Actually, one of the bad things about Vista was that GDI acceleration was removed when introducing Aero. Vista windows draws into a system memory buffer, which is later copied to video memory, thus removing the possibility for GDI acceleration and increasing the memory footprint. The only hardware accelleration in Vista was for the 3D effects.
This was fixed a bit in Windows 7, by removing at least one of the system memory buffers and reintroducing hardware accellerated GDI.
Because play, at all levels, is based on training for the future. Puppies play fight, chase, hunt, and hump because those are all things they need to be able to do as adults. Humans are the same way. We play at running a house, at being parents, at hunting/escaping, and yes, we play at warfare. Even organized sports, for the most part, boil down to ritualized tribal warfare or atleast competition.
I agree with your point that play is an important part in the human (as well as animal) development, but I don't think it's "at all levels based on training for the future". We can actually play for pure entertainment. Though we might still play war games as part of some socially or genetic heritage, I think the entertainment part is becoming greater. Especially for people who has not been directly involved in any real conflict (war) for generations.
You might say that the enjoyment, or the physiological reward of playing such a game as tetris is in fact training our brains for some future conflict, but I can't really find the link.
We want our endorphin, dopamine, adreanline or whatever hormone, and find ways to produce it.
Companies like Dell, Apple, Acer, HP and the beige box boys can simply just ignore the patent and say "Talk to Intel/nVidia/chipset vendor X" or simply not include onboard NIC machines and switch to using PCI/USB cards instead.
Maybe this is the point? Make all the big vendors disable their onboard NIC's and buy 3com solutions instead?
I would not recommend the PS3 as a media center, even though imho it's better than the 360 in that part.
It is a good blu-ray player and has a nice ui, but it is still limited in codec and container support. To play MKV files you have to transcode (in some cases a remux is enough), it does not support subtitles unless they are embedded in the movie file and copying large files (over 4GB) to the PS3 is not supported from USB drives due to FAT32 limits.
There are workarounds for these limitations such as the realtime transcoding PS3MediaServer, tools to add subtitles, and copy files through DLNA Server, but for me this is too much a hassle, especially since I don't want to have a computer running at all time.
The best media-center i've encountered yet is a mac mini with plex. If I could just find a DVB-C HD adapter with CAM support, that would be the ulitmate device.
So it seems you had some file system corruption then? A firmware update is probably a disk intensive operation, and might explain why it got worse after the second update. Maybe your harddrive is malfunctioning? I've had PC's behave like this before the harddrive crashed. Make sure you back up your savegames.
What I'm trying to say is that with 20-something million PS3's sold, a certain number of them will break - every day. Some of them will break coinciding with firmware upgrades. Maybe an unknown bug in their firmware caused your system failure, but statistically it could also be a hardware fault, especially a harddrive failure.
It's amazing how this is blown completely out of proportion.
The story itself is inaccurate and misleading. The users affected were having trouble with their blu-ray drives after the 3.0 update. There is no bricking involved. The 3.01 update was never meant to fix the problems with the blu-ray drives, it fixed a problem with stability in Uncharted. Wether the update caused the blu-ray problems or not is only speculation. One user said his player started working again after reformating his hard-drive and reinstalling the 3.0 update, so it might be the case, but it might also be coincidence.
The "1000's of users" statement is completely bull****, and is a number completely drawn out of the plaintiffs a**.
It strikes me that these reports (and the british Yellow Light of Death TV-programme) started spreading precisely when the PS3 Slim was announced and the PS3 price drop took effect. It feels like a well crafted FUD campain.
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I'm on a macbook! All my buttons are white!
...shouldn't they have bought US Ethernet Innovations instead?
As a swede, I must say they're not :-), but their non EU membership probably makes these rulings easier.
Actually, one of the bad things about Vista was that GDI acceleration was removed when introducing Aero. Vista windows draws into a system memory buffer, which is later copied to video memory, thus removing the possibility for GDI acceleration and increasing the memory footprint.
The only hardware accelleration in Vista was for the 3D effects.
This was fixed a bit in Windows 7, by removing at least one of the system memory buffers and reintroducing hardware accellerated GDI.
Because play, at all levels, is based on training for the future. Puppies play fight, chase, hunt, and hump because those are all things they need to be able to do as adults. Humans are the same way. We play at running a house, at being parents, at hunting/escaping, and yes, we play at warfare. Even organized sports, for the most part, boil down to ritualized tribal warfare or atleast competition.
I agree with your point that play is an important part in the human (as well as animal) development, but I don't think it's "at all levels based on training for the future".
We can actually play for pure entertainment. Though we might still play war games as part of some socially or genetic heritage, I think the entertainment part is becoming greater. Especially for people who has not been directly involved in any real conflict (war) for generations.
You might say that the enjoyment, or the physiological reward of playing such a game as tetris is in fact training our brains for some future conflict, but I can't really find the link.
We want our endorphin, dopamine, adreanline or whatever hormone, and find ways to produce it.
We need to somehow convince shareholders that the Blu-Ray drive in the PS3 is still relevant!
Or, it might be a way to work around the "exclusive" deal with microsoft.
Companies like Dell, Apple, Acer, HP and the beige box boys can simply just ignore the patent and say "Talk to Intel/nVidia/chipset vendor X" or simply not include onboard NIC machines and switch to using PCI/USB cards instead.
Maybe this is the point? Make all the big vendors disable their onboard NIC's and buy 3com solutions instead?
A pop up notice in the user's malware-infected browser is not the way to notify customers.
I think this might actually work. Clicking a "Your Computer Has Been Infected!" popup is probably how they got infected in the first place...
This one is brilliant. Thx for reminding me.
I would not recommend the PS3 as a media center, even though imho it's better than the 360 in that part.
It is a good blu-ray player and has a nice ui, but it is still limited in codec and container support. To play MKV files you have to transcode (in some cases a remux is enough), it does not support subtitles unless they are embedded in the movie file and copying large files (over 4GB) to the PS3 is not supported from USB drives due to FAT32 limits.
There are workarounds for these limitations such as the realtime transcoding PS3MediaServer, tools to add subtitles, and copy files through DLNA Server, but for me this is too much a hassle, especially since I don't want to have a computer running at all time.
The best media-center i've encountered yet is a mac mini with plex. If I could just find a DVB-C HD adapter with CAM support, that would be the ulitmate device.
So it seems you had some file system corruption then? A firmware update is probably a disk intensive operation, and might explain why it got worse after the second update. Maybe your harddrive is malfunctioning? I've had PC's behave like this before the harddrive crashed. Make sure you back up your savegames.
What I'm trying to say is that with 20-something million PS3's sold, a certain number of them will break - every day. Some of them will break coinciding with firmware upgrades. Maybe an unknown bug in their firmware caused your system failure, but statistically it could also be a hardware fault, especially a harddrive failure.
It's amazing how this is blown completely out of proportion.
The story itself is inaccurate and misleading. The users affected were having trouble with their blu-ray drives after the 3.0 update. There is no bricking involved. The 3.01 update was never meant to fix the problems with the blu-ray drives, it fixed a problem with stability in Uncharted.
Wether the update caused the blu-ray problems or not is only speculation. One user said his player started working again after reformating his hard-drive and reinstalling the 3.0 update, so it might be the case, but it might also be coincidence.
The "1000's of users" statement is completely bull****, and is a number completely drawn out of the plaintiffs a**.
It strikes me that these reports (and the british Yellow Light of Death TV-programme) started spreading precisely when the PS3 Slim was announced and the PS3 price drop took effect. It feels like a well crafted FUD campain.