Hell, so many phones take the standard mini USB cables now that it's really not an issue unless you want whatever functions are in the software.
Then the higher-end phones take the microSD cards, and most microSD cards come with adapters to fit into standard SD slots, so you can plug them straight in to most modern computers and printers. I also have a USB card reader sitting in my laptop bag that I picked up for less than $20 a few years ago because someone stuck something into the card slot on my laptop and killed the slot.
Most of the manufacturers and service providers aren't up-front about what the phone can do without their software, but I'm sure you can get the information somewhere, or, if you already have the phone, just plug it in and find out. Other than that, just don't buy phones with non-standard jacks.
Actually, the last company I worked for didn't permit iPods, either. I wanted to point out to them that you could store data on almost any cell phone (or just transmit it out of the building), but didn't really feel like arguing with someone that didn't understand technology anyway.
A lot of us would rather buy a phone that didn't have a camera, but that's getting harder to do every year, especially if you want a lot of other functionality in your phone.
Of course this just means it's back to the days of ISPs installing more software on people's systems. Now, instead of browsers, it'll be mail clients. That or they'll just send everyone to their broken webmail systems and eventually they'll all move to hotmail or aol.
An interesting note on the issue of webmail, though, is that I found a program from Google that notifies you when you receive new mail, and makes mailto links work with gmail ( http://mail.google.com/mail/help/notifier/ ). This was (hopefully) enough to get my father-in-law off of AOL.
They'll just send you to windowslive.com when you click on the icon for email in the little tour thing that starts up on every new Windows installation. Then they'll walk you through setting up Passport err Live ID or whatever they call it now, and maybe they'll be able to actually download the software that would have come with a previous version of Windows at that point.
Or maybe they'll just say screw it and download someone else's product.
Besides, you don't need as many comments if your code is easy to read. Reserve comments for making your intentions clear (so people can make sure the code works as intended), and explaining hacks and work-arounds when things don't work the way they should. Even my first year CS teacher told us not to use the alphabet as the source of our variable names, and most of us still had to learn the hard way.
Re:This should come naturally but...
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Clean Code
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It should be noted, though, that many students have been through classes in which their code was not reviewed if it compiled and passed the tests required by the assignment.
This is especially true of larger projects done for class, as even the TA has something better to do than review the poorly-written code of 60 CS students in a first-year class.
What the hell is OpenSQL? Is it a fork of MySQL or PostgreSQL? And surely by "real SQL" you don't mean MS's pitiful SQL Server?
Not to mention that changing from one vendor's SQL Server to another is almost always painful, unless one takes a lot of steps throughout the lifetime of the database to maintain vendor-independence in your SQL statements (and even then you've got management and development tools to worry about). Every SQL book I own would be 1/4 the size if it weren't for the differences between MS SQL, Oracle SQL, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. However, which one is best for your use is largely dependent on individual factors, and it's very rare that someone can discount any of those 4 outright from the start of a project, unless money and source code are primary concerns.
Even in the early days of the anti-cheat software (when you had to run PunkBuster outside of the game), it didn't have any issues with Visual Studio, or even with hacks on the computer that weren't active while you were playing.
Their primary concern is what's active in memory that might access the game's memory space, or the memory space of the DirectX layers it's interacting with.
Now of course if you're actively debugging the DirectX libraries while you're playing online, you might get flagged, but since I haven't run a Valve game frequently in a few years, I don't know the exact details of how the current anti-cheat system works.
Due to the closed nature of the whole system, though, you get a lot of excuses from people that are flagged for cheating, and people want to believe the people they thought they knew pretty well. Since the people that rely the most on the anti-cheating measures also have the most to lose if they're caught by them, they tend to pass a lot of these rumors around with little to no basis in the truth.
You know, back in the old days, games were released without the ridiculous protections and they still sold... and some argue (I don't) that games back then were better quality anyway. And who said the only method of digital distribution was an honesty box? Apogee's method was brilliant - games were episodes and you could pick up the first episode for free, and buy the rest off them.
Umm... people were doing some ack-basswords crap with games even before Apogee was doing shareware. Companies would print the manuals in such a way that they couldn't easily be photocopied, and then require you to enter the 30th word on page 5 of the manual, and the 5th word on page 7, and the 12th word on page 29, every time you played the game (not just when you installed it; and of course the word and page numbers were different each time). Of course, it was much less likely that someone would be downloading a cracked version of your game back then, and they were doing it for the same reason they do now: to stop casual copies.
Then there were the beautiful code wheels and many other beautiful ideas of crap they could throw in the box that you would have to have to be able to play the game.
Shareware was as much a response to the analog version of DRM as anything else. It also was helped (and then almost killed off) by the explosion of the internet, since you could suddenly download the first episode and either get a key to unlock the rest or pay to download the other episodes.
Of course, when id released Quake with all of their previous games on the CD as shareware with a key system to unlock the full versions, it was only a matter of time (and it wasn't much time at that) before someone cracked the key system and everyone could easily gain access to every game id had made at that time by buying a $5-10 shareware CD.
In many ways I think DRM is less draconian than some of the old ways, but some of the DRM methods have been down-right hostile, and none of them have been easier to deal with than the game is when it's been cracked (including Steam, though multiplayer authorization is often a big advantage in keeping people from pirating your games).
Well,maybe folks here got more street smarts,maybe since we have a college in the middle of town they know more,hell I don't know.
College towns have different dynamics from the rest of the country, especially if the college represents a significant portion of the population (for example I attended a school that caused the town's population to double when school was in session). You have a lot of people running hand-me-down hardware, and a lot of people trying to run bleeding-edge games on not-so-bleeding-edge hardware (and today you can often pull it off). They're also going to be doing a lot of downloading and burning stuff that isn't quite so common elsewhere. When I was in college we passed around floppy disks, but then we didn't have CD writers. We also passed around key generators and emailed each other download links so we didn't have to find 33 good floppy disks for this or that new game. Then we strung cables across the room (or out the window, across the hall) to play head-to-head C&C, Warcraft, Doom, and Quake. A DVD burner would've been a godsend to us, and 100 blank discs of any size would've been welcome at $30. Like I said earlier, though, my DVD and CD spindles mostly sit around for years, and I don't think I spent as much as $30 on my DVD spindle over a year ago.
One of the biggest questions I get is "Can I burn my pictures so they'll play as a slideshow on my DVD?"
and of course the answer is "depends on your DVD player", but then most of them will never bother, and of those that do half will fail on the first attempt and not try again.
Some things I have found no matter how cheap folks won't go for,for example when I sold my last capture card I didn't bother getting any more because folks would rather pay me to convert their home movies than do them themselves.
The problem with capture cards tends to be the flaky nature of driver support for them. It may not matter to a lot of people, but I've seen my father go through buying a new card every time he changes OS, and I dumped the whole idea when I finally got a TV bigger than my monitor. Thankfully I'm too young to have home movies that will ever need to be transfered from analog;)
Oh,and finally Vista? When folks around here bone XP you can usually fix it. You can clean out the viruses,restore the system files,and be good to go. But for some reason when they bone Vista they tend to kill it deader than Dixie. Total black screen. Damned if I know why. Like I said this is just what I am seeing with my little peepers in small town USA,YMMV
They're probably just getting nastier infections, in that case, or trying to force an "upgrade" to an incompatible video card driver. Since I pretty well stick to only working on computers from people I know, I've only had to fix two Vista computers, compared to who knows how many computers running other versions of Windows (because of course the other versions have been around longer).
I've never had a computer I couldn't actually use long enough to pull files off for backup (and cleanup) before scrubbing the system. Of course, since XP was released I've rarely bothered with cleaning up the live system because people are always so much happier with the newly-installed system that I've restored their "My Documents" folder on than with one that's been carefully (and painfully) cleaned up and tweaked. Gotta love the bit rot on Windows.
I've had two computers completely crap out running XP, but both turned out to be hardware problems (hard drive for one and ATA Controller for the other).
Most people own one game system, and then most of the games they buy for it are multi-platform games anyway.
I know a few people that bought PS3s (besides myself, but then I bought all 3), but most people bought either a Wii or a 360 (Wii is definitely the market leader, but has been hard to find, the 360 has been around longer).
Most of the people I know that bought the PS3 bought it because of the Blu-Ray functionality, knowing full well that most of the games they were going to buy would be on either the PS3 or the 360 (in other words they're buying Madden every year, and the next Splinter Cell and Tom Clancy game, maybe Tiger Woods). Of course, these people are also insane when it comes to their expenditures on movies. They're the guys that go to Best Buy or Circuit City every Tuesday during lunch and come back with several new movies, and they've already switched to Blu-Ray for all of their new stuff. At the time they bought PS3s, it was the cheapest Blu-Ray player on the market, and that was all it took to sell the system.
I have all 3 systems because I came into some cash and had certain games I wanted that all happened to be exclusive to each of the systems. I also sold off some of my older systems and games to help pay for games on the new systems. I rent Blu-Ray and don't buy movies any more. Instead I buy a game every month or two, and I'll let my movie collection sit at 200-something until they settle on something that might last as long as VHS did.
From my observations I can tell you that my customers hate Vista and when they kill it you are looking at a format/reinstall,
That's pretty much the deal with any version of Windows when they kill it, or really any operating system when you take it into a repair shop. It really takes too much time to restore an operating system to make it worthwhile unless you know how to do it yourself and are willing to have your system down long enough to take care of it. No one's going to spend the money to pay someone to spend a few hours on their system exclusively when they can format and reinstall 12 systems at once.
The Geforce 6xxx and 7xxx series is still popular around here with ATI almost nonexistent,
Any card in the $50-100 range is going to be pretty popular in machines where people even bother to use an after-market card. Some people swear by Intel/AMD or nVidia/ATI, and no matter what you see wherever you are, there is still a large group of people using stuff you rarely see. Besides that, the majority of systems are going to be using the on-board video, the majority of which is Intel or ATI.
and just about everyone under 40ish has some sort of DVD ripping software.
I could see this, except that most of the people I know (definitely in the under-40 crowd) don't have DVD ripping software, and don't really care because they throw the same DVD in their computer, DVD player, or portable DVD player (yeah with kids and low prices there are a lot of these around, certainly cheaper than buying a new car with DVD/LCD screens built in, or having them installed in your car). I know how to do it, and I've met a few people that know how to do it. A few lucky individuals even bought software off-the-shelf that could do it before that got shut down. For the most part, though, it's too time-consuming a process for the things parents really want to back up (Disney did what?), and with a few exceptions (again with Disney), the discs will be cheaper to replace than the cost in time decoding and burning discs.
Oh,and DVD burners are REAL hot sellers right now,thanks to the low price of blanks. I am currently waiting on some Lite-On burners to come in right now. Like I said,that is just what I am seeing in my little shop.
This has nothing to do with the cost of blank DVDs. This has to do with the fact that a DVD burner is only marginally (at least in most areas) more expensive than either a DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo or a DVD-ROM drive. Most people only have one optical drive in their system, and they want it to do everything. They buy the DVD burners because they're relatively inexpensive, and they don't buy Blu-Ray drives because they're more expensive than DVD-ROM drives were when I first bought them (and I was certainly an early adopter in that department). Yes, the blank DVDs are cheap, I have at least one spindle sitting around somewhere, and I would probably reach for it for anything that isn't destined for my car. However, I'm not archiving my whole DVD collection onto writeable DVDs, either. At best when I can afford a very large hard drive I might archive them to that.
It probably depends highly on the individual, but try using 720p instead of 1080i. To my eyes even 480p is a significant increase in quality over standard television. I find that 1080i doesn't look as good as 720p on my own TV, but then I spent a long period of time with a computer monitor as my primary means of watching TV and playing movies and video games, so interlaced pictures never do look as good to me.
Then in 5 years: 7) kids clean disc 8) kids insert disc into parents' ancient PC because it still has a blu-ray drive in it 9) kids crack DRM and rip high-def file to new optical disc type 10) kids laugh and say "I don't give a rat's ass about super-hi-def"
I'd probably be a much happier person if I couldn't tell the difference between a CD and a 128kbps MP3.
But yes, for home theater 5.1 is nice, and 7.1 is better. Of course, for the most part it's also a pain in the ass to set up and get working right on a system that actually sounds good (not that anyone would notice if they couldn't tell the difference between a low-bitrate MP3 and a CD).
I've just stopped buying movies altogether, because they're going to either take another step forward or start phasing out DVD. I also had to make the choice between buying 1 or 2 movies a month (on DVD) and renting movies from Netflix. I think I'd rather see more than 1 or 2 movies a month.
New movies run $30 on Blu-Ray, $20 on DVD. Older movies run $20 on Blu-Ray, $5-15 on DVD. And of course, since many movies are still unreleased on Blu-Ray, the definition of new movie means "new to Blu-Ray" for the $30 price tag.
I rent Blu-Ray, and have to say that while I notice the difference on most movies immediately, it stops mattering about 5 minutes in, when I start paying more attention to the movie itself than the way it looks on the TV. It should also be noted that I'm only playing these movies at 720p, since I haven't had the chance to upgrade my TV to 1080p.
DVD was a huge difference over VHS, and just being a more resilient format than the tapes was very important to me. Blu-Ray won't survive another bump in TV resolution, so I don't even see the point in buying a player (I watch them on the PS3 at the moment), never mind replacing my DVD library.
You can eliminate hiss and noise with good equipment unless you actually feel the need to record everything at obnoxiously low levels. After that it's up to the end user to have decent equipment that doesn't have hiss/noise on it in the first place, which isn't so hard these days, unless you're listening to the radio.
There is still plenty of music out there that doesn't do this, and I've had very little exposure to it in my music collection (which is roughly 50% or more metal, so the whole metal = loud argument doesn't hold up). Sure, some of it is louder than others, but not to the point of clipping or sounding compressed (hell, if I wanted compression I can do that without cranking the loudness, too; that's what they make compressors for).
The black album still had some metal on it, you just had to skip every song they played on the radio to find it, and none of it was as epic as almost anything on MoP. The strong metal songs on the black album are also pretty forgettable stuck in between a bunch of songs that got slammed into our heads for 4 years on the radio and MTV (remember when they played music?).
My dad still listens to music all the time, and is always open to new music, as long as it has something he's interested in (he's interested in skilled musicians, but he can't ignore a growling singer to listen to great guitarists).
My tastes have changed over the years (as far as new music goes), but I've still been able to find plenty of music to listen to from bands that weren't around when I was in high school (12-16 years ago), as well as some good music from bands I enjoyed in high school (the last 2 Ministry albums were great IMO, better than anything they've done since I was in high school). The basic problem with the idea that age is taking over Metallica is that the new Testament album was the best thing they've put out in over 10 years, the last two Judas Priest albums were very good (and Painkiller, which came out 20 years into their career, is a highlight of said career), and so on. There are many bands, even fast, aggressive bands, that do well into their later years.
I really think that Cliff's death had a bigger impact on Metallica than anything else. He was still credited on some of the Justice stuff, and even the band members said that the black album contained a lot of stuff that had been sitting around for a very long time, which they revisited and brought up to whatever standards they were working on at that time. Even with the creative control James and Lars claim to have previously had over the process of writing the songs, Cliff was credited on a lot of the material on RtL and Puppets, and there's no doubt that he brought a lot of those songs to life.
Of course, Cliff was the reason I picked up a bass at 14, and still play to this day, so my opinion might be slightly biased;)
It's really bad enough that the school has the amount of power it does when a student is on school grounds or attending a school activity. They don't need their power extended to what students do outside of school.
They should have simply prosecuted the student under the applicable laws rather than trying to circumvent the law and punish the student for something that is clearly outside their jurisdiction.
If they felt the punishment would be too harsh under the law, they should have called in the parents and discussed it with them. If the parents didn't appear to take it seriously (as is obviously the case with the parents helping the lawsuit), they should have made it clear to the parents that their only recourse would be through the legal system.
School officials all too often take their power as absolute, especially since the majority of the time it remains unquestioned. That power should have very clear boundaries, and most of us should be able to understand those boundaries quite well.
As a parent, I can definitely agree with allowing for punishment in this matter, but I don't think it should be a punishment the school comes up with on its own. I would work with the school on the matter if it were my daughter, but if they brought me in and wouldn't work with me on the punishment, simply stating that they were going to suspend her and not present me with options and the evidence to support their claim that she did it in the first place, I'd probably be doing something a little more effective than going to court, like campaigning for the administrator to be removed (something I've seen successfully done when principals overstep their authority).
Sure enough, after all, the school is a government-run institution. The case law makes it clear that saying certain things in school can be grounds for punishment. It's unlikely someone would be prosecuted for calling someone a prick, but if you do so at school you'll be punished.
Generally, the rights of minors are abridged, but they (as minors) are afforded a greater level of protection by the government, as well. They aren't prosecuted under the same legal system, and their parents often share some of the punishment for their actions.
Then again, the government can also turn around and try a minor as an adult with no prior notification of the new status or extension of the minor's legal rights.
OpenGL was never very big in the gaming world either. Quake/HL was a standout in this regard, but most 3D game engines have been very custom, or based on DirectX - DirectX was sort of mandatory once game authors lost direct access to hardware.
While I agree with your first statement (OpenGL is still big outside gaming), I disagree with this part. The Quake line of engines were very widely used in games in the mid-to-late 90s, and because of the impact they had on the gaming world most game developers developed for OpenGL or Glide (or both). Of course, since Glide only worked on 3dfx, and OpenGL never worked really well on 3dfx (not at all for most of the time they were putting out chips), there wasn't a significant overlap in the markets for the two APIs. The only reason anyone got away with not developing for OpenGL early on was that so few people expected good hardware acceleration from non-3dfx cards, so people that had 3dfx played in Glide, and everyone else played with software rendering.
Once software rendering started dropping out of the market (as nVidia started taking market share with the GeForce line, and on-board chips started doing some hardware 3D), different game engines made choices between Direct3D and OpenGL, but many of them supported both.
DirectX 3 was the first version anyone but Microsoft really took seriously, and it proliferated in non-3D games quite quickly. DirectX 5 pretty well solidified its place in gaming, but not quite in 3D (and DirectX 4 was canceled, as 4 and 5 were in simultaneous development, but the developers wanted the features in 5 and MS axed 4 to get 5 out more quickly).
There were a few things that moved people to Direct3D, though: - developing OpenGL extensions in-house consumes a lot of resources, and these are wasted if the features you're implementing already exist somewhere else (such as in Direct3D) - On Windows, you were probably already using the Direct X API for DirectInput and DirectSound (and it should be noted that DirectInput is now deprecated, and many game developers use other APIs for sound).
OpenGL was strong enough in 1997 that MS started working with SGI to unify the OpenGL and Direct3D APIs. Of course, while MS was supposed to be working with them on Fahrenheit, they also managed to release DirectX 5, 6, and 7, all of which further increased MS' market share in games (especially 3D games where they were not doing well with Direct X 1-3), meanwhile OpenGL didn't hit version 2.0 until 2005. Even for a standard, OpenGL moved pretty slowly, and rejected more ideas from game developers than Microsoft did with DirectX/3D.
The license didn't prevent this from happening previously. There are already plenty of extensions for OpenGL, and many of them are packaged with video card drivers and games. The standards process will most likely remain slow, as is usually the case with any standard. Really it's the case with many standards. The only reasons OpenGL didn't become completely obsolete are support from big-name 3D developers (both game developers and 3D tool developers), and the fact that the only major competition comes from Microsoft, and is Windows-only, meaning that OpenGL still has a place in Mac, *nix, and other environments.
Besides, when you're not developing something extremely cutting edge, you don't need the API changing every year (as DirectX did for some time).
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Hell, so many phones take the standard mini USB cables now that it's really not an issue unless you want whatever functions are in the software.
Then the higher-end phones take the microSD cards, and most microSD cards come with adapters to fit into standard SD slots, so you can plug them straight in to most modern computers and printers. I also have a USB card reader sitting in my laptop bag that I picked up for less than $20 a few years ago because someone stuck something into the card slot on my laptop and killed the slot.
Most of the manufacturers and service providers aren't up-front about what the phone can do without their software, but I'm sure you can get the information somewhere, or, if you already have the phone, just plug it in and find out. Other than that, just don't buy phones with non-standard jacks.
Actually, the last company I worked for didn't permit iPods, either. I wanted to point out to them that you could store data on almost any cell phone (or just transmit it out of the building), but didn't really feel like arguing with someone that didn't understand technology anyway.
A lot of us would rather buy a phone that didn't have a camera, but that's getting harder to do every year, especially if you want a lot of other functionality in your phone.
The install CD from their ISP does it for them.
Of course this just means it's back to the days of ISPs installing more software on people's systems. Now, instead of browsers, it'll be mail clients. That or they'll just send everyone to their broken webmail systems and eventually they'll all move to hotmail or aol.
An interesting note on the issue of webmail, though, is that I found a program from Google that notifies you when you receive new mail, and makes mailto links work with gmail ( http://mail.google.com/mail/help/notifier/ ). This was (hopefully) enough to get my father-in-law off of AOL.
They'll just send you to windowslive.com when you click on the icon for email in the little tour thing that starts up on every new Windows installation. Then they'll walk you through setting up Passport err Live ID or whatever they call it now, and maybe they'll be able to actually download the software that would have come with a previous version of Windows at that point.
Or maybe they'll just say screw it and download someone else's product.
Besides, you don't need as many comments if your code is easy to read. Reserve comments for making your intentions clear (so people can make sure the code works as intended), and explaining hacks and work-arounds when things don't work the way they should. Even my first year CS teacher told us not to use the alphabet as the source of our variable names, and most of us still had to learn the hard way.
It should be noted, though, that many students have been through classes in which their code was not reviewed if it compiled and passed the tests required by the assignment.
This is especially true of larger projects done for class, as even the TA has something better to do than review the poorly-written code of 60 CS students in a first-year class.
What the hell is OpenSQL? Is it a fork of MySQL or PostgreSQL? And surely by "real SQL" you don't mean MS's pitiful SQL Server?
Not to mention that changing from one vendor's SQL Server to another is almost always painful, unless one takes a lot of steps throughout the lifetime of the database to maintain vendor-independence in your SQL statements (and even then you've got management and development tools to worry about). Every SQL book I own would be 1/4 the size if it weren't for the differences between MS SQL, Oracle SQL, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. However, which one is best for your use is largely dependent on individual factors, and it's very rare that someone can discount any of those 4 outright from the start of a project, unless money and source code are primary concerns.
Even in the early days of the anti-cheat software (when you had to run PunkBuster outside of the game), it didn't have any issues with Visual Studio, or even with hacks on the computer that weren't active while you were playing.
Their primary concern is what's active in memory that might access the game's memory space, or the memory space of the DirectX layers it's interacting with.
Now of course if you're actively debugging the DirectX libraries while you're playing online, you might get flagged, but since I haven't run a Valve game frequently in a few years, I don't know the exact details of how the current anti-cheat system works.
Due to the closed nature of the whole system, though, you get a lot of excuses from people that are flagged for cheating, and people want to believe the people they thought they knew pretty well. Since the people that rely the most on the anti-cheating measures also have the most to lose if they're caught by them, they tend to pass a lot of these rumors around with little to no basis in the truth.
You know, back in the old days, games were released without the ridiculous protections and they still sold... and some argue (I don't) that games back then were better quality anyway. And who said the only method of digital distribution was an honesty box? Apogee's method was brilliant - games were episodes and you could pick up the first episode for free, and buy the rest off them.
Umm... people were doing some ack-basswords crap with games even before Apogee was doing shareware. Companies would print the manuals in such a way that they couldn't easily be photocopied, and then require you to enter the 30th word on page 5 of the manual, and the 5th word on page 7, and the 12th word on page 29, every time you played the game (not just when you installed it; and of course the word and page numbers were different each time). Of course, it was much less likely that someone would be downloading a cracked version of your game back then, and they were doing it for the same reason they do now: to stop casual copies.
Then there were the beautiful code wheels and many other beautiful ideas of crap they could throw in the box that you would have to have to be able to play the game.
Shareware was as much a response to the analog version of DRM as anything else. It also was helped (and then almost killed off) by the explosion of the internet, since you could suddenly download the first episode and either get a key to unlock the rest or pay to download the other episodes.
Of course, when id released Quake with all of their previous games on the CD as shareware with a key system to unlock the full versions, it was only a matter of time (and it wasn't much time at that) before someone cracked the key system and everyone could easily gain access to every game id had made at that time by buying a $5-10 shareware CD.
In many ways I think DRM is less draconian than some of the old ways, but some of the DRM methods have been down-right hostile, and none of them have been easier to deal with than the game is when it's been cracked (including Steam, though multiplayer authorization is often a big advantage in keeping people from pirating your games).
Well,maybe folks here got more street smarts,maybe since we have a college in the middle of town they know more,hell I don't know.
College towns have different dynamics from the rest of the country, especially if the college represents a significant portion of the population (for example I attended a school that caused the town's population to double when school was in session). You have a lot of people running hand-me-down hardware, and a lot of people trying to run bleeding-edge games on not-so-bleeding-edge hardware (and today you can often pull it off). They're also going to be doing a lot of downloading and burning stuff that isn't quite so common elsewhere. When I was in college we passed around floppy disks, but then we didn't have CD writers. We also passed around key generators and emailed each other download links so we didn't have to find 33 good floppy disks for this or that new game. Then we strung cables across the room (or out the window, across the hall) to play head-to-head C&C, Warcraft, Doom, and Quake. A DVD burner would've been a godsend to us, and 100 blank discs of any size would've been welcome at $30. Like I said earlier, though, my DVD and CD spindles mostly sit around for years, and I don't think I spent as much as $30 on my DVD spindle over a year ago.
One of the biggest questions I get is "Can I burn my pictures so they'll play as a slideshow on my DVD?"
and of course the answer is "depends on your DVD player", but then most of them will never bother, and of those that do half will fail on the first attempt and not try again.
Some things I have found no matter how cheap folks won't go for,for example when I sold my last capture card I didn't bother getting any more because folks would rather pay me to convert their home movies than do them themselves.
The problem with capture cards tends to be the flaky nature of driver support for them. It may not matter to a lot of people, but I've seen my father go through buying a new card every time he changes OS, and I dumped the whole idea when I finally got a TV bigger than my monitor. Thankfully I'm too young to have home movies that will ever need to be transfered from analog ;)
Oh,and finally Vista? When folks around here bone XP you can usually fix it. You can clean out the viruses,restore the system files,and be good to go. But for some reason when they bone Vista they tend to kill it deader than Dixie. Total black screen. Damned if I know why. Like I said this is just what I am seeing with my little peepers in small town USA,YMMV
They're probably just getting nastier infections, in that case, or trying to force an "upgrade" to an incompatible video card driver. Since I pretty well stick to only working on computers from people I know, I've only had to fix two Vista computers, compared to who knows how many computers running other versions of Windows (because of course the other versions have been around longer).
I've never had a computer I couldn't actually use long enough to pull files off for backup (and cleanup) before scrubbing the system. Of course, since XP was released I've rarely bothered with cleaning up the live system because people are always so much happier with the newly-installed system that I've restored their "My Documents" folder on than with one that's been carefully (and painfully) cleaned up and tweaked. Gotta love the bit rot on Windows.
I've had two computers completely crap out running XP, but both turned out to be hardware problems (hard drive for one and ATA Controller for the other).
That might explain it, since I have a 34" widescreen CRT that doesn't support 1080p.
Most people own one game system, and then most of the games they buy for it are multi-platform games anyway.
I know a few people that bought PS3s (besides myself, but then I bought all 3), but most people bought either a Wii or a 360 (Wii is definitely the market leader, but has been hard to find, the 360 has been around longer).
Most of the people I know that bought the PS3 bought it because of the Blu-Ray functionality, knowing full well that most of the games they were going to buy would be on either the PS3 or the 360 (in other words they're buying Madden every year, and the next Splinter Cell and Tom Clancy game, maybe Tiger Woods). Of course, these people are also insane when it comes to their expenditures on movies. They're the guys that go to Best Buy or Circuit City every Tuesday during lunch and come back with several new movies, and they've already switched to Blu-Ray for all of their new stuff. At the time they bought PS3s, it was the cheapest Blu-Ray player on the market, and that was all it took to sell the system.
I have all 3 systems because I came into some cash and had certain games I wanted that all happened to be exclusive to each of the systems. I also sold off some of my older systems and games to help pay for games on the new systems. I rent Blu-Ray and don't buy movies any more. Instead I buy a game every month or two, and I'll let my movie collection sit at 200-something until they settle on something that might last as long as VHS did.
From my observations I can tell you that my customers hate Vista and when they kill it you are looking at a format/reinstall,
That's pretty much the deal with any version of Windows when they kill it, or really any operating system when you take it into a repair shop. It really takes too much time to restore an operating system to make it worthwhile unless you know how to do it yourself and are willing to have your system down long enough to take care of it. No one's going to spend the money to pay someone to spend a few hours on their system exclusively when they can format and reinstall 12 systems at once.
The Geforce 6xxx and 7xxx series is still popular around here with ATI almost nonexistent,
Any card in the $50-100 range is going to be pretty popular in machines where people even bother to use an after-market card. Some people swear by Intel/AMD or nVidia/ATI, and no matter what you see wherever you are, there is still a large group of people using stuff you rarely see. Besides that, the majority of systems are going to be using the on-board video, the majority of which is Intel or ATI.
and just about everyone under 40ish has some sort of DVD ripping software.
I could see this, except that most of the people I know (definitely in the under-40 crowd) don't have DVD ripping software, and don't really care because they throw the same DVD in their computer, DVD player, or portable DVD player (yeah with kids and low prices there are a lot of these around, certainly cheaper than buying a new car with DVD/LCD screens built in, or having them installed in your car). I know how to do it, and I've met a few people that know how to do it. A few lucky individuals even bought software off-the-shelf that could do it before that got shut down. For the most part, though, it's too time-consuming a process for the things parents really want to back up (Disney did what?), and with a few exceptions (again with Disney), the discs will be cheaper to replace than the cost in time decoding and burning discs.
Oh,and DVD burners are REAL hot sellers right now,thanks to the low price of blanks. I am currently waiting on some Lite-On burners to come in right now. Like I said,that is just what I am seeing in my little shop.
This has nothing to do with the cost of blank DVDs. This has to do with the fact that a DVD burner is only marginally (at least in most areas) more expensive than either a DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo or a DVD-ROM drive. Most people only have one optical drive in their system, and they want it to do everything. They buy the DVD burners because they're relatively inexpensive, and they don't buy Blu-Ray drives because they're more expensive than DVD-ROM drives were when I first bought them (and I was certainly an early adopter in that department). Yes, the blank DVDs are cheap, I have at least one spindle sitting around somewhere, and I would probably reach for it for anything that isn't destined for my car. However, I'm not archiving my whole DVD collection onto writeable DVDs, either. At best when I can afford a very large hard drive I might archive them to that.
It probably depends highly on the individual, but try using 720p instead of 1080i. To my eyes even 480p is a significant increase in quality over standard television. I find that 1080i doesn't look as good as 720p on my own TV, but then I spent a long period of time with a computer monitor as my primary means of watching TV and playing movies and video games, so interlaced pictures never do look as good to me.
Then in 5 years:
7) kids clean disc
8) kids insert disc into parents' ancient PC because it still has a blu-ray drive in it
9) kids crack DRM and rip high-def file to new optical disc type
10) kids laugh and say "I don't give a rat's ass about super-hi-def"
I'd probably be a much happier person if I couldn't tell the difference between a CD and a 128kbps MP3.
But yes, for home theater 5.1 is nice, and 7.1 is better. Of course, for the most part it's also a pain in the ass to set up and get working right on a system that actually sounds good (not that anyone would notice if they couldn't tell the difference between a low-bitrate MP3 and a CD).
I've just stopped buying movies altogether, because they're going to either take another step forward or start phasing out DVD. I also had to make the choice between buying 1 or 2 movies a month (on DVD) and renting movies from Netflix. I think I'd rather see more than 1 or 2 movies a month.
New movies run $30 on Blu-Ray, $20 on DVD. Older movies run $20 on Blu-Ray, $5-15 on DVD. And of course, since many movies are still unreleased on Blu-Ray, the definition of new movie means "new to Blu-Ray" for the $30 price tag.
I rent Blu-Ray, and have to say that while I notice the difference on most movies immediately, it stops mattering about 5 minutes in, when I start paying more attention to the movie itself than the way it looks on the TV. It should also be noted that I'm only playing these movies at 720p, since I haven't had the chance to upgrade my TV to 1080p.
DVD was a huge difference over VHS, and just being a more resilient format than the tapes was very important to me. Blu-Ray won't survive another bump in TV resolution, so I don't even see the point in buying a player (I watch them on the PS3 at the moment), never mind replacing my DVD library.
You can eliminate hiss and noise with good equipment unless you actually feel the need to record everything at obnoxiously low levels. After that it's up to the end user to have decent equipment that doesn't have hiss/noise on it in the first place, which isn't so hard these days, unless you're listening to the radio.
There is still plenty of music out there that doesn't do this, and I've had very little exposure to it in my music collection (which is roughly 50% or more metal, so the whole metal = loud argument doesn't hold up). Sure, some of it is louder than others, but not to the point of clipping or sounding compressed (hell, if I wanted compression I can do that without cranking the loudness, too; that's what they make compressors for).
The black album still had some metal on it, you just had to skip every song they played on the radio to find it, and none of it was as epic as almost anything on MoP. The strong metal songs on the black album are also pretty forgettable stuck in between a bunch of songs that got slammed into our heads for 4 years on the radio and MTV (remember when they played music?).
My dad still listens to music all the time, and is always open to new music, as long as it has something he's interested in (he's interested in skilled musicians, but he can't ignore a growling singer to listen to great guitarists).
My tastes have changed over the years (as far as new music goes), but I've still been able to find plenty of music to listen to from bands that weren't around when I was in high school (12-16 years ago), as well as some good music from bands I enjoyed in high school (the last 2 Ministry albums were great IMO, better than anything they've done since I was in high school). The basic problem with the idea that age is taking over Metallica is that the new Testament album was the best thing they've put out in over 10 years, the last two Judas Priest albums were very good (and Painkiller, which came out 20 years into their career, is a highlight of said career), and so on. There are many bands, even fast, aggressive bands, that do well into their later years.
I really think that Cliff's death had a bigger impact on Metallica than anything else. He was still credited on some of the Justice stuff, and even the band members said that the black album contained a lot of stuff that had been sitting around for a very long time, which they revisited and brought up to whatever standards they were working on at that time. Even with the creative control James and Lars claim to have previously had over the process of writing the songs, Cliff was credited on a lot of the material on RtL and Puppets, and there's no doubt that he brought a lot of those songs to life.
Of course, Cliff was the reason I picked up a bass at 14, and still play to this day, so my opinion might be slightly biased ;)
It's really bad enough that the school has the amount of power it does when a student is on school grounds or attending a school activity. They don't need their power extended to what students do outside of school.
They should have simply prosecuted the student under the applicable laws rather than trying to circumvent the law and punish the student for something that is clearly outside their jurisdiction.
If they felt the punishment would be too harsh under the law, they should have called in the parents and discussed it with them. If the parents didn't appear to take it seriously (as is obviously the case with the parents helping the lawsuit), they should have made it clear to the parents that their only recourse would be through the legal system.
School officials all too often take their power as absolute, especially since the majority of the time it remains unquestioned. That power should have very clear boundaries, and most of us should be able to understand those boundaries quite well.
As a parent, I can definitely agree with allowing for punishment in this matter, but I don't think it should be a punishment the school comes up with on its own. I would work with the school on the matter if it were my daughter, but if they brought me in and wouldn't work with me on the punishment, simply stating that they were going to suspend her and not present me with options and the evidence to support their claim that she did it in the first place, I'd probably be doing something a little more effective than going to court, like campaigning for the administrator to be removed (something I've seen successfully done when principals overstep their authority).
Sure enough, after all, the school is a government-run institution. The case law makes it clear that saying certain things in school can be grounds for punishment. It's unlikely someone would be prosecuted for calling someone a prick, but if you do so at school you'll be punished.
Generally, the rights of minors are abridged, but they (as minors) are afforded a greater level of protection by the government, as well. They aren't prosecuted under the same legal system, and their parents often share some of the punishment for their actions.
Then again, the government can also turn around and try a minor as an adult with no prior notification of the new status or extension of the minor's legal rights.
OpenGL was never very big in the gaming world either. Quake/HL was a standout in this regard, but most 3D game engines have been very custom, or based on DirectX - DirectX was sort of mandatory once game authors lost direct access to hardware.
While I agree with your first statement (OpenGL is still big outside gaming), I disagree with this part. The Quake line of engines were very widely used in games in the mid-to-late 90s, and because of the impact they had on the gaming world most game developers developed for OpenGL or Glide (or both). Of course, since Glide only worked on 3dfx, and OpenGL never worked really well on 3dfx (not at all for most of the time they were putting out chips), there wasn't a significant overlap in the markets for the two APIs. The only reason anyone got away with not developing for OpenGL early on was that so few people expected good hardware acceleration from non-3dfx cards, so people that had 3dfx played in Glide, and everyone else played with software rendering.
Once software rendering started dropping out of the market (as nVidia started taking market share with the GeForce line, and on-board chips started doing some hardware 3D), different game engines made choices between Direct3D and OpenGL, but many of them supported both.
DirectX 3 was the first version anyone but Microsoft really took seriously, and it proliferated in non-3D games quite quickly. DirectX 5 pretty well solidified its place in gaming, but not quite in 3D (and DirectX 4 was canceled, as 4 and 5 were in simultaneous development, but the developers wanted the features in 5 and MS axed 4 to get 5 out more quickly).
There were a few things that moved people to Direct3D, though:
- developing OpenGL extensions in-house consumes a lot of resources, and these are wasted if the features you're implementing already exist somewhere else (such as in Direct3D)
- On Windows, you were probably already using the Direct X API for DirectInput and DirectSound (and it should be noted that DirectInput is now deprecated, and many game developers use other APIs for sound).
OpenGL was strong enough in 1997 that MS started working with SGI to unify the OpenGL and Direct3D APIs. Of course, while MS was supposed to be working with them on Fahrenheit, they also managed to release DirectX 5, 6, and 7, all of which further increased MS' market share in games (especially 3D games where they were not doing well with Direct X 1-3), meanwhile OpenGL didn't hit version 2.0 until 2005. Even for a standard, OpenGL moved pretty slowly, and rejected more ideas from game developers than Microsoft did with DirectX/3D.
The license didn't prevent this from happening previously. There are already plenty of extensions for OpenGL, and many of them are packaged with video card drivers and games. The standards process will most likely remain slow, as is usually the case with any standard. Really it's the case with many standards. The only reasons OpenGL didn't become completely obsolete are support from big-name 3D developers (both game developers and 3D tool developers), and the fact that the only major competition comes from Microsoft, and is Windows-only, meaning that OpenGL still has a place in Mac, *nix, and other environments.
Besides, when you're not developing something extremely cutting edge, you don't need the API changing every year (as DirectX did for some time).