That's not fair. What actually happens is that some Top Gear Rejects who got the sack because they refused to cut down on their sexist-innunedo-rate drive cars quickly, before going on to demonstrate why driving a car quickly and presenting a car programme are two completely seperate skills, and they've got bugger all of the latter one.
Meanwhile, Clarkson, May and Hammond are frankly average drivers at best, and leave that stuff to The Stig before doing their real jobs of entertaining me for 60 minutes.
Actual story - the site appears to be offering "extended versions" of some segments from the current series of Fifth Gear. It's only some bits of it that are unaired.
Frankly, though, Fifth Gear just took everything I hated about Old Top Gear (Tiff, Quentin, dull but "informative" car reviews) and forgot to pack the tomfoolery, so I'll pass.
I'm with Laconian. New Top Gear = Rock. 5th Gear = Suck.
The "presenters" on 5th Gear know a hell of a lot more about driving cars quickly than Clarkson ever will. But they don't have Hammond's grasp of the humour value in destroying caravans. If I want to be informed about cars, I read the mag. What I want from Top Gear, and get, is an hours worth of quality Sunday evening entertainment.
And I just don't get the appeal of VBH, either. Last time I tuned in, they were still giving them Needell's cast-off 70's-era innuendos, and sounded as embarrassed saying them as I did hearing them.
Correct. One major difference between the shows is that the new Clarkson, Hammond and May Top Gear is absolutely pissing hilarious and a must-watch even if you're not an Evo bore, while I'd rather watch paint dry than sit through another 30 minutes of Fifth Gear. Or Old Top Gear for that matter.
Tiff Needell is actually a pretty reasonable driver, and certainly far better at it than Clarkson. But he can't present a TV programme for toffee.
"the first webpage I found actually admitted to have been taken down - this usually only happens if there is a legal reason to do so (or they had a very bad webhotel provider - of course I cannot say for sure)."
You're not exactly au-fait with the whole automated DMCA notice thing, are you? Hardly a month goes by without yro.slashdot.org covering another site kicked offline erroneously due to an overzealous provider.
That's certainly a use for them, and it's mentioned on the extras for the Lord Of The Rings DVDs that they were carting around edited AVID footage on iPods as well.
But most people I know use a 20Gb iPod for carrying around 20Gb of music.
I very much doubt you're the average iPod owner, however. By Apple's own figures (which I completely admit are rather arbitrary, as they assume you're ripping 4 minute songs at 128kb) you could fit their entire collection on a 4Gb Mini and still have nearly 2Gb spare to use for data storage.
In which case, why would so many want the 20Gb+ models?
I love my 4Gb mini, and a day or two's worth of music is plenty to cart around for most purposes. But if I wanted to rip my entire collection from CD (even before I get to the vinyl) I'd be pushed to get it on a 60Gb Photo.
Precisely - I filled my iPod by just ripping a semi-random portion of my CDs through iTunes; a rather painless thing to do, and about an order of magnitude faster than LAME's --alt-preset-standard setting, with comparable sound quality at the equivalent bitrates.
If that is the case, then you're not actually a big-F Fundamentalist. You might be a born-again Christian with a true belief and a personal relationship with Jesus, but the reason that people get to be so "offensive" about Fundamentalists is that if you don't do all the self-contraditory nonsense.
Selectively quoting the Bible to excuse homophobia while being prepared to eat shellfish, attacking science and scientists that disagree with certain readings of Genesis, promotion of the nasty little double-think hand-waving pseudoscience that calls itself "Intelligent Design" is the core definition of the term in current popular usage.
Excuse me while I retch. "Intelligent Design" is pure 100% old-fashioned Creationism with a few management buzzwords sprinkled around to confuse the stupid.
I guess my complaint is that I'd never heard of those things. I'll give them a try - thanks! All the DIVX to DVD solutions I'd seen were around the £40 mark, while a cheap DIVX standalone player was only £35, so I just hadn't bothered.
So Motorola don't like the way Apple promote things?
Given the fact that every time I see a Motorola advert I want to smash the thing with a brick, but iPods are so trendy that no-one even says "mp3 player" when "iPod" will do, this is rather like Lada complaining about Rolls Royce's build-quality.
Actually, the real limitation is that a decent MPEG2 encoder that will work from DIVX (needed for either SVCD or DVD, and my DVD player has sound synch issues with SVCDs anyway) costs more than a new player that actually understands DIVX files, so I've just never bothered...
I'm on 512k ADSL, which in the UK is considered pretty fast. No idea where you are that 900k is considered slow.
So it takes me a couple of hours to download a 350mb Smallville episode from Usenet, to use a random example. Which means around 4 hours or more for a full-length film.
Even ignoring that I've got to convert it to crummy VCD if I want to play it on my DVD player (since none of my DVD encoding programs seem to do a reliable job with xvids), I'd rather just order the legitimate disc. I'm sure as hell not paying for the privilege of burning my own.
I don't have every movie ever made on my shelf, but I do have most of the ones I wish to watch. It isn't a huge amount of effort to order stuff off the net and have it turn up, then place it on my unwatched pile.
If the download takes overnight (and it does at the moment if I download a TV episode I missed) then I'm removing the spontenaity anyway.
That's just great for them. However, none of this makes me want to actually type their url in. What do they do? Is there much call for Online Palace Gilting?
1) SVideo sucks cock. Component or RGB Scart if you want a decent picture quality with DVD are the only options.
2) As iTunes has comprehensively demonstrated, the media companies are unwilling to sell me an encrypted downloaded version of something for substantially less than the boxed product. Why would I bother downloading a film and spending a significant amount of time backing it up to a DVD-R (or whatever the equivalent will be) when there are these nicely packaged pre-pressed ones on sale?
The mistake being made here is that Video is not Audio. I love my new iPod, because I can listen to my music anywhere, and cart a decent selection of it around in my pocket instead of deciding in advance what CDs to put in my bag. However, I don't watch films while shopping, nor do I watch them on a packed train.
As much as I do love my iPod, I really do, if I want to listen to music at home I'll put the CD or record on, not play lossy-compressed files, because grabbing it off the shelf isn't inconvenient. Grabbing a DVD off the shelf isn't, either.
If the choice is between buying them from iTunes at the current cost, and paying a mere $0.05 but having to pay a subsidy on every. fecking. piece. of. hardware. ever. then I'll stick with the $0.99 please.
I've bought a total of 1(one) song through iTunes, because it was an import-only single that was going to cost me about ten times that for the physical version (DJ Shadow's Keane remix, fact fans). At even a 1% tax rate, I can tell you now I've bought a shitload more than $94 worth of hardware over the years.
I may not be Australian, but my first thought wasn't anything to do with dingos, but why you named your daughter after the brilliant Hank Azaria (the voice of Moe/Apu/Chief Wiggum etc. in The Simpsons, Phoebe's boyfriend David in Friends and so on).
Some of the latest ones do, it's true. Finding one that will definitely last ages, and has decent picture quality to start with, and most importantly I can afford, is turning out a pain.
The only one I really know at the moment is the Panasonic 7-series, and that doesn't have an HDMI-board for when Sky HD digital launches next year.
Well, having helped a friend lift his 42" plasma, I'd say anyone moving this 82" TV regularly won't have to worry about their waistline for much longer. They're obscenely heavy, to be honest.
Being sensible for a moment, it's OLED that has the "blue pixel death" problem, not LCD, so you should be fine. LCDs don't have the short half-life of plasma and OLED (they just look like crap to start with).
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That's not fair. What actually happens is that some Top Gear Rejects who got the sack because they refused to cut down on their sexist-innunedo-rate drive cars quickly, before going on to demonstrate why driving a car quickly and presenting a car programme are two completely seperate skills, and they've got bugger all of the latter one.
Meanwhile, Clarkson, May and Hammond are frankly average drivers at best, and leave that stuff to The Stig before doing their real jobs of entertaining me for 60 minutes.
Actual story - the site appears to be offering "extended versions" of some segments from the current series of Fifth Gear. It's only some bits of it that are unaired.
Frankly, though, Fifth Gear just took everything I hated about Old Top Gear (Tiff, Quentin, dull but "informative" car reviews) and forgot to pack the tomfoolery, so I'll pass.
I'm with Laconian. New Top Gear = Rock. 5th Gear = Suck.
The "presenters" on 5th Gear know a hell of a lot more about driving cars quickly than Clarkson ever will. But they don't have Hammond's grasp of the humour value in destroying caravans. If I want to be informed about cars, I read the mag. What I want from Top Gear, and get, is an hours worth of quality Sunday evening entertainment.
And I just don't get the appeal of VBH, either. Last time I tuned in, they were still giving them Needell's cast-off 70's-era innuendos, and sounded as embarrassed saying them as I did hearing them.
Correct. One major difference between the shows is that the new Clarkson, Hammond and May Top Gear is absolutely pissing hilarious and a must-watch even if you're not an Evo bore, while I'd rather watch paint dry than sit through another 30 minutes of Fifth Gear. Or Old Top Gear for that matter.
Tiff Needell is actually a pretty reasonable driver, and certainly far better at it than Clarkson. But he can't present a TV programme for toffee.
"the first webpage I found actually admitted to have been taken down - this usually only happens if there is a legal reason to do so (or they had a very bad webhotel provider - of course I cannot say for sure)."
You're not exactly au-fait with the whole automated DMCA notice thing, are you? Hardly a month goes by without yro.slashdot.org covering another site kicked offline erroneously due to an overzealous provider.
No, no, no. What makes Scientology so pernicious is that the Moonies never made a piece of cinematic garbage as poor as Battlefield Earth.
That is the funniest thing I've read all day; mod parent up!
That's certainly a use for them, and it's mentioned on the extras for the Lord Of The Rings DVDs that they were carting around edited AVID footage on iPods as well.
But most people I know use a 20Gb iPod for carrying around 20Gb of music.
I very much doubt you're the average iPod owner, however. By Apple's own figures (which I completely admit are rather arbitrary, as they assume you're ripping 4 minute songs at 128kb) you could fit their entire collection on a 4Gb Mini and still have nearly 2Gb spare to use for data storage.
In which case, why would so many want the 20Gb+ models?
I love my 4Gb mini, and a day or two's worth of music is plenty to cart around for most purposes. But if I wanted to rip my entire collection from CD (even before I get to the vinyl) I'd be pushed to get it on a 60Gb Photo.
Precisely - I filled my iPod by just ripping a semi-random portion of my CDs through iTunes; a rather painless thing to do, and about an order of magnitude faster than LAME's --alt-preset-standard setting, with comparable sound quality at the equivalent bitrates.
If that is the case, then you're not actually a big-F Fundamentalist. You might be a born-again Christian with a true belief and a personal relationship with Jesus, but the reason that people get to be so "offensive" about Fundamentalists is that if you don't do all the self-contraditory nonsense.
Selectively quoting the Bible to excuse homophobia while being prepared to eat shellfish, attacking science and scientists that disagree with certain readings of Genesis, promotion of the nasty little double-think hand-waving pseudoscience that calls itself "Intelligent Design" is the core definition of the term in current popular usage.
Excuse me while I retch. "Intelligent Design" is pure 100% old-fashioned Creationism with a few management buzzwords sprinkled around to confuse the stupid.
Otherwise, Who Designs The Intelligent Designer?
I guess my complaint is that I'd never heard of those things. I'll give them a try - thanks! All the DIVX to DVD solutions I'd seen were around the £40 mark, while a cheap DIVX standalone player was only £35, so I just hadn't bothered.
So Motorola don't like the way Apple promote things?
Given the fact that every time I see a Motorola advert I want to smash the thing with a brick, but iPods are so trendy that no-one even says "mp3 player" when "iPod" will do, this is rather like Lada complaining about Rolls Royce's build-quality.
Actually, the real limitation is that a decent MPEG2 encoder that will work from DIVX (needed for either SVCD or DVD, and my DVD player has sound synch issues with SVCDs anyway) costs more than a new player that actually understands DIVX files, so I've just never bothered...
I'm on 512k ADSL, which in the UK is considered pretty fast. No idea where you are that 900k is considered slow.
So it takes me a couple of hours to download a 350mb Smallville episode from Usenet, to use a random example. Which means around 4 hours or more for a full-length film.
Even ignoring that I've got to convert it to crummy VCD if I want to play it on my DVD player (since none of my DVD encoding programs seem to do a reliable job with xvids), I'd rather just order the legitimate disc. I'm sure as hell not paying for the privilege of burning my own.
I don't have every movie ever made on my shelf, but I do have most of the ones I wish to watch. It isn't a huge amount of effort to order stuff off the net and have it turn up, then place it on my unwatched pile.
If the download takes overnight (and it does at the moment if I download a TV episode I missed) then I'm removing the spontenaity anyway.
That's just great for them. However, none of this makes me want to actually type their url in. What do they do? Is there much call for Online Palace Gilting?
That sounds like a nice setup you've got there, but for me it would be a _lot_ of work to rip 500+ DVDs in good quality, not to mention the expense.
The main thing is that I much prefer browsing a big pile of boxes on the shelf to reading a list on a screen, I suppose.
Still, there's plenty of room in the market for us both.
1) SVideo sucks cock. Component or RGB Scart if you want a decent picture quality with DVD are the only options.
2) As iTunes has comprehensively demonstrated, the media companies are unwilling to sell me an encrypted downloaded version of something for substantially less than the boxed product. Why would I bother downloading a film and spending a significant amount of time backing it up to a DVD-R (or whatever the equivalent will be) when there are these nicely packaged pre-pressed ones on sale?
The mistake being made here is that Video is not Audio. I love my new iPod, because I can listen to my music anywhere, and cart a decent selection of it around in my pocket instead of deciding in advance what CDs to put in my bag. However, I don't watch films while shopping, nor do I watch them on a packed train.
As much as I do love my iPod, I really do, if I want to listen to music at home I'll put the CD or record on, not play lossy-compressed files, because grabbing it off the shelf isn't inconvenient. Grabbing a DVD off the shelf isn't, either.
If the choice is between buying them from iTunes at the current cost, and paying a mere $0.05 but having to pay a subsidy on every. fecking. piece. of. hardware. ever. then I'll stick with the $0.99 please.
I've bought a total of 1(one) song through iTunes, because it was an import-only single that was going to cost me about ten times that for the physical version (DJ Shadow's Keane remix, fact fans). At even a 1% tax rate, I can tell you now I've bought a shitload more than $94 worth of hardware over the years.
I may not be Australian, but my first thought wasn't anything to do with dingos, but why you named your daughter after the brilliant Hank Azaria (the voice of Moe/Apu/Chief Wiggum etc. in The Simpsons, Phoebe's boyfriend David in Friends and so on).
So I'm weird, ok?
Some of the latest ones do, it's true. Finding one that will definitely last ages, and has decent picture quality to start with, and most importantly I can afford, is turning out a pain.
The only one I really know at the moment is the Panasonic 7-series, and that doesn't have an HDMI-board for when Sky HD digital launches next year.
Well, having helped a friend lift his 42" plasma, I'd say anyone moving this 82" TV regularly won't have to worry about their waistline for much longer. They're obscenely heavy, to be honest.
No, my LCD runs Windows just fine ;-)
Being sensible for a moment, it's OLED that has the "blue pixel death" problem, not LCD, so you should be fine. LCDs don't have the short half-life of plasma and OLED (they just look like crap to start with).