I know lots of people, myself included, that bought the PS2 when it first came out and none of us have any issues with it. Or with our original Playstation systems. Did it occur to you that, just maybe, you had one part fail as that is what happens to things, and that you have a warranty for that reason, not whole product recalls because of a 0.00001% failure rate? Talk about overkill!
If I order something on VOD, I don't own that forever, unlike with that DVD I buy. Also, how do I use VOD while in a car and I want to watch a movie? Or on an airplane? How does VOD deal with when I want to watch the first part of a commentary track, get interrupted, and come back to it a couple weeks later?
This is like saying that instant streaming audio online would stop me from buying CD's. Last I checked, I don't have an internet connection everywhere I want to listen to music, I can't loan that streaming music out to a friend, and I probably have to pay again to listen to that album. VOD might be nice if I want to have some friends over to watch a movie that I never plan to see again, but DVD's are going to still be my main media.
Sony enters the mid-end region, maybe, when you get into their ES line at a good retailer, but until you hit the ES line (but their XA777ES SACD player is definately high end), they're definately still low end, which is a step above budget lines, which is where Aiwa fits. Other mid-end manufacturers are Pioneer (even with their high end Elites, like the TX-49), Denon, Yamaha.
When you talk high end, you're talking brands that most people you pick off the street wouldn't know, like Krell, Proceed, Mark Levinson, Meridian, Linn, and in speakers you get into names like B&W Nautilus, Revel, Wilson, JM Labs Utopias, Martin Logan, etc... Basically, if you can buy a product at Circuit City or Best Buy, it's low end with the exception of the new Samsung DLP HDTV's. If you can buy it at a hifi store, it's probably at least mid-range, and if you need to see how big of a 2nd mortgage you can take out to afford that pair of speakers and they have sound dissipation material on the walls in the listening rooms, it's high end.
Yes, because I'm sure if the protesters had been staging a 'die in' in NYC when the WTC's were hit, they would have kept laying there and blocking traffic, not have been running for their lives like everyone else was. Maybe if you chose an example that was plausible your arguement would have merit.
However, no one currently is broadcasting a full 1920x1080i signal. The cameras and equipment used will get you around 1400-1500 x 1080i resolution, but not the full 1920 (I think HDNet might be the only channel that's full resolution). However, channels that use 720p do broadcast at full 1280x720p resolution, so you acually wind up with more pixels per second, not to mention far fewer motion and interlacing artifacts.
Acually, the Sharp DX-SX1 SACD player and their SM-SX1 amp have a special connection that let them transmit the SACD bitstream as well. I haven't heard these, but have heard the Pioneer setup this past weekend and it's nice to only have the single cable since the DAC's on the 49Txi are so nice. I was pretty sure that someone else had a player that could transmit a signal as well, but can't remember who (since it was out of my price range).
Forget the whole CS department, think about the other students who use the computer labs. So far, every place I have worked has used Microsoft software as the standard. Word, Excel, Outlook, Powerpoint, and so on are what 90% of the business world uses I imagine, on Macs or on PC's. Putting out 7,000 students who can't use the most widely used work software and are used to something like OpenOffice that, while great, isn't what they'll be using in their jobs, seems like a horrible idea.
That said, the Microsoft products are just better to use for most people as well. They have features that everyone else is trying to catch up with, and keep innovating more than anyone else. Not teaching Visual Studio to programmers is one thing, but not using Microsoft products is a totally different one.
If a music company wants me to pay for music (and I buy a lot of music), then I'm not going to pay $1-1.50 for a music track that comes in a compressed, horrible quality mp3 format when I can go buy it on a CD in a store that sounds far, far better, I can rip and manage myself, and if I have a hard drive crash, won't have to buy it again. In the end, mp3's sound awful (even at 320 bitrates, and ogg sounds awful as well) compared to CD's/SACD/DVD-A and I'm not going to pay for something that sounds worse.
Personally, I find what kind of performance I can get from a graphics card for playing games, and providing me more future insurance for games such as Doom 3, more important than what you listed. My cable modem gives me a max speed of 3 Mb/sec, what do I need 10 Gigabit Ethernet for? LCD's big enough for 1600x1200 resolution in games are far too expensive and have too slow a response time for my needs. I use headphones to play games so what use is 7.1 surround going to be to me? The smaller cable in SerialATA is nice, but I don't need anything else it offers.
Before you complain that you want sites to cover information that applies to you and not review another graphics card, consider that what you want covered might not be what someone else wants and we might really card about the graphics card. Maybe you just need to visit different sites? If Storage Review is still around, go there for SerialATA info, they won't be reviewing the new ATI chipset.
So Microsoft left the board for a standard that directly competes with a different standard that they have full control over, right? Why would you want Microsoft on the OpenGL board? Why would it ever be in Microsofts best interests to have OpenGL thrive as opposed to DirectX? Would it benefit Microsoft to direct the OpenGL board in such a way that it fails and DirectX benefits as a result?
OpenGL did OK when the markets that mattered (games) were pushing it over DirectX, even though Windows didn't have built in support for it. If people want OpenGL to continue to succeed, then they don't need Microsoft to support them, they need the products on the market to use OpenGL instead of DirectX by making OpenGL the better platform. I fail to see how Microsoft leaving the board will harm OpenGL in anyway, or should be unexpected or even a reason to make them into the villian.
Yeah, since I rip every single CD I own to my mp3 server, then burn a copy so my original never leaves my 301 disc changer, I had issues with them copy protecting their new CD. It was easy to find a copy on newsgroups, though, so someone figured out how to get around it. Maybe I'll pick up a copy protection free vinyl copy.
Looking back now, you'd be hard pressed to find any film critics, or even regular film lovers, that will say Dances with Wolves was better than Goodfellas or that Ordinary People was better than Raging Bull. Goodfellas was one of the best movies of the 90's, as Raging Bull was one of the best movies of the 80's. If Scorsese wins this year, it's more making up for the huge mistake in not having him win one of those years than because of Gangs of New York being the Best Directed movie of the year.
Though I don't know if the server managed to go down, it's fun to look at the Server Load Page to see just how much extra load a link at Slashdot can cause to a page that already gets a lot of traffic.
I guess one downside of working for a non-profit organization is that we don't get any kind of Christmas bonus, but someone has to work to cure cancer, right? At least one company we buy supplies from gave us all $50 each at Amazon, my new rice maker should arrive this week.
We have a machine at work that, since the company is from Germany, uses an embedded version of German MS-DOS. Nothing like that reassuring "Starten von MS-DOS" everytime we turn on that machine.
Really, most of the constant criticisms leveled at Windows are either irrelevant (I don't care about SQL Server security on my laptop) or outdated (crashing).
I've been running Windows 2000 or XP since I could get my hands on a Win2k beta in 1999. In that time, and among all my friends running it (we're all power users, CS students, DBA's, etc...), we've had a total of two crashes in that time. One was from a hard drive failure, one was from a beta program. Otherwise, the operating system has been rock solid that whole time. It recognizes our hardware, copies pictures from our digital cameras when I plug it in, plays all the games, and doesn't complain. Anyone that still complains about crashes on 2000 or XP has some other software causing it, or flaky hardware, since the OS never even crashed when I was installing it on thousands of computers at Boeing.
If I need to run Apache, MySQL, a NAT/Firewall, or something along that line, I'll setup a FreeBSD server on an old computer and use it. Those programs don't matter on my laptop, on my desktop at work, on anything other than a server box I'm running with no monitor. However, I've also done all of those in Windows and it's worked fine. Configuration was easy, they ran while I could setup the FreeBSD box, and they were easy to remove.
What FreeBSD/Linux are missing is a killer application that will make me switch. Windows2k/XP are solid enough for 99% of users out there (a crash a year is OK, power goes out more often than that), we know the interface and understand how it works, it supports the widest variety of hardware, and every program I need to use can run on it. The xNIX zealots might point out great alternative software I can run on their platforms, but the bottom line is no one has yet to point out a program they can use that I can't run on Windows. If you want to know why people aren't switching over, that's why. Until there is a program that I can't live without, I'm not going to be switching over for anything but my server, there's no reason to lose the advantages that Windows offers.
Why don't you just go with the new high end Philips Pronto they showed in Time's gift guide. It's only $1,700 and has built in 802.11b networking, what more do you need in a remote? I'm pretty sure you can almost buy one of those new TabletPC's and I'm sure turn it into a way to control your TV for that price. I can see spending $200 for a remote if you have a $5,000 setup, but you better have one really, really nice home theater to pay $1,700.
Lucas financed Star Wars Episodes 1 and 2 himself. They cost him around $100 million each, or less, to produce. He got a sweetheart distribution deal from 20th Century Fox that let him keep the vast majority of the $600 million or more they each made worldwide. Let's be really conservative and say movie theaters keep half that (it's more around 25% overall), and Fox gets $15 million. Lucasfilm is still getting around $200 million per movie, not counting merchandise, soundtracks, DVD's, etc... If they can't find a way to profit from that, I have no sympathy for them.
His citing Titanic isn't a good example either. Titanic was a total aberation for movies. It made as much the next 12 weekends as it did it's first weekend (within 10-20%) instead of having the usual 30-50% drop off that most major movies do now. People just kept going back again and again, and you can't expect any movie to come close to what Titanic did. I just think they're blowing everything way out of proportion. Yes, I'm sure downloading movies hurts them some, but not that much (I know I'm not going to take the time).
Go pick up one of the new Rolling Stones CD's that's been remastered and has a CD Audio as well as an SACD layer. Find an SACD player in a store somewhere you can listen to (preferably that isn't in the middle of a loud showroom). Virtually every player should let you switch between the SACD and CD layers, though you'll have to stop the disc to do so. Listen to a track like "Gimme Shelter" in CD, then in SACD, and you should instantly hear a difference. They're using the same masters for both of them, so they aren't degrading them at all, and you might want to buy a Rolling Stones disc anyway!
Acually, when I call the vendors of our main applications, I talk straight to the developers, or the database guys, or whoever I have a question for at the moment. If we need help with something, they fly down for a couple days and show us. If we didn't get that kind of support, we would probably do more of our own development, but if someone else is going to do most of the testing, give us all the source and other info we want for the program, and support us like that, we'll buy from them.
I do write lots of stuff that we use, and it's not written to be Win32 only, however, I can't write everything we use. Beyond HIPPA, you have FDA regulations and other rules to comply with as well, and when you can buy something from a vendor that other people (say, the National Institute of Health) are using fine and is compliant, or spend months developing your own custom solution, you're going to choose the one that is working and has support and is tested. If we had the time to write everything exactly how we wanted, we would, but we really don't have the time, or the money typically, to do that.
Maybe if you were doing HIPAA stuff yourself you would understand that it's not just where you store the records. All computers that need access to those records, as well as programs that access those records, have to be HIPAA compliant. Additionally, saying "Just use Linux" isn't a solution when all the custom software that people have and that is developed for lab work is done in a Windows32 environment.
That said, I'm almost certain that Win2k, with or without a service pack, will be HIPAA compliant since many, many medical and scientific organizations use it for their main operating system, and coordinating an upgrade to something else in the next 7 months would be near impossible. We really don't have much of a choice in what OS to use, though, since if all the programs we need are only available in Win32 versions, that's what we'll use.
Now I'm sure some people will take exception to this, but when Einstein published his paper on E=mc^2, did he really discover anything? What he did was try to prove a theory on something that has always existed in the world. He didn't invent the concept that mass contains a huge amount of energy, he just tried to prove to the world that it was fact. Very important, but does that mean that he should get a patent on something that just exists?
Now take the cotton gin. There, Eli Whitney did invent something that didn't exist before and should have a patent on something like that. JPEG, MPEG, and other algorythims might be very important and take lots of work to get to, but should a math equation be patented? Einstein might have no been the best reference point since he didn't even invent something like lossy compression for audio (mp3) but just proved something that had already existed, but it's also an equation, not something you can acually hold.
If you're addicted to TV, then maybe watching less of it is a good step, but turning it off isn't going to instantly make my life better, is it? If I spend that time reading Slashdot and browsing the web for news I would have seen on TV, have I really changed my life at all? I doubt your average TV watcher is suddenly going to start reading great stuff and become a new person?
I spent a nice weekend out of town a month ago, and didn't see a computer or television the whole time. Was I a better person because I spent my time browsing record stores and sitting in bars with people? Not really. TV is entertaining, and I'll be damned if you're going to get me to give mine up with football season starting.
First, if you're mad because you can't rip your SACD to an mp3 to listen to, then you're totally missing the point. Go buy a CD for that, it'll rip just fine, you can listen to it on your iPod, and everyone is happy. The point of buying something on SACD is to have far better sound quality, not to compress it down. SACD's secondary layer uses a DVD to hold the information, so that's 4.7 gigs of audio for the same amount of tracks.
The idea of buying something to listen to on your iPod, or in your car, or on your computer that is SACD makes no sense. You're going to have hardware that is holding you back far more than the qualify of the medium. Unless you're listening on a computer with a really nice DAC and some Grado RS1 headphones, you can probably stick to CD audio or mp3's and notice not much difference. However, if you are listening on a real stereo with decent speakers, then listening to a well made SACD compared to a CD will blow you away.
If I want to make a backup copy of my music, I can buy a copy on CD since I'm not going to be able to make a copy of a SACD myself anytime soon. To me, the compromise of incredibly high quality sound, that does beat the high end vinyl I've listened to, and having copy protection that doesn't interfere with that sound quality is a tradeoff I'm alright with. If you're mad over not being able to rip them for mp3's, then you should just buy the CD.
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I know lots of people, myself included, that bought the PS2 when it first came out and none of us have any issues with it. Or with our original Playstation systems. Did it occur to you that, just maybe, you had one part fail as that is what happens to things, and that you have a warranty for that reason, not whole product recalls because of a 0.00001% failure rate? Talk about overkill!
If I order something on VOD, I don't own that forever, unlike with that DVD I buy. Also, how do I use VOD while in a car and I want to watch a movie? Or on an airplane? How does VOD deal with when I want to watch the first part of a commentary track, get interrupted, and come back to it a couple weeks later?
This is like saying that instant streaming audio online would stop me from buying CD's. Last I checked, I don't have an internet connection everywhere I want to listen to music, I can't loan that streaming music out to a friend, and I probably have to pay again to listen to that album. VOD might be nice if I want to have some friends over to watch a movie that I never plan to see again, but DVD's are going to still be my main media.
Sony enters the mid-end region, maybe, when you get into their ES line at a good retailer, but until you hit the ES line (but their XA777ES SACD player is definately high end), they're definately still low end, which is a step above budget lines, which is where Aiwa fits. Other mid-end manufacturers are Pioneer (even with their high end Elites, like the TX-49), Denon, Yamaha.
When you talk high end, you're talking brands that most people you pick off the street wouldn't know, like Krell, Proceed, Mark Levinson, Meridian, Linn, and in speakers you get into names like B&W Nautilus, Revel, Wilson, JM Labs Utopias, Martin Logan, etc... Basically, if you can buy a product at Circuit City or Best Buy, it's low end with the exception of the new Samsung DLP HDTV's. If you can buy it at a hifi store, it's probably at least mid-range, and if you need to see how big of a 2nd mortgage you can take out to afford that pair of speakers and they have sound dissipation material on the walls in the listening rooms, it's high end.
Yes, because I'm sure if the protesters had been staging a 'die in' in NYC when the WTC's were hit, they would have kept laying there and blocking traffic, not have been running for their lives like everyone else was. Maybe if you chose an example that was plausible your arguement would have merit.
However, no one currently is broadcasting a full 1920x1080i signal. The cameras and equipment used will get you around 1400-1500 x 1080i resolution, but not the full 1920 (I think HDNet might be the only channel that's full resolution). However, channels that use 720p do broadcast at full 1280x720p resolution, so you acually wind up with more pixels per second, not to mention far fewer motion and interlacing artifacts.
Acually, the Sharp DX-SX1 SACD player and their SM-SX1 amp have a special connection that let them transmit the SACD bitstream as well. I haven't heard these, but have heard the Pioneer setup this past weekend and it's nice to only have the single cable since the DAC's on the 49Txi are so nice. I was pretty sure that someone else had a player that could transmit a signal as well, but can't remember who (since it was out of my price range).
Forget the whole CS department, think about the other students who use the computer labs. So far, every place I have worked has used Microsoft software as the standard. Word, Excel, Outlook, Powerpoint, and so on are what 90% of the business world uses I imagine, on Macs or on PC's. Putting out 7,000 students who can't use the most widely used work software and are used to something like OpenOffice that, while great, isn't what they'll be using in their jobs, seems like a horrible idea.
That said, the Microsoft products are just better to use for most people as well. They have features that everyone else is trying to catch up with, and keep innovating more than anyone else. Not teaching Visual Studio to programmers is one thing, but not using Microsoft products is a totally different one.
If a music company wants me to pay for music (and I buy a lot of music), then I'm not going to pay $1-1.50 for a music track that comes in a compressed, horrible quality mp3 format when I can go buy it on a CD in a store that sounds far, far better, I can rip and manage myself, and if I have a hard drive crash, won't have to buy it again. In the end, mp3's sound awful (even at 320 bitrates, and ogg sounds awful as well) compared to CD's/SACD/DVD-A and I'm not going to pay for something that sounds worse.
Personally, I find what kind of performance I can get from a graphics card for playing games, and providing me more future insurance for games such as Doom 3, more important than what you listed. My cable modem gives me a max speed of 3 Mb/sec, what do I need 10 Gigabit Ethernet for? LCD's big enough for 1600x1200 resolution in games are far too expensive and have too slow a response time for my needs. I use headphones to play games so what use is 7.1 surround going to be to me? The smaller cable in SerialATA is nice, but I don't need anything else it offers.
Before you complain that you want sites to cover information that applies to you and not review another graphics card, consider that what you want covered might not be what someone else wants and we might really card about the graphics card. Maybe you just need to visit different sites? If Storage Review is still around, go there for SerialATA info, they won't be reviewing the new ATI chipset.
OpenGL did OK when the markets that mattered (games) were pushing it over DirectX, even though Windows didn't have built in support for it. If people want OpenGL to continue to succeed, then they don't need Microsoft to support them, they need the products on the market to use OpenGL instead of DirectX by making OpenGL the better platform. I fail to see how Microsoft leaving the board will harm OpenGL in anyway, or should be unexpected or even a reason to make them into the villian.
Yeah, since I rip every single CD I own to my mp3 server, then burn a copy so my original never leaves my 301 disc changer, I had issues with them copy protecting their new CD. It was easy to find a copy on newsgroups, though, so someone figured out how to get around it. Maybe I'll pick up a copy protection free vinyl copy.
Looking back now, you'd be hard pressed to find any film critics, or even regular film lovers, that will say Dances with Wolves was better than Goodfellas or that Ordinary People was better than Raging Bull. Goodfellas was one of the best movies of the 90's, as Raging Bull was one of the best movies of the 80's. If Scorsese wins this year, it's more making up for the huge mistake in not having him win one of those years than because of Gangs of New York being the Best Directed movie of the year.
Though I don't know if the server managed to go down, it's fun to look at the Server Load Page to see just how much extra load a link at Slashdot can cause to a page that already gets a lot of traffic.
I guess one downside of working for a non-profit organization is that we don't get any kind of Christmas bonus, but someone has to work to cure cancer, right? At least one company we buy supplies from gave us all $50 each at Amazon, my new rice maker should arrive this week.
We have a machine at work that, since the company is from Germany, uses an embedded version of German MS-DOS. Nothing like that reassuring "Starten von MS-DOS" everytime we turn on that machine.
I've been running Windows 2000 or XP since I could get my hands on a Win2k beta in 1999. In that time, and among all my friends running it (we're all power users, CS students, DBA's, etc...), we've had a total of two crashes in that time. One was from a hard drive failure, one was from a beta program. Otherwise, the operating system has been rock solid that whole time. It recognizes our hardware, copies pictures from our digital cameras when I plug it in, plays all the games, and doesn't complain. Anyone that still complains about crashes on 2000 or XP has some other software causing it, or flaky hardware, since the OS never even crashed when I was installing it on thousands of computers at Boeing.
If I need to run Apache, MySQL, a NAT/Firewall, or something along that line, I'll setup a FreeBSD server on an old computer and use it. Those programs don't matter on my laptop, on my desktop at work, on anything other than a server box I'm running with no monitor. However, I've also done all of those in Windows and it's worked fine. Configuration was easy, they ran while I could setup the FreeBSD box, and they were easy to remove.
What FreeBSD/Linux are missing is a killer application that will make me switch. Windows2k/XP are solid enough for 99% of users out there (a crash a year is OK, power goes out more often than that), we know the interface and understand how it works, it supports the widest variety of hardware, and every program I need to use can run on it. The xNIX zealots might point out great alternative software I can run on their platforms, but the bottom line is no one has yet to point out a program they can use that I can't run on Windows. If you want to know why people aren't switching over, that's why. Until there is a program that I can't live without, I'm not going to be switching over for anything but my server, there's no reason to lose the advantages that Windows offers.
Why don't you just go with the new high end Philips Pronto they showed in Time's gift guide. It's only $1,700 and has built in 802.11b networking, what more do you need in a remote? I'm pretty sure you can almost buy one of those new TabletPC's and I'm sure turn it into a way to control your TV for that price. I can see spending $200 for a remote if you have a $5,000 setup, but you better have one really, really nice home theater to pay $1,700.
His citing Titanic isn't a good example either. Titanic was a total aberation for movies. It made as much the next 12 weekends as it did it's first weekend (within 10-20%) instead of having the usual 30-50% drop off that most major movies do now. People just kept going back again and again, and you can't expect any movie to come close to what Titanic did. I just think they're blowing everything way out of proportion. Yes, I'm sure downloading movies hurts them some, but not that much (I know I'm not going to take the time).
Go pick up one of the new Rolling Stones CD's that's been remastered and has a CD Audio as well as an SACD layer. Find an SACD player in a store somewhere you can listen to (preferably that isn't in the middle of a loud showroom). Virtually every player should let you switch between the SACD and CD layers, though you'll have to stop the disc to do so. Listen to a track like "Gimme Shelter" in CD, then in SACD, and you should instantly hear a difference. They're using the same masters for both of them, so they aren't degrading them at all, and you might want to buy a Rolling Stones disc anyway!
Acually, when I call the vendors of our main applications, I talk straight to the developers, or the database guys, or whoever I have a question for at the moment. If we need help with something, they fly down for a couple days and show us. If we didn't get that kind of support, we would probably do more of our own development, but if someone else is going to do most of the testing, give us all the source and other info we want for the program, and support us like that, we'll buy from them.
I do write lots of stuff that we use, and it's not written to be Win32 only, however, I can't write everything we use. Beyond HIPPA, you have FDA regulations and other rules to comply with as well, and when you can buy something from a vendor that other people (say, the National Institute of Health) are using fine and is compliant, or spend months developing your own custom solution, you're going to choose the one that is working and has support and is tested. If we had the time to write everything exactly how we wanted, we would, but we really don't have the time, or the money typically, to do that.
That said, I'm almost certain that Win2k, with or without a service pack, will be HIPAA compliant since many, many medical and scientific organizations use it for their main operating system, and coordinating an upgrade to something else in the next 7 months would be near impossible. We really don't have much of a choice in what OS to use, though, since if all the programs we need are only available in Win32 versions, that's what we'll use.
Now take the cotton gin. There, Eli Whitney did invent something that didn't exist before and should have a patent on something like that. JPEG, MPEG, and other algorythims might be very important and take lots of work to get to, but should a math equation be patented? Einstein might have no been the best reference point since he didn't even invent something like lossy compression for audio (mp3) but just proved something that had already existed, but it's also an equation, not something you can acually hold.
I spent a nice weekend out of town a month ago, and didn't see a computer or television the whole time. Was I a better person because I spent my time browsing record stores and sitting in bars with people? Not really. TV is entertaining, and I'll be damned if you're going to get me to give mine up with football season starting.
The idea of buying something to listen to on your iPod, or in your car, or on your computer that is SACD makes no sense. You're going to have hardware that is holding you back far more than the qualify of the medium. Unless you're listening on a computer with a really nice DAC and some Grado RS1 headphones, you can probably stick to CD audio or mp3's and notice not much difference. However, if you are listening on a real stereo with decent speakers, then listening to a well made SACD compared to a CD will blow you away.
If I want to make a backup copy of my music, I can buy a copy on CD since I'm not going to be able to make a copy of a SACD myself anytime soon. To me, the compromise of incredibly high quality sound, that does beat the high end vinyl I've listened to, and having copy protection that doesn't interfere with that sound quality is a tradeoff I'm alright with. If you're mad over not being able to rip them for mp3's, then you should just buy the CD.