Last I check, there were no calls to convert EXISTING, legacy documents to any new, open standard.
Then you haven't been paying attention for over nine years, as this is why Microsoft moved document formats around in 2000 because virtually the entire IT/Business community wanted legacy support standardized.
However, if your saying that the OOXML standard automatically includes these legacy documents -- ie, those documents are part of the standard -- then you still need to explain how those tags map, rather than just move them to the legacy section and leave them unexplained.
Ok, the person that posted above me, complained because the standard says they 'have' to implement these legacy import qualifications (which is NOT true) and hated OOXML for that reason. Now you argue these are not documented (which is also incorrect) and now you use it as a basis for you to hate OOXML.
So which it, people hate it because it has legacy readability support or people hate it because the legacy readability features are not required or documented?
Which version of the truth will you or someone go with next to support your 'personal' disdain for OOXML and try to create reasons to hate it to satisfy your emotion beliefs?
Hey, maybe you could argue you hate it because Dolly Parton didn't write it, and you only listen to her music and the rest sucks?
Similarly, I cringe whenever I notice a grammatical mistake in any of my posts.
Wow, so you judge people on whether they run their posts through a word processor or just type on the fly, knowing that simple errors happen to all mortals?
It is nice to know I can disregard your comment based on your lack of properly using an apostrophe in [persons] since by your standards I should assume you are an idiot.
Maybe you should support OOXML and actually use Microsoft Word for your posts in the future, I'm sure it would alert you to these errors and your level of ignorance could be hidden from the rest of us.
*Smile*
P.S. If you think profanity would skew what an officer thinks of a person or would offend them, then you under estimate their intelligence as well.
Microsoft "INK" is funny as it is a decedent from "Pen Windows" which was inferior to "Go Computing" at the time. Microsoft's monopoly allowed them to threaten OEMS and have them abandon support for Go's platform.
Nice theory, it doesn't support reality. I was a senior partner of an OEM company at this time that provided software and equipment for several pen computing markets. (One of our software projects from the time is still in use on the Space Station.)
First, today's INK from MS is only descended in terms of it is the same type of feature.
The INK technolgy is completely different, has different features, functions, and meets different standards based on the change in computing power and needs of TabletPC application innovations.
Go Computing? Really? Don't even try to argue MS used its monopoly, as people choose pen computing for Windows because they could USE THEIR EXISTING DOS AND WINDOWS APPLCIATIONS.
Have you even used the Pinpoint OS supplied by Go Corporation? It was crap... Grid would have been a better example as it was DOS based, but again, they failed because of the Windows Boom, BEFORE MS was even close to being a monopoly.
Nice revisionism, next time know you are trying to fool when making crap up...
BTW, autoSpaceLikeWord95 being deprecated isn't sufficient. Deprecated means it's been superseded by other functionality and shouldn't appear in new documents. However, as part of the standard an application still needs to be able to properly interpret it, and thus at the very minimum it should be stated what tags and settings apply the same functionality.
Exactly, and there ARE reasons for this. We already have 15 years of documents in Word format, that will NOT be converted because they are ALREADY archived for many reasons. This is also why there is deprecated functionality to 'interpret' WordPerfect file format contexts as well in OOXML that Word originally supported years and years ago, when WP was the standard being archived.
So we should just abandon all these documents, and all the WP documents because?
If you think you are going to get the FBI, or the CIA or any Large organization to open up all their archives and convert them to ODF (and lose features and formating), you are out of your mind.
MS at least 'understands' the need to preserve the need to read achived formats from this point in history back, and is trying to prevent the versioning mess from stoping from this point forward. Textual format prior to this already were fairly standardized.
If you go back to Office 2000 when MS moved to XML, you will find they did so for specific reasons to keep older formats viable and try to establish a standard format at that time. Just like they tried with RTF years and years before and like they did with XHTML, which did get accepted.
ODF is late the game and still doesn't support features word processors from 15 years ago were using, and we are not even just talking about Word, but how about placement features of AmiPro, or WordPerfect 5.5 and 6.0 features that ODF can't even preserve. How can anyone in their right mind want to stand behind a format that can't even preserve the textual context let alone the layout of their documents?
If you want to debate, please try minding your language. It takes away from your argument when you feel you have to swear to emphasize your point.
Ok, not my argument, but this is the smallest minded comment I have read in a while.
If you think particular 'letters/words or sounds combined together in a specific order' is somehow bad or negates someone's intellect, then you should immediately go find a shrink and find out what the 'heck' is the matter with you.
I work in health care technology and I have never heard of the INK standard. (A quick search shows that Google has never heard of it either...). I call shenanigans. This may exist as some proprietary obscure standard (and it probably deserves to die).
Not sure how you could be in the medical field and never heard of TabletPCs, Ink, or EMR, heck maybe you don't work in the medical industry.
However, I would assume you knew how to use Google, but apparently that is outside your capabilities.
Here is the first five or so search results. Go educate yourself, at least learn WTF EMR is. Maybe you might want to do this before you post in the future before you jump into a converation that is apparently over your head and call someone a liar.
Industry x bought a ton of MS software and so is dependant upon its quirks. Rather than do a Google search to determine that 'INK' is a proprietary clone of SVG,
Right here is where I and most other readers realize you are insane and have no freaking idea what you are talking about.
Since when does SVG handle pen pressure, angle, stroke speed, direction creation? When did SVG implement character recognition based on this data? Ink is more than an image or even the data stored that created the Ink, it is an ecosystem of handling the Ink in both graphical and textual contexts at the same time.
There is an easy fix, don't write software for Apple's Marketing 'technology'.
Instead write your code for an OSS phone or/and port it to Windows Mobile, there are far more Windows Mobile phones than iPhones, so you even get a bigger market.
In addition to more features, without restrictions, as you can write ANYTHING for the other platforms with no Big Brother approval from Nokia, Microsoft, etc.
Other cellphone companies and Microsoft made ONE mistake with their Mobile OSes, they didn't market the media features to the general public, even though people have been using them for MP3/WMA/WMV/MPEG4 for YEARS now, with the same level of features and more than the freaking iPhone. (Even my old 715 Motorola from 2004 has more media features than a freaking iPhone - it even has an 8GB storage device that was available back in 2004)
Isn't it time we actually stand up to Apple and the Apple Marketing machine. Apple isn't about technology or even good quality product or innovation anymore, they are the best Technology marketing company in the world. (And oddly their marketing team uses methods other marketing companies won't even use as they are considered dangerous because of the cult level of induction.)
Ok, now for fanboi/fangurls to mark my post down because the truth is scary...
There is no document standard that properly handles advanced properties and content.
I will again, mention one TINY item that ODF skips and ONLY OOXML supports completely, and it is INK.
I know everyone here seems to 'know it all' but there are billions of dollars in the medical industry that have applications built on INK technology and data. What happens to all these documents, and the exchange of these documents if INK is not preserved?
We could demand all government to not use OOXML, but when medical information that contains INK technology is submited to the government, the data will be lost or reduced to an image at best.
And the medical industry is just one example, although one of the biggest adopters of handwritten and Ink technologies.
So if we demand our governments to not use OOXML, or we demand that OOXML is killed, do you really feel comfortable with the medical industry having to convert and destroy the Ink format? There are billions of documents with Ink technology used in them, and this includes everything from Doctor's notes, to even signature authorizations.
I can't believe that SlashDot readers hate MS so much they are willing to kill technology and destroy technology in use. Is this really in YOUR best interest?
Just to clarify Ink for people. It is NOT just an image, Ink contains a lot of data from the stokes, direction, speed, pressure, as well as the textual equivalent of the Ink written. Which all would be lost when trying to convert it to an Image. Additionally, the 'richness' of Ink technology is why Microsoft TabletPCs and Vista with built in Ink support is important for industries like medical, as well as why it works so well.
You can even do Ink in web pages, but yet everyone here wants to shove this technology in the can so we can rally around a format that has no knowledge of Ink? How can people really justify this?
Microsoft research has put more money and time in making Ink work and work well by staying in native 'Ink' formats and working like existing words, as well as holding the Ink data even when converting the handwriting to text.
As for people that thinks Ink sucks or is a toy technology, go to YouTube and search for Ink, there are several demonstrations of MS Ink technology and even some comparisons of how well it works even for unreadable handwriting because it uses the stokes, pressure, to determine the word instead of the image the Ink produces.
(And if anyone wants to go 'Apple has Ink', also look at the YouTube videos of how Apple's Ink technology works in comparison to MS's technology. Apple's Ink uses an Image format and Image based recognition, and will never touch the recognition levels of MS's technology until they also handle Ink like MS's technology does.)
With my little argument of how important Ink is and a format to hold Ink is, do you really think just based on Ink, that we throw out all the Ink format just because we are paranoid or hate MS?
Now what if we up the conversation of other media formats supported and contained in OOXML, like sound notes (with textual recognition) to advanced animation or Video formats that OOXML provides support for. Then what about advanced engineering math and functions OOXML supports, that a large portion of many industries use and rely on?
In contrast ODF doesn't even touch 50% of today's document technologies, let alone have native support for upcoming and future technologies. OOXML not only defines today's document technologies, but has built in support for emergining technologies and has detailed specifications for adding new technologies in the future that are far more elegant than a reference point and freaking Zip file with the content like you get with ODF.
If you kill OOXML, you will cripple the medical industry at the very least, besides sending other industries back to the early 90s in terms of document features. Scientists and engineers will love having to go back to creating formulas and equations in non-natural formats or rasterize them in their documents. BRILLIANT, AYE?
Im not joking. Google have done so much for the industry, rather than holding any corner of its business to ransom. To call them the "new evil" is completely absurd
And this was exactly how MS was viewed in the early 90s... Windows was the anti-establishment Environment, MS didn't do copy protection on disks, etc. They were the company that was doing good for consumers...
How long before Google catches up with itself?
Google is a marketing company hidden behind software, tools, and the guise of being open. They started out being more evil than MS, it is sad that most people think Google is a search company and doing good for anything non-Google.
From combing GMail and cross identifying searches to IPs and even getting Firefox to help report back user habits for more marketing, Google is pulling a fast one on the kiddies, and other fools, that don't know any better.
Evil? Well the word isn't quite so easy to pin down. But if you want to go on honesty or personal invasion, then they are Evil. If Google said, hey we are a big marketing company that will use everything we know about you to sell to everyone and focus marketing at you, and hand over the info to governments if asked, then at least they would be more honest.
All the Google projects have a unified goal, and people that work there know this, but still don't understand how it is underhanded. They don't built products for consumers to help consumers, they build products to lure consumers to learn more about them. This makes MS look like angels in the tech industry.
Gaming is absolutely enhanced with a better (read: real) sound card. Onboard audio steals system RAM for its buffers rather than having its own memory
You are correct most of the time; however, there are a few onboard sound chipsets that provide their own buffers and hardware and interface to the mainboard via a PCI interface just like a real sound card, because they are real sound cards.
The usual implementation of the AC97 specification would be an example of what you are talking about, where older onboard technologies using Yamaha chipsets were complete solutions, even having dedicated RAM for GM Wave samples.
It is a contrasting technology, far from being the freaking same...
If you control the light/dark variance on the panel pixels, you squeeze additional colors from the display. This is not dithering, but light/dark adjusting pixel to achieve 4 to 16 million colors.
I don't care how many times you want to ignore how 'other' manufacturers handle 6bit panels, Apple is reduced the bargin bin LCDs and only using dithering.
This is like the idiots trying to argue the Video iPod is as good as anything else out there, when it is a locked and dithered 16bit display, compared to full 18bit displays on products like the Creative Zen.
Apple is failing its customers, and I'm sorry you don't understand the technology better, but just trust me when I point out they are using straight dithered output on the 18bit panels, instead of light/dark signaling like 99% of other OEMs do.
. In order for Apple to do what your rabid and deranged mind is insisting, they'd have to dig through the bins to find different panels for their notebooks
Or turn to fucking signaling instead of falling back to dithering... There is NO NEED TO Change the LCD panel, do I have to draw this with crayons? WTF?
Then the same fucking panels would display 16million colors... Go look up signaling vs dithering.
How fucking insane are you, or are you really Steve Jobs and are this stupid?
A test that ignores ALL of Vista's performance tools, options, smartfetch break in, and they runs benchmarks based on 'legacy' components of an Open Source project.
Is everything really this stupid now?
It is bad enough that some of the features Open Office taps into are considered legacy, and only availble in Vista for compatibilty, and have horrible performance in Vista when using these tools in this benchmark senerio, but to use a fresh install, with no optimization, and even turning off features in Vista that are designed to speed it up?
WTF are these people trying to prove or smoking.... Go to any freaking gaming site and look up games like Oblivion that run 20% faster on Vista, or other games that run equal to XP or 5% faster in recent benchmarks.
If a freaking game on the Vista WDDM model can outperform freaking XP, then a fucking wordprocessor is NOT GOING TO BE SLOWER ON VISTA, unless you are retarded and use retarded testing.
I wish our freaking tech labs wasn't private, so I could show our benchmarks that discredit crap like this to the point of being ridiculous. But hey, our company only advises EDS, NASA, and other little 'companies'...
Slashdot, how much shit will you support being made up to support a point that isn't even 'furthering' FOSS. You and your readers spend more time tearing down MS than building up any OSS project. WTF is wrong with you, don't you realize this makes MS automatically win, as you are obsessed with them?
I have virtually no faith left in this site or crap that gets to the front page.
due to the hardisk (SATA II) being the bottle_neck on my system
And people tried to make fun of Vista using free RAM for advanced HD Caching... Weird how Microsoft was on top of that, and even stranger is the Linux project to mimic the intelligent caching of Superfetch, all the while SlashDot people were making fun of it, until a few people realized how beneficial it was to overall performance.
BTW HD bottleneck technologies are being looked at more closely, as on a Vista system with I/O priority and intelligent caching, your HD becomes a much less important impact on performance, and as Flash and other solutions are designed to do addition prefetching and replacing slower HD technology, Vista's mechanisms are also designed to take advantage of these emerging technology replacements.
Also with x64 becoming more and more standard (especially in the Vista x64 market), having 16-128gb of RAM will not be so uncommon before long, and then technologies like Superfetch really go to town virtually eliminating all HD performance constraints. (This is why and how Vista continually gets faster and 'scales' up as more RAM is added, so there are performance gains even from 8gb to 16gb, even though your running applications are only using 400-900mb.)
Good perspective for people that only exist from the US side of things.
Microsoft holds an additional problem, as being an American company, the EU in general does not like the influence they have in the IT markets.
So the EU tries to shove MS around based on 'possible' outcomes and 'possible' non-EU activities more than they would a EU based company. And from this it becomes a economic political issue more than having anything directly to do with Microsoft other than the size of their influence.
Any non-EU based company with potential economic impact is going to be treated almost as harshly as Microsoft based on the scale of influence in their markets.
The EU hasn't actually proved that MS did anything wrong, and even with the N versions of Windows, MS fully complied even with their most outlandish requests, even government level source code access, which the US government should have stepped in and STOPPED to protect the American company from this level of handing over their internal corporate secrets.
I know it is fashionable to hate Microsoft on here, and even OOXML, but in reality MS isn't killing people in the streets of the EU and are forced to take tons of extra steps that are almost ridiculous at times.
Even the proponents of the competing OOXML standards for ISO certification don't oppose OOXML for ISO certification, and yet the SlashDot world acts like they are on the same side by hating OOXML.
Personally, until an open standard comes along that handles today's current document technologies we have NO CHOICE but OOXML. Right now any other standard would basterize content a lot of companies take for granted.
TabletPC is highly used in many markets, let's use medical institutions as an example, and they would be hit on the head, as all their stored INK content would be lost or converted to dead images.
And stuff like this is a major impact on a large sector of the Medical community, even though 99.9% of the people on SlashDot don't use or even realize that Ink technology is so widely used in many corporate markets. Any why the need for its preservation in documents is highly needed.
Anyone that has used Ink technology with a Wacom tablet or a TabletPC on Vista knows why it is going to grow even bigger, as the technology is dead on, being virtually 100% accurate even with Doctor's handwriting.
Go to YouTube and search for Vista TabletPC to see this in action if you think it is a joke technology like the Inking capables of OS X are. And XP TabletPC wasn't much behind Vista...
Then come back here and tell the world how much you hate OOXML even though your own personal medical records will be fubar if a non-INK format becomes standard.
PS. I also don't give a crap if you ever get the LCD technology 'concept'.
However, even you should be able to go, um, most quality laptops on the market can display 16million colors, and this is freaking Apple that is charging a premium for their technology, they at the very minimum should be providing one of the better quality display technologies to their customers.
If this was generic brand X, who would even give a crap...
Or do you think Apple is shit and it is ok for them to shove generic shit to their customers and charge premium prices?
Keep going, your links say exactly the same freaking thing I already said, twice now...
I don't care if the panel derives from a 6bit LCD technology, they use additional signaling to provide a full 8bits to each freaking pixel on the screen.
99.9% of the LCDs in use today DO NOT default to dithering approximation, which is what Apple is doing and what you are suggesting 'most' do, when almost no one else does.
They instead use additional contrast/intensity signaling to (lighten/darken) each pixel to widen the color spectrum visible.
So if the panel is 6bit with 1bit signaling this equates to a 36bit potential, with 8bit per pixel color variation and contrast for the gamut.
Yes there are some LCD technologies that provide a full 8/10/14 bit per pixel inherent ability in the technology of the LCD without using lighten/darken tricks, and these are 'beyond' the standard seen in most notebooks of today, although their quality is more in the lumens and contrast than actually providing more distinct colors on-screen.
(You get all the colors even with a natie 6bit LCD technolgy using the signaling technique. You will NOT get 16million colors if you use a 6bit LCD without signaling and dither the freaking screen like Apple is doing, and is freaking OLD, like 1999 Old.)
Modern LCDs do additional contrast signaliing, and provide a full freaking 8bits at minimum, with NO DITHERING and NO BANDING because they present 16,777,216(8bit) Colors (as provided from your OWN freaking link.)
I don't have time to educate you on LCD technologies, there are approximately 5 different methods that LCDs use even, and for you to make such retard stark generalizations is just freaking insane.
-
If you take a native 6bit per pixel LCD and display it native, you get 262K colors per pixel PERIOD, dithering is used to approximate higher color input.
If you take a native 6bit per pixel LCD technology and add light/dark signaling it becomes an 8bit visibility display, and is capable of reproducing 16million colors.
If you take a native 8bit(or higher) per pixel LCD technoloy, the advantage you have over the 6bit with signaling is higher brightness, contrast, gamma, etc. (This is why LCD TVs use 10/12/14bit per pixel LCD technologies, and even then some manufacturers still use 'signaling' for lighten/darken - like Toshiba for example - that expands the contrast and dynamic contrasting abilities to Plasma or better levels.
-
So provide links if you still don't get it, but I'm not going to freaking educate you on LCD technologies, or why Apple is FUCKING their customers with dithering 6bit displays and selling them as full range color displays.
I will go with you that there are probably some basement brand laptops out there that are doing what Apple does, but they are not the norm, even in cheap ass Walmart laptops, you will find the LCDs do signaling to provide more than 262K colors.
Again, I am not sure what you are confusing, but a 6bit LCD screen, is technically an 18bit Display that dithers, only having 262,144 colors.
Companies that are NOT Apple use, additional signal levels, so an 18bit display becomes a 36bit display, that can natively support 16million colors at the minimum.
This is where most people get confused, as even some of the higher LCD displays capable of 24bit colors, are inherently a design based off a 18bit panel, but using advanced signaling to the panel it is NO LONGER an 18bit display. So in theory there is a 18bit panel (6 div 3), however using additional levels it becomes a 24bit panel with wider contrast ranges.
I should restate, it hasn't been since 1999 that I have seen an LCD that uses only the 6bit(native 18bit) display methods, that Apple is doing on its LCDs.
The Apple displays in question are using dithering to acheive more than the 262,144 colors instead of technologies used in 99% of all laptop screens used since 2002 that add additional signaling to shove the LCD to 24bit levels.
Thus making the Apple display pitful, dark and YES 6bit display panels, which IS RARE TODAY.
(Go look up LCD TVs, and 10bit LCDs are considered mediocre, let alone trying to shove a 6bit based LCD on someone, like Apple seems so fond of doing.)
It's almost shocking that Apple, of all companies, does not provide 8bpp panels across their entire line. At the very least, given their reputation as a manufacturer of computers for creative professionals, they should be making it clear which screens are 8bpp panels and which ones aren't. And they should be publishing their screens' gamut as well.
Why would this be shocking? For the last 10-15 years Apple has used the cheapest or mid-range of all components in their hardware.
Want a laptop with 1920x1200 or 1600x1200 like PC users could buy in 2002? Apple didn't think their users did. (I guess Macs aren't for graphic artists needing higher DPI screens.)
Or how about a Fast Video card, even the most expensive Mac Desktops have had mid to low range PC level video cards. If you want fast video, you can't buy a Mac unless you plan on replacing the Video, and this is on machines it is even possible to replace.
Even the Notebook Mac market uses the low end of graphics, you can get a 2004 PC Laptop with Video that is still faster than most Mac Notebooks, let alone 2005 where PC Laptops have NVidia 7950 Go GPUs that are STILL faster than anything you can get in a Mac. (I guess Macs also aren't for the engineers, drafters, animators, or even someone wanting to play a freaking game. And people wonder why companies don't develop games for the Mac? Hardware is too slow, and OS X's OpenGL performance is marginal compared to Windows or even Linux.)
We could literally go down a list of components over the years that Apple has screwed their customers with, and that is not even counting the 'complexity' of a mouse with more than one button. Cheap Hard Drives with low RPM, and loud, to even little things like the optical drives.
Macs look cool, and have a few cool features with the Magentic locks and Cables, but when you get inside, where the average Mac user never sees, Apple uses the cheapest shit they can get by with.
Now it is starting to hurt them, because their screens are not hidden, and people are looking at their friends PC LCDs and going WTF, why is yours clearer, brighter, with no banding and more colors?
Then you have to explain that apple is using LCD specifications that were outdated in the late 90s. (Sadly, the last 6bit pixel LCD I have even seen was a 1999 Pentium II Laptop.) But hey, Macs rule, right? (gag)
Yea, too bad that a DVD quality movie is approximately 5% the size of an HD movie. You're Creative Zen will *only* hold one HD movie and approximately 2500 songs.
You listened to nothing I or other have tried to explain to you...
A HD Movie (720p VC1) is about 4Gb, so I could get several EVEN ON A Creative Zen, although pointless, as the device's maximum output level is DVD 480 (It has Video out ya know).
Now consider two years from now with the current laptop hard drives jammed in a portable player, 500gb will yield at least 100 HD quality movies. This is NOT FAR Fetched, and if you think so you need to go back to 8 Track now and sell your computer.
HD Content DOES NOT NEED the space the Blu-Ray or HD-DVD uses, the extra space only gave room for move features, angles, interactive features, period. Again look up WMV-HD DVD content, they were throwing HD content on DVDs years and years ago (Even 1080i)... (And WMV-HD is VC1, which is the same freaking format standard used on Blu-Ray.)
The rest of your post just got goofy, since you couldn't grasp the simple size facts around HD Video. You are too 'stuck' on Blu-Ray and the size of the freaking Discs. That has NOTHING to do with the video content other than that they can shove more formats and features on it.
I don't see a democratic OR republican administration
You do forget about Clinton and Gore uh? They were kind of big on pushing technology and opening up technology to everyone (ie The Internet).
In telecom classes in the late 80s, early 90s, teachers at University actually talked about the politics of the Internet and Gore was a key member they covered in the politics and opening of the Internet. (Before he was a VP canidate, and even after he was VP, Gates in a interview in 1995 credited Gore for his legislation that made the Internet open to everyone, and citing him as the key person that made MS change their business model to the Internet. (Gore is also the reason Satelite TV was opened to rural areas in the early 80s.)
Just because Bush & Co. don't give a shit about consumers, don't mean that people that have made places like SlashDot even possible, are like him. The Democratic leaders have a damn good record on technology, and you wouldn't have a freaking place to argue this shit if it weren't for them. SPECIFICALLY Gore and Clinton...
(Hillary and Barack have very similar technology proposal in place as well, which is sad because the Bush administration has had virtually none for 7 years now.)
Anyone that has worked with Vista over the past year usually know one thing. Creative is screwing its customers...
There is no reason that the same hardware level of support is being provided by Intel and even generic Realtek drivers and yet the sound industry leader, Creative, has been unable to deliver working drivers.
Vista new sound model is designed around an agnostic system that allows for more options than was ever available under XP, and Creative continues to tell people that they can't get the Vista drivers to work properly. If this is true, then Creative has horrible driver developers working on these products.
Look at generic drivers from Realtek, on Vista they support as many of the new Vista features as they are capable of, even on old Audio hardware.
Virtually every game out there, has also made adjustments to easily work with Vista's sound system, making it even EASIER for sound card manufacturers. Several games even have their own additions for EAX and other features, but you have to use non-creative cards for these features, which is freaking insane at best for Creative to let their cards be the only ones to consistently have problems and fail.
XP's sound system was barely in the range of industry standards, not supporting a lot of features becoming standard for music professionals and even gaming enthusiasts. XP's sound had no idea of multi-channel (5.1,7.1,etc) had limits on sampling rates, and combining multi-application streams at high quality sampling rates.
Microsoft's revamp in Vista was known a LONG time ago and was necessary to bring the Vista sound system up to the industry current standards, and also give Microsoft some design headroom to extend beyond what Apple and OSS was doing with Audio. (For example the self optimizing speaker technology, the basic realtime filtering of levels and noise, unlimited channels and sample rates, etc.)
- In Vista you can use a crap internal microphone on a laptop and with it processing for feedback and background sound from the laptop, get ok recordings for meeting notes, and even handle the sound well enough that speech recognition works well on low quality input like htis.
- Vista also handles internal processing and mixing of sound far beyond what XP did and even past Apple and other core technologies in the OSS world. Play any type of sound, same sound device, same speakers, and the Vista clarity is surprisingly there - making even high compression audio stretch back to levels that is borderline impressive.
- MS did kill off the older version of DirectSound, because of the problems with it, and its dependance on the XP sound system, which was severely limited.
10.1 DirectX replaces DirectSound for the hardware audio layer, and even prior to 10.1 sound in Vista is not 100% CPU bound, even though people try to scare people with this, as Vista is agnositic at what is processing the audio, but defaults to the CPU for advanced processing if the features are not inherent of the Audio hardware.
This is where Creative messed up, and instead of working 'within' the new API and driver model provided, are trying to work around Vista's audio and driver model, implementing things in good old XP fashion, so there is no wonder why their drivers are crap on Vista.
XP with basic API you could play sound, letting the format and output quality be handled outside the basic application level of understand. In Vista you can jam 20% of a sound to the RL speaker if you have Quad or higher speaker configuration. This is a good thing, and the right way audio should be handled from both a user and a developer standpoint.
Creative continues to dig themselves into a hole with the whole Vista mess, especially starting out by not even having drivers during the beta process for Vista, tell all testers to wait until Vista was released, and then losing all that tester and developer feedback and time, and releasing crap drivers AFTER Vista RTM'd, in fact waiting until after Vista was shipping at the retail level in 2007.
So if they approve something you 'believe' to be wrong, then it invalidates everything they have ever done?
This is probably one of the most closed minded and foolish arguments I have ever heard. If you apply this method of thinking to the rest of your life, how do you function day to day? If Starbucks starts promoting a product you don't like, you tell everyone how horrible their coffee has always been and always will be? WTF?
You like many others have so freaking little understanding of ISO that it makes me want to gag when your own personal interest rants try to redefine it because they are doing something the 'wrong' way according to you, or supporting something you don't.
I wonder if concert pitch had idiots like you demanding the invalidation of all standards processes, because we know it should really be 445 not 440... Geesh
Bullshit reasoning derives bullshit arguments. I hope people actually reread your idiotic rant and mod it properly, not based on their own hatred of OOXML which has very little to do with your argument.
Yeah, bribes and kickbacks. Plus, Microsoft has instructed their people on how to stack and rig committees and bribe "experts":
You and other fools act like ISO can be easily manipulated by any one company or country. Do you even have a freaking clue about ISO? Most people that get on these bandwagons accusing people of manipulating the ISO processes have no idea how old ISO is, what it does, how it works, in fact most people think ISO is a freaking acronym, and that is when I go, ok, and walk away. (hint: look up isos)
As for political 'expertise' in bribes, MS is at the bottom of the list, and wasn't even a player in lobbyist actions until after the WP/Novell politically motivated crap.
(Novell and WP had no legitimate claim, other than their companies were in Utah, and they fucked over their users and then instead of trying to compete, used political pressures. Yes I know a bit about it, I was there, I saw the memos of MS trying to get WP to make a Windows 3.1 version, and even offering them free help and development to port WP to a Windows version, and WP's response to MS to go pound sand thinking their 5.x version would continue to rule the world.)
When it comes to political influence, MS was one of the LAST old school major Technology companies to even have any D.C. lobbyists.
It wasn't until after Orin Hatch and the WP/Novell crap that Microsoft used lobbyists to fight back, and they themselves were shocked they had to use lobbyists to counter false political movements against their company.(Google this if you need proof)
If Microsoft wasn't so naive about lobbying, there would have never been any monopoly case against them, just like Apple keeps their lock in policies held in good regard in Washington, even with as much market saturation as the iPod has, being equal to MS's OS saturation of the time, and yet far more abusive.
However, you act like MS are the 'experts' at this, even though Apple, Sun, & IBM had Washington D.C. based lobbyists years before Microsoft. (This is how Apple worked with the education policies, POSIX became a US Govt requirement, etc.)
Also when it comes to manipulation, we have more OSS lobbists messing in the affairs of politics in Washington and Brussels than any closed source corporation. Open uh? Only as open as what the movers and shakers of OSS think is open, and of course benefits their pet projects.
And the whole freaking EU case, was sold to them based on 'potential monopoly' of Microsoft and Microsoft being a USA company rather than anything they did. Anti-US corporate sentiment, plus, OSS self indulgent nuts = EU ruling. (This is where I note I have spent a lot of time in Brussels and have several personal friends that work at the EU.)
I am so sick of the BullShit religion of the anti-MS mentality it makes me freaking sick. Everyone forms a premise THEN works hard to justify it. OOXML is a very good example of this. 1) We hate MS, so it is bad. 2) Now we have to figure out how we can pick it apart to prove to others it is bad, based on #1. 3) Sell it as bad based on idiotic and mind numbing ideals to reinforce #1.
Want to be Open Source and think 'more open'?; then stop buying into your own belief system that circumvents your ability to make 'open' decisions.
FOSS has become the Atheists of the world, making a religion out of not being a religion. Everyone supporting FOSS needs to admit that we can't know for sure and open our freaking minds, even if we come to the same conclusion in the end.
If not, we are following a path that is based upon a belief system instead of facts. Open thinking and open software should not ever be a belief system, which directly contrasts with open thinking.
Slashdot Mirror
Last I check, there were no calls to convert EXISTING, legacy documents to any new, open standard.
Then you haven't been paying attention for over nine years, as this is why Microsoft moved document formats around in 2000 because virtually the entire IT/Business community wanted legacy support standardized.
However, if your saying that the OOXML standard automatically includes these legacy documents -- ie, those documents are part of the standard -- then you still need to explain how those tags map, rather than just move them to the legacy section and leave them unexplained.
Ok, the person that posted above me, complained because the standard says they 'have' to implement these legacy import qualifications (which is NOT true) and hated OOXML for that reason. Now you argue these are not documented (which is also incorrect) and now you use it as a basis for you to hate OOXML.
So which it, people hate it because it has legacy readability support or people hate it because the legacy readability features are not required or documented?
Which version of the truth will you or someone go with next to support your 'personal' disdain for OOXML and try to create reasons to hate it to satisfy your emotion beliefs?
Hey, maybe you could argue you hate it because Dolly Parton didn't write it, and you only listen to her music and the rest sucks?
Geesh...
Similarly, I cringe whenever I notice a grammatical mistake in any of my posts.
Wow, so you judge people on whether they run their posts through a word processor or just type on the fly, knowing that simple errors happen to all mortals?
It is nice to know I can disregard your comment based on your lack of properly using an apostrophe in [persons] since by your standards I should assume you are an idiot.
Maybe you should support OOXML and actually use Microsoft Word for your posts in the future, I'm sure it would alert you to these errors and your level of ignorance could be hidden from the rest of us.
*Smile*
P.S. If you think profanity would skew what an officer thinks of a person or would offend them, then you under estimate their intelligence as well.
Microsoft "INK" is funny as it is a decedent from "Pen Windows" which was inferior to "Go Computing" at the time. Microsoft's monopoly allowed them to threaten OEMS and have them abandon support for Go's platform.
Nice theory, it doesn't support reality. I was a senior partner of an OEM company at this time that provided software and equipment for several pen computing markets. (One of our software projects from the time is still in use on the Space Station.)
First, today's INK from MS is only descended in terms of it is the same type of feature.
The INK technolgy is completely different, has different features, functions, and meets different standards based on the change in computing power and needs of TabletPC application innovations.
Go Computing? Really? Don't even try to argue MS used its monopoly, as people choose pen computing for Windows because they could USE THEIR EXISTING DOS AND WINDOWS APPLCIATIONS.
Have you even used the Pinpoint OS supplied by Go Corporation? It was crap... Grid would have been a better example as it was DOS based, but again, they failed because of the Windows Boom, BEFORE MS was even close to being a monopoly.
Nice revisionism, next time know you are trying to fool when making crap up...
BTW, autoSpaceLikeWord95 being deprecated isn't sufficient. Deprecated means it's been superseded by other functionality and shouldn't appear in new documents. However, as part of the standard an application still needs to be able to properly interpret it, and thus at the very minimum it should be stated what tags and settings apply the same functionality.
Exactly, and there ARE reasons for this. We already have 15 years of documents in Word format, that will NOT be converted because they are ALREADY archived for many reasons. This is also why there is deprecated functionality to 'interpret' WordPerfect file format contexts as well in OOXML that Word originally supported years and years ago, when WP was the standard being archived.
So we should just abandon all these documents, and all the WP documents because?
If you think you are going to get the FBI, or the CIA or any Large organization to open up all their archives and convert them to ODF (and lose features and formating), you are out of your mind.
MS at least 'understands' the need to preserve the need to read achived formats from this point in history back, and is trying to prevent the versioning mess from stoping from this point forward. Textual format prior to this already were fairly standardized.
If you go back to Office 2000 when MS moved to XML, you will find they did so for specific reasons to keep older formats viable and try to establish a standard format at that time. Just like they tried with RTF years and years before and like they did with XHTML, which did get accepted.
ODF is late the game and still doesn't support features word processors from 15 years ago were using, and we are not even just talking about Word, but how about placement features of AmiPro, or WordPerfect 5.5 and 6.0 features that ODF can't even preserve. How can anyone in their right mind want to stand behind a format that can't even preserve the textual context let alone the layout of their documents?
If you want to debate, please try minding your language. It takes away from your argument when you feel you have to swear to emphasize your point.
Ok, not my argument, but this is the smallest minded comment I have read in a while.
If you think particular 'letters/words or sounds combined together in a specific order' is somehow bad or negates someone's intellect, then you should immediately go find a shrink and find out what the 'heck' is the matter with you.
I work in health care technology and I have never heard of the INK standard. (A quick search shows that Google has never heard of it either...).
I call shenanigans. This may exist as some proprietary obscure standard (and it probably deserves to die).
Not sure how you could be in the medical field and never heard of TabletPCs, Ink, or EMR, heck maybe you don't work in the medical industry.
However, I would assume you knew how to use Google, but apparently that is outside your capabilities.
Here is the first five or so search results. Go educate yourself, at least learn WTF EMR is. Maybe you might want to do this before you post in the future before you jump into a converation that is apparently over your head and call someone a liar.
http://www.medicaltabletpc.com/
http://www.doctorsgadgets.com/forum/medical-tablet-pc-forum/
http://www.medscribbler.com/electronic_medical_records_tablet_pc_emr.html
http://www.softwareadvice.com/medical/tablet-pc-emr-medical-software-comparison/
http://www.funponsel.com/blog/archives/2007/02/22/c5-tablet-pc-medical-professionals-must-have/
Industry x bought a ton of MS software and so is dependant upon its quirks. Rather than do a Google search to determine that 'INK' is a proprietary clone of SVG,
Right here is where I and most other readers realize you are insane and have no freaking idea what you are talking about.
Since when does SVG handle pen pressure, angle, stroke speed, direction creation? When did SVG implement character recognition based on this data? Ink is more than an image or even the data stored that created the Ink, it is an ecosystem of handling the Ink in both graphical and textual contexts at the same time.
INK has no business being part of a document format. It's an image format
Exactly wrong...
Ink is NOT an Image, this is why preserving it IMPORTANT.
This is the level of understanding that makes people 'create reason' to cut off their nose to spite their face.
There is an easy fix, don't write software for Apple's Marketing 'technology'.
Instead write your code for an OSS phone or/and port it to Windows Mobile, there are far more Windows Mobile phones than iPhones, so you even get a bigger market.
In addition to more features, without restrictions, as you can write ANYTHING for the other platforms with no Big Brother approval from Nokia, Microsoft, etc.
Other cellphone companies and Microsoft made ONE mistake with their Mobile OSes, they didn't market the media features to the general public, even though people have been using them for MP3/WMA/WMV/MPEG4 for YEARS now, with the same level of features and more than the freaking iPhone. (Even my old 715 Motorola from 2004 has more media features than a freaking iPhone - it even has an 8GB storage device that was available back in 2004)
Isn't it time we actually stand up to Apple and the Apple Marketing machine. Apple isn't about technology or even good quality product or innovation anymore, they are the best Technology marketing company in the world. (And oddly their marketing team uses methods other marketing companies won't even use as they are considered dangerous because of the cult level of induction.)
Ok, now for fanboi/fangurls to mark my post down because the truth is scary...
Fun to Hate MS, but OOXML is needed...
There is no document standard that properly handles advanced properties and content.
I will again, mention one TINY item that ODF skips and ONLY OOXML supports completely, and it is INK.
I know everyone here seems to 'know it all' but there are billions of dollars in the medical industry that have applications built on INK technology and data. What happens to all these documents, and the exchange of these documents if INK is not preserved?
We could demand all government to not use OOXML, but when medical information that contains INK technology is submited to the government, the data will be lost or reduced to an image at best.
And the medical industry is just one example, although one of the biggest adopters of handwritten and Ink technologies.
So if we demand our governments to not use OOXML, or we demand that OOXML is killed, do you really feel comfortable with the medical industry having to convert and destroy the Ink format? There are billions of documents with Ink technology used in them, and this includes everything from Doctor's notes, to even signature authorizations.
I can't believe that SlashDot readers hate MS so much they are willing to kill technology and destroy technology in use. Is this really in YOUR best interest?
Just to clarify Ink for people. It is NOT just an image, Ink contains a lot of data from the stokes, direction, speed, pressure, as well as the textual equivalent of the Ink written. Which all would be lost when trying to convert it to an Image. Additionally, the 'richness' of Ink technology is why Microsoft TabletPCs and Vista with built in Ink support is important for industries like medical, as well as why it works so well.
You can even do Ink in web pages, but yet everyone here wants to shove this technology in the can so we can rally around a format that has no knowledge of Ink? How can people really justify this?
Microsoft research has put more money and time in making Ink work and work well by staying in native 'Ink' formats and working like existing words, as well as holding the Ink data even when converting the handwriting to text.
As for people that thinks Ink sucks or is a toy technology, go to YouTube and search for Ink, there are several demonstrations of MS Ink technology and even some comparisons of how well it works even for unreadable handwriting because it uses the stokes, pressure, to determine the word instead of the image the Ink produces.
(And if anyone wants to go 'Apple has Ink', also look at the YouTube videos of how Apple's Ink technology works in comparison to MS's technology. Apple's Ink uses an Image format and Image based recognition, and will never touch the recognition levels of MS's technology until they also handle Ink like MS's technology does.)
With my little argument of how important Ink is and a format to hold Ink is, do you really think just based on Ink, that we throw out all the Ink format just because we are paranoid or hate MS?
Now what if we up the conversation of other media formats supported and contained in OOXML, like sound notes (with textual recognition) to advanced animation or Video formats that OOXML provides support for. Then what about advanced engineering math and functions OOXML supports, that a large portion of many industries use and rely on?
In contrast ODF doesn't even touch 50% of today's document technologies, let alone have native support for upcoming and future technologies. OOXML not only defines today's document technologies, but has built in support for emergining technologies and has detailed specifications for adding new technologies in the future that are far more elegant than a reference point and freaking Zip file with the content like you get with ODF.
If you kill OOXML, you will cripple the medical industry at the very least, besides sending other industries back to the early 90s in terms of document features. Scientists and engineers will love having to go back to creating formulas and equations in non-natural formats or rasterize them in their documents. BRILLIANT, AYE?
Im not joking. Google have done so much for the industry, rather than holding any corner of its business to ransom. To call them the "new evil" is completely absurd
And this was exactly how MS was viewed in the early 90s... Windows was the anti-establishment Environment, MS didn't do copy protection on disks, etc. They were the company that was doing good for consumers...
How long before Google catches up with itself?
Google is a marketing company hidden behind software, tools, and the guise of being open. They started out being more evil than MS, it is sad that most people think Google is a search company and doing good for anything non-Google.
From combing GMail and cross identifying searches to IPs and even getting Firefox to help report back user habits for more marketing, Google is pulling a fast one on the kiddies, and other fools, that don't know any better.
Evil? Well the word isn't quite so easy to pin down. But if you want to go on honesty or personal invasion, then they are Evil. If Google said, hey we are a big marketing company that will use everything we know about you to sell to everyone and focus marketing at you, and hand over the info to governments if asked, then at least they would be more honest.
All the Google projects have a unified goal, and people that work there know this, but still don't understand how it is underhanded. They don't built products for consumers to help consumers, they build products to lure consumers to learn more about them. This makes MS look like angels in the tech industry.
Gaming is absolutely enhanced with a better (read: real) sound card. Onboard audio steals system RAM for its buffers rather than having its own memory
You are correct most of the time; however, there are a few onboard sound chipsets that provide their own buffers and hardware and interface to the mainboard via a PCI interface just like a real sound card, because they are real sound cards.
The usual implementation of the AC97 specification would be an example of what you are talking about, where older onboard technologies using Yamaha chipsets were complete solutions, even having dedicated RAM for GM Wave samples.
which INCLUDES what you refer to as signaling
No.........
It is a contrasting technology, far from being the freaking same...
If you control the light/dark variance on the panel pixels, you squeeze additional colors from the display. This is not dithering, but light/dark adjusting pixel to achieve 4 to 16 million colors.
I don't care how many times you want to ignore how 'other' manufacturers handle 6bit panels, Apple is reduced the bargin bin LCDs and only using dithering.
This is like the idiots trying to argue the Video iPod is as good as anything else out there, when it is a locked and dithered 16bit display, compared to full 18bit displays on products like the Creative Zen.
Apple is failing its customers, and I'm sorry you don't understand the technology better, but just trust me when I point out they are using straight dithered output on the 18bit panels, instead of light/dark signaling like 99% of other OEMs do.
. In order for Apple to do what your rabid and deranged mind is insisting, they'd have to dig through the bins to find different panels for their notebooks
Or turn to fucking signaling instead of falling back to dithering... There is NO NEED TO Change the LCD panel, do I have to draw this with crayons? WTF?
Then the same fucking panels would display 16million colors... Go look up signaling vs dithering.
How fucking insane are you, or are you really Steve Jobs and are this stupid?
OpenOffice.org's productivity suite.
A test that ignores ALL of Vista's performance tools, options, smartfetch break in, and they runs benchmarks based on 'legacy' components of an Open Source project.
Is everything really this stupid now?
It is bad enough that some of the features Open Office taps into are considered legacy, and only availble in Vista for compatibilty, and have horrible performance in Vista when using these tools in this benchmark senerio, but to use a fresh install, with no optimization, and even turning off features in Vista that are designed to speed it up?
WTF are these people trying to prove or smoking.... Go to any freaking gaming site and look up games like Oblivion that run 20% faster on Vista, or other games that run equal to XP or 5% faster in recent benchmarks.
If a freaking game on the Vista WDDM model can outperform freaking XP, then a fucking wordprocessor is NOT GOING TO BE SLOWER ON VISTA, unless you are retarded and use retarded testing.
I wish our freaking tech labs wasn't private, so I could show our benchmarks that discredit crap like this to the point of being ridiculous. But hey, our company only advises EDS, NASA, and other little 'companies'...
Slashdot, how much shit will you support being made up to support a point that isn't even 'furthering' FOSS. You and your readers spend more time tearing down MS than building up any OSS project. WTF is wrong with you, don't you realize this makes MS automatically win, as you are obsessed with them?
I have virtually no faith left in this site or crap that gets to the front page.
due to the hardisk (SATA II) being the bottle_neck on my system
And people tried to make fun of Vista using free RAM for advanced HD Caching... Weird how Microsoft was on top of that, and even stranger is the Linux project to mimic the intelligent caching of Superfetch, all the while SlashDot people were making fun of it, until a few people realized how beneficial it was to overall performance.
BTW HD bottleneck technologies are being looked at more closely, as on a Vista system with I/O priority and intelligent caching, your HD becomes a much less important impact on performance, and as Flash and other solutions are designed to do addition prefetching and replacing slower HD technology, Vista's mechanisms are also designed to take advantage of these emerging technology replacements.
Also with x64 becoming more and more standard (especially in the Vista x64 market), having 16-128gb of RAM will not be so uncommon before long, and then technologies like Superfetch really go to town virtually eliminating all HD performance constraints. (This is why and how Vista continually gets faster and 'scales' up as more RAM is added, so there are performance gains even from 8gb to 16gb, even though your running applications are only using 400-900mb.)
Good perspective for people that only exist from the US side of things.
Microsoft holds an additional problem, as being an American company, the EU in general does not like the influence they have in the IT markets.
So the EU tries to shove MS around based on 'possible' outcomes and 'possible' non-EU activities more than they would a EU based company. And from this it becomes a economic political issue more than having anything directly to do with Microsoft other than the size of their influence.
Any non-EU based company with potential economic impact is going to be treated almost as harshly as Microsoft based on the scale of influence in their markets.
The EU hasn't actually proved that MS did anything wrong, and even with the N versions of Windows, MS fully complied even with their most outlandish requests, even government level source code access, which the US government should have stepped in and STOPPED to protect the American company from this level of handing over their internal corporate secrets.
I know it is fashionable to hate Microsoft on here, and even OOXML, but in reality MS isn't killing people in the streets of the EU and are forced to take tons of extra steps that are almost ridiculous at times.
Even the proponents of the competing OOXML standards for ISO certification don't oppose OOXML for ISO certification, and yet the SlashDot world acts like they are on the same side by hating OOXML.
Personally, until an open standard comes along that handles today's current document technologies we have NO CHOICE but OOXML. Right now any other standard would basterize content a lot of companies take for granted.
TabletPC is highly used in many markets, let's use medical institutions as an example, and they would be hit on the head, as all their stored INK content would be lost or converted to dead images.
And stuff like this is a major impact on a large sector of the Medical community, even though 99.9% of the people on SlashDot don't use or even realize that Ink technology is so widely used in many corporate markets. Any why the need for its preservation in documents is highly needed.
Anyone that has used Ink technology with a Wacom tablet or a TabletPC on Vista knows why it is going to grow even bigger, as the technology is dead on, being virtually 100% accurate even with Doctor's handwriting.
Go to YouTube and search for Vista TabletPC to see this in action if you think it is a joke technology like the Inking capables of OS X are. And XP TabletPC wasn't much behind Vista...
Then come back here and tell the world how much you hate OOXML even though your own personal medical records will be fubar if a non-INK format becomes standard.
PS. I also don't give a crap if you ever get the LCD technology 'concept'.
However, even you should be able to go, um, most quality laptops on the market can display 16million colors, and this is freaking Apple that is charging a premium for their technology, they at the very minimum should be providing one of the better quality display technologies to their customers.
If this was generic brand X, who would even give a crap...
Or do you think Apple is shit and it is ok for them to shove generic shit to their customers and charge premium prices?
Keep going, your links say exactly the same freaking thing I already said, twice now...
I don't care if the panel derives from a 6bit LCD technology, they use additional signaling to provide a full 8bits to each freaking pixel on the screen.
99.9% of the LCDs in use today DO NOT default to dithering approximation, which is what Apple is doing and what you are suggesting 'most' do, when almost no one else does.
They instead use additional contrast/intensity signaling to (lighten/darken) each pixel to widen the color spectrum visible.
So if the panel is 6bit with 1bit signaling this equates to a 36bit potential, with 8bit per pixel color variation and contrast for the gamut.
Yes there are some LCD technologies that provide a full 8/10/14 bit per pixel inherent ability in the technology of the LCD without using lighten/darken tricks, and these are 'beyond' the standard seen in most notebooks of today, although their quality is more in the lumens and contrast than actually providing more distinct colors on-screen.
(You get all the colors even with a natie 6bit LCD technolgy using the signaling technique. You will NOT get 16million colors if you use a 6bit LCD without signaling and dither the freaking screen like Apple is doing, and is freaking OLD, like 1999 Old.)
Modern LCDs do additional contrast signaliing, and provide a full freaking 8bits at minimum, with NO DITHERING and NO BANDING because they present 16,777,216(8bit) Colors (as provided from your OWN freaking link.)
I don't have time to educate you on LCD technologies, there are approximately 5 different methods that LCDs use even, and for you to make such retard stark generalizations is just freaking insane.
-
If you take a native 6bit per pixel LCD and display it native, you get 262K colors per pixel PERIOD, dithering is used to approximate higher color input.
If you take a native 6bit per pixel LCD technology and add light/dark signaling it becomes an 8bit visibility display, and is capable of reproducing 16million colors.
If you take a native 8bit(or higher) per pixel LCD technoloy, the advantage you have over the 6bit with signaling is higher brightness, contrast, gamma, etc. (This is why LCD TVs use 10/12/14bit per pixel LCD technologies, and even then some manufacturers still use 'signaling' for lighten/darken - like Toshiba for example - that expands the contrast and dynamic contrasting abilities to Plasma or better levels.
-
So provide links if you still don't get it, but I'm not going to freaking educate you on LCD technologies, or why Apple is FUCKING their customers with dithering 6bit displays and selling them as full range color displays.
I will go with you that there are probably some basement brand laptops out there that are doing what Apple does, but they are not the norm, even in cheap ass Walmart laptops, you will find the LCDs do signaling to provide more than 262K colors.
PERIOD.
Again, I am not sure what you are confusing, but a 6bit LCD screen, is technically an 18bit Display that dithers, only having 262,144 colors.
Companies that are NOT Apple use, additional signal levels, so an 18bit display becomes a 36bit display, that can natively support 16million colors at the minimum.
This is where most people get confused, as even some of the higher LCD displays capable of 24bit colors, are inherently a design based off a 18bit panel, but using advanced signaling to the panel it is NO LONGER an 18bit display. So in theory there is a 18bit panel (6 div 3), however using additional levels it becomes a 24bit panel with wider contrast ranges.
I should restate, it hasn't been since 1999 that I have seen an LCD that uses only the 6bit(native 18bit) display methods, that Apple is doing on its LCDs.
The Apple displays in question are using dithering to acheive more than the 262,144 colors instead of technologies used in 99% of all laptop screens used since 2002 that add additional signaling to shove the LCD to 24bit levels.
Thus making the Apple display pitful, dark and YES 6bit display panels, which IS RARE TODAY.
(Go look up LCD TVs, and 10bit LCDs are considered mediocre, let alone trying to shove a 6bit based LCD on someone, like Apple seems so fond of doing.)
It's almost shocking that Apple, of all companies, does not provide 8bpp panels across their entire line. At the very least, given their reputation as a manufacturer of computers for creative professionals, they should be making it clear which screens are 8bpp panels and which ones aren't. And they should be publishing their screens' gamut as well.
Why would this be shocking? For the last 10-15 years Apple has used the cheapest or mid-range of all components in their hardware.
Want a laptop with 1920x1200 or 1600x1200 like PC users could buy in 2002? Apple didn't think their users did. (I guess Macs aren't for graphic artists needing higher DPI screens.)
Or how about a Fast Video card, even the most expensive Mac Desktops have had mid to low range PC level video cards. If you want fast video, you can't buy a Mac unless you plan on replacing the Video, and this is on machines it is even possible to replace.
Even the Notebook Mac market uses the low end of graphics, you can get a 2004 PC Laptop with Video that is still faster than most Mac Notebooks, let alone 2005 where PC Laptops have NVidia 7950 Go GPUs that are STILL faster than anything you can get in a Mac. (I guess Macs also aren't for the engineers, drafters, animators, or even someone wanting to play a freaking game. And people wonder why companies don't develop games for the Mac? Hardware is too slow, and OS X's OpenGL performance is marginal compared to Windows or even Linux.)
We could literally go down a list of components over the years that Apple has screwed their customers with, and that is not even counting the 'complexity' of a mouse with more than one button. Cheap Hard Drives with low RPM, and loud, to even little things like the optical drives.
Macs look cool, and have a few cool features with the Magentic locks and Cables, but when you get inside, where the average Mac user never sees, Apple uses the cheapest shit they can get by with.
Now it is starting to hurt them, because their screens are not hidden, and people are looking at their friends PC LCDs and going WTF, why is yours clearer, brighter, with no banding and more colors?
Then you have to explain that apple is using LCD specifications that were outdated in the late 90s. (Sadly, the last 6bit pixel LCD I have even seen was a 1999 Pentium II Laptop.) But hey, Macs rule, right? (gag)
Yea, too bad that a DVD quality movie is approximately 5% the size of an HD movie. You're Creative Zen will *only* hold one HD movie and approximately 2500 songs.
You listened to nothing I or other have tried to explain to you...
A HD Movie (720p VC1) is about 4Gb, so I could get several EVEN ON A Creative Zen, although pointless, as the device's maximum output level is DVD 480 (It has Video out ya know).
Now consider two years from now with the current laptop hard drives jammed in a portable player, 500gb will yield at least 100 HD quality movies. This is NOT FAR Fetched, and if you think so you need to go back to 8 Track now and sell your computer.
HD Content DOES NOT NEED the space the Blu-Ray or HD-DVD uses, the extra space only gave room for move features, angles, interactive features, period. Again look up WMV-HD DVD content, they were throwing HD content on DVDs years and years ago (Even 1080i)... (And WMV-HD is VC1, which is the same freaking format standard used on Blu-Ray.)
The rest of your post just got goofy, since you couldn't grasp the simple size facts around HD Video. You are too 'stuck' on Blu-Ray and the size of the freaking Discs. That has NOTHING to do with the video content other than that they can shove more formats and features on it.
I don't see a democratic OR republican administration
You do forget about Clinton and Gore uh? They were kind of big on pushing technology and opening up technology to everyone (ie The Internet).
In telecom classes in the late 80s, early 90s, teachers at University actually talked about the politics of the Internet and Gore was a key member they covered in the politics and opening of the Internet. (Before he was a VP canidate, and even after he was VP, Gates in a interview in 1995 credited Gore for his legislation that made the Internet open to everyone, and citing him as the key person that made MS change their business model to the Internet. (Gore is also the reason Satelite TV was opened to rural areas in the early 80s.)
Just because Bush & Co. don't give a shit about consumers, don't mean that people that have made places like SlashDot even possible, are like him. The Democratic leaders have a damn good record on technology, and you wouldn't have a freaking place to argue this shit if it weren't for them. SPECIFICALLY Gore and Clinton...
(Hillary and Barack have very similar technology proposal in place as well, which is sad because the Bush administration has had virtually none for 7 years now.)
Anyone that has worked with Vista over the past year usually know one thing. Creative is screwing its customers...
There is no reason that the same hardware level of support is being provided by Intel and even generic Realtek drivers and yet the sound industry leader, Creative, has been unable to deliver working drivers.
Vista new sound model is designed around an agnostic system that allows for more options than was ever available under XP, and Creative continues to tell people that they can't get the Vista drivers to work properly. If this is true, then Creative has horrible driver developers working on these products.
Look at generic drivers from Realtek, on Vista they support as many of the new Vista features as they are capable of, even on old Audio hardware.
Virtually every game out there, has also made adjustments to easily work with Vista's sound system, making it even EASIER for sound card manufacturers. Several games even have their own additions for EAX and other features, but you have to use non-creative cards for these features, which is freaking insane at best for Creative to let their cards be the only ones to consistently have problems and fail.
XP's sound system was barely in the range of industry standards, not supporting a lot of features becoming standard for music professionals and even gaming enthusiasts. XP's sound had no idea of multi-channel (5.1,7.1,etc) had limits on sampling rates, and combining multi-application streams at high quality sampling rates.
Microsoft's revamp in Vista was known a LONG time ago and was necessary to bring the Vista sound system up to the industry current standards, and also give Microsoft some design headroom to extend beyond what Apple and OSS was doing with Audio. (For example the self optimizing speaker technology, the basic realtime filtering of levels and noise, unlimited channels and sample rates, etc.)
- In Vista you can use a crap internal microphone on a laptop and with it processing for feedback and background sound from the laptop, get ok recordings for meeting notes, and even handle the sound well enough that speech recognition works well on low quality input like htis.
- Vista also handles internal processing and mixing of sound far beyond what XP did and even past Apple and other core technologies in the OSS world. Play any type of sound, same sound device, same speakers, and the Vista clarity is surprisingly there - making even high compression audio stretch back to levels that is borderline impressive.
- MS did kill off the older version of DirectSound, because of the problems with it, and its dependance on the XP sound system, which was severely limited.
10.1 DirectX replaces DirectSound for the hardware audio layer, and even prior to 10.1 sound in Vista is not 100% CPU bound, even though people try to scare people with this, as Vista is agnositic at what is processing the audio, but defaults to the CPU for advanced processing if the features are not inherent of the Audio hardware.
This is where Creative messed up, and instead of working 'within' the new API and driver model provided, are trying to work around Vista's audio and driver model, implementing things in good old XP fashion, so there is no wonder why their drivers are crap on Vista.
XP with basic API you could play sound, letting the format and output quality be handled outside the basic application level of understand. In Vista you can jam 20% of a sound to the RL speaker if you have Quad or higher speaker configuration. This is a good thing, and the right way audio should be handled from both a user and a developer standpoint.
Creative continues to dig themselves into a hole with the whole Vista mess, especially starting out by not even having drivers during the beta process for Vista, tell all testers to wait until Vista was released, and then losing all that tester and developer feedback and time, and releasing crap drivers AFTER Vista RTM'd, in fact waiting until after Vista was shipping at the retail level in 2007.
So if they approve something you 'believe' to be wrong, then it invalidates everything they have ever done?
This is probably one of the most closed minded and foolish arguments I have ever heard. If you apply this method of thinking to the rest of your life, how do you function day to day? If Starbucks starts promoting a product you don't like, you tell everyone how horrible their coffee has always been and always will be? WTF?
You like many others have so freaking little understanding of ISO that it makes me want to gag when your own personal interest rants try to redefine it because they are doing something the 'wrong' way according to you, or supporting something you don't.
I wonder if concert pitch had idiots like you demanding the invalidation of all standards processes, because we know it should really be 445 not 440... Geesh
Bullshit reasoning derives bullshit arguments. I hope people actually reread your idiotic rant and mod it properly, not based on their own hatred of OOXML which has very little to do with your argument.
Yeah, bribes and kickbacks. Plus, Microsoft has instructed their people on how to stack and rig committees and bribe "experts":
You and other fools act like ISO can be easily manipulated by any one company or country. Do you even have a freaking clue about ISO? Most people that get on these bandwagons accusing people of manipulating the ISO processes have no idea how old ISO is, what it does, how it works, in fact most people think ISO is a freaking acronym, and that is when I go, ok, and walk away. (hint: look up isos)
As for political 'expertise' in bribes, MS is at the bottom of the list, and wasn't even a player in lobbyist actions until after the WP/Novell politically motivated crap.
(Novell and WP had no legitimate claim, other than their companies were in Utah, and they fucked over their users and then instead of trying to compete, used political pressures. Yes I know a bit about it, I was there, I saw the memos of MS trying to get WP to make a Windows 3.1 version, and even offering them free help and development to port WP to a Windows version, and WP's response to MS to go pound sand thinking their 5.x version would continue to rule the world.)
When it comes to political influence, MS was one of the LAST old school major Technology companies to even have any D.C. lobbyists.
It wasn't until after Orin Hatch and the WP/Novell crap that Microsoft used lobbyists to fight back, and they themselves were shocked they had to use lobbyists to counter false political movements against their company.(Google this if you need proof)
If Microsoft wasn't so naive about lobbying, there would have never been any monopoly case against them, just like Apple keeps their lock in policies held in good regard in Washington, even with as much market saturation as the iPod has, being equal to MS's OS saturation of the time, and yet far more abusive.
However, you act like MS are the 'experts' at this, even though Apple, Sun, & IBM had Washington D.C. based lobbyists years before Microsoft. (This is how Apple worked with the education policies, POSIX became a US Govt requirement, etc.)
Also when it comes to manipulation, we have more OSS lobbists messing in the affairs of politics in Washington and Brussels than any closed source corporation. Open uh? Only as open as what the movers and shakers of OSS think is open, and of course benefits their pet projects.
And the whole freaking EU case, was sold to them based on 'potential monopoly' of Microsoft and Microsoft being a USA company rather than anything they did. Anti-US corporate sentiment, plus, OSS self indulgent nuts = EU ruling. (This is where I note I have spent a lot of time in Brussels and have several personal friends that work at the EU.)
I am so sick of the BullShit religion of the anti-MS mentality it makes me freaking sick. Everyone forms a premise THEN works hard to justify it. OOXML is a very good example of this. 1) We hate MS, so it is bad. 2) Now we have to figure out how we can pick it apart to prove to others it is bad, based on #1. 3) Sell it as bad based on idiotic and mind numbing ideals to reinforce #1.
Want to be Open Source and think 'more open'?; then stop buying into your own belief system that circumvents your ability to make 'open' decisions.
FOSS has become the Atheists of the world, making a religion out of not being a religion. Everyone supporting FOSS needs to admit that we can't know for sure and open our freaking minds, even if we come to the same conclusion in the end.
If not, we are following a path that is based upon a belief system instead of facts. Open thinking and open software should not ever be a belief system, which directly contrasts with open thinking.