There's been some speculation that the limitation is that the 360 has analog outputs (which may be easier to scale in hardware) while the PS3 has digital outputs (which might be harder to do?)
The 360's scaling is done before the signal is converted to analog. Anyways, if this was actually the problem, Sony could have just made the PS3 only capable of scaling up to 1080i on analog outputs. I don't know of a single HDTV out there with digital inputs that doesn't handle 720p, and there's no question that for games it's better to use 720p than 1080i.
The cards in the Intel Macs (at least the Macbook and MBP) are Atheros, not Broadcom. IIRC the 24" iMac has a Broadcom Pre-N card, but the rest are Atheros.
Count five more. I'm a huge PF fan, have been for years, and I'm 20. My 17 year old brother is the same way, and so are all three of the neighbors we hang out with (16, 20, and 24 I think). For a solid month, the only music heard in my car was from a trio of MP3 discs I burned containing every album PF ever released.
An enjoyable side-effect of the copywrong enforcement on the p2p world is that full albums are now easily available on BT sites.
What do you mean "now available"? I've been using torrents literally since the first day I read about them here and I've seen maybe ten total single tracks on the major trackers. Full album releases are the rule and single tracks are the very very slim exception. For the most part, any band which has released more than five albums will also have a discography listed.
Single track downloading has been mainly reserved to the more centralized P2P nets and even that is slowly fading.
See, we have a GPU "socket", just it's a long socket with only two rows of pins.
The idea of a socket purely for the GPU is a flawed concept. The memory technology used in graphics cards changes quite rapidly (notice how most graphics cards just skipped with over DDR2 and went to DDR3, now some have DDR4 while DDR2 is only now standard as system memory), different GPUs have different bus widths, and the memory speed varies. You solve this by putting the memory on-package with the GPU. Only then, you realize that what's left to connect is a host system interface and a display interface. The only difference from what we have now is that the DVI port would be on the motherboard, restricting the number of video outputs a card could have.
There are also issues of data clock rates being pickier over a socket/slot interface versus when the chip is directly soldered to the board, but I don't think we even need to get in to those.
PCI Express is the best we've got for now. AMD is pushing for direct HyperTransport interfacing of add-on cards and Intel has something of their own for linking to the FSB, so we'll start seeing GPUs directly tethered to the CPU soon, but a GPU socket will probably never happen.
Your TV already has such a patch. It's called CSPAN. Not only does it tell you what stupid thing Congresscritters are doing now, but it's also a great sleep aid in the spring when you have to get up an hour earlier.
Concerning school schedules. Start school no earlier than 4 hours before noon. If noon comes at 1pm, then start school, whether elementary, middle, or high, at 9am. Let them sleep in. Let them go when it's always light out, which would be 4 hours before noon during the winter for most of the U.S. if I'm not mistaken. So what if they have to end school at 4pm to 5pm.
Quoted for fuckin truth. Fortunately I'm out of high school now, but I never could figure out which genius decided that starting class at 7:30 or earlier was a smart idea. 90% of the class was either passed out or hypercaffeinated. Some (myself included) even built up enough of a tolerance to caffeine that they could drink two Red Bulls and then sleep through the entire class. Starting at a sane time like 9 makes a whole lot more sense, especially since it works alongside the standard "9 to 5" business schedule.
The FM transmitters are the more annoying issue to NPR though, since they tend to share the same frequencies so NPR listeners occasionally get a blast from a FM transmitter in a nearby car that may be playing something "offensive".
The repeaters matter less to NPR directly, since they're nowhere near the same frequency range, but this part is where Sirius and XM can be affected directly, since they're the ones with the licenses for those transmitters as opposed to the Part 15 transmitters in some receivers which neither broadcaster has any direct control over.
There are a couple of ext2 drivers for Windows with read and write support. They also support ext3, but last time I checked they treated it as an ext2 drive, so no journaling. The driver also completely ignores UNIX permissions, though that's understandable seeing that in most situations the permission info is useless even if you just dual-booted over to another install of the same OS.
The earliest evidence of 16:10 PC monitors that I've seen is the Sony GDM-W900 in early 2000. 16:9 had been part of the HDTV standard for years before then, plus DVDs (typically 16:9 or even wider) were beginning to catch on.
16:10 seems to be another confusing and reasonless LCD quirk, just like the 5:4 1280x1024 resolution. That said, I like my widescreens and don't really want things to change.
Wikipedia's wrong then. All I've ever heard used to refer to 1680x1050 is WSXGA+
My claims of no quality loss were based on WUXGA (1920x1200) which can display 1080p pixel for pixel. On a WSXGA+ display, there will be a loss of information, though a good decoder will make this unnoticable and it will still look better than 720p content on the same display.
I have a Dell 2005FPW WSXGA+ display and I run my Xbox 360 at 720p through it with excellent results, but it can't compare to playing 1080i movies or some of the very little 1080p content out there. Side by side the difference is obvious.
I don't know if there's another country that I could stand living in.
Pretty much everywhere in Europe and Asia is out due to the cars. If I couldn't pick up a used car with a V8 putting down at least 250HP through the rear wheels for under the equivalent of $3000, I'm not interested. Front wheel drive econoboxes seem to dominate the selection in those areas.
It's just too risky for an American to live in the middle east right now, so that's out too. I don't want to dramatically lower my standard of living or be in fear for my life on a daily basis, so that knocks out a good chunk of Africa and Central/South America.
The remaining countries that come to mind are Canada and Austrailia. Driving in Canada is just like driving here, except for the whole metric thing, so that's easy. Austrailia seems to be even better than here in the US, having vehicles like the Falcon and Monaro (which we finally got as the GTO) as well as those great B&S Utes that just sing to the redneck in me.
The problem with both of those is bandwidth. I've heard so many complaints about internet access in Austrailia being total garbage and Canadian complaints (particularly invisible bandwidth caps) seem to be increasing. I have 8mbit completely unrestricted here, and while it's not amazing in light of FiOS and some of the crazy direct 100mbit/1gbit to the home solutions I've heard of in Europe and Asia, it seems to be far above the average on Canada or Austrailia.
If anyone has some suggestions, I'm all ears. Tell me where I can find cars that would be fun to someone who loves the Mustang, at least 5mbit true unlimited internet, a less crazy government (no nanny states), and could survive speaking only American English for however long it takes to learn the native tongue.
SP2 breaks nothing. Already broken systems (malware typically) fail under SP2 because of the aforementioned breaks not being compatible with new fixes in SP2.
As the person who responded to your last post explained, that's just not possible with the K8 architecture as it is. The memory controller is on-die and memory technology is evolving, therefore the interface between the processor (where the controller is) and motherboard (where the DIMMs are) must also change.
The closest to a solution we have would be going back to Pentium 2/3 style processor-on-a-card designs which would move the memory slots to an expansion card shared with the processor which would then have a HyperTransport interface to the motherboard.
This works, as some motherboard manufacturers (ASRock on the 939DUAL for one) have implemented something along these lines for AM2 expandability. The problem lies in laying out the circuitry for this new slot, not to mention the incompatibility with many of the large coolers we often use today. It also would become even more complex when faced with another one or two extra HyperTransport lanes as found on Opteron 2xx and 8xx chips, respectively.
AMD made a compromise when they designed K8. On the one hand, the on-die memory controller improves latency by a huge amount and scales much better by completely eliminating the memory and FSB bottlenecks that Intel chips get in a multiprocessor environment. On the other hand, new memory interface = new socket, no way around it.
From what I understand, the upcoming Socket F Opterons will have over 1200 pins in their socket so as to allow both a direct DDR2 interface and FB-DIMM. If I understand FB-DIMM technology correctly, it should end this issue by providing a standard interface to the DIMM which is then translated for whatever type of memory is in use. Logically this will trickle down to the consumers in another generation. For the time being however, AMD has stated that the upcoming "AM3" processors will still work in AM2 motherboards, as they will have both DDR2 and DDR3 controllers.
I know, but you can't blame them for that. It is in fact a bug, and while said bug is unlikely to cause gameplay problems it could be considered a security hole. I install modchips and softmods for alcohol money (there's a lot of people on a college campus who want homebrew) so I have to say this is a wacky theory from way out in left field, but being a widely distributed platform it could possibly become a target for malware.
Let's consider this scenario. It's unlikely as hell, but entirely possible. -Person finds memory stick laying on the ground labelled "PSP" -Person pops memory stick in to their PSP, sees an unlabeled application -App takes advantage of the PSPs ability to multitask and loads in the background, connecting to any available WiFi APs and turning the PSP in to a spam drone any time its near an access point, until the device is fully powered down. If other memory sticks are inserted, it spreads to those.
Granted it's not worth the effort for spammers to attack PSPs due to the unpredictability of when they're available and the ease of finding open relays and rooted Windows boxes, but the point is this is a possible scenario and a legitimate justification of fixing the homebrew-enabling holes from a security perspective rather than a business perspective. This kind of thing could possibly actually become a real worry if the Wii ends up being remote-exploitable, since it is intended to be running in some state 24/7 and would likely have network access at all times through its WiFi.
Out of the existing network-patchable consoles (Xbox, Xbox 360, PSP) while both the Xbox and PSP have seen anti-softmod patches delivered, both have also had updates that add features (PSP web browser for example) and improve the gameplay experience (Halo 2 anti-cheat patches). So far it appears the 360 has had the friendliest patches, only adding features and fixing real bugs while not in any way affecting those of us with modified DVD firmware (though some claim the updates killed their Xboxes, based on the previous posts of most of those users they had impending hardware failure anyways).
I'll give you the King Kong and Dead Rising SD problems, though I'd attribute that to retarded testing procedures at the developer, publisher, and Microsoft QA levels. If they had seriously tested the game on all four supported resolutions as one would expect them to, the problem would have been obvious. The responses I've seen from the developers of both of those games are not indicative of a "patch it later" attitude, rather more of an "oh shit, we forgot to test that!".
Oblivion problems, well those are to be expected. The same thing happened with Morrowind on Xbox, but there they did not have a way to release updates. The original version had a fatal flaw that caused constant crashing if your save file got large. As the save file size was directly proportional to the level of clutter in your game, people like me who kept a lot of crap around their in-game houses got huge saves. At one time mine was over 20MB. This made the game so unplayable that I quit until the Game of the Year Edition release with the expansions and all the patches from the PC version to date was released. That fixed all the major issues and made the game playable again (I finally finished the main quest), but it cost $30 and honestly I haven't played the expansion quests enough to consider them worth it. If the Xbox version had a Live-based patching mechanism like Oblivion on 360 does, I'd probably have downloaded a patch long before my save file got large enough to encounter the problem.
The ability to patch after release is a very good thing, but the console makers need to enforce strict rules of QA before allowing production of the title to prevent "patch-it-later" syndrome.
You're looking at this pessimistically, believing that this system will be abused by developers to release a beta-grade game and fix it later, though that position is validated by the current situation with some PC games. I'm taking a more optimistic position and noting that people with SD screens who bought King Kong or Dead Rising would just have been fucked if there wasn't a patch mechanism in place. The control the console makers hold over the release of titles is what I hope will prevent the patch problems you fear, where those controls are nonexistant in the PC world where anyone can release a game to retail in any state.
Also, assuming you don't want to play online, you can keep playing your next-gen games offline with no updates like you always have. It's just an advantage to have it hooked up. The last numbers I heard had the Xbox 360 pegged at about 50% connected to the internet with about 35% being active members of Xbox Live (a.k.a. paid Gold accounts). Clearly this shows that you don't need to be online with a next-gen console.
Slashdot Mirror
The 360's scaling is done before the signal is converted to analog. Anyways, if this was actually the problem, Sony could have just made the PS3 only capable of scaling up to 1080i on analog outputs. I don't know of a single HDTV out there with digital inputs that doesn't handle 720p, and there's no question that for games it's better to use 720p than 1080i.
The cards in the Intel Macs (at least the Macbook and MBP) are Atheros, not Broadcom. IIRC the 24" iMac has a Broadcom Pre-N card, but the rest are Atheros.
Count five more. I'm a huge PF fan, have been for years, and I'm 20. My 17 year old brother is the same way, and so are all three of the neighbors we hang out with (16, 20, and 24 I think). For a solid month, the only music heard in my car was from a trio of MP3 discs I burned containing every album PF ever released.
What do you mean "now available"? I've been using torrents literally since the first day I read about them here and I've seen maybe ten total single tracks on the major trackers. Full album releases are the rule and single tracks are the very very slim exception. For the most part, any band which has released more than five albums will also have a discography listed.
Single track downloading has been mainly reserved to the more centralized P2P nets and even that is slowly fading.
See, we have a GPU "socket", just it's a long socket with only two rows of pins.
The idea of a socket purely for the GPU is a flawed concept. The memory technology used in graphics cards changes quite rapidly (notice how most graphics cards just skipped with over DDR2 and went to DDR3, now some have DDR4 while DDR2 is only now standard as system memory), different GPUs have different bus widths, and the memory speed varies. You solve this by putting the memory on-package with the GPU. Only then, you realize that what's left to connect is a host system interface and a display interface. The only difference from what we have now is that the DVI port would be on the motherboard, restricting the number of video outputs a card could have.
There are also issues of data clock rates being pickier over a socket/slot interface versus when the chip is directly soldered to the board, but I don't think we even need to get in to those.
PCI Express is the best we've got for now. AMD is pushing for direct HyperTransport interfacing of add-on cards and Intel has something of their own for linking to the FSB, so we'll start seeing GPUs directly tethered to the CPU soon, but a GPU socket will probably never happen.
Your TV already has such a patch. It's called CSPAN. Not only does it tell you what stupid thing Congresscritters are doing now, but it's also a great sleep aid in the spring when you have to get up an hour earlier.
Quoted for fuckin truth. Fortunately I'm out of high school now, but I never could figure out which genius decided that starting class at 7:30 or earlier was a smart idea. 90% of the class was either passed out or hypercaffeinated. Some (myself included) even built up enough of a tolerance to caffeine that they could drink two Red Bulls and then sleep through the entire class. Starting at a sane time like 9 makes a whole lot more sense, especially since it works alongside the standard "9 to 5" business schedule.
That doesn't seem right. If they're getting hit by cars while waiting for the bus, that means one of two things:
1. The kids are standing in the street. Stupid kids.
2. The car was being driven on the sidewalk. Drunk driver.
The time of day doesn't really come in to play when you have a stupid kid or drunk driver, the accident's going to happen eventually.
Or a modern-day Republican
The major parties see different problems, but the solution is the same: more government intervention
Both are parts of the complaint.
The FM transmitters are the more annoying issue to NPR though, since they tend to share the same frequencies so NPR listeners occasionally get a blast from a FM transmitter in a nearby car that may be playing something "offensive".
The repeaters matter less to NPR directly, since they're nowhere near the same frequency range, but this part is where Sirius and XM can be affected directly, since they're the ones with the licenses for those transmitters as opposed to the Part 15 transmitters in some receivers which neither broadcaster has any direct control over.
I've only ever seen one 24 hour Wal-Mart.
There are a couple of ext2 drivers for Windows with read and write support. They also support ext3, but last time I checked they treated it as an ext2 drive, so no journaling. The driver also completely ignores UNIX permissions, though that's understandable seeing that in most situations the permission info is useless even if you just dual-booted over to another install of the same OS.
The earliest evidence of 16:10 PC monitors that I've seen is the Sony GDM-W900 in early 2000. 16:9 had been part of the HDTV standard for years before then, plus DVDs (typically 16:9 or even wider) were beginning to catch on.
16:10 seems to be another confusing and reasonless LCD quirk, just like the 5:4 1280x1024 resolution. That said, I like my widescreens and don't really want things to change.
Wikipedia's wrong then. All I've ever heard used to refer to 1680x1050 is WSXGA+
My claims of no quality loss were based on WUXGA (1920x1200) which can display 1080p pixel for pixel. On a WSXGA+ display, there will be a loss of information, though a good decoder will make this unnoticable and it will still look better than 720p content on the same display.
I have a Dell 2005FPW WSXGA+ display and I run my Xbox 360 at 720p through it with excellent results, but it can't compare to playing 1080i movies or some of the very little 1080p content out there. Side by side the difference is obvious.
1080i/p HDTV would be letterboxed, so it fits fine just has some leftover space at the top and bottom.
Don't ask me why, but for some reason even though HDTVs are 16:9, those building widescreen computer monitors decided 16:10 was better.
I don't know if there's another country that I could stand living in.
Pretty much everywhere in Europe and Asia is out due to the cars. If I couldn't pick up a used car with a V8 putting down at least 250HP through the rear wheels for under the equivalent of $3000, I'm not interested. Front wheel drive econoboxes seem to dominate the selection in those areas.
It's just too risky for an American to live in the middle east right now, so that's out too. I don't want to dramatically lower my standard of living or be in fear for my life on a daily basis, so that knocks out a good chunk of Africa and Central/South America.
The remaining countries that come to mind are Canada and Austrailia. Driving in Canada is just like driving here, except for the whole metric thing, so that's easy. Austrailia seems to be even better than here in the US, having vehicles like the Falcon and Monaro (which we finally got as the GTO) as well as those great B&S Utes that just sing to the redneck in me.
The problem with both of those is bandwidth. I've heard so many complaints about internet access in Austrailia being total garbage and Canadian complaints (particularly invisible bandwidth caps) seem to be increasing. I have 8mbit completely unrestricted here, and while it's not amazing in light of FiOS and some of the crazy direct 100mbit/1gbit to the home solutions I've heard of in Europe and Asia, it seems to be far above the average on Canada or Austrailia.
If anyone has some suggestions, I'm all ears. Tell me where I can find cars that would be fun to someone who loves the Mustang, at least 5mbit true unlimited internet, a less crazy government (no nanny states), and could survive speaking only American English for however long it takes to learn the native tongue.
It's "jacking on", not "jacking in".
Damn young'ns screwing up the Futurama references...
*mumbles something about blackjack and hookers*
Working fine here with FF 1.5
Check if your Flash install is fucked.
First time i've seen that in a while...I must be lucky
SP2 breaks nothing. Already broken systems (malware typically) fail under SP2 because of the aforementioned breaks not being compatible with new fixes in SP2.
Unfortunately, Newegg doesn't take cash and the local computer parts places have horrible prices (sometimes 25% above MSRP).
As the person who responded to your last post explained, that's just not possible with the K8 architecture as it is. The memory controller is on-die and memory technology is evolving, therefore the interface between the processor (where the controller is) and motherboard (where the DIMMs are) must also change.
The closest to a solution we have would be going back to Pentium 2/3 style processor-on-a-card designs which would move the memory slots to an expansion card shared with the processor which would then have a HyperTransport interface to the motherboard.
This works, as some motherboard manufacturers (ASRock on the 939DUAL for one) have implemented something along these lines for AM2 expandability. The problem lies in laying out the circuitry for this new slot, not to mention the incompatibility with many of the large coolers we often use today. It also would become even more complex when faced with another one or two extra HyperTransport lanes as found on Opteron 2xx and 8xx chips, respectively.
AMD made a compromise when they designed K8. On the one hand, the on-die memory controller improves latency by a huge amount and scales much better by completely eliminating the memory and FSB bottlenecks that Intel chips get in a multiprocessor environment. On the other hand, new memory interface = new socket, no way around it.
From what I understand, the upcoming Socket F Opterons will have over 1200 pins in their socket so as to allow both a direct DDR2 interface and FB-DIMM. If I understand FB-DIMM technology correctly, it should end this issue by providing a standard interface to the DIMM which is then translated for whatever type of memory is in use. Logically this will trickle down to the consumers in another generation. For the time being however, AMD has stated that the upcoming "AM3" processors will still work in AM2 motherboards, as they will have both DDR2 and DDR3 controllers.
I know, but you can't blame them for that. It is in fact a bug, and while said bug is unlikely to cause gameplay problems it could be considered a security hole. I install modchips and softmods for alcohol money (there's a lot of people on a college campus who want homebrew) so I have to say this is a wacky theory from way out in left field, but being a widely distributed platform it could possibly become a target for malware.
Let's consider this scenario. It's unlikely as hell, but entirely possible.
-Person finds memory stick laying on the ground labelled "PSP"
-Person pops memory stick in to their PSP, sees an unlabeled application
-App takes advantage of the PSPs ability to multitask and loads in the background, connecting to any available WiFi APs and turning the PSP in to a spam drone any time its near an access point, until the device is fully powered down. If other memory sticks are inserted, it spreads to those.
Granted it's not worth the effort for spammers to attack PSPs due to the unpredictability of when they're available and the ease of finding open relays and rooted Windows boxes, but the point is this is a possible scenario and a legitimate justification of fixing the homebrew-enabling holes from a security perspective rather than a business perspective. This kind of thing could possibly actually become a real worry if the Wii ends up being remote-exploitable, since it is intended to be running in some state 24/7 and would likely have network access at all times through its WiFi.
Out of the existing network-patchable consoles (Xbox, Xbox 360, PSP) while both the Xbox and PSP have seen anti-softmod patches delivered, both have also had updates that add features (PSP web browser for example) and improve the gameplay experience (Halo 2 anti-cheat patches). So far it appears the 360 has had the friendliest patches, only adding features and fixing real bugs while not in any way affecting those of us with modified DVD firmware (though some claim the updates killed their Xboxes, based on the previous posts of most of those users they had impending hardware failure anyways).
I'll give you the King Kong and Dead Rising SD problems, though I'd attribute that to retarded testing procedures at the developer, publisher, and Microsoft QA levels. If they had seriously tested the game on all four supported resolutions as one would expect them to, the problem would have been obvious. The responses I've seen from the developers of both of those games are not indicative of a "patch it later" attitude, rather more of an "oh shit, we forgot to test that!".
Oblivion problems, well those are to be expected. The same thing happened with Morrowind on Xbox, but there they did not have a way to release updates. The original version had a fatal flaw that caused constant crashing if your save file got large. As the save file size was directly proportional to the level of clutter in your game, people like me who kept a lot of crap around their in-game houses got huge saves. At one time mine was over 20MB. This made the game so unplayable that I quit until the Game of the Year Edition release with the expansions and all the patches from the PC version to date was released. That fixed all the major issues and made the game playable again (I finally finished the main quest), but it cost $30 and honestly I haven't played the expansion quests enough to consider them worth it. If the Xbox version had a Live-based patching mechanism like Oblivion on 360 does, I'd probably have downloaded a patch long before my save file got large enough to encounter the problem.
The ability to patch after release is a very good thing, but the console makers need to enforce strict rules of QA before allowing production of the title to prevent "patch-it-later" syndrome.
You're looking at this pessimistically, believing that this system will be abused by developers to release a beta-grade game and fix it later, though that position is validated by the current situation with some PC games. I'm taking a more optimistic position and noting that people with SD screens who bought King Kong or Dead Rising would just have been fucked if there wasn't a patch mechanism in place. The control the console makers hold over the release of titles is what I hope will prevent the patch problems you fear, where those controls are nonexistant in the PC world where anyone can release a game to retail in any state.
Also, assuming you don't want to play online, you can keep playing your next-gen games offline with no updates like you always have. It's just an advantage to have it hooked up. The last numbers I heard had the Xbox 360 pegged at about 50% connected to the internet with about 35% being active members of Xbox Live (a.k.a. paid Gold accounts). Clearly this shows that you don't need to be online with a next-gen console.