I've nary seen anyone use their game console as a full time DVD player in the past several years in which they've had them. A couple people do, but most buy a seperate player because it's a pain in the ass using a game controller to use something that should be very simple.
Now, since Blu-Ray might be the only HD format disc available at the time of the PS3 launch, it might get a "first to market" advantage. There might be HD-DVD players already on the market by then, I don't know. First to market doesn't necessarily make a winner though.
I think it'll be the consumer players and their costs that make more of an initial impact, plus a lot of other little factors. Sure, the PS3 including Blu-Ray might help the standard a bit, but you make it sound like the PS3 has already decided the battle. We can never know this until the end. Obviously, it'll be the one with the more titles eventually.
I don't personally care which one 'wins'. They're both DRM infested crap. I mean, I'll end up with one just like everyone else, because we'll have no choice for HDTV discs. But I won't go as far as hoping one or the other is the one that becomes the major standard. (If anything, I think HD-DVD has an advantage because of the name, but that might be just as silly as the PS3 argument.)
As far as the PS3 is concerned, I'm not really interested anyways. Nor with the Xbox 360.
TiVo executive assistant: Sir, that's your foot. You really should try not to shoot it.
Seriously, with TiVo already in trouble, this won't help. Maybe they're in big trouble these days, worse then we realize. It might help them in the short term, but a lot of people aren't going to sign up for a year contract with a penalty when there's alternatives out there that are "good enough" and contain no such contract. Shit, my DVR from Cox isn't that great but at least it records HDTV and it's only $3/mo more then a normal box.
You can play games at 640x480 just fine, although it sucks now a days compared to what many people run including 1920x1200 or 1920x1080 on an HDTV. Bit this is really besides the point. The client machine needs to do the processing, and that means a PC right now and for the forseeable future.
I do agree with this guy to an extent - for many people, it's the Internet that's important. Whenever my cablemodem goes out it almost feels like the electricity goes out. Maybe in the future, you'll still buy a fast machine but everything will bootstrap off the Internet.
I think it will be a long, long time before the PC is phased out. They're very versatile and it's going to be decades before most of us get REAL network connections. And less we not forget that we need really strong computers for all the client-side work.
Yea, I was thinking the same thing. There was no word "Linux" before, whereas all of your other examples plus countless more trademarks are very common words.
Don't worry man, he's just upset that you might think an Apple product is lacking in some way.
I for one agree with you - even in a 1" display you can fit lots of stuff but even if it were a single song title it's orders of magnitude faster to locate a song versus listening to the starts of each song.
What part of that was "Apple bashing"? It was more like bashing the person that posted, but then again it wasn't really a bash at all. It was a disagreement.
You know, there is a such thing as an arguement.
I think you need to ease up on your paranoia, it's very tiring.
People don't give the C64 line (Pet, Vic20, C64, C128) enough credit. I guess it's because Commodore isn't around anymore.
The Pet was useful out of the box - I'm not sure how the Apple II was any better in this regard. And it did hit the shelves months before the Apple II making it the first "real" personal computer available. It *did* support graphics, not just text. Some of the features of the Pet:
- a keyboard with a separate numeric pad (almost completely unheard of at the time, even as an option) - a 9" integrated Blue and White monitor - a main board with a powerful new 1Mhz MOS 6502 processor - lots of room for an additional RAM or Processor board - 4K of memory - power supply - real storage device (cassette tape) - several expansion ports including an RS232 (serial) port - ability to handle and create fantastic graphics - upper and lower case text - an operating system that was burned onto ROM and loaded on boot
Interestingly enough, the OS was Basic. And it was actually licensed from Microsoft in 1976.
The Pet was considerably cheaper then the Apple II - initially $499 and then $595 when demand outgrew production - versus the $1295 Apple II with 4k of memory. You could buy a Pet (which included the tape drive, etc) PLUS a floppy drive (when released, roughly the same time the floppy was released for the Apple) for less then an Apple II with *no* peripherals.
You could upgrade the Pet with memory chips in a similar fashion to the Apple II, but it was not as "user servicable" as the Apple. But the same process was involved - plop in more chips.
But you're right about one point - the Apple II had color which the Pet did not.
Commodore sold a lot of Pets but they sold an ass-load of Vic-20's and C64's - the C64 was wildly more popular then the Apple 2 ever was. They sold 30 million of them - more then any computer system ever and still. Commodore was the first computer company to do over 1bn in sales - largely due to the Vic20 and C64 sales.
People still use the 64 for a wide range of hobby activities. Demo coders still write for it for fun. Musicians use the unique SID chip for music - either in C64's or you can get a MIDI synth based on the SID from a few companies out there.
I realize that the Apple II was out for a few years before the most popular of the Commodore machines, the C64. But the C64 completely usurped the Apple II. Apple didn't have an answer to it for several years. Nobody did, really.
If Commodore had made better business decisions and gotten new product to market more efficiently, they could have been the "Apple of today." Or maybe even more, since the Amiga was arguably a better system then the Mac - it was technically superior and had a GUI system that was both functional and efficient.
Commodore brought a lot of unique computing ideas to the table.
I don't know if you realize this, but LCD projector panels are extremely small. They fit 1366x768 in an area of less then an inch on some rear-projectors.
First of all, it's hard to take you seriously when you call it "Nutscrape." It's not funny. Get over it.
Intel didn't "give away patents." This ignorance shows how many years of experience you apparently don't have in the industry. The x86 line became very, very popular and the only player was Intel, whom had invented the 8086 in the first place.
AMD was making clones of the x86 chips (80286, 80386) from reverse-engineering Intel's chips. They weren't alone; there were others doing the same thing. Intel tried to stop them - and they even tried to trademark a number! Eventually the courts ruled that you couldn't trademark a number, and ruled that AMD had done nothing illegal in reverse-engineering the 386.
Since then, Intel developed the Pentium (aptly named because they couldn't trademark the number 586) and AMD launched it's K5 line. Eventually, after many development efforts on the side of AMD and the hiring of quite a bit of the DEC Alpha team, they produced the Athlon. AMD finally had a chip that could compete directly with Intel in the performance space.
Alledgedly, once AMD had some products that could compete, Intel started pulling some of the crap in this lawsuit.
AMD has long stood on their own feet, and they took the company from a small chip manufacturer to one of the largest CPU manufacturers in the world. They compete head-to-head with Intel, *the* largest chip maker, every day. And they've been winning. Better chips, faster, cooler, better features, and cheaper. They've forced Intel to get it's head out of it's ass and make better products.
x86-64 was AMD's baby, and because of it's popularity, Intel was FORCED to adopt it, too. And guess what? They reverse-engineered it from AMD. This stuff works both ways, you know.
I have a lot of respect for AMD. The management for that company has done a great job against all odds.
Seriously, we all know Sparc is 64-bit, has been for some time. Most of us also know that they've dabbled in the Opteron processors not very long ago, and that these new servers are probably all Opterons.
If not, maybe you shouldn't be reading Slashdot. It's too technical for you. Go read C|Net.
I suppose anything is repairable, but the internals of a hard drive are so sensitive that it's "dangerous" work. Ontrack and the like usually use special software and/or hardware connected to the drive to work around the errors and reconstruct the data. But, they can recover data from a drive you shoot a bullet through, so they have equipment such as special lasers to read data off the platers. It's VERY EXPENSIVE.
I had a 100GB drive die on me, and of course I was lazy and didn't back it up. The data wasn't extremely important but I didn't want to lose it. I called Ontrack and they said they would recover the data at $90/GB. So, it would have cost me $9000 to recover the data.
For a company that had vital documents on the drive, $9000 actually isn't all that bad.
I had another drive die on me, a 40GB. The motor sounded terrible and I couldn't get the drive to initialize. Friend of mine worked at a company that did backup restores (for legal purposes or otherwise) and told me I might want to put it in the freezer. I did so - I let it freeze for several hours. I plugged it in and I was able to get some of my data off before the drive died again. Some people say this is a myth, but it could work under specific circumstances. It did allow the drive to init for me.
I've had some drives die on me over the past few years. It's generally quick and unexpected, but sometimes you know they'll fail soon when you hear the terrible whine.
But I've got a lot of drives. In my machines at home all total, I have about 22 hard disks spinning. They've all been running for at least 6 months now, but most of them have been spinning for over three years. No issues.
If you got them running really hot, they could die faster. But it's often just luck of the draw. I had an IDE disk in an external case with a fan die in 9 months, and it never moved (I didn't carry it around.) In the meantime, I have three 18GB 15K SCSI disks in a desktop case with no direct cooling on the disks, and they've been running great for four years. And these things run HOT - you can't touch them for more then a few seconds before it hurts.
The SCSI disks out there are a lot more expensive as a general rule, and don't have as high of capacity as ATA or SATA, but they do tend to live a lot longer under more difficult environments. The S/ATA disks at CompUSA are just run of the mill - they don't have nearly as much QC and it's to keep the prices down.
If you have a 500GB disk and you use it, you really should be thinking about backups. Even a layperson (with PC's) digital photographer should already understand the benefits of backups. Usually people don't because it's just not a fun thing to do, and you might never need your backup.
Good thing there's a lot of machines out there now that support things such as mirroring, to at least protect you from a drive failure.
Um, actually, quite a few people (myself included) think you need to chill the hell out. He put a smiley, it sounded sarcastic, I took it as such - but you didn't because you're one of the BSDefenders.
If a peice of software is released under GPL v2 OR later, you can choose to continue to use GPL v2 for the software even after GPL v8 is available.
If the software was released under with an "AND" instead of the "OR" then it would require you to follow future revisions of the GPL (although the AND clause is fairly foggy and it should be better written then that.) If the license said "You must follow the latest revision of the GPL" then you'd obviously have to honor that.
Personally, I prefer the LGPL for most core software such as kernels and even Office packages, but the GPL ain't bad. Commercial vendors don't seem to have a problem working around it.
I actually thought you had to enable PAE if you wanted to use more then 3GB RAM because of some sort of addressing issues.
We have a couple VMWare servers here with Xeons on Windows 2003 that have 32GB of memory, and they run fine. Currently, VMWare on 32-bit windows only supports 3700MB RAM per VM, though.
PAE does slow things down quite a bit though, so it'll be one of the huge advantages to going x86-64 in the near future.
You Comcast guys don't know what you've got =) I have the Cox High Def package, and it has SEVEN channels. ABC, NBC, INHD1, INHD2, Disc, Sho1, HBO1. That's all. I mean, they look great (especially INHD2 when there's a game on NESN on it) and they all do full 1080i except for the SD stuff on NBC/ABC and some older HD Discovery stuff (720p.)
Comcast has so many more channels. My friend lives a mile away in Mass, and when he gets his new TV he'll have something like 21 channels of HD to use including FOX and CBS, which I don't get at all.
But at least the Cox stuff is really 1920x1080i though, unlike some of the satellite providers that'll do 1280x1080 and scale it to save bandwidth.
It might be - but you won't get some of the other benefits. I have Cox but the boxes are all basically the same. It's not nearly as nice as a TiVo but I *can* record two high-def channels and watch a recording - all at the same time.
The interface is kinda slow and clunky, and it's only got 150GB storage. But the ability to watch something on one channel and record on another shouldn't be underestimated!
Maybe with CableCards, moving forward, we'll be able to ditch the cable companies boxes and use our own, like the good old days. But it's not good enough yet - and a lot of that is because the cable company either doesn't support cablecard, or if they do they don't put all their channels on them.
I agree that not all new games must be 3d, must require the latest hardware, and must be online.
But those are the games that have the most replay value. While I love playing all the MAME games and pogo games as much as the next guy, I get bored with them. On the other hand, I can play CS for hours and hours every weekend and get a lot more play for my money.
The little games they make for Assembly (two of them were really cool this year) show that there's a lot of different directions that publishers could take with games. I agree that more could be done to make quality releases instead of just releases. But I don't think the state of gaming is poor.
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I've nary seen anyone use their game console as a full time DVD player in the past several years in which they've had them. A couple people do, but most buy a seperate player because it's a pain in the ass using a game controller to use something that should be very simple.
Now, since Blu-Ray might be the only HD format disc available at the time of the PS3 launch, it might get a "first to market" advantage. There might be HD-DVD players already on the market by then, I don't know. First to market doesn't necessarily make a winner though.
I think it'll be the consumer players and their costs that make more of an initial impact, plus a lot of other little factors. Sure, the PS3 including Blu-Ray might help the standard a bit, but you make it sound like the PS3 has already decided the battle. We can never know this until the end. Obviously, it'll be the one with the more titles eventually.
I don't personally care which one 'wins'. They're both DRM infested crap. I mean, I'll end up with one just like everyone else, because we'll have no choice for HDTV discs. But I won't go as far as hoping one or the other is the one that becomes the major standard. (If anything, I think HD-DVD has an advantage because of the name, but that might be just as silly as the PS3 argument.)
As far as the PS3 is concerned, I'm not really interested anyways. Nor with the Xbox 360.
Mispelled or not, it's pronounced the same and obviously inspired by the original.
Just to be clear, the word "google" was not created by these people - it means the number one plus one hundred zeros.
But yes, the word itself is now a lot more common then pre-Google times, but it was a word before them that many people had heard.
TiVo executive assistant: Sir, that's your foot. You really should try not to shoot it.
Seriously, with TiVo already in trouble, this won't help. Maybe they're in big trouble these days, worse then we realize. It might help them in the short term, but a lot of people aren't going to sign up for a year contract with a penalty when there's alternatives out there that are "good enough" and contain no such contract. Shit, my DVR from Cox isn't that great but at least it records HDTV and it's only $3/mo more then a normal box.
Actually, I think 60Hz is plenty =)
You can play games at 640x480 just fine, although it sucks now a days compared to what many people run including 1920x1200 or 1920x1080 on an HDTV. Bit this is really besides the point. The client machine needs to do the processing, and that means a PC right now and for the forseeable future.
I do agree with this guy to an extent - for many people, it's the Internet that's important. Whenever my cablemodem goes out it almost feels like the electricity goes out. Maybe in the future, you'll still buy a fast machine but everything will bootstrap off the Internet.
I think it will be a long, long time before the PC is phased out. They're very versatile and it's going to be decades before most of us get REAL network connections. And less we not forget that we need really strong computers for all the client-side work.
Yea, I was thinking the same thing. There was no word "Linux" before, whereas all of your other examples plus countless more trademarks are very common words.
Don't worry man, he's just upset that you might think an Apple product is lacking in some way.
I for one agree with you - even in a 1" display you can fit lots of stuff but even if it were a single song title it's orders of magnitude faster to locate a song versus listening to the starts of each song.
What part of that was "Apple bashing"? It was more like bashing the person that posted, but then again it wasn't really a bash at all. It was a disagreement.
You know, there is a such thing as an arguement.
I think you need to ease up on your paranoia, it's very tiring.
People don't give the C64 line (Pet, Vic20, C64, C128) enough credit. I guess it's because Commodore isn't around anymore.
The Pet was useful out of the box - I'm not sure how the Apple II was any better in this regard. And it did hit the shelves months before the Apple II making it the first "real" personal computer available. It *did* support graphics, not just text. Some of the features of the Pet:
- a keyboard with a separate numeric pad (almost completely unheard of at the time, even as an option)
- a 9" integrated Blue and White monitor
- a main board with a powerful new 1Mhz MOS 6502 processor
- lots of room for an additional RAM or Processor board
- 4K of memory
- power supply
- real storage device (cassette tape)
- several expansion ports including an RS232 (serial) port
- ability to handle and create fantastic graphics
- upper and lower case text
- an operating system that was burned onto ROM and loaded on boot
Interestingly enough, the OS was Basic. And it was actually licensed from Microsoft in 1976.
The Pet was considerably cheaper then the Apple II - initially $499 and then $595 when demand outgrew production - versus the $1295 Apple II with 4k of memory. You could buy a Pet (which included the tape drive, etc) PLUS a floppy drive (when released, roughly the same time the floppy was released for the Apple) for less then an Apple II with *no* peripherals.
You could upgrade the Pet with memory chips in a similar fashion to the Apple II, but it was not as "user servicable" as the Apple. But the same process was involved - plop in more chips.
But you're right about one point - the Apple II had color which the Pet did not.
Commodore sold a lot of Pets but they sold an ass-load of Vic-20's and C64's - the C64 was wildly more popular then the Apple 2 ever was. They sold 30 million of them - more then any computer system ever and still. Commodore was the first computer company to do over 1bn in sales - largely due to the Vic20 and C64 sales.
People still use the 64 for a wide range of hobby activities. Demo coders still write for it for fun. Musicians use the unique SID chip for music - either in C64's or you can get a MIDI synth based on the SID from a few companies out there.
I realize that the Apple II was out for a few years before the most popular of the Commodore machines, the C64. But the C64 completely usurped the Apple II. Apple didn't have an answer to it for several years. Nobody did, really.
If Commodore had made better business decisions and gotten new product to market more efficiently, they could have been the "Apple of today." Or maybe even more, since the Amiga was arguably a better system then the Mac - it was technically superior and had a GUI system that was both functional and efficient.
Commodore brought a lot of unique computing ideas to the table.
"4) AMD probably can't handle the volume of bringing all of Apple's products over to them at the moment."
This is a popular misconception. AMD has massive production capabilities.
I don't know if you realize this, but LCD projector panels are extremely small. They fit 1366x768 in an area of less then an inch on some rear-projectors.
The tech is certainly there.
Maybe so, but you apparently didn't even do that much.
First of all, it's hard to take you seriously when you call it "Nutscrape." It's not funny. Get over it.
Intel didn't "give away patents." This ignorance shows how many years of experience you apparently don't have in the industry. The x86 line became very, very popular and the only player was Intel, whom had invented the 8086 in the first place.
AMD was making clones of the x86 chips (80286, 80386) from reverse-engineering Intel's chips. They weren't alone; there were others doing the same thing. Intel tried to stop them - and they even tried to trademark a number! Eventually the courts ruled that you couldn't trademark a number, and ruled that AMD had done nothing illegal in reverse-engineering the 386.
Since then, Intel developed the Pentium (aptly named because they couldn't trademark the number 586) and AMD launched it's K5 line. Eventually, after many development efforts on the side of AMD and the hiring of quite a bit of the DEC Alpha team, they produced the Athlon. AMD finally had a chip that could compete directly with Intel in the performance space.
Alledgedly, once AMD had some products that could compete, Intel started pulling some of the crap in this lawsuit.
AMD has long stood on their own feet, and they took the company from a small chip manufacturer to one of the largest CPU manufacturers in the world. They compete head-to-head with Intel, *the* largest chip maker, every day. And they've been winning. Better chips, faster, cooler, better features, and cheaper. They've forced Intel to get it's head out of it's ass and make better products.
x86-64 was AMD's baby, and because of it's popularity, Intel was FORCED to adopt it, too. And guess what? They reverse-engineered it from AMD. This stuff works both ways, you know.
I have a lot of respect for AMD. The management for that company has done a great job against all odds.
Evem 5 or 3 or 1Mbit would be wonderful for people living with dial-up still.
Seriously, we all know Sparc is 64-bit, has been for some time. Most of us also know that they've dabbled in the Opteron processors not very long ago, and that these new servers are probably all Opterons.
If not, maybe you shouldn't be reading Slashdot. It's too technical for you. Go read C|Net.
I suppose anything is repairable, but the internals of a hard drive are so sensitive that it's "dangerous" work. Ontrack and the like usually use special software and/or hardware connected to the drive to work around the errors and reconstruct the data. But, they can recover data from a drive you shoot a bullet through, so they have equipment such as special lasers to read data off the platers. It's VERY EXPENSIVE.
I had a 100GB drive die on me, and of course I was lazy and didn't back it up. The data wasn't extremely important but I didn't want to lose it. I called Ontrack and they said they would recover the data at $90/GB. So, it would have cost me $9000 to recover the data.
For a company that had vital documents on the drive, $9000 actually isn't all that bad.
I had another drive die on me, a 40GB. The motor sounded terrible and I couldn't get the drive to initialize. Friend of mine worked at a company that did backup restores (for legal purposes or otherwise) and told me I might want to put it in the freezer. I did so - I let it freeze for several hours. I plugged it in and I was able to get some of my data off before the drive died again. Some people say this is a myth, but it could work under specific circumstances. It did allow the drive to init for me.
I've had some drives die on me over the past few years. It's generally quick and unexpected, but sometimes you know they'll fail soon when you hear the terrible whine.
But I've got a lot of drives. In my machines at home all total, I have about 22 hard disks spinning. They've all been running for at least 6 months now, but most of them have been spinning for over three years. No issues.
If you got them running really hot, they could die faster. But it's often just luck of the draw. I had an IDE disk in an external case with a fan die in 9 months, and it never moved (I didn't carry it around.) In the meantime, I have three 18GB 15K SCSI disks in a desktop case with no direct cooling on the disks, and they've been running great for four years. And these things run HOT - you can't touch them for more then a few seconds before it hurts.
The SCSI disks out there are a lot more expensive as a general rule, and don't have as high of capacity as ATA or SATA, but they do tend to live a lot longer under more difficult environments. The S/ATA disks at CompUSA are just run of the mill - they don't have nearly as much QC and it's to keep the prices down.
If you have a 500GB disk and you use it, you really should be thinking about backups. Even a layperson (with PC's) digital photographer should already understand the benefits of backups. Usually people don't because it's just not a fun thing to do, and you might never need your backup.
Good thing there's a lot of machines out there now that support things such as mirroring, to at least protect you from a drive failure.
Um, actually, quite a few people (myself included) think you need to chill the hell out. He put a smiley, it sounded sarcastic, I took it as such - but you didn't because you're one of the BSDefenders.
Don't be so defensive, it's just an OS!
Yes. If you have a disk volume that is very close to, at or over 1TB it will show "TB" accordingly. ie .99TB or 2.2TB.
If a peice of software is released under GPL v2 OR later, you can choose to continue to use GPL v2 for the software even after GPL v8 is available.
If the software was released under with an "AND" instead of the "OR" then it would require you to follow future revisions of the GPL (although the AND clause is fairly foggy and it should be better written then that.) If the license said "You must follow the latest revision of the GPL" then you'd obviously have to honor that.
Personally, I prefer the LGPL for most core software such as kernels and even Office packages, but the GPL ain't bad. Commercial vendors don't seem to have a problem working around it.
I actually thought you had to enable PAE if you wanted to use more then 3GB RAM because of some sort of addressing issues.
We have a couple VMWare servers here with Xeons on Windows 2003 that have 32GB of memory, and they run fine. Currently, VMWare on 32-bit windows only supports 3700MB RAM per VM, though.
PAE does slow things down quite a bit though, so it'll be one of the huge advantages to going x86-64 in the near future.
You Comcast guys don't know what you've got =) I have the Cox High Def package, and it has SEVEN channels. ABC, NBC, INHD1, INHD2, Disc, Sho1, HBO1. That's all. I mean, they look great (especially INHD2 when there's a game on NESN on it) and they all do full 1080i except for the SD stuff on NBC/ABC and some older HD Discovery stuff (720p.)
Comcast has so many more channels. My friend lives a mile away in Mass, and when he gets his new TV he'll have something like 21 channels of HD to use including FOX and CBS, which I don't get at all.
But at least the Cox stuff is really 1920x1080i though, unlike some of the satellite providers that'll do 1280x1080 and scale it to save bandwidth.
If only *any* of these companies had SciFi HD..
It might be - but you won't get some of the other benefits. I have Cox but the boxes are all basically the same. It's not nearly as nice as a TiVo but I *can* record two high-def channels and watch a recording - all at the same time.
The interface is kinda slow and clunky, and it's only got 150GB storage. But the ability to watch something on one channel and record on another shouldn't be underestimated!
Maybe with CableCards, moving forward, we'll be able to ditch the cable companies boxes and use our own, like the good old days. But it's not good enough yet - and a lot of that is because the cable company either doesn't support cablecard, or if they do they don't put all their channels on them.
How so? You'd still need to be a subscriber to access the network. There would be a trail.
I agree that not all new games must be 3d, must require the latest hardware, and must be online.
But those are the games that have the most replay value. While I love playing all the MAME games and pogo games as much as the next guy, I get bored with them. On the other hand, I can play CS for hours and hours every weekend and get a lot more play for my money.
The little games they make for Assembly (two of them were really cool this year) show that there's a lot of different directions that publishers could take with games. I agree that more could be done to make quality releases instead of just releases. But I don't think the state of gaming is poor.