This proves the original point as much as anything. A DVR is a fucking computer and it can't figure out that when you try to change a channel while watching a recorded show that you really do want to watch something else and it should just switch to the other tuner for you? I know it's possible, because a) computers are pretty smart and b) that's exactly how my TiVo works. And if both tuners are busy, it puts up a message saying that both tuners are in use, and if you try to change channels, this one will stop recording, and do I wish to continue? no [default]/yes.
With DVDs, there's a lot to be said for ripping to a single file. You lose the ability to jump from chapter to chapter but you gain more than just space--your movies show up in a list like TiVo shows, you don't need to muck around with the menus, you don't need to wait through FBI warnings and previews, etc etc etc. 99% of the time I just want to watch the movie, straight through, in English. Once in a while if I want to look at bonus materials or play it with subtitles for my father-in-law I'll dig out the disc. If someone were to rip Season 2 of '24' with HandBrake to ~1500kbps mp4s it would require about 10.5 GB.
Just like with MP3s, the loss in quality is noticeable if you're doing A-B comparisons, but for the most part, it's not a problem. (Dark scenes can get blocky but it's not much worse than DirecTV.) When I watch a movie or show, I'm watching it, not looking at it. Just depends how picky you are. For me and many others, the gains outweigh the losses.
Reading other replies to your comment, I see this:
42" is EXTREMELY small and some would convincingly argue that it is too small to notice any difference between 1080p and 1080i on a screen that small. There is a reason the bigger manufacturers don't make 1080p screens that small.
Most 1080p capable monitors only accept 1080i inputs through hdmi.
I didn't think the Westinghouse was one of them though. I thought it only accepted 1080i input (same as a Sony SXRD), despite having 1920x1080 resolution.
Note that although the HP accepts 1080p, it isn't true progressive display. There is no such thing as a true 1080p DLP, as 1080-res DLPs use wobleration and thus are inherently interlaced.
Sharp has sold a couple 1080p-inputting, 1080-res, true 1080p output flat panels for a while now, long before the woblerating DLPs came out.
And that's why I'm not buying any HD gear--TVs, DVD players, TiVos, etc.--until a) all this shit gets sorted out or b) I have so much money I don't care or c) HD gear is the only gear that's available and is as cheap as SD gear is today.
I'm not about to gamble $5k+ on gear that will depreciate rapidly in the next couple years AND has a good chance of not being optimal AND stands a good chance of not working with to-be-released content and components.
"...the author believes that Microsoft will unleash an abundance of next-generation applications that will take everyone by surprise. From the article: 'So why am I citing all these examples? Simply because I think Microsoft is itself poised for a big leap.'"
Wrong. If MS had anything big up their sleeves--that is to say, anything that worked and was compelling--they'd have it out already. I'm not saying there's nothing cool left to be done with computers, but given MS's track record, do you really believe that they're just sitting on a pile of apps that will "take everyone by surprise"? No effing way.
"...people (and I don't mean technology enthusiasts) will continue to purchase Microsoft products simply because of the sheer familiarity and comfort levels (BSoD et al) that they have with Microsoft software.'"
This part is true. When people need a new computer, it'll come with Vista. When their games say they need Vista, they'll go buy it at CompUSA. When they need Office, they'll go buy whatever Office is current.
One more note: please, it's 2006. Can we let go of BSOD jokes yet? I've seen maybe 10 BSODs in the last five years with W2K and XP systems. Any time I see a BSOD reference I think "here's a guy stuck in 1998 who thinks Linux will rule the desktop because it's more stable." I know that a) he wasn't joking and b) he seems to like MS, but it's time to find a new representation of all things wrong with Windows.
And before you go posting links to sites that show pics of BSODs in airports, Time Square, etc., know that most of those systems are running NT.
Facts: 1. Jimbo Wales is a mammal. 2. Jimbo deletes articles ALL the time. 3. The purpose of Jimbo to flip out and nominate articles for speedy deletion.
I heard that Jimbo was eating at a diner. And when some dude dropped a spoon Jimbo deleted the 'Justin Berry' article. My friend Mark said that he saw Jimbo totally delete the article on Brian Peppers just because some kid opened a window. And that's what I call REAL Ultimate Power!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hate to reply to myself, but I just noticed this on their page:
Why diggdot.us? Digg, slashdot, and del.icio.us- this is a constant browsing cycle for us. So why not combine them into a unified format without all the extra chrome? We can eliminate dupes and add some extra niceities. [emphasis added]
Stromcode - AJAX: Building a Spy
source: del.icio.us
posted: 04/13/2006 05:03AM ...
AJAX: How to make your own Spy page
source: digg
posted: 04/13/2006 05:31PM
I take pretty good care of my gear. I'm not too concerned about Hacker McPhee. I've not had a virus in over 8 years despite running Windows without A/V protection. It's outfits like Sony--"legitimate manufacturers"--that worry me more these days.
The article is about must-have Windows software for someone who wants to see what Windows is like but already has a Mac, so I think he's really looking for things that do not exist on the Mac. The implied thought is, "Show me some great things that you can do on Windows that just can't be done in Mac OS X." That said,
- Crimson Editor I use CE on Windows and love it. However, TextWrangler for OS X is comparable. Everyone has one or two killer features in their editor of choice. In this case, both do a great job with syntax coloring, but TextWrangler has built-in SFTP support, which CE doesn't. I'm sure you have some great feature in CE that TW lacks. That's why I say "comparable." Neither is a direct replacement for the other for all users.
- uTorrent I don't do much torrenting, so I can't comment here.
- As -U- Type. Spell check anywhere. Mac OS has that built-in. It's spellchecking this post as I type. So far it doesn't like TextWrangler, uTorrent, or torrenting and it thinks screensavers should be hyphenated.
- 3 Plane Soft Screensavers. I'm sure it's very nice, but there are a million screensavers to be had. I doubt anyone would dual-boot to watch one.
- Trillian. If you chat a lot and don't like iChat, maybe. I wouldn't call it a reason to reboot.
- The Bat! Email clients are a dime a dozen, most people don't feel strongly about them, and I guaran-damn-tee you no one is going to boot into another OS just to check mail.
- IZarc Again, most people don't give a shit about the gazillion options for unzipping things. OS X comes with built-in SW though, oddly, it doesn't support that old Mac standard, '.bin' Again, we're not talking about a compelling reason to reboot.
- Folder Size Built into OS X; only works in list view, though.
- True Crypt Data Don't know about this one.
- Thumbs Plus Arguably there are a lot of good applications in this space...... and there are many for OS X. Once again, how many users will have 20k images in a folder?
- DVD Decrypter Not quite one-button apps, but DVDBackup will copy commercial DVDs and does region-free, de-Macrovision, and DeCSS. To rip into a single file, I like HandBrake.
- Microsoft Power Toys and there are a zillion "haxies" available to customize OS X.
As far as I know, there are 3 big reasons and one small one to dual-boot a Mac: - games - specialized high-end software, like CAD - custom-built business apps - and to view sites in IE/Win. But, like the song says, that's what friends are for.
In my correspondence with him, he has estimated that a 1-ton payload can be launched into low earth orbit using a 1-Gigawatt class pulsed laser cannon.
Also forgot Caldera, which was pretty sweet at 2.2 and 2.3. (1999-ish.) Took advantage of Linux' multitasking abilities right in the installer--once it came to package-copying time, you could play Tetris! That distro was awesome, it even found the sound card on my Compaq 5280 laptop. Too bad they put stuff in odd places, so I couldn't trade notes with my RedHat using buddies. But then, so did every other distro back then. No one could agree on things like where to put Apache's docroot.
When I first started using Linux (1998), RedHat (around 4.x or 5.x) was the "easy to install" one. Then came Caldera, and also around then some people started liking Mandrake (which I never got into), then Corel came out and we thought it was gonna be a real Windows-killer, since they could ship a distro with WordPerfect and (I hoped) CorelDraw, PhotoPaint, but they didn't, of course; then RH became easier again, then Knoppix made a big splash, as did Gentoo at the totally opposite end of the spectrum, and now everyone likes Ubuntu, which I mostly like but still can't get some things to work on. I loved going to LUG meetings--every month were new CDs from SuSE, TurboLinux, SCO, those little LinuxCare bootable business card CDs... ah, the good old days.
In the meantime, I have found true happiness with Mac OS X.:-) 10.0: neat to look at, very slow Finder, no apps. 10.1: sped up a lot. Great. Now I can stand to use it. Kind of. Eventually got Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. 10.2: now *this* is what 10.0 should have been, plus all the apps are here. Very nice OS. 10.3: w00t! this is sweet! Cleaner looking than 10.2, fast user switching, iChat A/V, etc. 10.4: actually, I stuck with 10.3--I don't like Spotlight or Dashboard at all. And there are nice packages for PHP and MySQL and everything else and it All Just Freakin' Works. Not to mention gorgeous hardware, good wireless and sleep for laptops, iPods, etc etc etc.
from http://205.166.161.12/OncoreV2/ "The Broward County Records Division shall not be liable for errors contained herein or for any damages in connection with the use of the information contained herein." [emphasis added]
1) Can't sort inbox by sender, size, subject, etc. I mean, I know labels and searching are all the rage these days but why can't I take advantage of basic information that every email message has had for decades?
Actually, that's pretty much it. Call me when they implement that.
Bonus: OK, here's #2: I use Yahoo's webmail. Looking at my inbox, I want to read, say, 5 random messages out of the 10 new ones. So, I middle-click on them to open each one in new background tabs. They are all loaded by the time I start reading the first. After reading one, I usually either delete it or move it to a folder, or mark it as read for future attention. (If I just want to leave it in my inbox, read, I just close that tab.) After clicking on the appropriate button(s), I instantly switch to a different tab and start reading the next message--I don't have to wait for the operation to complete.
I also tried Yahoo's new AJAX mail beta but went back to the old style almost immediately. It's very slick, but I'm happy with the plain-vanilla version. If I ran my own server, I'd probably be happy with squirrel mail.
Everyone's different. If I searched my email a lot or did other things, I might light GMail more. To each his own.
(For those who don't know, the above link leads to a site protesting the ads--not trailers, but real television-style ads--that run for up to 20 minutes before the trailer even starts, or the newer and even more annoying practice of showing ads while the house is filling, thus making pre-movie conversation difficult, if not impossible.)
No sense mentioning assholes on cell phones, or people who think it's OK to bring their infants to movies like Mr. and Mrs. Smith. I hate it--they're the ones who won't take their crying kids out to the lobby when they're disrupting a movie I paid $8.75 to see, yet if I shot them I'd be the criminal.:-p
Slashdot Mirror
This proves the original point as much as anything. A DVR is a fucking computer and it can't figure out that when you try to change a channel while watching a recorded show that you really do want to watch something else and it should just switch to the other tuner for you? I know it's possible, because a) computers are pretty smart and b) that's exactly how my TiVo works. And if both tuners are busy, it puts up a message saying that both tuners are in use, and if you try to change channels, this one will stop recording, and do I wish to continue? no [default]/yes.
It's funny how different two people's priorities can be. I'd rather have my DirecTiVo and a 9" black-and-white than HDTV without TiVo.
With DVDs, there's a lot to be said for ripping to a single file. You lose the ability to jump from chapter to chapter but you gain more than just space--your movies show up in a list like TiVo shows, you don't need to muck around with the menus, you don't need to wait through FBI warnings and previews, etc etc etc. 99% of the time I just want to watch the movie, straight through, in English. Once in a while if I want to look at bonus materials or play it with subtitles for my father-in-law I'll dig out the disc. If someone were to rip Season 2 of '24' with HandBrake to ~1500kbps mp4s it would require about 10.5 GB.
Just like with MP3s, the loss in quality is noticeable if you're doing A-B comparisons, but for the most part, it's not a problem. (Dark scenes can get blocky but it's not much worse than DirecTV.) When I watch a movie or show, I'm watching it, not looking at it. Just depends how picky you are. For me and many others, the gains outweigh the losses.
A sarcasm detector? Oh, that's a really useful inven*POOF*
And that's why I'm not buying any HD gear--TVs, DVD players, TiVos, etc.--until
a) all this shit gets sorted out
or
b) I have so much money I don't care
or
c) HD gear is the only gear that's available and is as cheap as SD gear is today.
I'm not about to gamble $5k+ on gear that will depreciate rapidly in the next couple years AND has a good chance of not being optimal AND stands a good chance of not working with to-be-released content and components.
... but the site's already down.
Assuming the summary is accurate,
"...the author believes that Microsoft will unleash an abundance of next-generation applications that will take everyone by surprise. From the article: 'So why am I citing all these examples? Simply because I think Microsoft is itself poised for a big leap.'"
Wrong. If MS had anything big up their sleeves--that is to say, anything that worked and was compelling--they'd have it out already. I'm not saying there's nothing cool left to be done with computers, but given MS's track record, do you really believe that they're just sitting on a pile of apps that will "take everyone by surprise"? No effing way.
"...people (and I don't mean technology enthusiasts) will continue to purchase Microsoft products simply because of the sheer familiarity and comfort levels (BSoD et al) that they have with Microsoft software.'"
This part is true. When people need a new computer, it'll come with Vista. When their games say they need Vista, they'll go buy it at CompUSA. When they need Office, they'll go buy whatever Office is current.
One more note: please, it's 2006. Can we let go of BSOD jokes yet? I've seen maybe 10 BSODs in the last five years with W2K and XP systems. Any time I see a BSOD reference I think "here's a guy stuck in 1998 who thinks Linux will rule the desktop because it's more stable." I know that a) he wasn't joking and b) he seems to like MS, but it's time to find a new representation of all things wrong with Windows.
And before you go posting links to sites that show pics of BSODs in airports, Time Square, etc., know that most of those systems are running NT.
Jimbo deletes articles all the time.
Sorry, couldn't resist...
Facts:
1. Jimbo Wales is a mammal.
2. Jimbo deletes articles ALL the time.
3. The purpose of Jimbo to flip out and nominate articles for speedy deletion.
I heard that Jimbo was eating at a diner. And when some dude dropped a spoon Jimbo deleted the 'Justin Berry' article. My friend Mark said that he saw Jimbo totally delete the article on Brian Peppers just because some kid opened a window. And that's what I call REAL Ultimate Power!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hate to reply to myself, but I just noticed this on their page:
Why diggdot.us?
Digg, slashdot, and del.icio.us- this is a constant browsing cycle for us. So why not combine them into a unified format without all the extra chrome? We can eliminate dupes and add some extra niceities. [emphasis added]
Wow! They've even got dupes! :-)
...
Stromcode - AJAX: Building a Spy
source: del.icio.us
posted: 04/13/2006 05:03AM
AJAX: How to make your own Spy page
source: digg
posted: 04/13/2006 05:31PM
Guess I'll stick with XP!
:-)
Wow. After sticking with Windows 2000 for so long, it made a weird little echo in my brain to hear someone say that.
I've got $1000 that says Vista-with-glitter will be pirated within the first month.
:-)
You should know now that work like this costs about $13-14,000.
I take pretty good care of my gear. I'm not too concerned about Hacker McPhee. I've not had a virus in over 8 years despite running Windows without A/V protection. It's outfits like Sony--"legitimate manufacturers"--that worry me more these days.
The article is about must-have Windows software for someone who wants to see what Windows is like but already has a Mac, so I think he's really looking for things that do not exist on the Mac. The implied thought is, "Show me some great things that you can do on Windows that just can't be done in Mac OS X." That said,
... and there are many for OS X. Once again, how many users will have 20k images in a folder?
- Crimson Editor
I use CE on Windows and love it. However, TextWrangler for OS X is comparable. Everyone has one or two killer features in their editor of choice. In this case, both do a great job with syntax coloring, but TextWrangler has built-in SFTP support, which CE doesn't. I'm sure you have some great feature in CE that TW lacks. That's why I say "comparable." Neither is a direct replacement for the other for all users.
- uTorrent
I don't do much torrenting, so I can't comment here.
- As -U- Type. Spell check anywhere.
Mac OS has that built-in. It's spellchecking this post as I type. So far it doesn't like TextWrangler, uTorrent, or torrenting and it thinks screensavers should be hyphenated.
- 3 Plane Soft Screensavers.
I'm sure it's very nice, but there are a million screensavers to be had. I doubt anyone would dual-boot to watch one.
- Trillian.
If you chat a lot and don't like iChat, maybe. I wouldn't call it a reason to reboot.
- The Bat!
Email clients are a dime a dozen, most people don't feel strongly about them, and I guaran-damn-tee you no one is going to boot into another OS just to check mail.
- IZarc
Again, most people don't give a shit about the gazillion options for unzipping things. OS X comes with built-in SW though, oddly, it doesn't support that old Mac standard, '.bin' Again, we're not talking about a compelling reason to reboot.
- Folder Size
Built into OS X; only works in list view, though.
- True Crypt Data
Don't know about this one.
- Thumbs Plus Arguably there are a lot of good applications in this space...
- DVD Decrypter
Not quite one-button apps, but DVDBackup will copy commercial DVDs and does region-free, de-Macrovision, and DeCSS. To rip into a single file, I like HandBrake.
- Microsoft Power Toys
and there are a zillion "haxies" available to customize OS X.
As far as I know, there are 3 big reasons and one small one to dual-boot a Mac:
- games
- specialized high-end software, like CAD
- custom-built business apps
- and to view sites in IE/Win. But, like the song says, that's what friends are for.
In my correspondence with him, he has estimated that a 1-ton payload can be launched into low earth orbit using a 1-Gigawatt class pulsed laser cannon.
:-)
Rounding error--should be 1.21 Gigawatts.
I would have said google earth a few weeks ago but that's out for OS X now.
Just take screenshots of each page and print those. Duh. :-)
OS X.
Also forgot Caldera, which was pretty sweet at 2.2 and 2.3. (1999-ish.) Took advantage of Linux' multitasking abilities right in the installer--once it came to package-copying time, you could play Tetris! That distro was awesome, it even found the sound card on my Compaq 5280 laptop. Too bad they put stuff in odd places, so I couldn't trade notes with my RedHat using buddies. But then, so did every other distro back then. No one could agree on things like where to put Apache's docroot.
:-)
When I first started using Linux (1998), RedHat (around 4.x or 5.x) was the "easy to install" one. Then came Caldera, and also around then some people started liking Mandrake (which I never got into), then Corel came out and we thought it was gonna be a real Windows-killer, since they could ship a distro with WordPerfect and (I hoped) CorelDraw, PhotoPaint, but they didn't, of course; then RH became easier again, then Knoppix made a big splash, as did Gentoo at the totally opposite end of the spectrum, and now everyone likes Ubuntu, which I mostly like but still can't get some things to work on. I loved going to LUG meetings--every month were new CDs from SuSE, TurboLinux, SCO, those little LinuxCare bootable business card CDs... ah, the good old days.
In the meantime, I have found true happiness with Mac OS X.
10.0: neat to look at, very slow Finder, no apps.
10.1: sped up a lot. Great. Now I can stand to use it. Kind of. Eventually got Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.
10.2: now *this* is what 10.0 should have been, plus all the apps are here. Very nice OS.
10.3: w00t! this is sweet! Cleaner looking than 10.2, fast user switching, iChat A/V, etc.
10.4: actually, I stuck with 10.3--I don't like Spotlight or Dashboard at all.
And there are nice packages for PHP and MySQL and everything else and it All Just Freakin' Works. Not to mention gorgeous hardware, good wireless and sleep for laptops, iPods, etc etc etc.
from http://205.166.161.12/OncoreV2/ ." [emphasis added]
"The Broward County Records Division shall not be liable for errors contained herein or for any damages in connection with the use of the information contained herein
True. More specifically:
MySQL > MSSQL
1) Can't sort inbox by sender, size, subject, etc. I mean, I know labels and searching are all the rage these days but why can't I take advantage of basic information that every email message has had for decades?
Actually, that's pretty much it. Call me when they implement that.
Bonus: OK, here's #2: I use Yahoo's webmail. Looking at my inbox, I want to read, say, 5 random messages out of the 10 new ones. So, I middle-click on them to open each one in new background tabs. They are all loaded by the time I start reading the first. After reading one, I usually either delete it or move it to a folder, or mark it as read for future attention. (If I just want to leave it in my inbox, read, I just close that tab.) After clicking on the appropriate button(s), I instantly switch to a different tab and start reading the next message--I don't have to wait for the operation to complete.
I also tried Yahoo's new AJAX mail beta but went back to the old style almost immediately. It's very slick, but I'm happy with the plain-vanilla version. If I ran my own server, I'd probably be happy with squirrel mail.
Everyone's different. If I searched my email a lot or did other things, I might light GMail more. To each his own.
Yup. I don't know any skiers that would touch quadruple black diamond.
Too bad Apple is shipping network drivers. If they didn't, this would be the most secure Windows box ever. :-)
Dear theater owners,
:-p
Two words: Captive audience.
Two more: Fuck you.
(For those who don't know, the above link leads to a site protesting the ads--not trailers, but real television-style ads--that run for up to 20 minutes before the trailer even starts, or the newer and even more annoying practice of showing ads while the house is filling, thus making pre-movie conversation difficult, if not impossible.)
No sense mentioning assholes on cell phones, or people who think it's OK to bring their infants to movies like Mr. and Mrs. Smith. I hate it--they're the ones who won't take their crying kids out to the lobby when they're disrupting a movie I paid $8.75 to see, yet if I shot them I'd be the criminal.
**Disclaimer: I am NOT a gamer. I enjoy simple D-pad+four button games.***
Four buttons==simple?!?!? In my day, we had a two-way controller with ONE button and we liked it, dag nabbit!