All you need to change now is the plugs, no more rotor, cap, points, condenser. It's a nice reliable system.
Yeah, at this point unless spark plugs are responsible for greatly increased fuel use, then the cost of switching to something else has to be close to zero to make a change worthwhile.
I think I spent about $300 total for spark plugs (including the labor for somebody else to replace them) in the 10 years I had my last vehicle (an 8-cylinder, BTW).
This is why I'm sitting on this generation under they work out the DRM bullshit.
I get the Blu-Ray good parts without the bad by just stealing.
OK, not really, but the MPAA would consider my ripping from my discs to my media server as such. But, that way, I can play back at full quality with no need for any DRM (including HDCP).
The release of the extended editions includes a remaster of FOTR and since the movies are being split across two 50 GB disks it looks like the bit rate will be very high too.
When will studios learn that high average bitrates ends up as lower quality in scenes that really need it (for the same total file size)?
An average bitrate of 15Mbps is usually more than enough for 1080p, as long as the max bitrate can run up as high as necessary for the hard to compress scenes. In this case, though, I suspect the 20 or so soundtracks are part of the reason for the spread to two discs.
DTS-HD has a "core" 5.1 DTS track, and Dolby TrueHD has a similar "interleaved" Dolby Digital 5.1 track.
One of the reasons I rip everything is because I also don't support the lossless codecs on my home theater, but I have found that the embedded 640Kbps AC-3 is far more of a drop in quality than the DTS core. So, anything with TrueHD gets ripped to PCM and then encoded to 1510Kbps DTS.
Sure, some people have 50" 1080p TV's, but some have 20-30" 720p sets (where the difference between dvd and bluray is small), and some still have CRTs (where the difference between dvd and bluray is non-existant).
HDTVs were available as CRTs, and I can assure you that 720p is a huge jump up from DVD on the larger ones.
For me, not having to dig through my collection of over 500 disks to find the movie I want to watch is more important than any gain in picture quality I would get from BluRay.
On my media server, I have nearly 300 movies sourced from Blu-Ray, and close to 300 more from DVD, and still use less than 2TB.
The DVD-sourced movies averaged about 1.2GB, while Blu-Ray averages about 4GB. I don't keep lossless audio from Blu-Ray, but I do keep the best quality audio possible: either the DTS core, Dolby Digital TrueHD converted to DTS, or Dolby Digital (in order of preference). I also resize so that I end up with close to the same number of pixels as 1280x720 (so 2.40:1 movies are about 1536x640).
I don't have an HDTV either - my old cathode ray tube is still going strong
A small nitpick...my HDTV is a cathode ray tube. It's 38" diagonal, insanely heavy, doesn't have DVI or HDMI, and really doesn't benefit from more than 720p (using a resolution chart, it's about 1400x800), but it's been chugging along for 9 years now, so I'm not complaining.
I've never had an issue, and since I don't own a Blu-Ray player, I have to rip all my discs.
In fact, since I have yet to find a movie on Blu-Ray that isn't at the original frame rate and progressive scan, the number one issue I have with DVD ripping (consistent de-interlacing and pulldown removal) goes away.
Although I don't actually automate, with AnyDVD HD, eac3to, DGAVCIndex (or ffmsindex), AVISynth, Xvid or x264, and mkvmerge, it's close to automation, with only a few conversions needing some extra tweaks (like subtitles). My only real issue is that I have a media player that does not handle MKV files, so I have to encode to AVI, which means splitting at 2GB.
There's no money in creating new stories when people will pay to see what they already know, no matter how bad/bland it is.
Mostly, reboots are either to fix a franchise that became broken (e.g., Batman) or about not having enough money to continue paying the actors in a successful franchise. The relative failure of the third movie and the "origins" concept, plus the large cast means that for X-Men, the reboot is probably for both reasons,.
Even if the actors aren't too expensive, some just want to move on, and another thing the '90s Batman films showed was that you really need actor continuity (although audiences will generally overlook it even for a major part when the actor dies).
"Green Lantern" could be Hollywood's dream, as the comic book has Doctor Who-like reboots built in. So, you can change actors and change the whole tone of the movies, while still being "Green Lantern".
If it was free, that payback should be optional as in BSD, not forced as in GPL.
You misunderstand two things:
what is "free" in the term "free software"
that "free" does not refer to money, but rather to liberty
Basically, under the GPL the software itself is "liberated" (which is commonly called "free") and cannot be "locked up" without a violation of the license.
So, multiple downloads from different sites is also a very valid point in my argument.So the fact tat single streams may not hit the cap speed is not terribly important.
Other than P2P, how often are you downloading large enough files from multiple sites at the same time that there will be a significant difference between having a 30Mbps vs. a 60Mbps line?
I rarely see faster than about 15Mbps from any one site where the downloads are large (Microsoft, Red Hat, etc.). I might get faster from sites where I am downloading a song, but with files less than 10MB, it doesn't matter. You really do run into limits from the source server long before your line is saturated.
As a side note, if your upstream speed is any reasonable fraction of your downstream, you need more than the free router the ISP gave you to handle the data. I've tested quite a few, and they can't sustain more than about 40Mbps symmetric, especially if you have a lot of simultaneous connections.
Maybe, in that browsers already have "zoom" functions, so that the page gets scaled, but everything should scale relatively and the page should look right, but an element that CSS says should be 50 pixels wide may or may not be that size after final rendering.
In the same way, I don't know if any browsers respect OS settings like DPI, so you really can't rely on anything being exactly as you request.
I don't see how what I wrote demonstrates a lot of difference. I've yet to see any Windows 7-specific drivers out there for any hardware I have.seen.
I've used Vista and Windows 7 64-bit drivers on Windows XP x64, too, so there's definitely not that much real difference under the hood over an even longer span.
I suspect it's like the "DirectX 10 only for Vista and newer". There's no reason XP can't have that software installed, it's just that Microsoft doesn't want it to happen.
I ran IE8 on Vista for years without any issue, so I guess my standard displays, though big and high-resolutioney weren't "high DPI".
It's the "small but high resolution" that are "high DPI". I have a laptop with a 16" 1920x1080 screen, which works out to 137 DPI.
Standard desktop displays (even large ones) are around 100 DPI. So, what happens on the smaller display is that text of the same point size uses more pixels, and many developers don't account for that. For example, dialog boxes that are fixed in size at 600x400 will have the text run off the edges, because text that takes up 500 pixels wide at 100 DPI will require 685 pixels at 137 DPI. This is caused because text size in Windows is defined in terms of inches (actually, units of 1/1440 of an inch), not pixels.
As someone who has a 100/100 Mbps connection this seems weird, I can easily use more bandwidth than that in a month.
I only have 25/15, and over the past two years I have averaged 270GB/month in download. That's about 800Kbps, or 0.75% utilization on a 100Mbps line. It's only 3% on my line, so it's not like it's "busy".
It is also about downloading stuff quicker, believe it or not.
There are almost no services out there that will download a single stream to you at 30Mbps, much less 100Mbps. There are a few that don't limit bandwidth on single streams, but then you run into the problem where their servers are too loaded to give you full bandwidth anyway.
On the other hand, if you want to download from many places at the same time, then 100Mbps would really help. Unfortunately, the tool that makes such downloading easy is considered "evil" by many ISPs: P2P software.
Except for that paper by the United States Government Accountability Office that says that all the studies commissioned by the RIAA and MPAA are bogus and that copying generally helps sales.
It's fascinating that every study on "casual" copyright infringement that way paid for by an organization with lots of items under copyright says that "piracy is bad", while every study done by groups that only care about the truth shows that "piracy is unimportant".
Pretty much all of the evidence shows that if the record industry adapted with the times their profit margins would increase.
The same holds true for the movie industry.
The music companies basically handed over a huge chunk of potential profit to Apple instead of opening their own online store. In the same way, the movie studios let every other company make a lot of money renting movies (with Netflix being analogous to Apple for music) instead of taking the profit for themselves.
The reason both industries did this is that when they previously tried to do similar things, they made it so useless to consumers (*cough* "Plays for Sure" *cough* DIVX *cough*) that nobody wanted it. The "creators" of content in both industries are suffering badly from trying to maintain absolute control of their content, while at the same time other companies are making a fortune off giving consumers what they really want.
At this point, its pretty well validated that pirates absolutely do harm sales, at least initially.
Actually, the studies not funded by the MPAA/RIAA/BSA show that infringement helps sales if the product is "worth it" (i.e., priced low enough for the quality of product).
Truly poor (or vastly overpriced) products do lose some sales due to infringement, because the bad word-of-mouth spreads faster. Good products, OTOH, lose no sales because a certain percentage of infringers would never have purchased the product, but gain sales because of the increased good reviews.
Really, you bring up a bunch of questions that only show you did't read anything.
Reading the article is meaningless, because the lobbying that would happen for this sort of bill would likely make it unrecognizable by the time it was voted on.
As an example, do you pay tax based on the jurisdiction where you live, or where the item was shipped? Either case would make it ripe for tax evasion. The first would the simplest, where you merely acquire some sort of address in Delaware, New Hampshire, etc., and then ship to your real address. And, you couldn't prevent at least some of this fraud, as many people now ship to their work instead of their home, and I know a lot of people that cross state borders on their commute to work.
So, if you purchase something from a company headquartered in California, shipped to Minnesota (your friend's house, whom you are buying a present for) from a warehouse in Tennessee, and you legally reside in New Hampshire, but are in Texas when you make your purchase, and the bill for the credit card used for the purchase goes to Massachusetts, what tax law should apply?
I can guarantee you that California, Minnesota, and New Hampshire will all have a pretty loud claim, while the rest will have at least some, because your purchase is causing some use of services (roads, etc.) in their state (which is the whole point of sales tax). Because of this ambiguity, there would be a lot of unusual lobbying about the details of this sort of bill (e.g., Washington will want it based on "company headquarters" because of Amazon).
This is why sales tax at the counter of a brick and mortar is "easy", and mail order or Internet sales tax is hard.
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All you need to change now is the plugs, no more rotor, cap, points, condenser. It's a nice reliable system.
Yeah, at this point unless spark plugs are responsible for greatly increased fuel use, then the cost of switching to something else has to be close to zero to make a change worthwhile.
I think I spent about $300 total for spark plugs (including the labor for somebody else to replace them) in the 10 years I had my last vehicle (an 8-cylinder, BTW).
This is why I'm sitting on this generation under they work out the DRM bullshit.
I get the Blu-Ray good parts without the bad by just stealing.
OK, not really, but the MPAA would consider my ripping from my discs to my media server as such. But, that way, I can play back at full quality with no need for any DRM (including HDCP).
The release of the extended editions includes a remaster of FOTR and since the movies are being split across two 50 GB disks it looks like the bit rate will be very high too.
When will studios learn that high average bitrates ends up as lower quality in scenes that really need it (for the same total file size)?
An average bitrate of 15Mbps is usually more than enough for 1080p, as long as the max bitrate can run up as high as necessary for the hard to compress scenes. In this case, though, I suspect the 20 or so soundtracks are part of the reason for the spread to two discs.
DTS-HD has a "core" 5.1 DTS track, and Dolby TrueHD has a similar "interleaved" Dolby Digital 5.1 track.
One of the reasons I rip everything is because I also don't support the lossless codecs on my home theater, but I have found that the embedded 640Kbps AC-3 is far more of a drop in quality than the DTS core. So, anything with TrueHD gets ripped to PCM and then encoded to 1510Kbps DTS.
Sure, some people have 50" 1080p TV's, but some have 20-30" 720p sets (where the difference between dvd and bluray is small), and some still have CRTs (where the difference between dvd and bluray is non-existant).
HDTVs were available as CRTs, and I can assure you that 720p is a huge jump up from DVD on the larger ones.
For me, not having to dig through my collection of over 500 disks to find the movie I want to watch is more important than any gain in picture quality I would get from BluRay.
On my media server, I have nearly 300 movies sourced from Blu-Ray, and close to 300 more from DVD, and still use less than 2TB.
The DVD-sourced movies averaged about 1.2GB, while Blu-Ray averages about 4GB. I don't keep lossless audio from Blu-Ray, but I do keep the best quality audio possible: either the DTS core, Dolby Digital TrueHD converted to DTS, or Dolby Digital (in order of preference). I also resize so that I end up with close to the same number of pixels as 1280x720 (so 2.40:1 movies are about 1536x640).
I don't have an HDTV either - my old cathode ray tube is still going strong
A small nitpick...my HDTV is a cathode ray tube. It's 38" diagonal, insanely heavy, doesn't have DVI or HDMI, and really doesn't benefit from more than 720p (using a resolution chart, it's about 1400x800), but it's been chugging along for 9 years now, so I'm not complaining.
Blu-ray is still hard to rip.
I've never had an issue, and since I don't own a Blu-Ray player, I have to rip all my discs.
In fact, since I have yet to find a movie on Blu-Ray that isn't at the original frame rate and progressive scan, the number one issue I have with DVD ripping (consistent de-interlacing and pulldown removal) goes away.
Although I don't actually automate, with AnyDVD HD, eac3to, DGAVCIndex (or ffmsindex), AVISynth, Xvid or x264, and mkvmerge, it's close to automation, with only a few conversions needing some extra tweaks (like subtitles). My only real issue is that I have a media player that does not handle MKV files, so I have to encode to AVI, which means splitting at 2GB.
Even the $80 special I linked is a 10x. How about you get with the times, grandpa?
How about you try to buy some 10x Blu-Ray recordable media, whippersnapper?
FYI, 6x is the fastest made.
I assume you mean besides the obvious bright spot of Charlize Theron running around in a black catsuit.
It would have been much brighter if the live-action movie had kept the same outfit from the anime.
There's no money in creating new stories when people will pay to see what they already know, no matter how bad/bland it is.
Mostly, reboots are either to fix a franchise that became broken (e.g., Batman) or about not having enough money to continue paying the actors in a successful franchise. The relative failure of the third movie and the "origins" concept, plus the large cast means that for X-Men, the reboot is probably for both reasons,.
Even if the actors aren't too expensive, some just want to move on, and another thing the '90s Batman films showed was that you really need actor continuity (although audiences will generally overlook it even for a major part when the actor dies).
"Green Lantern" could be Hollywood's dream, as the comic book has Doctor Who-like reboots built in. So, you can change actors and change the whole tone of the movies, while still being "Green Lantern".
If it was free, that payback should be optional as in BSD, not forced as in GPL.
You misunderstand two things:
Basically, under the GPL the software itself is "liberated" (which is commonly called "free") and cannot be "locked up" without a violation of the license.
So, multiple downloads from different sites is also a very valid point in my argument.So the fact tat single streams may not hit the cap speed is not terribly important.
Other than P2P, how often are you downloading large enough files from multiple sites at the same time that there will be a significant difference between having a 30Mbps vs. a 60Mbps line?
I rarely see faster than about 15Mbps from any one site where the downloads are large (Microsoft, Red Hat, etc.). I might get faster from sites where I am downloading a song, but with files less than 10MB, it doesn't matter. You really do run into limits from the source server long before your line is saturated.
As a side note, if your upstream speed is any reasonable fraction of your downstream, you need more than the free router the ISP gave you to handle the data. I've tested quite a few, and they can't sustain more than about 40Mbps symmetric, especially if you have a lot of simultaneous connections.
Maybe, in that browsers already have "zoom" functions, so that the page gets scaled, but everything should scale relatively and the page should look right, but an element that CSS says should be 50 pixels wide may or may not be that size after final rendering.
In the same way, I don't know if any browsers respect OS settings like DPI, so you really can't rely on anything being exactly as you request.
I don't see how what I wrote demonstrates a lot of difference. I've yet to see any Windows 7-specific drivers out there for any hardware I have.seen.
I've used Vista and Windows 7 64-bit drivers on Windows XP x64, too, so there's definitely not that much real difference under the hood over an even longer span.
I suspect it's like the "DirectX 10 only for Vista and newer". There's no reason XP can't have that software installed, it's just that Microsoft doesn't want it to happen.
I ran IE8 on Vista for years without any issue, so I guess my standard displays, though big and high-resolutioney weren't "high DPI".
It's the "small but high resolution" that are "high DPI". I have a laptop with a 16" 1920x1080 screen, which works out to 137 DPI.
Standard desktop displays (even large ones) are around 100 DPI. So, what happens on the smaller display is that text of the same point size uses more pixels, and many developers don't account for that. For example, dialog boxes that are fixed in size at 600x400 will have the text run off the edges, because text that takes up 500 pixels wide at 100 DPI will require 685 pixels at 137 DPI. This is caused because text size in Windows is defined in terms of inches (actually, units of 1/1440 of an inch), not pixels.
Downloads are around 10Megs per second on a good day, you can download all day for 5 days at this rate and still not max out the 250GB per month.
At 10 megaBYTES per second, you can download 250 gigaBYTES in about 7 hours.
Even if you meant 10 megaBITS per second, at that rate you can download 250 gigaBYTES in about 56 hours, or a little more than two days.
Obviously, math is not your strong suit.
As someone who has a 100/100 Mbps connection this seems weird, I can easily use more bandwidth than that in a month.
I only have 25/15, and over the past two years I have averaged 270GB/month in download. That's about 800Kbps, or 0.75% utilization on a 100Mbps line. It's only 3% on my line, so it's not like it's "busy".
Speed is not just about downloading more.
After about 30Mbps, yeah, it is.
It is also about downloading stuff quicker, believe it or not.
There are almost no services out there that will download a single stream to you at 30Mbps, much less 100Mbps. There are a few that don't limit bandwidth on single streams, but then you run into the problem where their servers are too loaded to give you full bandwidth anyway.
On the other hand, if you want to download from many places at the same time, then 100Mbps would really help. Unfortunately, the tool that makes such downloading easy is considered "evil" by many ISPs: P2P software.
Furthermore, those studies were never vetted.
Except for that paper by the United States Government Accountability Office that says that all the studies commissioned by the RIAA and MPAA are bogus and that copying generally helps sales.
It's fascinating that every study on "casual" copyright infringement that way paid for by an organization with lots of items under copyright says that "piracy is bad", while every study done by groups that only care about the truth shows that "piracy is unimportant".
Pretty much all of the evidence shows that if the record industry adapted with the times their profit margins would increase.
The same holds true for the movie industry.
The music companies basically handed over a huge chunk of potential profit to Apple instead of opening their own online store. In the same way, the movie studios let every other company make a lot of money renting movies (with Netflix being analogous to Apple for music) instead of taking the profit for themselves.
The reason both industries did this is that when they previously tried to do similar things, they made it so useless to consumers (*cough* "Plays for Sure" *cough* DIVX *cough*) that nobody wanted it. The "creators" of content in both industries are suffering badly from trying to maintain absolute control of their content, while at the same time other companies are making a fortune off giving consumers what they really want.
At this point, its pretty well validated that pirates absolutely do harm sales, at least initially.
Actually, the studies not funded by the MPAA/RIAA/BSA show that infringement helps sales if the product is "worth it" (i.e., priced low enough for the quality of product).
Truly poor (or vastly overpriced) products do lose some sales due to infringement, because the bad word-of-mouth spreads faster. Good products, OTOH, lose no sales because a certain percentage of infringers would never have purchased the product, but gain sales because of the increased good reviews.
Amazon's reported objection is not to collecting sales tax, but to doing so according to 7000+ sets of rules.
Even this isn't their real objection...their real problem is deciding which of the 7000 sets of rules to apply to an individual transaction.
Your states tax requirements.
Really, you bring up a bunch of questions that only show you did't read anything.
Reading the article is meaningless, because the lobbying that would happen for this sort of bill would likely make it unrecognizable by the time it was voted on.
As an example, do you pay tax based on the jurisdiction where you live, or where the item was shipped? Either case would make it ripe for tax evasion. The first would the simplest, where you merely acquire some sort of address in Delaware, New Hampshire, etc., and then ship to your real address. And, you couldn't prevent at least some of this fraud, as many people now ship to their work instead of their home, and I know a lot of people that cross state borders on their commute to work.
The technical problems have been solved
So, if you purchase something from a company headquartered in California, shipped to Minnesota (your friend's house, whom you are buying a present for) from a warehouse in Tennessee, and you legally reside in New Hampshire, but are in Texas when you make your purchase, and the bill for the credit card used for the purchase goes to Massachusetts, what tax law should apply?
I can guarantee you that California, Minnesota, and New Hampshire will all have a pretty loud claim, while the rest will have at least some, because your purchase is causing some use of services (roads, etc.) in their state (which is the whole point of sales tax). Because of this ambiguity, there would be a lot of unusual lobbying about the details of this sort of bill (e.g., Washington will want it based on "company headquarters" because of Amazon).
This is why sales tax at the counter of a brick and mortar is "easy", and mail order or Internet sales tax is hard.