I use an already owned laptop and a free copy of CDex. It supports line in recording at all your favorite bitrates. No need to buy a new piece of hardware
No way. I've never seen a Laptop with sound hardware that didn't sound like completely crap. All kinds of distortions. I think I'd rather record to a casette than to the input of any one of the laptops I've ever owned.
At the very, very least, to record decent audio, you'll need to buy something like an external Audigy (USB) soundcard, which won't be cheap.
MDs are not as indestructable as this yahoo would lead you to believe. The door eventually gets flukey just like 3-1/2" floppies did. I mean, it's a moving part and (especially on compact players) takes a lot of force to slide back and forth. Once the door is bent or starts catching, you end up either removing it and fearing that you've essentially rendered the point of having a media caddy useless, or losing your $1-2 investment.
You've completely lost me there. Opening the cover takes a really, really trivial ammount of force. I mean, if you put a pin on the latch, and just let the weight of gravity push it down, it will unlock the door. I also have NO IDEA what makes you think portable players would be any easier or harder on the mechanism, since they work in exactly the same way.
Besides that, with my hundreds of minidiscs, and through years and years of heavy usage (I started long before '97) I have never seen one of them fail.
For that matter, after thousands of write/erase cycles, I've never seen even a single minidisc fail, very much unlike flash discs, and just about the exact opposite of my experiences with CD-RWs (very unreliable).
Despite this, I do actually agree with you. [In fact I posted a similar comment before I read yours (although mine is much longer, more detailed, and goes into other aspects like battery life, etc]
I didn't give Sony the authority to put DRM on stuff I record, but my MD recorder takes this liberty.
You sure did. You voted (or failed to vote) for your representatives, and those representatives passed a law not just allowing, but REQUIRING SCMS on all audio devices. That's right, Sony would be sued to hell if they didn't have SCMS to prevent you from making multiple-generation copies of minidiscs you own and created.
Things like MP3 players only seem to get around this because they don't do any copying, letting the PC actually do the copying, and PCs are just lucky enough to be exempt from the SCMS law.
It's really not a stretch to say that PCs have become the center of most music collections very much because of this. I'm sure companies would love to sell you a portable device which plugs into your network, and downloads music (for a fee) but can't because of the very real potential for lawsuits if they don't impliment strict copy protection.
Cheap as in, you can buy a CD player that can play MP3s at walmart for $25.
And then you'll go through $100 worth of batteries in a month thanks to the 6 hour run-time... Seriously, spend a little bit more and get an Aiwa or Sony unit with 40 hours of run-time on 2AAs. If there are other companies putting out portable CD players with comparable run-times, I'd love to hear about it. Their nearest competitor, Panasonic, wasn't even at half that when I last checked.
2.) The media is much cheaper than the Mini Discs.
Old discs are always cheaper than new discs. I remember years ago when the $2 minidiscs were far cheaper than CDs, and were REWRITEABLE an almost unlimited number of times.
MDs don't come on spindles of 100 last time I checked.
I've never seen a spindle of 100 CD-RWs, actually, and CD-RWs aren't exactly cheap (or terribly fast for that matter).
3.) You can use MP3s!
You didn't RTFA. The whole idea was that MDs natively support MP3s now.
Minidisc was a great idea, which I bought into early on, and kept-on using for many years... in fact, I used them exclusively up until very recently.
Back when MD started, CD-burners were painfully slow, and unbelivably expensive. A few hundred for an MD recorder, plus a couple dollars for a disc (same length as a CD) was a great deal. Problem was, Sony crippled the format from the very beginning, with SCMS copy protection, and completely failing to introduce MD drives for the PC.
The MD, as an incredibly reliable, and almost infinitely rewriteble M.O. format, could very, very easily have replaced Zip disks, and floppies, back then. Instead, Sony totally dropped the ball and didn't allow them to be used as data storage. This also kept the content locked-up in propritary home audio components which you could hardly copy from, and had to very carefully copy to, in real-time. It took Sony about a DECADE before they came up with their NetMD products, and finally got their most BASIC computer integration working, and FINALY imlimented better-than-realtime recording (and even that was really only if you selected a very low-quality setting). It certainly did not allow you to copy your pre-recorded songs off the minidiscs, and neither did it let you even edit tracks that you transfered from a computer... Really a serious case of lock-in hell(tm).
Still, MDs were a great format at the time, and even now are pretty good. You can hardly imagine how much easier it is to exchange minidiscs, than to swap CDs. The MDs are nice and small (single-hand-sized) and have a caddly, much like floppy disks, which eliminates concerns about how you handle them.
In fact, to this day, even though I own HUNDREDS of them, I have NEVER had a single one go bad. Neither through thousands upon thousands of cycles of repeat recording/erasing, nor through vast numbers of edits and song relabling, nor through physical damage from sitting out in the sun, or being dropped in the dirt, kicked and stepped-on. Really really tough. The players, on the other hand, only last about 2 years of heavy use in my hands, if that. At several hundred dollars in the beginning, I'm immensely glad I got that 4-year warranty, which certainly ended up costing Best Buy a hell of a lot of money. .
These days, though, just I can't see any market for minidiscs at all. 512MB CompactFlash cards can be had for $25, and thanks to Moore's law, they're rapidly getting larger and cheaper, without requiring any change to the devices themselves (unlike discs of any kind). CompactFlash cards are smaller than even minidiscs, and much more flexible. Besides, just try to find a USB-Minidisc drive for $6, like you can for CF cards! Personally, I'm pretty pissed SD/MMC is taking the market. CompactFlash cards are still twice as large, half as expensive, and as small as I (personally) ever want my data storage devices to get...
Minidisc can't take the hard drive market, because carrying 60 minidiscs around still can't compete with a 60GB iPod. HOWEVER, I wish we'd see a DVD-Discman. Just imagine, a CD-sized player with MP3 (and hopefully Ogg and Flac) support, that plays your MP3 CDs, but also handleds dual-layer DVD-RWs. That could be almost 20GBs of music per disc (asuming double-sided, dual-layer). Now THAT could be some real competition for iPods.
Which brings me to my next point. Sony has one amazing thing going for them. Battery life. My portable Sony CD (MP3) player/radio is supposed to get 40 hours of battery life, and with my high-power rechargable NiMH batteries, I figure I'm getting almost double that.
That's the kind of figure Apple can only dream of. Not only do you go an incredibly long time before swapping batteries or plugging in, but you can use an external 15 minute battery charger, buy a fresh pair of AAs off-the-shelf wherever you happen to be, and NEVER have to worry if you're going to be able to get a replacement battery pack from the company that sold you the device.
The phone companies have put large sums of money into reaserch to tell them and us that the phones themselves are harmless.
No, "the phone companies" are spread across both ends of the issue. The telcos without cell-phone interests would much rather show cell phones to be dangerous.
Neither fact should, in any way, lead anyone to jump to the opposite conclusion.
It looks now as if an independant? researcher has added to the body of evidence that there is in fact a real risk.
No. Correlation != Causation.
You can find study after study that quite simply reaches an incorrect conclusion. You have to have a study that controls all variables to reach any kind of useful conclusion, otherwise, it's just barely above the level of old wives' tales.
In this case, it could very, very easily be the case that people who spend the most time on the cellphone have some other traits in common, such as genetics, longer-than-average exposure to the sun, riskier behaviors, less healthy diets, etc., which are the ACTUAL contributing factors, and cellphone usage happens to be completely irrelevant.
Truthfully, the claim that cellphones cause cancer is about at the same level as flying saucers, and exceptional evidence (with NO possible alternative interpretions) is needed to show there is an actual link. Because, after 100 years of megawatt electrical lines and high power transmissions all around us, nobody has thus far found any solid evidence of any harmful effects, so it's very difficult to believe low-power devices, such as cell-phones are having vastly more effect than the rest of the constant, 24 hour electrical bombardment. These same scare stories were popular with microwaves for many years, with no real scientific basis, until they finally went away, presumably with the nutjobs switching their attention to crop circles and cell phones.
Interestingly the mobil phone towers them selves seem to escape the scruting that the handsets have been subjected to.
Well, if you would have read the first dammed sentence of the article, you would have seen the mention of cell towers. Where, then, you get the idea they are escaping scrutiny, is beyond me.
However, there is very good reason people aren't remotely as concerned with cell towers. They send out a tiny fraction as much power as other communications, such as TV and radio broadcasts. You'll have a hard time scamming otherwise rational people into believing one lower-power tower is more dangerous than a higher-power transmission tower. But, apparently there's been enough luck with cellphones, since they're so near your face, that otherwise rational people are willing to listen, just like they did for Y2K, UFOs, The Bermuda Triangle, The Lost City of Atlantis, etc.
To tell a Really Big story that just wouldn't fit in one episode, and to spend more money on special effects than you could on one episode.
Bah! This is what you would call a vast over-generalization, being poorly applied.
Really, the reason to have a movie, is because the studio makes a lot more money that way. It has to be BETTER than any old TV show to do that, of course, but there's no reason it can only be made because of time or special effects constraints.
Any story, no matter how big, can be spread across multiple episodes quite easily. In-fact, that's pretty much the model of many recent TV shows, from Lexx, to Lost.
Money doesn't just apply to special effects. It applies to writing as well. And The Simpsons could sure as hell use some very good writing right now (actually, they could have used it 2 years ago, but I digress).
I have seen a mythbackend server on a Dual P-III 866 that had 5 PVR-250 tuner cards in it all recording from the CATV signal.
The "magic" isn't in the software, but in the capture card. With a PVR-250, you just need a system fast enough to copy 4Mbps over the PCI bus (per-card). Even a a very old single-proc machine can handle that.
Incidentally, PVR-150s are quite a bit cheaper, these days.
Truth is, it really doesn't require much complexity at all. MythTV is just a mess. I found it much easier, far more flexible, etc., to write a simple scheduler script.
The EVD format is as old as DVDs. It's China's little failed experiment, trying to follow-up the sucess of SVCD.
Back when it was going to use VP5, it sounded like a good format. Now that they had a contract dispute (read: lawsuit) with On2, they've given-up and just gone for MPEG-2. So, EVD, at best, is no better than DVD, and isn't supported by any players, and is about a decade behind schedule.
Back-up my computers over the internet to some cheap storage service (like Gmail!) in a reasonable ammount of time.
Video is a good option for IPTV, but that's a hard financial sell against a deployed coaxial cable network.
No, not even slightly. Cable/Satellite networks give you a few hundred channels at most, and 99% of them are crap you don't want to watch, but have to pay for, anyhow. With IPTV, you can have an absolutely unlimited variety of channels, and it wouldn't be centrally controlled like cable/satellihistorychannel.com for $1/mo if you like, or not if you're not interested... You could sign-up for the "Dominican Pet Olympics Channel" if you want... You could sign-up for the Slashdot TV channel if you want!
What the internet has done for everything else... it can do for TV just as well, if not better.
3. Start to use digital projectors. (Make the experience better with better looking films.)
Not interested. Film looks quite good. Personally, I somewhat expect digital projection to give worse quality, such as all kinds of digital compression artifacts, and CRT/LCD/DLP artifacts.
6. Fewer commericals. (More trailers instead.)
I hate trailers just slightly less than I hate commercials...
Why not have a cheap digital projector displaying cartoons on the screen, up until the film starts? Or, perhaps old public-domain short films. Keeps people entertained (instead of annoyed) while they're waiting. Also, you can keep the lights on until the film starts (big plus).
Just showing blockbusters is a very new phenomenon in the theatre industry. It wasn't long ago that you could go watch cheap midnight matinees, and much more varied films. With cheap digital projectors, this could be done for almost no cost. With lots of public-domain movies (such as Night of the Living Dead) it's even cheaper to do.
There is a lot theatres could do to draw crowds. In fact, it doesn't even have to relate to films at all... Air conditioning was a big draw for theatres, before that was common in homes.
If you upgraded and didn't see anything break, you haven't been doing it for long.
I think you misunderstood the point in that comment of mine... I haven't seen any other OS upgrade even from one version to the next, without serious breakage. That FreeBSD works smoothly even after just one upgrade is a significant achievment.
When BSD went from a.out to ELF, a ton of libraries stopped working as advertised.
Yes, that would be the time NOT to upgrade, but to install from scratch. There's no way that change could possibly be handled gracefully.
You strike me as someone who has never acctually installed Free yourself. Esspecially if you aren't aware of the installer problems.
Shows how much you know. I'm using a nicely updated FreeBSD 6.0 right now. Using Firefox 1.5 compiled from ports (with a minor modification to have it use GTK1 instead of 2). In fact, practically every program I'm using was compiled from ports, perhaps with the exception of MPlayer, since I wanted a CVS snapshot, not the last (1-year old) release.
Even the FreeBSD diciples among my friends freely admit that the installer is a huge dog and a major downfall of the system.
Yes, well, the "FreeBSD diciples" you know may quite possibly be idiots. I have no way of knowing.
I heard rumors of a new installer being created but I have yet to see it.
Nope, still the same-old installer. If it ain't broke...
As for the slackware installer.. haven't used it since almost certainly before you knew what a computer was.
Definately not. Linux has only been around about 15 years now, and I've got a much longer history with computers than that. In fact I still sometimes use a '81 QUME terminal I kept around.
When I last used slackware it came with a little red book with very small text and step by step instructions
Only if you paid for it... I'm sure plenty of us were loading up floppies at school/work instead of paying for it.
As for the OBSD installer... it works, everytime. Enough said.
If only that were true. I've run across lots of systems where OpenBSD didn't like the disk geometry, couldn't load a driver for the CD-ROM, didn't have appropriate network card drivers, would lock-up upon kernel boot-up, would start throwing out read-errors halfway through installation, etc. The most annoying, though, is one I went through repeatedly... The OpenBSD boot disk/CD isn't a big fan of my Alpha system, and if it sits idle (no keypresses) for more than about 2 minutes, you can't input anything. Now, to make this problem all the more horendous, it loads the de driver before the dc one (took quite a while for me to figure-out this problem) so these hundreds of megs of dist files were downloading at 1KB/s, meaning I'd have to sit there at the keyboard for a very long time to get the thing installed.
Sorry, but there is NO way that you will get me to agree that working on new features is more important then developing stable and bug free code.
This is beyond ridiculous. Nothing you have listed could even remotely be considered a bug in FreeBSD, at all. At most you can consider the above an inconvenience. Perhaps a lack of polish.
I'm just wasting my time. I'm done with this nonsense zealotry... Send a bugreport, post some details, etc. Otherwise, you're just blowing hot air.
Installing OpenOffice I had to stop and download three different licences
That much is true, only because it has Java as a dependency. I can't see how that would cause it to fail to compile. Anyhow, you can always disable Java (hence the license agreements) with "-DWITHOUT_JAVA".
Realplayer doesn't run nativly and has to use Linux Binary compatiblity mode,
Yes it does, but it still works just fine (just takes a while to install all the Linux base libs). If you don't want to do that, you can always install MPlayer/Xine, which will run natively, and use the Win32 DLLs.
Flash is a program that just doesn't work.
It had it working just fine back when I needed it. Then I got annoyed with all the ads and animations and uninstalled it all-together.
The alternatives cause Firefox to crash randomly.
Yes, that much is true. The open source flash libraries are terribly unstable, but that has NOTHING to do with FreeBSD, as they exhibit the same behavior on Linux.
It has been a while since I installed Free but we stopped using it a while ago due to one of the worst installers I have EVER seen. It wouldn't resolve DNS correctly and if you made a mistake, you are starting ALL over again.
What the hell? The FreeBSD installer is basically a step-up from the Slackware installer, and a hell of a lot better than the limited and bare-bones OpenBSD installer. You can always abort whatever step you're on, go back to the main screen, and start that step again. I have no idea where you're getting the idea from that you are somehow stuck with your mistakes.
Lastly, when I tried to boot up the computer behind my firewall without passing defining a local domain suffex it would hang on the sendmail script for 10 to 15 min before continueing on with the boot.
First legitimate complaint I've heard so far... Yes, that minor issue is very easily worked-around.
What do you do in the future when one of these is mass-produced and forgets its turn signal and cuts you off?
Finally, all my knowledge aquired over the years becomes extremely useful!
I know this one... What you do is get way out in front of it, and get out of your car. Walk over and grab the yellow-line in the middle of the road. Rip it so that you have an end, and carry your end to the nearest wall, then set it down. The robotic vehicle will follow the curved line at full speed, straight into the brick wall, where it will be flattened...
The only thing I'm not sure about, is if it will see stars or birds flying around it's head...
The problem is that the idealists are in the minority, while the shallow whiners who will do anything to save a buck are the majority.
Personally, I haven't gone in to a walmart in several years, even though it's the closest store to me. Personally, I'm happy to pay twice as much if it means I don't have to dig through piles of junk strewn around the store, don't get treated like cattle, and don't have to wait in absouletely massively long lines, because they don't want to open another register.
What's more, paying twice as much, elsewhere, usually puts you out ahead... Instead of getting cheap crap at Walmart, you can get decent-quality crap elsewhere, which will be better from day 1, and last a lot longer as well.
I think the real of Walmart becomes most obvious when you compare Sam's Club with Costco:
This is just a baseless troll, without any real information.
At any given time, I was never able to run more than about 75% of the desktop apps that I wanted to run. I tried portupgrade, but that often did more harm than good.
WTF? I can't remember the last time I saw FreeBSD ports break. Not even a SINGLE package. They ALL compile and install perfectly every time. Hell, I've UPGRADED my system from FreeBSD version to version, never bothered uninstalling the old ports, and everything continues to work fine. I've never seen ANY other OS handle upgrades remotely as gracefully.
Besides, even if you did have a problem with compiling from ports (which I have a very hard time believing), why didn't you just install from the binary packages, instead?
I can't believe this is anything other than another anti-BSD troll.
this begs a freaking question, should a modern OS even allow some application to modify behaviour of another application in memory, especially behaviour of a system level application, an OS DLL?
OpenBSD has W^X built-in, which, in-fact, elminates this. Each segment of memory is exclusively marked as either WRITE or EXECUTE, to prevent security exploits.
Linux can also get somewhat similar security features using PaX or ExecSheild.
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No way. I've never seen a Laptop with sound hardware that didn't sound like completely crap. All kinds of distortions. I think I'd rather record to a casette than to the input of any one of the laptops I've ever owned.
At the very, very least, to record decent audio, you'll need to buy something like an external Audigy (USB) soundcard, which won't be cheap.
You've completely lost me there. Opening the cover takes a really, really trivial ammount of force. I mean, if you put a pin on the latch, and just let the weight of gravity push it down, it will unlock the door. I also have NO IDEA what makes you think portable players would be any easier or harder on the mechanism, since they work in exactly the same way.
Besides that, with my hundreds of minidiscs, and through years and years of heavy usage (I started long before '97) I have never seen one of them fail.
For that matter, after thousands of write/erase cycles, I've never seen even a single minidisc fail, very much unlike flash discs, and just about the exact opposite of my experiences with CD-RWs (very unreliable).
Despite this, I do actually agree with you. [In fact I posted a similar comment before I read yours (although mine is much longer, more detailed, and goes into other aspects like battery life, etc]
You sure did. You voted (or failed to vote) for your representatives, and those representatives passed a law not just allowing, but REQUIRING SCMS on all audio devices. That's right, Sony would be sued to hell if they didn't have SCMS to prevent you from making multiple-generation copies of minidiscs you own and created.
Things like MP3 players only seem to get around this because they don't do any copying, letting the PC actually do the copying, and PCs are just lucky enough to be exempt from the SCMS law.
It's really not a stretch to say that PCs have become the center of most music collections very much because of this. I'm sure companies would love to sell you a portable device which plugs into your network, and downloads music (for a fee) but can't because of the very real potential for lawsuits if they don't impliment strict copy protection.
And then you'll go through $100 worth of batteries in a month thanks to the 6 hour run-time... Seriously, spend a little bit more and get an Aiwa or Sony unit with 40 hours of run-time on 2AAs. If there are other companies putting out portable CD players with comparable run-times, I'd love to hear about it. Their nearest competitor, Panasonic, wasn't even at half that when I last checked.
Old discs are always cheaper than new discs. I remember years ago when the $2 minidiscs were far cheaper than CDs, and were REWRITEABLE an almost unlimited number of times.
I've never seen a spindle of 100 CD-RWs, actually, and CD-RWs aren't exactly cheap (or terribly fast for that matter).
You didn't RTFA. The whole idea was that MDs natively support MP3s now.
Minidisc was a great idea, which I bought into early on, and kept-on using for many years... in fact, I used them exclusively up until very recently.
Back when MD started, CD-burners were painfully slow, and unbelivably expensive. A few hundred for an MD recorder, plus a couple dollars for a disc (same length as a CD) was a great deal. Problem was, Sony crippled the format from the very beginning, with SCMS copy protection, and completely failing to introduce MD drives for the PC.
The MD, as an incredibly reliable, and almost infinitely rewriteble M.O. format, could very, very easily have replaced Zip disks, and floppies, back then. Instead, Sony totally dropped the ball and didn't allow them to be used as data storage. This also kept the content locked-up in propritary home audio components which you could hardly copy from, and had to very carefully copy to, in real-time. It took Sony about a DECADE before they came up with their NetMD products, and finally got their most BASIC computer integration working, and FINALY imlimented better-than-realtime recording (and even that was really only if you selected a very low-quality setting). It certainly did not allow you to copy your pre-recorded songs off the minidiscs, and neither did it let you even edit tracks that you transfered from a computer... Really a serious case of lock-in hell(tm).
Still, MDs were a great format at the time, and even now are pretty good. You can hardly imagine how much easier it is to exchange minidiscs, than to swap CDs. The MDs are nice and small (single-hand-sized) and have a caddly, much like floppy disks, which eliminates concerns about how you handle them.
In fact, to this day, even though I own HUNDREDS of them, I have NEVER had a single one go bad. Neither through thousands upon thousands of cycles of repeat recording/erasing, nor through vast numbers of edits and song relabling, nor through physical damage from sitting out in the sun, or being dropped in the dirt, kicked and stepped-on. Really really tough. The players, on the other hand, only last about 2 years of heavy use in my hands, if that. At several hundred dollars in the beginning, I'm immensely glad I got that 4-year warranty, which certainly ended up costing Best Buy a hell of a lot of money.
.
These days, though, just I can't see any market for minidiscs at all. 512MB CompactFlash cards can be had for $25, and thanks to Moore's law, they're rapidly getting larger and cheaper, without requiring any change to the devices themselves (unlike discs of any kind). CompactFlash cards are smaller than even minidiscs, and much more flexible. Besides, just try to find a USB-Minidisc drive for $6, like you can for CF cards! Personally, I'm pretty pissed SD/MMC is taking the market. CompactFlash cards are still twice as large, half as expensive, and as small as I (personally) ever want my data storage devices to get...
Minidisc can't take the hard drive market, because carrying 60 minidiscs around still can't compete with a 60GB iPod. HOWEVER, I wish we'd see a DVD-Discman. Just imagine, a CD-sized player with MP3 (and hopefully Ogg and Flac) support, that plays your MP3 CDs, but also handleds dual-layer DVD-RWs. That could be almost 20GBs of music per disc (asuming double-sided, dual-layer). Now THAT could be some real competition for iPods.
Which brings me to my next point. Sony has one amazing thing going for them. Battery life. My portable Sony CD (MP3) player/radio is supposed to get 40 hours of battery life, and with my high-power rechargable NiMH batteries, I figure I'm getting almost double that.
That's the kind of figure Apple can only dream of. Not only do you go an incredibly long time before swapping batteries or plugging in, but you can use an external 15 minute battery charger, buy a fresh pair of AAs off-the-shelf wherever you happen to be, and NEVER have to worry if you're going to be able to get a replacement battery pack from the company that sold you the device.
That last i
No, "the phone companies" are spread across both ends of the issue. The telcos without cell-phone interests would much rather show cell phones to be dangerous.
Neither fact should, in any way, lead anyone to jump to the opposite conclusion.
No. Correlation != Causation.
You can find study after study that quite simply reaches an incorrect conclusion. You have to have a study that controls all variables to reach any kind of useful conclusion, otherwise, it's just barely above the level of old wives' tales.
In this case, it could very, very easily be the case that people who spend the most time on the cellphone have some other traits in common, such as genetics, longer-than-average exposure to the sun, riskier behaviors, less healthy diets, etc., which are the ACTUAL contributing factors, and cellphone usage happens to be completely irrelevant.
Truthfully, the claim that cellphones cause cancer is about at the same level as flying saucers, and exceptional evidence (with NO possible alternative interpretions) is needed to show there is an actual link. Because, after 100 years of megawatt electrical lines and high power transmissions all around us, nobody has thus far found any solid evidence of any harmful effects, so it's very difficult to believe low-power devices, such as cell-phones are having vastly more effect than the rest of the constant, 24 hour electrical bombardment. These same scare stories were popular with microwaves for many years, with no real scientific basis, until they finally went away, presumably with the nutjobs switching their attention to crop circles and cell phones.
Well, if you would have read the first dammed sentence of the article, you would have seen the mention of cell towers. Where, then, you get the idea they are escaping scrutiny, is beyond me.
However, there is very good reason people aren't remotely as concerned with cell towers. They send out a tiny fraction as much power as other communications, such as TV and radio broadcasts. You'll have a hard time scamming otherwise rational people into believing one lower-power tower is more dangerous than a higher-power transmission tower. But, apparently there's been enough luck with cellphones, since they're so near your face, that otherwise rational people are willing to listen, just like they did for Y2K, UFOs, The Bermuda Triangle, The Lost City of Atlantis, etc.
Congratulations. You've shown you have absolutely no clue what tags are, and how they work. Read the FAQ and be enlightened.
Bah! This is what you would call a vast over-generalization, being poorly applied.
Really, the reason to have a movie, is because the studio makes a lot more money that way. It has to be BETTER than any old TV show to do that, of course, but there's no reason it can only be made because of time or special effects constraints.
Any story, no matter how big, can be spread across multiple episodes quite easily. In-fact, that's pretty much the model of many recent TV shows, from Lexx, to Lost.
Money doesn't just apply to special effects. It applies to writing as well. And The Simpsons could sure as hell use some very good writing right now (actually, they could have used it 2 years ago, but I digress).
No.
You must be new here...
That's life. Get used-to it. MAny of us are absolutely fed-up with moronic political correctness, and don't give a damn.
How about "kids" being used as a derogatory term? How about "old men" being used as a derogatory term?
Don't like it, screw you. Welcome to being a member of the public, and having to put up with others, as they put up with you.
The "magic" isn't in the software, but in the capture card. With a PVR-250, you just need a system fast enough to copy 4Mbps over the PCI bus (per-card). Even a a very old single-proc machine can handle that.
Incidentally, PVR-150s are quite a bit cheaper, these days.
Truth is, it really doesn't require much complexity at all. MythTV is just a mess. I found it much easier, far more flexible, etc., to write a simple scheduler script.
You could have said that 5 years ago...
Three-cheers for Vaporware!
Nobody is going to wait 20 hours, with their DSL connection maxed-out, to download a single HDTV movie. Online distribution is probably decade off.
Obviously true, but since you don't have a monopoly on the future, whether or not HD-DVD will catch-on is still up-in-the-air.
Certainly, if Sony bungles Blu-ray any further, HD-DVD could very easily be *THE* format for the next couple decades (at least).
The EVD format is as old as DVDs. It's China's little failed experiment, trying to follow-up the sucess of SVCD.
Back when it was going to use VP5, it sounded like a good format. Now that they had a contract dispute (read: lawsuit) with On2, they've given-up and just gone for MPEG-2. So, EVD, at best, is no better than DVD, and isn't supported by any players, and is about a decade behind schedule.
Yes, and those $100 Wal-mart HD-DVD players will probably work right up until a few days after the warranty expires...
Download ISOs MUCH faster...
Download FLAC-compressed audio instead of MP3s.
Download more HDTV videos.
Back-up my computers over the internet to some cheap storage service (like Gmail!) in a reasonable ammount of time.
No, not even slightly. Cable/Satellite networks give you a few hundred channels at most, and 99% of them are crap you don't want to watch, but have to pay for, anyhow. With IPTV, you can have an absolutely unlimited variety of channels, and it wouldn't be centrally controlled like cable/satellihistorychannel.com for $1/mo if you like, or not if you're not interested... You could sign-up for the "Dominican Pet Olympics Channel" if you want... You could sign-up for the Slashdot TV channel if you want!
What the internet has done for everything else... it can do for TV just as well, if not better.
Not interested. Film looks quite good. Personally, I somewhat expect digital projection to give worse quality, such as all kinds of digital compression artifacts, and CRT/LCD/DLP artifacts.
I hate trailers just slightly less than I hate commercials...
Why not have a cheap digital projector displaying cartoons on the screen, up until the film starts? Or, perhaps old public-domain short films. Keeps people entertained (instead of annoyed) while they're waiting. Also, you can keep the lights on until the film starts (big plus).
Just showing blockbusters is a very new phenomenon in the theatre industry. It wasn't long ago that you could go watch cheap midnight matinees, and much more varied films. With cheap digital projectors, this could be done for almost no cost. With lots of public-domain movies (such as Night of the Living Dead) it's even cheaper to do.
There is a lot theatres could do to draw crowds. In fact, it doesn't even have to relate to films at all... Air conditioning was a big draw for theatres, before that was common in homes.
I think you misunderstood the point in that comment of mine... I haven't seen any other OS upgrade even from one version to the next, without serious breakage. That FreeBSD works smoothly even after just one upgrade is a significant achievment.
Yes, that would be the time NOT to upgrade, but to install from scratch. There's no way that change could possibly be handled gracefully.
Shows how much you know. I'm using a nicely updated FreeBSD 6.0 right now. Using Firefox 1.5 compiled from ports (with a minor modification to have it use GTK1 instead of 2). In fact, practically every program I'm using was compiled from ports, perhaps with the exception of MPlayer, since I wanted a CVS snapshot, not the last (1-year old) release.
Yes, well, the "FreeBSD diciples" you know may quite possibly be idiots. I have no way of knowing.
Nope, still the same-old installer. If it ain't broke...
Definately not. Linux has only been around about 15 years now, and I've got a much longer history with computers than that. In fact I still sometimes use a '81 QUME terminal I kept around.
Only if you paid for it... I'm sure plenty of us were loading up floppies at school/work instead of paying for it.
If only that were true. I've run across lots of systems where OpenBSD didn't like the disk geometry, couldn't load a driver for the CD-ROM, didn't have appropriate network card drivers, would lock-up upon kernel boot-up, would start throwing out read-errors halfway through installation, etc. The most annoying, though, is one I went through repeatedly... The OpenBSD boot disk/CD isn't a big fan of my Alpha system, and if it sits idle (no keypresses) for more than about 2 minutes, you can't input anything. Now, to make this problem all the more horendous, it loads the de driver before the dc one (took quite a while for me to figure-out this problem) so these hundreds of megs of dist files were downloading at 1KB/s, meaning I'd have to sit there at the keyboard for a very long time to get the thing installed.
This is beyond ridiculous. Nothing you have listed could even remotely be considered a bug in FreeBSD, at all. At most you can consider the above an inconvenience. Perhaps a lack of polish.
I'm just wasting my time. I'm done with this nonsense zealotry... Send a bugreport, post some details, etc. Otherwise, you're just blowing hot air.
That much is true, only because it has Java as a dependency. I can't see how that would cause it to fail to compile. Anyhow, you can always disable Java (hence the license agreements) with "-DWITHOUT_JAVA".
Yes it does, but it still works just fine (just takes a while to install all the Linux base libs). If you don't want to do that, you can always install MPlayer/Xine, which will run natively, and use the Win32 DLLs.
It had it working just fine back when I needed it. Then I got annoyed with all the ads and animations and uninstalled it all-together.
Yes, that much is true. The open source flash libraries are terribly unstable, but that has NOTHING to do with FreeBSD, as they exhibit the same behavior on Linux.
What the hell? The FreeBSD installer is basically a step-up from the Slackware installer, and a hell of a lot better than the limited and bare-bones OpenBSD installer. You can always abort whatever step you're on, go back to the main screen, and start that step again. I have no idea where you're getting the idea from that you are somehow stuck with your mistakes.
First legitimate complaint I've heard so far... Yes, that minor issue is very easily worked-around.
That's insane. I've never seen anything like that, and I've certainly compiled MPlayer dozens of times. If I did see that, I'd fix it.
How about posting the log of this MPlayer error?
No, Windows has a really crippled and crappy implimentation.
- technique.html
http://woct-blog.blogspot.com/2005/01/dep-evasion
Finally, all my knowledge aquired over the years becomes extremely useful!
I know this one... What you do is get way out in front of it, and get out of your car. Walk over and grab the yellow-line in the middle of the road. Rip it so that you have an end, and carry your end to the nearest wall, then set it down. The robotic vehicle will follow the curved line at full speed, straight into the brick wall, where it will be flattened...
The only thing I'm not sure about, is if it will see stars or birds flying around it's head...
I have to say, you're just simply wrong...
o us_Good_For_Business
The problem is that the idealists are in the minority, while the shallow whiners who will do anything to save a buck are the majority.
Personally, I haven't gone in to a walmart in several years, even though it's the closest store to me. Personally, I'm happy to pay twice as much if it means I don't have to dig through piles of junk strewn around the store, don't get treated like cattle, and don't have to wait in absouletely massively long lines, because they don't want to open another register.
What's more, paying twice as much, elsewhere, usually puts you out ahead... Instead of getting cheap crap at Walmart, you can get decent-quality crap elsewhere, which will be better from day 1, and last a lot longer as well.
I think the real of Walmart becomes most obvious when you compare Sam's Club with Costco:
http://gnn.tv/articles/239/The_Wal_Mart_Myth
http://shogo.gnn.tv/headlines/3846/Is_Being_Gener
This is just a baseless troll, without any real information.
WTF? I can't remember the last time I saw FreeBSD ports break. Not even a SINGLE package. They ALL compile and install perfectly every time. Hell, I've UPGRADED my system from FreeBSD version to version, never bothered uninstalling the old ports, and everything continues to work fine. I've never seen ANY other OS handle upgrades remotely as gracefully.
Besides, even if you did have a problem with compiling from ports (which I have a very hard time believing), why didn't you just install from the binary packages, instead?
I can't believe this is anything other than another anti-BSD troll.
OpenBSD has W^X built-in, which, in-fact, elminates this. Each segment of memory is exclusively marked as either WRITE or EXECUTE, to prevent security exploits.
Linux can also get somewhat similar security features using PaX or ExecSheild.