I recently heard a claim from MS that their OEMs were selling more than a million media centre PCs with TV cards each quarter, which is more than Apple sell of all their laptops and desktops combined.
It does indicate there actually is a significant demand out there but perhaps it isn't as big as the rest of the computer industry.
I have heard that there are currently a number of games in development on Windows using C# as the performance hit is negligable and C# has a wrapper for all the DirectX libraries. In modern games DirectX takes the bulk of the load and so C# can be used for the rest of the game logic without a significant drop in performance. It may be that these sort of situations increase where you have a high performance library being called from a JIT compiled language like.NET / Java.
Well as the old favourite Microsoft happens to be one of the biggest games distributors in the world I suspect they may have a little bit of money down the back of the sofa which they could use to put EB out of business.
Minor point but a SAMPLE rate of 44KHz (as used on CD) can only reproduce sound at 22KHz as above as it requires TWO samples per cycle in order to define a wave. For this reason any frequencies above 22KHz are filtered out during CD encoding...This is a very simple form of compression and is what I was referring to when I mentioned the low compression rates of CD. It is a simple type of compression that does not require decompression and thus does not increase the load on the 1980s processors it was designed to run on. In a similar way sounds of low volumes are removed if they occur immediately before or after or at the same time as louder sounds as they are completely obliterated and the human ear can't detect them...hence no need to store them. If you don't believe me on this feel free to check the original "Red book" holy bible of CDs, which defines the encoding of audio CD as developed by Sony and Philips in the 80s.
ATRAC-3 certainly compresses much more than 2:1 and so there is no way on earth that you would get 360MB.
p.s. Microwaves are electromagnetic waves and not vibrations travelling through air and so if you could detect them yourself you would detect them with your eyes not your ears.
Unfortunately MiniDiscs are no good for anything other than music. Ignoring Zip disks because they are magnetic is not the best argument in the world as MiniDiscs are also magnetic. If you ignore Zips for this reason you also exclude MD.
In addition MD have a MUCH lower data capacity than CDs. They both store 74 minutes of music but the CD stores it at a higher quality without anything other than the simplest and crudest compression (i.e. removal of frequecies outside human hearing range). On the other hand MD has compression that is superior to MP3. You could easily fit 74 mins of audio into less than 75MB and as MD compression achieves higher rates than this you can conclude that data capacity is going to be no more than 50-60MB thus reducing their usefulness. This then makes CD-RW (650MB) and Zip (100/250MB) much more appealing (and cheaper, I can buy good quality CDRW individually for only £1($1.40 US).
Slashdot Mirror
I recently heard a claim from MS that their OEMs were selling more than a million media centre PCs with TV cards each quarter, which is more than Apple sell of all their laptops and desktops combined.
It does indicate there actually is a significant demand out there but perhaps it isn't as big as the rest of the computer industry.
Mog
I have heard that there are currently a number of games in development on Windows using C# as the performance hit is negligable and C# has a wrapper for all the DirectX libraries. In modern games DirectX takes the bulk of the load and so C# can be used for the rest of the game logic without a significant drop in performance. It may be that these sort of situations increase where you have a high performance library being called from a JIT compiled language like .NET / Java.
Well as the old favourite Microsoft happens to be one of the biggest games distributors in the world I suspect they may have a little bit of money down the back of the sofa which they could use to put EB out of business.
Minor point but a SAMPLE rate of 44KHz (as used on CD) can only reproduce sound at 22KHz as above as it requires TWO samples per cycle in order to define a wave. For this reason any frequencies above 22KHz are filtered out during CD encoding...This is a very simple form of compression and is what I was referring to when I mentioned the low compression rates of CD. It is a simple type of compression that does not require decompression and thus does not increase the load on the 1980s processors it was designed to run on. In a similar way sounds of low volumes are removed if they occur immediately before or after or at the same time as louder sounds as they are completely obliterated and the human ear can't detect them...hence no need to store them. If you don't believe me on this feel free to check the original "Red book" holy bible of CDs, which defines the encoding of audio CD as developed by Sony and Philips in the 80s. ATRAC-3 certainly compresses much more than 2:1 and so there is no way on earth that you would get 360MB. p.s. Microwaves are electromagnetic waves and not vibrations travelling through air and so if you could detect them yourself you would detect them with your eyes not your ears.
Unfortunately MiniDiscs are no good for anything other than music. Ignoring Zip disks because they are magnetic is not the best argument in the world as MiniDiscs are also magnetic. If you ignore Zips for this reason you also exclude MD. In addition MD have a MUCH lower data capacity than CDs. They both store 74 minutes of music but the CD stores it at a higher quality without anything other than the simplest and crudest compression (i.e. removal of frequecies outside human hearing range). On the other hand MD has compression that is superior to MP3. You could easily fit 74 mins of audio into less than 75MB and as MD compression achieves higher rates than this you can conclude that data capacity is going to be no more than 50-60MB thus reducing their usefulness. This then makes CD-RW (650MB) and Zip (100/250MB) much more appealing (and cheaper, I can buy good quality CDRW individually for only £1($1.40 US).