Re:$$$$ for nothing but higher res? Sure, guys. Su
on
The Great HDCP Fiasco
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· Score: 1
Give that/.er a cigar. Same reason that nobody's interested in SACD or whatever they're trying to push for CDs.
I think the thing these companies are forgetting is that the move to CD/DVD was a huge upswing in convenience for the user over records/tape: size, random access... and oh, fidelity too. The next major shift to mp3/mpeg was a loss in quality, but an increase in convenience.
It's clear to me that most people will give up some quality for convenience, not the other way around. Nobody cares about quality anyway; witness the number of widescreen TVs in bars with the aspect ratio set to "make everyone look short and fat" or "stretch the edges so it looks like a fisheye lens". The aesthetics of something completely irrelevant-- the terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad black bar trumps quality every time.
My non-geek friend was really PISSED when he found out that he couldn't put a legally purchased & downloaded song onto his digital music player, because they didn't support the same hoohah copy-protection protocol. I told him this is the reason I don't use [whatever crippled service he was using] - I'd rather buy the CD unencumbered for a little more. He muttered some vulgarities which I roughly translated as "not going to buy anything more from that download service".
Ever seen the ad campaign for Office, trying to convince people to get off Word 97, the "evolve" thing? They stick plastic dinosaurs on everyone's head. They don't say directly "you're a dinosaur", but it's pretty clear what they think of you, if you don't hand over a few hundred bucks for no reason whatsoever.
Right, it's so hilarious. Everything did work when there was just mp3. The only reason "plays for sure" even needs to exist is because now it might not, since we're having my-format-is-better pissing contests peppered with the DRM du jour, and thus people need to be reassured.
If it really did "play for sure" you wouldn't have to say anything. It's a bit like someone sitting at the border crossing saying "UH! HA, um... NO, I DON'T HAVE ANY, ha ha ha, UH, DRUGS! For sure!".
No, you have to put in context. A better way would be, in place of the album art, show a big "?" picture with something that says "click here to show the CD art".
When you click on it, then inform the user that the data is sent to Apple to do it. I'm not kidding - many people really think that the track names and CD picture is encoded on the CD! and don't realize that information has to be gathered from an external database.
Putting up a message at a time when they don't care about it (installation time) is just asking for it to be ignored. No matter what you put there, they will ignore the words and assume it says "Press YES to install iTunes". You could put a dialog there says "Do you want to send $100,000 to Steve Jobs?" and people would click YES.
I'm running into this exact problem with the new Windows Media Player. When you open it to play a local MP3, it opens about 10 pointless network connections to napster.com and who knows what else. No obvious way to turn it off, other than "Work Offline" which means then you can't stream anything!
I have the same monitor but have never noticed any delay-- probably because I always leave the monitor on during the day. I then set it to automatically power down the monitor after 1/2 hour or so. This is easy in Windows (change your power settings) and works fine in X too.
I only ever switch it off at night.
If you insist on powering it down, you could probably just disconnect the USB cable permanently! Unless you use the card reader all the time, it will probably save you time.
My father-in-law has one of those. It is so terrible compared to the ReplayTV I'd almost rather not even use it. We tried to watch a recorded movie over there. Since we have kids to run after and family to visit, we tend to watch movies in chunks... 20 minutes here and there. The stupid DVR refused to remember where you last left off, so you have to FAST FORWARD back to the spot you were at.
After 4 or 5 restarts we wanted to smash the thing into little bits and pieces, Office Space style.
Nah, the editors have just realized that since we don't read the linked articles anyway, they can just omit them. After all, we prefer to talk about stuff we don't know about here.
There's porting the entire dang thing, and porting a single display hack you like.
I think the latter it's possible. I took standalone OpenGL graphic demo that I wrote and ported into the xscreensaver framework. It took all of a few hours. For a portable program that uses just GL, I suspect the reverse would be true.
You don't really want to port the entire thing, because a good part of what Jamie's code is trying to deal with is already done on Windows - namely, launching the screensaver itself. So if you ported to Windows, you wouldn't port that part. His framework is already very similar to Windows in that each saver is a dedicated executable, instead of a monolithic program like xlock or xlockmore.
What I don't know is how the Windows screensaver framework and conventions, and getting a development setup going there. It's been long years since I've done Windows development and it's a fast-moving target.
Same happened to me. I had to go, one by one, uninstalling all the nagware and 42 media players fighting for control over files. It's pretty easy for major things like Quickbooks. It was ridiculous, took a few days, but it made things much beter.
Still, there are some things I'd like to get rid of, but without a frickin' CD of the original sofware, I can't uninstall it to test it out. There are a bunch of things that load at startup that seem totally unnecessary (why sound the on-board sound need to run all the time? Intel Application Accelerator?)
It would be so much faster to start with a clean install of XP, and then add the stuff that I want (e.g., the DVD player software so you can get the codec).
That and XP feels like having I have nanny constantly watching over me. I'm tempted to reinstall my fully legit version of Win2000.
No, that makes too much sense, it has to be a conspiracy!
If it's not exactly 50/50, then it's not because less women are interested in computers.
No, it's because the dominant, repressive, patriarchal society is forcing females to not be interested in computers, via systemic direct conditioning and discouragement towards such roles, and indirect systemtic persuasion to other existing genderified normative roles (e.g. "Your hair looks nice today" really means "You and your entire gender are physical objects whose sole role is to provide sexual services, and you should not learn to read"), to keep them having successful careers in order to force them to stay at home so they can be slaves.
[shudder] Wow, how do people write like that and not be joking?
I think it's like dyslexia or color-blindess: there seems to be people genetically unable to see distorted aspect ratios.
Ever some a home-brew newsletter with photos pasted into it, and the ratio is all distorted becasue they decided to resize the picture? Hell, I see all the time in online help screenshots!
The best compromise I've seen is some edge-stretching. I was at Target the other day and they had a bunch of widescreen TVs all fed with a regular signal. Some looked messed up, some were side-letterboxed, and others appeared normal. Huh? How did that happen? On closer look, the latter stretched the edges of the frame, but not the center. So only the people on the edges looked short and fat.
Personally, I hate any distortion, but a default like this would make more sense to people who automatically think letterbox is broken.
You're arguing with your wife again. It seems she's missed her spending quota again this quarter. A proud patriot, you have no problem spending 85% and sometimes 90% of your income on consumer goods, yet she can't manage to spend even close to the 75% required by law.
I'd be ecstatic if she spent anything less than 125%!
Spending at or below your income is so 1970s... it's, like, what old people do?
Find something closely related. A friend of mine started at a video card company working on drivers, and then moved into game development. His wife started as a tester in that company and then moved into game design.
I realized a while back that every writer's wet dream is to coin a new term that becomes common use. Not merely to report a word in use by others, but the make a new one up and refer to it in the article in some offhand manner, as if it already exists and is common, but you ain't hep 'nuff to know that, and so we're gonna let you in on what the cool kids are saying now.
Riiiight.
Now when I read articles with new fake words I just laugh and make sure not to use it.
I hate one-liners. Here's a fake example of stuff I see all the time:
if (foo) {/* OHO! */ if (bar) return;/* Well, well, false alarm. */ if (!x)/* Class is bogus. */ z=y;/* Did we already have one? */ }
Great, I'm sure this Howard-Cosell running commentary is cute if you already know what the code is doing, but it means nothing to everyone else. Comments are not for you, they are for other people.
I don't think so, perhaps for some niche apps. Most of the data travels through IPC and highly efficient and fast communication mechanisms, not files. Files are for the end results on the master system.
Have you ever looked at the inside of an app like this? Or are you just guessing?
You don't use files for IPC, you use it to store giant input data sets and output results.
Where else are you going to put the result of a 2,000 node computation that produces a few terabytes of data? Span it across 2,000 hard drives?
Or do you think the answer is just going to be a few bytes long like "42"?
Listen, I've logged into personally and run applications on these supercomputers. The guy down the office is logged into BlueGene right now, and I talk with the folks who built and use these machines all the time.
A lot of development and debugging for hi-scale actually happens at small scale. They'll get their app working at 2 or 16 or 32 nodes, debug the hell out of it, and then book time on the behemoth to do the real work at a few thousand. It's very expensive to drop a buggy app on a 2,000 node run.
You have to realize that the licensing fees are a factor, but NOT a huge factor in evaluating the cost for a such system. If that was the case they would never have used propietary systems like AIX in the first place.
This is not to disparage Linux. I love Linux on supercomputers, it's much more pleasant to work with than other things like AIX.
I'm not saying Windows is a good idea on a cluster, just that MS is not stupid, and ignore them at your own peril. There are also a market for not-so-big clusters, too.
The fact that supercomputers are moving to x86 should make us Linux fans more wary. MS could say something like You've already done the hard work porting over to x86. Why not run Windows on your development cluster and front end and use these wonderful UI tools that you love?
MS is not stupid. They know exactly what supercomputer owners are paying in licenses as part of the total cost (they're not all Linux), and I'm sure they'd steeply discount the license to get into the space they want.
They bring very little value to the back end. A typical distributed app is not a rich UI client that needs lots of Windows APIs to play DRM'd movies, so Windows has no advantage there. It's a C, C++, or Fortan (mixed, even) job running MPI over some specialized interconnect hardware.
You also need a good parallel file system which I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that CIFS is probably not the optimal choice - any real system will probably be using a dedicated filer.
However, their strong suit in this space are tools like IDEs. If they can convince folks that using Windows as a front-end to development, then they can make some good inroads.
Right now the supercomputing folks are starting to get interested in Eclipse, and they're trying to head that off, not to mention small ISV's like us.
Slashdot Mirror
Give that /.er a cigar. Same reason that nobody's interested in SACD or whatever they're trying to push for CDs.
I think the thing these companies are forgetting is that the move to CD/DVD was a huge upswing in convenience for the user over records/tape: size, random access... and oh, fidelity too. The next major shift to mp3/mpeg was a loss in quality, but an increase in convenience.
It's clear to me that most people will give up some quality for convenience, not the other way around. Nobody cares about quality anyway; witness the number of widescreen TVs in bars with the aspect ratio set to "make everyone look short and fat" or "stretch the edges so it looks like a fisheye lens". The aesthetics of something completely irrelevant-- the terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad black bar trumps quality every time.
My non-geek friend was really PISSED when he found out that he couldn't put a legally purchased & downloaded song onto his digital music player, because they didn't support the same hoohah copy-protection protocol. I told him this is the reason I don't use [whatever crippled service he was using] - I'd rather buy the CD unencumbered for a little more. He muttered some vulgarities which I roughly translated as "not going to buy anything more from that download service".
Welcome to the new world, buddy.
Ever seen the ad campaign for Office, trying to convince people to get off Word 97, the "evolve" thing? They stick plastic dinosaurs on everyone's head. They don't say directly "you're a dinosaur", but it's pretty clear what they think of you, if you don't hand over a few hundred bucks for no reason whatsoever.
I can only imagine what they'll do for Windows.
The big box that you put the CDs into is not a CPU.
If it really did "play for sure" you wouldn't have to say anything. It's a bit like someone sitting at the border crossing saying "UH! HA, um... NO, I DON'T HAVE ANY, ha ha ha, UH, DRUGS! For sure!".
No, you have to put in context. A better way would be, in place of the album art, show a big "?" picture with something that says "click here to show the CD art".
When you click on it, then inform the user that the data is sent to Apple to do it. I'm not kidding - many people really think that the track names and CD picture is encoded on the CD! and don't realize that information has to be gathered from an external database.
Putting up a message at a time when they don't care about it (installation time) is just asking for it to be ignored. No matter what you put there, they will ignore the words and assume it says "Press YES to install iTunes". You could put a dialog there says "Do you want to send $100,000 to Steve Jobs?" and people would click YES.
I'm running into this exact problem with the new Windows Media Player. When you open it to play a local MP3, it opens about 10 pointless network connections to napster.com and who knows what else. No obvious way to turn it off, other than "Work Offline" which means then you can't stream anything!
I have the same monitor but have never noticed any delay-- probably because I always leave the monitor on during the day. I then set it to automatically power down the monitor after 1/2 hour or so. This is easy in Windows (change your power settings) and works fine in X too.
I only ever switch it off at night.
If you insist on powering it down, you could probably just disconnect the USB cable permanently! Unless you use the card reader all the time, it will probably save you time.
After 4 or 5 restarts we wanted to smash the thing into little bits and pieces, Office Space style.
Nah, the editors have just realized that since we don't read the linked articles anyway, they can just omit them. After all, we prefer to talk about stuff we don't know about here.
There's porting the entire dang thing, and porting a single display hack you like.
I think the latter it's possible. I took standalone OpenGL graphic demo that I wrote and ported into the xscreensaver framework. It took all of a few hours. For a portable program that uses just GL, I suspect the reverse would be true.
You don't really want to port the entire thing, because a good part of what Jamie's code is trying to deal with is already done on Windows - namely, launching the screensaver itself. So if you ported to Windows, you wouldn't port that part. His framework is already very similar to Windows in that each saver is a dedicated executable, instead of a monolithic program like xlock or xlockmore.
What I don't know is how the Windows screensaver framework and conventions, and getting a development setup going there. It's been long years since I've done Windows development and it's a fast-moving target.
Jamie will never port them. But, someone else could. Especially the OpenGL ones, which would easier to do than the pure X ones.
Same happened to me. I had to go, one by one, uninstalling all the nagware and 42 media players fighting for control over files. It's pretty easy for major things like Quickbooks. It was ridiculous, took a few days, but it made things much beter.
Still, there are some things I'd like to get rid of, but without a frickin' CD of the original sofware, I can't uninstall it to test it out. There are a bunch of things that load at startup that seem totally unnecessary (why sound the on-board sound need to run all the time? Intel Application Accelerator?)
It would be so much faster to start with a clean install of XP, and then add the stuff that I want (e.g., the DVD player software so you can get the codec).
That and XP feels like having I have nanny constantly watching over me. I'm tempted to reinstall my fully legit version of Win2000.
If it's not exactly 50/50, then it's not because less women are interested in computers.
No, it's because the dominant, repressive, patriarchal society is forcing females to not be interested in computers, via systemic direct conditioning and discouragement towards such roles, and indirect systemtic persuasion to other existing genderified normative roles (e.g. "Your hair looks nice today" really means "You and your entire gender are physical objects whose sole role is to provide sexual services, and you should not learn to read"), to keep them having successful careers in order to force them to stay at home so they can be slaves.
[shudder] Wow, how do people write like that and not be joking?
Ever some a home-brew newsletter with photos pasted into it, and the ratio is all distorted becasue they decided to resize the picture? Hell, I see all the time in online help screenshots!
The best compromise I've seen is some edge-stretching. I was at Target the other day and they had a bunch of widescreen TVs all fed with a regular signal. Some looked messed up, some were side-letterboxed, and others appeared normal. Huh? How did that happen? On closer look, the latter stretched the edges of the frame, but not the center. So only the people on the edges looked short and fat.
Personally, I hate any distortion, but a default like this would make more sense to people who automatically think letterbox is broken.
I'd be ecstatic if she spent anything less than 125%!
Spending at or below your income is so 1970s... it's, like, what old people do?
Gargh! My brain just did this:
Loading story...
(Article and trivial verb removal filter plugin v1.1)
WARNING! Bullshit-to-normal word ratio 66%
maximum 15%, aborting story!
saxmaniac%
What kind of abuses? What stores do this?
Find something closely related. A friend of mine started at a video card company working on drivers, and then moved into game development. His wife started as a tester in that company and then moved into game design.
Riiiight.
Now when I read articles with new fake words I just laugh and make sure not to use it.
WTF? I thought I filtered out JonKatz stories years ago.
Yes, Law and Order, CSI:*, and all the other top-rated shows that everyone knows about owes deep allegiance to... what was that again?
Trillian for Windows, gaim on Linux. Next question?
Is this a joke? There are plenty of failed technologies like this: PICS, RSAC/IPAC. Turn them on and watch the net cease to be useful to anyone.
Have you ever looked at the inside of an app like this? Or are you just guessing?
You don't use files for IPC, you use it to store giant input data sets and output results.
Where else are you going to put the result of a 2,000 node computation that produces a few terabytes of data? Span it across 2,000 hard drives?
Or do you think the answer is just going to be a few bytes long like "42"?
A lot of development and debugging for hi-scale actually happens at small scale. They'll get their app working at 2 or 16 or 32 nodes, debug the hell out of it, and then book time on the behemoth to do the real work at a few thousand. It's very expensive to drop a buggy app on a 2,000 node run.
You have to realize that the licensing fees are a factor, but NOT a huge factor in evaluating the cost for a such system. If that was the case they would never have used propietary systems like AIX in the first place.
This is not to disparage Linux. I love Linux on supercomputers, it's much more pleasant to work with than other things like AIX.
I'm not saying Windows is a good idea on a cluster, just that MS is not stupid, and ignore them at your own peril. There are also a market for not-so-big clusters, too.
The fact that supercomputers are moving to x86 should make us Linux fans more wary. MS could say something like You've already done the hard work porting over to x86. Why not run Windows on your development cluster and front end and use these wonderful UI tools that you love?
They bring very little value to the back end. A typical distributed app is not a rich UI client that needs lots of Windows APIs to play DRM'd movies, so Windows has no advantage there. It's a C, C++, or Fortan (mixed, even) job running MPI over some specialized interconnect hardware.
You also need a good parallel file system which I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that CIFS is probably not the optimal choice - any real system will probably be using a dedicated filer.
However, their strong suit in this space are tools like IDEs. If they can convince folks that using Windows as a front-end to development, then they can make some good inroads.
Right now the supercomputing folks are starting to get interested in Eclipse, and they're trying to head that off, not to mention small ISV's like us.