got really tired of tweaking my grabber every couple of weeks when it broke or some provider changed the way they displayed information
You wrote your grabber wrong;-)
When the then-current Aus grabber (JavaXMLTV?) stopped chasing the moving target of the TV guide websites when they went to Javascript 'encryption' in about 2005 or 2006, I - a half-arsed programmer if ever there was one - sat down and decided to write my own. One week, and a bit of lateral thinking* later, I had a working grabber. Outside of maybe the half-dozen times they've changed channel designations or radically changed the individual event pages, that grabber has worked continuously since then. I still use it to feed EPG data to my Topfield.
(Actually, looking at my original code, I lie a bit - they made a big change in November 2007, so I took the opportunity to re-write my original grabber, though it still uses the same method I originally came up with. I've made exactly one change - not guide-provider related, but due to a protocol spec change - to the grabber part since then.)
(* Not going to reveal it here in case they twig and close that particular loophole - though it'd be hard, and actually hurt them web-wise to do it - but think WAP and the World's Biggest Proxy...;-)
Vegans want to reduce the suffering of animals, insects are not animals, they are insects.
Science would disagree with you. Let's see what Wikipedia has to say on, oh, I dunno, let's pick the Hymenoptera (the order of insects that contains the aforementioned honeybees).
Note the Kingdom at the top of the phylogeny...
OK, so you might dismiss science. That's fine. Have a look at how the Bible classifies things such as insects. It's a little more complicated, as it divides animals into 'behemoths'/'beasts' (bigger things that live on land), 'fowl' (including "all things that fly" even if they "go upon four feet", and insects such as bees), 'living beings that swim in the water', and 'creeping things' (short-legged mammals, reptiles, and the flightless insects) - but, as far as the Bible is concerned, they're still all animals.
What was your point again? That the vegan exclusion of insects from their definition of animals was an arbitrary definition to allow them to enjoy things like honey and cupcakes with cochineal-coloured icing?
"On the other hand, and I guess this comes from my more cynical side, I've dealt with plenty of men and women who don't know much about {computers | cooking | vehicle maintenance | electricity | multivariate analysis | television production | plumbing | town planning | home repair | hydrology | drilling holes | timber harvesting | fishing | animal husbandry | cheesemaking | medicine | telephony | building | financial planning | capital raising | hairdressing | marketing | petroleum refining | chemical engineering | injection moulding | physical chemistry} and they don't want to know. They seem to revel in their ignorance and are quite happy to just rely on others to keep things working for them."
I think you get my point. There's a million things you don't know much about, don't want to know much about, and don't need to know much about. That's why you pay other people to look after those things for you.
There's something in the psyche of self-described "computer nerds" that can't comprehend / isn't interested in comprehending why other people don't care about them beyond the absolute basics of day-to-day use. Your mechanic doesn't berate you for not knowing anything about spanners beyond "righty-tighty, lefty-loosey", does he? (note: your gasfitter might...)
Seriously though, if you're going to try to come up with a new standard for low-power connections on portable devices, one that is going to require proprietary hardware (the Green Plug chip) anyway, why not do something sensible and come up with a connector that minimises the potential for hardware damage? USB ain't it, any more than the stupid barrel DC connectors are - it's just too easy to snap things like that off in the socket, or strain the connections to the PC board, and then you're fucked.
They could start by taking a long hard look at something like Apple's Magsafe connector, and trying to engineer something similar which doesn't fall foul of Apple's IP...
No, what that says is that initial device current must be limited to 100mA (USB2) or 500mA (USB3) per port, that the current drain of bus-powered hubs must be limited to ((# of ports)*100mA)+100mA (which is why bus-powered hubs > 4 ports are rare), and that that is the minimum a root hub must be able to supply in order to conform with the specs.
According to the full spec, not just the FAQ version, devices are free to negotiate for up to 1A (USB2; dunno about USB3 but I'd guess it's higher), and it's up to the root hub to say "yay" or "nay".
Lol i think using a volt meter could work a tad more accurately than a lightbulb. Talk about clinging to dying tech.
lol i think you've missed the point of what the lightbulb does lol
The lightbulb acts as a current/voltage limiter. Picture this:
Caps are OK - their internal "resistance" is high so, when in series with the lightbulb, they effectively receive something like 1/2 ~ full mains V & the equipment works (usually at reduced capacity)
Caps are faulty - their internal resistance is low, so now the bulb has near-full mains V across it (& lights up fully, as a nice indicator of this) instead of the equipment catching fire.
It's crude, but effective, and a trick electricians have been using for years.
(Caveat: the actual technical facts of the matter are somewhat more complicated than this, but given the quality of your comment I doubt you're capable of understanding them...)
about 1 in 4 neurosurgeons to have a diagnosable mental illness,
about 1 in 17 to have a serious mental illness, and
(by various sources, so no specific link; google away!) about 1 or 2 in 100 to suffer from extreme paranoia
Given that there are an estimated 3229 practicing neurosurgeons in the U.S., to be 80 confident that this guy isn't a (diagnosed or undiagnosed) loony you'd want to show (excuse my very rough math; I'm not firing up a statistical calculator to tell me the exact answer!) another 645 neurosurgeons that believe the same thing.
I spent 8 years or so doing field networking repairs & installations. Big stuff & little stuff, from home PCs to corporate and ISP networks. In all that time, it was rare to see a Mac outside of graphics shops.
Now, I'm back studying at university; y'know, those big buildings where smart people with open minds go to learn useful and interesting things? I see a lot of Macs around here;-)
uTorrent, the most popular bittorrent client, wasn't even available on mac until this year.
OTOH, Bram Cohen's original BT client ran on OS X from day 1, without having to install anything extra (Python was already included in OS X). Say, before they eventually released the Mac version (still in beta, BTW), did utorrent run on anything other than Windows anyway?
Apart from the old mainline releases, OS X had (among others) Bits on Wheels, Tomato Torrent, Azureus, and the (execrable*) Transmission. Azureus & Transmission are even cross-platform, available on *BSD, Linux, Solaris, Windows, OS X, and BeOS.
(* Yes, execrable. Random bug o' the week is excusable, as long as you acknowledge the bugs. Among many others: for how many months, and for how many releases, did the recent "let's download 4~8x the data to get 1 complete copy" bug go unacknowledged and unfixed? And that's without even mentioning the numerous crash, disconnect, bad reporting, and other sharing bugs it seems to have every other release...)
Reading that, it looks to me like he (and/or his co-workers) used a dangerously wrong tool for the wrong jobs. That's not intelligence, that's insanity. The whole point of Tim the Toolman Taylor was comedy, not a HOWTO...
People sometimes use a chainsaw to cut 4x2's for building, and sometimes even use a circular saw for lopping branches. Doesn't mean it's right, or even smart.
(FWIW, there are more powerful, stronger, yet better built and safer, tools of that type than a Hole Hawg. But they're not made by Milwaukee.)
Now, where did my mod points go - I had a bunch of 'em just a couple of days ago...
Somebody, mod parent up - because this is exactly spot-on. As a Mac convert for the last few years, you've captured something of the essence of what makes Macs & OS X so nice to just use - yes, use, instead of fighting little things like Windows (&, yes, Linux) makes you do every day. It's what Mac users mean when they say "It Just Works"...
Now, I'd agree with you on some things, disagree with you on others. I own both a 800MHz G4, with 768M RAM, and a 1.83GHz Core2Duo Macbook. In its day, surrounded by 1+GHz PCs, the G4 still felt like it ran smoother and faster than its peers. People who remember running BeOS on a 200MHz Pentium would understand this; I'm not sure others would.
However, given equivalent RAM (I bought the MacBook with 512M), the Macbook felt... not slower exactly, nor clunkier, just - lesser than the G4. Chucking 2Gig in there made it shine though.
I disagree with your reasoning on why you consider OS X a 'subscription', at least any more than Windows is. Sure, there's a tendency amongst freeware / shareware developers to only compile for the latest release - a fact that, still sitting on 10.4.x, I'm well aware of. To ameliorate that, I tend to upgrade only every other version (i.e. 10.2->10.4, and I'll jump to 10.6 when it comes out). But, for commercial apps, I don't think it's any worse than case with the Win98->Win2k, Win2k->XP, or XP->Vista transitions. There's always going to be some that require the latest OS version (can anyone give me a valid reason why Adobe Audition required XP, compared to Win2K for its predecessor, CEP?). Photoshop is a pig anywhere unless you throw RAM at it, and running on Rosetta didn't help (I can only assume you were running CS2 or below, because the Mac native Intel versions are fine with sufficient RAM), but even under Rosetta I didn't think it was particularly slower than native G4 or Windows versions once it was up an running (module loading notwithstanding).
Can't say I'm enamoured of Vista as you have been, though. My GF's Vista laptop, despite having more CPU (but only 1G of RAM), is a dog compared to my Macbook (even if I throw back in the original 512M!). The look & feel - not just the UI, but other things like the choice of where to hide both commonly and uncommonly used options and settings - feels random, obtuse; like it's trying to make it hard for you. Having been well experienced with setting up networking in Win2k and XP, and coming back to it from a Mac, getting wireless properly set up in Vista was a nightmare of "where the fsck is that setting going to be hidden this time?" - sometimes, it seems as though a particular option was hidden in different sections, control panel settings, and sub-menus, depending on how you approached it. I walked away thoroughly unimpressed, to the point where I even gave up on removing the random vendorware crap it also came with.
But, as you say, to each their own. If you've got a purpose that requires Windows, fine, get a Windows PC. Conversely, if you've got a purpose that requires a Mac then fine, get a Mac. My default option, for the vast majority of people that actually ask me, is "Buy a Mac!" - because, if they're asking me, they don't know what they want it for. For them, a Mac is probably (initial cost notwithstanding) the best option - for them (it will "Just Work"), and for me (who doesn't have to delve through as many of the arcanities of support for the damned thing!).
Having said that, my father refuses to buy a Mac because "they're not compatible!". Despite the fact that he only ever runs Firefox, Thunderbird, Office, and Adobe Reader, and despite the fact that I've shown him all those on the Mac (and the better Mac options such as Mail.app and Preview.app, and even other Windows stuff in Parallels), he's just stuck in that mindset. It'd save both of us a lot of heartache & trouble if he bought a Mac, and he'd be less frustrated and happier, but that's a whole 'nother story...
But the problem there is that as soon as you clear up and rebuild, another giant lizard or flying turtle comes along and you have to start all over again...
I still remember the time I googled "Totally Wild" hoping to find out more about Ranger Stacey, and the first result was a pic of two guys fisting each other...
Will someone please explain to me how global warming is causing mass extinctions? I believe that the average temperature has gone up something like one degree in the last several decades, which is no more than the amount of variation you would see from year to year anyway.
9 degrees C ~ 29 degrees C = 19 degrees C average. 10 degrees C ~ 30 degrees C = 20 degrees C average.
Why did I chose those numbers? There's an interesting reason. Many species of coral will thrive at 19 degrees C, tolerate a 29 degree C max daily temperature for weeks at a time, yet can't tolerate more than a couple of days of 30 degree C max temps - they expel their symbiotic zooxanthellae, and die.
Now that's a very direct example of why a 1 degree C variation in average temperature may not seem like much, but makes one hell of a difference. There's hundreds, if not millions, of other indirect examples - consider an ectothermic lizard on a very tight energy budget, where a 1 degree C rise in average temp may mean expending more time on thermoregulation to drop body temp at the expense of feeding time, and so slowly starves to death - but I think you can get the idea.
but the same could be said of a set of mathematical formulas, a chronological list of all U.S. presidents, a compilation of state laws, a set of driving directions, etc. it doesn't matter how much skill or labor was employed in making such lists, no one should be prevented from duplicating such information. copyright was never meant to give people a monopoly to factual information. otherwise, journalism would violate all sorts of copyrights.
But all your examples are things that have already happened! They're facts, and yes, I agree that lists of facts shouldn't be copyrightable. But consider this list:
A thesis describing a new mathematical formula
a chronological list of future US presidents
a proposal for a new state law, or
a map for a place which doesn't yet exist
Would you argue that those are not creative? Because that's what a TV guide is; it's probably closest to the US presidents example in that it is a chronological list of events which haven't happened yet.
Would you also argue that any of those on my list are not copyrightable? I'd only argue 1, maybe 2 - a proposal for a new state law, because it's been produced by public official using public funds, and so should be freely available and usable by the public; and possibly the thesis describing a new mathematical formula, provided it was (a) pure math, not something with a direct commercial application, or (b) if the research that led to it had any amount of public funding. Outside of that, they're all copyrightable, no? And I'm given to understand that, in some US states, compilations of state law - or, at least, individual acts introducing new laws - are copyrighted, and not freely available to the public.
Note, I'm not arguing that TV guide data should be copyrighted - as an Australian who's been struggling with the ramifications of this with my PVR since we started harvesting guide data from websites before IceTV launched their guide, I don't think it should. I'm arguing that your analogies suck;-)
One of the things that IceTV can do is to skip ads when recording, or mute them when watching live.
No it can't.
This ability was mentioned as part of their PR/publicity spiel at the beginning, but never happened. Rumour at the time had them working on the idea of having a bunch of people watching the show live pressing the pause button when the ads came on, which would then be distributed (by the pager or phone network; this was pre widespread broadband) to IceTV-enabled recorders across the country. Never got off the ground, and IceTV have been playing down the fact that it was ever mentioned since the day they actually launched their guide. Can't see how it would work reliably anyway, without the help of the broadcasters in putting 'ad break' flags in the signal - the traditional means of detecting ad breaks (e.g. full black, etc), have way too high a false positive/negative rate to be reliable for unattended use.
Now Ch 9, who own HWW (the actual guide aggregators), kept bringing up this 'threat' every chance they got during the actual court case, giving the impression that ad-skipping was what it was really all about. It wasn't; never was - it was about keeping control over who distributed TV guide data, and what the end-user could do with it. Note that TiVo in aus has had the 30-second skip completely disabled; it's not even recoverable by using any of the hacks available in the US versions. Note also that the TV networks here refuse to 'approve' (dunno what that means in practice, but I suspect we might start finding out in the next 12-18 months if the "Freeview" branding/approval actually takes off) any PVR with any sort of ad-skipping capacity. They maintain that, for a device to be 'allowed' to use their EIT EPG on digital, one of the conditions is that it have no ad or 30-second skip capability.
They were also making noises initially about not allowing 'search' capability (because OMFG! You might have your PVR automatically record programs and watch them later while ffwding over the ads!), but they seem to have let that slip, at least in the specific case of TiVo. I imagine that they realised, what with search being the core of TiVo's usefullness, without it TiVo would have just been another overpriced PVR.
When talking about the commercial TV networks in Australia, it's best to keep the phrase "a cunch of bunts" in mind...
There is no copyright on non-creative works. A schedule isn't creative.
You're wrong. Australian law, not US law, applies in Australia - and a collated list is considered a creative work & copyright applies. There's a landmark case that set the benchmark for this, involving a 3rd-party company (in India? The Philippines?) copying phonebooks to provide an alternative forward/reverse phonebook.
Regardless of that, why isn't a schedule creative? Sure, a list of facts may not be, but a schedule probably is. Events on a schedule aren't facts until they actually happen in order and on time; until then it's a creatively-envisioned list of events with a high probability of occurring. Besides, Australian TV guides are mostly fiction anyway, which is covered by copyright. An entry like this:
"8:30pm - Australia's Funniest Home Videos - hosted by a flouncy trollop in a breezy sundress, so Dad can get a little stiffy while watching TV with the kids"
will most likely turn out to be:
"8:47 - Mostly Recycled Cretinously Unfunny American Home Videos, With A Few Australian Ones Thrown In To Make You Think It's All Australian Content"
Note, not even the start time is correct, so it's definitely a work of fiction. It'll still be hosted by a flouncy trollop in a breezy sundress, so Dad can get a little stiffy while watching TV with the kids, though...
Instead of putting it down when you encountered a word you didn't like, why not look up that word to see what it means in context, not what you think it means?
I'm not going to link to a dictionary or Wikipedia for you, but I will link to the relevant part of this BBC article about C.S. Lewis' book. The 4th & 5th paragraphs might explain a few things for you...
And yes, I've read the whole book. Pity a quick Google didn't bring up an on-line version, otherwise I would've linked directly to the relevant parts of that.
Y'know, I was going to mention that, because that was a real low point for my country. Then I thought, "no, even when we sent them to Christmas Island, Nauru, PNG, etc, at least we gave them access to communications, official immigration processes, and (eventually, though not without a bit of a fight) the Australian legal system."
FWIW, despite the concerted efforts of the government at the time, more than 70% of them have since gained permanent residency in Australia...
(And the couple of thousand who were arriving illegally by boat each year pales into insignificance compared to the 10's of thousands per year who fly in on perfectly valid short-term visas then disappear into society. Yet there's very little public fear - or even knowledge - of that fact. Doesn't make a good fear story, I guess, and at least they get sprayed with disinfectant and the dirt cleaned off their shoes on the plane...)
Slashdot Mirror
You wrote your grabber wrong ;-)
When the then-current Aus grabber (JavaXMLTV?) stopped chasing the moving target of the TV guide websites when they went to Javascript 'encryption' in about 2005 or 2006, I - a half-arsed programmer if ever there was one - sat down and decided to write my own. One week, and a bit of lateral thinking* later, I had a working grabber. Outside of maybe the half-dozen times they've changed channel designations or radically changed the individual event pages, that grabber has worked continuously since then. I still use it to feed EPG data to my Topfield.
(Actually, looking at my original code, I lie a bit - they made a big change in November 2007, so I took the opportunity to re-write my original grabber, though it still uses the same method I originally came up with. I've made exactly one change - not guide-provider related, but due to a protocol spec change - to the grabber part since then.)
(* Not going to reveal it here in case they twig and close that particular loophole - though it'd be hard, and actually hurt them web-wise to do it - but think WAP and the World's Biggest Proxy... ;-)
Science would disagree with you. Let's see what Wikipedia has to say on, oh, I dunno, let's pick the Hymenoptera (the order of insects that contains the aforementioned honeybees).
Note the Kingdom at the top of the phylogeny...
OK, so you might dismiss science. That's fine. Have a look at how the Bible classifies things such as insects. It's a little more complicated, as it divides animals into 'behemoths'/'beasts' (bigger things that live on land), 'fowl' (including "all things that fly" even if they "go upon four feet", and insects such as bees), 'living beings that swim in the water', and 'creeping things' (short-legged mammals, reptiles, and the flightless insects) - but, as far as the Bible is concerned, they're still all animals.
What was your point again? That the vegan exclusion of insects from their definition of animals was an arbitrary definition to allow them to enjoy things like honey and cupcakes with cochineal-coloured icing?
"On the other hand, and I guess this comes from my more cynical side, I've dealt with plenty of men and women who don't know much about {computers | cooking | vehicle maintenance | electricity | multivariate analysis | television production | plumbing | town planning | home repair | hydrology | drilling holes | timber harvesting | fishing | animal husbandry | cheesemaking | medicine | telephony | building | financial planning | capital raising | hairdressing | marketing | petroleum refining | chemical engineering | injection moulding | physical chemistry} and they don't want to know. They seem to revel in their ignorance and are quite happy to just rely on others to keep things working for them."
I think you get my point. There's a million things you don't know much about, don't want to know much about, and don't need to know much about. That's why you pay other people to look after those things for you.
There's something in the psyche of self-described "computer nerds" that can't comprehend / isn't interested in comprehending why other people don't care about them beyond the absolute basics of day-to-day use. Your mechanic doesn't berate you for not knowing anything about spanners beyond "righty-tighty, lefty-loosey", does he? (note: your gasfitter might...)
Screw that - Anderson connectors are where it's at!
Seriously though, if you're going to try to come up with a new standard for low-power connections on portable devices, one that is going to require proprietary hardware (the Green Plug chip) anyway, why not do something sensible and come up with a connector that minimises the potential for hardware damage? USB ain't it, any more than the stupid barrel DC connectors are - it's just too easy to snap things like that off in the socket, or strain the connections to the PC board, and then you're fucked.
They could start by taking a long hard look at something like Apple's Magsafe connector, and trying to engineer something similar which doesn't fall foul of Apple's IP...
No, what that says is that initial device current must be limited to 100mA (USB2) or 500mA (USB3) per port, that the current drain of bus-powered hubs must be limited to ((# of ports)*100mA)+100mA (which is why bus-powered hubs > 4 ports are rare), and that that is the minimum a root hub must be able to supply in order to conform with the specs.
According to the full spec, not just the FAQ version, devices are free to negotiate for up to 1A (USB2; dunno about USB3 but I'd guess it's higher), and it's up to the root hub to say "yay" or "nay".
Why?
Give us reasons, not rhetoric.
And there's a problem with that?
Even if a closed-source app statically links *BSD libs it's not a problem. That's the fundamental point of difference between the GPL & BSD licences.
lol i think you've missed the point of what the lightbulb does lol
The lightbulb acts as a current/voltage limiter. Picture this:
It's crude, but effective, and a trick electricians have been using for years.
(Caveat: the actual technical facts of the matter are somewhat more complicated than this, but given the quality of your comment I doubt you're capable of understanding them...)
Not to argue either way (really, no, I'm curious but not vested with either side), but this sort of appeal has always seemed a little odd to me.
After all, if they follow the statistical likelihoods in the average american population, you'd expect:
Given that there are an estimated 3229 practicing neurosurgeons in the U.S., to be 80 confident that this guy isn't a (diagnosed or undiagnosed) loony you'd want to show (excuse my very rough math; I'm not firing up a statistical calculator to tell me the exact answer!) another 645 neurosurgeons that believe the same thing.
Personally, I suspect that using Google as your go-to for correct spelling/grammar/pronunciation automatically makes you a looser.
(Ah, what the hell, I'm only going to have to explain it later: that was deliberate.)
I spent 8 years or so doing field networking repairs & installations. Big stuff & little stuff, from home PCs to corporate and ISP networks. In all that time, it was rare to see a Mac outside of graphics shops.
Now, I'm back studying at university; y'know, those big buildings where smart people with open minds go to learn useful and interesting things? I see a lot of Macs around here ;-)
OTOH, Bram Cohen's original BT client ran on OS X from day 1, without having to install anything extra (Python was already included in OS X). Say, before they eventually released the Mac version (still in beta, BTW), did utorrent run on anything other than Windows anyway?
Apart from the old mainline releases, OS X had (among others) Bits on Wheels, Tomato Torrent, Azureus, and the (execrable*) Transmission. Azureus & Transmission are even cross-platform, available on *BSD, Linux, Solaris, Windows, OS X, and BeOS.
(* Yes, execrable. Random bug o' the week is excusable, as long as you acknowledge the bugs. Among many others: for how many months, and for how many releases, did the recent "let's download 4~8x the data to get 1 complete copy" bug go unacknowledged and unfixed? And that's without even mentioning the numerous crash, disconnect, bad reporting, and other sharing bugs it seems to have every other release...)
Reading that, it looks to me like he (and/or his co-workers) used a dangerously wrong tool for the wrong jobs. That's not intelligence, that's insanity. The whole point of Tim the Toolman Taylor was comedy, not a HOWTO...
People sometimes use a chainsaw to cut 4x2's for building, and sometimes even use a circular saw for lopping branches. Doesn't mean it's right, or even smart.
(FWIW, there are more powerful, stronger, yet better built and safer, tools of that type than a Hole Hawg. But they're not made by Milwaukee.)
Now, where did my mod points go - I had a bunch of 'em just a couple of days ago...
Somebody, mod parent up - because this is exactly spot-on. As a Mac convert for the last few years, you've captured something of the essence of what makes Macs & OS X so nice to just use - yes, use, instead of fighting little things like Windows (&, yes, Linux) makes you do every day. It's what Mac users mean when they say "It Just Works"...
Now, I'd agree with you on some things, disagree with you on others. I own both a 800MHz G4, with 768M RAM, and a 1.83GHz Core2Duo Macbook. In its day, surrounded by 1+GHz PCs, the G4 still felt like it ran smoother and faster than its peers. People who remember running BeOS on a 200MHz Pentium would understand this; I'm not sure others would.
However, given equivalent RAM (I bought the MacBook with 512M), the Macbook felt ... not slower exactly, nor clunkier, just - lesser than the G4. Chucking 2Gig in there made it shine though.
I disagree with your reasoning on why you consider OS X a 'subscription', at least any more than Windows is. Sure, there's a tendency amongst freeware / shareware developers to only compile for the latest release - a fact that, still sitting on 10.4.x, I'm well aware of. To ameliorate that, I tend to upgrade only every other version (i.e. 10.2->10.4, and I'll jump to 10.6 when it comes out). But, for commercial apps, I don't think it's any worse than case with the Win98->Win2k, Win2k->XP, or XP->Vista transitions. There's always going to be some that require the latest OS version (can anyone give me a valid reason why Adobe Audition required XP, compared to Win2K for its predecessor, CEP?). Photoshop is a pig anywhere unless you throw RAM at it, and running on Rosetta didn't help (I can only assume you were running CS2 or below, because the Mac native Intel versions are fine with sufficient RAM), but even under Rosetta I didn't think it was particularly slower than native G4 or Windows versions once it was up an running (module loading notwithstanding).
Can't say I'm enamoured of Vista as you have been, though. My GF's Vista laptop, despite having more CPU (but only 1G of RAM), is a dog compared to my Macbook (even if I throw back in the original 512M!). The look & feel - not just the UI, but other things like the choice of where to hide both commonly and uncommonly used options and settings - feels random, obtuse; like it's trying to make it hard for you. Having been well experienced with setting up networking in Win2k and XP, and coming back to it from a Mac, getting wireless properly set up in Vista was a nightmare of "where the fsck is that setting going to be hidden this time?" - sometimes, it seems as though a particular option was hidden in different sections, control panel settings, and sub-menus, depending on how you approached it. I walked away thoroughly unimpressed, to the point where I even gave up on removing the random vendorware crap it also came with.
But, as you say, to each their own. If you've got a purpose that requires Windows, fine, get a Windows PC. Conversely, if you've got a purpose that requires a Mac then fine, get a Mac. My default option, for the vast majority of people that actually ask me, is "Buy a Mac!" - because, if they're asking me, they don't know what they want it for. For them, a Mac is probably (initial cost notwithstanding) the best option - for them (it will "Just Work"), and for me (who doesn't have to delve through as many of the arcanities of support for the damned thing!).
Having said that, my father refuses to buy a Mac because "they're not compatible!". Despite the fact that he only ever runs Firefox, Thunderbird, Office, and Adobe Reader, and despite the fact that I've shown him all those on the Mac (and the better Mac options such as Mail.app and Preview.app, and even other Windows stuff in Parallels), he's just stuck in that mindset. It'd save both of us a lot of heartache & trouble if he bought a Mac, and he'd be less frustrated and happier, but that's a whole 'nother story...
But the problem there is that as soon as you clear up and rebuild, another giant lizard or flying turtle comes along and you have to start all over again...
Oh no, you're not going to catch me out again!
I still remember the time I googled "Totally Wild" hoping to find out more about Ranger Stacey, and the first result was a pic of two guys fisting each other...
S3 is about as fast as opening the lid of your Macbook, after you've closed it without shutting down.
S4 is about as fast as powering up your Mac from scratch ;-)
9 degrees C ~ 29 degrees C = 19 degrees C average.
10 degrees C ~ 30 degrees C = 20 degrees C average.
Why did I chose those numbers? There's an interesting reason. Many species of coral will thrive at 19 degrees C, tolerate a 29 degree C max daily temperature for weeks at a time, yet can't tolerate more than a couple of days of 30 degree C max temps - they expel their symbiotic zooxanthellae, and die.
Now that's a very direct example of why a 1 degree C variation in average temperature may not seem like much, but makes one hell of a difference. There's hundreds, if not millions, of other indirect examples - consider an ectothermic lizard on a very tight energy budget, where a 1 degree C rise in average temp may mean expending more time on thermoregulation to drop body temp at the expense of feeding time, and so slowly starves to death - but I think you can get the idea.
But all your examples are things that have already happened! They're facts, and yes, I agree that lists of facts shouldn't be copyrightable. But consider this list:
Would you argue that those are not creative? Because that's what a TV guide is; it's probably closest to the US presidents example in that it is a chronological list of events which haven't happened yet.
Would you also argue that any of those on my list are not copyrightable? I'd only argue 1, maybe 2 - a proposal for a new state law, because it's been produced by public official using public funds, and so should be freely available and usable by the public; and possibly the thesis describing a new mathematical formula, provided it was (a) pure math, not something with a direct commercial application, or (b) if the research that led to it had any amount of public funding. Outside of that, they're all copyrightable, no? And I'm given to understand that, in some US states, compilations of state law - or, at least, individual acts introducing new laws - are copyrighted, and not freely available to the public.
Note, I'm not arguing that TV guide data should be copyrighted - as an Australian who's been struggling with the ramifications of this with my PVR since we started harvesting guide data from websites before IceTV launched their guide, I don't think it should. I'm arguing that your analogies suck ;-)
No it can't.
This ability was mentioned as part of their PR/publicity spiel at the beginning, but never happened. Rumour at the time had them working on the idea of having a bunch of people watching the show live pressing the pause button when the ads came on, which would then be distributed (by the pager or phone network; this was pre widespread broadband) to IceTV-enabled recorders across the country. Never got off the ground, and IceTV have been playing down the fact that it was ever mentioned since the day they actually launched their guide. Can't see how it would work reliably anyway, without the help of the broadcasters in putting 'ad break' flags in the signal - the traditional means of detecting ad breaks (e.g. full black, etc), have way too high a false positive/negative rate to be reliable for unattended use.
Now Ch 9, who own HWW (the actual guide aggregators), kept bringing up this 'threat' every chance they got during the actual court case, giving the impression that ad-skipping was what it was really all about. It wasn't; never was - it was about keeping control over who distributed TV guide data, and what the end-user could do with it. Note that TiVo in aus has had the 30-second skip completely disabled; it's not even recoverable by using any of the hacks available in the US versions. Note also that the TV networks here refuse to 'approve' (dunno what that means in practice, but I suspect we might start finding out in the next 12-18 months if the "Freeview" branding/approval actually takes off) any PVR with any sort of ad-skipping capacity. They maintain that, for a device to be 'allowed' to use their EIT EPG on digital, one of the conditions is that it have no ad or 30-second skip capability.
They were also making noises initially about not allowing 'search' capability (because OMFG! You might have your PVR automatically record programs and watch them later while ffwding over the ads!), but they seem to have let that slip, at least in the specific case of TiVo. I imagine that they realised, what with search being the core of TiVo's usefullness, without it TiVo would have just been another overpriced PVR.
When talking about the commercial TV networks in Australia, it's best to keep the phrase "a cunch of bunts" in mind...
You're wrong. Australian law, not US law, applies in Australia - and a collated list is considered a creative work & copyright applies. There's a landmark case that set the benchmark for this, involving a 3rd-party company (in India? The Philippines?) copying phonebooks to provide an alternative forward/reverse phonebook.
Regardless of that, why isn't a schedule creative? Sure, a list of facts may not be, but a schedule probably is. Events on a schedule aren't facts until they actually happen in order and on time; until then it's a creatively-envisioned list of events with a high probability of occurring. Besides, Australian TV guides are mostly fiction anyway, which is covered by copyright. An entry like this:
will most likely turn out to be:
Note, not even the start time is correct, so it's definitely a work of fiction. It'll still be hosted by a flouncy trollop in a breezy sundress, so Dad can get a little stiffy while watching TV with the kids, though...
If it wasn't for the tragic story of Sir Henry Blunt-Instrument, myths like that would never have arisen...
(OK, so it's a Pratchett line. If you're gonna steal, steal from the masters! ;-)
Instead of putting it down when you encountered a word you didn't like, why not look up that word to see what it means in context, not what you think it means?
I'm not going to link to a dictionary or Wikipedia for you, but I will link to the relevant part of this BBC article about C.S. Lewis' book. The 4th & 5th paragraphs might explain a few things for you...
And yes, I've read the whole book. Pity a quick Google didn't bring up an on-line version, otherwise I would've linked directly to the relevant parts of that.
Remember when
(Ummm, remind me again, how popular/important is
Y'know, I was going to mention that, because that was a real low point for my country. Then I thought, "no, even when we sent them to Christmas Island, Nauru, PNG, etc, at least we gave them access to communications, official immigration processes, and (eventually, though not without a bit of a fight) the Australian legal system."
FWIW, despite the concerted efforts of the government at the time, more than 70% of them have since gained permanent residency in Australia...
(And the couple of thousand who were arriving illegally by boat each year pales into insignificance compared to the 10's of thousands per year who fly in on perfectly valid short-term visas then disappear into society. Yet there's very little public fear - or even knowledge - of that fact. Doesn't make a good fear story, I guess, and at least they get sprayed with disinfectant and the dirt cleaned off their shoes on the plane...)