Internet Explorer does not have integration with the kernel. IE is a user-level app, (part of explorer.exe, which is the windows desktop environment). IMHO, Internet Explorer's integration with windows is equivalent to the integration Konqueror has with KDE. Putting a web-browser into the kernel would be an a very stupid thing to do, since html/javascript engines are very unpredictable and unstable beasts.
In terms of user experience, the Windows 2000 command prompt is the only part of windows that is not competive with UNIX-based operating systems. Does Microsoft have any plans to improve the command shell in future versions of windows?
Is it just me or do the majority of top level comments have some sort of automatic random moderation? It appears that even 5 minute old ones have nonsensical moderation such as (+4 Interesting). Strange.
This cannot be my file, as I first started programming on my Tetris clone May 8, 2000 (the post is dated a month before then). There are probably tons of different tetris.exe files.
I assure you that there are no trojans in the exe referenced.
Although they ask for payment for decoders, they do not have legal grounds for asking for it (their patents are only on the encoding process). For more information, refer to this (slightly dated) document at mp3-tech.org.
MPEG-4 was primarily made for low-bitrate streaming video, and was touted as the ideal replacement for garbage like RealVideo. It's max resolution is indeed 720x576
MPEG-2 is still the standard for high-bitrate video. DVDs never have a resolution higher than 720x576. However, HDTV also uses MPEG-2 datastreams, and they can scale all the way to 1920x1152. DVD will not take advantage of HDTV, you won't have any better resolution there than a high-quality NTSC TV with component video connections. Eventually (probably many years from now) you will see a DVD-2 which will feature HDTV-resolution MPEG-2 datastreams.
MP3 is fully usable without any patents. The decoding process is completely patent free, and the superior LAME encoder does not use fraunhofer's patented method of encoding.
Actually, that is incorrect. '15-bit' color data is indeed stored in 16-bit chunks, however when the distinction between 15-bit and 16-bit color data is being discussed, 15-bit usually refers to pixel data in the 5-5-5 (5 bits for each color component), where as 16-bit refers to it in the 5-6-5 format (5 bits for blue and red, 6 bits for green). The 5-6-5 format has 65536 unique colors, and the 5-5-5 format has 32768 unique colors. The pixel format of your high-color modes depends on your video card. Most video cards these days use 5-6-5 as their high-color pixel format, which does indeed give you a full 65536 colors.
The extra bit in 5-5-5 could theoretically be used for an alpha channel, however in reality it is almost always ignored.
The advantages of the 5-5-5 format is that the color components are more equal, so you get a full 32 shades of true grey rather than the pseudo almost-greys of the 5-6-5 format. Of course, for most photographic data you want as much color depth as possible, so the 5-6-5 format is preferred.
Actually, it's really easy to uncover without the source...all the privacy group has to do is run a packet sniffer on their LAN on be on the lookout for packets coming out of the installation computer.
Even with consumer backlash, I imagine that this sort of check will become very common as net access becomes more of a requirement to run a computer. Companies believe that they are losing way too much money due to piracy, and this sort of scheme will make it virtually impossible for Joe user to 'borrow' the Office 2000 CD from a friend.
Non-anonymous FTP will run without any problems...as long as there aren't any duplicate usernames on the system (which there should not be). Run a normal ftp server, and each client gets put in their home directory when they log in.
Other annoyances with DevStudio is it's inconsistant code completion features, and it's inefficient way of browsing through source. (I love how in Delphi you can hold the Ctrl button down and navigate your source like a hyperlinked web page)
This is not a problem if you run Linux on your computer. I bought a 12 GB drive 2 years ago, and was dissapointed to find out that my BIOS would only support the first 8 GB of it. Fortunately, after I installed Linux a few months later, I noticed that it saw my disk as a full 12 GB. So, I created a new 4 GB ext2 partition in the previously unused space, without having to muck around with my bios or any other strange settings.
It is too late now to turn back from the free distribution of digital entertainment. Napster is used by the masses, and even downloadable movies is becoming a reality thanks to DivX compression. Once control has been taken by "the people", it is almost impossible for those in authority to get it back.
If the media giants hope to stay alive, they will have to adapt. Currently, they are trying to take control by offering downloadable music in proprietary formats with strict 'copy protection'. Ideally, they would like to charge a person $0.25 every time they listen to a song, but this sort of pricing scheme turns off consumers. Per use charges limit the freedom of the consumer, if only psychologically. This is one of the reasons that all-you-can eat style entertainment is the most popular. People spend $60 a month on cable movie channels, and the majority of internet accounts sold today are unlimited access.
So, perhaps a subscription based model to all the media you could ever want is the answer. Rather than having to download amateurly ripped MP3s from the bogged down cable modems of Napster users, the consumer could pay $80/month and have access to all the media they could ever want, with a guaranteed level of signal quality, and from fast dedicated servers. The average person probably doesn't spend more than this on their monthly entertainment anyways, so the media giants might make even more money than they do today.
This sort of revolutionary change is similiar to the outcry the movie studios had when VCRs first came out. They claimed that the technology would put them out of business, when in fact VCRs spawned a whole new distribution method in the form of video rentals and the retail sales of videos. Perhaps these media giants should stop being scared of 'new technology', and instead use it to offer new services to the consumer.
Actually, that is incorrect. First of all, there are only ~480 horizontal lines on any NTSC TV, no more no less. (the TV station is what sets the resolution). What you might be referring to is the number of vertical lines your television can display, which is the only thing that can vary between televisions. NTSC dictates that all broadcasts be sent at 59.9 Hz interlaced, which makes it impossible to get more than 60 fields per second. It is also possible to send a TV a non-interlaced 240 horizontal line signal, like many older consoles do, but this is not used when broadcasting.
If the X-box runs at 800*600, the final resolution will have to be scaled down to fit within the 480-horizontal line limit. This is similiar to what TV-out cards for computers do..they linearly scale the high resolution output of the computer into the low resolution of TVs (which is one of the reasons the text is impossible to read).
Yes it is possible, but you lose half your vertical resolution. Next time you are using a legacy console, examine closely the lines on the TV screen. Notice how they are staying still. Next, change to a regular TV station, and notice how the lines appear to be moving down the screen (or up, depending on how your brain interprets the interlaced fields).
I just though that I needed to point out the insane amount of technical inaccuracies with your post.
First of all, polygon rates have absolutely nothing to do with the resolution. It doesn't matter wheter your running at 1600x1200 or 320x200, the number of polygons in a scene will remain the same. Fast fill rates is what is needed to run at high resolutions.
The theoretical maximum resolution of a television is 720x480 interlaced. While it is true that most of today's game consoles run at a resolution of roughtly 320x240 non-interlaced, the majority of games on Sega's Dreamcast, Sony's Playstation 2, and Nintendo's Dolphi will run at 720x480 interlaced.
Television fields are refreshed 60 (or more acurrately 59.998) times a second. When the TV is running in non-interlaced mode like most current consoles, (240 vertical lines progressive scan), the entire screen is refreshed at 60Hz. When viewing interlaced video, all the odd lines or all the even lines will be refreshed alternatively 60 times a second, emulating the feel of 60Hz.
The XBox will be using Nvidia's upcoming NV25 chip, which is significantly faster than today's PC 3D accelerators.
Games written for the X-box will be able to take advantage of the fact that every single X-box is the same, getting rid of cumbersome compatibility issues. This will also allow developers to 'stretch the capabilities of the hardware', much like how current playstation games look much better than the games that came out during it's release.
The process is quite complicated, and results vary quite a bit between various implementations. The reason for this is that with CMYK uses 4 channels: cyan, magenta, and yellow (inverses of RGB), and also the key (usually black). For example, the color black can be made either by setting the key channel to 100%, or by setting C, M, and Y to 100%. While converting RGB to CMY without a key is trivial, deciding how much key to put in various combinations can be quite painstaking to get 'close to perfect' results.
The whine that you hear is equivalent to the horizontal frequency in the cathode ray tube. Regular interlaced TVs draw approximately 240 horizontal lines every 1/60th of a second, which works out to a frequency of 14.4 kHz, which is within the hearing range of some people (myself included). A computer monitor at 640x480 with a 60Hz progressive-scan refresh rate will draw approximately 480 horizontal lines every 1/60th of a second which works out to 28.8 kHz, which is above the hearing range of humans.
I have much experience with various MP3 encoders, and I have found that the quality of results you get depends on both the encoder, and the type of music that is being encoded. Generally, the worst types of music to compress are classical and dirty-rock with tons of cymbals and stuff. Most pop nonsense sounds fine at just 128kbps.
BladeEnc: BladeEnc I have found produces the very worst audio, even worse than Xing. I can make out artifacts on every type of music, even at bitrates up to 256kbps. The highs get all slushy, and you can usually hear strange electronic noises when listening through a good pair of headphones. Avoid BladeEnc.
Xing Encoder: Xing is very common, and yet it is horrible. I can tell if an mp3 was made with Xing right away upon hearing it. Generally Xing has the same sort of problems as BladeEnc, but not quite as pronounced. I must say it is 2 or 3 times faster than the other codecs, but it is definately 4 or 5 times worse. Stay away.
LAME: When I first tried LAME under Linux, I thought it was just as good as the modern Fraunhofer codec found in products such as MP3 Producer. But, after using it for a while and ABing it against the same music made with the more modern Fraunhofer codecs, I have found that it is not quite perfect. But the quality is acceptable, and if the bitrate is reasonably high (192-256kbps), I have no problems listening to MP3s encoded with LAME. For pop music, it is even listenable at 128 kbps.
Modern Fraunhofer (MP3 Producer, etc): This is definately the best encoding algorythms. Fraunhofer has perfected their psychoacoustic encoder over the years, taking advantage of their extended knowledge of the codec. 50% of all music sounds find at 128kbps, 95% at 192kbps, at 256kbps, it is impossible for me to hear the difference between the mp3 and cd, even with the most demanding recordings.
I have found that many open-source zealots will try out BladeEnc, being free, and after encoding a few songs make the blanket statement that all MP3s sound like crap. This is simply not true. Please try listening to some properly encoded mp3s before you make rash generalizations.
What I don't get is how these sorts of people can condemn Internet usage when the average person watches over 3 hours of TV a day. It almost seems as though these 'Internet makes you an antisocial loner' stories are written to keep people tuned in to good, positive, social things like the latest celebretiy gossip or other mass-media trash.
After all, proper social behavior like going to the bar and getting drunk is so much more beneficial to humans.
Re:Content control -- DIY? $15? Not for long.
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(4) While cable access is widespread in urban areas, many rural areas across the US have no cable access. Even small cities (100,000) often have limitted cable service, which is not likely to provide cable modem capabilities. While these areas are small individually, when combined they account for up to 20% of the potential US internet market, which is locked-out of cable modem service.
Within a few years everyone should have access to cable modems if they want them...I live in a small town of 5000 people and we've had full-bandwidth (10Mbps down / 2.5Mbps up ) cable modem service for a year.
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Internet Explorer does not have integration with the kernel. IE is a user-level app, (part of explorer.exe, which is the windows desktop environment). IMHO, Internet Explorer's integration with windows is equivalent to the integration Konqueror has with KDE. Putting a web-browser into the kernel would be an a very stupid thing to do, since html/javascript engines are very unpredictable and unstable beasts.
In terms of user experience, the Windows 2000 command prompt is the only part of windows that is not competive with UNIX-based operating systems. Does Microsoft have any plans to improve the command shell in future versions of windows?
For those of you who want to play some tetris right now, I have a win32 executable for you: Tetris.exe (276k)
He's referring to the playing time...a 3 minute mp3 would cost $0.75.
Is it just me or do the majority of top level comments have some sort of automatic random moderation? It appears that even 5 minute old ones have nonsensical moderation such as (+4 Interesting). Strange.
I assure you that there are no trojans in the exe referenced.
PNG doesn't support animations. The new MNG (Moving Network Graphics?) file-format is basically PNG with support for multiple frames.
Although they ask for payment for decoders, they do not have legal grounds for asking for it (their patents are only on the encoding process). For more information, refer to this (slightly dated) document at mp3-tech.org.
MPEG-2 is still the standard for high-bitrate video. DVDs never have a resolution higher than 720x576. However, HDTV also uses MPEG-2 datastreams, and they can scale all the way to 1920x1152. DVD will not take advantage of HDTV, you won't have any better resolution there than a high-quality NTSC TV with component video connections. Eventually (probably many years from now) you will see a DVD-2 which will feature HDTV-resolution MPEG-2 datastreams.
MP3 is fully usable without any patents. The decoding process is completely patent free, and the superior LAME encoder does not use fraunhofer's patented method of encoding.
The extra bit in 5-5-5 could theoretically be used for an alpha channel, however in reality it is almost always ignored.
The advantages of the 5-5-5 format is that the color components are more equal, so you get a full 32 shades of true grey rather than the pseudo almost-greys of the 5-6-5 format. Of course, for most photographic data you want as much color depth as possible, so the 5-6-5 format is preferred.
Even with consumer backlash, I imagine that this sort of check will become very common as net access becomes more of a requirement to run a computer. Companies believe that they are losing way too much money due to piracy, and this sort of scheme will make it virtually impossible for Joe user to 'borrow' the Office 2000 CD from a friend.
Non-anonymous FTP will run without any problems...as long as there aren't any duplicate usernames on the system (which there should not be). Run a normal ftp server, and each client gets put in their home directory when they log in.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Devstudio\6.0 \Layout
Other annoyances with DevStudio is it's inconsistant code completion features, and it's inefficient way of browsing through source. (I love how in Delphi you can hold the Ctrl button down and navigate your source like a hyperlinked web page)
Try a USB mouse. My Microsoft Intellimouse refreshes 80 times a second under XFree4.
This is not a problem if you run Linux on your computer. I bought a 12 GB drive 2 years ago, and was dissapointed to find out that my BIOS would only support the first 8 GB of it. Fortunately, after I installed Linux a few months later, I noticed that it saw my disk as a full 12 GB. So, I created a new 4 GB ext2 partition in the previously unused space, without having to muck around with my bios or any other strange settings.
If the media giants hope to stay alive, they will have to adapt. Currently, they are trying to take control by offering downloadable music in proprietary formats with strict 'copy protection'. Ideally, they would like to charge a person $0.25 every time they listen to a song, but this sort of pricing scheme turns off consumers. Per use charges limit the freedom of the consumer, if only psychologically. This is one of the reasons that all-you-can eat style entertainment is the most popular. People spend $60 a month on cable movie channels, and the majority of internet accounts sold today are unlimited access.
So, perhaps a subscription based model to all the media you could ever want is the answer. Rather than having to download amateurly ripped MP3s from the bogged down cable modems of Napster users, the consumer could pay $80/month and have access to all the media they could ever want, with a guaranteed level of signal quality, and from fast dedicated servers. The average person probably doesn't spend more than this on their monthly entertainment anyways, so the media giants might make even more money than they do today.
This sort of revolutionary change is similiar to the outcry the movie studios had when VCRs first came out. They claimed that the technology would put them out of business, when in fact VCRs spawned a whole new distribution method in the form of video rentals and the retail sales of videos. Perhaps these media giants should stop being scared of 'new technology', and instead use it to offer new services to the consumer.
If the X-box runs at 800*600, the final resolution will have to be scaled down to fit within the 480-horizontal line limit. This is similiar to what TV-out cards for computers do..they linearly scale the high resolution output of the computer into the low resolution of TVs (which is one of the reasons the text is impossible to read).
Yes it is possible, but you lose half your vertical resolution. Next time you are using a legacy console, examine closely the lines on the TV screen. Notice how they are staying still. Next, change to a regular TV station, and notice how the lines appear to be moving down the screen (or up, depending on how your brain interprets the interlaced fields).
The process is quite complicated, and results vary quite a bit between various implementations. The reason for this is that with CMYK uses 4 channels: cyan, magenta, and yellow (inverses of RGB), and also the key (usually black). For example, the color black can be made either by setting the key channel to 100%, or by setting C, M, and Y to 100%. While converting RGB to CMY without a key is trivial, deciding how much key to put in various combinations can be quite painstaking to get 'close to perfect' results.
The whine that you hear is equivalent to the horizontal frequency in the cathode ray tube. Regular interlaced TVs draw approximately 240 horizontal lines every 1/60th of a second, which works out to a frequency of 14.4 kHz, which is within the hearing range of some people (myself included). A computer monitor at 640x480 with a 60Hz progressive-scan refresh rate will draw approximately 480 horizontal lines every 1/60th of a second which works out to 28.8 kHz, which is above the hearing range of humans.
- BladeEnc: BladeEnc I have found produces the very worst audio, even worse than Xing. I can make out artifacts on every type of music, even at bitrates up to 256kbps. The highs get all slushy, and you can usually hear strange electronic noises when listening through a good pair of headphones. Avoid BladeEnc.
- Xing Encoder: Xing is very common, and yet it is horrible. I can tell if an mp3 was made with Xing right away upon hearing it. Generally Xing has the same sort of problems as BladeEnc, but not quite as pronounced. I must say it is 2 or 3 times faster than the other codecs, but it is definately 4 or 5 times worse. Stay away.
- LAME: When I first tried LAME under Linux, I thought it was just as good as the modern Fraunhofer codec found in products such as MP3 Producer. But, after using it for a while and ABing it against the same music made with the more modern Fraunhofer codecs, I have found that it is not quite perfect. But the quality is acceptable, and if the bitrate is reasonably high (192-256kbps), I have no problems listening to MP3s encoded with LAME. For pop music, it is even listenable at 128 kbps.
- Modern Fraunhofer (MP3 Producer, etc): This is definately the best encoding algorythms. Fraunhofer has perfected their psychoacoustic encoder over the years, taking advantage of their extended knowledge of the codec. 50% of all music sounds find at 128kbps, 95% at 192kbps, at 256kbps, it is impossible for me to hear the difference between the mp3 and cd, even with the most demanding recordings.
I have found that many open-source zealots will try out BladeEnc, being free, and after encoding a few songs make the blanket statement that all MP3s sound like crap. This is simply not true. Please try listening to some properly encoded mp3s before you make rash generalizations.After all, proper social behavior like going to the bar and getting drunk is so much more beneficial to humans.
Within a few years everyone should have access to cable modems if they want them...I live in a small town of 5000 people and we've had full-bandwidth (10Mbps down / 2.5Mbps up ) cable modem service for a year.