Here's how you design a product like Apple TV; you decide what features it will have. And what features it may need in the future. And what components you will need to design hardware for a certain price that allows the product to do that.
In all of the above, I doubt DivX was even considered, they picked hardware to support their business of selling iTunes movies, and that matches the support of the rest of their iLife video apps and Quicktime pushing of H.264 as some kind of massive standard.
AppleTV probably has a very ordinary H.264 decoder in it with a low-end ARM or MIPS core sitting around. The H.264 decoder probably accepts a very restricted set of profiles, and DivX profiles from an AVI container probably isn't one of them. The processor core can probably demux the DivX out but it certainly won't have the juice to decode it, and the hardware inside probably isn't - at least there is a very good chance that it isn't - designed for that kind of data anyway (even tiny deviations from the MPEG4 Basic Profile will screw up when you push them through a specialised hardware decoder).
This is why DivX have their own certification system and don't just let people throw a basic MPEG4 decoder on a box and a software demuxer and say "yeah it works". DivX *isn't* MPEG4 standard, and the vast majority of chipsets out there on the market DON'T support DivX profile MPEG4 with modifications to the standard for their tweaky little features.
Apple made a business decision; they picked H.264 for their video format. They will have picked the hardware that supports that video format, AAC and MP3 audio (like the iPod) and I doubt much else. Apple's PortalPlayer chips probably do support WMA, or perhaps they don't. Chips like that are designed as IP Cores and a company wishing to design such high-volume products around them can easily have that part of the IP remove (otherwise PortalPlayer will be buying WMA licenses for every chip and passing that cost onto Apple, and Apple don't need it. There will have been a business decision around that too).
DivX isn't in Apple's business model so why would they have gone to the trouble to get hardware and software ready or even work on updates to support someone else's business model, especially when it doesn't involve the same kind of standardisation?
I never said there was anything wrong with it. I like H.264. I dislike Ogg, Matroska, AVI containers, multitudes of audio formats and VBR MP3 in containers that don't support it, hacks, weirdness, people enabling shitty settings in the DivX profiles.. H.264 is nice and soft and fluffy, very high quality and standard and you can guarantee some stability with it.
Supporting DivX is a big "WTF for?" for me. No chance of it ever happening. Why would your purchase rely on supporting the older MPEG4 standard with some proprietary tweaks and nonstandard profiles, in a weird custom container format, with a random audio codec picked by the encoder, at some godforsaken weird size?
The hardware in the player sorta precludes it. It's a hardware decoder chip probably with very little real CPU power (enough to decrypt the stream, then pass to another decoder block).
Just like Ogg is a bitch to support on older MP3 players, FLAC is a bitch to decode (bandwidth is too high) on those teeny procs. Apple will have picked the decoder chip that matches the needs of iTunes, full stop. If it's even relaxed or powerful enough to support anything more than that, Apple have no vested interest whatsoever in supporting it anyway. Why not tie everyone to making stuff in iMovie, exporting Quicktimes and buying from iTunes?
My point was, it's meant to play iTunes downloads. That's the whole point of Apple TV.
You can export a movie to Apple TV, but it's the EXACT same format just without the FairPlay encryption. It's a very limited set of features for a very limited (copyright-conscious) reason. But 99% of people who buy it won't give a shit - and they probably won't be custom encoding movies to play on Apple TV anyway.
What I would definitely like to see is more movies online coming in H.264 with AAC in a standard container - 1280x720p movies at 24fps which the AppleTV can play. And any damn PC can play. There's no good reason to use DivX compared to this standard format now. Or MP3 (or MP3 Surround). The codec mess should be over and done with. I'm sick of having a movie come in OGM, Matroska, AVI (usually badly encoded using VBR MP3 or OpenDML) or split onto two CDs (DVD writers are $30 guys, stop splitting them onto two CDs) or having weird and wonderful concepts of subtitles formats. DivX can be congratulated - as a company - for bringing us the wonder of DVD players which can play all our encoded movies (in high definition, even) but now, why bother?
Plays anything Quicktime plays out of the box, with an extreme focus on their preferred download format (DRM or not) then, doesn't it?:)
The chance of such a hardware decoder supporting any more esoteric formats (especially anything but standard H.264 profiles) like DivX, why Apple would bother even supporting AVI files (when MPEG4 is a Quicktime container..) let alone Matroska or Ogg containers, is mind-bogglingly low.
DivX won't be supported. The thing will play specially encoded H.264 movies from iTunes with DRM bolted onto, end of story. There's no way Apple would have been able to secure the licensing to sell stuff on iTunes if they didn't.
I guess you won't be getting one, but think of how many hookers you can get for the same price. A lot more fun!
I think this is a global conspiracy to undermine the patent system by submitting totally invalid patents. Once it's found they're unenforcable they'll kill off the patent system that is broken. Yay for that. Congratulations to that law firm and whatever!?
Actually I'm curious, when was your first experience of a linked list implemented in a highly exposed manner? As far as I recall it was in AmigaOS (but then I am only just young enough to remember that as my first OS and the first OS I cared coding for). A lot of systems do use linked lists, it's a very old (1960's?:) concept. But AmigaOS gave you a linked list for nearly everything, stored all it's windows and objects and tasks in them, and expected you to traverse it with exec.library and utility.library.
Along with tags (tagitems, taglists) and ReadArgs they're things I miss in modern operating systems which seem too 'hidden' and trying to feel too unixy. It's all pipes and sockets and syscalls, blagghhh.. I'm glad QNX puts message passing right in your face, and DragonFly is bringing it all back to me again. I can't wait until someone patents one of those again!
It did that a couple of times for me, but luckily all my email is on IMAP (all 8GB of it plus an anal retentive collection of spam so I can re-teach the checker:) so.. I just got a slow INBOX every now and again.
The fix was really simple in the end, a combination of switching to Thunderbird and installing a virus checker on the server. Actually that should be something virus checkers do - I never understood why your email application has to do all the junk detection and virus checking AFTER it's been pulled into your INBOX. On my IMAP box, okay, this is pretty much how it works (it hits my inbox regardless of the email app being open after all) but if you're using POP3 or HTTP mail clients, why not have your virus checker and spam checker hook into the mail app at the network protocol level - download a mail into the virus checker and then have the virus checker proxy it to the mail app?
After all, what I get if I use POP3 with a virus checker now is, email app downloads a mail, it is indexed and put in the inbox, flagged as unread and sets off a notification that I got mail delivered, then the junk mail and virus checker runs over the inbox (sometimes flagging off a "do you want this application to access your mail box?" warning dialog), the disk churns again over this. Why does it have to hit the email application first, then be checked, then be deleted, leaving a hidden deleted message to my inbox, and another spam mail in my Junk folder or discarded completely if it threw up a virus exception?
Don't the commercial virus checkers (Sophos?) handle this properly?
Indeed, games should reward the player for every action, even if that reward is a rather swift (but well portrayed:) death.
The rant coming from a Spore developer is that graphics and complex artificial intelligence and storage space are more important than making a game that is actually fun. Okay, so his game IS all about complex artificial intelligence, but there is more than enough horsepower on the Wii to support this - there is also more than enough horsepower to support a 720x480 display and rather impressive graphics on it (hey, I own an HDTV, but if I need 2 million pixels on screen just so I can read some tiny fucking text and see over the horizon - and while I'm ranting here, why the FUCK would I need to see to the horizon, enemies shooting me from way over there is unfair).
If any Spore hits the Wii, they will have unique and rather comfortable control option for it (PC with mouse and Wii with 'mote may be the best ones for it - I dunno how you will be building creatures on an XBox360 version, but I suspect it will be rather clumsy).
But omg it's ONLY just a bit better than the Gamecube (which is ONLY just a bit more powerful than the original XBox if you think about it)!!! If that's so disgusting to him, he's too blind to be a games designer. He's a geek who ended up writing games, more than someone who wants to make entertaining products.
Joliet supports Unicode but then you have two file tables, and the length of unicode filenames is limited. You could encode UTF-8 filenames in the Rockridge or ISO9660:1999 records but then your "maximum filename length" becomes variable which is.. too odd for users or standardisation. Basically the ISO9660 format is too restrictive. The entire industry moved to UDF for their advanced DVD format; it's a shame Chinese/Japanese DVD player manufacturers are too f**king lazy to support the advanced disk format and there are those awful UDF/ISO hybrids, and DVD files are split into 1GB chunks, and so on. What the hell is the point of that?
Either way, recovery protection on ISO9660 is a dead loss. Not in the HD-DVD standard for political reasons or because it's a stupid, stupid idea to support improvements and firmware changes for a 10 year old filesystem, especially for media that standardises UDF?
Microsoft won't be adding features to FAT anymore and nobody's worried about that are they?:D
It may simply become the "other format" supported on every camera (alongside JPEG, RAW or even TIFF) the same way Ogg is the "other format" supported on MP3 players (also supporting WMA, AAC). I doubt they have wild new technology in there that will make it hard to support all of them at once.
This guy needs to go out and get himself a new gold-plated mobile phone, $4500 laptop or something, and calm down a little.
Gamers who want the MOST STUFF are really the worst kind. They'll play (and design!) any old shit as long as it gets a review score for prettiest, shiniest graphics or most surround-soundy audio. Gameplay? What's that anymore? We need a huge, epic storyline, that's what we need. Something that confuses the piss out of gamers and leaves them disappointed with a cliffhanger, when you spent the last 6 hours wandering through the ice level, lava/radioactive level, jungle terrain and arrid desert - token level designer staples - oh and the "totally fucked up and not necessary alien world full of pixel-accurate jumping puzzles" at the end.. but wow the STORY was great and you want MORE okay!?! And the enemies must be able to speak 3 languages including French with an convincing accent. Because better AI means a lot more fun.
I can only be impressed a couple of times when an enemy ducks behind a barrel on a level, and I have to walk out into the open and get shot in the face to even get an aim in. He should concentrate on level design and game mechanics, and stop whining about whether the CPU will let him add layers of sparkle.
From article: "Since the TrueDisc format is open and the master copies stored by TrueDisc are located in the standard ISO 9660 filesystem"
That pretty much fucks up anyone's day when they wanna burn a UDF DVD doesn't it? ISO9660 doesn't support files greater than 4GB, you can only have 8 directories deep (until the 1999 spec but I always had a hell of a time reading this stuff on anything but XP), stupid filename restrictions (and then do you use Joliet or RockRidge or whatever to fix it or not?)..
Re:News At 11, Industry Insider Hates Nonconformis
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Spore Dev Down On the Wii
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· Score: 2, Insightful
> Do you seriously want to play the same games you played since the SNES over and over -- never getting > something really different and new?
Yes. And so does everyone else. The sales of Mario rehashes, Virtual Console style stuff on Wii and XBox is through the roof - much higher than any expectation. Nintendo release old SNES and NES games for the DS. They released the old Mario games on a single cart for the SNES and even bundled the console with it (I miss Mario Allstars more than you can imagine)
Sony do the same thing with myriad rehashes of Crash, Spyro, Gran Turismo (same game, same cars, SHINIER SPECULAR HIGHLIGHTS, same lawnmower engines, MORE LEAVES ON THE TREES).
Modern games are only an artform if you think accurately modelling the wind on the leaves individually makes your car go any faster round the track.
The article states that Apple get to make a profit because they are "not beholden to Microsoft". That, I think, is crap. Alienware get to make a decent profit and they ARE beholden to Microsoft to ship an OS that runs just like on every other PC. The differentiation point is basically the hardware - Apple used to ship Power and now they ship rather more original Intel designs. They get to do cute things like build a decent camera into it, motion sensors for the hard disk (IBM/Lenovo did this as well - it's an IBM patent - but most laptops didn't at the time) and the silly magnetic cable and such things. This is how they make a profit.
If they were not beholden to Microsoft, they wouldn't be trying to keep MS Office despite having iLife and OpenOffice, they wouldn't have produced BootCamp or pallied up with the Parallels guys or specifically started selling their pro machines with a chip that hardware-asissts virtualisation (they actually *waited* for this chip, because of that). They also wouldn't be saying go out and get a copy of XP and use BootCamp to run games..
The thing Apple is not beholden to is competing in the very low end just-a-PC market. At a certain price and a certain performance level, the sub-$300 PC has no room to manuever. Apple cleverly stay well clear of that market. This is why they can make a profit on their systems. High prices for high features. They compete with a fairly even market of high spec high feature PC's which also run Windows, which Dell never advertises on their TV adverts ($249 special offer and a free 17" TFT, printer and $250 worth of bundled paint package software sounds better than $999 and 'buy your own fucking monitor')
Apple isn't making more money because they don't need to be "beholden" to Microsoft. The reality is that operating system licenses don't cost the Dells of this world that much. They are a thing that goes on every PC and hundreds of millions sold each year means it doesn't cost a great deal per unit for Dell.
What Apple has the advantage of is that they do not need to compete trying to make a system which does exactly the same as their competitor's boxes with exactly the same hardware and resources. They have their own OS and can pick out a few things which differentiate themselves. That differentiation comes at a slight price premium. It is NOT because "they are not beholden to Microsoft" - they could do the same thing with a high-spec PC like Alienware do (ironically part of Dell now), they just do it with their own stuff and application suite and the integrated-monitor-iMac and cute features on PowerBooks instead.
Why can't it be a crazy solar cycle *AND* human intervention?
If there's anything we've proved from all this science and conference nonsense going around on the news, is we can do tiny things and make drastic changes to the environment. If we were concentrating on keeping the Earth nice and cool during a crazy solar cycle, we could probably do it.
Having the fossil fuels, CFCs and all that stuff in the way is going to make a warm decade unbearable, basically. That's the problem; if we hadn't fucked the environment we may well just have been in for a great set of summers and mild winters. Now we'll get a Katrina-grade hurricane every year, half of Alabama flattened by tornados, freak ice storms in Australia..
Who cares what OS you run it on? Microsoft won't be unseated by an XML "OS" like this. If they could be, then nobody would bother running Ubuntu, or OS X or SuSE either. Google won't be usurped.. because their main asset is a great search engine, then their mail and maps services.. all basically for locating information. Will Google suddenly die because you can use a word processor based in Javascript and XML? I doubt that.
As subject. How is this meant to change the world or "threaten" Google or Microsoft when you need an OS (probably from Microsoft) and a browser (probably with Google as the homepage, both if we take the most popular)?
Once you wanna do something in this "internet OS" you'll fullscreen your $179 copy of Internet Explorer on Windows Vista, and fire up an app which probably uses some Google API internally. World changing? Or just another layer between you and them that serves yet more adverts?
AAC is royalty free and better than MP3. You only need a license for certain purposes, which your computer manufacturer, media player etc. probably has bundled just fine (iTunes for example, which is.. for free)
Arguably it's better quality and smaller than Vorbis too, which for all intents and purposes could well be patented somehow somewhere, just hasn't been tested yet. At least you know where you stand with AAC.
I think the statement Dell made was not that Linux preinstalls cannot exist because nobody wants them, but that the target market isn't big enough. This poll on Dell's little ideastorm website doesn't make that false, or change their stance, or prove that they can no longer deny it as a feature.
And in any case, preinstalling Linux for geeks is a waste of time - they're the vocal minority who want preinstalled Linux because it increases mindshare but will tire of having a 6 month old distro on their laptop when they buy it, and install the latest development release anyway.
Would people be happy if they had Dapper Xubuntu installed just because it has a 10-year support cycle and Dell think that's better for customers, or do Dell take the risk and put Feisty on it?
RedHat or SuSE? Ubuntu or Debian? Think of problems like Fedora where preinstalling it on a system is against their charter (and preinstalling it and calling it Fedora even worse. The trademark licensing is atrocious. Would they bother with a Fedora-based Dell Linux?)
It's simply not as easy and simple and there aren't enough people who will appreciate it (despite demands - not the same as demand) to make it worthwhile. Windows or a BLANK laptop would be a better idea. A lack of a Windows license and preinstall. Maybe ship a CD of choice?
I think Dell might do well to allow people to uncheck the Windows button, and give a link to something like the Ubuntu "ShipIt" service. Order your Dell box and push a link to the shipping address to the Ubuntu service, so you get your CD in the mail..
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Here's how you design a product like Apple TV; you decide what features it will have. And what features it may need in the future. And what components you will need to design hardware for a certain price that allows the product to do that.
In all of the above, I doubt DivX was even considered, they picked hardware to support their business of selling iTunes movies, and that matches the support of the rest of their iLife video apps and Quicktime pushing of H.264 as some kind of massive standard.
AppleTV probably has a very ordinary H.264 decoder in it with a low-end ARM or MIPS core sitting around. The H.264 decoder probably accepts a very restricted set of profiles, and DivX profiles from an AVI container probably isn't one of them. The processor core can probably demux the DivX out but it certainly won't have the juice to decode it, and the hardware inside probably isn't - at least there is a very good chance that it isn't - designed for that kind of data anyway (even tiny deviations from the MPEG4 Basic Profile will screw up when you push them through a specialised hardware decoder).
This is why DivX have their own certification system and don't just let people throw a basic MPEG4 decoder on a box and a software demuxer and say "yeah it works". DivX *isn't* MPEG4 standard, and the vast majority of chipsets out there on the market DON'T support DivX profile MPEG4 with modifications to the standard for their tweaky little features.
Apple made a business decision; they picked H.264 for their video format. They will have picked the hardware that supports that video format, AAC and MP3 audio (like the iPod) and I doubt much else. Apple's PortalPlayer chips probably do support WMA, or perhaps they don't. Chips like that are designed as IP Cores and a company wishing to design such high-volume products around them can easily have that part of the IP remove (otherwise PortalPlayer will be buying WMA licenses for every chip and passing that cost onto Apple, and Apple don't need it. There will have been a business decision around that too).
DivX isn't in Apple's business model so why would they have gone to the trouble to get hardware and software ready or even work on updates to support someone else's business model, especially when it doesn't involve the same kind of standardisation?
I never said there was anything wrong with it. I like H.264. I dislike Ogg, Matroska, AVI containers, multitudes of audio formats and VBR MP3 in containers that don't support it, hacks, weirdness, people enabling shitty settings in the DivX profiles.. H.264 is nice and soft and fluffy, very high quality and standard and you can guarantee some stability with it.
Supporting DivX is a big "WTF for?" for me. No chance of it ever happening. Why would your purchase rely on supporting the older MPEG4 standard with some proprietary tweaks and nonstandard profiles, in a weird custom container format, with a random audio codec picked by the encoder, at some godforsaken weird size?
The hardware in the player sorta precludes it. It's a hardware decoder chip probably with very little real CPU power (enough to decrypt the stream, then pass to another decoder block).
Just like Ogg is a bitch to support on older MP3 players, FLAC is a bitch to decode (bandwidth is too high) on those teeny procs. Apple will have picked the decoder chip that matches the needs of iTunes, full stop. If it's even relaxed or powerful enough to support anything more than that, Apple have no vested interest whatsoever in supporting it anyway. Why not tie everyone to making stuff in iMovie, exporting Quicktimes and buying from iTunes?
Or a strip club. $200 is a lot of panties and straps to stuff. The rest, swigging down b-52's and cranberry vodkas? :)
My point was, it's meant to play iTunes downloads. That's the whole point of Apple TV.
You can export a movie to Apple TV, but it's the EXACT same format just without the FairPlay encryption. It's a very limited set of features for a very limited (copyright-conscious) reason. But 99% of people who buy it won't give a shit - and they probably won't be custom encoding movies to play on Apple TV anyway.
What I would definitely like to see is more movies online coming in H.264 with AAC in a standard container - 1280x720p movies at 24fps which the AppleTV can play. And any damn PC can play. There's no good reason to use DivX compared to this standard format now. Or MP3 (or MP3 Surround). The codec mess should be over and done with. I'm sick of having a movie come in OGM, Matroska, AVI (usually badly encoded using VBR MP3 or OpenDML) or split onto two CDs (DVD writers are $30 guys, stop splitting them onto two CDs) or having weird and wonderful concepts of subtitles formats. DivX can be congratulated - as a company - for bringing us the wonder of DVD players which can play all our encoded movies (in high definition, even) but now, why bother?
Plays anything Quicktime plays out of the box, with an extreme focus on their preferred download format (DRM or not) then, doesn't it? :)
The chance of such a hardware decoder supporting any more esoteric formats (especially anything but standard H.264 profiles) like DivX, why Apple would bother even supporting AVI files (when MPEG4 is a Quicktime container..) let alone Matroska or Ogg containers, is mind-bogglingly low.
DivX won't be supported. The thing will play specially encoded H.264 movies from iTunes with DRM bolted onto, end of story. There's no way Apple would have been able to secure the licensing to sell stuff on iTunes if they didn't.
I guess you won't be getting one, but think of how many hookers you can get for the same price. A lot more fun!
I think this is a global conspiracy to undermine the patent system by submitting totally invalid patents. Once it's found they're unenforcable they'll kill off the patent system that is broken. Yay for that. Congratulations to that law firm and whatever!?
:) concept. But AmigaOS gave you a linked list for nearly everything, stored all it's windows and objects and tasks in them, and expected you to traverse it with exec.library and utility.library.
Actually I'm curious, when was your first experience of a linked list implemented in a highly exposed manner? As far as I recall it was in AmigaOS (but then I am only just young enough to remember that as my first OS and the first OS I cared coding for). A lot of systems do use linked lists, it's a very old (1960's?
Along with tags (tagitems, taglists) and ReadArgs they're things I miss in modern operating systems which seem too 'hidden' and trying to feel too unixy. It's all pipes and sockets and syscalls, blagghhh.. I'm glad QNX puts message passing right in your face, and DragonFly is bringing it all back to me again. I can't wait until someone patents one of those again!
So basically the RIAA/MPAA loses money and the pirates don't make any.
Either that balances out or it means the aforementioned studio mafia are justified in suing grandmas and teenagers.
I'd rather the US government spent money on their people than fighting wars and the usual terrorism bullshit.
ONLY a billion dollars though. I want a $4000 coupon to get a new HDTV LCD.
It did that a couple of times for me, but luckily all my email is on IMAP (all 8GB of it plus an anal retentive collection of spam so I can re-teach the checker :) so.. I just got a slow INBOX every now and again.
The fix was really simple in the end, a combination of switching to Thunderbird and installing a virus checker on the server. Actually that should be something virus checkers do - I never understood why your email application has to do all the junk detection and virus checking AFTER it's been pulled into your INBOX. On my IMAP box, okay, this is pretty much how it works (it hits my inbox regardless of the email app being open after all) but if you're using POP3 or HTTP mail clients, why not have your virus checker and spam checker hook into the mail app at the network protocol level - download a mail into the virus checker and then have the virus checker proxy it to the mail app?
After all, what I get if I use POP3 with a virus checker now is, email app downloads a mail, it is indexed and put in the inbox, flagged as unread and sets off a notification that I got mail delivered, then the junk mail and virus checker runs over the inbox (sometimes flagging off a "do you want this application to access your mail box?" warning dialog), the disk churns again over this. Why does it have to hit the email application first, then be checked, then be deleted, leaving a hidden deleted message to my inbox, and another spam mail in my Junk folder or discarded completely if it threw up a virus exception?
Don't the commercial virus checkers (Sophos?) handle this properly?
Indeed, games should reward the player for every action, even if that reward is a rather swift (but well portrayed :) death.
The rant coming from a Spore developer is that graphics and complex artificial intelligence and storage space are more important than making a game that is actually fun. Okay, so his game IS all about complex artificial intelligence, but there is more than enough horsepower on the Wii to support this - there is also more than enough horsepower to support a 720x480 display and rather impressive graphics on it (hey, I own an HDTV, but if I need 2 million pixels on screen just so I can read some tiny fucking text and see over the horizon - and while I'm ranting here, why the FUCK would I need to see to the horizon, enemies shooting me from way over there is unfair).
If any Spore hits the Wii, they will have unique and rather comfortable control option for it (PC with mouse and Wii with 'mote may be the best ones for it - I dunno how you will be building creatures on an XBox360 version, but I suspect it will be rather clumsy).
But omg it's ONLY just a bit better than the Gamecube (which is ONLY just a bit more powerful than the original XBox if you think about it)!!! If that's so disgusting to him, he's too blind to be a games designer. He's a geek who ended up writing games, more than someone who wants to make entertaining products.
Joliet supports Unicode but then you have two file tables, and the length of unicode filenames is limited. You could encode UTF-8 filenames in the Rockridge or ISO9660:1999 records but then your "maximum filename length" becomes variable which is.. too odd for users or standardisation. Basically the ISO9660 format is too restrictive. The entire industry moved to UDF for their advanced DVD format; it's a shame Chinese/Japanese DVD player manufacturers are too f**king lazy to support the advanced disk format and there are those awful UDF/ISO hybrids, and DVD files are split into 1GB chunks, and so on. What the hell is the point of that?
:D
Either way, recovery protection on ISO9660 is a dead loss. Not in the HD-DVD standard for political reasons or because it's a stupid, stupid idea to support improvements and firmware changes for a 10 year old filesystem, especially for media that standardises UDF?
Microsoft won't be adding features to FAT anymore and nobody's worried about that are they?
Yeah right. End of JPEG. As if.
It may simply become the "other format" supported on every camera (alongside JPEG, RAW or even TIFF) the same way Ogg is the "other format" supported on MP3 players (also supporting WMA, AAC). I doubt they have wild new technology in there that will make it hard to support all of them at once.
Least enjoyable Zelda adventure EVER, yeah :D
This guy needs to go out and get himself a new gold-plated mobile phone, $4500 laptop or something, and calm down a little.
Gamers who want the MOST STUFF are really the worst kind. They'll play (and design!) any old shit as long as it gets a review score for prettiest, shiniest graphics or most surround-soundy audio. Gameplay? What's that anymore? We need a huge, epic storyline, that's what we need. Something that confuses the piss out of gamers and leaves them disappointed with a cliffhanger, when you spent the last 6 hours wandering through the ice level, lava/radioactive level, jungle terrain and arrid desert - token level designer staples - oh and the "totally fucked up and not necessary alien world full of pixel-accurate jumping puzzles" at the end.. but wow the STORY was great and you want MORE okay!?! And the enemies must be able to speak 3 languages including French with an convincing accent. Because better AI means a lot more fun.
I can only be impressed a couple of times when an enemy ducks behind a barrel on a level, and I have to walk out into the open and get shot in the face to even get an aim in. He should concentrate on level design and game mechanics, and stop whining about whether the CPU will let him add layers of sparkle.
From article: "Since the TrueDisc format is open and the master copies stored by TrueDisc are located in the standard ISO 9660 filesystem"
That pretty much fucks up anyone's day when they wanna burn a UDF DVD doesn't it? ISO9660 doesn't support files greater than 4GB, you can only have 8 directories deep (until the 1999 spec but I always had a hell of a time reading this stuff on anything but XP), stupid filename restrictions (and then do you use Joliet or RockRidge or whatever to fix it or not?)..
> Do you seriously want to play the same games you played since the SNES over and over -- never getting
> something really different and new?
Yes. And so does everyone else. The sales of Mario rehashes, Virtual Console style stuff on Wii and XBox is through the roof - much higher than any expectation. Nintendo release old SNES and NES games for the DS. They released the old Mario games on a single cart for the SNES and even bundled the console with it (I miss Mario Allstars more than you can imagine)
Sony do the same thing with myriad rehashes of Crash, Spyro, Gran Turismo (same game, same cars, SHINIER SPECULAR HIGHLIGHTS, same lawnmower engines, MORE LEAVES ON THE TREES).
Modern games are only an artform if you think accurately modelling the wind on the leaves individually makes your car go any faster round the track.
Thanks for the rant, and missing the point.
The article states that Apple get to make a profit because they are "not beholden to Microsoft". That, I think, is crap. Alienware get to make a decent profit and they ARE beholden to Microsoft to ship an OS that runs just like on every other PC. The differentiation point is basically the hardware - Apple used to ship Power and now they ship rather more original Intel designs. They get to do cute things like build a decent camera into it, motion sensors for the hard disk (IBM/Lenovo did this as well - it's an IBM patent - but most laptops didn't at the time) and the silly magnetic cable and such things. This is how they make a profit.
If they were not beholden to Microsoft, they wouldn't be trying to keep MS Office despite having iLife and OpenOffice, they wouldn't have produced BootCamp or pallied up with the Parallels guys or specifically started selling their pro machines with a chip that hardware-asissts virtualisation (they actually *waited* for this chip, because of that). They also wouldn't be saying go out and get a copy of XP and use BootCamp to run games..
The thing Apple is not beholden to is competing in the very low end just-a-PC market. At a certain price and a certain performance level, the sub-$300 PC has no room to manuever. Apple cleverly stay well clear of that market. This is why they can make a profit on their systems. High prices for high features. They compete with a fairly even market of high spec high feature PC's which also run Windows, which Dell never advertises on their TV adverts ($249 special offer and a free 17" TFT, printer and $250 worth of bundled paint package software sounds better than $999 and 'buy your own fucking monitor')
Apple isn't making more money because they don't need to be "beholden" to Microsoft. The reality is that operating system licenses don't cost the Dells of this world that much. They are a thing that goes on every PC and hundreds of millions sold each year means it doesn't cost a great deal per unit for Dell.
What Apple has the advantage of is that they do not need to compete trying to make a system which does exactly the same as their competitor's boxes with exactly the same hardware and resources. They have their own OS and can pick out a few things which differentiate themselves. That differentiation comes at a slight price premium. It is NOT because "they are not beholden to Microsoft" - they could do the same thing with a high-spec PC like Alienware do (ironically part of Dell now), they just do it with their own stuff and application suite and the integrated-monitor-iMac and cute features on PowerBooks instead.
Why can't it be a crazy solar cycle *AND* human intervention?
If there's anything we've proved from all this science and conference nonsense going around on the news, is we can do tiny things and make drastic changes to the environment. If we were concentrating on keeping the Earth nice and cool during a crazy solar cycle, we could probably do it.
Having the fossil fuels, CFCs and all that stuff in the way is going to make a warm decade unbearable, basically. That's the problem; if we hadn't fucked the environment we may well just have been in for a great set of summers and mild winters. Now we'll get a Katrina-grade hurricane every year, half of Alabama flattened by tornados, freak ice storms in Australia..
Who cares what OS you run it on? Microsoft won't be unseated by an XML "OS" like this. If they could be, then nobody would bother running Ubuntu, or OS X or SuSE either. Google won't be usurped.. because their main asset is a great search engine, then their mail and maps services.. all basically for locating information. Will Google suddenly die because you can use a word processor based in Javascript and XML? I doubt that.
As subject. How is this meant to change the world or "threaten" Google or Microsoft when you need an OS (probably from Microsoft) and a browser (probably with Google as the homepage, both if we take the most popular)?
Once you wanna do something in this "internet OS" you'll fullscreen your $179 copy of Internet Explorer on Windows Vista, and fire up an app which probably uses some Google API internally. World changing? Or just another layer between you and them that serves yet more adverts?
AAC is royalty free and better than MP3. You only need a license for certain purposes, which your computer manufacturer, media player etc. probably has bundled just fine (iTunes for example, which is .. for free)
Arguably it's better quality and smaller than Vorbis too, which for all intents and purposes could well be patented somehow somewhere, just hasn't been tested yet. At least you know where you stand with AAC.
I think the statement Dell made was not that Linux preinstalls cannot exist because nobody wants them, but that the target market isn't big enough. This poll on Dell's little ideastorm website doesn't make that false, or change their stance, or prove that they can no longer deny it as a feature.
And in any case, preinstalling Linux for geeks is a waste of time - they're the vocal minority who want preinstalled Linux because it increases mindshare but will tire of having a 6 month old distro on their laptop when they buy it, and install the latest development release anyway.
Would people be happy if they had Dapper Xubuntu installed just because it has a 10-year support cycle and Dell think that's better for customers, or do Dell take the risk and put Feisty on it?
RedHat or SuSE? Ubuntu or Debian? Think of problems like Fedora where preinstalling it on a system is against their charter (and preinstalling it and calling it Fedora even worse. The trademark licensing is atrocious. Would they bother with a Fedora-based Dell Linux?)
It's simply not as easy and simple and there aren't enough people who will appreciate it (despite demands - not the same as demand) to make it worthwhile. Windows or a BLANK laptop would be a better idea. A lack of a Windows license and preinstall. Maybe ship a CD of choice?
I think Dell might do well to allow people to uncheck the Windows button, and give a link to something like the Ubuntu "ShipIt" service. Order your Dell box and push a link to the shipping address to the Ubuntu service, so you get your CD in the mail..