I couldn't tell you if Vista is anything better using it day to day over XP, since I've only been using it only for the last few hours, but when you compare it for ease of install between the two, Vista smokes XP like a cheap cigar.
This has to have been the easiest MS install, even with all the "Are you sure" and "Are you really, really sure" boxes (they vanished with a few checkboxes) I've ever had to deal with. It installed the OS, connected itself to the LAN and internet, and managed to install or go online and find all but one driver all by it's little lonesome. No lock-ups, no crashes, no driver disks. Color me impressed.
Gamewise I ran up Lost Coast (Half-Life 2) and ran the stress test. It only lost 7fps (130fps vs 137fps) over the game installed on XP PRO. Not too bad since all the sound and video drivers available are beta drivers at the moment. The manufacturers need to get off their collective butts.
There is a big difference between just going to the moon, looking around and heading back home and going there and setting up shop. It sounds like they are planning on running five upwards of these ships at once. It would make things alot safer and more practical sending them in groups. Launch the first couple with no crews, just supplies and equipment then send the others one at a time up with crews so that they can have a constant supply of people working and still have a ship left over as a backup. Make the jump to the next level and build ten of them, so that several can be in the air at all times.
I too measure the effectivity of my home security system by the pound, the quantity of teeth it has, and how much poop it leaves in the back yard. Most people out there will not mess with a dog, much less two or three, and they don't need electricity or a phone line to be fully functional. POTS, VOIP, or whatever. Of course the Brink's home security system won't dump the trash, pee next to the door, and eat one of your shoes if you come home late from work.
don't care if it's 65nm, 45nm or 10mm - that's a completely irrelevant (to me as a user and purchaser) implementation detail. I care about the results - how fast is it for my workloads? How much is it? How much power does it use?
The best way of looking at things. I started off Intel and stuck with them up to about 1Ghz, jumped ship stayed with AMD untill my X2 3800, now I'm back to Intel with a Duo 2 6600. We'll see in 1-2 years who'll I'll be with next. The same goes for video cards and soda. Pepsi vs Coke, Nvidia vs ATI. Doesn't matter which ever gives me what I want at the lowest price.
Of course companies spend billions trying to convince you otherwise, but all products are just commodities and are practically the same in the end.
As long as they have a cubby hole with a PC and a steady supply of soda and pizza, along with a halfway decent internet connection, they wouldn't even realize they were in space.
It is not illegal to take pictures of bridges and many other public places reguardless of what various law enforcement agencies say. The only laws on the books against taking pictures that will get you in actual trouble are military installations and nuclear power plants and peeping Tom type photos of private residents, unless you are some sort of pop star sunbathing nude in the back yard. As long as you are in a public place there is not a whole lot they can do to you, besides maybe some annoying or intimidating questioning, but no actually criminal penalties. Now businesses and some government facilities can have no photo policies, but they have no legal enforcement outside the boundaries of their little piece of property.
The same goes for taking photos in airports, minus the security stations and checkpoints or course, and buildings with trademark logos on them or buildings that have copyrighted designs. The later only extends to building other buildings with copyrighted designs and not the taking photos of them.
The appleTv is a neat toy, but it's a pretty weak toy at best. I'm sure it'll find a home in the roommate/college kid crowd, I can see it being practicle there. On the other hand I'd figure someone that would be willing to drop $3000 on speakers would expect something more usefull.
I think it's time to end this conversation, I don't like arguing with Fanboys. Your comments go around in circles and can't seem to grasp anything beyond the hype around the product, a product that is completely unproven and not on the market yet. So be it. Enjoy your aTV it'll probably suit you just fine.
This was all just a ploy to get all the Apple fan boys of the slashdot crowd out in the open. HAHA! We have them now! Send in the robots!!
(Crickets chirping) What the hell, where are the damn robots? What, they still are still downloading updates? We've got all these smug punks in one spot and you're telling me no robots!? We have to wait until SP1? Oh the humanity.
This isn't over, you hear me you bunch of Steve Jobs trouser sniffers, we'll be back. Damn it stupid robots.
Damnit accidently hit submit instead of preview again.
Let's see where did I leave off. Having the central server. One thing is you also have to realize I won't subscribe to DRM based media, at least music and video anyway, so needing a solution such as the aTV to bridge all those iTunes accounts to a central place is also unecessary. Copy and paste is all that is needed. Most people I find if they are visiting or as roommates typically have far less capable computers, even the x-girlfriend's nearly new Mac, so having the server let's me institute a level of quality control on the media and storage hardware and some much needed organization. The other rather large advantage would be that you don't need 1-5 other computers on to get it to work. Running around the house firing up machines so you can watch tv in the living room, doesn't sound very efficient or convient. Also in the defense of the media machine I can stream in both directions. Watching or listening to anything anywhere in the house only requires a device and wireless connection, and if I want to and let anyone visiting join into the system I can do so without changing anything.
As far as total space my current PC has just under 1TB of harddrive space, which at the momenty is 90% full, mostly of movies these days (DVD movie and TV-show rips) and I have another 1TB on the way as we speak. I'll have room for 4 more drives internally, so plenty of room to upgrade in the future. I'm not much of a pirate type anymore and rarely download anything, besided the occassional Tv show I miss. My worst pirating, at least by the movie industry standards would be ripping movies I rent, but I only do that due to the superior playback of harddrives vs ROMs and so I can take the movies back before I get hit with a late fee. Anything I truly love I purchase and put in a binder once ripped and out of the way. Everything else eventually gets deleated once I grow tired of watching it to make room for something else. TV shows are particularly evil when it comes to disk space.
I too perfer to watch movies on the big screen in the living room, and also want to avoid the rat's nest of wires that seems typical of computers and entertainment systems these days. PC based sound systems have come a long ways and I'm pretty happy with the 5.1 system I have, though I want to upgrade it to something with more output once I move out of the UK and back to the land of unconnected houses. The hardest thing was running all the wiring under the carpet. I'm going to redo it with some flat wiring once I get it ordered. When you walk into the room all you would see is a couch, the 5 speakers and the sub, the TV stand, the 40" LCD tv,a small external DVD-rom and wireless mouse sensor on a shelf underneath it. The wireless keyboard and mouse hide under the couch along with a remote. The only wires coming out of the PC are the DVI>HDMI cable, three linked together speaker wires, and a power cord. There are a few more coming from the Nintendo Wii leading directly to the TV since stereo is all it's really capable of anyway and the speakers build into the TV are more than adequate. I've got a large transformer there for the Wii, but it'll go by by once I pick up a different power supply for the thing. I do love the 220vAC power over here, but it makes it a pain if the devices aren't dual voltage which the Wii for some God auwful reason is not. Network connections for both the PC and the Wii are wireless so no LAN cables needed, though I wouldn't mind them if I had a house with the runs pre-installed for bandwidth and lack of interference sake. Once the 802.11n quits farting around and sets the standard, they are getting close, I'll jump up from G to N. All in all a very clean set-up. You can eliminate alot from a system by dumping the reciever and various media players and go with self-amplified speakers.
You would laugh if you saw my datacenter, aka my computer room. Housing in the UK is what I would call optimistic. Such as the house I rented. It
Well first off, I'm not an Apple customer, so ever bothering with iTunes in the first place is a moot point. My last girlfriend nagged me a bit to quit being so narrow minded and to try new things, so I did and used iTunes for about 6 months. The deal breaker for me with iTunes is once they got your money they could give a rats ass wether or not you manage to delete your content. Want to download it a second time? Then give us more money. Valve's steam service is just about perfect in what I've expect from an online delivery service. You buy the content and they have your back if you ever loose the content or need to move it someplace else. You can redownload it as many times as you want. Apple could just about eliminate the number of pissed off customers that leave their service after their first misshap.
I'm not overly excited about popular music these days since radio beats it to death before I could ever go out and buy it, and finally I found 320x240 and even the upgrade to 640x480 for video to be entirely lacking. Yes alot of people don't watch TV on their computer monitor, but when you have a dual monitor set-up 24" and 17" monitor set-up you do, which I have. It looks pretty bad on either of them. It cannot compair to a DVD rip or a pirate download from bittorrent.
Now your example of the house full of guys is exactly why I moved towards a central server, because I was living in a house full of guys. Three total + 1-3 girlfriends and another 1-3 regular friends living on the couch during the weekends sponging off the high-speed since getting high speed was just about impossible where I used to live. That meant anywhere from three to six computers, tripple it on weekends we threw a LAN party, were pushing and pulling data around the 100bT wired network. The wireless G I later upgraded to could keep up fairly well as long as I hid all the 2.4gHz cordless phones. The problem was as soon as anyone pulled from your computer anything you were doing would slow to a craw since each additional draw on a harddrive eats up more than the last. By putting in multiple harddrives and moving everything to a server eliminated that problem.
Substitute in XP in for Vista and all the comments would have the same tone and probably the same comments made during XP's launch.
Here are the typical responses I expect to see here.
Too expensive...
Too demanding on the hardware, why doesn't it work perfect on my five year old computer?...
Blatently copies Apple...
Apple does it better (even though it's a blatent copy)...
Does too much, bloatware...
Doesn't do enough, were is support for my win95 aps...
Microsoft suxs, Bill Gates is the Devil...
Apple is cool, Steve Jobs is God...
Security is to restrictive, I don't need a baby sitter...
Won't protect me from myself, where is the security?!...
Too much of it is automatic, why I can't I just manually type in registry info?...
Plug and play doesn't work, why can't the OS do everything for me?...
OMG the hackers will have viruses, why doesn't it include better protection...
Fucking monopoly, they included better protection and are driving out the little guy...
Who gives a crap about gaming, Apple is better is every way...
Blah blah blah blah.:)
Personally I'm looking forward to getting my new machine that I'm building set-up with Vista. The last of the parts and the OS disc should reach me over here in the UK by next week.:D
Damn dude you wrote a novel didn't you? I'll get into a few things I agree with and disagree with.
I have nothing against the "It just works" crowd. Personally I try to stick with that as much as possible and shun companies that don't provide that kind of service.
:) Don't give me the switch to Apple then you PC fan boy, because up until very recently Apple didn't just work especially in gaming and other things, and now I'm old and set in my ways and won't switch just out of spite.
The iTV like I said is a neat little device and will fill it's niche well. For me to try to use the iTV device is backwards for what I want. I want to store at the TV and stream in the other direction, not pulling from all over the place to the iTV. I don't like having media scattered all over the place since it makes organizing it, transfering it, and backing it up a chore. Not to mention when someone starts pulling media from a machine you are using or may need to shut down can cause problems. If I was much more pressed for space then the media server would end up in a closet with water cooling pulling double duty as a hot water preheater for the house, and the iTV at the TV. I also find streaming to be a very over hyped and over rated method of playback. I'd rather have it cached on the machine and then played back. I'm sure the iTV has some amount of ram or flash devoted to doing the same, but wireless is unrelyable and only takes your thick roommate to set the wireless phone down next to it or the router for the 40th time and you yelling at them to stop doing that to jam the signal. Having everything stored at the player eliminates this.
The only real advantage the iTV has over the media PC, once you disregard DRV function and storage space, is that they have a 100% complete interface, much like the iPod does now. What it does, it most likely will do very well, but at the same time I expect my device to do other things as well, which at the moment the iTV cannot do. A mediaPC with a similar piece of software could do the exact same thing along with quite a big more, such as browse the web, play games, play content outside of the iTunes little world, talk on skype, plus anything else I can come up with.
The one thing you and I are on the exact same page is I too think new optical media (BR & HDDVD) is obsolete right out of the box. Having all your media stored on a harddrive elimnates the need for every needing to upgrade to a new technology since everything is just a firmware or software update or codec download away. Of course there is always bigger and faster when it comes to hardware, but you don't have to start over with a new player and media library every time you upgrade.
As far as all the various monitor types, I'm pretty happy with LCD, though I'm looking forward to OLED and some of the others. I do wish the media and hardware people would quit playing games and just post the specs of their stuff in native format (height and width!), rather than what it is compatable with. Being 1080i ready is a nifty way of saying it can scale a 1080i signal down to a 720p screen without actually being able to display 1080 lines. It would make comparisons and knowing how things will work together much less confusing for everyone.
Hehe 720x480 is not any more 480p than 640x480. There is also NTSC 270x480, Laserdisc 560x480, Betamax 250x480, VHS 240x480, S-VHS (400x480, 640x480, 704x480, 852x480) and a half dozen more. Back to 720x480 and 640x480, one is DVD wide screen and other is simply a VGA video monitor standard (There is no TV broad cast equivalent). With 640x480 you just end up letter boxing, formating, or stretching it to make it fit. They both can be progressive or interlaced, but progressive is always preffered. I'm sure there is an offical definition someplace as to what 480 is, but looking over the "Display Resolution" on wikipedia there are just too many formats to pick from. Apple picking 720p is a smart choice, for the same reasons I
The thing with most IP-TV offerings they look to be no more than changes to the video on demand offering. Instead of scheduled video on demand (the same show starting every 15 minutes on 6-8 different channels) you are going to be able to make a purchase from a library. It'll be buffered in a DVR and won't start until enough is download to play while the rest is completed. I can see it being popular with the new movie release crowd as well as the latest episode of tv shows that will release globally to the IP-TV crowd and can be pre-ordered, so when you get home from work or wake up in the morning it'll be waiting for you.
As far as the bandwidth issues there are really two kind of bandwidth, network and internet backbone connection. If people would share files only across the ISP's own local network I don't think they'd ever gripe about people being hogs. It's when they connect to that guy over seas to get the latest episode of "show x" that they have to fork out cash or swap service with other bandwidth providers to make the connection that they start getting a little stingy. I could always tell on bittorrent when I connected to someone in town, I'd get 1-2mbps transfer rates from them and they'd have a similar IP address as mine.
Personally my favorite ISP is the US Postal Service. With a $10 flate rate box and some harddrives you can "upload/download" an awful lot of stuff faster an cheaper than any service and ISP provides!
I'm not sure what to make of the Apple iTV, seeing as iTunes until recently only offerd 320x240 resolution for TV downloads. They've boosted it up to 640x480 which is nothing more than 480p. It's going to be 480p for the movies too which is not good enough for me, but it is a start. Considering how neurotic the movie industry is, I'm surprised they are offering anything at all. There are plenty of devices that already do what the iTv can do, and nothing even compares to a semi-decent media PC with a ton of harddrive space tucked behind the TV. I'm sure if they find a market it'll be in the non-computer crowd that just wants it to "work", which is a very large market indead, and the fact that the thing is even smaller than a Wii which is saying alot. To get me to buy it it would have to work outside of the iTunes player, which I can't stand, and to get me back into iTunes offering 720p content.
Heh, the funny thing is when everyone keeps quoting the "Big Surge" in HD TV sales, what they are usually talking about are 720p HD tv's, not 1080p, whether they know it or not. The same goes for 90% of the HD content on cable, it's usually 720p not 1080p. The last funny thing is all those people that ran out and bought 1080i HD TV's typically bought a 720p or lower resolution TV that has the ability to deal with 1080 signals, but not actually able to display it, in other words down-scaling and letter boxes.
720p is hardly a compromise, it is in every sense of the word HD and looks great. Price wise it is the sweet spot in HD. By the time prices for 1080p come down or my paycheck goes up, I'll be looking to replace my 40" 720p that I bought this month. Hopefully by then they have figured out a way to display 480i-720p media without all the compression artifacts that show up on 1080p screens.
Just for fun if you are the type that won't be happy until you have a very tough time telling the difference between a photograph and your TV screen you are going to have to wait a few more years for the WQUXGA screen resolutions to hit the market 3840x2400 or 2400p, though we are getting closer the 2560x1600 monitors came out just this last year (so much for 1080p). That is just under 10 megapixals which is where digital images catches up to printing photos. There are screen size and scaling issues with bigger monitors obviously, but you get my drift.
HDMI isn't going to do anything except cut down on cable clutter. DVI cables don't have as much bandwidth capability as HDMI which also happens to be able to carry sound as well as video, which is why there is such a big push towards HDMI.
The only DRM in the HDMI interface is either in the the playing device, video card, software, or receiving device such as an LCD tv or monitor, not the cable itself.
Vista is not an evil plot to force everyone to move to trusted computing and mandatory DRM. If they tried to make it like the Zume player's wireless that DRM'd everything reguardless of its status they wouldn't be able to sell hardly any software. None of those things will keep you from watching or playing HD video streams that are not laced with DRM. So any unprotected content or games will work just fine above 720p.
So in other words don't buy any media that has DRM or cannot be easily cracked. Hell take it one step further, rent every piece of media you can and if you have to buy it donate it to your local library after you are through with it so everyone can "rent" it for free. It's amazing how quicking a library's DVD collection grows when people start donating a few movies every year along with the library's own purchases of 1-2 a month.
Our local library has gotten to the point were you can at least find the first couple of seasons of almost any TV show you can think of, dozens of History channel and Discovery channel shows, and over well over 2000 movies. Sure they typically only have one copy of each movie, but at the same time three free rentals is hard to beat. You could pull your three take them home, rip them take them back, get three more, rip them, take them back, rinse and repeat. If you were motivated you could probably rip 30-40 in a day. NetFlix and even a little Yarring on bittorrent can't come close to that kind of "bandwidth".
The trick to avoiding the whole "HD obsolences" is to make sure you buy into the "other other" HD...720p or skip TV's altogether and go buy that 24"+ sized LCD computer monitor you've always wanted.
720p HD (1366x768) plays well with both the past and the future and it's more or less the lower limit of screen resolution required to use it with a computer hooked up to it without going through the joys of having to play around to make the text of webpages and programs readable. Sure 1080 looks nice, right up until you have to pay the equivalent of a healthy downpayment for a new car. That got me looking elsewhere and 720p seemed like a nice fit since it's most likely going to take 5-10 years before 1080p HD becomes the "common" standard.
By the way the Wii looks pretty damn nice on it too, just got to keep the friends from sailing a remote through it, we've already had one lamp KIA'd during an enthusiastic round of drunk tennis.
Want to see what those crazy Video developers are up to even make 1080p look like poop? Do a search for "Display Resolution" on Wikipedia.
1080p Bah that's rubbish, I want my 4800p resolution monitor. Just imagin the detail you'd get out of video formated for that! Of course you'd only be able to save about 15 minutes of video on a terrabyte sized piece of media, so Lord of the Rings Complete Director's cut trillogy might not be out any time soon.
uh, that's like what people are already doing with bittorrent now. Bittorrent might as well be called tv/movie torrent.:)
Of course lot's of bandwidth could be freed up from cable WANS if they just simply let you subscribe to only the channels you wanted vs the 100 channel nuthin on packages.
We had similar things in California. The severe anti-gunness of the People's Repulic of California stops about 40 miles outside the counties of all the major cities. Lot's of local sherif ran and were elected based on a refusal to enforce confiscations and registration schemes. Even the the State Prosecutors finally said they wouldn't enforce the new guns laws that were coming out in droves every every year since they hadn't even had a chance to figure out the old ones yet and there were alot that ran afoul of the State Constitution.
My point exactly, I hadn't paid too much attention to the case after it started. I find the government arguement to be stupid. They get to regulate it because her personal use growing would impact the illegal market.
Though from what I've read it sounds like this clash is far from over.
There is already the hammer sol'n for the RFID in passports which takes care of the RFID without invalidating the passport.
The real power is in the States, it's just that most people are ignorant about government and only care about a free check from Uncle Sam, which of course Uncle Sam took out of their own pocket anyway.
Yes and no, if the state you live in has laws against it, then no, but if they don't then yes it is legal. Now the only time the Federal Government can get involved is when you take your car full of it accross state lines with the intent to sell then you get back to it being illegal, but on a Federal Level.
That's why the Federal Gov't made a huge stink about it a few years ago and tried to arrest a bunch of people in CA who were legally growing and selling it IN STATE to other people with "Medical Pescriptions", but for the most part they were unable to prove these people were selling it over the state line so the charges were dropped.
I would strongly suggest you check with a lawyer before you start cultivating anything in the back yard for personal use. Relying on slashdot lawyers could get you in some trouble.
Gamers don't need Dual video cards, cards with 512mb ram, 256mb, 128mb, 64mb, 32mb, 24mb, 6mb, 4mb, 3D graphics cards, 2D color graphics cards, color graphics, hell any kind of graphics or a monitor either....
Gamers don't need broad band, wireless or wire networks, 56k dial-up, 28.8k dialup, 9k, 6k, 900 baud, 600, 300.....
Gamers don't need a wireless laser mouse, laser mouse, optical mouse, three button mouse, a mouse, a joystick
Gamers don't need Vista,XP,98...well Me and 95 did suck much
Gamers don't need 2gb of ram, 1gb, 512mb, 256mb, 128mb, 64mb, 24mb, 12mb....
Yep all those "bad bad people making us have all those horrible horrible upgrade REQUIREMENTS. DAMN THEM, DAMN THEM ALL TO HELL for ruining EVERYTHING. We were happy then....Pong was enough....we had plenty of quarters....we didn't need anything else."
From a developement standpoint it is somewhat interesting what he is doing.
Depending on the mission a solider has a limited amount of weight he can carry. 40lbs for armor is alot for the guy humping it out in the mountains, but not so bad for the guy riding in a vehicle or standing at the gate who doesn't have to carry his own ammo, water, food, and pack.
Of course the military is already working on that too from making existing things lighter, to robotic pack-mules, and my personal favorite powered exoskeletons. The last have been getting steadily better every year. They're slow and noisy but they now can carry themselves plus another 150lbs (300lbs total) at a walking pace. Take that guy's idea add another 110 lbs of armor, weapon, ammo, and fuel and you'll have a good idea of what they are like.
Slashdot Mirror
This has to have been the easiest MS install, even with all the "Are you sure" and "Are you really, really sure" boxes (they vanished with a few checkboxes) I've ever had to deal with. It installed the OS, connected itself to the LAN and internet, and managed to install or go online and find all but one driver all by it's little lonesome. No lock-ups, no crashes, no driver disks. Color me impressed.
Gamewise I ran up Lost Coast (Half-Life 2) and ran the stress test. It only lost 7fps (130fps vs 137fps) over the game installed on XP PRO. Not too bad since all the sound and video drivers available are beta drivers at the moment. The manufacturers need to get off their collective butts.
There is a big difference between just going to the moon, looking around and heading back home and going there and setting up shop. It sounds like they are planning on running five upwards of these ships at once. It would make things alot safer and more practical sending them in groups. Launch the first couple with no crews, just supplies and equipment then send the others one at a time up with crews so that they can have a constant supply of people working and still have a ship left over as a backup. Make the jump to the next level and build ten of them, so that several can be in the air at all times.
I too measure the effectivity of my home security system by the pound, the quantity of teeth it has, and how much poop it leaves in the back yard. Most people out there will not mess with a dog, much less two or three, and they don't need electricity or a phone line to be fully functional. POTS, VOIP, or whatever. Of course the Brink's home security system won't dump the trash, pee next to the door, and eat one of your shoes if you come home late from work.
The best way of looking at things. I started off Intel and stuck with them up to about 1Ghz, jumped ship stayed with AMD untill my X2 3800, now I'm back to Intel with a Duo 2 6600. We'll see in 1-2 years who'll I'll be with next. The same goes for video cards and soda. Pepsi vs Coke, Nvidia vs ATI. Doesn't matter which ever gives me what I want at the lowest price.
Of course companies spend billions trying to convince you otherwise, but all products are just commodities and are practically the same in the end.
As long as they have a cubby hole with a PC and a steady supply of soda and pizza, along with a halfway decent internet connection, they wouldn't even realize they were in space.
The same goes for taking photos in airports, minus the security stations and checkpoints or course, and buildings with trademark logos on them or buildings that have copyrighted designs. The later only extends to building other buildings with copyrighted designs and not the taking photos of them.
I think it's time to end this conversation, I don't like arguing with Fanboys. Your comments go around in circles and can't seem to grasp anything beyond the hype around the product, a product that is completely unproven and not on the market yet. So be it. Enjoy your aTV it'll probably suit you just fine.
(Crickets chirping) What the hell, where are the damn robots? What, they still are still downloading updates? We've got all these smug punks in one spot and you're telling me no robots!? We have to wait until SP1? Oh the humanity.
This isn't over, you hear me you bunch of Steve Jobs trouser sniffers, we'll be back. Damn it stupid robots.
that's the difference
Let's see where did I leave off. Having the central server. One thing is you also have to realize I won't subscribe to DRM based media, at least music and video anyway, so needing a solution such as the aTV to bridge all those iTunes accounts to a central place is also unecessary. Copy and paste is all that is needed. Most people I find if they are visiting or as roommates typically have far less capable computers, even the x-girlfriend's nearly new Mac, so having the server let's me institute a level of quality control on the media and storage hardware and some much needed organization. The other rather large advantage would be that you don't need 1-5 other computers on to get it to work. Running around the house firing up machines so you can watch tv in the living room, doesn't sound very efficient or convient. Also in the defense of the media machine I can stream in both directions. Watching or listening to anything anywhere in the house only requires a device and wireless connection, and if I want to and let anyone visiting join into the system I can do so without changing anything.
As far as total space my current PC has just under 1TB of harddrive space, which at the momenty is 90% full, mostly of movies these days (DVD movie and TV-show rips) and I have another 1TB on the way as we speak. I'll have room for 4 more drives internally, so plenty of room to upgrade in the future. I'm not much of a pirate type anymore and rarely download anything, besided the occassional Tv show I miss. My worst pirating, at least by the movie industry standards would be ripping movies I rent, but I only do that due to the superior playback of harddrives vs ROMs and so I can take the movies back before I get hit with a late fee. Anything I truly love I purchase and put in a binder once ripped and out of the way. Everything else eventually gets deleated once I grow tired of watching it to make room for something else. TV shows are particularly evil when it comes to disk space.
I too perfer to watch movies on the big screen in the living room, and also want to avoid the rat's nest of wires that seems typical of computers and entertainment systems these days. PC based sound systems have come a long ways and I'm pretty happy with the 5.1 system I have, though I want to upgrade it to something with more output once I move out of the UK and back to the land of unconnected houses. The hardest thing was running all the wiring under the carpet. I'm going to redo it with some flat wiring once I get it ordered. When you walk into the room all you would see is a couch, the 5 speakers and the sub, the TV stand, the 40" LCD tv,a small external DVD-rom and wireless mouse sensor on a shelf underneath it. The wireless keyboard and mouse hide under the couch along with a remote. The only wires coming out of the PC are the DVI>HDMI cable, three linked together speaker wires, and a power cord. There are a few more coming from the Nintendo Wii leading directly to the TV since stereo is all it's really capable of anyway and the speakers build into the TV are more than adequate. I've got a large transformer there for the Wii, but it'll go by by once I pick up a different power supply for the thing. I do love the 220vAC power over here, but it makes it a pain if the devices aren't dual voltage which the Wii for some God auwful reason is not. Network connections for both the PC and the Wii are wireless so no LAN cables needed, though I wouldn't mind them if I had a house with the runs pre-installed for bandwidth and lack of interference sake. Once the 802.11n quits farting around and sets the standard, they are getting close, I'll jump up from G to N. All in all a very clean set-up. You can eliminate alot from a system by dumping the reciever and various media players and go with self-amplified speakers.
You would laugh if you saw my datacenter, aka my computer room. Housing in the UK is what I would call optimistic. Such as the house I rented. It
You are very cool and Froody, and you smell great.
I'm not overly excited about popular music these days since radio beats it to death before I could ever go out and buy it, and finally I found 320x240 and even the upgrade to 640x480 for video to be entirely lacking. Yes alot of people don't watch TV on their computer monitor, but when you have a dual monitor set-up 24" and 17" monitor set-up you do, which I have. It looks pretty bad on either of them. It cannot compair to a DVD rip or a pirate download from bittorrent.
Now your example of the house full of guys is exactly why I moved towards a central server, because I was living in a house full of guys. Three total + 1-3 girlfriends and another 1-3 regular friends living on the couch during the weekends sponging off the high-speed since getting high speed was just about impossible where I used to live. That meant anywhere from three to six computers, tripple it on weekends we threw a LAN party, were pushing and pulling data around the 100bT wired network. The wireless G I later upgraded to could keep up fairly well as long as I hid all the 2.4gHz cordless phones. The problem was as soon as anyone pulled from your computer anything you were doing would slow to a craw since each additional draw on a harddrive eats up more than the last. By putting in multiple harddrives and moving everything to a server eliminated that problem.
Here are the typical responses I expect to see here.
Too expensive...
Too demanding on the hardware, why doesn't it work perfect on my five year old computer?...
Blatently copies Apple...
Apple does it better (even though it's a blatent copy)... Does too much, bloatware...
Doesn't do enough, were is support for my win95 aps...
Microsoft suxs, Bill Gates is the Devil...
Apple is cool, Steve Jobs is God...
Security is to restrictive, I don't need a baby sitter...
Won't protect me from myself, where is the security?!...
Too much of it is automatic, why I can't I just manually type in registry info?...
Plug and play doesn't work, why can't the OS do everything for me?...
OMG the hackers will have viruses, why doesn't it include better protection...
Fucking monopoly, they included better protection and are driving out the little guy...
Who gives a crap about gaming, Apple is better is every way...
Blah blah blah blah. :)
Personally I'm looking forward to getting my new machine that I'm building set-up with Vista. The last of the parts and the OS disc should reach me over here in the UK by next week. :D
I have nothing against the "It just works" crowd. Personally I try to stick with that as much as possible and shun companies that don't provide that kind of service.
The iTV like I said is a neat little device and will fill it's niche well. For me to try to use the iTV device is backwards for what I want. I want to store at the TV and stream in the other direction, not pulling from all over the place to the iTV. I don't like having media scattered all over the place since it makes organizing it, transfering it, and backing it up a chore. Not to mention when someone starts pulling media from a machine you are using or may need to shut down can cause problems. If I was much more pressed for space then the media server would end up in a closet with water cooling pulling double duty as a hot water preheater for the house, and the iTV at the TV. I also find streaming to be a very over hyped and over rated method of playback. I'd rather have it cached on the machine and then played back. I'm sure the iTV has some amount of ram or flash devoted to doing the same, but wireless is unrelyable and only takes your thick roommate to set the wireless phone down next to it or the router for the 40th time and you yelling at them to stop doing that to jam the signal. Having everything stored at the player eliminates this.
The only real advantage the iTV has over the media PC, once you disregard DRV function and storage space, is that they have a 100% complete interface, much like the iPod does now. What it does, it most likely will do very well, but at the same time I expect my device to do other things as well, which at the moment the iTV cannot do. A mediaPC with a similar piece of software could do the exact same thing along with quite a big more, such as browse the web, play games, play content outside of the iTunes little world, talk on skype, plus anything else I can come up with.
The one thing you and I are on the exact same page is I too think new optical media (BR & HDDVD) is obsolete right out of the box. Having all your media stored on a harddrive elimnates the need for every needing to upgrade to a new technology since everything is just a firmware or software update or codec download away. Of course there is always bigger and faster when it comes to hardware, but you don't have to start over with a new player and media library every time you upgrade.
As far as all the various monitor types, I'm pretty happy with LCD, though I'm looking forward to OLED and some of the others. I do wish the media and hardware people would quit playing games and just post the specs of their stuff in native format (height and width!), rather than what it is compatable with. Being 1080i ready is a nifty way of saying it can scale a 1080i signal down to a 720p screen without actually being able to display 1080 lines. It would make comparisons and knowing how things will work together much less confusing for everyone.
Hehe 720x480 is not any more 480p than 640x480. There is also NTSC 270x480, Laserdisc 560x480, Betamax 250x480, VHS 240x480, S-VHS (400x480, 640x480, 704x480, 852x480) and a half dozen more. Back to 720x480 and 640x480, one is DVD wide screen and other is simply a VGA video monitor standard (There is no TV broad cast equivalent). With 640x480 you just end up letter boxing, formating, or stretching it to make it fit. They both can be progressive or interlaced, but progressive is always preffered. I'm sure there is an offical definition someplace as to what 480 is, but looking over the "Display Resolution" on wikipedia there are just too many formats to pick from. Apple picking 720p is a smart choice, for the same reasons I
As far as the bandwidth issues there are really two kind of bandwidth, network and internet backbone connection. If people would share files only across the ISP's own local network I don't think they'd ever gripe about people being hogs. It's when they connect to that guy over seas to get the latest episode of "show x" that they have to fork out cash or swap service with other bandwidth providers to make the connection that they start getting a little stingy. I could always tell on bittorrent when I connected to someone in town, I'd get 1-2mbps transfer rates from them and they'd have a similar IP address as mine.
Personally my favorite ISP is the US Postal Service. With a $10 flate rate box and some harddrives you can "upload/download" an awful lot of stuff faster an cheaper than any service and ISP provides!
Heh, the funny thing is when everyone keeps quoting the "Big Surge" in HD TV sales, what they are usually talking about are 720p HD tv's, not 1080p, whether they know it or not. The same goes for 90% of the HD content on cable, it's usually 720p not 1080p. The last funny thing is all those people that ran out and bought 1080i HD TV's typically bought a 720p or lower resolution TV that has the ability to deal with 1080 signals, but not actually able to display it, in other words down-scaling and letter boxes.
720p is hardly a compromise, it is in every sense of the word HD and looks great. Price wise it is the sweet spot in HD. By the time prices for 1080p come down or my paycheck goes up, I'll be looking to replace my 40" 720p that I bought this month. Hopefully by then they have figured out a way to display 480i-720p media without all the compression artifacts that show up on 1080p screens.
Just for fun if you are the type that won't be happy until you have a very tough time telling the difference between a photograph and your TV screen you are going to have to wait a few more years for the WQUXGA screen resolutions to hit the market 3840x2400 or 2400p, though we are getting closer the 2560x1600 monitors came out just this last year (so much for 1080p). That is just under 10 megapixals which is where digital images catches up to printing photos. There are screen size and scaling issues with bigger monitors obviously, but you get my drift.
The only DRM in the HDMI interface is either in the the playing device, video card, software, or receiving device such as an LCD tv or monitor, not the cable itself.
Vista is not an evil plot to force everyone to move to trusted computing and mandatory DRM. If they tried to make it like the Zume player's wireless that DRM'd everything reguardless of its status they wouldn't be able to sell hardly any software. None of those things will keep you from watching or playing HD video streams that are not laced with DRM. So any unprotected content or games will work just fine above 720p.
So in other words don't buy any media that has DRM or cannot be easily cracked. Hell take it one step further, rent every piece of media you can and if you have to buy it donate it to your local library after you are through with it so everyone can "rent" it for free. It's amazing how quicking a library's DVD collection grows when people start donating a few movies every year along with the library's own purchases of 1-2 a month.
Our local library has gotten to the point were you can at least find the first couple of seasons of almost any TV show you can think of, dozens of History channel and Discovery channel shows, and over well over 2000 movies. Sure they typically only have one copy of each movie, but at the same time three free rentals is hard to beat. You could pull your three take them home, rip them take them back, get three more, rip them, take them back, rinse and repeat. If you were motivated you could probably rip 30-40 in a day. NetFlix and even a little Yarring on bittorrent can't come close to that kind of "bandwidth".
720p HD (1366x768) plays well with both the past and the future and it's more or less the lower limit of screen resolution required to use it with a computer hooked up to it without going through the joys of having to play around to make the text of webpages and programs readable. Sure 1080 looks nice, right up until you have to pay the equivalent of a healthy downpayment for a new car. That got me looking elsewhere and 720p seemed like a nice fit since it's most likely going to take 5-10 years before 1080p HD becomes the "common" standard.
By the way the Wii looks pretty damn nice on it too, just got to keep the friends from sailing a remote through it, we've already had one lamp KIA'd during an enthusiastic round of drunk tennis.
Want to see what those crazy Video developers are up to even make 1080p look like poop? Do a search for "Display Resolution" on Wikipedia.
1080p Bah that's rubbish, I want my 4800p resolution monitor. Just imagin the detail you'd get out of video formated for that! Of course you'd only be able to save about 15 minutes of video on a terrabyte sized piece of media, so Lord of the Rings Complete Director's cut trillogy might not be out any time soon.
Of course lot's of bandwidth could be freed up from cable WANS if they just simply let you subscribe to only the channels you wanted vs the 100 channel nuthin on packages.
We had similar things in California. The severe anti-gunness of the People's Repulic of California stops about 40 miles outside the counties of all the major cities. Lot's of local sherif ran and were elected based on a refusal to enforce confiscations and registration schemes. Even the the State Prosecutors finally said they wouldn't enforce the new guns laws that were coming out in droves every every year since they hadn't even had a chance to figure out the old ones yet and there were alot that ran afoul of the State Constitution.
Though from what I've read it sounds like this clash is far from over.
The real power is in the States, it's just that most people are ignorant about government and only care about a free check from Uncle Sam, which of course Uncle Sam took out of their own pocket anyway.
That's why the Federal Gov't made a huge stink about it a few years ago and tried to arrest a bunch of people in CA who were legally growing and selling it IN STATE to other people with "Medical Pescriptions", but for the most part they were unable to prove these people were selling it over the state line so the charges were dropped.
I would strongly suggest you check with a lawyer before you start cultivating anything in the back yard for personal use. Relying on slashdot lawyers could get you in some trouble.
Gamers don't need Dx9,8,7,6,5,4...
Gamers don't need Dual video cards, cards with 512mb ram, 256mb, 128mb, 64mb, 32mb, 24mb, 6mb, 4mb, 3D graphics cards, 2D color graphics cards, color graphics, hell any kind of graphics or a monitor either....
Gamers don't need broad band, wireless or wire networks, 56k dial-up, 28.8k dialup, 9k, 6k, 900 baud, 600, 300.....
Gamers don't need a wireless laser mouse, laser mouse, optical mouse, three button mouse, a mouse, a joystick
Gamers don't need Vista,XP,98...well Me and 95 did suck much
Gamers don't need 2gb of ram, 1gb, 512mb, 256mb, 128mb, 64mb, 24mb, 12mb....
Gamers don't need multi-core CPU's, 4ghz CPU's, 3ghz, 2ghz, 1ghz, 700mhz, 500mhz, 333mhz, 266mhz, 133mhz, 66mhz, 33mhz, 10mhz.....
Yep all those "bad bad people making us have all those horrible horrible upgrade REQUIREMENTS. DAMN THEM, DAMN THEM ALL TO HELL for ruining EVERYTHING. We were happy then....Pong was enough....we had plenty of quarters....we didn't need anything else."
Yeah right :P
Depending on the mission a solider has a limited amount of weight he can carry. 40lbs for armor is alot for the guy humping it out in the mountains, but not so bad for the guy riding in a vehicle or standing at the gate who doesn't have to carry his own ammo, water, food, and pack.
Of course the military is already working on that too from making existing things lighter, to robotic pack-mules, and my personal favorite powered exoskeletons. The last have been getting steadily better every year. They're slow and noisy but they now can carry themselves plus another 150lbs (300lbs total) at a walking pace. Take that guy's idea add another 110 lbs of armor, weapon, ammo, and fuel and you'll have a good idea of what they are like.