Have you tried Winamp3? Its ne wplaylist anf file management functioanlity far surpasses WMP
Maybe you're thinking of WMP6 or 7, though I don't remember it being all that bad in 7 (not as good as XP or 9 though). What I do know is that WinAmp uses almost 3x as much RAM when I load my mp3 folder into it (using default settings on WinAmp, maybe with some tweaking I could get this down a bit) and 3-5x as much CPU time, with a file actively playing in WMP9, no file playing in WinAmp (just viewing the mp3 files in the file management window), with default skins on both players.
Playlists are normally better in WinAmp (it can handle very large playlists much better than WMP seems to, though I haven't tried this in WMP9 yet), but the dynamic playlists in WMP9 are a feature that doesn't appear to be matched in WinAmp.
Of course, this is all comparing a very recent release of WMP to a release of WinAmp which doesn't appear to be nearly as recent, I'm sure they'll get some of the features in WinAmp eventually. Another bonus is that I don't get AOL icons on my desktop when I install WMP...
Since most people use these types of games to play online anyway, if they have a secure system for validating keys (see battle.net), they shouldn't have to worry about open-sourcing parts of (or the entire) client.
For reasons not to open-source the entire client see cheating, kindof like when id released the source code for Quake/QW under the GPL and killed off a great deal of the remaining post-Halif-life online community for that game.
Ah, I guess since I write software for a living I don't have a tendency to use the term API to refer to client-server communications protocols. I do thank you for making me aware of that particular section, though, since I had not seen nor heard about that before.
I'm going to wait and see what stuff gets 'broken' as a result of this sp that ms will blame on 'app hiding'. Then they can say 'see? we told you that you can't remove Internet Explorer!!!'
Nothing's being removed, so, in theory, nothing will be broken because of it. That was why they agreed to this settlement proposal in the first place. If you actually decide to remove Internet Explorer, that's on your own head.
Of course they have to package this in a 133 megabyte package in order to discourage dialup users from applying it... is there any valid reason that such a patch should take up so much space?
Because service packs always include the updates between the previous large release (either the last service pack or the retail release) and the time it's released. Sometimes they'll just be a small front-end that scans your computer for existing updates and then only downloads what you don't have installed yet, but since I'm not running WinXP on this computer and won't see my XP computer for a few more hours, I couldn't tell you if that's how this one works. Needless to say, there have been a lot of updates since WinXP was released last year.
Not to individuals. You have to supply a corporate ID to even get the NDA. They're under NDA. The NDA probably has non-compete clauses in it.
What APIs are you talking about? The ones that were released for this settlement proposal are at the MSDN site and nowhere have I seen an NDA or request for corporate ID
Or have your competing program's installer do it for you. This is the approach AOL has chosen with its "Netscape" web browser and "Winamp" media player.
Which is an added bonus to this whole thing, as it provides an easy front-end for the user to make those decisions (though perhaps not in the detail some would like, though there are other places to do it). There's also a section in the WMP options dialogue that'll let the user reclaim file types (I believe some other players have this as well, some such as WinAmp are really persistent about reclaiming file types if you set certain options) which has saved me a lot of time dealing with players like QuickTime and RealPlayer that like to take over everything (when I only install them for one particular type of file).
The point, though, was in regards to 'hiding' IE (or WMP or whatever) without installing something else, and what effect that has which doesn't occur simply by deleting the shortcuts to it. In that case, there is no installer to change the file associations, but the interface that this hiding mechanism uses does edit/remove those registry entries for you.
But really, the best thing to do is to do a good job of branding their own JVM and likewise, paint Microsoft's JVM as a bastardized wannabe
They need to make it easier for people to find and download the VM for IE/Windows. Most people don't even know to go to Sun to get the thing in the first place, but as an added bonus, they have to dig through a mess of acronyms to get it.
Of course, they'll probably never be able to make MS-specific Java code run on their VM.
The settlement was just to "hide" the bundled software? There was no part indicating that the services offered to IE, Outlook, Media Player, etc by the OS have to be available to competitors, so that they can integrate and interoperate as seamlessly? No wonder 9 states dissented.
The proposed settlement has quite a few other things besides just this, but Windows doesn't need service packs to address contractual terms with vendors, API releases, and other such terms in the proposal. There was a release of documentation for a few APIs a couple weeks ago, which I believe was also covered here, and all of the contracts have been changing as they come up for renewal. There are also some other points, but you could just read the proposed settlement for yourself. US DoJ US vs Microsoft site
Ok, you obviously didn't read the articles, either. The agreement was for NEW computers to be able to come with different default programs. The Service Patch isn't going to remove IE completely, and install Netscape for you!
It's still a valid question, and from the other questions, and experience with the Win2k release of this thing that occured a couple weeks ago, it does pretty much what he's asking about, which is ignore the fact that there's a program that can open it until you install something else that will.
And as far as "hiding" goes, you don't need a damn service pack to do it. It's called the "delete" button. Any shortcut anywhere (including the IE icons) can be deleted.
That isn't quite the same thing, as double-clicking an html file would bring up IE unless you also removed the IE files themselves (not just the shortcuts). You'd have to go into the registry and edit/remove the file type associations.
Most everyone I know uses Winamp to play their Mp3's. Some of my friends were actually amazed when I told them that WMP could even PLAY mp3's This is one area in which the general populace's ignorance is a good thing, because there is a.ogg plugin for Winamp.
I dumped WinAmp when I started using WMP on WinXP, primarily because WMP has better file management. The WMP9 beta is looking even better with a lot of nice new features (including some things I've been wanting to have for some time, like playback controls on the toolbar, which were part of one of the powertoys releases but weren't very good until now). Once they fix the obviously beta bugs (sorting's a little hosed, some of the content views refresh themselves constantly unless the player is maximized, etc), they'll be in a very good position that will make it hard for other players to catch up.
Oh yeah, and everye on the planet hates RealJukebox.
I agree there, except that the statistics don't agree. Real has always had one of the top 3 formats, and has historically been the most widely used player. Perhaps there simply haven't been enough statistics specifically on what people use to listen to MP3s, but obviously there aren't enough people willing to ditch Real Player completely (as I have done).
WMA has ogg support. All you need to do is install an extra codec. With all the integration madness in Windows, that can be done automagically
Any idea if there's an encoder plugin for WMP to encode ogg files? I've been using an MP3 encoder plug-in that does fairly well, though it's limited in bitrate (to 192k). Now that I have more drive space, switching to another encoder and a higher bit rate would make sense. There are some features of encoding with WMP, however, that are nearly impossible to find in other encoders. I've considered writing the encoder myself, but I'm not very familiar with the plug-in architecture WMP uses for this.
Do you encode your mp3s with mp3? I guess not. Do you see my point? Don't convert your mp3s. Keep 'em. From now on, if you rip a new cd, use Ogg.
His point is from the angle of people that use mostly downloaded files for their computer's music collection. In that case, they should simply switch formats whenever possible and try finding those same songs in ogg format.
Maybe on a boring afternoon you could re-rip your already ripped cd's to Ogg and send the old mp3s to the bitbucket.
Assuming I could find an Ogg encoder as fast as my MP3 encoder (~5 mins per CD), it'd take 5-6 days at about 8 hours a day to re-rip ~500 CDs. This is why so much of my collection is still at 128k, though all newer stuff is at 192, and the (relatively few) downloaded files are mostly higher bit rates (256k).
As an aside, I noticed with the new beta of WMP that they've included encoders for variable bit rate and uncompressed wma files (with the highest setting for vbr being 240-355k, much higher than their default wma encoder allows (192k)). I also noticed that the player doesn't have the uncompressed option on Win2k, as well as a few other features being missing, vs. on WinXP.
That said, I'm really skeptical about the ability to market rock online. Seems to me that the Internet is really more of a tool for cross-promotional opportunities, where you can drive people from the Real World to real estate online in order to let them hear/get more of your material. I'm not sure how effective an effort to aquire new fans purely online would be, as the net seems much better suited to expound on the marketing materials we encounter in real life, rather than aquire new people.
I have found out about a lot of great bands online. However, most of it has been through various sites that give info like "these bands sound like the band you're currently reading about/listening to", or because smaller record labels have fairly complete catalogues online with at least some samples to listen to (some larger labels do have all of this as well, though the larger the label is the harder it is to go through their catalogue without looking for something specific).
This is mostly because in the Real World real estate, you can make your marketing materials highly targetted, where as online it is far more difficult to pitch only to your target geo/demo-graphic.. thus for very specific products like music, which appeal only to specific graphics, it'd be hard to get a good Return on Investment out of purely online marketing ventures.
I actually think that with music this can be the reverse. Many stores don't want to stock things they don't think they'll be able to sell, so many genres are almost impossible to get anywhere but online. Furthermore, there are a lot of genre-specific sites out there, and a lot of ways to target specific groups that you think will like your particular style of music. As I mentioned above, the larger labels can't really supply me with good information online about bands I haven't heard before, because they simply have too much to go through (or maybe their website design just sucks, because more general purpose non-label-specific sites can do just fine). The key is finding the target audience online, looking for info on bands that might hit that same audience, and seeing if you can get your site linked by fan sites, or the larger general purpose sites like ubl, mp3.com, and so on. You may not make the Billboard charts any time soon, but you can certainly be successful, if there are enough fans for the music willing to shell out some cash for CDs.
Besides, any band is far better off if they have a solid fan base before they sign a contract, because they can work on getting a better contract. The metal scene survived largely through tape-trading in the 80s (and no, not that hair band shit that was all over MTV), and spawned a few (select few granted) highly successful bands through what was initially entirely made up of word of mouth and trading of actual physical recordings, rather than something as easily portable as MP3 files. I still find out about bands through word of mouth, either from real-life friends or people online (not even counting websites) who's opinions about music I respect, and if I'm not sure I can always either find samples online, borrow the CD from a friend, or download a couple of MP3s to check it out.
Really the RIAA's constant fight against new technology is rarely about piracy or bands not being able to make money, it's about the idea that the RIAA's labels won't be able to make money. MetalBlade, Earache, and a couple of other labels thrive because of tape trading more than anything (and will probably continue to do so with Mp3s), because they picked up bands that paved their way on the tape-trading circuits. Meanwhile most of the big labels spend their time either picking up bands from the smaller labels (Earache's had probably a half-dozen bands picked up in the last decade or so, some of which were dropped by the major label rather quickly when they wouldn't make their sound more major-friendly), going through other industry contacts (it's who you know, not what you know), or the old-fashioned method of sending people out to shows to listen to bands. Still, they only continue to make money because they control distribution and marketing. They determine what posters you see in most record stores, they determine how many copies are pressed and shipped to those stores, and they make sure those stores have enough copies on the shelves. Anything that makes it easier for the artists to do these things themselves, or to change the distribution channels (ie get people buying music somewhere other than the store) is suppressed as much as possible until they can find a way to exploit it for themselves.
Good hearted agnostics have one virtue above all others, humility. Religious people in their heart of hearts have contempt for those who do not follow their path and those that don't are hypocrits or worse.
All groups of people contain those with both humility and contempt, and even hypocrites. The very religions these people follow teach that they should have humility, and it is a praised virtue in most religions. Very few religions teach contempt for any reason, but that does not mean that people that believe in such religions do not harbor such contempt. People are fallible, and religion is just one of many tools that people use to try to improve themselves. If you do not need it, then do not use it. Similarly, those that do need it should realise that not everyone does, and that any one religion will not be useful to all people.
If the person meant that much to you, unplug and make an effort to get to know the real person he was by maybe being there for the family in real life. Mourning his avatar is not the same thing.
What makes the real-world funeral any more valid than an online funeral? How can people he knew online really be there for his family by showing up to the funeral? To me, the meetings I've had with people I only knew online (about 10 so far) have started out rather akward in most cases, but eventually it was like being with an old friend (in the cases where I'd known the person a fairly long time before meeting them). At the same time, when most of your interaction with someone is online, you rarely meet their family members (unless those people also have at least a passing online involvment with shared interests). The family members might be thankful that online friends showed up for the real-world funeral, but they won't necessarily be any more comforted by it, and it probably will be somewhat awkward.
Personally, I don't much care what people that know me decide to do when I die. However, I hope that if they take the time to remember me, they do so in accordance with how they remember me. I would be at least as happy with a game of cz2 in TFC dedicated to my memory by my clanmates as with whatever my family decides to do. It's all representative of how they know me in life, regardless of whether or not they've sat down face to face with me.
Just to add to that, although children need supervision and guidance, they don't need 24-hour-a-day interaction from their parents. Parents should be involved in their children's lives, and they should definitely be there when their children need them, but they shouldn't be the only source of human contact or entertainment for their children.
You're right if you're looking at Quake simply as the game. When it comes to clans, though, most people spend a good deal of time with their clanmates outside of the game. Some people choose to take less part in the IRC and other forms of contact through the whole thing, while others take away quite a bit from the interaction outside the game. Quake and similar games tend to have very little feeling of community, until you actually take part in the community, which occurs mostly outside the game itself.
Then again, perhaps the spread of voice communications (used in clans for years now through 3rd party software, but finally finding it's way into the games themselves) will change some of that. After all, you can't type much in an FPS unless you've just been fragged, but many people could probably hold a conversation while they play.
In a quake clan the talk on the idle time on a clan channel is mostly not about the quake itself (because it's very straight forward), but about the things my clan mates have been doing recently (in real life).
Additionally, clans playing team-based mods usually use voice communications while they play. Personally, as far as I know no one I've known in the three clans I've been a part of has died, but I feel that I have at least a good friendship with a lot of them. I've lost 3 people in my life this year, and it's certainly hard at times, but you can't let it consume all of your time. I think that it would be the same with most of my friends online (passing acquaintances would be different, as in real life). You're right, though, in that there is a lot of conversation about life in general and what everyone's been up to when you're in a clan together.
The key difference between the FPS style games and the MMORPG types, of course, is that the game itself in the case of the MMORPGs supports the community aspects much better than any current FPS, so a lot of the community building goes on inside the game (and probably blurs the interaction between the people a bit more).
Funny then, how I found this with just a couple of clicks from the main kernel.org page. I've seen a few other HCLs for Linux in the last few years, but overall I'd expect that for really new hardware you either have to have a good idea of how to get it to work already or find someone that does. Linux moves more quickly than most operating systems, and, as such, hardware compatibility is a moving target dependant on a large number of variables, including changes to the kernel and dedication of the hardware developers.
but most of the people involved today and in the future were not there in the beginning. This is a good step for people coming in with ideas of what they might like to do with it. Other than that, as a few others have said, someone else might come along with a good idea on how to use the visualization tools themselves in something else, like an IDE.
the "newest QuickTime format" is QuickTime, and is certainly not an MPEG-4 derivative. Just because QT6 can export.mp4 files and read MPEG-4 properly doesn't mean QuickTime has changed. It's just been extended again. You don't seem to know what you're talking about, son.
I'm sorry, would implementation be a better word for you? Or perhaps you're confused because Apple created a codec for MPEG-4 (much like MS did) audio and video (even though the MPEG-4 standard doesn't require any change in audio or video codecs, you can easily put MPEG-2 audio and video in an MPEG-4 format). Or maybe you're just confused in general, since you seem to have me confused with someone else (go talk to your son if you want to call someone son).
wmf is an MPEG-4 derivative, much like the newest QuickTime format (and MPEG-4 is based on the older QuickTime format), so really the quality depends mostly on the encoding and the configuration of the player.
Other than that, I am starting to get the feeling that the biggest limit on what games can do nowadays isn't what the hardware they are being run on is capable of, whether it is a console or some gee-whiz computer with some overclocked GeForce card with Peltier cooling. It seems to me that the limiting factor is more how much time the artists on a game's production team can afford to put into the models - going back to games like GT3 and GTA3, it looks like the polygon count on any one screen is oftentimes well below the capability of the hardware.
While the effort definitely makes a difference, the dev teams for those 2 games in particular wouldn't have had to spend half as much time on the games if they weren't working with trying to stretch the capabilities of the hardware. Just getting GT3 to look like anything but a mess of jagged edges (ala Tekken Tag Tournament) must've been a long process. Plus with consoles they will usually work for a fixed framerate with v-sync, whereas in PC games they've always got to deal with the people that disable v-sync and try for triple digit framerates, just so they can watch tears on every third frame and only have half the frames displayed.
The best reason for cranking out high framerates in a game is so that you can maintain a reasonable framerate under the harshest conditions the game might see. With my hardware (the video card is pushing 2 years old now) I can crank out triple digit framerates in TFC at 1280x1024, but I choose to limit it to 72 (still below the refresh rate) in order to make the drops to 50-60 fps under hard conditions less noticable. Sensitivity to framerates is a lot like hearing, different from person to person, and variance can be quite high. One thing almost everyone has in common in both departments, though, is that dramatic changes are easily noticable by the observer/listener. While you may not be able to see more than 30 fps (most people can the way computers display them, but anyway), you should be able to tell the difference between 60 and 30 fps if it drops from 60 to 30 within a few frames as you're watching. Plus with some game engines (*COUGH*Quake1/2/3*COUGH*) having many other factors dependant on the number of frames it's rendering (such as physics and input, there are things you just can't do in Quake3 at lower than 100 fps that have nothing to do with what you can or cant see), it does become important for those people that want to get the most out of the game. Consoles are a different breed because you can write to the hardware and know that it's the only hardware running the game, and you can maximize performance by limiting the framerate to the TVs you expect to display it (newer consoles, starting pretty much with the Dreamcast, have had to take into account higher resolution displays with different refresh rates and methods, though not all games do on these systems). Most PC gamers (especially in genres like FPS games) would be fairly ticked off if they couldn't override the developer's decision to cap the framerate and run 4xFSAA with a fixed resolution of 640x480 (or less), and some rightly so (especially with cards/drivers that aren't optimized for running low resolutions, in some cases you can get better performance by going to 1024x768 or higher).
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Have you tried Winamp3? Its ne wplaylist anf file management functioanlity far surpasses WMP
Maybe you're thinking of WMP6 or 7, though I don't remember it being all that bad in 7 (not as good as XP or 9 though). What I do know is that WinAmp uses almost 3x as much RAM when I load my mp3 folder into it (using default settings on WinAmp, maybe with some tweaking I could get this down a bit) and 3-5x as much CPU time, with a file actively playing in WMP9, no file playing in WinAmp (just viewing the mp3 files in the file management window), with default skins on both players.
Playlists are normally better in WinAmp (it can handle very large playlists much better than WMP seems to, though I haven't tried this in WMP9 yet), but the dynamic playlists in WMP9 are a feature that doesn't appear to be matched in WinAmp.
Of course, this is all comparing a very recent release of WMP to a release of WinAmp which doesn't appear to be nearly as recent, I'm sure they'll get some of the features in WinAmp eventually. Another bonus is that I don't get AOL icons on my desktop when I install WMP...
Since most people use these types of games to play online anyway, if they have a secure system for validating keys (see battle.net), they shouldn't have to worry about open-sourcing parts of (or the entire) client.
For reasons not to open-source the entire client see cheating, kindof like when id released the source code for Quake/QW under the GPL and killed off a great deal of the remaining post-Halif-life online community for that game.
Ah, I guess since I write software for a living I don't have a tendency to use the term API to refer to client-server communications protocols. I do thank you for making me aware of that particular section, though, since I had not seen nor heard about that before.
I'm going to wait and see what stuff gets 'broken' as a result of this sp that ms will blame on 'app hiding'. Then they can say 'see? we told you that you can't remove Internet Explorer!!!'
Nothing's being removed, so, in theory, nothing will be broken because of it. That was why they agreed to this settlement proposal in the first place. If you actually decide to remove Internet Explorer, that's on your own head.
Of course they have to package this in a 133 megabyte package in order to discourage dialup users from applying it... is there any valid reason that such a patch should take up so much space?
Because service packs always include the updates between the previous large release (either the last service pack or the retail release) and the time it's released. Sometimes they'll just be a small front-end that scans your computer for existing updates and then only downloads what you don't have installed yet, but since I'm not running WinXP on this computer and won't see my XP computer for a few more hours, I couldn't tell you if that's how this one works. Needless to say, there have been a lot of updates since WinXP was released last year.
Not to individuals. You have to supply a corporate ID to even get the NDA.
They're under NDA.
The NDA probably has non-compete clauses in it.
What APIs are you talking about? The ones that were released for this settlement proposal are at the MSDN site and nowhere have I seen an NDA or request for corporate ID
Or have your competing program's installer do it for you. This is the approach AOL has chosen with its "Netscape" web browser and "Winamp" media player.
Which is an added bonus to this whole thing, as it provides an easy front-end for the user to make those decisions (though perhaps not in the detail some would like, though there are other places to do it). There's also a section in the WMP options dialogue that'll let the user reclaim file types (I believe some other players have this as well, some such as WinAmp are really persistent about reclaiming file types if you set certain options) which has saved me a lot of time dealing with players like QuickTime and RealPlayer that like to take over everything (when I only install them for one particular type of file).
The point, though, was in regards to 'hiding' IE (or WMP or whatever) without installing something else, and what effect that has which doesn't occur simply by deleting the shortcuts to it. In that case, there is no installer to change the file associations, but the interface that this hiding mechanism uses does edit/remove those registry entries for you.
But really, the best thing to do is to do a good job of branding their own JVM and likewise, paint Microsoft's JVM as a bastardized wannabe
They need to make it easier for people to find and download the VM for IE/Windows. Most people don't even know to go to Sun to get the thing in the first place, but as an added bonus, they have to dig through a mess of acronyms to get it.
Of course, they'll probably never be able to make MS-specific Java code run on their VM.
The settlement was just to "hide" the bundled software? There was no part indicating that the services offered to IE, Outlook, Media Player, etc by the OS have to be available to competitors, so that they can integrate and interoperate as seamlessly? No wonder 9 states dissented.
The proposed settlement has quite a few other things besides just this, but Windows doesn't need service packs to address contractual terms with vendors, API releases, and other such terms in the proposal. There was a release of documentation for a few APIs a couple weeks ago, which I believe was also covered here, and all of the contracts have been changing as they come up for renewal. There are also some other points, but you could just read the proposed settlement for yourself. US DoJ US vs Microsoft site
Ok, you obviously didn't read the articles, either. The agreement was for NEW computers to be able to come with different default programs. The Service Patch isn't going to remove IE completely, and install Netscape for you!
It's still a valid question, and from the other questions, and experience with the Win2k release of this thing that occured a couple weeks ago, it does pretty much what he's asking about, which is ignore the fact that there's a program that can open it until you install something else that will.
And as far as "hiding" goes, you don't need a damn service pack to do it. It's called the "delete" button. Any shortcut anywhere (including the IE icons) can be deleted.
That isn't quite the same thing, as double-clicking an html file would bring up IE unless you also removed the IE files themselves (not just the shortcuts). You'd have to go into the registry and edit/remove the file type associations.
Most everyone I know uses Winamp to play their Mp3's. Some of my friends were actually amazed when I told them that WMP could even PLAY mp3's This is one area in which the general populace's ignorance is a good thing, because there is a .ogg plugin for Winamp.
I dumped WinAmp when I started using WMP on WinXP, primarily because WMP has better file management. The WMP9 beta is looking even better with a lot of nice new features (including some things I've been wanting to have for some time, like playback controls on the toolbar, which were part of one of the powertoys releases but weren't very good until now). Once they fix the obviously beta bugs (sorting's a little hosed, some of the content views refresh themselves constantly unless the player is maximized, etc), they'll be in a very good position that will make it hard for other players to catch up.
Oh yeah, and everye on the planet hates RealJukebox.
I agree there, except that the statistics don't agree. Real has always had one of the top 3 formats, and has historically been the most widely used player. Perhaps there simply haven't been enough statistics specifically on what people use to listen to MP3s, but obviously there aren't enough people willing to ditch Real Player completely (as I have done).
WMA has ogg support. All you need to do is install an extra codec. With all the integration madness in Windows, that can be done automagically
Any idea if there's an encoder plugin for WMP to encode ogg files? I've been using an MP3 encoder plug-in that does fairly well, though it's limited in bitrate (to 192k). Now that I have more drive space, switching to another encoder and a higher bit rate would make sense. There are some features of encoding with WMP, however, that are nearly impossible to find in other encoders. I've considered writing the encoder myself, but I'm not very familiar with the plug-in architecture WMP uses for this.
Do you encode your mp3s with mp3? I guess not. Do you see my point?
Don't convert your mp3s. Keep 'em. From now on, if you rip a new cd, use Ogg.
His point is from the angle of people that use mostly downloaded files for their computer's music collection. In that case, they should simply switch formats whenever possible and try finding those same songs in ogg format.
Maybe on a boring afternoon you could re-rip your already ripped cd's to Ogg and send the old mp3s to the bitbucket.
Assuming I could find an Ogg encoder as fast as my MP3 encoder (~5 mins per CD), it'd take 5-6 days at about 8 hours a day to re-rip ~500 CDs. This is why so much of my collection is still at 128k, though all newer stuff is at 192, and the (relatively few) downloaded files are mostly higher bit rates (256k).
As an aside, I noticed with the new beta of WMP that they've included encoders for variable bit rate and uncompressed wma files (with the highest setting for vbr being 240-355k, much higher than their default wma encoder allows (192k)). I also noticed that the player doesn't have the uncompressed option on Win2k, as well as a few other features being missing, vs. on WinXP.
That said, I'm really skeptical about the ability to market rock online. Seems to me that the Internet is really more of a tool for cross-promotional opportunities, where you can drive people from the Real World to real estate online in order to let them hear/get more of your material. I'm not sure how effective an effort to aquire new fans purely online would be, as the net seems much better suited to expound on the marketing materials we encounter in real life, rather than aquire new people.
.. thus for very specific products like music, which appeal only to specific graphics, it'd be hard to get a good Return on Investment out of purely online marketing ventures.
I have found out about a lot of great bands online. However, most of it has been through various sites that give info like "these bands sound like the band you're currently reading about/listening to", or because smaller record labels have fairly complete catalogues online with at least some samples to listen to (some larger labels do have all of this as well, though the larger the label is the harder it is to go through their catalogue without looking for something specific).
This is mostly because in the Real World real estate, you can make your marketing materials highly targetted, where as online it is far more difficult to pitch only to your target geo/demo-graphic
I actually think that with music this can be the reverse. Many stores don't want to stock things they don't think they'll be able to sell, so many genres are almost impossible to get anywhere but online. Furthermore, there are a lot of genre-specific sites out there, and a lot of ways to target specific groups that you think will like your particular style of music. As I mentioned above, the larger labels can't really supply me with good information online about bands I haven't heard before, because they simply have too much to go through (or maybe their website design just sucks, because more general purpose non-label-specific sites can do just fine). The key is finding the target audience online, looking for info on bands that might hit that same audience, and seeing if you can get your site linked by fan sites, or the larger general purpose sites like ubl, mp3.com, and so on. You may not make the Billboard charts any time soon, but you can certainly be successful, if there are enough fans for the music willing to shell out some cash for CDs.
Besides, any band is far better off if they have a solid fan base before they sign a contract, because they can work on getting a better contract. The metal scene survived largely through tape-trading in the 80s (and no, not that hair band shit that was all over MTV), and spawned a few (select few granted) highly successful bands through what was initially entirely made up of word of mouth and trading of actual physical recordings, rather than something as easily portable as MP3 files. I still find out about bands through word of mouth, either from real-life friends or people online (not even counting websites) who's opinions about music I respect, and if I'm not sure I can always either find samples online, borrow the CD from a friend, or download a couple of MP3s to check it out.
Really the RIAA's constant fight against new technology is rarely about piracy or bands not being able to make money, it's about the idea that the RIAA's labels won't be able to make money. MetalBlade, Earache, and a couple of other labels thrive because of tape trading more than anything (and will probably continue to do so with Mp3s), because they picked up bands that paved their way on the tape-trading circuits. Meanwhile most of the big labels spend their time either picking up bands from the smaller labels (Earache's had probably a half-dozen bands picked up in the last decade or so, some of which were dropped by the major label rather quickly when they wouldn't make their sound more major-friendly), going through other industry contacts (it's who you know, not what you know), or the old-fashioned method of sending people out to shows to listen to bands. Still, they only continue to make money because they control distribution and marketing. They determine what posters you see in most record stores, they determine how many copies are pressed and shipped to those stores, and they make sure those stores have enough copies on the shelves. Anything that makes it easier for the artists to do these things themselves, or to change the distribution channels (ie get people buying music somewhere other than the store) is suppressed as much as possible until they can find a way to exploit it for themselves.
Good hearted agnostics have one virtue above all others, humility. Religious people in their heart of hearts have contempt for those who do not follow their path and those that don't are hypocrits or worse.
All groups of people contain those with both humility and contempt, and even hypocrites. The very religions these people follow teach that they should have humility, and it is a praised virtue in most religions. Very few religions teach contempt for any reason, but that does not mean that people that believe in such religions do not harbor such contempt. People are fallible, and religion is just one of many tools that people use to try to improve themselves. If you do not need it, then do not use it. Similarly, those that do need it should realise that not everyone does, and that any one religion will not be useful to all people.
If the person meant that much to you, unplug and make an effort to get to know the real person he was by maybe being there for the family in real life. Mourning his avatar is not the same thing.
What makes the real-world funeral any more valid than an online funeral? How can people he knew online really be there for his family by showing up to the funeral? To me, the meetings I've had with people I only knew online (about 10 so far) have started out rather akward in most cases, but eventually it was like being with an old friend (in the cases where I'd known the person a fairly long time before meeting them). At the same time, when most of your interaction with someone is online, you rarely meet their family members (unless those people also have at least a passing online involvment with shared interests). The family members might be thankful that online friends showed up for the real-world funeral, but they won't necessarily be any more comforted by it, and it probably will be somewhat awkward.
Personally, I don't much care what people that know me decide to do when I die. However, I hope that if they take the time to remember me, they do so in accordance with how they remember me. I would be at least as happy with a game of cz2 in TFC dedicated to my memory by my clanmates as with whatever my family decides to do. It's all representative of how they know me in life, regardless of whether or not they've sat down face to face with me.
Just to add to that, although children need supervision and guidance, they don't need 24-hour-a-day interaction from their parents. Parents should be involved in their children's lives, and they should definitely be there when their children need them, but they shouldn't be the only source of human contact or entertainment for their children.
You're right if you're looking at Quake simply as the game. When it comes to clans, though, most people spend a good deal of time with their clanmates outside of the game. Some people choose to take less part in the IRC and other forms of contact through the whole thing, while others take away quite a bit from the interaction outside the game. Quake and similar games tend to have very little feeling of community, until you actually take part in the community, which occurs mostly outside the game itself.
Then again, perhaps the spread of voice communications (used in clans for years now through 3rd party software, but finally finding it's way into the games themselves) will change some of that. After all, you can't type much in an FPS unless you've just been fragged, but many people could probably hold a conversation while they play.
In a quake clan the talk on the idle time on a clan channel is mostly not about the quake itself (because it's very straight forward), but about the things my clan mates have been doing recently (in real life).
Additionally, clans playing team-based mods usually use voice communications while they play. Personally, as far as I know no one I've known in the three clans I've been a part of has died, but I feel that I have at least a good friendship with a lot of them. I've lost 3 people in my life this year, and it's certainly hard at times, but you can't let it consume all of your time. I think that it would be the same with most of my friends online (passing acquaintances would be different, as in real life). You're right, though, in that there is a lot of conversation about life in general and what everyone's been up to when you're in a clan together.
The key difference between the FPS style games and the MMORPG types, of course, is that the game itself in the case of the MMORPGs supports the community aspects much better than any current FPS, so a lot of the community building goes on inside the game (and probably blurs the interaction between the people a bit more).
Funny then, how I found this with just a couple of clicks from the main kernel.org page. I've seen a few other HCLs for Linux in the last few years, but overall I'd expect that for really new hardware you either have to have a good idea of how to get it to work already or find someone that does. Linux moves more quickly than most operating systems, and, as such, hardware compatibility is a moving target dependant on a large number of variables, including changes to the kernel and dedication of the hardware developers.
but most of the people involved today and in the future were not there in the beginning. This is a good step for people coming in with ideas of what they might like to do with it. Other than that, as a few others have said, someone else might come along with a good idea on how to use the visualization tools themselves in something else, like an IDE.
the "newest QuickTime format" is QuickTime, and is certainly not an MPEG-4 derivative. Just because QT6 can export .mp4 files and read MPEG-4 properly doesn't mean QuickTime has changed. It's just been extended again. You don't seem to know what you're talking about, son.
I'm sorry, would implementation be a better word for you? Or perhaps you're confused because Apple created a codec for MPEG-4 (much like MS did) audio and video (even though the MPEG-4 standard doesn't require any change in audio or video codecs, you can easily put MPEG-2 audio and video in an MPEG-4 format). Or maybe you're just confused in general, since you seem to have me confused with someone else (go talk to your son if you want to call someone son).
What gives? Spend money for a platform (which won't come back), that platforms users call you Spyware, Lame etc.
Windows users do the same thing, because it's pos software. I wish they would stop developing it for every platform and just go away.
And what the fuck is "wmf", genius?
wmf is an MPEG-4 derivative, much like the newest QuickTime format (and MPEG-4 is based on the older QuickTime format), so really the quality depends mostly on the encoding and the configuration of the player.
Other than that, I am starting to get the feeling that the biggest limit on what games can do nowadays isn't what the hardware they are being run on is capable of, whether it is a console or some gee-whiz computer with some overclocked GeForce card with Peltier cooling. It seems to me that the limiting factor is more how much time the artists on a game's production team can afford to put into the models - going back to games like GT3 and GTA3, it looks like the polygon count on any one screen is oftentimes well below the capability of the hardware.
While the effort definitely makes a difference, the dev teams for those 2 games in particular wouldn't have had to spend half as much time on the games if they weren't working with trying to stretch the capabilities of the hardware. Just getting GT3 to look like anything but a mess of jagged edges (ala Tekken Tag Tournament) must've been a long process. Plus with consoles they will usually work for a fixed framerate with v-sync, whereas in PC games they've always got to deal with the people that disable v-sync and try for triple digit framerates, just so they can watch tears on every third frame and only have half the frames displayed.
The best reason for cranking out high framerates in a game is so that you can maintain a reasonable framerate under the harshest conditions the game might see. With my hardware (the video card is pushing 2 years old now) I can crank out triple digit framerates in TFC at 1280x1024, but I choose to limit it to 72 (still below the refresh rate) in order to make the drops to 50-60 fps under hard conditions less noticable. Sensitivity to framerates is a lot like hearing, different from person to person, and variance can be quite high. One thing almost everyone has in common in both departments, though, is that dramatic changes are easily noticable by the observer/listener. While you may not be able to see more than 30 fps (most people can the way computers display them, but anyway), you should be able to tell the difference between 60 and 30 fps if it drops from 60 to 30 within a few frames as you're watching. Plus with some game engines (*COUGH*Quake1/2/3*COUGH*) having many other factors dependant on the number of frames it's rendering (such as physics and input, there are things you just can't do in Quake3 at lower than 100 fps that have nothing to do with what you can or cant see), it does become important for those people that want to get the most out of the game. Consoles are a different breed because you can write to the hardware and know that it's the only hardware running the game, and you can maximize performance by limiting the framerate to the TVs you expect to display it (newer consoles, starting pretty much with the Dreamcast, have had to take into account higher resolution displays with different refresh rates and methods, though not all games do on these systems). Most PC gamers (especially in genres like FPS games) would be fairly ticked off if they couldn't override the developer's decision to cap the framerate and run 4xFSAA with a fixed resolution of 640x480 (or less), and some rightly so (especially with cards/drivers that aren't optimized for running low resolutions, in some cases you can get better performance by going to 1024x768 or higher).