I have a friend that is using EPIAs with PXE as well. Claims it works flawlessly for connecting to Windows servers with RDP as well. Cheap and effective.;)
It probably won't really do anything except make the pirates seek out an alternate serial number. Frankly, I wish they'd ban all pirated copies from downloading service packs... Then, more people would look for an alternative operating system. Microsoft is too smart for that though. They know that a lot of these people help sustain their platform (believe it or not) by making the userbase even larger.
I really can't tell what they are trying to prove by this. Maybe they are just experimenting with a limited number of people to see what the outcome will be.
They can pretend that they hate piracy of their products, but they hate OSS/Free software even more. Locking out non-payers would probably just hurt them more than help them, causing a lot of people to defect to Linux and Macs.
This is true, to some degree - but look at products like the QTopia desktop interface. I don't really see Trolltech hurting right now, and QTopia is a pretty good product (look at the Zaurus).
Outside of the PDA - Companies like Opera use QT (commercial) for making their browser products.
Open source (especially free software and dual-license) can really benefit the innovative companies that do it right. Right now, that completely goes against Microsoft's traditional model... It scares the hell out of companies like that, because they no longer have the same level of control.
The only real problem is that the VIA Envy 24 series chips don't do hardware mixing on Linux. VIA claims that the standard Envy 24 (not the HT model) does it, but it only works in Windows. Frankly, I think that they are possibly lying though. The EMU chips and the CS46xx (like those in the Santa Cruz) are probably some of the best choices for audio on Linux, even if they are considered to be "consumer-grade". There is no doubt in my mind that some of M-Audio's hardware has a better S/N ratio and THD than that of the Santa Cruz, but it's not substantial enough to warrant the shear lack of features that you'll get with using the Envy chips on Linux.
I've also noticed that Turtle Beach now makes a card called the "Catalina", which looks like standard Envy 24 HT-S fare. How disappointing. I've never been a Creative Labs fan, but they appear to make one of the only new chipsets anymore with halfway decent Linux support. Audigy 2 is technically inferior to the M-Audio Delta hardware (in terms of recording capabilities, like true 24/96 support), but it's superior in a sense that its hardware actually works very well. You can't say that for any of the Envy 24 lineup, especially the low-end Envy 24 HT models.
Man... I'm sorely disappointed at the state of PC Audio. It's actually *regressed* in the past few years. Companies think that it's enough to simply add a few extra speaker channels and tout 96 KHz SPDIF output, but it ISN'T enough. Look at this comparison:
http://turtlebeach.com/site/products/soundcards/ ca talina/comparisons.asp
Sure, the M-Audio Delta hardware is more advanced than Catalina (especially with the more sophisticated Envy 24 chip), but the fact that it has a million XLR jacks and 24/96KHz doesn't change the fact that the Envy DSPs are near-useless junk on Linux. Besides... Most home users are going to introduce more noise anyway, through their cheapo mics and mixing boards, than any of these soundcards produce, and then they're going to master CDs at 44 KHz. Anyone else that needs to do serious audio work, beyond what I mentioned, probably won't use Linux anyway.
I'll probably stick with my Santa Cruz until someone starts making decent DSPs (with balls) again. UNCreative is probably the only future option that even comes close.
It's not ATI's drivers as many people would suspect. I've seen it in almost every DRI-based card; Intel graphics chips, S3, ATI Rage 128, Radeons with the open and closed source drivers, etc.
I suspect that someone patched something and only really tested it on nVidia hardware with thier closed drivers - thus breaking it on almost *everything* else. It's pretty typical behavior in game development, but I'm surprised that it made it this far into X itself.
It's hard to tell though. I haven't seen a solution or a patch at all. I've searched a million google threads and I've found nothing; No explanations or anything, other than complaints from many people about these problems.
After I upgraded to an nVidia card, the problem went away, but I get a blue image when I open up my first video when utilizing the overlay. Afterwards, most video files open fine, but resizing and full screen acts a bit goofy at times; something I never experienced on my Radeon or any other cards.
That leads me to believe that there is just something whacked out in the overlay code in X.org 6.7.0 and XF86 4.4.
If you are up for a temporary fix at a marginal performance cost, add these two entries to your Mplayer config file in $HOME/mpayer/config
vo=x11 zoom=yes
That is, if you use Mplayer... I think that you can do something similar for Xine and Xinelib apps.
It is pretty disappointing about ATI's drivers. While they were reasonably stable for me, the performance was ridiculously slow. I got so fet-up with my Radeon 9500 PRO's performance that I sold it last week and got a GeForce FX 5900 XT. I could run UT2004 in 1024x758 with all of the details cranked, but large outdoor areas would get a bit sluggish. The biggest problem with the drivers is the poor OpenGL VBO support, which provides a noticable speed-boost in games that support it.
ATI would have done better by providing the DRI developers with more programming documentation, like they did with the R200 cores. The R200 cards are probably a better choice for Linux than any of the newer ATI products.
Personally, I think that they should hand development back to the DRI/Tungsten/etc. developers and then provide closed-source plugins for all of the wacko proprietary stuff that they can't share with the community without violating patent laws or whatever excuses they have. ATI would have fabulous hardware support with the community coding the drivers, and they could in-turn provide the extra OpenGL extensions (via some sort of plugin) with minimal effort on their part.
Well, I'll rephrase things a bit. XV does work, but only sometimes. For instance, if you have a web browser open with a bunch of tabs, it seems to affect XV for some unknown reason. Is your XV working all of the time? It seems to often break on large movies or if other programs are open (in my case). This happens on musltiple machines of mine, all with different video hardware.
I'm a bit surprised that it would work perfectly on your 9600. My 9500 PRO acted just as goofy as all of my other DRI/opensource hardware.
One thing that Pat noted is that the ATI drivers will not work with XF86 4.4. This is incorrect. It's a matter of forcing XF86 to pretend it is a 4.39 PRE release or something, however the driver is binary compatible with XF86 4.4.
The easiest solution is to go with X.org instead though.
I've been using X.org with Dropline Gnome and Slackware 9.1. The only problem that I've had is with the XV overlay support. It seems to have been broken with any card except for the non-DRI nVidia hardware. I hear that this has been a problem with XFee86 since before the X.org fork of the 4.4 PRE release.
Be prepared for a few XV overlay headaches if you don't use nVidia hardware. Other than that, it is fast and quite stable.
I must correct something though. I referred to SEGA as a Sammy company, and really it is the other way around.
Also, AtomisWave has less memory than Naomi, putting it more in-line with Dreamcast specs (16 MB instead of 32 MB). Regardless, they are practically the same. Naomi 2 had the benefit of added memory, dual PowerVR graphics processors, and the option of a hardware-based T&L unit.
That's because AtomisWave *is* Naomi. It's just Sammy's name for the hardware, before they became a SEGA company. In fact, Sammy decided that SEGA should start using AtomisWave/Naomi several months ago, probably because they had planned to move everything over to the next revision of their PowerVR Series-5-based hardware.
It's stuff that both Sammy and SEGA were very familiar with from a design standpoint. If I am not mistaken, several of Sammy's arcade games (like ARC/Sammy's Guilty Gear X), were Naomi-based.
As a Kyro II-owning Dreamcast fanatic, I'm happy to see this news. I read a press-release about a week ago, from PowerVR, discussing their 2004 roadmap. It detailed that PowerVR Series 5 technology would be used in the new SEGA/Sammy arcade hardware. This makes more sense now as Sammy previously chose to adopt AtomisWave as their preferred development platform for slot machines. AtomisWave is essentially Dreamcast/Naomi hardware with some slight changes. People thought that they were crazy at first, but it's an architecture that is easy to program and puts out a lot of good performance.
We are close to delivering our very high-end next generation graphics technology that targets arcade, PC and console. We have already licensed this technology to SEGA for use in arcade systems and intend to explore relevant partnerships for other markets. Also, our very important R&D programme, which brings our latest know-how from this area into the next generation of our scalable MBX family, is also at an advanced stage. We continue to strengthen our video offering for the growing digital flat panel TV market and develop relevant technologies for the emerging mobile TV markets. Additionally we are developing video encoding and compression technologies so that we are able to service our customers' needs and market trends in mobile video communication and camera segments in due course. These solutions build heavily on our existing know-how and combine technologies from PowerVR and Metagence divisions delivering efficient and flexible multi-standard platforms.
Though Series 5 seems to have been delayed a bit, I would not put it past PowerVR to release a very powerful architecture that can compete with even the likes of ATI and nVidia. If what this release says is true, we may likely see another PC adaptation of the hardware sometime this year. I loved my Hercules Kyro II board. Though it didn't have a hardware T&L unit, it was still up there with high-end GeForce 2 performance at a GeForce 2 MX's price. The Linux drivers, in my opinion, were pretty good as well (even if they were not perfect). I hope that I will eventually have the option of buying new PowerVR hardware for the PC.
FYI: For those that don't know, Series 2 was the hardware used in the Dreamcast and Naomi/AtomisWave machines, Series 3 was the Kyro series, Series 4 was never released, and Series 5 is the up-coming technology. I must admit that I'm a bit surprised that they mention that it's geared for game consoles as well. With all of the 3 major contenders opting for PPC+ATI variants, I can't see that anyone would be interested in Series 5 for consoles (even though I have faith in its capabilities)... Unless, perhaps, someone is planning another console release. Should we put it past SEGA to do such a thing after their short-lived support of the Dreamcast in US and Europe (even though it still lives on in Japan)?
Screw Alien Crush. Devil's Crush is probably the best of the Turbo pinball games. I've had the good fortune of getting for free from a friend of mine. It's fantastic game. I do like Alien Crush though, don't get me wrong. They are also much easier to come by.
The choice of Keith Courage as a standard pack-in game was totally stupid. You couldn't *give* those things away. I think that a choice of say; Neutopia , Shock Man, or Dungeon Explorer, or a pinball game, would have been a better choice.
Unimpressive? You've probably never seen the superior versions of "Dracula X" and "Street Fighter 2" that were released on the PC Engine in Japan. There was a 6 button controller called the "NEC Avenue 6 Pad" that even put the SNES controller to shame.
It was "16 bit" in that era. The graphics chip produced 16 bit color graphics. In fact, that was the original factor in the 16 vs 8 bit arguments. So, sure - the HU6280 was an 8 bit chip, but the graphics output was 16 bit (HU6270). The sprite display capabilities nearly rivaled the Genesis even though it was an older system. The HU6280, though 8 bit, was clocked at twice the speed (7.16 MHz) as the custom SNES 65C816 at 3.58 MHz. Even though the SNES had a color pallete of 32000 to draw from, it was still limited to using 512 color s on the screen, which is the same as the TurboGrafx and the Genesis.
Again... It really depends on which locality you are referring to. The PC Engine was incredibly successful in Japan, even into the SNES era. It's probably TTI's local mismanagement that prevented the TG16 to really take off in the USA.
You probably have never played any of the Japanese TurboGrafx (PC-Engine) games then. The library was fantastic. It's a shame that TTI and Hudson had such weird agreements and policies that prevented the truly excellent Japanese Turbo games from making it to the US. In fact, some games (like Street Fighter 2), were actually more arcade-perfect than the SNES-versions, aside from the color limitations of the TurboGrafx system.
I personally longed to own a TurboExpress portable for many years. When I was young, in the early-90s, a friend had one of the amazing portables. Nearly 10 years later I was able to pick one up from TZD (www.tzd.com) for a mere $150, brand new and in the box.
I also am lucky enough to have the CDROM attachment as well. It's pretty amazing hardware considering that it is about 15 years old now.
In Japan, the PC Engine was a very popular machine. I would even be willing to say that it was more successful than the NES and the SNES. The PCEFX successor was too little too late, and couldn't compete with other hardware that was being released about the same time (Playstation and Saturn).
Device drivers for what? Most UPC and credit card scanners still spit out to a serial port. What kind of peripherals are you referring to? I can't think of many reasons why there would be too many problems with POS peripherals, considering that many of them still even use DOS.
Well, I suppose that would make sense. I've just never seen a WMA file in anything other than 128 bit CBR. I've actually not used Windows in several years, so I don't really have much experience with the format.
It does, however, seem kinda supid that they would perform the test that way, but I guess they were just trying to go by each format's standard method of encoding.
Trust me. If I purchased a Karma, I'd be damn sure to buy a Best Buy replacement plan. Those Karmas have bad karma, and conk out pretty easily from the reviews I've read. They are really cool devices though, when they last.
I certainly cannot tell a difference between FLAC encodings and the original WAVS. The raw output looks identical if you examine the waveform.
1) It is a codec. You encode/decode from raw PCM/WAV to another format.
2) Sounds lossless to my ears. This is because it uses a compression format that is similar to ZIP/TAR.GZ/ETC., as you suggest. Nothing is cut out in the process. MP3 and other lossy formats make it a point to strip the highs and lows that the human ear cannot normally hear.
3) An average of 40-50% savings on a fully compressed FLAC file are very much worth it, in my opinion. Most people these days have many (hundreds?) of gigs of storage space. As I noted above, 200 (or more) full albums in FLAC format should fit on an 80 GB drive. I can normally fit at least two whole FLAC albums on a single 700 MB CDR for archival and backups. It's really hard to tell though. Certain types of music, like classical, compress better in FLAC format than noisy rock n' roll. You never really know what you are going to get, but on average - it is about 50%-60% of the original size for most of my music collection.
An 80 GB drive should hold nearly 200 (or more) FLAC encoded CDs. That's CDs, not tracks. This is assuming that the CD is nearly full, and the FLAC compression averages out at its usual 60% of the original.
Lossless is a more viable solution as we get larger hard drives and faster Internet connections.
I guess that if you are like many people and you have a ridiculous collection of pirated songs though, FLAC may not be a good solution.
Vorbis is not a CBR codec like WMA. It's almost impossible to get it directly on the nose. The encoder doesn't easily allow that kind of control without seriously damaging the quality of the finished file. I'm not sure that the 14% difference really matters as much as you insist.
To be fair though, WMA does perform reasonably well for a CBR format. However, that's not what the test is about. It's about getting the best sound out of a similar amount of space.
I don't doubt that Vorbis would still beat WMA if the bitrates were 100% even, to be honest with you. It's just not that simple to get it directly on the nose. It would have been interesting to see the results of Vorbis on a quality level that is a notch lower, so that we could see how much variance there is between each level.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a friend that is using EPIAs with PXE as well. Claims it works flawlessly for connecting to Windows servers with RDP as well. Cheap and effective. ;)
X.org *is* pulled right from an XF86 4.4 release candidate. It even has the same bugs that XF86 4.4 has (like the broken XV overlay code).
pracy^H^H^H^H^Hpiracy
Please mod these down. They are links that support pracy.
It probably won't really do anything except make the pirates seek out an alternate serial number. Frankly, I wish they'd ban all pirated copies from downloading service packs... Then, more people would look for an alternative operating system. Microsoft is too smart for that though. They know that a lot of these people help sustain their platform (believe it or not) by making the userbase even larger.
I really can't tell what they are trying to prove by this. Maybe they are just experimenting with a limited number of people to see what the outcome will be.
They can pretend that they hate piracy of their products, but they hate OSS/Free software even more. Locking out non-payers would probably just hurt them more than help them, causing a lot of people to defect to Linux and Macs.
This is true, to some degree - but look at products like the QTopia desktop interface. I don't really see Trolltech hurting right now, and QTopia is a pretty good product (look at the Zaurus).
Outside of the PDA - Companies like Opera use QT (commercial) for making their browser products.
Open source (especially free software and dual-license) can really benefit the innovative companies that do it right. Right now, that completely goes against Microsoft's traditional model... It scares the hell out of companies like that, because they no longer have the same level of control.
The only real problem is that the VIA Envy 24 series chips don't do hardware mixing on Linux. VIA claims that the standard Envy 24 (not the HT model) does it, but it only works in Windows. Frankly, I think that they are possibly lying though. The EMU chips and the CS46xx (like those in the Santa Cruz) are probably some of the best choices for audio on Linux, even if they are considered to be "consumer-grade". There is no doubt in my mind that some of M-Audio's hardware has a better S/N ratio and THD than that of the Santa Cruz, but it's not substantial enough to warrant the shear lack of features that you'll get with using the Envy chips on Linux.
/ ca talina/comparisons.asp
I've also noticed that Turtle Beach now makes a card called the "Catalina", which looks like standard Envy 24 HT-S fare. How disappointing. I've never been a Creative Labs fan, but they appear to make one of the only new chipsets anymore with halfway decent Linux support. Audigy 2 is technically inferior to the M-Audio Delta hardware (in terms of recording capabilities, like true 24/96 support), but it's superior in a sense that its hardware actually works very well. You can't say that for any of the Envy 24 lineup, especially the low-end Envy 24 HT models.
Man... I'm sorely disappointed at the state of PC Audio. It's actually *regressed* in the past few years. Companies think that it's enough to simply add a few extra speaker channels and tout 96 KHz SPDIF output, but it ISN'T enough. Look at this comparison:
http://turtlebeach.com/site/products/soundcards
Sure, the M-Audio Delta hardware is more advanced than Catalina (especially with the more sophisticated Envy 24 chip), but the fact that it has a million XLR jacks and 24/96KHz doesn't change the fact that the Envy DSPs are near-useless junk on Linux. Besides... Most home users are going to introduce more noise anyway, through their cheapo mics and mixing boards, than any of these soundcards produce, and then they're going to master CDs at 44 KHz. Anyone else that needs to do serious audio work, beyond what I mentioned, probably won't use Linux anyway.
I'll probably stick with my Santa Cruz until someone starts making decent DSPs (with balls) again. UNCreative is probably the only future option that even comes close.
It's not ATI's drivers as many people would suspect. I've seen it in almost every DRI-based card; Intel graphics chips, S3, ATI Rage 128, Radeons with the open and closed source drivers, etc.
I suspect that someone patched something and only really tested it on nVidia hardware with thier closed drivers - thus breaking it on almost *everything* else. It's pretty typical behavior in game development, but I'm surprised that it made it this far into X itself.
It's hard to tell though. I haven't seen a solution or a patch at all. I've searched a million google threads and I've found nothing; No explanations or anything, other than complaints from many people about these problems.
After I upgraded to an nVidia card, the problem went away, but I get a blue image when I open up my first video when utilizing the overlay. Afterwards, most video files open fine, but resizing and full screen acts a bit goofy at times; something I never experienced on my Radeon or any other cards.
That leads me to believe that there is just something whacked out in the overlay code in X.org 6.7.0 and XF86 4.4.
If you are up for a temporary fix at a marginal performance cost, add these two entries to your Mplayer config file in $HOME/mpayer/config
vo=x11
zoom=yes
That is, if you use Mplayer... I think that you can do something similar for Xine and Xinelib apps.
It is pretty disappointing about ATI's drivers. While they were reasonably stable for me, the performance was ridiculously slow. I got so fet-up with my Radeon 9500 PRO's performance that I sold it last week and got a GeForce FX 5900 XT. I could run UT2004 in 1024x758 with all of the details cranked, but large outdoor areas would get a bit sluggish. The biggest problem with the drivers is the poor OpenGL VBO support, which provides a noticable speed-boost in games that support it.
ATI would have done better by providing the DRI developers with more programming documentation, like they did with the R200 cores. The R200 cards are probably a better choice for Linux than any of the newer ATI products.
Personally, I think that they should hand development back to the DRI/Tungsten/etc. developers and then provide closed-source plugins for all of the wacko proprietary stuff that they can't share with the community without violating patent laws or whatever excuses they have. ATI would have fabulous hardware support with the community coding the drivers, and they could in-turn provide the extra OpenGL extensions (via some sort of plugin) with minimal effort on their part.
Well, I'll rephrase things a bit. XV does work, but only sometimes. For instance, if you have a web browser open with a bunch of tabs, it seems to affect XV for some unknown reason. Is your XV working all of the time? It seems to often break on large movies or if other programs are open (in my case). This happens on musltiple machines of mine, all with different video hardware.
I'm a bit surprised that it would work perfectly on your 9600. My 9500 PRO acted just as goofy as all of my other DRI/opensource hardware.
One thing that Pat noted is that the ATI drivers will not work with XF86 4.4. This is incorrect. It's a matter of forcing XF86 to pretend it is a 4.39 PRE release or something, however the driver is binary compatible with XF86 4.4.
The easiest solution is to go with X.org instead though.
I've been using X.org with Dropline Gnome and Slackware 9.1. The only problem that I've had is with the XV overlay support. It seems to have been broken with any card except for the non-DRI nVidia hardware. I hear that this has been a problem with XFee86 since before the X.org fork of the 4.4 PRE release.
Be prepared for a few XV overlay headaches if you don't use nVidia hardware. Other than that, it is fast and quite stable.
I must correct something though. I referred to SEGA as a Sammy company, and really it is the other way around.
Also, AtomisWave has less memory than Naomi, putting it more in-line with Dreamcast specs (16 MB instead of 32 MB). Regardless, they are practically the same. Naomi 2 had the benefit of added memory, dual PowerVR graphics processors, and the option of a hardware-based T&L unit.
That's because AtomisWave *is* Naomi. It's just Sammy's name for the hardware, before they became a SEGA company. In fact, Sammy decided that SEGA should start using AtomisWave/Naomi several months ago, probably because they had planned to move everything over to the next revision of their PowerVR Series-5-based hardware.
It's stuff that both Sammy and SEGA were very familiar with from a design standpoint. If I am not mistaken, several of Sammy's arcade games (like ARC/Sammy's Guilty Gear X), were Naomi-based.
http://www.imgtec.com/News/Release/index.asp?ID
http://www.imgtec.com/Investors/HTMLResults/Pr
In particular, this is interesting:
Though Series 5 seems to have been delayed a bit, I would not put it past PowerVR to release a very powerful architecture that can compete with even the likes of ATI and nVidia. If what this release says is true, we may likely see another PC adaptation of the hardware sometime this year. I loved my Hercules Kyro II board. Though it didn't have a hardware T&L unit, it was still up there with high-end GeForce 2 performance at a GeForce 2 MX's price. The Linux drivers, in my opinion, were pretty good as well (even if they were not perfect). I hope that I will eventually have the option of buying new PowerVR hardware for the PC.
FYI: For those that don't know, Series 2 was the hardware used in the Dreamcast and Naomi/AtomisWave machines, Series 3 was the Kyro series, Series 4 was never released, and Series 5 is the up-coming technology. I must admit that I'm a bit surprised that they mention that it's geared for game consoles as well. With all of the 3 major contenders opting for PPC+ATI variants, I can't see that anyone would be interested in Series 5 for consoles (even though I have faith in its capabilities)... Unless, perhaps, someone is planning another console release. Should we put it past SEGA to do such a thing after their short-lived support of the Dreamcast in US and Europe (even though it still lives on in Japan)?
Screw Alien Crush. Devil's Crush is probably the best of the Turbo pinball games. I've had the good fortune of getting for free from a friend of mine. It's fantastic game. I do like Alien Crush though, don't get me wrong. They are also much easier to come by.
The choice of Keith Courage as a standard pack-in game was totally stupid. You couldn't *give* those things away. I think that a choice of say; Neutopia , Shock Man, or Dungeon Explorer, or a pinball game, would have been a better choice.
Unimpressive? You've probably never seen the superior versions of "Dracula X" and "Street Fighter 2" that were released on the PC Engine in Japan. There was a 6 button controller called the "NEC Avenue 6 Pad" that even put the SNES controller to shame.
It was "16 bit" in that era. The graphics chip produced 16 bit color graphics. In fact, that was the original factor in the 16 vs 8 bit arguments. So, sure - the HU6280 was an 8 bit chip, but the graphics output was 16 bit (HU6270). The sprite display capabilities nearly rivaled the Genesis even though it was an older system. The HU6280, though 8 bit, was clocked at twice the speed (7.16 MHz) as the custom SNES 65C816 at 3.58 MHz. Even though the SNES had a color pallete of 32000 to draw from, it was still limited to using 512 color s on the screen, which is the same as the TurboGrafx and the Genesis.
Again... It really depends on which locality you are referring to. The PC Engine was incredibly successful in Japan, even into the SNES era. It's probably TTI's local mismanagement that prevented the TG16 to really take off in the USA.
You probably have never played any of the Japanese TurboGrafx (PC-Engine) games then. The library was fantastic. It's a shame that TTI and Hudson had such weird agreements and policies that prevented the truly excellent Japanese Turbo games from making it to the US. In fact, some games (like Street Fighter 2), were actually more arcade-perfect than the SNES-versions, aside from the color limitations of the TurboGrafx system.
I personally longed to own a TurboExpress portable for many years. When I was young, in the early-90s, a friend had one of the amazing portables. Nearly 10 years later I was able to pick one up from TZD (www.tzd.com) for a mere $150, brand new and in the box.
I also am lucky enough to have the CDROM attachment as well. It's pretty amazing hardware considering that it is about 15 years old now.
In Japan, the PC Engine was a very popular machine. I would even be willing to say that it was more successful than the NES and the SNES. The PCEFX successor was too little too late, and couldn't compete with other hardware that was being released about the same time (Playstation and Saturn).
Device drivers for what? Most UPC and credit card scanners still spit out to a serial port. What kind of peripherals are you referring to? I can't think of many reasons why there would be too many problems with POS peripherals, considering that many of them still even use DOS.
Well, I suppose that would make sense. I've just never seen a WMA file in anything other than 128 bit CBR. I've actually not used Windows in several years, so I don't really have much experience with the format.
It does, however, seem kinda supid that they would perform the test that way, but I guess they were just trying to go by each format's standard method of encoding.
Trust me. If I purchased a Karma, I'd be damn sure to buy a Best Buy replacement plan. Those Karmas have bad karma, and conk out pretty easily from the reviews I've read. They are really cool devices though, when they last.
I certainly cannot tell a difference between FLAC encodings and the original WAVS. The raw output looks identical if you examine the waveform.
1) It is a codec. You encode/decode from raw PCM/WAV to another format.
2) Sounds lossless to my ears. This is because it uses a compression format that is similar to ZIP/TAR.GZ/ETC., as you suggest. Nothing is cut out in the process. MP3 and other lossy formats make it a point to strip the highs and lows that the human ear cannot normally hear.
3) An average of 40-50% savings on a fully compressed FLAC file are very much worth it, in my opinion. Most people these days have many (hundreds?) of gigs of storage space. As I noted above, 200 (or more) full albums in FLAC format should fit on an 80 GB drive. I can normally fit at least two whole FLAC albums on a single 700 MB CDR for archival and backups. It's really hard to tell though. Certain types of music, like classical, compress better in FLAC format than noisy rock n' roll. You never really know what you are going to get, but on average - it is about 50%-60% of the original size for most of my music collection.
An 80 GB drive should hold nearly 200 (or more) FLAC encoded CDs. That's CDs, not tracks. This is assuming that the CD is nearly full, and the FLAC compression averages out at its usual 60% of the original.
Lossless is a more viable solution as we get larger hard drives and faster Internet connections.
I guess that if you are like many people and you have a ridiculous collection of pirated songs though, FLAC may not be a good solution.
128 / 149 = 86%
Vorbis is not a CBR codec like WMA. It's almost impossible to get it directly on the nose. The encoder doesn't easily allow that kind of control without seriously damaging the quality of the finished file. I'm not sure that the 14% difference really matters as much as you insist.
To be fair though, WMA does perform reasonably well for a CBR format. However, that's not what the test is about. It's about getting the best sound out of a similar amount of space.
I don't doubt that Vorbis would still beat WMA if the bitrates were 100% even, to be honest with you. It's just not that simple to get it directly on the nose. It would have been interesting to see the results of Vorbis on a quality level that is a notch lower, so that we could see how much variance there is between each level.