Those photos are also parts of the "autoshow" groups and one in the "cadillac" group, where others have put together photo albums as a collaboration effort.
The mixing can be performed in hardware on many audio chips. Many sound cards have had this feature for years. Sure, not all of them do, but you'd be better off optimizing for sound card features than doing it all in the CPU yourself.
Companies should be heavily slapped for using CPUID data for anything it wasn't designed for.
If you want to know how fast my computer goes, benchmark it. The software could easily say "please wait, checking performance"... since I might be playing Quake4 in another window, killing my CPU performance anyway.
Last I knew, public schools taught about Zeus and various other myths of ancient times and required knowing them well enough to pass tests. I'd say that even if you think creationism is bunk, its worth teaching about. In fact, I learned about native healing circles from teachers who believed in that too. Aliens? We dealt with those too... even watched those tv shows in class about people who were abducted. Why? Its pop culture and not just "science" makes up our day to day lives.
Interacting with most people on the street requires a lot less math and a lot more pop culture.
Many companies even do this internally. I love my Yamaha receiver, but Yamaha manufactuers two versions of almost every receiver they make -- the HTR line and the RX line. The RX line is usually identical (according to their own FAQ) to the HTR line (some high-end RX product aren't always available in the HTR line). THe difference is price, and who's allowed to sell them. RX is only available from the best dealers. In other words, its a status issue.
PS, if you want to buy an RX receiver to prove you have the cash, go right ahead.
The values are supposed to represent 'below reference' volumes.
That is, at '0' dB, you should be listening to the reference volume for the material in question. My receiver's 0 reference changes with room size, for example, but can't compensate for speaker sensitivity.
My appologies, you obviously didn't catch the drift of my argument.
I don't care how Act! is available.
I care that Microsoft (say 'Ford') has so much money that they can dump a crappy product like Schedule+ (say, Ford-Crap-Car to avoid hurting any feelings) to put everyone else (say Ferrari) out of business.
Now, they market this Ford-Crap-Car as being a sports car, give it a loud muffler and drop one off for free with every garage door sold at Sears, et al.
Now everyone has a free car.
Hardly anyone feels the need to go out and buy a better car because the cost barrier is huge compared to 'free'.
This is the problem faced by (for example) Act!... its a much better product, but by Microsoft purposely dumping product for free, they're ruining the market for competitors. When and if Outlook is the only product left, they'll probably charge for it.
"Instead of compiling with optimizations, I should be able to distribute a debug build and just make them buy better hardware".
We're talking at least a 25% increase in speed in many CPU-bound applications, and often a several-fold increase with specialized compilers.
People who do video and audio encoding are not the target here either -- in those cases, optimized builds often make little difference because somebody went to the effort of hand-writing the main loops in optimized assembly already.
Check out Intel's C compiler versus Microsoft's (or GCC) for simple non-CPU-bound application performance differences.
If you're that experienced, I'd be interested in hearing your opinion after you've had a chance to go through some of the development specs of the cell if they ever get publically released (I'm sure they will). The APIs Sony has been developing are supposedly very complete as well (pre-built physics engines and such) so that game developers can just make the game, not the back-end engine.
To be honest, the removable drives confuse me (on both platforms). Unless I can connect two at once (like memory cards on the PS2) and transfer data or at least access both, I don't really want this feature.
I want to bring my game data to my friend's house and not lose his at the same time. Sounds like I'll be using memory cards (with are memory stick for the PS3).
I bought a "just" 30" HDTV recently and I can tell you that watching HD content on CSI, House, Grey's Anatomy, etc. has ruined DVDs for me. I thought the LotR was an amazingly filmed movie. Now I notice the lack of detail in the shots. HDTV has a lot more pixels than DVDs do and when you see the difference, you'll love it.
Sure, HDTV isn't yet "consumer" priced, but its damn close. My 30" HDTV set was just over $750 canadian. Within a year, there won't be much reason not to buy an HDTV set when buying a new TV.
That said, I know a lot of people who'd rather spend $1000 on a set that's bigger and looks terrible than a smaller TV with a better picture.
My Yamaha HTR-5650 is plenty for my living room's needs and drives a 5.1 system beautifully. Most notably, I don't have a subwoofer, so my receiver is powering the bass effects through my main speakers (only the full-sized floor-standing ones). The effects in the Lord of the Rings where large 'thuds' cause rumbles that can be easily heard at the sidewalk are evidence that no more power is required for my situation. And as a more important factor, at about -23 (where I listen to the LotR), there is no audible distortion.
What, you wouldn't pay to host your site on Google's server farms?
I sure would.
Even better, you can pay to have your servers replicated automatically to provide better service where your clients are. Server gets replicated x1 to China and x6 to west coast.
We're talking about a company that does algorithms really well and does hosting really well. Should they sell hosting services? Sounds kinda boring for Google, but its right up their alley.
Its not Microsoft's problem if administrators want Active Directory. It should be sold as a seperate package for Windows server is the point.
Ditto for Media Player and Media Server.
Ditto for Outlook.
Act! was a much better product for 90% of your day to day call tracking than Outlook, but Outlook is "free" with Office (its not, its bundled into the price). Outlook didn't sell for years (as the Exchange client or universal Inbox features) but when they bundled Schedule+ with Office people started using it.
The point is, it wasn't good enough to sell, so other companies were able to compete. Instead, Microsoft gave it away and hurt those companies' businesses. This is illegal in many countries (market flooding, anti-competition, etc.)
I listen to all my CDs in surround sound (with the Dolby Prologic II Music decoder in my Yamaha receiver/amp). Many audio engineers have put the effort into properly blending multiple channels and making a better-than-stereo experience available to the listener.
If you don't have such a system, you're missing out on what's already built into the track by way of Prologic encoding.
If you use normal stereo MP3s or ogg files, you get most of the same rear channel reproduction as well (since Prologic and Prologic II require only stereo storage).
I did, did you? The Emotion Engine is and was an incredible development. Watch the "making of" featurette on the God of War disc and you'll hear them comment somewhat tellingly how this many years later, the "hard problems" are solved and people have figured out how to take advantage of that hardware.
That's the problem though -- how long between when the 386 came out and we got a 32-bit desktop OS that made use of those new features?
Just because the first generation of games didn't take full advantage of the Emotion Engine doesn't mean it sucked or was over-hyped. Consider that it was released in 2000 and could do then what it can do now (minus 5MHz).
The fact of game consoles is that they can't change (much) from inception till discontinuation, so comparing (for example) the PS2 to a modern 2006 PC is silly. Compare it instead to what a $500 PC in 2000 could do.
Please explain to me how 'average' intelligence has any more to do with going to the moon than the average income of the US has to do with the size of Hollywood actors' homes.
Going to the moon is a specialized task for a "few" specialized people.
Lockheed Martin pulled together the engineers to design the SR-71 from those 'sub-average' intelligence people too.
There are many extraordinary people in the world, the question is whether they have resources and get recognition.
Here's an idea... those get singled out by the religious community because they care about those ones, but shouldn't the scientific community be fact-checking these on their own?
Last I checked, people expected scientists to be scientific, not political. If its a theory, just call it one and get it over with, that applies to everything theoretical. It would get people used to the fact that most things we rely on from day to day are in fact theoretical.
We know something that behaves like gravity exists, and we call it gravity, and our tests seem to conclude that we're right about its behaviours, but in all honesty, we have no idea how it works or why or what larger effects it has on space-time beyond what we've been able to test so far, etc.
I was pretty annoyed personally in gr12 when the teacher said "light always travels in a straight line" and then looked at me and said "I know, I know, but for today it does".
Why not just be honest with people and stop treating them like morons?
Microsoft has a deeper API problem when it comes to user security than whether to allow super-user access to the desktop; it wants things to be easy and lets software make those decisions.
For example, my WinXP desktop runs the Windows firewall with basically everything locked down. However, I installed McAfee's (newish) ASAP product (which brags about being able to do updates p2p style on your LAN). Suspicious, I check my packets and sure enough, McAfee is exchanging data (as Administrator) between my PC and a collegues. Sure, its just my AV updates (they say) but when did I turn that firewall port on? I didn't. I installed the software as administrator (required of course) but instead of Windows alerting me that something needed doing (firewall changes), it allowed software to make those changes for me.
You make an argument in your reply I can't agree with -- that Windows wouldn't sell if it sucked. You forget to define your audiences though; it sucks according to computer professionals, and it 'works' for non-professionals 'just fine'. My mother thinks Windows sucks but only because she knows my Linux PC doesn't give me the problems her Windows PC does. Would I install Linux for her? Sure, if she didn't get Dell's support for her Windows PC as it is.
Elder Scrolls (for the PC) is one of the best games ever, period. I can't play it on the XBox though; not good enough resolution. I can understand your enjoyment however; its still a great game.
On the XBox360 however, I expect Oblivion will be incredible... and it may be enough to make me buy an XBox360 on its own. I have no desire to purchase one otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
Or you can do tags within your own photos, so to see my photos of the Toronto International Auto Show recently, you could go to:
w
http://flickr.com/photos/mikebabcock/tags/autosho
Those photos are also parts of the "autoshow" groups and one in the "cadillac" group, where others have put together photo albums as a collaboration effort.
The mixing can be performed in hardware on many audio chips. Many sound cards have had this feature for years. Sure, not all of them do, but you'd be better off optimizing for sound card features than doing it all in the CPU yourself.
Companies should be heavily slapped for using CPUID data for anything it wasn't designed for.
... since I might be playing Quake4 in another window, killing my CPU performance anyway.
If you want to know how fast my computer goes, benchmark it. The software could easily say "please wait, checking performance"
Last I knew, public schools taught about Zeus and various other myths of ancient times and required knowing them well enough to pass tests. I'd say that even if you think creationism is bunk, its worth teaching about. In fact, I learned about native healing circles from teachers who believed in that too. Aliens? We dealt with those too ... even watched those tv shows in class about people who were abducted. Why? Its pop culture and not just "science" makes up our day to day lives.
Interacting with most people on the street requires a lot less math and a lot more pop culture.
Many companies even do this internally. I love my Yamaha receiver, but Yamaha manufactuers two versions of almost every receiver they make -- the HTR line and the RX line. The RX line is usually identical (according to their own FAQ) to the HTR line (some high-end RX product aren't always available in the HTR line). THe difference is price, and who's allowed to sell them. RX is only available from the best dealers. In other words, its a status issue.
PS, if you want to buy an RX receiver to prove you have the cash, go right ahead.
The values are supposed to represent 'below reference' volumes.
That is, at '0' dB, you should be listening to the reference volume for the material in question. My receiver's 0 reference changes with room size, for example, but can't compensate for speaker sensitivity.
For what its worth.
My appologies, you obviously didn't catch the drift of my argument.
... its a much better product, but by Microsoft purposely dumping product for free, they're ruining the market for competitors. When and if Outlook is the only product left, they'll probably charge for it.
I don't care how Act! is available.
I care that Microsoft (say 'Ford') has so much money that they can dump a crappy product like Schedule+ (say, Ford-Crap-Car to avoid hurting any feelings) to put everyone else (say Ferrari) out of business.
Now, they market this Ford-Crap-Car as being a sports car, give it a loud muffler and drop one off for free with every garage door sold at Sears, et al.
Now everyone has a free car.
Hardly anyone feels the need to go out and buy a better car because the cost barrier is huge compared to 'free'.
This is the problem faced by (for example) Act!
There's a major problem with your argument.
"Extra few percent"
I hear that all the time.
"Instead of compiling with optimizations, I should be able to distribute a debug build and just make them buy better hardware".
We're talking at least a 25% increase in speed in many CPU-bound applications, and often a several-fold increase with specialized compilers.
People who do video and audio encoding are not the target here either -- in those cases, optimized builds often make little difference because somebody went to the effort of hand-writing the main loops in optimized assembly already.
Check out Intel's C compiler versus Microsoft's (or GCC) for simple non-CPU-bound application performance differences.
If you're that experienced, I'd be interested in hearing your opinion after you've had a chance to go through some of the development specs of the cell if they ever get publically released (I'm sure they will). The APIs Sony has been developing are supposedly very complete as well (pre-built physics engines and such) so that game developers can just make the game, not the back-end engine.
:)
I'm not a full-time assembly programmer though
To be honest, the removable drives confuse me (on both platforms). Unless I can connect two at once (like memory cards on the PS2) and transfer data or at least access both, I don't really want this feature.
I want to bring my game data to my friend's house and not lose his at the same time. Sounds like I'll be using memory cards (with are memory stick for the PS3).
I bought a "just" 30" HDTV recently and I can tell you that watching HD content on CSI, House, Grey's Anatomy, etc. has ruined DVDs for me. I thought the LotR was an amazingly filmed movie. Now I notice the lack of detail in the shots. HDTV has a lot more pixels than DVDs do and when you see the difference, you'll love it.
Sure, HDTV isn't yet "consumer" priced, but its damn close. My 30" HDTV set was just over $750 canadian. Within a year, there won't be much reason not to buy an HDTV set when buying a new TV.
That said, I know a lot of people who'd rather spend $1000 on a set that's bigger and looks terrible than a smaller TV with a better picture.
Sony pointed out early in this fight that reading HD-DVD with BluRay drives would simply be a cost issue, not a major technological hurdle.
My Yamaha HTR-5650 is plenty for my living room's needs and drives a 5.1 system beautifully. Most notably, I don't have a subwoofer, so my receiver is powering the bass effects through my main speakers (only the full-sized floor-standing ones). The effects in the Lord of the Rings where large 'thuds' cause rumbles that can be easily heard at the sidewalk are evidence that no more power is required for my situation. And as a more important factor, at about -23 (where I listen to the LotR), there is no audible distortion.
What, you wouldn't pay to host your site on Google's server farms?
I sure would.
Even better, you can pay to have your servers replicated automatically to provide better service where your clients are. Server gets replicated x1 to China and x6 to west coast.
We're talking about a company that does algorithms really well and does hosting really well. Should they sell hosting services? Sounds kinda boring for Google, but its right up their alley.
Its not Microsoft's problem if administrators want Active Directory. It should be sold as a seperate package for Windows server is the point.
Ditto for Media Player and Media Server.
Ditto for Outlook.
Act! was a much better product for 90% of your day to day call tracking than Outlook, but Outlook is "free" with Office (its not, its bundled into the price). Outlook didn't sell for years (as the Exchange client or universal Inbox features) but when they bundled Schedule+ with Office people started using it.
The point is, it wasn't good enough to sell, so other companies were able to compete. Instead, Microsoft gave it away and hurt those companies' businesses. This is illegal in many countries (market flooding, anti-competition, etc.)
I listen to all my CDs in surround sound (with the Dolby Prologic II Music decoder in my Yamaha receiver/amp). Many audio engineers have put the effort into properly blending multiple channels and making a better-than-stereo experience available to the listener.
If you don't have such a system, you're missing out on what's already built into the track by way of Prologic encoding.
If you use normal stereo MP3s or ogg files, you get most of the same rear channel reproduction as well (since Prologic and Prologic II require only stereo storage).
Its preference.
... exciting.
Duh.
I like Gnome better, period (with E17, to be honest).
A coworker definately prefers KDE.
I don't think KDE sucks -- it works, I just don't like it.
He doesn't like Gnome.
Wow
There's nothing stopping Sony from releasing a media player on the XBox or even Real for that matter.
There is however plenty preventing Sony from playing iTunes music on their minidisc players.
Your argument is fruitless. You forgot to define "C++".
What subset of C++ does it need to compile to be a C++ compiler?
Do you even care?
What if it can't compile templates or classes, is that good enough? After all, not everyone uses them.
What if it can do classes and not operator overloads? Is that still a C++ compiler?
The reason the standards exist is to help with this *real* problem -- what is or isn't a compiler for this language.
My first three computers were a TI99/4A (with 4k expansion and voice synthesis), C64 and 286-20 (with a full meg of ram).
I did, did you? The Emotion Engine is and was an incredible development. Watch the "making of" featurette on the God of War disc and you'll hear them comment somewhat tellingly how this many years later, the "hard problems" are solved and people have figured out how to take advantage of that hardware.
That's the problem though -- how long between when the 386 came out and we got a 32-bit desktop OS that made use of those new features?
Just because the first generation of games didn't take full advantage of the Emotion Engine doesn't mean it sucked or was over-hyped. Consider that it was released in 2000 and could do then what it can do now (minus 5MHz).
The fact of game consoles is that they can't change (much) from inception till discontinuation, so comparing (for example) the PS2 to a modern 2006 PC is silly. Compare it instead to what a $500 PC in 2000 could do.
Please explain to me how 'average' intelligence has any more to do with going to the moon than the average income of the US has to do with the size of Hollywood actors' homes.
Going to the moon is a specialized task for a "few" specialized people.
Lockheed Martin pulled together the engineers to design the SR-71 from those 'sub-average' intelligence people too.
There are many extraordinary people in the world, the question is whether they have resources and get recognition.
Here's an idea ... those get singled out by the religious community because they care about those ones, but shouldn't the scientific community be fact-checking these on their own?
Last I checked, people expected scientists to be scientific, not political. If its a theory, just call it one and get it over with, that applies to everything theoretical. It would get people used to the fact that most things we rely on from day to day are in fact theoretical.
We know something that behaves like gravity exists, and we call it gravity, and our tests seem to conclude that we're right about its behaviours, but in all honesty, we have no idea how it works or why or what larger effects it has on space-time beyond what we've been able to test so far, etc.
I was pretty annoyed personally in gr12 when the teacher said "light always travels in a straight line" and then looked at me and said "I know, I know, but for today it does".
Why not just be honest with people and stop treating them like morons?
Microsoft has a deeper API problem when it comes to user security than whether to allow super-user access to the desktop; it wants things to be easy and lets software make those decisions.
For example, my WinXP desktop runs the Windows firewall with basically everything locked down. However, I installed McAfee's (newish) ASAP product (which brags about being able to do updates p2p style on your LAN). Suspicious, I check my packets and sure enough, McAfee is exchanging data (as Administrator) between my PC and a collegues. Sure, its just my AV updates (they say) but when did I turn that firewall port on? I didn't. I installed the software as administrator (required of course) but instead of Windows alerting me that something needed doing (firewall changes), it allowed software to make those changes for me.
You make an argument in your reply I can't agree with -- that Windows wouldn't sell if it sucked. You forget to define your audiences though; it sucks according to computer professionals, and it 'works' for non-professionals 'just fine'. My mother thinks Windows sucks but only because she knows my Linux PC doesn't give me the problems her Windows PC does. Would I install Linux for her? Sure, if she didn't get Dell's support for her Windows PC as it is.
Elder Scrolls (for the PC) is one of the best games ever, period. I can't play it on the XBox though; not good enough resolution. I can understand your enjoyment however; its still a great game.
... and it may be enough to make me buy an XBox360 on its own. I have no desire to purchase one otherwise.
On the XBox360 however, I expect Oblivion will be incredible