let me clarify - where I'm posting from, this is America. if you're unlucky enough to live in a part of the world where people can't at least pay lip service to freedom of expression, my sympathies. regardless of location, consent is consent is consent. the minute you say a woman has no right to pose for this picture if she chooses too, you disempower her more than the picture ever would.
oh, don't get me wrong, i'm definitely a leftist. just not a knee-jerk one. that is to say, i have liberal values, but i don't let others manipulate me into things like censorship with them. i remember in the 80's when self-purported "liberals" thought it'd be great to have copies of huck finn purged from all public schools because they used the word "nigger". never mind that the novel was set in the mid 1800's and had a very anti-racism message. they burned the books anyway - nobody who burns books is a liberal. period.
i'd be completely against the photo if it was taken against the woman's will, or was of a minor, etc etc. but i've seen a lot of women do a lot more offensive things than pose for a photo of them with a plunger that may or may not be photoshopped in on their face. this was clearly consensual, and as a leftist i don't believe anything that goes on between consenting adults should be illegal.
BTW, has anybodye else figured out that now that daleks are made of gold, a dalek-cyberman war would be MUCH more interesting?
a) the fact that the picture has been published without the publisher being sued into oblivion shows clearly that the woman in the picture was perfectly content to pose for, and profit from, it's publication
b) most male geeks don't get laid because we're not good looking. never forget SNL's three rules for getting dates: be handsome. be attractive. don't be unattractive. BTW a lot of female geeks don't get laid either.
c) women are superior to men in some ways, men are superior to women in others, and neither could survive without the other. anybody who tells you all of one group is always superior to all of another group, especially when dealing with groups as large as all men and all women, is either very very dangerous or selling something.
d) you have a massive male-guilt complex and I don't envy you it, assuming you're even a man, which i somehow doubt from your SCUM manifesto-ish tone
e) the people who would really disempower women (in other words, dangerous fascists like you) are the ones who would deny them the right to pose for pictures like this if they wanted to. this is america, asshole, you have no right to deny others' humor or entertainment no matter how much you disagree with it, as long as nobody's being hurt. you either have free speech or you don't. where would you draw the line? do women have no right to participate in, and profit from, the production of pornography? do they have the right to "degrade themselves" by telling off-color jokes? by wearing pants? have fun sliding down that slippery slope.
f) it's probably just photoshop anyway
g) let the PC modbombing begin, i'm not posting this anon because i'd like there to be some record that i'm not a knee-jerk leftist, karma be damned.
h) i'm thrilled to see the return of the daleks. or at least a dalek. i've always harbored a sneaking suspicion bill gates has one hidden away somewhere. now all that needs to happen is for some villain to somehow "borrow" a tardis, go back and grab davros, bring him to this one renegade dalek and have him close it, etc etc...
i) daleks still aren't as cool as cybermen, even if (and perhaps because) they did kill adric.
They're even worse - unless you specifically cancel them, they submit the bug report automagically. Almost like MS expects tons of shit to go wrong. Go figure.
Windows 95 was certainly buggy, and I can see how you'd say it was beta-level buggy (especially given it's three subsequent revisions), but at least it didn't have semi-automatic opt-out-if-you're-quick-enough bug reports. That, to me, marked XP as the biggest beta to ever cost $300.
...on disc players, especially DVD's, are as follows.
Expensive players break *much* more frequently than cheap ones. One of my former roommates had this bad habit of going out and buying a $250 sony dvd player that purported to be the best thing since sliced bread - only to find that it couldn't play mp3 cd's, couldn't play cd's at ALL, couldn't play VCD's, couldn't play photo-CD's, etc etc etc. And then the thing broke (and when I say broke I mean you hit the power button and the LED turned red and nothing happened, not mechanical failure). So he's spend a few days cursing, then go out and buy another $250 sony dvd player. Iterate.
For a year and a half I was Chief Engineer at a recording studio. The owner invested over $200 in a high-end DVD player (either Panasonic or Sony, I forget). Inside of six months the thing started developing problems, inside of a year it wouldn't play a single thing. And this was in a smoke-free room with great A/C.
I've bought one DVD player in my life. It's a $40 Shinsonic. It plays DVD's, CD's, MP3 CD's, VCD's and picture-CD's. It never skips or has errors unless the disc is scratched, has endured vast amounts of tobacco and marijuana smoke with no problem, and just generally kicks ass.
I know it seems counter-intuitive, but my experience really has been that the cheaper a DVD player is, the better it works and more reliable it is.
As for CD players/burners, again, the ones I've had the most trouble with have been expensive Sony's - mostly early discmans. My Hi-val 2x burner, the first one I ever got, still works fine, as do my 8x hp burner and my 40x sony. My super-cheap Pioneer 6-disc CD changer still works like a champ as well.
So my advice is - go cheap and generic. Best case scenario, you get a great deal, worst case scenario, you spend less on 3 cheap players than you would on one expensive one.
They passed a law in the 80's to specifically state that it was OK to make mixtapes for your friends. Their reasoning was that a) the person making the mixtape had paid for the music in the first place and b) cassettes weren't exact copies of the original, that people could make tapes for their friends. This law being passed was the only reason music-oriented casette recorders (as opposed to voice-oriented casette recorers) ever became legal to own in the US. For many years, they weren't - and I'm old enough to remember it.
So, Mr-know-it-all-AC, since I paid for my 300+ CD collection, and mp3's are lossy (read: not exact) copies, am I allowed to share them with 10 friends on the net? 20? How many friends am I allowed to have and make the equivalent of digital mixtapes for, of stuff I bought with my own money? Remember, mp3's are lossy compression and nowhere near as high quality as the original PCM streams. They're not exact copies. And "not exact copies" is exactly what Congress passed a LAW to protect our ability to make, and share with our friends.
And what started all the controversy, you ask? Funny thing - it was the fucking RIAA running around like fucking Chicken Little screaming that the fucking sky was falling and that they'd all be bankrupt in six days and all the recording artists would fucking starve and it would be the end of western fucking civilization! Sound just a little bit familiar?!
But gee, the RIAA is still around. In fact, now that I think about it, the RIAA made fucking SHIT TONS of cash off of selling cassettes - once they had been forced by the marketplace into accepting a new distribution mechanism.
I'm getting SO tired of repeating myself over and over and over because all you twenty-something self-righteous oh-look-I'm-a-good-corpofascist little twerps have absolutely ZERO sense of history!
Dolby is part of a group of organizations involved in the development of AAC (Advanced Audio Coding), part of MPEG specifications, and also considered the successor to MP3. AAC outperforms AC-3 at any bitrate, but is more complex. The advantages of AAC become clearly audible at less than 400 kbit/s for 5.1 channels, and at less than 180 kbit/s for 2.0 channels.
You mean the iTunes player for mac computers, or did you mean the iPod?
Who said mac players were all there were? Sound forge (and SD2 on the mac side) could play aac ages before the ipod came out, I was hearing about aac in 96, it was developed about the same time as mp3 and ATRAC were. It's a wrapper as well as a codec, just like.wav is a wrapper as well as a codec, but aac has DRM built in.
But no, I don't think for a second that Sony will use any non-proprietary format, if that's what you're getting at. I was just pointing out that the only reason Apple's aac's play on other platforms is that it's not their technology - they'd lock us out in a heartbeat if it was.
Apple likes to make money too, that's why they understood that providing music that you can't find in a store will get your more customers than just providing the same old crap. Apple understood that the Napster phenomonon was driven not just by the free-ness of the music, but the incredibly wide variety of artists and styles - exactly the thing the radio no longer provided. Apple provided it for a minimal fee and scored big. ITMS would never have gotten as big as it is if it just offered radio music.
And Sony's online movie store will never take off if it only offers what I can already buy at Suncoast or Blockbuster or Amazon in substantially better formats. If it's only their popular titles, why wouldn't I just buy the DVD and rip/encode it to whatever I wanted?
Sony made seventy-four foot discs?:) What kind of bandwidth *couldn't* you fit on a 74 foot disc?
Seriously, though, ATRAC sounded like absolute ass for anything besides rock or rap - in other words, anything with any kind of dynamic range - especially when it got to the reverb tail at the end of the song. I went out to the Overpriced Stereo Store when they first came out cuz I thought it sounded like a good idea and A/B'ed em against CD, cassette and vinyl - not surprisingly, PCM streams still sound the best, and all three older formats blew ATRAC away... My half-deaf father could even tell it sounded like shit, and he thinks vinyl sounds better than CD...
...top 500 movies?! Who gives a rat's ass about their top 500? You can buy those at the store anyway. How about a huge backcatalog of obscure and indy films (kinda like iTunes has a large catalog on non-Britney music)? They might actually get some money from me then.
"So, becuase I disagree, I automatically believe everyone else is wrong?"
You tell me, I was the one asking you that question. My point was that different people have different requirements of a system, and that, aside from 98's innate superiority in speed, footprint, and hardware requirements, my requirements as a recording engineer are met by 98se and no other OS. The rest of this pedantic excuse for an argument is based on your desire to prove 98's innate superiority in the three aforementioned areas does not exist, which puts you an the uneviable position of arguing a position with no evidence to support it. Which you freely admit, but that doesn't stop you from being rude, offensive, and wrong about fourteen times. So let's do this.
"They, essentially, are the same."
Funny. If they're the same, I'd love to see you make a drive larger than 2G using FAT16. If I were using FAT16 my computer would contain more drives than there are letters in the alphabet (I don't know what windows even does in that situation).
"If I have a 3.0ghz with 1GB of memory and some uber fast hard drive, which should allow XP to do what it needs to do, then I'm fairly certain it's faster. I can't prove one way or the other."
Firstly, if you have a 3GHz CPU with 1G of RAM and an "uber-fast" hard drive, you've spent a lot more on hardware than I have. I'm only running 1.2GHz with 768M of RAM and because my OS is so smokin', I've never encountered a situation where my system's resources were maxed out. I'll never need to buy hardware again, unless what I already have breaks.
Secondly, if you have a 3.0GHz CPU with 1G of RAM and an "uber-fast" hard drive, XP might be fast, but 98 would still be faster. And you can prove this, it's called an A/B test, something any real engineer or scientist would know about. You keep all components the same and switch one thing - in this case, the OS. Any observed differences must be the result of the one thing you changed. This is something you could do very easily (I mean, if an idiot like me can do it, your ignor^K^K^Kbrilliant ass certainly can) inside of a day. But I'm guessing you won't, because that would demonstrate how wrong you are.
Thirdly, when XP was released, the fastest CPU you could get was about 1GHz. So you're defending MS by saying that, three years after they released XP, we finally have hardware good enough to make it not crawl.
I feel bad for not paying you for this free entertainment.
"Perhaps you haven't been following recent events, but every time MS releases a patch *then* the viruses get released."
Unfortunately that has not always been the case. When Beagle (which had over thirty variants) came out, MS *hadn't* come out with a patch for the latest ones yet, nor had symantec, and we had enterprise-level support from both (hell, our company bought so many copies of XP that MS *gave* us five xboxes). We had a crack MicroServices team and they were sitting in front of their PC's sweating waiting for a patch to come down from either one of them. It hit us so hard they had to shut down all Lotus Notes access, including that of the CEO of the (very very large) company. Because the virus came out before the patch. Which makes you wrong. Again. Go home, n1x k1dd13, you're way out of your depth talking to me about windows.
"If you run out of date software then you shoudl *expect* problems to happen,"
So explain why all the datacenters running OS/400 and OS/390 (both over 20 years old) aren't hacked everyday. Explain why RACF is still the industry leader in enterprise-level security. Explain why UNIX, a FORTY year old OS, has been embraced by everybody from HP to IBM (HP/UX and AIX), and has spawned a variant whose market share for the home desktop is increasing dramatically versus Microsoft's. I'm sure you have a good explanation, or, failing that, a good reason why you don't hav
"but it didn't have drivers for hardly anything on my test machine"
yeah, drivers can be a pain in the ass. XP will be exactly the same in three years.
Re:xplite... I will definitely have to tell my XP-having friends about this, good to know
"ME was out, and I didn't know any better so I ran that for a while..."
I'm soooo sorry...
"Which is an arguable point, as we've demonstrated."
Reasonable people can disagree, and no two people have the exact same requirements for a system. Operating with slightly older hardware (1.2 gigahoitz cpu, 768mb ram) and lots of VERY specific audio hardware and software, my requirements are compatability and overhead, hence 98se/lite.
I never said you couldn't, I only said many others had contradictory experiences. Or is anybody who disagrees with you automatically wrong?
"It seems faster for me"
Never seen a box in my life that ran faster under xp than 98. XP's footprint is HUGE. It requires something like 30-40 system processes just to be a normal PC. Try a/b-ing the two on the same box with any kind of benchmarking.
"98 has FAT."
No, 98 has FAT32.
"I can restrict my share so only my boss and the department can read/write the files "
Well, them and the dozens of script kiddies butt-surfing your box on the latest sploit MS hasn't found out about yet.
2k/xp does have built-in filesystem-level share control, true. So does Unix. I believe you can achieve the same result with 98 using something like Lotus Notes, network shares, or possibly some other form of actual creativity. But 98 was never designed to be an enterprise desktop, NT was. And as much as 98 pretends to be a multi-user system, it's really not. If I had to outfit a bunch of enterprise level desktops, I'd use 2k. But not XP, which is even slower than 2k and full of unnecessary crap like pretty round buttons. Gag.
If all your criteria are based on how well an OS performs strictly in the workplace, I feel sorry for you.
"98 doesn't have drivers."
this is a red herring. Any OS, XP included, isn't gonna have drivers for types of hardware released after the OS was. Next.
"You haven't seen anything nasty becuase Microsoft doesn't push updates out anymore."
Hey, Einstein, guess what I just did? Got windows updates for the 98 box I'm on right now. Turns out you don't have to have MS push them to you in order to get them. Next.
"Who's to say something hasn't happened and you don't know about it?"
If something had happened there would be some kind of performace loss, used disk space, that can and would be detected since I work routinely with massive amounts of massive files and very CPU intensive applications. But the main reason I know is cuz nobody's bothering to write worms for it anymore. Why bother, when writing worms for xp is so EASY (thanks again MS)? Can you even tell me the last virus or worm that targeted 98 was released?
"I'm curious to know how developing.NET software in Win98 is."
Never tried it. Not a developer.
What I *am* is a recording engineer, and I'd *love* to see you set up my $15,000 Ensoniq PARIS system to run on an XP or 2k box. Oh, shit, you can't. It REQUIRES 98se. Try running Hypersignal RIDE under XP. Next.
"A great many things can be done with XP/2K that can't for 98."
I never denied that. There's also things that 98 can do that xp/2k can't. And the fact remains that 98se is THE most supported OS by software and hardware manufacturers, period.
And hey, you know what you can do with 98se/lite that you can't with XP? UNINSTALL INTERNET EXPLODER COMPLETELY! That's pretty freakin cool if you ask me!
I never said 98 did more than XP, I said I, and others, had experienced it to be faster and have less inherent vulnerabilities. Take two boxes, install 98se unpatched and XP unpatched, put 'em on a cable line and see which one gets infected first just sitting on the internet. An unpatched install of XP has an average time-to-infection of FIFTEEN MINUTES.
"/angered at the idiots."
no, an idiot is somebody who assumes that everybody else's requirements for a system are the same as his own.
"Three things you do not discuss in polite company: politics, religion, and operating systems. It can only get ugly."
Funny, those are probably my three favorite topics here...
"I've only used 95 and ME extensively, which may have jaded me"
Mos def. 95 was a good idea but not mature at all, not even the first edition of 98 was mature (no uDMA support or WDM model), ME was a giant turd. 98se, with 98lite installed, is the best MS OS I've ever used. If you haven't ever tried it, you really should, if just for comparison and contrast.
And you might just never go back.
"it's plenty fast when you turn off all the visual noise and plenty secure when you firewall it and stay the hell away from IE"
Tried turning off all the noise and it didn't help much. A little, but not nearly as much as just running a mature, well-patched and updated OS with a much smaller footprint.
And I didn't think XP let you uninstall IE like 98lite does - it wouldn't even let my roommate select any default app for email other than either outlook or hotmail (like, NONE, maybe). If there is a way to uninstall IE from XP I would LOVE to hear it. Last I heard it was directly built into the OS so that you couldn't remove it. The 2k side of my machine doesn't want to work right now so I can't check, but I know on the 98 side there's explorer.exe and ie.exe, two separate things... aren't they the same in 2k/xp?
Now, to be fair, I'll admit that there are things that you need XP for (some apps and games require it). And there are some things XP does that 98 doesn't - transparencies, and suggesting computer names like "Mary's computer" and "Kitchen computer", and menus that fade in and out... it's pretty. And it comes with lots of pretty pictures of flowers and cute little doggies. And heck, by MS's track record, in five years or so XP might just be a mature OS. That's usually when they stop supporting it in order to force everybody to betatest their newest and crappiest OS. That's been the distinct trend. Every windows ever released has sucked when it first came out (as evidenced by the frequent revisions thereafter, remember 3.1, 95osr2 and 98se were basically the DOS kernel's version of service packs done to correct MAJOR problems with 3.0, 95a b and c, and 98 first edition), was pretty stable and solid about 3-5 years after initial release, at which point MS promptly discontinues support.
And, lest we forget, the NT kernel was just a revision of the os/2 kernel anyway, from back when os/2 was a joint MS/IBM venture. OS/2 actually came with a windows 3.1 emulator that ran pretty well. Then they split it and IBM came out with os/2 warp and MS came out with NT 3 (at least that's how I remember it, I could always be wrong I suppose). So we're talking about a glorified DOS hack versus a glorified os/2 hack.
But hey, if it works for you, then more power to you man. It's a free country. Sorry I came off like an asshole before.
heh, i totally misspoke, mea culpa. It is indeed a FAT32 partition. But it's the one where my 2k is installed, and 2k won't boot cuz it keeps saying "ntoskrnl.exe not found or corrupted" when I can see clearly in 98 that it's there and have restored it several times already... 2k recovery floppies also see the entire drive as not being there, so does partitionmagic, yet windows explorer not only sees it but let me copy all the files I needed off of it. This is a problem I've seen many many times with XP or 2k, all of a sudden it thinks a drive just isn't there.
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"Only mom is a guy in a suit getting paid to listen to your phone sex."
And the person who's paying him is me.
""(Forgent) is subverting the JPEG standard to extract millions of dollars in unwarranted profits," Microsoft's lawsuit states."
Sounds like Microsoft is against the use of IP laws as bludgeoning instruments to make up for lack of competitiveness in the marketplace.
Shoe, meet the other foot. It will be very interesting to see how this develops. Can you picture MS as a crusader against IP abuse?
Me neither.
let me clarify - where I'm posting from, this is America. if you're unlucky enough to live in a part of the world where people can't at least pay lip service to freedom of expression, my sympathies. regardless of location, consent is consent is consent. the minute you say a woman has no right to pose for this picture if she chooses too, you disempower her more than the picture ever would.
oh, don't get me wrong, i'm definitely a leftist. just not a knee-jerk one. that is to say, i have liberal values, but i don't let others manipulate me into things like censorship with them. i remember in the 80's when self-purported "liberals" thought it'd be great to have copies of huck finn purged from all public schools because they used the word "nigger". never mind that the novel was set in the mid 1800's and had a very anti-racism message. they burned the books anyway - nobody who burns books is a liberal. period.
i'd be completely against the photo if it was taken against the woman's will, or was of a minor, etc etc. but i've seen a lot of women do a lot more offensive things than pose for a photo of them with a plunger that may or may not be photoshopped in on their face. this was clearly consensual, and as a leftist i don't believe anything that goes on between consenting adults should be illegal.
BTW, has anybodye else figured out that now that daleks are made of gold, a dalek-cyberman war would be MUCH more interesting?
a) the fact that the picture has been published without the publisher being sued into oblivion shows clearly that the woman in the picture was perfectly content to pose for, and profit from, it's publication
b) most male geeks don't get laid because we're not good looking. never forget SNL's three rules for getting dates: be handsome. be attractive. don't be unattractive. BTW a lot of female geeks don't get laid either.
c) women are superior to men in some ways, men are superior to women in others, and neither could survive without the other. anybody who tells you all of one group is always superior to all of another group, especially when dealing with groups as large as all men and all women, is either very very dangerous or selling something.
d) you have a massive male-guilt complex and I don't envy you it, assuming you're even a man, which i somehow doubt from your SCUM manifesto-ish tone
e) the people who would really disempower women (in other words, dangerous fascists like you) are the ones who would deny them the right to pose for pictures like this if they wanted to. this is america, asshole, you have no right to deny others' humor or entertainment no matter how much you disagree with it, as long as nobody's being hurt. you either have free speech or you don't. where would you draw the line? do women have no right to participate in, and profit from, the production of pornography? do they have the right to "degrade themselves" by telling off-color jokes? by wearing pants? have fun sliding down that slippery slope.
f) it's probably just photoshop anyway
g) let the PC modbombing begin, i'm not posting this anon because i'd like there to be some record that i'm not a knee-jerk leftist, karma be damned.
h) i'm thrilled to see the return of the daleks. or at least a dalek. i've always harbored a sneaking suspicion bill gates has one hidden away somewhere. now all that needs to happen is for some villain to somehow "borrow" a tardis, go back and grab davros, bring him to this one renegade dalek and have him close it, etc etc...
i) daleks still aren't as cool as cybermen, even if (and perhaps because) they did kill adric.
They're even worse - unless you specifically cancel them, they submit the bug report automagically. Almost like MS expects tons of shit to go wrong. Go figure.
Windows 95 was certainly buggy, and I can see how you'd say it was beta-level buggy (especially given it's three subsequent revisions), but at least it didn't have semi-automatic opt-out-if-you're-quick-enough bug reports. That, to me, marked XP as the biggest beta to ever cost $300.
Two words - Windows XP.
...on disc players, especially DVD's, are as follows.
Expensive players break *much* more frequently than cheap ones. One of my former roommates had this bad habit of going out and buying a $250 sony dvd player that purported to be the best thing since sliced bread - only to find that it couldn't play mp3 cd's, couldn't play cd's at ALL, couldn't play VCD's, couldn't play photo-CD's, etc etc etc. And then the thing broke (and when I say broke I mean you hit the power button and the LED turned red and nothing happened, not mechanical failure). So he's spend a few days cursing, then go out and buy another $250 sony dvd player. Iterate.
For a year and a half I was Chief Engineer at a recording studio. The owner invested over $200 in a high-end DVD player (either Panasonic or Sony, I forget). Inside of six months the thing started developing problems, inside of a year it wouldn't play a single thing. And this was in a smoke-free room with great A/C.
I've bought one DVD player in my life. It's a $40 Shinsonic. It plays DVD's, CD's, MP3 CD's, VCD's and picture-CD's. It never skips or has errors unless the disc is scratched, has endured vast amounts of tobacco and marijuana smoke with no problem, and just generally kicks ass.
I know it seems counter-intuitive, but my experience really has been that the cheaper a DVD player is, the better it works and more reliable it is.
As for CD players/burners, again, the ones I've had the most trouble with have been expensive Sony's - mostly early discmans. My Hi-val 2x burner, the first one I ever got, still works fine, as do my 8x hp burner and my 40x sony. My super-cheap Pioneer 6-disc CD changer still works like a champ as well.
So my advice is - go cheap and generic. Best case scenario, you get a great deal, worst case scenario, you spend less on 3 cheap players than you would on one expensive one.
Congress disagrees.
They passed a law in the 80's to specifically state that it was OK to make mixtapes for your friends. Their reasoning was that a) the person making the mixtape had paid for the music in the first place and b) cassettes weren't exact copies of the original, that people could make tapes for their friends. This law being passed was the only reason music-oriented casette recorders (as opposed to voice-oriented casette recorers) ever became legal to own in the US. For many years, they weren't - and I'm old enough to remember it.
So, Mr-know-it-all-AC, since I paid for my 300+ CD collection, and mp3's are lossy (read: not exact) copies, am I allowed to share them with 10 friends on the net? 20? How many friends am I allowed to have and make the equivalent of digital mixtapes for, of stuff I bought with my own money? Remember, mp3's are lossy compression and nowhere near as high quality as the original PCM streams. They're not exact copies. And "not exact copies" is exactly what Congress passed a LAW to protect our ability to make, and share with our friends.
And what started all the controversy, you ask? Funny thing - it was the fucking RIAA running around like fucking Chicken Little screaming that the fucking sky was falling and that they'd all be bankrupt in six days and all the recording artists would fucking starve and it would be the end of western fucking civilization! Sound just a little bit familiar?!
But gee, the RIAA is still around. In fact, now that I think about it, the RIAA made fucking SHIT TONS of cash off of selling cassettes - once they had been forced by the marketplace into accepting a new distribution mechanism.
I'm getting SO tired of repeating myself over and over and over because all you twenty-something self-righteous oh-look-I'm-a-good-corpofascist little twerps have absolutely ZERO sense of history!
" Apple is able to leverage a huge catalog of artists and genres"
And Sony owns a movie studio!! What possible excuse could they have to NOT have a shitton of movies, popular and not?
If 57% of Amazon's sales come from books you can't buy at B&N, what on Earth makes you think that most of ITMS's sales come from popular music? Can you cite anything on that at all?
*sigh*...
"iTunes can play AAC the same as MP3"
.wav is a wrapper as well as a codec, but aac has DRM built in.
You mean the iTunes player for mac computers, or did you mean the iPod?
Who said mac players were all there were? Sound forge (and SD2 on the mac side) could play aac ages before the ipod came out, I was hearing about aac in 96, it was developed about the same time as mp3 and ATRAC were. It's a wrapper as well as a codec, just like
But no, I don't think for a second that Sony will use any non-proprietary format, if that's what you're getting at. I was just pointing out that the only reason Apple's aac's play on other platforms is that it's not their technology - they'd lock us out in a heartbeat if it was.
Um, no, they licensed it from Dolby. The DRM is something dolby allowed for in the spec, Apple is one company that does it but so is InterTrust.
Speak for yourself...
Apple likes to make money too, that's why they understood that providing music that you can't find in a store will get your more customers than just providing the same old crap. Apple understood that the Napster phenomonon was driven not just by the free-ness of the music, but the incredibly wide variety of artists and styles - exactly the thing the radio no longer provided. Apple provided it for a minimal fee and scored big. ITMS would never have gotten as big as it is if it just offered radio music.
And Sony's online movie store will never take off if it only offers what I can already buy at Suncoast or Blockbuster or Amazon in substantially better formats. If it's only their popular titles, why wouldn't I just buy the DVD and rip/encode it to whatever I wanted?
Sony made seventy-four foot discs? :) What kind of bandwidth *couldn't* you fit on a 74 foot disc?
Seriously, though, ATRAC sounded like absolute ass for anything besides rock or rap - in other words, anything with any kind of dynamic range - especially when it got to the reverb tail at the end of the song. I went out to the Overpriced Stereo Store when they first came out cuz I thought it sounded like a good idea and A/B'ed em against CD, cassette and vinyl - not surprisingly, PCM streams still sound the best, and all three older formats blew ATRAC away... My half-deaf father could even tell it sounded like shit, and he thinks vinyl sounds better than CD...
"Apple's AACs don't *need* an iPod to work"
That's because AAC is a product of Dolby, Apple just licensed it.
...top 500 movies?! Who gives a rat's ass about their top 500? You can buy those at the store anyway. How about a huge backcatalog of obscure and indy films (kinda like iTunes has a large catalog on non-Britney music)? They might actually get some money from me then.
"Another? I do enjoy a good debate"
:)
Welcome to our store!
"So, becuase I disagree, I automatically believe everyone else is wrong?"
You tell me, I was the one asking you that question. My point was that different people have different requirements of a system, and that, aside from 98's innate superiority in speed, footprint, and hardware requirements, my requirements as a recording engineer are met by 98se and no other OS. The rest of this pedantic excuse for an argument is based on your desire to prove 98's innate superiority in the three aforementioned areas does not exist, which puts you an the uneviable position of arguing a position with no evidence to support it. Which you freely admit, but that doesn't stop you from being rude, offensive, and wrong about fourteen times. So let's do this.
"They, essentially, are the same."
Funny. If they're the same, I'd love to see you make a drive larger than 2G using FAT16. If I were using FAT16 my computer would contain more drives than there are letters in the alphabet (I don't know what windows even does in that situation).
"If I have a 3.0ghz with 1GB of memory and some uber fast hard drive, which should allow XP to do what it needs to do, then I'm fairly certain it's faster. I can't prove one way or the other."
Firstly, if you have a 3GHz CPU with 1G of RAM and an "uber-fast" hard drive, you've spent a lot more on hardware than I have. I'm only running 1.2GHz with 768M of RAM and because my OS is so smokin', I've never encountered a situation where my system's resources were maxed out. I'll never need to buy hardware again, unless what I already have breaks.
Secondly, if you have a 3.0GHz CPU with 1G of RAM and an "uber-fast" hard drive, XP might be fast, but 98 would still be faster. And you can prove this, it's called an A/B test, something any real engineer or scientist would know about. You keep all components the same and switch one thing - in this case, the OS. Any observed differences must be the result of the one thing you changed. This is something you could do very easily (I mean, if an idiot like me can do it, your ignor^K^K^Kbrilliant ass certainly can) inside of a day. But I'm guessing you won't, because that would demonstrate how wrong you are.
Thirdly, when XP was released, the fastest CPU you could get was about 1GHz. So you're defending MS by saying that, three years after they released XP, we finally have hardware good enough to make it not crawl.
I feel bad for not paying you for this free entertainment.
"Perhaps you haven't been following recent events, but every time MS releases a patch *then* the viruses get released."
Unfortunately that has not always been the case. When Beagle (which had over thirty variants) came out, MS *hadn't* come out with a patch for the latest ones yet, nor had symantec, and we had enterprise-level support from both (hell, our company bought so many copies of XP that MS *gave* us five xboxes). We had a crack MicroServices team and they were sitting in front of their PC's sweating waiting for a patch to come down from either one of them. It hit us so hard they had to shut down all Lotus Notes access, including that of the CEO of the (very very large) company. Because the virus came out before the patch. Which makes you wrong. Again. Go home, n1x k1dd13, you're way out of your depth talking to me about windows.
"If you run out of date software then you shoudl *expect* problems to happen,"
So explain why all the datacenters running OS/400 and OS/390 (both over 20 years old) aren't hacked everyday. Explain why RACF is still the industry leader in enterprise-level security. Explain why UNIX, a FORTY year old OS, has been embraced by everybody from HP to IBM (HP/UX and AIX), and has spawned a variant whose market share for the home desktop is increasing dramatically versus Microsoft's. I'm sure you have a good explanation, or, failing that, a good reason why you don't hav
OK, what's your email? It's not shown publicly on /.
"but it didn't have drivers for hardly anything on my test machine"
yeah, drivers can be a pain in the ass. XP will be exactly the same in three years.
Re:xplite... I will definitely have to tell my XP-having friends about this, good to know
"ME was out, and I didn't know any better so I ran that for a while..."
I'm soooo sorry...
"Which is an arguable point, as we've demonstrated."
Reasonable people can disagree, and no two people have the exact same requirements for a system. Operating with slightly older hardware (1.2 gigahoitz cpu, 768mb ram) and lots of VERY specific audio hardware and software, my requirements are compatability and overhead, hence 98se/lite.
" I'm going to have to disagree"
.NET software in Win98 is."
I never said you couldn't, I only said many others had contradictory experiences. Or is anybody who disagrees with you automatically wrong?
"It seems faster for me"
Never seen a box in my life that ran faster under xp than 98. XP's footprint is HUGE. It requires something like 30-40 system processes just to be a normal PC. Try a/b-ing the two on the same box with any kind of benchmarking.
"98 has FAT."
No, 98 has FAT32.
"I can restrict my share so only my boss and the department can read/write the files "
Well, them and the dozens of script kiddies butt-surfing your box on the latest sploit MS hasn't found out about yet.
2k/xp does have built-in filesystem-level share control, true. So does Unix. I believe you can achieve the same result with 98 using something like Lotus Notes, network shares, or possibly some other form of actual creativity. But 98 was never designed to be an enterprise desktop, NT was. And as much as 98 pretends to be a multi-user system, it's really not. If I had to outfit a bunch of enterprise level desktops, I'd use 2k. But not XP, which is even slower than 2k and full of unnecessary crap like pretty round buttons. Gag.
If all your criteria are based on how well an OS performs strictly in the workplace, I feel sorry for you.
"98 doesn't have drivers."
this is a red herring. Any OS, XP included, isn't gonna have drivers for types of hardware released after the OS was. Next.
"You haven't seen anything nasty becuase Microsoft doesn't push updates out anymore."
Hey, Einstein, guess what I just did? Got windows updates for the 98 box I'm on right now. Turns out you don't have to have MS push them to you in order to get them. Next.
"Who's to say something hasn't happened and you don't know about it?"
If something had happened there would be some kind of performace loss, used disk space, that can and would be detected since I work routinely with massive amounts of massive files and very CPU intensive applications. But the main reason I know is cuz nobody's bothering to write worms for it anymore. Why bother, when writing worms for xp is so EASY (thanks again MS)? Can you even tell me the last virus or worm that targeted 98 was released?
"I'm curious to know how developing
Never tried it. Not a developer.
What I *am* is a recording engineer, and I'd *love* to see you set up my $15,000 Ensoniq PARIS system to run on an XP or 2k box. Oh, shit, you can't. It REQUIRES 98se. Try running Hypersignal RIDE under XP. Next.
"A great many things can be done with XP/2K that can't for 98."
I never denied that. There's also things that 98 can do that xp/2k can't. And the fact remains that 98se is THE most supported OS by software and hardware manufacturers, period.
And hey, you know what you can do with 98se/lite that you can't with XP? UNINSTALL INTERNET EXPLODER COMPLETELY! That's pretty freakin cool if you ask me!
I never said 98 did more than XP, I said I, and others, had experienced it to be faster and have less inherent vulnerabilities. Take two boxes, install 98se unpatched and XP unpatched, put 'em on a cable line and see which one gets infected first just sitting on the internet. An unpatched install of XP has an average time-to-infection of FIFTEEN MINUTES.
"/angered at the idiots."
no, an idiot is somebody who assumes that everybody else's requirements for a system are the same as his own.
"You must have a natural affinity."
:)
Guilty as charged.
"Three things you do not discuss in polite company: politics, religion, and operating systems. It can only get ugly."
Funny, those are probably my three favorite topics here...
"I've only used 95 and ME extensively, which may have jaded me"
Mos def. 95 was a good idea but not mature at all, not even the first edition of 98 was mature (no uDMA support or WDM model), ME was a giant turd. 98se, with 98lite installed, is the best MS OS I've ever used. If you haven't ever tried it, you really should, if just for comparison and contrast.
And you might just never go back.
"it's plenty fast when you turn off all the visual noise and plenty secure when you firewall it and stay the hell away from IE"
Tried turning off all the noise and it didn't help much. A little, but not nearly as much as just running a mature, well-patched and updated OS with a much smaller footprint.
And I didn't think XP let you uninstall IE like 98lite does - it wouldn't even let my roommate select any default app for email other than either outlook or hotmail (like, NONE, maybe). If there is a way to uninstall IE from XP I would LOVE to hear it. Last I heard it was directly built into the OS so that you couldn't remove it. The 2k side of my machine doesn't want to work right now so I can't check, but I know on the 98 side there's explorer.exe and ie.exe, two separate things... aren't they the same in 2k/xp?
Now, to be fair, I'll admit that there are things that you need XP for (some apps and games require it). And there are some things XP does that 98 doesn't - transparencies, and suggesting computer names like "Mary's computer" and "Kitchen computer", and menus that fade in and out... it's pretty. And it comes with lots of pretty pictures of flowers and cute little doggies. And heck, by MS's track record, in five years or so XP might just be a mature OS. That's usually when they stop supporting it in order to force everybody to betatest their newest and crappiest OS. That's been the distinct trend. Every windows ever released has sucked when it first came out (as evidenced by the frequent revisions thereafter, remember 3.1, 95osr2 and 98se were basically the DOS kernel's version of service packs done to correct MAJOR problems with 3.0, 95a b and c, and 98 first edition), was pretty stable and solid about 3-5 years after initial release, at which point MS promptly discontinues support.
And, lest we forget, the NT kernel was just a revision of the os/2 kernel anyway, from back when os/2 was a joint MS/IBM venture. OS/2 actually came with a windows 3.1 emulator that ran pretty well. Then they split it and IBM came out with os/2 warp and MS came out with NT 3 (at least that's how I remember it, I could always be wrong I suppose). So we're talking about a glorified DOS hack versus a glorified os/2 hack.
But hey, if it works for you, then more power to you man. It's a free country. Sorry I came off like an asshole before.
heh, i totally misspoke, mea culpa. It is indeed a FAT32 partition. But it's the one where my 2k is installed, and 2k won't boot cuz it keeps saying "ntoskrnl.exe not found or corrupted" when I can see clearly in 98 that it's there and have restored it several times already... 2k recovery floppies also see the entire drive as not being there, so does partitionmagic, yet windows explorer not only sees it but let me copy all the files I needed off of it. This is a problem I've seen many many times with XP or 2k, all of a sudden it thinks a drive just isn't there.