I can see what the original poster meant, but "specialized, crippled version of the Windows 2000 kernel" and "Windows 2000" aren't quite the same thing.
now, as for RTSs, why do you think you see those caps? why is there a limit at all? its because of the limits of a mouse in controlling an RTS.
Partially, but also the limits of the brain. No human can micromanage 500 units. If all you'd do with an army that size is order them around in larger groups, then it makes very little sense to make a game like that. Simplifying the play by reducing army sizes makes for a much more tactical game.
Also, unit caps help keep players from building indefinately, and never actually attacking. Obviously, that's mostly a newbie problem, but it does help force them to attack and liven up the game.
HDTV means 480p, 720p, and 1080i. that for the most part matches, and at 1080i, beats, the resolutions that most people's PC monitors are at.
A TV capable of 1080i will cost more than a new computer, and there aren't many games that can take advantage of it. Even the XBox's GeForce3.5 is quite underpowered compared to modern PC graphics cards, and the other consoles are worse. So consoles can't render 1080i (which has a pixel count roughly equivilent to 1600x1200) smoothly in most modern-looking games. My Radeon 9700 PRO can barely keep up with Morrowind at 1600x1200. Could the Xbox render Morrowind at 1080i with decent quality settings? I doubt it. (I don't know if Morrowind even supports 1080i on the Xbox, I don't own it).
As for RTS's, yeah, neither PCs nor consoles are perfect at them. However, while you can't efficiently command 500-member armies with a mouse, most RTS's don't allow 500-member armies. The max army you'll see in Starcraft is probably around 90 units, and the cap is much lower in WCIII. Those armies can be managed pretty well.
but I bought a 160gb SATA drive last week, and it works out to 131gb
I know nothing about SATA, but some older BIOS's have size limitations, where big disks won't have capacity over 137GB (don't know if that's 1000 or 1024 GB) recognized. I don't know if that's strictly an IDE thing or not, but you might want to look into it.
One thing to note, though, is that if you encode your Ogg to reasonable quality (500Kbps)
There's no reason for anyone to use 500kpbs Ogg (does that even exist)? If you're such an audiophile that you can hear artifacts in -q 6 or 7 Ogg, you should be using FLAC, which usually gets 600-800 kpbs.
Yes, I know. The point was that you can take a protected M4P file and get the decrypted M4A file, without any quality loss. This isn't possible with WMA.
It's quite likely that that's a vendor version (from Debian stable?) that has had all relevant bugfixes and patches backported by the vendor. I really doubt they'd use the vanilla 1.3.26.
No, you're wrong. Burning to CD and reencoding involves transcoding from one digital format (AAC) to another (MP3, Vorbis, FLAC, whatever). Thus, you get the artifacts from the original AAC file and also from your reencoded file (unless you use FLAC, in which case you get a giant file that still has the original AAC artifacts).
The "crack" for iTunes results in one being able to go from protected AAC to unprotected AAC, with no transcoding involved. The file you end up with is of the same quality, and the same size, as the original protected version. No, the format hasn't been "cracked", but the player has been, and that's almost as good (the only difference is that you can't write a third-party program to batch-decrypt them for you, you have to wait for iTunes to do it at 1x).
The M4P format has not been cracked at all. What was done was someone patched the binaries of iTunes so that they could capture the unencrypted data while it was being played (or streamed, I forget which). That data can then be re-captured into a DRM-free format. It's basically similar to burning a CD and then ripping it, without the CD step.
No, it's not. When you burn to a CD, you go from protected AAC to unprotected raw audio, and then back to unprotected MP3. That means that the MP3 you end up with will have a quality drop, because it contains both the artifacts from the original AAC and from the reencoded MP3.
With the patch, you instead get an unprotected AAC file. It hasn't been reencoded, it's the exact same quality as the original encrypted version. It doesn't require a CD, and the results are noticably better (to me, anyway, I'm not an audiophile) than reencoding.
There are substantial costs for an online music store. You have to develop the software, both client and server. You have to rip, encode, and store hundreds of thousands of songs. You have to pay for bandwidth, and handle customer service. I believe Apple gets a $0.35 cut of each $0.99 song. Of that, they make only a $0.05-$0.10 profit.
With iTunes you're locked into the iPod, with the other stores you're locked into DRM-supporting WMA portables. Considering that there are probably at least as many iPod owners as all WMA/DRM-supporting devices combined, I don't think it much matters.
Also, I personally would rather buy music from iTunes, because the M4P format has been cracked. That means that I can completely un-DRM the music and listen in any AAC-supporting player of my choice, on any platform. You don't have that freedom (yet) with WMA.
There's absolutely no reason there can't be standard battery sizes that are user-servicable.
Great. Go design an iPod with a foolproof user-servicable battery, maintaining the same size and weight as the current line. I'm sure Apple will be interested to see how you manage it.
It's not that powerful. Any modern Radeon or GeForce easily outpowers the Emotion Engine. If the Apple G5 is available in Chine, there's no reason to ban the PS2.
Space isn't the issue. One could easily fit 72 hours of MIDI/MOD/etc. audio on a CD or DVD. The problem is finding an paying an artist willing to undertake such an enormous task.
Kiosk support is in GNOME 2.6, due out March 2004. GNOME is generally quite good about keeping their release schedules. That said, Kiosk mode isn't absolutely needed for corporate deployments. Quite a few corporations give employees unrestricted access to their own Windows machines, and probably quite a few wouldn't choose to limit their Linux machines either. But, for those that want it, it'll be there.
If coding for GTK in C is to be the main alternatice against.NET and winforms, MS won't have to break out in a sweat about this.
Perens doesn't mention this, but another advantage of GNOME is that it has excellent C# bindings, so.NET programmers can easily develop GNOME apps with Mono and GTK#. This in addition to the myriad of higher-level languages GTK already supports, including Perl, Python, Ruby, C++, Java, Ada, TCL, Scheme, PHP, Pascal, and a few others. QT does have a decent group of bindings as well, but they're lesser in quantity as well as (subjectively) quality.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently you haven't installed Lindows recently.
I can see what the original poster meant, but "specialized, crippled version of the Windows 2000 kernel" and "Windows 2000" aren't quite the same thing.
I wasn't aware that Windows 2000 is available for the Xbox. Are you sure?
Partially, but also the limits of the brain. No human can micromanage 500 units. If all you'd do with an army that size is order them around in larger groups, then it makes very little sense to make a game like that. Simplifying the play by reducing army sizes makes for a much more tactical game.
Also, unit caps help keep players from building indefinately, and never actually attacking. Obviously, that's mostly a newbie problem, but it does help force them to attack and liven up the game.
A TV capable of 1080i will cost more than a new computer, and there aren't many games that can take advantage of it. Even the XBox's GeForce3.5 is quite underpowered compared to modern PC graphics cards, and the other consoles are worse. So consoles can't render 1080i (which has a pixel count roughly equivilent to 1600x1200) smoothly in most modern-looking games. My Radeon 9700 PRO can barely keep up with Morrowind at 1600x1200. Could the Xbox render Morrowind at 1080i with decent quality settings? I doubt it. (I don't know if Morrowind even supports 1080i on the Xbox, I don't own it).
As for RTS's, yeah, neither PCs nor consoles are perfect at them. However, while you can't efficiently command 500-member armies with a mouse, most RTS's don't allow 500-member armies. The max army you'll see in Starcraft is probably around 90 units, and the cap is much lower in WCIII. Those armies can be managed pretty well.
I know nothing about SATA, but some older BIOS's have size limitations, where big disks won't have capacity over 137GB (don't know if that's 1000 or 1024 GB) recognized. I don't know if that's strictly an IDE thing or not, but you might want to look into it.
There's no reason for anyone to use 500kpbs Ogg (does that even exist)? If you're such an audiophile that you can hear artifacts in -q 6 or 7 Ogg, you should be using FLAC, which usually gets 600-800 kpbs.
Something tells me you've never been to your local chess club.
Yes, I know. The point was that you can take a protected M4P file and get the decrypted M4A file, without any quality loss. This isn't possible with WMA.
It's quite likely that that's a vendor version (from Debian stable?) that has had all relevant bugfixes and patches backported by the vendor. I really doubt they'd use the vanilla 1.3.26.
Yeah, but the iPod only rarely has a spinning hard disk (a few seconds out of every half-hour it's in use). It has a battery all the time.
Apple recently announced AppleCare for the iPod - $60 for a two-year warranty.
When did the DJ become a "best-of-breed" product?
The "crack" for iTunes results in one being able to go from protected AAC to unprotected AAC, with no transcoding involved. The file you end up with is of the same quality, and the same size, as the original protected version. No, the format hasn't been "cracked", but the player has been, and that's almost as good (the only difference is that you can't write a third-party program to batch-decrypt them for you, you have to wait for iTunes to do it at 1x).
I was talking about the music store. I'd be quite surprised if your Nomad could play protected AAC files bought from the iTunes store.
No, it's not. When you burn to a CD, you go from protected AAC to unprotected raw audio, and then back to unprotected MP3. That means that the MP3 you end up with will have a quality drop, because it contains both the artifacts from the original AAC and from the reencoded MP3.
With the patch, you instead get an unprotected AAC file. It hasn't been reencoded, it's the exact same quality as the original encrypted version. It doesn't require a CD, and the results are noticably better (to me, anyway, I'm not an audiophile) than reencoding.
There are substantial costs for an online music store. You have to develop the software, both client and server. You have to rip, encode, and store hundreds of thousands of songs. You have to pay for bandwidth, and handle customer service. I believe Apple gets a $0.35 cut of each $0.99 song. Of that, they make only a $0.05-$0.10 profit.
Also, I personally would rather buy music from iTunes, because the M4P format has been cracked. That means that I can completely un-DRM the music and listen in any AAC-supporting player of my choice, on any platform. You don't have that freedom (yet) with WMA.
Great. Go design an iPod with a foolproof user-servicable battery, maintaining the same size and weight as the current line. I'm sure Apple will be interested to see how you manage it.
It's not that powerful. Any modern Radeon or GeForce easily outpowers the Emotion Engine. If the Apple G5 is available in Chine, there's no reason to ban the PS2.
Yeah. I always thought Steam came from Valve...
Space isn't the issue. One could easily fit 72 hours of MIDI/MOD/etc. audio on a CD or DVD. The problem is finding an paying an artist willing to undertake such an enormous task.
Kiosk support is in GNOME 2.6, due out March 2004. GNOME is generally quite good about keeping their release schedules. That said, Kiosk mode isn't absolutely needed for corporate deployments. Quite a few corporations give employees unrestricted access to their own Windows machines, and probably quite a few wouldn't choose to limit their Linux machines either. But, for those that want it, it'll be there.
QT 1.x and 2.x were also source incompatible. What's your point?
Perens doesn't mention this, but another advantage of GNOME is that it has excellent C# bindings, so .NET programmers can easily develop GNOME apps with Mono and GTK#. This in addition to the myriad of higher-level languages GTK already supports, including Perl, Python, Ruby, C++, Java, Ada, TCL, Scheme, PHP, Pascal, and a few others. QT does have a decent group of bindings as well, but they're lesser in quantity as well as (subjectively) quality.