Not really, the 8600 GTS is (in performance) between the GT 220 and GT 240. The 240 is a midrange gamer card, but the 220 is considered low-end. The 220 goes for ~$75* and the 240 for $135* or so. The 8600 doesn't have the same video rendering capabilities (older generation of PureVideo), and as an older card it'd go for less. So this is a $45 card at most, cheaper now than almost anything else still on the market.
DivX might have stayed current, but the latest few versions have slowly become more and more proprietary, which is why many people have switched to XviD - not alleviating the problem, I'm afraid.
I doubt it - my 3-year-old dual-core E6700 and 8600 GTS can handle 1080p MP4s just fine. Either it's an issue with your decoder or your hardware is more obsolete than you think.
Yes, Matroska has really simplified things for everybody, from standard release groups to the guys who dub anime. Instead of releasing separate versions of their rip with different language tracks for audio, now you can combine the whole thing into one - subtitles, alternate audio tracks, the works. Simple, clean, and efficient. So, this means none of the hair-pulling that resulted in the days when you spent hours downloading a dvdrip, only to find out that it was in Spanish.
The advantage of h.264 is that it can have comparable video quality at a lower bitrate than DivX or XviD - this results in smaller filesizes (which was the whole point of using it for blu-ray in the first place) but requires more processing power to decode. This is attractive for people like Sony because the PS3 is already a monstrously powerful machine (at least by consumer standards) but has very little hard drive space and depends on accessing content stored on optical media. With more powerful players, h.264 will definitely become the way to go, as it stores data more efficiently.
Basically, to sum it up, h.264 is the pirate's wet dream - most people who watch lots of movies will find HDMI-out directly to their HDTV easier and more efficient anyway, and it's ideal for minimizing the space taken up on your hard drive(s). I can make a virtually lossless rip of a DVD9 with 1.5-2.0gb, keeping the original resolution and video quality. They basically beat the hell out of the those 700mb AVIs that release groups seem to love so much.
I don't see any of these problems. Firefox has never crashed for me under reasonable circumstances.
Sibling posts are right - this seems way too long and too calm. If someone writes a lot, it's usually a rant. Also, the bolding, etc.? It's way too artificial.
Actually, it would be an interesting project to graph sales and ratings for long-running, many-installment franchises (*looks at sports/racing games*) to see how things have fluctuated - some of them are old enough to have gone through multiple generations of gamers. It's an old wrestling strategy that you can redo a gimmick after 7 years, because the people who were around then won't be around now, and the ones that are around now won't remember anyway.
For instance, the first Call of Duty and Call of Duty 5: World at War. WaW has some references and nods (it also rips off Modern Warfare's narrative structure, but that's beside the point), but this was fine until the final scene: Russian soldiers in Berlin capturing the Reichstag and ending the bulk of the war. This scene was copied almost directly from CoD1. So even in narrative-based FPSs, you're starting to see repetition within a franchise after a few years. I think you'll find that the majority of people who have played CoD5 have never played the original Call of Duty and wouldn't know about this.
This is also one of Disney's strategies - they re-release their "classics" just short of every decade, which is enough to account for a new generation of children and the format changes that would require re-buying.
They wouldn't need to actually be holding it, it was mentioned that it was RFID (or RFID-style), so they could have scanned it from several metres away.
That's a complete fallacy. The thing that makes the labels/**AAs (you can't really talk about one without the other) is not what they do but how they do it.
Most firearms companies are small and operate through defense contracts with governments. Most of the knockoff weapons that rather unsavoury people are armed with were produced by gunsmiths working with gangs. The fact that the weapons kill is irrelevant - the weapons exist, so they would be used, which necessitates producing more to defend yourself with, etc., etc.
If Zimbabwe suddenly discovered oil reserves within their borders, the US would invade them in an instant under the guise of 'removing the yolk of tyranny and oppression from the people of Zimbabe'.
The yolk of tyranny? You, sir, have egg on your face.
If they do and have their own - congratulations, you live amongst idiots. Most neighbourhoods are given a single shared pipe, so they'll be stealing bandwidth from themselves.
Many clueless people torrent - all it would take would be people talking about how it would make it easier to torrent... oh dear, I'm afraid ipv6 won't be arriving then, MAFIAA hitmen will take care of that.
Why is it that, whenever something is supposed to happen, it's perpetually 2 years from now? This seems like a pretty common phenomenon in tech - mostly due to the vanishing point for new tech being several years (startups tend to not last very long, so having 2 years of R&D on something usually means it will never be finished). Anyone got other examples/ideas?
Programming is more like pure design rather than engineering (despite engineering's design component). I'd say the closest equivalent to it would be architecture.
No - I have a theory. The arrogant assholes usually are angry and bitter support people - underpaid, etc, who believe they don't deserve such a terrible job. Sysadmins (provided they don't have to also double as support, which they might in some situations) are usually more stressed and challenged (after all, support isn't a challenge for anything but your patience and sanity) but, since they do something meaningful and interesting, most are probably satisfied.
The problem inherent in (common) support is the unfairness. The way I see it, to gain the benefits of using a computer, you should also have the requirement to LEARN how to use it, rather than having to have support walk you through it. High-level support (such as on IRC for various things) is usually a good thing - the "support" IRC channels often have a great deal of general discussion and it's possible to learn simply by observing. This is the same for projects and software that have poor documentation. However, the rise of developer-created wikis for various programs (Arch Wiki, Fedora/RHEL Wiki, rTorrent wiki come to mind) and power-user/sysadmin blogs mean that a fix is usually easy to find with a bit of googling. Most of "low level" support is from people either too stupid or too lazy to try to fix it themselves, and most knowledgeable people (who, you remember, spent years of their life learning about computers) will resent the idea of people trying to operate on the same level as them without the expertise that is, in truth, necessary.
"Systems administrator", in of itself, is (or, at least, should be) an impressive title - basically saying that you are the one responsible for making everything work. His issue with it is that "computer guy" is a blanket term that can be used to refer to programmers ("software engineer" - an example of the parent's idea of people giving themselves stupid titles), sysadmins, front-line IT support, or a member of the Best Buy Geek Squad. You see why he might be offended about being labelled as a "computer guy"?
Actually, if he was good at cheating, he likely went through life easily and now makes three times as much money as you and has a supermodel wife. Congratulations, a CEO cheated off of you in school.
Two (or one?) Anonymous Cowards supporting each other...
IMHO, though, links in/. signatures should be discouraged; if people want to put links, they could put it in their profile that people could check. Even links to a blog they have.
Actually, no. They consider you responsible for it and that "forgetting" isn't an excuse - so if you HAD legitimately forgotten the key, you would be imprisoned anyway.
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Thanks for the info, it's 20 chars now. I, uh, "improved" it for you.
Not really, the 8600 GTS is (in performance) between the GT 220 and GT 240. The 240 is a midrange gamer card, but the 220 is considered low-end. The 220 goes for ~$75* and the 240 for $135* or so. The 8600 doesn't have the same video rendering capabilities (older generation of PureVideo), and as an older card it'd go for less. So this is a $45 card at most, cheaper now than almost anything else still on the market.
* Prices are in CAD.
Here's a solution - HDMI-out. Use it. It eliminates all of the headaches that come from DVD players.
DivX might have stayed current, but the latest few versions have slowly become more and more proprietary, which is why many people have switched to XviD - not alleviating the problem, I'm afraid.
I doubt it - my 3-year-old dual-core E6700 and 8600 GTS can handle 1080p MP4s just fine. Either it's an issue with your decoder or your hardware is more obsolete than you think.
Yes, Matroska has really simplified things for everybody, from standard release groups to the guys who dub anime. Instead of releasing separate versions of their rip with different language tracks for audio, now you can combine the whole thing into one - subtitles, alternate audio tracks, the works. Simple, clean, and efficient. So, this means none of the hair-pulling that resulted in the days when you spent hours downloading a dvdrip, only to find out that it was in Spanish.
The advantage of h.264 is that it can have comparable video quality at a lower bitrate than DivX or XviD - this results in smaller filesizes (which was the whole point of using it for blu-ray in the first place) but requires more processing power to decode. This is attractive for people like Sony because the PS3 is already a monstrously powerful machine (at least by consumer standards) but has very little hard drive space and depends on accessing content stored on optical media. With more powerful players, h.264 will definitely become the way to go, as it stores data more efficiently.
Basically, to sum it up, h.264 is the pirate's wet dream - most people who watch lots of movies will find HDMI-out directly to their HDTV easier and more efficient anyway, and it's ideal for minimizing the space taken up on your hard drive(s). I can make a virtually lossless rip of a DVD9 with 1.5-2.0gb, keeping the original resolution and video quality. They basically beat the hell out of the those 700mb AVIs that release groups seem to love so much.
I don't see any of these problems. Firefox has never crashed for me under reasonable circumstances.
Sibling posts are right - this seems way too long and too calm. If someone writes a lot, it's usually a rant. Also, the bolding, etc.? It's way too artificial.
Actually, it would be an interesting project to graph sales and ratings for long-running, many-installment franchises (*looks at sports/racing games*) to see how things have fluctuated - some of them are old enough to have gone through multiple generations of gamers. It's an old wrestling strategy that you can redo a gimmick after 7 years, because the people who were around then won't be around now, and the ones that are around now won't remember anyway.
For instance, the first Call of Duty and Call of Duty 5: World at War. WaW has some references and nods (it also rips off Modern Warfare's narrative structure, but that's beside the point), but this was fine until the final scene: Russian soldiers in Berlin capturing the Reichstag and ending the bulk of the war. This scene was copied almost directly from CoD1. So even in narrative-based FPSs, you're starting to see repetition within a franchise after a few years. I think you'll find that the majority of people who have played CoD5 have never played the original Call of Duty and wouldn't know about this.
This is also one of Disney's strategies - they re-release their "classics" just short of every decade, which is enough to account for a new generation of children and the format changes that would require re-buying.
They wouldn't need to actually be holding it, it was mentioned that it was RFID (or RFID-style), so they could have scanned it from several metres away.
That's a complete fallacy. The thing that makes the labels/**AAs (you can't really talk about one without the other) is not what they do but how they do it.
Most firearms companies are small and operate through defense contracts with governments. Most of the knockoff weapons that rather unsavoury people are armed with were produced by gunsmiths working with gangs. The fact that the weapons kill is irrelevant - the weapons exist, so they would be used, which necessitates producing more to defend yourself with, etc., etc.
Or maybe the Iranian Cyber Army strikes agai^H^HCARRIER LOST
If Zimbabwe suddenly discovered oil reserves within their borders, the US would invade them in an instant under the guise of 'removing the yolk of tyranny and oppression from the people of Zimbabe'.
The yolk of tyranny? You, sir, have egg on your face.
If they do and have their own - congratulations, you live amongst idiots. Most neighbourhoods are given a single shared pipe, so they'll be stealing bandwidth from themselves.
Many clueless people torrent - all it would take would be people talking about how it would make it easier to torrent... oh dear, I'm afraid ipv6 won't be arriving then, MAFIAA hitmen will take care of that.
Why is it that, whenever something is supposed to happen, it's perpetually 2 years from now? This seems like a pretty common phenomenon in tech - mostly due to the vanishing point for new tech being several years (startups tend to not last very long, so having 2 years of R&D on something usually means it will never be finished). Anyone got other examples/ideas?
Programming is more like pure design rather than engineering (despite engineering's design component). I'd say the closest equivalent to it would be architecture.
Paid per line of code...? Now I understand why Windows has got so bulky!
Mod parent up. That is all I have to say.
No - I have a theory. The arrogant assholes usually are angry and bitter support people - underpaid, etc, who believe they don't deserve such a terrible job. Sysadmins (provided they don't have to also double as support, which they might in some situations) are usually more stressed and challenged (after all, support isn't a challenge for anything but your patience and sanity) but, since they do something meaningful and interesting, most are probably satisfied.
The problem inherent in (common) support is the unfairness. The way I see it, to gain the benefits of using a computer, you should also have the requirement to LEARN how to use it, rather than having to have support walk you through it. High-level support (such as on IRC for various things) is usually a good thing - the "support" IRC channels often have a great deal of general discussion and it's possible to learn simply by observing. This is the same for projects and software that have poor documentation. However, the rise of developer-created wikis for various programs (Arch Wiki, Fedora/RHEL Wiki, rTorrent wiki come to mind) and power-user/sysadmin blogs mean that a fix is usually easy to find with a bit of googling. Most of "low level" support is from people either too stupid or too lazy to try to fix it themselves, and most knowledgeable people (who, you remember, spent years of their life learning about computers) will resent the idea of people trying to operate on the same level as them without the expertise that is, in truth, necessary.
"Systems administrator", in of itself, is (or, at least, should be) an impressive title - basically saying that you are the one responsible for making everything work. His issue with it is that "computer guy" is a blanket term that can be used to refer to programmers ("software engineer" - an example of the parent's idea of people giving themselves stupid titles), sysadmins, front-line IT support, or a member of the Best Buy Geek Squad. You see why he might be offended about being labelled as a "computer guy"?
Well, if you gave the guy with the mortgage the money, you could consider it your own personal contribution to the bank stimulus plan.
Actually, if he was good at cheating, he likely went through life easily and now makes three times as much money as you and has a supermodel wife. Congratulations, a CEO cheated off of you in school.
Two (or one?) Anonymous Cowards supporting each other... IMHO, though, links in /. signatures should be discouraged; if people want to put links, they could put it in their profile that people could check. Even links to a blog they have.
Actually, no. They consider you responsible for it and that "forgetting" isn't an excuse - so if you HAD legitimately forgotten the key, you would be imprisoned anyway.