I agree, it would be nice to see them make money, and this is really in the spirit of give the product away, charge for services. But the reporting is done with such a double standard.
If MS was to institute this sort of plan, the response would not be "can't fault a company for trying to make money". Granted, they already make enough money as it is, but if you're going to be critical of MS for considering subscription-ware, you ought to be critical of Ximian.
Of course, the updates are still free, but the automatic service costs. Of course, with MS this fact would be completely overlooked and the flaming would commence.
All that said, I think it is very valid to charge for this. For home users, this is only a mild inconvenience, manually updating is both fast enough and mostly trivial. If you are more adventuresome, you can rig an auto-update setup with scripts and cron. Where this really shines is for large deployments (companies) that could afford the subscriptions anyway.
You have to think about these things in context. The GameBoy Pokemon franchise seemed to be based along the lines of the trading cards, take it with you, trade and collect. Small, cheap, portable, and the system didn't cost that much. The success of that Pokemon strategy doesn't translate to the sit in one place and play style of N64. While they both are based on the same thing, they have entirely different approaches and therefore cannot be compared directly.
I would dare say, though, that FF by itself doesn't push that many systems, it's too expensive for one game. *Maybe* the Square franchise has that power. I think the combination of "killer" games really does it: FFX (but more importantly, having Square mostly exclusive...), MGS2 (will be released for other platforms, but those wanting it here and now need PS2), Gran Turismo 2, Tekken Tag, DOA2:Hardcore. There are a lot of great games for PS2. XBox biggest push is behind Halo, which is, imho, a tired genre, and doesn't translate well to console play. Dead or Alive 3 looks beautiful, a tired genre, but one that works well on the console. MS Should have really pushed this harder. Aside from those two titles, nothing notable for X-Box.
Gamecube games are similar, but the strength for them is that their games target a younger segment mostly overlooked by PS2 and X-Box, which seem to be targeting the later teens and college age people.
Don't know how accurate this kind of speculation is... I've been through a few stores while shopping. One was sold out of Playstation2 and X-Box, and one was sold out of Gamecube, and the third had all three available. It all depends on where you go, seems equally likely that the store will be out of any of the systems, though most places have all three. I bought a Dreamcast myself:) Boot off of CD-Rs, a few good games, it costs the same as a game, who cares if it is discontinued:)
Yeah, that was quite underhanded, but they retracted that. Though it was very bad, it does make us stop and think about how all these expert sites evaluate cards. It's always x card acheives y more FPS than z card, so it is clearly better. Price and quality are ignored (which is why ATI got away with their trick so long, quality sucked, but no one paid any attention...).
Also, you could mention how ATI, by omitting the facts, kinda led sites to make the assumption that the good Anti-Aliasing was a well implemented multi-sampling solution when it was actually an inefficient super-sampling solution. True, ATI didn't ever claim that it wasn't supersampling, but they didn't seem to want to mention one way or another until confronted. Of course this strategy of misinformation through omission is common in corporations, but still seems a little devious to watch all these sites mention Smoothvision in contest of multi-sampling without offering corrections...
On the other hand, if you are using ATI-written drivers, then you are running a Microsoft OS, and therefore you are already a customer of a company that has pulled some dirty tricks in its days. Pretty much all successful companies pull dirty tricks, and in comparison to other corporate acts, this one isn't that high on the sleaze scale. In this case, they cheated, but released fully functional drivers when called on it. It was really deceptive, but people and review sites need to learn not to judge a card mostly on a single game's acheived framerate so that companies won't get away with this sort of cheating.
My primary interest is Linux, and the GeForce cards use unsupported chips for TV Capture/Playback. I'm not about to sacrifice functionality just so I can give money to a company that has probably pulled similar nasty tricks in its time, but got away with them.
Easy, because the cash value of a "big bucks" GeForce is a *lot* lower than the "big bucks" of those really big monitors, plasma, or flat panels. For example, even a 36" traditional CRT TV runs 800 dollars or so, over twice what one would pay for a good GeForce. The really nice, big HDTV-type monitors with VGA or component connectors run *at least* two thousand dollars. Sure, people get nice monitors for their systems, but too small to really enjoy with a group of people. That 36" CRT-TV with S-Video connection may work well for you, and TV-out to those is very useful.
Now if I had all the money I could ever want, I'd be hooking up my computer through composite connectors to a 30,000 dollar front-projection system in a really nice home theater room, but for now I'll be using that S-Video with a large CRT TV.
I'd rather have the ATI All-In-Wonder 8500DV. Sure, it might not have the performance of some of the GeForce3, but for Video capture and playback, it is great (even under linux soon, given the track record of the All-In-Wonders of the past). Of course, there isn't really any card I know of with *good*, well supported TV-out (yeah, there are tricks to use the framebuffer and unhooking the monitor, but that's ugly).
nVidia isn't the only game in town, particularly not for those of use who do video playback and editing more than play games.
I'll bet that in at least 90% of the games out there realistic physics would completely ruin the whole fun. What is the point of interacting with a fake environment when the environment reacts the exact same way real life reacts? Racing games are a good example. People want cares to handle well, generally. They don't want realism, in real life operating cars at high speeds is a lot more difficult than most games.
And in *any* game where people jump, realistic jumping becomes completely pointless. People want to be superhuman. Imagine quake with realistic physics....
Realism is not the high mark of games in all aspects, that is the whole point of games, to escape reality...
They never present real world experiences that collaborate their claims that the desktop metaphor, as is, is "dead". As the author said himself, Apple was going to use a NeXT like filebrowser, but decided against it with a "chorus of protest from the users". Users are *not*, for the most part having difficulty with the current paradigm, it works well. Experts spend all the time complaining that the users have it too hard, and users are simply wishing that companies leave well enough alone.
His proposal of imposing artificial, view based limits on the organazation of files is ludicrous. He spends his time complaining that while their is a screen with a Desktop, it's not consistant with directory structure, not like we have it in real life. Last time I checked, people working on stuff on their desks pull them out of a file cabinet and put them back when finished, more like the computer paradigm. It makes sense to store your information differently from the way we work on a desktop. A strategy like he suggests would impose a huge penalty in terms of time to organize and retrieve data that is not currently on the Desktop, and greatly limits the amount of data that can be in one space, even if the relationships demand that they *should* be together, regardless of "icon clutter".
All these self-proclaimed experts need to be hit a few times with a clue stick. Users like the paradigm the way it is, it is not too complicated.
bits does equal audio levels. I never made the claim that more bits means louder sounds, and I thought I made that clear. As you say, it allows more precision to be present for *all* volumes, i.e. more possible levels of amplitude can be discreetly represented. levels does not automatically equal loud sound.... (this amp is better because it goes up to 11, that's one better!)
You're right, thanks for the info. Now I have to try the ALSA drivers:)
And true, while MIDI is a standard for communication, the common language has kinda mutilated it so that it generally refers to command files for MIDI devices, and thus has a lot to do with sound:) I'm guilty of using the term badly, but I'll probably stick with timidity, if the Windows drivers are any indication of the MIDI rendering quality of the Live...
You're point is taken, but still, the standard approach works even here... Rather than use a linear scale, a log scale is typically used. The levels are clustered together at the lower amplitudes, where things need to be most distinguished. At the very very loud end, they are widely spaced to allow very loud amplitude with low differentiation, since the human ear loses precision at higher dB levels. For security applications, quality does not need to be audiophile level, certainly your run-of-the-mill security video is pretty crappy but considered adequate.
For movie audio, I don't think people want to be able to hear realistic level close up rocket noise, as that would probably blow out their speakers and make them deaf in the process. 65,535 is a lot of levels, especially allocated on a log scale...
I don't know, for most common people, sound card technology doesn't matter much, it has pretty much reached the level it needs to. The only reason I upgraded from AWE64 to Live was because I needed a PCI audio card. The midi support under windows improved, and now I could do all kinds of neat surround sound stuff if I had the speakers, but, especially under linux, it doesn't do much that my AWE didn't, in fact, does less sometimes (no midi support). I don't mind, timidity is better anyway, and the sampling rate from 44.1kHz to 48kHz helps the playback of some files (software that doesn't downsample, not that I can tell the difference between 44.1 and 48kHz, 44.1kHz more than satisfies the requirement of the human ear. To appreciate 48kHz, you would have to be able to distinguish sounds approaching 24 kHz, while 44.1 had you covered up to 22.05, more than enough for common ears.. And the industry move from 16-bit samples to 24-bit samples for sound seem equally pointless... I don't think *anyone* can distinguish 65,535 levels of amplitude for sound, much less 16.7 million. Yet it takes up 150% the space (uncompressed). CD Quality s152ound: 16bitx441000sample/sec=705600
New standards:
24bitx480000samples/sec=1152000
This huge difference for imperceptible improvemnts? At this point it's not so much about improving quality, put pushing new tech to get consumers to buy more.
Anyway, the differences between Audigy and Live series seem less distinctive than between the AWE and Live series. This is not like the 3D scene, where completely realistic output is not yet possible. Sure you can add all kinds of mostly useless bells and whistles. You can mix tons of channels in hardware, but typically each application only makes use of a single channel, and done intelligently a small pool of 3 or 4 channels will suffice. Most sound applications that would take advantage of this do this in software anyway, and modern hardware can provide realtime preview in software without trouble anyway. The only thing Audigy has done is make Creative work less on the Live drivers, which are still a bit flaky on XP...
Nothing, they get more money, so they could care less about what you do with it. They are just trying to get people to pay more money. Just like with WinXP, they are trying to get it so the "professional" edition is truly an upgrade to the "home" edition in every sense of the word. For 2k vs. ME, it wasn't the case as 2k wouldn't some apps designed for ME, so an upgrade isn't as popular as MS would like... Same principle here, you can get relatively good service for a good price, but for the niceties not used by common internet users, you pay a premium. VPNs are a target as the most widespread use of it is telecommuting, i.e. using your connection to earn profit, and the carrier wants a slice of the pie, whether they are entitled to it or not. Same deal with the ISPs prohibiting servers, they are afraid you'll set up an e-commerce site or a few banner ads and profit from selling services that the ISP is really providing. The more enlightened TOS say that while you are permitted to use servers and VPN, you must only use it for non-profit purposes. VPN is harder to know what the traffic is, so a blanket ban is more popular, though not more justified...
I'm just saying that completely discarding VPN in favor of Citrix/Term server is stupid. Yes, the bandwidth isn't as bad as VNC, but it is still not as efficient as VPN approaches. Yes, it is useful for applications where your client lacks the hardware or software to run an application as good as through Citrix, and therefore can be used well *in conjunction* with a VPN, but by itself, not the most efficient/useful solution. You can have VPN running on the corporate router and provide a transparent tunnel through the firewall to privately addressable hosts with RDP and Citrix on them, which is a much more secure solution than sticking your RDP/Citrix boxes outside the firewall...
Additionally, RDP isn't very cross-platform, though Citrix and X11 are... Of course Windows X servers are not typically that great. When you can access smb/nfs natively, then you can pick whatever local OS/Application you want to modify the data, and are not just stuck with whatever is installed in the Citrix/RDP/X box.
I think they did have a goal, produce a good, Linux/Mac/Win compatible native codec. The problem is DivX beat them to it, so now the goal isn't so well defined. BTW, I'd replace DivX with MPEG-4, since that is what the MS codec that DivX was based on was a modification of (so many levels...) Of course, MPEG-4 is not only for privacy, but can be legitimately used for saving drive space (duh), but, of more primary interest, streaming multimedia. That is really what the low bitrate, but not as hot quality of MPEG-4 is meant for. And instead of MPEG for DVDs, say MPEG-2, as MPEG encompasses a lot of territory that has nothing to do with DVDs (from VCDs, mpg, mp2, mp3, etc...)
You mention that now that DivX 4.0 is out, no one cares anymore. Does your codec outperform DivX4.0 in terms of bitrate, quality, and/or performance? If the answer to all the questions is no, then perhaps it would be best to let it die. If the answer is "not now, but with work it could be..." and you want to stop working, you may want to first fish around for interested companies, and as a last resort give it to the Ogg group as something they could hammer into being Tarkin. I guess if you really don't care about the code anymore but really don't want to let it die, you could pass it on to the Ogg people anyway and they can decide for themselves whether the code is worthwhile or at least salvagable. If it isn't, then they can kill it instead of you:)
Umm, this is the dumbest idea I have ever seen...
1) Bandwidth prohibitive. Term Server and Citrix are better than VNC, but the bandwidth requirement is still insane
2) "All you're sending is keystrokes, mouse movements, and video refreshes.." oh, is that all, that doesn't sound like anything important. Your argument I suppose is that with all that junk/noise going through, what could they possibly get? One thing is the keystrokes are easy, just grab packets that go in one direction and you have the video separated from mouse/keyboard events. All those passwords you type are suddenly in clear view. Since the downstream is essentially just video, then it's not too difficult to extract the sensitive information you are viewing. If telnet is insecure, this is even worse...
Using VPN is a very clean, efficient, and secure solution. Traffic is entirely encrypted, and the connection is transparent. Unlike what you suggest, VPN only sends what traffic is actually needed to be transferred between client and server, i.e. smb, nfs, http, ftp, whatever. For example, if modifying a Word document, you are *constantly* sending traffic back and forth, all of it somewhat sensitive with Term Server. With VPN, you pull down the.doc, modify it locally, and then push it back again as you save.
You really need to think things through before making a suggestion like this again. If I ever interviewed you for a sysadmin position, you would be turned down in a heartbeat based on this alone....
I agree, for once I'm glad I'm an AOL-Time-Warner customer. I have mail server, web server, and an IPsec connection running without problems.
What is this dialup service you speak of, though? Does it mean that with the broadband access you can also use a phone line while on the road? I can't seem to find mention of this on their site... This is a feature I could find useful.
Back on topic, this story is an example of why it's bad for this sort of thing to be managed by a regulated monopoly. Where I live, the nearest DSL CO is too far away, so the only viable, affordable alternative is Roadrunner, but it's ok thusfar. However, if I was stuck with Comcast, I'd be pissed...
Yes, but that doesn't work well in practice. One, by sending an extra packet, you're wasting bandwidth. Issuing an acknowledgement that the first three packets have been received would likely be too late to stop transmission of the fourth packet, otherwise, your complaint about negative acknowledgement being too slow becomes moot.
For another, a large portion of transmission errors are not localized to a single packet, thus providing for a single packet to be in error (parity scheme) is essentially useless, as you'd probably need to send a negative acknowledgement anyway.
And the process you describe does nothing for showing benefit. Look, we can represent the three original packets using three different packets is a rather pointless endeavor, especially sending all four seems really silly. If you scale that principle at all, pure XORing doesn't work to save any bandwidth. You need a better example to illustrate how this would actually be useful. I don't think you properly understand what the article is getting at...
But it is an issue. It's not really fairly competing, it is leveraging their OS monopoly to gain ground in other areas. Just like they used Windows as leverage for IE, and that was bad. They have more subtly leveraged their OS monopoly to get their media player on every desktop. It seemed harmless at first, but now they are managing to push the more proprietery.wm* formats through their bundled encoder (along with digital rights managemnt). Now they feel that they have sufficiently established their.wm* formats that they can use it as leverage to break into the DVD market.
Same is true of the X-Box. For example, their most hyped game is Halo, right? Halo started as a game for Windows, but MS somehow convinced the developers to both develop for X-Box and delay work on a Windows release so that they could sell more X-Boxes. Again, leveraging their monopoly unfairly.
On the plus side, I think that neither X-Box nor this DVD idea will see much market penetration. Current wave of DVD players are too prolific for the publishers to avoid. While it may be a standard feature for many future DVD players, I doubt you'll be going to the store to pick up.wmv movies on disc any time soon. With X-Box, the hardware is impressive, but the games are really lame for the most part. As we saw with the Dreamcast, even with great hardware you need great titles, which Nintendo and Sony have. Incidentally, I noticed that a lot of Dreamcast games are being continued on the X-Box, is this an omen?:) Besides the games, a lot of people I talk to have grown to distrust MS product quality due to so many BSODs. For their computers, MS is a necessary evil, but they will not purchase Microsoft stuff if they don't feel they have to, as is the case with desktop PCs.
The cheaper and motherboard IDE-RAID controllers are useless and more expensive to W2k and Linux users. Why? Because they require about the same or worse CPU load than the native software RAID solutions. The cheaper IDE-RAID cards are mostly smoke and mirrors. First, a BIOS-Trick to at least make it look like an array at boot. Then, the OS drivers take over with RAID operations done almost entirely in software, not hardware. If you don't run the vendor's or some other special driver for the controller, you do not see a RAID array, but the drives that should be in the RAID array as independent ide devices.
It provides good redundancy against hardware failure. Together with using snapshotting you can have better than nothing protection against both hardware and software errors. The presumption here is that it is a *home* network. In other words, super-high availability is not important. If a drive goes bad, I can afford to shut down that system until I have a replacement hard drive. Sure, a hot spare is nice and really keeps you covered in a drive failure, but isn't that critical when you can power down the system in event of drive failure without consequence.
Backup is cost prohibitive to a lot of home users. I back up most important stuff to CD-R, but the other 30 gigs or so I just have to stick it on the RAID-5 and cross my fingers.
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I agree, it would be nice to see them make money, and this is really in the spirit of give the product away, charge for services. But the reporting is done with such a double standard.
If MS was to institute this sort of plan, the response would not be "can't fault a company for trying to make money". Granted, they already make enough money as it is, but if you're going to be critical of MS for considering subscription-ware, you ought to be critical of Ximian.
Of course, the updates are still free, but the automatic service costs. Of course, with MS this fact would be completely overlooked and the flaming would commence.
All that said, I think it is very valid to charge for this. For home users, this is only a mild inconvenience, manually updating is both fast enough and mostly trivial. If you are more adventuresome, you can rig an auto-update setup with scripts and cron. Where this really shines is for large deployments (companies) that could afford the subscriptions anyway.
You have to think about these things in context. The GameBoy Pokemon franchise seemed to be based along the lines of the trading cards, take it with you, trade and collect. Small, cheap, portable, and the system didn't cost that much. The success of that Pokemon strategy doesn't translate to the sit in one place and play style of N64. While they both are based on the same thing, they have entirely different approaches and therefore cannot be compared directly.
I would dare say, though, that FF by itself doesn't push that many systems, it's too expensive for one game. *Maybe* the Square franchise has that power. I think the combination of "killer" games really does it: FFX (but more importantly, having Square mostly exclusive...), MGS2 (will be released for other platforms, but those wanting it here and now need PS2), Gran Turismo 2, Tekken Tag, DOA2:Hardcore. There are a lot of great games for PS2. XBox biggest push is behind Halo, which is, imho, a tired genre, and doesn't translate well to console play. Dead or Alive 3 looks beautiful, a tired genre, but one that works well on the console. MS Should have really pushed this harder. Aside from those two titles, nothing notable for X-Box.
Gamecube games are similar, but the strength for them is that their games target a younger segment mostly overlooked by PS2 and X-Box, which seem to be targeting the later teens and college age people.
Don't know how accurate this kind of speculation is... I've been through a few stores while shopping. One was sold out of Playstation2 and X-Box, and one was sold out of Gamecube, and the third had all three available. It all depends on where you go, seems equally likely that the store will be out of any of the systems, though most places have all three. I bought a Dreamcast myself :) Boot off of CD-Rs, a few good games, it costs the same as a game, who cares if it is discontinued :)
Yeah, that was quite underhanded, but they retracted that. Though it was very bad, it does make us stop and think about how all these expert sites evaluate cards. It's always x card acheives y more FPS than z card, so it is clearly better. Price and quality are ignored (which is why ATI got away with their trick so long, quality sucked, but no one paid any attention...).
Also, you could mention how ATI, by omitting the facts, kinda led sites to make the assumption that the good Anti-Aliasing was a well implemented multi-sampling solution when it was actually an inefficient super-sampling solution. True, ATI didn't ever claim that it wasn't supersampling, but they didn't seem to want to mention one way or another until confronted. Of course this strategy of misinformation through omission is common in corporations, but still seems a little devious to watch all these sites mention Smoothvision in contest of multi-sampling without offering corrections...
On the other hand, if you are using ATI-written drivers, then you are running a Microsoft OS, and therefore you are already a customer of a company that has pulled some dirty tricks in its days. Pretty much all successful companies pull dirty tricks, and in comparison to other corporate acts, this one isn't that high on the sleaze scale. In this case, they cheated, but released fully functional drivers when called on it. It was really deceptive, but people and review sites need to learn not to judge a card mostly on a single game's acheived framerate so that companies won't get away with this sort of cheating.
My primary interest is Linux, and the GeForce cards use unsupported chips for TV Capture/Playback. I'm not about to sacrifice functionality just so I can give money to a company that has probably pulled similar nasty tricks in its time, but got away with them.
Easy, because the cash value of a "big bucks" GeForce is a *lot* lower than the "big bucks" of those really big monitors, plasma, or flat panels. For example, even a 36" traditional CRT TV runs 800 dollars or so, over twice what one would pay for a good GeForce. The really nice, big HDTV-type monitors with VGA or component connectors run *at least* two thousand dollars. Sure, people get nice monitors for their systems, but too small to really enjoy with a group of people. That 36" CRT-TV with S-Video connection may work well for you, and TV-out to those is very useful.
Now if I had all the money I could ever want, I'd be hooking up my computer through composite connectors to a 30,000 dollar front-projection system in a really nice home theater room, but for now I'll be using that S-Video with a large CRT TV.
I'd rather have the ATI All-In-Wonder 8500DV. Sure, it might not have the performance of some of the GeForce3, but for Video capture and playback, it is great (even under linux soon, given the track record of the All-In-Wonders of the past). Of course, there isn't really any card I know of with *good*, well supported TV-out (yeah, there are tricks to use the framebuffer and unhooking the monitor, but that's ugly).
nVidia isn't the only game in town, particularly not for those of use who do video playback and editing more than play games.
I'll bet that in at least 90% of the games out there realistic physics would completely ruin the whole fun. What is the point of interacting with a fake environment when the environment reacts the exact same way real life reacts? Racing games are a good example. People want cares to handle well, generally. They don't want realism, in real life operating cars at high speeds is a lot more difficult than most games.
And in *any* game where people jump, realistic jumping becomes completely pointless. People want to be superhuman. Imagine quake with realistic physics....
Realism is not the high mark of games in all aspects, that is the whole point of games, to escape reality...
They never present real world experiences that collaborate their claims that the desktop metaphor, as is, is "dead". As the author said himself, Apple was going to use a NeXT like filebrowser, but decided against it with a "chorus of protest from the users". Users are *not*, for the most part having difficulty with the current paradigm, it works well. Experts spend all the time complaining that the users have it too hard, and users are simply wishing that companies leave well enough alone.
His proposal of imposing artificial, view based limits on the organazation of files is ludicrous. He spends his time complaining that while their is a screen with a Desktop, it's not consistant with directory structure, not like we have it in real life. Last time I checked, people working on stuff on their desks pull them out of a file cabinet and put them back when finished, more like the computer paradigm. It makes sense to store your information differently from the way we work on a desktop. A strategy like he suggests would impose a huge penalty in terms of time to organize and retrieve data that is not currently on the Desktop, and greatly limits the amount of data that can be in one space, even if the relationships demand that they *should* be together, regardless of "icon clutter".
All these self-proclaimed experts need to be hit a few times with a clue stick. Users like the paradigm the way it is, it is not too complicated.
I can build a 400 gig system... This doesn't seem to be very cost effective of a product....
bits does equal audio levels. I never made the claim that more bits means louder sounds, and I thought I made that clear. As you say, it allows more precision to be present for *all* volumes, i.e. more possible levels of amplitude can be discreetly represented. levels does not automatically equal loud sound.... (this amp is better because it goes up to 11, that's one better!)
You're right, thanks for the info. Now I have to try the ALSA drivers :)
:) I'm guilty of using the term badly, but I'll probably stick with timidity, if the Windows drivers are any indication of the MIDI rendering quality of the Live...
And true, while MIDI is a standard for communication, the common language has kinda mutilated it so that it generally refers to command files for MIDI devices, and thus has a lot to do with sound
You're point is taken, but still, the standard approach works even here... Rather than use a linear scale, a log scale is typically used. The levels are clustered together at the lower amplitudes, where things need to be most distinguished. At the very very loud end, they are widely spaced to allow very loud amplitude with low differentiation, since the human ear loses precision at higher dB levels. For security applications, quality does not need to be audiophile level, certainly your run-of-the-mill security video is pretty crappy but considered adequate.
For movie audio, I don't think people want to be able to hear realistic level close up rocket noise, as that would probably blow out their speakers and make them deaf in the process. 65,535 is a lot of levels, especially allocated on a log scale...
I don't know, for most common people, sound card technology doesn't matter much, it has pretty much reached the level it needs to. The only reason I upgraded from AWE64 to Live was because I needed a PCI audio card. The midi support under windows improved, and now I could do all kinds of neat surround sound stuff if I had the speakers, but, especially under linux, it doesn't do much that my AWE didn't, in fact, does less sometimes (no midi support). I don't mind, timidity is better anyway, and the sampling rate from 44.1kHz to 48kHz helps the playback of some files (software that doesn't downsample, not that I can tell the difference between 44.1 and 48kHz, 44.1kHz more than satisfies the requirement of the human ear. To appreciate 48kHz, you would have to be able to distinguish sounds approaching 24 kHz, while 44.1 had you covered up to 22.05, more than enough for common ears.. And the industry move from 16-bit samples to 24-bit samples for sound seem equally pointless... I don't think *anyone* can distinguish 65,535 levels of amplitude for sound, much less 16.7 million. Yet it takes up 150% the space (uncompressed). CD Quality s152ound: 16bitx441000sample/sec=705600
New standards:
24bitx480000samples/sec=1152000
This huge difference for imperceptible improvemnts? At this point it's not so much about improving quality, put pushing new tech to get consumers to buy more.
Anyway, the differences between Audigy and Live series seem less distinctive than between the AWE and Live series. This is not like the 3D scene, where completely realistic output is not yet possible. Sure you can add all kinds of mostly useless bells and whistles. You can mix tons of channels in hardware, but typically each application only makes use of a single channel, and done intelligently a small pool of 3 or 4 channels will suffice. Most sound applications that would take advantage of this do this in software anyway, and modern hardware can provide realtime preview in software without trouble anyway. The only thing Audigy has done is make Creative work less on the Live drivers, which are still a bit flaky on XP...
Don't think using a standard of measurement is going to prevent gunk getting on the lens...
Nothing, they get more money, so they could care less about what you do with it. They are just trying to get people to pay more money. Just like with WinXP, they are trying to get it so the "professional" edition is truly an upgrade to the "home" edition in every sense of the word. For 2k vs. ME, it wasn't the case as 2k wouldn't some apps designed for ME, so an upgrade isn't as popular as MS would like... Same principle here, you can get relatively good service for a good price, but for the niceties not used by common internet users, you pay a premium. VPNs are a target as the most widespread use of it is telecommuting, i.e. using your connection to earn profit, and the carrier wants a slice of the pie, whether they are entitled to it or not. Same deal with the ISPs prohibiting servers, they are afraid you'll set up an e-commerce site or a few banner ads and profit from selling services that the ISP is really providing. The more enlightened TOS say that while you are permitted to use servers and VPN, you must only use it for non-profit purposes. VPN is harder to know what the traffic is, so a blanket ban is more popular, though not more justified...
I'm just saying that completely discarding VPN in favor of Citrix/Term server is stupid. Yes, the bandwidth isn't as bad as VNC, but it is still not as efficient as VPN approaches. Yes, it is useful for applications where your client lacks the hardware or software to run an application as good as through Citrix, and therefore can be used well *in conjunction* with a VPN, but by itself, not the most efficient/useful solution. You can have VPN running on the corporate router and provide a transparent tunnel through the firewall to privately addressable hosts with RDP and Citrix on them, which is a much more secure solution than sticking your RDP/Citrix boxes outside the firewall...
Additionally, RDP isn't very cross-platform, though Citrix and X11 are... Of course Windows X servers are not typically that great. When you can access smb/nfs natively, then you can pick whatever local OS/Application you want to modify the data, and are not just stuck with whatever is installed in the Citrix/RDP/X box.
I think they did have a goal, produce a good, Linux/Mac/Win compatible native codec. The problem is DivX beat them to it, so now the goal isn't so well defined. BTW, I'd replace DivX with MPEG-4, since that is what the MS codec that DivX was based on was a modification of (so many levels...) Of course, MPEG-4 is not only for privacy, but can be legitimately used for saving drive space (duh), but, of more primary interest, streaming multimedia. That is really what the low bitrate, but not as hot quality of MPEG-4 is meant for. And instead of MPEG for DVDs, say MPEG-2, as MPEG encompasses a lot of territory that has nothing to do with DVDs (from VCDs, mpg, mp2, mp3, etc...)
You mention that now that DivX 4.0 is out, no one cares anymore. Does your codec outperform DivX4.0 in terms of bitrate, quality, and/or performance? If the answer to all the questions is no, then perhaps it would be best to let it die. If the answer is "not now, but with work it could be..." and you want to stop working, you may want to first fish around for interested companies, and as a last resort give it to the Ogg group as something they could hammer into being Tarkin. I guess if you really don't care about the code anymore but really don't want to let it die, you could pass it on to the Ogg people anyway and they can decide for themselves whether the code is worthwhile or at least salvagable. If it isn't, then they can kill it instead of you :)
Umm, this is the dumbest idea I have ever seen...
.doc, modify it locally, and then push it back again as you save.
1) Bandwidth prohibitive. Term Server and Citrix are better than VNC, but the bandwidth requirement is still insane
2) "All you're sending is keystrokes, mouse movements, and video refreshes.." oh, is that all, that doesn't sound like anything important. Your argument I suppose is that with all that junk/noise going through, what could they possibly get? One thing is the keystrokes are easy, just grab packets that go in one direction and you have the video separated from mouse/keyboard events. All those passwords you type are suddenly in clear view. Since the downstream is essentially just video, then it's not too difficult to extract the sensitive information you are viewing. If telnet is insecure, this is even worse...
Using VPN is a very clean, efficient, and secure solution. Traffic is entirely encrypted, and the connection is transparent. Unlike what you suggest, VPN only sends what traffic is actually needed to be transferred between client and server, i.e. smb, nfs, http, ftp, whatever. For example, if modifying a Word document, you are *constantly* sending traffic back and forth, all of it somewhat sensitive with Term Server. With VPN, you pull down the
You really need to think things through before making a suggestion like this again. If I ever interviewed you for a sysadmin position, you would be turned down in a heartbeat based on this alone....
I agree, for once I'm glad I'm an AOL-Time-Warner customer. I have mail server, web server, and an IPsec connection running without problems.
What is this dialup service you speak of, though? Does it mean that with the broadband access you can also use a phone line while on the road? I can't seem to find mention of this on their site... This is a feature I could find useful.
Back on topic, this story is an example of why it's bad for this sort of thing to be managed by a regulated monopoly. Where I live, the nearest DSL CO is too far away, so the only viable, affordable alternative is Roadrunner, but it's ok thusfar. However, if I was stuck with Comcast, I'd be pissed...
Yes, but that doesn't work well in practice. One, by sending an extra packet, you're wasting bandwidth. Issuing an acknowledgement that the first three packets have been received would likely be too late to stop transmission of the fourth packet, otherwise, your complaint about negative acknowledgement being too slow becomes moot.
For another, a large portion of transmission errors are not localized to a single packet, thus providing for a single packet to be in error (parity scheme) is essentially useless, as you'd probably need to send a negative acknowledgement anyway.
And the process you describe does nothing for showing benefit. Look, we can represent the three original packets using three different packets is a rather pointless endeavor, especially sending all four seems really silly. If you scale that principle at all, pure XORing doesn't work to save any bandwidth. You need a better example to illustrate how this would actually be useful. I don't think you properly understand what the article is getting at...
But it is an issue. It's not really fairly competing, it is leveraging their OS monopoly to gain ground in other areas. Just like they used Windows as leverage for IE, and that was bad. They have more subtly leveraged their OS monopoly to get their media player on every desktop. It seemed harmless at first, but now they are managing to push the more proprietery .wm* formats through their bundled encoder (along with digital rights managemnt). Now they feel that they have sufficiently established their .wm* formats that they can use it as leverage to break into the DVD market.
.wmv movies on disc any time soon. With X-Box, the hardware is impressive, but the games are really lame for the most part. As we saw with the Dreamcast, even with great hardware you need great titles, which Nintendo and Sony have. Incidentally, I noticed that a lot of Dreamcast games are being continued on the X-Box, is this an omen? :) Besides the games, a lot of people I talk to have grown to distrust MS product quality due to so many BSODs. For their computers, MS is a necessary evil, but they will not purchase Microsoft stuff if they don't feel they have to, as is the case with desktop PCs.
Same is true of the X-Box. For example, their most hyped game is Halo, right? Halo started as a game for Windows, but MS somehow convinced the developers to both develop for X-Box and delay work on a Windows release so that they could sell more X-Boxes. Again, leveraging their monopoly unfairly.
On the plus side, I think that neither X-Box nor this DVD idea will see much market penetration. Current wave of DVD players are too prolific for the publishers to avoid. While it may be a standard feature for many future DVD players, I doubt you'll be going to the store to pick up
The cheaper and motherboard IDE-RAID controllers are useless and more expensive to W2k and Linux users. Why? Because they require about the same or worse CPU load than the native software RAID solutions. The cheaper IDE-RAID cards are mostly smoke and mirrors. First, a BIOS-Trick to at least make it look like an array at boot. Then, the OS drivers take over with RAID operations done almost entirely in software, not hardware. If you don't run the vendor's or some other special driver for the controller, you do not see a RAID array, but the drives that should be in the RAID array as independent ide devices.
It provides good redundancy against hardware failure. Together with using snapshotting you can have better than nothing protection against both hardware and software errors. The presumption here is that it is a *home* network. In other words, super-high availability is not important. If a drive goes bad, I can afford to shut down that system until I have a replacement hard drive. Sure, a hot spare is nice and really keeps you covered in a drive failure, but isn't that critical when you can power down the system in event of drive failure without consequence.
Backup is cost prohibitive to a lot of home users. I back up most important stuff to CD-R, but the other 30 gigs or so I just have to stick it on the RAID-5 and cross my fingers.