afaik it's only a one off sub if you already have an expensive monnthly fee, I've been told that if you have one of the cheap packages then you still have to pay.
I've heard from people who own both sky+ and tivo, and they say that a tivo plugged into a sky box is preferable to a sky+.
I'd be really disappointed if sky have exclusive rights to tivo. I know that tivo use sky+ for their subscriber billing.
alot of people in the U don't have sky, and I personally have no intention of getting sky, there is very little on it that I want. frankly I think sky is a bloody rip off for the sheer amount of money you have to pay them for the service.
for all the money they take off you, ho many programs do they actually *make*. at least the bbc and itv make programs, quite a few of them.
sky is too many ads, too much money, too commercial, and too filled with crap basically:)
I want a freeview tivo. it's also not got that amazing stuff on it either but it's got what I want.
talking about UK tivo's, are we due to see any more tivo's in the UK. I've got a thompson tivo as do half a dizen people I know but they aren't available any mroe and I've heard nothing about newer models with new features. sure there is sky+ but I've heard that it's not very good and of course, you've got to pay for sky which I don't want.
I'd love to see a new uk spec tivo with dual freeview tuners (maybe even three), bigger HD's, ethernet port, rendevous support (tivo claim to support it) and lots of new features.
does anyone know what tivo's plans as regards the UK are?
almost everyone I know who owns a tivo, owns one because they've seen how great mine is. I know they didn't sell that well in the UK but i think that was a marketting problem rather than the market not wanting it. I guess it's just a hard product to advertise. people need to use them to find out ho amazing they are.
I was moderating this thread but I couldn't help myself by correct you, not trying to get at your as such or be a spelling nazi just that this one stood out. I think you meant to say "chique" and not "sheik". fyi they are pronounced differently too. the former is "sheek", the latter is "shake".
hope you're not offended at my intrusion.
dave
PS. micorsoft copying an idea from apple, adding features and making the product worse obverall as a result of the compromises involved?! say it ain't so!
too many non-technical people (e.g. CTOs and CIOs)
you know, phrases like that are a worrying sign of modern business. does it strike anyone else as odd that a cheif *technical* officer should have no technical background?
I'm sorry but I've seen to many fuckup's by middle management in charge of high technical fields that know nothing of the field. and I think it's a big problem. I don;t expect managers in technical departments to know everything in detail, but having a good overview and some of the skills I would think ought to be a pre-requisite.
I don't want to use any program to transfer songs to my MP3 player. I want it to mount as an external drive so I can transfer any song, MP3 or otherwise, onto the player.
I don't know for sure, because I don't own one, but afiak, the ipods do mount as simple firewire accessable storage and you can copy any files you like to them. form what I hear, you can even install macosx on an ipod and boot from it. So from that point of view, it still fits your wishes (although it still doesn't play and record video).
the itunes interface is just nice to have, and of course, support for the itunes playlists etc.
that looks like a nice system you've set up there, very nice bu I'm afraid I took the easy (but more expensive) way out and bought an apple which so far I've been very happy with, but then I might add, I'm not a dedicated gamer. I used to pla a few games but the only game I've played with any regularity is angband:)
oh, I'm not saying that it's not right for others, and when I was a student, I did my fair share of it. it's just that there have been lots of posts recently implying that anyone who is a geek and doesn't put together their own machine is stoopid. I'm just trying to say that there are very valid reasons for even a geek to buy a premade machine.
I used to like the tweaking, but frankly I've gone off it:)
there is a problem with this. they see you buying the 9200 but they don't know why. they probably think you're buying it because it's cheap and this gives them cause to bring out a cheaper version of the bigger cards, still with a proprietry driver. they don't know that the reason you're getting it is because it has OS drivers.
I've built my fair share of PC's for bhoth windows, linux and freebsd and frankly I've got bored of the hassle. yes, you can save money doing so but I'm not a student anymore, I've got a decent job with a decent salary, I don't need to penny pinch anymore and I'm coming to the conclusing that my time is worth more to me than the money I might save by hand making it, esp considering all the hassle you can get.
yes, all the individual bits have their own warranties but that's little help when all you know is that the box is crashing. is it the mobo that's at fault? how about the ram? maybe the PSU isn't providing enough juice. maybe I just didn't plug a pci card in hard enough?
if you try and take the mobo back they'll ask if you tried it with different ram, well, of course you didn't, this machine takes shiny new ddr400 ram, you don't have any more of that. then they test it and it works and they charge you a tenner for wasting their time, you go home with the mobo, having wasted an hours worth of time and petrol driving and you've still got the same problem, it keeps crashing.
so you go on the beg, can you borrow some sticks of ddr400 from a friend, so now you're inconveniencing both yourself and a friend to fix this problem. and so the story goes.
and it's not just due to buying crap components either. my last handbuilt PC had an abit mobo with, it turns out, a propensity to run the CPU at high temps (60 degrees C). not a major problem, the machine ran without a glitch, but I couldn't cool it without making a racket etcetc.
I've built PC's ever since I finally put my amiga in the cupboard and it rarely goes all according to plan.
I'm now at the point where if I want a new PC. I want to get it out of a box, all built, put it on a desk and turn it on.
what about consumers who use a 30 second skip features available as a backdoor hack to the tivo? do they remember the brand name too?:)
when I see an ad break I end up seeing 4-6 freeze frames of adverts before the next bit starts. occasioanlly there is a brand name in there, far more often, it's not:)
and skipping commercials on the VCR (with the fast-forward button, if your VCR doesn't do it automatically) is pretty much there too.
so why can't you skip commericlas on many dvd's, like the disney dvd's the other poster referred to?
this is an example of technology stopping what people are used to being able to do. I don't want to watch the ads on a disney dvd, I don't want to read the fbi warning on R1 dvd's (I don't even live in america) but unless your dvd player has been specifically hacked to disable user prohibitions (like mine) then you have to see them.
actually, scart would be alot more useful I think if it had a pin to signify if the pics are being used for rgb or svideo type signals, then all your scart sockets could support rgb and svhs and react accordingly.
I've just had to shell out for a rgb2svhs converter (no, not a plug converter, a signal converter) because my tivo only output's rgb and composite, not svhs and I wanted to route the tivo video through my av preamp along with my dvd player.
this is true actually, I remember reading on the internet, american reviews of "snatch" by guy ritchie (that's a british gangster film, not a porno:) and realising that while it had just come in in the cinema in the states, I already had the legally purchased dvd on my shelf in R2.
dave
PS. it was kinda nice to see the staggered release date go the other way for once
R1 DVDs only need to carry English audio, subtitles and menus while R2 DVDs theoretically have to have English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and usually other languages.
you#'re assuming that they only make 1 R2 disc for the whole of europe and that's not true. they pretty much make one for each country, so it's moot. they could easily bring out the UK and US releases at the same time if they wanted, and in some situations, they have.
and of course, most movies don't have dubbed soundtracks in other languages, just subtitles and those are done way ahead of schedule
yes, you can buy US dvd's in europe, why wouldn't you? in fact in some countries the regioning is illegal. I was in switzerland several years ago and the sold region 1 and 2 dvd's side by side.
actually, I was recently thinking about upgrading my dvd player to something that supports sacd and dvdaudio etc. and I noticed something interesting.
I currently have a uk spec multiregion sony 725 dvd player with a chip modification that I bought several years ago.
back then the whole dvd multiregion thing had a bit of a "dodgy" air about it, everyone did it but it kinda felt a bit more under the counter. my player is fully multiregion, macrovision disabled and user prohibitions disabled.
nowadays, I think the players are arriving at the shops "hacked" by the manufacturer. yes, they are multiregion, but most still have macrovision and user prohibitions which is really annoying.
why do they allow prohibitions? is they are going to flaunt the "rules" by making it multiregion then why not can the prohibitions too? it's what the customer wants.
and as for macrovision, that gets more ridiculous the more expensive the player is. you need to disable macrovision to be able to see your movie on a projector as they have AGC circuits, which is what macrovision messes with.
sorry, a minor rant. I just wish that all players now had the 3 3 dvd annoyances taken care of.
(now if only we could get studios to chuck those 25 second long "get to the next page in the menu" animations)
It should be obvious to anyone that given the choice always buy the region 1 DVD player.
no, in europe, given the choice, always buy the multiregion player that can play anything. virtually all our machines are multiregion these days.
afaik, the problem with buying plain region 1 players is a) sourcing them and b) they probably only support ntsc, and not pal and secam that much of the rest of the world uses.
Encryption is bad when Apu and his buddies want to hide info from the FBI because they are planning to bomb a schoolbus.
remember, one man's terrorist is another man's freedmo fighter. skipping over the implied racism there. what about the human rights worker investigating the situation in zimbabwe? from his point of view, he needs to get his report about conditions there back to amnesty internation or the UN dept who sent him. from the PoV of the government he is a spy who seeks to bring down the "elected" ruling party.
what about journo's? they have a right to keep their sources secret (mob informer, gov whistleblower, whatever) but what happens if they get searched either legally or illegally? they want/need to keep their data safe.
in both these situations the person ideally needs to be able to deny the existance of the data so that they don't have to be forced to give up passwords.
just because something can be used for both good and bad is no reason to ban it.
is it too much to ask for patience? do what alot of the rest of us did, wait for the collectors edition. he told us from the start that there would be 2 versions, if you wanted the version with everything all you had to do was wait a few months.
I would say that he isn't just tryinhg to make money there are two different audiences for the lotr films, the normal moviegoers who want it as they saw it, and the lotr fans who want the full thing. he's catering for both and everyone knew it.
so don't complain that he's ripping you off just because you didn't have the patience to wait for the version you wanted when it was well known that it would be around a few months later.
The largest carrier doesn't have any at all. To start using Bluetooth on my phone, I'd have to ditch my cellular provider.
hmm.. that's interesting. are you forced to only use the phone you bought from the carrier? here in the uk you can buy any phone, move your sim card into it and be happy. so had the phone I bought not had bluetooth (it did), I could go into a shop and buy a phone with it and then put my sim card in and bob would be my uncle.
Slashdot Mirror
afaik it's only a one off sub if you already have an expensive monnthly fee, I've been told that if you have one of the cheap packages then you still have to pay.
dave
I've heard from people who own both sky+ and tivo, and they say that a tivo plugged into a sky box is preferable to a sky+.
:)
I'd be really disappointed if sky have exclusive rights to tivo. I know that tivo use sky+ for their subscriber billing.
alot of people in the U don't have sky, and I personally have no intention of getting sky, there is very little on it that I want. frankly I think sky is a bloody rip off for the sheer amount of money you have to pay them for the service.
for all the money they take off you, ho many programs do they actually *make*. at least the bbc and itv make programs, quite a few of them.
sky is too many ads, too much money, too commercial, and too filled with crap basically
I want a freeview tivo. it's also not got that amazing stuff on it either but it's got what I want.
dave
talking about UK tivo's, are we due to see any more tivo's in the UK. I've got a thompson tivo as do half a dizen people I know but they aren't available any mroe and I've heard nothing about newer models with new features. sure there is sky+ but I've heard that it's not very good and of course, you've got to pay for sky which I don't want.
I'd love to see a new uk spec tivo with dual freeview tuners (maybe even three), bigger HD's, ethernet port, rendevous support (tivo claim to support it) and lots of new features.
does anyone know what tivo's plans as regards the UK are?
almost everyone I know who owns a tivo, owns one because they've seen how great mine is. I know they didn't sell that well in the UK but i think that was a marketting problem rather than the market not wanting it. I guess it's just a hard product to advertise. people need to use them to find out ho amazing they are.
dave
dave
I was moderating this thread but I couldn't help myself by correct you, not trying to get at your as such or be a spelling nazi just that this one stood out. I think you meant to say "chique" and not "sheik". fyi they are pronounced differently too. the former is "sheek", the latter is "shake".
hope you're not offended at my intrusion.
dave
PS. micorsoft copying an idea from apple, adding features and making the product worse obverall as a result of the compromises involved?! say it ain't so!
too many non-technical people (e.g. CTOs and CIOs)
you know, phrases like that are a worrying sign of modern business. does it strike anyone else as odd that a cheif *technical* officer should have no technical background?
I'm sorry but I've seen to many fuckup's by middle management in charge of high technical fields that know nothing of the field. and I think it's a big problem. I don;t expect managers in technical departments to know everything in detail, but having a good overview and some of the skills I would think ought to be a pre-requisite.
dave
that reminds me of the film "the commitments"
:)
"you were the first to have the 'frankie goes to hollywood' album, and you were the first to realise they was shite!"
good film that
dave
I don't want to use any program to transfer songs to my MP3 player. I want it to mount as an external drive so I can transfer any song, MP3 or otherwise, onto the player.
I don't know for sure, because I don't own one, but afiak, the ipods do mount as simple firewire accessable storage and you can copy any files you like to them. form what I hear, you can even install macosx on an ipod and boot from it. So from that point of view, it still fits your wishes (although it still doesn't play and record video).
the itunes interface is just nice to have, and of course, support for the itunes playlists etc.
dave
that looks like a nice system you've set up there, very nice bu I'm afraid I took the easy (but more expensive) way out and bought an apple which so far I've been very happy with, but then I might add, I'm not a dedicated gamer. I used to pla a few games but the only game I've played with any regularity is angband
dave
oh, I'm not saying that it's not right for others, and when I was a student, I did my fair share of it. it's just that there have been lots of posts recently implying that anyone who is a geek and doesn't put together their own machine is stoopid. I'm just trying to say that there are very valid reasons for even a geek to buy a premade machine.
:)
I used to like the tweaking, but frankly I've gone off it
dave
Vote with your dollars...
there is a problem with this. they see you buying the 9200 but they don't know why. they probably think you're buying it because it's cheap and this gives them cause to bring out a cheaper version of the bigger cards, still with a proprietry driver. they don't know that the reason you're getting it is because it has OS drivers.
dave
that's not a given you know.
I've built my fair share of PC's for bhoth windows, linux and freebsd and frankly I've got bored of the hassle. yes, you can save money doing so but I'm not a student anymore, I've got a decent job with a decent salary, I don't need to penny pinch anymore and I'm coming to the conclusing that my time is worth more to me than the money I might save by hand making it, esp considering all the hassle you can get.
yes, all the individual bits have their own warranties but that's little help when all you know is that the box is crashing. is it the mobo that's at fault? how about the ram? maybe the PSU isn't providing enough juice. maybe I just didn't plug a pci card in hard enough?
if you try and take the mobo back they'll ask if you tried it with different ram, well, of course you didn't, this machine takes shiny new ddr400 ram, you don't have any more of that. then they test it and it works and they charge you a tenner for wasting their time, you go home with the mobo, having wasted an hours worth of time and petrol driving and you've still got the same problem, it keeps crashing.
so you go on the beg, can you borrow some sticks of ddr400 from a friend, so now you're inconveniencing both yourself and a friend to fix this problem. and so the story goes.
and it's not just due to buying crap components either. my last handbuilt PC had an abit mobo with, it turns out, a propensity to run the CPU at high temps (60 degrees C). not a major problem, the machine ran without a glitch, but I couldn't cool it without making a racket etcetc.
I've built PC's ever since I finally put my amiga in the cupboard and it rarely goes all according to plan.
I'm now at the point where if I want a new PC. I want to get it out of a box, all built, put it on a desk and turn it on.
dave
what about consumers who use a 30 second skip features available as a backdoor hack to the tivo? do they remember the brand name too? :)
:)
when I see an ad break I end up seeing 4-6 freeze frames of adverts before the next bit starts. occasioanlly there is a brand name in there, far more often, it's not
dave
and skipping commercials on the VCR (with the fast-forward button, if your VCR doesn't do it automatically) is pretty much there too.
so why can't you skip commericlas on many dvd's, like the disney dvd's the other poster referred to?
this is an example of technology stopping what people are used to being able to do.
I don't want to watch the ads on a disney dvd, I don't want to read the fbi warning on R1 dvd's (I don't even live in america) but unless your dvd player has been specifically hacked to disable user prohibitions (like mine) then you have to see them.
dave
actually, scart would be alot more useful I think if it had a pin to signify if the pics are being used for rgb or svideo type signals, then all your scart sockets could support rgb and svhs and react accordingly.
I've just had to shell out for a rgb2svhs converter (no, not a plug converter, a signal converter) because my tivo only output's rgb and composite, not svhs and I wanted to route the tivo video through my av preamp along with my dvd player.
hey ho
dave
Another nice thing about Europe is a lot of the DVDs are Region 0 anyway.
I've not seen that I must admit, my few R0 disc's are from america, criterion discs are often R0. but many R2 discs are dual coded 2 and 4.
dave
this is true actually, I remember reading on the internet, american reviews of "snatch" by guy ritchie (that's a british gangster film, not a porno :) and realising that while it had just come in in the cinema in the states, I already had the legally purchased dvd on my shelf in R2.
dave
PS. it was kinda nice to see the staggered release date go the other way for once
R1 DVDs only need to carry English audio, subtitles and menus while R2 DVDs theoretically have to have English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and usually other languages.
you#'re assuming that they only make 1 R2 disc for the whole of europe and that's not true. they pretty much make one for each country, so it's moot. they could easily bring out the UK and US releases at the same time if they wanted, and in some situations, they have.
and of course, most movies don't have dubbed soundtracks in other languages, just subtitles and those are done way ahead of schedule
dave
I do hope you're trolling
yes, you can buy US dvd's in europe, why wouldn't you? in fact in some countries the regioning is illegal. I was in switzerland several years ago and the sold region 1 and 2 dvd's side by side.
dave
Macrovision, forced ad viewing
actually, I was recently thinking about upgrading my dvd player to something that supports sacd and dvdaudio etc. and I noticed something interesting.
I currently have a uk spec multiregion sony 725 dvd player with a chip modification that I bought several years ago.
back then the whole dvd multiregion thing had a bit of a "dodgy" air about it, everyone did it but it kinda felt a bit more under the counter. my player is fully multiregion, macrovision disabled and user prohibitions disabled.
nowadays, I think the players are arriving at the shops "hacked" by the manufacturer. yes, they are multiregion, but most still have macrovision and user prohibitions which is really annoying.
why do they allow prohibitions? is they are going to flaunt the "rules" by making it multiregion then why not can the prohibitions too? it's what the customer wants.
and as for macrovision, that gets more ridiculous the more expensive the player is. you need to disable macrovision to be able to see your movie on a projector as they have AGC circuits, which is what macrovision messes with.
sorry, a minor rant. I just wish that all players now had the 3 3 dvd annoyances taken care of.
(now if only we could get studios to chuck those 25 second long "get to the next page in the menu" animations)
dave
It should be obvious to anyone that given the choice always buy the region 1 DVD player.
no, in europe, given the choice, always buy the multiregion player that can play anything. virtually all our machines are multiregion these days.
afaik, the problem with buying plain region 1 players is a) sourcing them and b) they probably only support ntsc, and not pal and secam that much of the rest of the world uses.
dave
that latter case is great britain, for those who are unaware
*sigh*
dave
Encryption is bad when Apu and his buddies want to hide info from the FBI because they are planning to bomb a schoolbus.
remember, one man's terrorist is another man's freedmo fighter. skipping over the implied racism there. what about the human rights worker investigating the situation in zimbabwe? from his point of view, he needs to get his report about conditions there back to amnesty internation or the UN dept who sent him. from the PoV of the government he is a spy who seeks to bring down the "elected" ruling party.
what about journo's? they have a right to keep their sources secret (mob informer, gov whistleblower, whatever) but what happens if they get searched either legally or illegally? they want/need to keep their data safe.
in both these situations the person ideally needs to be able to deny the existance of the data so that they don't have to be forced to give up passwords.
just because something can be used for both good and bad is no reason to ban it.
dave
is it too much to ask for patience? do what alot of the rest of us did, wait for the collectors edition. he told us from the start that there would be 2 versions, if you wanted the version with everything all you had to do was wait a few months.
I would say that he isn't just tryinhg to make money there are two different audiences for the lotr films, the normal moviegoers who want it as they saw it, and the lotr fans who want the full thing. he's catering for both and everyone knew it.
so don't complain that he's ripping you off just because you didn't have the patience to wait for the version you wanted when it was well known that it would be around a few months later.
dave
The largest carrier doesn't have any at all. To start using Bluetooth on my phone, I'd have to ditch my cellular provider.
hmm.. that's interesting. are you forced to only use the phone you bought from the carrier? here in the uk you can buy any phone, move your sim card into it and be happy. so had the phone I bought not had bluetooth (it did), I could go into a shop and buy a phone with it and then put my sim card in and bob would be my uncle.
dave