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Thats childish, immature and thoughtless, ok shutting down a tv wall is funny, but ****ing with a live presentation? How much effort went into that guys presentation, and then he goes a mucks it up. Thats not funny. I say ban them from mac world, and any other media event.

For those who aren't intimately familiar with HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, I've really gotten into it in the past few months so here's a quick primer:

Discs will be replaced by downloads? Let me know when I can download a movie in 1080p with lossless 5.1 sound in a reasonable amount of time. Perhaps to the iToons generation that thinks 128kbps sound is good you can live with downloaded movies, but for me I don't think CD is good enough (I'm an SACD/DVD-A geek). Likewise I don't think DVD is good enough, why do I want to go backwards (downloadable movies) instead of forward (HD disc)?

Blu-Ray is the superior format, on paper. No doubt. However, there are a couple of wrenches in the works.

First, both formats are actually 90% the same. The physical storage medium is based on the same principles (blue laser) but different implementation (mostly depth of the reflective layer in the substrate). Blu-Ray is slightly denser and offers a higher total capacity (50GB vs 34GB, something like that). Blu-Ray is actually sort-of a superset of DVD from there, once you get to what's actually on the disc. HD-DVD has a new encryption layer (they learned from CSS), Blu-Ray uses this same scheme and then puts a 2nd layer of encryption on top of it. Both use the same codecs -- MPEG2, MPEG-4 H.262, and VC1 (Microsoft's codec), and Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby Pure HD, DTS Plus, etc.

I believe movie studio support determines who wins. The studios were split 50-50 pretty much. Then, something funny happened. Some HD-DVD studios announced they would ALSO support Blu-Ray. In my mind, that meant Blu-Ray wins.

The launch came, HD-DVD came out first and Toshiba led the way with a pair of chunky, heavy, PC-based players at $500 and $1000. Everyone hated the Toshiba players, they were slow, unwieldy, and have awful remotes. A few months later Blu-Ray launched with Samsung's $1000 player, and surprisingly this player was AWFUL, and the picture quality looks worse over HDMI than component because they forgot to turn off some video filtering. Worse, the Blu-Ray transfers thus far have been very poor quality. This seems to be because Blu-Ray is leaning towards old MPEG-2 HD transfers, while HD-DVD has embraced VC1 (which is the best of the 3 video codecs for quality and size) and gotten new encodings with Microsoft's attention. Then, Toshiba started putting out firmware updates for their HD-DVD players and suddenly their players didn't suck so bad.

So here we are; the only Blu-Ray player on the market is a Samsung, Sony has no presence. We're one month away from the launch of the PS3 (which will play Blu-Ray) and the X-Box 360 HD-DVD drive.

Right now, HD-DVD has all the momentum. The Blu-Ray titles are low quality, they have no $500 player, and HD-DVD is building a head of steam.


I know I'm the minority around here when I say this, but I don't own an iPod. :eek: Yeah, it's true... I personally don't care for the MP3 format and the lesser quality offerings of iTunes. If it isn't at least CD quality, uncompressed, I don't want it. And yes, I can hear the difference on my sound system which is a separate setup from my home theatre.

:) I love iPods but I know I'm trading off quality for convenience. Meanwhile, I'm re-ripping all of my hundreds of CDs into Apple lossless format and putting the CDs in storage. It's not SACD, but at least I'll be back to CD quality.

Sorry, during which year of medical school do doctors receive gun safety training? How many hours of coursework on home safety do they complete? The typical MD is no more qualified to discuss these matters than any bozo on the street with more than an ounce of common sense. If they really want to help their patients child-proof their homes effectively, providing a helpful checklist would far more effective than interrogating parents.

Which brings me back to my initial reply. . I am fine with a doctor providing a pamphlet of common household hazards and steps to prevent them, but I get the feeling this is not the case. I can too easily imagine the doctor going off on a tangent about firearms deaths statistics, etc...

But again, the most important part: If you dont want your doctor "politicing" you, GO TO A NEW DOCTOR. There should NEVER be laws against what you can or can not say.

My, we do get defensive about our guns, don't we? :rolleyes:

Asking a question about potential hazard in the home does not constitute an attempt to "interrogate" or "politic." A verbal inventory is often reinforced by a written checklist. However, if the answer to "Do you have a firearm in the house?" is "yes", the follow up is "make sure there is a trigger lock, or that it is locked up where the child cannot access it."

I agree that "a "Firearm" has ZERO possibility of injuring your child, until someone behaves irresponsibly." However, the irresponsibility is the parent leaving the firearm and ammunition where a child can access it. That is a preventable irresponsibility.

That childish prank is close to the kind of thing that Woz pulled in college, so I can appreciate the humor on one level. The problem is that this was done at a trade show and is completely unacceptable behavior for any group passing themselves off as professional journalists or industry bloggers who wish to be taken seriously.

If I were CES management, I'd ban them for life. Can't imagine Apple will let them anywhere near Moscone.

Believe it or not, neither Mac OS X nor Windows suits my needs best right now - hence why I've migrated to something altogether different: Ubuntu Linux.

That said, I will continue to use Mac OS X and Windows for development/testing purposes, so I am very much looking forward to both Lion and Windows 8.

I'm only posting my timer code balamw, you don't want to see the rest and even if you do, I wouldn't show it here. The only problem is the timer the rest works fine. You can check out my App tomorrow morning (Availability Date is 28 of April). Look for "Pastry Chef app"

Then, as I suggested above you need to pull all of that timer related code out into a "toy"/"test" app that you can post the entire code of to help us help you. As KnightWRX says we have to be able to reproduce what you are seeing to see the problem(s). This is part of the work you need to do to get help.

I don't think you are in a position to judge where it is broken, being that you don't care to understand fundamentals.

B