To Americans, perhaps. To me, living in Canada, I'm not sure there is any marketing value in which foreign country it's manufactured in. The US is a big market, but not the only market.
They (and especially the most indignant among them) should be happy to pay a little more to keep the work local; after all, they're demanding that others do it.
It costs three times more ($299) than the closest competitor (Apple TV, $99) that it seems to have a similar feature-set to. That's not "a little more", that's "nobody will buy it because it costs three times more".
In many cases, the content from those digital distribution houses arrives on... DVD. A lot of Funimation's titles are very obviously ripped from DVDs, for example.
Even then, it's not as easy as all that. DVD's don't store subtitles as text, they store subtitles as a low-res graphical overlay. Turning those into text requires OCR, which isn't perfectly accurate, so now you need somebody to watch them to ensure they're showing up at the right time without any errors, and then correct any errors that are found. Also, different DVDs feature different fonts, so you need to manually tune the OCR engine for each DVD.
You don't need 2D glasses if you're blind in one eye; regular 3D glasses will work properly, showing you a single image for the one eye.
2D glasses are, however, useful for those who can't see 3D for some other reason (such as strabismus). The problem is that 3D movies have a hefty premium in ticket price on top of the 2D version, so the affected person still has to pay that premium. About the only scenario where you might want to do this is if you want to see a movie in 2D (either because you can't see 3D or because you don't like it), but still want to attend a 3D showing with friends.
Four months ago, Netflix reached 80% of content subtitled or captioned. Since they prioritized by popularity, they intended to continue increasing that percentage, but at a slower pace. This seems to directly contradict with your experience.
Except you're discussing ancient GPUs and extrapolating your experience with those to the assertion that they are currently releasing hardware "with all kinds of issues"
Fixed-function hardware can implement an algorithm much more efficiently than software. Reproducing what the dedicated scalers do in software may not be practical.
HDMI and DisplayPort both support this, and lots of displays will accept it as input. For example, both my home theatre projector (Epson PowerLite 8345) and my desktop's computer monitor (Dell U2711) will accept YCbCr input.
In fact, dedicated media players (such as my PS3) are already outputting YCbCr, so I'm currently using this... Of course, ultimately, it gets converted back into RGB at display-time, since all display devices are RGB.
I can't speak for the US, but such a law would be blatantly unconstitutional in Canada due to violating the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (which is enshrined in our constitution). Does the US not have any part of the US constitution that forbids laws from discriminating like that? Does the bill of rights cover that, and is it part of the constitution? Not trolling, I'm not very familiar with the US constitution, only copyright law, ironically.
I could give you some horror stories (one friend bought a Vertex 2 and is now on his fourth one as they keep failing and needing RMAs), but the general feeling out there seems to be that OCZ stuff is fast, when it works, but has a higher failure/bug rate than companies like Intel or Samsung.
If you want a fast drive, Intel's 330 and 520 series use the same controllers as OCZ's sandforce stuff, so the performance is similar. They can also be quite cheap since Intel is throwing mail-in-rebates around. I bought a 180GB Intel 330 for $145 after rebate, only to see them drop down to $120 after rebate not long after. Looks like they're back up to $145 now.
Processors haven't only because of design decisions rather than technical capabilities; the die shrinks are still happening at a Moore's Law compatible rate, but die sizes are getting smaller as power becomes a bigger and bigger focus. GPUs, on the other hand...
Samsung is actually decent, they do a huge amount of OEM work, so their validation requirements are pretty decent. Other than that, I'd stick to Intel.
OCZ is hit or miss. Their stuff is fast, but reliability isn't great compared to Intel.
Samsung's are actually the only other brand I'd probably trust enough to buy, but they're almost impossible to find at retail, so I largely ignore them. They're mostly into OEM stuff. Anandtech did some impressive reviews of their stuff, and I looked around trying to find them, and didn't have much luck. Even on newegg, at the time, there was just a handful of Samsung parts, and at the time they were outdated models.
Portal's level editor can be used to implement binary logic, so that has some educational value. I saw somebody implement a 4-bit adder using lasers and moving platforms, and I managed to do one using just lasers and receptors, so there's a lot of flexibility there. My stuff was pretty messy and compact, but I'm pretty sure you could do it up in a more illustrative manner.
Operating systems will still refuse to let any individual process use more than 2 or 3 GB of RAM (depending on kernel/user split) on a 32-bit system, regardless of PAE. Your 8GB machine will do fine as a server, but any memory-intensive app is going to be just as limited as it would on a system with 4GB of RAM.
It's a lot more straightforward than that: NAND chips follow Moore's law (and so does their pricing), while magnetic storage doesn't. SSDs are dropping by Moore's law, and will continue to do so as long as Moore's law holds up for flash memory. It's not that the $700 160GB Intel SSD was ludicrous or ridiculously priced, it's that flash memory really cost that much back then, and the prices we see today are just about where Moore's law would predict they'd be.
I've seen so many problems with other brands, that I don't really trust anything but Intel SSDs anymore. Even when using the same controller, Intel manages to avoid issues, like the BSOD problems with the sandforce controllers that only Intel bothered to fix.
I don't know why TFA says Intel isn't discounting things, though. They're constantly doing mail-in-rebates for their products. I bought an Intel 160GB X25-m G1 for $700 roughly three years ago. Today, you can buy from newegg an Intel 180GB 330 for $120 after rebate, and it's enormously faster to boot.
If it is the case (that WP 7.8 will get most of the features), then they couldn't have done a worse job marketing that release. Apple's approach of bundling it all together in one release and supporting which features they can on different devices would work much better. If WP8 supports NFC, for example, but the only feature on a certain phone that won't get WP8 can't do is NFC, then it markets itself a lot better to say that phone IS getting WP8 (but has no NFC) than to say it's getting a minor revision update...
Whatever anybody might say about Apple's products, they're really good at marketing: Microsoft could learn a lot from them in that regard.
The Xperia Play would be a terrible choice to buy today considering the fact that it's an obsolete phone both in terms of hardware (small RAM, slower CPU, very slow GPU, low-res screen) and software (doesn't support current Android release 4.x).
It was a decent phone when it came out over a year ago, but if nothing else the fact that Sony has abandoned support for it should discourage new purchases today.
It's worth noting that the Lumia 900 came out five months ago... My response to people who complain about Apple dropping iOS support for old hardware is that Android has even shorter support periods, but this takes the cake. They didn't even make it half a year before announcing they're dropping support for it...
On the one hand I wonder if Microsoft can afford to snub the few customers they have, what with WP7's tiny marketshare, but that got me thinking, maybe they see the tiny marketshare as the reason they can afford to snub the people: they don't have much to lose if they alienate existing customers if they can capture a respectable marketshare with WP8?
Ikea has a range of products. You can buy a bookshelf at $30, $70, $100, $200, $300, or even up to $800. The quality and durability of the product varies by price. Is the $30 bookshelf pretty flimsy? Yeah, but what do you expect for $30?
I actually own an example of both the $30 and $70 shelves, and there is an enormous difference in the quality, but that's exactly what I'd expect... And yes, the $30 shelf used plastic bolts, but the $70 was all metal locking bolts, not to mention far denser/thicker wood.
Basically, you get what you pay for, and they have a variety of options that let you pay what you want.
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To Americans, perhaps. To me, living in Canada, I'm not sure there is any marketing value in which foreign country it's manufactured in. The US is a big market, but not the only market.
They (and especially the most indignant among them) should be happy to pay a little more to keep the work local; after all, they're demanding that others do it.
It costs three times more ($299) than the closest competitor (Apple TV, $99) that it seems to have a similar feature-set to. That's not "a little more", that's "nobody will buy it because it costs three times more".
http://blog.netflix.com/2012/02/update-on-captioning-for-our-members.html
In many cases, the content from those digital distribution houses arrives on... DVD. A lot of Funimation's titles are very obviously ripped from DVDs, for example.
Even then, it's not as easy as all that. DVD's don't store subtitles as text, they store subtitles as a low-res graphical overlay. Turning those into text requires OCR, which isn't perfectly accurate, so now you need somebody to watch them to ensure they're showing up at the right time without any errors, and then correct any errors that are found. Also, different DVDs feature different fonts, so you need to manually tune the OCR engine for each DVD.
You don't need 2D glasses if you're blind in one eye; regular 3D glasses will work properly, showing you a single image for the one eye.
2D glasses are, however, useful for those who can't see 3D for some other reason (such as strabismus). The problem is that 3D movies have a hefty premium in ticket price on top of the 2D version, so the affected person still has to pay that premium. About the only scenario where you might want to do this is if you want to see a movie in 2D (either because you can't see 3D or because you don't like it), but still want to attend a 3D showing with friends.
Four months ago, Netflix reached 80% of content subtitled or captioned. Since they prioritized by popularity, they intended to continue increasing that percentage, but at a slower pace. This seems to directly contradict with your experience.
Except you're discussing ancient GPUs and extrapolating your experience with those to the assertion that they are currently releasing hardware "with all kinds of issues"
Modern Intel GPUs work rather well.
Fixed-function hardware can implement an algorithm much more efficiently than software. Reproducing what the dedicated scalers do in software may not be practical.
HDMI and DisplayPort both support this, and lots of displays will accept it as input. For example, both my home theatre projector (Epson PowerLite 8345) and my desktop's computer monitor (Dell U2711) will accept YCbCr input.
In fact, dedicated media players (such as my PS3) are already outputting YCbCr, so I'm currently using this... Of course, ultimately, it gets converted back into RGB at display-time, since all display devices are RGB.
Just simplify it: Terran. We both originated there, and are still there.
I can't speak for the US, but such a law would be blatantly unconstitutional in Canada due to violating the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (which is enshrined in our constitution). Does the US not have any part of the US constitution that forbids laws from discriminating like that? Does the bill of rights cover that, and is it part of the constitution? Not trolling, I'm not very familiar with the US constitution, only copyright law, ironically.
I could give you some horror stories (one friend bought a Vertex 2 and is now on his fourth one as they keep failing and needing RMAs), but the general feeling out there seems to be that OCZ stuff is fast, when it works, but has a higher failure/bug rate than companies like Intel or Samsung.
If you want a fast drive, Intel's 330 and 520 series use the same controllers as OCZ's sandforce stuff, so the performance is similar. They can also be quite cheap since Intel is throwing mail-in-rebates around. I bought a 180GB Intel 330 for $145 after rebate, only to see them drop down to $120 after rebate not long after. Looks like they're back up to $145 now.
Netcraft now comfirms: Miami-Illinois is dying.
Processors haven't only because of design decisions rather than technical capabilities; the die shrinks are still happening at a Moore's Law compatible rate, but die sizes are getting smaller as power becomes a bigger and bigger focus. GPUs, on the other hand...
Samsung is actually decent, they do a huge amount of OEM work, so their validation requirements are pretty decent. Other than that, I'd stick to Intel.
OCZ is hit or miss. Their stuff is fast, but reliability isn't great compared to Intel.
Samsung's are actually the only other brand I'd probably trust enough to buy, but they're almost impossible to find at retail, so I largely ignore them. They're mostly into OEM stuff. Anandtech did some impressive reviews of their stuff, and I looked around trying to find them, and didn't have much luck. Even on newegg, at the time, there was just a handful of Samsung parts, and at the time they were outdated models.
Portal's level editor can be used to implement binary logic, so that has some educational value. I saw somebody implement a 4-bit adder using lasers and moving platforms, and I managed to do one using just lasers and receptors, so there's a lot of flexibility there. My stuff was pretty messy and compact, but I'm pretty sure you could do it up in a more illustrative manner.
Operating systems will still refuse to let any individual process use more than 2 or 3 GB of RAM (depending on kernel/user split) on a 32-bit system, regardless of PAE. Your 8GB machine will do fine as a server, but any memory-intensive app is going to be just as limited as it would on a system with 4GB of RAM.
It's a lot more straightforward than that: NAND chips follow Moore's law (and so does their pricing), while magnetic storage doesn't. SSDs are dropping by Moore's law, and will continue to do so as long as Moore's law holds up for flash memory. It's not that the $700 160GB Intel SSD was ludicrous or ridiculously priced, it's that flash memory really cost that much back then, and the prices we see today are just about where Moore's law would predict they'd be.
I've seen so many problems with other brands, that I don't really trust anything but Intel SSDs anymore. Even when using the same controller, Intel manages to avoid issues, like the BSOD problems with the sandforce controllers that only Intel bothered to fix.
I don't know why TFA says Intel isn't discounting things, though. They're constantly doing mail-in-rebates for their products. I bought an Intel 160GB X25-m G1 for $700 roughly three years ago. Today, you can buy from newegg an Intel 180GB 330 for $120 after rebate, and it's enormously faster to boot.
If it is the case (that WP 7.8 will get most of the features), then they couldn't have done a worse job marketing that release. Apple's approach of bundling it all together in one release and supporting which features they can on different devices would work much better. If WP8 supports NFC, for example, but the only feature on a certain phone that won't get WP8 can't do is NFC, then it markets itself a lot better to say that phone IS getting WP8 (but has no NFC) than to say it's getting a minor revision update...
Whatever anybody might say about Apple's products, they're really good at marketing: Microsoft could learn a lot from them in that regard.
The Xperia Play would be a terrible choice to buy today considering the fact that it's an obsolete phone both in terms of hardware (small RAM, slower CPU, very slow GPU, low-res screen) and software (doesn't support current Android release 4.x).
It was a decent phone when it came out over a year ago, but if nothing else the fact that Sony has abandoned support for it should discourage new purchases today.
It's worth noting that the Lumia 900 came out five months ago... My response to people who complain about Apple dropping iOS support for old hardware is that Android has even shorter support periods, but this takes the cake. They didn't even make it half a year before announcing they're dropping support for it...
On the one hand I wonder if Microsoft can afford to snub the few customers they have, what with WP7's tiny marketshare, but that got me thinking, maybe they see the tiny marketshare as the reason they can afford to snub the people: they don't have much to lose if they alienate existing customers if they can capture a respectable marketshare with WP8?
Clearly somebody has clearly not been watching Continuum.
Ikea has a range of products. You can buy a bookshelf at $30, $70, $100, $200, $300, or even up to $800. The quality and durability of the product varies by price. Is the $30 bookshelf pretty flimsy? Yeah, but what do you expect for $30?
I actually own an example of both the $30 and $70 shelves, and there is an enormous difference in the quality, but that's exactly what I'd expect... And yes, the $30 shelf used plastic bolts, but the $70 was all metal locking bolts, not to mention far denser/thicker wood.
Basically, you get what you pay for, and they have a variety of options that let you pay what you want.