Why are cops in cities terrible? Is it because of bad apples? ( Maybe, but even good cops still do jerk things) Is it because they have a lot of legal protection for bad behavior (maybe, but in the US you can get some restitution, and they can get punished) It's really because police are just giant revenue generating machines for the city. In order for a police officer to advance in his career, he is measured by the number of citations, summons, and arrests he has achieved. And if performance is based on the number of bad things happening in your area, all of a sudden you see bad things happening everywhere. A police officer does not get promoted for the number of old ladies he or she helps cross the street, the number of kittens retrieved from trees, or having effective patrols that result in zero incidences. They only get promoted for getting the high stats of bad actions. And if police departments institute quotas, then you feel compelled to find a sucker (usually a minority or poor person because they lack the resources to fight back) to harass and induce them to break a minor infraction to get them into the station or write a citation.
Take away the performance metric of citations, summons and arrests, and you will have a much better police force who is delegated to truly being servants of the community rather than the rich and powerful.
While Bill Gates and others may talk about the declining state of education, there is a real movement by conservatives to use public money that funds education to enrich those who teach, by privatizing schools.
The Common Core is a strategy to standardize the curriculum across all the 50 states (which isn't a bad idea) but the people who write the standards and create the tests don't have our best interests at heart. By creating ludicrous tests, they are going to "prove" that the US students are failing terribly, especially those in public schools. Then there will be demands of reform, where they will promote pseudo public schools that use public funds ran in a for profit manner.
Once that happens, education which should not be a for profit enterprise, would be transformed into private enterprises that uses public funds to enrich companies like Pearson, Amplify, Thompson, etc.
The Japanese call people who forget how to write characters "waa puro baka" which is a short way to say "Word Processor Idiocy". However, even if today's youth are forgetting how to write on paper; the Japanese government has decided to revise the list of kanji Japanese citizens must learn to be considered literate. Thanks to IME's (input method editors) Japanese are starting to use hard to write Kanji more and more thanks to modern input systems.
First thing I did was emailed a few of the principal owners of the game, and told them about my intent, and asked about who holds the copyright and trademarks. I got the go ahead, with the caveat that another company owned the trademark to this particular game.
I also searched the web to look at other projects based on remakes. It seems that the best way to handle remakes of abandownare games is to not to bother the company that made it (especially if they're big like EA or Activision). The unwritten rule seems to be if you don't bother them, they won't bother you. Otherwise, they'll just say no and might put the kibosh on the project.
This should also be obvious, but don't sell the game. Just don't.
I never finished the game I was remaking since writing the tools to make it got laboriously time consuming.
I can't speak for Best Buy calibration, but I have had my plasma TV ISF certified calibrated. The calibrator brought his 20,000 USD sensor, and his blu-ray (standard stuff you can buy/download) and calibrated my plasma through the service menu (not the regular settings menu); then he set the regular settings (contrast/tint/brightness, etc). He also had some gizmo that connected to my cable box STB and adjusted my colors for cable TV.
I've heard that stores like Best Buy might get some guy to use an LCD sensor like iDisplay or a Spyder and calibrate a TV that way using the standard PC software; that's not too bad but you can get the best results when they can adjust the (hidden) service menu options. However I won't pay 300 bucks for cheap device calibration. 350 is the average rate for plasma tvs calibrated by ISF certified techs. That is worth the money.
The problem with the Wii according to the game dev is that it costs a lot of money to license the games. And if the game doesn't sell well, they won't recoup their investment. In fact EA and Ubisoft have stated that their general revenues make up for the poor sales of their Wii games.
As for the PC side of things, faster and latest gen cards are not a bad thing, but it will take a good year or two before a worthwhile game comes out that can take advantage of the capabilities without it being some variant of a shooter. I love games like Half Life (and a few of the mods) but I would prefer to see more variety now a days and I hope to see novel games that use 3d in a fun way. Something like Trine.
I have an acquaintance who works in the console gaming industry, and based on his look at his market data, he has mentioned these points: - Microsoft laid off huge swaths of internal game studios/developers, so they're limiting their output to only surefire titles for the Xbox 360 - Many major publishers prefer to sell games on consoles, pirating on the PC and the difficulty and expense of supporting PC users makes it less desirable - The Wii is not a good console to publish for due to low sales. The only games that sell well are made by Nintendo, and Nintendo offers little help to third parties; and they have unusual rules as well. Most third party games tend to be shovelware. - Major publishers have announced many exclusive games to come out for console only. PCs are considered too expensive to support. - Though nvidia and AMD make their video cards faster and better, only a few independent development houses are interested in taking advantage of faster cards, like Crytek. He feels Valve software still uses old technology for a lot of its games, so faster video cards are not worth the money. Developers hate Unreal Engine 3.0 so Epic games won't get too far trying to get new licenses with major publishers. - There will probably be many exclusive games for the PS3 since there are no pirated games for it (yet) and support from Sony is a little better than Microsoft. Though Microsoft has better development tools. ~~~~ I don't agree with this guy on points but when I think about my own habits, I have bought more games for my console than my PC. The games I have bought for my PC have been mostly small games from indie publishers, the only excpetion being Fallout 3. On the Wii and PS3 I have bought some of the downloadble games. When I look at potential games for the PC to get, I look for RPGs or something unique that can't be done on console. But I don't see too many compelling games. And those that do look good often come to console first. PC games that are based on console games tend to be poorly programmed so I avoid those.
Here are some problems I've had with Vista DRM and presumably bad drivers. I have a brand spanking new Gigabyte x38-dq6 (meaning it uses the high end Intel x38 chipset) with a quad core 2.4 ghz core 2. I have an nVidia 7900GTO card. When I installed Vista x64, after installing the video drivers, I got nothing but screen noise. I switched to safe mode, and found out online that the 7900gt has a bug where it would garble the screen and you can fix the screen by Ctrl-Alt-Del and selecting Switch User. This worked fine in my games and applications except when I was watching a real DVD! I would get an error message stating that "Due to video tampering, this video can no longer play". I had to restart WMP to replay the DVD.
Another instance of lame DRM. There is less support of wave files in standard Vista. I couldn't listen to a sound clip from the wikipedia because there was no codec in WMP to handle PCM in a standard wave file. WTF MSFT?! I had to use a program like WinAmp or quicktime.
Another issue I had was that Flash is probably half crashed in IE7 and I had WMP opened and I couldn't get any sound from any YouTube videos. Only when I closed WMP did all the Flash apps began to playback sound.
Now I don't know whether this was specifically the DRM interfering, but considering that closing WMP fixed things without restarting IE or opening a new process of IE, there's some weird wonkery going on.
Aside from DRM, there also issues like the spacing of where you can click on a widget. Some applications have very fat clickable areas such as where you want to click on the 'X' to close an app, and instead of closing the app, the app thinks you want to resize the window. That has annoyed me on occasion.
IE7 is less stable compared to IE7 on XP. IE7 crashed every now and then when I had XP. But I can rely on IE7 to crash every 2 weeks on Vista.
Deleting files is sometimes problematic. For some reason something locks a file preventing it from being erased on occasion. Very annoying but it hardly happens. But it has happened more than once.
Now the reason I run Vista is because I know that within a few years, I'll have to be familiar with it because XP will be unsupported; and also Vista can take advantage of new technologies (I'm looking forward to "Deep Color" LCDS). Also it has nicer 64 bit support than XP-64. But man it's a huge pain in the ass at times.
Assuming her son is a bright, all a concerned parent should do is install an invisible logger that logs everything being said.
This way at the end of the day, the parent can review the logs, and then decide accordingly based on inappropriate content.
Now the only problem is if the logger is on the PC the child is using, it can give itself away if it crashes, or if the child is paranoid enough to look for such things.
Anyhow good parenting is all about talking to your children and helping them make good choices, after all no one can fix the bad friends loophole...
I run Opera on Windows precisely because of the memory footprint. IE and Firefox seemingly have infinite memory cache (not to be confused with disk cache, which I limit to 50MB and IE and Firefox enforce pretty well). I run my PC 24/7 and when I use Firefox or IE, they seem to keep track of all the pages I've been to since my last reboot, IN MEMORY. Naturally this would lead to about 1GB of RAM usage after a few weeks. Opera actually has an option to limit the memory cache, so my memory usage remains stable throughout the weeks. So let's say I manage to keep 40 windows open for a month, I'll only be using about 250MB of memory, and never more (unless I open more windows.) Opera is great for those who need a lightweight browser that can do a lot. Though v9.2 needs better compatibility with some Google web apps.
Reminds of an early 90's SNL fake commercial depicting a kid playing with a Macintosh, showing off the things he printed out on his LaserWriter, with the end slogan was "Apple Computer: The Power to Crush Other Kids"
Even Adobe complains that Apple doesn't help them with speed issues when developing their software. So I can see why gaming on the Mac never really takes off. And Adobe helped Apple stay afloat in the 90's.
However, there's one exception; Macs are now on Intel processors, and OpenGL is still relevant. BUT, most affordable Macs have weak video cards.:/
I said that researchers should create a derivative of Python for children, since Python in its native form is a bit complicated for young children who don't know the basics. Though I am glad to hear that children were able to be productive with Python despite its shortcomings in the graphics/audio component.
Personally, I learned some programming when I had an Atari 800xl and my brother showed me some BASIC. Later we got magazines like Compute! and started entering BASIC and assembly programs on my Apple IIc. Only when I entered college did I learn formal programming; I didn't understand BASIC fully (things like arrays and PEEK/POKE were over my head when I was young, and I was much more interested in games than trying to learn all the details.)
I think these researchers should use Python and form a child friendly language derivative. It has clean syntax, and makes it easy to express a lot of hard concepts. Plus it has a live interpreter, which is like Logo. This way, they can learn programming in a easy environment and when they build confidence to do something more complex, they will have an excellent language to start from.
I've read about the Alice program, but I think it's a bit buggy, and a little too much stuff to learn.
That is a CRPG where the single player story is good with a good engine to go with it. And it has multiplayer that allows you to play the campaign with friends, and better of all you don't need to pay a monthly subscription.
Sort of like Neverwinter Nights, but prettier, more flexible. Also ideally, I would like a game where you don't have to churn through combat to earn level advancements, sort of like some of the Ultima games (Ultima 7) but have enough activity to satisfy younger players with oodles of time.
When Apple announced the iPod, I knew it would be a huge hit. At the time, the alternatives were really small flash based players with at most 256MB of storage, like Creative's products. Also you were limited to 128kbits at most if you wanted to have decent quality. There was harddisk based mp3 players as well, but they were expensive (iPod certainly was expensive too) and they were rather bulky. Apple made something small, with a good user interface, and with a decent app (iTunes) to manage the music, that held 5GB of music. With the popularity of Napster in 2000, I am pretty sure many people had large collections of music, and if they wanted to take those songs with them while they commute, their choice of mp3 players was rather limited until the iPod came out. At that time I transcoded my mp3s to CD-Rs and made mixed albums of my songs, but that meant I had to do a lot of shufflng of CDs. Also the availability of CD players with mp3 decoders was rather limited in the US. It took a few years before you can buy one from iRiver, as an example.
I think the iPhone will be a big hit, but I don't see the same kind of success as the iPod because the cell phone market is very dynamic, and the price of the iPhone is a bit much compared to popular PDA phones. At least, Apple will cater to Mac and Windows users with the iPhone, unlike the iPod which was only a Mac product at release.
For me, the iPhone has to offer good cellular reception, new "gee whiz" iPod features without any weird restrictions, and decent battery life for me to shell out the bucks for Apple's latest.
The DVI spec does not support 10bit per channel output, officially. I am just looking to the future... HDMI 1.3a supports up to 24 bit per channel for video. DVI is supposed to support HDCP (otherwise it wouldn't work with some settop boxes and DVRs), and it does. DVI can support 10bpc unofficially through duallink, but suppose I had a 30" inch LCD, I don't know if those extra bits maybe truncated. That's why I like HDMI. It's not because it's HDCP friendly.
I agree with you. Also rumour* has it that Apple's next line of Cinema HD displays will have HDMI inputs and 10 bit output, perhaps using either LEDs (unlikely) or Wide Gamut Cold Compact Fluorescents (most likely).
The rendering issues are bugs from their implementation of their APIs, but that doesn't affect the capability for Vista to take advantage of high bit displays.
BTW, can you link me to these "blitter" issues, I am curious.
Mac OS X can handle 128 bit graphics calculations the same way Windows XP can do 32 bit graphic processing for GDI+, or OpenGL can take advantage of higher bit representations. Howeever, when it comes time to talk to the video card, it gets truncated to 8bits per channel.
However, Mac OS X is the first to have 32 bit floating point representation for audio in CoreAudio, way before Windows Vista.
I'm hoping Leopard will match or exceed in Vista in this regard. But Apple doesn't have an "MSDN" like Microsoft, so I don't know.
Slashdot Mirror
Why are cops in cities terrible?
Is it because of bad apples? ( Maybe, but even good cops still do jerk things)
Is it because they have a lot of legal protection for bad behavior (maybe, but in the US you can get some restitution, and they can get punished)
It's really because police are just giant revenue generating machines for the city.
In order for a police officer to advance in his career, he is measured by the number of citations, summons, and arrests he has achieved.
And if performance is based on the number of bad things happening in your area, all of a sudden you see bad things happening everywhere.
A police officer does not get promoted for the number of old ladies he or she helps cross the street, the number of kittens retrieved from trees, or having effective patrols that result in zero incidences. They only get promoted for getting the high stats of bad actions.
And if police departments institute quotas, then you feel compelled to find a sucker (usually a minority or poor person because they lack the resources to fight back) to harass and induce them to break a minor infraction to get them into the station or write a citation.
Take away the performance metric of citations, summons and arrests, and you will have a much better police force who is delegated to truly being servants of the community rather than the rich and powerful.
"...other translated inscriptions turned out to be playful taunts at the person doing the decoding."
Remember to drink your ovaltine!
While Bill Gates and others may talk about the declining state of education, there is a real movement by conservatives to use public money that funds education to enrich those who teach, by privatizing schools.
The Common Core is a strategy to standardize the curriculum across all the 50 states (which isn't a bad idea) but the people who write the standards and create the tests don't have our best interests at heart. By creating ludicrous tests, they are going to "prove" that the US students are failing terribly, especially those in public schools. Then there will be demands of reform, where they will promote pseudo public schools that use public funds ran in a for profit manner.
Once that happens, education which should not be a for profit enterprise, would be transformed into private enterprises that uses public funds to enrich companies like Pearson, Amplify, Thompson, etc.
The Japanese call people who forget how to write characters "waa puro baka" which is a short way to say "Word Processor Idiocy".
However, even if today's youth are forgetting how to write on paper; the Japanese government has decided to revise the list of kanji Japanese citizens must learn to be considered literate. Thanks to IME's (input method editors) Japanese are starting to use hard to write Kanji more and more thanks to modern input systems.
First thing I did was emailed a few of the principal owners of the game, and told them about my intent, and asked about who holds the copyright and trademarks. I got the go ahead, with the caveat that another company owned the trademark to this particular game.
I also searched the web to look at other projects based on remakes. It seems that the best way to handle remakes of abandownare games is to not to bother the company that made it (especially if they're big like EA or Activision). The unwritten rule seems to be if you don't bother them, they won't bother you. Otherwise, they'll just say no and might put the kibosh on the project.
This should also be obvious, but don't sell the game. Just don't.
I never finished the game I was remaking since writing the tools to make it got laboriously time consuming.
I can't speak for Best Buy calibration, but I have had my plasma TV ISF certified calibrated. The calibrator brought his 20,000 USD sensor, and his blu-ray (standard stuff you can buy/download) and calibrated my plasma through the service menu (not the regular settings menu); then he set the regular settings (contrast/tint/brightness, etc). He also had some gizmo that connected to my cable box STB and adjusted my colors for cable TV.
I've heard that stores like Best Buy might get some guy to use an LCD sensor like iDisplay or a Spyder and calibrate a TV that way using the standard PC software; that's not too bad but you can get the best results when they can adjust the (hidden) service menu options. However I won't pay 300 bucks for cheap device calibration. 350 is the average rate for plasma tvs calibrated by ISF certified techs. That is worth the money.
The problem with the Wii according to the game dev is that it costs a lot of money to license the games. And if the game doesn't sell well, they won't recoup their investment. In fact EA and Ubisoft have stated that their general revenues make up for the poor sales of their Wii games.
As for the PC side of things, faster and latest gen cards are not a bad thing, but it will take a good year or two before a worthwhile game comes out that can take advantage of the capabilities without it being some variant of a shooter. I love games like Half Life (and a few of the mods) but I would prefer to see more variety now a days and I hope to see novel games that use 3d in a fun way. Something like Trine.
I have an acquaintance who works in the console gaming industry, and based on his look at his market data, he has mentioned these points:
- Microsoft laid off huge swaths of internal game studios/developers, so they're limiting their output to only surefire titles for the Xbox 360
- Many major publishers prefer to sell games on consoles, pirating on the PC and the difficulty and expense of supporting PC users makes it less desirable
- The Wii is not a good console to publish for due to low sales. The only games that sell well are made by Nintendo, and Nintendo offers little help to third parties; and they have unusual rules as well. Most third party games tend to be shovelware.
- Major publishers have announced many exclusive games to come out for console only. PCs are considered too expensive to support.
- Though nvidia and AMD make their video cards faster and better, only a few independent development houses are interested in taking advantage of faster cards, like Crytek. He feels Valve software still uses old technology for a lot of its games, so faster video cards are not worth the money. Developers hate Unreal Engine 3.0 so Epic games won't get too far trying to get new licenses with major publishers.
- There will probably be many exclusive games for the PS3 since there are no pirated games for it (yet) and support from Sony is a little better than Microsoft. Though Microsoft has better development tools.
~~~~
I don't agree with this guy on points but when I think about my own habits, I have bought more games for my console than my PC. The games I have bought for my PC have been mostly small games from indie publishers, the only excpetion being Fallout 3.
On the Wii and PS3 I have bought some of the downloadble games.
When I look at potential games for the PC to get, I look for RPGs or something unique that can't be done on console. But I don't see too many compelling games. And those that do look good often come to console first. PC games that are based on console games tend to be poorly programmed so I avoid those.
What Tim needs is Hulk Hogan endorsing the new "WWWF!"
Here are some problems I've had with Vista DRM and presumably bad drivers.
I have a brand spanking new Gigabyte x38-dq6 (meaning it uses the high end Intel x38 chipset) with a quad core 2.4 ghz core 2. I have an nVidia 7900GTO card. When I installed Vista x64, after installing the video drivers, I got nothing but screen noise. I switched to safe mode, and found out online that the 7900gt has a bug where it would garble the screen and you can fix the screen by Ctrl-Alt-Del and selecting Switch User. This worked fine in my games and applications except when I was watching a real DVD! I would get an error message stating that "Due to video tampering, this video can no longer play". I had to restart WMP to replay the DVD.
Another instance of lame DRM. There is less support of wave files in standard Vista. I couldn't listen to a sound clip from the wikipedia because there was no codec in WMP to handle PCM in a standard wave file. WTF MSFT?! I had to use a program like WinAmp or quicktime.
Another issue I had was that Flash is probably half crashed in IE7 and I had WMP opened and I couldn't get any sound from any YouTube videos. Only when I closed WMP did all the Flash apps began to playback sound.
Now I don't know whether this was specifically the DRM interfering, but considering that closing WMP fixed things without restarting IE or opening a new process of IE, there's some weird wonkery going on.
Aside from DRM, there also issues like the spacing of where you can click on a widget. Some applications have very fat clickable areas such as where you want to click on the 'X' to close an app, and instead of closing the app, the app thinks you want to resize the window. That has annoyed me on occasion.
IE7 is less stable compared to IE7 on XP. IE7 crashed every now and then when I had XP. But I can rely on IE7 to crash every 2 weeks on Vista.
Deleting files is sometimes problematic. For some reason something locks a file preventing it from being erased on occasion. Very annoying but it hardly happens. But it has happened more than once.
Now the reason I run Vista is because I know that within a few years, I'll have to be familiar with it because XP will be unsupported; and also Vista can take advantage of new technologies (I'm looking forward to "Deep Color" LCDS). Also it has nicer 64 bit support than XP-64. But man it's a huge pain in the ass at times.
Assuming her son is a bright, all a concerned parent should do is install an invisible logger that logs everything being said.
This way at the end of the day, the parent can review the logs, and then decide accordingly based on inappropriate content.
Now the only problem is if the logger is on the PC the child is using, it can give itself away if it crashes, or if the child is paranoid enough to look for such things.
Anyhow good parenting is all about talking to your children and helping them make good choices, after all no one can fix the bad friends loophole...
I run Opera on Windows precisely because of the memory footprint. IE and Firefox seemingly have infinite memory cache (not to be confused with disk cache, which I limit to 50MB and IE and Firefox enforce pretty well). I run my PC 24/7 and when I use Firefox or IE, they seem to keep track of all the pages I've been to since my last reboot, IN MEMORY. Naturally this would lead to about 1GB of RAM usage after a few weeks. Opera actually has an option to limit the memory cache, so my memory usage remains stable throughout the weeks. So let's say I manage to keep 40 windows open for a month, I'll only be using about 250MB of memory, and never more (unless I open more windows.) Opera is great for those who need a lightweight browser that can do a lot. Though v9.2 needs better compatibility with some Google web apps.
It's easy. If Verizon FIOS is readily available in a neighborhood with competing cable, magically your speeds go up.
When NYC proper gets FIOS city wide, I expect my Time Warner Roadrunner service to automagically give me at least 20mbit/5 mbit speed.
Until then, I'll just have to be content with 10mbit/768kbit.
My brother lives in Westchester county, NY and he gets 10/5 from Cablevision, because FIOS is readily available in his neighborhood.
Reminds of an early 90's SNL fake commercial depicting a kid playing with a Macintosh, showing off the things he printed out on his LaserWriter, with the end slogan was "Apple Computer: The Power to Crush Other Kids"
That is promising news. However, that doesn't explain why they don't help Adobe today...
Even Adobe complains that Apple doesn't help them with speed issues when developing their software. So I can see why gaming on the Mac never really takes off. And Adobe helped Apple stay afloat in the 90's.
:/
However, there's one exception; Macs are now on Intel processors, and OpenGL is still relevant. BUT, most affordable Macs have weak video cards.
Mod parent up.
Back when I tried jhymn, it left your AppleID in the AAC file. I had to use a hex editor to zero out the ID.
This is really much ado about nothing.
I said that researchers should create a derivative of Python for children, since Python in its native form is a bit complicated for young children who don't know the basics.
:) A
Though I am glad to hear that children were able to be productive with Python despite its shortcomings in the graphics/audio component.
Personally, I learned some programming when I had an Atari 800xl and my brother showed me some BASIC. Later we got magazines like Compute! and started entering BASIC and assembly programs on my Apple IIc. Only when I entered college did I learn formal programming; I didn't understand BASIC fully (things like arrays and PEEK/POKE were over my head when I was young, and I was much more interested in games than trying to learn all the details.)
As an aside, I too am an Anarchist.
I think these researchers should use Python and form a child friendly language derivative. It has clean syntax, and makes it easy to express a lot of hard concepts. Plus it has a live interpreter, which is like Logo. This way, they can learn programming in a easy environment and when they build confidence to do something more complex, they will have an excellent language to start from.
I've read about the Alice program, but I think it's a bit buggy, and a little too much stuff to learn.
the Palladium Age of CRPGS to come.
That is a CRPG where the single player story is good with a good engine to go with it. And it has multiplayer that allows you to play the campaign with friends, and better of all you don't need to pay a monthly subscription.
Sort of like Neverwinter Nights, but prettier, more flexible. Also ideally, I would like a game where you don't have to churn through combat to earn level advancements, sort of like some of the Ultima games (Ultima 7) but have enough activity to satisfy younger players with oodles of time.
When Apple announced the iPod, I knew it would be a huge hit. At the time, the alternatives were really small flash based players with at most 256MB of storage, like Creative's products. Also you were limited to 128kbits at most if you wanted to have decent quality. There was harddisk based mp3 players as well, but they were expensive (iPod certainly was expensive too) and they were rather bulky. Apple made something small, with a good user interface, and with a decent app (iTunes) to manage the music, that held 5GB of music. With the popularity of Napster in 2000, I am pretty sure many people had large collections of music, and if they wanted to take those songs with them while they commute, their choice of mp3 players was rather limited until the iPod came out. At that time I transcoded my mp3s to CD-Rs and made mixed albums of my songs, but that meant I had to do a lot of shufflng of CDs. Also the availability of CD players with mp3 decoders was rather limited in the US. It took a few years before you can buy one from iRiver, as an example.
I think the iPhone will be a big hit, but I don't see the same kind of success as the iPod because the cell phone market is very dynamic, and the price of the iPhone is a bit much compared to popular PDA phones. At least, Apple will cater to Mac and Windows users with the iPhone, unlike the iPod which was only a Mac product at release.
For me, the iPhone has to offer good cellular reception, new "gee whiz" iPod features without any weird restrictions, and decent battery life for me to shell out the bucks for Apple's latest.
The DVI spec does not support 10bit per channel output, officially. I am just looking to the future... HDMI 1.3a supports up to 24 bit per channel for video. DVI is supposed to support HDCP (otherwise it wouldn't work with some settop boxes and DVRs), and it does. DVI can support 10bpc unofficially through duallink, but suppose I had a 30" inch LCD, I don't know if those extra bits maybe truncated. That's why I like HDMI. It's not because it's HDCP friendly.
I agree with you. Also rumour* has it that Apple's next line of Cinema HD displays will have HDMI inputs and 10 bit output, perhaps using either LEDs (unlikely) or Wide Gamut Cold Compact Fluorescents (most likely).
*spelled this way to please the British educated.
The rendering issues are bugs from their implementation of their APIs, but that doesn't affect the capability for Vista to take advantage of high bit displays.
BTW, can you link me to these "blitter" issues, I am curious.
Mac OS X can handle 128 bit graphics calculations the same way Windows XP can do 32 bit graphic processing for GDI+, or OpenGL can take advantage of higher bit representations. Howeever, when it comes time to talk to the video card, it gets truncated to 8bits per channel.
However, Mac OS X is the first to have 32 bit floating point representation for audio in CoreAudio, way before Windows Vista.
I'm hoping Leopard will match or exceed in Vista in this regard. But Apple doesn't have an "MSDN" like Microsoft, so I don't know.