I readily admit that on paper Blu-Ray was better technically regarding higher density disks. The slightly higher transfer rates are irrelevant regarding movies, since there's no bandwidth issues there unless your source is using an inefficient compression algorithm.
Both BR and HDDVD support TrueHD audio, so I'm not sure where your misinformation on audio comes from. You should also note that almost all movies are in 5.1 audio, not the 7.1 that's supported.
But, BR the implementation was hamstrung from the beginning by DRM requirements, and the implementation at the time of the "win" was far below what HD DVD already was capable of. (we really should just say "bought in as gross an example of monopolistic anti-competitive behavior as is available in history" as Sony mortgaged half the company to do so)
Add to that the fact that the hard coating was a requirement on BR disks, and could have easily been added to HD DVD disks, the only thing left is capacity. Now as to capacity, most BR disks use the less than optimal MPEG2 encoding which is a space hog, yet still leaves lots of room on most BR disks, essentially stating they could also easily fit on HD DVD disks. MPEG4 encoding, which is much more efficient and actually preserves more quality even when a movie is compressed to a smaller file size than MPEG2 equivalent would completely negate the size argument at least as far as movies go - the primary reason for these disks existence in the first place.
...it's due to the corporate interest to maximize their profit by taking away my right to a fair resale value as determined by the used game marketplace.
So don't buy the product from them in the first place.
If any business fucks me over, even once, I NEVER go back to it
Even when a business holds an actual monopoly, such as the electric company or perhaps the phone company prior to widespread deployment of VoIP service?
Sony is not a monopoly, and with their current practices, probably will never become one.
I don't buy a Sony TV because of my past experiences with Sony's car radios etc. The whole DRM thing is useful to tell the good ones from the bad ones.
Having such cool products.... I wonder if they fully appreciate what they're doing to their brand.
I don't buy Sony products because:
They have placed malignant rootkits on their audio CDs that compromised PCs
Their quality over a period dropped significantly from their heyday in the 70s-80s
They did underhanded deals to foist a sub-optimal solution (Blu-Ray) on everyone
They continue to champion DRM to screw their customers over under the guise of "sticking it to the pirates" when the only thing they're doing is moving the population towards acceptance of a pay to play revenue model
They are the reason we have Celine Dion
I think any of those alone are enough reason to boycott any company. Put more than one into a single company and there's no excuse to buy anything from them.
I've played with the actual backend WMI bits on 2008 R2 (same core as W7) and can tell you there is no such thing as an easy way to make these numbers appear. The "Used" number you see is actually the total - available. The actual numbers reported for the apps added together frequently exceeds the actual total RAM, no matter which available stats you use.
I'm not sure how accurate the "available" number is either. The free number appears to be the only one that's truly accurate and verifiable.
How can game engines not take advantage of multiple cores?
Because not everyone has multiple cores so PC games have to go for some version of the lowest common denominator whereas a console game has a known platform to work with that is standardized.
This is completely irrelevant to multi-threaded coding, the essential difference between a monolithic single threaded game and one that can take advantage of multiple cores.
The main reason games do not do multi-threaded coding historically was that the x86 did horrible context switching, causing a massive performance hit that was large enough to be noticeable. This is still true compared to other architectures, but the overhead is so minor in terms of a CPU's ability it no longer is noticeable. The second reason games are generally not multi-threaded is that parallel programming is not necessarily easy. Even windows still drives much of its IO through a single thread in the GDI component (not sure if this is finally fixed in W7). So it's not just game programmers that find this hard.
I've got a Pentium Pro 180, retired, sitting next to my desk.
Next to it is a Pentium 166. Upstairs is a Sun Ultra 2.
They're all still functional, but no real reason to keep them going. They will probably head out the door shortly for the recycle bin or whatever I can do to make them not have a huge impact on landfills.
Yeah, blame the criminals for exploiting a system designed to dispense cash based solely on a 4 digit number;
You're smoking crack, or have a bad bank. CC fraud requires a number, the expiration date, and the name, at the very least. An additional layer that is increasingly being used is provided by the sid (that 3 or 4 digit number), and for the vendor that likes to validate as much as possible: a full mailing address (not all providers do address verification though).
The latter combined with shipping only to said address is an attempt to restrict purchases only to the person who holds the card. Short of an additional password or biometrics that are done asynchronously to the purchase (much like an OpenID system) there's really no way to be "secure" as all of this information is available when a DB/Service is cracked. Note that only a separate authentication piece handled by the bank/CC issuer is the only way to allow "secure" authentication, provided that that service is also not cracked. If you leave it all to the vendor to collect and pass through, then all the keys are being held by the vendor for however short a time that may be.
And how often do you log out of your Mac? The only time I do that is when I reboot, and according to uptime, I haven't rebooted in more than a week. That was only because of security updates.
One mac - 2 days after 21 days, because Parallels/Windows 2008 R2 along with safari ran me into 4GB of swap space it wouldn't release. Mac two - 90 days. (No Parallels/Windows on this one - needs a reboot with new security patch.
How about they first put seats in that fit 90% of the population? Otherwise, perhaps this is a ploy to sell 2 seats to "normal" people.
I do not fit into most coach seats even though the armrests have never been a problem. Either the pitch is too narrow (row to row spacing) with knees hitting the seat in front or the seat itself made for 12 year olds because they're too narrow in the shoulders. It's annoying as hell.
Updating from Vista to Windows 7 is a fluid motion of medium risk. Updating from Windows 2000 to Windows 7 or Linux or whatever becomes a serious and risky undertaking.
That a funny statement, as there are virtually no Vista->Win7 updates. It's mostly XP->W7, and that only because XP has been EOL'd.
XP is actually still better than W7 in many ways, fewer resources, faster, lighter. W7 claims to be more secure but it really isn't. If you run XP with everything turned off and all non MS software for anything going out to the internet, you'll be better off than W7 w/ IE 8.
What could be better than botnets trying to destroy each other? Eventually one of them will screw something up and fewer and fewer systems will be members of any botnet as they get corrupted. That can only be good news as users wind up having to reinstall their software and hopefully at least a small percentage will learn a thing or two about security along the way.
They drank the koolaid, and the piper's come a calling. Shortcuts inevitably wind up costing you sooner or later, and that's what web sites created solely for IE6 are.
Then I disagree with your definition of "report." It does not tell anyone anywhere of it. XP reports battery life. It has an icon for it in the system tray and multiple pop-ups about battery issues of a variety of types.
You have a definition problem. XP reports everything. You're describing notifications. That's an entirely different thing.
I've never heard anyone say "XP reports your IP when you connect via DHCP."...Would you say "XP reports my IP when I connect via DHCP"?
It does - just look in Event Viewer.
XP does not repeat the message. It stores it, and it can be looked up. But it doesn't repeat it as it comes in.
I beg to differ. It's repeated in various places and utilities, and programs. Users just don't happen to be on the active notification list. Otherwise, how does the "report" get into the Event Log? It certainly didn't originate there.
Now, as to notifications, I'm not sure, but I believe you can configure them. My main goal has been to remove as many of those incredibly useless notifications as possible. You see, I run regular reports, which I review and they tell me what I need to know. Since I don't log into all my machines regularly, this is a much more useful tool than a GUI notification on the desktop in the form of a transient popup balloon. (Oh no - I was in a meeting for 5 minutes, now what?)
As a last point: there's an entire industry that charges for this type of notification support, including MS's own internal products. Why would they give this to you for free? On the other hand, you could write a small registered listener that would give you your desired notification popup, should you need it so desperately.
After running Linux and OS X for the past 3 years solid, and only running windows 50% or less at work the previous 6 years, I can say that find, grep, and history are probably my 3 most used and missing commands, along with a reasonable shell. Follow that with ssh and scp, and the ability to easily manage any machine from any other with proper credentials and minimal bandwidth, and you get the idea. It's not windows.
Yes, I'm aware of some of the native "ports' of these commands. Most are flawed implementations (esp grep and find) and do not work as expected.
People badmouth Linux docs, but I have a far easier time finding how to do something in Linux than Windows. How good is Apple documentation?
Let's put it this way, a 3 year old's chicken scratch on toilet paper that's been flushed down the toilet, retrieved from the sewer and dried is more useful than most MS documentation.
XP onward reports SMART status. Do they supply you with a script kiddie friendly tool to retrieve and view that data? Obviously not.
I went and reread the entire set of ancestor posts. Nowhere is a popup stated prior to his response. I too was surprised by his initial statement, as I know that XP reports SMART status, and there's a variety of third party tools to view that information in a more pleasant manner.
However, there's also truth in it, but not in the current context. You have to work for yourself, which is what the top tier is doing. Working for others, you only get the leftover crumbs.
You're talking to a Mac Classic user. Back then, yes, consistency mattered. Now? Now there's no consistency. None. Nada.
OS X took that and flushed it down the crapper, from when they decided to ship both chrome and aqua windows.
Windows 7 is significantly more consistent, UI-wise, than newer versions of OS X. If consistency is something you care about, you should be using Windows. There was a time when Apple was the only good place to go for us rare users that valued usability, but that time is long-passed. Mac has gone downhill while everybody else is racing upwards, and there's no real noticeable difference anymore.
Please don't even mention consistency and Windows in the same sentence. It's an obvious troll.
There's at least 3 classes of windows, with some being resizable, some not, some being scrollable, others not. Some you can cut and paste from, others not. And these are all in various system administration applications installed in a plain vanilla default installation. We won't even start with the the classic vs category vs "new" view of Control panel, or any of the other multitudes of changes that were made for apparently no good reason other than to drive new revenue in the MCSE training/certification program.
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BR's have data 0.1 mm deep. HD DVD's are like DVDs and 0.6 mm deep, making the data more scratch tolerant.
So what's a relevant first post get me? 100 points?
I readily admit that on paper Blu-Ray was better technically regarding higher density disks. The slightly higher transfer rates are irrelevant regarding movies, since there's no bandwidth issues there unless your source is using an inefficient compression algorithm.
Both BR and HDDVD support TrueHD audio, so I'm not sure where your misinformation on audio comes from. You should also note that almost all movies are in 5.1 audio, not the 7.1 that's supported.
But, BR the implementation was hamstrung from the beginning by DRM requirements, and the implementation at the time of the "win" was far below what HD DVD already was capable of. (we really should just say "bought in as gross an example of monopolistic anti-competitive behavior as is available in history" as Sony mortgaged half the company to do so)
Add to that the fact that the hard coating was a requirement on BR disks, and could have easily been added to HD DVD disks, the only thing left is capacity. Now as to capacity, most BR disks use the less than optimal MPEG2 encoding which is a space hog, yet still leaves lots of room on most BR disks, essentially stating they could also easily fit on HD DVD disks. MPEG4 encoding, which is much more efficient and actually preserves more quality even when a movie is compressed to a smaller file size than MPEG2 equivalent would completely negate the size argument at least as far as movies go - the primary reason for these disks existence in the first place.
...it's due to the corporate interest to maximize their profit by taking away my right to a fair resale value as determined by the used game marketplace.
So don't buy the product from them in the first place.
If any business fucks me over, even once, I NEVER go back to it
Even when a business holds an actual monopoly, such as the electric company or perhaps the phone company prior to widespread deployment of VoIP service?
Sony is not a monopoly, and with their current practices, probably will never become one.
I don't buy a Sony TV because of my past experiences with Sony's car radios etc. The whole DRM thing is useful to tell the good ones from the bad ones.
Having such cool products.... I wonder if they fully appreciate what they're doing to their brand.
I don't buy Sony products because:
I think any of those alone are enough reason to boycott any company. Put more than one into a single company and there's no excuse to buy anything from them.
I've played with the actual backend WMI bits on 2008 R2 (same core as W7) and can tell you there is no such thing as an easy way to make these numbers appear. The "Used" number you see is actually the total - available. The actual numbers reported for the apps added together frequently exceeds the actual total RAM, no matter which available stats you use.
I'm not sure how accurate the "available" number is either. The free number appears to be the only one that's truly accurate and verifiable.
Pretty much anyone that doesn't drop the FP registers.
How can game engines not take advantage of multiple cores?
Because not everyone has multiple cores so PC games have to go for some version of the lowest common denominator whereas a console game has a known platform to work with that is standardized.
This is completely irrelevant to multi-threaded coding, the essential difference between a monolithic single threaded game and one that can take advantage of multiple cores.
The main reason games do not do multi-threaded coding historically was that the x86 did horrible context switching, causing a massive performance hit that was large enough to be noticeable. This is still true compared to other architectures, but the overhead is so minor in terms of a CPU's ability it no longer is noticeable. The second reason games are generally not multi-threaded is that parallel programming is not necessarily easy. Even windows still drives much of its IO through a single thread in the GDI component (not sure if this is finally fixed in W7). So it's not just game programmers that find this hard.
I've got a Pentium Pro 180, retired, sitting next to my desk.
Next to it is a Pentium 166. Upstairs is a Sun Ultra 2.
They're all still functional, but no real reason to keep them going. They will probably head out the door shortly for the recycle bin or whatever I can do to make them not have a huge impact on landfills.
I tossed the 286 a while ago.
Yeah, blame the criminals for exploiting a system designed to dispense cash based solely on a 4 digit number;
You're smoking crack, or have a bad bank. CC fraud requires a number, the expiration date, and the name, at the very least. An additional layer that is increasingly being used is provided by the sid (that 3 or 4 digit number), and for the vendor that likes to validate as much as possible: a full mailing address (not all providers do address verification though).
The latter combined with shipping only to said address is an attempt to restrict purchases only to the person who holds the card. Short of an additional password or biometrics that are done asynchronously to the purchase (much like an OpenID system) there's really no way to be "secure" as all of this information is available when a DB/Service is cracked. Note that only a separate authentication piece handled by the bank/CC issuer is the only way to allow "secure" authentication, provided that that service is also not cracked. If you leave it all to the vendor to collect and pass through, then all the keys are being held by the vendor for however short a time that may be.
And yes, I do blame the criminal.
And how often do you log out of your Mac? The only time I do that is when I reboot, and according to uptime, I haven't rebooted in more than a week. That was only because of security updates.
One mac - 2 days after 21 days, because Parallels/Windows 2008 R2 along with safari ran me into 4GB of swap space it wouldn't release.
Mac two - 90 days. (No Parallels/Windows on this one - needs a reboot with new security patch.
How about they first put seats in that fit 90% of the population? Otherwise, perhaps this is a ploy to sell 2 seats to "normal" people.
I do not fit into most coach seats even though the armrests have never been a problem. Either the pitch is too narrow (row to row spacing) with knees hitting the seat in front or the seat itself made for 12 year olds because they're too narrow in the shoulders. It's annoying as hell.
Heck, that's less than a month's output, if you're working on a well-designed project.
Updating from Vista to Windows 7 is a fluid motion of medium risk. Updating from Windows 2000 to Windows 7 or Linux or whatever becomes a serious and risky undertaking.
That a funny statement, as there are virtually no Vista->Win7 updates. It's mostly XP->W7, and that only because XP has been EOL'd.
XP is actually still better than W7 in many ways, fewer resources, faster, lighter. W7 claims to be more secure but it really isn't. If you run XP with everything turned off and all non MS software for anything going out to the internet, you'll be better off than W7 w/ IE 8.
What could be better than botnets trying to destroy each other? Eventually one of them will screw something up and fewer and fewer systems will be members of any botnet as they get corrupted. That can only be good news as users wind up having to reinstall their software and hopefully at least a small percentage will learn a thing or two about security along the way.
They drank the koolaid, and the piper's come a calling. Shortcuts inevitably wind up costing you sooner or later, and that's what web sites created solely for IE6 are.
Then I disagree with your definition of "report." It does not tell anyone anywhere of it. XP reports battery life. It has an icon for it in the system tray and multiple pop-ups about battery issues of a variety of types.
You have a definition problem. XP reports everything. You're describing notifications. That's an entirely different thing.
I've never heard anyone say "XP reports your IP when you connect via DHCP." ...Would you say "XP reports my IP when I connect via DHCP"?
It does - just look in Event Viewer.
XP does not repeat the message. It stores it, and it can be looked up. But it doesn't repeat it as it comes in.
I beg to differ. It's repeated in various places and utilities, and programs. Users just don't happen to be on the active notification list. Otherwise, how does the "report" get into the Event Log? It certainly didn't originate there.
Now, as to notifications, I'm not sure, but I believe you can configure them. My main goal has been to remove as many of those incredibly useless notifications as possible. You see, I run regular reports, which I review and they tell me what I need to know. Since I don't log into all my machines regularly, this is a much more useful tool than a GUI notification on the desktop in the form of a transient popup balloon. (Oh no - I was in a meeting for 5 minutes, now what?)
As a last point: there's an entire industry that charges for this type of notification support, including MS's own internal products. Why would they give this to you for free? On the other hand, you could write a small registered listener that would give you your desired notification popup, should you need it so desperately.
After running Linux and OS X for the past 3 years solid, and only running windows 50% or less at work the previous 6 years, I can say that find, grep, and history are probably my 3 most used and missing commands, along with a reasonable shell. Follow that with ssh and scp, and the ability to easily manage any machine from any other with proper credentials and minimal bandwidth, and you get the idea. It's not windows.
Yes, I'm aware of some of the native "ports' of these commands. Most are flawed implementations (esp grep and find) and do not work as expected.
Let me introduce you to the future of MS OS servers: Server 2008 R2 Server Core.
The next iteration of the GUI.
Oh, and it's not fully 64 bit. Turns out MS's installer still requires 32 bit components. Probably for those GUI popups.
People badmouth Linux docs, but I have a far easier time finding how to do something in Linux than Windows. How good is Apple documentation?
Let's put it this way, a 3 year old's chicken scratch on toilet paper that's been flushed down the toilet, retrieved from the sewer and dried is more useful than most MS documentation.
XP onward reports SMART status. Do they supply you with a script kiddie friendly tool to retrieve and view that data? Obviously not.
I went and reread the entire set of ancestor posts. Nowhere is a popup stated prior to his response. I too was surprised by his initial statement, as I know that XP reports SMART status, and there's a variety of third party tools to view that information in a more pleasant manner.
That's truly insightful and painful.
However, there's also truth in it, but not in the current context. You have to work for yourself, which is what the top tier is doing. Working for others, you only get the leftover crumbs.
Darn it - wrong mod - posting to remove.
Dude.
You're talking to a Mac Classic user. Back then, yes, consistency mattered. Now? Now there's no consistency. None. Nada.
OS X took that and flushed it down the crapper, from when they decided to ship both chrome and aqua windows.
Windows 7 is significantly more consistent, UI-wise, than newer versions of OS X. If consistency is something you care about, you should be using Windows. There was a time when Apple was the only good place to go for us rare users that valued usability, but that time is long-passed. Mac has gone downhill while everybody else is racing upwards, and there's no real noticeable difference anymore.
Please don't even mention consistency and Windows in the same sentence. It's an obvious troll.
There's at least 3 classes of windows, with some being resizable, some not, some being scrollable, others not. Some you can cut and paste from, others not. And these are all in various system administration applications installed in a plain vanilla default installation. We won't even start with the the classic vs category vs "new" view of Control panel, or any of the other multitudes of changes that were made for apparently no good reason other than to drive new revenue in the MCSE training/certification program.