Dayyyummm. Found it back!

[Trenton.]

I would create a poll about the favorite video game system to see witch is more loved...

 

nahh too lazy. cant be bothered.

 

Though its too bad that they took gameboy games out of ds's these days. the cartridge slot is still there in the regular DS's but not in latter versions like the dsi ds light or 3ds

[Aoslare]

Originally Posted By: Lilith

In most Western countries, the 360 has the advantage. However, it sells quite poorly in Japan, where the PS3 does much better.

Interesting - I didn't know that, but it makes sense. I was surprised at how high the PS3 was as well.

Originally Posted By: Force of Will: Power of Attorney

—Alorael, who thinks it's well worth keeping mind elements besides the extra abilities when examining consoles. Older generations have had more years to sell. The Playstation had two years before it had to compete against the Xbox. The DS, as a handheld, is in a market niche of its own.

Older generations have not really had more years to sell. Each generation has tended to last about 6 years before its consoles are supplanted, almost entirely, by the next generation. Game Boy is the one major exception here.

In general, I think these other elements like release timing are pretty minor influences compared to the console's perceived capabilities, and most importantly, game availability. The NES, SNES, and PS2 all flatly dominated their respective eras, and game availability was one of the most important factors here. The SNES outshone the Genesis despite being released two years after it. The PS1 did have that two year advantage, but it also came out with a lot of fanfare and big name games and the well-publicized defection of a few major game publishers who had previously made their games for Nintendo consoles. The original XBox, on the other hand, had to deal with skepticism that Microsoft would produce a serious competitor.

Also, it's worth noting that the market has expanded - HUGELY. The NES sold 5 times as many units as its closest competitor, the SMS. In Wii has sold more units than the NES has, but its dominance is much narrower.

[nikki.]

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S

Originally Posted By: Lilith

In most Western countries, the 360 has the advantage. However, it sells quite poorly in Japan, where the PS3 does much better.

Interesting - I didn't know that, but it makes sense. I was surprised at how high the PS3 was as well.

I once read somewhere that a fairly large majority (2:1) of people watching blu-ray films were doing so on a PS3, since that offered a cheap way to play those disks. With the cost of standalone players falling, the dominance of the PS3 as a blu-ray player may be greatly diminished, but people are still going to have the consoles in their homes.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Nikki.

I once read somewhere that a fairly large majority (2:1) of people watching blu-ray films were doing so on a PS3, since that offered a cheap way to play those disks. With the cost of standalone players falling, the dominance of the PS3 as a blu-ray player may be greatly diminished, but people are still going to have the consoles in their homes.

Yeah, the PS3 is still one of the better Blu-ray players on the market while the 360 doesn't have Blu-ray compatibility, so if you're buying a console that you also want to use as a home media centre, that's something to keep in mind.

of course i ended up getting both a 360 and a PS3 bundled with TV sets i bought so if you're in the market for a TV anyway then maybe waiting for a special offer like that is the way to go

[Student of Trinity]

About disks vs. flash: There was a breakthrough twenty years ago in sensing weak magnetic fields, which got gradually commercialized. That's why hard drives suddenly began getting enormous without getting more expensive. The original discoverers got the Nobel prize in 2007. Thanks to this technology, data can be stored as really tiny magnetic domains, and we can still reliably read the data from the faint magnetic fields they create.

 

Now magnetic storage is reaching some fundamental limits for information density. (If the domains get much smaller, they'll be able to have their magnetization flipped by random thermal fields, meaning that your hard drive would need to be drastically cooled to avoid constant data corruption. You don't want to have to keep topping up your laptop with liquid nitrogen.)

 

There has been no comparable breakthrough in the speed with which we can switch magnetization controllably. But there probably could be; we are far below all known physical limits for this speed. People are working hard on this now. It might be that disk drives suddenly start getting really fast in a few years.

[Kyronea]

Is that why solid state discs have much lower storage space capacity?

[Earth]

SSD 1 Tb might be out next year. Biggest SSD atm is prolly 512Mb.

[keira]

Originally Posted By: Earth Empires

SSD 1 Tb might be out next year. Biggest SSD atm is prolly 512Mb.

It's already here. Sure, it's only 960 GB, but close enough, I think. Of course, I'd have to whore out a few organs to be able to afford it...

[Earth]

that's PCI-E card not SATA-drive.

[Lazarus.]

http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/08/22

[VCH]

I must be abnormal; I have trouble filling a 60GB hardrive.

 

 

What are ya'll putting on them things any way?

[Randomizer]

Tyranicus filled a few drives with videos. That's been a big sink on my hard drive.

 

Beta testing software can fill a few GB with saved files and different versions.

[nikki.]

Also, some games use multiple gigabites worth of space these days, so if you have a couple of those, a healthy music library, and a movie or two (especially in HD), you're looking at a fair amount of space used up.

[Tyranicus]

My desktop computer has 10.14TB of hard drive space split up over 8 drives.

[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

Now magnetic storage is reaching some fundamental limits for information density. (If the domains get much smaller, they'll be able to have their magnetization flipped by random thermal fields, meaning that your hard drive would need to be drastically cooled to avoid constant data corruption. You don't want to have to keep topping up your laptop with liquid nitrogen.)

Not only that, but the size of the storage available is now getting so large that the machine code that's decades old is now starting to have difficulties dealing with running an OS in all that space. On WinXP, for instance, you can't have more than IIRC 2.2 TB worth of memory, simply because it can't handle that much memory. So it looks like we'll probably hit the absolute storage limit sometime in this decade. FUun stuff.

Of course, there's no reasont his couldn't be expanded, but that would be pretty tricky by my understanding, and it's not like most people really need 5 or 10 TB of storage for anything we have today...

[The Ratt]

Hey Tyran, have you tried thunderbolt yet, and if you have, how was it?

[Tyranicus]

Originally Posted By: The (Armored) Ratt

Hey Tyran, have you tried thunderbolt yet, and if you have, how was it?

I have not. I'm still using a late 2008 MacBook Pro (first unibody) and probably won't be upgrading for a couple more years. After replacing the optical drive with an SSD and upgrading it to 6GB of RAM, it is still plenty powerful and fast for me. The drawback of course is that I don't have a Thunderbolt port, but since there are virtually no Thunderbolt devices out there, this really isn't that important to me. My desktop is a hackintosh, so there is definitely no Thunderbolt there.

[Kyronea]

Originally Posted By: Tyranicus

My desktop computer has 10.14TB of hard drive space split up over 8 drives.

Good grief. I thought I was ridiculous with only 1.5 TB spread across three hard drives...

[keira]

And here I was thinking I was all badass for setting up an NAS of four old ATA drives. 80 GiB.

 

But then Tyran has to go and show off.

[Tyranicus]

Originally Posted By: Sylae

80 GiB

Microsoft (and the various Linux developers) should really take a cue from Apple and start listing sizes in GiB. It's really annoying that the confusion over the 1000-1024 thing still exists.

[keira]

Originally Posted By: Tyranicus

Originally Posted By: Sylae

80 GiB

Microsoft (and the various Linux developers) should really take a cue from Apple and start listing sizes in GiB. It's really annoying that the confusion over the 1000-1024 thing still exists.

Oh, it says GB, but I make sure everything isn't in that base-ten garbage, so I end up using gibibytes out of habit.

I actually think the only Windows program I have set up to actually show the IEC prefixes is FileZilla...

[Tyranicus]

Originally Posted By: Sylae

Originally Posted By: Tyranicus

Originally Posted By: Sylae

80 GiB

Microsoft (and the various Linux developers) should really take a cue from Apple and start listing sizes in GiB. It's really annoying that the confusion over the 1000-1024 thing still exists.

Oh, it says GB, but I make sure everything isn't in that base-ten garbage, so I end up using gibibytes out of habit.

I actually think the only Windows program I have set up to actually show the IEC prefixes is FileZilla...

OS X uses base 10, which honestly makes more sense, because every hard drive manufacture has used base 10 since the beginning, and base 10 is much more intuitive to most people. I understand that at the very heart of everything, your computer is using base 2, but the end user doesn't care about that.

[Earth]

not only older operating systems can't understand bigger harddrives but BIOSes can't either (on bootable devices) so UEFI will replace BIOS.

 

Operating systems calc stroage space as 1024Mt=1Gb but sellers count 1000Mt=1Gb.

[Tyranicus]

Originally Posted By: Earth Empires

not only older operating systems can't understand bigger harddrives but BIOSes can't either (on bootable devices) so UEFI will replace BIOS.

Another area where Apple is ahead of the curve. They have been using EFI since 2006.

Originally Posted By: Earth Empires

Operating systems calc stroage space as 1024Mt=1Gb but sellers count 1000Mt=1Gb.

Not every operating system. OS X has calculated it in base 10 since Snow Leopard.

[Rowen]

Tyran, what cooling system do you have rigged up for you MBP? Has your outer case started to warp yet from all the heat?

 

Mine did, the keypad looks like an earthquake zone now.

[Tyranicus]

I just use the stock cooling, although I did replace one of the fans about a year ago after it died on me. I have not had any warping issues, nor have I heard about this being a problem before just now. That said, I can see how that might happen on the older, pre-unibody models, but the modern MacBook Pros are hollowed out of solid aluminum.

[Rowen]

I've got an older 2007 MPB before the unibody come out. The logic board has melted 3 times in the last 5 years now from heat problems.

 

Haven't had heat issues in two years since I started using a third party fan control.

 

This MBP has turned me off from buying another Mac computer for a long time.

[Tyranicus]

How odd. I had an early 2006 model MacBook Pro, which had the same basic structural design as yours, and never had a problem with overheating. I have two friends with early 2008 models, the last of the old design, and they haven't had issues either. I would certainly imagine that I would have heard more about this if it were a widespread issue. To the best of my knowledge the only known defect on that model was a problem with the GPU.

[Student of Trinity]

Hey, if you guys do minor MBP surgery, maybe you can answer me this. My trackpad is sick; sometimes it's fine for days, then suddenly it goes alternately unresponsive and berserk, with the cursor jittering around all on its own, yet not moving when I try to make it move.

 

I sort of suspect there might just be some loose bit of grit caught in there, or something. How easy is it to fix this kind of thing?

 

In principle the machine is still under warranty, but my daughter knocked it off a table a year or so ago, and crunched in one corner. The thing worked fine after that, but it has obviously suffered harm. I'm thinking this has probably voided my warranty somehow.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

Hey, if you guys do minor MBP surgery, maybe you can answer me this. My trackpad is sick; sometimes it's fine for days, then suddenly it goes alternately unresponsive and berserk, with the cursor jittering around all on its own, yet not moving when I try to make it move.

I sort of suspect there might just be some loose bit of grit caught in there, or something. How easy is it to fix this kind of thing?

Have you tried wiping it down with a damp cloth? Oils and salts from your fingers that build up on the surface can cause this effect.

[Niemand]

Originally Posted By: Tyranicus

How odd. I had an early 2006 model MacBook Pro, which had the same basic structural design as yours, and never had a problem with overheating. I have two friends with early 2008 models, the last of the old design, and they haven't had issues either. I would certainly imagine that I would have heard more about this if it were a widespread issue. To the best of my knowledge the only known defect on that model was a problem with the GPU.

I also have an early 2008 MBP, and while I've had one of the internal fans wear out twice, I've never had problems with overheating, even when I was down to only one fan temporarily. One of my officemates claims that this model is doomed to melt itself if third party software isn't used to run the fans faster than normal, and I've ignored him.

[Alorael at Large]

Track pad problems can be from the battery swelling and pressing up underneath. That's more likely to cause click stickiness than movement, but it's worth checking out. Batteries are also more likely to swell after being dropped and dented.

 

—Alorael, whose dropped-on-its-head-as-a-baby 2008 Macbook Pro has had battery swelling issues twice. The first, while it was under warranty, got him a free battery replacement even though the computer is bent into a noticeable U shape and can't close. And he's had no overheating.

[Tyranicus]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

Hey, if you guys do minor MBP surgery, maybe you can answer me this. My trackpad is sick; sometimes it's fine for days, then suddenly it goes alternately unresponsive and berserk, with the cursor jittering around all on its own, yet not moving when I try to make it move.

I sort of suspect there might just be some loose bit of grit caught in there, or something. How easy is it to fix this kind of thing?

In principle the machine is still under warranty, but my daughter knocked it off a table a year or so ago, and crunched in one corner. The thing worked fine after that, but it has obviously suffered harm. I'm thinking this has probably voided my warranty somehow.

The only time I have seen that behavior is when I have spilled something on the trackpad. As for the warranty, Apple is generally pretty good about covering things that are obviously not related to physical damage. I would recommend at least trying to get it fixed.