I'm not sure which acronym I despise more: the PTC with their cries of "We must tell every parent and politician in America how to raise children or our children will surely grow up to be heathen criminals.", or the ESA with their cries of "We must ignore and/or sabotage any and all technology standards or our customers will surely rob us blind."
The MPAA could pay me all they want, and I would still legislate against them, not for them. Are you sure? Money talks, you know. If I gave you 2 billion dollars to support legislation for me, would you do it? Or would you listen to "the voters," who got you the job but don't pay you at all (or at least aren't contributing anymore now that you are in office)? Add the lack of knowledge of the consequences of said legislation that almost all politicians suffer from at least at some point in their careers, if not all the time, and it's pretty easy to see why bought-and-paid-for legislation is so common.
They can threaten to pull funding -- fine, I'll use the last of their own money to buy some ads, exposing how they essentially tried to bribe/blackmail me into writing legislation for them. A message of "I'm doing the right thing, even if it costs me money" should serve to get me re-elected, right? Wrong. The voters won't remember you for taking a stand against lobbyists but for accepting that money in the first place, even if you never acted on it. The relationship between bribes and biased legislation is just too great in their minds.
Think about it: would you re-elect someone who publicly announced that he or she would no longer act upon bribes, or would you suspect that this is just a ploy to get more votes with good-old-fashioned political deception?
My WRT54GL came with the same instructions. I would have followed them if I weren't already desensitized by the last few times I was told to run the CD first when I bought new hardware - times in which I found out that not only was the CD completely unnecessary, but it only served to try and install junk software onto my computer. Considering that my last router was a router/modem combo that came from my ISP and the included CD was exactly like this, I pretty much assumed a similar situation.
You don't need to burn a disc; just play it directly from the computer. Any decent HDTV should come with a VGA input; my cheap Vizio from Costco came with one, even though it's a fraction of the price of "name-brand" sets. If it has one, every TV should have one.
I know that a lot of HDTVs come with VGA inputs, but not all of them will display VGA in full HD. My parents own two HDTV sets: A Westinghouse 720p and an LG 1080i. Both have VGA inputs, but neither will display at a resolution higher than 1024x768. This meets the required number of horizontal lines for HDTV, but it is a 4:3 picture (all HDTV standards are 16:9). Unless your zoom/overscan controls work on the VGA input, chances are that if you try to watch HDTV from your PC with VGA you'll have either black boxes on all four sides (if your TV defaults to 4:3) or black bars on the top and bottom and a stretched image (if your TV defaults to 16:9). Even if you can zoom or overscan, your media player will still downsample the video to fit on the 1024x768 screen with black bars at the top and bottom. You can tell the player to stretch the video to fit the entire 4:3 screen and then set your TV to "widescreen" (I know that Media Player Classic and VLC can stretch 16:9 video to fit on a 4:3 screen), but you might not have a "widescreen" setting for your VGA input. The Westinghouse only offers overscan and the LG only offers widescreen for VGA. Plus most average customers would be using Windows Media Player, which of course does not have a "stretch" feature. So while these tricks would give you 720p over VGA, you would have to both know how to change your TV's aspect ratio and how to stretch the video on your PC, both things that Joe Average has no clue how to do and usually doesn't have the patience to learn how to do.
Well, in the next year or so, many average consumers are going to be forced to buy an HDTV set, or at least a converter box, or else they'll have to stop watching TV altogether.
I believe you're confusing "HD" with "digital." Average customers would also confuse the two, but every TV set, SD or HD, made after March of 2007 is equipped for the analog shutoff. From Wikipedia as of this post:
As of March 2006, all 25 inch and larger TVs for sale were required to have ATSC tuners capable of receiving the 8VSB modulation used for free terrestrial digital broadcasts in the United States. The final conversion step was a mandate that all televisions and TV-tuning devices have ATSC tuners by March 2007. Many of these are not capable of displaying HDTV signals at their full resolution, but they are capable of decoding and displaying these signals.
So if someone has bought a TV, any TV, made after last March then they are safe.
Consumers with cable might be immune for a while, but they're already paying big bucks every month for TV, so what's the problem with buying a new set when you're already paying $100/month just for programming?
While statistically the majority of customers (or at least Americans) get cable or satellite, I would imagine that the bulk of these subscriptions are basic cable, which probably costs between $45-$65 a month depending on the provider. If someone were to subscribe to the digital cable package, along with movie channels, then I could imagine that person paying $100 or more a month, but I've never heard of basic cable costing this much. Where are you getting that figure from?
Audio is very different from video. Most people simply can't hear the difference between lossy and lossless codecs (in fact, I challenge you to show any double-blind tests where people could distinguish high-bitrate compressed music from lossless), and many people have quite poor hearing and can't tell the difference between most different bitrates and/or codecs.
Why is this modded "Troll"? I'm just making an argument that using XP Starter in favor of something like GNU/Linux or BSD doesn't make sense. Full XP? Maybe. But not XP Starter.
I too have seen HD broadcasts and I agree that they are spectacular. Even DVDs look better in HD sets. I acknowledge this. But I'm not talking about a videophile or a Slashdot poster or a knowledgeable college student here. I'm talking about an average typical US customer who really only wants to see his or her programs and nothing more.
Said customers are not knowledgeable about BitTorrent, and even those that are will probably want to view their programs on a TV set, and will see it as being a hassle to either author and burn DVD-Video discs of their torrented video (which you and I both know is not as simple as making a CD compilation from MP3s) or run a cable to a TV set which may very well be in another room entirely. Yes, a lot of modern DVD players now support DivX, but if an average customer can't tell the difference between an MP3 file and a WMA or AAC file, what makes you think that he or she will have any clue what "DivX" is? As for the cable; how many non-Apple laptops can you name that come with DVI ports instead of VGA? I know that a lot of HDTVs come with VGA inputs, but not all of them will display VGA in full HD. You would need a VGA to component video cable or a DVI connector and a DVI to HDMI cable to get full HD on these sets, and neither of those come cheap, which brings me to the argument of cost.
Average customers are generally not willing or not able to spend the money needed to get the HD experience, even if they really only need just the monitor. HDTVs may have gotten cheaper, but so have SDTVs and there are still plenty of them being sold at electronics stores. It ultimately depends on how big one's entertainment budget is and how much one cares about quality, but if low-bitrate MP3s and other lossy codecs are still dominant over lossless codecs despite the advances in both bandwidth and storage space in the last decade, what makes you think that average customers care that much about quality, or at least enough to justify the cost?
That, or just use existing technology like DVDs, RCA cables, and SDTVs. Joe Average isn't going to care enough about HD content to buy a next-gen player, discs, cables, and monitor. Sure it's fun to watch the demo units in Best Buy or Circuit City, but at the end of the day the increase in quality just doesn't justify the price tag for most people, and hunting down torrents is still more of a hassle than buying the cheaper standard equipment.
Why would any decent school system accept an offer for a severely crippled OS at a severely discounted price when the school could just as easily get a full-featured OS for free?
If this is the best Microsoft can do to compete against free operating systems in the developing world, then they are throughly screwed. Even using an illegal full copy of XP would be a smarter decision than taking up this offer, despite the inherent liability involved.
A shotgun or a submachinegun would be a far better choice. Or you could just meelee the guy with the grenade launcher. Who says you have to actually launch grenades?
If this is some ploy to get Mac users who need VBA to switch back to Windows I don't see how it would help at this point. Mac users can just use Windows Office in CrossOver Mac.
Another type of show I've seen everywhere else in the world except the US is the live variety show. It's especially popular in Asia. It basically consists of a bunch of celebrities sitting around talking about nonsense. It's not really like anything available in the US because the guests are there for the entire show, they discuss a variety of topics and it's usually comedic in nature. The guests tend to be selected on current popularity but it isn't like the US where they're obviously promoting a movie or something.
An important thing is that these shows are never prerecorded. That means if you miss an episode and don't catch the rerun later than night you're probably never going to see it again. Unless someone posts it on youtube. I remember there being a show on Comedy Central from 2003-2004 called "Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn." (sp?) The show wasn't very good, and most of the guests were rather unknown comedians with the occasional celebrity, but it had a formula much like the one you describe.
According to the MythTV website you can archive recordings to DVD and stream them over your network. If you use TV tuners with hardware encoders then the recordings should be in MPEG-2 format.
The monthly fee for the TiVo service is outrageous, and TiVo ended their lifetime service payment option a few years ago. You can still buy gift cards on eBay that will activate new units with lifetime service until March of this year (Or was it last year? I don't remember.), but the last time I checked they were so rare people were bidding over $700 for a card that initially cost $300. Hell, I remember having to pay about $650 for my new Series2 DT with lifetime service, and that was over a year ago.
That depends on how good your spelling skills are. You still need to spell the word well enough that the spell checker can guess what word you want to use. I'm a horrible speller, and I know that I've encountered a number of times where I had to keep guessing at a word's spelling just to get the spell checker to recognize what it should be.
Slashdot Mirror
Well at the very least Slashdot could use decent CAPTCHAs. For a technology site it's pretty dumb of them to be using dictionary words.
I'm not sure which acronym I despise more: the PTC with their cries of "We must tell every parent and politician in America how to raise children or our children will surely grow up to be heathen criminals.", or the ESA with their cries of "We must ignore and/or sabotage any and all technology standards or our customers will surely rob us blind."
Yep. That describes the situation in the US perfectly.
I'm guessing these are either some very tall children or some very short politicians.
Think about it: would you re-elect someone who publicly announced that he or she would no longer act upon bribes, or would you suspect that this is just a ploy to get more votes with good-old-fashioned political deception?
And just exactly how does one not benefit from personal and economic freedom if they are "a woman or poor or brown-skinned"?
My WRT54GL came with the same instructions. I would have followed them if I weren't already desensitized by the last few times I was told to run the CD first when I bought new hardware - times in which I found out that not only was the CD completely unnecessary, but it only served to try and install junk software onto my computer. Considering that my last router was a router/modem combo that came from my ISP and the included CD was exactly like this, I pretty much assumed a similar situation.
I'm not a "rightwinger" and I'm not "wail[ing] and clamor[ing]," if that's what you are implying. I'm just speaking from experience.
So if I work in a coal mine and suffer an untimely death, should my children continue to receive my salaries?
You're kidding, right? College campuses house some of the most vocal left-wing advocates in the country, both student and faculty alike.
Or you could think of it like Stephen Colbert does: The hippies of the 60s pissed everybody else off so much that they became conservatives.
You don't need to burn a disc; just play it directly from the computer. Any decent HDTV should come with a VGA input; my cheap Vizio from Costco came with one, even though it's a fraction of the price of "name-brand" sets. If it has one, every TV should have one.
I know that a lot of HDTVs come with VGA inputs, but not all of them will display VGA in full HD.
My parents own two HDTV sets: A Westinghouse 720p and an LG 1080i. Both have VGA inputs, but neither will display at a resolution higher than 1024x768. This meets the required number of horizontal lines for HDTV, but it is a 4:3 picture (all HDTV standards are 16:9). Unless your zoom/overscan controls work on the VGA input, chances are that if you try to watch HDTV from your PC with VGA you'll have either black boxes on all four sides (if your TV defaults to 4:3) or black bars on the top and bottom and a stretched image (if your TV defaults to 16:9). Even if you can zoom or overscan, your media player will still downsample the video to fit on the 1024x768 screen with black bars at the top and bottom. You can tell the player to stretch the video to fit the entire 4:3 screen and then set your TV to "widescreen" (I know that Media Player Classic and VLC can stretch 16:9 video to fit on a 4:3 screen), but you might not have a "widescreen" setting for your VGA input. The Westinghouse only offers overscan and the LG only offers widescreen for VGA. Plus most average customers would be using Windows Media Player, which of course does not have a "stretch" feature. So while these tricks would give you 720p over VGA, you would have to both know how to change your TV's aspect ratio and how to stretch the video on your PC, both things that Joe Average has no clue how to do and usually doesn't have the patience to learn how to do.
Well, in the next year or so, many average consumers are going to be forced to buy an HDTV set, or at least a converter box, or else they'll have to stop watching TV altogether.
I believe you're confusing "HD" with "digital." Average customers would also confuse the two, but every TV set, SD or HD, made after March of 2007 is equipped for the analog shutoff. From Wikipedia as of this post:
As of March 2006, all 25 inch and larger TVs for sale were required to have ATSC tuners capable of receiving the 8VSB modulation used for free terrestrial digital broadcasts in the United States. The final conversion step was a mandate that all televisions and TV-tuning devices have ATSC tuners by March 2007. Many of these are not capable of displaying HDTV signals at their full resolution, but they are capable of decoding and displaying these signals.
So if someone has bought a TV, any TV, made after last March then they are safe.
Consumers with cable might be immune for a while, but they're already paying big bucks every month for TV, so what's the problem with buying a new set when you're already paying $100/month just for programming?
While statistically the majority of customers (or at least Americans) get cable or satellite, I would imagine that the bulk of these subscriptions are basic cable, which probably costs between $45-$65 a month depending on the provider. If someone were to subscribe to the digital cable package, along with movie channels, then I could imagine that person paying $100 or more a month, but I've never heard of basic cable costing this much. Where are you getting that figure from?
Audio is very different from video. Most people simply can't hear the difference between lossy and lossless codecs (in fact, I challenge you to show any double-blind tests where people could distinguish high-bitrate compressed music from lossless), and many people have quite poor hearing and can't tell the difference between most different bitrates and/or codecs.
True. That was a bad
Why is this modded "Troll"? I'm just making an argument that using XP Starter in favor of something like GNU/Linux or BSD doesn't make sense. Full XP? Maybe. But not XP Starter.
I too have seen HD broadcasts and I agree that they are spectacular. Even DVDs look better in HD sets. I acknowledge this. But I'm not talking about a videophile or a Slashdot poster or a knowledgeable college student here. I'm talking about an average typical US customer who really only wants to see his or her programs and nothing more.
Said customers are not knowledgeable about BitTorrent, and even those that are will probably want to view their programs on a TV set, and will see it as being a hassle to either author and burn DVD-Video discs of their torrented video (which you and I both know is not as simple as making a CD compilation from MP3s) or run a cable to a TV set which may very well be in another room entirely. Yes, a lot of modern DVD players now support DivX, but if an average customer can't tell the difference between an MP3 file and a WMA or AAC file, what makes you think that he or she will have any clue what "DivX" is? As for the cable; how many non-Apple laptops can you name that come with DVI ports instead of VGA? I know that a lot of HDTVs come with VGA inputs, but not all of them will display VGA in full HD. You would need a VGA to component video cable or a DVI connector and a DVI to HDMI cable to get full HD on these sets, and neither of those come cheap, which brings me to the argument of cost.
Average customers are generally not willing or not able to spend the money needed to get the HD experience, even if they really only need just the monitor. HDTVs may have gotten cheaper, but so have SDTVs and there are still plenty of them being sold at electronics stores. It ultimately depends on how big one's entertainment budget is and how much one cares about quality, but if low-bitrate MP3s and other lossy codecs are still dominant over lossless codecs despite the advances in both bandwidth and storage space in the last decade, what makes you think that average customers care that much about quality, or at least enough to justify the cost?
That, or just use existing technology like DVDs, RCA cables, and SDTVs. Joe Average isn't going to care enough about HD content to buy a next-gen player, discs, cables, and monitor. Sure it's fun to watch the demo units in Best Buy or Circuit City, but at the end of the day the increase in quality just doesn't justify the price tag for most people, and hunting down torrents is still more of a hassle than buying the cheaper standard equipment.
Why would any decent school system accept an offer for a severely crippled OS at a severely discounted price when the school could just as easily get a full-featured OS for free?
If this is the best Microsoft can do to compete against free operating systems in the developing world, then they are throughly screwed. Even using an illegal full copy of XP would be a smarter decision than taking up this offer, despite the inherent liability involved.
If this is some ploy to get Mac users who need VBA to switch back to Windows I don't see how it would help at this point. Mac users can just use Windows Office in CrossOver Mac.
30,000 (about $44,070 as of this post) is pocket change for a company like Amazon.
An important thing is that these shows are never prerecorded. That means if you miss an episode and don't catch the rerun later than night you're probably never going to see it again. Unless someone posts it on youtube. I remember there being a show on Comedy Central from 2003-2004 called "Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn." (sp?) The show wasn't very good, and most of the guests were rather unknown comedians with the occasional celebrity, but it had a formula much like the one you describe.
According to the MythTV website you can archive recordings to DVD and stream them over your network. If you use TV tuners with hardware encoders then the recordings should be in MPEG-2 format.
The monthly fee for the TiVo service is outrageous, and TiVo ended their lifetime service payment option a few years ago. You can still buy gift cards on eBay that will activate new units with lifetime service until March of this year (Or was it last year? I don't remember.), but the last time I checked they were so rare people were bidding over $700 for a card that initially cost $300. Hell, I remember having to pay about $650 for my new Series2 DT with lifetime service, and that was over a year ago.
Except that some of those startup apps just re-enable themselves when the main program loads. I know QuickTime does this.
Nope. That's Parker Brothers.
That depends on how good your spelling skills are. You still need to spell the word well enough that the spell checker can guess what word you want to use. I'm a horrible speller, and I know that I've encountered a number of times where I had to keep guessing at a word's spelling just to get the spell checker to recognize what it should be.