They could have simply specified that a browser must support ONE of the two options, h.264 or Theora. This would have at least provided a reference to websites, such that they can guarantee that they need support no more than two codecs. Without a standard, they can't necessarily guarantee that a browser will support either. A third party browser may come by and decide to implement nothing but MJPEG since it isn't specified.
I mean, there are legitimate concerns in both camps. Theora's hardware support is non-existent, and h.264 has expensive licensing fees. So why not allow browser manufactuerers to pick the one that best suits their position, rather than leaving it undefined entirely?
A guarantee of at least one of two being supported is better than no guarantee at all.
These days, ASUS just builds the BIOS flashing utility right into the BIOS. You launch the app from your BIOS setup menu, and then it can read the ROM file right off your hard disk or a USB stick (or whatever other media).
Don't you people ever need to apply BIOS updates? Or run hard drive diagnostic software?
Yes, and neither of those requires DOS. My motherboard (an Asus P6T Deluxe v2) has a BIOS-flashing utility built into the BIOS, which is capable of loading the ROM file right off existing media (like my NTFS hard disk, although Linux users may need to use a FAT32 USB stick or something).
As for disk utilities, most are either Linux-based or use their own booting solution. Admittedly, some manufacturer utilities cling to the old DOS ways, and I do believe I needed to use DOS to update the firmware on my Intel SSD.
Vorbis did make some inroads into the game market, though. It's not all that rare that I see a copyright notice for Xiph in the opening of a game. The most recent example is Ghostbusters.
That's just in sustained speeds, which isn't nearly as important as random read/write speeds (especially for server use).
While a quick glance doesn't show direct random read/write tests in that article, they do measure I/O per second (another random operation) where the Intel drive was typically 10 to 20 *times* faster than the Cheetah. (~250 iops versus ~5400 iops)
Apple could sue, and Palm could counter-sue with antitrust claims. After all, Apple does control most of the music market via iTunes.
I vaguely recall a lawsuit where Apple was sued for limiting the iPod to only iTunes (Apple won), but I don't think anybody has challenged the reverse (using something else with iTunes) in court.
Britain, Canada, and Australia all have mandatory nationwide blacklists of banned sites
Umm, while I can't speak for Britain or Australia, Canada most definitely does *NOT* have a mandatory nationwide blacklist of banned sites.
What we do have is Cybertip.ca, who provide a child porn black list to *PARTICIPATING* ISPs (as in *OPTIONAL*). If you worry that the censorship will expand to other categories, you can always pick a different ISP or DNS provider.
Opera Mini does a good job at getting pages crunched down, and can be run on a desktop. You'd probably want to turn off images, and browse in mobile mode, but it'd probably be an acceptable experience. Figure 30-60 seconds to load a short page? It'd be compressed and text-only, although you're wasting bandwidth sending the HTML rather than with lynx where you just send the text.
Your 7200RPM drives probably have a sequential transfer average of something like 50 or 60 MB/s each, for 100 to 120 MB/s total. A mainstream Intel SSD does 230MB/s average (using my own drive's benchmarks). As for random read/write performance, you'd need dozens (or more?) of drives in an array to match up a single SSD.
Ignoring write performance (where the Intel drives still slaughter a traditional HDD in random performance, but fall a bit behind in sustained), you're still far behind an SSD.
Yes. I do. My single drive has an average sustained transfer rate of 230MB/s. A SATA1 bus would severely constrain the performance of my drive (an Intel x25-m).
There are numerous other SSDs on the market whose manufacturers focused on higher sustained performance rather than random access performance that already hit the 300MB/s wall of SATA2. And I expect that Intel's next series of drives will do the same. SATA2 is woefully unprepared for the very near future, let alone the present; it's slow enough to already be constraining high-end performance.
It was one thing for Sun to have been purchased by a company that doesn't really compete with IBM directly (or not be purchased at all). It's another thing to consolidate MySQL and Oracle against DB2.
Except Oracle already owns InnoDB, the only storage engine for MySQL that's worth a damn.
Both InnoDB and MySQL are multi-licensed with at least one of those licenses being the GPL. There's nothing Oracle can do to kill off MySQL should somebody decide to fork it.
Social engineering makes this all moot anyhow. All you need to do is convince somebody to give you brief access to a regular user account and then there are often very nice exploits in Linux that will give a regular user root access.
That slices one a while back was particularly nasty. A friend demoed it on my box. One command (admittedly with some semicolons) to wget, chmod, and run the executable. Boom, he's looking at a nice prompt just as if he'd successfully done a "su -".
You, and everybody else, seems to be missing the point. The game wasn't OUT at the time. GameStop leaked it, pre-orders got activated, and the rest of the game buying public still couldn't buy it.
When a game is only really available to pirates, of COURSE there will be more pirates than paying customers.
mplayer's GUI is a joke; telling anybody that they can use it if they don't like mplayer's keyboard shortcuts is disingenuous.
If people want to use straight-up mplayer, they can. If they want a UI, they're probably better off with smplayer.
Personally, I (usually) use smplayer; it's useful to be able to play with the filter chain on-the-fly without having to resort to a man page. And best of all, nearly all mplayer keyboard shortcuts are still supported and can be changed. Those that aren't recognized by smplayer are passed through to mplayer.
By default, MPC's internal subtitle support is disabled. So I'd suggest taking a look at your settings.
MPC's author is the same guy who wrote directvobsub, the defacto standard for ASS/SSA subtitle rendering; sub support is generally better than every other renderer out there. Competing sub renderers are things like libass (used by mplayer), which is horrible and incomplete (useless for anything but basic subs).
VLC did have a UI-rewrite as of 0.9, I believe. Might be worth giving it another try. Although if you ask me, the only looks better, it still behaves poorly.
You really shouldn't need any codec downloaders or codec packs.
MPC-HC has integrated a good deal of libavcodec (same library used in mplayer, ffmpeg/ffdshow, VLC, xine, gstreamer/totem, etc.) Out of the box, MPC-HC should play back virtually anything you throw at it. It also has integrated subtitle support that is superior to directvobsub. After all, the author of MPC is the same guy who wrote directvobsub, and MPC can render the subs at native screen-res, which looks quite nice.
Personally, though, I install three things for media playback:
1) MPC-HC: eed a player, and this one is great.
2) Haali's Splitter: This Matroska (MKV) splitter is better than MPC's own, but I primarily use this to get Haali's Renderer. It does accurate two-pass bicubic scaling, and supports buffering of raw uncompressed data (good for handling CPU spikes). Supported by MPC.
3) ffdshow-tryouts: This fork of ffdshow is widely regarded as the successor to ffdshow. This will provide all the codec support that MPC-HC might be missing, since MPC-HC focuses on the mainstream codecs rather than the more esoteric ones. I tend to use ffdshow as the default codec in order to use some of the ffdshow filters. Primarily, deband, which I desperately wish somebody would port to mplayer, and the occasional other filter like yadif deinterlacing or perhaps an unsharp mask.
Of course, since I'm a Linux user, these days I just use smplayer. Unfortunately, smplayer is extremely buggy, and mplayer/smplayer have rather limited support for DVD menus via libdvdnav. And again, I'm flabberghasted that nobody has ported ffdshow's deband filter to mplayer; it's an enormous quality improvement on pretty much every video, and has absolutely no negative impact on level of detail.
A modern laptop doesn't necessarily need any moving parts. Other than fans (which aren't required in lower-power models), the hard drive is the only moving part left. Many notebooks ship with SSDs today, eliminating that.
LCDs don't necessarily require glass substrate, as it seems there's been some research into using plastic substrates.
That's what ECC RAM and shielding is for. They'd be morons not to be using ECC RAM in a rugged laptop. Radiation-induced bit-flipping is not something that can be solved by an off-the-shelf SSD, although you can probably solve this in software. For example, ZFS will detect the errors, and RAID-Z would correct them. Thing is, since ZFS doesn't work on the normal partition metaphor, I'm not sure if you could get a RAID-Z setup working on a single disk. You wouldn't normally want to do that, of course, but use in high-radiation environments would be precisely the one place that single-drive parity-based RAID makes sense.
The cooling shouldn't be much of an issue either. Laptops are typically designed to be able to cool their components running at full blast; IE, my laptop produces far more heat running with the CPU clockspeed maxed out with both cores at 100%. By switching my CPU and GPU to power saving mode (and possibly rebooting with the second core disabled), the cooling requirements are dramatically reduced, to the extend where the laptop runs essentially passively cooled. If air pressure were to drop, this being a desktop replacement, I've got a TON of backup cooling capacity.
On the other hand, some components are *only* cooled passively (HDD, RAM, LCD backlight, etc) and might have issues.
I'd imagine that they design their own motherboards in laptops, even if they don't do the actual manufacturing themselves. The same is probably true for desktops. If nothing else, they don't use off-the-shelf models, and are responsible for their selection.
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They could have simply specified that a browser must support ONE of the two options, h.264 or Theora. This would have at least provided a reference to websites, such that they can guarantee that they need support no more than two codecs. Without a standard, they can't necessarily guarantee that a browser will support either. A third party browser may come by and decide to implement nothing but MJPEG since it isn't specified.
I mean, there are legitimate concerns in both camps. Theora's hardware support is non-existent, and h.264 has expensive licensing fees. So why not allow browser manufactuerers to pick the one that best suits their position, rather than leaving it undefined entirely?
A guarantee of at least one of two being supported is better than no guarantee at all.
These days, ASUS just builds the BIOS flashing utility right into the BIOS. You launch the app from your BIOS setup menu, and then it can read the ROM file right off your hard disk or a USB stick (or whatever other media).
Don't you people ever need to apply BIOS updates? Or run hard drive diagnostic software?
Yes, and neither of those requires DOS. My motherboard (an Asus P6T Deluxe v2) has a BIOS-flashing utility built into the BIOS, which is capable of loading the ROM file right off existing media (like my NTFS hard disk, although Linux users may need to use a FAT32 USB stick or something).
As for disk utilities, most are either Linux-based or use their own booting solution. Admittedly, some manufacturer utilities cling to the old DOS ways, and I do believe I needed to use DOS to update the firmware on my Intel SSD.
I'm also using Dropbox. It's great.
Vorbis did make some inroads into the game market, though. It's not all that rare that I see a copyright notice for Xiph in the opening of a game. The most recent example is Ghostbusters.
A list:
http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/Games_that_use_Vorbis
Everything from Halo (Mac/PC) to Guitar Hero (II) and Rock Band to GTA to Quake4 / Doom 3 to Devil May Cry and all sorts of games in between.
That's just in sustained speeds, which isn't nearly as important as random read/write speeds (especially for server use).
While a quick glance doesn't show direct random read/write tests in that article, they do measure I/O per second (another random operation) where the Intel drive was typically 10 to 20 *times* faster than the Cheetah. (~250 iops versus ~5400 iops)
But that's kind of the point. Finally, we can severely reduce memory bloat due to memory fragmentation by separating tabs into different processes.
Chrome has a higher memory footprint at first, but then as Firefox continues to use more and more RAM, Chrome's memory usage remains consistent.
Apple could sue, and Palm could counter-sue with antitrust claims. After all, Apple does control most of the music market via iTunes.
I vaguely recall a lawsuit where Apple was sued for limiting the iPod to only iTunes (Apple won), but I don't think anybody has challenged the reverse (using something else with iTunes) in court.
Britain, Canada, and Australia all have mandatory nationwide blacklists of banned sites
Umm, while I can't speak for Britain or Australia, Canada most definitely does *NOT* have a mandatory nationwide blacklist of banned sites.
What we do have is Cybertip.ca, who provide a child porn black list to *PARTICIPATING* ISPs (as in *OPTIONAL*). If you worry that the censorship will expand to other categories, you can always pick a different ISP or DNS provider.
Opera Mini does a good job at getting pages crunched down, and can be run on a desktop. You'd probably want to turn off images, and browse in mobile mode, but it'd probably be an acceptable experience. Figure 30-60 seconds to load a short page? It'd be compressed and text-only, although you're wasting bandwidth sending the HTML rather than with lynx where you just send the text.
Your 7200RPM drives probably have a sequential transfer average of something like 50 or 60 MB/s each, for 100 to 120 MB/s total. A mainstream Intel SSD does 230MB/s average (using my own drive's benchmarks). As for random read/write performance, you'd need dozens (or more?) of drives in an array to match up a single SSD.
Ignoring write performance (where the Intel drives still slaughter a traditional HDD in random performance, but fall a bit behind in sustained), you're still far behind an SSD.
Yes. I do. My single drive has an average sustained transfer rate of 230MB/s. A SATA1 bus would severely constrain the performance of my drive (an Intel x25-m).
There are numerous other SSDs on the market whose manufacturers focused on higher sustained performance rather than random access performance that already hit the 300MB/s wall of SATA2. And I expect that Intel's next series of drives will do the same. SATA2 is woefully unprepared for the very near future, let alone the present; it's slow enough to already be constraining high-end performance.
It was one thing for Sun to have been purchased by a company that doesn't really compete with IBM directly (or not be purchased at all). It's another thing to consolidate MySQL and Oracle against DB2.
Except Oracle already owns InnoDB, the only storage engine for MySQL that's worth a damn.
Both InnoDB and MySQL are multi-licensed with at least one of those licenses being the GPL. There's nothing Oracle can do to kill off MySQL should somebody decide to fork it.
Social engineering makes this all moot anyhow. All you need to do is convince somebody to give you brief access to a regular user account and then there are often very nice exploits in Linux that will give a regular user root access.
That slices one a while back was particularly nasty. A friend demoed it on my box. One command (admittedly with some semicolons) to wget, chmod, and run the executable. Boom, he's looking at a nice prompt just as if he'd successfully done a "su -".
You, and everybody else, seems to be missing the point. The game wasn't OUT at the time. GameStop leaked it, pre-orders got activated, and the rest of the game buying public still couldn't buy it.
When a game is only really available to pirates, of COURSE there will be more pirates than paying customers.
mplayer's GUI is a joke; telling anybody that they can use it if they don't like mplayer's keyboard shortcuts is disingenuous.
If people want to use straight-up mplayer, they can. If they want a UI, they're probably better off with smplayer.
Personally, I (usually) use smplayer; it's useful to be able to play with the filter chain on-the-fly without having to resort to a man page. And best of all, nearly all mplayer keyboard shortcuts are still supported and can be changed. Those that aren't recognized by smplayer are passed through to mplayer.
By default, MPC's internal subtitle support is disabled. So I'd suggest taking a look at your settings.
MPC's author is the same guy who wrote directvobsub, the defacto standard for ASS/SSA subtitle rendering; sub support is generally better than every other renderer out there. Competing sub renderers are things like libass (used by mplayer), which is horrible and incomplete (useless for anything but basic subs).
VLC did have a UI-rewrite as of 0.9, I believe. Might be worth giving it another try. Although if you ask me, the only looks better, it still behaves poorly.
MPC-HC might be called "Home Cinema", but it also works quite well as a general continually updated fork of MPC.
ffdshow itself is long dead, with the current active fork being ffdshow-tryouts: http://ffdshow-tryout.sourceforge.net/
You really shouldn't need any codec downloaders or codec packs.
MPC-HC has integrated a good deal of libavcodec (same library used in mplayer, ffmpeg/ffdshow, VLC, xine, gstreamer/totem, etc.) Out of the box, MPC-HC should play back virtually anything you throw at it. It also has integrated subtitle support that is superior to directvobsub. After all, the author of MPC is the same guy who wrote directvobsub, and MPC can render the subs at native screen-res, which looks quite nice.
Personally, though, I install three things for media playback:
1) MPC-HC: eed a player, and this one is great.
2) Haali's Splitter: This Matroska (MKV) splitter is better than MPC's own, but I primarily use this to get Haali's Renderer. It does accurate two-pass bicubic scaling, and supports buffering of raw uncompressed data (good for handling CPU spikes). Supported by MPC.
3) ffdshow-tryouts: This fork of ffdshow is widely regarded as the successor to ffdshow. This will provide all the codec support that MPC-HC might be missing, since MPC-HC focuses on the mainstream codecs rather than the more esoteric ones. I tend to use ffdshow as the default codec in order to use some of the ffdshow filters. Primarily, deband, which I desperately wish somebody would port to mplayer, and the occasional other filter like yadif deinterlacing or perhaps an unsharp mask.
Of course, since I'm a Linux user, these days I just use smplayer. Unfortunately, smplayer is extremely buggy, and mplayer/smplayer have rather limited support for DVD menus via libdvdnav. And again, I'm flabberghasted that nobody has ported ffdshow's deband filter to mplayer; it's an enormous quality improvement on pretty much every video, and has absolutely no negative impact on level of detail.
A modern laptop doesn't necessarily need any moving parts. Other than fans (which aren't required in lower-power models), the hard drive is the only moving part left. Many notebooks ship with SSDs today, eliminating that.
LCDs don't necessarily require glass substrate, as it seems there's been some research into using plastic substrates.
That's what ECC RAM and shielding is for. They'd be morons not to be using ECC RAM in a rugged laptop. Radiation-induced bit-flipping is not something that can be solved by an off-the-shelf SSD, although you can probably solve this in software. For example, ZFS will detect the errors, and RAID-Z would correct them. Thing is, since ZFS doesn't work on the normal partition metaphor, I'm not sure if you could get a RAID-Z setup working on a single disk. You wouldn't normally want to do that, of course, but use in high-radiation environments would be precisely the one place that single-drive parity-based RAID makes sense.
The cooling shouldn't be much of an issue either. Laptops are typically designed to be able to cool their components running at full blast; IE, my laptop produces far more heat running with the CPU clockspeed maxed out with both cores at 100%. By switching my CPU and GPU to power saving mode (and possibly rebooting with the second core disabled), the cooling requirements are dramatically reduced, to the extend where the laptop runs essentially passively cooled. If air pressure were to drop, this being a desktop replacement, I've got a TON of backup cooling capacity.
On the other hand, some components are *only* cooled passively (HDD, RAM, LCD backlight, etc) and might have issues.
I'd imagine that they design their own motherboards in laptops, even if they don't do the actual manufacturing themselves. The same is probably true for desktops. If nothing else, they don't use off-the-shelf models, and are responsible for their selection.
Too bad their later products (such as Zip disks) didn't take anything more than regular use to fail regularly.