Maybe the point is Blizzard realized that unlike most data-center junk, this was something people might be willing to pay more than used hardware costs for and they could do something good with the money they raised from selling it.
Did you complain about Penny Arcade's charity drives, too?
No styled subtitle support until after 0.90, a feature other players had for years already. Version 1.0 was an improvement in playback, but still wasn't nearly as good as MPC-HC. Lots of regressions on h264 playback in the.0.x releases after that. I could play 1080p in ffdshow-based players, but VLC couldn't even get 720p smoothly.
New 2.0 version is MUCH better, still doesn't handle order chapters right. There's a noticeable pause in the breaks between the linked segments and the "font database" updates (WTF is that, anyway. No other player seems to need to catalog my fonts before starting playback).. Ordered chapters are by definition supposed to be seamless. I shouldn't be able to tell when one segment ends and another begins.
There's a reason why VLC can play basically anything, on any system, far better and more reliably then anything else on the planet.
LMAO. The only thing VLC can do reliably is play back crappy AVI files.
Until the recent version 2.0 VLC hasn't been able to play any h264 files of HD resolution without macroblocking on sudden scene changes or scrubs, it didn't supported ordered chapter MKVs (and the support that's there now is half-baked), resource usage was higher than ffdshow-based playback apps, and picture quality wasn't as good.
There's a reason VLC has been considered a joke in the fansubbing world for awhile now.
MPEG-LA is the SCO of h.264. SCO collected Unix license fees, but the actual copyrights were owned by Novell. Just like the actual h.264 copyrights are owned by Apple, Microsoft, and dozens (hundreds?) of other companies.
Um, except MPEG-LA is actually assigned the duty of licensing the patents and collecting the royalties by the holders. SCO was just a company that liked to claim it owned something it didn't, to try and get money for it, in effect stealing the royalties from the legitimate rights holder.
Yup. They want a convenient one-stop-shop for all their politician-purchasing needs. Plus, it's more difficult to bribe local leaders who might personally be effected by the Telco's tyranny and have their own interest in seeing more competition.
The answer to the question "how many sales are lost to piracy" when the product is not available for sale is always "all of the sales." Because you can't buy something you can't buy.
No, wait a minute, that makes no sense. The answer is "none". If the pirate option didn't exist the maker would still have zero sales, so they can't blame the piracy for that. It's the same justification for abandonware computer games. If the product is not available for sale you can't buy it even if you want to, so the studio has no one to blame but themselves for the lost sales -- they don't want to follow the Long Tail.
For an example of following the Long Tail, look to Steam. A couple weeks ago I bought a RTS game that has been out of (physical) print for over a decade after a friend loaned me an old CD copy. I could have just duplicated the CD and kept playing it for free (no CD key or any other DRM on a game that old) but it was available on Steam, with expansion packs included I didn't have, for a song. No brick-and-mortar retailer would stock any product this old, but the current IP holder, instead of banishing it to an old server and telling people is was gone, made it available to buy and play legally still. And look, they got a sale instead of another person playing for free on the excuse of "abandonware" because of it.
Why do Microsoft believe that people want or need touch monitors? Why do Microsoft believe large-dimension touch interfaces are better interface than a mouse?
Probably because of their (patented) work on Surface, among other things. Whereas right now they're using a common pointing device everyone's free to utilize without paying Microsoft a license fee.
My dumb phone would have been considered "smart" just 12 years ago, when the first Blackberry was introduced!
Yes, 12 years is hardly any time at all:
* People were still buying 5100-series Nokias powered by Ni-Cd batteries as on-contract phones. * The end of the Newton MessagePad was still a recent event. * Everyone was (mistakenly) hyping up for the release of Windows M.E. * The term "smartphone" didn't even exist.
What good is high-quality speakers when the signal received is so low "resolution"?
That argument doesn't work because the components have actually gotten worse than they used to be, and now give a sub-quality performance even with the existing non-HD signal. From my own observation, things started to go downhill when flip-phones were becoming the most popular, possibly because more shallow components were needed to fit flip-phone casing thickness.
It's actually a variant of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, which is the codec on Blu-Ray audio. But not at a high bit rate, as on Blu-Ray discs. It's AAC/ELD v2, at 24Kb/s.
It's already in IOS Facetime, anyway.
This post doesn't make any sense.
H.264 is a video codec, it has nothing to do with the audio on a bluray disc. Blu-ray discs use a wide variety of sound formats, from 24-bit PCM Mono, all the way to 7.1 Lossless codecs.
You don't have to use H.264 to be "Full HD". "Full HD" is nothing more than a marketing term to start with, but it only refers to 1080p video. Early Blurays used MPEG2 for video codec and still did 1080p resolution.
Handset makers have been so focused on stuffing their handsets with cameras, MP3 playback, video playback, picture messaging and other dumb things in a features race that they only phone-in (pun intended) the basic voice calling capabilities now.
Start burning stuff to DVD or putting it on cheap flash drives and hand them out to your friends. It's just like saving stuff to the Cloud, except they appreciate the music and movies and you can drink with them.
I call it "Sneaker-cloud".
So I take it you use Air Jordans for the physical layer? (or is that considered the data-link layer)?
When I got married, I made a commitment, a promise, to always love her. Even if I feel tired of her. Even if she's changed... I intend to keep that promise, even if one of us changes. THAT is what mature people do.
Mature people stay in relationships with partners even if they don't love them anymore? Boy am I glad I don't consider myself mature yet.
Being able to work through difficulty and have your relationship grow in ways beyond what originally brought you together is one thing, but your promise sounds a little too close to "I'll keep being married to this person no matter what."
Why would you make a promise that has the potential to make your life and someone else's miserable? Trying "through good times and bad" is great. But if it's not working, it's not working, and you should still prepare yourself for that possibility. Lots of the couples that make up that 50% who end in divorce didn't just "throw in the towel" and were trying hard to make their marriages work. There is a line between perseverance and simply being too proud to admit it's not a storybook.
Yes, the problem is rebooting is something you should try before you call tech support, and the person staffing the support number should known now to fix issues beyond doing this (or reformatting the machine) and they generally do not.
The real question is, do we need to use that much water in agriculture?
Do we need to use that much fresh water in agriculture, I wonder. A lower-level filtration process yielding "grey water" for these uses would probably be fine and save energy over a full treatment-plant supply.
'Classical music lovers hate the fact that urban planners use classical music to disperse youth,' says Minneapolis City Council Member Gary Schiff.
Oh, God. Another group of fucking elitists. Instead of being happy more people are exposed to classical music they're going to complain. "No! Don't use our favorite thing on the masses! They aren't sophisticated enough to appreciate this music." They're just like the Apple fans upset the new iPhone doesn't look significantly different from the previous model so they can differentiate themselves.
If you had ever served on a standards committee, you would know that competing standards are not a plot to screw the consumer, but are the result of an inability of people from different countries to agree on things.
ATSC was developed by a consortium called Grand Alliance which is a group of, guess what, companies that have a vested interest in the standard. The reason they can't agree on anything is for competitive reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
So it is a joke. At least, it's a joke his parents played on him.
Maybe the point is Blizzard realized that unlike most data-center junk, this was something people might be willing to pay more than used hardware costs for and they could do something good with the money they raised from selling it.
Did you complain about Penny Arcade's charity drives, too?
Sony AND Microsoft in one device?
Man oh man. That's going to get some Slashdot love.....
That will be a truly amazing device. It will steal your identity despite not being able to run.
Try again.
Been following VLC since version 0.86 at least.
No styled subtitle support until after 0.90, a feature other players had for years already. .0.x releases after that. I could play 1080p in ffdshow-based players, but VLC couldn't even get 720p smoothly.
Version 1.0 was an improvement in playback, but still wasn't nearly as good as MPC-HC.
Lots of regressions on h264 playback in the
New 2.0 version is MUCH better, still doesn't handle order chapters right. There's a noticeable pause in the breaks between the linked segments and the "font database" updates (WTF is that, anyway. No other player seems to need to catalog my fonts before starting playback).. Ordered chapters are by definition supposed to be seamless. I shouldn't be able to tell when one segment ends and another begins.
In the battle of who's more of a technology company, Microsoft or Google, the winner is...the one that doesn't make its money from ads?
Wouldn't that be Apple in this case? (at least it makes less of its money on ads)
There's a reason why VLC can play basically anything, on any system, far better and more reliably then anything else on the planet.
LMAO. The only thing VLC can do reliably is play back crappy AVI files.
Until the recent version 2.0 VLC hasn't been able to play any h264 files of HD resolution without macroblocking on sudden scene changes or scrubs, it didn't supported ordered chapter MKVs (and the support that's there now is half-baked), resource usage was higher than ffdshow-based playback apps, and picture quality wasn't as good.
There's a reason VLC has been considered a joke in the fansubbing world for awhile now.
MPEG-LA is the SCO of h.264. SCO collected Unix license fees, but the actual copyrights were owned by Novell. Just like the actual h.264 copyrights are owned by Apple, Microsoft, and dozens (hundreds?) of other companies.
Um, except MPEG-LA is actually assigned the duty of licensing the patents and collecting the royalties by the holders. SCO was just a company that liked to claim it owned something it didn't, to try and get money for it, in effect stealing the royalties from the legitimate rights holder.
Yup. They want a convenient one-stop-shop for all their politician-purchasing needs. Plus, it's more difficult to bribe local leaders who might personally be effected by the Telco's tyranny and have their own interest in seeing more competition.
The answer to the question "how many sales are lost to piracy" when the product is not available for sale is always "all of the sales." Because you can't buy something you can't buy.
No, wait a minute, that makes no sense. The answer is "none". If the pirate option didn't exist the maker would still have zero sales, so they can't blame the piracy for that. It's the same justification for abandonware computer games. If the product is not available for sale you can't buy it even if you want to, so the studio has no one to blame but themselves for the lost sales -- they don't want to follow the Long Tail.
For an example of following the Long Tail, look to Steam. A couple weeks ago I bought a RTS game that has been out of (physical) print for over a decade after a friend loaned me an old CD copy. I could have just duplicated the CD and kept playing it for free (no CD key or any other DRM on a game that old) but it was available on Steam, with expansion packs included I didn't have, for a song. No brick-and-mortar retailer would stock any product this old, but the current IP holder, instead of banishing it to an old server and telling people is was gone, made it available to buy and play legally still. And look, they got a sale instead of another person playing for free on the excuse of "abandonware" because of it.
What? How will we decrease global temperatures by making prime-time television more steamy?
Why do Microsoft believe that people want or need touch monitors? Why do Microsoft believe large-dimension touch interfaces are better interface than a mouse?
Probably because of their (patented) work on Surface, among other things. Whereas right now they're using a common pointing device everyone's free to utilize without paying Microsoft a license fee.
My dumb phone would have been considered "smart" just 12 years ago, when the first Blackberry was introduced!
Yes, 12 years is hardly any time at all:
* People were still buying 5100-series Nokias powered by Ni-Cd batteries as on-contract phones.
* The end of the Newton MessagePad was still a recent event.
* Everyone was (mistakenly) hyping up for the release of Windows M.E.
* The term "smartphone" didn't even exist.
What good is high-quality speakers when the signal received is so low "resolution"?
That argument doesn't work because the components have actually gotten worse than they used to be, and now give a sub-quality performance even with the existing non-HD signal. From my own observation, things started to go downhill when flip-phones were becoming the most popular, possibly because more shallow components were needed to fit flip-phone casing thickness.
I blame this on only having two political parties. Since each party only really has one competitor, it boils down to us versus them rhetoric.
Kind of like our ISP situation, then?
It's actually a variant of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, which is the codec on Blu-Ray audio. But not at a high bit rate, as on Blu-Ray discs. It's AAC/ELD v2, at 24Kb/s.
It's already in IOS Facetime, anyway.
This post doesn't make any sense.
...when the phones have shit sound components.
Handset makers have been so focused on stuffing their handsets with cameras, MP3 playback, video playback, picture messaging and other dumb things in a features race that they only phone-in (pun intended) the basic voice calling capabilities now.
Start burning stuff to DVD or putting it on cheap flash drives and hand them out to your friends. It's just like saving stuff to the Cloud, except they appreciate the music and movies and you can drink with them.
I call it "Sneaker-cloud".
So I take it you use Air Jordans for the physical layer? (or is that considered the data-link layer)?
When I got married, I made a commitment, a promise, to always love her. Even if I feel tired of her. Even if she's changed... I intend to keep that promise, even if one of us changes. THAT is what mature people do.
Mature people stay in relationships with partners even if they don't love them anymore? Boy am I glad I don't consider myself mature yet.
Being able to work through difficulty and have your relationship grow in ways beyond what originally brought you together is one thing, but your promise sounds a little too close to "I'll keep being married to this person no matter what."
Why would you make a promise that has the potential to make your life and someone else's miserable? Trying "through good times and bad" is great. But if it's not working, it's not working, and you should still prepare yourself for that possibility. Lots of the couples that make up that 50% who end in divorce didn't just "throw in the towel" and were trying hard to make their marriages work. There is a line between perseverance and simply being too proud to admit it's not a storybook.
I was wondering why I hadn't seen a pre-order link on Amazon yet. I gotta wait almost another year to find out how it ends now?
Too many people are "STATUS" oriented, so they pick iPad.
It is the APPS that make the system!
Doesn't the Apple App Store have a largest number of apps, though?
I know, it's a coincidence. Those people who picked Apple couldn't possibly have done it for any reason other than to look cool...
Yes, the problem is rebooting is something you should try before you call tech support, and the person staffing the support number should known now to fix issues beyond doing this (or reformatting the machine) and they generally do not.
The real question is, do we need to use that much water in agriculture?
Do we need to use that much fresh water in agriculture, I wonder. A lower-level filtration process yielding "grey water" for these uses would probably be fine and save energy over a full treatment-plant supply.
Oh, God. Another group of fucking elitists. Instead of being happy more people are exposed to classical music they're going to complain. "No! Don't use our favorite thing on the masses! They aren't sophisticated enough to appreciate this music." They're just like the Apple fans upset the new iPhone doesn't look significantly different from the previous model so they can differentiate themselves.
"Begun, the Drone War has..."
If you had ever served on a standards committee, you would know that competing standards are not
a plot to screw the consumer, but are the result of an inability of people from different countries to
agree on things.
ATSC was developed by a consortium called Grand Alliance which is a group of, guess what, companies that have a vested interest in the standard. The reason they can't agree on anything is for competitive reasons.