Even if you have the codecs installed, it cannot browse or play non-WTV or DVR-MS without the use of something like MediaBrowser (which itself, is a slick application).
I feel compelled to correct this in case others misunderstand you and it reflects poorly on Media Center. Media Center can play videos in a variety of containers and codecs. I commonly put m4v files encoded using h.264 in my "videos" folder. Media center picks them right up and allows me to play them (even on my extenders). Perhaps what you mean is that you can't play these files from your "Recorded TV" folder (perhaps this is the case -- I've never tried it).
Agreed. I think the douchebaggery peaked at this point:
"Right now, the suit is still largely on the drawing board...We are just finishing up the ideation phase and beginning design and prototyping.”
Still, this part gives me an entertaining mental image of some superhero trying to get tech from his supplier, only to be met with a Dilbertesque sequence of overhyped marketing, corporate buzzwords, and eventual disappointment.
From the point of view of marketing, you die when you turn 30 and come back to life when you turn 55. In between that time, you have just the right combination of poverty and responsibility that prevents you from throwing money away based on advertising.
There were *NO* commercials on television touting the new product.
There were commericals on TV. For over a week now. I saw them while watching football (which is the only time I watch live TV and therefore commercials). They weren't very memorable, though. Didn't tell me much about the product and they certainly didn't make me want to buy the thing.
Sorry about the sentence fragments. Been reading too much Cormac McCarthy.
The difference between the internet and space is that only advanced western states have access to space. All states feel like they need to protect their own resources on the internet from hackers (mostly non-state actors), so they will want complete freedom when deciding how to do that. As soon as western countries believe that Al Qaeda (or whoever we are afraid of at the time) has any change of destroying their satellites, they will pull out of the Outer Space Treaty for the same reason.
Right, this was probably an expensive INS (e.g. ring laser gyro) + GPS system. I imagine they would use something like this for a prototype, because they can get precise acceleration information without having to recalibrate after changes to the vehicle. The good news is that it is easy to get acceleration data for cars because they only have one axis of rotation, and they have wheels that are always on the ground. For production cars with this sort of technology, they can probably just use the speedometer along with something that measures how much the front wheels are turned. Maybe they will throw in a cheap INS to detect loss of wheel traction or otherwise improve the quality of the speed/acceleration data.
Of course, this only helps for navigation, which is probably the easiest part of the problem. Collision avoidance would probably be done with cameras, radar, ultrasonic ranging, etc.
Myself I prefer to say "I don't believe in an anthropomorphic god".
My line is "I assert nothing." I don't believe anything is true unless I can prove it using mathematics. If I need any information that cannot be obtained by proof, I just do the best that I can, and I accept that my information may be incorrect.
Why exactly is telling people MORE about the product they are buying a bad thing?
Passing a law that requires anybody to do anything is always a bad thing. We should only do this if we expect the collective benefit derived from the new law significantly outweighs the harm to the adversely affected individuals. Keep in mind what is going on here: the court is not going to decide what information phone companies are allowed to publish or people are allowed to obtain. The court is only going to decide whether stores are required to display this information.
In my opinion, the law is not helpful, so it should be removed. If manufacturers want to publish information about phones or educate the public, then they are free to do so. If some people are concerned about phone radiation and they want to research the power output of phones before buying them, then they are free to do so. Until we see convincing research that shows that cell phone radiation is harmful, this arrangement should be good enough.
You don't need to navigate using a browser on an HTPC. You can use the (fully supported (for now)) Hulu Desktop application and browse using a remote control. You can even set up a launcher in Windows Media Center to launch the program so you never need a keyboard. It works fine and my wife uses it all the time. Though I would definitely prefer better integration with Media Center.
Regardless of how our payment processing technology progresses, we will always need a secure and private mechanism that allows us to purchase (or possibly sell) something. I have seen people try to jump through all sorts of cryptographic hoops in order to develop such a system, but nothing is more simple and effective than simply taking something out your wallet and giving it to someone in exchange for the thing that you want to purchase.
It makes little sense to classify anything as evil or not evil. Morality is complicated, and people have vastly different and often conflicting motivations.
If we want efficient code, we have to figure out ways to reward the programmers that write it. I don't see any sign that people anywhere are interested in doing this. Anyone have suggestions for how it might be done?
"Efficiency" is accomplished by including some software requirements involving time, memory/disk usage, etc. If nobody is interested in doing this, then that means it isn't important to the project. There are some large classes of projects (e.g. embedded systems, real-time systems) that always these performance requirements, because they are important.
Keep in mind that efficiency isn't the only desirable property of software. If I am tasked with implementing some new functionality, and I don't have any documented performance requirements, I will write code in a way that maximizes maintainability at the expense of performance. Maintainability is another valuable property and it is often at odds with efficiency.
After all, they don't care if they sell ALL their tickets, just that they make a profit, so the more they buy, the higher they can set *their* per ticket price, and the fewer overall they'd have to sell.
So, how is that different from the way the concert producer sells tickets? The concert producer has exactly as much power to "artificially" influence the demand by selling fewer tickets (e.g. at a smaller venue), reducing the availability of the tickets (e.g. you have to stand in line for a day or win a contest with your local radio station) and altering the ticket price. So both the scalper and the producer are selling tickets, while doing what it takes to make a profit. The only major difference is the concert producer has enough money to buy favorable laws.
I'd love an electric assist bike because my current bike commute is on 5 miles of dedicated bike trail sandwiched between some fairly dangerous road travel (1 mile to get from my house to the trail, 1 mile to get from the trail to work). I would feel a lot safer if I could use the electric assist on the roads so I would be going closer to the speed of traffic while traveling uphill. While traveling on the trail or while traveling downhill on the road, I would turn off the electric assist and just pedal.
What prevents me from buying such a bike is the concern that I wouldn't be allowed to ride it on the bikeways even if I am not using the electric assist at the time. I'm paying attention to how the laws shape up around this.
Today, introductory courses in computer science are too often focused merely on teaching students to use software like word processing and spreadsheet programs, says Janice C. Cuny, a program director at the National Science Foundation
There are two possible realities associated with this statement:
There are intro computer science courses out there in which students learn how to do word processing and spreadsheeting.
A program director at the NSF doesn't know the difference between courses on "computer science" and "business computer applications."
I've had this problem at two distinct times in the past and both times I wrote some simple programs to help:
I always had trouble keeping track of my home maintenance tasks, so I wrote this little program. It allows you to create hierarchical tasks. Tasks are prioritized by due date. Attachments aren't supported, but you can put arbitrary text in each task, so I suppose you could include links to files/directories on your machine. The program works as a standalone client or in a client/server configuration.
At work, I typically had several open tasks, so I built a custom application to solve this problem as well. I can't share this one with you, but I will share that developing this program was well worth the effort. The primary benefit to developing the system yourself is that you can integrate it with your revision control system, issue tracking system, time charging system, etc.
I played MTGO and took a strictly "pauper deck" approach. In pauper deck rules, your entire deck must be constructed entirely out of common cards. That means you can build a competitive deck for $5 instead of $100. There are rooms and tournaments for pauper deck players, but I mostly enjoyed playing casually against unrestricted decks. There is a lot of satisfaction in beating a player with an obviously expensive deck.
There seem to be an awfully high number of people who commute from New Hampshire to work in Massachusetts because of the lack of personal income and sales taxes in NH
One minor correction -- people who live in NH and work in MA pay MA income tax. In fact, because property tax is generally higher in NH than in MA, those people you describe end up paying more income and property taxes (proportionally speaking) than people who live and work in MA. The main reason why people live in NH and commute to MA is that homes in NH are cheaper.
You are right about the sales tax, though. I live in MA about 30 minutes away from the NH border and I cross the border to do all my major shopping. Of course, MA requires that I pay "use" tax on all these purchases at the end of the year, but there are (legal) ways to make MA happy and still come out on top.
Hi! I'm your local TimeCox representative and I'm posting to let you know that your MiphTV box is not compatible with TimeCox cable. But don't worry, for a small monthly fee, you can have a TimeCox DVR that can be used to record all your shows. The TimeCox DVR allows you to record any show (except for pay per view, live sporting events, and anything on premium channels, The Disney Channel, or The Food Network) and watch it at a time that is convenient to you (as long as you view the show within 14 days of recording it, and as long as you don't play it back within same week as a live broadcast of the same show, and as long as you don't play it back on the Sabbath). The TimeCox DVR allows you to record up to 40 hours of programming (or 5 hours in HD) and it has a user interface that many customers can tolerate.
So really, I don't know why you would want to fiddle around with your home-made DVR when you can get all these great features with the support you've come to expect from TimeCox.
Trust me, you don't want people in other countries to see old American western films. If they do, they'll all start acting like us, and the world already has enough cowboys. So in this case, I think the region coding is a good thing.
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Even if you have the codecs installed, it cannot browse or play non-WTV or DVR-MS without the use of something like MediaBrowser (which itself, is a slick application).
I feel compelled to correct this in case others misunderstand you and it reflects poorly on Media Center. Media Center can play videos in a variety of containers and codecs. I commonly put m4v files encoded using h.264 in my "videos" folder. Media center picks them right up and allows me to play them (even on my extenders). Perhaps what you mean is that you can't play these files from your "Recorded TV" folder (perhaps this is the case -- I've never tried it).
"Right now, the suit is still largely on the drawing board...We are just finishing up the ideation phase and beginning design and prototyping.”
Still, this part gives me an entertaining mental image of some superhero trying to get tech from his supplier, only to be met with a Dilbertesque sequence of overhyped marketing, corporate buzzwords, and eventual disappointment.
From the point of view of marketing, you die when you turn 30 and come back to life when you turn 55. In between that time, you have just the right combination of poverty and responsibility that prevents you from throwing money away based on advertising.
There were commericals on TV. For over a week now. I saw them while watching football (which is the only time I watch live TV and therefore commercials). They weren't very memorable, though. Didn't tell me much about the product and they certainly didn't make me want to buy the thing.
Sorry about the sentence fragments. Been reading too much Cormac McCarthy.
The difference between the internet and space is that only advanced western states have access to space. All states feel like they need to protect their own resources on the internet from hackers (mostly non-state actors), so they will want complete freedom when deciding how to do that. As soon as western countries believe that Al Qaeda (or whoever we are afraid of at the time) has any change of destroying their satellites, they will pull out of the Outer Space Treaty for the same reason.
http://xkcd.com/703/
Right, this was probably an expensive INS (e.g. ring laser gyro) + GPS system. I imagine they would use something like this for a prototype, because they can get precise acceleration information without having to recalibrate after changes to the vehicle. The good news is that it is easy to get acceleration data for cars because they only have one axis of rotation, and they have wheels that are always on the ground. For production cars with this sort of technology, they can probably just use the speedometer along with something that measures how much the front wheels are turned. Maybe they will throw in a cheap INS to detect loss of wheel traction or otherwise improve the quality of the speed/acceleration data.
Of course, this only helps for navigation, which is probably the easiest part of the problem. Collision avoidance would probably be done with cameras, radar, ultrasonic ranging, etc.
This is great! I've been looking for a new metaphor for my current software project. The "two story outhouse" metaphor wasn't quite working anymore.
I prefer to say "I don't believe in God." instead
Myself I prefer to say "I don't believe in an anthropomorphic god".
My line is "I assert nothing." I don't believe anything is true unless I can prove it using mathematics. If I need any information that cannot be obtained by proof, I just do the best that I can, and I accept that my information may be incorrect.
Passing a law that requires anybody to do anything is always a bad thing. We should only do this if we expect the collective benefit derived from the new law significantly outweighs the harm to the adversely affected individuals. Keep in mind what is going on here: the court is not going to decide what information phone companies are allowed to publish or people are allowed to obtain. The court is only going to decide whether stores are required to display this information.
In my opinion, the law is not helpful, so it should be removed. If manufacturers want to publish information about phones or educate the public, then they are free to do so. If some people are concerned about phone radiation and they want to research the power output of phones before buying them, then they are free to do so. Until we see convincing research that shows that cell phone radiation is harmful, this arrangement should be good enough.
Great idea! Unfortunately, such an app would require a working antenna on the device.
You don't need to navigate using a browser on an HTPC. You can use the (fully supported (for now)) Hulu Desktop application and browse using a remote control. You can even set up a launcher in Windows Media Center to launch the program so you never need a keyboard. It works fine and my wife uses it all the time. Though I would definitely prefer better integration with Media Center.
Regardless of how our payment processing technology progresses, we will always need a secure and private mechanism that allows us to purchase (or possibly sell) something. I have seen people try to jump through all sorts of cryptographic hoops in order to develop such a system, but nothing is more simple and effective than simply taking something out your wallet and giving it to someone in exchange for the thing that you want to purchase.
It makes little sense to classify anything as evil or not evil. Morality is complicated, and people have vastly different and often conflicting motivations.
It's just as well. I'm never invited to those sorts of parties anyway.
If you are not allowed to access Hulu, you can still see episodes of Cosmos on the view screen of your space ship of the imagination.
"Efficiency" is accomplished by including some software requirements involving time, memory/disk usage, etc. If nobody is interested in doing this, then that means it isn't important to the project. There are some large classes of projects (e.g. embedded systems, real-time systems) that always these performance requirements, because they are important.
Keep in mind that efficiency isn't the only desirable property of software. If I am tasked with implementing some new functionality, and I don't have any documented performance requirements, I will write code in a way that maximizes maintainability at the expense of performance. Maintainability is another valuable property and it is often at odds with efficiency.
So, how is that different from the way the concert producer sells tickets? The concert producer has exactly as much power to "artificially" influence the demand by selling fewer tickets (e.g. at a smaller venue), reducing the availability of the tickets (e.g. you have to stand in line for a day or win a contest with your local radio station) and altering the ticket price. So both the scalper and the producer are selling tickets, while doing what it takes to make a profit. The only major difference is the concert producer has enough money to buy favorable laws.
I'd love an electric assist bike because my current bike commute is on 5 miles of dedicated bike trail sandwiched between some fairly dangerous road travel (1 mile to get from my house to the trail, 1 mile to get from the trail to work). I would feel a lot safer if I could use the electric assist on the roads so I would be going closer to the speed of traffic while traveling uphill. While traveling on the trail or while traveling downhill on the road, I would turn off the electric assist and just pedal.
What prevents me from buying such a bike is the concern that I wouldn't be allowed to ride it on the bikeways even if I am not using the electric assist at the time. I'm paying attention to how the laws shape up around this.
There are two possible realities associated with this statement:
I don't know which reality is worse.
I played MTGO and took a strictly "pauper deck" approach. In pauper deck rules, your entire deck must be constructed entirely out of common cards. That means you can build a competitive deck for $5 instead of $100. There are rooms and tournaments for pauper deck players, but I mostly enjoyed playing casually against unrestricted decks. There is a lot of satisfaction in beating a player with an obviously expensive deck.
One minor correction -- people who live in NH and work in MA pay MA income tax. In fact, because property tax is generally higher in NH than in MA, those people you describe end up paying more income and property taxes (proportionally speaking) than people who live and work in MA. The main reason why people live in NH and commute to MA is that homes in NH are cheaper.
You are right about the sales tax, though. I live in MA about 30 minutes away from the NH border and I cross the border to do all my major shopping. Of course, MA requires that I pay "use" tax on all these purchases at the end of the year, but there are (legal) ways to make MA happy and still come out on top.
Hi! I'm your local TimeCox representative and I'm posting to let you know that your MiphTV box is not compatible with TimeCox cable. But don't worry, for a small monthly fee, you can have a TimeCox DVR that can be used to record all your shows. The TimeCox DVR allows you to record any show (except for pay per view, live sporting events, and anything on premium channels, The Disney Channel, or The Food Network) and watch it at a time that is convenient to you (as long as you view the show within 14 days of recording it, and as long as you don't play it back within same week as a live broadcast of the same show, and as long as you don't play it back on the Sabbath). The TimeCox DVR allows you to record up to 40 hours of programming (or 5 hours in HD) and it has a user interface that many customers can tolerate.
So really, I don't know why you would want to fiddle around with your home-made DVR when you can get all these great features with the support you've come to expect from TimeCox.
Trust me, you don't want people in other countries to see old American western films. If they do, they'll all start acting like us, and the world already has enough cowboys. So in this case, I think the region coding is a good thing.