That's specific to outlook. It doesn't fix the brokenness in the operating system.
The operating system is hardly "broken": It merely operates in a fashion that you disagree with. A execute bit or a exe extension hardly seem like the big chasm of difference that you make them out to be. In any case, the NT line of operating systems have highly pervasive ACLs: Hypothetically there should be little that could be done if a errant exe were run.
Palladium isn't about fixing this problem. "stpooing viruses" is, at best, a side effect. Palladium is about control -- control by Microsoft. It conveniently kills open development for Windows, including free software and shareware.
Palladium is actually largely a bunch of technologies that have existed for years. ActiveX, for instance, is a code signed binary..NET includes a wide range of code signing and code authentication technologies. ITs have fully had the ability to set up their own internal trust hierarchies to internally sign and distribute their own code.
You mean like this (it prevents Outlook users from being able to access executable content)? To circumvent this the executables must be sent as compressed files which have to be then uncompressed and then execute: It's no different than chmod +x. The attributes on the file are hardly that different from the extension of the file, and indeed many compression utilities store the attributes of the file.
In any case it's interesting that what you're talking about is something that Microsoft is making great strides in "fixing", to the consternation of many Slashdotters. A heavily debated feature of Paladium is the fact that executable files have to be signed by a trusted authority (configurable by domain. For instance your corporate IT department) to be executable. There have been third party utilities that only allow configured executables to run as well via an executable database.
Yes, they did have some ports of NT to the Alpha architecture didn't they. Except I hear they dropped that support after a while.
They also had support for MIPS, however a funny thing happens when the same software is available on different platforms: People gravitate to the platform that gives the biggest bang for the buck (which is why you don't see OS X for the PC: Apple has always basically been a software company that gets people to buy their hardware for the software, and if the same software was equally available on a more powerful, less expensive platform, you can be sure that Mac sales would dry up). It just so happened that among the CPUs that Windows NT targeted, the Intel platform won the battle, however if the battle had turned out differently, and Intel hit some sort of roadblock while the other chip makers stormed forward, I assure you we'd be using that variant of NT today.
That it's the most respected and that it generates the most optimized and efficient code.
Actually I qualified each statement with clarifiers like "some of the most optimized code". The point being that it holds its own among the best, and most certainly isn't "garbage" (especially with a ridiculous "granted" postfix).
I've said nothing about Visual Studio's reputation or why people use it, but merely questioned the comment that it's compiler is "garbage" (hint: It's actually one of the most respected compilers out there. One of the reason why alternate compilers disappeared was because they had no realistic benefit to many user: In the old days Turbo C and other compilers could boast about much more efficient code, but today there simply aren't any competitors that produce better code).
The compiler is garbage, given. The linker sucks too.
Uh, yeah, "given". How exactly is the compiler "garbage"? It produces some of the most optimized, efficient code of any compiler (note the death of competing compilers: There was no reason to buy a third party compiler. The only big one really in the game is Intel's, and it only exists so they can encourage developers to use Intel only operands). I'm curious against what competitor you feel it appropriate to disparage it in such a way. Oh, right, you were just getting the obligatory Microsoft bash in there to avoid down-moderation.
People with high karma can post with the "+1 Karma Bonus", but many readers disable the Karma bonus these days
Speaking of the karma bonus when I first had that option I actually thought there was a negative to it: That by using it I would then lose karma. As such I got in the habit of never using it, and it really was just nuisance perpetually clicking the no karma bonus checkbox. The system probably would work better if one "Spent" karma (perhaps at a ratio of 5:1) when they used it, naturally limiting people to only "raising the volume" on points that they really think need to be made.
Could someone tell me why this guy left Microsoft? While others seem to take parting blows as words of wisdom, cynicism has me taking them more as vengeful potshots, basically taking whatever position is opposite of the "enemy" (which becomes the employer when someone is forced out/fired).
You crystalized the problem with many MMORPGs with this and the associated posts (regardless of the fanboys fervently defending their first love): Kudos to you sir.
I've actually played a couple of the MMORPG (geesh) and the overly contrived, linear, and formulaic nature of their gameplay just gets so old so quickly. Even among non-online games I'm starting to find them so: SimCity 4 had my interest for about 3 hours until it was just more of the same, over and over and over again.
Regarding the graphics, again I'm in full agreement. Hell even the website looks unbelievably amateur, and from other posts it looks like the historical basis of this game is tenuous at best. This game looks like it might be the creation of a couple of guys trying their hardest to start at the ground level, and that is commendable, but $14US a month? As if.
It's the classic pyramid scheme that drives many online role-playing games: The "fun" and achievement in the game comes as a ratio compared to newer players -- Without new lower levels, say level X, joining Ultima Online, there would be no enjoyment to being a level 2X. Of course this formula works for a while until the new pyramid collapses, just as it does financially: Soon new players are saying "Getting PKd all day in a game where everything costs a tremendous amount because of a dearth of high level characters just isn't fun".
This is the free market baby, the law of supply and demand, if more people want to drive in a particular place at any one time, it's going to get expensive.
And it gets expensive without user fees: Expensive in time, frustration, gas, etc -- If it is sufficiently congested that people cannot conveniently get from place to place in a time effective manner, often they'll resort to other methods of getting around (public transit, avoiding the area altogether, etc).
40MB/second is faster than most network cards. How can a moving device perform faster than a non-moving one?
ATA-133 is 133MB/second per channel. I have two 7200 RPM drives, each on their own 133MB/second channel. Both drives can read and write from 20-40MB/second, depending upon the section of the drive that it is writing and the fragmentation, and if you'd check any review you'd find that 20MB/second is an absolute minimum for current drives, and 40MB is average. Given this, the 11.5GB 60 minute uncompressed AVI takes less than 10 minutes to read. Now, remembering that current systems are busmastered, that means that this is not additive with compression, but rather the weakest link is the most important point (i.e. if the hard drive took 59 minutes and the compression took 60 minutes, then the combination would take about 61 minutes, not 59 minutes + 60 minutes).
The hard drive isn't even remotely, but a factor of about 100:1, the weakest link in this equation, but instead a faster processor means everything.
I could not care less about the fact that I did not improperly use the term hardly doubt!:-) Seriously though that was a bit of a brain misfire there, combinging the thoughts that I doubt that they make enough, and hardly believe that they make enough...
This is somewhat logical because maintainance of the bridge is not covered in the tax structure, so you pay if you use it.
9 times out of 10 the bridge is supported by the tax structure, and the toll is often just an additional fee that goes into the generic government coffers (i.e. not some specialized bridge maintenance fund). I had a chuckle recently, travelling through one of the rust belt states, having to stop to pay $0.25 to a guy in a booth in the middle of the night, and this covered the next 50 miles or so: I hardly doubt they recoup enough to pay for the guy's wages, much less pay for the highway. As far as Canada, we have a brilliant method for taxing highway use: A gas tax. This actually works very well as heavier vehicles, which do more damage to the highways, generally consume more gas (and hence pay more of a "toll"). If you have a small vehicle and you don't drive much, your "toll" is minimized, but if you have a Ford Expedition and do thousands of KM per week, you will pay your toll accordingly. Sounds like we have anything but a socialist system.
The UK/Canadian system is more socialist - everyone pays a little to spread out the cost
Brrrrr....I am really getting to hate the term "socialist", which is probably the most common hoped-to-be-insult hurled towards Canada by pompous ahole Americans (no I am not calling all Americans pompous aholes. Indeed, the vast majority are nothing of the sort, however being a hyper-power has blessed the fringe of the society with the from-above mandate to set world policy through diatribes in newspapers and online message boards, setting those damn Canucks straight by calling them "Socialists". See the blessed letter by such a whacko in yesterday's National Post). What makes Canada more "socialist" than the US? That we have universal healthcare, like every single first world nation on the planet but the US?
In 95% of the governmental structure Canada is absolutely no more socialist than the US. In some areas (healthcare) Canada is more "socialist", but in others it is drastically less socialist. The US, for instance, has such incredibly socialist agricultural subsidies that each head of cattle yields enough government dollars to fly them first class around the globe. Countless other industries abound where true capitalism is foresaken "for the common good".
A bit offtopic, however I think the "socialist"/non-socialist titles are just grossly misleading.
Ok, interesting comment, but your expertise is brought into serious question by the fact that you are electing to use Windows Media Encoder
Well I'm certainly not trying to portray myself as an expert video ripper. However another poster hit exactly on the point why I opted to use WM9: It is more of less standard in that Windows users have or can easily (using Windows Update) have it. In this case I had to give a copy of the video to my sister-in-law as well so it just made sense.
Having said that, let me also say that preceding all of this I did do fairly extensive comparative testing between divx and WM9, ripping scenes from the Simpsons, Fight Club, among others (because if divx truly shone I would have opted for it). My personal conclusion was that at an equally low bitrate (1.5Mbps) WM9 was superior to divx.
The interesting thing is that I really don't want hits, and never put the page up intending so (I gain no profit from people looking for this restaurant), but it just was sort of an offhanded thing where I mentioned it and due to the unique name and the exclusivity of it, suddenly got lots of hits. Didn't mention it merely because I don't intend to solicit or the like, but I thought it was interesting how the Google database seemed to rollback a transaction (albeit like a week long transaction) and didn't recover until the next spider.
Several weeks back I happened to mention a very nice new restaurant in Toronto on one of my pages, and within days shot to the #2 position on Google when searching for several variants of this restaurants name. I knew this by the fact that suddenly I was seeing closing on a hundred hits per day of people looking for this restaurant. Note that this restaurant has such a unique name that there are only around 5 pages of links in all anyways. Anyways suddenly the hits entirely stopped, and a search on Google found my page was purged from the database: Despite it being a unique name with few hits, it no longer even registered. A week later suddenly it was back in the #2 spot again.
No idea why this happened, but it is entertaining to see it vary.
The task you specified is taxing on the harddrive not the CPU.
Err, no, it's taxing on the CPU: I can stream it from one HD to the other in less than 10 minutes, and given that I'm using two hard drives, one purely as a source for the large AVI, it can easily read the data far faster than the processor could ever imagine of processing it.
I'm not sure what sort of hard drives you have, but mine can sequentially read about 40MB/second, which is far faster than the speed that the CPU can process it. Indeed I can actually watch the uncompressed AVI in real time.
You seem to be suggesting that our senses have no limits. That is ridiculous.
I'm saying nothing of the sort, but rather that we've seen a long line of people arbitrarily choosing a convenient value and proclaiming it "The limit of human perception!". I've read so many idiotic claims on Slashdot that resolutely proclaim that the human eye cannot detect more than 30FPS (usually in some sort of perverted justification of their antiquated video card), yet I could prove contrary, at least to 3x that frame rate, in a moment. Alas, this myth perpetuates.
Regarding colours I can clearly see banding with 24-bit colour, yet again we've been told time and time again that this is more than the eye can see. While the standard is to select one of the 3 primary colours as the test (R, G, or B), it is actually for these hues that the 24-bit RGB colour scheme has the maximal colour resolution. I'd rather test it with, say, 3R 2G 1B (A hue made up of the additive colours of 3xB=R, 2xB=G, 1xB=B). Now made a gradiant of just that huge to really find how limited 24-bit colour really is.
I have done some trial runs with the divx codec and admittingly have found it to be quite a bit faster at compressing, however in my own rather unscientific tests [ducking] I found that WM9 did a marginally better job at 1.5Mbps (with a 64Kbps audio stream which was sufficient for the audio that came from a mic on a videocamera). It seems like WM9 does a tremendous amount of analysis of the image to try to eak out every last morsel of compression and it really labours the system.
With the proliferation of digital video cameras that conveniently download absolutely monstrous videos to your PC, full motion at 720x480, there is definitely a growing need for both more CPU power and more storage than is currently the norm. I have an Athlon XP 2000+ with 512MB of DDR with a pair of 60GB 7200RPM drives, and recently decided to compress a 60 minute video of a baby shower. Total compression time in Windows Media Encoder (compressing to WM9's video codec): Approximately 9 hours. (Actually a first run turned out to have a bad setting, so in real metrics it took about 18 hours) This was taking a direct several GB uncompressed AVI and verbatim compressing it to a 1.5Mbps video (which just fits on a CD-R). Of course doing any sort of processing or effects raises the bar even more if you're going to anything other than postage-stamp videos, so you could triple or quadruple if I were doing any major processing. If the Internet bandwidth were there for full-sized full-motion video again the current codecs are running at around 1:6th real time or less on current PCs.
So basically, FSAA ain't as simple as rendering at 3200x2400 and reducing that to 1280x960 anymore.
That's right it isn't. Instead it's as simple as "take the to left 10x10 and sample it at 30x30 and then downsize it to 10x10...do the next block". Effectively it is exactly the same thing.
While industrial and residential consumers continue to be irresponsible in their use of resources like power, water but whine when the bills go up
Nice revisionist history.
As an Ontarian I was well aware of Mr. Harris' sales campaign for deregulation of electricity--REDUCED PRICES: We were promised the idea that somehow by getting countless layers of remoras each taking of bit of the profit, this increased competition (albeit competition using the same power distribution network and the same generation plants...) would lead to reduces prices for consumers. I find it absolutely hilarious how people such as yourself can parrot conservation now when it had ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with deregulation, and never, ever was it mentioned. Suddenly when it went to hell as a California like mass-fraud began to take place (suddenly in a province with an abundance of energy, the majority of power generation being non-varying hydro-electricity, all we would hear about is the upcoming threat of blackouts...almost like California).
In any case, again I will say that you must be a bit of a sucker: The Tory government price fixed a single element of the electrical bill while continuing the various other spun-off charges and debt-reduction costs. While saps are sure that this is a big win for those "irresponsible" power users, the reality is that the average electric bill is now from 30-60% higher than it was before. You, sir, have been duped.
It's said that you stop seeing the difference at around 30 fps
And 16 million colours is more than the eye can see, and 44,100 samples per second is more than the ear can hear. Throughout the march of technology we've heard these ridiculously arbitrary "limits" of our senses, and invariably they are discounted at a future time. In essence you can consider them a sort of justification.
but so far I've only heard comparisons with movies and TV
Actually I've been paying attention at movies having heard the "well movies are 24fps and they look perfect": MOVIES LOOK LIKE TRASH. Seriously the next time you go to the movies pay close attention to any large movements on the screen and you'll be surprized how horrendous 24fps really is. For instance, my wife recently dragged me to see "Two Weeks Notice" and there is a scene where the camera pans laterally across a shelf full of shoes at a rate of about a screen width per 1/2 second-- It looks absolutely atrocious. For fast action most filmmakers either resort to the action taking a small portion of the screen, or they use slow motion effects, again because the action simply looks terrible at 24fps.
However when you get down to it the root of the "X FPS is more than anyone can see" is people's astoundingly self-centered claims that no-one else can see more than 30fps, or some other metric. This can be disproved instantly via the Q3 command cg_maxfps. Set it to 30 and it looks like a horrendous slideshow. Set it to 45 and it looks like a 1998 computer. Set it to 80 and it feels smooth with a bit of jaggedness. Set it to 90 and it feels nice. You'd think this would disprove the 30fps'ers in an instant, but amazingly they persist.
and then complain that a gfx card sucks since it doesn't perform good enough in 1600x1200. It's not like you have enough time to spot the microscopic pixels anyway.:-) And then there's FSAA to remove the pixelation even more.
1600x1200 on a 19" monitor is hardly "microscopic" pixels, however to consider this in a forward thinking manner consider the heavyweight video-card required to do 1080p resolutions on a HDTV set? 1920x1024.
FSAA, BTW, is tremendously difficult for video-cards to do (because they're actually rendering at 2x or greater resolutions): There is no current video card that could dream of doing even Urban Terror (a Q3 mod) at 1600x1200 with FSAA at acceptable frame-rates.
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That's specific to outlook. It doesn't fix the brokenness in the operating system.
.NET includes a wide range of code signing and code authentication technologies. ITs have fully had the ability to set up their own internal trust hierarchies to internally sign and distribute their own code.
The operating system is hardly "broken": It merely operates in a fashion that you disagree with. A execute bit or a exe extension hardly seem like the big chasm of difference that you make them out to be. In any case, the NT line of operating systems have highly pervasive ACLs: Hypothetically there should be little that could be done if a errant exe were run.
Palladium isn't about fixing this problem. "stpooing viruses" is, at best, a side effect. Palladium is about control -- control by Microsoft. It conveniently kills open development for Windows, including free software and shareware.
Palladium is actually largely a bunch of technologies that have existed for years. ActiveX, for instance, is a code signed binary.
I'd like to see MSFT fix *that.*
You mean like this (it prevents Outlook users from being able to access executable content)? To circumvent this the executables must be sent as compressed files which have to be then uncompressed and then execute: It's no different than chmod +x. The attributes on the file are hardly that different from the extension of the file, and indeed many compression utilities store the attributes of the file.
In any case it's interesting that what you're talking about is something that Microsoft is making great strides in "fixing", to the consternation of many Slashdotters. A heavily debated feature of Paladium is the fact that executable files have to be signed by a trusted authority (configurable by domain. For instance your corporate IT department) to be executable. There have been third party utilities that only allow configured executables to run as well via an executable database.
Yes, they did have some ports of NT to the Alpha architecture didn't they. Except I hear they dropped that support after a while.
They also had support for MIPS, however a funny thing happens when the same software is available on different platforms: People gravitate to the platform that gives the biggest bang for the buck (which is why you don't see OS X for the PC: Apple has always basically been a software company that gets people to buy their hardware for the software, and if the same software was equally available on a more powerful, less expensive platform, you can be sure that Mac sales would dry up). It just so happened that among the CPUs that Windows NT targeted, the Intel platform won the battle, however if the battle had turned out differently, and Intel hit some sort of roadblock while the other chip makers stormed forward, I assure you we'd be using that variant of NT today.
That it's the most respected and that it generates the most optimized and efficient code.
Actually I qualified each statement with clarifiers like "some of the most optimized code". The point being that it holds its own among the best, and most certainly isn't "garbage" (especially with a ridiculous "granted" postfix).
I've said nothing about Visual Studio's reputation or why people use it, but merely questioned the comment that it's compiler is "garbage" (hint: It's actually one of the most respected compilers out there. One of the reason why alternate compilers disappeared was because they had no realistic benefit to many user: In the old days Turbo C and other compilers could boast about much more efficient code, but today there simply aren't any competitors that produce better code).
The compiler is garbage, given. The linker sucks too.
Uh, yeah, "given". How exactly is the compiler "garbage"? It produces some of the most optimized, efficient code of any compiler (note the death of competing compilers: There was no reason to buy a third party compiler. The only big one really in the game is Intel's, and it only exists so they can encourage developers to use Intel only operands). I'm curious against what competitor you feel it appropriate to disparage it in such a way. Oh, right, you were just getting the obligatory Microsoft bash in there to avoid down-moderation.
People with high karma can post with the "+1 Karma Bonus", but many readers disable the Karma bonus these days
Speaking of the karma bonus when I first had that option I actually thought there was a negative to it: That by using it I would then lose karma. As such I got in the habit of never using it, and it really was just nuisance perpetually clicking the no karma bonus checkbox. The system probably would work better if one "Spent" karma (perhaps at a ratio of 5:1) when they used it, naturally limiting people to only "raising the volume" on points that they really think need to be made.
Could someone tell me why this guy left Microsoft? While others seem to take parting blows as words of wisdom, cynicism has me taking them more as vengeful potshots, basically taking whatever position is opposite of the "enemy" (which becomes the employer when someone is forced out/fired).
You crystalized the problem with many MMORPGs with this and the associated posts (regardless of the fanboys fervently defending their first love): Kudos to you sir.
I've actually played a couple of the MMORPG (geesh) and the overly contrived, linear, and formulaic nature of their gameplay just gets so old so quickly. Even among non-online games I'm starting to find them so: SimCity 4 had my interest for about 3 hours until it was just more of the same, over and over and over again.
Regarding the graphics, again I'm in full agreement. Hell even the website looks unbelievably amateur, and from other posts it looks like the historical basis of this game is tenuous at best. This game looks like it might be the creation of a couple of guys trying their hardest to start at the ground level, and that is commendable, but $14US a month? As if.
It's the classic pyramid scheme that drives many online role-playing games: The "fun" and achievement in the game comes as a ratio compared to newer players -- Without new lower levels, say level X, joining Ultima Online, there would be no enjoyment to being a level 2X. Of course this formula works for a while until the new pyramid collapses, just as it does financially: Soon new players are saying "Getting PKd all day in a game where everything costs a tremendous amount because of a dearth of high level characters just isn't fun".
This is the free market baby, the law of supply and demand, if more people want to drive in a particular place at any one time, it's going to get expensive.
And it gets expensive without user fees: Expensive in time, frustration, gas, etc -- If it is sufficiently congested that people cannot conveniently get from place to place in a time effective manner, often they'll resort to other methods of getting around (public transit, avoiding the area altogether, etc).
40MB/second is faster than most network cards. How can a moving device perform faster than a non-moving one?
ATA-133 is 133MB/second per channel. I have two 7200 RPM drives, each on their own 133MB/second channel. Both drives can read and write from 20-40MB/second, depending upon the section of the drive that it is writing and the fragmentation, and if you'd check any review you'd find that 20MB/second is an absolute minimum for current drives, and 40MB is average. Given this, the 11.5GB 60 minute uncompressed AVI takes less than 10 minutes to read. Now, remembering that current systems are busmastered, that means that this is not additive with compression, but rather the weakest link is the most important point (i.e. if the hard drive took 59 minutes and the compression took 60 minutes, then the combination would take about 61 minutes, not 59 minutes + 60 minutes).
The hard drive isn't even remotely, but a factor of about 100:1, the weakest link in this equation, but instead a faster processor means everything.
I could not care less about the fact that I did not improperly use the term hardly doubt! :-) Seriously though that was a bit of a brain misfire there, combinging the thoughts that I doubt that they make enough, and hardly believe that they make enough...
This is somewhat logical because maintainance of the bridge is not covered in the tax structure, so you pay if you use it.
9 times out of 10 the bridge is supported by the tax structure, and the toll is often just an additional fee that goes into the generic government coffers (i.e. not some specialized bridge maintenance fund). I had a chuckle recently, travelling through one of the rust belt states, having to stop to pay $0.25 to a guy in a booth in the middle of the night, and this covered the next 50 miles or so: I hardly doubt they recoup enough to pay for the guy's wages, much less pay for the highway. As far as Canada, we have a brilliant method for taxing highway use: A gas tax. This actually works very well as heavier vehicles, which do more damage to the highways, generally consume more gas (and hence pay more of a "toll"). If you have a small vehicle and you don't drive much, your "toll" is minimized, but if you have a Ford Expedition and do thousands of KM per week, you will pay your toll accordingly. Sounds like we have anything but a socialist system.
The UK/Canadian system is more socialist - everyone pays a little to spread out the cost
Brrrrr....I am really getting to hate the term "socialist", which is probably the most common hoped-to-be-insult hurled towards Canada by pompous ahole Americans (no I am not calling all Americans pompous aholes. Indeed, the vast majority are nothing of the sort, however being a hyper-power has blessed the fringe of the society with the from-above mandate to set world policy through diatribes in newspapers and online message boards, setting those damn Canucks straight by calling them "Socialists". See the blessed letter by such a whacko in yesterday's National Post). What makes Canada more "socialist" than the US? That we have universal healthcare, like every single first world nation on the planet but the US?
In 95% of the governmental structure Canada is absolutely no more socialist than the US. In some areas (healthcare) Canada is more "socialist", but in others it is drastically less socialist. The US, for instance, has such incredibly socialist agricultural subsidies that each head of cattle yields enough government dollars to fly them first class around the globe. Countless other industries abound where true capitalism is foresaken "for the common good".
A bit offtopic, however I think the "socialist"/non-socialist titles are just grossly misleading.
Ok, interesting comment, but your expertise is brought into serious question by the fact that you are electing to use Windows Media Encoder
Well I'm certainly not trying to portray myself as an expert video ripper. However another poster hit exactly on the point why I opted to use WM9: It is more of less standard in that Windows users have or can easily (using Windows Update) have it. In this case I had to give a copy of the video to my sister-in-law as well so it just made sense.
Having said that, let me also say that preceding all of this I did do fairly extensive comparative testing between divx and WM9, ripping scenes from the Simpsons, Fight Club, among others (because if divx truly shone I would have opted for it). My personal conclusion was that at an equally low bitrate (1.5Mbps) WM9 was superior to divx.
The interesting thing is that I really don't want hits, and never put the page up intending so (I gain no profit from people looking for this restaurant), but it just was sort of an offhanded thing where I mentioned it and due to the unique name and the exclusivity of it, suddenly got lots of hits. Didn't mention it merely because I don't intend to solicit or the like, but I thought it was interesting how the Google database seemed to rollback a transaction (albeit like a week long transaction) and didn't recover until the next spider.
Several weeks back I happened to mention a very nice new restaurant in Toronto on one of my pages, and within days shot to the #2 position on Google when searching for several variants of this restaurants name. I knew this by the fact that suddenly I was seeing closing on a hundred hits per day of people looking for this restaurant. Note that this restaurant has such a unique name that there are only around 5 pages of links in all anyways. Anyways suddenly the hits entirely stopped, and a search on Google found my page was purged from the database: Despite it being a unique name with few hits, it no longer even registered. A week later suddenly it was back in the #2 spot again.
No idea why this happened, but it is entertaining to see it vary.
The task you specified is taxing on the harddrive not the CPU.
Err, no, it's taxing on the CPU: I can stream it from one HD to the other in less than 10 minutes, and given that I'm using two hard drives, one purely as a source for the large AVI, it can easily read the data far faster than the processor could ever imagine of processing it.
I'm not sure what sort of hard drives you have, but mine can sequentially read about 40MB/second, which is far faster than the speed that the CPU can process it. Indeed I can actually watch the uncompressed AVI in real time.
You seem to be suggesting that our senses have no limits. That is ridiculous.
I'm saying nothing of the sort, but rather that we've seen a long line of people arbitrarily choosing a convenient value and proclaiming it "The limit of human perception!". I've read so many idiotic claims on Slashdot that resolutely proclaim that the human eye cannot detect more than 30FPS (usually in some sort of perverted justification of their antiquated video card), yet I could prove contrary, at least to 3x that frame rate, in a moment. Alas, this myth perpetuates.
Regarding colours I can clearly see banding with 24-bit colour, yet again we've been told time and time again that this is more than the eye can see. While the standard is to select one of the 3 primary colours as the test (R, G, or B), it is actually for these hues that the 24-bit RGB colour scheme has the maximal colour resolution. I'd rather test it with, say, 3R 2G 1B (A hue made up of the additive colours of 3xB=R, 2xB=G, 1xB=B). Now made a gradiant of just that huge to really find how limited 24-bit colour really is.
I have done some trial runs with the divx codec and admittingly have found it to be quite a bit faster at compressing, however in my own rather unscientific tests [ducking] I found that WM9 did a marginally better job at 1.5Mbps (with a 64Kbps audio stream which was sufficient for the audio that came from a mic on a videocamera). It seems like WM9 does a tremendous amount of analysis of the image to try to eak out every last morsel of compression and it really labours the system.
With the proliferation of digital video cameras that conveniently download absolutely monstrous videos to your PC, full motion at 720x480, there is definitely a growing need for both more CPU power and more storage than is currently the norm. I have an Athlon XP 2000+ with 512MB of DDR with a pair of 60GB 7200RPM drives, and recently decided to compress a 60 minute video of a baby shower. Total compression time in Windows Media Encoder (compressing to WM9's video codec): Approximately 9 hours. (Actually a first run turned out to have a bad setting, so in real metrics it took about 18 hours) This was taking a direct several GB uncompressed AVI and verbatim compressing it to a 1.5Mbps video (which just fits on a CD-R). Of course doing any sort of processing or effects raises the bar even more if you're going to anything other than postage-stamp videos, so you could triple or quadruple if I were doing any major processing. If the Internet bandwidth were there for full-sized full-motion video again the current codecs are running at around 1:6th real time or less on current PCs.
So basically, FSAA ain't as simple as rendering at 3200x2400 and reducing that to 1280x960 anymore.
That's right it isn't. Instead it's as simple as "take the to left 10x10 and sample it at 30x30 and then downsize it to 10x10...do the next block". Effectively it is exactly the same thing.
You're right. :-) Mea culpa.
While industrial and residential consumers continue to be irresponsible in their use of resources like power, water but whine when the bills go up
Nice revisionist history.
As an Ontarian I was well aware of Mr. Harris' sales campaign for deregulation of electricity--REDUCED PRICES: We were promised the idea that somehow by getting countless layers of remoras each taking of bit of the profit, this increased competition (albeit competition using the same power distribution network and the same generation plants...) would lead to reduces prices for consumers. I find it absolutely hilarious how people such as yourself can parrot conservation now when it had ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with deregulation, and never, ever was it mentioned. Suddenly when it went to hell as a California like mass-fraud began to take place (suddenly in a province with an abundance of energy, the majority of power generation being non-varying hydro-electricity, all we would hear about is the upcoming threat of blackouts...almost like California).
In any case, again I will say that you must be a bit of a sucker: The Tory government price fixed a single element of the electrical bill while continuing the various other spun-off charges and debt-reduction costs. While saps are sure that this is a big win for those "irresponsible" power users, the reality is that the average electric bill is now from 30-60% higher than it was before. You, sir, have been duped.
It's said that you stop seeing the difference at around 30 fps
:-) And then there's FSAA to remove the pixelation even more.
And 16 million colours is more than the eye can see, and 44,100 samples per second is more than the ear can hear. Throughout the march of technology we've heard these ridiculously arbitrary "limits" of our senses, and invariably they are discounted at a future time. In essence you can consider them a sort of justification.
but so far I've only heard comparisons with movies and TV
Actually I've been paying attention at movies having heard the "well movies are 24fps and they look perfect": MOVIES LOOK LIKE TRASH. Seriously the next time you go to the movies pay close attention to any large movements on the screen and you'll be surprized how horrendous 24fps really is. For instance, my wife recently dragged me to see "Two Weeks Notice" and there is a scene where the camera pans laterally across a shelf full of shoes at a rate of about a screen width per 1/2 second-- It looks absolutely atrocious. For fast action most filmmakers either resort to the action taking a small portion of the screen, or they use slow motion effects, again because the action simply looks terrible at 24fps.
However when you get down to it the root of the "X FPS is more than anyone can see" is people's astoundingly self-centered claims that no-one else can see more than 30fps, or some other metric. This can be disproved instantly via the Q3 command cg_maxfps. Set it to 30 and it looks like a horrendous slideshow. Set it to 45 and it looks like a 1998 computer. Set it to 80 and it feels smooth with a bit of jaggedness. Set it to 90 and it feels nice. You'd think this would disprove the 30fps'ers in an instant, but amazingly they persist.
and then complain that a gfx card sucks since it doesn't perform good enough in 1600x1200. It's not like you have enough time to spot the microscopic pixels anyway.
1600x1200 on a 19" monitor is hardly "microscopic" pixels, however to consider this in a forward thinking manner consider the heavyweight video-card required to do 1080p resolutions on a HDTV set? 1920x1024.
FSAA, BTW, is tremendously difficult for video-cards to do (because they're actually rendering at 2x or greater resolutions): There is no current video card that could dream of doing even Urban Terror (a Q3 mod) at 1600x1200 with FSAA at acceptable frame-rates.