7612BSWZ-P), buy the one with HDCP.
AVI does not support B frames, back-referencing P frames only. That means no MPEG4, no XviD, no DivX, no H264, and no other halfway modern codecs.
What? Almost all .avi files on TPB are XviD/DivX.
Now sure, you can hack on all sorts of additional functionality that lies outside the AVI spec, but then you're not using AVI.
Oh, OK.
I guess .mp4 would be better (though I had more problems with it, maybe my codec config is wrong or those files were badly encoded). I wonder why the releases are in .avi then. Maybe some players can play these non-standard files, but cannot play other containers (I know that only recent players support mkv)?
Also, broadcast television is variable framerate? For some reason I thought that it is always 50 fields per second (60 in some other countries).
Yea, I can use 1920x1440@85Hz on my CRT monitor and it is not blurry. Also, this resolution requires much higher quality cable (because the pixel clock frequency is very high) than 1920x1080@60Hz
Most likely because you didn't need it that much. As I use a CRT monitor, probably the first thing I would do after finding that limit would be to google for a solution.
Well, sure Linux was more for servers and those who wanted Unix. I just replied to the comparison of Win95 and Linux stability. Yes, Linux did not crash as often, but it also was not as useful for the Win95 users.
As for the dependencies - I remember trying to get some program to run on an old (wasn't old at the time I tried) distribution of Linux and it kept asking me for yet another lib* with the last one being incompatible with pretty much everything else in the system. Then same thing happened later with a newer distribution but the program in question was not in any repository.
But we were comparing Linux to Windows 95. While Windows also does not do any dependency resolution, the software tends to come with all its parts and there are only a few separate dependencies (DirectX, VB Runtime etc), some software even had those in the install disk. This continues even now, so it is possible to use a computer without internet connection. Compared to the Linux way where it is a bit more difficult.
As for Office software, again, the comparison was Win95 vs Linux. So, yes, Linux was more stable than Win95, but was not as useful for those people who used Win95.
Did it support MS .doc and .xls formats? IIRC they were a problem even later.
Oh and IIRC there were no package managers at the time, so if you wanted to install a program you had to get a bunch of dependencies. And then a bunch of dependencies of those dependencies and so on...
By comparison Linux at the time was rock solid.
And the GUI sucked, there was almost no software for it, hardware compatibility sucked and so on.