I don't consider a machine that can boot from CDROM to be old:-) (And I especially don't consider any machine that supports USB to be old...)
Just to confuse your value system, I have a PentiumPro machine with USB ports, but which can't boot from CDs...
Actually, to be more accurate, it does seem to have some sort of boot-from-CD functionality, but it's probably DEC's own method, pre-dating El Torito... Anyhow, the effect is the same.
One trick I'm planning to try soon is putting the laptop disk into an external USB shoebox so I can load it from one of my larger computers, side-stepping the whole problem.
I've done that for years with old notebooks (and a 40 to 44-pin IDE adapter). Many of them don't have working floppy drives anymore, so you really don't have any other options.
You can make all the claims about money and media you want, but it still takes 51% of the vote to take power.
Money and media get them elected, for the most part. With enough money, you can run enough ads to convince enough people to vote for you. With control of the media, your activies that people won't like, won't be made public. There was a huge ammount of information kept quiet before the election, which would have hurt the administration significantly. Since they passed with a tiny margin, it clearly made the difference.
And don't forget all the known voter fraud.
If Bush/Cheney could run again, you can bet they would win again.
That's just idiotic. Bush's approval rating is through the floor. If he ran in 2008 against Hillary Clinton, I'd say Ralph Nader would win by a landslide...
Here's the problem... There are a lot of strange people out there, with a fairly low I.Q., so your story doesn't even seem slightly suspicous to me.
My neighbor's house was broken into, several years ago. There are occasionally transients passing-through the area, so having nothing stolen but a few blankets made perfect sense. The strange thing was, this person obviously used a crowbar or similar object to bend the garage door enough that he could crawl through. He must have spent half an hour working on this, causing hundreds of dollars in damage, when breaking a window would have taken only a second, and would have cost much less to replace.
Cyber-Implants: when you're *really* assimilated! Have the power of Google searches on tap in your own brain. Win every trivia game show. Ace every test. View porn just by thinking about it.
I'll pass. I've got the much better, and less expensive Eye-Fi:
In this hypothetical, he'd have a 50/50 chance of making it through the second flight, as well
Yes, he'd have a 50% chance of making it through each individual flight, however, the aggregate statistics add-up. The second flight would really be a 1/4 chance of success.
Certainly, some people do better than the odds, and some people do worse, but you're really testing your luck on such a long-shot.
All those incidents you've alluded to were perpetrated by different groups of people, under totally different circumstances...
What do you mean "different"? You mean they weren't arabs, and wasn't triggered by a cartoon so it doesn't count?
The Rodney King incident was caused by WAY more than some stupid cartoon.
The Rodney King incident was only about a black man getting beaten by police. The 'stupid cartoon' incident is about muslims being discriminated against, abducted, tortured, killed, etc. You've got a really screwed up system of priorities there.
As for the Crusades, that happened in the 11th Century, not today! [...] We are here today, with modern laws, moderan civilizations, modern technology, modern expectations of acceptable human behavior.
You have no knowledge of history at all, do you? The 11th century, despite a lack of computers, were modern times, with modern standards of acceptable behavior. You should study the crusades, you'll be amazed how "Christian" the Muslims acted, and how brutal and terrorist-like the Christians acted.
Why don't you just compare Bin Laden with a Neanterthal that lived millions of years ago then, and justify his actions that way?
Ah, the good old straw-man... It's been quite a while since I've seen you.
I had a very good idea for an anonymous P2P network (anonymous for the uploader, not the downloader), that would be just a tiny bit slower than regular P2P (unlike every other anonymous P2P method). The idea was for the network to use UDP, have the upload software randomize source IP addresses, and have all the ACKs (as few as practical) broadcast back through the P2P network (likely, encrypted), thereby eliminating the only need for the downloader to know the real IP address of the uploader.
I later discovered that somebody else independently came up with the same idea, too, and actually started coding it. The project in question is http://udpp2p.sf.net/
Checking it out, and contribute to the project if you're able, to help get it to a usable state sooner, rather than later.
That's the difference between us and them. In our society, we can protest all we want, but in the end we're still civilized about it.
Yes, such as the oh-so-civilized widespread church arsons going on in Atlanta right now.
The Rodney King riots in L.A. were nice as well. Nothing says civilized like vast looting and some attempted murder.
Fire-bombing abortion clinics is also quite civilized as well, particularly when a couple people get incidentally killed in the process.
None of those was triggered by the release of a cartoon, AFAIK, but "triggered" is the key word here. It's clearly not about the cartoons at all.
The Crusades have been coming to mind a lot recently... You can look back on it now and say "See, Muslims are evil, just like the Catholics said centuries ago," or you can say "See Christians were just as bad (centuries ago) when they were in that position."
Actually, I don't use GNOME either, so I'm anything but a fanatic.
I'm an Openbox2 fan, actually (better than Blackbox or Fluxbox, where it matters). And yes, it's mainly C++, but that's really besides the point.
My disdain for C++ comes about through many years of developing various projects with it, not because KDE happens to be slower. It was just a general example I think most people can understand well enough.
FWIW, the FSF does a great job managing to bloat code, completely needlessly, both with purely ineffecient coding, and with absoultely positively useless features.
Most of the media extensions you see on a regular basis are containers in the same way that ogg is.
The difference is that you NEVER have a video file, with an audiofile extension, until Xiph came along and did this idiocy.
When have you ever found a.mp2 or.mp3 file with video? When have you ever found a.m4a file with video?
Microsoft understood the problem, and used.wmv and.wma to make the necessary distinction. Xiph.org does not.
Personally, any ogg file I create which has video will be named.ogm (including Theora files), and anything I come across will be renamed immediately. It's just pure nonsense to have a stupid trivial filename extension conflict like this.
Which explains all the old unsafe at any speed horribly polluting cars at the weekend cruise nights owned by the upper middle class people who typically vote Democrat and are in favor of those laws against unsafe and polluting cars. As long as they aren't theirs. They also tend to drive huge honkin SUVs during the week.
Only an idiot would say that.
First of all, if you've been around the country at all, you'd know that the large majority of in-use pre-80s cars are in RED STATES, where money is scarce, fixing up a "muscle car" is the only hobby in town, and NASCAR reins supreme.
The same is true about SUVs, trucks, etc. Red States are far, far, far more rural, have far less traffic to be concerned with, and have lots of agrculture, construction, and other blue collar jobs, where people have uses for trucks and SUVs. Gasoline is significantly cheaper, and pollution regulations are, well, just about non-existant. Plus there's that whole "snow" thing. I've got dozens of family members and inlaws in the red states, and they don't have a post-1970 car among them. In fact, the men (and kids) all have pick-ups (some old, some new), and the women all have SUVs.
Besides, the fact that a few people, who might be democrats, happen to drive polluting cars, doesn't necessarily make them hypocrits, at all. Hell, if you had to support EVERYTHING a political stands for, just being poor and voting Republican would make you a hypocrit. Being anti-abortion and voting democratic would make you a hypocrit. Being non-white and voting Republican would make you a hypocrit. etc.
thing is in the last decade or so (possiblly longer i'm unsure when this started) most consumer electronics has become so complex and/or miniturized that you don't stand a chance of figuring out whats going on without a circuit diagram or a lot of electronics knowlage.
Things have gotten more complex, in general, but that doesn't mean there isn't still a tremendous ammount to learn, and fix!
What are the biggest problems with consumer electronics these days? Dead capacitors, loose solder connections, etc.
Sure, you can't learn as much as you were once able to, but what you learned a few decades ago hasn't made it possible for you to fix your DVD player, either;-). The whole world has changed, and the things people don't learn from taking apart electronics these days, are the things that aren't relevant these days...
So, instead of learning how a tube works, kids are learning how a microcontroller works. So, instead of building crystal radios and amplifiers, kids are building circuits which allow them to directly drive an ISA videocard, or modifying a 'free' satellite reciever.
Just because things have changed, doesn't mean they've gotten worse. It's just nostalga.
Of human lead disposal, the vast majority, over 90%, is car battries. Solder is only a fraction of the remaining fraction.
Car batteries have enough value that you can be sure they will practically ALWAYS be recycled properly.
Lead solder, however, gets tossed into landfills all the time, in the form of discarded stereos, computers, etc.
Eliminating lead solder, while keeping lead car battries, is like saving power by turning off a table lamp, while leaving your windows open and AC on.
Wow, what a terrible analogy... Comparing the ban on lead solder, to an example of blatantly wasting energy...
1) Higher melting point. Means more components get fried
I have to say, after many, many years of soldering a lot of electronics with heavy-duty soldering irons, I have NEVER fried ANYTHING. Not once. I can only imagine this problem comes from people using low-powered (<20w) soldering irons, leaving them on components for much longer periods of time. I've never, never seen a single case of this with high-power industrial soldering irons (>40w).
and more joints don't form properly in creation, leading to more stuff for the junk heap.
I'm not so sure. In fact, the additional strength of tin (well, as compared to lead anyhow) should mean less solder points breaking after repeated stress, either from tempurature change (computers, TVs, monitors, etc.) or from physical stresses (surface-mount connectors, etc.). Perhaps we'd never have heard about blowing on a videogame cartridge, if Nintendo had used tin solder?
Really, this is not only a solution to a non-issue, it just makes things worse over all.
I'd say, at the very least, you're exaggerating. It has the potential to cause new problems, just as any material change does. However, there's plenty of reason to believe it could lead to an improvement in reliability, as well as meaning far less lead in the environment.
Bah! This isn't about "rights" at all, it's about being a shady and liquid enough company that you can't be sued for violating contracts and local laws.
Besides, this is about fair-use of copyright material, not a right by any stretch of the imagination. And, although nobody will say it, the thing to do is boycott DVDs if you feel your rights have been violated (and that doesn't imply downloading movies from the net). That's been the issue from the very beginning, and people everywhere, including/.ers decided to buy DVDs anyways. It is a problem with a VERY simple solution, if people had any dicipline or self control at all.
If I didn't have to RMA so much of their stuff, I might be too.
I heard about their ultra-quiet DVD-ROMs, so I bought a couple 16X drives for my DVR. One was defective right-off-the-bat and couldn't read anything. After an RMA, I sure was stunned how quiet they were... for about the first 3 months. After which, they're ear-piercing half the time. What's worse, you can't use hdparm (or anything else) to lower the drive speed from 16X, so you can't do anything about the buzz-saw effect, other than buying something else. Then another dead drive, just outside of warranty, but I guess it's all the same.
More recently, I've been hearing about their super-quiet hard drives... Deja Vu. I'll pass, thanks. At least when a DVD drive dies, you don't actually have any data on the drive itself.
I know this is just anecdotal, but I've owned several other Samsung products, from CRT monitors to RAM, and none of them have lasted more than 2 years. With odds of 0 for 10, I don't just consider it an isolated case of bad luck.
and everything I've bought from them of late works with Linux.
What have you bought from them? Linux hardware support continues to improve, and except in the fringes (eg. capture cards and video cards), it has nothing to do with the manufacturer.
At last there is a company that appears to manufacture electronic products the way consumers want.
One errant DVD player that doesn't quite include all the restrictions it should, isn't exactly convincing. What else you got?
i hate to break this to you, but MPEG-4 has Also been supported widely in better video cards for the past 4+ years.
The GPUs in VIA systems for the past couple years have done MPEG-4 decoding, because they really, really had to (terribly under-powered CPU)... It was just recently that ATI began including MPEG-4 support, and I'm sure NVidia hasn't been doing it for very long either.
No, definately not widely supported. Sure, you can find a graphics card that will do it, but it's certainly not common at all.
the CPU load for mpeg-2 and mpeg-4 streams when being decoded with hardware acceleration is roughly a 50% reduction.
Now that is just a moronic assertion. First of all, unless we're talking about a specific CPU, there's no way you can say it will use-up 50% less time... Is that 50% on a 300MHz system, or 50% of a 4GHz dual-core CPU?
Besides, as I've said before, the performance improvement is directly proportional to the speed of the CPU. With about a 2GHz Athlon, software decoding is FASTER, and takes less CPU time than XVMC (hardware decoding). You can do the benchmarks yourself, or you can ask someone else who knows this stuff even better than me, like Ivor Hewitt, the main man behind openchrome.
a CPU that is running at 50% of load uses a lot less electricity and cranks out a lot less heat than one at 100% load.
Also a terrible assertion to make. Read my former journal entry about S2K Bus Disconnect. There are many 32-bit AMD CPUs out there which barely change their power consumption and heat during idle vs. load. Newer motherboards support S2K now, but older ones do not, so that's not always the case.
(reguardless of your assertions they Are performing computations on the video needed for final display. to a tune of reducing the load on the cpu by 50%)
A hardware decoding card will do much of the decoding, but that's not how "all videocards" work, as the parent claimed (I think it's safe to assume you're actually the parent, posting as an AC, but that doesn't really matter right now...). Even with videocard cards that support hardware acceleration, most people aren't using that functionality at all, for numerous reasons.
The overlay the parent was talking about isn't a matter of number-crunching being easier for the GPU rather than the CPU. It's just a case of an overlay being trivially easy to scale, and not going through the standard display calls saves time. You could have nearly as good performance without hardware scaling though, by just displaying it normal sized, and instead of zooming, just changing the videomode to get the video to fullscreen.
why would i WANT to run those computations on my 30 million transistor CPU?
I can think of many, many reasons. First of all for future compatibility... An ASIC isn't a general purpose CPU, so it can't be upgraded when the next video codec comes out, or a current one gets an improvement. Second, because it's a tremendous waste of money to include all the major codecs in a videocard. You'd be better off spending that money on a larger battery, a much more effecient CPU, etc. With that better, faster CPU, you can also do things OTHER than video decoding, such as video ENCODING for instance... MPEG-2 acceleration is common just because it's so easy to do.
Also because your videocard can't do postprocessing, good deinterlacing or inverse telecine. Because interlacing and telecining methods change over the years, and software can keep-up with them, but hardware can't.
Plus, because software decoding can actually be faster... Even with full hardware offload, you are spending CPU time on interrupts transfering the video from the hard drive into RAM, then to the GPU. Interrupts are something PCs have a TERRIBLE time with, as opposed to number-crunching, which it has a very easy time with. At s
I'm talking about 100% hardware MPEG decoders that take an MPEG stream in and give video out, such as the decoder on MyHD MDP-1x0 series cards.
Then why, in the next sentence of the paragraph or so, do you talk about the CN400, which is an XVMC videocard card, and not a "100% hardware MPEG decoder"?
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Just to confuse your value system, I have a PentiumPro machine with USB ports, but which can't boot from CDs...
Actually, to be more accurate, it does seem to have some sort of boot-from-CD functionality, but it's probably DEC's own method, pre-dating El Torito... Anyhow, the effect is the same.
I've done that for years with old notebooks (and a 40 to 44-pin IDE adapter). Many of them don't have working floppy drives anymore, so you really don't have any other options.
Money and media get them elected, for the most part. With enough money, you can run enough ads to convince enough people to vote for you. With control of the media, your activies that people won't like, won't be made public. There was a huge ammount of information kept quiet before the election, which would have hurt the administration significantly. Since they passed with a tiny margin, it clearly made the difference.
And don't forget all the known voter fraud.
That's just idiotic. Bush's approval rating is through the floor. If he ran in 2008 against Hillary Clinton, I'd say Ralph Nader would win by a landslide...
Here's the problem... There are a lot of strange people out there, with a fairly low I.Q., so your story doesn't even seem slightly suspicous to me.
My neighbor's house was broken into, several years ago. There are occasionally transients passing-through the area, so having nothing stolen but a few blankets made perfect sense. The strange thing was, this person obviously used a crowbar or similar object to bend the garage door enough that he could crawl through. He must have spent half an hour working on this, causing hundreds of dollars in damage, when breaking a window would have taken only a second, and would have cost much less to replace.
No "dicipline" involved, just apparent stupidity.
Nolo contendere
I'll pass. I've got the much better, and less expensive Eye-Fi:
(Pick your video mirror)
http://www.devilducky.com/media/41533/
http://www.funmansion.com/html/Eye-Fi.html
http://www.dumpalink.com/media/1138903828/Eye-Fi_
You're an idiot.
Of course you shouldn't upgrade to HD unless you have an HD set. What kind of complete idiot would think he should?
You WILL have an HD set in the near future, and then, you'll have very, very good reason to get an HD player (6X higher resolution).
What? They ARE going to be backwards compatible. HD-DVD, Blu-ray, both will always have DVD and CD support.
So, unlike the switch from VHS to DVD, you don't need to replace your DVD collection.
Those "bouncers" area terrible idea, which completely compromises the possible anonymity. What's more, they're entirely unnecessary.
Yes, he'd have a 50% chance of making it through each individual flight, however, the aggregate statistics add-up. The second flight would really be a 1/4 chance of success.
Certainly, some people do better than the odds, and some people do worse, but you're really testing your luck on such a long-shot.
What do you mean "different"? You mean they weren't arabs, and wasn't triggered by a cartoon so it doesn't count?
The Rodney King incident was only about a black man getting beaten by police. The 'stupid cartoon' incident is about muslims being discriminated against, abducted, tortured, killed, etc. You've got a really screwed up system of priorities there.
You have no knowledge of history at all, do you? The 11th century, despite a lack of computers, were modern times, with modern standards of acceptable behavior. You should study the crusades, you'll be amazed how "Christian" the Muslims acted, and how brutal and terrorist-like the Christians acted.
Ah, the good old straw-man... It's been quite a while since I've seen you.
I had a very good idea for an anonymous P2P network (anonymous for the uploader, not the downloader), that would be just a tiny bit slower than regular P2P (unlike every other anonymous P2P method). The idea was for the network to use UDP, have the upload software randomize source IP addresses, and have all the ACKs (as few as practical) broadcast back through the P2P network (likely, encrypted), thereby eliminating the only need for the downloader to know the real IP address of the uploader.
I later discovered that somebody else independently came up with the same idea, too, and actually started coding it. The project in question is http://udpp2p.sf.net/
Checking it out, and contribute to the project if you're able, to help get it to a usable state sooner, rather than later.
Yes, such as the oh-so-civilized widespread church arsons going on in Atlanta right now.
The Rodney King riots in L.A. were nice as well. Nothing says civilized like vast looting and some attempted murder.
Fire-bombing abortion clinics is also quite civilized as well, particularly when a couple people get incidentally killed in the process.
None of those was triggered by the release of a cartoon, AFAIK, but "triggered" is the key word here. It's clearly not about the cartoons at all.
The Crusades have been coming to mind a lot recently... You can look back on it now and say "See, Muslims are evil, just like the Catholics said centuries ago," or you can say "See Christians were just as bad (centuries ago) when they were in that position."
But the real question is: If you did return unharmed, would you volunteer for a second flight?
Actually, I don't use GNOME either, so I'm anything but a fanatic.
I'm an Openbox2 fan, actually (better than Blackbox or Fluxbox, where it matters). And yes, it's mainly C++, but that's really besides the point.
My disdain for C++ comes about through many years of developing various projects with it, not because KDE happens to be slower. It was just a general example I think most people can understand well enough.
FWIW, the FSF does a great job managing to bloat code, completely needlessly, both with purely ineffecient coding, and with absoultely positively useless features.
Yeah, broccoli always screws up my head, too.
Where's that wooshing sound comming from?
I'm American, and "railway" was perfectly easy to understand. After all, we have railroads and subways, so it's pretty easy to figure out.
Now "electisied" OTOH...
The difference is that you NEVER have a video file, with an audiofile extension, until Xiph came along and did this idiocy.
When have you ever found a
Microsoft understood the problem, and used
Personally, any ogg file I create which has video will be named
It's not just a winamp thing.
Just shoot me now...
You've got to be kidding, or stupid. A Java X server!!! Hell, even a C++ one would damn slow (see KDE), and pure SPEED is what X needs THE MOST.
Only an idiot would say that.
First of all, if you've been around the country at all, you'd know that the large majority of in-use pre-80s cars are in RED STATES, where money is scarce, fixing up a "muscle car" is the only hobby in town, and NASCAR reins supreme.
The same is true about SUVs, trucks, etc. Red States are far, far, far more rural, have far less traffic to be concerned with, and have lots of agrculture, construction, and other blue collar jobs, where people have uses for trucks and SUVs. Gasoline is significantly cheaper, and pollution regulations are, well, just about non-existant. Plus there's that whole "snow" thing. I've got dozens of family members and inlaws in the red states, and they don't have a post-1970 car among them. In fact, the men (and kids) all have pick-ups (some old, some new), and the women all have SUVs.
Besides, the fact that a few people, who might be democrats, happen to drive polluting cars, doesn't necessarily make them hypocrits, at all. Hell, if you had to support EVERYTHING a political stands for, just being poor and voting Republican would make you a hypocrit. Being anti-abortion and voting democratic would make you a hypocrit. Being non-white and voting Republican would make you a hypocrit. etc.
Things have gotten more complex, in general, but that doesn't mean there isn't still a tremendous ammount to learn, and fix!
What are the biggest problems with consumer electronics these days? Dead capacitors, loose solder connections, etc.
Sure, you can't learn as much as you were once able to, but what you learned a few decades ago hasn't made it possible for you to fix your DVD player, either
So, instead of learning how a tube works, kids are learning how a microcontroller works. So, instead of building crystal radios and amplifiers, kids are building circuits which allow them to directly drive an ISA videocard, or modifying a 'free' satellite reciever.
Just because things have changed, doesn't mean they've gotten worse. It's just nostalga.
Car batteries have enough value that you can be sure they will practically ALWAYS be recycled properly.
Lead solder, however, gets tossed into landfills all the time, in the form of discarded stereos, computers, etc.
Wow, what a terrible analogy... Comparing the ban on lead solder, to an example of blatantly wasting energy...
I have to say, after many, many years of soldering a lot of electronics with heavy-duty soldering irons, I have NEVER fried ANYTHING. Not once. I can only imagine this problem comes from people using low-powered (<20w) soldering irons, leaving them on components for much longer periods of time. I've never, never seen a single case of this with high-power industrial soldering irons (>40w).
I'm not so sure. In fact, the additional strength of tin (well, as compared to lead anyhow) should mean less solder points breaking after repeated stress, either from tempurature change (computers, TVs, monitors, etc.) or from physical stresses (surface-mount connectors, etc.). Perhaps we'd never have heard about blowing on a videogame cartridge, if Nintendo had used tin solder?
I'd say, at the very least, you're exaggerating. It has the potential to cause new problems, just as any material change does. However, there's plenty of reason to believe it could lead to an improvement in reliability, as well as meaning far less lead in the environment.
Bah! This isn't about "rights" at all, it's about being a shady and liquid enough company that you can't be sued for violating contracts and local laws.
/.ers decided to buy DVDs anyways. It is a problem with a VERY simple solution, if people had any dicipline or self control at all.
Besides, this is about fair-use of copyright material, not a right by any stretch of the imagination. And, although nobody will say it, the thing to do is boycott DVDs if you feel your rights have been violated (and that doesn't imply downloading movies from the net). That's been the issue from the very beginning, and people everywhere, including
If I didn't have to RMA so much of their stuff, I might be too.
I heard about their ultra-quiet DVD-ROMs, so I bought a couple 16X drives for my DVR. One was defective right-off-the-bat and couldn't read anything. After an RMA, I sure was stunned how quiet they were... for about the first 3 months. After which, they're ear-piercing half the time. What's worse, you can't use hdparm (or anything else) to lower the drive speed from 16X, so you can't do anything about the buzz-saw effect, other than buying something else. Then another dead drive, just outside of warranty, but I guess it's all the same.
More recently, I've been hearing about their super-quiet hard drives... Deja Vu. I'll pass, thanks. At least when a DVD drive dies, you don't actually have any data on the drive itself.
I know this is just anecdotal, but I've owned several other Samsung products, from CRT monitors to RAM, and none of them have lasted more than 2 years. With odds of 0 for 10, I don't just consider it an isolated case of bad luck.
What have you bought from them? Linux hardware support continues to improve, and except in the fringes (eg. capture cards and video cards), it has nothing to do with the manufacturer.
One errant DVD player that doesn't quite include all the restrictions it should, isn't exactly convincing. What else you got?
The GPUs in VIA systems for the past couple years have done MPEG-4 decoding, because they really, really had to (terribly under-powered CPU)... It was just recently that ATI began including MPEG-4 support, and I'm sure NVidia hasn't been doing it for very long either.
No, definately not widely supported. Sure, you can find a graphics card that will do it, but it's certainly not common at all.
Now that is just a moronic assertion. First of all, unless we're talking about a specific CPU, there's no way you can say it will use-up 50% less time... Is that 50% on a 300MHz system, or 50% of a 4GHz dual-core CPU?
Besides, as I've said before, the performance improvement is directly proportional to the speed of the CPU. With about a 2GHz Athlon, software decoding is FASTER, and takes less CPU time than XVMC (hardware decoding). You can do the benchmarks yourself, or you can ask someone else who knows this stuff even better than me, like Ivor Hewitt, the main man behind openchrome.
Also a terrible assertion to make. Read my former journal entry about S2K Bus Disconnect. There are many 32-bit AMD CPUs out there which barely change their power consumption and heat during idle vs. load. Newer motherboards support S2K now, but older ones do not, so that's not always the case.
A hardware decoding card will do much of the decoding, but that's not how "all videocards" work, as the parent claimed (I think it's safe to assume you're actually the parent, posting as an AC, but that doesn't really matter right now...). Even with videocard cards that support hardware acceleration, most people aren't using that functionality at all, for numerous reasons.
The overlay the parent was talking about isn't a matter of number-crunching being easier for the GPU rather than the CPU. It's just a case of an overlay being trivially easy to scale, and not going through the standard display calls saves time. You could have nearly as good performance without hardware scaling though, by just displaying it normal sized, and instead of zooming, just changing the videomode to get the video to fullscreen.
I can think of many, many reasons. First of all for future compatibility... An ASIC isn't a general purpose CPU, so it can't be upgraded when the next video codec comes out, or a current one gets an improvement. Second, because it's a tremendous waste of money to include all the major codecs in a videocard. You'd be better off spending that money on a larger battery, a much more effecient CPU, etc. With that better, faster CPU, you can also do things OTHER than video decoding, such as video ENCODING for instance... MPEG-2 acceleration is common just because it's so easy to do.
Also because your videocard can't do postprocessing, good deinterlacing or inverse telecine. Because interlacing and telecining methods change over the years, and software can keep-up with them, but hardware can't.
Plus, because software decoding can actually be faster... Even with full hardware offload, you are spending CPU time on interrupts transfering the video from the hard drive into RAM, then to the GPU. Interrupts are something PCs have a TERRIBLE time with, as opposed to number-crunching, which it has a very easy time with. At s
Then why, in the next sentence of the paragraph or so, do you talk about the CN400, which is an XVMC videocard card, and not a "100% hardware MPEG decoder"?
They're low fat, but you eat more of them...
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