I've also gone this route. Plays nearly everything you throw at it, it's got a fairly well polished interface, works with the Xbox remote (and works fairly well with just the controller, too; with the long cables you may not need the remote), has a hard drive for local storage, works with SMB as well as its own streaming formats... and did I mention it'll run Linux and play Xbox games as well?
Decent city, heh... Where I am, Adelphia's basic alone cable is $25/mo (that's analog basic, not digital basic). No idea what HDTV costs but I'm willing to bet it's more than $7/mo...
I think you should consider yourself pretty lucky.
Most HDTV captures (unless you're talking about the raw transport stream ones, which are pretty huge (4-6 gigs)) are scaled down from native HDTV resolution (usually 1280x720) to around half that. 640x368 and 624x352 are some common resolutions.
Also, most rips nowadays are encoded with XVID, although some people still use DivX.
You can do this with most word processors, by using tabs. What you do is set a tab on the right side of the page, then modify it to be a right-aligned tab. When you tab over to it, your text will be right-aligned to the tab line. This works both in OpenOffice and Microsoft Word.
I've been reading some of the SBC forums on DSLReports, basically there was a period of time in which they were offering the 3Mb/300kb package when they didn't actually have such a thing in place on the systems, so everyone who subscribed for 3/300 got 6/600. Just becareful, if you change your service in any way you will likely lose this 'upgrade'
The Most Wired ranking criteria are sort of silly and don't make a whole lot of sense. For example, they rate you both on how many computer labs you have and what percentage of students own computers. But if most of your students own computers, why do they need labs? If there are labs in each dorm and they're open 24/7, not as many of your students will buy computers.
It's a pretty silly award, and it's really not much of a reflection on how "with-it" a school is. Not a big surprise you don't see the real tech school leaders on the list; they're doing new things that the survey doesn't even know to look for.
There's a good reason to recommend Dell. CWRU made arrangements with Dell to have offer a system with gigabit fiber already installed, at a decent cost. I don't think you'll find many computer retailers out there that even sell gigabit fiber cards, let alone preinstall them for you. For many students who don't regularly tinker with their innards of their PC, it's appreciated.
Some might argue South Park beat them to it. Sure, it wasn't originally made for the Internet, but its popularity once it hit the net surely was a big part of them getting a show.
But if you don't think that counts, Tripping the Rift definately should.
I was just looking at this the other day. The maps they have are nice, but they are seperated by provider. Which means if you want to find out who has coverage of your town, you can't just click on a single map, you have to check the coverage area of each individual provider...
It'd also be nice if the maps were a bit bigger. Still, a useful resource. Trying to find coverage maps on providers' pages is a nightmare.
Read the article. They surveyed to find d-spots for all providers, and they are advertising that their network is much better than the rest, and that if you switch to them you won't have problems at those locations.
I think a customer would not buy one of these unless they needed it. That is to say, the people who get them will probably have no trouble generating enough traffic to test it.
I can't say why UBid failed, but for me, I never signed up with them because a) their website looked very shady, with lots of colorful graphics advertising expensive electronics "... from $10!" b) they required a credit card number at registration
There was no way I was going to trust them with my CC info.
Retaliation is a legitimate concern for those who are not full-time buyers and sellers. If I have a bad experience with a guy who sells 50 items a month, he's probably already got 100+ positive feedbacks and my one negative won't look like much on his record. On the other hand, I only shop on eBay occasionally, and 1 negative feedback compared to 6 or 7 positive feedback is much more of a big deal. I'm not sure how to address this but it's a problem.
You cite exceptional examples. WinAmp was the first full-featured Windows MP3 player. Napster was the first huge p2p app. Both of them hit at just the right time to ride the MP3 wave to popularity.
Many people probably used these applications in/spite/ of their interface; they were just so hot and unlike anything else at the time.
Now, not to say there isn't some innovative FOSS software out there; but a lot of it is rather mundane, i.e. apps that already exist in the closed-source world. In the midst of all the competition, if a FOSS looks kinda weird and is not obviously head shoulders better than the competition, it's probably going to be a point against it.
I was wondering about this; I recall way back when in the "hacker days of AOL", there a AOL warez scene that functioned via email. Someone would make a mail and upload as many programs as possible as attachments. Then they'd forward a copy to anyone who was interested. Because it was all done on AOLs internal mail system, it didn't have to transfer a new copy of the attachments to each person. You could send hundreds of megabytes to dozens of people instantly. A neat trick.
I wonder if something like this would be possible on GMail. Sure, a gig isn't what it used to be in terms of the sizes of modern games, movies and music, but it's enough for a lot of things.
I prefere DataGlyphs (another neat Xerox Parc project). What's cool is that you can embed them in images by using different thicknesses and colors. They even have a nice online demo to generate and decode your own glyphs. Very neat stuff.
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Okay, random test. Search for "fisherman":
Sorry, no results were found containing "fishermen"
1 billion entries? Please.
Google:
Results 1 - 10 of about 1,350,000 for fishermen [definition]. (0.33 seconds)
Nice work so far MS...
I've also gone this route. Plays nearly everything you throw at it, it's got a fairly well polished interface, works with the Xbox remote (and works fairly well with just the controller, too; with the long cables you may not need the remote), has a hard drive for local storage, works with SMB as well as its own streaming formats... and did I mention it'll run Linux and play Xbox games as well?
Decent city, heh... Where I am, Adelphia's basic alone cable is $25/mo (that's analog basic, not digital basic). No idea what HDTV costs but I'm willing to bet it's more than $7/mo...
I think you should consider yourself pretty lucky.
Most HDTV captures (unless you're talking about the raw transport stream ones, which are pretty huge (4-6 gigs)) are scaled down from native HDTV resolution (usually 1280x720) to around half that. 640x368 and 624x352 are some common resolutions.
Also, most rips nowadays are encoded with XVID, although some people still use DivX.
You can do this with most word processors, by using tabs. What you do is set a tab on the right side of the page, then modify it to be a right-aligned tab. When you tab over to it, your text will be right-aligned to the tab line. This works both in OpenOffice and Microsoft Word.
I've been reading some of the SBC forums on DSLReports, basically there was a period of time in which they were offering the 3Mb/300kb package when they didn't actually have such a thing in place on the systems, so everyone who subscribed for 3/300 got 6/600. Just becareful, if you change your service in any way you will likely lose this 'upgrade'
The Most Wired ranking criteria are sort of silly and don't make a whole lot of sense. For example, they rate you both on how many computer labs you have and what percentage of students own computers. But if most of your students own computers, why do they need labs? If there are labs in each dorm and they're open 24/7, not as many of your students will buy computers.
It's a pretty silly award, and it's really not much of a reflection on how "with-it" a school is. Not a big surprise you don't see the real tech school leaders on the list; they're doing new things that the survey doesn't even know to look for.
There's a good reason to recommend Dell. CWRU made arrangements with Dell to have offer a system with gigabit fiber already installed, at a decent cost. I don't think you'll find many computer retailers out there that even sell gigabit fiber cards, let alone preinstall them for you. For many students who don't regularly tinker with their innards of their PC, it's appreciated.
Some might argue South Park beat them to it. Sure, it wasn't originally made for the Internet, but its popularity once it hit the net surely was a big part of them getting a show.
But if you don't think that counts, Tripping the Rift definately should.
I was just looking at this the other day. The maps they have are nice, but they are seperated by provider. Which means if you want to find out who has coverage of your town, you can't just click on a single map, you have to check the coverage area of each individual provider...
It'd also be nice if the maps were a bit bigger. Still, a useful resource. Trying to find coverage maps on providers' pages is a nightmare.
Read the article. They surveyed to find d-spots for all providers, and they are advertising that their network is much better than the rest, and that if you switch to them you won't have problems at those locations.
I think a customer would not buy one of these unless they needed it. That is to say, the people who get them will probably have no trouble generating enough traffic to test it.
Assumedly if you lived and worked in these countries for an extended period, you'd go outside once in a while...
Um, yeah, sure... I'm sorry, piracy on the Xbox is so easy it's not even funny. I highly doubt that that had anything to do with their decision.
I can't say why UBid failed, but for me, I never signed up with them because
a) their website looked very shady, with lots of colorful graphics advertising expensive electronics "... from $10!"
b) they required a credit card number at registration
There was no way I was going to trust them with my CC info.
Retaliation is a legitimate concern for those who are not full-time buyers and sellers. If I have a bad experience with a guy who sells 50 items a month, he's probably already got 100+ positive feedbacks and my one negative won't look like much on his record. On the other hand, I only shop on eBay occasionally, and 1 negative feedback compared to 6 or 7 positive feedback is much more of a big deal. I'm not sure how to address this but it's a problem.
And you don't think Intel was making a good margin on those either?
You cite exceptional examples. WinAmp was the first full-featured Windows MP3 player. Napster was the first huge p2p app. Both of them hit at just the right time to ride the MP3 wave to popularity.
/spite/ of their interface; they were just so hot and unlike anything else at the time.
Many people probably used these applications in
Now, not to say there isn't some innovative FOSS software out there; but a lot of it is rather mundane, i.e. apps that already exist in the closed-source world. In the midst of all the competition, if a FOSS looks kinda weird and is not obviously head shoulders better than the competition, it's probably going to be a point against it.
Really? Checked out the price of a P4 Extreme Edition CPU lately? Check it out:
Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz 800FSB 512KB: $279.00
Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz 800FSB Extreme: $910.00
Intel Pentium 4 3.4GHz 800FSB 512KB: $412.00
Intel Pentium 4 3.4GHz 800FSB Extreme: $1,139.00
A grand for a CPU... man, I thought those days were long over...
I was wondering about this; I recall way back when in the "hacker days of AOL", there a AOL warez scene that functioned via email. Someone would make a mail and upload as many programs as possible as attachments. Then they'd forward a copy to anyone who was interested. Because it was all done on AOLs internal mail system, it didn't have to transfer a new copy of the attachments to each person. You could send hundreds of megabytes to dozens of people instantly. A neat trick.
I wonder if something like this would be possible on GMail. Sure, a gig isn't what it used to be in terms of the sizes of modern games, movies and music, but it's enough for a lot of things.
Never seen that either, been using Mozilla and most recently FireFox for at least a year now.
Stealth does not protect optically, only against radar... They show up quite well against white clouds.
Which is probably why they like to paint them black and fly them at night.
I'm pretty sure that was Space Miner 2049 (aka SMiner). Fun little game.
I prefere DataGlyphs (another neat Xerox Parc project). What's cool is that you can embed them in images by using different thicknesses and colors. They even have a nice online demo to generate and decode your own glyphs. Very neat stuff.
Probably track 2, "Shawshank Prison (Stoic Theme)".
Excellent soundtrack, but don't listen to it if you're already feeling a bit depressed.