This just sounds like another take on the "suspend to disk" or "hibernate" features that have been in Windows (and probably Mac for all I know) for the better part of a decade by now. I suspect the only difference is that they're using high-speed non-volatile RAM to do it faster than you could with a hard drive on a computer with 512MB to 1GB of system RAM. Not all that exciting, basically.
Of course, only laptop users really use such features. Even so, my desktop boots up quite quickly - the longest single delay by far is due to my silly ITE second IDE controller, which takes 10-15 seconds to scan its drive(s).
Re:I'd like IMDB more if...
on
IMDb Turns 15
·
· Score: 1
What? It says there are DVDs available in four languages when I view it...
Re:I'd like IMDB more if...
on
IMDb Turns 15
·
· Score: 1
Right, because nobody is going to pay to be dishonest, and nobody who is honest will mind paying.
Nah, I should just go to a non-DMCA country and reverse-engineer myself (since I didn't sign an NDA with any of the patent-holders). Then I can release my genes under the GPL on GeneForge!
I find a friend or family member with an old computer and give them a bit of an upgrade. I recently found some extra PC100 SDRAM laying around and put it in my mom's computer the last time I visited.
Pfft. I used computers for over 15 years before the Internet. I have enough games stockpiled up to last me five lifetimes worth of having no life outside of computers.
The rest of you could just write down the IP addresses of your favorite sites and visit them directly. Kind of like how we used to dial into BBSes in ancient times.
I could say the same about EAX 3.0/4.0 being the only selling point of Creative cards these days. Also, your statement about expensive receivers is misinformed and/or misleading: I got my Logitech Z-5500 speakers for just over 1/4 of that price, and the older Z-680's support AC3 decoding as well.
Real-time DDL/AC3 encoding makes a lot of sense for me because my Logitech Z-5500 speakers that support it. I don't take advantage of SPDIF passthrough on my current setup when watching AC3 movies because I'd have to switch settings on my sound card, speakers, and/or player software to transition between games, AC3 movies, and non-AC3 video in order to get the most out of each of them (instead, I currently use analog 5.1, which costs CPU power and quality when decoding AC3). With a DDL/AC3 card, however, I could safely leave my speakers set to coax or optical and have 5.1 sound in games and movies without having to reconfigure anything.
Also, all sound cards these days have EAX support - just not EAX 3.0/4.0. I haven't spent much time using Creative cards with Creative drivers that support EAX 3.0/4.0, and I really haven't missed it. Few games support EAX 3.0+ due (among other things) to the widespread popularity of non-Creative hardware (mostly on-board 5.1 chipsets like Soundstorm and Realtek ALC6xx/8xx). Instead, they stick to the standard DirectSound3D feature set (and sometimes EAX 1.0/2.0, which like all versions of EAX are just extensions to DS3D) to provide a consistent experience across most modern sound hardware.
But it really boils down to a conscious choice to boycott Creative products. Here are some of the reasons why I've chosen this path: - They don't listen to customers. They ignore feedback and provide poor support. - They abandon their products quickly in favor of new ones (much more quickly than most hardware manufacturers), often releasing only one or two driver revisions over a period of a few months before stopping development. - Their drivers are notorious for bugs and instability. Install them in the wrong order and expect lots of crashes and/or broken features. - They lost credibility with myself and others by engaging in a finger-pointing war with VIA over severe compatability issues between Live/Audigy cards and VIA motherboard chipsets. VIA lost credibility for the same reason. They should have worked together to resolve the issues instead of simply blaming each other and leaving customers out to dry. - They don't innovate. Instead, they buy out any company that does and then sell their products relabeled as the next Sound Blaster. Examples include Aureal (who are famous to this day for developing a superior 3D sound engine) who Creative killed with marketing FUD and then bought out, Ensoniq who Creative bought out to get their PCI sound card technology (which became the Sound Blaster PCI64/128 and part of the Live! series), and E-mu Systems whose chips powered the Live! and Audigy series. - They compete through marketing rather than innovation. They pay off game developers to add EAX 3.0/4.0 support to their games, while paying off publishers to display their logos on game boxes and cutscenes. Despite this, however, few games take special advantage of EAX 3.0/4.0 features, while consumers are lead to believe otherwise. - They're too cheap to license technologies like DDL from companies that they can't buy out (such as Dolby), which again limits innovation and consumer choice. - They use a proprietary API (EAX) to maintain their weakening stranglehold on the desktop sound hardware market. This is the same mistake that 3dfx made with their Glide API, except that it won't kill Creative because they've diversified their product line to include more than just sound cards.
Basically they've become the archetypical evil corporation that relies on brand loyalty, diversification, marketing, and by crushing or buying out its competitors. Their anti-competitive behavior stifles innovation and limits consumer choice, and their attitude towards their customers i
I looked at the data sheet on C-Media's web site and it does indeed have a DSP inside (of course). I don't know how programmable it is, though, and you'd probably have to ask C-Media for info on how to program it (and I don't know how willing they'd be to provide such info).
I agree that is a nice card, but it lacks the same feature every non creative card lacks; hardware acceleration.
I'm sorry, you've fallen prey to Creative FUD. Things have changed quite a bit these days; even on-board sound is catching up to Creative in terms of gaming performance. If you read the reviews you will see that these new C-Media CMI8768+ based cards come very close in game performance to Creative's latest offerings. Really the only thing Creative cards have over the competition is EAX 3.0/4.0 support, but most games don't take advantage of them due to the increasing popularity of on-board sound as a viable gaming sound hardware solution (thanks in part to nVidia, and to a lesser extent Realtek and VIA). Creative would be in serious trouble by now if sound cards were its only product, as they seem to be clinging to EAX as a selling point in the way that 3dfx clung to Glide.
What really tickles my cynical bone is the knowledge that Creative will never have a DDL-capable card due to the fact that it would never license the technology from Dolby. Creative only seems to come up with new ideas by buying out competitors and reselling their technology as the next Sound Blaster, but even Creative isn't big enough to buy Dolby.
As a former long-time Creative customer who has been burned many times and have seen many others burned, I'm no longer interested in Creative products. What I am interested in is this:
That's right, a card that can perform real-time Dolby Digital AC3 encoding (aka Dolby Digital Live, or DDL). The spiritual successor to the nVidia Soundstorm!
Turtle Beach has a card with the same chip, although their driver support is a bit lacking in comparison:
The cards are pretty affordable - newegg has them both for under $100. Personally I'd rather go with the X-Mystique due to better driver support and on-board coax output (even though both cards come with optical cables, IIRC).
I guess Terratec has an Aureon 7.1 card that has DDL as well, but they don't market their cards to the U.S.
DOSBox is great. It's also got a great forum community at http://vogons.zetafleet.com/ if you need any help or have any comments/questions/suggestions.
I fully agree their business model desperately needs updating, except that as I understand it, concerts and merchandise sales are where the artists make most of their money. This is not to say that the RIAA doesn't have its dirty fingers in those lucrative pies as well, however for them the media sales are where the bulk of their profits lie right now.
If this is true, then all that is needed to kill the RIAA and the record labels is a decision by the artists to use the Internet as a way of distributing albums. They could offer them for download for free (or for very cheap, as with iTunes and such) and they'd still be effective for promoting the bands and encouraging people to attend concerts.
Of course, this doesn't happen because the artists who are in it for the money are gambling that the music labels will decide that they are the artist that is going to be the "next big hit" and will promote them above the rest. Yes, they manipulate the popularity of individual artists by giving them more exposure, which is something that wouldn't happen if the music labels went away and artists had to compete on a level playing field (i.e. the Internet).
I've noticed a distressing trend to dismiss the abuse of power with the phrase "that's democracy". It's almost as if we have come to think of injustice and corruption of as an itegral part of the holy democratic process, and therefore immune from any criticism.
I guess I was referring to the simplistic "majority rule" definition of democracy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy I invoke it with a cynical connotation because we Americans tend to uphold it as some sort of ideal - with the US government as a prime example of how wonderful it can be - so that we feel better when we meddle in the business of other countries "for their own good".
Of course, the US is a democratic republic (adjective noun!) which means that we only get to elect which corrupt politician the corporations will pay off for the next few years. To make things worse, politicians have unionized into two parties, ensuring that only rarely will someone be elected who actually cares about anything other than lining his/her own pockets or making a name for him/herself. At this point, I suspect that the voting thing is just a way to keep us from revolting; obviously I'm not the only one who thinks so, given the low percentage of Americans who bother to vote these days (incidentally, to those who would say that "every vote counts": I would like to refer you back to the corrupt two-party system under which we suffer, which ensures that nobody who cares about the people will be in politics for long).
In this case, there's nothing inherently democratic about making the same set of rules apply to everyone everywhere, or in inflicting the populace with the stupidest or least fair solution to any given problem. The simple fact that the EU legislators are appointed by people who are appointed by people who I may have at some point have been involved in an election somewhere, this does not excuse the corruption, greed and injustice that runs rampant though the system.
Indeed, nothing ever excuses such behavior. The problem is that when given power, humans will by nature use it to their own selfish ends. Throughout recorded history, humanity has struggled against itself to evolve a system of government which cannot be corrupted by the selfishness of men; we still haven't found one that works for a large enough number of people. I don't know if such a system exists, but it seems we're destined to keep trying until we either find out or destroy ourselves utterly. Fun stuff.
Also, in a pure democracy the majority vote of the populace decides what solutions are best. Even this system is flawed because the majority of people can be stupid and/or misled sometimes.
I should also say, that isn't aimed at you, HunterZ, personally. In general I agree with your points above. You just touched on a sore point.
Then why is the US so successful? I agree that bigger governments often (always?) make a mess of things, but the reason the EU will help growth is that it will open internal borders and standardize business practices/logistics across the union. If it works out...
Whether or not the U.S. is "so successful" depends on how you look at it. As a U.S. citizen, I'm starting to wonder how long it will be before things break down if they keep heading in their current direction. For the past century the federal government has been gaining more and more power over the states, wasting more and more resources due to the inherent inefficiencies of governing at that level, and favoring the interests of whoever has the most money to spend on lobbying - with citizens steadily becoming more disillusioned and hopeless all the while as a result.
Another problem with it is that, as humans, we always seem to standardize on whatever most people are already doing. If 5 people herding reindeer in Lapland have the best accounting methods, then the whole union should switch, not force them to change, damnit.
Yes, it's called "democracy", and like all other forms of government invented so far it has its drawbacks. Really, though, I think that governments go wrong more often as a result of trying to govern too many people and not from the system they follow (with a few exceptions like small countries that are seized by corrupt dictators).
I think Europe had a good thing going with small countries (on the same order of size as U.S. states) with governments that strike varying balances between democracy and socialism. Trying to unite them under one governing body (especially an economic one!) is just going to introduce the same problems that the U.S. is experiencing (ignoring the people's interests in favor of the interests of whoever has the most money, bureaucratic waste, gradual leeching of power away from individual countries to a self-serving centralized government, etc.)
In closing, I should mention that I'm a computer programmer and not a political activist. I'm also American so I'm probably largely ignorant about the EU situation.
All you have to do is disable the Wireless Configuration service to disable Windows' control of Wi-Fi NICs. You may also be able to accomplish it by unchecking the box that says something like "let Windows manage my wireless settings for this device".
One of my roommates uses a Netgear PCI card to connect to our WRT54g router, and we've gone back and forth between the Netgear config util and WinXP's wireless config. One nice thing about the Netgear one is that you can type in the WEP passphrase instead of the hex key.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah when I read that I thought, "Red Dwarf doesn't have a 't' in it!"
Lower your weapons and think again. Popular doesn't mean evil.
You are not one of us! This is news for nerds! Get your own site!
This just sounds like another take on the "suspend to disk" or "hibernate" features that have been in Windows (and probably Mac for all I know) for the better part of a decade by now. I suspect the only difference is that they're using high-speed non-volatile RAM to do it faster than you could with a hard drive on a computer with 512MB to 1GB of system RAM. Not all that exciting, basically.
Of course, only laptop users really use such features. Even so, my desktop boots up quite quickly - the longest single delay by far is due to my silly ITE second IDE controller, which takes 10-15 seconds to scan its drive(s).
What? It says there are DVDs available in four languages when I view it...
Right, because nobody is going to pay to be dishonest, and nobody who is honest will mind paying.
</sarcasm>
Except that we obviously didn't, since we're still doing okay right now.
Nah, I should just go to a non-DMCA country and reverse-engineer myself (since I didn't sign an NDA with any of the patent-holders). Then I can release my genes under the GPL on GeneForge!
I find a friend or family member with an old computer and give them a bit of an upgrade. I recently found some extra PC100 SDRAM laying around and put it in my mom's computer the last time I visited.
It's not too late to help lower the global average temperature. Become a swashbuckling disciple of the Flying Spaghetti Monster!
http://www.venganza.org/
so that countries like China wouldn't have enough leverage to create their own, censored version of the Internet.
Huh? Doesn't China already have that?
Gopher is coming back? Sweet!
:p
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_protocol
You can have your stupid intarwebs back - we don't need it anyways
(just kidding of course)
Pfft. I used computers for over 15 years before the Internet. I have enough games stockpiled up to last me five lifetimes worth of having no life outside of computers.
The rest of you could just write down the IP addresses of your favorite sites and visit them directly. Kind of like how we used to dial into BBSes in ancient times.
WTF? Why are they placing arbitrary limits on the amount of RAM and number of CPUs supported?
I could say the same about EAX 3.0/4.0 being the only selling point of Creative cards these days. Also, your statement about expensive receivers is misinformed and/or misleading: I got my Logitech Z-5500 speakers for just over 1/4 of that price, and the older Z-680's support AC3 decoding as well.
Real-time DDL/AC3 encoding makes a lot of sense for me because my Logitech Z-5500 speakers that support it. I don't take advantage of SPDIF passthrough on my current setup when watching AC3 movies because I'd have to switch settings on my sound card, speakers, and/or player software to transition between games, AC3 movies, and non-AC3 video in order to get the most out of each of them (instead, I currently use analog 5.1, which costs CPU power and quality when decoding AC3). With a DDL/AC3 card, however, I could safely leave my speakers set to coax or optical and have 5.1 sound in games and movies without having to reconfigure anything.
Also, all sound cards these days have EAX support - just not EAX 3.0/4.0. I haven't spent much time using Creative cards with Creative drivers that support EAX 3.0/4.0, and I really haven't missed it. Few games support EAX 3.0+ due (among other things) to the widespread popularity of non-Creative hardware (mostly on-board 5.1 chipsets like Soundstorm and Realtek ALC6xx/8xx). Instead, they stick to the standard DirectSound3D feature set (and sometimes EAX 1.0/2.0, which like all versions of EAX are just extensions to DS3D) to provide a consistent experience across most modern sound hardware.
But it really boils down to a conscious choice to boycott Creative products. Here are some of the reasons why I've chosen this path:
- They don't listen to customers. They ignore feedback and provide poor support.
- They abandon their products quickly in favor of new ones (much more quickly than most hardware manufacturers), often releasing only one or two driver revisions over a period of a few months before stopping development.
- Their drivers are notorious for bugs and instability. Install them in the wrong order and expect lots of crashes and/or broken features.
- They lost credibility with myself and others by engaging in a finger-pointing war with VIA over severe compatability issues between Live/Audigy cards and VIA motherboard chipsets. VIA lost credibility for the same reason. They should have worked together to resolve the issues instead of simply blaming each other and leaving customers out to dry.
- They don't innovate. Instead, they buy out any company that does and then sell their products relabeled as the next Sound Blaster. Examples include Aureal (who are famous to this day for developing a superior 3D sound engine) who Creative killed with marketing FUD and then bought out, Ensoniq who Creative bought out to get their PCI sound card technology (which became the Sound Blaster PCI64/128 and part of the Live! series), and E-mu Systems whose chips powered the Live! and Audigy series.
- They compete through marketing rather than innovation. They pay off game developers to add EAX 3.0/4.0 support to their games, while paying off publishers to display their logos on game boxes and cutscenes. Despite this, however, few games take special advantage of EAX 3.0/4.0 features, while consumers are lead to believe otherwise.
- They're too cheap to license technologies like DDL from companies that they can't buy out (such as Dolby), which again limits innovation and consumer choice.
- They use a proprietary API (EAX) to maintain their weakening stranglehold on the desktop sound hardware market. This is the same mistake that 3dfx made with their Glide API, except that it won't kill Creative because they've diversified their product line to include more than just sound cards.
Basically they've become the archetypical evil corporation that relies on brand loyalty, diversification, marketing, and by crushing or buying out its competitors. Their anti-competitive behavior stifles innovation and limits consumer choice, and their attitude towards their customers i
I looked at the data sheet on C-Media's web site and it does indeed have a DSP inside (of course). I don't know how programmable it is, though, and you'd probably have to ask C-Media for info on how to program it (and I don't know how willing they'd be to provide such info).
I agree that is a nice card, but it lacks the same feature every non creative card lacks; hardware acceleration.
I'm sorry, you've fallen prey to Creative FUD. Things have changed quite a bit these days; even on-board sound is catching up to Creative in terms of gaming performance. If you read the reviews you will see that these new C-Media CMI8768+ based cards come very close in game performance to Creative's latest offerings. Really the only thing Creative cards have over the competition is EAX 3.0/4.0 support, but most games don't take advantage of them due to the increasing popularity of on-board sound as a viable gaming sound hardware solution (thanks in part to nVidia, and to a lesser extent Realtek and VIA). Creative would be in serious trouble by now if sound cards were its only product, as they seem to be clinging to EAX as a selling point in the way that 3dfx clung to Glide.
What really tickles my cynical bone is the knowledge that Creative will never have a DDL-capable card due to the fact that it would never license the technology from Dolby. Creative only seems to come up with new ideas by buying out competitors and reselling their technology as the next Sound Blaster, but even Creative isn't big enough to buy Dolby.
As a former long-time Creative customer who has been burned many times and have seen many others burned, I'm no longer interested in Creative products. What I am interested in is this:
t goddl/
http://www.hidiaudio.com/products/mystique.html
http://www.bluegears.com/soundcard_xmystique.html
That's right, a card that can perform real-time Dolby Digital AC3 encoding (aka Dolby Digital Live, or DDL). The spiritual successor to the nVidia Soundstorm!
Turtle Beach has a card with the same chip, although their driver support is a bit lacking in comparison:
http://turtlebeach.com/site/products/soundcards/m
And this is the chip that drives them both:
http://cmedia.com.tw/product/CMI8768_plus.htm
The cards are pretty affordable - newegg has them both for under $100. Personally I'd rather go with the X-Mystique due to better driver support and on-board coax output (even though both cards come with optical cables, IIRC).
I guess Terratec has an Aureon 7.1 card that has DDL as well, but they don't market their cards to the U.S.
DOSBox is great. It's also got a great forum community at http://vogons.zetafleet.com/ if you need any help or have any comments/questions/suggestions.
So when is Google going to release a web-based web browser?
My stuff is made in Taiwan, Singapore, and Japan...
I fully agree their business model desperately needs updating, except that as I understand it, concerts and merchandise sales are where the artists make most of their money. This is not to say that the RIAA doesn't have its dirty fingers in those lucrative pies as well, however for them the media sales are where the bulk of their profits lie right now.
If this is true, then all that is needed to kill the RIAA and the record labels is a decision by the artists to use the Internet as a way of distributing albums. They could offer them for download for free (or for very cheap, as with iTunes and such) and they'd still be effective for promoting the bands and encouraging people to attend concerts.
Of course, this doesn't happen because the artists who are in it for the money are gambling that the music labels will decide that they are the artist that is going to be the "next big hit" and will promote them above the rest. Yes, they manipulate the popularity of individual artists by giving them more exposure, which is something that wouldn't happen if the music labels went away and artists had to compete on a level playing field (i.e. the Internet).
I've noticed a distressing trend to dismiss the abuse of power with the phrase "that's democracy". It's almost as if we have come to think of injustice and corruption of as an itegral part of the holy democratic process, and therefore immune from any criticism.
:) We've all got a few of those.
I guess I was referring to the simplistic "majority rule" definition of democracy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy
I invoke it with a cynical connotation because we Americans tend to uphold it as some sort of ideal - with the US government as a prime example of how wonderful it can be - so that we feel better when we meddle in the business of other countries "for their own good".
Of course, the US is a democratic republic (adjective noun!) which means that we only get to elect which corrupt politician the corporations will pay off for the next few years. To make things worse, politicians have unionized into two parties, ensuring that only rarely will someone be elected who actually cares about anything other than lining his/her own pockets or making a name for him/herself. At this point, I suspect that the voting thing is just a way to keep us from revolting; obviously I'm not the only one who thinks so, given the low percentage of Americans who bother to vote these days (incidentally, to those who would say that "every vote counts": I would like to refer you back to the corrupt two-party system under which we suffer, which ensures that nobody who cares about the people will be in politics for long).
In this case, there's nothing inherently democratic about making the same set of rules apply to everyone everywhere, or in inflicting the populace with the stupidest or least fair solution to any given problem. The simple fact that the EU legislators are appointed by people who are appointed by people who I may have at some point have been involved in an election somewhere, this does not excuse the corruption, greed and injustice that runs rampant though the system.
Indeed, nothing ever excuses such behavior. The problem is that when given power, humans will by nature use it to their own selfish ends. Throughout recorded history, humanity has struggled against itself to evolve a system of government which cannot be corrupted by the selfishness of men; we still haven't found one that works for a large enough number of people. I don't know if such a system exists, but it seems we're destined to keep trying until we either find out or destroy ourselves utterly. Fun stuff.
Also, in a pure democracy the majority vote of the populace decides what solutions are best. Even this system is flawed because the majority of people can be stupid and/or misled sometimes.
I should also say, that isn't aimed at you, HunterZ, personally. In general I agree with your points above. You just touched on a sore point.
No worries
Then why is the US so successful? I agree that bigger governments often (always?) make a mess of things, but the reason the EU will help growth is that it will open internal borders and standardize business practices/logistics across the union. If it works out...
Whether or not the U.S. is "so successful" depends on how you look at it. As a U.S. citizen, I'm starting to wonder how long it will be before things break down if they keep heading in their current direction. For the past century the federal government has been gaining more and more power over the states, wasting more and more resources due to the inherent inefficiencies of governing at that level, and favoring the interests of whoever has the most money to spend on lobbying - with citizens steadily becoming more disillusioned and hopeless all the while as a result.
Another problem with it is that, as humans, we always seem to standardize on whatever most people are already doing. If 5 people herding reindeer in Lapland have the best accounting methods, then the whole union should switch, not force them to change, damnit.
Yes, it's called "democracy", and like all other forms of government invented so far it has its drawbacks. Really, though, I think that governments go wrong more often as a result of trying to govern too many people and not from the system they follow (with a few exceptions like small countries that are seized by corrupt dictators).
I think Europe had a good thing going with small countries (on the same order of size as U.S. states) with governments that strike varying balances between democracy and socialism. Trying to unite them under one governing body (especially an economic one!) is just going to introduce the same problems that the U.S. is experiencing (ignoring the people's interests in favor of the interests of whoever has the most money, bureaucratic waste, gradual leeching of power away from individual countries to a self-serving centralized government, etc.)
In closing, I should mention that I'm a computer programmer and not a political activist. I'm also American so I'm probably largely ignorant about the EU situation.
All you have to do is disable the Wireless Configuration service to disable Windows' control of Wi-Fi NICs. You may also be able to accomplish it by unchecking the box that says something like "let Windows manage my wireless settings for this device".
One of my roommates uses a Netgear PCI card to connect to our WRT54g router, and we've gone back and forth between the Netgear config util and WinXP's wireless config. One nice thing about the Netgear one is that you can type in the WEP passphrase instead of the hex key.
This might be a lead:r eless-not-working-on-Windows-XP.html
http://www.techspot.com/vb/all/windows/t-18052-Wi
Apparently HP has a generic Broadcom wireless configuration utility.