At some point you have to expect that a comparison is between things that are different, and there aren't any players capable of playing both formats.
What's frustrating about this test, though, is that there are so many differences between the players that it would almost seem necessary to go through a calibration routine with each player to ensure that the display device was properly calibrated for the source.
It'd also be nice to take the results of the test to the respective manufacturers and ask them about the output from each player and see if they have any feedback about the problems; the fact that the Samsung player is so new and that patches and firmware upgrades are likely probably makes an early comparison like this meaningless.
I'd never do an in-place out of choice, but there are times where you stumble across an older workstation during a larger project and time doesn't permit a clean install, or, you have some client who has "lost" install discs, licensing or other important info about an installed application yet has some critical need to upgrade to a newer Windows version.
Can't an application do something to dynamically measure optimum thread usage? Ie, each launch increase the thread count until whatever performance measure you're using starts seeing a diminishing rate of return, and then stop. It's highly imprecise, but at least it reflects what's going on as opposed to a purely arbitrary build-time guess.
IMHO, the Intel statement was probably based on what they know today about the limits to parallelization with what they know about hardware, software and compilers. There's a diminishing rate of return on growth of anything.
And they're probably also doing some crystal ball gazing about how you might use a 'desktop' computer in the future. Who's to say that in 10 years we're not primarily accessing some kind of networked setup that minimizes local processing requirements. I know it's been hyped for years and hasn't really materialized, but with Remote Desktop, mobile devices, web-based apps, etc, it's more of a reality than it was 5-10 years ago.
And Intel is largely building CPUs for massive economies of scale. Just because the Slashdot collective believes they could immediately utilize 16 cores doesn't mean it fits into the other 99.9999% of the economic equation.
But "outdoor advertising" firms make no representations that they can measure these things. You know what you're getting when you buy space on a billboard.
I worked in advertising for over a decade and your statement is totally false. These days EVERY advertising medium being pitched to a client MUST contain all kinds of analytical data backing it up, and this includes billboards. Locations, lighting, traffic patterns, etc, etc.
And I'm sure that some outdoor media companies have their own internal research demonstrating that some locations feature superior demographics (ie, this road is between the corporate HQs and the wealthy suburbs and gets seen by all the wealthy commuters).
The cell phone marketplace sucks for non-voice applications, but how is it non-neutral? I can make and take calls to/from off-network endpoints without any penalty, voice quality remains the same no matter what, and that describes most of what the cell network is used for currently (although is changing with more smart phones, blackberry, etc). It'd be a better argument if calling a landline or a different carrier meant crappier service, but that would be the death knell for any cell provider.
I think it's too early to make a lot of claims about the cell data networks. Sure, they're largely closed but until very recently they were also unusable for all but a tiny percentage of specific applications. The cell companies would like them to stay limited so they can wring profits out of them, but it's only a matter of time before pretty much anyone who wants a high speed cell-network based data connection can have one inexpensively, and at that point the companies will eventually end up having to provide a neutral network environment as it will become a point of competition.
I resist writing paper checks as much as possible and I seem to create a new billing destination for online bill pay, probably one per month, sometimes more, sometimes less, but easily 12 per year. Some are changes -- our pediatrician changed billing systems and changed the billing account and address -- but some are new, almost single use payments for magazine subscriptions and other stuff.
Monetizing DNS service is like trying to monetize traffic signage; the system as a whole doesn't work without universal service.
I don't think it would work from a user-support perspective, either; alternative root server systems offering expanded top level domains largely failed previously.
A "value added" DNS server with filtering, etc might be worthwhile if run at the standards of other high-quality free services (Wikipedia, etc). The problem with their model, though, is they're inviting marketers to the table, which means you know that money will be the top item on the agenda and the pressure will be on to please advertisers first. We know where this road goes.
I keep thinking I should try it as well, but I guess almost 4 years of training plus Tivo's adaptive FF->Play adjustment have been good enough that the 30 Second Skip keycodes never make it from the PC in my office to the TV.
I've owned a S2 standalone Tivo since 2002, it's worked flawlessly the entire time.
In spite of all the "changes" Tivo has made, the only two things that feel even remotely invasive are the advertisements that periodically show up as a menu option on the main menu, and the "integrated" online stuff they squish into the Music & Photos server selector.
Nothing they have done has appeared to interfere with the primary DVR functions -- browsing recorded programs has actually improved along the way with some changes to Now Playing.
I guess it's just lack of familiarity, but Tivo naysayers get caught up in some weird made-up problems that have just never been real problems. 30 Second Skip was never an actual feature (there was some keycode to turn it on, I've never bothered and have never missed it when FFing commercials).
I guess this all makes me an apologist, but I don't really understand what I'm apologizing for...
Addiction used to mean, more or less, a physical dependence that drove a compulsive consumption of mind-alterting substances. It has long been recognized that addicts are generally powerless to stop their consumption, thus freeing them, more or less, from the moral consequences such behavior often brings. This language has been hijacked to mean any compulsive behavior pattern, unfortunately it hasn't been stripped of notion that these other non-physical addictions shouldn't really carry the freedom from their moral consequences.
For example, most fat people are fat because they lack self-control and discipline. Call them "food addicts" and instead of just lacking self control and they no longer are responsible for their behavior, and in many ways, they can shift the blame to someone else -- ie, the medical community is at fault for failing to understand and treat obesity.
This is why we live in a society where everyone is blameless.
I haven't been to the dentist in about 7 years, not because it hurts, but because I got sick and tired of being insulted by the dentist and his hourly-wage employees about the state of my oral health. Its bad? OK, so fix it. That's what you're being *paid* for. I don't want or need to be scolded or insulted because I haven't turned flossing into my life's work.
I actually do floss (although with a frequency that wouldn't meet any dental standards) and brush twice daily. I'm sure my mouth is a train wreck by dental standards, but I haven't really had any problems. It's actually made me wonder if the dental field isn't operating at a standard a whole lot higher than might actually be necessary.
The reason I bring up anesthetic dentistry is not so much the pain mitigation component, but most of them advertise their services in the vein of "guilt/lecture-free dentistry", that, and they can fix a lot of problems when you're under.
IMHO the dental profession would move the ball forward if they would just look at patients with bad flossing habits as a source of revenue and not an opportunity to get on their soapbox.
Unless it was in a SEC filing, it's not surprising it remained under the radar. Most building and construction permits are local in nature (city, or county), although undoubtably a building of this scale might have some state environmental permits to contend with.
Unless you were making a habit of reviewing all of the local permit issuances nationwide (now THERE'S a boring job!), it'd be almost impossible to know they were building something, barring an employee or contractor leak or a SEC filing. And even some of the leaks could have been contained by having some wholly owned private entity be the one doing the building, so that all the contractors know is that they're building a data center for "XYZ Inc".
Even if you live and work near a building site, you often have no idea what the building is for. I worked next to an AMEX building for a couple of years and never knew what it was. You couldn't get into it without a pass card and there was no signage AT ALL on the building other than numbers over the door. We called it the CIA building.
I don't trust the Chinese either, but they're not the only villains on this stage.
That's kind of like saying because I've played catch with a baseball, I should be judged among the NY Yannkees.
Even if you add up all the villainy of the U.S. government over the last 55 years -- COINTELPRO, MKULTRA, NSA eavesdropping, and virtually everything the Bush administration has proposed, it still doesn't come close to the Chinese level of villainy.
Even if Tiananmen Sqaure was the only oppressive, murderous thing the Chinese have ever done -- and it isn't -- they would still be in a category of oppression and dictatorship that has only Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany as peers.
The thing that frustrates me the most about the Bush Administration's "War on Freedom" isn't so much the invasion of privacy or the possible usurption of the constitution (although they are infuriating), it's the global and internal notion that we now have achieved some kind of oppression parity with the Chinese. When I hear this, I know it's just ignorance talking, but it still drives me mad that a level of snooping that's not even in the same league as every day corporate data mining or desktop spyware suddenly has people believing the U.S. government steals pages from Mao's playbook.
One of the common plans in high school electronics was a strobe light. Part of the project was building a sheet metal housing for it.
Invariably at least one or two students did a poor job with trimming excess component leads from their circuit boards and shorted one of the big capacitors. I never quite understood why the instuctor didn't substitute larger spacers for the circuit boards.
I guess I don't see why they're using flash. You'd think that they could accomplish it with some RAM module with its own seperate battery backing (like a RAID card), and then have the disk writes delayed to some optimum amount to minimize power consumption as well as being used as a pre-fetched RAM cache with the same optimization, with the read/write split dynamically reallocated as needed.
I think this is an improvement over DiVX. DiVX required you to make some effort to find and buy the discs. This is in some ways like a Tivo programmed to record pay per view movies as Tivo Suggestions, since all you have to do is sit down, find a movie and watch it. No discs to find, buy, store, etc.
Netflix might be cheaper (and you can rip the discs..), but it's still effort. The disc has to be kept track of, returned, and your selection at any one point in time is going to be whatever 3 movies you have on hand, vs. potentially hundreds, and when you're done watching, you're done. No envelopes, no mailing, no effort.
It's clearly an advantage over most renting for "popular" movies.
The weakness is that it's pay per view (a rights-weak model), which hasn't been an overwhelming success where it has survived (cable, satellite). Adding new equipment costs to the mix doesn't seem like it will improve anything.
I worked for a company that was a big Webroot reseller, and a lot of our clients had SS Enterprise installed. It worked well, cleaning non-cookie stuff that current MS AntiSpyware wouldn't see.
Our problem came in the last 6-8 months when a major upgrade took place. Some systems attempting an autoupgrade tanked, requiring a PITA uninstall and reinstall of the admin console. Other systems took the autoupgrade, but the clients began going haywire.
We eventually began removing it and not reselling it. Some guys thinks it works OK if you just do periodic sweeps and disable all the active shields, but at that point, why bother?
Considering that more than half of the story links are either completely bullshit, Slashdotted, or simply BS advertising magnets with a single 75-word paragraph of "article" and the balance a bunch of blinking Flash ads, and no worthwhile information 'till the final page, are you really surprised?
I think you're somewhat overestimating how "hard" it is to break organized crime groups. While RICO isn't always perfect, what it really seemed good at doing was making a big enough charge that when coupled with an offer of immunity and witness protection, got a lot of Cosa Nostra guys to turn informant.
With informants and RICO together, they've done a really good job at breaking the back of the Italian mafia in the U.S. It's not gone completely, but it is a faint shadow of what it was even 30 years ago.
I've long felt that there were inadequate resources applied to "cybercrime"; even in SPAM businesses that might be more or less tagged as legitimate (ie, money paid results in *something* delivered), the product is almost ALWAYS wholly fraudulent and the money trail trivial to follow, especially for forensic financial guys more accustomed to international drug cartels.
And where's the RICO prosecutions? It seems axiomatic to me that spam relies on people being able to spend money, and being able to receieve money from people must involve the cooperation of third parties (transaction processing, web hosting, mail sending, ISPs, shipping, etc), some of which have knowledge of the business being transacted and knowingly and willingly are accessories to it.
A single successful RICO prosecution that snared an ISP, or a bank, or other nominally legitimate business tacitly involved would likely create such an intimidating environment that many spammers would be choked off from the resources necessary to engage in that trade.
This might not necessarily solve some transnational scams (Nigeria, etc), but I think too often people expect or demand total success and if they can't have it do nothing. I'd rather have what we've done with the Mob -- incremental prosecutions that have largely gutted it -- than saying "These guys are too good" and doing nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
At some point you have to expect that a comparison is between things that are different, and there aren't any players capable of playing both formats.
What's frustrating about this test, though, is that there are so many differences between the players that it would almost seem necessary to go through a calibration routine with each player to ensure that the display device was properly calibrated for the source.
It'd also be nice to take the results of the test to the respective manufacturers and ask them about the output from each player and see if they have any feedback about the problems; the fact that the Samsung player is so new and that patches and firmware upgrades are likely probably makes an early comparison like this meaningless.
I'd never do an in-place out of choice, but there are times where you stumble across an older workstation during a larger project and time doesn't permit a clean install, or, you have some client who has "lost" install discs, licensing or other important info about an installed application yet has some critical need to upgrade to a newer Windows version.
Usually, though, it's the latter.
Can't an application do something to dynamically measure optimum thread usage? Ie, each launch increase the thread count until whatever performance measure you're using starts seeing a diminishing rate of return, and then stop. It's highly imprecise, but at least it reflects what's going on as opposed to a purely arbitrary build-time guess.
IMHO, the Intel statement was probably based on what they know today about the limits to parallelization with what they know about hardware, software and compilers. There's a diminishing rate of return on growth of anything.
And they're probably also doing some crystal ball gazing about how you might use a 'desktop' computer in the future. Who's to say that in 10 years we're not primarily accessing some kind of networked setup that minimizes local processing requirements. I know it's been hyped for years and hasn't really materialized, but with Remote Desktop, mobile devices, web-based apps, etc, it's more of a reality than it was 5-10 years ago.
And Intel is largely building CPUs for massive economies of scale. Just because the Slashdot collective believes they could immediately utilize 16 cores doesn't mean it fits into the other 99.9999% of the economic equation.
But "outdoor advertising" firms make no representations that they can measure these things. You know what you're getting when you buy space on a billboard.
I worked in advertising for over a decade and your statement is totally false. These days EVERY advertising medium being pitched to a client MUST contain all kinds of analytical data backing it up, and this includes billboards. Locations, lighting, traffic patterns, etc, etc.
And I'm sure that some outdoor media companies have their own internal research demonstrating that some locations feature superior demographics (ie, this road is between the corporate HQs and the wealthy suburbs and gets seen by all the wealthy commuters).
The cell phone marketplace sucks for non-voice applications, but how is it non-neutral? I can make and take calls to/from off-network endpoints without any penalty, voice quality remains the same no matter what, and that describes most of what the cell network is used for currently (although is changing with more smart phones, blackberry, etc). It'd be a better argument if calling a landline or a different carrier meant crappier service, but that would be the death knell for any cell provider.
I think it's too early to make a lot of claims about the cell data networks. Sure, they're largely closed but until very recently they were also unusable for all but a tiny percentage of specific applications. The cell companies would like them to stay limited so they can wring profits out of them, but it's only a matter of time before pretty much anyone who wants a high speed cell-network based data connection can have one inexpensively, and at that point the companies will eventually end up having to provide a neutral network environment as it will become a point of competition.
Get yourself a carry permit and a J-frame S&W or other pocket-carry firearm and you won't have that unarmed feeling anymore.
Many IT problems would be solved by MS making Vista bootable from a USB device.
Testing OSes
Running multiple OSes on one machine
Isolated test environments
Running OSes on unsupported hardware
Running legacy apps (see above)
I resist writing paper checks as much as possible and I seem to create a new billing destination for online bill pay, probably one per month, sometimes more, sometimes less, but easily 12 per year. Some are changes -- our pediatrician changed billing systems and changed the billing account and address -- but some are new, almost single use payments for magazine subscriptions and other stuff.
Monetizing DNS service is like trying to monetize traffic signage; the system as a whole doesn't work without universal service.
I don't think it would work from a user-support perspective, either; alternative root server systems offering expanded top level domains largely failed previously.
A "value added" DNS server with filtering, etc might be worthwhile if run at the standards of other high-quality free services (Wikipedia, etc). The problem with their model, though, is they're inviting marketers to the table, which means you know that money will be the top item on the agenda and the pressure will be on to please advertisers first. We know where this road goes.
I keep thinking I should try it as well, but I guess almost 4 years of training plus Tivo's adaptive FF->Play adjustment have been good enough that the 30 Second Skip keycodes never make it from the PC in my office to the TV.
I've owned a S2 standalone Tivo since 2002, it's worked flawlessly the entire time.
In spite of all the "changes" Tivo has made, the only two things that feel even remotely invasive are the advertisements that periodically show up as a menu option on the main menu, and the "integrated" online stuff they squish into the Music & Photos server selector.
Nothing they have done has appeared to interfere with the primary DVR functions -- browsing recorded programs has actually improved along the way with some changes to Now Playing.
I guess it's just lack of familiarity, but Tivo naysayers get caught up in some weird made-up problems that have just never been real problems. 30 Second Skip was never an actual feature (there was some keycode to turn it on, I've never bothered and have never missed it when FFing commercials).
I guess this all makes me an apologist, but I don't really understand what I'm apologizing for...
Addiction used to mean, more or less, a physical dependence that drove a compulsive consumption of mind-alterting substances. It has long been recognized that addicts are generally powerless to stop their consumption, thus freeing them, more or less, from the moral consequences such behavior often brings. This language has been hijacked to mean any compulsive behavior pattern, unfortunately it hasn't been stripped of notion that these other non-physical addictions shouldn't really carry the freedom from their moral consequences.
For example, most fat people are fat because they lack self-control and discipline. Call them "food addicts" and instead of just lacking self control and they no longer are responsible for their behavior, and in many ways, they can shift the blame to someone else -- ie, the medical community is at fault for failing to understand and treat obesity.
This is why we live in a society where everyone is blameless.
I have.
I haven't been to the dentist in about 7 years, not because it hurts, but because I got sick and tired of being insulted by the dentist and his hourly-wage employees about the state of my oral health. Its bad? OK, so fix it. That's what you're being *paid* for. I don't want or need to be scolded or insulted because I haven't turned flossing into my life's work.
I actually do floss (although with a frequency that wouldn't meet any dental standards) and brush twice daily. I'm sure my mouth is a train wreck by dental standards, but I haven't really had any problems. It's actually made me wonder if the dental field isn't operating at a standard a whole lot higher than might actually be necessary.
The reason I bring up anesthetic dentistry is not so much the pain mitigation component, but most of them advertise their services in the vein of "guilt/lecture-free dentistry", that, and they can fix a lot of problems when you're under.
IMHO the dental profession would move the ball forward if they would just look at patients with bad flossing habits as a source of revenue and not an opportunity to get on their soapbox.
But it would be nice to see the technology adapted to consumer price points, but it probably won't be as long as huge ATA disks are $200.
Unless it was in a SEC filing, it's not surprising it remained under the radar. Most building and construction permits are local in nature (city, or county), although undoubtably a building of this scale might have some state environmental permits to contend with.
Unless you were making a habit of reviewing all of the local permit issuances nationwide (now THERE'S a boring job!), it'd be almost impossible to know they were building something, barring an employee or contractor leak or a SEC filing. And even some of the leaks could have been contained by having some wholly owned private entity be the one doing the building, so that all the contractors know is that they're building a data center for "XYZ Inc".
Even if you live and work near a building site, you often have no idea what the building is for. I worked next to an AMEX building for a couple of years and never knew what it was. You couldn't get into it without a pass card and there was no signage AT ALL on the building other than numbers over the door. We called it the CIA building.
I don't trust the Chinese either, but they're not the only villains on this stage.
That's kind of like saying because I've played catch with a baseball, I should be judged among the NY Yannkees.
Even if you add up all the villainy of the U.S. government over the last 55 years -- COINTELPRO, MKULTRA, NSA eavesdropping, and virtually everything the Bush administration has proposed, it still doesn't come close to the Chinese level of villainy.
Even if Tiananmen Sqaure was the only oppressive, murderous thing the Chinese have ever done -- and it isn't -- they would still be in a category of oppression and dictatorship that has only Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany as peers.
The thing that frustrates me the most about the Bush Administration's "War on Freedom" isn't so much the invasion of privacy or the possible usurption of the constitution (although they are infuriating), it's the global and internal notion that we now have achieved some kind of oppression parity with the Chinese. When I hear this, I know it's just ignorance talking, but it still drives me mad that a level of snooping that's not even in the same league as every day corporate data mining or desktop spyware suddenly has people believing the U.S. government steals pages from Mao's playbook.
One of the common plans in high school electronics was a strobe light. Part of the project was building a sheet metal housing for it.
Invariably at least one or two students did a poor job with trimming excess component leads from their circuit boards and shorted one of the big capacitors. I never quite understood why the instuctor didn't substitute larger spacers for the circuit boards.
I guess I don't see why they're using flash. You'd think that they could accomplish it with some RAM module with its own seperate battery backing (like a RAID card), and then have the disk writes delayed to some optimum amount to minimize power consumption as well as being used as a pre-fetched RAM cache with the same optimization, with the read/write split dynamically reallocated as needed.
I think this is an improvement over DiVX. DiVX required you to make some effort to find and buy the discs. This is in some ways like a Tivo programmed to record pay per view movies as Tivo Suggestions, since all you have to do is sit down, find a movie and watch it. No discs to find, buy, store, etc.
Netflix might be cheaper (and you can rip the discs..), but it's still effort. The disc has to be kept track of, returned, and your selection at any one point in time is going to be whatever 3 movies you have on hand, vs. potentially hundreds, and when you're done watching, you're done. No envelopes, no mailing, no effort.
It's clearly an advantage over most renting for "popular" movies.
The weakness is that it's pay per view (a rights-weak model), which hasn't been an overwhelming success where it has survived (cable, satellite). Adding new equipment costs to the mix doesn't seem like it will improve anything.
Taking drives apart is work.
I think a few rounds from my Smith and Wesson Model 29 would be more than sufficient.
I worked for a company that was a big Webroot reseller, and a lot of our clients had SS Enterprise installed. It worked well, cleaning non-cookie stuff that current MS AntiSpyware wouldn't see.
Our problem came in the last 6-8 months when a major upgrade took place. Some systems attempting an autoupgrade tanked, requiring a PITA uninstall and reinstall of the admin console. Other systems took the autoupgrade, but the clients began going haywire.
We eventually began removing it and not reselling it. Some guys thinks it works OK if you just do periodic sweeps and disable all the active shields, but at that point, why bother?
Considering that more than half of the story links are either completely bullshit, Slashdotted, or simply BS advertising magnets with a single 75-word paragraph of "article" and the balance a bunch of blinking Flash ads, and no worthwhile information 'till the final page, are you really surprised?
I think you're somewhat overestimating how "hard" it is to break organized crime groups. While RICO isn't always perfect, what it really seemed good at doing was making a big enough charge that when coupled with an offer of immunity and witness protection, got a lot of Cosa Nostra guys to turn informant.
With informants and RICO together, they've done a really good job at breaking the back of the Italian mafia in the U.S. It's not gone completely, but it is a faint shadow of what it was even 30 years ago.
I've long felt that there were inadequate resources applied to "cybercrime"; even in SPAM businesses that might be more or less tagged as legitimate (ie, money paid results in *something* delivered), the product is almost ALWAYS wholly fraudulent and the money trail trivial to follow, especially for forensic financial guys more accustomed to international drug cartels.
And where's the RICO prosecutions? It seems axiomatic to me that spam relies on people being able to spend money, and being able to receieve money from people must involve the cooperation of third parties (transaction processing, web hosting, mail sending, ISPs, shipping, etc), some of which have knowledge of the business being transacted and knowingly and willingly are accessories to it.
A single successful RICO prosecution that snared an ISP, or a bank, or other nominally legitimate business tacitly involved would likely create such an intimidating environment that many spammers would be choked off from the resources necessary to engage in that trade.
This might not necessarily solve some transnational scams (Nigeria, etc), but I think too often people expect or demand total success and if they can't have it do nothing. I'd rather have what we've done with the Mob -- incremental prosecutions that have largely gutted it -- than saying "These guys are too good" and doing nothing.
I'm surprised this wasn't the top comment!
The edge market for low end routers has been hammered by DSL and other cheap hardware and there's only so much core router market growth.
It's obvious that the core vendors see tiering as a huge selling opportunity for new hardware and software.