Internet Explorer has a "Content Advisor". Tools -> Internet Options -> Content.
If you enable the content advisor, it checks for the presence of a ratings tag (the Recreational Software Advisory Council, http://www.rsac.org/rsac/) inside a page before rendering/displaying it. You can set different allowable levels of pages. But it's pretty much worthless, since the page itself has to contain the rating. Most porn sites/etc. aren't going to do that.
I do consulting work on the side, and a woman was complaining about the pop ups she was getting and how slow her computer was-- turned out she was infected with spyware and a virus.. she had never run Windows Update (didn't even know what it was) and her computer was directly connected to a cable modem. Very bad indeed. She had Norton Internet Security installed, so she thought she was protected against everything. Riiiight.
After I fixed the spyware and viruses, I removed Norton, and told her I was installing a new browser for her to use, called Firefox. She seemed kind of hesistant to change, but said she would give it a shot. A week later, she called to ask me where the content advisor options were. I did a "huh?" and wondered what she was talking about. She said Internet Explorer had a "Content Advisor" to warn you if the page has porn/bad language/etc. -- and that she wanted it on to protect her children on the internet. I told her Firefox didn't offer this feature, and that the feature was really kind of worthless, since sites had to present their ratings themselves (via a tag or whatever in the HTML) -- and most sites weren't going to do that anyhow. She didn't believe me, and still insisted I put IE back as the default browser.
A week later? She calls and says her system is infected with spyware again, and for me to visit once more. Fun!
What crappy DSL network on you on where you get hit with this stuff?
I'm glad I'm on Speakeasy, and they filter that sort of crap out for me. Also, if someone's infected on their network, they're disconnected almost immediately. It's a Good Thing(tm).
When I had Cox@Home, powering up the modem (without anything being plugged into the ethernet port) would result in the activity light flashing non-stop. Wonderful stuff.
The only soundcard that can encode to Dolby Digital 5.1 (that I know of) is the nForce2's MCP chipset. And it's delicious. Best sound card/chip I've ever dealt with.
A lot of people spread this myth that IRQ sharing and/or APCI cause sound and video slowdowns or problems; that's mostly a lot of bollocks. If your sound card is having trouble, most of the time it's due to poor PCI traffic management by your southbridge. I had a VIA KT400 (or whatever) chipset motherboard a while back, paired up with a Creative Audigy Deluxe, and a Promise IDE controller. Any time I started to copy files to/from the drive connected to the promise controller, my sound would skip and pop and just get horrid. My mouse would also lag sometimes, and general computer response would be slow. Upgraded to an nForce2 chipset, and never once had the same problems. I found out later that VIA has god-awful PCI bandwidth (something like a little about 50% of the full bus) compared to other smarter solutions, like Intel's and nVidia's chipsets (which can utilize something like 85-90% of the bus with no problems.)
If you gave me more details on your hardware, I could probably help troubleshoot it more.
A lot of people who bought 4-speaker or 5.1-speaker sound cards, that's who. I run my ASUS A7N8X Deluxe's SP/DIF output into a receiver and play stuff in 5.1
As a side note, it seems more and more games _are_ handling audio better. Max Payne 2 sends all "vocal" content to the center channel (like a movie) if you have 5.1 -- True Crime does something similiar. Counter-Strike works in 5.1 mode via EAX emulation. Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic also utilizes 5.1, similiar to how Max Payne 2 does it. MP2 is probably the best "5.1" game I've found so far, though. I'm sure Half-Life and Doom3 will change that..
Ultimately it comes down to what sound provider these games use.. if they're using DirectSound through hardware, odds are it will support many a speaker configuration. It's when they use lame crap like Miles in software that it starts to suck.
Also, Creative has made some of the overrated soundcards ever. They're like the Bose of sound cards now. What's really funny is that I cannot get my Audigy Deluxe working on my computer. Everytime I attempt to install the drivers (which, by the way, are a pain in the ass to download. Who is going to BUY a drivers CD? Gimme a break!) the machine blue screens. Creative's tech support was no help either, basically saying the Audigy Deluxe was incompatable with my A7N8X Deluxe motherboard.
The problem with Enter The Matrix was that a large portion of it's players (on both XBox and PC) had major problems with it; random lockups, corrupted savefiles, corrupted graphics, that sort of fun stuff.
To this day I still haven't been able to play it all the way through on the PC. Apparently my 2GHz Athlon with 1gig of RAM and Radeon 9800Pro video card isn't powerful enough to render the "bullet time" effects. Riiight. Stick in a GeForce3, and it actually runs FASTER. Boggles the mind.
They promised new patches a few months after the game came out, but there have only been two (and they didn't fix anything, really.)
Your explanation is somewhat flawed, because you're mixing terminologies/etc.. so here's my attempt to set things straight.
Widescreen: Typically means the resulting image is in the 16:9 ratio, (or on some films, 2.35:1, 2:85:1, etc.)
Pan & Scan: Typically applies to "widescreen" video that has been converted to 4:3 (aka a standard television's) aspect ratio. "Pan & Scan" refers to the process of doing fake panning across the widescreen image, to show portions that might otherwise be cut off by the 4:3 crop/window. A good example is the scene in Ghostbusters right before they bust the ghost in the big ballroom.. three actors are walking in a line talking to each other, and on the "widescreen" version, you can see all three of them at once. In the "pan & scan" version, you can see the image "scan" over slowly as each actor speaks, giving the appearance of a camera pan, when actually no pan took place in the original film.
A DVD's video stream is typically 720x480 resolution. If the video is 4:3 ratio, the image generally fills the entire space. If the video is in a "widescreen" ratio, there are a couple of ways they accomplish this:
Letterbox: Adds fake "black bars" to the top and bottom of the video image. The resulting image is 720x480, but maybe only 720x350 of the image is actually film content. The rest is blackness. This is how a lot of "cheap" DVDs are produced, and the quality isn't that great.
Anamorphic: Uses the entire height of the video stream (usually 480 pixels) with no encoded blackness. This results in increased resolution over the Letterbox method. If played back without proper scaling, the image will appear "stretched" vertically (actors having "long" faces, etc.) -- your DVD player scales/sizes this to the proper aspect ratio on the fly. This is how a lot of high-end DVDs are encoded, and is a lot better quality than the letterbox method.
You're probably talking about the chroma upsampling bug that a lot of DVD players suffer from (even the high-end ones.)
Not to mention the fact that a lot of people buy fancy plasma/LCD screens, and haven't the slightest clue how to hook them up properly, what a scaler/de-interlacer is, or a good DVD player model.
The problem is, DiVX/XViD aren't designed with streaming in mind..
Make a container format (like OGM/MKV) and build up a streaming platform for them, and maybe we'll get talking. But we all know that will never happen.
The Promise "FastTrak" series is the cheaper/lamer one, which doesn't truly support "hardware" RAID. They contain basic code that essentially loads an ATA driver for your drives, and that's about it. The drivers for the card itself are what provide the RAID functionality, through your CPU.
There are writeups about this all over the net. Promise's other series, the "SuperTrak", is a hardware based solution that's much better for servers and the like.
If you've got open ATA slots on your motherboard, you're better off using Windows' built in RAID functionality with those than getting a Promise "FastTrak" card.
Human beings are flawed creatures and prone to error--especially so in high-stress situations.
Under your logic, any sort of tool that has the capacity to be mishandled or accidently used incorrectly by people should be banned? Yeah, that's a great piece of logic there. Under your rule we'd have to ban pretty much everything in existance.
The last thing I want in the hands of a panicked civilian is a weapon specifically designed to kill other people.
So you think we should ban knives as well? Spears?
Also, as a side comment, if you're properly trained in handling a firearm, you'd know when it's appropriate to draw your weapon. If there's a crowd present/blocking your shot, you are probably not going to draw your weapon. Or if you do have it drawn, it's pointed away from any targets.
A review of Cooper's gun rules:
1) Treat all weapons as if they were loaded.
2) Never point the weapon at something you don't fully intend to _destroy_.
3) Always keep your finger OFF the trigger, until your sights are on your target, and you are SURE of your target.
4) Always be sure of your target, your target's surroundings, your surroundings, and where your bullets will travel when fired.
TriloByte had made DirectX/Windows versions of the 7th Guest and 11th Hours "viewers" available before they went under. Unfortunately I cannot find them anywhere on the web. tbyte.com is now some other company. They worked great.. actually used DirectX to render the movies/sound.
I've been running Posadis on a Windows 2000 server for about three months now, and it's been nothing but awesome. Rock solid stable, and easy to config. Took me a while to find the rare gem, though. It's hard to find an open-source/free DNS server for Windows.
I've purchased two different brands of PS/2->USB converters (both of the "keyboard & mouse" variety), and they have both sucked horribly. The first one would randomly "lock up" the keyboard, causing whatever character I was pressing at the time to be repeated over and over until you unplugged the adapter. The mouse wasn't "smooth", either.. it felt delayed.
The second adapter made the mouse's refresh rate really awful (reminded me of Windows 3.1 days) and wouldn't let you press more than 1 key at a time on the keyboard. What a waste.
first realised what XP (Pro here) was doing because when it reloads, it usually forgets to reload some of the systray stuff, in my case that means InCD and QuickViewPlus don't reload. However, it always remembers to reload ZoneAlarm and the volume doohickey.
That's because ZA/volume control/etc. follow Microsoft's guideline for handling system/explorer crashes. There is actually a writeup on API's/etc. to hook to to allow icons to be "rebound" to the systray when the explorer.exe process comes back. I don't have the URL with me, you'll have to search Microsoft to find it.
You should really read up on what is different between Windows 2000's and Windows XP's boot cycles are before opening your mouth and spewing crap.
Once loaded, XP has an annoying habit of wanting to refresh the desktop from time to time.
If this is happening often, you probably have spyware or some other program continually accessing the desktop (or files shortcutt'd to the desktop), which is causing the refresh.
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What's funnier to me is that the robot company in the "I, Robot" movie is named "U.S. Robotics". Sounds like another company, doesn't it? :)
They've also stated before that you should never "see" your character. Gordon Freeman = you, literally. That's the experience they want to convey.
The whole box/cover art we all know (of the guy with glasses and a goatee) is sort of a generic vision of what the character would look like.
Gabe has actually said that August 2004 is now their targeted release date.
I can wait 2 months.. really, I can!
Internet Explorer has a "Content Advisor". Tools -> Internet Options -> Content.
If you enable the content advisor, it checks for the presence of a ratings tag (the Recreational Software Advisory Council, http://www.rsac.org/rsac/) inside a page before rendering/displaying it. You can set different allowable levels of pages. But it's pretty much worthless, since the page itself has to contain the rating. Most porn sites/etc. aren't going to do that.
I do consulting work on the side, and a woman was complaining about the pop ups she was getting and how slow her computer was-- turned out she was infected with spyware and a virus.. she had never run Windows Update (didn't even know what it was) and her computer was directly connected to a cable modem. Very bad indeed. She had Norton Internet Security installed, so she thought she was protected against everything. Riiiight.
After I fixed the spyware and viruses, I removed Norton, and told her I was installing a new browser for her to use, called Firefox. She seemed kind of hesistant to change, but said she would give it a shot. A week later, she called to ask me where the content advisor options were. I did a "huh?" and wondered what she was talking about. She said Internet Explorer had a "Content Advisor" to warn you if the page has porn/bad language/etc. -- and that she wanted it on to protect her children on the internet. I told her Firefox didn't offer this feature, and that the feature was really kind of worthless, since sites had to present their ratings themselves (via a tag or whatever in the HTML) -- and most sites weren't going to do that anyhow. She didn't believe me, and still insisted I put IE back as the default browser.
A week later? She calls and says her system is infected with spyware again, and for me to visit once more. Fun!
However, I doubt Microsoft will do anything for at least two months.
Even read the article or check out how to fix the problem? The patch/hotfix (835732) to fix the bug in IIS was released back in April.
Unless you're talking about the IE side of things.. but well, we all know about the issues IE has.
What crappy DSL network on you on where you get hit with this stuff?
I'm glad I'm on Speakeasy, and they filter that sort of crap out for me. Also, if someone's infected on their network, they're disconnected almost immediately. It's a Good Thing(tm).
When I had Cox@Home, powering up the modem (without anything being plugged into the ethernet port) would result in the activity light flashing non-stop. Wonderful stuff.
Doesn't the SB Live! 5.1 encode to AC3?
No. It can decode AC3, though..
The only soundcard that can encode to Dolby Digital 5.1 (that I know of) is the nForce2's MCP chipset. And it's delicious. Best sound card/chip I've ever dealt with.
A lot of people spread this myth that IRQ sharing and/or APCI cause sound and video slowdowns or problems; that's mostly a lot of bollocks. If your sound card is having trouble, most of the time it's due to poor PCI traffic management by your southbridge. I had a VIA KT400 (or whatever) chipset motherboard a while back, paired up with a Creative Audigy Deluxe, and a Promise IDE controller. Any time I started to copy files to/from the drive connected to the promise controller, my sound would skip and pop and just get horrid. My mouse would also lag sometimes, and general computer response would be slow. Upgraded to an nForce2 chipset, and never once had the same problems. I found out later that VIA has god-awful PCI bandwidth (something like a little about 50% of the full bus) compared to other smarter solutions, like Intel's and nVidia's chipsets (which can utilize something like 85-90% of the bus with no problems.)
If you gave me more details on your hardware, I could probably help troubleshoot it more.
I'll also add these games to my "has great surround sound audio" list:
- Freelancer (center channel is vocals, music swells to fill speakers)
- Dungeon Siege (very atmospheric)
And who on EARTH has surround sound on their PC?
A lot of people who bought 4-speaker or 5.1-speaker sound cards, that's who. I run my ASUS A7N8X Deluxe's SP/DIF output into a receiver and play stuff in 5.1
As a side note, it seems more and more games _are_ handling audio better. Max Payne 2 sends all "vocal" content to the center channel (like a movie) if you have 5.1 -- True Crime does something similiar. Counter-Strike works in 5.1 mode via EAX emulation. Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic also utilizes 5.1, similiar to how Max Payne 2 does it. MP2 is probably the best "5.1" game I've found so far, though. I'm sure Half-Life and Doom3 will change that..
Ultimately it comes down to what sound provider these games use.. if they're using DirectSound through hardware, odds are it will support many a speaker configuration. It's when they use lame crap like Miles in software that it starts to suck.
Also, Creative has made some of the overrated soundcards ever. They're like the Bose of sound cards now. What's really funny is that I cannot get my Audigy Deluxe working on my computer. Everytime I attempt to install the drivers (which, by the way, are a pain in the ass to download. Who is going to BUY a drivers CD? Gimme a break!) the machine blue screens. Creative's tech support was no help either, basically saying the Audigy Deluxe was incompatable with my A7N8X Deluxe motherboard.
Riiight.
The problem with Enter The Matrix was that a large portion of it's players (on both XBox and PC) had major problems with it; random lockups, corrupted savefiles, corrupted graphics, that sort of fun stuff.
To this day I still haven't been able to play it all the way through on the PC. Apparently my 2GHz Athlon with 1gig of RAM and Radeon 9800Pro video card isn't powerful enough to render the "bullet time" effects. Riiight. Stick in a GeForce3, and it actually runs FASTER. Boggles the mind.
They promised new patches a few months after the game came out, but there have only been two (and they didn't fix anything, really.)
Atari can suck it.
How DVD's Get THX Certified
Your explanation is somewhat flawed, because you're mixing terminologies/etc.. so here's my attempt to set things straight.
Widescreen: Typically means the resulting image is in the 16:9 ratio, (or on some films, 2.35:1, 2:85:1, etc.)
Pan & Scan: Typically applies to "widescreen" video that has been converted to 4:3 (aka a standard television's) aspect ratio. "Pan & Scan" refers to the process of doing fake panning across the widescreen image, to show portions that might otherwise be cut off by the 4:3 crop/window. A good example is the scene in Ghostbusters right before they bust the ghost in the big ballroom.. three actors are walking in a line talking to each other, and on the "widescreen" version, you can see all three of them at once. In the "pan & scan" version, you can see the image "scan" over slowly as each actor speaks, giving the appearance of a camera pan, when actually no pan took place in the original film.
A DVD's video stream is typically 720x480 resolution. If the video is 4:3 ratio, the image generally fills the entire space. If the video is in a "widescreen" ratio, there are a couple of ways they accomplish this:
Letterbox: Adds fake "black bars" to the top and bottom of the video image. The resulting image is 720x480, but maybe only 720x350 of the image is actually film content. The rest is blackness. This is how a lot of "cheap" DVDs are produced, and the quality isn't that great.
Anamorphic: Uses the entire height of the video stream (usually 480 pixels) with no encoded blackness. This results in increased resolution over the Letterbox method. If played back without proper scaling, the image will appear "stretched" vertically (actors having "long" faces, etc.) -- your DVD player scales/sizes this to the proper aspect ratio on the fly. This is how a lot of high-end DVDs are encoded, and is a lot better quality than the letterbox method.
You're probably talking about the chroma upsampling bug that a lot of DVD players suffer from (even the high-end ones.)
Not to mention the fact that a lot of people buy fancy plasma/LCD screens, and haven't the slightest clue how to hook them up properly, what a scaler/de-interlacer is, or a good DVD player model.
The problem is, DiVX/XViD aren't designed with streaming in mind..
Make a container format (like OGM/MKV) and build up a streaming platform for them, and maybe we'll get talking. But we all know that will never happen.
The problem is getting the information from those 5 drives or whatever to the PC-- ATA isn't going to cut it, and neither is USB2 or Firewire.
The Promise "FastTrak" series is the cheaper/lamer one, which doesn't truly support "hardware" RAID. They contain basic code that essentially loads an ATA driver for your drives, and that's about it. The drivers for the card itself are what provide the RAID functionality, through your CPU.
There are writeups about this all over the net. Promise's other series, the "SuperTrak", is a hardware based solution that's much better for servers and the like.
If you've got open ATA slots on your motherboard, you're better off using Windows' built in RAID functionality with those than getting a Promise "FastTrak" card.
Under your logic, any sort of tool that has the capacity to be mishandled or accidently used incorrectly by people should be banned? Yeah, that's a great piece of logic there. Under your rule we'd have to ban pretty much everything in existance.
So you think we should ban knives as well? Spears?
Also, as a side comment, if you're properly trained in handling a firearm, you'd know when it's appropriate to draw your weapon. If there's a crowd present/blocking your shot, you are probably not going to draw your weapon. Or if you do have it drawn, it's pointed away from any targets.
A review of Cooper's gun rules:
1) Treat all weapons as if they were loaded.
2) Never point the weapon at something you don't fully intend to _destroy_.
3) Always keep your finger OFF the trigger, until your sights are on your target, and you are SURE of your target.
4) Always be sure of your target, your target's surroundings, your surroundings, and where your bullets will travel when fired.
TriloByte had made DirectX/Windows versions of the 7th Guest and 11th Hours "viewers" available before they went under. Unfortunately I cannot find them anywhere on the web. tbyte.com is now some other company. They worked great.. actually used DirectX to render the movies/sound.
If anyone knows of a link to it, please post it..
Man now I wish I could find my Indy 4 CD :-/ Someone borrowed it years ago and never returned it. Bastards.
I've been running Posadis on a Windows 2000 server for about three months now, and it's been nothing but awesome. Rock solid stable, and easy to config. Took me a while to find the rare gem, though. It's hard to find an open-source/free DNS server for Windows.
I've purchased two different brands of PS/2->USB converters (both of the "keyboard & mouse" variety), and they have both sucked horribly. The first one would randomly "lock up" the keyboard, causing whatever character I was pressing at the time to be repeated over and over until you unplugged the adapter. The mouse wasn't "smooth", either.. it felt delayed.
The second adapter made the mouse's refresh rate really awful (reminded me of Windows 3.1 days) and wouldn't let you press more than 1 key at a time on the keyboard. What a waste.
Seems like such a simple thing to get so wrong.
first realised what XP (Pro here) was doing because when it reloads, it usually forgets to reload some of the systray stuff, in my case that means InCD and QuickViewPlus don't reload. However, it always remembers to reload ZoneAlarm and the volume doohickey.
That's because ZA/volume control/etc. follow Microsoft's guideline for handling system/explorer crashes. There is actually a writeup on API's/etc. to hook to to allow icons to be "rebound" to the systray when the explorer.exe process comes back. I don't have the URL with me, you'll have to search Microsoft to find it.
You must enjoy talking out of your ass.
You should really read up on what is different between Windows 2000's and Windows XP's boot cycles are before opening your mouth and spewing crap.
Once loaded, XP has an annoying habit of wanting to refresh the desktop from time to time.
If this is happening often, you probably have spyware or some other program continually accessing the desktop (or files shortcutt'd to the desktop), which is causing the refresh.