Windows Vista supports the following WDM audio capabilities:
* WDM version 1.40
* All the features that Windows XP supports (see Windows XP Support for WDM Audio), with the following exceptions.
o Hardware peak meters are supported, except when the Windows Vista mixer API runs in per-application mode.
o Wave and MIDI NT4 drivers function normally, but they are not supported by the new audio user interface.
o AUX devices are not supported, and the auxGetNumDevs function in Mmsystem.h will always return a count of zero.
o Windows NT4-style mixer drivers (DRIVERS32) are not supported.
Anyone who knows anything about windows driver development will know that WDM is a kernel mode only API.
I trust MS documentation over some article on a random website.
btw there are now win32 and linux ports of duke3d out there with a somewhat updated engine (it actually gets perspective right;) ), google for jfduke3D.
How the hell did I miss that trailer? That looked like an awesome game! Why the hell didn't they release it? My guess is that they want DNF to be the best game ever and they keep getting close but never quite to the point where they are sufficiantly better than the competition to want to release.
Either that or the whole thing is a hoax with a faked teaser every so often to keep people interested.
Did anyone else know the steroids would instantly grow you from a shrink Yes.
I wonder if one of the duke ports will ever get arround to moving to a modern network model. Servers with drop in play make improptu online play so much easier.
Windows out of the box usually (in my experience anyway) doesn't have network drivers. Generally as with much other hardware windows doesn't tend to come with drivers for chips (unless there is a generic interface windows can use to talk to the device which there isn't for network adaptors) that are newer than the release of windows in question.
The situation is pretty similar in the linux world.
6709ff39ea47d3563b537b67153f60ee0c932a93 is the info hash of the torrent.
This is NOT a MD5 of the file it is a SHA1 hash of the info section of the torrent which contains the SHA1 hashes of the individual peices of the file and some other metainformation.
afaict many distros do something similar but it only helps if you are using distro packages. Once you move outside of that for whatever reason you are pretty much on your own.
My understanding is that the problem with systems like that is they allow vote blackmail. Once you can prove who you voted for those in a position to exert a coercive influence over you can check you are doing what they told you to do.
No, it's not. If a 400 Hz sine wave is sampled at a mere 800 Hz, it can be reproduced perfectly It can't actually, at 800Hz sampling rate 400Hz aliases to -400Hz so your sampling loses information (think of a 400hz sine wave that is always zero at your sample points).
Also nyquists theorems rely on perfect nyquist filters which don't and can't exist. Analog filters in particular tend to have a pretty large section between effectively passing unchanged and effectively cut off.
The way to get good quality with a low transmission sample rate is to sample at a higher rate digitally downsample then transmit then digitally upsample but afaict few systems bother to do this.
Comparing the specs and prices with those specs, they're about the same actually. The thing is there are far less mac models than PC models so you will often have to buy more than you need in some areas to get what you want in others This along with the fact you *are* paying for high build quality (macbooks are comparable in price to thinkpads, vaios, lattitudes etc not to inspirons and thier ilk) is what makes macs relatively expensive in practice.
That last update to GarageBand should be quite a surprise then. Ok so there are two tricks, the one you mentioned that involves a non obvious use of a mac only app (and probablly causes re-encoding) and one (mentioned by a poster further up) that involves manually changing the file extention and reimporting.
Still afaict the only obvious way to use a song as a ringtone on the iphone is to re-buy it as one. Compare this to most other phones where you just upload the track to the music library and select it from the ringtones menu.
You could say the same about AMD64 linux. There were issues with amd64 linux but drivers weren't a particularlly big one afaict. The linux kernel and it's associated drivers were being built for a huge range of architectures since before amd64 was born.
Afaict the biggest issue 64 bit linux has had has been relatively poor support for using the few propietry 32 bit only components that are required for a comfortable desktop within a 64 bit environment. Flash and java applets have been particularlly sore points (nspluginwrapper has mostly solved the former and icedtea has mostly solved the latter but theese only made thier way into distros fairly recently).
The end result is that software for LP64 software needs to be ported by being recompiled to either 32bit or 64bit systems but for LLP64, the software needs to be specifically written for either 32 or 64bit. I'm not an expert here. Can someone else comment? Setting the sizes of the standard C integer types is always a compromise, making them bigger wastes memory and breaks file formats that rely on them. Leaving them the same size breaks apps that cast between pointers and the standard C integer types.
The fact is programs that use the standard C types and don't make very conservative assumptions about those types are likely to have portability problems. This is a side affect of the way the C language was designed (remember C was designed before the idea of the 8 bit byte was really settled on!). Programmers should use better specified types introduced by newer standards (int*_t for fields in files, size_t for casting pointers to integers and so on) and if nessacery include a block of #DEFINES under #IFDEFs somewhere to set them up for platforms that don't have them as standard.
but the only Microsoft 32 bit operating system to take advantage of that so far is Server 2003. at least according to MS windows 2000 advanced server and datacenter server editions could too. I strongly suspect server 2008 (essentially the server edition of vista) does too though that is still in beta.
MS keeps the feature disabled in desktop editions. IIRC they claim the reason is driver compatibility which I can well beleive, having address space beyond 4GB creates some complications with DMA but I suspect there is also an aspect of upselling in there.
which is why Vista moves sound drivers out of kernel space completely. They don't (and can't, sound hardware is generally PCI and driving PCI devices pretty much requires running in kernel mode), they just cripple them presumablly in the hope that they won't crash when the OS isn't asking them to do anything beyond simple stereo output.
Printer rendering drivers on the other hand were forced to be in user mode.
I think it's fair to say that newer Linux distro's require more memory than they did five years ago too. Sadly you are right on this point, increasing bloat seems to be almost universal in the software development world.
it's inaccurate in that it's actually turning out to be far worse than Windows ME Indeed ME was quickly replaced by XP, 2K was availible to those who wanted it and many people unofficially downgraded to 98 even though they weren't meant to (since piracy protection was nonexistant in 98).
OEM vista buisness and ultimate come with downgrade rights but you need to already have the media/key to excercise it and if you end up using retail or system builder (whitebox OEM) media/key then you will have to telephone activate. Those who got vista home basic or home premium with thier machine and don't have a volume license agreement they can use to get the machine up to professional and onto software assurance have to either buy XP retail or bend the rules on system builder packs. Using a pirate copy of XP is another option but that brings problems of it's own (if you don't have access to a legit XP corp key that hasn't been widely leaked and you don't very carefully control installation of updates then you are likely to run into wga). Then you have the whole issue of drivers etc to consider (though presumablly this was an issue going me-98 as well).
So for the most part non techincal home users who get vista with thier PC are stuck with vista until MS releases thier next os:(
I have the solution to solving the holiday product crunch: spread the holidays out over the calendar. In the USA, divide the country up into 12 regions of about the same population and economics. Then assign each region a different month to have the gift giving holidays. Most people don't celebrate Christmas religiously, anymore, so this shouldn't be much of a problem.
Afaict at least here in the UK the convention is to have two times in the year where people take time off and splurge financially. In the middle of summer people go away to the seaside or some other kind of holiday that involves spending lots of time outdoors. In the winter people buy themselves, each other and thier kids presents than spend time off indoors enjoying thier presents with thier family and/or friends.
In other words getting presents is part of christmas but having time of work/school and your friends and family having time off work/school at the same time is just as important.
Another reason I can think of is nostalgia. There must be many people who had nes's megadrives and so on who really liked some of the games but thier hardware died or they sold it to get the next generation of console or because they didn't have room for it and buying secondhand equipment that old is always something of a gamblem. Emultation on PCs is one route but its always been a bit of an undergound activity since for most people the only practical way to get the games to run in such emulators is to pirate them.
with the Wii they can buy those games from the comfort of thier own home and play them on a modern and reliable console.
That's about as scary as a hacker getting complete access to the WindowsUpdate.com servers or some popular Linux distribution update servers, right? This is why linux distros have moved towards digitally signing thier repositries and if MS has any sense then they will have done the same for windows update.
Of course if the master key and the distribution network are both comprimised then it gets about this nasty but I would imagine they take quite substantial precautions to stop this happening.
you can but there is no gaurantee you will end up with packages identical to those in the repositry. Changing versions of a packages build dependencies can easilly change the binaries that a source package will produce between the binaries uploaded to the repositries and your attempt at rebuilding.
a rouge debian developer could easilly upload a compromised binary to the archive without being noticed.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows Vista supports the following WDM audio capabilities:
* WDM version 1.40
* All the features that Windows XP supports (see Windows XP Support for WDM Audio), with the following exceptions.
o Hardware peak meters are supported, except when the Windows Vista mixer API runs in per-application mode.
o Wave and MIDI NT4 drivers function normally, but they are not supported by the new audio user interface.
o AUX devices are not supported, and the auxGetNumDevs function in Mmsystem.h will always return a count of zero.
o Windows NT4-style mixer drivers (DRIVERS32) are not supported.
Anyone who knows anything about windows driver development will know that WDM is a kernel mode only API.
I trust MS documentation over some article on a random website.
btw there are now win32 and linux ports of duke3d out there with a somewhat updated engine (it actually gets perspective right ;) ), google for jfduke3D.
How the hell did I miss that trailer? That looked like an awesome game! Why the hell didn't they release it?
My guess is that they want DNF to be the best game ever and they keep getting close but never quite to the point where they are sufficiantly better than the competition to want to release.
Either that or the whole thing is a hoax with a faked teaser every so often to keep people interested.
Did anyone else know the steroids would instantly grow you from a shrink
Yes.
I wonder if one of the duke ports will ever get arround to moving to a modern network model. Servers with drop in play make improptu online play so much easier.
Windows out of the box usually (in my experience anyway) doesn't have network drivers.
Generally as with much other hardware windows doesn't tend to come with drivers for chips (unless there is a generic interface windows can use to talk to the device which there isn't for network adaptors) that are newer than the release of windows in question.
The situation is pretty similar in the linux world.
6709ff39ea47d3563b537b67153f60ee0c932a93 is the info hash of the torrent.
This is NOT a MD5 of the file it is a SHA1 hash of the info section of the torrent which contains the SHA1 hashes of the individual peices of the file and some other metainformation.
afaict many distros do something similar but it only helps if you are using distro packages. Once you move outside of that for whatever reason you are pretty much on your own.
My understanding is that the problem with systems like that is they allow vote blackmail. Once you can prove who you voted for those in a position to exert a coercive influence over you can check you are doing what they told you to do.
No, it's not. If a 400 Hz sine wave is sampled at a mere 800 Hz, it can be reproduced perfectly
It can't actually, at 800Hz sampling rate 400Hz aliases to -400Hz so your sampling loses information (think of a 400hz sine wave that is always zero at your sample points).
Also nyquists theorems rely on perfect nyquist filters which don't and can't exist. Analog filters in particular tend to have a pretty large section between effectively passing unchanged and effectively cut off.
The way to get good quality with a low transmission sample rate is to sample at a higher rate digitally downsample then transmit then digitally upsample but afaict few systems bother to do this.
I suspect the difference is that downloads from the ISPs mirror don't count towards the users traffic quota.
Comparing the specs and prices with those specs, they're about the same actually.
The thing is there are far less mac models than PC models so you will often have to buy more than you need in some areas to get what you want in others This along with the fact you *are* paying for high build quality (macbooks are comparable in price to thinkpads, vaios, lattitudes etc not to inspirons and thier ilk) is what makes macs relatively expensive in practice.
That last update to GarageBand should be quite a surprise then.
Ok so there are two tricks, the one you mentioned that involves a non obvious use of a mac only app (and probablly causes re-encoding) and one (mentioned by a poster further up) that involves manually changing the file extention and reimporting.
Still afaict the only obvious way to use a song as a ringtone on the iphone is to re-buy it as one. Compare this to most other phones where you just upload the track to the music library and select it from the ringtones menu.
nokia too, just put the mp3 on the phone as a music track and the ringtones list finds it.
You could say the same about AMD64 linux.
There were issues with amd64 linux but drivers weren't a particularlly big one afaict. The linux kernel and it's associated drivers were being built for a huge range of architectures since before amd64 was born.
Afaict the biggest issue 64 bit linux has had has been relatively poor support for using the few propietry 32 bit only components that are required for a comfortable desktop within a 64 bit environment. Flash and java applets have been particularlly sore points (nspluginwrapper has mostly solved the former and icedtea has mostly solved the latter but theese only made thier way into distros fairly recently).
The end result is that software for LP64 software needs to be ported by being recompiled to either 32bit or 64bit systems but for LLP64, the software needs to be specifically written for either 32 or 64bit. I'm not an expert here. Can someone else comment?
Setting the sizes of the standard C integer types is always a compromise, making them bigger wastes memory and breaks file formats that rely on them. Leaving them the same size breaks apps that cast between pointers and the standard C integer types.
The fact is programs that use the standard C types and don't make very conservative assumptions about those types are likely to have portability problems. This is a side affect of the way the C language was designed (remember C was designed before the idea of the 8 bit byte was really settled on!). Programmers should use better specified types introduced by newer standards (int*_t for fields in files, size_t for casting pointers to integers and so on) and if nessacery include a block of #DEFINES under #IFDEFs somewhere to set them up for platforms that don't have them as standard.
but the only Microsoft 32 bit operating system to take advantage of that so far is Server 2003.
at least according to MS windows 2000 advanced server and datacenter server editions could too. I strongly suspect server 2008 (essentially the server edition of vista) does too though that is still in beta.
MS keeps the feature disabled in desktop editions. IIRC they claim the reason is driver compatibility which I can well beleive, having address space beyond 4GB creates some complications with DMA but I suspect there is also an aspect of upselling in there.
which is why Vista moves sound drivers out of kernel space completely.
They don't (and can't, sound hardware is generally PCI and driving PCI devices pretty much requires running in kernel mode), they just cripple them presumablly in the hope that they won't crash when the OS isn't asking them to do anything beyond simple stereo output.
Printer rendering drivers on the other hand were forced to be in user mode.
I think it's fair to say that newer Linux distro's require more memory than they did five years ago too.
Sadly you are right on this point, increasing bloat seems to be almost universal in the software development world.
it's inaccurate in that it's actually turning out to be far worse than Windows ME
:(
Indeed ME was quickly replaced by XP, 2K was availible to those who wanted it and many people unofficially downgraded to 98 even though they weren't meant to (since piracy protection was nonexistant in 98).
OEM vista buisness and ultimate come with downgrade rights but you need to already have the media/key to excercise it and if you end up using retail or system builder (whitebox OEM) media/key then you will have to telephone activate. Those who got vista home basic or home premium with thier machine and don't have a volume license agreement they can use to get the machine up to professional and onto software assurance have to either buy XP retail or bend the rules on system builder packs. Using a pirate copy of XP is another option but that brings problems of it's own (if you don't have access to a legit XP corp key that hasn't been widely leaked and you don't very carefully control installation of updates then you are likely to run into wga). Then you have the whole issue of drivers etc to consider (though presumablly this was an issue going me-98 as well).
So for the most part non techincal home users who get vista with thier PC are stuck with vista until MS releases thier next os
I have the solution to solving the holiday product crunch: spread the holidays out over the calendar. In the USA, divide the country up into 12 regions of about the same population and economics. Then assign each region a different month to have the gift giving holidays. Most people don't celebrate Christmas religiously, anymore, so this shouldn't be much of a problem.
Afaict at least here in the UK the convention is to have two times in the year where people take time off and splurge financially. In the middle of summer people go away to the seaside or some other kind of holiday that involves spending lots of time outdoors. In the winter people buy themselves, each other and thier kids presents than spend time off indoors enjoying thier presents with thier family and/or friends.
In other words getting presents is part of christmas but having time of work/school and your friends and family having time off work/school at the same time is just as important.
Another reason I can think of is nostalgia. There must be many people who had nes's megadrives and so on who really liked some of the games but thier hardware died or they sold it to get the next generation of console or because they didn't have room for it and buying secondhand equipment that old is always something of a gamblem. Emultation on PCs is one route but its always been a bit of an undergound activity since for most people the only practical way to get the games to run in such emulators is to pirate them.
with the Wii they can buy those games from the comfort of thier own home and play them on a modern and reliable console.
What I don't understand is why nintendo doesn't do the obvious thing and raise the price.
That's about as scary as a hacker getting complete access to the WindowsUpdate.com servers or some popular Linux distribution update servers, right?
This is why linux distros have moved towards digitally signing thier repositries and if MS has any sense then they will have done the same for windows update.
Of course if the master key and the distribution network are both comprimised then it gets about this nasty but I would imagine they take quite substantial precautions to stop this happening.
you can but there is no gaurantee you will end up with packages identical to those in the repositry. Changing versions of a packages build dependencies can easilly change the binaries that a source package will produce between the binaries uploaded to the repositries and your attempt at rebuilding.
a rouge debian developer could easilly upload a compromised binary to the archive without being noticed.
of course you can avoid the whole problem by making your device use a standard device class so there is no need to ship a driver.
I wonder how hard it would be to hack out the ugliness of the test mode?