higher res ingame at youtube!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4A4ir1_t58
apparently the action is slowed down so you can see whats going on.... probably like whats in the original... slow game speed to highest game speed.......
My experience with Vista started with build 5308, then tried 5365 and now 5384. Typically in Windows, I run firefox, thunderbird, battlefield 2 and starcraft as my main apps. Then there are the various media players, winamp with the clearone beta theme, itunes, and windows media player. My Windows XP experience has been relatively flawless. Sometimes I yearn for Mac OS's zen like simplicity and features like expose, but otherwise XP runs great on MY computer, meaning my computer doesn't run anything else with all the hardware supported very easily. Now, Vista Beta 2 is definitely an improvement over 5308, but it's still pretty damn raw. In 5308 I couldn't run BF2, but now I can. All it requires is that you run it in administrator mode. Performance at first was pretty bad, but after checking how much RAM was being used, I saw that Windows with nothing else running was up to 850 megs. I don't remember all the services I turned off, but it had a lot of unneccessary services running, stuff like tabletpc functionality and remote assistance (which ill never use). After turning off UAC and all the unneccesary services, I got it down to 400 megs, aero turned on, but usually DWM service and svchost.exe start climbing up as you basically just move your mouse around. So, it climbed back up to 500. BF2 then ran pretty well but it still wasn't as good as in XP. Ok, no problem, it runs, its playable, Vista performance hopefully will get better. NEXT, the game I absolutely can't live without, I fire it up when I'm stressed or generally feel like escaping: Starcraft. My god, this game runs great on a 166 mhz pentium 1 running Windows 95. Shit, well... under Vista if you don't select any compatability settings, the colors are all inverted upon first boot up. SO, enable 256 color mode and 640x480 and it boots up ok with colors all correct. BUT the game runs at a crawl when you actually get into any games. Starcraft in Vista at its current form is basically unplayable. And I wonder what other games are unplayable under Vista. Next, WINDOWS VISTA WIRELESS NETWORKING SUCKS. 5308, 5365, 5384... all of them had the most horrible wireless networking i've ever experienced. I got a signal, connected fine. But my connection would only stay active randomly. Sometimes after 5 minutes it would be dead and I would have to disconnect and reconnect, which in 5384 usually fixed the problem (it didnt previously) But after reconnecting sometimes it would die within 30 seconds again. horrible, i hope they fix this. Next, the UI is PRETTY PRETTY PRETTY. nice effects and hopefully they will allow modders and skinners to make some awesome add ons that could be quite nice. BUT the UI design scheme, having like 50 control panel items in classic mode (i know its not what they recommend but it's the advanced mode isn't it? it's too many seperate items in one folder) Welcome center is good, personalize menu sucks. This is one place where they should have copied OS X exactly, just put everything in one menu and like their laptop configuration menu, make it transition to the other control app in one window to other items. Not new windows for every control panel. well those are my assessments, I have others, such as Firefox not being able to be made default browser no matter what i have tried with default apps configuration (same with thunderbird) and i dont know why they changed this, but it seems to be making it harder to use apps other than those that were configured to be used as default (Iexplorer, Outlook...) so thats lame. Also, firefox can't play imbedded media player anymore, the plugin wouldnt work and i couldnt figure it out. Long story made short, Vista needs A LOT of work. More than i thought previously. I'll be surprised if it is ready for Jan. 2007. I won't be surprised if it's released, but I wouldn't expect it to be anywhere near polished until 2008/9.
that this has only really been in serious development since August 2004. That's when the code rewrite was implemented and everything before that was scrapped. So in terms of development if you believe that they really scrapped everything before that date, this has really been in development for less than 2 years. Which really isn't a very long time. No wonder they have to rush things now... if anybody doubts what i say, look it up on google, i read it in an interview and dont have a link, but its been said numerous times.......:P
i would like to submit a formal apology via slashdot to this guy. apparently im the deuschebag and he was the one trying to be humorous. Guess it went over a lot of our heads;).. oops
before i saw it here on slashdot. The article is a big troll. I told him he should title it "I don't like Macs and Here's Why:" Seriously he compares a lot more than boot camp here. He compares macs to windows as a whole and doesn't say all that much about boot camp in itself. Besides, its still in beta so wait for Leapard before a review like this. He mentions hardware that might not run and upgradability being a problem, but come on the hardware he mentions is the kind of stuff that people that would be using it would know whether or not it would be beneficial to use a mac or not with. The kind of people Boot Camp is for ain't what he thinks it is. Either that or again, he's trolling. Boot camps good for gamers, period. (in my opinion) Everyone else that uses a mac and needs to run Windows software can use virtualization software. OR, boot into windows... but i still see it as mostly for gamers and/or people with some lingering other high powered windows software that doesnt run in mac osx. but again, why would you buy a mac if you do professional editing or some other thing in windows? as he mentioned professional sound cards and such, whatever... this guy is a deuschebag
ya know, i have been running vista 5365 and the first thing I did was to turn off UAP... It's still horribly implemented and the screen black out is kind of annoying too.. i know why they did it, because of the supposed spoof that could be displayed where users click ok thinking its the cancel button, but it would have been better if the screen simply faded to gray rather than look like a resolution change to the input screen... also, its still waaay too frequent. when you have to enter your password for deleting shortcuts thats silly... furthermore, i personally think that it should be more like web browser password memory. while you have one particular section open, you put your password in once and it works until you close that particular section, such as the device manager section or copying files to a location or something like that. It needs to have better AI. The good news is they'll have plenty of time now that Vista has been delayed to fix that:D. Vista can be better than XP. Given that its been 5+ years since XPs release thats not too much to ask for, but I wish it could have been better. Aero is not as nice as aqua but if microsoft releases the API for aero and makes application developers able to integrate their gui better into aero, that will go a long way. Right now, many applications stick out a bit with the transparent windows and nothing else that blends into that theme. IE7 and media player look better in Vista because they were designed for it. Hopefully this won't be like the Office API where that looked nicer than the API that other developers were given to develop with. (i dont know too much about that but anyway better application integration with aero would be a big plus) We'll see how it turns out...
Re:it's a contract dispute, not trademark
on
On Apple vs Apple
·
· Score: 1
except that the contract specifies that Apple Computer shall not go into the business of selling physical media with music on it. As I read in the article that said this (sorry not gonna look for it now) Apple Computer isn't doing this. The iTunes music store might very well not breach any contracts. It seems fair that Apple Corp should bring up this lawsuit legally, but if they lose this, they might be putting a couple nails into their coffin (IMNSHO). We'll see....
i completely disagree on many of these points.
First of all, to answer point two, after watching the channel9 (or whatever that online video interview with people developing for vista thing is) and listening to what one of the guys who worked on aero say, he said that the large window borders were specifically to make it easier to resize windows. So they DO serve a purpose. And they are transparent "to make them less heavy". Also, as you mentioned, Windows has always had a lot of configurable options. Sometimes you might have to dig deep or download some software, but you can usually change what you don't like about it. That goes right into point 3. I'm sure there will be plenty of user-made themes after vistas release that have no transparency with aero enabled. Typically there has always been a large community addressing these discrepancies in taste. That also answers point 4. As for point 1, i think i agree with you. Not having used Vista yet (and i take it you haven't either) I can't say for sure, but what you say seems to be quite logical. I hope they rethink that, or maybe it will be changeable with different themes (dont see why it couldnt, you can change xp's close/minimize button sizes with themes although they are all the same)
To go on with what i was going to originally reply to this whole topic about..... I currently use a PC with the option of running windows, linux, or OSX. I run windows. why? the support is unparralelled in terms of hardware support and applications. On windows, I have games, Nero 7 ultra (better than anything i can find on mac, but i havent tried idvd for authoring dvds yet, toast is decent..) and i know that if i want something extra on the OS, its PROBABLY downloadable online. There are so many MS bashers around, especially on this site, its kind of ridiculous. OK, MS has a monopoly and they use it unfairly sometimes. But, if there was a vacuum to fill, somebody would have done it by now right? The fact is, every other OS choice on the market doesn't really replace windows and improve on it at the same time. Linux as a desktop OS doesn't have ubiquitous software support for various reasons and there are no standards for what gui a user will be using. And in my opinion thats how it should be. Windows fills the market for commodity PC hardware and it has the most market share. Sure, its hard to compete with that, but name one OS that is poised to take over in this area RIGHT now. Unfortunately, i loved BeOS and it could have done some serious competing against windows at the time of the release (hell it beat windows hands down at the time save a few unimplemented features it probably beats xp right now in my mind) but anyway, theres nothing out there competing in the same market as Windows. Linux ain't a desktop OS and it might never be. OSX? Unless Apple plans on releasing it as a standalone OS with no hardware tie ins, it's not in the same market either. As for vista, it actually looks decent. WinFS might not be available at the time of shipping, but its in development and will probably be shipped by service pack 1 or 2. That's not a bad deal.. you buy windows and get the upgrade for free later on..... it seems as though vista is improving with every ctp, hopefully the final product will be polished. I for one, am looking forward to it.
right now with nero ultra edition 7 i can make my own menus and import any kind of video file and it will automatically convert it to dvd video. I'm sure there will be software similar for bd and hd... its not very hard. you drag the files in, create the menu and the titles appear automatically as buttons on the menu which you can edit. You can choose that clips not play successively so as to go back to the main menu after being done with one clip. So as for more than one movie, yes I'm sure this will be supported.
For those that don't know much about them (i didn't)
STORAGE:
HD- HD DVD supports 15 gb for one layer and 30 gb for dual layer. A triple layer disc in development by Toshiba will hold 45 gb.
BD - Blu-Ray discs as said in the summary hold 25 gb for one layer and 50 for two. Also in development for BD is 100 gb 4 layer and 200 gb 8 layer discs. Both BD and HD are backwards compatible with the current DVD specification (although for BD it is apparently not compulsory for manufacturers to include it).
COPY PROTECTION:
HD - HD's will employ copy restriction developed by AACS LA. Audio Watermark Technology is also being used. All Hd dvd players will include a sensor that listens for audible watermarks placed in the soundtracks of movies. (read more at the wikipedia site).
BD - Blu-ray has "experimental digital rights management that allows for dynamically changing encryption schemes". This prevents a single crack from breaking the whole protection scheme like what happened with DeCSS and DVDs. Also included is digital watermarking technology. (more at wikipedia
Interesting note about Blue Ray discs, original discs made with blue ray technology were very susceptible to scratches and had to be enclosed in plastic caddies for protection. TDK came up for a solution to this in January 2004 that gave Blue ray discs "unprecedented scratch resistance." HD DVD discs use the same coating found on cds and dvds. For my money, it seems like BD is the better technology. We'll see how the copy protection pans out.
All information taken from wikipedia.org
LINKS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD-DVD"
who cares, lets see how they do... watching madden nfl gaming "playoffs" on espn during the college football season was actually pretty cool. You got to follow these people that had a chance to go meet professional athletes that they would play as with the team on the football game... then depending on whether they won or lost they got to stay with their team which was actually the bus that they travelled to different sites on. It was like survivor with video games. Will this ever take off? I frankly don't care, it'll probably find its own niche. 15 to 19 year olds will always be interested in this kind of stuff IMO. We'll see.........
You know, i have dealt with this kind of thing all my life as well, I never joined the marines or anything, but I did try and make myself tougher and questioned everything about myself and life to find out what was wrong with me. Could it be that some people are assholes with no consciences that like to gang up on other individuals with no self esteem? i think so... i have always had low self esteem and i got picked on a lot. Yet, I found a lot in common with myself and the bullies that were picking on me. We both had problems, but we dealt with them differently. I usually dealt with them by becoming socially isolated trying to avoid confrontation, and they with their problems on the surface instead of inside took their frustrations out on other people trying to dominate them. I don't know if its all about self esteem, but psychology is a very very complicated thing. I'll mention that I have taken lsd and psilocybin mushrooms and I dont know if i can trust what i learned from those experiences but it's shown me how complex the brain and relationships with other brains can be. I guess if I want to say anything to you its that while I have dedicated my life to trying to understand these things (i have no choice with my personality it seems) it's not always the other people that are bad and its not always so black and white. It's usually a combination of issues. Your problems combined with their problems makes for some very fucked up chemistry. And it's fascinating how it actually is your chemistry mixing with theirs. You might not be mixing chemicals in a flask but the result is the same, each of you affecting each others chemicals within your skulls. All relationships are like this... when people have problems individually, they get worse with relationships, especially with other people that have problems. I wish I had the answer, I still have an avoidant personality and I still have the desire to improve my personality but who knows what the real problem is.. At least keep an open mind.
except that the authors are the ones using and implementing hdr. If it was a mod to a game already released I would agree, but the case for most games is going to be to add this as a feature. So I guess to include your example, maybe if Trent Reznor released some track that had mega bass activated through effects that would make sense, but really, im not sure that its the greatest analogy.;/
After playing Half Life 2: Lost Coast with Full HDR at 1280x1024 and settings all the way at max, I came away with the impression that HDR is really quite nice. Comparing screens with normal filters and HDR, HDR is much more realistic. When you look at water reflections HDR is invaluable. Sun reflections especially looked impressive. Where normal filters made the bright spots look gray, HDR made everything shine and bleed a bit. It was quite accurate as far as the water went. Now, what I didn't think was realistic, was HDR used in the distance. There was that seem bleeding effect across open windows and such. Also, the effect is sampled every so often, I don't know what the sampling rate was there, but a couple times i noticed a slow sampling rate that wasnt entirely realistic. Towards the end of the Lost Coast level, I was impressed by the light coming in from the windows (you'll know what im talking about if you've played it). They were stained glass windows and first there was a dull light in them, but when you shot them out, a big blast of white/yellow light shines through that looks quite good. My conclusion is that HDR is good, but they should up the sampling rate in HL2LC and also change how its viewed in the distance. But what do i know... anyway, thats how i saw it.
the spam filters work quite well actually. Go into your options (top right hand corner) click on mail, then junk email protection, then junk email filter and select "enhanced". This adds a junk mail folder and it works pretty well. Sometimes 1 message gets through to my inbox, but it works much better than on the low setting.
My biggest pet peave other than space with hotmail is the link system.. it opens new links in a new window but within another frame. It would be nice if there was an option in the settings to turn this "feature" off.
you know what would be very cool? just an idea, even if security (and a million other things) needs to be worked out... But make internet connection purely wireless for the end user in all parts of the world. Blanket the world in wireless access points, and make it accessible to anyone just by asking their gps coordinates or something like that. A vision for the future internet! would be very cool to have a fully connected world where wherever you were in the world you could just switch on and be able to communicate with anyone else.
mm.. grandiose ideas that are impractical... but cool. But still, I consider humans communication technology to be in a rather primitive state... I mean what, we got our first real start in 1876? its only been 120 years, thats not much time to progress.. The scene is really exciting if you think about the prospects of what we could one day possess. Now for the specifics?:) dont know, but i can dream
if they are doing this, why not try to gain some power from the keyboard. I mean, we type quite a bit, make a bit of resistance and convert it and you dont even have to do anything extra. And we'll have extra strong fingers! seriously though, this would be a good idea. why not right?
The only good thing to come out of Microsoft as a monopoly is that many devices follow their "standard". Yes, it is true that Microsoft ignores industry standards, but at least they create a conformity that allows many devices to work together without too much of a problem.
Look at the cell phone market in the United States and you will see what a hinderance lack of standards can be. The US is very far behind in cell phone techonology with regards to many other nations, and mostly because of big companies each willing to push their own proprietary technology because they believe they will be profiting more in the long run.
Well, back to the new OS, what's gonna happen here? The description of services offered, control their home appliances via PC, and watch television programs and movies on their PC at any location , sound great, but how are Microsoft and even Apple gonna react to this? They obviously both want a piece of that market share and I'm not sure if they are all willing to conform to each others standards.
Ideally, every company would be small and would have to follow industry standards. These standards would be imposed by a legislation with representation from all the developers. Instead what we get is a couple people fighting like babies over who will dictate the future standard. No one wins, and technology gets screwed.
TARKIN: The Major Labels now have direct control over territories. Fear will keep the consumers in line. Fear of the DMCA and the New Police State.
I think it was Che Guevara who once said a revolution is healthy for a country every couple hundred years... Ya, maybe a little extreme, but when do we know it's too late?
When it is too late
As Linus did with UNIX, as the "clone wars" (I'm telling you, that would've been such a better name) of the 80's did with the IBM-PC, Lindows may be able to accomplish with Windows. As the car analogy comes back into play, all cars run off of gas, but have different features. Some people run electric/solar powered cars for the whole ideal (think linux). Then there are most of the people who run off of regular gas powered cars (think windows), they don't have time to put up with the inconveniences that the other cars offer but would most likely love the advantages of them as well. Then you see the hybrid cars (think Lindows), these are the only cars that have a chance of penetrating the market with the idea that slowly people can make the transition to fully non gas powered technology.
Many of us here do use Linux because it offers us many benefits and we can afford to put in the time to reap the benefits of the OS. Most people just don't have the time to put in or don't see the advantages without ever using it. Lindows is exactly what this market needs to put Microsoft out of the picture as the sole distributor of Windows (sounds funny, but it makes as much sense to me as Intel and AMD both releasing x86 processors). Why will or why should people choose Lindows? Because it offers them more. If you have all the base options and give a little more, people like that. Just look at SUV's:)
Slashdot Mirror
higher res ingame at youtube! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4A4ir1_t58 apparently the action is slowed down so you can see whats going on.... probably like whats in the original... slow game speed to highest game speed.......
What's it say about these guys if they can't find a real woman to play the part of the woman? ;P
My experience with Vista started with build 5308, then tried 5365 and now 5384. Typically in Windows, I run firefox, thunderbird, battlefield 2 and starcraft as my main apps. Then there are the various media players, winamp with the clearone beta theme, itunes, and windows media player. My Windows XP experience has been relatively flawless. Sometimes I yearn for Mac OS's zen like simplicity and features like expose, but otherwise XP runs great on MY computer, meaning my computer doesn't run anything else with all the hardware supported very easily. Now, Vista Beta 2 is definitely an improvement over 5308, but it's still pretty damn raw. In 5308 I couldn't run BF2, but now I can. All it requires is that you run it in administrator mode. Performance at first was pretty bad, but after checking how much RAM was being used, I saw that Windows with nothing else running was up to 850 megs. I don't remember all the services I turned off, but it had a lot of unneccessary services running, stuff like tabletpc functionality and remote assistance (which ill never use). After turning off UAC and all the unneccesary services, I got it down to 400 megs, aero turned on, but usually DWM service and svchost.exe start climbing up as you basically just move your mouse around. So, it climbed back up to 500. BF2 then ran pretty well but it still wasn't as good as in XP. Ok, no problem, it runs, its playable, Vista performance hopefully will get better. NEXT, the game I absolutely can't live without, I fire it up when I'm stressed or generally feel like escaping: Starcraft. My god, this game runs great on a 166 mhz pentium 1 running Windows 95. Shit, well... under Vista if you don't select any compatability settings, the colors are all inverted upon first boot up. SO, enable 256 color mode and 640x480 and it boots up ok with colors all correct. BUT the game runs at a crawl when you actually get into any games. Starcraft in Vista at its current form is basically unplayable. And I wonder what other games are unplayable under Vista.
Next, WINDOWS VISTA WIRELESS NETWORKING SUCKS. 5308, 5365, 5384... all of them had the most horrible wireless networking i've ever experienced. I got a signal, connected fine. But my connection would only stay active randomly. Sometimes after 5 minutes it would be dead and I would have to disconnect and reconnect, which in 5384 usually fixed the problem (it didnt previously) But after reconnecting sometimes it would die within 30 seconds again. horrible, i hope they fix this.
Next, the UI is PRETTY PRETTY PRETTY. nice effects and hopefully they will allow modders and skinners to make some awesome add ons that could be quite nice. BUT the UI design scheme, having like 50 control panel items in classic mode (i know its not what they recommend but it's the advanced mode isn't it? it's too many seperate items in one folder) Welcome center is good, personalize menu sucks. This is one place where they should have copied OS X exactly, just put everything in one menu and like their laptop configuration menu, make it transition to the other control app in one window to other items. Not new windows for every control panel.
well those are my assessments, I have others, such as Firefox not being able to be made default browser no matter what i have tried with default apps configuration (same with thunderbird) and i dont know why they changed this, but it seems to be making it harder to use apps other than those that were configured to be used as default (Iexplorer, Outlook...) so thats lame. Also, firefox can't play imbedded media player anymore, the plugin wouldnt work and i couldnt figure it out. Long story made short, Vista needs A LOT of work. More than i thought previously. I'll be surprised if it is ready for Jan. 2007. I won't be surprised if it's released, but I wouldn't expect it to be anywhere near polished until 2008/9.
that this has only really been in serious development since August 2004. That's when the code rewrite was implemented and everything before that was scrapped. So in terms of development if you believe that they really scrapped everything before that date, this has really been in development for less than 2 years. Which really isn't a very long time. No wonder they have to rush things now... if anybody doubts what i say, look it up on google, i read it in an interview and dont have a link, but its been said numerous times....... :P
i would like to submit a formal apology via slashdot to this guy. apparently im the deuschebag and he was the one trying to be humorous. Guess it went over a lot of our heads ;) .. oops
From : Louderback, Jim
Sent : Thursday, May 4, 2006 8:33 PM
To : "Paul *"
Subject : RE: Boot Camp: Apple Bobs for Suckers
It was meant to be somewhat tongue in cheek. Glad you liked it and saw
it that way!
before i saw it here on slashdot. The article is a big troll. I told him he should title it "I don't like Macs and Here's Why:" Seriously he compares a lot more than boot camp here. He compares macs to windows as a whole and doesn't say all that much about boot camp in itself. Besides, its still in beta so wait for Leapard before a review like this. He mentions hardware that might not run and upgradability being a problem, but come on the hardware he mentions is the kind of stuff that people that would be using it would know whether or not it would be beneficial to use a mac or not with. The kind of people Boot Camp is for ain't what he thinks it is. Either that or again, he's trolling. Boot camps good for gamers, period. (in my opinion) Everyone else that uses a mac and needs to run Windows software can use virtualization software. OR, boot into windows... but i still see it as mostly for gamers and/or people with some lingering other high powered windows software that doesnt run in mac osx. but again, why would you buy a mac if you do professional editing or some other thing in windows? as he mentioned professional sound cards and such, whatever... this guy is a deuschebag
ya know, i have been running vista 5365 and the first thing I did was to turn off UAP... It's still horribly implemented and the screen black out is kind of annoying too.. i know why they did it, because of the supposed spoof that could be displayed where users click ok thinking its the cancel button, but it would have been better if the screen simply faded to gray rather than look like a resolution change to the input screen... also, its still waaay too frequent. when you have to enter your password for deleting shortcuts thats silly... furthermore, i personally think that it should be more like web browser password memory. while you have one particular section open, you put your password in once and it works until you close that particular section, such as the device manager section or copying files to a location or something like that. It needs to have better AI. The good news is they'll have plenty of time now that Vista has been delayed to fix that :D. Vista can be better than XP. Given that its been 5+ years since XPs release thats not too much to ask for, but I wish it could have been better. Aero is not as nice as aqua but if microsoft releases the API for aero and makes application developers able to integrate their gui better into aero, that will go a long way. Right now, many applications stick out a bit with the transparent windows and nothing else that blends into that theme. IE7 and media player look better in Vista because they were designed for it. Hopefully this won't be like the Office API where that looked nicer than the API that other developers were given to develop with. (i dont know too much about that but anyway better application integration with aero would be a big plus) We'll see how it turns out...
except that the contract specifies that Apple Computer shall not go into the business of selling physical media with music on it. As I read in the article that said this (sorry not gonna look for it now) Apple Computer isn't doing this. The iTunes music store might very well not breach any contracts. It seems fair that Apple Corp should bring up this lawsuit legally, but if they lose this, they might be putting a couple nails into their coffin (IMNSHO). We'll see....
i completely disagree on many of these points.
First of all, to answer point two, after watching the channel9 (or whatever that online video interview with people developing for vista thing is) and listening to what one of the guys who worked on aero say, he said that the large window borders were specifically to make it easier to resize windows. So they DO serve a purpose. And they are transparent "to make them less heavy". Also, as you mentioned, Windows has always had a lot of configurable options. Sometimes you might have to dig deep or download some software, but you can usually change what you don't like about it. That goes right into point 3. I'm sure there will be plenty of user-made themes after vistas release that have no transparency with aero enabled. Typically there has always been a large community addressing these discrepancies in taste. That also answers point 4. As for point 1, i think i agree with you. Not having used Vista yet (and i take it you haven't either) I can't say for sure, but what you say seems to be quite logical. I hope they rethink that, or maybe it will be changeable with different themes (dont see why it couldnt, you can change xp's close/minimize button sizes with themes although they are all the same)
To go on with what i was going to originally reply to this whole topic about..... I currently use a PC with the option of running windows, linux, or OSX. I run windows. why? the support is unparralelled in terms of hardware support and applications. On windows, I have games, Nero 7 ultra (better than anything i can find on mac, but i havent tried idvd for authoring dvds yet, toast is decent..) and i know that if i want something extra on the OS, its PROBABLY downloadable online. There are so many MS bashers around, especially on this site, its kind of ridiculous. OK, MS has a monopoly and they use it unfairly sometimes. But, if there was a vacuum to fill, somebody would have done it by now right? The fact is, every other OS choice on the market doesn't really replace windows and improve on it at the same time. Linux as a desktop OS doesn't have ubiquitous software support for various reasons and there are no standards for what gui a user will be using. And in my opinion thats how it should be. Windows fills the market for commodity PC hardware and it has the most market share. Sure, its hard to compete with that, but name one OS that is poised to take over in this area RIGHT now. Unfortunately, i loved BeOS and it could have done some serious competing against windows at the time of the release (hell it beat windows hands down at the time save a few unimplemented features it probably beats xp right now in my mind) but anyway, theres nothing out there competing in the same market as Windows. Linux ain't a desktop OS and it might never be. OSX? Unless Apple plans on releasing it as a standalone OS with no hardware tie ins, it's not in the same market either. As for vista, it actually looks decent. WinFS might not be available at the time of shipping, but its in development and will probably be shipped by service pack 1 or 2. That's not a bad deal.. you buy windows and get the upgrade for free later on..... it seems as though vista is improving with every ctp, hopefully the final product will be polished. I for one, am looking forward to it.
right now with nero ultra edition 7 i can make my own menus and import any kind of video file and it will automatically convert it to dvd video. I'm sure there will be software similar for bd and hd... its not very hard. you drag the files in, create the menu and the titles appear automatically as buttons on the menu which you can edit. You can choose that clips not play successively so as to go back to the main menu after being done with one clip. So as for more than one movie, yes I'm sure this will be supported.
For those that don't know much about them (i didn't)
STORAGE:
HD- HD DVD supports 15 gb for one layer and 30 gb for dual layer. A triple layer disc in development by Toshiba will hold 45 gb.
BD - Blu-Ray discs as said in the summary hold 25 gb for one layer and 50 for two. Also in development for BD is 100 gb 4 layer and 200 gb 8 layer discs. Both BD and HD are backwards compatible with the current DVD specification (although for BD it is apparently not compulsory for manufacturers to include it).
COPY PROTECTION:
HD - HD's will employ copy restriction developed by AACS LA. Audio Watermark Technology is also being used. All Hd dvd players will include a sensor that listens for audible watermarks placed in the soundtracks of movies. (read more at the wikipedia site).
BD - Blu-ray has "experimental digital rights management that allows for dynamically changing encryption schemes". This prevents a single crack from breaking the whole protection scheme like what happened with DeCSS and DVDs. Also included is digital watermarking technology. (more at wikipedia
Interesting note about Blue Ray discs, original discs made with blue ray technology were very susceptible to scratches and had to be enclosed in plastic caddies for protection. TDK came up for a solution to this in January 2004 that gave Blue ray discs "unprecedented scratch resistance." HD DVD discs use the same coating found on cds and dvds. For my money, it seems like BD is the better technology. We'll see how the copy protection pans out.
All information taken from wikipedia.org
LINKS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD-DVD"
who cares, lets see how they do... watching madden nfl gaming "playoffs" on espn during the college football season was actually pretty cool. You got to follow these people that had a chance to go meet professional athletes that they would play as with the team on the football game... then depending on whether they won or lost they got to stay with their team which was actually the bus that they travelled to different sites on. It was like survivor with video games. Will this ever take off? I frankly don't care, it'll probably find its own niche. 15 to 19 year olds will always be interested in this kind of stuff IMO. We'll see.........
You know, i have dealt with this kind of thing all my life as well, I never joined the marines or anything, but I did try and make myself tougher and questioned everything about myself and life to find out what was wrong with me. Could it be that some people are assholes with no consciences that like to gang up on other individuals with no self esteem? i think so... i have always had low self esteem and i got picked on a lot. Yet, I found a lot in common with myself and the bullies that were picking on me. We both had problems, but we dealt with them differently. I usually dealt with them by becoming socially isolated trying to avoid confrontation, and they with their problems on the surface instead of inside took their frustrations out on other people trying to dominate them. I don't know if its all about self esteem, but psychology is a very very complicated thing. I'll mention that I have taken lsd and psilocybin mushrooms and I dont know if i can trust what i learned from those experiences but it's shown me how complex the brain and relationships with other brains can be. I guess if I want to say anything to you its that while I have dedicated my life to trying to understand these things (i have no choice with my personality it seems) it's not always the other people that are bad and its not always so black and white. It's usually a combination of issues. Your problems combined with their problems makes for some very fucked up chemistry. And it's fascinating how it actually is your chemistry mixing with theirs. You might not be mixing chemicals in a flask but the result is the same, each of you affecting each others chemicals within your skulls. All relationships are like this... when people have problems individually, they get worse with relationships, especially with other people that have problems. I wish I had the answer, I still have an avoidant personality and I still have the desire to improve my personality but who knows what the real problem is.. At least keep an open mind.
except that the authors are the ones using and implementing hdr. If it was a mod to a game already released I would agree, but the case for most games is going to be to add this as a feature. So I guess to include your example, maybe if Trent Reznor released some track that had mega bass activated through effects that would make sense, but really, im not sure that its the greatest analogy. ;/
After playing Half Life 2: Lost Coast with Full HDR at 1280x1024 and settings all the way at max, I came away with the impression that HDR is really quite nice. Comparing screens with normal filters and HDR, HDR is much more realistic. When you look at water reflections HDR is invaluable. Sun reflections especially looked impressive. Where normal filters made the bright spots look gray, HDR made everything shine and bleed a bit. It was quite accurate as far as the water went. Now, what I didn't think was realistic, was HDR used in the distance. There was that seem bleeding effect across open windows and such. Also, the effect is sampled every so often, I don't know what the sampling rate was there, but a couple times i noticed a slow sampling rate that wasnt entirely realistic. Towards the end of the Lost Coast level, I was impressed by the light coming in from the windows (you'll know what im talking about if you've played it). They were stained glass windows and first there was a dull light in them, but when you shot them out, a big blast of white/yellow light shines through that looks quite good. My conclusion is that HDR is good, but they should up the sampling rate in HL2LC and also change how its viewed in the distance. But what do i know... anyway, thats how i saw it.
the spam filters work quite well actually. Go into your options (top right hand corner) click on mail, then junk email protection, then junk email filter and select "enhanced". This adds a junk mail folder and it works pretty well. Sometimes 1 message gets through to my inbox, but it works much better than on the low setting.
My biggest pet peave other than space with hotmail is the link system.. it opens new links in a new window but within another frame. It would be nice if there was an option in the settings to turn this "feature" off.
you know what would be very cool? just an idea, even if security (and a million other things) needs to be worked out... But make internet connection purely wireless for the end user in all parts of the world. Blanket the world in wireless access points, and make it accessible to anyone just by asking their gps coordinates or something like that. A vision for the future internet! would be very cool to have a fully connected world where wherever you were in the world you could just switch on and be able to communicate with anyone else. mm.. grandiose ideas that are impractical... but cool. But still, I consider humans communication technology to be in a rather primitive state... I mean what, we got our first real start in 1876? its only been 120 years, thats not much time to progress.. The scene is really exciting if you think about the prospects of what we could one day possess. Now for the specifics? :) dont know, but i can dream
if they are doing this, why not try to gain some power from the keyboard. I mean, we type quite a bit, make a bit of resistance and convert it and you dont even have to do anything extra. And we'll have extra strong fingers! seriously though, this would be a good idea. why not right?
The only good thing to come out of Microsoft as a monopoly is that many devices follow their "standard". Yes, it is true that Microsoft ignores industry standards, but at least they create a conformity that allows many devices to work together without too much of a problem.
Look at the cell phone market in the United States and you will see what a hinderance lack of standards can be. The US is very far behind in cell phone techonology with regards to many other nations, and mostly because of big companies each willing to push their own proprietary technology because they believe they will be profiting more in the long run.
Well, back to the new OS, what's gonna happen here? The description of services offered, control their home appliances via PC, and watch television programs and movies on their PC at any location , sound great, but how are Microsoft and even Apple gonna react to this? They obviously both want a piece of that market share and I'm not sure if they are all willing to conform to each others standards.
Ideally, every company would be small and would have to follow industry standards. These standards would be imposed by a legislation with representation from all the developers. Instead what we get is a couple people fighting like babies over who will dictate the future standard. No one wins, and technology gets screwed.
TARKIN: The Major Labels now have direct control over territories. Fear will keep the consumers in line. Fear of the DMCA and the New Police State.
I think it was Che Guevara who once said a revolution is healthy for a country every couple hundred years... Ya, maybe a little extreme, but when do we know it's too late?
When it is too late
The RIAA, protectors of the American Dream since 1952
As Linus did with UNIX, as the "clone wars" (I'm telling you, that would've been such a better name) of the 80's did with the IBM-PC, Lindows may be able to accomplish with Windows. As the car analogy comes back into play, all cars run off of gas, but have different features. Some people run electric/solar powered cars for the whole ideal (think linux). Then there are most of the people who run off of regular gas powered cars (think windows), they don't have time to put up with the inconveniences that the other cars offer but would most likely love the advantages of them as well. Then you see the hybrid cars (think Lindows), these are the only cars that have a chance of penetrating the market with the idea that slowly people can make the transition to fully non gas powered technology. Many of us here do use Linux because it offers us many benefits and we can afford to put in the time to reap the benefits of the OS. Most people just don't have the time to put in or don't see the advantages without ever using it. Lindows is exactly what this market needs to put Microsoft out of the picture as the sole distributor of Windows (sounds funny, but it makes as much sense to me as Intel and AMD both releasing x86 processors). Why will or why should people choose Lindows? Because it offers them more. If you have all the base options and give a little more, people like that. Just look at SUV's :)