Jay

reave said:

Sigh. I hate to see these rifts.

You can't create drama and expect it not to follow you around.

Teh innernets never forget.

C3PX said:

That may very well be the most misinformed, ignorant bullshit I have ever read on this site.

I think he's being facetious and poking fun at boon.

zombie84 said:

Thats like saying we should remove brush strokes from oil paintings. Its part of the texture of the medium. Filmmakers and cinematographers are well aware that grain exists and work WITH it, chosing deliberate film stocks for the grain quality. This notion that grain=bad is firstly dumb but secondly ignorant. Its SUPPOSED to be there because its film.

Exactly. Digital restoration is one thing, but grain removal is NOT restoration. It's destruction.

Like pan and scan vs. original aspect ratio during DVD's growth years, it looks like enthusiasts are going to have another battle against the clueless masses with Blu-ray thanks to DNR misused in the name of film grain removal and image "clarity."

I keep reading words like "forced" in regards to consumer adoption of Blu-ray and "replace" in regards to some people's current DVD library. I must have missed something, because I wasn't aware that DVD was a dead format. I also didn't realize that DVDs you've already purchased somehow stopped working now that Blu-ray is here, and that you have to replace your entire library with Blu-ray versions.

The DVD format has many years of life left in it. The DVDs you own now will continue to provide the same experience they always have, and it's pretty much a sure thing that any Blu-ray player released in the future will be be able to play DVDs, so you're covered on the hardware front. When your DVD player finally dies, buy a Blu-ray player cheap and continue to enjoy your DVD library, while buying future titles on Blu-ray.

The way some of you talk, you'd think there was a gun pointed at you. So much unnecessary angst over a home video format.

Didn't you just kind of argue my point? If the "average movie watcher" doesn't perceive that much of a difference, why so much bitching about high prices? Just watch DVDs and be happy. Enough complaining about $300 Blu-ray players like they're some kind of outrageously priced luxury item.

American consumers have such an unbelievable sense of entitlement.

Vinyl doesn't rely upon "steps" at all. It's an analog waveform.

The biggest limitation of vinyl is the frequency response, which has a narrower range than CD. It cuts off around 18KHz I believe, whereas CD goes to about 20KHz. However, most people over 25 can't hear 20KHz very well anyway.

You hear in analog. Hearing music recorded on vinyl is like hearing live music, even with the low-level hiss and occasional clicks and pops.

If you hear a difference between music on CD and a live performance, you'll hear a difference between high-quality vinyl on a decent setup and the same recording on a CD.

Digital recording, by its very nature, is lossy. Sound occurs in waves, and a digital recording can only approximate those waveforms. That's where the sample rate comes in and that's why many audiophiles weren't happy about the introduction of CDs; they didn't think the sample rate was high enough. CD players can use oversampling to smooth out the digital stairsteps, but in the end, that's no different than an upscaling DVD player. You can't reintroduce detail that's been lost; you can only approximate it.

DVD-Audio and SACD represent very good improvements in digital audio because they have a much higher sample rate than CD, reintroducing that analog "warmth" so many people claim is missing from CDs.

To my ears, the best audio I've heard is newly pressed vinyl produced from analog master tapes. The DVD-Audio recordings I've heard come a close second.

I can't hear a difference between AAC files I've encoded with iTunes and the original CD recording, but I do think DVD-Audio sounds significantly better than CD, and good vinyl sounds even better than DVD-Audio.

adywan said:

Actually blu-ray isn't overpriced at all. Players and discs are coming down in price all the time. Its only been out for a couple of years and prices are about in line with what DVD was when that format came out. I can remember when DVD's were almost £30 when they first came out. My first DVD player was £250 and that was a few years after the format came out. Blu-Ray players can be found for under £200 now. Up until a couple of years ago double disc edition DVD's were still priced at around £19 and Blu-rays are already around that price now and even cheeper, so Blu-Ray is actually better value now compared to when DVD's first came out.

Thanks for introducing a point that Blu-ray detractors frequently ignore. Compared to DVD, Blu-ray has reached very reasonable prices much sooner in its lifespan than DVD was able to do.

I feel like some people want something for nothing and won't be happy until Blu-ray players become $99 commoditized Chinese junk and bargain bins are littered with $5 titles.

DVD is still alive and well, so why complain about Blu-ray costing more when it offers more? Isn't that kind of the point?

It's only overpriced if you have bad eyesight and don't really care about quality all that much.

For the rest of us, it's pretty damn awesome.

Oppo has a player coming out soon. Should be a giant killer, I'd imagine.

ferris209 said:

http://lifehacker.com/5086009/windows-7-is-exactly-like-vista-under-the-hood

Once again, this should be an SP.

Direct response to the article cited by lifehacker.com:

http://www.osnews.com/story/20527/Unmasked_by_Counting_Threads_%20PC%20World

Major interface changes do not equal a service pack regardless of whether or not the same stuff is running the hood--and as the osnews.com article states, the original article's author is either clueless or purposely stirring shit.

If you're so upset about Microsoft's practices, why do you continue to support their products?

Rob said:

 If you're talking about digital formats (CD vs mp3), it all depends on the sample rate. If you're talking about vinyl vs mp3, any person can tell the difference, it's night and day.

I got into vinyl years ago, and I remember my first listen of a new pressing of Bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet (should I be embarrassed by that?). I was blown away at how "live" it sounded.

Amazing.

Some of my favorite debates online have been between engineers who work in the audio industry and golden ears who believe they can discern the subtlest nuances, allowing them to hear the improvements provided by $100/ft speaker cable and $500 power cords. These debates carry over into home theater as well, and I find it especially interesting when someone claims to hear a difference between Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA--both of which are lossless.

If the golden ear is willing to subject himself to a true ABX test, what has always happened in my experience, without fail, is that the golden ear is unable to pick out the "better" version reliably. Statistically, they do about as well as someone who's guessing, and that's probably because they are. They refuse to acknowledge that the differences they hear are purely emotional, driven more by belief than anything else.

I bought some pretty decent headphones a while back (Sennheiser 595's) and listened to a broad sample of my music collection, which I've ripped to AAC format using iTunes (256 kbps). I pulled out a few of the original CDs and did a very informal comparison flipping back and forth between the CD and AAC versions, and being honest with myself, I couldn't tell the difference between the two. In an ABX test, I'm certain I couldn't reliably choose one over the other.

And I lol'ed at the mention of Bose. "Better sound through marketing."

ferris209 said:

Having to be exposed to the real world on a daily basis, I have experienced this to be the truth, sorry if it sounds arrogant. But I've seen many liberals change their minds on somethings once exposed to it for real and not just on the 5 o'clock news. There was woman I'd once met briefly, she was rabidly liberal and always insinuated that we (Police Officers) were violating peoples rights and being aggressive, even against the death penalty. A few years later her daughter was raped. I helped the investigation and got to know her well after that, a lot of her ideas changed once she realized the impact that criminals have on victims, she even apologized to me for having so much doubt. After some time she admitted that perhaps the death penalty is a just thing to do. Terrible what it took to wise her up. Just one example, of many.

Assuming all liberals hate the police and want to cure criminals through hugs is like assuming all conservatives think the Earth is 6,000 years old and vote the way their pastor tells them.

My best friend is a cop. He got stabbed in the face with an ice pick trying to stop a rape in progress. The other officers on the scene subdued the "suspect," but I certainly wouldn't have shed a tear if they'd emptied their clips in the guy because he was caught in the act and he clearly assaulted a police officer with a deadly weapon.

However, I hear too many stories these days about convicted rapists getting cleared decades later because of DNA evidence and recanted testimonies. There are too many shades of gray in our legal system, and death is black.

I'm sorry for your friend's daughter's experience. If somebody raped my sister or mother, I'd want them dead. I'd beat them to death myself. But wanting them dead and needing them dead doesn't make it right.

Again, this whole idea that you guys "get it" and the rest of us--including Obama--don't is silly. It's just as stupid as liberals assuming conservatives don't "get it." I'm sure Senator Obama was privy to more intelligence and information than anybody on this board is, yet he still believes what he believes. We might see some policy adjustments due to information he receives from the intelligence community, such as the recent reports that military officials are calling it impossible to get all the troops and gear out of Iraq within 16 months, but I doubt Obama's core beliefs will be shaken and he'll suddenly wake up free of the clouds of liberalism and ready to embrace the sunny, clear skies of conservatism just because he had a conversation with President Bush.

Octorox said:

They did lie outright although it is a bit different than simple bluescreening because it is a live conversation and the did have like 30 cameras pointed at her. I believe its called a "tomogram" when a 3d image is composited in a scene live. They could change camera angles and whatnot and she would still be in the right place.

That part of the technology is actually pretty cool. The processing power required to combine images from 30 video cameras and coordinate that with the roving camera angles in the studio, all in realtime, must be pretty hefty.

Yeah, it was cheesy, and my girlfriend laughed at me when I expressed my outrage at what wasn't really a hologram at all.

I agree that Macs seem expensive, but if you compare a Mac Pro or MacBook part-for-part to its PC counterpart, you'll find that the Mac is often cheaper than the equivalent from Dell or other major PC manufacturers. The problem is that Apple doesn't drop their prices as the models age, so a Mac Pro costs the same today that it did 12 months ago. At that point in its life cycle, it is more expensive than an equivalent PC. That's why the best time to buy is when Apple launches updated hardware.

Psystar (or your own hackintosh) could be a viable option. I've never used one myself, but I've looked into them. The biggest benefit is the ability to upgrade your hardware. Mac Pros provide a certain level of upgradability, but the video card options have always been limited. If you're a hardcore gamer or constant tweaker, PCs are still the best choice. When I switched, I decided I was spending too much time and money tweaking and upgrading. I used to build all my PCs from scratch, so that was a tough adjustment. In the end, I just wanted to get my work done and not worry so much any more about my machine's internals.

My transition was pretty smooth. The biggest money hit for me was replacing my PC software with the Mac equivalents. I bought Office 2004 for Mac and upgraded from Adobe CS1 to CS2, and thankfully Adobe has a platform switch program that lets you change your software license from PC to Mac and vice versa at no charge. Mac Office lagged behind the Windows version for a long time, but with the release of Office 2008, they're now pretty much equal in terms of features. Now that I'm full-on Mac, I find that there are plenty of Mac-only options that are just as good--and often better--than their PC equivalents. I used to be a HomeSite/Dreamweaver user, but now I use an app called Coda for all my web dev work, and it's a Mac-only product.

Being in web development, I have a few remaining applications that require Windows (SQL Server, Management Studio, IIS, etc.), so I use VMWare Fusion running XP for those. Great product.

Switching is a bit of a process, and I did get frustrated at times because OS X is different from Windows, but once I deprogrammed myself, I really started enjoying my Mac. I'm on my second tower now (started with a Power Mac G5, and now have an Intel-based Mac Pro). I'm happy for now and don't see the need for a major upgrade for another year or two. I already have 10 gigs of RAM, but I need more hard drive space, which is an easy upgrade (Mac Pros have cable-free hard drive bays, pretty damn sweet), and I might upgrade the video card (currently have an ATI X1900, best available for the Mac Pro at the moment is an 8800GT).

Overall, moving to Mac has been a great experience for me.

ferris209 said:

Well, I'll bet Prez Elect Obama has a change of heart on a few subjects today after he gets done with the National Intelligence Briefing, may even walk out a little less liberal.

The assumption being that us wacky liberals simply don't get it, and once we're exposed to the nasty truth, our core beliefs will be shaken? Like you guys see something we don't.

I don't like arrogance, no matter what side it comes from.

So buy a Mac. That was the solution I chose three years ago and I haven't looked back since :)

This place is starting to look like Hannity's forums.

I'm reading lots of whining about wanting something for nothing.

If you don't like the product, there are other options.

MeBeJedi said:

But yeah, the quote function sucks, and [blockquote] apparently doesn't work. :(

[quote] does, just as it always has.

shimy said:

You go to the left to erase mistakes made by moving to the right. After the mistake is erased you move to the right make new ones :P

Hey, somebody who actually gets metaphors!

C3PX said:

Brace yourself Ferris, the backlash to that one is going to be big.

Not as big as the backlash Republicans experienced tonight for shitting on the country's neck for the last eight years.

Somebody should draw a cartoon of Obama moonwalking his ass into the White House and defeating the red army with dance.

You hit the backspace key to move left in order to correct a mistake.

Duh.

Hey FUD guy! Way to represent the South! Love you guys.