Pray tell what kind of quality you'd have to rip down to to get 100 movies onto 64gb of flash memory, some of which is already used by the OS and apps.

I think most people would rather keep their cheap, rather small, perfectly portable DVD wallets and not end up with abysmal quality

Seriously? You do understand NTSC DVDs are limited to 480p (less than that if you want uniform square pixels and are talking most movies these days)? We're talking something a real like 24 Hz, 405p for the video channel for a typical film. (Yes, the DVD may run at near 30Hz, but almost all films originate at 24).

You are unlikely to need more than stereo 128 kbit MP3 for mobile film audio. (Again, remember, we're comparing to an ICE). So we're talking about 90 minutes (typical film), 128kbit audio, that works out to 82 MiB for the audio channel.

64GiB (we're talking flash, not HDD) will give you 655 MiB average for each of 100 films. You don't need to install an OS or applications, we're talking data media here. That leave 573 MiB for the video channel.

From years of video work (no, not a euphemism for pirating movies; I studied video compression techniques in grad school, and did some professional CODEC work thereafter), a few hundred megs will give you barely adequate (soft) video with H.264 for a typical movie. 573-some will give you respectable video with MPEG-4 Part 2, and very nice mobile (or even very basic home theatre) performance for H.264, assuming your CODEC is good and carefully tuned. Again, I'm talking strictly the video channel here.

So, no, I'd rather carry around a flash drive or two than 100 DVD's. For the application the whole thread is discussing, the available memory per film would be just fine. You would genuinely prefer 100 DVDs scratched, smeared with peanut butter, and dropped randomly into your car at the worst possible moment to a USB key sitting in the glovebox? (We're talking about ICE applications, and, overwhelmingly that's for kids in the back seat. If you haven't seen what kids do to DVD's, I should invite you on a road trip...)

Is it what I'd encode my DVDs at for home theatre use? Nope. I'd want twice the space per DVD, so I'd only get about 50 per 64GB, but I'd be happy to see you try to tell the difference between those and the original encodes.

Your sarcasm was misplaced-

And, respectfully, your condescension towards the GP was misplaced. His point was reasonable and correct, and he's just fine in quality for mobile use. Even adequate (though not great) for basic home viewing.

-Holmwood

Except he's (more or less) right. James Ellis, at GCHQ (roughly the UK equivalent of NSA) had developed the basics of public key cryptography by the end of 1969. This was about 6 years ahead of Diffie Hellman and Merkle. In 1973, a GCHQ cryptographer, Clifford Cocks, realized that one-way functions would be an elegant way of achieving Ellis' insight. See http://cryptome.org/ukpk-alt.htm for example. This was some years ahead of RSA.

GCHQ and the NSA definitely would have exchanged this information. It's also quite possible that the US made some of these breakthroughs even earlier than the British; I've not paid much attention to anything NSA-related that has declassified in the last 5+ years.

It won't need to. The crypto check will simply be skipped by modifying the code in the client. Or altering the client code to always accept any response.

I've never really understood this attitude. I feel that one needs to be aware of security theatre, or security kabuki -- things that make you feel safer but don't actually make you safer. There are two possibilities for an attacker: an idiot, or, someone very capable.

While it's true that a non-broadcast SSID might stop an idiot, ditto for locking down MAC addresses, you can extract both of these (completely unencrypted) from the packet stream. Any modestly competent attacker can do this quite quickly.

But locking down MAC addresses and turning off SSID broadcasting increases the tedium of administration while making no real difference to a hacker. Like the TSA, it's security kabuki in my view.

In general, I don't find my security enhanced by assuming that the attacker is a clueless moron. If that were the case, then Windows 98 coupled with digital hashes checked against all files would be a secure OS.

The one argument I think you could come up with is that if you enable all security features in a disciplined manner then that's just good practice. Maybe. I still think it smacks of a bit of security theatre.

Jade Empire, Mass Effect 1, Dragon Age, Mass Effect 2 are four that don't seem to suffer from the specific problems cited above at the time I write this.(i.e. bad translation of controls). I don't much like the minigames in ME1, but that's not a console issue.

Fable was fine IIRC. Fahrenheit -- didn't like the control schema, but it was translated properly to PC IIRC.

That's your half dozen right there, and just off the top of my head. (Granted, a lot are from Bioware). The problem isn't universal; some developers and publishers seem to care about doing a decent port and some don't.

The Milestone's based on an ARM Cortex A8 running at 600 MHz. It's probably the slowest-clocked of the "new" superphones. (For Americans, it's a Motorola Droid for Europe and Canada with some small software and SKU differences).

The Dingoo A320, according to the font of all wisdom, Wikipedia, is underclocked to 336MHz.

Last I looked, ARM seemed to have a definite edge in memory bandwidth, and had instructions aimed at handling media-rich applications much better than MIPS. I could, of course, be out of date on that.

So at an educated guess, I wouldn't expect your Dingoo to be able to touch a modern superphone. (Maybe at best a quarter of the processing power assuming Neon optimizations?) Of course if the Dingoo's screen is low enough resolution, then that may not matter as much.

I agree the parent is a troll, but not a very good one. From the very second sentence of the linked post:

I had seen ports of Quake3 to the iphone and the N900 which have similar specifications

When you troll without even bothering to read two sentences of what's linked that's just... sad.

Moreover, the iPhone falls significantly short in one area: the N900 runs at 800x480, and the Milestone/Droid at 854x480. The iPhone is presumably pushing ~37% of the number of pixels. (Assuming the game is running at native resolution on all 3 platforms). If so, fairly impressive pixel-pushing for the other two platforms.

If you read the fine article, you'll see they give a sample image you can test against your applications. I tested Irfanview (4.25) and it appears to suffer from the problem. Haven't tried Picasa yet; don't have it installed.

I'm using Ubuntu as a guest OS on Windows 7. Doesn't work. Going there directly via IE8/Win 7 (Host OS) it doesn't work either. (TFA is fine; it's the post on microsoftontheissues.com that won't load).

It would be pretty amusing if Microsoft designed a website hosting a blog that discusses browser choice to not function properly with Linux-hosted browsers.