Exactly. Some of the best games are OpenGL. Like one game I've got on preorder for June: Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. Check out the in-game footage. The game looks to be one of the biggest online FPS games of the year. It's not missing anything by omitting DX10.
When you have a shooter in one of several hundred buildings on a sprawling city-like campus with 40000 adults, you don't lock anything down unless you want to live in a vastly different society than I.
I think I already do live in a different society than you do: one that is much safer. I think there's still about 12 homicides a year in my state. So metal detectors and armed guards aren't exactly commonplace. But we take murdererers and in the case of the hospital, potential baby kidnappers, very seriously. I'm not sure exactly what your comment "a vastly different society than I" was supposed to mean, but I think extra security for at least 24 hours after 2 people were murdered is not to much to ask, even in an "open society" in a more murderous state.
If it had happened at UVM, I know the dorms and major buildings would be locked down and they'd be looking for the killer. Everyone would know about it immediately, likely through TV and radio combined with word-of-mouth. Again, I know we're talking about a larger campus, but the first incident still happened on campus, correct? And the second incident happened in one of the university's major buildings, correct? So what I want to know is what was the emergency plan for that building and what additional security did they have there? In my opinion, emergency planning does not make you a less "free" and "open" society. And it does a lot more than gun control or widespread gun-carrying would have done in this case. You don't have control over murderers. You do have control over your emergency planning. It is that simple.
Working for a hospital, I'm familiar with their lockdown procedures and surprised that a college does not have the same procedures. From what I've heard, the first shooting took place in a dorm and killed 2 people, on campus. Then the second shooting happened 2 hours later in an engineering hall, killing 31 people? And he barricaded himself in the engineering hall during the shooting?
Why wasn't the engineering hall and any other major building in the facility locked down with restricted entry and armed campus or city police guarding the doors and inspecting people for weapons? Wouldn't that make sense if you were looking for a shooter, in any type of facility? I know that's what they'd do in a medium-sized hospital. I don't know why that wouldn't be in the emergency plans of a college, at least for the primary buildings and the dorms and other smaller buildings in the vicinity of the first shooting.
I don't know enough about this story yet, but rather than arguing for/against gun control, it seems like the first defense would have been the emergency plans and increased police presence. Even if he wasn't a mass-murderer yet at 2 killings, he was still a murderer loose on campus at that point. Maybe they did increase security in the engineering hall, and I'm just not aware of it. But that's the first thing I'd look into in this case for preventing additional shootings.
Re:joe user doesnt have to have a ripping utility.
on
AACS Cracked Again
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· Score: 1
it's not my fault a group of teens and twenties in their garages and college dorms are vastly better at video encoding than the cartel mastering houses
Well, they think they are. That's for sure. But if you want a horribly compressed DVD5 at 720p, why not take the DVD9, resize it to 720p, then compress that to H.264. You end up with almost the same result. In other words, it has the quality of the DVD. You might as well just get the DVD.
A 15 GB MPEG-2 HD movie might compress well to a DVD9. Not a DVD5. And not the 30-45 GB Blu-Ray rips. The smallest that makes any sense for those is 2x DVD9 (9-18 GB H.264).
H.264 is damn good. But it is not magic. MD5 and SHA-1 will compress an HD movie to fit on a DVD5 too, but it's a bit lossy...
Looks like as with all media post-internet, the solution is to cut out the middle man:
1) writers/directors/actors focus on creating good movies; -->2) movie distribution/marketing companies focus on wasting money on copy protecting their media.<-- (hackers concentrate ruining the cop protection efforts;) 3) the general consumer looks at the easier way to get their movie, be it rental/torrent/buy DVD/p2p: whatever seems better value.
Re:joe user doesnt have to have a ripping utility.
on
AACS Cracked Again
·
· Score: 1
hd-dvd and bd rips have been showing up on trackers as early as the first crack, and to make things even cushier from a fair use perspective, the media files are generally small enough to burn to a single layer dvd-r...
I don't know if I'd call those <DVD-size downloads HD-DVD "rips".
We could call them...I don't know...Is "shreds" taken?
1) Console players will get owned by PC players. Console gamers will either segregate to their own servers or give up.
2) They give console players auto-aim or some other cheat. There won't be a level playing field so you won't be able to tell how good a player actually is.
You could be right. I just picked one of each at random. Quicktime gives a "data rate" in bytes (~1MBps) too, and I don't trust it to convert correctly to match normal apps' bitrate. Thank $deity for MPC and ffdshow. They make H.264 viewing so much more convenient (and so much less CPU-intensive for my C2D).
Or to put it simply: Do you notice a difference in picture quality when playing a game at 1600x1200 vs. lower resolutions? Absolutely. I sit about 2 feet away from my monitor, and if I move my head back a foot, I still notice a difference. I'd say at 3-4' I notice a difference on a 19" monitor. So we're talking about a 50"+ TV from 8' away? We're talking over twice the size of display at twice the distance. Of course you're still going to notice a difference.
As I said in my other post, one of the few (possibly the only) stations broadcasting in 1080p is BBC's Sky station, though obviously not in the US. They also use H.264 instead of MPEG-2. You can find some of their 1080p movies online if you look hard enough.
When most people talk about 1080p, they often are implying 1080p at 60 frames per second. Most Hollywood movies are actually 1080p but at 24fps which can be carried using 1080i bandwidths and using pulldown. And you don't want to change the frame rate of these movies anyway because it's a waste of bandwidth and, if you frame rate convert it using motion compensated techniques, you lose the suspension of reality that low frame rates give you. The TV's deinterlacer needs to know how to deal with pulldown (aka "film mode") but most new DTVs can do this fairly well.
I agree with you for movies, but broadcast television shows are still a PITA to deal with. They're seldom/never 24 fps, and there is no way to reconstruct progressive frames from 29.97 fps interlaced (not pulldown) TV. I suppose the difference is whether specific content is recorded in progressive or interlaced that matters.
BBC's Sky broadcasts some movies in 1080p. They actually use H.264 within a transport stream, which looks pretty good.
Here is an example of one of their movies I have: Domino, an OAR broadcast, so its actual res is 1920x800 or so. It looks much better than DVD to me. I also have the DVD around here somewhere, but no caps from it to compare to.
Noone really want to go 0-60 in 3.5 seconds and reach 175mph, unless they're looking to die, and do it as fast as possible.
A car with good acceleration, good braking (which it has because it is so light), and tight steering is the safest car to drive. Inertia kills. If you can quickly avoid an obstacle or accelerate out of a bad situation, you're much better off.
Suppose I pay $15 per month to have access to any songs I want. But what songs do I want? I'm not going to go through a catalog of 2 or 3 million songs and figure out what's good and what sucks! I have better things to do with my day! And I already own my favorite songs on CD, so I'm certainly not going to rent them again. So what do I get from the subscription model? Absolutely nothing. I still have to do all the work.
So make it a real service. Do some research. Use other people's research. Come up with genre playlists and let people subscribe to them. Find worthwhile podcasts and hire/pay people to make them daily/weekly and let people subscribe to them.
What you're looking for sounds a lot like Yahoo Music (Launch). They've been around forever, though they've changed names. It's basically personalized radio, based on your ratings, like something Amazon or Netflix might provide. The high quality stream is only $4/month. I've subscribed to them a few times and rated thousands of tracks. It's decent at selecting songs you might like, although it has a bit too much pop-ish stuff for my tastes now.
I wrote in my thesis a couple years ago that DAPs would eventually get Wi-Fi and personalized portable radio (similar to Launch) would be the next big thing. But alas, we have (crippled) Wi-Fi now, but still no good personalized streaming radio services. Ideally, the DAP would allow you to rate radio tracks on-the-fly conveniently, including skipping songs you don't like, and allow you to keep songs you do like, possibly by purchasing them separately. But the most important aspect is the recommendation engine, which should be good at introducing you to new music similar to what you already like. And the idea that it would act like your ideal radio station, continuously playing a mix of your favorite old songs and a selection of new ones.
The Core Duo -> C2D upgrade is more significant than that, practically speaking. The performance of nearly 100% of the apps you're likely to use will increase, as well as possibly saving battery power and other improvements. Because it is a new architecture.
Moving from quad- to octo- is less significant because first off, hardly anyone buys a machine that beefy. But beyond that, it's not likely to improve the performance at all unless you run a server, or >4 100% CPU maxed processes on your computer. Even then, you're likely to be limited by disk I/O or memory constraints. Unless you buy even more ridiculous upgrades for a desktop computer.
you think 2K and 98 had a slowing effect on XP uptake, I'd say XP will slow Vista much worse.
Which says a lot about the quality of XP SP2, relative to 98/ME. Even if Vista was the exact same OS as XP with a different name, if XP was completely awful, people would jump ship to see what was new immediately. They seem pretty satisfied with their current computers that came with XP preinstalled instead. It's stable. Third party drivers generally don't crash it. It runs almost everything they could want to run. It's biggest problem has been security, but as far as virus propagation, they've mostly stopped that with SP2. It's not everything I'd want in an OS, but for most people, it's good enough.
In the OS X version of Firefox, the menus aren't Mac-like at all.
As someone who uses Firefox on OS X, Windows, and Linux, I'd rather they keep the UI consistent across all platforms, at least as far as menu placement.
Though it could use a clean-up on all platforms. Personally, I use Menu Editor extension to hide everything except History, Bookmarks, and Tools. It's a browser, not a word-processor. I don't need File and Edit.
They don't each have a full 16 lanes of signaling backing them up. There is probably 16 total lanes, so if both are in use they get 8 lanes per, despite being electrically 16x.
It better have 40 total lanes if they're trying to get close to 680i performance. 680i has 40 lanes total, two x16 SLI and one x8 intended for a physics card, but which can be used for anything. If the Dual x16 SLI doesn't even have 32 or 40 total lanes, it's not really in the same league. Surely it does, right? Or is that another disadvantage to this mb?
I was looking forward to drooling over a newer board design than my 680i. This isn't even as good as that. The "hybrid" part is just a cross between flagship and mainstream. There's a more common term for that: mid-range.
Like it or not, Apple now has to cater to a lot of different markets, and the best way to do that is to let the pro users configure the machines themselves.
Hmm...it appears they changed the store to have only one configurable model, and you can pick any gfx card you want. Last time I checked a week or two ago, the base model's gfx card couldn't be updated past 7300 GT. Not a problem now then, I guess. The price for the "base model" (configured down) seems more expensive though...
I grew tired of my 320 GB drive always having 10 GB free for recording TV and downloading from USENET that I added a 1 TB RAID-0. Filled in up in a week. Though it is easier and less time-consuming to find 100 GB of crap to delete/burn on a 1.3 TB box than it was to free up 10-20 GB daily on a 320 GB box, so I guess that's a plus.
I know others have said it, and you even hinted at it yourself. There is a key thing that most people miss when looking at the Mac Pro (or G5's when they were out), which is they are specifically a WORKSTATION. The kind of WORKSTATION that does the kind of WORK that involves a *lot* of processing power, such as physics, bioinformatics, and video/image crunching.
I think the only one of those that wouldn't benefit from a faster video card is bioinformatics.
It's definitely the case that editing HD video would benefit. Actually if it didn't have such an overdone processor, it would stutter on H.264 1080p with that video card. Not having MPEG-2 and H.264 hardware acceleration puts a much larger load on the processor until it hits 100% and you drop frames. 7600 GT would really be the minimum good video card for HD, with the 8800's accelerating it even more.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. Some of the best games are OpenGL. Like one game I've got on preorder for June: Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. Check out the in-game footage. The game looks to be one of the biggest online FPS games of the year. It's not missing anything by omitting DX10.
I think I already do live in a different society than you do: one that is much safer. I think there's still about 12 homicides a year in my state. So metal detectors and armed guards aren't exactly commonplace. But we take murdererers and in the case of the hospital, potential baby kidnappers, very seriously. I'm not sure exactly what your comment "a vastly different society than I" was supposed to mean, but I think extra security for at least 24 hours after 2 people were murdered is not to much to ask, even in an "open society" in a more murderous state.
If it had happened at UVM, I know the dorms and major buildings would be locked down and they'd be looking for the killer. Everyone would know about it immediately, likely through TV and radio combined with word-of-mouth. Again, I know we're talking about a larger campus, but the first incident still happened on campus, correct? And the second incident happened in one of the university's major buildings, correct? So what I want to know is what was the emergency plan for that building and what additional security did they have there? In my opinion, emergency planning does not make you a less "free" and "open" society. And it does a lot more than gun control or widespread gun-carrying would have done in this case. You don't have control over murderers. You do have control over your emergency planning. It is that simple.
Working for a hospital, I'm familiar with their lockdown procedures and surprised that a college does not have the same procedures. From what I've heard, the first shooting took place in a dorm and killed 2 people, on campus. Then the second shooting happened 2 hours later in an engineering hall, killing 31 people? And he barricaded himself in the engineering hall during the shooting?
Why wasn't the engineering hall and any other major building in the facility locked down with restricted entry and armed campus or city police guarding the doors and inspecting people for weapons? Wouldn't that make sense if you were looking for a shooter, in any type of facility? I know that's what they'd do in a medium-sized hospital. I don't know why that wouldn't be in the emergency plans of a college, at least for the primary buildings and the dorms and other smaller buildings in the vicinity of the first shooting.
I don't know enough about this story yet, but rather than arguing for/against gun control, it seems like the first defense would have been the emergency plans and increased police presence. Even if he wasn't a mass-murderer yet at 2 killings, he was still a murderer loose on campus at that point. Maybe they did increase security in the engineering hall, and I'm just not aware of it. But that's the first thing I'd look into in this case for preventing additional shootings.
Well, they think they are. That's for sure. But if you want a horribly compressed DVD5 at 720p, why not take the DVD9, resize it to 720p, then compress that to H.264. You end up with almost the same result. In other words, it has the quality of the DVD. You might as well just get the DVD.
A 15 GB MPEG-2 HD movie might compress well to a DVD9. Not a DVD5. And not the 30-45 GB Blu-Ray rips. The smallest that makes any sense for those is 2x DVD9 (9-18 GB H.264).
H.264 is damn good. But it is not magic. MD5 and SHA-1 will compress an HD movie to fit on a DVD5 too, but it's a bit lossy...
I don't know if I'd call those <DVD-size downloads HD-DVD "rips".
We could call them...I don't know...Is "shreds" taken?
1) Console players will get owned by PC players. Console gamers will either segregate to their own servers or give up.
2) They give console players auto-aim or some other cheat. There won't be a level playing field so you won't be able to tell how good a player actually is.
You could be right. I just picked one of each at random. Quicktime gives a "data rate" in bytes (~1MBps) too, and I don't trust it to convert correctly to match normal apps' bitrate. Thank $deity for MPC and ffdshow. They make H.264 viewing so much more convenient (and so much less CPU-intensive for my C2D).
Or to put it simply: Do you notice a difference in picture quality when playing a game at 1600x1200 vs. lower resolutions? Absolutely. I sit about 2 feet away from my monitor, and if I move my head back a foot, I still notice a difference. I'd say at 3-4' I notice a difference on a 19" monitor. So we're talking about a 50"+ TV from 8' away? We're talking over twice the size of display at twice the distance. Of course you're still going to notice a difference.
As I said in my other post, one of the few (possibly the only) stations broadcasting in 1080p is BBC's Sky station, though obviously not in the US. They also use H.264 instead of MPEG-2. You can find some of their 1080p movies online if you look hard enough.
I agree with you for movies, but broadcast television shows are still a PITA to deal with. They're seldom/never 24 fps, and there is no way to reconstruct progressive frames from 29.97 fps interlaced (not pulldown) TV. I suppose the difference is whether specific content is recorded in progressive or interlaced that matters.
I think you mean the difference between compressed 18 MBps 1080i MPEG-2 streams and Apple's compressed 8 MBps 1080p H.264 streams.
BBC's Sky broadcasts some movies in 1080p. They actually use H.264 within a transport stream, which looks pretty good.
Here is an example of one of their movies I have: Domino, an OAR broadcast, so its actual res is 1920x800 or so. It looks much better than DVD to me. I also have the DVD around here somewhere, but no caps from it to compare to.
Yea but good luck getting DRM'd iTMS files to play in that.
A car with good acceleration, good braking (which it has because it is so light), and tight steering is the safest car to drive. Inertia kills. If you can quickly avoid an obstacle or accelerate out of a bad situation, you're much better off.
What you're looking for sounds a lot like Yahoo Music (Launch). They've been around forever, though they've changed names. It's basically personalized radio, based on your ratings, like something Amazon or Netflix might provide. The high quality stream is only $4/month. I've subscribed to them a few times and rated thousands of tracks. It's decent at selecting songs you might like, although it has a bit too much pop-ish stuff for my tastes now.
I wrote in my thesis a couple years ago that DAPs would eventually get Wi-Fi and personalized portable radio (similar to Launch) would be the next big thing. But alas, we have (crippled) Wi-Fi now, but still no good personalized streaming radio services. Ideally, the DAP would allow you to rate radio tracks on-the-fly conveniently, including skipping songs you don't like, and allow you to keep songs you do like, possibly by purchasing them separately. But the most important aspect is the recommendation engine, which should be good at introducing you to new music similar to what you already like. And the idea that it would act like your ideal radio station, continuously playing a mix of your favorite old songs and a selection of new ones.
The Core Duo -> C2D upgrade is more significant than that, practically speaking. The performance of nearly 100% of the apps you're likely to use will increase, as well as possibly saving battery power and other improvements. Because it is a new architecture.
Moving from quad- to octo- is less significant because first off, hardly anyone buys a machine that beefy. But beyond that, it's not likely to improve the performance at all unless you run a server, or >4 100% CPU maxed processes on your computer. Even then, you're likely to be limited by disk I/O or memory constraints. Unless you buy even more ridiculous upgrades for a desktop computer.
Which says a lot about the quality of XP SP2, relative to 98/ME. Even if Vista was the exact same OS as XP with a different name, if XP was completely awful, people would jump ship to see what was new immediately. They seem pretty satisfied with their current computers that came with XP preinstalled instead. It's stable. Third party drivers generally don't crash it. It runs almost everything they could want to run. It's biggest problem has been security, but as far as virus propagation, they've mostly stopped that with SP2. It's not everything I'd want in an OS, but for most people, it's good enough.
As someone who uses Firefox on OS X, Windows, and Linux, I'd rather they keep the UI consistent across all platforms, at least as far as menu placement.
Though it could use a clean-up on all platforms. Personally, I use Menu Editor extension to hide everything except History, Bookmarks, and Tools. It's a browser, not a word-processor. I don't need File and Edit.
It better have 40 total lanes if they're trying to get close to 680i performance. 680i has 40 lanes total, two x16 SLI and one x8 intended for a physics card, but which can be used for anything. If the Dual x16 SLI doesn't even have 32 or 40 total lanes, it's not really in the same league. Surely it does, right? Or is that another disadvantage to this mb?
I was looking forward to drooling over a newer board design than my 680i. This isn't even as good as that. The "hybrid" part is just a cross between flagship and mainstream. There's a more common term for that: mid-range.
Nvm, I was looking at iMacs. Cheapest HD-capable solution was $2125. I have a bad memory, apparently.
Hmm...it appears they changed the store to have only one configurable model, and you can pick any gfx card you want. Last time I checked a week or two ago, the base model's gfx card couldn't be updated past 7300 GT. Not a problem now then, I guess. The price for the "base model" (configured down) seems more expensive though...
I grew tired of my 320 GB drive always having 10 GB free for recording TV and downloading from USENET that I added a 1 TB RAID-0. Filled in up in a week. Though it is easier and less time-consuming to find 100 GB of crap to delete/burn on a 1.3 TB box than it was to free up 10-20 GB daily on a 320 GB box, so I guess that's a plus.
I think the only one of those that wouldn't benefit from a faster video card is bioinformatics.
It's definitely the case that editing HD video would benefit. Actually if it didn't have such an overdone processor, it would stutter on H.264 1080p with that video card. Not having MPEG-2 and H.264 hardware acceleration puts a much larger load on the processor until it hits 100% and you drop frames. 7600 GT would really be the minimum good video card for HD, with the 8800's accelerating it even more.