I was sort of a "late bloomer" for music. My older sister had bands that she liked, mostly picked up from friends, and certainly I had heard the Beatles and the Stones and the stuff that was on the radio. But I never really became somebody who listened avidly to music myself until I was maybe 15 or 16. I got into it after I developed a taste for the stuff that wasn't on the radio all that much. Some of the first bands I got into included old Oingo Boingo, Skinny Puppy, Front 242, GBH, Dead Kennedys, Minor Threat, Sigue Sigue Sputnik... connect the dots between all those bands any way you want, but the point is that I wouldn't have heard any of this stuff if it weren't for my friends who dubbed me off tapes of it. (That's right, cassette tapes, remember those?) Did I buy records? Sure. Did I buy more records than I listened to copies from friends? Maybe, but I can't say for sure that I did. But even if half the music I listened to wasn't paid for, it still made me a more willing consumer of music today. So how evil is this "casual piracy" really?
But then, more willing consumer is one thing; better consumer -- at least in the eyes of the major conglomerates -- is another. I think I'm far less likely to buy into a lot of the garbage that's forced down the primary media channels today and far more likely to buy from independent labels/genres than most Americans. All that piracy in my youth made me more likely to spend my money on music today, but it made me less likely to spend my money on "the right music," as far as Sony is concerned.
I won't say the original article ripped me off, but I do know InfoWorld published pretty much the exact same article three days earlier and mine was better written. Oh well, call it sour grapes.
Re:So...how much longer until...
on
Four GPU Motherboard
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
There have ALWAYS been a huge amount of "games" with horrible gameplay. The only difference now is that the crap looks nice.
I always thought the main gripe was that nowadays the crap looks nice and costs millions and millions of dollars to produce. What you end up with, therefore, is a gaming industry that's become a big-money factory system run by huge media conglomerates who A.) overwork their employees and B.) are highly risk averse, meaning they are far more likely to produce mediocre games based on such-and-such "proven" media franchise than they are to invest in the things that makes games fun. All the money gets poured into stinkers and boring re-hashes and the small, innovative games companies get swept under the rug, or else are acquired and subsequently dismantled by the machine.
DISCLAIMER: I almost never play videogames, I'm just relaying the gripes as I understand them.
the key here is the word knowledge: "longhorn builds on...NET framework knowledge"
According to the Longhorn Developer FAQ, Longhorn will be based heavily on WinFX, which is a superset of.Net. So saying it is based on.Net would be inaccurate.
As I understand it, WinFX replaces Win32 as the primary API for Windows, and WinFX is based on 100% managed code. Managed code came in with.Net -- so to say Microsoft is somehow backing away from.Net seems a little disingenuous.
I don't want to be spreading rumors, but I swear someone from Microsoft told me that even device drivers will be managed code in Longhorn. I could be wrong there. Suffice it to say, though, that all this outrage sounds a lot like a tempest in a teapot.
I beg to differ. #2 requires physical access to the computer. #1 doesn't require it. Once #1 becomes low-tech, we will see an explosion of abuse in that area.
Installing a keylogger requires physical access to a computer? Methinks you're not as security conscious as you claim to be.
Can somebody invite sony to make a wireless keyboard set?
My Sony VGC-RA830G desktop came with a Sony wireless keyboard and mouse set. Unfortunately, they were infrared (as opposed to RF) and thus required true line-of-sight, plus they didn't have the multimedia keys that come on the standard, wired Sony keyboard. I swapped them out for a Logitech LX700.
The LX700 supports encryption, but it's not enabled by default. You have to go into the supplied configuration application and elect to turn it on, at which point it goes through a little routine that takes about a minute. I don't remember how it goes exactly, but over the course of the minute it asks you to do various things -- push this key, push that key. Then it says you're done, and communications between the keyboard, mouse, and receiver are henceforth encrypted.
I can't speak for the encryption protocol itself. But it seems unlikely that Logitech would try to make up its own form of encryption for something as silly as a keyboard, and the configuration process sounds suspiciously like something that's using random user input to generate public and private keys. My bet that it's fairly secure, depending on the number of bits in the keys.
Also, the range on the keyboard is really not that far. To "tap" it, you'd need to be within 10 feet, at most. Which begs the question: Which is the easier plan for somebody who wants to snoop on what you're typing and can get within 10 feet of your machine -- to try to crack the encryption on your wireless keyboard, or to sneak a keylogger onto your system somehow? My bet is #2. Or, you could criticize the fact that you have to specifically enable the encryption on the keyboard... but if that's too much for you, then you're unlikely to enable safe encryption on your wireless router either. In that case, packet sniffing from the router would be the better bet, since you could even do that from next door.
In my experience (and yes, I have one of these keyboard/mouse combos), if the receiver is on the shelf above my desktop, I can't put the mouse on the floor underneath the desk and have the receiver pick it up. So that's a distance of, what, maybe four feet? And two physical barriers, each being about an inch of melamine-coated particle board.
I was a little disappointed in the range on the mouse. Range on the keyboard is much better. Maybe the difference is due to the fact that the mouse uses a rechargable battery while the keyboard uses two AAs.
Special keys I've used on my Logitech wireless keyboard under Windows:
Email
Instant Messaging
One for each MS Office application
Open "My Documents" Folder
Open media folder (separate ones for music, movies, photos)
Close Document (shorthand for Ctrl-W)
Shutdown/Standby
Volume Control
Eject optical drive(s)
I think there are more, but those are the ones I've actually personally used. So is the real problem that the keyboards with the special keys are useless, or that you just can't train yourself to use them?
Sure, and you can always be sure to pay for your books in cash so they can't link your itemized receipts back to your credit card records...
The whole point is that this is America and we're not supposed to have to worry about things like this. The problem is not that the government is connected to the library system and therefore the government could have access to your library records. The problem is that our society has become one where the government would access the average citizen's library records.
Sitting around and bitching about the evil government doesn't do anything for anyone. The purpose of reporting these stories is so that everyone can stay informed of what's going on in our country. For you to say "fine, you shouldn't be going to the library anyway" is tantamount to saying this story doesn't matter. And it does matter.
People who pass LPIC like parenthesis?
on
LPIC 1 Exam Cram 2
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
Bad formatting aside, it's interesting that this company policy page has almost as many nonsensical parenthesis in it as the original review. How coincidental that two entirely different writers would have the same style. Isn't it?
Totally legit, completely solicited by the recipients, but definately marketing-related and sales driven
I, personally, do not want to receive any commercial, marketing-related, or sales-driven e-mails. Not a single blessed one. I do receive many, of course. I wonder how many of those I've "solicited"?
I doubt it would be all that difficult to identify bulk mail messages from single-use ones, even a small mailing list to friends and family. Second, there could be a legal test to differentiate between commercial and private email. This kind of distinction is already made in "free speech" arguments. Unfortunately, I find myself bringing the lawyers into the picture, but that seems to be the only way.
The problem, of course, with any kind of law about spam is enforcing it. A law that doesn't get enforced is worse than useless; it damages the legislature by breeding contempt for the rule of law. As such, I'm not saying that charging a fee for spam is going to be an easy solution to implement. I'm just saying makes a lot more sense than some convoluted plan to -- what? -- set up PayPal accounts for every human being on earth with an e-mail account and make sure they get reimbursed for unwanted spam? Ludicrous.
I don't get it. This kind of "disincentive" has already been implemented in just about every business plan on earth in a much less logistically challenging way. When you advertise, you have to pay for it. Let's say you advertise too 1,000 people, it costs you two cents each, and only one person is receptive to your message. That person buys your product for $50. Great! Your ad campaign was successful. On the other hand, if nobody bought your product, you'd be out $20.
This is pretty basic stuff. The problem with spam is that spammers are continually finding ways to pay nothing to advertise. If one person in a thousand replies to a message you paid nothing for and sends you $50, you've made almost double the profits vs. if you had to pay 2 cents per recipient. That's always going to be an attractive market for people with useless crap to sell, because the real rate of return on crap might be considerably less than one in a thousand.
This plan gives people the warm fuzzies because it sounds like each individual will be able to profit from unwanted advertising, but in reality it would never work that way. On the other hand, you'd get the same "punitive" effect on spammers if you just found a way to force them to pay to send spam.
So lots of people will mod this down since they assume that the low-level details like cache lines are more important than oh, say, free memory management. But I got some news: a few minor tweaks and you can do all that same low-level crap in Java or managed C# and get all the benefits of a safe kernel.
You've got my vote. Can you get this finished by the end of the month?
How do you figure that one? If Anakin had done what he was told and never got all hot-n-bothered over Padme, he never would have become Darth Vader. Period. Watch Revenge of the Sith and you'll see what I mean.
What's more, apocryphal stories say Darth Vader was directly inspired by Doctor Doom, another comic book villain invented by Jack Kirby (creator of the New Gods).
Considering how rich George Lucas is, it's interesting to keep hearing him talk about his future projects, how he wants to make smaller movies etc.
"I've earned the right to just make things that I find provocative in my own way," he's quoted as saying. "I've earned the right to fail, which means making what I think are really great movies that no one wants to see."
I always wonder what the hell that means? Earned the right to fail? Like he wasn't allowed to fail before? Exactly how much money was he supposed to make before he could buy his way into the club of mere mortals who are allowed to fail? Kind of a strange way to approach a creative ambition, I think. What mental process must go on in Lucas's head that he has to actually give himself permission to be creative, and justify it by pointing to his past commercial successes?
In general, I'd love to see a psychological profile of George Lucas sometime. Especially considering some of the truly bizarre moral commandments he's put into his recent films (missing your mom is wrong, getting angry at things is bad and makes you a bad person, if you want to be a hero then relationships are forbidden, etc.)... don't get me wrong, I like [some of] his movies and all, but I can't help but suspect that despite all his success, Lucas is just sort of a sad, isolated, lonely, messed-up old fucker.
In the trade press, and probably even newspapers though I have no firsthand experience there, you generally have two arms of the company, which we might call "church" and "state."
"Church" is the editorial department. The head of an editorial department is the editor-in-chief.
"State" is the publishing side. This is where all the marketing, advertising, sales type stuff happens. The head of the publishing side of the business is the publisher. Typically the publisher does not get a direct say in what goes into the magazine. He can object, but what the editor-in-chief says goes. In a well-run operation, the publisher might get a lot of say in what goes on the front cover of a magazine (because you can consider the cover a marketing vehicle as much as it is an editorial one) but that's about where it ends.
The role of CEO is trickier. Doubtless this is a business position. Probably the role of the CEO has more to do with preserving a brand identity for the book through its editorial content. The CEO is probably not all that involved in the day-to-day operations of choosing which articles to publish and which not to publish. He probably does get some say in the matter, though; so, if there's a problem, he probably goes and yells at the editor-in-chief at 4pm on a Friday afternoon and everybody needs to bust ass over the weekend to fix things.
Anyway -- in a well-run publishing outfit that has not compromised its journalistic integrity, the "church" and "state" sides are separate (which is why people tend to call them that). And to tell you the truth, I have no reason to believe this isn't how it is at Sys-Con.
When O'Gara's article was published, who raised the stink? The editor-in-chief of LinuxWorld. Sounds good so far; it's his job to meddle in content. But how did it get published in the first place? Because the editor-in-chief of LinuxWorld doesn't have oversight over it. If O'Gara's content was published as part of a normal publishing structure, perhaps he would. But apparently, according to what Mr. Kircaali says, it is Maureen O'Gara who has oversight over what she publishes. Sys-Con merely "syndicates" it, meaning she basically gets a rubber stamp from Kircaali and nobody even bothers to read it. And I quote:
Maureen does not act directly on behalf of SYS-CON or anyone else. She is the owner of her own company, G2 Computer Intelligence. She is not a staff reporter of SYS-CON. We have been syndicating her LinuxGram newsletter for more than three years.... We do not make decisions on behalf of Ms. O'Gara. I'm not her boss.
So, to Mr. Kircaali: You're quick to put down blogs, but how is what Ms. O'Gara does any different, if there's no editorial oversight? If nobody's her boss, nobody decided what she should or should not write about, nobody has oversight over her stories... then what's that, if not the same thing as blogging?
I think the reason this guy's answers come off so terribly is that he's really not used to being in a position to defend editorial content. He's a business guy. He gets content, he syndicates it on the Web. Certain content goes out without the backing of an editorial department or the oversight of any staff editors? Great! All the cheaper. Well, now it's come to bite him in the ass and he really doesn't know what to say about it, except that he wishes it would all go away and he could go back to running his business.
Am I the only one who thinks that this is a stretch for any OS? Getting past DRM and proprietary formats is even a pain in the ass on Windows.
Laugh all you want, but I recently bought a new PC that came bundled with Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. It is far (I said far) from perfect, but it pretty much does everything on the list.
Store music, movies, TV, photos? Check.
Play back all these media seamlessly? Sort of. For some reason MCE treats music and video differently, which is strange since Windows Media Player does not. For example, you can create playlists and shuffle music; you can't do the same with video.
Support a wide variety of codecs? Sure. Of course it doesn't support XVid or OGG Vorbis out of the box, but install the right DirectShow filters and away you go.
DVD Movies? Check.
Support DRM? You know it. Actively promote DRM is more like it.
Serve to other client machines? You need to buy a Media Center Extender appliance, but yes. However, the extenders don't support all content formats.
Simple GUI? Functions range from simple to almost aggravatingly childlike.
Rock solid and stable? Believe it or not, I have seen very few blue screens on XP. If you have, you've got dodgy hardware.
Go in and out of sleep states with no difficulty? I doubt you guys even comprehend this one. Mac OS X has a nice sleep function, but my MCE machine is pretty damn cool. You can hit a button on the remote and it will go into standby. The hard drives will spin down, the CPU goes into low-power mode, everything. But suppose you have programs queued up to record? No problem -- the machine will actually switch itself back on half way when it's time to grab those programs. The monitor doesn't even turn on. It just spins up the drive and starts capturing the TV program, then goes back into full Standby mode when it's done. Very slick.
Run quiet? It's not silent, but the words "whisper-quiet" definitely come to mind. Most of what you hear is the hard drives. The noise is completely negated by TV at even a moderate volume.
Can handle HD formats? MCE 2005 already supports current HD standards. You really think Microsoft won't be in on the party when new ones come along?
Say what you will about Microsoft, but their track record for this stuff is pretty all right. My main gripe is that it doesn't support simultaneous "computing" and "TV watching" functions as well as maybe it could. It works, but there are aspects of "dual-mode" operation that are a little clunky. I need to use this thing as a PC -- I can't afford a $1,550 set-top box.
P.S. The machine I bought is a Sony VAIO RA830G desktop.
So they spent enormous amounts of time to build a HTPC, and what's in the list of things that don't work: CSS encrypted DVDs. Which is like every single one.
OK, well we know this is trivial to overcome. They say as much in the article.
I want to be able to play the highest quality that's available. This means WMV9-HD @ 1080p for video and DVD-Audio for audio.
I was unaware that HDTV was being broadcast in WMV format. Point me to all those movies available in 1080p and I might start to agree with you. You're just as likely to see a lot of content in 1080p Dirac format as WMV, by the time that content starts to appear. You really think every content producer in the world is willing to align itself with Microsoft rather than use patent-encumbered, but consortium-driven, MPEG technologies?
And on another note, I'm pleased to finally meet a guy who is interested in DVD-Audio. I was wondering who that guy was.
Unlike the previous XBox, this isn't just a PC in a box. Run Linux on a custom triple-core PowerPC chip with a custom ATI graphics chipset? "Hours after release" might be expecting a little much.
Slashdot Mirror
Ultimately your material possessions mean nothing. Matter is conserved; you cannot truly own anything.
Whoah.
I was sort of a "late bloomer" for music. My older sister had bands that she liked, mostly picked up from friends, and certainly I had heard the Beatles and the Stones and the stuff that was on the radio. But I never really became somebody who listened avidly to music myself until I was maybe 15 or 16. I got into it after I developed a taste for the stuff that wasn't on the radio all that much. Some of the first bands I got into included old Oingo Boingo, Skinny Puppy, Front 242, GBH, Dead Kennedys, Minor Threat, Sigue Sigue Sputnik ... connect the dots between all those bands any way you want, but the point is that I wouldn't have heard any of this stuff if it weren't for my friends who dubbed me off tapes of it. (That's right, cassette tapes, remember those?) Did I buy records? Sure. Did I buy more records than I listened to copies from friends? Maybe, but I can't say for sure that I did. But even if half the music I listened to wasn't paid for, it still made me a more willing consumer of music today. So how evil is this "casual piracy" really?
But then, more willing consumer is one thing; better consumer -- at least in the eyes of the major conglomerates -- is another. I think I'm far less likely to buy into a lot of the garbage that's forced down the primary media channels today and far more likely to buy from independent labels/genres than most Americans. All that piracy in my youth made me more likely to spend my money on music today, but it made me less likely to spend my money on "the right music," as far as Sony is concerned.
I won't say the original article ripped me off, but I do know InfoWorld published pretty much the exact same article three days earlier and mine was better written. Oh well, call it sour grapes.
DISCLAIMER: I almost never play videogames, I'm just relaying the gripes as I understand them.
As I understand it, WinFX replaces Win32 as the primary API for Windows, and WinFX is based on 100% managed code. Managed code came in with .Net -- so to say Microsoft is somehow backing away from .Net seems a little disingenuous.
I don't want to be spreading rumors, but I swear someone from Microsoft told me that even device drivers will be managed code in Longhorn. I could be wrong there. Suffice it to say, though, that all this outrage sounds a lot like a tempest in a teapot.
The LX700 supports encryption, but it's not enabled by default. You have to go into the supplied configuration application and elect to turn it on, at which point it goes through a little routine that takes about a minute. I don't remember how it goes exactly, but over the course of the minute it asks you to do various things -- push this key, push that key. Then it says you're done, and communications between the keyboard, mouse, and receiver are henceforth encrypted.
... but if that's too much for you, then you're unlikely to enable safe encryption on your wireless router either. In that case, packet sniffing from the router would be the better bet, since you could even do that from next door.
I can't speak for the encryption protocol itself. But it seems unlikely that Logitech would try to make up its own form of encryption for something as silly as a keyboard, and the configuration process sounds suspiciously like something that's using random user input to generate public and private keys. My bet that it's fairly secure, depending on the number of bits in the keys.
Also, the range on the keyboard is really not that far. To "tap" it, you'd need to be within 10 feet, at most. Which begs the question: Which is the easier plan for somebody who wants to snoop on what you're typing and can get within 10 feet of your machine -- to try to crack the encryption on your wireless keyboard, or to sneak a keylogger onto your system somehow? My bet is #2. Or, you could criticize the fact that you have to specifically enable the encryption on the keyboard
In my experience (and yes, I have one of these keyboard/mouse combos), if the receiver is on the shelf above my desktop, I can't put the mouse on the floor underneath the desk and have the receiver pick it up. So that's a distance of, what, maybe four feet? And two physical barriers, each being about an inch of melamine-coated particle board.
I was a little disappointed in the range on the mouse. Range on the keyboard is much better. Maybe the difference is due to the fact that the mouse uses a rechargable battery while the keyboard uses two AAs.
- Email
- Instant Messaging
- One for each MS Office application
- Open "My Documents" Folder
- Open media folder (separate ones for music, movies, photos)
- Close Document (shorthand for Ctrl-W)
- Shutdown/Standby
- Volume Control
- Eject optical drive(s)
I think there are more, but those are the ones I've actually personally used. So is the real problem that the keyboards with the special keys are useless, or that you just can't train yourself to use them?Jesus F'ing Christ, man, what part of RTFA can you not get your head around?
Sure, and you can always be sure to pay for your books in cash so they can't link your itemized receipts back to your credit card records...
The whole point is that this is America and we're not supposed to have to worry about things like this. The problem is not that the government is connected to the library system and therefore the government could have access to your library records. The problem is that our society has become one where the government would access the average citizen's library records.
Sitting around and bitching about the evil government doesn't do anything for anyone. The purpose of reporting these stories is so that everyone can stay informed of what's going on in our country. For you to say "fine, you shouldn't be going to the library anyway" is tantamount to saying this story doesn't matter. And it does matter.
Bad formatting aside, it's interesting that this company policy page has almost as many nonsensical parenthesis in it as the original review. How coincidental that two entirely different writers would have the same style. Isn't it?
I doubt it would be all that difficult to identify bulk mail messages from single-use ones, even a small mailing list to friends and family. Second, there could be a legal test to differentiate between commercial and private email. This kind of distinction is already made in "free speech" arguments. Unfortunately, I find myself bringing the lawyers into the picture, but that seems to be the only way.
The problem, of course, with any kind of law about spam is enforcing it. A law that doesn't get enforced is worse than useless; it damages the legislature by breeding contempt for the rule of law. As such, I'm not saying that charging a fee for spam is going to be an easy solution to implement. I'm just saying makes a lot more sense than some convoluted plan to -- what? -- set up PayPal accounts for every human being on earth with an e-mail account and make sure they get reimbursed for unwanted spam? Ludicrous.
I don't get it. This kind of "disincentive" has already been implemented in just about every business plan on earth in a much less logistically challenging way. When you advertise, you have to pay for it. Let's say you advertise too 1,000 people, it costs you two cents each, and only one person is receptive to your message. That person buys your product for $50. Great! Your ad campaign was successful. On the other hand, if nobody bought your product, you'd be out $20.
This is pretty basic stuff. The problem with spam is that spammers are continually finding ways to pay nothing to advertise. If one person in a thousand replies to a message you paid nothing for and sends you $50, you've made almost double the profits vs. if you had to pay 2 cents per recipient. That's always going to be an attractive market for people with useless crap to sell, because the real rate of return on crap might be considerably less than one in a thousand.
This plan gives people the warm fuzzies because it sounds like each individual will be able to profit from unwanted advertising, but in reality it would never work that way. On the other hand, you'd get the same "punitive" effect on spammers if you just found a way to force them to pay to send spam.
How do you figure that one? If Anakin had done what he was told and never got all hot-n-bothered over Padme, he never would have become Darth Vader. Period. Watch Revenge of the Sith and you'll see what I mean.
What's more, apocryphal stories say Darth Vader was directly inspired by Doctor Doom, another comic book villain invented by Jack Kirby (creator of the New Gods).
Considering how rich George Lucas is, it's interesting to keep hearing him talk about his future projects, how he wants to make smaller movies etc.
... don't get me wrong, I like [some of] his movies and all, but I can't help but suspect that despite all his success, Lucas is just sort of a sad, isolated, lonely, messed-up old fucker.
"I've earned the right to just make things that I find provocative in my own way," he's quoted as saying. "I've earned the right to fail, which means making what I think are really great movies that no one wants to see."
I always wonder what the hell that means? Earned the right to fail? Like he wasn't allowed to fail before? Exactly how much money was he supposed to make before he could buy his way into the club of mere mortals who are allowed to fail? Kind of a strange way to approach a creative ambition, I think. What mental process must go on in Lucas's head that he has to actually give himself permission to be creative, and justify it by pointing to his past commercial successes?
In general, I'd love to see a psychological profile of George Lucas sometime. Especially considering some of the truly bizarre moral commandments he's put into his recent films (missing your mom is wrong, getting angry at things is bad and makes you a bad person, if you want to be a hero then relationships are forbidden, etc.)
"Church" is the editorial department. The head of an editorial department is the editor-in-chief.
"State" is the publishing side. This is where all the marketing, advertising, sales type stuff happens. The head of the publishing side of the business is the publisher. Typically the publisher does not get a direct say in what goes into the magazine. He can object, but what the editor-in-chief says goes. In a well-run operation, the publisher might get a lot of say in what goes on the front cover of a magazine (because you can consider the cover a marketing vehicle as much as it is an editorial one) but that's about where it ends.
The role of CEO is trickier. Doubtless this is a business position. Probably the role of the CEO has more to do with preserving a brand identity for the book through its editorial content. The CEO is probably not all that involved in the day-to-day operations of choosing which articles to publish and which not to publish. He probably does get some say in the matter, though; so, if there's a problem, he probably goes and yells at the editor-in-chief at 4pm on a Friday afternoon and everybody needs to bust ass over the weekend to fix things.
Anyway -- in a well-run publishing outfit that has not compromised its journalistic integrity, the "church" and "state" sides are separate (which is why people tend to call them that). And to tell you the truth, I have no reason to believe this isn't how it is at Sys-Con.
When O'Gara's article was published, who raised the stink? The editor-in-chief of LinuxWorld. Sounds good so far; it's his job to meddle in content. But how did it get published in the first place? Because the editor-in-chief of LinuxWorld doesn't have oversight over it. If O'Gara's content was published as part of a normal publishing structure, perhaps he would. But apparently, according to what Mr. Kircaali says, it is Maureen O'Gara who has oversight over what she publishes. Sys-Con merely "syndicates" it, meaning she basically gets a rubber stamp from Kircaali and nobody even bothers to read it. And I quote:
So, to Mr. Kircaali: You're quick to put down blogs, but how is what Ms. O'Gara does any different, if there's no editorial oversight? If nobody's her boss, nobody decided what she should or should not write about, nobody has oversight over her storiesI think the reason this guy's answers come off so terribly is that he's really not used to being in a position to defend editorial content. He's a business guy. He gets content, he syndicates it on the Web. Certain content goes out without the backing of an editorial department or the oversight of any staff editors? Great! All the cheaper. Well, now it's come to bite him in the ass and he really doesn't know what to say about it, except that he wishes it would all go away and he could go back to running his business.
- Store music, movies, TV, photos? Check.
- Play back all these media seamlessly? Sort of. For some reason MCE treats music and video differently, which is strange since Windows Media Player does not. For example, you can create playlists and shuffle music; you can't do the same with video.
- Support a wide variety of codecs? Sure. Of course it doesn't support XVid or OGG Vorbis out of the box, but install the right DirectShow filters and away you go.
- DVD Movies? Check.
- Support DRM? You know it. Actively promote DRM is more like it.
- Serve to other client machines? You need to buy a Media Center Extender appliance, but yes. However, the extenders don't support all content formats.
- Simple GUI? Functions range from simple to almost aggravatingly childlike.
- Rock solid and stable? Believe it or not, I have seen very few blue screens on XP. If you have, you've got dodgy hardware.
- Go in and out of sleep states with no difficulty? I doubt you guys even comprehend this one. Mac OS X has a nice sleep function, but my MCE machine is pretty damn cool. You can hit a button on the remote and it will go into standby. The hard drives will spin down, the CPU goes into low-power mode, everything. But suppose you have programs queued up to record? No problem -- the machine will actually switch itself back on half way when it's time to grab those programs. The monitor doesn't even turn on. It just spins up the drive and starts capturing the TV program, then goes back into full Standby mode when it's done. Very slick.
- Run quiet? It's not silent, but the words "whisper-quiet" definitely come to mind. Most of what you hear is the hard drives. The noise is completely negated by TV at even a moderate volume.
- Can handle HD formats? MCE 2005 already supports current HD standards. You really think Microsoft won't be in on the party when new ones come along?
Say what you will about Microsoft, but their track record for this stuff is pretty all right. My main gripe is that it doesn't support simultaneous "computing" and "TV watching" functions as well as maybe it could. It works, but there are aspects of "dual-mode" operation that are a little clunky. I need to use this thing as a PC -- I can't afford a $1,550 set-top box.P.S. The machine I bought is a Sony VAIO RA830G desktop.
And on another note, I'm pleased to finally meet a guy who is interested in DVD-Audio. I was wondering who that guy was.
Unlike the previous XBox, this isn't just a PC in a box. Run Linux on a custom triple-core PowerPC chip with a custom ATI graphics chipset? "Hours after release" might be expecting a little much.