Let me guess. You're a lot younger than I am. I don't even have my PS2, but I'm talking about PS2 release time here (2000) and how most people in their teens/early twenties then didn't already have a DVD player. Note, umm, all the past tense. For most, it was their only DVD player for a few years.
I never had one skip, but I'm not still using one, so maybe they get old. XBMC didn't even exist then.
Point being, as stated before, the DVD player in the PS2 was the sole DVD player for many PS2 buyers that weren't really, really late in the game.
Also, not like it needs to be stated, but most people bought a PS2, not an Xbox.
Out of everyone that I know that had a PS2, maybe 10 people, only one of them also had a DVD player. All of them played movies on their PS2. I don't know how you can not consider that a significant selling point of the PS2.
Ha, that's true. I still have my 5 year old Alpine deck and never bought an iPod, so I haven't thought about this much, but that's pretty obvious.
The best way to integrate an iPod with your car is to buy a deck. Works with all makes and models. I don't know why you'd spend that much on an iPod and then keep your stock deck anyway.
You're also degrading the sound quality by running it through FM. You end up with about 50Hz to 15KHz frequency range, where your car's system is probably capable of 20-30Hz to 20KHz, at least. You lose a considerable range of bass and the really high end treble.
I really hate replying to this, because there are so many people that make these Apple worshiping posts that I won't have time to reply to all of them. But I really can't take much more of this.
Apple's UIs are not good. Take iTunes 7 for example. The search has no autocomplete. The iTunes store browser has no right-click to give you a Back option. When you purchase a track or get a podcast, it gives you no indication it has started other than a small indicator next to Downloads. When a download finishes and you're on the downloads page, it always flips you back to Music library, even if you were previously browsing the store, tv shows, or podcasts.
The store breadcrumb is horribly broken. If you have Home->TV Shows->Eureka->Eureka Season 1 and you click Eureka, it takes you to the page you're already on. There is no way to get to their podcasts other than searching for Eureka again. If you're at Home->Music->System of a Down->Music Videos->Hypnotize and you click Music Videos, it doesn't show you all of SOAD's music videos, it shows you ALL music videos. That is not a breadcrumb. So they shouldn't make it look like one.
iTunes has 2 font sizes: small (8pt) and large (10 or 12pt). Neither of those work well when viewing from a distance. They wouldn't work at all for someone with poor eyesight. Bad accessibility is not good UI.
Nevermind that Quicktime makes you pay for full-screen, or that QT7 only works with admin accounts on Windows until you change the permissions in the registry for the QTControl. Or that iTunes causes the Windows installer to pop up for 5-10 seconds everytime I open it, doing what seems to be rebuilding its already existing shortcuts. Both of those aren't bad UI, just poor programming in general.
I could continue explaining every single annoyance I find in Apple's UIs, but I understand that some people would have a problem with that. Some of the accessibility issues are bad UI, no question, regardless of personal preference. But it may be worth stating, that if many people bump into the same usability issues, and like me, they find that Apple products have a higher frequency of these issues than almost every other program that they use, Apple is not revolutionizing UIs. They're making them harder to use, but with better branding and marketing.
If you have a hotmail or msn account, enter that instead to skip the verification. It will just show you your Product Key right on the screen, along with an email containing the product key. But no verification email preceeding that.
Yeah but I wasn't replying to him, I was replying to you. Nothing in your post mentioned anything about other OSes bootloaders, just Windows.
And I'm not that surprised that it doesn't play nicely with other systems' bootloaders. If you type grub-install it doesn't play nicely with MS's either. Nor would Apple's if you ran linux on a Mac.
It would be nice if it did. But there was no WHOOSH. I was replying to what you said, not what you meant to say.
In addition, once you install Windows Vista RC1, you cannot roll back to the previous operating system installation--you will either have to acquire and install the final released edition of Windows Vista or reinstall a previous edition of Windows
Nice way of getting people to forget that XP already does everything they need, and locking them into having to buy an upgrade at retail prices.
Unless you install to a different partition/disk. Then it's no problem rolling it back.
Microsoft's always been much better at this stuff than anyone else who designs for their platform. SQL Server, Data Access frameworks, Visual Studio: all install without reboot. Office and most of their home apps too I believe. Almost every MS product that ships on CD now prompts for an admin password if you're not admin.
They put all their shortcuts in the Programs folder (usually even in All Users where it should be), and regularly have good help files built into the programs.
They've basically been doing most of this stuff for quite some time, but they likely saw that Apple had some success with documenting and "evangelizing" and decided to give it a shot too.
Yeah, you didn't come right out and say it's your site. You pretended like someone else started. I don't know how I can make that any more clear to you. And you are a dick. There I said it this time. Happy?
Have you ever done more than read the spec sheets on these signals? NTSC is a lousy signal, and yet you're touting it as if it were coming out of a DVI port!
Or actually tried recording it. I record several shows in the highest quality I can from cable, then get a copy again on iTunes to get versions with far less noise in the picture. Even with H.264, it's still slightly blocky in freeze frame, but the lack of analog noise more than makes up for it.
Also, no matter how much tweaking I do, I can never seem to get the analogue recordings with just the right saturation/intensity. I don't have to worry about adjusting that for every channel when I can just download a perfect copy from iTMS/Amazon.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't most movies still shot on 24 fps film?
And DVDs/HDDVDs/BluRay are either p/24 or telecined to i/60?
And reconstructing (IVTC) p/24 from i/60 looks exactly the same as p/24?
You need p/60 source film or broadcasts for p/60 TVs to do anything useful. Unless "upscaling to 1080p" in games means something different than for movies, in which case you might see some benefit for games.
When MS finally realizes that all design (phisical or virtual) must adhere to "form follows function", rather than "function follows form", "function follows corporate strategy", or "form follows corporate strategy" then they will produce a natural, usable interface.
You should really be talking to Apple about that. They have excellent UI simplicity, but there are so many times when I just wish they'd show me what is going on, a progress bar or two here and there. Or being able to right-click at almost all times to get handy shortcuts. Or not having to click inside a window first before my clicks start doing anything with that app.
Apple is much more "function follows form". MS is more "form follows function", even if that means making everything all ugly.
Well, I just priced out a new workstation comparing the top of the line MacPro and an equivalently configured Dell. I ended up buying the 3.0Ghz version of the MacPro for $1000 cheaper than an equivalent Dell.
You should probably mention that you are comparing Apple's top desktop to a top Dell Precision workstation from the Small Business section. As another poster said, businesses don't actually pay that much when they buy more than one.
More importantly, your statement only holds true at the very top end...of the business market...without any discounts.
I think MS just can't stand to let someone else be more evil than them in a particular market. They saw Apple, with its DRM lock-in, and once they considered themselves as players in the market, rather than spectators, they decided they'd prefer to use Apple's strategy.
They liked the idea that Apple owns the market and created an entry barrier to competitors by locking them into their DRM, and decided if they're going to beat Apple (in their minds, they always will), they need to be just as evil as Apple in their DRM strategy.
I truly don't think MS leaders can see an opportunity to be evil, especially when they know it worked for the market leader, and pass it up.
Slashdot Mirror
One slightly* annoying aspect of that bump is that you had to repurchase anything you had bought at 320x240.
* I say "slightly" because I was lucky enough to only have 2 or 3 videos at that quality.
Let me guess. You're a lot younger than I am. I don't even have my PS2, but I'm talking about PS2 release time here (2000) and how most people in their teens/early twenties then didn't already have a DVD player. Note, umm, all the past tense. For most, it was their only DVD player for a few years.
I never had one skip, but I'm not still using one, so maybe they get old. XBMC didn't even exist then.
Point being, as stated before, the DVD player in the PS2 was the sole DVD player for many PS2 buyers that weren't really, really late in the game.
Also, not like it needs to be stated, but most people bought a PS2, not an Xbox.
Out of everyone that I know that had a PS2, maybe 10 people, only one of them also had a DVD player. All of them played movies on their PS2. I don't know how you can not consider that a significant selling point of the PS2.
Ha, that's true. I still have my 5 year old Alpine deck and never bought an iPod, so I haven't thought about this much, but that's pretty obvious.
The best way to integrate an iPod with your car is to buy a deck. Works with all makes and models. I don't know why you'd spend that much on an iPod and then keep your stock deck anyway.
You're also degrading the sound quality by running it through FM. You end up with about 50Hz to 15KHz frequency range, where your car's system is probably capable of 20-30Hz to 20KHz, at least. You lose a considerable range of bass and the really high end treble.
I really hate replying to this, because there are so many people that make these Apple worshiping posts that I won't have time to reply to all of them. But I really can't take much more of this.
Apple's UIs are not good. Take iTunes 7 for example. The search has no autocomplete. The iTunes store browser has no right-click to give you a Back option. When you purchase a track or get a podcast, it gives you no indication it has started other than a small indicator next to Downloads. When a download finishes and you're on the downloads page, it always flips you back to Music library, even if you were previously browsing the store, tv shows, or podcasts.
The store breadcrumb is horribly broken. If you have Home->TV Shows->Eureka->Eureka Season 1 and you click Eureka, it takes you to the page you're already on. There is no way to get to their podcasts other than searching for Eureka again. If you're at Home->Music->System of a Down->Music Videos->Hypnotize and you click Music Videos, it doesn't show you all of SOAD's music videos, it shows you ALL music videos. That is not a breadcrumb. So they shouldn't make it look like one.
iTunes has 2 font sizes: small (8pt) and large (10 or 12pt). Neither of those work well when viewing from a distance. They wouldn't work at all for someone with poor eyesight. Bad accessibility is not good UI.
Nevermind that Quicktime makes you pay for full-screen, or that QT7 only works with admin accounts on Windows until you change the permissions in the registry for the QTControl. Or that iTunes causes the Windows installer to pop up for 5-10 seconds everytime I open it, doing what seems to be rebuilding its already existing shortcuts. Both of those aren't bad UI, just poor programming in general.
I could continue explaining every single annoyance I find in Apple's UIs, but I understand that some people would have a problem with that. Some of the accessibility issues are bad UI, no question, regardless of personal preference. But it may be worth stating, that if many people bump into the same usability issues, and like me, they find that Apple products have a higher frequency of these issues than almost every other program that they use, Apple is not revolutionizing UIs. They're making them harder to use, but with better branding and marketing.
Oh, no! Clear Channel might get knocked off the air! What a shame that would be.
The only good story in the past 6 hours and it's /.ed.
Time to lose some brain cells reading such interesting stories as "I'm a PC Guy" uses a Mac.
If you have a hotmail or msn account, enter that instead to skip the verification. It will just show you your Product Key right on the screen, along with an email containing the product key. But no verification email preceeding that.
Yeah but I wasn't replying to him, I was replying to you. Nothing in your post mentioned anything about other OSes bootloaders, just Windows.
And I'm not that surprised that it doesn't play nicely with other systems' bootloaders. If you type grub-install it doesn't play nicely with MS's either. Nor would Apple's if you ran linux on a Mac.
It would be nice if it did. But there was no WHOOSH. I was replying to what you said, not what you meant to say.
Yeah, it upgrades it when you pick upgrade, just like it always has.
Unless you install to a different partition/disk, then it just adds another entry in boot.ini for you to select when it starts up, like it always has.
You'll need a product key from here. Pull down "select your location" in the Download section. Fill out some stuff and you get a product key.
Unless you install to a different partition/disk. Then it's no problem rolling it back.
After buying $30 or so of videos from each service, Amazon blows iTMS away.
iTMS finally got 640x480 videos, but they're still ~240 MB / 0.5 hr compared to Amazon's 550 MB, for the same price.
The blockiness of iTMS videos is still very apparent. Amazon's look very close to DVD quality.
Microsoft's always been much better at this stuff than anyone else who designs for their platform. SQL Server, Data Access frameworks, Visual Studio: all install without reboot. Office and most of their home apps too I believe. Almost every MS product that ships on CD now prompts for an admin password if you're not admin.
They put all their shortcuts in the Programs folder (usually even in All Users where it should be), and regularly have good help files built into the programs.
They've basically been doing most of this stuff for quite some time, but they likely saw that Apple had some success with documenting and "evangelizing" and decided to give it a shot too.
The GVI files that you download are just AVIs with a different extension.
The GVP files are just text files that you can open to get a link to the AVI/GVI.
The files are actually OpenDivX encoded.
I just use FLVSplitter and open them in any DirectShow capable player/editor. WMP or MPC work.
Usually I run them through an AviSynth DirectShowSource() script and then open them in VirtualDub, where I can apply filters, edit, and/or reencode.
Yeah, you didn't come right out and say it's your site. You pretended like someone else started. I don't know how I can make that any more clear to you. And you are a dick. There I said it this time. Happy?
Relax. I wasn't calling you a dick.
Just pointing out that which was obscured by your language (as if it wasn't obvious by your name).
hmm...MrFinanceForum.com...I wonder whose forum that would be?
Or actually tried recording it. I record several shows in the highest quality I can from cable, then get a copy again on iTunes to get versions with far less noise in the picture. Even with H.264, it's still slightly blocky in freeze frame, but the lack of analog noise more than makes up for it.
Also, no matter how much tweaking I do, I can never seem to get the analogue recordings with just the right saturation/intensity. I don't have to worry about adjusting that for every channel when I can just download a perfect copy from iTMS/Amazon.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't most movies still shot on 24 fps film?
And DVDs/HDDVDs/BluRay are either p/24 or telecined to i/60?
And reconstructing (IVTC) p/24 from i/60 looks exactly the same as p/24?
You need p/60 source film or broadcasts for p/60 TVs to do anything useful. Unless "upscaling to 1080p" in games means something different than for movies, in which case you might see some benefit for games.
You should really be talking to Apple about that. They have excellent UI simplicity, but there are so many times when I just wish they'd show me what is going on, a progress bar or two here and there. Or being able to right-click at almost all times to get handy shortcuts. Or not having to click inside a window first before my clicks start doing anything with that app.
Apple is much more "function follows form". MS is more "form follows function", even if that means making everything all ugly.
You should probably mention that you are comparing Apple's top desktop to a top Dell Precision workstation from the Small Business section. As another poster said, businesses don't actually pay that much when they buy more than one.
More importantly, your statement only holds true at the very top end...of the business market...without any discounts.
I think MS just can't stand to let someone else be more evil than them in a particular market. They saw Apple, with its DRM lock-in, and once they considered themselves as players in the market, rather than spectators, they decided they'd prefer to use Apple's strategy.
They liked the idea that Apple owns the market and created an entry barrier to competitors by locking them into their DRM, and decided if they're going to beat Apple (in their minds, they always will), they need to be just as evil as Apple in their DRM strategy.
I truly don't think MS leaders can see an opportunity to be evil, especially when they know it worked for the market leader, and pass it up.