All those connections (composite, component, s-video and VGA) have one thing in common: they carry the video signal in an analog format. What about digital connections such DVI or HDMI? Will there be A/V packs with DVI and/or HDMI connections? If not, will you consider offering that in the future?
Todd Holmdahl: Xbox 360 will support HD component video output, which is compatible with nearly every HD-ready TV on the market today. We're poised to hit the sweet spot of the HD market at launch and as the market matures, and we will provide an HDMI for our customers when it makes sense. The reality is, you don't need HDMI for HD gaming.
the 360 has plenty of HD support, just no HD physical media support at this time. It still outputs HD and can play HD media from sources other than HD-DVD/BluRay. Contrast this to the PS3 which doesn't exist at all.
1080p may be the ultimate format goal but there are precious few devices that can do it and no software coded in it. How many HD televisions can take a 1080p source today? Any Sony's? Hopefully this year sometime.
The biggest problem with 1080i is that it has to be deinterlaced for progressive output devices and deinterlacing chips are expensive or crappy right now. A lot can change between now and when it matters.
The important differences between the PS3 and XBox360 are not in the HD support.
Maybe not now but eventually you will be able to. Remember that realtime MPEG2 encoding wasn't possible all that long ago. It's not only conceivable but desirable to have a TIVO-like device that records from HDMI inputs and exports over a network. Eventually, pirating full-res HD content over HDMI or anything else would be possible.
No, you're not wrong. There's no reason to halve the resolution of a scan line in this instance. BTW, cheap de-interlacers convert 1080i to 1920x540 anyway and it's reasonable to assume that 720p sets might do it this way (though they don't have to).
Another couple points. You can't compare resolution in only one dimension when two formats have different aspect ratios, and DVD doesn't always produce 480p. It's interesting that the original poster chose to assume best-case processing of DVD content and compare it to (worse than) worst-case processing of HD content. If he's complaining about his imaginary 960 pixels being interpolated to 1280, then why isn't he complaining about DVD's 640 pixels?
Drives don't have independent read/write heads. They have a single actuator that can process only one I/O at a time. You can queue commands into them and get optimizations that way, but heads can't be used independently.
It's discomforting to know that engineers recommend that you not use 1/3 of your storage so that the OS doesn't have to work so hard. That employee needs to be fired.
"At anyrate if you buy a new $5k~20k camera every 2~3 years you can pony up for a Quad G5 to get the job done."...or you could be smart about it. Aperture does have mature competition.
no, it's 60% thicker, not 161%. Some additional points in Dell's favor to offset its extra size (in addition to the vastly superior display and graphics) are it's S-Video port, VGA connector, 6 USB ports, memory card reader, and real PC-Card slot. No, the Dell isn't as small as the Apple but it offers more for less money and it's more user-servicable. Try changing the hard drive in each and then say which is better. That's a real issue for me since neither offers a 160GB drive yet.
Speaking of tired arguments, how about the one that suggests that Apple is like BMW? As an owner of a BMW I'm not sure that's a good thing, but at least BMW does have real technical differentiation from it's competitors. Apple uses PC parts and puts them in a shiny box. If Dell is like a Chevy, then Apple isn't a BMW, it's a GMC. They're just like Chevy only with a fancy grill (and you pay more).
yes, in fact, it is, but the 20" display is intended to be viewed from further away so it's lower dpi is more excusable. A 1920x1200 17" display is a glorious thing. Hopefully Apple will invent it soon.
you lack imagination then. It's incrementally larger than the 15.4" model. To each his own, but I find traveling with a large notebook quite easy (and easy to imagine as well).
...or perhaps it was the fact that, until recently, macs had gawdawful slow processors in them. I certainly wouldn't characterize it has fear but that macs haven't been viable computing platforms until recently. First they fixed the pitiful OS, then added a real processor, then added windows support. Now they have something worth buying.
I certainly agree with you, and I'd add that PC notebooks offer 1920x1200 resolution in a 15.4" screen as well as a 17" one. I love those.
What really annoys me is all the talk about screen dpi. Screen dpi is not entirely the issue since viewing distance also comes into play. What really matters is the angle of view and the arc of a single pixel. Since notebooks are viewed frequently at closer distances than desktops, their screen dpi values should naturally be higher. PC notebook manufacturers seem to get that while Apple does not. Apple is stupid for doggedly sticking to 100 dpi displays despite the fact that (a) you don't want that, (b) technology has offered better for a long while, and (c) it was never a good idea in the first place. I once owned a 30" cinema display but sold it because I couldn't stand the coarse, 100 dpi jagged image. I currently use the 9MP IBM monitor. Sure it's 200 dpi but I just sit closer and get superior results. Too bad Apple broke support for it in OS X.
You said yuou had issues with the ordering process but you only described problems with manufacturing and delivery.
Fact is, Dell's information on the manufacturing details of an order have always been BS. You don't really know what happened with your system, you only know the bogus information that was provided when you asked. Your machine was delivered 5 days earlier than initially promised, so what's the deal?
I can assure you, no system sits in the boxing stage for 3 days. That should have been a tipoff for you right then.
No, not hypocritical at all. It's strictly business, and he was not the cause of the fight nor did he ask to profit from it. $20K is so small it might as well be nothing.
Hypocritical would have been using the patent system for his own financial gain but, even then, business is amoral to begin with. The real hypocrites are those who realized that prior art existed and sought to prevent evidence of it from coming to light.
It's always interesting that arguments in favor of a mac inherently play to the mac's unique strengths---in this case the mini's unique form factor. It wasn't that long ago that no mac lover seemed to care that there wasn't a mac as small as a mini. Now it's the greatest thing ever, and of course Apple invented it.
It's nice that a machine as small as the mini is available. It sucks that you have to use slow, expensive notebook drives in it. I own a G4 one and it's nice but terribly slow.
Since when does a single (non-replacable) monitor cable make the product higher quality? It's a nice touch with a downside. As for brand-name parts, Dell uses the same brands Apple does. The highest failure rate parts in a computer are fans and disk drives. Since when are Apple's better than Dell's?
just to amend this comment, Dell offers multiple screen resolutions. The base screen is lower resolution than the MacBook Pro. They also offer more than one screen resolution higher than Apple's. Dell's highest resolution 15.4" screen is 1920x1200. The Apple is 1440x900. Anyone who desires to edit video on a notebook would be foolish to buy a low resolution screen.
Video editing is not demanding on video performance but it is demanding of screen real estate. The Dell, by virtue of its higher resolution display, would make a better video editing platform and Windows has viable video editing applications despite what mac people think. Apple needs to get with the times on LCD resolution. 100dpi is so 1990's.
Facebook is specifically for students. Enforcing the policy through email keeps outs non-students though not completely. That may filter out many 40 year old creeps but not the 20 year old ones.
I don't know what a generic "Dell" is but I do know what a Dell notebook is. Dell notebooks are by no means generic.
The big advantage of Dell and many other notebooks are the high resolution screens. The MacBook Pro's display looks nice but it doesn't have enough real estate, especially for 15.4". A Dell of that size can be had with 1920x1200. Clearly the way to go. Then there's the extra mouse button...
I don't know about addons to alternative email programs for PalmOS. I've tried Chatter and don't like it because it's ugly. I'm not a heavy email user and I like the way Versamail works. Just wish it weren't buggy. Background processing proitsvided by PalmOS itself is poor.
Sprint is planning to launch their version of the 700. What software that's included isn't announced. There is other speculation on future Treos for GSM and I'd prefer the ones without the antenna to a version of the 700.
Treos are the best one-handed QWERTY keyboard devices so far IMO. Too bad PalmOS is so bad and the 650 has such unacceptable software problems. My experience with the 650 tells me that there just aren't any decent programmers left at Palm so I don't expect things to get better. Windows Mobile and Symbian don't have the usability that the Palm apps do but that can change over time. The ideal device doesn't exist yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Look here: http://interviews.teamxbox.com/xbox/1190/Xbox-360
Here's a excerpt:
the 360 has plenty of HD support, just no HD physical media support at this time. It still outputs HD and can play HD media from sources other than HD-DVD/BluRay. Contrast this to the PS3 which doesn't exist at all.
1080p may be the ultimate format goal but there are precious few devices that can do it and no software coded in it. How many HD televisions can take a 1080p source today? Any Sony's? Hopefully this year sometime.
The biggest problem with 1080i is that it has to be deinterlaced for progressive output devices and deinterlacing chips are expensive or crappy right now. A lot can change between now and when it matters.
The important differences between the PS3 and XBox360 are not in the HD support.
Maybe not now but eventually you will be able to. Remember that realtime MPEG2 encoding wasn't possible all that long ago. It's not only conceivable but desirable to have a TIVO-like device that records from HDMI inputs and exports over a network. Eventually, pirating full-res HD content over HDMI or anything else would be possible.
HDMI cables aren't offered for the 360 now but may be in the future according to MS. The 360 does more than 720p.
Why do you suspect that a device which is specifically said to NOT support HD will do so? There's no reason to believe Wii will do 720p.
If you like people to have the facts then perhaps you should get them straight first.
No, you're not wrong. There's no reason to halve the resolution of a scan line in this instance. BTW, cheap de-interlacers convert 1080i to 1920x540 anyway and it's reasonable to assume that 720p sets might do it this way (though they don't have to).
Another couple points. You can't compare resolution in only one dimension when two formats have different aspect ratios, and DVD doesn't always produce 480p. It's interesting that the original poster chose to assume best-case processing of DVD content and compare it to (worse than) worst-case processing of HD content. If he's complaining about his imaginary 960 pixels being interpolated to 1280, then why isn't he complaining about DVD's 640 pixels?
no. the whole point of risc is an instruction set that's easier to execute. that includes uniform size but not necessarily smaller.
take all the time you want. there aren't any updates yet
40MB? You must be thinking of 1986. by the early 90's all drives were much bigger than that.
Drives don't have independent read/write heads. They have a single actuator that can process only one I/O at a time. You can queue commands into them and get optimizations that way, but heads can't be used independently.
It's discomforting to know that engineers recommend that you not use 1/3 of your storage so that the OS doesn't have to work so hard. That employee needs to be fired.
I would tend to agree with the BS theory.
"At anyrate if you buy a new $5k~20k camera every 2~3 years you can pony up for a Quad G5 to get the job done." ...or you could be smart about it. Aperture does have mature competition.
I guess you ordered the Venti KoolAid.
no, it's 60% thicker, not 161%. Some additional points in Dell's favor to offset its extra size (in addition to the vastly superior display and graphics) are it's S-Video port, VGA connector, 6 USB ports, memory card reader, and real PC-Card slot. No, the Dell isn't as small as the Apple but it offers more for less money and it's more user-servicable. Try changing the hard drive in each and then say which is better. That's a real issue for me since neither offers a 160GB drive yet.
Speaking of tired arguments, how about the one that suggests that Apple is like BMW? As an owner of a BMW I'm not sure that's a good thing, but at least BMW does have real technical differentiation from it's competitors. Apple uses PC parts and puts them in a shiny box. If Dell is like a Chevy, then Apple isn't a BMW, it's a GMC. They're just like Chevy only with a fancy grill (and you pay more).
yes, in fact, it is, but the 20" display is intended to be viewed from further away so it's lower dpi is more excusable. A 1920x1200 17" display is a glorious thing. Hopefully Apple will invent it soon.
you lack imagination then. It's incrementally larger than the 15.4" model. To each his own, but I find traveling with a large notebook quite easy (and easy to imagine as well).
...or perhaps it was the fact that, until recently, macs had gawdawful slow processors in them. I certainly wouldn't characterize it has fear but that macs haven't been viable computing platforms until recently. First they fixed the pitiful OS, then added a real processor, then added windows support. Now they have something worth buying.
I certainly agree with you, and I'd add that PC notebooks offer 1920x1200 resolution in a 15.4" screen as well as a 17" one. I love those.
What really annoys me is all the talk about screen dpi. Screen dpi is not entirely the issue since viewing distance also comes into play. What really matters is the angle of view and the arc of a single pixel. Since notebooks are viewed frequently at closer distances than desktops, their screen dpi values should naturally be higher. PC notebook manufacturers seem to get that while Apple does not. Apple is stupid for doggedly sticking to 100 dpi displays despite the fact that (a) you don't want that, (b) technology has offered better for a long while, and (c) it was never a good idea in the first place. I once owned a 30" cinema display but sold it because I couldn't stand the coarse, 100 dpi jagged image. I currently use the 9MP IBM monitor. Sure it's 200 dpi but I just sit closer and get superior results. Too bad Apple broke support for it in OS X.
You said yuou had issues with the ordering process but you only described problems with manufacturing and delivery.
Fact is, Dell's information on the manufacturing details of an order have always been BS. You don't really know what happened with your system, you only know the bogus information that was provided when you asked. Your machine was delivered 5 days earlier than initially promised, so what's the deal?
I can assure you, no system sits in the boxing stage for 3 days. That should have been a tipoff for you right then.
No, not hypocritical at all. It's strictly business, and he was not the cause of the fight nor did he ask to profit from it. $20K is so small it might as well be nothing.
Hypocritical would have been using the patent system for his own financial gain but, even then, business is amoral to begin with. The real hypocrites are those who realized that prior art existed and sought to prevent evidence of it from coming to light.
It's always interesting that arguments in favor of a mac inherently play to the mac's unique strengths---in this case the mini's unique form factor. It wasn't that long ago that no mac lover seemed to care that there wasn't a mac as small as a mini. Now it's the greatest thing ever, and of course Apple invented it.
It's nice that a machine as small as the mini is available. It sucks that you have to use slow, expensive notebook drives in it. I own a G4 one and it's nice but terribly slow.
Since when does a single (non-replacable) monitor cable make the product higher quality? It's a nice touch with a downside. As for brand-name parts, Dell uses the same brands Apple does. The highest failure rate parts in a computer are fans and disk drives. Since when are Apple's better than Dell's?
just to amend this comment, Dell offers multiple screen resolutions. The base screen is lower resolution than the MacBook Pro. They also offer more than one screen resolution higher than Apple's. Dell's highest resolution 15.4" screen is 1920x1200. The Apple is 1440x900. Anyone who desires to edit video on a notebook would be foolish to buy a low resolution screen.
Video editing is not demanding on video performance but it is demanding of screen real estate. The Dell, by virtue of its higher resolution display, would make a better video editing platform and Windows has viable video editing applications despite what mac people think. Apple needs to get with the times on LCD resolution. 100dpi is so 1990's.
Facebook is specifically for students. Enforcing the policy through email keeps outs non-students though not completely. That may filter out many 40 year old creeps but not the 20 year old ones.
"Since I prefer film vs digital..."
That comment alone disqualifies your opinion.
I don't know what a generic "Dell" is but I do know what a Dell notebook is. Dell notebooks are by no means generic.
The big advantage of Dell and many other notebooks are the high resolution screens. The MacBook Pro's display looks nice but it doesn't have enough real estate, especially for 15.4". A Dell of that size can be had with 1920x1200. Clearly the way to go. Then there's the extra mouse button...
how does that make the keyboard usable with one hand?
I don't know about addons to alternative email programs for PalmOS. I've tried Chatter and don't like it because it's ugly. I'm not a heavy email user and I like the way Versamail works. Just wish it weren't buggy. Background processing proitsvided by PalmOS itself is poor.
Sprint is planning to launch their version of the 700. What software that's included isn't announced. There is other speculation on future Treos for GSM and I'd prefer the ones without the antenna to a version of the 700.
Treos are the best one-handed QWERTY keyboard devices so far IMO. Too bad PalmOS is so bad and the 650 has such unacceptable software problems. My experience with the 650 tells me that there just aren't any decent programmers left at Palm so I don't expect things to get better. Windows Mobile and Symbian don't have the usability that the Palm apps do but that can change over time. The ideal device doesn't exist yet.