Is there any way to find out how much space such a command would use before actually doing it? Because I think it's a jolly good idea, but it might be a bit prohibitive on the bandwidth or disk space usage side of things.
I was going to read the article, but then I scrolled down and read some of the comments which quoted bits from the article and instantly realised I'd get extremely annoyed at the inaccuracies if I did actually read it.
I'm a Windows user, but I don't have anything against Macs. I'd buy one myself, except for one problem: they're still too expensive. The Mac Mini is a step in the right direction, but its underpowered Radeon 9200 graphics kind of let the side down when even the eMac is running a Radeon 9600 these days. Also there are potential spyware issues with Mac OS X now that Safari Tiger has a default option enabled for autoinstalling widgets. Mac zealots will probably say "oh, but you can just turn that off and it fixes it" without considering that the same is true of Windows and ActiveX: if you disable ActiveX in IE, a lot of spyware problems go away.
On a completely different subject, when did Slashdot start using captchas for posts? And, does anyone else find it interesting and amusing that the string I was given to type reads "ffapmsa"? Think they're trying to tell me something?:)
You could always use the new Doctor Who RSS feed and get text commentary on what's happening...
Not quite the same I guess...
But anyway yeah, this is basically the reverse of the problem that affects UKers; we don't seem to get American shows until at least three or six months after they've been broadcast in the US. I've been following the demise of Enterprise using btefnet, but the same episodes won't appear on Sky One for at least another two or three months. I don't see that there's anything wrong with me downloading the episodes, since a) we pay our TV License fee and Sky Digital subscription and b) the episodes will be on TV here eventually. I'd be happy to pay a small fee to be able to legitimately download TV shows as they come out - as long as they don't put them in some lame DRM format like Windows Media.
A lot of people are simply dismissing this article as pointless bitching, but I think it's a good idea to highlight the kind of issues that occur over here with BT, from the perspective of someone who isn't used to the system and expects bureaucracy. As the first post shows, there are people in the US who don't realise how bad things are over here with regard to the Internet and telecommunications in general. BT rules the roost with an iron fist, and Ofcom isn't showing any more signs of being able to deal with them than Oftel did... maybe if some American company were to buy up a chunk of BT, we'd get better service - it's clear that there's a market for it.
Unfortunately, homebrew DVRs are not much good for using with digital satellite in the UK... the main reason being that Sky (the satellite company) does not produce or allow any other company to produce CAMs to allow third party products to decrypt their service. So if you want an all-digital DVR, you have to sign up for their Sky+ service and pay £199 (or whatever ridiculous amount they're charging now) for a Sky+ box.
Digital terrestrial on the other hand is another matter, though currently the number of channels available on it is pitiful compared to Sky. TopUpTV do appear to produce CAMs for their service, so it should theoretically be possible to homebrew a DVR capable of running off it. Pity there's not anything any good on...
Now that he's made his own iTunes client that doesn't add DRM, the next thing DVD Jon ought to turn his attention to is finding a way (if it's at all possible on the client side) to break the artificial regioning that exists in the iTunes Music Store. I'm in the UK, but I'd love to be able to buy tracks from the US or Japan or places like that. Seeing as how the record labels and suchlike don't seem to be inclined to let this happen any time soon, maybe DVD Jon could figure a way of doing it, unless it's all handled server-side.
To be honest, I've always wondered why they let you BROWSE other-country iTMS stores? I mean, what's the point? "Hey, here's a whole bunch of stuff that YOU CAN'T BUY! Sure, you can listen to previews and run searches and everything but we're not gonna let you buy the track! You'll just have to hope we added it to your own country's store, otherwise you're SOL!"
1. I haven't got to wait months to be able to watch it, as I would with Sky. 2. Since the source is HDTV, the quality is excellent, and Sky will not be offering HDTV until 2006. 3. It's in widescreen - when Sky were broadcasting Enterprise they did so in pan-and-scam, if I recall correctly.
Some American TV shows have the same kind of delay between their US and UK airing as movies do. Take Enterprise for example - season 4 is already showing in the US (there's been 9 episodes so far) but there's no sign of it on Sky in the UK. Add that to the fact that it's broadcast in HDTV in the US (whereas HDTV doesn't even exist over here and Sky has said it has no plans to start offering it until 2006) and there's a compelling argument for just downloading it instead of waiting months for a lower quality version to come on TV here.
I am pretty sure you will be able to purchase an "illegal" card from Europe [...] after the broadcast law steps in force.
There's HDTV in Europe? First time I've heard of it... as far as I'm aware it's still restricted to trials and specialist services like Euro1080 (which provides HDTV versions of sports stuff to venues). Sky Digital (the UK's main, and indeed only, satellite provider) has announced it will start doing HDTV in 2006, but until then you're SOL I think. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
Nobody seems to have mentioned that the socket A Semprons are in fact not related to the Athlon 64 at all, and they are not a development of current Athlon XP cores either; actually, the socket A Sempron is based off of the Thoroughbred core, which is OLDER than the current Barton core. So personally I would recommend snapping up Barton-core XP chips while you still can, rather than buying these new "budget" Semprons.
Austrumi is a Linux bootable ISO image for recovering NT passwords
Er, I notice that they don't mention this capability on their web page. Is this some kind of undocumented feature, or are you referring to some sort of modified version of this thing?
1. can I get a region free DVD drive for my Dell laptops?
Possibly. Try having a look on The Firmware Page and seeing if there is a region-unlocked firmware for the drive in your Dell laptop. Your other alternative is to get hold of a program like DVD Region Free which I believe will strip off the region coding (and other things) before it reaches your DVD player software.
What about games that use or need the HDD? Final Fantasy XI in Europe?
Er, there aren't any plans for a PS2 release of FFXI over here in Europe - precisely because of the lack of the hard drive. Nobody really seems to care, FFXI made #3 in the UK PC game charts on its release here last Friday.
Find someone in the UK who's got a DAB digital radio receiver, and get them to record it for you directly to mp3 (since that's what DAB is broadcast in).
"If you haven't made the switch to Mozilla Firefox it may be because you aren't aware of the great benefits Firefox has over IE."
What, like crashing when I try to import Saved Form History and Saved Passwords from IE using Firefox's import wizard? Or maybe you mean the way that every new version is incompatible not only with the settings and profiles of the old one but the extensions too, forcing me to uninstall and delete the old version before upgrading? Yeah, those are some really cool features... hey look! It even has an Error Report thing that comes up when it crashes! Oh wait, IE has that too...
I'd love to be able to load protected AAC onto my NetMD minidisc player without having to burn it to CD first.
You can. I don't know whether your NetMD unit will directly support AAC, so there'd be some quality loss anyway when you convert it to a compatible format, but it seems better than having to burn it to CD and then re-ripping it.
...that nobody's broken the current generation of Windows Media DRM yet. Also, an online music store peddling WMA tracks is hardly a new idea - OD2 have been doing it in Europe for years, but I never bothered with legit music services until iTunes came out here. Why? Because if I buy a DRM'ed WMA track, the only thing I can do with it is sit at my computer and listen to it. Now I grant that most of the time that's probably what I'll want to do, but it means that if at some point in the future I decide I want to do something else with it (for example, putting it on my laptop so I can listen to it on the train) I can't. And even if they've made that sort of thing possible now, I bet it involves some sort of horribly complicated license transfer process or something. With iTunes, I can buy music, run it through hymn and Bob's your uncle, I can do whatever I want with it. Course, it's still in AAC format, so if I want to put it on a device that isn't compatible with AAC, such as an MP3 player, I need to do some conversion, but at least I can do that.
Does anyone really care about shareware XChat for Windows? Surely the majority of Windows IRCers are using mIRC anyway, and it's not like XChat was the ONLY free (as in zero-cost) Windows IRC client out there anyway - check out leafChat and Visual IRC for a couple of examples. Or if you absolutely MUST have an Open Source IRC client, there's always ChatZilla.
4) Your all-wonderful closed-source system comes under the control of some snotty-nosed haxor, forcing you to re-install your pirated version of Windows XP and your pirated gamez and your pirated appz. Not so smart now, are we?
If you've got any sense, you've also got a pirated version of Norton Internet Security to keep the snotty-nosed haxors out of your pirated version of Windows XP. Either that or you have a Linux box doing NAT and firewall stuff to hide behind, like I do.
The way I'd do it (in fact, the way I did do it, before I got laid off due to the computer shop I worked at closing down) is to download the necessary patches beforehand on another computer and burn them to CD. Then you can install them on before connecting it to any type of network. Alternatively as someone suggested you can get an Update CD from Microsoft, which might be easier if you don't have access to broadband.
It might be that their card processor doesn't work with certain banks - I'm with the Halifax, and one other guy who had the same problem is with Intelligent Finance which is also a Halifax company. I've posted a support request using the Apple feedback form thingy, but I doubt I'll get any sort of useful response, and someone else reported that their phone support people haven't even been trained to deal with iTunes issues yet and just direct you back to the web form.
... with certain Switch debit cards. They provide the option for new UK users to use a debit card (such as Switch or Solo) to sign up with, but some users (such as myself, but there are others) get a "declined" error when trying to enter their card details. I've also heard that there are problems when trying to enter London postcodes, apparently it doesn't recognise them.
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Is there any way to find out how much space such a command would use before actually doing it? Because I think it's a jolly good idea, but it might be a bit prohibitive on the bandwidth or disk space usage side of things.
I was going to read the article, but then I scrolled down and read some of the comments which quoted bits from the article and instantly realised I'd get extremely annoyed at the inaccuracies if I did actually read it.
:)
I'm a Windows user, but I don't have anything against Macs. I'd buy one myself, except for one problem: they're still too expensive. The Mac Mini is a step in the right direction, but its underpowered Radeon 9200 graphics kind of let the side down when even the eMac is running a Radeon 9600 these days. Also there are potential spyware issues with Mac OS X now that Safari Tiger has a default option enabled for autoinstalling widgets. Mac zealots will probably say "oh, but you can just turn that off and it fixes it" without considering that the same is true of Windows and ActiveX: if you disable ActiveX in IE, a lot of spyware problems go away.
On a completely different subject, when did Slashdot start using captchas for posts? And, does anyone else find it interesting and amusing that the string I was given to type reads "ffapmsa"? Think they're trying to tell me something?
Not quite the same I guess...
But anyway yeah, this is basically the reverse of the problem that affects UKers; we don't seem to get American shows until at least three or six months after they've been broadcast in the US. I've been following the demise of Enterprise using btefnet, but the same episodes won't appear on Sky One for at least another two or three months. I don't see that there's anything wrong with me downloading the episodes, since a) we pay our TV License fee and Sky Digital subscription and b) the episodes will be on TV here eventually. I'd be happy to pay a small fee to be able to legitimately download TV shows as they come out - as long as they don't put them in some lame DRM format like Windows Media.
A lot of people are simply dismissing this article as pointless bitching, but I think it's a good idea to highlight the kind of issues that occur over here with BT, from the perspective of someone who isn't used to the system and expects bureaucracy. As the first post shows, there are people in the US who don't realise how bad things are over here with regard to the Internet and telecommunications in general. BT rules the roost with an iron fist, and Ofcom isn't showing any more signs of being able to deal with them than Oftel did... maybe if some American company were to buy up a chunk of BT, we'd get better service - it's clear that there's a market for it.
Unfortunately, homebrew DVRs are not much good for using with digital satellite in the UK... the main reason being that Sky (the satellite company) does not produce or allow any other company to produce CAMs to allow third party products to decrypt their service. So if you want an all-digital DVR, you have to sign up for their Sky+ service and pay £199 (or whatever ridiculous amount they're charging now) for a Sky+ box.
Digital terrestrial on the other hand is another matter, though currently the number of channels available on it is pitiful compared to Sky. TopUpTV do appear to produce CAMs for their service, so it should theoretically be possible to homebrew a DVR capable of running off it. Pity there's not anything any good on...
Now that he's made his own iTunes client that doesn't add DRM, the next thing DVD Jon ought to turn his attention to is finding a way (if it's at all possible on the client side) to break the artificial regioning that exists in the iTunes Music Store. I'm in the UK, but I'd love to be able to buy tracks from the US or Japan or places like that. Seeing as how the record labels and suchlike don't seem to be inclined to let this happen any time soon, maybe DVD Jon could figure a way of doing it, unless it's all handled server-side.
To be honest, I've always wondered why they let you BROWSE other-country iTMS stores? I mean, what's the point? "Hey, here's a whole bunch of stuff that YOU CAN'T BUY! Sure, you can listen to previews and run searches and everything but we're not gonna let you buy the track! You'll just have to hope we added it to your own country's store, otherwise you're SOL!"
Sure there is... let me spell it out for you:
1. I haven't got to wait months to be able to watch it, as I would with Sky.
2. Since the source is HDTV, the quality is excellent, and Sky will not be offering HDTV until 2006.
3. It's in widescreen - when Sky were broadcasting Enterprise they did so in pan-and-scam, if I recall correctly.
Some American TV shows have the same kind of delay between their US and UK airing as movies do. Take Enterprise for example - season 4 is already showing in the US (there's been 9 episodes so far) but there's no sign of it on Sky in the UK. Add that to the fact that it's broadcast in HDTV in the US (whereas HDTV doesn't even exist over here and Sky has said it has no plans to start offering it until 2006) and there's a compelling argument for just downloading it instead of waiting months for a lower quality version to come on TV here.
Nobody seems to have mentioned that the socket A Semprons are in fact not related to the Athlon 64 at all, and they are not a development of current Athlon XP cores either; actually, the socket A Sempron is based off of the Thoroughbred core, which is OLDER than the current Barton core. So personally I would recommend snapping up Barton-core XP chips while you still can, rather than buying these new "budget" Semprons.
But anyway, yes, most people I've spoken to agree that the "TV tax" sucks, and here's some other things that suck about the UK.
Possibly. Try having a look on The Firmware Page and seeing if there is a region-unlocked firmware for the drive in your Dell laptop. Your other alternative is to get hold of a program like DVD Region Free which I believe will strip off the region coding (and other things) before it reaches your DVD player software.
I clicked on this headline in the Slashdot RSS feed thinking it'd be an Apple story.
Yesterday called, they'd like their current affairs back. Oh wait, I forgot that you AMERICANS didn't get your Star Wars yesterday :)
Find someone in the UK who's got a DAB digital radio receiver, and get them to record it for you directly to mp3 (since that's what DAB is broadcast in).
...that nobody's broken the current generation of Windows Media DRM yet. Also, an online music store peddling WMA tracks is hardly a new idea - OD2 have been doing it in Europe for years, but I never bothered with legit music services until iTunes came out here. Why? Because if I buy a DRM'ed WMA track, the only thing I can do with it is sit at my computer and listen to it. Now I grant that most of the time that's probably what I'll want to do, but it means that if at some point in the future I decide I want to do something else with it (for example, putting it on my laptop so I can listen to it on the train) I can't. And even if they've made that sort of thing possible now, I bet it involves some sort of horribly complicated license transfer process or something. With iTunes, I can buy music, run it through hymn and Bob's your uncle, I can do whatever I want with it. Course, it's still in AAC format, so if I want to put it on a device that isn't compatible with AAC, such as an MP3 player, I need to do some conversion, but at least I can do that.
Does anyone really care about shareware XChat for Windows? Surely the majority of Windows IRCers are using mIRC anyway, and it's not like XChat was the ONLY free (as in zero-cost) Windows IRC client out there anyway - check out leafChat and Visual IRC for a couple of examples. Or if you absolutely MUST have an Open Source IRC client, there's always ChatZilla.
The way I'd do it (in fact, the way I did do it, before I got laid off due to the computer shop I worked at closing down) is to download the necessary patches beforehand on another computer and burn them to CD. Then you can install them on before connecting it to any type of network. Alternatively as someone suggested you can get an Update CD from Microsoft, which might be easier if you don't have access to broadband.
It might be that their card processor doesn't work with certain banks - I'm with the Halifax, and one other guy who had the same problem is with Intelligent Finance which is also a Halifax company. I've posted a support request using the Apple feedback form thingy, but I doubt I'll get any sort of useful response, and someone else reported that their phone support people haven't even been trained to deal with iTunes issues yet and just direct you back to the web form.
... with certain Switch debit cards. They provide the option for new UK users to use a debit card (such as Switch or Solo) to sign up with, but some users (such as myself, but there are others) get a "declined" error when trying to enter their card details. I've also heard that there are problems when trying to enter London postcodes, apparently it doesn't recognise them.