You're right. Creative's cards DO have "3D positional audio," they just chose to stick with their reverb engine (EAX) instead of using the technology they acquired from Aureal. When comapred to what Aureal had going, Creative's technology comes out sounding pretty nasty. I wish we could have something like the Aureal hardware again because it computed the reflection of sound off of simplified world geometry in real time, and the sound changed as the listener's position changed. It completely blows EAX away, which is a deterministic pre-programmed system. It would be nice if Creative still had some reasonable competition, because consumers are now left with one company that seems to be pretty good at hyping what's essentially the only (comparetively mediocre) gaming sound technology still in existance. (Plus I dislike their hardware greatly, it has always given me issues performance and otherwise.)
Is that "Z" in the worst position possible or what?
No. All the games that I've played used the Z button for something that wasn't critical to the action like bringing up menus or maps (sure beats reaching over for the start button.) I have one of these controllers sitting right in front of me, and I do have to say that its placement right over the shoulder button really doesn't make it very hard to reach. It's only bad if the designers of a game decide that the shoulder buttons AND the Z-button are to be used for something important, but those are the types of games that probably didn't have a lot of thought put into them anyway.
Your car analogy would be good if we were talking about computer code -- it takes a lot more skill to write some good code than to mess it up (in textual form). But that's not what we're talking about here.
Well, his nephew can also circumvent the car's security system (locking doors) by smashing the window with a cinder block, but that doesn't make him an expert brick maker now does it?
Ideally the best time to launch a next generation console is when the media format is established. DVD was established when the PS2 came out and popularised it.
It seems like Sony is hoping that the PS3's (presumed) popularity will help spread systems with Blu-Ray drives into millions of homes. It's quite obvious, as observed by others, that the decision to use a BD-ROM drive in the PS3 is being used by Sony as a way to gain an advantage in the HD format war.
I get your point, but really, if I was in court I wouldn't want to get myself into any extra trouble unnecessarily. I guess being held in contempt is not bad if what you're protecting is actually valuable, but still. It seems like there's already a backdoor installed to the whole encryption thing.
I often see arguments like this one. What's the point for some people to encrypt their files (other than temporary privacy) if you're going to get in trouble later in court anyway for not revealing your keys? Now this might actually be unlikely, but what if average windows user genuinely forgets their password? Seems kind of unfair.
This is a load of crap. Of course, this assumes that you actually want to watch Blu-Ray content on your PC. Personally, I'm not planning on doing so, and I haven't bothered to play a video DVD in any of my machines yet either. Does anyone have an idea as to how hard it would be to break the encryption scheme being placed on the next gen technology?
I suspect that the most likely reason for the results in the FA is that Web users who know how to use Firefox in the first place are more likely to be cognisant of such threats to begin with
Their experiment tried to emulate the careless behavior of the "average user" and it was found that Firefox was much less susceptible to attacks. So yes, the browser does matter as well as its default configuration. It also helps that Firefox doesn't support ActiveX by default and isn't affected by drive by installations.
I got the PXC250 though. Compared to the Bose noise canceling headphones, they're pretty cheap, and they won't hurt your ears nearly as much. (Plus, they collapse in on themselves making it possible to carry them in your pocket.) I've had these for over a year and the active noise cancelling really does work. The unit will get rid of the low rumbling noises (air conditioners, motors, etc) but doesn't touch most other sounds (like keyboards.) You'll end up listening to your music at a lower volume with the noise cancelling on than off, and you can hear things around you in your environment. I'd recommend waiting a bit to get a pair of headphones with this feature.
For audio, use aacPlus (probably not free) or Ogg Vorbis (free!) Mainstream players support these (like Winamp.) Don't push junk like Realplayer. Vorbis alone will save a lot, and even super low bit rates will end up sounding decent compared to other compression technologies (I'm looking at you, MP3.) You can also set up a free streamcast server and use vorbis with it.
For video? I'd recommend XviD, and not just because I use it almost exclusively, but it creates a compliant MPEG-4 video stream (compresses nicely), which will hopefully be streamable by any player that supports MPEG-4 video.
I think the big difference is that the people developing Duke Forever have made good games in the past and appear to be competent. Another game, Daikatana, was in production for a while as well with the big difference being that it was a first release from an unproven developer. Even if reviewers say Duke Forver is a flop, I'm buying it anyway.
I was also thinking that this device would be good for displaying widgets like you see in dashboard. I'm not into having those things on my desktop because I think they waste space, but having them on an external display seems like a better place for some of them.
Do you know of any relatively cheap OLED or LCD displays that can basically do the same thing? I wasn't particularly interested in building my own. I know there are some external displays being sold to do something similar but they're only dot matrix and they cost about as much as this thing does.
I bet this is a lot like those people with the expensive gaming rigs and the high end video cards boasting about the few extra point they got in 3D Mark by overclocking their hardware past any reasonable point. Probably just a lot of bragging to make their ePenis bigger.
"Yeah? Well.... I'm SO rich that the IRS needs special computers to calculate my taxes!.. And they take up two warehouses near the docks!!"
I wouldn't buy it to actually *press* the keys. I'd be more interested in programming the displays to show something useful. That would be pretty cool.
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You're right. Creative's cards DO have "3D positional audio," they just chose to stick with their reverb engine (EAX) instead of using the technology they acquired from Aureal. When comapred to what Aureal had going, Creative's technology comes out sounding pretty nasty. I wish we could have something like the Aureal hardware again because it computed the reflection of sound off of simplified world geometry in real time, and the sound changed as the listener's position changed. It completely blows EAX away, which is a deterministic pre-programmed system. It would be nice if Creative still had some reasonable competition, because consumers are now left with one company that seems to be pretty good at hyping what's essentially the only (comparetively mediocre) gaming sound technology still in existance. (Plus I dislike their hardware greatly, it has always given me issues performance and otherwise.)
It's just like a version numbering system: It doesn't HAVE to make sense
No. All the games that I've played used the Z button for something that wasn't critical to the action like bringing up menus or maps (sure beats reaching over for the start button.) I have one of these controllers sitting right in front of me, and I do have to say that its placement right over the shoulder button really doesn't make it very hard to reach. It's only bad if the designers of a game decide that the shoulder buttons AND the Z-button are to be used for something important, but those are the types of games that probably didn't have a lot of thought put into them anyway.
Or the 60Hz magnetic fields created by our electrical wiring and infastructure
Darn. I was hoping you were going to say aspertame/splenda.
Well, his nephew can also circumvent the car's security system (locking doors) by smashing the window with a cinder block, but that doesn't make him an expert brick maker now does it?
I wouldn't worry about that. They're all the same thing but with different features exposed to the user and included utilities.
Dude. If I saw a carrot dangling in front of an ass, my first reaction would be to not follow it!
It seems like Sony is hoping that the PS3's (presumed) popularity will help spread systems with Blu-Ray drives into millions of homes. It's quite obvious, as observed by others, that the decision to use a BD-ROM drive in the PS3 is being used by Sony as a way to gain an advantage in the HD format war.
Oh, Microsoft already went there! "Where do you want to go today?"
I get your point, but really, if I was in court I wouldn't want to get myself into any extra trouble unnecessarily. I guess being held in contempt is not bad if what you're protecting is actually valuable, but still. It seems like there's already a backdoor installed to the whole encryption thing.
I often see arguments like this one. What's the point for some people to encrypt their files (other than temporary privacy) if you're going to get in trouble later in court anyway for not revealing your keys? Now this might actually be unlikely, but what if average windows user genuinely forgets their password? Seems kind of unfair.
If you haven't already read the article, you can actually change this setting so Firefox will end up using less memory than it does by default.
This is a load of crap. Of course, this assumes that you actually want to watch Blu-Ray content on your PC. Personally, I'm not planning on doing so, and I haven't bothered to play a video DVD in any of my machines yet either. Does anyone have an idea as to how hard it would be to break the encryption scheme being placed on the next gen technology?
The person who was telling the story wasn't the one who was supposed to be treated it was their child, and she had to wait a bit apparently.
If religion is caused by parasites then Resident Evil 4 is on to something big!
[Adult Swim]
Their experiment tried to emulate the careless behavior of the "average user" and it was found that Firefox was much less susceptible to attacks. So yes, the browser does matter as well as its default configuration. It also helps that Firefox doesn't support ActiveX by default and isn't affected by drive by installations.
I got the PXC250 though. Compared to the Bose noise canceling headphones, they're pretty cheap, and they won't hurt your ears nearly as much. (Plus, they collapse in on themselves making it possible to carry them in your pocket.) I've had these for over a year and the active noise cancelling really does work. The unit will get rid of the low rumbling noises (air conditioners, motors, etc) but doesn't touch most other sounds (like keyboards.) You'll end up listening to your music at a lower volume with the noise cancelling on than off, and you can hear things around you in your environment. I'd recommend waiting a bit to get a pair of headphones with this feature.
For video? I'd recommend XviD, and not just because I use it almost exclusively, but it creates a compliant MPEG-4 video stream (compresses nicely), which will hopefully be streamable by any player that supports MPEG-4 video.
I think the big difference is that the people developing Duke Forever have made good games in the past and appear to be competent. Another game, Daikatana, was in production for a while as well with the big difference being that it was a first release from an unproven developer. Even if reviewers say Duke Forver is a flop, I'm buying it anyway.
I was also thinking that this device would be good for displaying widgets like you see in dashboard. I'm not into having those things on my desktop because I think they waste space, but having them on an external display seems like a better place for some of them.
Do you know of any relatively cheap OLED or LCD displays that can basically do the same thing? I wasn't particularly interested in building my own. I know there are some external displays being sold to do something similar but they're only dot matrix and they cost about as much as this thing does.
"Yeah? Well.... I'm SO rich that the IRS needs special computers to calculate my taxes! .. And they take up two warehouses near the docks!!"
I wouldn't buy it to actually *press* the keys. I'd be more interested in programming the displays to show something useful. That would be pretty cool.