How is this different from other sweeping, absolutist statements that claim, for example, all politicians are corrupt, all police are sadistic brutes, or all (ethnic group) are (place favorite slur here)? All "big corporations" have already been proven to do the exact same thing that microsoft is accused of today. Hence, it is different from all the other allegations because it is a fact.
Second, there is the implication that since 'any company' supposedly will blackmail, then it's somehow less despicable for Microsoft to do so I am sorry if that is what came out of my post. Microsoft is doing very despicable things. What I am tired of is that people are saying: "See? M$ it teh evil. Bill MUST DIE!". That I am tired of, because anyone in his position (and able to get there) would do the same (again, this have been proven to be true, not just a blank statement)
He has the power to govern Microsoft's behavior, and therefore has responsibility for it. One thing you seem to be missing here: Without his alledged despicable behavior, Microsoft would be nowhere near the position it's in today. So should Microsoft be thankfull for that or in shame? Maybe a bit of both.
If at least you would have read the article, you would have seen that Microsoft is not the only one company in the entire universe to do this. So no, is does not show how low Microsoft can go, it just shows how low any company can go.
Decoding an mp3 file is not a heavy task, even a 486 CPU would manage that While I agree with the first part (mp3 is not a heavy task), I just disagree with the second one. I clearly remember running Winamp on a 486-DX2 66 and having to uncheck "Stereo" and "16 bit" to have it run real time.
486 was VERY slow compared to whatever we have today.
First, let's compare my assertion and your answer: Me: For a very specific search, where google would return a handful of results, Yahoo and MSN always display much more res, and they are relevant. You: If I search for Linux I get 225M vs 98M.
How much more offtopic can you be? 225 millions is certainly far from a handful. You should also know that what made google what it is today is its ability to rank these pages in order of relevance/importance, not the fact that there were more. See, I don't give a rat's ass if Google has 225M pages with Linux in it and MSN "only" 98M. It is all utterly useless if they are not able to deliver them in the proper order. only the first few dozens are really important. And I am not even pointing out the fact that what google displays is an approximation of the total number of hits. And sure enough, when you dig, the actual number is far less than the approximated one. Of course that is quite difficult to dig with 225M results.
Let's try then: Just search for "Linux windows mac bidule chouette" which is a string I just pulled out of my ass 10 seconds ago. Google will tell you that there is 130 results matching. Try to go page 10 of the results, and then you will see that "only" 44 results actually match that String. That is a ration of approximately 33%. So if we try to extrapolate to your results and assume that this ratio is a constant (which is obviously false), we would find that "only" about 75M results actually exists in Google's database for the word "Linux". Versus MSN with 98M, I'd say MSN wins that round. Note that with that fairly stupid sentence, MSN is even more wrong that google (while retrieving the exact same number of results). This is just pointing at that your numbers are "estimates" and therefore cannot be taken seriously to compare anything.
The sentence I looked for last week was "doodles grimaud" because I was looking for a friend that writes doodles on the internet and his name is Grimaud. Google didn't find him (and found only 9 results) MSN found him as well as 14 others, and sure enough both words were in the webpage. Hence "more relevant results", not just "more results".
Note that Yahoo, while retrieving only 7 results also found my friend. It's the "Pierre's Doodles: Un Mec Pas Vraiment Bizarre" result, FYI. Not really a proof of anything...
But we can still go further. I'll type the sentence "corentin anaïs Aurore Anne Laure pierre" which are the names of the guy's children and wife (and his). Google will display that approx 1140 results were found, but you quickly discover that "only" 258 are actually there. Ratio is even worse here: Only 22% of the advertised results are there. The guy's homepage is on the 16th page!! You would expect better from a page that has a few hundred words containing all searched terms, specially when the first hit is a list of 185k of first names... relevance of that? very low. MSN displayed that it has 1588 results when it has actually 218. Again wrong, and this time even less results and wronger estimate than google. Ouch! But the guy's homepage is on the first page. Yahoo advertise only 161 results and thay have 111. Best estimate. And the guy's homepage is the first hit! And it's well deserved: It's the only page that I looked at that is not a huge list of first names!!! It is actually talking about 5 people whose first names I typed in!! How more accurate can it be? (Or inaccurate in Google's case)
So all in all, this is all a big illusion. Because I had to dig down to the 16th page in google's case, I noticed the estimate being dead wrong. Yahoo and MSN displayed my requested page in the first page, so I didn't notice. Yahoo's index is *much* smaller than both others. MSN's is quite close to the Google's one, but so much more accurate on a search.
It just shows that estimates cannot be trusted for anything else than a vague order of magnitude.
It also shows that both Yahoo and MSN has a greater relevance on my specific tests.
While this might very well be true, I find that MSN Search (as well as MSN search) have much more pages indexed than Google. For a very specific search, where google would return a handful of results, Yahoo and MSN always display much more res, and they are relevant.
If this is so, I will probably give it a shot. Some very annoying website still requires IE and being able to integrate it in my Firefox would be pretty cool. Maybe this Netscape thingy is a good compromise...
Not counting that my wife and myself use the same PC at home and if I could have two hotmail sessions opened at the same time (one in IE, one in Gecko), it would be pretty cool too.
The hardware you use to listen is composed of two pieces of equipment: Your speakers and your ears.
See this other post, and before you start asking, I encoded with lame, with the r3imx archive CBR profile (at least for the 256kbps track). And this is the second time I do this kind of test with two different people. So there is obviously a difference for him between 256kbps and uncompressed.
And remember that if average joe cannot tell the difference with his $200 speakers, he will be disappointed when he'll buy (in 20 years) some nice audio setup and realizes he can throw away all of his MP3s.
Well, it all depends on the hardware you are using to listen to your music. MP3 degrades the sound in two different ways: 1. Artifacts. That is the easiest way to recognise an MP3. Because you can hear them!!! 2. Frequency decay. This is tricky and you need a lot of attention to hear it. Some frequencies are cut off, that is the whole concept of MP3 compression. Some of them would be audible or perceptible.
all in all, I'm backing up all my CDs in MP3, 320kbps. I used to do it at 256kbps, but I did a few month ago a double blind test with a friend of mine: I brought a CD with 4 audio tracks, all the same, "Dogs" from the album Animals (Pink Floyd).
The purpose of the game was for him to reorder all 4 tracks in order of quality: 160kbps, 192kbps, 256kbps and the original wave track, as extracted. He didn't know the order of the tracks on the CD.
He plugged the CD in his CD player, and sat with me on the couch. After listening for the first 20 seconds of the 4 tracks, he told me: 160, 256, original, 192. And he was right.
From that day, I back up all my CDs in 320kbps. Probably a mistake. I should back up the WAV files directly.
I am a bit skeptical about the article though. Do we have real numbers to back up the "AMD has declared dominance in the gaming and server microprocessor market in 2004"? Last time I checked, it was only for one week and intel still had 82.7% market share...
Ahhh, here we go. Because you said "what you want is...", but now you say "I stand by my opinion"
Everyone is entitled to its own opinion. However, if you push it on everyone else, it becomes their problem as well. I can see plenty of scenarios where one might need a longer distance. And remember this is a theoretical "perfect condition" distance. If you have curtains, a wall or anything in between you and the receptor, this number starts do decrease a bit and 30 feet might fall short on more than one situation.
You said: "what you want is a small wireless/bluetooth control with just forward/back buttons and built-in laser pointer. anyone know of something like this?"
This question is answered in the article, in that there are no bluetooth remote control or mouse that works for that range, hence an added value intrinsic to this product.
This is not the media center one. Replied from the tech support (again) when asked that very question:
"If you have seen a similar product in the UK or EU, it's our GyroRemote for presentation's but can be used as Mouse Ctrl for Media Center use."
It can be used for MCE probably through keyboard emulation as are almost 100% of the remotes you can find with any tuner card (hauppauge, etc...). Some key features do not work with such remotes however such as power on/off.
Oh well, I just bought a MS remote. That one ought to be compatible...
While I like the remote and keyboard a lot, there are two major issues for me to be the ultimate wireless combo for my media center:
1. They don't release it in Europe and don't plan to. RF norms are different over here... 2. There are no numbers, which means no keypad onto the remote. Painful if you want to switch from channel 1 to channel 74...
But otherwise, I've seen these at work and they are awsome. You can use the remote/mouse either as a regular optical mouse, or you can press a bice button and you can use it by just moving it in the air. After a 2 min practice, it's very usable.
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Well, the article talks about Philips and Microsoft, and yet everyone is shouting: "Look: M$ is the Evil in person!!!"
How is that not hypocritical?
How is this different from other sweeping, absolutist statements that claim, for example, all politicians are corrupt, all police are sadistic brutes, or all (ethnic group) are (place favorite slur here)?
All "big corporations" have already been proven to do the exact same thing that microsoft is accused of today. Hence, it is different from all the other allegations because it is a fact.
Second, there is the implication that since 'any company' supposedly will blackmail, then it's somehow less despicable for Microsoft to do so
I am sorry if that is what came out of my post. Microsoft is doing very despicable things. What I am tired of is that people are saying: "See? M$ it teh evil. Bill MUST DIE!". That I am tired of, because anyone in his position (and able to get there) would do the same (again, this have been proven to be true, not just a blank statement)
He has the power to govern Microsoft's behavior, and therefore has responsibility for it.
One thing you seem to be missing here: Without his alledged despicable behavior, Microsoft would be nowhere near the position it's in today. So should Microsoft be thankfull for that or in shame? Maybe a bit of both.
Are you fully aware that there are several hands in this cookie jar? As of today? And are you aware that I suggested you read TFA? Did you?
If at least you would have read the article, you would have seen that Microsoft is not the only one company in the entire universe to do this. So no, is does not show how low Microsoft can go, it just shows how low any company can go.
Stop putting all evil on Bill's shoulders.
Well, people mix everything nowadays. He is not forced to stay at Google, and Google is not forced to keep him. That's the way it is.
Now if any of both parties does something the other one dislike, they are at risk of seeing their contract broken. Again, that's the way it is.
Big deal.
Decoding an mp3 file is not a heavy task, even a 486 CPU would manage that
While I agree with the first part (mp3 is not a heavy task), I just disagree with the second one. I clearly remember running Winamp on a 486-DX2 66 and having to uncheck "Stereo" and "16 bit" to have it run real time.
486 was VERY slow compared to whatever we have today.
Ooops, my bad. I don't know what I'm smoking these days...
Anyways, anyone has numbers on word processor market share? How big is MSOffice (apart from "very big") vs OpenOffice?
Nope. Running on a marginal OS doesn't make a product a serious competitor to anyone, but marginal software.
Don't take marginal in the bad sense. Just means low market penetration. That's all.
Hey, I just couldn't resist this one:
"Goog: Results 1 - 10 of about 14,600 for windows 98 Registry ACLs
MSN: 1-10 of 10,724 containing windows 98 Registry ACLs"
Google: 621 results (just try to go to the last page)
Clearly these numbers are pathetically meaningless.
Wow! You are susceptible, aren't you?
First, let's compare my assertion and your answer:
Me: For a very specific search, where google would return a handful of results, Yahoo and MSN always display much more res, and they are relevant.
You: If I search for Linux I get 225M vs 98M.
How much more offtopic can you be? 225 millions is certainly far from a handful. You should also know that what made google what it is today is its ability to rank these pages in order of relevance/importance, not the fact that there were more.
See, I don't give a rat's ass if Google has 225M pages with Linux in it and MSN "only" 98M. It is all utterly useless if they are not able to deliver them in the proper order. only the first few dozens are really important.
And I am not even pointing out the fact that what google displays is an approximation of the total number of hits. And sure enough, when you dig, the actual number is far less than the approximated one. Of course that is quite difficult to dig with 225M results.
Let's try then:
Just search for "Linux windows mac bidule chouette" which is a string I just pulled out of my ass 10 seconds ago. Google will tell you that there is 130 results matching. Try to go page 10 of the results, and then you will see that "only" 44 results actually match that String. That is a ration of approximately 33%. So if we try to extrapolate to your results and assume that this ratio is a constant (which is obviously false), we would find that "only" about 75M results actually exists in Google's database for the word "Linux". Versus MSN with 98M, I'd say MSN wins that round.
Note that with that fairly stupid sentence, MSN is even more wrong that google (while retrieving the exact same number of results). This is just pointing at that your numbers are "estimates" and therefore cannot be taken seriously to compare anything.
The sentence I looked for last week was "doodles grimaud" because I was looking for a friend that writes doodles on the internet and his name is Grimaud. Google didn't find him (and found only 9 results) MSN found him as well as 14 others, and sure enough both words were in the webpage. Hence "more relevant results", not just "more results".
Note that Yahoo, while retrieving only 7 results also found my friend. It's the "Pierre's Doodles: Un Mec Pas Vraiment Bizarre" result, FYI. Not really a proof of anything...
But we can still go further. I'll type the sentence "corentin anaïs Aurore Anne Laure pierre" which are the names of the guy's children and wife (and his). Google will display that approx 1140 results were found, but you quickly discover that "only" 258 are actually there. Ratio is even worse here: Only 22% of the advertised results are there. The guy's homepage is on the 16th page!! You would expect better from a page that has a few hundred words containing all searched terms, specially when the first hit is a list of 185k of first names... relevance of that? very low. MSN displayed that it has 1588 results when it has actually 218. Again wrong, and this time even less results and wronger estimate than google. Ouch! But the guy's homepage is on the first page. Yahoo advertise only 161 results and thay have 111. Best estimate. And the guy's homepage is the first hit! And it's well deserved: It's the only page that I looked at that is not a huge list of first names!!! It is actually talking about 5 people whose first names I typed in!! How more accurate can it be? (Or inaccurate in Google's case)
So all in all, this is all a big illusion. Because I had to dig down to the 16th page in google's case, I noticed the estimate being dead wrong. Yahoo and MSN displayed my requested page in the first page, so I didn't notice. Yahoo's index is *much* smaller than both others. MSN's is quite close to the Google's one, but so much more accurate on a search.
It just shows that estimates cannot be trusted for anything else than a vague order of magnitude.
It also shows that both Yahoo and MSN has a greater relevance on my specific tests.
While this might very well be true, I find that MSN Search (as well as MSN search) have much more pages indexed than Google. For a very specific search, where google would return a handful of results, Yahoo and MSN always display much more res, and they are relevant.
What's going on at google?
If this is so, I will probably give it a shot. Some very annoying website still requires IE and being able to integrate it in my Firefox would be pretty cool. Maybe this Netscape thingy is a good compromise...
Not counting that my wife and myself use the same PC at home and if I could have two hotmail sessions opened at the same time (one in IE, one in Gecko), it would be pretty cool too.
Hmmm, almost:
Netscape, Mozilla and Firefox are all three based on Gecko.
Additionally, Mozilla, Firefox and Gecko are all three products of the Mozilla foundation.
The hardware you use to listen is composed of two pieces of equipment: Your speakers and your ears.
See this other post, and before you start asking, I encoded with lame, with the r3imx archive CBR profile (at least for the 256kbps track). And this is the second time I do this kind of test with two different people. So there is obviously a difference for him between 256kbps and uncompressed.
And remember that if average joe cannot tell the difference with his $200 speakers, he will be disappointed when he'll buy (in 20 years) some nice audio setup and realizes he can throw away all of his MP3s.
Well, it all depends on the hardware you are using to listen to your music. MP3 degrades the sound in two different ways:
1. Artifacts. That is the easiest way to recognise an MP3. Because you can hear them!!!
2. Frequency decay. This is tricky and you need a lot of attention to hear it. Some frequencies are cut off, that is the whole concept of MP3 compression. Some of them would be audible or perceptible.
all in all, I'm backing up all my CDs in MP3, 320kbps. I used to do it at 256kbps, but I did a few month ago a double blind test with a friend of mine: I brought a CD with 4 audio tracks, all the same, "Dogs" from the album Animals (Pink Floyd).
The purpose of the game was for him to reorder all 4 tracks in order of quality: 160kbps, 192kbps, 256kbps and the original wave track, as extracted. He didn't know the order of the tracks on the CD.
He plugged the CD in his CD player, and sat with me on the couch. After listening for the first 20 seconds of the 4 tracks, he told me: 160, 256, original, 192. And he was right.
From that day, I back up all my CDs in 320kbps. Probably a mistake. I should back up the WAV files directly.
Thanks you for explaining in great details why PNG has trouble for taking off and is eventually doomed.
If you need a PhD and a full research before being able to encode a PNG, the format is effectively dead.
I am a bit skeptical about the article though. Do we have real numbers to back up the "AMD has declared dominance in the gaming and server microprocessor market in 2004"? Last time I checked, it was only for one week and intel still had 82.7% market share...
Anyone has a source?
Ahhh, here we go. Because you said "what you want is ...", but now you say "I stand by my opinion"
Everyone is entitled to its own opinion. However, if you push it on everyone else, it becomes their problem as well. I can see plenty of scenarios where one might need a longer distance. And remember this is a theoretical "perfect condition" distance. If you have curtains, a wall or anything in between you and the receptor, this number starts do decrease a bit and 30 feet might fall short on more than one situation.
Anyways, thanks for your insight.
You said: "what you want is a small wireless/bluetooth control with just forward/back buttons and built-in laser pointer. anyone know of something like this?"
This question is answered in the article, in that there are no bluetooth remote control or mouse that works for that range, hence an added value intrinsic to this product.
but only in QWERTY layout, which makes it effectively useless for all Europe but the UK. Nice try though.
As every class I bluetooth device. Nothing special about it.
And there you go, a well deserved "RTFA". Now, the obligatory exerpt from TFA:
"However, all of the Bluetooth remote controls and remote mice available today are Class 3, and only have about 30 feet range"
This is not the media center one. Replied from the tech support (again) when asked that very question:
"If you have seen a similar product in the UK or EU, it's our GyroRemote for presentation's but can be used as Mouse Ctrl for Media Center use."
It can be used for MCE probably through keyboard emulation as are almost 100% of the remotes you can find with any tuner card (hauppauge, etc...). Some key features do not work with such remotes however such as power on/off.
Oh well, I just bought a MS remote. That one ought to be compatible...
If you only tried to read the fscking article, you would have read that the author covered that very question:
"However, all of the Bluetooth remote controls and remote mice available today are Class 3, and only have about 30 feet range"
There you go.
I did write to the tech support (cause I wanted one and am in Europe) which answered in turn:
"Please be aware that the Media Center Remote is not RF certified for Europe and therefore illegal to import to the European Union."
and then, when I asked when it would be available:
"No, the Media Center will definitely not be launched in Europe and the USA RF products are not compatible with European Versions."
and, when I asked why:
"The information about media center remote is unfortunately under disclosure for future strategic reason's"
While I like the remote and keyboard a lot, there are two major issues for me to be the ultimate wireless combo for my media center:
1. They don't release it in Europe and don't plan to. RF norms are different over here...
2. There are no numbers, which means no keypad onto the remote. Painful if you want to switch from channel 1 to channel 74...
But otherwise, I've seen these at work and they are awsome. You can use the remote/mouse either as a regular optical mouse, or you can press a bice button and you can use it by just moving it in the air. After a 2 min practice, it's very usable.
I'd like one so much......