If he uses a frequency doubling crystal on his laser, it becomes 532nm, so what would make it green too:)
Assuming there's a crystal supporting such a hit.
On the other hand I wonder how they've managed to get around air ionization... for far less energy then that, air ionize and it creates a mirror effect that sometimes bounces the beam back in the system and crack something in the optical system (usually the crystal)
I've noticed the amount of emails targetting paypal and ebay to grab accounts and then to list very expensive items at a "deal" price. I was in the market for a L-series lens for my canon camera (read: expensive 1500+$) and I've noticed there was a 600mm fixed high quality lens for 900$ buy it now. Now this specific lens retails between 3000 and 5000 used, and unless it's seriously damaged, it wouldn't go down to that price. So I've sent an email to the guy, and the response left me puzzled, so I did a wide search for the serial number of the lens he posted, to find out that there were 10 listings from 5 different users with the SAME auction, using the exact same description, they've all listed their items with all the bell and whistles (gallery, bold, etc). When you see something like that, it becomes quite obvious that it's fraud. Some could argue that the listings are always copied from one to another when the item sells well, I agree, but if you get a hit on specifics like a serial number, or everyone selling the same price, or the person accepting only western union, c'mon... oh, and there's no such deal as getting a popular item at 1/5th of the price, if you see that there is no one jumping on it, you should look elsewhere. Also, for expensive items, make sure that you can reach by voice the person that you are buying from, make sure you can track him down.
For more advanced users, Save the emails, in the header you can get the originating IP. If you're buying from someone listed in USA or Canada, and you see romania in the header packets (use something like www.whois.sc/###.###.###.###), well you have your answer.
Finally, if you see a user with 40 feedback and search for "other listings from this user" and see 15 items of 1000$+ listed with all the features turned on, get suspicious, again, a mix of suspicious conditions and good judgement will make your transaction aborted or safe.
What ebay should add is a flag that signed in members with 98%+ feedback could click for suspicious listings, when ebay gets a X number of hits on a specific auction, they could review/investigate it. You can't ask ebay to look into every single auctions, this would be insane and cost-prohibitive and it's already expensive enough as is; they would pass the cost on the users for sure so you don't want that. But better cooperation with authority and a simple system like this would reduce potential frauds drastically. The ideal would be 0 frauds, but this is utopia, on such a big system, with hacked accounts of good ebayers, it makes the process much harder. What is needed now is to cut down 90% of the frauds, and they are obvious to track and shut down.
If copying movies over the net was technically impossible, movie piracy wouldn't be as bad as today. But it is. On the other hand, they offer NO alternative (aside from suing) to the people who are willing to download movies instead of going to an overcrowded theatre where popcorn price are insane, babies are crying and teens are making more noise than the THX sound system.
It's been what... about over 5 years now that most people can get fast net connection. How come there's only a handfull of online video "renting" services? This is because some dinosaurs didn't want to change, they even had the chance to see their audio cousins getting smacked by piracy and had YEARS to prepare to counterattack by offering a better experience. They didn't. Today, they are way behind.
One of the reasons I went from going every week to the theatre, down to about 3 times a year (aside from the obvious "i'm not going to pay 20$ to see this much crap" is also that the overall experience seems to get worse or I am getting older:), just 10 years ago, i'd never seen that many people getting up and going to get a refill or taking a leak during a movie. This is really disturbing when you are trying to concentrate, and if I go to a theatre, last thing I am looking for is the "living room" feel where everyone talks or comments while the tv is on.
This brings me to the living room feel. Actually I think more and more people like having projection screens or large displays, it's more affordable than it used to, and best of all, movies are out to DVD just a few months after showing in theatre, cheaper, so you can basically have almost the same experience, "free" popcorn, talk without disturbing, or watch without being disturbed, and best of all, you can rewatch or rewind if you missed something, at your convinience, and when you feel like it. You don'e need to drive to a specific time, you don't need to wonder if it's going to be filled at a premiere before you show up, etc..
I own a projector and sound system, and I must admit that it's not a THX experience, but it sure as he** better than the last 5 times I went to a theatre.
Of course, if there would be more SWIII or shrecks being put to the screen, I wouldn't want to wait and they would probably get me back in the theatres:) but if there would be a download service that would cost me 10$ a movie, I'd pay it, I'd split it with people watching me, and we'd have a superb experience, they'd get new money from people that wouldn't have gone to the theatres in the first place, but I admit; I don't know how this could affect their current audience. Still, there's a HUGE market for internet downloads, and iTunes didn't make artists go starving.
People are willing to pay overquota bandwidth, or HS internet ONLY for that purpose, I don't think the argument that they get it for free thus they wouldn't pay holds for everyone. If you get them on a faster pipe at let's say 5$ (or less) a download, at a high quality, many would pay.... I would.
Now imagine this fully populated, with a few TB array at 10W per drives, it goes up fast to 1Kw...
I'm planning on getting one of those for a specific 3D application where I need several cpus inside the main machine (render nodes wouldn't be as efficient) so I was actually wondering if there were a lot of 800W+ psus out there... interresting.
(please don't argue about the fact that 10 pcs would cost less blablalba, this is beyond the scope of this message, question was is there a use, yes there is:) )
One thing that piss me the most about everything HD these days, is all the mislabeling and almost fraudulent usage of HD label on every piece of hardware out there.
EDV is NOT HDTV, yet, if you are not a geek or have basic knowledge, it seems to be "similar" when you are purchasing a TV.
HDTV LCD monitor, HDTV projector.... yes, because it does 854 (or something close) by 480P, it's considered HDTV? c'mon. Well check every HDTV projector or TV display closely, specs-wise, and you'll see a lot of 1280x720P and/or less. Not "true" HDTV a la 1920x1080i (or you could debate that 720P has a clearer picture, and 1080i has more resolution but flickers, this is another story, but something's for sure: 480P for me is NOT HD... it's called NTSC + progressive scan, or EDV, yet, some sells this as "HDTV"-capable device because they can take HDTV signal and rape it down to 480P).
now if HDTV could be 2 SPECIFIC, HIGH resolution formats, (one interlace, one progressive) to fit any type of output where one or the other could be better suited (P for computer display, i for tv/specific hardware (I'm thinking of stereoscopic display with interlaced inputs:)) ), with new connections and fix all that sub-resolution crap along the way, I say, GO for it. Because right now, I'm not going to buy an XGA LCD TV labeled as HDTV display, no thanks!
And those damn DVI cables, DVD-I, DVD-D, yadi yada... one cable, no potential errors, thank you!
You can complain as much as you want about buying overpriced yet already obsolete hardware, but if you have a true 1080i or 720p display that lives to the "real" HD specs, you'll be able to afford the converter box (there will be adapters for sure) and make good use of your gear for another 3-4 years. For the others, this should be a lesson into more careful knowledge before buying stuff.
3-4 years sounds good, OLED HDTV display, should be awesome. Because current LCD TVs aside from a few minor exeptions, it's nothing but disgusting color/contrast/gamut-wise for any video purist.
I'm sorry but I've found the opening paragraph in the article quite condescending and below what I would expect from anandtech.
If his "source" doesn't make use of the 3 cpus (cores) of the Xbox, well, he's just showing he can't code multithreaded or simply that he lacks either the will, the budget or imagination on how to use this extra juice to offload some calculations. I'm sure some other gaming companies won't.
I can see why some are bashing on specific core enhancements such as vector units which aren't boosting overall performance by much (it's still arguable; people at sony wouldn't put these features in if they weren't going to help for something) but bashing against a powerfull CPU that has itself multiplied by 3 fitting in a single die, cmon. Anyone who's doing 3d today and got himself a dual AthlonX2 machine will tell you how much he gained compared to if he would have been using a dual cpu setup (as opposed to dual cpu with dual core). 180% increase clock per clock depending on the type of scene and renderer would be a conservative estimate.
Granted this isn't the same, cinematic 3D and realtime 3D is 2 completely different beasts, but bashing on something because you use only 1/3rd of what's given to you, it's just too easy... it's like someone bashing on an athlonX2 while benchmarking it under windows 98 (singleCPU support).
I agree that marketting overload people with hopes (and lots of border-line BS), but still, grand tourismo 4 TODAY would be awesome on these machines, you'd have extra juice for simualtion, and could actually have higher resolution and antialiasing instead of looking like an "almost cool" game which lacked the juice to live it's full technical miracle.
If the coders of this game (GTA4) are their anonymous source, I'll gladly eat my socks, but I bet you 10$ they've coded something like tetris (I can be condescending too;) ).
People with the brains will know how to make good use of this technology, developpers who just code and compile without doing research on new technology don't even diserve this much (anonymous) exposure
I wanted to install DirectX 9.0C on my laptop, and got hit by that. They've asked me to type in my product Key (which was UNDER my dhell laptop, attached to it was my external 80gb firewire drive and my 200GB USB2 drive, thank god it's not using a docking station, this would have required me to turn it off and then write it down then reboot than download, then reboot again...
for god's sake what are they thinking? don't they get it? lot of people are buying software and use cracked version EXACTLY because of the fact that all legitimate software puts totally INSANE overhead that only irritates clients and in the end penalize them. And beleive me, they lose sales little by little because in the end it's less of a pain in the back to install cracked versions than upgrade with the re-registration, phone confirmation, yadi yada that without mentionning activations problems and all that stuff that people don't want to deal with especially after shelling out hundreds of dollars.
You want people to stop pirating, EDUCATE them, irritating them will only do the exact opposite. When I was a kid, I had a VIC20 and a C64, EVERYTHING was copied because "stores selling games" what not a commodity like today, plus, at 11, you don't have that much money, and face it, piracy is what made the C64 such a hot seller. But later, I was educated once entering a specific field of interest (3d/video editing) by people on mailing lists and also local pros, and today I'm the one pushing people to buy software and support companies, especially when these companies puts out educational pricing or non-commercial licenses at very decent pricing. Its still easy to get pirated software, but when you are educated, you know what happens in the long run, or you know the potential legal implications it might get you into if positive reinforcement is not your thing:).
Seriously, I just don't get it... if the goal is a clever way to reduce bandwidth costs on their server and outsource the stuff to pirate sites or torrents sites, well, hats off! but I doubt this would be the case.... man how pathetic can it get...
It's so bad, that they've beaten Shrek 2 at the box office setting a new world record in sales (something like 50M$? someone can correct me), c'mon.. instead of bashing on the technology because you're an elephant that can't move fast enough to adapt and rely on unenforcable practices, how about embracing it and actually make people pay 10$ to download an HTDV version to view at home...
you could have added an extra 50M$ to that record, plus, it wouldn't have costed you so much in bandwidth since everyone would have chipped in.
I just don't get it. they've should have learned from RIAA's mistake, they had YEARS to prepare, yet, nothing has been done on a large scale basis to profit from this.
People downloading it and watching it NOW are people who wouldn't go to the theatre to watch it in the first place (c'mon this is something to see on a big screen full resolution to enjoy), ok maybe SOME idiots that would do this instead of going and then find out they ruined their experience, which can be translated in loss of revenues, but then again those idiots stay home and don't go up to piss every 30 minutes or talk out loud during the film making the experience to everyone else a better one.
Seriously though... someone out there that has a voice to make them listen to reason, tell them to invest in geeks/programmers/good distribution ideas instead of investing in lawyers, both sides will profit from this. Because right now, their tactics will end up pissing everyone off and teens (and others actually) will "fight the powah" to look cool (or take a stand) and go exactly the opposite way, just like with the MP3s. In this case, almost everyone loses.
It's really sad to see this much "nerds" falling into the easiest route from point a to b without even considering any other possibilities.
How about this: They don't have a clue on how to get to the heads of the insurgency, thus they can't send them bad information, in which case they "do an error that looks legit" and broadcast it abroad knowing every news agency and curious person on the planet will pick it up.
Disinformation is a powerful thing. and even if the troops movements and all kind of information is included in the text, maybe there's one point there that they know that could be set up as a trap or whatever.
I mean, it's easy to jump to conclusions that humanity is stupid because someone revealed information, and the military knows nothing about the evil.DOC format, I'd tend to think that seeing how US military failed in terms of preparation and casulties in Irak, but this would be also too big (someone would get charged for something really huge, and normally someone having access to this type of document as source to encode them, isn't a total idiot and has been checked up. Plus, there's surely a procedure on how to make documents and etc. there).
So the point is, I could be wrong, the gun-jumpers could be wrong, but one thing is right; there are ALWAYS other possible alternatives to something obvious, especially when it's military or political. A forum like this is not to say "ahh bad bad bad" and see 500 messages of bitching on bad bad bad, but rather to promote a certain level of dicussion and intelligible arguments.
I've got some problems right now with AOL that blacklisted a complete class of adresses in which my mail server belongs. The catch is this server sits next to me, I closely monitor it, and it never generated any spam. I got caught in a spam cross-fire and there's NO way I can get in touch with someone there that manages that ban list (not without wasting a complete day over the phone at least, I gave up after 2 hours).
Oh and the nice thing is it's not even sending you a message back nor smtp server response, it just closes the connection. Nice when you're trying to figure out what's wrong.
Now usually I wouln't care about AOL, the problem is that some board members are using AOL and I can't just go and tell them it's crap and they should open a gmail account or something like that. You don't do that, and besides, they have lots of other contacts and exchanges that work and they would need to have lots more trouble to justify moving to another server.
So basically this is probably pissing not only me but several other people with similar problems. So the way I see this right now is (unfortunately) good for them, and maybe at some point they'll do something to make this better both for their users, but also for people who actually want to contact them as well.
Spamcop and some others at least has some way to tell them "look, we don't spam, test us and remove us from your blacklist, thanks!" Why don't they?
So if anything can put pressure on them to make things better, and show them that they cannot just bully people around without having a taste of their own medecine, I'm all for it, it's a win win in any cases; users get pissed and switch, or they get their act together and things work out like they should.
Something I didn't like yesterday with my 1.0 I did "check for updates" within firefox, everything was up to date eventhough 1.01 was out for a while... I went on manually downloading the 1.01 update and install it.
I'm a bit lazy when it comes to installing and trying things, now i've been going in the doc (well, very lightly I must admit) but from what I understand, I need to be root on the box on which I would like to install this nice app.
Is there a way, branch, doc or something that someone could point me to to install this to a remote web server with perl and everything installed, but just not root access? (like most reseller packages out there, with db access and all, but no rights to install stuff outside Ensim/Cpanel/Helm/whatever).
There are a lot of Bug tracking/help desks systems out there, I'm currently looking for different alternatives, if being root on the box is a must, it's unfortunate (I don't need the arguments on why that is the case and all, I am not complaining about it, just pointing it).
So if there is such a "web-based" branch, I'm sure it would get even more people's attention.
If you look on axis's site, you see most of them atre ~640x480 resolution, one being 1280x960, toshiba also has one megapixel version but it's astronomically out of price reach for simple applications.
With all of those sub 100 cameras that are going up to 3mpix these days, how come there aren't "HD"webcams or anything similar in the cheap end of the spectrum? it would be good enough for low-level consumer home security, and I'm sure it would sell like crazy. I know the image quality wouldn't be equal to the top webcam using CCD out there, but some application would require more resolution before perfect color reproduction.
Anyways just a thought... If anyone could point me to something that already exists, it would be nice, as I am sure a lot of people here would jump on this...:)
Group policy editors that are actually easier to manage, if you run Win2K's active directory for a 25-50 users database, it's not so bad, but if you run it or a larger scale and need to mess around security/group policies... you probably already lost all your hair:)
Who still has that windows 2000 for Dec Alpha pre-release build (like 10 builds before release or something like that) that was canned because that compaq was in bed with Intel for the home PC and workstation market?
Some readers might be new in the OS world, but there was a time when NT was on MIPS, Dec Alpha and Intel processors. There's an historical reason for the "Wintel" word.
So all this to say, would I switch? Hell no, history has shown that it's not always the best hardware (amiga to name an example) that wins. And besides, porting drivers. apps, windows hacks, kernel workarounds, and all the nightmares that I can't think of, I wouldn't even dare think of the logistics of that would imply at microsoft and on their top partners.
Remember when win2000 came out, driver support was a nightmare, manufacturers would say "well this is not a home OS, this joystick or that sound card (I remember with my soundblaster live) won't be supported... (and when it was, drivers weren't multi processor-aware, blablabla). I would imagine that it would be the same kind of problems for PPC ports, and all this for what? faster rendering time? some high-end renderers are already ported supported on different OSes, faster Office? (err?) faster net? what are the benefits? cost? x86 systems are almost shipping inside cereal boxes nowadays.
I just checked with "check for updates" on my 0.9.3 version, it said there's no updates needed. Why putting the button if it won't work properly? Ok yes it's beta, but c'mon, the potential userbase for mozilla is for microsoft-basher and most importantly, people who don't trust IE to be safe/secure anymore.
Ok with the release of 1.0 it's been fixed, I grant that, but still, I'm really annoyed after seeing this. And while at it, why do we have to go so deep to get updates? there should be an upgrade button in the menu 1st level.
For their defense, they do turn on update checking by default. The only thing is one who downloaded prior 1.0 and thought he was safe from where will probably have the same reaction I have. It's not trolling, it's just common sense and misjudgment. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't even write this if I wouldn't care about mozilla, Its my main browser now, I've been doing my bank transactions from it, etc etc.. that's why I'm getting this reaction.
Trust is the most difficult thing to gain and easiest thing to lose.
When you see hardware like this, you might think "heck, why do people pay in the thousands for video capture cards with effects that can be done with current processors?" the answers are:
Remember the video IN of your graphics cards with "VIVO"? with some you can do uncompressed streams, but why does it look amazingly ugly sometimes? noisy etc..
The main difference between let's say a consumer card like this ATI and high-end card not only lies in price and bundled software, but also by the selection of components and the electrical design of the signal sampling portion of the board. Some will have basic filtering and signal conditioning (what I suspect from ATI) and others will have higher quality components, more signal conditioning features, better bandcut filters to limit noise, etc..
While this is a nice way to have good video quality for an inexpensive rate, I'd keep my miro DC30+ board rather than replacing it with that, given ATI's track record with hardware and drivers, I wouldn't count on that hardware to work well outside ATI's bundled software, which is probably *very* newbie.
Nevertheless, the good thing is this will force better companies to make similar specs at the same price breakpoint, end users and midrange users are the winners.
Every Week or so, there's a new "breakthrough" in storage that will allow us xTB or yPB to be stored on zMEDIA. In real end-user life, however, we're still behind 5 yrs ago practical announcements of tangible products.
Remember when the DVD was announced and started shipping, what was it, 18GB onto 1 single disk, dual layer dual side. We're starting to see that dual layer out, with almost no medias, a technology that was promised way before today, remember fluorecent CD drives with over 100GB of information that were supposed to be commercially available before this year?
We're still drooling on the blu-ray drives DUE to ship with consumer-level prices somewhat by the end of this year or next year, yet, we're still far from what we were discussing that was "so close" less than a decade ago.
I don't want to sound bashing or anything, but what I don't like about all those announcements, it's when they dare saying a date of availability out of vapor, this, besides showing off, has the adverse effect of pissing off people that could actually design hardware/concepts around that technology, and miss their deadlines even with delays accounted in (months of delays is reasonable in some fields, but years isn't). The other bad effect is you might actually kill the funding of your technology just because lots of consumers might just wait for that "other better" technology. I'm not talking about those 50$ dvd writers, I'm talking about early adopters of new technologies (my first CDR costed me 2500$US) that pay a premium per devices, or OEM that helps to build a market for that new technology, whatever you do, it ends up pissing people off.
Then again, I guess you have to BS a bit to get some funding sometimes just to iron out that last bug or to go from R&D to commercial, but I still don't think that giving out timeframes out of the blues or based on the "miraculous positive planning scenario" is being honnest towards the consumers and OEMs. Don't get me wrong, I love to know what's around the corner, and how it works and the fields that they are aiming, I just don't like being lied to with false hopes.
> The AMD chips themselves are perfectly stable, and platforms are very mature. The bug you mention is ancient history and due to a bug in the way the Live! worked
It's not an old bug, I have an Nforce2-based motherboard and have that zzzzzzzzz always present in my speakers, and it even varies the pitch depending on CPU load.. imagine the annoyance. I can't beleive things like that still shows up in modern systems, but they do, in fact, I'm not really mad since the board didn't cost me 500$. Of course this isn't related to AMD directly but it's still something that, in the real world, would be associated to AMD easily since you don't see that kind of issues with intel-based systems.
On the other end, AMD's dual chipset is really a good platform (getting old but still good) I used it in a production environment, 7 renderfarms were made with those, only one failed in 2 years, and while I didn't have time to check it yet, I'm sure it's something other than the board/CPU.
I do, had a batchload of failing Deathstar and Fujitsu drives a while back, let me tell you that I replaced every single one of them, when they were shipping them back with new/refurb units, I'd simply put them in a raid config, when they'd offer a check (fujitsu did) I simply turned around and went seagate.
Face it, if you have mixed experiences you probably see seagate lightyear more reliable than maxtor or ibm.
Does that mean that finally, 10 years later, my amiga 1200 will finally have support for not only frames but java too?:)
I remember the browsing frustrations I had in my last years on that platform, at one point we were in advance for just about everything possible, then lost to 3d gaming, then 16bits audio, then lost all the cool hacks like running a multi-line BBS routed through both telnet and dialup at the same time without even being a programmer, to being a slow about to die dog exept for playing speedball... Oh well.. better late than never I guess..
I remember when I saw a similar article a few years ago, and people were pointing to a site where to upgrade my MP7040 to 7060 (4x to 6x). The flashing worked, the firmware and everything was recognized perfectly, wrote one cd, then after that nothing worked correctly, in the end, I was left with a cheezy CDROM instead of CD-RW.
Of course, maybe the drive was already on the edge of giving up and I just gave it the tap it needed to pass out, but then again, I am not going to blame anyone but myself for doing this because I knew what I was getting into.
Yes some drives have "features cutted back" but remember also that sometimes (might be or not be applicable in this case) if they are selling a drive as a "4x" and it's the same layout as an "8x", maybe there's not only capitalism in the equation, remember intel with their processor validation, etc.. it's not because we've got our 300A celeron to 450 and our dual 366MHZ BP6 motherboard to dual 550 Celerons that we'll always be that lucky.
So if anyone out there has doubts, I'd seriously suggest against going for it until you see sufficient number of people reporting that it works, because if you were doing this to prevent an upgrade cycle, you might actually force yourself into being an early adopter and that is a double loss.
Slashdot Mirror
If he uses a frequency doubling crystal on his laser, it becomes 532nm, so what would make it green too :)
Assuming there's a crystal supporting such a hit.
On the other hand I wonder how they've managed to get around air ionization... for far less energy then that, air ionize and it creates a mirror effect that sometimes bounces the beam back in the system and crack something in the optical system (usually the crystal)
Dude, you just woke me from not posting anything for a long time.
sense/net, heh.
Neuromancer Rocked! can't beleive nobody made a MMORPG game based on that universe yet. That would totally kill the non-spare-time I haven't got left!
Those who don't get the reference to the above, try this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer#Video_game
First, my experience:
I've noticed the amount of emails targetting paypal and ebay to grab accounts and then to list very expensive items at a "deal" price. I was in the market for a L-series lens for my canon camera (read: expensive 1500+$) and I've noticed there was a 600mm fixed high quality lens for 900$ buy it now. Now this specific lens retails between 3000 and 5000 used, and unless it's seriously damaged, it wouldn't go down to that price. So I've sent an email to the guy, and the response left me puzzled, so I did a wide search for the serial number of the lens he posted, to find out that there were 10 listings from 5 different users with the SAME auction, using the exact same description, they've all listed their items with all the bell and whistles (gallery, bold, etc). When you see something like that, it becomes quite obvious that it's fraud. Some could argue that the listings are always copied from one to another when the item sells well, I agree, but if you get a hit on specifics like a serial number, or everyone selling the same price, or the person accepting only western union, c'mon... oh, and there's no such deal as getting a popular item at 1/5th of the price, if you see that there is no one jumping on it, you should look elsewhere. Also, for expensive items, make sure that you can reach by voice the person that you are buying from, make sure you can track him down.
For more advanced users, Save the emails, in the header you can get the originating IP. If you're buying from someone listed in USA or Canada, and you see romania in the header packets (use something like www.whois.sc/###.###.###.###), well you have your answer.
Finally, if you see a user with 40 feedback and search for "other listings from this user" and see 15 items of 1000$+ listed with all the features turned on, get suspicious, again, a mix of suspicious conditions and good judgement will make your transaction aborted or safe.
What ebay should add is a flag that signed in members with 98%+ feedback could click for suspicious listings, when ebay gets a X number of hits on a specific auction, they could review/investigate it. You can't ask ebay to look into every single auctions, this would be insane and cost-prohibitive and it's already expensive enough as is; they would pass the cost on the users for sure so you don't want that. But better cooperation with authority and a simple system like this would reduce potential frauds drastically. The ideal would be 0 frauds, but this is utopia, on such a big system, with hacked accounts of good ebayers, it makes the process much harder. What is needed now is to cut down 90% of the frauds, and they are obvious to track and shut down.
If copying movies over the net was technically impossible, movie piracy wouldn't be as bad as today. But it is. On the other hand, they offer NO alternative (aside from suing) to the people who are willing to download movies instead of going to an overcrowded theatre where popcorn price are insane, babies are crying and teens are making more noise than the THX sound system.
:), just 10 years ago, i'd never seen that many people getting up and going to get a refill or taking a leak during a movie. This is really disturbing when you are trying to concentrate, and if I go to a theatre, last thing I am looking for is the "living room" feel where everyone talks or comments while the tv is on.
:) but if there would be a download service that would cost me 10$ a movie, I'd pay it, I'd split it with people watching me, and we'd have a superb experience, they'd get new money from people that wouldn't have gone to the theatres in the first place, but I admit; I don't know how this could affect their current audience. Still, there's a HUGE market for internet downloads, and iTunes didn't make artists go starving.
It's been what... about over 5 years now that most people can get fast net connection. How come there's only a handfull of online video "renting" services? This is because some dinosaurs didn't want to change, they even had the chance to see their audio cousins getting smacked by piracy and had YEARS to prepare to counterattack by offering a better experience. They didn't. Today, they are way behind.
One of the reasons I went from going every week to the theatre, down to about 3 times a year (aside from the obvious "i'm not going to pay 20$ to see this much crap" is also that the overall experience seems to get worse or I am getting older
This brings me to the living room feel. Actually I think more and more people like having projection screens or large displays, it's more affordable than it used to, and best of all, movies are out to DVD just a few months after showing in theatre, cheaper, so you can basically have almost the same experience, "free" popcorn, talk without disturbing, or watch without being disturbed, and best of all, you can rewatch or rewind if you missed something, at your convinience, and when you feel like it. You don'e need to drive to a specific time, you don't need to wonder if it's going to be filled at a premiere before you show up, etc..
I own a projector and sound system, and I must admit that it's not a THX experience, but it sure as he** better than the last 5 times I went to a theatre.
Of course, if there would be more SWIII or shrecks being put to the screen, I wouldn't want to wait and they would probably get me back in the theatres
People are willing to pay overquota bandwidth, or HS internet ONLY for that purpose, I don't think the argument that they get it for free thus they wouldn't pay holds for everyone. If you get them on a faster pipe at let's say 5$ (or less) a download, at a high quality, many would pay.... I would.
check this baby out for example:
l
:) )
quad processor, with support module to add another 4, with dual core support... I am planning on getting this for a 3d rendering workstation at work:
http://www.tyan.com/products/html/thunderk8qw.htm
Now imagine this fully populated, with a few TB array at 10W per drives, it goes up fast to 1Kw...
I'm planning on getting one of those for a specific 3D application where I need several cpus inside the main machine (render nodes wouldn't be as efficient) so I was actually wondering if there were a lot of 800W+ psus out there... interresting.
(please don't argue about the fact that 10 pcs would cost less blablalba, this is beyond the scope of this message, question was is there a use, yes there is
One thing that piss me the most about everything HD these days, is all the mislabeling and almost fraudulent usage of HD label on every piece of hardware out there.
:)) ), with new connections and fix all that sub-resolution crap along the way, I say, GO for it. Because right now, I'm not going to buy an XGA LCD TV labeled as HDTV display, no thanks!
EDV is NOT HDTV, yet, if you are not a geek or have basic knowledge, it seems to be "similar" when you are purchasing a TV.
HDTV LCD monitor, HDTV projector.... yes, because it does 854 (or something close) by 480P, it's considered HDTV? c'mon. Well check every HDTV projector or TV display closely, specs-wise, and you'll see a lot of 1280x720P and/or less. Not "true" HDTV a la 1920x1080i (or you could debate that 720P has a clearer picture, and 1080i has more resolution but flickers, this is another story, but something's for sure: 480P for me is NOT HD... it's called NTSC + progressive scan, or EDV, yet, some sells this as "HDTV"-capable device because they can take HDTV signal and rape it down to 480P).
now if HDTV could be 2 SPECIFIC, HIGH resolution formats, (one interlace, one progressive) to fit any type of output where one or the other could be better suited (P for computer display, i for tv/specific hardware (I'm thinking of stereoscopic display with interlaced inputs
And those damn DVI cables, DVD-I, DVD-D, yadi yada... one cable, no potential errors, thank you!
You can complain as much as you want about buying overpriced yet already obsolete hardware, but if you have a true 1080i or 720p display that lives to the "real" HD specs, you'll be able to afford the converter box (there will be adapters for sure) and make good use of your gear for another 3-4 years. For the others, this should be a lesson into more careful knowledge before buying stuff.
3-4 years sounds good, OLED HDTV display, should be awesome. Because current LCD TVs aside from a few minor exeptions, it's nothing but disgusting color/contrast/gamut-wise for any video purist.
I'm sorry but I've found the opening paragraph in the article quite condescending and below what I would expect from anandtech.
;) ).
If his "source" doesn't make use of the 3 cpus (cores) of the Xbox, well, he's just showing he can't code multithreaded or simply that he lacks either the will, the budget or imagination on how to use this extra juice to offload some calculations. I'm sure some other gaming companies won't.
I can see why some are bashing on specific core enhancements such as vector units which aren't boosting overall performance by much (it's still arguable; people at sony wouldn't put these features in if they weren't going to help for something) but bashing against a powerfull CPU that has itself multiplied by 3 fitting in a single die, cmon. Anyone who's doing 3d today and got himself a dual AthlonX2 machine will tell you how much he gained compared to if he would have been using a dual cpu setup (as opposed to dual cpu with dual core). 180% increase clock per clock depending on the type of scene and renderer would be a conservative estimate.
Granted this isn't the same, cinematic 3D and realtime 3D is 2 completely different beasts, but bashing on something because you use only 1/3rd of what's given to you, it's just too easy... it's like someone bashing on an athlonX2 while benchmarking it under windows 98 (singleCPU support).
I agree that marketting overload people with hopes (and lots of border-line BS), but still, grand tourismo 4 TODAY would be awesome on these machines, you'd have extra juice for simualtion, and could actually have higher resolution and antialiasing instead of looking like an "almost cool" game which lacked the juice to live it's full technical miracle.
If the coders of this game (GTA4) are their anonymous source, I'll gladly eat my socks, but I bet you 10$ they've coded something like tetris (I can be condescending too
People with the brains will know how to make good use of this technology, developpers who just code and compile without doing research on new technology don't even diserve this much (anonymous) exposure
my C$0.02
I wanted to install DirectX 9.0C on my laptop, and got hit by that. They've asked me to type in my product Key (which was UNDER my dhell laptop, attached to it was my external 80gb firewire drive and my 200GB USB2 drive, thank god it's not using a docking station, this would have required me to turn it off and then write it down then reboot than download, then reboot again...
:).
for god's sake what are they thinking? don't they get it? lot of people are buying software and use cracked version EXACTLY because of the fact that all legitimate software puts totally INSANE overhead that only irritates clients and in the end penalize them. And beleive me, they lose sales little by little because in the end it's less of a pain in the back to install cracked versions than upgrade with the re-registration, phone confirmation, yadi yada that without mentionning activations problems and all that stuff that people don't want to deal with especially after shelling out hundreds of dollars.
You want people to stop pirating, EDUCATE them, irritating them will only do the exact opposite. When I was a kid, I had a VIC20 and a C64, EVERYTHING was copied because "stores selling games" what not a commodity like today, plus, at 11, you don't have that much money, and face it, piracy is what made the C64 such a hot seller. But later, I was educated once entering a specific field of interest (3d/video editing) by people on mailing lists and also local pros, and today I'm the one pushing people to buy software and support companies, especially when these companies puts out educational pricing or non-commercial licenses at very decent pricing. Its still easy to get pirated software, but when you are educated, you know what happens in the long run, or you know the potential legal implications it might get you into if positive reinforcement is not your thing
Seriously, I just don't get it... if the goal is a clever way to reduce bandwidth costs on their server and outsource the stuff to pirate sites or torrents sites, well, hats off! but I doubt this would be the case.... man how pathetic can it get...
It's so bad, that they've beaten Shrek 2 at the box office setting a new world record in sales (something like 50M$? someone can correct me), c'mon.. instead of bashing on the technology because you're an elephant that can't move fast enough to adapt and rely on unenforcable practices, how about embracing it and actually make people pay 10$ to download an HTDV version to view at home...
you could have added an extra 50M$ to that record, plus, it wouldn't have costed you so much in bandwidth since everyone would have chipped in.
I just don't get it. they've should have learned from RIAA's mistake, they had YEARS to prepare, yet, nothing has been done on a large scale basis to profit from this.
People downloading it and watching it NOW are people who wouldn't go to the theatre to watch it in the first place (c'mon this is something to see on a big screen full resolution to enjoy), ok maybe SOME idiots that would do this instead of going and then find out they ruined their experience, which can be translated in loss of revenues, but then again those idiots stay home and don't go up to piss every 30 minutes or talk out loud during the film making the experience to everyone else a better one.
Seriously though... someone out there that has a voice to make them listen to reason, tell them to invest in geeks/programmers/good distribution ideas instead of investing in lawyers, both sides will profit from this. Because right now, their tactics will end up pissing everyone off and teens (and others actually) will "fight the powah" to look cool (or take a stand) and go exactly the opposite way, just like with the MP3s. In this case, almost everyone loses.
Use brains, not lawyers.
C'mon think 1 second of another alternative.
.DOC format, I'd tend to think that seeing how US military failed in terms of preparation and casulties in Irak, but this would be also too big (someone would get charged for something really huge, and normally someone having access to this type of document as source to encode them, isn't a total idiot and has been checked up. Plus, there's surely a procedure on how to make documents and etc. there).
:) )
It's really sad to see this much "nerds" falling into the easiest route from point a to b without even considering any other possibilities.
How about this: They don't have a clue on how to get to the heads of the insurgency, thus they can't send them bad information, in which case they "do an error that looks legit" and broadcast it abroad knowing every news agency and curious person on the planet will pick it up.
Disinformation is a powerful thing. and even if the troops movements and all kind of information is included in the text, maybe there's one point there that they know that could be set up as a trap or whatever.
I mean, it's easy to jump to conclusions that humanity is stupid because someone revealed information, and the military knows nothing about the evil
So the point is, I could be wrong, the gun-jumpers could be wrong, but one thing is right; there are ALWAYS other possible alternatives to something obvious, especially when it's military or political. A forum like this is not to say "ahh bad bad bad" and see 500 messages of bitching on bad bad bad, but rather to promote a certain level of dicussion and intelligible arguments.
My $0.02CDN (which isn't worth much
I've got some problems right now with AOL that blacklisted a complete class of adresses in which my mail server belongs. The catch is this server sits next to me, I closely monitor it, and it never generated any spam. I got caught in a spam cross-fire and there's NO way I can get in touch with someone there that manages that ban list (not without wasting a complete day over the phone at least, I gave up after 2 hours).
Oh and the nice thing is it's not even sending you a message back nor smtp server response, it just closes the connection. Nice when you're trying to figure out what's wrong.
Now usually I wouln't care about AOL, the problem is that some board members are using AOL and I can't just go and tell them it's crap and they should open a gmail account or something like that. You don't do that, and besides, they have lots of other contacts and exchanges that work and they would need to have lots more trouble to justify moving to another server.
So basically this is probably pissing not only me but several other people with similar problems. So the way I see this right now is (unfortunately) good for them, and maybe at some point they'll do something to make this better both for their users, but also for people who actually want to contact them as well.
Spamcop and some others at least has some way to tell them "look, we don't spam, test us and remove us from your blacklist, thanks!" Why don't they?
So if anything can put pressure on them to make things better, and show them that they cannot just bully people around without having a taste of their own medecine, I'm all for it, it's a win win in any cases; users get pissed and switch, or they get their act together and things work out like they should.
Something I didn't like yesterday with my 1.0 I did "check for updates" within firefox, everything was up to date eventhough 1.01 was out for a while... I went on manually downloading the 1.01 update and install it.
Am I the only one who got this?
I'm a bit lazy when it comes to installing and trying things, now i've been going in the doc (well, very lightly I must admit) but from what I understand, I need to be root on the box on which I would like to install this nice app.
Is there a way, branch, doc or something that someone could point me to to install this to a remote web server with perl and everything installed, but just not root access? (like most reseller packages out there, with db access and all, but no rights to install stuff outside Ensim/Cpanel/Helm/whatever).
There are a lot of Bug tracking/help desks systems out there, I'm currently looking for different alternatives, if being root on the box is a must, it's unfortunate (I don't need the arguments on why that is the case and all, I am not complaining about it, just pointing it).
So if there is such a "web-based" branch, I'm sure it would get even more people's attention.
Thanks to whomever helps.
If you look on axis's site, you see most of them atre ~640x480 resolution, one being 1280x960, toshiba also has one megapixel version but it's astronomically out of price reach for simple applications.
:)
With all of those sub 100 cameras that are going up to 3mpix these days, how come there aren't "HD"webcams or anything similar in the cheap end of the spectrum? it would be good enough for low-level consumer home security, and I'm sure it would sell like crazy. I know the image quality wouldn't be equal to the top webcam using CCD out there, but some application would require more resolution before perfect color reproduction.
Anyways just a thought... If anyone could point me to something that already exists, it would be nice, as I am sure a lot of people here would jump on this...
Group policy editors that are actually easier to manage, if you run Win2K's active directory for a 25-50 users database, it's not so bad, but if you run it or a larger scale and need to mess around security/group policies... you probably already lost all your hair :)
Let's wait till Drew gets a hold of this :)
Who still has that windows 2000 for Dec Alpha pre-release build (like 10 builds before release or something like that) that was canned because that compaq was in bed with Intel for the home PC and workstation market?
Some readers might be new in the OS world, but there was a time when NT was on MIPS, Dec Alpha and Intel processors. There's an historical reason for the "Wintel" word.
So all this to say, would I switch? Hell no, history has shown that it's not always the best hardware (amiga to name an example) that wins. And besides, porting drivers. apps, windows hacks, kernel workarounds, and all the nightmares that I can't think of, I wouldn't even dare think of the logistics of that would imply at microsoft and on their top partners.
Remember when win2000 came out, driver support was a nightmare, manufacturers would say "well this is not a home OS, this joystick or that sound card (I remember with my soundblaster live) won't be supported... (and when it was, drivers weren't multi processor-aware, blablabla). I would imagine that it would be the same kind of problems for PPC ports, and all this for what? faster rendering time? some high-end renderers are already ported supported on different OSes, faster Office? (err?) faster net? what are the benefits? cost? x86 systems are almost shipping inside cereal boxes nowadays.
just my C$0.02
I just checked with "check for updates" on my 0.9.3 version, it said there's no updates needed. Why putting the button if it won't work properly? Ok yes it's beta, but c'mon, the potential userbase for mozilla is for microsoft-basher and most importantly, people who don't trust IE to be safe/secure anymore.
Ok with the release of 1.0 it's been fixed, I grant that, but still, I'm really annoyed after seeing this. And while at it, why do we have to go so deep to get updates? there should be an upgrade button in the menu 1st level.
For their defense, they do turn on update checking by default. The only thing is one who downloaded prior 1.0 and thought he was safe from where will probably have the same reaction I have. It's not trolling, it's just common sense and misjudgment. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't even write this if I wouldn't care about mozilla, Its my main browser now, I've been doing my bank transactions from it, etc etc.. that's why I'm getting this reaction.
Trust is the most difficult thing to gain and easiest thing to lose.
When you see hardware like this, you might think "heck, why do people pay in the thousands for video capture cards with effects that can be done with current processors?" the answers are:
Remember the video IN of your graphics cards with "VIVO"? with some you can do uncompressed streams, but why does it look amazingly ugly sometimes? noisy etc..
The main difference between let's say a consumer card like this ATI and high-end card not only lies in price and bundled software, but also by the selection of components and the electrical design of the signal sampling portion of the board. Some will have basic filtering and signal conditioning (what I suspect from ATI) and others will have higher quality components, more signal conditioning features, better bandcut filters to limit noise, etc..
While this is a nice way to have good video quality for an inexpensive rate, I'd keep my miro DC30+ board rather than replacing it with that, given ATI's track record with hardware and drivers, I wouldn't count on that hardware to work well outside ATI's bundled software, which is probably *very* newbie.
Nevertheless, the good thing is this will force better companies to make similar specs at the same price breakpoint, end users and midrange users are the winners.
> The RIAA is now building a rocket which can be sent into space to deliver a cease and desist order to supernova to stop piracy once and for all.
:)
The idea of RIAA paying to send lawyers in space is somewhat... funny
Every Week or so, there's a new "breakthrough" in storage that will allow us xTB or yPB to be stored on zMEDIA. In real end-user life, however, we're still behind 5 yrs ago practical announcements of tangible products.
Remember when the DVD was announced and started shipping, what was it, 18GB onto 1 single disk, dual layer dual side. We're starting to see that dual layer out, with almost no medias, a technology that was promised way before today, remember fluorecent CD drives with over 100GB of information that were supposed to be commercially available before this year?
We're still drooling on the blu-ray drives DUE to ship with consumer-level prices somewhat by the end of this year or next year, yet, we're still far from what we were discussing that was "so close" less than a decade ago.
I don't want to sound bashing or anything, but what I don't like about all those announcements, it's when they dare saying a date of availability out of vapor, this, besides showing off, has the adverse effect of pissing off people that could actually design hardware/concepts around that technology, and miss their deadlines even with delays accounted in (months of delays is reasonable in some fields, but years isn't). The other bad effect is you might actually kill the funding of your technology just because lots of consumers might just wait for that "other better" technology. I'm not talking about those 50$ dvd writers, I'm talking about early adopters of new technologies (my first CDR costed me 2500$US) that pay a premium per devices, or OEM that helps to build a market for that new technology, whatever you do, it ends up pissing people off.
Then again, I guess you have to BS a bit to get some funding sometimes just to iron out that last bug or to go from R&D to commercial, but I still don't think that giving out timeframes out of the blues or based on the "miraculous positive planning scenario" is being honnest towards the consumers and OEMs. Don't get me wrong, I love to know what's around the corner, and how it works and the fields that they are aiming, I just don't like being lied to with false hopes.
> The AMD chips themselves are perfectly stable, and platforms are very mature. The bug you mention is ancient history and due to a bug in the way the Live! worked
It's not an old bug, I have an Nforce2-based motherboard and have that zzzzzzzzz always present in my speakers, and it even varies the pitch depending on CPU load.. imagine the annoyance. I can't beleive things like that still shows up in modern systems, but they do, in fact, I'm not really mad since the board didn't cost me 500$. Of course this isn't related to AMD directly but it's still something that, in the real world, would be associated to AMD easily since you don't see that kind of issues with intel-based systems.
On the other end, AMD's dual chipset is really a good platform (getting old but still good) I used it in a production environment, 7 renderfarms were made with those, only one failed in 2 years, and while I didn't have time to check it yet, I'm sure it's something other than the board/CPU.
> Who cares about the warranty anyways?
I do, had a batchload of failing Deathstar and Fujitsu drives a while back, let me tell you that I replaced every single one of them, when they were shipping them back with new/refurb units, I'd simply put them in a raid config, when they'd offer a check (fujitsu did) I simply turned around and went seagate.
Face it, if you have mixed experiences you probably see seagate lightyear more reliable than maxtor or ibm.
Does that mean that finally, 10 years later, my amiga 1200 will finally have support for not only frames but java too? :)
I remember the browsing frustrations I had in my last years on that platform, at one point we were in advance for just about everything possible, then lost to 3d gaming, then 16bits audio, then lost all the cool hacks like running a multi-line BBS routed through both telnet and dialup at the same time without even being a programmer, to being a slow about to die dog exept for playing speedball... Oh well.. better late than never I guess..
I remember when I saw a similar article a few years ago, and people were pointing to a site where to upgrade my MP7040 to 7060 (4x to 6x). The flashing worked, the firmware and everything was recognized perfectly, wrote one cd, then after that nothing worked correctly, in the end, I was left with a cheezy CDROM instead of CD-RW.
Of course, maybe the drive was already on the edge of giving up and I just gave it the tap it needed to pass out, but then again, I am not going to blame anyone but myself for doing this because I knew what I was getting into.
Yes some drives have "features cutted back" but remember also that sometimes (might be or not be applicable in this case) if they are selling a drive as a "4x" and it's the same layout as an "8x", maybe there's not only capitalism in the equation, remember intel with their processor validation, etc.. it's not because we've got our 300A celeron to 450 and our dual 366MHZ BP6 motherboard to dual 550 Celerons that we'll always be that lucky.
So if anyone out there has doubts, I'd seriously suggest against going for it until you see sufficient number of people reporting that it works, because if you were doing this to prevent an upgrade cycle, you might actually force yourself into being an early adopter and that is a double loss.
Just my 0.02$