MS killed the Xbox immediatly after the 360 launch.
No kidding. And it wasn't just the consoles, but peripherals as well. Xbox controllers vanished within a month from everywhere, and original MS ones are now almost impossible to get in a decent nick. There are 3rd party controllers, but they are much much worse.
F Lock, yes, but not nonsense. The Microsoft 4000 is one of the few keyboards I've seen where the F Lock setting survives reboots. On other keyboards it reverts to the idiotic macro mode.
Power users? No, if by that you mean the traditional computer geek.
Gamers - yes, unfortunately the directional sound (and EAX) support of onboard audio is still not up to the same level as Creative's. This is especially relevant if you play FPS games with either a 4+ channel speaker set or headphones. The X-Fi's headphone processing combined with a quality pair of headphones wipes the table with any of the so-called "surround" cans.
Hi-Fi enthusiasts - most definitely. Onboard audio is getting better, but not quite there yet. Most often the rare onboard audio codecs that are of high quality are only found on very expensive mainboards. It's often much more practical to get a cheaper mobo and a proper separate audio card.
Musicians, DJs and others - most definitely. Need multiple independent channels, ASIO drivers, proper A/D converters, etc.
Other potential applications include HTPCs. Take a look at Asus' new Xonar HDAV 1.3, for example.
However, you're right in that the market has shrunk considerably. Onboard audio is good enough for most people these days, and Creative's sound card business is in trouble. For me, an M-Audio Delta with a Creative X-Fi (one of the real ones, not the XtremeAudio fakes) is good enough. But I'm picky compared to most when it comes to audio.
I also used W2k for a long time after XP came out. But then I switched to an LCD display, and the subpixel anti-aliasing (Cleartype) was more than enough reason to switch to XP. I could do without some of XP's features, but never that one.
(the DRM affecting sound and networking performance is a big no no for me because I listen to music a lot while I work) Would you happen to have a link confirming this? Thanks.
I'm curious. The blog you linked says that Vista would decline to play a DRM-protected audio CD over SPDIF outputs. How would it know that an audio CD has DRM, does Vista's Windows Media Player have an ID list of every possible DRM scheme used on audio CDs?
I think not. What's probably going on here is that the author tried to play one of those trick CDs that have several sessions, and when used with a computer the session that's visible is the data CD session that holds DRM'd WMA versions of the songs.
You have NEVER been able to play DRM-crippled WMA files over SPDIF. This is NOT a Vista thing, it's an inherent idiocy in Windows Media DRM.
It's understandable enough - all a Windows PC needs is a decent DAC, DMA, and a chip with enough power to mix a few dozen sounds. SBLive did this perfectly and what were the marketing people supposed to do when onboard sound chips caught up? Make up crap like the XFi, that's what.
Actually, the problem with the SB Live! was that it didn't do that anywhere near perfectly. The hardware resampler was audibly bad, in addition to showing as crazy intermodulation distortion figures in measurements.
The XFi is a total waste of time, more marketing than anything else. I don't want my music "crystallized", I want it as the artist intended, but nowhere in the huge chunk of crapware provided by Creative is a button to turn off all the processing. When you can't actually play sound *without* distorting it then you've got problems. You *can* turn them off. I'm not even sure if Crystallizer and CMSS are enabled by default. What's more, the X-Fi can play a 44,1kHz stream with no resampling, unlike earlier Creative cards. Just switch the driver into audio creation mode, enable bit-matched playback and all the distorting effect options actually go away from the control panel. The quality of the analogue output is very very good, both subjectively and objectively. Even using the new hardware resampler has negligible effect on sound quality.
Creative have churned out an incredible pile of crappy products over the years, and still do, but the X-Fi is not one of them. Just disregard all the marketing lies about 'better than CD quality sound', and be aware that the cheapest X-Fi PCI card and the external Xmod are *not* X-Fis. Of course, if you use Linux, you're much better off with an Envy24 based card. And if you have no need for the multichannel capabilities or DS3D hardware acceleration with effects, you're better off with a more simple card from M-Audio or E-Mu.
Although there were the occasional problems, the SB16 was mostly SB Pro compatible in my experience (as in supporting stereo PCM and OPL3 FM synthesis).
Ah, but it's more complicated than that. There were two versions of the SB Pro. The original didn't have an OPL3 chip, but rather two OPL2 chips, one for each output channel. The SB Pro2, like the SB16, had a single OPL3 chip.
The problem is that watermarking is not supposed to affect audio quality, but if it is truly inaudible the watermark would be damaged by lossy encoding. Thus, not only are we not going to get lossless files, we're going to get files that have potentially audible watermarks degrading their quality.
If its so useful then why do most people recommend that it should be turned off?
Most people recommend that it should be turned off in Windows XP, not in Vista. XP's search function is crappy whether you use the indexer or not. And on XP it has the tendency to eat resources when it shouldn't. No idea if it's the same in Vista, hope not.
Two Words: Joint Stereo
As a default, it's the worst possible choice.
No, it isn't. It's the smartest possible choice. There is no loss of stereo separation in LAME "joint stereo" (actually, mid/side or matrix stereo), unlike in intensity stereo encoding, which isn't even implemented in LAME. How LAME works by default is that it analyses each frame separately to see whether it is more efficient to encode the frame in LR or MS. Most of the time, not every frame is encoded in "joint stereo". If there was an audible effect to stereo imaging from using MS encoding, the stereo image would continuously pump back and forth as the encoding method changes. Never heard of anyone complaining about that happening...
The drawback to MS encoding is that LAME is only optimised for stereo listening - if the compressed track is played back through a Dolby Pro Logic decoder, the quality of the rear channel sound can suffer audibly in some cases. In Dolby Stereo, the rear channel is L-R, just like the S channel in MS encoded stereo. LAME only optimises the decoded LR stereo signals for audible artifacts, not the S signal when listened to as is.
As far as I know, that is the only scenario where using LAME in LR mode exclusively has been shown to improve sound quality. In all other situations, it performs much better in automatic LR/MS mode, or "joint stereo", so the encoder can decide where to use the bits available.
See this old page for an explanation of MS encoding. There's lots to be found on the topic in Hydrogenaudio's archives, but I can't be arsed to do a search right now.
That sounds a bit strange, as the Jetta is basically a low-budget version of the Passat. They share most of the mechanical parts, the Passat just has more luxury and other options, and it looks a lot better. So If money is not the issue you would be pretty stupid to prefer the Jetta.
Although the current Passat is based on the Golf/Jetta platform, it is a much bigger car. Wheelbase is 13 cm longer, whole car 23 cm longer. It doesn't even look much nicer to me, being so bulky. I don't see why preferring a smaller car over a bloated saloon would be stupid.
If I really had to pick a VW to buy, I'd take the Golf GTI. Of course, there's the VW badge tax, so the more rational choice would be the Seat Leon TFSI, which is very nearly the same car, just looks a bit better and costs less.
Unfortunately these cost more to make resulting in everyone ceasing to make them for the consumer/prosumer segment; NEC is retiring its prosumer IPS-based LCDs and they were the last holdout.
Apple Cinema Displays are still S-IPS screens, as is Dell's 2007WFP and - I assume - the 30-inch Dell. None of them are fresh models, true, but S-IPS screens are still available.
You crazy Europeans (I assume)... here in the US, the Jetta is often significantly more expensive than the Camry! And yes, I'm complaining about that, because I'd rather have the VW.
Probably not a European, since Toyota doesn't even sell Camrys in Europe anymore. It's much too big to be a volume seller, and those who want a huge boring saloon car will buy a European one anyway. A VW Passat, probably. I don't see why the Jetta wouldn't be considered a nice family car though, I'd rather have one of those than either a Passat or a Camry.
A Nokia N91 and N95 will do 8GB as standard, which you can get free on contract.
I haven't tried the N95, but the N91 8GB isn't all that hot. It's big and bulky, the UI is slow, the whole thing takes over half a minute to turn on, and while there is a music player app included, it's next to useless because getting that music onto the phone takes *ages* - the same problem you get with most "music" phones. And there's no gapless mp3 playback. No thanks. I haven't tried the iPhone either, but at least iPod touch is a much better music/movie player than the Nokia, and it's much smaller and lighter too.
The PS2 is still in production, they're even coming up with a cost-reduced model like they had earlier with the PSone. In contrast, the first Xbox is dead. Completely. There aren't even any MS controllers around for it, which is annoying as hell, as gamepads aren't forever and the third party products just suck. Another case of MS forcing customers to upgrade, if you ask me...
Ahh you're right, I didn't remember that any more. I never really did that either because that always got you into the low-res desktop, unless you were running the Atari B/W monitor. I preferred 640x200, so I always had to have a GEM disk...
No, that's not quite right. The original Amiga 1000 didn't come with Kickstart ROMs, because the OS was still in a state of change. Instead, you had to load Kickstart from disk, and it ate up 256k of the 512k of RAM installed. Later Amigas came with ROM Kickstarts and could be started without a disk. The full Workbench environment still had to be loaded from disk, just like with the A1000 - on which you actually needed two disks to get the whole OS up and running.
The Atari ST, on the other hand, had the whole OS in ROM, except for the very first models. Even STs weren't instant-on though, because the bootloader would waste at least half a minute looking for a disk to boot from - it was actually faster to have a GEM disk with custom settings in the drive when turning the power on than booting from ROM only.
Increased usefulness?
So the ultimate Upgrade is Win2k? No, it's Windows XP. Never mind the other new features over 2k, there's one that I just can't live without: ClearType. Subpixel font antialiasing (with LCDs) is one of the great advances in computer usability, IMO. Of course, they could have added it to 2k as well, but didn't (surprise surprise). Actually, in Vista, ClearType finally supports rotated screens properly -- so for some people the Vista up/downgrade could even be useful. (Yes yes, I know vertical SPAA has been in X for ages already.)
Battery life with Rockbox is very much dependent on which build you use. The iPod build is not even in the same galaxy with Apple's firmware when it comes to power management. OTOH, on my iRiver H120 Rockbox is actually more efficient than the original. With an upgraded battery and Rockbox, I get about 30 hours of continuous play. The original battery and firmware could only do 16 hours when the thing was new.
They also created the Sony/Phillips Digital Interface for audio known as SPIDF. It's been around for a while but is only now picking up momentum in the consumer market. It's been in use for professional audio for a long time. Though, my Archos Jukebox Recorder has a SPIDF interface. (It was the first USB 2.0 hdd based mp3 player on the market.)
Actually, S/PDIF was designed for consumer devices. It's a slightly modified version of the AES/EBU digital interface used in professional equipment. They added SCMS serial copy protection and removed mandatory support for 24-bit audio. The connectors and cables are also different. S/PDIF uses either RCA or TOSLINK connectors, while AES/EBU typically uses XLR connectors. It's also not new at all, I had a Sony Minidisc recorder with optical S/PDIF inputs and outputs over ten years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
MS killed the Xbox immediatly after the 360 launch.
No kidding. And it wasn't just the consoles, but peripherals as well. Xbox controllers vanished within a month from everywhere, and original MS ones are now almost impossible to get in a decent nick. There are 3rd party controllers, but they are much much worse.
F Lock, yes, but not nonsense. The Microsoft 4000 is one of the few keyboards I've seen where the F Lock setting survives reboots. On other keyboards it reverts to the idiotic macro mode.
Gamers - yes, unfortunately the directional sound (and EAX) support of onboard audio is still not up to the same level as Creative's. This is especially relevant if you play FPS games with either a 4+ channel speaker set or headphones. The X-Fi's headphone processing combined with a quality pair of headphones wipes the table with any of the so-called "surround" cans.
Hi-Fi enthusiasts - most definitely. Onboard audio is getting better, but not quite there yet. Most often the rare onboard audio codecs that are of high quality are only found on very expensive mainboards. It's often much more practical to get a cheaper mobo and a proper separate audio card.
Musicians, DJs and others - most definitely. Need multiple independent channels, ASIO drivers, proper A/D converters, etc.
Other potential applications include HTPCs. Take a look at Asus' new Xonar HDAV 1.3, for example.
However, you're right in that the market has shrunk considerably. Onboard audio is good enough for most people these days, and Creative's sound card business is in trouble. For me, an M-Audio Delta with a Creative X-Fi (one of the real ones, not the XtremeAudio fakes) is good enough. But I'm picky compared to most when it comes to audio.
...is why do Ask Slashdot articles keep getting posted in other sections?
I also used W2k for a long time after XP came out. But then I switched to an LCD display, and the subpixel anti-aliasing (Cleartype) was more than enough reason to switch to XP. I could do without some of XP's features, but never that one.
There is, of course. Virgin Records the label is now owned by EMI.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_records
Yes, except that DRM has nothing to do with it, not according to any half-reliable source I've found. Mark Russinovich probably has the best explanation: http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2007/08/27/1833290.aspx
I'm curious. The blog you linked says that Vista would decline to play a DRM-protected audio CD over SPDIF outputs. How would it know that an audio CD has DRM, does Vista's Windows Media Player have an ID list of every possible DRM scheme used on audio CDs?
I think not. What's probably going on here is that the author tried to play one of those trick CDs that have several sessions, and when used with a computer the session that's visible is the data CD session that holds DRM'd WMA versions of the songs.
You have NEVER been able to play DRM-crippled WMA files over SPDIF. This is NOT a Vista thing, it's an inherent idiocy in Windows Media DRM.
Actually, the problem with the SB Live! was that it didn't do that anywhere near perfectly. The hardware resampler was audibly bad, in addition to showing as crazy intermodulation distortion figures in measurements.
The XFi is a total waste of time, more marketing than anything else. I don't want my music "crystallized", I want it as the artist intended, but nowhere in the huge chunk of crapware provided by Creative is a button to turn off all the processing. When you can't actually play sound *without* distorting it then you've got problems. You *can* turn them off. I'm not even sure if Crystallizer and CMSS are enabled by default. What's more, the X-Fi can play a 44,1kHz stream with no resampling, unlike earlier Creative cards. Just switch the driver into audio creation mode, enable bit-matched playback and all the distorting effect options actually go away from the control panel. The quality of the analogue output is very very good, both subjectively and objectively. Even using the new hardware resampler has negligible effect on sound quality.Creative have churned out an incredible pile of crappy products over the years, and still do, but the X-Fi is not one of them. Just disregard all the marketing lies about 'better than CD quality sound', and be aware that the cheapest X-Fi PCI card and the external Xmod are *not* X-Fis. Of course, if you use Linux, you're much better off with an Envy24 based card. And if you have no need for the multichannel capabilities or DS3D hardware acceleration with effects, you're better off with a more simple card from M-Audio or E-Mu.
Ah, but it's more complicated than that. There were two versions of the SB Pro. The original didn't have an OPL3 chip, but rather two OPL2 chips, one for each output channel. The SB Pro2, like the SB16, had a single OPL3 chip.
The problem is that watermarking is not supposed to affect audio quality, but if it is truly inaudible the watermark would be damaged by lossy encoding. Thus, not only are we not going to get lossless files, we're going to get files that have potentially audible watermarks degrading their quality.
Most people recommend that it should be turned off in Windows XP, not in Vista. XP's search function is crappy whether you use the indexer or not. And on XP it has the tendency to eat resources when it shouldn't. No idea if it's the same in Vista, hope not.
No, it isn't. It's the smartest possible choice. There is no loss of stereo separation in LAME "joint stereo" (actually, mid/side or matrix stereo), unlike in intensity stereo encoding, which isn't even implemented in LAME. How LAME works by default is that it analyses each frame separately to see whether it is more efficient to encode the frame in LR or MS. Most of the time, not every frame is encoded in "joint stereo". If there was an audible effect to stereo imaging from using MS encoding, the stereo image would continuously pump back and forth as the encoding method changes. Never heard of anyone complaining about that happening...
The drawback to MS encoding is that LAME is only optimised for stereo listening - if the compressed track is played back through a Dolby Pro Logic decoder, the quality of the rear channel sound can suffer audibly in some cases. In Dolby Stereo, the rear channel is L-R, just like the S channel in MS encoded stereo. LAME only optimises the decoded LR stereo signals for audible artifacts, not the S signal when listened to as is. As far as I know, that is the only scenario where using LAME in LR mode exclusively has been shown to improve sound quality. In all other situations, it performs much better in automatic LR/MS mode, or "joint stereo", so the encoder can decide where to use the bits available.
See this old page for an explanation of MS encoding. There's lots to be found on the topic in Hydrogenaudio's archives, but I can't be arsed to do a search right now.
Although the current Passat is based on the Golf/Jetta platform, it is a much bigger car. Wheelbase is 13 cm longer, whole car 23 cm longer. It doesn't even look much nicer to me, being so bulky. I don't see why preferring a smaller car over a bloated saloon would be stupid.
If I really had to pick a VW to buy, I'd take the Golf GTI. Of course, there's the VW badge tax, so the more rational choice would be the Seat Leon TFSI, which is very nearly the same car, just looks a bit better and costs less.
Apple Cinema Displays are still S-IPS screens, as is Dell's 2007WFP and - I assume - the 30-inch Dell. None of them are fresh models, true, but S-IPS screens are still available.
Probably not a European, since Toyota doesn't even sell Camrys in Europe anymore. It's much too big to be a volume seller, and those who want a huge boring saloon car will buy a European one anyway. A VW Passat, probably. I don't see why the Jetta wouldn't be considered a nice family car though, I'd rather have one of those than either a Passat or a Camry.
I haven't tried the N95, but the N91 8GB isn't all that hot. It's big and bulky, the UI is slow, the whole thing takes over half a minute to turn on, and while there is a music player app included, it's next to useless because getting that music onto the phone takes *ages* - the same problem you get with most "music" phones. And there's no gapless mp3 playback. No thanks. I haven't tried the iPhone either, but at least iPod touch is a much better music/movie player than the Nokia, and it's much smaller and lighter too.
The PS2 is still in production, they're even coming up with a cost-reduced model like they had earlier with the PSone. In contrast, the first Xbox is dead. Completely. There aren't even any MS controllers around for it, which is annoying as hell, as gamepads aren't forever and the third party products just suck. Another case of MS forcing customers to upgrade, if you ask me...
Ahh you're right, I didn't remember that any more. I never really did that either because that always got you into the low-res desktop, unless you were running the Atari B/W monitor. I preferred 640x200, so I always had to have a GEM disk...
The Atari ST, on the other hand, had the whole OS in ROM, except for the very first models. Even STs weren't instant-on though, because the bootloader would waste at least half a minute looking for a disk to boot from - it was actually faster to have a GEM disk with custom settings in the drive when turning the power on than booting from ROM only.
Laden or unladen?
Battery life with Rockbox is very much dependent on which build you use. The iPod build is not even in the same galaxy with Apple's firmware when it comes to power management. OTOH, on my iRiver H120 Rockbox is actually more efficient than the original. With an upgraded battery and Rockbox, I get about 30 hours of continuous play. The original battery and firmware could only do 16 hours when the thing was new.
Actually, S/PDIF was designed for consumer devices. It's a slightly modified version of the AES/EBU digital interface used in professional equipment. They added SCMS serial copy protection and removed mandatory support for 24-bit audio. The connectors and cables are also different. S/PDIF uses either RCA or TOSLINK connectors, while AES/EBU typically uses XLR connectors. It's also not new at all, I had a Sony Minidisc recorder with optical S/PDIF inputs and outputs over ten years ago.