In my experience, if you're posting on internet forums about how everyone should be using your favourite operating system you're a platform snob, even if you claim you're not.
Then you're not the market for this particular device, just as simple as that. It's like saying you don't like the direction Honda is taking with the Fit when you want to buy an SUV.
Condensed version of the speech: "I have condemned Reverend Wright's statements in unequivical terms. They were wrong, divisive, profoundly distorted and racially charged. But hey, he's black and those black people have had it hard, so it's understandable. And you typical white people are racist too, even my grandma, so you shouldn't be bothered if I've chosen this man who's views I just condemned unequivically as my personal mentor, dragged him along on the campaign trail, named books after him and taken my two daughters to his church so they could hear his profoundly distorted, racially charged views too."
Yes, I've seen the full clips of Wright's sermons. They don't exonerate him.
So you don't think he may have picked up a thing or two about law during the course of two terms in the House of Representatives and four terms as a Senator?
By the way, President is an executive position, not legislative.
I've seen the whole clip. The text you're referring to is: "He pointed out, (Did you see him, John?) --a white man-- he pointed out-- an ambassador-- that what Malcolm X said when he got silenced by Elijah Mohammad was in fact true, America's chickens are coming home to roost."
Now he could mean that Edward Peck personally quoted Malcom X or he could mean that what Peck said supported that thesis. Given that bloggers have searched transcripts and failed to find any where the ex-ambassador actually used that phrase, it seems that the latter interpretation is most likely. Unless someone digs up a clip or transcript showing his sermon to be a quote or close paraphrase, I think the clear interpretation is that he was riffing off a sentiment he heard on the news.
This is further supported by the tirade having the tone and rhythm of a sermon rather than an answer in an interview and by a backreference to the sermon Wright was making before his "faith footnote", specifically a quote from psalm 137: "blessed be they who bash your children's head agains the rocks".
And really, what would it matter even if an ex-ambassador had said it first? He obviously believes exactly what the media has been quoting - "america's chickens have come home to roost" - and judging by the reaction of the congregation it isn't a radical idea in that church. It really doesn't matter whether he invokes a crusty old white guy to lend credence to the idea.
If your job includes computers and technology and you don't understand the value of only adopting new interfaces (or technology) on the basis of need or tangible benefit, I'd rather not have you as a coworker. Even in that particular realm, I'd venture to say there are more interesting (and more beneficial) things to do with your time than aclimating to the quirks of a particular desktop or tracking down where they hid a particular configuration option.
I think its good for the brain to learn new interfaces. If you just stick with what you're used to you don't react to change as quickly. You get kinda stuck-in-your-ways. Yeah, its good not to screw yourself up changing things frequently, especially things you depend on, but it is good to make yourself learn new interfaces and have to adjust to new processes. Otherwise you get rusty.
I think I'd rather find more meaningful ways of excercising my brain than adopting change for change's sake. It isn't as if the world is so bereft of things to learn that make-work is a necessity.
I'm hardly old (31) and I generally don't bother upgrading for years at a time. Nor do I have any particular interest in learning new software. Still use pine despite years of people saying mutt is the shit.
Fear? Hardly. Just have better things to do with my time than to chase incremental improvement (and likely spending more effort adapting than I save with new features).
Personally, I don't much care. Intel chipsets (even the aging 915) work just dandy for me. Better than Nvidia or ATI, on average, since Intel is open enough to allow free driver development to remain on par with emerging X11 features.
Fact is most people don't want or need a machine that will support high framerate games. If they want to target only highly capable hardware, fine, just don't whine about it. Likewise, if they want to target mass market hardware at the expense of alienating the ZOMFGFPS crowd, fine.
Frankly I think the hey day of high end PC gaming is largely over. Less than 10% of game sales were accounted for by the PC segment. It simply isn't economical to target anything but consoles in terms of hardware capability and, from the consumer perspective, why spend thousands on a gaming machine just to play the same games you could be playing on a $200-400 console?
The current PC gaming market has already shifted largely to online gaming, which tends to be far less GPU intensive. Flash-based web games are another strong segment and those can be played on any bottom barrel PC.
You equated multi-core with multi-processor. I countered that it's fallacious to say that about both volume designs currently in the marketplace.
Shared cache is hardly a necessity. The original Pentium D didn't have any. And (I misspoke, er typed) neither does the Athlon X2. It's just an option that makes sense when you're sharing silicon.
Another differentiator is that multi-core designs can communicate at native clockspeed, rather than resorting to an interconnect. Hypertransport is fast, but shared silicon is faster.
I wouldn't discount cache and interconnect as tangential aspects of a processor. If you look at any modern CPU the majority of the die size is going to be cache, and a significant portion of the power draw comes from the system interface.
Even discounting the performance gains possible with shared resources and on-chip intercommunication and ignoring the power savings (note that quad core parts are hitting the same power envelope as quad core without drastic process changes) there's the simple matter of density. Producing a 1U rack server with eight discrete processor slots would be an engineering miracle, yet any white box operation will happily sell you a 1U rack server with dual four core processors.
I actually miswrote, too. The X2 uses exclusive L2 for each core, not shared. And I didn't mean to imply a performance bottleneck, since on-die communication and cache sharing (when applicable) are typically a performance win.
In regards to AMD I specifically meant in contrast to multi-socket Athlon configurations, where each processor has a discrete memory controller.
Have you ever looked at a block diagram of the predominant dual core designs? They're not simply "two processors on one piece of silicon". Both Intel and AMD used a shared cache design with a single connection to the system bus (FSB and HT, respectively). In the case of AMD, it also means a shared memory controller. It's a real difference with real performance and power implications, not a "silly marketing term".
Now if you complained about Intel shoving two dies into a multi-chip package and calling that quad-core, I'd agree with you. All the reduced bandwidth of a shared connection to the FSB with none of shared cache! Sign me up!
Via isn't terribly; they're just aimed at a different segment. The current C7 chips are more akin to the upcoming Intel Atom chips (and in fact share very similar design characteristics).
I have plenty of babies already. Two toddlers and one infant is more than enough.:)
Really, though, it's not a big deal. I paid less than a hundred for my player and didn't make a huge investment in movies. Likely I'll pick up one of those combo BD/HD drives LG is coming out with. Assuming I can dump the film successfully with DumpHD, I'll buy up any HD DVD titles I'm interested in and just serve them from my (soon to be) media machine.
Not going to buy in to BD just yet. The standalones are still far too expensive. May just skip it in favor of on-line distribution.
The main reason is much shorter - Sony. By bundling into their gaming platform they got millions of adopters for free. And their ownership of two movie studios (Sony Pictures, MGM) guaranteed them a content advantage as well.
And Paramount and Universal didn't annouce Blu-ray support until after Toshiba announced they were dropping the format, so including them on your list is highly disingenuous.
Households, not individuals. And assuming people you happen to know are a representative sample is always a mistake. Assuming people you happen to know are representative of an entire nation of people over seven thousand miles away is flat out idiotic.
The 25% number is actually one of the lower estimates for overall penetration. If you look at the Consumer Electronics Association they pegged penetration at 30% back in June, with a projection of 36% by YE07.
Hell, a cursory look seems to indicate your friends aren't even representative of Australia given that this article seems to imply significant market penetration in Australia as well.
Modern has nothing to do with it. Both formats are based on identical 405nm blue-violet lasers. The difference in capacity comes from BD using a wider apeture, which allows greater storage capacity but moves the data closer to the surface. The trade-off is higher manufacturing costs since existing production lines need to be retooled and discs require an additional protective coating.
Proponents of the HD DVD format (myself included) argue that because both formats have ample capacity for a full length feature film in 1080p/24 with lossless audio the trade-off wasn't worthwhile. For most titles the additional spaces simply isn't used or is wasted with inefficient encoding; for example, the majority of titles that contain lossless audio forego compression entirely because the BDA made lossless compression (TrueHD or DTS-MA) optional instead of mandatory like the HD DVD spec. And since the overwhelming majority of standalone players don't implement them the titles which do use advanced compression will simply default back to DD 5.1 sound (i.e. no better than bog standard DVD).
The additional capacity makes it more attractive as an optical storage format for computers, but I question whether that's particularly important these days. Now that USB hard drives are so cheap the consumer market is largely shifting that direction for archive and backup. Software distribution is likely to remain CD and DVD for a good long time, since very little software requires more space and very few computers had BD drives. File transfer is likely to remain a mix of DVD and (increasingly) flash storage. USB drives are cheap and far more compact and convienent than any optical media.
Home video mastering is a potential market as well but given that the capacity of AVCREC (i.e. Blu-ray content on a standard DVD) is about two hours of high definition video, I suspect most of the market will stick with the media that costs a nickel a disc instead of the one that costs twelve dollars a disc.:) Prices will certainly drop as time goes on, but there's a chicken and egg problem here - prices won't drop with mass adoption, mass adoption won't happen without a price drop.
(By the way, yes - TDK created a prototype of a 200GB disc about two years ago. No existing player supports them and there's been no indication that they're pursuing commercial production. They also showcased a 100GB disc at CES 2006 but have yet to bring anything to market. Hitachi has also demonstrated 100GB media and stated last quarter they were working on bringing it to market "soon" and is also working on 200GB but has yet to create a prototype.)
Most mainstream consumers couldn't give a flying fig what the raw capacity of the disc is. They might care if a movie had to be split onto two sides of a disc or two seperate discs (like some early DVD5 titles) but that wasn't a concern with either format. In most cases Blu-ray didn't even make any practical use of the space. Half the released titles used MPEG-2 instead of the more space efficient AVC and VC-1 codecs and most of the lossless audio tracks out there are uncompressed because the BDA didn't mandate lossless compression as part of the base specification.
There are plenty of other things that most consumers would care about, though. Personally I refuse to buy Blu-ray until they actually release a finished product. When questioned memebers of the BDA have admitted they rushed the product to market to stifle adoption of HD DVD. Some people say they don't care because it should be only secondary content that won't be available on older players, but I'll be damned if I'm going to pay $400 for a player and $20-30 per disc and not get the full experience.
Price is another major factor for most consumers, especially with the recent economic downturn. Price on BD players may start dropping as consumer confidence in the longevity of the format increases sales. On the other hand the Playstation still represents the majority of sales (unsuprisingly, since BDA representatives have stated publicaly that it's the only player they would recommend) which may retard sales of standalone players.
It's not all that hard to see why they won. The PS3 allowed them to establish a large install base in a relatively short time period without regard to whether the people buying them were interested in buying an HD player. They literally own several studios (Sony Entertainment, MGM) which gave them a guaranteed early advantage in content, and the inclusion of extensible DRM (BD+) attracted the loyatly of several others (Fox, Disney).
Pretty simple: install base advantage + content advantage = winz0rz, regardless of whether the advantage was necessarily fair.
Is it the best outcome for the consumer? I don't personally think so, but there are plenty of people who would disagree.
Between standalones, computers and portables I have eight DVD players. I bought combo discs so that I could play my discs everywhere without buying two copies or having to blow thousands upgrading everything at once. In some cases that's not even an option. Good luck finding replacement drives for even recent laptops. Or a in-car entertainment system. Or a portable player. (What would be the point of HD on a 7" screen anyways?)
It's one of the reasons I've never even considered Blu-ray.
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In my experience, if you're posting on internet forums about how everyone should be using your favourite operating system you're a platform snob, even if you claim you're not.
Then you're not the market for this particular device, just as simple as that. It's like saying you don't like the direction Honda is taking with the Fit when you want to buy an SUV.
The average weekly wage in Manhattan is about $1500, not monthly.
Condensed version of the speech: "I have condemned Reverend Wright's statements in unequivical terms. They were wrong, divisive, profoundly distorted and racially charged. But hey, he's black and those black people have had it hard, so it's understandable. And you typical white people are racist too, even my grandma, so you shouldn't be bothered if I've chosen this man who's views I just condemned unequivically as my personal mentor, dragged him along on the campaign trail, named books after him and taken my two daughters to his church so they could hear his profoundly distorted, racially charged views too."
Yes, I've seen the full clips of Wright's sermons. They don't exonerate him.
So you don't think he may have picked up a thing or two about law during the course of two terms in the House of Representatives and four terms as a Senator?
By the way, President is an executive position, not legislative.
I've seen the whole clip. The text you're referring to is: "He pointed out, (Did you see him, John?) --a white man-- he pointed out-- an ambassador-- that what Malcolm X said when he got silenced by Elijah Mohammad was in fact true, America's chickens are coming home to roost."
Now he could mean that Edward Peck personally quoted Malcom X or he could mean that what Peck said supported that thesis. Given that bloggers have searched transcripts and failed to find any where the ex-ambassador actually used that phrase, it seems that the latter interpretation is most likely. Unless someone digs up a clip or transcript showing his sermon to be a quote or close paraphrase, I think the clear interpretation is that he was riffing off a sentiment he heard on the news.
This is further supported by the tirade having the tone and rhythm of a sermon rather than an answer in an interview and by a backreference to the sermon Wright was making before his "faith footnote", specifically a quote from psalm 137: "blessed be they who bash your children's head agains the rocks".
And really, what would it matter even if an ex-ambassador had said it first? He obviously believes exactly what the media has been quoting - "america's chickens have come home to roost" - and judging by the reaction of the congregation it isn't a radical idea in that church. It really doesn't matter whether he invokes a crusty old white guy to lend credence to the idea.
If your job includes computers and technology and you don't understand the value of only adopting new interfaces (or technology) on the basis of need or tangible benefit, I'd rather not have you as a coworker. Even in that particular realm, I'd venture to say there are more interesting (and more beneficial) things to do with your time than aclimating to the quirks of a particular desktop or tracking down where they hid a particular configuration option.
I think its good for the brain to learn new interfaces. If you just stick with what you're used to you don't react to change as quickly. You get kinda stuck-in-your-ways. Yeah, its good not to screw yourself up changing things frequently, especially things you depend on, but it is good to make yourself learn new interfaces and have to adjust to new processes. Otherwise you get rusty.
I think I'd rather find more meaningful ways of excercising my brain than adopting change for change's sake. It isn't as if the world is so bereft of things to learn that make-work is a necessity.
I'm hardly old (31) and I generally don't bother upgrading for years at a time. Nor do I have any particular interest in learning new software. Still use pine despite years of people saying mutt is the shit.
Fear? Hardly. Just have better things to do with my time than to chase incremental improvement (and likely spending more effort adapting than I save with new features).
There are plenty of heavy readers who don't have a big (or any) book budget. See, there's these things called libraries...
Personally, I don't much care. Intel chipsets (even the aging 915) work just dandy for me. Better than Nvidia or ATI, on average, since Intel is open enough to allow free driver development to remain on par with emerging X11 features.
Fact is most people don't want or need a machine that will support high framerate games. If they want to target only highly capable hardware, fine, just don't whine about it. Likewise, if they want to target mass market hardware at the expense of alienating the ZOMFGFPS crowd, fine.
Frankly I think the hey day of high end PC gaming is largely over. Less than 10% of game sales were accounted for by the PC segment. It simply isn't economical to target anything but consoles in terms of hardware capability and, from the consumer perspective, why spend thousands on a gaming machine just to play the same games you could be playing on a $200-400 console?
The current PC gaming market has already shifted largely to online gaming, which tends to be far less GPU intensive. Flash-based web games are another strong segment and those can be played on any bottom barrel PC.
Blah blah blah we don't want to target what consumers actually buy whine whine whine.
I'll be over here with my affordable computers not buying your products.
You equated multi-core with multi-processor. I countered that it's fallacious to say that about both volume designs currently in the marketplace.
Shared cache is hardly a necessity. The original Pentium D didn't have any. And (I misspoke, er typed) neither does the Athlon X2. It's just an option that makes sense when you're sharing silicon.
Another differentiator is that multi-core designs can communicate at native clockspeed, rather than resorting to an interconnect. Hypertransport is fast, but shared silicon is faster.
I wouldn't discount cache and interconnect as tangential aspects of a processor. If you look at any modern CPU the majority of the die size is going to be cache, and a significant portion of the power draw comes from the system interface.
Even discounting the performance gains possible with shared resources and on-chip intercommunication and ignoring the power savings (note that quad core parts are hitting the same power envelope as quad core without drastic process changes) there's the simple matter of density. Producing a 1U rack server with eight discrete processor slots would be an engineering miracle, yet any white box operation will happily sell you a 1U rack server with dual four core processors.
I actually miswrote, too. The X2 uses exclusive L2 for each core, not shared. And I didn't mean to imply a performance bottleneck, since on-die communication and cache sharing (when applicable) are typically a performance win.
In regards to AMD I specifically meant in contrast to multi-socket Athlon configurations, where each processor has a discrete memory controller.
I was speaking of the system bus, so Hypertransport.
Have you ever looked at a block diagram of the predominant dual core designs? They're not simply "two processors on one piece of silicon". Both Intel and AMD used a shared cache design with a single connection to the system bus (FSB and HT, respectively). In the case of AMD, it also means a shared memory controller. It's a real difference with real performance and power implications, not a "silly marketing term".
Now if you complained about Intel shoving two dies into a multi-chip package and calling that quad-core, I'd agree with you. All the reduced bandwidth of a shared connection to the FSB with none of shared cache! Sign me up!
Via isn't terribly; they're just aimed at a different segment. The current C7 chips are more akin to the upcoming Intel Atom chips (and in fact share very similar design characteristics).
I have plenty of babies already. Two toddlers and one infant is more than enough. :)
Really, though, it's not a big deal. I paid less than a hundred for my player and didn't make a huge investment in movies. Likely I'll pick up one of those combo BD/HD drives LG is coming out with. Assuming I can dump the film successfully with DumpHD, I'll buy up any HD DVD titles I'm interested in and just serve them from my (soon to be) media machine.
Not going to buy in to BD just yet. The standalones are still far too expensive. May just skip it in favor of on-line distribution.
The main reason is much shorter - Sony. By bundling into their gaming platform they got millions of adopters for free. And their ownership of two movie studios (Sony Pictures, MGM) guaranteed them a content advantage as well.
And Paramount and Universal didn't annouce Blu-ray support until after Toshiba announced they were dropping the format, so including them on your list is highly disingenuous.
Households, not individuals. And assuming people you happen to know are a representative sample is always a mistake. Assuming people you happen to know are representative of an entire nation of people over seven thousand miles away is flat out idiotic.
The 25% number is actually one of the lower estimates for overall penetration. If you look at the Consumer Electronics Association they pegged penetration at 30% back in June, with a projection of 36% by YE07.
Hell, a cursory look seems to indicate your friends aren't even representative of Australia given that this article seems to imply significant market penetration in Australia as well.
Modern has nothing to do with it. Both formats are based on identical 405nm blue-violet lasers. The difference in capacity comes from BD using a wider apeture, which allows greater storage capacity but moves the data closer to the surface. The trade-off is higher manufacturing costs since existing production lines need to be retooled and discs require an additional protective coating.
:) Prices will certainly drop as time goes on, but there's a chicken and egg problem here - prices won't drop with mass adoption, mass adoption won't happen without a price drop.
Proponents of the HD DVD format (myself included) argue that because both formats have ample capacity for a full length feature film in 1080p/24 with lossless audio the trade-off wasn't worthwhile. For most titles the additional spaces simply isn't used or is wasted with inefficient encoding; for example, the majority of titles that contain lossless audio forego compression entirely because the BDA made lossless compression (TrueHD or DTS-MA) optional instead of mandatory like the HD DVD spec. And since the overwhelming majority of standalone players don't implement them the titles which do use advanced compression will simply default back to DD 5.1 sound (i.e. no better than bog standard DVD).
The additional capacity makes it more attractive as an optical storage format for computers, but I question whether that's particularly important these days. Now that USB hard drives are so cheap the consumer market is largely shifting that direction for archive and backup. Software distribution is likely to remain CD and DVD for a good long time, since very little software requires more space and very few computers had BD drives. File transfer is likely to remain a mix of DVD and (increasingly) flash storage. USB drives are cheap and far more compact and convienent than any optical media.
Home video mastering is a potential market as well but given that the capacity of AVCREC (i.e. Blu-ray content on a standard DVD) is about two hours of high definition video, I suspect most of the market will stick with the media that costs a nickel a disc instead of the one that costs twelve dollars a disc.
(By the way, yes - TDK created a prototype of a 200GB disc about two years ago. No existing player supports them and there's been no indication that they're pursuing commercial production. They also showcased a 100GB disc at CES 2006 but have yet to bring anything to market. Hitachi has also demonstrated 100GB media and stated last quarter they were working on bringing it to market "soon" and is also working on 200GB but has yet to create a prototype.)
Most mainstream consumers couldn't give a flying fig what the raw capacity of the disc is. They might care if a movie had to be split onto two sides of a disc or two seperate discs (like some early DVD5 titles) but that wasn't a concern with either format. In most cases Blu-ray didn't even make any practical use of the space. Half the released titles used MPEG-2 instead of the more space efficient AVC and VC-1 codecs and most of the lossless audio tracks out there are uncompressed because the BDA didn't mandate lossless compression as part of the base specification.
There are plenty of other things that most consumers would care about, though. Personally I refuse to buy Blu-ray until they actually release a finished product. When questioned memebers of the BDA have admitted they rushed the product to market to stifle adoption of HD DVD. Some people say they don't care because it should be only secondary content that won't be available on older players, but I'll be damned if I'm going to pay $400 for a player and $20-30 per disc and not get the full experience.
Price is another major factor for most consumers, especially with the recent economic downturn. Price on BD players may start dropping as consumer confidence in the longevity of the format increases sales. On the other hand the Playstation still represents the majority of sales (unsuprisingly, since BDA representatives have stated publicaly that it's the only player they would recommend) which may retard sales of standalone players.
It's not all that hard to see why they won. The PS3 allowed them to establish a large install base in a relatively short time period without regard to whether the people buying them were interested in buying an HD player. They literally own several studios (Sony Entertainment, MGM) which gave them a guaranteed early advantage in content, and the inclusion of extensible DRM (BD+) attracted the loyatly of several others (Fox, Disney).
Pretty simple: install base advantage + content advantage = winz0rz, regardless of whether the advantage was necessarily fair.
Is it the best outcome for the consumer? I don't personally think so, but there are plenty of people who would disagree.
About one in four homes has at least one HDTV. I bet that's far higher than the number of people willing to watch TV on a 12-17" laptop screen. :)
Between standalones, computers and portables I have eight DVD players. I bought combo discs so that I could play my discs everywhere without buying two copies or having to blow thousands upgrading everything at once. In some cases that's not even an option. Good luck finding replacement drives for even recent laptops. Or a in-car entertainment system. Or a portable player. (What would be the point of HD on a 7" screen anyways?)
It's one of the reasons I've never even considered Blu-ray.