You had a VCR with commercial skip? Care to divulge the make and model?
I got rid of it when I got the Tivo some years ago, and I don't remember who made it. I notice that eBay has a passel of Panasonic PV-V4022s for sale that the seller claims to be commercial-skipping. Or search for vcr and "commercial skip" in the descriptions and a bunch of others turn up.
Automatic commercial skipping has been around for years. I had the capability on a VCR that I had about 8 years ago. The way it works is that the device looks for the completely black screen that preceeds the commercial and the resumption of the show. Next time you're watching a show, pay attention to that transition and you'll see it. It apparently never happens at other times (well, hardly ever: my VCR was fooled once in a great while by something in the middle of a show or string of commercials). If my Tivo had something like that, it'd be even more awesome (but, the manual skipping using the remote ain't that bad as it is).
Could you explain the hot cocoa box sampler joke to to me? I see it all the time on Fark but I've only been there for a few months, and I missed that one. Always been curious.
It started December 20 on a thread titled 'Who else got a crappy almost insulting Holiday bonus (if any at all) from their employer and if so, what was it? Link goes to google search for "crappy gift"'. Link here. The first post was about a guy who made the cmpany $14k and got a crappy hot cocoa sampler box. Scroll down a bit and you'll see people start riffing on that theme.
I got a mass email from corporate headquarters reminding me not to clog up the email system with Christmas wishes to other people, complete with links to the corporate email policy. Merry frickin' Christmas to you too, you bastards.
I'm on my second Tivo (upgraded to DirecTV with Tivo in order to get two channel recording capability), and couldn't be happier. I've never had a problem.
I found a site that has the scream here. As soon as I heard it, I recognized it from many movies. IMO, the best screen scream of all time was the one uttered by Daniel Stern in "Home Alone" when his character found a tarantula on his face.
Well, I do remember reading interviews with them where they basically talk about how they aren't in any rush to get this finished because the 'clock' is ticking, and with each tick their damages grow.
If they actually said this out in the open, I'd be amazed. In the U.S. tort system you have a duty to mitigate your damages, and saying that "we're purposely gonna let this fester" kind of violates that.
Why is the judge letting SCO get away with this coy "they infringed, but we're not going to show you how yet" stuff? Why hasn't he said, "Put the infringing source code in a brief and hand it over tomorrow, or I'm tossing this"? If, as SCO claims, they're being horrifically damaged, shouldn't they in fact be eager to get the offending code removed, which IBM could do, once it knows what the problem is? If I were the judge in this case, I'd be telling them to make their case or withdraw it. But, as Dennis Miller say, that's just me, I could be wrong.
I've been saying for years that the solution to global warming was to increase the earth's albedo and that we all ought to start putting as much particulant matter as possible into the air. The big fires in Southern California last month were a good start.
I took a look at the radiosity tutorial from which those pictures come, and it's really well written. It's clear that raytracing is better than nothing, but that other techniques will yield even more realistic images.
This year the Blender "Suzanne" awards got handed out as a small bronze statuette of the very same shape you see rendered on the pictures.
Out of curiosity, how was the statuette produced? Was the output of blender used in the making of a mold or numerically-controlled machine instruction file?
I ask because I've begun wondering if blender could be used for modeling things that would ultimately be made in the real world, like prototypes of enclosures, mechanical gears, etc.
I wrote a thoughtful, humorous, and witty reply, and the server decided at the moment of submission that it would take a vacation. The world's loss. Summary: I thought I WAS reading pretty widely.
This is the same reaction I get when somebody mentions a sports team and I ask if it's baseball or football. Hard as it may be to believe, some people don't share the same fascinations and need a little context when some wonderful thing happens on Project Blurfty Sprackett.
How about at least mentioning what features are new?
Better still, how about also saying what the product IS? I've never heard of Evolution, and had to dig around a bit to discover that it's a PIM. Would it kill people to spend another three words to say that in the headline?
What's causing ME problems is Microsoft Visual Studio. With each new version, the damned thing gets more and more difficult to use, and the documentation (if that's what you can call it) gets harder to obtain an answer from. (Yeah, yeah: use Linux. I'd love to, but my customers want it done in Visual Studio.)
If something like this ever happens again, try asking for your city council member and/or state legislator to put some pressure on the cops for you. That can sometimes get a case moved up the ladder, priority-wise. It would be particularly effective if your politician had also had a laptop stolen. There's nothing like a ticked-off politico to get a bureaucrat to haul his butt out of his chair.
Here's an article in the Los Angeles Times about groups that oppose this. They claim, among other things, that it'll "make it harder for some people to vote." I love free speech, but sometimes the people exercising it just piss me the hell off.
The only "mess" we've had came about because one group didn't like the outcome of the election and decided to create a pseudo "crisis" on purpose so that the election could be decided by the courts. It was never about a failure of our systems of voting. This rush to electronic voting is an example of why it's a bad idea to let one incident stampede us into ill-advised "action" without reflection.
Don't constantly piss off the rest of the world, and deal with real problems at home
And how do you suggest the U.S. not "piss off the rest of the world," when all that's necessary for that is its mere existence? Perhaps in some fantasy plane the U.S. could withdraw behind its borders and adopt a "don't bother us and we won't bother you" stance, but that isn't going to work in the increasingly interdependent world that's what we actually have.
The 2000 Florida "problems" were largely a construct of the losing side to justify the involvement of the courts. Unfortunately, the notion that undervotes and overvotes constitute unacceptable "errors" (when in fact, for all we know most could be deliberate) has gotten enshrined in the national consciousness, and is now being used to justify wholesale revamping of the system through the use of these new machines. My own state of California has stampeded down this path, I expect to its future regret.
The summary implies that it's conservatives who oppose these systems. Read the linked story, and you'll see that the "conspiracy theory" is one that Republicans are behind some sort of sinister plot to fix the vote. If anything, this makes it conspiracy theory on the part of the left wing. Personally, I'll be happy if these machines never see use. Punch card ballots seem to be usable without major problem everywhere but Florida. Let them have the electronic voting machines if they want, and leave the rest of us with systems that've worked just fine for decades.
I would urge you to exercise independent judgement before concluding that he's "one of the worst people in high places." Such pronouncements come from George Bush's political opposition, who are hardly objective in their criticisms. To begin with, ask youself why terrorists are blowing up overseas targets and not any in the U.S. Do you think that's their first choice? No. Could it be because Bush/Ashcroft/Ridge have managed to cripple the U.S. operations of terrorists (while getting their ankles chewed on by people more interested in scoring political points than protecting us)? I think the answer is yes. And they're managing to do it without sending people to the ovens, despite the picture their political opponents are trying to paint.
Slashdot Mirror
I got rid of it when I got the Tivo some years ago, and I don't remember who made it. I notice that eBay has a passel of Panasonic PV-V4022s for sale that the seller claims to be commercial-skipping. Or search for vcr and "commercial skip" in the descriptions and a bunch of others turn up.
My old VCR used the completely black screens that preceed the commercial and the resumption of the show.
Automatic commercial skipping has been around for years. I had the capability on a VCR that I had about 8 years ago. The way it works is that the device looks for the completely black screen that preceeds the commercial and the resumption of the show. Next time you're watching a show, pay attention to that transition and you'll see it. It apparently never happens at other times (well, hardly ever: my VCR was fooled once in a great while by something in the middle of a show or string of commercials). If my Tivo had something like that, it'd be even more awesome (but, the manual skipping using the remote ain't that bad as it is).
It started December 20 on a thread titled 'Who else got a crappy almost insulting Holiday bonus (if any at all) from their employer and if so, what was it? Link goes to google search for "crappy gift"'. Link here. The first post was about a guy who made the cmpany $14k and got a crappy hot cocoa sampler box. Scroll down a bit and you'll see people start riffing on that theme.
But at least it wasn't a hot cocoa sampler.
I'm on my second Tivo (upgraded to DirecTV with Tivo in order to get two channel recording capability), and couldn't be happier. I've never had a problem.
I found a site that has the scream here. As soon as I heard it, I recognized it from many movies. IMO, the best screen scream of all time was the one uttered by Daniel Stern in "Home Alone" when his character found a tarantula on his face.
If they actually said this out in the open, I'd be amazed. In the U.S. tort system you have a duty to mitigate your damages, and saying that "we're purposely gonna let this fester" kind of violates that.
Why is the judge letting SCO get away with this coy "they infringed, but we're not going to show you how yet" stuff? Why hasn't he said, "Put the infringing source code in a brief and hand it over tomorrow, or I'm tossing this"? If, as SCO claims, they're being horrifically damaged, shouldn't they in fact be eager to get the offending code removed, which IBM could do, once it knows what the problem is? If I were the judge in this case, I'd be telling them to make their case or withdraw it. But, as Dennis Miller say, that's just me, I could be wrong.
I've been saying for years that the solution to global warming was to increase the earth's albedo and that we all ought to start putting as much particulant matter as possible into the air. The big fires in Southern California last month were a good start.
Wow, that's an amazing service. Thanks for the tip.
I took a look at the radiosity tutorial from which those pictures come, and it's really well written. It's clear that raytracing is better than nothing, but that other techniques will yield even more realistic images.
Out of curiosity, how was the statuette produced? Was the output of blender used in the making of a mold or numerically-controlled machine instruction file?
I ask because I've begun wondering if blender could be used for modeling things that would ultimately be made in the real world, like prototypes of enclosures, mechanical gears, etc.
I wrote a thoughtful, humorous, and witty reply, and the server decided at the moment of submission that it would take a vacation. The world's loss. Summary: I thought I WAS reading pretty widely.
This is the same reaction I get when somebody mentions a sports team and I ask if it's baseball or football. Hard as it may be to believe, some people don't share the same fascinations and need a little context when some wonderful thing happens on Project Blurfty Sprackett.
Better still, how about also saying what the product IS? I've never heard of Evolution, and had to dig around a bit to discover that it's a PIM. Would it kill people to spend another three words to say that in the headline?
What's causing ME problems is Microsoft Visual Studio. With each new version, the damned thing gets more and more difficult to use, and the documentation (if that's what you can call it) gets harder to obtain an answer from. (Yeah, yeah: use Linux. I'd love to, but my customers want it done in Visual Studio.)
If something like this ever happens again, try asking for your city council member and/or state legislator to put some pressure on the cops for you. That can sometimes get a case moved up the ladder, priority-wise. It would be particularly effective if your politician had also had a laptop stolen. There's nothing like a ticked-off politico to get a bureaucrat to haul his butt out of his chair.
Here's an article in the Los Angeles Times about groups that oppose this. They claim, among other things, that it'll "make it harder for some people to vote." I love free speech, but sometimes the people exercising it just piss me the hell off.
The only "mess" we've had came about because one group didn't like the outcome of the election and decided to create a pseudo "crisis" on purpose so that the election could be decided by the courts. It was never about a failure of our systems of voting. This rush to electronic voting is an example of why it's a bad idea to let one incident stampede us into ill-advised "action" without reflection.
Don't constantly piss off the rest of the world, and deal with real problems at home
And how do you suggest the U.S. not "piss off the rest of the world," when all that's necessary for that is its mere existence? Perhaps in some fantasy plane the U.S. could withdraw behind its borders and adopt a "don't bother us and we won't bother you" stance, but that isn't going to work in the increasingly interdependent world that's what we actually have.
The 2000 Florida "problems" were largely a construct of the losing side to justify the involvement of the courts. Unfortunately, the notion that undervotes and overvotes constitute unacceptable "errors" (when in fact, for all we know most could be deliberate) has gotten enshrined in the national consciousness, and is now being used to justify wholesale revamping of the system through the use of these new machines. My own state of California has stampeded down this path, I expect to its future regret.
The summary implies that it's conservatives who oppose these systems. Read the linked story, and you'll see that the "conspiracy theory" is one that Republicans are behind some sort of sinister plot to fix the vote. If anything, this makes it conspiracy theory on the part of the left wing. Personally, I'll be happy if these machines never see use. Punch card ballots seem to be usable without major problem everywhere but Florida. Let them have the electronic voting machines if they want, and leave the rest of us with systems that've worked just fine for decades.
I would urge you to exercise independent judgement before concluding that he's "one of the worst people in high places." Such pronouncements come from George Bush's political opposition, who are hardly objective in their criticisms. To begin with, ask youself why terrorists are blowing up overseas targets and not any in the U.S. Do you think that's their first choice? No. Could it be because Bush/Ashcroft/Ridge have managed to cripple the U.S. operations of terrorists (while getting their ankles chewed on by people more interested in scoring political points than protecting us)? I think the answer is yes. And they're managing to do it without sending people to the ovens, despite the picture their political opponents are trying to paint.
How about a blinking dash light that indicates the system is active?