Oh, certainly, mp3 is no panacea, but you can understand why I've stuck with it so long - the benefits of mature mp3 codecs have largely hidden the limitations fo the standard.
My point is, AAC will never produce performance even twice as good as mp3 at ANY bitrate - it's good, but it can't work miracles. Without an amazing increase in performance, AAC will not easily displace mp3 (I mean AMAZING, like the 1:10 compression ratio over PCM that people were WOWED with when mp3 was gaining ground).
The next step, in my mind, is lossless encoding - and those encoders, much like AAC, are still immature, and still gaining ground every year. My hope is in another 3-4 years, when we have 250GB+ hard drives in all PCs, lossless will make more sense...but for now, mp3 offers the best performance for most people.
Not too bad, actually. Not as good as a direct rip, of course, but from my experience having a "transparent" lossy source is almost as good as the original when using the same codec.
But it's more along the lines of: I'm lazy. I want to maintain ONE copy of my song, and that's it. No transcoding on-the-fly, just one copy. If Apple doesn't give me the option of something between 256 and 128k direct, I can't see myself buying it, because it's just wasted space.
Funny, I used to refuse the purchase of Itunes music because I felt that AAC 128k wasn't good enough to be my "source," but now that they've completely overshot any reasonable "transparent" quality level, I'm once-again torn about purchasing their music. But yeah, at this point, I'm just nitpicking...AAC at 256k should sound perfect.
To extend your arguement, you also tend to see the same problem PC gaming sees once you start stringing multiple Cells together.
One is, these things never work %100 of the time - manufacturers dick around with specs to save a few cents, and suddenly you have Cell-based systems that don't even talk to each other.
The second is this: once you have people connecting multiple PS3s, you end up with the same problem PC gamers see: games either target the lowest-common platform (one PS3), or they target multiple performance levels (at greater expense), because it would be foolish to just target the high-end (multiple PS3s) folks.
Finally, you won't see the optimization current console programmers ususually perform over the lifetime of the console, because they can always just up the specifications if they want better visuals.
What you end up with is a market which tears into game developers that target lower-end graphics setups (boring visuals), and then you also have an entire chunk of the market whining when you release a game with specs that are "too high" (Oblivion, for example, which requires a DX9 card). And through it all, you see less emphasis on optimization, and more emphasis on content.
Game consoles are supposed to avoid this bullshit by freezing the specs.
In fact, another test performed in December 2005 shows marked improvement for both AAC and LAME mp3. Even with VBR enabled for Itunes, it remains tied with LAME. Quality was so good all-around, the author declared that this would be the last test at 128k.
Now, I don't know where you're going to get music that's less than 128k out of the Itunes Music Store, and you can bet your ass that 128k LAME mp3s will sound just as good as those 128k AAC tracks.
My personal beef with the 256k file size is that is is TOO BIG. My entire CD collection is encoded using LAME --alt-preset standard, and the average bitrate is under 200k. "Upgrading" to Apple's 256k AAC files would mean more space used up on my portable player. Mp3 doesn't need more than 192k average bitrate to make a 99.99% transparent copy of the original track, and neither does AAC.
This is one reason I don't understand MS: almost every computer sold in the markeplace today is 64-bit capable, but MS won't make Vista 64 their primary release. This is going to cause major problems for the Windows gaming market, Microsoft's bread-and-butter early adopters.
Think about it: unless you go completely 64-bit, the memory map gets messy when you go beyond 2GB of ram. 4GB will show up as 3-3.25GB on most motherboards, but nothing above that(even with PAE enabled) because most consumer-level motherboards don't support the extra 4 bits of PAE and the ability to remap PCI / PCIe address space. Even with properly-supported PAE in-hardware, we're still limited to a 4GB barrier for one game.
Windows gaming, until Vista 64 catches on, is going to be a mess. We already have games that take advantage of 2GB of ram...going above that limit is going to be a crap-shoot. What this could lead to is a limit on memory for Vista 32 development, placing an upper barrier on memory of 2-3GB. If such a thing happens, Windows game designs will stagnate until the introduction of the next version of Windows (which should be fully 64-bit).
I never owned a Commodore computer, but that's because I lived in East Bumblefuck while growing up, and was poor-as-dirt. The fact is, because they're not around today, people have forgotten Commodore's contributions.
From what I've read, the Apple II was a slow-seller, and got left in the dust of the VIC-20 and Commodore 64.
From what I've read, these "top" items on the list were heavily influenced by Commodore:
Hayes Smartmodem (1981): derived from the VICModem, the first sub-$100 modem. Commodore contracted Hayes to design a cut-down modem without the acoustic coupler as a cheap add-on for the Vic-20, and they worked together to build the product. A MILLION VICModems were sold.
26. CompuServe (1982): is it really a surprise that Compuserve began to boom after the introduction of a million+ VIC-20s and modems? Not when you consider the fact that Commodore invented the idea of bundling "free" trial accounts with their VICModems. Each VICModem came with trial accounts to The Source, Compuserve and Dow Jones. The VIC-20 users were so numerous, a special Commodore Information Network section of Compuserve was created, and that section alone posted the highest traffic of anything on Compuserve at the time.
42. Epson MX-80 (1980): preceeded by the TX-80, Epson's first US-marked dot-matrix printer. The TX-80 was built by request for, you guessed it, Commodore. Commodore brought Epson in because Centronics refused to make a printer for the PET, and untimately Epson's entry into the US market opened the door for other Centronics clone makers.
This is true, but that's a common theme for all entry-level cars across all makes. The reason is, designing a small, cheap car with high efficiency is easy. Think about it: pair a lightweight body and chassis with a small-displacement (2.0l or less) 4-banger with the fuel consumption benefits of EFI and computer management, and you've got a cheap car with great gas mileage (definitely better than an engine from 1974 with no electronics whatsoever). If you make it standard with manual transmission, don't waste weight on engine insulation, and throw out new tech that saps engine efficiency (like say, balance shafts), you end up with a cheap, noisy, efficient box.
However, it may not surprise you that entry-level cars are not that popular in the US. The most popular car in the USA is the Toyota Camry, a car in an entirely different size and price class than the Golf. It may also not surprise you that the most popular VW in the USA is the Jetta, a car in a similar price class to the Camry, with similar features and mileage numbers.
You see, the grandparent poster was absolutely correct about the USA: when technology improves, it is used for comfort. While you can find entry-level cars, these are mostly to nab first-time buyers, and to make it easier for them to meet average EPA mpg limits. The monsy is in mid-sized sedans, and that's where the feature bloat comes into play.
Just like you can get a decent entry-level car with good efficiency for cheap, you can also get a new, cheap 512MB PC in Best Buy today and put Vista Home Basic on it, and STILL get good performance. The only problem is, people want their Camrys, and they want their Vista Home Premium - the only problem is, manufacturers aren't communicating clearly to consumers that, to get the "Camry" software experience, they have to pay a little extra for "Camry"-level hardware to run it all.
They did. It was called TrueX, and was manufactured by Kenwood and Hi-Val.
The drive rotated at equivilant 6-10x speed (CLV), and delivered 40x-72x speeds constantly, thanks to seven independent read heads.
A buddy of mine bought the first-generation drive, and I was amazed how quickly it installed Windows. It was also very quiet...but beyond that, it wasn't that amazing.
Reasons why it failed:
* TOO EXPENSIVE. It couldn't compete with cheap CD drives. * POOR BIOS support, drives would often not be detected during POST. * POOR COMPATIBILITY, the drives had trouble reading certain discs. * CRAPPY ACCESS TIMES, what do you expect when the disc spins so slow?
The consumers responded by bringing a class-action lawsuit over the problems. Kenwood lost the lawsuit, and the technology was quietly buried.
I recently picked up a Sansa e280, nice device overall.
Normally, to recharge the unit, you have to plug it into the USB adapter, at which point it syncs with the computer, and leaves the screen turned on until you disconnect it.
Now, those of you who like to sleep in dark rooms know how distracting bright LCDs can be, but luckily the hardware was designed with an unintended feature: if you plug in the USB adapter part-way, only the power leads make contact. Using this trick, the player has a charge indicator but remains in "play" mode, so the screen automatically turns off after 15 seconds.
The reason for this is just good connector design: you want to connect your power contacts before you connect your signal contacts, to prevent glitches when the cable connects...so, the power leads are longer.
everything about the cost of buying a new PC has gone down in price over the years...except the cost of Windows. they sell more and more copies and because it's software their own cost to develop it is less linked to the number of copies sold versus something like RAM or Hard Drives, but their piece is the one that doesn't get cheaper.
You are generalizing a rather complex market.
The price of Windows sed to be easy to track 15 years ago because these was only ONE version. The OS was fairly simple, and Microsoft could make the incredible profit ratios they did without charging through-the-nose.
Then, we had a home line (Win9x/ME) and a professional line (NT), merged together under the same OS with XP Home and Professional. By then, the price of entry was double for Retail, but still the OEM price of XP Home was relatively low.
Today, the OS is incredibly complex, and it is that way because these is a constant demand for new features: new hardware standards, new software standards, new drivers, new bundled applications, new interfaces...you name it! While you personally may not want ALL of these features, there is demand for every one of them.
But Microsoft has answered your plea - even Vista comes in price-points that are affordable. You have three options for home-users now: Basic, Premium and Ultimate. Basic doesn't come with many new features over XP, but then Basic really only exists so OEMs can offer low prices, and tempt your to upgrade to Premium. Premium comes with most of the features any home user could want (much more than came with the old XP Home), all below the price-point of XP Professional, which I think is a nice improvement. Finally, we have Ultimate, which has EVERTHING - even more features than Business. Most people don't need all these features, but it is there for those that do.
I do think it's a mistake for Microsoft to only include Media Center with Premium (better to have tons of media center PCs out to entice peope to buy extenders like the 360), but that's the only real feature gap I see with this.
Face it man: MS cannot charge more than it currently does for a baseline OS - OEMs would skin them alive. What they can do is charge extra for new features, and that is why we have multiple home versions this time around.
They can create a $299 box with TV-out that has a discrete graphics controller built in, but they can't put one into one SINGLE model of Mac Mini? Wow.
Not so hard to believe.
The Dothan ULV is a chip Intel sells solely for "embedded" applications these days (similar in performance and power enveloper to AMD's Geode NX). Core Duo processors in the Mac Mini cost quite a bit more.
The Apple TV also includes a 40GB 2.5" 4200 RPM hard drive, which costs a lot less than the baseline Mini's 60GB 5400 RPM drive. Pair that with the smaller base memory (256MB versus 1GB), and you can see how they can sell it for so little.
As for the discrete video, well...the GeForce 7300 Go is a slower-clocked version of the desktop 7300 LE (very cheap). It is only included because PureVideo is so much better than Intel's Clear Video (for deinterlacing and scaling), and it also accelerates video decoding. With only 64MB of slow DDR2 on a 64-bit bus, it would choke on most modern (released in the last 3 years) games.
If you wanted a solid discrete graphics solution for the Mac Mini, you'd have to go with something beefier (like the GeForce 7300 GT or Radeon x1300 Pro) plus double the memory (128MB), or it just wouldn't be worth the effort.
Windows NT/2000/XP: Ctrl+Shift+Esc brings up our "Windows Task Manager" window. It doesn't allow us to reset the OS, but it does give us a nifty shortcut to kill any crashed programs. Did I mention the entire combo can be hit with one hand?
SPU: 2 execution pipes, each 128-bits wide, for a total of 8 32-bit VECTORIZED (SIMD) operations per-clock.
8 * 3.2 GHz = 25.6 GFLOPS for each SPU. These are the same performance numbers being quoted everywhere for SPU SINGLE-PRECISION. This performance-level would not be possible if your math was accurate to 64-bits.
In fact, 64-bit (double) operations actually cut performance because the SPU has to re-use the single-precision SIMD hardware (it has to sacrifice the SIMD functionality). So the SPU can only output ONE double-precision float from each pipe per-clock, or 6.4 GFLOPS.
Just because the registers are 128-bit wide does not mean the math is accurate to 128-bits. See this article here for more details.
As an owner of an original Ensoniq AudioPCI, I disagree with your assessment of how Creative handled them. Creative purchased Ensoniq for their PCI development, as well as their excellent DOS-mode support over PCI.
Unfortunately, Creative could not pull this off on their own, so they bought Ensoniq and pretty-much dicked-over the AudioPCI series of cards.
Creative's AudioPCI drivers (now called the Soundblaster PCI 64) didn't come with a lot of features AudioPCI owners enjoyed, and they BROKE other features. Downloadable SBPCI64 drivers didn't come with a MIDI waveset (not even the tiny 2MB one), and NO version of the Creative driver included DOS-mode drivers.
WORSE: in the windows/AUDIOPCI.ini file, the Creative driver COMMENTED-OUT configuration settings, automatically disabling your AudioPCI DOS support! It also commented-out AudioPCI-specific lines in the config.sys! Malicious bastards didn't want to support DOS for anything but the Live!, so they just pretended the (complete and VERY robust) DOS support for the AudioPCI didn't exist.
To get full support for ALL features in Windows 98, users were forced to install their original AudioPCI driver discs (this gave you DOS-mode drivers, and the MIDI waveset), and then install (1) the Creative AudioPCI -> SBPCI64 "upgrade" driver, then (2) the latest Creative drivers over-top. You then had to FIX the changes the Creative driver made, and then point the Creative driver to the MIDI waveset.
And was that ALL Creative did to piss-off AudioPCI owners? Oh, hell no!
Creative added software EAX support to their entire range in Windows 98, including the AudioPCI. This was an attempt to bury A3D by providing developers with an instantaneous huge installed-base of EAX. The only problem? By the time the trial with Aureal came to a close, EAX support for any card except the Live! was forgotten. Later Windows 98 driver releases did not contain EAX, and Creative completely dropped software EAX support for Windows 2000 and XP.
Could be a simple hardware bug with incredibly coincidental timing.
This would certainly not be the first DVD drive to magically stop reading DVDs, but still read CDs...just ask any PlayStation 2 owner. Now that most of these DVD/CD drives do it all with a single laser and some cheap lenses, that's even more likely to break.
I'd try the drive on another computer, if at all possible. You could also try a USB external drive enclousure, because that would use a different driver.
That idea of both versions on the same disc didn't last for two reasons:
1. It is more expensive to make a double-sided (DS) disc. The sides are created separately, and are then glued together.
2. It is also very expensive to make a double-sided, double-layer disc, so the vast majority of these double-sided discs are single-layer (DS-SL).
This means your two versions of the movie on a DS-SL disc are bandwidth-starved, because after the soundtrack(s) and special features, you're left with 3-3.5 GB to represent the movie. This gives you *okay* (not great) video quality for a 90-minute flick, but for a 2-hour+ movie the video quality is awful.
So, the industry moved to DS-DL discs, because they were cheaper to produce. They also started selling the widescreen and fullscreen versions separately, and it turns out that both formats can sell enough copies to justify this. That allowed them to include features like DTS and extras without hampering the main feature's quality.
Yup, this is the downside of the whole Media PC thing - someone comes up with a spec, and you know manufacturers are just going to abuse it. Two GB of ram, on a system that can't play games well, and sits in your livingroom? What a waste!
Back when I heard about this spec, I was interested because I thought it might force manufacturers to bundle a decent video chip in the under $1000 range - but then I read the spec, saw nothing about minimum video requirements, and promptly ignored it as the marketing gimmick it was.
So yes, your $1000 PC has a chipset designed for $500 PCs (Fast Ethernet, crappy integrated graphics), and manufacturers are rolling in the dough, because the extra memory is cheaper than a video card. About the only good thing you can say is: it comes with a PCIe 16x slot. But then, so does almost EVERY PC these days, even the $400 ones.
A somewhat related topic, I wanted to mention it:
The only reason the G965 graphics outperforms the 6150 is because of the Core2 Duo processor. Most people don't realize this, but the uber-powerful GMA X3000 is actually running without hardware vertex shaders for the moment. Hardware vertex shader drivers have been promised for the last 6 months, with no end in sight. This is actually the reason for many game compatibility problems with the X3000 (and low performance), because very few games offer a software vertex processing path.
So, this 8-pipe monster only gets slightly better performance than a pathetic 2-pipe IGP from Nvidia, and it only manages that because of the incredible power of the Core 2. People have also seen marked performance increases using Core2 Duos with 850-series IGPs, for the same reason. Of course, this will backfire once game designers start using the second core for AI/physics, so Intel needs to release those drivers eventually.
And the kind of people who do it are certainly not people I'd associate with, or let in my house.
Have you ever whistled / sung / hummed a song you heard on the radio? Did anyone hear you do it?
That's
1) not illegal (just like the case of copying a single disc, this is a civil tort).
and
2) morally wrong (only by your moral standards).
That song is protected by copyright, regardless of who performs it, and has a performance fee associated with it. No, these rights do NOT come with the price of the CD purchase - that's just a license to listen.
You'd better lock yourself out of your own house, and throw away the key, because you're just as guilty as every one of us.
The point is, it is natural for humans to reproduce the sounds, rythyms and words they hear - before written and recorded word, it was a way to record history and pass-on knowledge. Now that we have mastered writing and recording, performance of "copyright" works is discouraged by strong copyright restrictions. The fact that people still sing / whistle / hum songs they've heard is a testament to the fact that you can't legislate human nature.
The reason why people don't want to call it "music theft" is because restricting access to music goes against our very nature. Music is meant to be shared. People (including bars and performers) have been dodging the performance fees for songs since their creation, because they're incredibly stupid (and up until recently, unenforceable).
In a time when electronic music copying / distrubution costs are almost nothing, copying music is as easy as singing it. If you don't feel bad about singing your favorite song, why should you feel bad about copying it?
As a contrast, do you know what the RIAA wants to use technology for? Imagine a world where you cannot even whistle your favorite tune without paying a performance fee. Would you REALLY want to live in such a locked-down world? If you want to know why people are collectively giving the RIAA the finger, just think about the incredible amount of control infarstructure they will put in-place just to pull that off...it's scary.
Artists have the right to be successful. They do not have any inherent right to be superstars. The superstar is an alien concept born of copyright, and protected by lobbyists. Is it any wonder that their locked-down system begins to crumble once you can bypass these protections with a simple mouse click?
And let's talk about "entitlement" for a moment, since you've used the word so casually to demean other posters:
Are YOU entitled to sing that song you just heard on the radio? Are YOU entitled to breathe the air around you? Not a bit! But, you do it anyway, because it's easy and it's natural. If somebody took all your air away, or prevented you from singing songs, would you fight back for that? You only think you're entitled to breathe and sing songs, because you've never had to FIGHT for those rights. So don't you EVER bring entitlement into this.
People who copy songs are not entitled to do so, they just do it. In a similar manner, you're not entitled to project your morals or interpretations of the law onto others, but you do so anyway. Myself, I am not entitled to expect you to read this post, but you will anyway. That's the way the world works.
Intel has been trying to diversify over the past two decades. Some of their attempts have been fruitful (their move into NOR flash in the late 80s, the move into networking products), whereas others have been mistakes (StrongARM / XScale, LCoS).
A quick note: Intel is not new to flash memory production. Intel pioneered flash memory production back in the 1980s, and it has been hugely profitable. The new thing here is NAND flash production.
Both AMD (now Spansion) and Intel jumped on the NOR flash train because, back in the 80s and 90s the run-in-place simplicity made NOR flash a big seller. Now that consumer products demand higher capacity, and the performance issues of NAND have largely been solved (or hidden), NOR flash sales are declining while NAND sales are skyrocketing. Even cell phones have started using NAND memory, which is really hurting NOR flash sales.
Spansion saw this trend, and attempted to bridge the gap by attaching a NAND chip to a NOR interface (ORNAND), giving cellphone makers the best of both worlds. But so far, the results have been unimpressive (1 Gbit chip capacities). In light of the obvious industry transition, Intel feels they need to move to NAND in in order to remain competitive. Instead of taking the risk of reinventing the wheel like Spansion, Intel has chosen to follow the rest of the industry.
Between union issues, playing politics both with the schoolboard and the school faculty itself, grading papers, supporting the debate team (after school, of course), she can count the hours of free time she has per-week on two hands.
Since she's become a teacher 8 years ago, they've systematically taken away her time and replaced it with pure bullshit. Since she's joined the club, they've insisted she teach more classes, taken away her administrative time slots (teacher prep time), and they've asked that she come in earlier in the day. They've also put in *mandatory* training every month that teachers have to do on their own time, training that is a complete waste of time (think "self-improvement seminar" type crap).
Meanwhile, she has to field crap from the schoolboard (braindead ideas about teaching methods and requirements), has to deal with the union and payroll (that keeps stabbing her in the back regarding her pay increases), and she has to diffuse gang violence right in her classroom because the shoolboard is unwilling to take the problem seriously.
If she didn't love the good students, there's no way in hell she'd be doing it. If you don't love to teach, you might as well not bother...not unless you like self-torture.
Isn't this called "passive backplane" or something? If it already exists for some systems, why not desktop computers?
Early high-end computer systems started out like this, utilizing backplanes like VME. They've been phased-out, because ultimately that modularity was too expensive, and because the shared-bus architecture hurt performance. Hardware devices that used to require multiple cards can now fit on a single chip, and have their own PCIe drop to increase performance. Memory upgrades that used to require multiple cards just to reach 1MB are now eclipsed by 8 and 16-chip configurations on a single DIMM (a specialized expansion slot), and have their own bus to improve performance.
Let's say they went with the Single-board computer design (CPU+memory+bus controller) - now your costs go up, because you have to build multiple "processor cards" for all the different backplanes you want to plug into. ISA backplane - 1 model. PCI backplane - 1 model. PCI + ISA backplane - 1 more model, and it also requires a new specification: the new bus designs have to play nice with the limited I/O space at the back of the card, so you end up either making the bus connector larger, or you end up making certain bus combinations impossible.
With the motherboard and atached bus design, your costs go down because you can provide a mixture of the busses that are the most popular. Thus, you only have one product to design and electrically verify, and only one manufacturing line to test.
Also, when you move to point-to-point architectures like PCI-Express, with a separate backplane you really limit yourself to the slot configurations you can offer. Unlike with a shared bus, with P2P interconnects you have to make sure the backplane layout matches the connector layout exactly. This means you either standardize on ONE configuration (boring), or you put the ports on the processor card (what we are doing).
The only places that still use modular bus designs today are embedded developers, and that's because they still need the expandability and modularity that end-users do not. They also need the backward-compatibility affored by these old bus specifications (VME especially). They pay for it, in terms of performance - most of them bypass the slow backplane of VME or CompactPCI with faster interconnects like Gig/10GigE, Fibre Channel, RapidIO or Infiniband.
Yet another typical M$ lie, there is no such thing a depreciating support, support starts from the day you buy the product not some arbitrary time in the distant past.
You are absolutely correct. And that is absolutely what I posted.
You pay for your support cycle. This isn't some crazy ponzi-scheme like Social Security - you pay for your product, and you get the support you paid for. Support is, of course, expensive, so it does require a certain minimum number of sales to pay for it...that's what we call "risk" in the industry. You do your part, and if they can afford it, they do their part.
And yes, support DOES begin from the moment you buy the card. Have you ever noticed how the price of the card DECREASES with time? Well, as the price of the card DECREASES, the amount of support you can pay for with that money also decreases. This means, if you buy a card on-release for $100, you can expect 7-8 years of support...but if you buy the same card for $50-75 after three years on the market, you expect 4-5 years of support.
If you buy the card used, you inherit the support time remaining from the original purchaser.
Does M$ discount the software as they discount you support, do you pay less for the software as it support period shrinks?
No, they don't. But neither does Apple. Whatever the newest OS is, you pay full-price for that. You're not going to get a better price on XP or OS X 10.3 just because they're older versions, not unless dealers are trying to clear excess stock.
But MS attempts to add value: they've encouraged OEMs to offer a Vista upgrade coupon with XP machines sold in the last 6-12 months. It gives people more value, because now they get the whole support lifetime of Vista with their purchase(plus the initial 6-12 months), if they care to upgrade.
Even if you don't upgrade, you're guaranteed MS support through 2012.
Why don't the prices come down? Because the prices are already cheap-as-hell! For an operating system that does SO much, you get Windows / OS X for VERY cheap. Very few people use programs that they bought 10 years ago, but there are still a sizeable minority of people who still use Windows 98, and that's 10 years old!
Even if you only get 5 years out of your OS purchase, that's just $40 (XP) / $26(OS X) per-year if you buy retail, or $18 a year if you buy OEM XP. If you buy an OEM computer bundled with the OS, you get it for even cheaper, or if you can get an educational copy, the price comes down to a few dollars a year.
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Oh, certainly, mp3 is no panacea, but you can understand why I've stuck with it so long - the benefits of mature mp3 codecs have largely hidden the limitations fo the standard.
My point is, AAC will never produce performance even twice as good as mp3 at ANY bitrate - it's good, but it can't work miracles. Without an amazing increase in performance, AAC will not easily displace mp3 (I mean AMAZING, like the 1:10 compression ratio over PCM that people were WOWED with when mp3 was gaining ground).
The next step, in my mind, is lossless encoding - and those encoders, much like AAC, are still immature, and still gaining ground every year. My hope is in another 3-4 years, when we have 250GB+ hard drives in all PCs, lossless will make more sense...but for now, mp3 offers the best performance for most people.
Not too bad, actually. Not as good as a direct rip, of course, but from my experience having a "transparent" lossy source is almost as good as the original when using the same codec.
But it's more along the lines of: I'm lazy. I want to maintain ONE copy of my song, and that's it. No transcoding on-the-fly, just one copy. If Apple doesn't give me the option of something between 256 and 128k direct, I can't see myself buying it, because it's just wasted space.
Funny, I used to refuse the purchase of Itunes music because I felt that AAC 128k wasn't good enough to be my "source," but now that they've completely overshot any reasonable "transparent" quality level, I'm once-again torn about purchasing their music. But yeah, at this point, I'm just nitpicking...AAC at 256k should sound perfect.
To extend your arguement, you also tend to see the same problem PC gaming sees once you start stringing multiple Cells together.
One is, these things never work %100 of the time - manufacturers dick around with specs to save a few cents, and suddenly you have Cell-based systems that don't even talk to each other.
The second is this: once you have people connecting multiple PS3s, you end up with the same problem PC gamers see: games either target the lowest-common platform (one PS3), or they target multiple performance levels (at greater expense), because it would be foolish to just target the high-end (multiple PS3s) folks.
Finally, you won't see the optimization current console programmers ususually perform over the lifetime of the console, because they can always just up the specifications if they want better visuals.
What you end up with is a market which tears into game developers that target lower-end graphics setups (boring visuals), and then you also have an entire chunk of the market whining when you release a game with specs that are "too high" (Oblivion, for example, which requires a DX9 card). And through it all, you see less emphasis on optimization, and more emphasis on content.
Game consoles are supposed to avoid this bullshit by freezing the specs.
But it doesn't, not unless you're under 128kbps.
See the 128k listening test here. Itunes is TIED with Lame -V5 at 128k.
In fact, another test performed in December 2005 shows marked improvement for both AAC and LAME mp3. Even with VBR enabled for Itunes, it remains tied with LAME. Quality was so good all-around, the author declared that this would be the last test at 128k.
Now, I don't know where you're going to get music that's less than 128k out of the Itunes Music Store, and you can bet your ass that 128k LAME mp3s will sound just as good as those 128k AAC tracks.
My personal beef with the 256k file size is that is is TOO BIG. My entire CD collection is encoded using LAME --alt-preset standard, and the average bitrate is under 200k. "Upgrading" to Apple's 256k AAC files would mean more space used up on my portable player. Mp3 doesn't need more than 192k average bitrate to make a 99.99% transparent copy of the original track, and neither does AAC.
This is one reason I don't understand MS: almost every computer sold in the markeplace today is 64-bit capable, but MS won't make Vista 64 their primary release. This is going to cause major problems for the Windows gaming market, Microsoft's bread-and-butter early adopters.
Think about it: unless you go completely 64-bit, the memory map gets messy when you go beyond 2GB of ram. 4GB will show up as 3-3.25GB on most motherboards, but nothing above that(even with PAE enabled) because most consumer-level motherboards don't support the extra 4 bits of PAE and the ability to remap PCI / PCIe address space. Even with properly-supported PAE in-hardware, we're still limited to a 4GB barrier for one game.
Windows gaming, until Vista 64 catches on, is going to be a mess. We already have games that take advantage of 2GB of ram...going above that limit is going to be a crap-shoot. What this could lead to is a limit on memory for Vista 32 development, placing an upper barrier on memory of 2-3GB. If such a thing happens, Windows game designs will stagnate until the introduction of the next version of Windows (which should be fully 64-bit).
I never owned a Commodore computer, but that's because I lived in East Bumblefuck while growing up, and was poor-as-dirt. The fact is, because they're not around today, people have forgotten Commodore's contributions.
From what I've read, the Apple II was a slow-seller, and got left in the dust of the VIC-20 and Commodore 64.
From what I've read, these "top" items on the list were heavily influenced by Commodore:
Hayes Smartmodem (1981): derived from the VICModem, the first sub-$100 modem. Commodore contracted Hayes to design a cut-down modem without the acoustic coupler as a cheap add-on for the Vic-20, and they worked together to build the product. A MILLION VICModems were sold.
26. CompuServe (1982): is it really a surprise that Compuserve began to boom after the introduction of a million+ VIC-20s and modems? Not when you consider the fact that Commodore invented the idea of bundling "free" trial accounts with their VICModems. Each VICModem came with trial accounts to The Source, Compuserve and Dow Jones. The VIC-20 users were so numerous, a special Commodore Information Network section of Compuserve was created, and that section alone posted the highest traffic of anything on Compuserve at the time.
42. Epson MX-80 (1980): preceeded by the TX-80, Epson's first US-marked dot-matrix printer. The TX-80 was built by request for, you guessed it, Commodore. Commodore brought Epson in because Centronics refused to make a printer for the PET, and untimately Epson's entry into the US market opened the door for other Centronics clone makers.
Cursors are! What a flagellant parade.
I recommend you ground your human decency in salt domes. One cannot expect the animated cursors to fly in a vaccuum.
In an entirely unrelated note, "sand" is German for "sand." I sand acquitted!
This is true, but that's a common theme for all entry-level cars across all makes. The reason is, designing a small, cheap car with high efficiency is easy. Think about it: pair a lightweight body and chassis with a small-displacement (2.0l or less) 4-banger with the fuel consumption benefits of EFI and computer management, and you've got a cheap car with great gas mileage (definitely better than an engine from 1974 with no electronics whatsoever). If you make it standard with manual transmission, don't waste weight on engine insulation, and throw out new tech that saps engine efficiency (like say, balance shafts), you end up with a cheap, noisy, efficient box.
However, it may not surprise you that entry-level cars are not that popular in the US. The most popular car in the USA is the Toyota Camry, a car in an entirely different size and price class than the Golf. It may also not surprise you that the most popular VW in the USA is the Jetta, a car in a similar price class to the Camry, with similar features and mileage numbers.
You see, the grandparent poster was absolutely correct about the USA: when technology improves, it is used for comfort.
While you can find entry-level cars, these are mostly to nab first-time buyers, and to make it easier for them to meet average EPA mpg limits. The monsy is in mid-sized sedans, and that's where the feature bloat comes into play.
Just like you can get a decent entry-level car with good efficiency for cheap, you can also get a new, cheap 512MB PC in Best Buy today and put Vista Home Basic on it, and STILL get good performance. The only problem is, people want their Camrys, and they want their Vista Home Premium - the only problem is, manufacturers aren't communicating clearly to consumers that, to get the "Camry" software experience, they have to pay a little extra for "Camry"-level hardware to run it all.
They did. It was called TrueX, and was manufactured by Kenwood and Hi-Val.
The drive rotated at equivilant 6-10x speed (CLV), and delivered 40x-72x speeds constantly, thanks to seven independent read heads.
A buddy of mine bought the first-generation drive, and I was amazed how quickly it installed Windows. It was also very quiet...but beyond that, it wasn't that amazing.
Reasons why it failed:
* TOO EXPENSIVE. It couldn't compete with cheap CD drives.
* POOR BIOS support, drives would often not be detected during POST.
* POOR COMPATIBILITY, the drives had trouble reading certain discs.
* CRAPPY ACCESS TIMES, what do you expect when the disc spins so slow?
The consumers responded by bringing a class-action lawsuit over the problems. Kenwood lost the lawsuit, and the technology was quietly buried.
I recently picked up a Sansa e280, nice device overall.
Normally, to recharge the unit, you have to plug it into the USB adapter, at which point it syncs with the computer, and leaves the screen turned on until you disconnect it.
Now, those of you who like to sleep in dark rooms know how distracting bright LCDs can be, but luckily the hardware was designed with an unintended feature: if you plug in the USB adapter part-way, only the power leads make contact. Using this trick, the player has a charge indicator but remains in "play" mode, so the screen automatically turns off after 15 seconds.
The reason for this is just good connector design: you want to connect your power contacts before you connect your signal contacts, to prevent glitches when the cable connects...so, the power leads are longer.
everything about the cost of buying a new PC has gone down in price over the years...except the cost of Windows. they sell more and more copies and because it's software their own cost to develop it is less linked to the number of copies sold versus something like RAM or Hard Drives, but their piece is the one that doesn't get cheaper.
You are generalizing a rather complex market.
The price of Windows sed to be easy to track 15 years ago because these was only ONE version. The OS was fairly simple, and Microsoft could make the incredible profit ratios they did without charging through-the-nose.
Then, we had a home line (Win9x/ME) and a professional line (NT), merged together under the same OS with XP Home and Professional. By then, the price of entry was double for Retail, but still the OEM price of XP Home was relatively low.
Today, the OS is incredibly complex, and it is that way because these is a constant demand for new features: new hardware standards, new software standards, new drivers, new bundled applications, new interfaces...you name it! While you personally may not want ALL of these features, there is demand for every one of them.
But Microsoft has answered your plea - even Vista comes in price-points that are affordable. You have three options for home-users now: Basic, Premium and Ultimate. Basic doesn't come with many new features over XP, but then Basic really only exists so OEMs can offer low prices, and tempt your to upgrade to Premium. Premium comes with most of the features any home user could want (much more than came with the old XP Home), all below the price-point of XP Professional, which I think is a nice improvement. Finally, we have Ultimate, which has EVERTHING - even more features than Business. Most people don't need all these features, but it is there for those that do.
I do think it's a mistake for Microsoft to only include Media Center with Premium (better to have tons of media center PCs out to entice peope to buy extenders like the 360), but that's the only real feature gap I see with this.
Face it man: MS cannot charge more than it currently does for a baseline OS - OEMs would skin them alive. What they can do is charge extra for new features, and that is why we have multiple home versions this time around.
They can create a $299 box with TV-out that has a discrete graphics controller built in, but they can't put one into one SINGLE model of Mac Mini? Wow.
Not so hard to believe.
The Dothan ULV is a chip Intel sells solely for "embedded" applications these days (similar in performance and power enveloper to AMD's Geode NX). Core Duo processors in the Mac Mini cost quite a bit more.
The Apple TV also includes a 40GB 2.5" 4200 RPM hard drive, which costs a lot less than the baseline Mini's 60GB 5400 RPM drive. Pair that with the smaller base memory (256MB versus 1GB), and you can see how they can sell it for so little.
As for the discrete video, well...the GeForce 7300 Go is a slower-clocked version of the desktop 7300 LE (very cheap). It is only included because PureVideo is so much better than Intel's Clear Video (for deinterlacing and scaling), and it also accelerates video decoding. With only 64MB of slow DDR2 on a 64-bit bus, it would choke on most modern (released in the last 3 years) games.
If you wanted a solid discrete graphics solution for the Mac Mini, you'd have to go with something beefier (like the GeForce 7300 GT or Radeon x1300 Pro) plus double the memory (128MB), or it just wouldn't be worth the effort.
Windows NT/2000/XP: Ctrl+Shift+Esc brings up our "Windows Task Manager" window. It doesn't allow us to reset the OS, but it does give us a nifty shortcut to kill any crashed programs. Did I mention the entire combo can be hit with one hand?
Your understanding is wrong.
SPU: 2 execution pipes, each 128-bits wide, for a total of 8 32-bit VECTORIZED (SIMD) operations per-clock.
8 * 3.2 GHz = 25.6 GFLOPS for each SPU. These are the same performance numbers being quoted everywhere for SPU SINGLE-PRECISION. This performance-level would not be possible if your math was accurate to 64-bits.
In fact, 64-bit (double) operations actually cut performance because the SPU has to re-use the single-precision SIMD hardware (it has to sacrifice the SIMD functionality). So the SPU can only output ONE double-precision float from each pipe per-clock, or 6.4 GFLOPS.
Just because the registers are 128-bit wide does not mean the math is accurate to 128-bits. See this article here for more details.
As an owner of an original Ensoniq AudioPCI, I disagree with your assessment of how Creative handled them. Creative purchased Ensoniq for their PCI development, as well as their excellent DOS-mode support over PCI.
Unfortunately, Creative could not pull this off on their own, so they bought Ensoniq and pretty-much dicked-over the AudioPCI series of cards.
Creative's AudioPCI drivers (now called the Soundblaster PCI 64) didn't come with a lot of features AudioPCI owners enjoyed, and they BROKE other features. Downloadable SBPCI64 drivers didn't come with a MIDI waveset (not even the tiny 2MB one), and NO version of the Creative driver included DOS-mode drivers.
WORSE: in the windows/AUDIOPCI.ini file, the Creative driver COMMENTED-OUT configuration settings, automatically disabling your AudioPCI DOS support! It also commented-out AudioPCI-specific lines in the config.sys! Malicious bastards didn't want to support DOS for anything but the Live!, so they just pretended the (complete and VERY robust) DOS support for the AudioPCI didn't exist.
To get full support for ALL features in Windows 98, users were forced to install their original AudioPCI driver discs (this gave you DOS-mode drivers, and the MIDI waveset), and then install (1) the Creative AudioPCI -> SBPCI64 "upgrade" driver, then (2) the latest Creative drivers over-top. You then had to FIX the changes the Creative driver made, and then point the Creative driver to the MIDI waveset.
And was that ALL Creative did to piss-off AudioPCI owners? Oh, hell no!
Creative added software EAX support to their entire range in Windows 98, including the AudioPCI. This was an attempt to bury A3D by providing developers with an instantaneous huge installed-base of EAX. The only problem? By the time the trial with Aureal came to a close, EAX support for any card except the Live! was forgotten. Later Windows 98 driver releases did not contain EAX, and Creative completely dropped software EAX support for Windows 2000 and XP.
Now THAT's being a complete and total dick.
Could be a simple hardware bug with incredibly coincidental timing.
This would certainly not be the first DVD drive to magically stop reading DVDs, but still read CDs...just ask any PlayStation 2 owner. Now that most of these DVD/CD drives do it all with a single laser and some cheap lenses, that's even more likely to break.
I'd try the drive on another computer, if at all possible. You could also try a USB external drive enclousure, because that would use a different driver.
Is it just an incorrect label, or does the drive now not recognize DVD discs?
There is a difference, you know.
That idea of both versions on the same disc didn't last for two reasons:
1. It is more expensive to make a double-sided (DS) disc. The sides are created separately, and are then glued together.
2. It is also very expensive to make a double-sided, double-layer disc, so the vast majority of these double-sided discs are single-layer (DS-SL).
This means your two versions of the movie on a DS-SL disc are bandwidth-starved, because after the soundtrack(s) and special features, you're left with 3-3.5 GB to represent the movie. This gives you *okay* (not great) video quality for a 90-minute flick, but for a 2-hour+ movie the video quality is awful.
So, the industry moved to DS-DL discs, because they were cheaper to produce. They also started selling the widescreen and fullscreen versions separately, and it turns out that both formats can sell enough copies to justify this. That allowed them to include features like DTS and extras without hampering the main feature's quality.
Why not look at Wikipedia's description on how it works?
Model engines and glow plugs
Yup, this is the downside of the whole Media PC thing - someone comes up with a spec, and you know manufacturers are just going to abuse it. Two GB of ram, on a system that can't play games well, and sits in your livingroom? What a waste!
Back when I heard about this spec, I was interested because I thought it might force manufacturers to bundle a decent video chip in the under $1000 range - but then I read the spec, saw nothing about minimum video requirements, and promptly ignored it as the marketing gimmick it was.
So yes, your $1000 PC has a chipset designed for $500 PCs (Fast Ethernet, crappy integrated graphics), and manufacturers are rolling in the dough, because the extra memory is cheaper than a video card. About the only good thing you can say is: it comes with a PCIe 16x slot. But then, so does almost EVERY PC these days, even the $400 ones.
A somewhat related topic, I wanted to mention it:
The only reason the G965 graphics outperforms the 6150 is because of the Core2 Duo processor. Most people don't realize this, but the uber-powerful GMA X3000 is actually running without hardware vertex shaders for the moment. Hardware vertex shader drivers have been promised for the last 6 months, with no end in sight. This is actually the reason for many game compatibility problems with the X3000 (and low performance), because very few games offer a software vertex processing path.
So, this 8-pipe monster only gets slightly better performance than a pathetic 2-pipe IGP from Nvidia, and it only manages that because of the incredible power of the Core 2. People have also seen marked performance increases using Core2 Duos with 850-series IGPs, for the same reason. Of course, this will backfire once game designers start using the second core for AI/physics, so Intel needs to release those drivers eventually.
And the kind of people who do it are certainly not people I'd associate with, or let in my house.
Have you ever whistled / sung / hummed a song you heard on the radio? Did anyone hear you do it?
That's
1) not illegal (just like the case of copying a single disc, this is a civil tort).
and
2) morally wrong (only by your moral standards).
That song is protected by copyright, regardless of who performs it, and has a performance fee associated with it. No, these rights do NOT come with the price of the CD purchase - that's just a license to listen.
You'd better lock yourself out of your own house, and throw away the key, because you're just as guilty as every one of us.
The point is, it is natural for humans to reproduce the sounds, rythyms and words they hear - before written and recorded word, it was a way to record history and pass-on knowledge. Now that we have mastered writing and recording, performance of "copyright" works is discouraged by strong copyright restrictions. The fact that people still sing / whistle / hum songs they've heard is a testament to the fact that you can't legislate human nature.
The reason why people don't want to call it "music theft" is because restricting access to music goes against our very nature. Music is meant to be shared. People (including bars and performers) have been dodging the performance fees for songs since their creation, because they're incredibly stupid (and up until recently, unenforceable).
In a time when electronic music copying / distrubution costs are almost nothing, copying music is as easy as singing it. If you don't feel bad about singing your favorite song, why should you feel bad about copying it?
As a contrast, do you know what the RIAA wants to use technology for? Imagine a world where you cannot even whistle your favorite tune without paying a performance fee. Would you REALLY want to live in such a locked-down world? If you want to know why people are collectively giving the RIAA the finger, just think about the incredible amount of control infarstructure they will put in-place just to pull that off...it's scary.
Artists have the right to be successful. They do not have any inherent right to be superstars. The superstar is an alien concept born of copyright, and protected by lobbyists. Is it any wonder that their locked-down system begins to crumble once you can bypass these protections with a simple mouse click?
And let's talk about "entitlement" for a moment, since you've used the word so casually to demean other posters:
Are YOU entitled to sing that song you just heard on the radio? Are YOU entitled to breathe the air around you? Not a bit! But, you do it anyway, because it's easy and it's natural. If somebody took all your air away, or prevented you from singing songs, would you fight back for that? You only think you're entitled to breathe and sing songs, because you've never had to FIGHT for those rights. So don't you EVER bring entitlement into this.
People who copy songs are not entitled to do so, they just do it. In a similar manner, you're not entitled to project your morals or interpretations of the law onto others, but you do so anyway. Myself, I am not entitled to expect you to read this post, but you will anyway. That's the way the world works.
Intel has been trying to diversify over the past two decades. Some of their attempts have been fruitful (their move into NOR flash in the late 80s, the move into networking products), whereas others have been mistakes (StrongARM / XScale, LCoS).
A quick note: Intel is not new to flash memory production. Intel pioneered flash memory production back in the 1980s, and it has been hugely profitable. The new thing here is NAND flash production.
Both AMD (now Spansion) and Intel jumped on the NOR flash train because, back in the 80s and 90s the run-in-place simplicity made NOR flash a big seller. Now that consumer products demand higher capacity, and the performance issues of NAND have largely been solved (or hidden), NOR flash sales are declining while NAND sales are skyrocketing. Even cell phones have started using NAND memory, which is really hurting NOR flash sales.
Spansion saw this trend, and attempted to bridge the gap by attaching a NAND chip to a NOR interface (ORNAND), giving cellphone makers the best of both worlds. But so far, the results have been unimpressive (1 Gbit chip capacities). In light of the obvious industry transition, Intel feels they need to move to NAND in in order to remain competitive. Instead of taking the risk of reinventing the wheel like Spansion, Intel has chosen to follow the rest of the industry.
Between union issues, playing politics both with the schoolboard and the school faculty itself, grading papers, supporting the debate team (after school, of course), she can count the hours of free time she has per-week on two hands.
Since she's become a teacher 8 years ago, they've systematically taken away her time and replaced it with pure bullshit. Since she's joined the club, they've insisted she teach more classes, taken away her administrative time slots (teacher prep time), and they've asked that she come in earlier in the day. They've also put in *mandatory* training every month that teachers have to do on their own time, training that is a complete waste of time (think "self-improvement seminar" type crap).
Meanwhile, she has to field crap from the schoolboard (braindead ideas about teaching methods and requirements), has to deal with the union and payroll (that keeps stabbing her in the back regarding her pay increases), and she has to diffuse gang violence right in her classroom because the shoolboard is unwilling to take the problem seriously.
If she didn't love the good students, there's no way in hell she'd be doing it. If you don't love to teach, you might as well not bother...not unless you like self-torture.
Isn't this called "passive backplane" or something? If it already exists for some systems, why not desktop computers?
Early high-end computer systems started out like this, utilizing backplanes like VME. They've been phased-out, because ultimately that modularity was too expensive, and because the shared-bus architecture hurt performance. Hardware devices that used to require multiple cards can now fit on a single chip, and have their own PCIe drop to increase performance. Memory upgrades that used to require multiple cards just to reach 1MB are now eclipsed by 8 and 16-chip configurations on a single DIMM (a specialized expansion slot), and have their own bus to improve performance.
Let's say they went with the Single-board computer design (CPU+memory+bus controller) - now your costs go up, because you have to build multiple "processor cards" for all the different backplanes you want to plug into. ISA backplane - 1 model. PCI backplane - 1 model. PCI + ISA backplane - 1 more model, and it also requires a new specification: the new bus designs have to play nice with the limited I/O space at the back of the card, so you end up either making the bus connector larger, or you end up making certain bus combinations impossible.
With the motherboard and atached bus design, your costs go down because you can provide a mixture of the busses that are the most popular. Thus, you only have one product to design and electrically verify, and only one manufacturing line to test.
Also, when you move to point-to-point architectures like PCI-Express, with a separate backplane you really limit yourself to the slot configurations you can offer. Unlike with a shared bus, with P2P interconnects you have to make sure the backplane layout matches the connector layout exactly. This means you either standardize on ONE configuration (boring), or you put the ports on the processor card (what we are doing).
The only places that still use modular bus designs today are embedded developers, and that's because they still need the expandability and modularity that end-users do not. They also need the backward-compatibility affored by these old bus specifications (VME especially). They pay for it, in terms of performance - most of them bypass the slow backplane of VME or CompactPCI with faster interconnects like Gig/10GigE, Fibre Channel, RapidIO or Infiniband.
Yet another typical M$ lie, there is no such thing a depreciating support, support starts from the day you buy the product not some arbitrary time in the distant past.
You are absolutely correct. And that is absolutely what I posted.
You pay for your support cycle. This isn't some crazy ponzi-scheme like Social Security - you pay for your product, and you get the support you paid for. Support is, of course, expensive, so it does require a certain minimum number of sales to pay for it...that's what we call "risk" in the industry. You do your part, and if they can afford it, they do their part.
And yes, support DOES begin from the moment you buy the card. Have you ever noticed how the price of the card DECREASES with time? Well, as the price of the card DECREASES, the amount of support you can pay for with that money also decreases. This means, if you buy a card on-release for $100, you can expect 7-8 years of support...but if you buy the same card for $50-75 after three years on the market, you expect 4-5 years of support.
If you buy the card used, you inherit the support time remaining from the original purchaser.
Does M$ discount the software as they discount you support, do you pay less for the software as it support period shrinks?
No, they don't. But neither does Apple. Whatever the newest OS is, you pay full-price for that. You're not going to get a better price on XP or OS X 10.3 just because they're older versions, not unless dealers are trying to clear excess stock.
But MS attempts to add value: they've encouraged OEMs to offer a Vista upgrade coupon with XP machines sold in the last 6-12 months. It gives people more value, because now they get the whole support lifetime of Vista with their purchase(plus the initial 6-12 months), if they care to upgrade.
Even if you don't upgrade, you're guaranteed MS support through 2012.
Why don't the prices come down? Because the prices are already cheap-as-hell! For an operating system that does SO much, you get Windows / OS X for VERY cheap. Very few people use programs that they bought 10 years ago, but there are still a sizeable minority of people who still use Windows 98, and that's 10 years old!
Even if you only get 5 years out of your OS purchase, that's just $40 (XP) / $26(OS X) per-year if you buy retail, or $18 a year if you buy OEM XP. If you buy an OEM computer bundled with the OS, you get it for even cheaper, or if you can get an educational copy, the price comes down to a few dollars a year.