Indeed. I visited the Army's Night Vision and Electro-Optics laboratory several years ago, where they do extensive work with lasers among other things. I was given a small clear polymer disk that had a very intricate hologram of a rose--it didn't look realistic, because it was meant to look *more* than realistic. It looked thoroughly 3D and was realistic in that respect, but it was designed to show a more vibrant and changing array of colors--extremely impressive for a plastic disk the size of a silver dollar.
But then again, what you can do with billions of dollars of equipment at your disposal is a lot different from what you can do with a consumer-level product, or even what most mid-level corporate backing could afford...;-)
> I still contend that the one-board solution was what really did in 3dfx.
Then you're wrong, because the Voodoo3 cards were all one-board 2D/3D solutions.:-) The era of the passthrough cable ended with the Voodoo2.
Incidentally, this is why many enthusiasts of older games keep a Voodoo2 in their machines--it provides seamless Glide support while allowing the primary card to handle all OpenGL and DirectX calls without interfering, and doesn't even use up an IRQ.
I myself have several old Voodoo2 cards for just this purpose--many older games look worlds better when rendered under Glide as they were intended, than when rendered under D3D or a software renderer. I've tried Glide wrappers and they absolutely suck. So, for retro PC gaming, many well-rounded gamers keep a Voodoo2 along with their modern GeForceSomenumber or RadeonWhatever series cards. My favorites are the dual-Voodoo2-SLI-on-a-single-card solutions made by Quantum3D, such as the Obsidian2 X-24, which provided the best performance ever seen back in 1998 and retailed for $699. Today they can be found on eBay for less than $50, while "plain" Voodoo2 cards can be had for just a few dollars.
I digress, but anyway, my point was that the Voodoo2 was the last add-in 3d-only accelerator. Everything after, including the Voodoo3 series, were integrated 2d/3d. And at the time, the Voodoo3 series spanked all but the TNT2 Ultra line, which of course was released 6 months later than the original TNT2, which was stomped by the Voodoo3 cards in performance. The TNT2's only advantage was 32-bit color, which at the time required a rather high-end processor to be playable anyway.
> which still beat x86 designs, megahertz for megahertz.
But which can't seem to scale well enough to compete performance-wise in the real world. A 1GHz PPC may well beat a 1GHz P4, but since the P4 is available at 2.5GHz, that hardly matters.
> Can you say Macintosh, PowerPC, and MC680x0? I knew you could.
Amazing how something so condescending could be so wrong.:-)
The Macintosh line could easily move over to PPC from 68k because of one factor and one factor only: the PPC was so much faster than the 68k that 68k apps could run in an emulated 68k environment at decent speeds. And then of course, a huge motivating factor was that the 68k CPUs had reached the end of their useful life and ween't going to be produced at higher speeds.
Fast forward to today, and the situation with Itanium is very different. It can't run x86 applications at near-native speeds. It doesn't offer a compelling upgrade path for users, especially since all their old software and games won't run on it and nothing it offers makes up for that. And then we have AMD's x86-64 Hammer, which offers all the advantages of a 64-bit CPU but with complete backwards compatability with existing 32-bit x86 apps. Many people bitch about the x86 instruction set and the limitations of the architecture, but the fact is instructions sets are nearly meaningless nowadays now that instructions are predecoded into micro-ops and treated as they would be on RISC processors. And the limitations of the x86 architecture are solved in the expanded x86-64 architechture.
Backwards compatability with no discernible performance drawbacks is always preferable to no backwards compatability.
I tried cleaning, but to no avail. When conventional methods didn't work I even tried using a compressed air canister to blow the area out, figuring it doesn't matter if I damage anything since it isn't working well anymore in the first place.:-)
But, alas, I think the laser is just semi-dead... Not that I can blame it--getting five useful years out of a PC part isn't as common as it used to be.:-)
Yup. I'm still using my Creative 4-2-24 CD-RW drive to this day.:-) Since I've never had the need to get CDs burnt as fast as technologically possible, I've never felt like upgrading it. It's followed me from my old K6-2 to my Duron to my Athlon.
Unfortunately, after 5 years or so of faithful service it's been slowly dying for the last few months. First it stopped reading past 650MB on 700MB CDs. Weird, but I figured the thing's just so old... And then, it started burning coasters about 10% of the time even though I use good Taiyo Yuden media. Then it gradually climbed up until now a CD gets burnt properly about 1 in 10 tries. Sometimes the CDs would come out completely unwritten, and sometimes the data would only be very lightly burnt in, making it obvious the writing laser wasn't working reliably anymore.
So, it's time to finally put the old girl out to pasture and get one of those newer, faster, more versatile models. Plextor or Asus, I guess, from what I've read about various models. But I'll kinda miss the old CD burner, the only part of my first desktop PC that's still being used in my newest desktop PC...
> Based on the rack of SD and HD MPEG-2 encoding gear in my lab
Again, this is my point, and this is why you're so heartily mistaken. That is expensive non-consumer-level equipment that you're discussing. Consumer-level equipment *cannot* compress into a good-quality MPEG-2 stream, period, and without any extant exception. "Real" PVRs can do so because TiVos and such are produced on a much larger scale than PC or Mac based USB devices and have economies of scale to reduce component costs; PC and Mac USB devices do not. And no, I was not talking only of the EyeTV device specifically, but of *every* consumer USB-based video capture device yet devised--and there are many. Go research them. All are inadequate.
> But don't let that develop into a superiority complex.
It's not a superiority complex. It's simple observation from personal experience. Well-made MPEG-2 captures with good equipment from a quality source such as a high-quality satellite broadcast can almost rival DVD quality. MPEG-1 from a USB device cannot. You may work in broadcasting, but you're talking out of your ass about a market segment of which you are ignorant. Go advise broadcast houses on what to purchase, but don't presume to say that because the peak bandwidth of unshared USB is high enough to accomodate a broadcast quality stream has *anything* to do with whether consumer USB video capture devices (not this one in particular, ALL of them) could produce a decent picture. They can't, period, and I've provided links earlier explaining why.
If you must game on a console and sit on a floor, I'd recommend either the sleeping pads/pallets that they sell at camping supply stores, or perhaps a small wrestling mat from a sporting goods supplier.
The sleeping pallets are pretty much what they sound like--foam-filled mats just big enough to lay on. Some people use them for comfort on camping trips or when staying on someone's floor. Ditto for the wrestling mats, I think we know what they are.:-) Comfy asses. Ahhhh....
Sorry if I was, but I see so many ill-educated posts here that could be cured by a quick trip to the ArsTechnica A/V FAQ or the AVS Forum that it's quite annoying. These issues of USB-based video capture devices have already been discussed ad nauseam and demonstrated conclusively. This has even been pointed out on Slashdot before. Yet for some reason, a large number of Slashdot's newer Mac users are completely ignorant of such issues and discussions.
> SD at 8 Mbps MPEG-2, MP@ML, is considered (by most) to be broadcast > quality. USB's bandwidth is 12 Mbps. QED.
Not QED, because to compress it *before* it gets sent over the USB bus into a quality MPEG-2 stream would take *expensive* professional-quality encoding equipment. That's not what EyeTV is; it's yet another consumer USB MPEG-1 encoder so by definition its picture will be rather poor. There are already comparable devices for both the PC and Mac, such as the ATI TV-Wonder USB, and such devices are roundly panned as low-quality, with noisy pictures and bad artifacting and too-low bitrates. PCI and AGP solutions are worlds better. Here's a quick primer on some of them, with the ATI All-in-Wonder line being pretty clear winners:
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1609
> I've never seen a software MPEG-2 encoder that could work in real time, > so I can't really have an opinion about those, either.
That's what devices like the ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon 8500 and similar can do when paired with a fast processor. Powerful CPUs are cheap these days--may as well put them to use more intensive than word-processing. Depending on the settings, picture quality can be quite impressive.
These issues I've witnessed first-hand because I not only use an older PCI-based capture card, I've also taken to downloading many of the TV shows I watch regularly and would probably want to keep a day or two after they've been aired from USENET, rather than having to watch them at a particular time. That's exposed me to a lot of different captures with the whole spectrum of equipment. Depending on the equipment and capture methods and quality of the source some captures look *almost* DVD-quality, while others look (and sound) horrible. People often list their equipment in the readme files for their posts, and the equipment that provides the worst-quality video is USB. It just isn't suitable for such devices, at least not until a truly cheap broadcast-quality MPEG-2 encoder chipset is invented for them. Even so, remember that USB's top throughput listing is a *burst* speed, unlike Firewire's, and that the bus will be shared between any other USB peripherals connected. This just makes the USB bus a risky method of realtime A/V data collection, particularly on Macs where USB speakers and hard drives and CD devices are so common. As Apple themselves point out, USB is for low-bandwidth peripherals like keyboards and mice and webcams and the occasional digital camera or such. Firewire is much better for more intensive uses.
> But don't take an extreme position and then argue that everybody else's > position sucks.
It's not an extreme position in the least. Go to sites populated with people who use consumer capture technology, and there's about 90% agreement with my position. Start by going to the ArsTechnica.com forums' "A/V Club" and reading their FAQ if you disbelieve what I'm saying. My position is mainstream in the community which buys most of the consumer video capture devices.
Re:USB = plenty of bandwidth for compressed data
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USB isn't Firewire though--sharing USB's processor overhead and low bandwidth between devices will quickly cause problems when you're dealing with something as chunky as a video signal over USB. Since Macs use so much crap over USB, this is a recipe for disaster--imagine if you're trying to save the video stream to a USB drive while listening to the audio on your USB speakers and using your USB mouse and keyboard which are next to your USB CD-RW, etc.--not good. Even if you're saving to the internal drive or a Firewire drive, that still leaves a lot of devices sharing the USB ports--even though some are low-bandwidth low-overhead like your keyboard and mouse, that video signal needs as much bandwidth as you can get.
Sorry, but internal AGP All-in-Wonder cards will always be the best PVRs--you can encode FULL NTSC or PAL resolution into MPEG-2 or anything else, not just lowly 320x240 or thereabouts MPEG-1. And as processors become more powerful, realtime MPEG-4 encoding of full-quality signals will become an option for such cards. But never for lowly USB devices.
That's the problem you just don't seem to understand. It has to be compressed BEFORE it goes over the USB bus, meaning it has to be done either by cheap low-quality hardware or expensive broadcast-quality hardware. Guess which kind comes on sub-$500 dongles like this POS? So, the video will be poorly compressed and low-quality. What good is that supposedly superior PPC processor if it doesn't even get to do all the compression, and instead gets a stream pre-compressed by a cheap lossy EyeTV chipset?
Contrast that to the AGP All-in-Wonder solutions and the many PCI solutions for the PC, which have ten to fifty times more bandwidth and can let the CPU handle most of the encoding duties to produce high-quality realtime MPEG-2 or other captures at full NTSC or PAL resolution, not comparatively crappy 320x240 or so MPEG-1.
Seriously, go rad the ArsTechnica A/V Club FAQ and forum before you spout this ill-educated nonsense. Better yet, go mention it on the AVSforum website, this idea that crappy MPEG-1 over USB is going to rival a real encoding card. Bah.
Re:Let's hope they do a better job than ATi
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ATI's Mac PVR products are nearly useless. Their PC All-in-Wonder AGP and PCI cards are, however, the best such cards available, and will easily blow the doors off a Mac-based PVR with this new EyeTV thing. Why? For one thing, as mentioned on ArsTechnica, EyeTV is limited to MPEG-1 bitrates suitable for transmission over USB--in other words, low resolution crap.
Real PVR solutions with highest quality capabilities--MPEG-2 in full resolution with decent bitrates, for example--are only possible over the AGP or PCI bus. Such solutions are commonplace in the PC world, and many work wonders. They're almost unknown in the Mac consumer space because so many Mac users have iMacs that can't use them, or wouldn't want to tinker inside their towers, that it hasn't been deemed profitable enough yet.
Of course, it's possible a Firewire solution could provide high quality TiVo-like abilities for the Mac, but as of yet no one has tried.
Actually, don't knock old tech. I'd feel safer in an F-18 than in an Osprey.;-)
Actually, the president of my old college had a great story about how old tech can be superior in performance. He was a former Deputy Dirctor of the CIA, and had some stories he was willing to tell about some of the declassified things he was involved in. One of them was the study of the first MiG fighter we got our hands on.
Back in the 60s we were afraid of these new MiG fighters the Soviets were using--they performed significantly better than out own fighter jets of the day. We couldn't figure out what it was about them that made them more maneuverable and faster, but among other things we were scared that they had more advanced onboard electronics.
We finally got our chance to find out when a Soviet pilot took a MiG to Japan to defect to the U.S., and my college president's team was called in to disassemble, photograph, and reassemble everything before the Soviets came to retrieve their fighter the next day.
So, do you know what those sophisticated electronics we were afraid they might have developed were? Vacuum tubes. Yep, those early MiGs that outperformed our own fighters were still using vacuum tubes, a technology ten years out of date; our fighter electronics had long been transistor based. The advantages of the MiG turned out to be nominal design differences and nothing more--no super-sophisticated technology at all.
So, don't knock it 'cause it's outdated tech. The proven F-18 can still kick the ass of many newer more sophisticated designs when ity comes down to brass tacks.
Unrealistic. Why would anyone switch to a platform that has relatively little software and hardware support--on the unlikely hope that everyone else will someday? Bah. Apple's marketshare hasn't increased significantly in many years, and it won't now. Sorry, but that's reality.
Sorry, but that isn't the answer for people who are really interested, as he seems to be, in just being able to hook things up and have them work. OS X is great; but it doesn't support nearly as much hardware as Windows does. It also doesn't support nearly as much software, particularly important for a gamer--while many of the best new titles get ported to the Mac, many do not, and there's a whole back-catalogue of wonderful games that are Windows-only. I can even play most of the cool older Mac-only games on Windows or Linux using the open-source Basilisk ][ 68k Mac emulator. However, newer games require hardware acceleration, so will never be playable under VirtualPC or similar on Macs.
That's why, despite my love for the look and feel of MacOS (I first got started on Macs), I could never buy an Apple machine. I like hooking up new bits of hardware, and being able to use almost all PC games, and being 100% interoperable with the hardware and software used by 85-90% of my fellow home computer users.
OS X is a fine OS. But it doesn't have the hardware and software support many, and perhaps most, want.
> I agree for the most part, but the Yoda fight scene was comedy, why would there be tension?
That's the sad part. I guarantee Lucas was convinced that audiences would be glued to their seats in awe, rather than laughing hysterically... Which, of course, is what would have happened if the scene were done correctly. If done correctly, people would have initially laughed at the comedic value of Yoda in a lightsaber bout--but then they'd have been awestruck, and overcome with tension.
But no, because the fight was all wrong, the dialogue was insipid, and Count Dooku damn well wasn't a Darth Vader--we never fear him because he's a caricature from childrens' cartoons, not a menacing figure like Vader was.
The result is something Lucas surely intended to be on par with the lightsaber duels in his earlier films, and even surpass it--and instead he turned it into a quick joke that takes audiences off guard at first, but which will have no huge impact on future viewings.
Comparing it to, for example, Luke's big fight with Vader at the end of *RotJ*, the Luke/Vader duel still has palpable tension and impact every time I view the film again. Does the Yoda bout with Dooku offer much on later viewings? Not much...and that's a sign that Lucas went wrong.
ATI *cannot* do SLI because it's patented, and nVidia bought 3dfx's patents on SLI among other things. This is why ATI used another method--their methos was just as simple and effective; each GPU renders alternate frames. In fact, it has fewer theoretical problems when doing alternate frames, than Voodoos did with rendering alternate scanlines. The scanline approach produced occasional tearing or shimmering effects, though it's very rare.
The problem with the Rage Fury MAXX has to do not with the method of interleaving or the presence of GPUs, but rather the method ATI chose to bridge the two chips, which isn't permitted in the NT AGP code. ATI couldn't find a way around it, so they abandoned the card. Sad, since it was a nice performer under Win9x...
However, many other implementations do 2 graphics chips right with NT support, such as the Voodoo 5 5500 and the high-end multi-chip Quantum3D boards.
So, ATI could easily do a Radeon MAXX part with WinXP support, since they know what mistakes not to make in silicon this time around...
Actually, I had the weird idea after noticing how bad the script was for *AotC*, of taking a few weeks to dedicate to writing a really convincing fake script for the 3rd episode and then "leaking" it to a bunch of rumor sites later in the year just to see what the reaction would be. Compared to Lucas' own screenplay, I'm sure mine would be a gem...;-) It would indeed be ironic if fan sites thought a false screnplay were better than the real one when the real one comes out.:-)
Indeed, Spielberg has the pedigree to set *Star Wars* straight. Looking at his directorial filmography on IMDB reveals a great mix of both serious films, good sci-fi, and endearing movies that appeak to kids. That's a perfect rcipe for directing a great *Star Wars* film, whereas Lucas has gotten carried away by technology to the point of believing CG can replace plot and emotion.
Seriously, compare the use of CG in the two *Star Wars* prequels to the use of CG in *Minority Report* and the original *Jurassic Park*. Spielberg's films have plot and emotion at the center, with the CG as an important element used to bring realism to the sci-fi element--but the CG is never put before the plot and emotion. Lucas' *SW* prequels on the other hand relegate plot and emotion to the back-burner--even in *AotC* when Anakin and Padme are supposedly in love, the audience never really feels it. They have how much on screen time together again--and how much of that is taken up by screechingly corny and hackneyed cliches? Ack, what a disgrace. Even Lucas' best CG in the film is botched--the Yoda fight scene was awesome, but far too short and far less dramatic than it should have been. Remember the tension when Obi Wan fought Vader in *SW*? Remember the tension when Luke fought Vader in *RotJ*? It really wasn't there in the Yoda bout, because Lucas can't write and direct worth crap anymore.
Seriously, with Spielberg doing the directing and fixing the dialogue, and Lucas doing the special effects, future *SW* films would be truly great. As it is, we can only really hope for *better* than the two prequels so far, but probably not as good as the older films.
> And it takes a lot of effort to supplement my feed from other servers.
Easynews. Check it out. Standard NNTP access, or a searchable Web interface. I use NNTP for most things, but if I just want to browse a particular group's binaries quickly, I often use the Web interface--which is perfect for quickly grabbing an episode of Buffy.:-) In fact, the complete version of OMWF is still in the Buffy repost group in full on Easynews, since Web retention of binaries is ~38 days currently.
Only *one* of those games he mentioned was of the "good"variety of Hentai game, with an engaging plot and artful story. The rest are the total crap which I clearly stated dominates in the Hentai games that have been translated into English.
The one good game on his list, which he panned because he didn't have the patience to figure out how to get past the game's slow point of having to search a few too many rooms, was *3 Sisters' Story*. It came out about 1992, so has only 256-color imagery, and yes it does make you go into a few too many rooms once or twice. However, it has an excellent plot, which he didn't get the benefit of because he quit after just a couple hours.
However, he hasn't reviewed any of the recent great titles, like *Divi-Dead*. Read the reviews I listed above. Some of these are very worthy RPGs.
> SMG is good-looking, but she's not outrageously exceptionally > good-looking in a religeous-inspiring launch-a-thousand-ships kind of way.
No, that would be her little sister on the show, Michelle Trachtenberg, who's much more launch-a-thousand-ships lovely than Gellar. Mmmmm...Michelle Trachtenberg... Jailbait: The Other White Meat. Seriously, don't you just see her on *Buffy* and wanna bend her over and grab her hair and...
In fact, this season is *why* I started watching Buffy regularly, and catching up with previous seasons. The show never really appealed to me before because it was very hit-and-miss, with a few good episodes surrounded by eons of mindless soulless drivel. When it was good, it was great--like when Willow first comes out as a lesbian, or when the gang has to deal with Angel's return after he'd killed and tortured people; all the great episodes had an emotional component. However, most were mindless fighting episodes with thin plots and mediocre writing, though good choreography in general. But you can get that sort of mindless fighting in any number of series--*VIP*, *Relic Hunter*, etc.
What made the 6th season attractive was that most of the episodes had emotional depth. It dealt with young adults finally growing up and out into the real world, with real-world problems--money, social workers, addictions, emptiness. It was amazing. When I started watching, I went back and discovered that much of the 5th season was the same--episodes had depth, not just the killing of stuff. But before that--phew, mostly stinkers. And unlike the guy below who bemoans the "predictability" of these emotional crises, I have to say that while themes were familiar, and sometimes bordering on trite--the addiction to magic as an analogue to drug addiction--every such theme was presented with unique twists or perspectives, such that it impressed me with the writers' inventiveness in bringing the viewer into the series through bits of real-life problems presented in inscrutable contexts.
Only those interested in emotional depth and truly superb writing will appreciate the 6th season for the tour-de-force that it was. Or are we to believe the same creative minds which brought us "Once More with Feeling" were completely non-creative for the rest of the season? A certain type of science fiction fan--the puerile type only interested in otherworldly action, not plot or feeling--would be greatly disappointed, and never satisfuied with this season, picking apart the plots with the sort of banal and useless complaining of a certain comic-store-owning *Simpsons* character. But to the rest of us, who can appreciate artful and engaging storytelling, and who can appreciate the effort to show characters dealing with the same early-20s crises many people go through once college is over and the real world hits, the 6th season was a masterpiece. It was also a critical success and a popular success, as the ratings show--how much better in the Nielson ratings could you expect a transplanted show, from one network and slot to another totally different network, to do? It was clearly a success, the bitching of comic-book-guys around the globe notwithstanding.
I have to thank the writers and producers again for letting these characters mature and grow up, and for showing us that painful process in each episode of the 6th season.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. I visited the Army's Night Vision and Electro-Optics laboratory several years ago, where they do extensive work with lasers among other things. I was given a small clear polymer disk that had a very intricate hologram of a rose--it didn't look realistic, because it was meant to look *more* than realistic. It looked thoroughly 3D and was realistic in that respect, but it was designed to show a more vibrant and changing array of colors--extremely impressive for a plastic disk the size of a silver dollar.
;-)
But then again, what you can do with billions of dollars of equipment at your disposal is a lot different from what you can do with a consumer-level product, or even what most mid-level corporate backing could afford...
> I still contend that the one-board solution was what really did in 3dfx.
:-) The era of the passthrough cable ended with the Voodoo2.
Then you're wrong, because the Voodoo3 cards were all one-board 2D/3D solutions.
Incidentally, this is why many enthusiasts of older games keep a Voodoo2 in their machines--it provides seamless Glide support while allowing the primary card to handle all OpenGL and DirectX calls without interfering, and doesn't even use up an IRQ.
I myself have several old Voodoo2 cards for just this purpose--many older games look worlds better when rendered under Glide as they were intended, than when rendered under D3D or a software renderer. I've tried Glide wrappers and they absolutely suck. So, for retro PC gaming, many well-rounded gamers keep a Voodoo2 along with their modern GeForceSomenumber or RadeonWhatever series cards. My favorites are the dual-Voodoo2-SLI-on-a-single-card solutions made by Quantum3D, such as the Obsidian2 X-24, which provided the best performance ever seen back in 1998 and retailed for $699. Today they can be found on eBay for less than $50, while "plain" Voodoo2 cards can be had for just a few dollars.
I digress, but anyway, my point was that the Voodoo2 was the last add-in 3d-only accelerator. Everything after, including the Voodoo3 series, were integrated 2d/3d. And at the time, the Voodoo3 series spanked all but the TNT2 Ultra line, which of course was released 6 months later than the original TNT2, which was stomped by the Voodoo3 cards in performance. The TNT2's only advantage was 32-bit color, which at the time required a rather high-end processor to be playable anyway.
> which still beat x86 designs, megahertz for megahertz.
But which can't seem to scale well enough to compete performance-wise in the real world. A 1GHz PPC may well beat a 1GHz P4, but since the P4 is available at 2.5GHz, that hardly matters.
> Can you say Macintosh, PowerPC, and MC680x0? I knew you could.
:-)
Amazing how something so condescending could be so wrong.
The Macintosh line could easily move over to PPC from 68k because of one factor and one factor only: the PPC was so much faster than the 68k that 68k apps could run in an emulated 68k environment at decent speeds. And then of course, a huge motivating factor was that the 68k CPUs had reached the end of their useful life and ween't going to be produced at higher speeds.
Fast forward to today, and the situation with Itanium is very different. It can't run x86 applications at near-native speeds. It doesn't offer a compelling upgrade path for users, especially since all their old software and games won't run on it and nothing it offers makes up for that. And then we have AMD's x86-64 Hammer, which offers all the advantages of a 64-bit CPU but with complete backwards compatability with existing 32-bit x86 apps. Many people bitch about the x86 instruction set and the limitations of the architecture, but the fact is instructions sets are nearly meaningless nowadays now that instructions are predecoded into micro-ops and treated as they would be on RISC processors. And the limitations of the x86 architecture are solved in the expanded x86-64 architechture.
Backwards compatability with no discernible performance drawbacks is always preferable to no backwards compatability.
I tried cleaning, but to no avail. When conventional methods didn't work I even tried using a compressed air canister to blow the area out, figuring it doesn't matter if I damage anything since it isn't working well anymore in the first place. :-)
:-)
But, alas, I think the laser is just semi-dead... Not that I can blame it--getting five useful years out of a PC part isn't as common as it used to be.
> Remember when 4x was fast?
:-) Since I've never had the need to get CDs burnt as fast as technologically possible, I've never felt like upgrading it. It's followed me from my old K6-2 to my Duron to my Athlon.
:-)
Yup. I'm still using my Creative 4-2-24 CD-RW drive to this day.
Unfortunately, after 5 years or so of faithful service it's been slowly dying for the last few months. First it stopped reading past 650MB on 700MB CDs. Weird, but I figured the thing's just so old... And then, it started burning coasters about 10% of the time even though I use good Taiyo Yuden media. Then it gradually climbed up until now a CD gets burnt properly about 1 in 10 tries. Sometimes the CDs would come out completely unwritten, and sometimes the data would only be very lightly burnt in, making it obvious the writing laser wasn't working reliably anymore.
So, it's time to finally put the old girl out to pasture and get one of those newer, faster, more versatile models. Plextor or Asus, I guess, from what I've read about various models. But I'll kinda miss the old CD burner, the only part of my first desktop PC that's still being used in my newest desktop PC...
Sad when old hardware finally bites the dust.
> Based on the rack of SD and HD MPEG-2 encoding gear in my lab
Again, this is my point, and this is why you're so heartily mistaken. That is expensive non-consumer-level equipment that you're discussing. Consumer-level equipment *cannot* compress into a good-quality MPEG-2 stream, period, and without any extant exception. "Real" PVRs can do so because TiVos and such are produced on a much larger scale than PC or Mac based USB devices and have economies of scale to reduce component costs; PC and Mac USB devices do not. And no, I was not talking only of the EyeTV device specifically, but of *every* consumer USB-based video capture device yet devised--and there are many. Go research them. All are inadequate.
> But don't let that develop into a superiority complex.
It's not a superiority complex. It's simple observation from personal experience. Well-made MPEG-2 captures with good equipment from a quality source such as a high-quality satellite broadcast can almost rival DVD quality. MPEG-1 from a USB device cannot. You may work in broadcasting, but you're talking out of your ass about a market segment of which you are ignorant. Go advise broadcast houses on what to purchase, but don't presume to say that because the peak bandwidth of unshared USB is high enough to accomodate a broadcast quality stream has *anything* to do with whether consumer USB video capture devices (not this one in particular, ALL of them) could produce a decent picture. They can't, period, and I've provided links earlier explaining why.
If you must game on a console and sit on a floor, I'd recommend either the sleeping pads/pallets that they sell at camping supply stores, or perhaps a small wrestling mat from a sporting goods supplier.
:-) Comfy asses. Ahhhh....
The sleeping pallets are pretty much what they sound like--foam-filled mats just big enough to lay on. Some people use them for comfort on camping trips or when staying on someone's floor. Ditto for the wrestling mats, I think we know what they are.
> First of all, you're being kind of an asshole.
Sorry if I was, but I see so many ill-educated posts here that could be cured by a quick trip to the ArsTechnica A/V FAQ or the AVS Forum that it's quite annoying. These issues of USB-based video capture devices have already been discussed ad nauseam and demonstrated conclusively. This has even been pointed out on Slashdot before. Yet for some reason, a large number of Slashdot's newer Mac users are completely ignorant of such issues and discussions.
> SD at 8 Mbps MPEG-2, MP@ML, is considered (by most) to be broadcast
> quality. USB's bandwidth is 12 Mbps. QED.
Not QED, because to compress it *before* it gets sent over the USB bus into a quality MPEG-2 stream would take *expensive* professional-quality encoding equipment. That's not what EyeTV is; it's yet another consumer USB MPEG-1 encoder so by definition its picture will be rather poor. There are already comparable devices for both the PC and Mac, such as the ATI TV-Wonder USB, and such devices are roundly panned as low-quality, with noisy pictures and bad artifacting and too-low bitrates. PCI and AGP solutions are worlds better. Here's a quick primer on some of them, with the ATI All-in-Wonder line being pretty clear winners:
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1609
> I've never seen a software MPEG-2 encoder that could work in real time,
> so I can't really have an opinion about those, either.
That's what devices like the ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon 8500 and similar can do when paired with a fast processor. Powerful CPUs are cheap these days--may as well put them to use more intensive than word-processing. Depending on the settings, picture quality can be quite impressive.
These issues I've witnessed first-hand because I not only use an older PCI-based capture card, I've also taken to downloading many of the TV shows I watch regularly and would probably want to keep a day or two after they've been aired from USENET, rather than having to watch them at a particular time. That's exposed me to a lot of different captures with the whole spectrum of equipment. Depending on the equipment and capture methods and quality of the source some captures look *almost* DVD-quality, while others look (and sound) horrible. People often list their equipment in the readme files for their posts, and the equipment that provides the worst-quality video is USB. It just isn't suitable for such devices, at least not until a truly cheap broadcast-quality MPEG-2 encoder chipset is invented for them. Even so, remember that USB's top throughput listing is a *burst* speed, unlike Firewire's, and that the bus will be shared between any other USB peripherals connected. This just makes the USB bus a risky method of realtime A/V data collection, particularly on Macs where USB speakers and hard drives and CD devices are so common. As Apple themselves point out, USB is for low-bandwidth peripherals like keyboards and mice and webcams and the occasional digital camera or such. Firewire is much better for more intensive uses.
> But don't take an extreme position and then argue that everybody else's
> position sucks.
It's not an extreme position in the least. Go to sites populated with people who use consumer capture technology, and there's about 90% agreement with my position. Start by going to the ArsTechnica.com forums' "A/V Club" and reading their FAQ if you disbelieve what I'm saying. My position is mainstream in the community which buys most of the consumer video capture devices.
USB isn't Firewire though--sharing USB's processor overhead and low bandwidth between devices will quickly cause problems when you're dealing with something as chunky as a video signal over USB. Since Macs use so much crap over USB, this is a recipe for disaster--imagine if you're trying to save the video stream to a USB drive while listening to the audio on your USB speakers and using your USB mouse and keyboard which are next to your USB CD-RW, etc.--not good. Even if you're saving to the internal drive or a Firewire drive, that still leaves a lot of devices sharing the USB ports--even though some are low-bandwidth low-overhead like your keyboard and mouse, that video signal needs as much bandwidth as you can get.
Sorry, but internal AGP All-in-Wonder cards will always be the best PVRs--you can encode FULL NTSC or PAL resolution into MPEG-2 or anything else, not just lowly 320x240 or thereabouts MPEG-1. And as processors become more powerful, realtime MPEG-4 encoding of full-quality signals will become an option for such cards. But never for lowly USB devices.
> Of course the video would be compressed.
That's the problem you just don't seem to understand. It has to be compressed BEFORE it goes over the USB bus, meaning it has to be done either by cheap low-quality hardware or expensive broadcast-quality hardware. Guess which kind comes on sub-$500 dongles like this POS? So, the video will be poorly compressed and low-quality. What good is that supposedly superior PPC processor if it doesn't even get to do all the compression, and instead gets a stream pre-compressed by a cheap lossy EyeTV chipset?
Contrast that to the AGP All-in-Wonder solutions and the many PCI solutions for the PC, which have ten to fifty times more bandwidth and can let the CPU handle most of the encoding duties to produce high-quality realtime MPEG-2 or other captures at full NTSC or PAL resolution, not comparatively crappy 320x240 or so MPEG-1.
Seriously, go rad the ArsTechnica A/V Club FAQ and forum before you spout this ill-educated nonsense. Better yet, go mention it on the AVSforum website, this idea that crappy MPEG-1 over USB is going to rival a real encoding card. Bah.
ATI's Mac PVR products are nearly useless. Their PC All-in-Wonder AGP and PCI cards are, however, the best such cards available, and will easily blow the doors off a Mac-based PVR with this new EyeTV thing. Why? For one thing, as mentioned on ArsTechnica, EyeTV is limited to MPEG-1 bitrates suitable for transmission over USB--in other words, low resolution crap.
Real PVR solutions with highest quality capabilities--MPEG-2 in full resolution with decent bitrates, for example--are only possible over the AGP or PCI bus. Such solutions are commonplace in the PC world, and many work wonders. They're almost unknown in the Mac consumer space because so many Mac users have iMacs that can't use them, or wouldn't want to tinker inside their towers, that it hasn't been deemed profitable enough yet.
Of course, it's possible a Firewire solution could provide high quality TiVo-like abilities for the Mac, but as of yet no one has tried.
And:
There is no sex in the Champagne Room.
Oh, there's *champagne* in the Champagne Room; but you don't want champagne, you want sex...
> If you feel inclined to share, what kind of message would you
> leave to the future children of Earth?
"Always...no, never...forget to check your references."
Actually, don't knock old tech. I'd feel safer in an F-18 than in an Osprey. ;-)
Actually, the president of my old college had a great story about how old tech can be superior in performance. He was a former Deputy Dirctor of the CIA, and had some stories he was willing to tell about some of the declassified things he was involved in. One of them was the study of the first MiG fighter we got our hands on.
Back in the 60s we were afraid of these new MiG fighters the Soviets were using--they performed significantly better than out own fighter jets of the day. We couldn't figure out what it was about them that made them more maneuverable and faster, but among other things we were scared that they had more advanced onboard electronics.
We finally got our chance to find out when a Soviet pilot took a MiG to Japan to defect to the U.S., and my college president's team was called in to disassemble, photograph, and reassemble everything before the Soviets came to retrieve their fighter the next day.
So, do you know what those sophisticated electronics we were afraid they might have developed were? Vacuum tubes. Yep, those early MiGs that outperformed our own fighters were still using vacuum tubes, a technology ten years out of date; our fighter electronics had long been transistor based. The advantages of the MiG turned out to be nominal design differences and nothing more--no super-sophisticated technology at all.
So, don't knock it 'cause it's outdated tech. The proven F-18 can still kick the ass of many newer more sophisticated designs when ity comes down to brass tacks.
> Switch, and tell your friends to switch.
Unrealistic. Why would anyone switch to a platform that has relatively little software and hardware support--on the unlikely hope that everyone else will someday? Bah. Apple's marketshare hasn't increased significantly in many years, and it won't now. Sorry, but that's reality.
Sorry, but that isn't the answer for people who are really interested, as he seems to be, in just being able to hook things up and have them work. OS X is great; but it doesn't support nearly as much hardware as Windows does. It also doesn't support nearly as much software, particularly important for a gamer--while many of the best new titles get ported to the Mac, many do not, and there's a whole back-catalogue of wonderful games that are Windows-only. I can even play most of the cool older Mac-only games on Windows or Linux using the open-source Basilisk ][ 68k Mac emulator. However, newer games require hardware acceleration, so will never be playable under VirtualPC or similar on Macs.
That's why, despite my love for the look and feel of MacOS (I first got started on Macs), I could never buy an Apple machine. I like hooking up new bits of hardware, and being able to use almost all PC games, and being 100% interoperable with the hardware and software used by 85-90% of my fellow home computer users.
OS X is a fine OS. But it doesn't have the hardware and software support many, and perhaps most, want.
> I agree for the most part, but the Yoda fight scene was comedy, why would there be tension?
That's the sad part. I guarantee Lucas was convinced that audiences would be glued to their seats in awe, rather than laughing hysterically... Which, of course, is what would have happened if the scene were done correctly. If done correctly, people would have initially laughed at the comedic value of Yoda in a lightsaber bout--but then they'd have been awestruck, and overcome with tension.
But no, because the fight was all wrong, the dialogue was insipid, and Count Dooku damn well wasn't a Darth Vader--we never fear him because he's a caricature from childrens' cartoons, not a menacing figure like Vader was.
The result is something Lucas surely intended to be on par with the lightsaber duels in his earlier films, and even surpass it--and instead he turned it into a quick joke that takes audiences off guard at first, but which will have no huge impact on future viewings.
Comparing it to, for example, Luke's big fight with Vader at the end of *RotJ*, the Luke/Vader duel still has palpable tension and impact every time I view the film again. Does the Yoda bout with Dooku offer much on later viewings? Not much...and that's a sign that Lucas went wrong.
ATI *cannot* do SLI because it's patented, and nVidia bought 3dfx's patents on SLI among other things. This is why ATI used another method--their methos was just as simple and effective; each GPU renders alternate frames. In fact, it has fewer theoretical problems when doing alternate frames, than Voodoos did with rendering alternate scanlines. The scanline approach produced occasional tearing or shimmering effects, though it's very rare.
The problem with the Rage Fury MAXX has to do not with the method of interleaving or the presence of GPUs, but rather the method ATI chose to bridge the two chips, which isn't permitted in the NT AGP code. ATI couldn't find a way around it, so they abandoned the card. Sad, since it was a nice performer under Win9x...
However, many other implementations do 2 graphics chips right with NT support, such as the Voodoo 5 5500 and the high-end multi-chip Quantum3D boards.
So, ATI could easily do a Radeon MAXX part with WinXP support, since they know what mistakes not to make in silicon this time around...
Actually, I had the weird idea after noticing how bad the script was for *AotC*, of taking a few weeks to dedicate to writing a really convincing fake script for the 3rd episode and then "leaking" it to a bunch of rumor sites later in the year just to see what the reaction would be. Compared to Lucas' own screenplay, I'm sure mine would be a gem... ;-) It would indeed be ironic if fan sites thought a false screnplay were better than the real one when the real one comes out. :-)
Indeed, Spielberg has the pedigree to set *Star Wars* straight. Looking at his directorial filmography on IMDB reveals a great mix of both serious films, good sci-fi, and endearing movies that appeak to kids. That's a perfect rcipe for directing a great *Star Wars* film, whereas Lucas has gotten carried away by technology to the point of believing CG can replace plot and emotion.
Seriously, compare the use of CG in the two *Star Wars* prequels to the use of CG in *Minority Report* and the original *Jurassic Park*. Spielberg's films have plot and emotion at the center, with the CG as an important element used to bring realism to the sci-fi element--but the CG is never put before the plot and emotion. Lucas' *SW* prequels on the other hand relegate plot and emotion to the back-burner--even in *AotC* when Anakin and Padme are supposedly in love, the audience never really feels it. They have how much on screen time together again--and how much of that is taken up by screechingly corny and hackneyed cliches? Ack, what a disgrace. Even Lucas' best CG in the film is botched--the Yoda fight scene was awesome, but far too short and far less dramatic than it should have been. Remember the tension when Obi Wan fought Vader in *SW*? Remember the tension when Luke fought Vader in *RotJ*? It really wasn't there in the Yoda bout, because Lucas can't write and direct worth crap anymore.
Seriously, with Spielberg doing the directing and fixing the dialogue, and Lucas doing the special effects, future *SW* films would be truly great. As it is, we can only really hope for *better* than the two prequels so far, but probably not as good as the older films.
> And it takes a lot of effort to supplement my feed from other servers.
:-) In fact, the complete version of OMWF is still in the Buffy repost group in full on Easynews, since Web retention of binaries is ~38 days currently.
Easynews. Check it out. Standard NNTP access, or a searchable Web interface. I use NNTP for most things, but if I just want to browse a particular group's binaries quickly, I often use the Web interface--which is perfect for quickly grabbing an episode of Buffy.
> He describes anime "classics" for what they are
Only *one* of those games he mentioned was of the "good"variety of Hentai game, with an engaging plot and artful story. The rest are the total crap which I clearly stated dominates in the Hentai games that have been translated into English.
The one good game on his list, which he panned because he didn't have the patience to figure out how to get past the game's slow point of having to search a few too many rooms, was *3 Sisters' Story*. It came out about 1992, so has only 256-color imagery, and yes it does make you go into a few too many rooms once or twice. However, it has an excellent plot, which he didn't get the benefit of because he quit after just a couple hours.
However, he hasn't reviewed any of the recent great titles, like *Divi-Dead*. Read the reviews I listed above. Some of these are very worthy RPGs.
> SMG is good-looking, but she's not outrageously exceptionally
:-)
> good-looking in a religeous-inspiring launch-a-thousand-ships kind of way.
No, that would be her little sister on the show, Michelle Trachtenberg, who's much more launch-a-thousand-ships lovely than Gellar. Mmmmm...Michelle Trachtenberg... Jailbait: The Other White Meat. Seriously, don't you just see her on *Buffy* and wanna bend her over and grab her hair and...
Oops, did I type that out loud? Err...
In fact, this season is *why* I started watching Buffy regularly, and catching up with previous seasons. The show never really appealed to me before because it was very hit-and-miss, with a few good episodes surrounded by eons of mindless soulless drivel. When it was good, it was great--like when Willow first comes out as a lesbian, or when the gang has to deal with Angel's return after he'd killed and tortured people; all the great episodes had an emotional component. However, most were mindless fighting episodes with thin plots and mediocre writing, though good choreography in general. But you can get that sort of mindless fighting in any number of series--*VIP*, *Relic Hunter*, etc.
What made the 6th season attractive was that most of the episodes had emotional depth. It dealt with young adults finally growing up and out into the real world, with real-world problems--money, social workers, addictions, emptiness. It was amazing. When I started watching, I went back and discovered that much of the 5th season was the same--episodes had depth, not just the killing of stuff. But before that--phew, mostly stinkers. And unlike the guy below who bemoans the "predictability" of these emotional crises, I have to say that while themes were familiar, and sometimes bordering on trite--the addiction to magic as an analogue to drug addiction--every such theme was presented with unique twists or perspectives, such that it impressed me with the writers' inventiveness in bringing the viewer into the series through bits of real-life problems presented in inscrutable contexts.
Only those interested in emotional depth and truly superb writing will appreciate the 6th season for the tour-de-force that it was. Or are we to believe the same creative minds which brought us "Once More with Feeling" were completely non-creative for the rest of the season? A certain type of science fiction fan--the puerile type only interested in otherworldly action, not plot or feeling--would be greatly disappointed, and never satisfuied with this season, picking apart the plots with the sort of banal and useless complaining of a certain comic-store-owning *Simpsons* character. But to the rest of us, who can appreciate artful and engaging storytelling, and who can appreciate the effort to show characters dealing with the same early-20s crises many people go through once college is over and the real world hits, the 6th season was a masterpiece. It was also a critical success and a popular success, as the ratings show--how much better in the Nielson ratings could you expect a transplanted show, from one network and slot to another totally different network, to do? It was clearly a success, the bitching of comic-book-guys around the globe notwithstanding.
I have to thank the writers and producers again for letting these characters mature and grow up, and for showing us that painful process in each episode of the 6th season.