What happens if I'm on a flight that for whatever the reason HAS to land at La Guardia (low fuel) and cannot navigate AROUND lower Manhattan, but instead wants to go over it. And this system won't let the pilot do that, and by steering around, runs the plane out of fuel and crashes it.
So someone says "Oh, there will be an override for situations like that" -- well, why won't that override get used when someone is bound and detmined to fly a 757 into a tall building? At that point its just another warning system, which is fine, but the computer control part scares me. I like pilots in control when necessary.
Grow is too much of a corporate buzzword, I'd replace it it with "find a goal". The original goal of a free, stable and usable Unix workalike has been accomplished and then some, with ports to various architectures large and small.
So what's next? Is fine tuning the VM and implementing yet another filesystem "it"? Or should there be another goal that takes it somewhere else, like a Desktop Linux initiative or something? I'm guessing that's the growth he meant, not in the "get bigger" sense, although I'd imagine he was thinking of a revised goal that accomplished a bigger user/installation base, too.
I know someone who got paid to keep a log for one of the major data collection companies.
Of course he made every attempt to "jam" the data with bogus information; getting his friends and family's viewing preferences and even some of his own weird preferences.
Area codes and phone numbers are totally artificial, but at some point the actual infrstructure isn't artificial. Even IP addresses are allocated roughly in a geographic pattern, primarily to ease the routing burden for border routers and create better summaries. If you're dialing their IP address, chances are high that you ARE dialing a country or regional code but don't realize that the IP assignment was largely from a regionally assigned pool.
Clearly what's needed is not region codes or country codes, but a DNS type directory system which is capable of mapping easy to remember names to more specific info like IP addresses or other destination-specific info.
I don't know if it was the MD ROM format or not, but I worked at a color seperator in the mid 90s that had 3.5 optical drives in their Macs. They were storage for in-process jobs, and travelled with the job jacket.
What did they hold? 128M? That was a significant amount of disk space, considering the next best thing was a 44 or 88 MB syquest which was much larger and more fragile.
I'd like to see that form factor come back, but with a storage tech capable of a minimum of 32 gigs. Which is probably unrealistic, but that was the problem with removable storage in the 90s -- each time a new storage tech hit the market, six months later it was falling quickly behind the storage demand curve, rendering it useless.
At this point 32 gigs in a 3.5" formfactor would be valuable for a lot of uses, from DVD HD recording to computer storage. But it looks like we'll have to settle for Blu-Ray in a 5.25 form factor.
It'll be whatever the DVD-HD system provides backwards compatibility for. By the time these are released, HD media will still be super expensive, and people will want to record on cheap DVD media. Whatever media these systems support will likely be the winner, since these will be the "replacements" for the future of set-top recording.
I'd swear the last time I read about Sony's Blu-Ray machine it didn't support + formats, and their current DVD recorder doesn't support +RW, but does support -R and +R. Both Pioneer and Panasonic support -R, and are the technology leaders in set-top DVD recording (see the AVSForum DVD recorder section).
On the PC side it doesn't matter; the plain brown wrapper DVD writers all seem to be multiformat these days. Only sheep that buy HP and Dell equipment seem to be getting + only writers.
MS translations probably have less to do with size of audience than audience size and language complexity. Estonian is a simpler language to support, since it follows the same input methods and text layouts as other latin alphabet languages.
How big is the market for a Hebrew-enabled office? It can't be that big outside of a few Jewish schools, some of the Orthodox community in the US, and Israel itself.
It just sounds like a pricing game to me -- MS wanting (needing?) to sell the whole package in Hebrew to make any money keeping up their translation and the Israeli government objecting to the provisions of the seller.
It wouldn't surprise me if MS just decided to drop Hebrew altogether; it's a limited growth market, and the number of people who speak English in addition to Hebrew has to be huge, and with the demands of document portability, many would likely switch to the English version anyway vs. some other version which supports Hebrew.
I know, I know, it's another terrible example of American corporations exterminating a local culture in the name of profits, but that's just a political interpretation of economic reality.
You'll want to add some firearms and ammunition to your party supplies.
Guns, cars, and booze are an American holiday tradition, although I must admit that the Arabs and their AK-47 tributes are pretty impressive. Except don't a few dozen people die every time there's a big hoopla involving firing AKs into the air?
Leaving you to do your work and let a system run, instead of having to upgrade 100s of boxes every 12 months. Whatever spin you put on it, it's as simple as this:
RHEL: Upgrade every 5 years
Debian: Upgrade every 2 years
Mandrake: Upgrade every 18 months
Slack: Upgrade every 18 months
It's not ever that simple; major applications of all those OSes have had significant root exploits and significant changes in libraries and components over 18 months let alone over five years. You cannot help but maintain them and *hope* that the components released for them are reliable and stable. The only way you can NOT upgrade them is if they are not connected to the rest of the world and do some isolated processing on an application that itself is never updated. Even the hardware they run on must be replaced more often than that if load and other demands increase over time.
Security fixes, feature-driven application upgrades, bug fixes, etc are a reality and FreeBSD's build system via STABLE is the easiest and most reliable way to accomplish this.
In the FreeBSD Ports collection, there are many Ports marked as broken, and many more unmaintained and suffering from bit-rot.
Name any five that depend on each other and are important for real-world use? Ports suffers from both the desire to be large and from the fact that they're generally supported by one person. I've been running FreeBSD now for nearly 5 years and have only run into a broken port once, snmpd, which broke after a significant change in system variables, which in turn broke snmpd. It was fixed quickly, and since then every time I've built a port it's built.
How exactly is FreeBSD 5 a "dramatic step-up from ANY Linux distro"? FreeBSD releases are only supported for 12 months. Then you have to upgrade. In comparison, Debian supports its releases for at least two years, and RHEL offers a whopping FIVE years. That's right, five. This matters in real-world use.
You don't understand FreeBSD releases. There are point releases (eg, 5.2), -STABLE branches and -CURRENT branches. Most people track a -STABLE branch. Tracking a stable branch provides you with bug fixes and occasionally some new features backported from -CURRENT. Tracking -STABLE requires you to periodically rebuild the system from source, but this is FreeBSD's *advantage* -- it's a single, coherent system that can be easily and totally recompiled from up-to-date source code.
I've been running 4-STABLE now for almost 4 years and its still a supported (ie, active development and maintenance) branch of FreeBSD. The 2.2 and 3 STABLE branches are still there and I think 3 was still supported until the 5-STABLE branch was created.
Maintaining FreeBSD is easy if you track -STABLE and supported for years, and its often possible (albeit not necessarily recommnede) to upgrade from one major release to another -- I did it from 3.x to 4.x. In this manner (and not just point RELEASEs), FreeBSD revisions are suppported for years -- far longer than even most sane people would run a given revision of software.
I never did more chasing than I did trying to keep Dead Rat systems updated; either I used RPMs and prayed that the package author didn't decide to switch a bunch of compilation options, or a built packages from source, which meant I had to do my own porting. And then there was libc upgrades and all other manner of horror of trying to maintain an OS that was a kernel with a bunch of other stuff glued on without any coherency.
I'll grant some Linux distros have better turnkey desktop setups, and certainly greater corporate involvement (although ask yourself when "greater corporate involvement" and "better software" were part of the same sentence), and higher visibility.
But longer suppport, easier maintenance and reliability over the long haul? No way.
DVD-RAM caddies don't strike me as all that much different from the CD-R caddies I used. They're heavier, but they're also designed to be easily opened and closed. Slot loading is ideal.
As for marginal costs, if the original CD-ROM caddies are anything like what factory caddies would have been, you can see those adding $.50 to a $1, at least initially. My guess is that when the money guys got ahold of the spec and figured out what it would have to be sold for in stores, somebody figured that something had to give or it would be too expensive.
I can't give up my voice line -- I get DSL on it and my wife would never tolerate it.
But what I want is:
A box similar to the Vonage VoIP bridges that you can plug into your IP network and your voice network. It would sit between your POTS phones and the POTS line. Incoming POTS and some VOIP calls would be routed to the phones as usual. But outgoing calls would be routed over VoIP for certain programmable number sequences; either direct dial to other VoIP phones or to other bridges for completion to POTS lines. With the right authentication, incoming VoIP callers would be able to use my POTS line as a gateway to the POTS network.
With one at work and one at home:
1) Mirror my work phone at home 2) Make work calls and make work LD calls using work's LD provider 3) Make personal VOIP calls to home 4) Make personal calls on my home line from the road
With a device at a relative or friend's house, I could theoretically make free LD calls local to their setup and vice versa.
Does something like this exist? It seems fairly trivial, especially if you make analog call routing pretty basic.
This is a good idea in theory but I don't think that this would work. People would want backwards compatibility and the easiest way of doing this is to keep the discs the same size. For protection, a caddy-type system could work but these have been tried before and have always failed...
Backwards compatibility has nothing to do with it. A new format that accepts smaller caddied media could easily accomodate larger uncaddied media. My DVD recorder takes -RAM discs in caddies as well as -R without them.
The story I've always heard is that the original CD spec included the caddy as part of the medium, but it was dropped prior to introduction due to the marginal cost it added, especially when music was concerned since it complicated packaging of extra material (booklets, etc). So instead we got the jewel case. My first 1x CDR drive (circa 1994) would ONLY accept discs in caddies, and I found myself with a dozen or so caddies for frequently used discs.
There haven't been any other formats that have failed *because* of the inclusion of a caddy in the medium design. MiniDisc never was terribly successful in the US, but the medium itself was quite good, particularly for the mid to late 90s. DVD-RAM didn't gain the popularity it should have, either, but the case REALLY doesn't matter there since RAM discs can be bought with or without caddies, and most of the caddied media can actually be *removed* from the caddy if desired.
I think the caddy is a great idea, but unfortunately it adds cost while only valuing the consumer. It actually seems to make the most sense for DVD media since it is by definition a visual medium and what's on the keep case could easily be printed on the caddy itself, eliminating the keep case, and any included printed info could be on the disc itself.
Technically speaking, my cable provider can give me 12 HD stations:
NBC, Public TV, CBS, Discovery HD Theater, INHD, INHD2, HDNet, HDNet Movies, HBO HD East, HBO HD West, Showtime HD East, Showtime HD West.
I only count that as 9 channels, as a couple are just timeshifted duplicates. It's far less programming than it sounds when you consider that not every channel is true (telecined) HD content or content that's not repeated ad nauseum.
From my perspective, only HBO HD and HDNet Movies are of any interest to me, the rest is stereo store eye candy loops that are neat to show your friends but not something you sit and watch.
Plus, I can't get any sat service due to my location (trees block the sky) and a lack of a mounting location that doesn't make my house look stupid.
The difference is that all content is released in the same format; ie, there's no question right now what format a purchased DVD is in or if it will be released for your player. The only dispute is over recordable formats.
On the PC side, the battle over formats is essentially moot due to the availability of multiformat recorders capable of doing all formats. There were no multiformat VCRs during Beta/VHS.
The only place where there is "conflict" is in the market for set-top DVD recorders. In this arena, it's not clear what format will or if there will be a winner. Panasonic and Pioneer are leaders in this area, and they both favor -R. The cheaper players tend to favor +R, and Sony does +R, -R/-RW but not +RW.
If the DVD blank section at the store is any indication, I'm kind of inclined to think that -R is winning, mainly due to the speed at which -R blanks disappear when there's a sale. +R seems to be always in stock, leading me to believe there's less demand for it, which may be driven by the slightly higher compatibility offered by -R media in random set-top players. Many new ones will play +R, but I've found older ones won't when they do play -R media.
Overall, it's a different competition and one that seems as if it will end a "tie" as new, higher capacity formats become available before a "victor" is declared.
If the new DVD formats being recommended aren't as 'open', and do not present a sizeable improvement over the current resolution of existing DVDs, I don't think that one conglomerate will be able to 'force' the market place into accepting a new tech.
The market is just beginning to buy into HDTV in any significant quantity. The NY Times had an article on 12/24 about the intense demand for DLP and LCD RP televisions this season; stores simply cannot keep these in stock. And these sets all do 720p quite nicely.
The trouble is, there's very little HD broadcast content. I can get a whopping 6 channels of HD with digital cable here, and about 1/3 of it would be even halfway interesting to me (ie, no sports).
If a new DVD format is available that is true (ie, telecined at 720p or better) HD resolution, it may be enough of a cause-effect loop to suck people in -- HD owners who want more HD content will buy the format, and it will also drive people to buy more HD TVs.
I'm most concerned that the new formats aren't high enough capacity. I think we're on the verge of seeing 1080p or even higher displays. A format not capable of displaying video at these resolutions will be seen as DOA and won't be adopted. If display resolutions hold tight at 720p for fixed-pixel displays in the sub-$10k market, then it will be a "good enough" format for a while.
I just wish manufacturers would agree on an HD resolution (in the way that 480i was the standard for a long time) so that we can reach an era where we don't rely on scalers as much. I'd love to see content telecined for and displayed at the same resolution.
One of the "virtues" of fax spam is there's almost always an 800 voice number to enable the spam. We just put THEIR fax in the machine and send it to their 800 voice number with redials=99 and delay=1. We can hear them answering on our fax machine.
If each 800 call costs them a couple of cents, the total redial will cost them a couple of bucks. Once we got an angry call from some call center manager complaining about fax calls. We verified they were the call center we were hitting over the phone, and asked if they had a fax machine so we could send some configuration info...and faxed 25 copies of their spam to their machine!!
We wouldn't have this problem on our departmental machine if we didn't have some loser in the department using some high-risk credit bureau; ever since they faxed a signed document OKing their 378% annual interest rate, we've gotten a ton of bogus mortgage offers, stock tips and vacation packages..
I tried a 350 about a year ago with two different systems in the office (an HP P3 700 and a Dell P3 1.03 Ghz), and both times the card performed very poorly, 100% CPU usage during capture or playback, with the UI of the applications nearly unusable.
I used both the drivers from the package and some special "beta" drivers Hauppauge provided, and same results.
I would not recommend one of their products for this reason alone, but I also found their included software poor -- a "hodge-podge" if you will, that was low quality.
How is a movie on your computer "easier to watch"?
I have a pair of 21" displays, a nice chair and a fast computer, but its not easier than watching DVDs sitting in a *better* chair or couch, watching on a 42" screen *designed* for DVDs, with a superior sound system.
Keeping the DVDs safe makes sense, but why not just make dupes and watch the dupes?
They've been doing a fair job of releasing stuff onto DVD, although the old nag of "intellectual property" is still an issue. I read or heard an article recently about the release of old TV shows on DVD, and the biggest obstacle isn't a willingness to release the DVDs, its often the music rights -- the rights were negotiated for broadcast only and not for resale, and some shows (Miami Vice was used as an example) have so much popular music in them that the music rights for the DVD make a set that might sell 100,000 copies unprofitable.
I'm sure that some of these things will work themselves out over time (ie, value of music shrinks) and as distribution becomes more "on demand" oriented and doesn't require a massive investment in DVD manufacturing or distribution. Of course the latter will probably inhibit copying, mucking up what was turning out to be a reasonably fair deal...
I think it got bad when they banner, er, "advised" us not to lock luggage that I think it became a nuisance. Long prior to 9/11 I used to just check everything; there was nothing more liberating than cruise through security with a book, my car keys and boarding pass. Checking luggage and waiting for it was a slight bother, but not nearly as much as the nuisance at security and the sardine-can spaces on the plane.
Now I'm forced to actually bring my laptop on the plane (which I hate to do; unless I get a lucky upgrade to first class or an exit row, my Dell D600 is too darn big for regular coach), deal with more security, and lug more shit onto the airplane.
I still seal my luggage -- instead of a lock, I use a tie-wrap and I keep a cheapie wire cutters stashed in a hidden pocket. It's not much, but at least I'll know that prying eyes will have to WORK to get into my luggage.
Both Tivo and Replay need to find a better way to make money. Charging as much as they do for guide data reminds me of a newspaper or magazine trying to make all their money off the subscription. They don't, because nobody would buy even the NY Times for $10 per day.
I'm not sure what that is, but perhaps selling more and more compelling software options, more widely licensed software to consumer electronics resellers, broader marketing of usage info (yes, I know the tin hats will go batty here...).
I love my Tivo, but it's a an extremely expensive device when you factor in the box and the lifetime, especially against CATV-provided PVRs, which can be had for as little as $5 per month in some areas. Yes, I'm aware they suck compared to Tivo, but it's a non-investment that doesn't *have* to be perfect for many people.
The Direct TV Tivos appear much cheaper, but that's if you want to invest in Satellite and can get a signal (I can't, so its a moot point).
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What happens if I'm on a flight that for whatever the reason HAS to land at La Guardia (low fuel) and cannot navigate AROUND lower Manhattan, but instead wants to go over it. And this system won't let the pilot do that, and by steering around, runs the plane out of fuel and crashes it.
So someone says "Oh, there will be an override for situations like that" -- well, why won't that override get used when someone is bound and detmined to fly a 757 into a tall building? At that point its just another warning system, which is fine, but the computer control part scares me. I like pilots in control when necessary.
Grow is too much of a corporate buzzword, I'd replace it it with "find a goal". The original goal of a free, stable and usable Unix workalike has been accomplished and then some, with ports to various architectures large and small.
So what's next? Is fine tuning the VM and implementing yet another filesystem "it"? Or should there be another goal that takes it somewhere else, like a Desktop Linux initiative or something? I'm guessing that's the growth he meant, not in the "get bigger" sense, although I'd imagine he was thinking of a revised goal that accomplished a bigger user/installation base, too.
I know someone who got paid to keep a log for one of the major data collection companies.
Of course he made every attempt to "jam" the data with bogus information; getting his friends and family's viewing preferences and even some of his own weird preferences.
Area codes and phone numbers are totally artificial, but at some point the actual infrstructure isn't artificial. Even IP addresses are allocated roughly in a geographic pattern, primarily to ease the routing burden for border routers and create better summaries. If you're dialing their IP address, chances are high that you ARE dialing a country or regional code but don't realize that the IP assignment was largely from a regionally assigned pool.
Clearly what's needed is not region codes or country codes, but a DNS type directory system which is capable of mapping easy to remember names to more specific info like IP addresses or other destination-specific info.
Iron Maiden
...and they want their band back. They'd also like you to return the satanic props and hair care products when you're done, too.
Thanks!
I don't know if it was the MD ROM format or not, but I worked at a color seperator in the mid 90s that had 3.5 optical drives in their Macs. They were storage for in-process jobs, and travelled with the job jacket.
What did they hold? 128M? That was a significant amount of disk space, considering the next best thing was a 44 or 88 MB syquest which was much larger and more fragile.
I'd like to see that form factor come back, but with a storage tech capable of a minimum of 32 gigs. Which is probably unrealistic, but that was the problem with removable storage in the 90s -- each time a new storage tech hit the market, six months later it was falling quickly behind the storage demand curve, rendering it useless.
At this point 32 gigs in a 3.5" formfactor would be valuable for a lot of uses, from DVD HD recording to computer storage. But it looks like we'll have to settle for Blu-Ray in a 5.25 form factor.
It'll be whatever the DVD-HD system provides backwards compatibility for. By the time these are released, HD media will still be super expensive, and people will want to record on cheap DVD media. Whatever media these systems support will likely be the winner, since these will be the "replacements" for the future of set-top recording.
I'd swear the last time I read about Sony's Blu-Ray machine it didn't support + formats, and their current DVD recorder doesn't support +RW, but does support -R and +R. Both Pioneer and Panasonic support -R, and are the technology leaders in set-top DVD recording (see the AVSForum DVD recorder section).
On the PC side it doesn't matter; the plain brown wrapper DVD writers all seem to be multiformat these days. Only sheep that buy HP and Dell equipment seem to be getting + only writers.
MS translations probably have less to do with size of audience than audience size and language complexity. Estonian is a simpler language to support, since it follows the same input methods and text layouts as other latin alphabet languages.
How big is the market for a Hebrew-enabled office? It can't be that big outside of a few Jewish schools, some of the Orthodox community in the US, and Israel itself.
It just sounds like a pricing game to me -- MS wanting (needing?) to sell the whole package in Hebrew to make any money keeping up their translation and the Israeli government objecting to the provisions of the seller.
It wouldn't surprise me if MS just decided to drop Hebrew altogether; it's a limited growth market, and the number of people who speak English in addition to Hebrew has to be huge, and with the demands of document portability, many would likely switch to the English version anyway vs. some other version which supports Hebrew.
I know, I know, it's another terrible example of American corporations exterminating a local culture in the name of profits, but that's just a political interpretation of economic reality.
You'll want to add some firearms and ammunition to your party supplies.
Guns, cars, and booze are an American holiday tradition, although I must admit that the Arabs and their AK-47 tributes are pretty impressive. Except don't a few dozen people die every time there's a big hoopla involving firing AKs into the air?
Leaving you to do your work and let a system run, instead of having to upgrade 100s of boxes every 12 months. Whatever spin you put on it, it's as simple as this:
RHEL: Upgrade every 5 years
Debian: Upgrade every 2 years
Mandrake: Upgrade every 18 months
Slack: Upgrade every 18 months
It's not ever that simple; major applications of all those OSes have had significant root exploits and significant changes in libraries and components over 18 months let alone over five years. You cannot help but maintain them and *hope* that the components released for them are reliable and stable. The only way you can NOT upgrade them is if they are not connected to the rest of the world and do some isolated processing on an application that itself is never updated. Even the hardware they run on must be replaced more often than that if load and other demands increase over time.
Security fixes, feature-driven application upgrades, bug fixes, etc are a reality and FreeBSD's build system via STABLE is the easiest and most reliable way to accomplish this.
In the FreeBSD Ports collection, there are many Ports marked as broken, and many more unmaintained and suffering from bit-rot.
Name any five that depend on each other and are important for real-world use? Ports suffers from both the desire to be large and from the fact that they're generally supported by one person. I've been running FreeBSD now for nearly 5 years and have only run into a broken port once, snmpd, which broke after a significant change in system variables, which in turn broke snmpd. It was fixed quickly, and since then every time I've built a port it's built.
How exactly is FreeBSD 5 a "dramatic step-up from ANY Linux distro"? FreeBSD releases are only supported for 12 months. Then you have to upgrade. In comparison, Debian supports its releases for at least two years, and RHEL offers a whopping FIVE years. That's right, five. This matters in real-world use.
You don't understand FreeBSD releases. There are point releases (eg, 5.2), -STABLE branches and -CURRENT branches. Most people track a -STABLE branch. Tracking a stable branch provides you with bug fixes and occasionally some new features backported from -CURRENT. Tracking -STABLE requires you to periodically rebuild the system from source, but this is FreeBSD's *advantage* -- it's a single, coherent system that can be easily and totally recompiled from up-to-date source code.
I've been running 4-STABLE now for almost 4 years and its still a supported (ie, active development and maintenance) branch of FreeBSD. The 2.2 and 3 STABLE branches are still there and I think 3 was still supported until the 5-STABLE branch was created.
Maintaining FreeBSD is easy if you track -STABLE and supported for years, and its often possible (albeit not necessarily recommnede) to upgrade from one major release to another -- I did it from 3.x to 4.x. In this manner (and not just point RELEASEs), FreeBSD revisions are suppported for years -- far longer than even most sane people would run a given revision of software.
I never did more chasing than I did trying to keep Dead Rat systems updated; either I used RPMs and prayed that the package author didn't decide to switch a bunch of compilation options, or a built packages from source, which meant I had to do my own porting. And then there was libc upgrades and all other manner of horror of trying to maintain an OS that was a kernel with a bunch of other stuff glued on without any coherency.
I'll grant some Linux distros have better turnkey desktop setups, and certainly greater corporate involvement (although ask yourself when "greater corporate involvement" and "better software" were part of the same sentence), and higher visibility.
But longer suppport, easier maintenance and reliability over the long haul? No way.
DVD-RAM caddies don't strike me as all that much different from the CD-R caddies I used. They're heavier, but they're also designed to be easily opened and closed. Slot loading is ideal.
As for marginal costs, if the original CD-ROM caddies are anything like what factory caddies would have been, you can see those adding $.50 to a $1, at least initially. My guess is that when the money guys got ahold of the spec and figured out what it would have to be sold for in stores, somebody figured that something had to give or it would be too expensive.
I can't give up my voice line -- I get DSL on it and my wife would never tolerate it.
But what I want is:
A box similar to the Vonage VoIP bridges that you can plug into your IP network and your voice network. It would sit between your POTS phones and the POTS line. Incoming POTS and some VOIP calls would be routed to the phones as usual. But outgoing calls would be routed over VoIP for certain programmable number sequences; either direct dial to other VoIP phones or to other bridges for completion to POTS lines. With the right authentication, incoming VoIP callers would be able to use my POTS line as a gateway to the POTS network.
With one at work and one at home:
1) Mirror my work phone at home
2) Make work calls and make work LD calls using work's LD provider
3) Make personal VOIP calls to home
4) Make personal calls on my home line from the road
With a device at a relative or friend's house, I could theoretically make free LD calls local to their setup and vice versa.
Does something like this exist? It seems fairly trivial, especially if you make analog call routing pretty basic.
This is a good idea in theory but I don't think that this would work. People would want backwards compatibility and the easiest way of doing this is to keep the discs the same size. For protection, a caddy-type system could work but these have been tried before and have always failed...
Backwards compatibility has nothing to do with it. A new format that accepts smaller caddied media could easily accomodate larger uncaddied media. My DVD recorder takes -RAM discs in caddies as well as -R without them.
The story I've always heard is that the original CD spec included the caddy as part of the medium, but it was dropped prior to introduction due to the marginal cost it added, especially when music was concerned since it complicated packaging of extra material (booklets, etc). So instead we got the jewel case. My first 1x CDR drive (circa 1994) would ONLY accept discs in caddies, and I found myself with a dozen or so caddies for frequently used discs.
There haven't been any other formats that have failed *because* of the inclusion of a caddy in the medium design. MiniDisc never was terribly successful in the US, but the medium itself was quite good, particularly for the mid to late 90s. DVD-RAM didn't gain the popularity it should have, either, but the case REALLY doesn't matter there since RAM discs can be bought with or without caddies, and most of the caddied media can actually be *removed* from the caddy if desired.
I think the caddy is a great idea, but unfortunately it adds cost while only valuing the consumer. It actually seems to make the most sense for DVD media since it is by definition a visual medium and what's on the keep case could easily be printed on the caddy itself, eliminating the keep case, and any included printed info could be on the disc itself.
Technically speaking, my cable provider can give me 12 HD stations:
NBC, Public TV, CBS, Discovery HD Theater, INHD, INHD2, HDNet, HDNet Movies, HBO HD East, HBO HD West, Showtime HD East, Showtime HD West.
I only count that as 9 channels, as a couple are just timeshifted duplicates. It's far less programming than it sounds when you consider that not every channel is true (telecined) HD content or content that's not repeated ad nauseum.
From my perspective, only HBO HD and HDNet Movies are of any interest to me, the rest is stereo store eye candy loops that are neat to show your friends but not something you sit and watch.
Plus, I can't get any sat service due to my location (trees block the sky) and a lack of a mounting location that doesn't make my house look stupid.
The difference is that all content is released in the same format; ie, there's no question right now what format a purchased DVD is in or if it will be released for your player. The only dispute is over recordable formats.
On the PC side, the battle over formats is essentially moot due to the availability of multiformat recorders capable of doing all formats. There were no multiformat VCRs during Beta/VHS.
The only place where there is "conflict" is in the market for set-top DVD recorders. In this arena, it's not clear what format will or if there will be a winner. Panasonic and Pioneer are leaders in this area, and they both favor -R. The cheaper players tend to favor +R, and Sony does +R, -R/-RW but not +RW.
If the DVD blank section at the store is any indication, I'm kind of inclined to think that -R is winning, mainly due to the speed at which -R blanks disappear when there's a sale. +R seems to be always in stock, leading me to believe there's less demand for it, which may be driven by the slightly higher compatibility offered by -R media in random set-top players. Many new ones will play +R, but I've found older ones won't when they do play -R media.
Overall, it's a different competition and one that seems as if it will end a "tie" as new, higher capacity formats become available before a "victor" is declared.
If the new DVD formats being recommended aren't as 'open', and do not present a sizeable improvement over the current resolution of existing DVDs, I don't think that one conglomerate will be able to 'force' the market place into accepting a new tech.
The market is just beginning to buy into HDTV in any significant quantity. The NY Times had an article on 12/24 about the intense demand for DLP and LCD RP televisions this season; stores simply cannot keep these in stock. And these sets all do 720p quite nicely.
The trouble is, there's very little HD broadcast content. I can get a whopping 6 channels of HD with digital cable here, and about 1/3 of it would be even halfway interesting to me (ie, no sports).
If a new DVD format is available that is true (ie, telecined at 720p or better) HD resolution, it may be enough of a cause-effect loop to suck people in -- HD owners who want more HD content will buy the format, and it will also drive people to buy more HD TVs.
I'm most concerned that the new formats aren't high enough capacity. I think we're on the verge of seeing 1080p or even higher displays. A format not capable of displaying video at these resolutions will be seen as DOA and won't be adopted. If display resolutions hold tight at 720p for fixed-pixel displays in the sub-$10k market, then it will be a "good enough" format for a while.
I just wish manufacturers would agree on an HD resolution (in the way that 480i was the standard for a long time) so that we can reach an era where we don't rely on scalers as much. I'd love to see content telecined for and displayed at the same resolution.
One of the "virtues" of fax spam is there's almost always an 800 voice number to enable the spam. We just put THEIR fax in the machine and send it to their 800 voice number with redials=99 and delay=1. We can hear them answering on our fax machine.
If each 800 call costs them a couple of cents, the total redial will cost them a couple of bucks. Once we got an angry call from some call center manager complaining about fax calls. We verified they were the call center we were hitting over the phone, and asked if they had a fax machine so we could send some configuration info...and faxed 25 copies of their spam to their machine!!
We wouldn't have this problem on our departmental machine if we didn't have some loser in the department using some high-risk credit bureau; ever since they faxed a signed document OKing their 378% annual interest rate, we've gotten a ton of bogus mortgage offers, stock tips and vacation packages..
I tried a 350 about a year ago with two different systems in the office (an HP P3 700 and a Dell P3 1.03 Ghz), and both times the card performed very poorly, 100% CPU usage during capture or playback, with the UI of the applications nearly unusable.
I used both the drivers from the package and some special "beta" drivers Hauppauge provided, and same results.
I would not recommend one of their products for this reason alone, but I also found their included software poor -- a "hodge-podge" if you will, that was low quality.
How is a movie on your computer "easier to watch"?
I have a pair of 21" displays, a nice chair and a fast computer, but its not easier than watching DVDs sitting in a *better* chair or couch, watching on a 42" screen *designed* for DVDs, with a superior sound system.
Keeping the DVDs safe makes sense, but why not just make dupes and watch the dupes?
They've been doing a fair job of releasing stuff onto DVD, although the old nag of "intellectual property" is still an issue. I read or heard an article recently about the release of old TV shows on DVD, and the biggest obstacle isn't a willingness to release the DVDs, its often the music rights -- the rights were negotiated for broadcast only and not for resale, and some shows (Miami Vice was used as an example) have so much popular music in them that the music rights for the DVD make a set that might sell 100,000 copies unprofitable.
I'm sure that some of these things will work themselves out over time (ie, value of music shrinks) and as distribution becomes more "on demand" oriented and doesn't require a massive investment in DVD manufacturing or distribution. Of course the latter will probably inhibit copying, mucking up what was turning out to be a reasonably fair deal...
I think it got bad when they banner, er, "advised" us not to lock luggage that I think it became a nuisance. Long prior to 9/11 I used to just check everything; there was nothing more liberating than cruise through security with a book, my car keys and boarding pass. Checking luggage and waiting for it was a slight bother, but not nearly as much as the nuisance at security and the sardine-can spaces on the plane.
Now I'm forced to actually bring my laptop on the plane (which I hate to do; unless I get a lucky upgrade to first class or an exit row, my Dell D600 is too darn big for regular coach), deal with more security, and lug more shit onto the airplane.
I still seal my luggage -- instead of a lock, I use a tie-wrap and I keep a cheapie wire cutters stashed in a hidden pocket. It's not much, but at least I'll know that prying eyes will have to WORK to get into my luggage.
Both Tivo and Replay need to find a better way to make money. Charging as much as they do for guide data reminds me of a newspaper or magazine trying to make all their money off the subscription. They don't, because nobody would buy even the NY Times for $10 per day.
I'm not sure what that is, but perhaps selling more and more compelling software options, more widely licensed software to consumer electronics resellers, broader marketing of usage info (yes, I know the tin hats will go batty here...).
I love my Tivo, but it's a an extremely expensive device when you factor in the box and the lifetime, especially against CATV-provided PVRs, which can be had for as little as $5 per month in some areas. Yes, I'm aware they suck compared to Tivo, but it's a non-investment that doesn't *have* to be perfect for many people.
The Direct TV Tivos appear much cheaper, but that's if you want to invest in Satellite and can get a signal (I can't, so its a moot point).
I'd think that the average Norwegian would rather be a prisoner in Norway than a fugitive anywhere else in the world.
You know, that's probably true. Prison in Norway is probably better than freedom in many places...