"But LD (LaserDisc) to DVD wasn't a huge step. DVD really offers very little -- aside from a smaller disc -- that LD hadn't already offered for years."
You're kidding, right? LD's could only hold 30 minutes (CAV) or 60 minutes (CLV) of video per disc side. Before double-sided players came out, you had to physically eject and turn over the disc at least once in the middle of the movie. And even with a double-side player, you had about a 5-second pause between side changes. If your movie was in CAV and you had a single sided player, you had to flip/swap discs a minimum of 3 times just to watch one movie. My LD boxed set of the movie Gettysburg had something like 12(!) discs in it, IIRC.
There were numerous other problems with the LD format - disc warping, laser rot, etc. I haven't tried to play any of the LD's in my collection for years, but I'd be very surprised if any of them could now play through an entire movie without skipping or locking up. The LD format was not well designed (who the hell thought that glueing two platters together to make a double-sided disc was a good idea?)
LD's did introduce the AC3 audio format to home video, but I could never get it to work properly on my players, and now Dolby Digital and DTS on DVD's has far surpassed the audio quality of LD's.
I saw "Wings of Courage" with Val Kilmer back in 1996. It was the very first IMAX 3D film to be released. It used the full headgear, and the effect (both video and audio) was impressive, although hearing Val Kilmer whispering in my ear was a little disconcerting (the women in the audience probably enjoyed it).
It is my understanding that DX10 will make it possible to have thousands of rendered objects on-screen simultaneously with very little performance hit. An example of this would be a forest with thousands of trees densely packed together. Try loading up a game like Oblivion with distant lod turned on and view distance turned up to the max. The result is a gorgeous view which will bring your DX9 card to its knees. DX10 has the promise to change that.
Assuming the drives will use the SATA interface, there should be no reason why you couldn't RAID multiple drives together to get more space. Multiple RAIDed solid state drives would have unbelievable performance.
I'm not so sure they do. Have you ever seen a MicroSD card? They're about half the size of your thumbnail. I'd be afraid to eject it from my device for fear of dropping it and never finding it again.
Actually Ewan would be better playing Scotty, since he really is Scottish. Another good Scot to play Scotty would be Gerard Butler from "Phantom of the Opera" and "300".
The last level of this game was IMPOSSIBLE. After about an hour of dealing with dozens of giant mechanical spiders, hundreds of kleers, and a giant pyramid driven by Mental, I finally gave up and used a god mode cheat to finish the game. An extremely frustrating experience.
I played EQ for years, and after having to deal with all of the ninja looters, immature 12 year old griefers, scam artists, etc., not to mention guild politics, I find a single player game like Oblivion to be a breath of fresh air.
Most of us who e-file do so because we are expecting a large refund and want to get it as soon as possible and are willing to pay a little to get the money sooner. Personally, I e-file the minute I have received all my W2's and 1099's, usually late January/early February. If I actually owed the IRS money, I would snail mail the return on April 15th like many, many other people do, so that I could hold onto the money for as long as possible.
You can buy a 300GB drive for under $100. I've seen 500GB drives for as low as $140. With that much space you could easily store over 100 games with room to spare. If you are like me and use No-CD cracks on all of your games, then you don't even need to put the game disc in the drive to play any of those 100 games. Just click and go. You can put all the discs away in a safe place and just run completely off the hard drive. IMO, this puts the PC way ahead of consoles.
Re:Harddrives wear worse from int Amps than 24/7 u
on
Why Vista Took So Long
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· Score: 1
And one day, you will find your hard drive will never wake back up. Better to move the PC to another room and leave it turned on (or buy a new case that is designed to be silent, such as an HTPC case) than to lose your hard drive.
The article is referring to only one thing: picture quality. And unless you've got a decent HDTV with DVI/HDMI inputs that can do at least 720p, you are not going to see any difference between a $20 DVD player and a high-end HTPC.
My HTPC is connected to my DLP HDTV via DVI and the picture is so amazing that it looks almost three-dimensional (and this is with an ancient ATI Radeon 8500 card).
The stocks these spammers are touting are all "Over The Counter Bulletin Board" (OTCBB) stocks. Most, if not all, brokerages do not allow shorting of OTCBB stocks.
You should make the move to Blockbuster. No throttling, free in-store rental coupons, and in the next couple of weeks, they will be rolling out a whole new website with a superior interface (you will be able to drag and drop titles in your rental queue, for example). I made the move to Blockbuster 2 years ago when NetFlix first started this throttling nonsense, and I haven't looked back.
MySpace used to be a site for storing your MP3's online and then streaming them to any PC on the internet. They gave you 3GB of free storage (which was huge back then). I had my entire music collection stored there. I miss the old MySpace a lot.
"Speculation. There is no way short of you working at Netflix and doing the recieving yourself that you could know when recieved or shipped your movies."
And that is exactly why these liars have been able to get away with it, because you can't prove it unless you work for the post office or for Netflix. I have had both Blockbuster and NetFlix service at the same time. Where I live, their distribution centers are in the same city, within a couple of miles of each other. With Blockbuster I ALWAYS get the DVD the next day. With NetFlix, it is 1-3 days in each direction. It doesn't take a genius to figure out what's really going on under these conditions.
"This is in the TOS. They give priority to lower volume members. They have to give priority to SOMEONE."
OK, since they have to give priority to someone, how about "first come, first served?" That's the way Blockbuster does it and it's the only way that's truly fair. Blockbuster finally confessed to their priority system in their revised TOS because they had no choice, since this was the only throttling method that could be independently verified without having to be an employee of NetFlix or the post office. If there were any way to prove their shipping shenanigans as well, they would have no choice but to confess to that too.
"So basically you helped convince me that the throttling is a myth"
Go ahead and bury your head in the sand if you want to, but throttling is a FACT, and thousands of people have been affected by it. Thank God for Blockbuster for providing a superior, throttling-free alternative to those lying bastards at NetFlix.
What the heck are you smoking? Blockbuster has over 50,000 DVD titles - as much as NetFlix has. The difference is, Blockbuster doesn't throttle you like NetFlix does. I consistently get over 20 rentals per month on a 3-out-at-a-time program. Try doing that with NetFlix!
NetFlix throttling is well documented and even admitted to by NetFlix in their TOS. When I was a member, there were basically 3 ways in which I was throttled:
1. They lied about what day they received a DVD back from me (adding 1-2 days to the time it takes for the DVD to show up as being returned on their site)
2. They lied about the availability of new releases (I would see "Very Long Wait" while a new subscriber would see "Available Now" for the exact same DVD)
3. They lied about what day they shipped a DVD back to me (for example, saying they shipped the DVD on Monday but actually shipped it on Tuesday or Wednesday).
Slashdot Mirror
Here's one:
http://www.dvdfab.com/free.htm
Actually, it was Admiral Cain, which is something she never let Commander Adama forget...
"But LD (LaserDisc) to DVD wasn't a huge step. DVD really offers very little -- aside from a smaller disc -- that LD hadn't already offered for years." You're kidding, right? LD's could only hold 30 minutes (CAV) or 60 minutes (CLV) of video per disc side. Before double-sided players came out, you had to physically eject and turn over the disc at least once in the middle of the movie. And even with a double-side player, you had about a 5-second pause between side changes. If your movie was in CAV and you had a single sided player, you had to flip/swap discs a minimum of 3 times just to watch one movie. My LD boxed set of the movie Gettysburg had something like 12(!) discs in it, IIRC. There were numerous other problems with the LD format - disc warping, laser rot, etc. I haven't tried to play any of the LD's in my collection for years, but I'd be very surprised if any of them could now play through an entire movie without skipping or locking up. The LD format was not well designed (who the hell thought that glueing two platters together to make a double-sided disc was a good idea?) LD's did introduce the AC3 audio format to home video, but I could never get it to work properly on my players, and now Dolby Digital and DTS on DVD's has far surpassed the audio quality of LD's.
I saw "Wings of Courage" with Val Kilmer back in 1996. It was the very first IMAX 3D film to be released. It used the full headgear, and the effect (both video and audio) was impressive, although hearing Val Kilmer whispering in my ear was a little disconcerting (the women in the audience probably enjoyed it).
It is my understanding that DX10 will make it possible to have thousands of rendered objects on-screen simultaneously with very little performance hit. An example of this would be a forest with thousands of trees densely packed together. Try loading up a game like Oblivion with distant lod turned on and view distance turned up to the max. The result is a gorgeous view which will bring your DX9 card to its knees. DX10 has the promise to change that.
Assuming the drives will use the SATA interface, there should be no reason why you couldn't RAID multiple drives together to get more space. Multiple RAIDed solid state drives would have unbelievable performance.
I'm not so sure they do. Have you ever seen a MicroSD card? They're about half the size of your thumbnail. I'd be afraid to eject it from my device for fear of dropping it and never finding it again.
Vista has it's own version of DirectX 9 (I think it's something like 9.0i or 9.0l) in addition to DirectX10 to maintain backward compatibility.
At least with a PC we have choice of whether to add Blu-Ray or not, the PS3 gave you no choice.
Actually Ewan would be better playing Scotty, since he really is Scottish. Another good Scot to play Scotty would be Gerard Butler from "Phantom of the Opera" and "300".
The last level of this game was IMPOSSIBLE. After about an hour of dealing with dozens of giant mechanical spiders, hundreds of kleers, and a giant pyramid driven by Mental, I finally gave up and used a god mode cheat to finish the game. An extremely frustrating experience.
I played EQ for years, and after having to deal with all of the ninja looters, immature 12 year old griefers, scam artists, etc., not to mention guild politics, I find a single player game like Oblivion to be a breath of fresh air.
Most of us who e-file do so because we are expecting a large refund and want to get it as soon as possible and are willing to pay a little to get the money sooner. Personally, I e-file the minute I have received all my W2's and 1099's, usually late January/early February. If I actually owed the IRS money, I would snail mail the return on April 15th like many, many other people do, so that I could hold onto the money for as long as possible.
You can buy a 300GB drive for under $100. I've seen 500GB drives for as low as $140. With that much space you could easily store over 100 games with room to spare. If you are like me and use No-CD cracks on all of your games, then you don't even need to put the game disc in the drive to play any of those 100 games. Just click and go. You can put all the discs away in a safe place and just run completely off the hard drive. IMO, this puts the PC way ahead of consoles.
And one day, you will find your hard drive will never wake back up. Better to move the PC to another room and leave it turned on (or buy a new case that is designed to be silent, such as an HTPC case) than to lose your hard drive.
The article is referring to only one thing: picture quality. And unless you've got a decent HDTV with DVI/HDMI inputs that can do at least 720p, you are not going to see any difference between a $20 DVD player and a high-end HTPC.
My HTPC is connected to my DLP HDTV via DVI and the picture is so amazing that it looks almost three-dimensional (and this is with an ancient ATI Radeon 8500 card).
The stocks these spammers are touting are all "Over The Counter Bulletin Board" (OTCBB) stocks. Most, if not all, brokerages do not allow shorting of OTCBB stocks.
Even XP lets you do that. It's called a Repair Installation.
You should make the move to Blockbuster. No throttling, free in-store rental coupons, and in the next couple of weeks, they will be rolling out a whole new website with a superior interface (you will be able to drag and drop titles in your rental queue, for example). I made the move to Blockbuster 2 years ago when NetFlix first started this throttling nonsense, and I haven't looked back.
God opted for the death penalty.
Another good one is TransferBigFiles
MySpace used to be a site for storing your MP3's online and then streaming them to any PC on the internet. They gave you 3GB of free storage (which was huge back then). I had my entire music collection stored there. I miss the old MySpace a lot.
"Speculation. There is no way short of you working at Netflix and doing the recieving yourself that you could know when recieved or shipped your movies." And that is exactly why these liars have been able to get away with it, because you can't prove it unless you work for the post office or for Netflix. I have had both Blockbuster and NetFlix service at the same time. Where I live, their distribution centers are in the same city, within a couple of miles of each other. With Blockbuster I ALWAYS get the DVD the next day. With NetFlix, it is 1-3 days in each direction. It doesn't take a genius to figure out what's really going on under these conditions. "This is in the TOS. They give priority to lower volume members. They have to give priority to SOMEONE." OK, since they have to give priority to someone, how about "first come, first served?" That's the way Blockbuster does it and it's the only way that's truly fair. Blockbuster finally confessed to their priority system in their revised TOS because they had no choice, since this was the only throttling method that could be independently verified without having to be an employee of NetFlix or the post office. If there were any way to prove their shipping shenanigans as well, they would have no choice but to confess to that too. "So basically you helped convince me that the throttling is a myth" Go ahead and bury your head in the sand if you want to, but throttling is a FACT, and thousands of people have been affected by it. Thank God for Blockbuster for providing a superior, throttling-free alternative to those lying bastards at NetFlix.
What the heck are you smoking? Blockbuster has over 50,000 DVD titles - as much as NetFlix has. The difference is, Blockbuster doesn't throttle you like NetFlix does. I consistently get over 20 rentals per month on a 3-out-at-a-time program. Try doing that with NetFlix!
1. They lied about what day they received a DVD back from me (adding 1-2 days to the time it takes for the DVD to show up as being returned on their site)
2. They lied about the availability of new releases (I would see "Very Long Wait" while a new subscriber would see "Available Now" for the exact same DVD)
3. They lied about what day they shipped a DVD back to me (for example, saying they shipped the DVD on Monday but actually shipped it on Tuesday or Wednesday).
Check out http://www.hackingnetflix.com/ for more information about NetFlix throttling.