Sony is not the only one that released BluRay movies.
I hate to say it again, but I doubt the poor video ratings for the BluRay titles has anything to do with the choice of codec. MPEG2 is mature and there is solid expertise in how to make it work well, and can easily deliver stunning video provided it is given its bandwidth, and a 25GB BRD should be fine.
The thing that most Slashdot posters don't understand or know, is that the BluRay player used in this test (a Samsung) has a defective video chip in it, harming the video quality. But hey, that's easy to ignore if you are going take it as another opportunity to bash Sony, even though the real problem this time is not Sony's fault.
Betamax really wasn't any better that a lot of people noticed.
BluRay has a longer potential life. The current crop of reviews and most of the Slashdot comments don't account for the fact that Samsung's BluRay player has a defective video chip that is unrelated to the format. I wouldn't blame MPEG2 for that because getting stunning MPEG2 isn't that hard, it does take more bandwidth to do the same, that's all. There is plenty of room on the disc to get high quality video, even with MPEG2.
x86 is and always was superior to PPC. Most knew it immediately. Apple took a little longer.
PPC is used in embedded systems because for a long time, I know specifically in avionics, because it did have a much better performance per watt. The advantage did not stay that way, though I think it does have development advantages.
Yeah, so you shield it, just like you'd shield a reactor. Next question?
There is no panacea and I doubt this is one. Any material to shield radioactivity will also become radioactive. Heck, even fusion isn't completely clean, I think one of the project goals of ITER is to find ways to manage the radioactivity of the components for when it is dismantled.
One other thing to keep in mind is that the Samsung model used in the comparison has a now-known defect in one of the video chips, it is a chip for processing high-definition, it's not a format-specific chip. I would regard the video comparisons are completely moot until that gets fixed.
In the end, I expect both formats to have equivalent picture quality for movies, save for player-specific issues or mistakes in the authoring.
Even the audio feature comparisons are moot as far as I'm concerned. Except for deliberate choices (leaving out an audio track) or mistakes in the authoring, I don't expect there to be a difference because both formats generally allow the disc producer to use the same sets of audio codecs.
The whole idea of A-B comparison is interesting, but because, as you state, they haven't isolated all the variables, it really isn't sufficient.
I don't see why a company shouldn't be held liable for the damage its tests causes to volunteers, I don't care if it was previously untested in humans or not. The corporation should have a good idea of the risks through prior modeling and tests, and taking responsibility for their own test subjects is the acceptable thing to do. I don't see paying as an admission of guilt, unless they knowingly tested a dangerous substance. Mistakes sometimes do happen, and tests and modeling don't show all the flaws.
If it develops into a standard, it would appear that maybe it will have a niche. It sounds like a nice idea that may be worth a shot for some uses. I can't help but wonder if the higher cost of iSCSI and FiberChannel is there for a necessary reason. The nice thing though is that even desktop systems are being made available with multiple network adapters, so one can be dedicated to this sort of storage.
Hibernate has been pretty reliable for me, but you can't use it on garbage, the hardware must be good, with good drivers. Sleep mode has always been reliable, I don't think there is any excuse to not use it.
I think it's too soon to expect something to change just because it's now the "21st Century". There are alternatives if you are serious enough about using them, but the reality is that you must resign yourself to the fact that it is the best tool for the job. If there was something else that was more economical, then it would probably be in dominant use. Frankly, hard drives work well enough, IMO, and have an unbeatable value in cost, number of re-writes and capacity. I really don't get many failures in the long run, only one case of hard drive death and that was more or less infant mortality. I do keep regular backups but that's because I value my data and don't want to tempt fate to a theft, corruption, mechanical or electrical failure.
You should also understand that many of the principles of how things work have been established long ago, generally what we have are refinements, usually an idea isn't abandoned just because it is old. I mean, how old is the wheel? Are you going to demand that something else take its place?
What I see, in continuing the mideast mess, is that the militants, and even some of the governments deny Israel's right to exist. Iran's president is spewing an odd juxtaposition of denying the Jewish holocaust but wants to perform the same deed himself, I wonder if he's really jealous of the Germans for doing what his extremists couldn't do.
I don't wholly agree with everything Israel has done, but what we've seen is the Hezbollah deliberately targetting civilians with over 2000 launched rockets, which isn't an act of terrorism but a deliberate act of war. If it was just run-of-the-mill terrorism, the number of rockets would be orders of magnitude smaller. The Hezbollah are using Lebanese civilians as a shield to protect their activities, requiring Israel to it civilian areas to stop the launchings. At least Israel is using far more precise bombs to target the appropriate buildings in question.
That's a pretty good point. All compiled software is given at least some basic information about the target CPU and tunes for that CPU. Also, because AMD and Intel start from the same basic instruction sets, the compiled software will generally work on both.
ATI and nVidia don't start with the same instruction sets so they need their own software to convert the high level graphics calls to their own chips.
I think there may be some selective memory going on here too, especially when comparing to movies of the past. I mean, Casablanca was just one of about fifty movies made by one studio that year. How many people go to the effort to watch any of those other fifty movies to see if they were any good? I'm not saying they were bad, but I personally haven't seen them. It's not a good idea to compare the best of the past against today's average.
I think what it really is is that the installer holds as many as several dozen drivers, and the installer gives the impression that it's just one set of driver files. Matrox has been doing this too, one installer holds the drivers for a good range of their products, if you look in the directories you'll see files for many different models.
Intel's driver installers are a lot like that too. It will detect what chips you have in your system and install the ones you need.
Apple does this with iPod, every updater has the latest version of the firmware for every major model, even if the firmware for most of the models hasn't been updated since the previous updater release.
So true. I support family computers, but not for free. If they don't like my rates, they are free to chose from any number of less competent services that will charge more. A computer is a privilege and not a right, and I have no motivation to waste my time.
I do have to wonder what this woman was doing because I've never needed to extract spyware from any of my family's computers. Granted, they don't play games, and thankfully don't download random crap.
One thing is that the strengths of OS X can't be fully appreciated without actually using it for a while. Sure, there are annoyances, but the amount of time needed to tune, tweak and futz with OS X is a LOT less than you would need to do with Windows XP. Currently, there isn't even a risk of running into registration errors like some see with Microsoft's WGA. There's no registry to go bad. Most programs don't even use installers, and uninstalling most programs is as easy as just deleting the application icon, because the application icon is actually a special folder that holds the entire program. If on the rare occasion you do need to reinstall OS X, you can do so without having to reinstall all of your programs and user accounts. It's also trivial to boot from an external drive, which unfortunately isn't so standard on Windows computers. I do this so I can boot from a backup drive should the main hard drive ever fail. And that's just the beginning.
You should also keep in mind that Apple has consistently had the top ratings for support in PC World and Consumer Reports surveys for the past several years. Every other maker is either much lower or their ratings are fading quickly. Sure, there are complaints and problems, but statistically, there are a lot fewer complainers of Apple's support than that of any other consumer computer company. The same goes for computer reliability.
Support costs money, so don't be surprised if Apple is more expensive.
Airport is only 802.11b. The standard Airport Extreme is 802.11b/g. Some recent Macs do support 802.11a, but that was never a standard part of Airport.
I doubt the productivity difference is 2%. That also assumes that a person spends all their time in Office. In my business, it's maybe an hour a day.
Frankly, the only time I notice OO.o is slow is when starting up. I really haven't used MS Office lately, but previous versions of Office were about the same speed.
It is possible to get good service, but it costs money and there is only so much cost cutting before there's no way to cut any more without ruining the quality of service.
Complaining about the quality or lack of service doesn't matter if no one is willing to pay for it. If you buy a product and are more concerned about the cost of the product than the quality of the service, then there's your problem. No one seems to realize that there can be hidden costs.
I'm not saying that this might cause problems in the long term, but the unemployment rate in the US is pretty low, at 4.6, a five year low point and it's not too far from the dot bomb/Enron era.
Slashdot Mirror
Sony is not the only one that released BluRay movies.
I hate to say it again, but I doubt the poor video ratings for the BluRay titles has anything to do with the choice of codec. MPEG2 is mature and there is solid expertise in how to make it work well, and can easily deliver stunning video provided it is given its bandwidth, and a 25GB BRD should be fine.
The thing that most Slashdot posters don't understand or know, is that the BluRay player used in this test (a Samsung) has a defective video chip in it, harming the video quality. But hey, that's easy to ignore if you are going take it as another opportunity to bash Sony, even though the real problem this time is not Sony's fault.
Betamax really wasn't any better that a lot of people noticed.
BluRay has a longer potential life. The current crop of reviews and most of the Slashdot comments don't account for the fact that Samsung's BluRay player has a defective video chip that is unrelated to the format. I wouldn't blame MPEG2 for that because getting stunning MPEG2 isn't that hard, it does take more bandwidth to do the same, that's all. There is plenty of room on the disc to get high quality video, even with MPEG2.
x86 is and always was superior to PPC. Most knew it immediately. Apple took a little longer.
PPC is used in embedded systems because for a long time, I know specifically in avionics, because it did have a much better performance per watt. The advantage did not stay that way, though I think it does have development advantages.
I think that would mean believing that the earth was somehow chryogenically frozen between the dinosaurs and now and many different times.
Yeah, so you shield it, just like you'd shield a reactor. Next question?
There is no panacea and I doubt this is one. Any material to shield radioactivity will also become radioactive. Heck, even fusion isn't completely clean, I think one of the project goals of ITER is to find ways to manage the radioactivity of the components for when it is dismantled.
One other thing to keep in mind is that the Samsung model used in the comparison has a now-known defect in one of the video chips, it is a chip for processing high-definition, it's not a format-specific chip. I would regard the video comparisons are completely moot until that gets fixed.
In the end, I expect both formats to have equivalent picture quality for movies, save for player-specific issues or mistakes in the authoring.
Even the audio feature comparisons are moot as far as I'm concerned. Except for deliberate choices (leaving out an audio track) or mistakes in the authoring, I don't expect there to be a difference because both formats generally allow the disc producer to use the same sets of audio codecs.
The whole idea of A-B comparison is interesting, but because, as you state, they haven't isolated all the variables, it really isn't sufficient.
I was never under any impression that E3 was anything other than an ad. I wasn't aware that anyone had expectations otherwise.
I don't see why a company shouldn't be held liable for the damage its tests causes to volunteers, I don't care if it was previously untested in humans or not. The corporation should have a good idea of the risks through prior modeling and tests, and taking responsibility for their own test subjects is the acceptable thing to do. I don't see paying as an admission of guilt, unless they knowingly tested a dangerous substance. Mistakes sometimes do happen, and tests and modeling don't show all the flaws.
If it develops into a standard, it would appear that maybe it will have a niche. It sounds like a nice idea that may be worth a shot for some uses. I can't help but wonder if the higher cost of iSCSI and FiberChannel is there for a necessary reason. The nice thing though is that even desktop systems are being made available with multiple network adapters, so one can be dedicated to this sort of storage.
I knew a family set up like that, my cousins. I think all the kids revolted in the end.
I think the stereotype is that fathers are irresponsible when present, assuming they are around at all and not just running off with a mistress.
Hibernate has been pretty reliable for me, but you can't use it on garbage, the hardware must be good, with good drivers. Sleep mode has always been reliable, I don't think there is any excuse to not use it.
it's really time for something new
I think it's too soon to expect something to change just because it's now the "21st Century". There are alternatives if you are serious enough about using them, but the reality is that you must resign yourself to the fact that it is the best tool for the job. If there was something else that was more economical, then it would probably be in dominant use. Frankly, hard drives work well enough, IMO, and have an unbeatable value in cost, number of re-writes and capacity. I really don't get many failures in the long run, only one case of hard drive death and that was more or less infant mortality. I do keep regular backups but that's because I value my data and don't want to tempt fate to a theft, corruption, mechanical or electrical failure.
You should also understand that many of the principles of how things work have been established long ago, generally what we have are refinements, usually an idea isn't abandoned just because it is old. I mean, how old is the wheel? Are you going to demand that something else take its place?
Definitely not the "first time", though maybe a first for Linux.
I think there is a video called "SmackBook" that demonstrates the use of the software you described. I thought it was posted on Slashdot.
What I see, in continuing the mideast mess, is that the militants, and even some of the governments deny Israel's right to exist. Iran's president is spewing an odd juxtaposition of denying the Jewish holocaust but wants to perform the same deed himself, I wonder if he's really jealous of the Germans for doing what his extremists couldn't do.
I don't wholly agree with everything Israel has done, but what we've seen is the Hezbollah deliberately targetting civilians with over 2000 launched rockets, which isn't an act of terrorism but a deliberate act of war. If it was just run-of-the-mill terrorism, the number of rockets would be orders of magnitude smaller. The Hezbollah are using Lebanese civilians as a shield to protect their activities, requiring Israel to it civilian areas to stop the launchings. At least Israel is using far more precise bombs to target the appropriate buildings in question.
Better question: What's eating Gilbert MDGrape-3?
That's a pretty good point. All compiled software is given at least some basic information about the target CPU and tunes for that CPU. Also, because AMD and Intel start from the same basic instruction sets, the compiled software will generally work on both.
ATI and nVidia don't start with the same instruction sets so they need their own software to convert the high level graphics calls to their own chips.
I think there may be some selective memory going on here too, especially when comparing to movies of the past. I mean, Casablanca was just one of about fifty movies made by one studio that year. How many people go to the effort to watch any of those other fifty movies to see if they were any good? I'm not saying they were bad, but I personally haven't seen them. It's not a good idea to compare the best of the past against today's average.
I think what it really is is that the installer holds as many as several dozen drivers, and the installer gives the impression that it's just one set of driver files. Matrox has been doing this too, one installer holds the drivers for a good range of their products, if you look in the directories you'll see files for many different models.
Intel's driver installers are a lot like that too. It will detect what chips you have in your system and install the ones you need.
Apple does this with iPod, every updater has the latest version of the firmware for every major model, even if the firmware for most of the models hasn't been updated since the previous updater release.
So true. I support family computers, but not for free. If they don't like my rates, they are free to chose from any number of less competent services that will charge more. A computer is a privilege and not a right, and I have no motivation to waste my time.
I do have to wonder what this woman was doing because I've never needed to extract spyware from any of my family's computers. Granted, they don't play games, and thankfully don't download random crap.
One thing is that the strengths of OS X can't be fully appreciated without actually using it for a while. Sure, there are annoyances, but the amount of time needed to tune, tweak and futz with OS X is a LOT less than you would need to do with Windows XP. Currently, there isn't even a risk of running into registration errors like some see with Microsoft's WGA. There's no registry to go bad. Most programs don't even use installers, and uninstalling most programs is as easy as just deleting the application icon, because the application icon is actually a special folder that holds the entire program. If on the rare occasion you do need to reinstall OS X, you can do so without having to reinstall all of your programs and user accounts. It's also trivial to boot from an external drive, which unfortunately isn't so standard on Windows computers. I do this so I can boot from a backup drive should the main hard drive ever fail. And that's just the beginning.
You should also keep in mind that Apple has consistently had the top ratings for support in PC World and Consumer Reports surveys for the past several years. Every other maker is either much lower or their ratings are fading quickly. Sure, there are complaints and problems, but statistically, there are a lot fewer complainers of Apple's support than that of any other consumer computer company. The same goes for computer reliability.
Support costs money, so don't be surprised if Apple is more expensive.
Airport is only 802.11b. The standard Airport Extreme is 802.11b/g. Some recent Macs do support 802.11a, but that was never a standard part of Airport.
I doubt the productivity difference is 2%. That also assumes that a person spends all their time in Office. In my business, it's maybe an hour a day.
Frankly, the only time I notice OO.o is slow is when starting up. I really haven't used MS Office lately, but previous versions of Office were about the same speed.
It is possible to get good service, but it costs money and there is only so much cost cutting before there's no way to cut any more without ruining the quality of service.
Complaining about the quality or lack of service doesn't matter if no one is willing to pay for it. If you buy a product and are more concerned about the cost of the product than the quality of the service, then there's your problem. No one seems to realize that there can be hidden costs.
I'm not saying that this might cause problems in the long term, but the unemployment rate in the US is pretty low, at 4.6, a five year low point and it's not too far from the dot bomb/Enron era.
http://www.bls.gov/eag/eag.us.htm
The impression that times are bad don't really ring true based on these numbers, they all seem to point to a pretty good employment situation.