Anyway, with a 1 year contract, I got a triple LNB dish wired into two rooms, a DVR7000, and a additional regular reciever free. I didn't even have to buy any special programming packages.. Just the base with locals.
Also, if I need more space, just slap in more hard drives. No "modding" required.
So, opening the case, putting in a drive, formatting it, and closing it back up is different from what you have to do with TiVo how again? Sounds like the exact same process to me.
Plus you still have to deal with the fact that upgrades aren't free like they are with TiVo. What do you do when you have to pay for Media Center 2007 and 2009? What will your total cost be then? At the same time, TiVo upgrades are included in the price. Sounds like your costs are still higher.
Statins, as a class of drug, are among the best selling drugs in history. An interesting thing about statins, which are prescribed for hyperlipidemia, is that patients might wind up, on average, getting a few more months before they drop dead of CVD anyway
Most likely because treating a symptom or an indicator does little to combat the root of the problem. It's the lifestyle or physiolgical conditions that lead to high cholesterol cause the problem. They haven't invented a pill that gets your fat ass up off the couch puts down the bag of junk food and does some exercise for you yet though.
DirecTV with Tivo: $0 + $4/month = $480 over 10 years. Standalone Tivo: $50 + $299 = $349 over 10 years. Complete Windows Media Center PC: $800+ and probably won't be supported for 10 years and will require upgrades Build your own Media Center PC: $150 (software) + $300+ (minimum, for PC with sufficient specs) + $30 (remote) + $50 (cables) + $??? (who knows what else) = $lots. (And it still won't be supported in 10 years)
Go ahead. Kill off your agricultural sector and be completely dependant on other countries for your food supply. Just be real careful which countries you piss off, or don't allow to bully you around.
A country that can't produce it's own food is not a sovereign state. Put a price on that.
Actually, they made it because MMC and CF didn't have copy protection.
SD did, but it came after MemoryStick. Sure, MemoryStick didn't have any advantage for the user, but it had huge advantages for a large electronics company that also sells content...
They're keeping HDCP suport too... So not only can you have your pixel wasting eye-candy, but if you have media player opened with DRMd content playing and you haven't bought a new monitor with an HDMI port yet you can look forward to intentionally blurred eye candy.
Until the version *after* Vista comes out, all commercial software (read: games) that comes out will work on XP as well, so there is litterally no compelling reason to upgrade to this new version for home users, but good reason to downgrade to XP if you get Vista on a new PC.
I'd rather just be able to drag & drop files I wanted to use on the player onto the player's icon under My Computer, rather than having to use a media player to manage it.
You know, I used to think that too. So I bought an Aiwa CDC-MP3 for my car, and a few more CD MP3 players after that, and what I learned from it was that organizing music files manually takes way too long, and is a total pain in the ass.
It's so much nicer to highlight a bunch of tracks and hit a button, knowing that they're going to be organized nicely for you on your device or CD than it is to make folders, make sure the file names sort properly, etc...
There is exactly one feature that WMP6 didn't have that I would miss if went away... Playlists. I've never used Media Player Classic though, so I don't know if it's got 'em. I also don't use Windows Media Player, so I guess I have nothing to worry about.
It's not a service, because you own the device and you own the image, so they haven't provided you with anything. There was no work done, or goods received.
Your cable analogy is wrong. For it to be accurate it would have to be you paying the cable company a monthy fee to be able to watch home videos of your kids that you made with your camcorder on your TV and VCR.
It's not that I don't understand their perspective. It's that if they weren't a telephone company, their perspective would get them charged under RICO.
No, see... You pay them and they give you something (a magazine). That's not extortion.
For this "service" from verizon, you pay them, or else they delete your custom wallpaper. See the difference? Pay somebody and get something: subscription. Pay somebody or else you get something that's yours taken away: extortion.
The square footage of the space has almost nothing to do with the size of the cooling unit you need. You need to base it on the wattage of the equipment you're going to put in there instead. Divide the wattage of your equipment by three to get an approximation of the BTUs per hour rating you'll need on your AC unit. Regardless, the laws of thermodynamics require that you will have to cut a vent hole for the heat to exit through even if you're using an air conditioner. As long as you're going to have a vent hole anyway, why not cut two? Put a big slow quiet fan in the top one blowing in, and an air filter in the bottom (or the other way around)?
If you insist on AC, you probably want something like this: APC NetworkAIR AP7003 or more likely, some other (cheaper, but similar) portable AC unit with an exhaust hose from your local Wal-Mart.
Usually you want to please your direct supervisor. If you do what he likes, the only person with direct knowledge of your work says good things about you. If you don't please your bosses boss, it's not you that will be taking heat.
Judicious use of the hardware buffering and some fiddling by the user should be able to overcome the latency deficiency. You just need to write more than your average latency worth of audio to your buffer at a time, and the padding you place at the beginning of your first sample will give you as fine grained control of the phase as you need.
But you'll be hard pressed to get there using a multi-tasking OS on a standard laptop.
It depends on the OS. Some allow you to change kernel code. That lets you do your timing sensitive operations with interrupts disabled. With the right hooks in your DSP driver you may not reduce the latency, but you could practically eliminate the latency jitter (the real problem) during your calculations.
If paying retailers for shelf space, and spending whatever it takes dispite losses had any signifigant effect on the outcome of the market share race for any particular console generation, Microsoft would be king of the hill ten times over with the Xbox. I mean, have you been to an EBGames store lately? Plus they've lost enough cash on the thing to put most Fortune 500 companies out of business.
You can't buy a win in a console race. The reason is that when it comes down to it, for everybody but the 'hardcore gamers' the *only* thing that matters is the games. Not the graphics, not the box, not the advertisements... Just the games.
Do you really think I just made stuff up to "hear" myself talk on the internet or pick an argument with you?
Obviously, when you spew made up crap like "Sony fucked Sega by paying retailers to pull Saturn advertising and shelf-space." And "it's hard to compete when others are willing to spend whatever it takes no matter how high the losses."
When you say stuff like that; stuff that's proveably untrue, you come off as a fanboy who is only capable of sharing a biased opinion. Especially when it's just because you "felt a few lesser known facts needed to be pointed out" when they weren't related to the current situation in any way. (Unless you're implying that somebody is going to do stuff like that this generation?)
The fact of the matter is that it's Sega that was selling their system at a huge loss (I'm talking the Saturn here. The first console anybody can prove was ever sold at a loss.), not Sony. And it's common practice for companies to buy shelf space in larger department stores, but you buy space for yourself, you don't pay to have space taken away from others.
Sega turned out the way it did because they misread the market with the Saturn (admitedly an impressive machine, but it couldn't compete considering the competition had 3D and practically as good 2D), which left them in a financially vulnerable position for when the Dreamcast came around. They didn't have the cash to properly market the Dreamcast to developers or end-users, so it failed. Combine that with falling arcade revenues, and well... If Sony didn't drive the dagger in, Nintendo or somebody else (Probably Microsoft, given their interest in the industry and their history of back-stabbing partners) would have since they had one foot in the grave already.
That doesn't matter. You only cancel constant background noise, so you're canceling based on feedback from sound heard earlier. That's how the headphones work too. (You don't think they have instantanious electronics do you? Even anlog signals have latency.) The real problem comes with phase alignment, which will only be possible at certain points, not everywhere. If you use headphones you could probably do noise cancelation in software without a problem. It would just be fussy, and you'd have to tweak the settings all the time to keep the phase right.
You think users care about petty crap? It would be a tough sell to even convince me they care much about the difference between the graphics on a Dreamcast and on an Xbox. Sony didn't win against Sega because of silly retail games. They won because the developers wrote for PS2, and because the developers wrote for Playstation. Even if your crackpot conspiracy theory is true, it doesn't matter. Those things you are describing aren't what get gamers to break out their wallets.
You say it yourself. They held off. Dreamcast wasn't dead yet when PS2 was released. If there was a compelling reason to buy a Dreamcast, they would have. No sense in crying because you wasted your $200.
Did you respond to the right post? What the hell are you talking about?
I agree with your principals. I was just talking about wording your arguments in a way that is more persuasive to others that don't understand. Talking like you're talking won't win anybody over.
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What does "STB" mean?
Anyway, with a 1 year contract, I got a triple LNB dish wired into two rooms, a DVR7000, and a additional regular reciever free. I didn't even have to buy any special programming packages.. Just the base with locals.
How? Had almost all of the hardware already.
Got it for free, did you?
Also, if I need more space, just slap in more hard drives. No "modding" required.
So, opening the case, putting in a drive, formatting it, and closing it back up is different from what you have to do with TiVo how again? Sounds like the exact same process to me.
Plus you still have to deal with the fact that upgrades aren't free like they are with TiVo. What do you do when you have to pay for Media Center 2007 and 2009? What will your total cost be then? At the same time, TiVo upgrades are included in the price. Sounds like your costs are still higher.
Statins, as a class of drug, are among the best selling drugs in history. An interesting thing about statins, which are prescribed for hyperlipidemia, is that patients might wind up, on average, getting a few more months before they drop dead of CVD anyway
Most likely because treating a symptom or an indicator does little to combat the root of the problem. It's the lifestyle or physiolgical conditions that lead to high cholesterol cause the problem. They haven't invented a pill that gets your fat ass up off the couch puts down the bag of junk food and does some exercise for you yet though.
cheaper than Tivo over 5-10 years
Hmm...
DirecTV with Tivo: $0 + $4/month = $480 over 10 years.
Standalone Tivo: $50 + $299 = $349 over 10 years.
Complete Windows Media Center PC: $800+ and probably won't be supported for 10 years and will require upgrades
Build your own Media Center PC: $150 (software) + $300+ (minimum, for PC with sufficient specs) + $30 (remote) + $50 (cables) + $??? (who knows what else) = $lots. (And it still won't be supported in 10 years)
Good luck with that cheaper part.
Insightful, huh?
Go ahead. Kill off your agricultural sector and be completely dependant on other countries for your food supply. Just be real careful which countries you piss off, or don't allow to bully you around.
A country that can't produce it's own food is not a sovereign state. Put a price on that.
The Dreamcast was playable in just about every EB for weeks before launch.
The GameCube was playable in Circuit City and Sears stores for about a month before launch.
The Nintendo DS, the Gameboy Advance, Advance SP, Pocket, and Pocket Color all had pre-release in store playable demos.
Actually, they made it because MMC and CF didn't have copy protection.
SD did, but it came after MemoryStick. Sure, MemoryStick didn't have any advantage for the user, but it had huge advantages for a large electronics company that also sells content...
They're keeping HDCP suport too... So not only can you have your pixel wasting eye-candy, but if you have media player opened with DRMd content playing and you haven't bought a new monitor with an HDMI port yet you can look forward to intentionally blurred eye candy.
Until the version *after* Vista comes out, all commercial software (read: games) that comes out will work on XP as well, so there is litterally no compelling reason to upgrade to this new version for home users, but good reason to downgrade to XP if you get Vista on a new PC.
I'd rather just be able to drag & drop files I wanted to use on the player onto the player's icon under My Computer, rather than having to use a media player to manage it.
You know, I used to think that too. So I bought an Aiwa CDC-MP3 for my car, and a few more CD MP3 players after that, and what I learned from it was that organizing music files manually takes way too long, and is a total pain in the ass.
It's so much nicer to highlight a bunch of tracks and hit a button, knowing that they're going to be organized nicely for you on your device or CD than it is to make folders, make sure the file names sort properly, etc...
Drag and Drop is overrated.
There is exactly one feature that WMP6 didn't have that I would miss if went away... Playlists. I've never used Media Player Classic though, so I don't know if it's got 'em. I also don't use Windows Media Player, so I guess I have nothing to worry about.
Because it's not a service.
It's not a service, because you own the device and you own the image, so they haven't provided you with anything. There was no work done, or goods received.
Your cable analogy is wrong. For it to be accurate it would have to be you paying the cable company a monthy fee to be able to watch home videos of your kids that you made with your camcorder on your TV and VCR.
It's not that I don't understand their perspective. It's that if they weren't a telephone company, their perspective would get them charged under RICO.
You're right, of course... I should have double checked before posting so quickly. Multiply... Divide... Those are almost the same, right? ;)
Because indoor AC units like the one I linked vent out a 4" duct. Hence, you need a vent hole.
No, see... You pay them and they give you something (a magazine). That's not extortion.
For this "service" from verizon, you pay them, or else they delete your custom wallpaper. See the difference? Pay somebody and get something: subscription. Pay somebody or else you get something that's yours taken away: extortion.
Why is this so hard for you to understand?
The square footage of the space has almost nothing to do with the size of the cooling unit you need. You need to base it on the wattage of the equipment you're going to put in there instead. Divide the wattage of your equipment by three to get an approximation of the BTUs per hour rating you'll need on your AC unit. Regardless, the laws of thermodynamics require that you will have to cut a vent hole for the heat to exit through even if you're using an air conditioner. As long as you're going to have a vent hole anyway, why not cut two? Put a big slow quiet fan in the top one blowing in, and an air filter in the bottom (or the other way around)?
If you insist on AC, you probably want something like this: APC NetworkAIR AP7003 or more likely, some other (cheaper, but similar) portable AC unit with an exhaust hose from your local Wal-Mart.
Best advice ever.
Usually you want to please your direct supervisor. If you do what he likes, the only person with direct knowledge of your work says good things about you. If you don't please your bosses boss, it's not you that will be taking heat.
Judicious use of the hardware buffering and some fiddling by the user should be able to overcome the latency deficiency. You just need to write more than your average latency worth of audio to your buffer at a time, and the padding you place at the beginning of your first sample will give you as fine grained control of the phase as you need.
But you'll be hard pressed to get there using a multi-tasking OS on a standard laptop.
It depends on the OS. Some allow you to change kernel code. That lets you do your timing sensitive operations with interrupts disabled. With the right hooks in your DSP driver you may not reduce the latency, but you could practically eliminate the latency jitter (the real problem) during your calculations.
I'd like to add one more thing.
If paying retailers for shelf space, and spending whatever it takes dispite losses had any signifigant effect on the outcome of the market share race for any particular console generation, Microsoft would be king of the hill ten times over with the Xbox. I mean, have you been to an EBGames store lately? Plus they've lost enough cash on the thing to put most Fortune 500 companies out of business.
You can't buy a win in a console race. The reason is that when it comes down to it, for everybody but the 'hardcore gamers' the *only* thing that matters is the games. Not the graphics, not the box, not the advertisements... Just the games.
Do you really think I just made stuff up to "hear" myself talk on the internet or pick an argument with you?
Obviously, when you spew made up crap like "Sony fucked Sega by paying retailers to pull Saturn advertising and shelf-space." And "it's hard to compete when others are willing to spend whatever it takes no matter how high the losses."
When you say stuff like that; stuff that's proveably untrue, you come off as a fanboy who is only capable of sharing a biased opinion. Especially when it's just because you "felt a few lesser known facts needed to be pointed out" when they weren't related to the current situation in any way. (Unless you're implying that somebody is going to do stuff like that this generation?)
The fact of the matter is that it's Sega that was selling their system at a huge loss (I'm talking the Saturn here. The first console anybody can prove was ever sold at a loss.), not Sony. And it's common practice for companies to buy shelf space in larger department stores, but you buy space for yourself, you don't pay to have space taken away from others.
Sega turned out the way it did because they misread the market with the Saturn (admitedly an impressive machine, but it couldn't compete considering the competition had 3D and practically as good 2D), which left them in a financially vulnerable position for when the Dreamcast came around. They didn't have the cash to properly market the Dreamcast to developers or end-users, so it failed. Combine that with falling arcade revenues, and well... If Sony didn't drive the dagger in, Nintendo or somebody else (Probably Microsoft, given their interest in the industry and their history of back-stabbing partners) would have since they had one foot in the grave already.
That doesn't matter. You only cancel constant background noise, so you're canceling based on feedback from sound heard earlier. That's how the headphones work too. (You don't think they have instantanious electronics do you? Even anlog signals have latency.) The real problem comes with phase alignment, which will only be possible at certain points, not everywhere. If you use headphones you could probably do noise cancelation in software without a problem. It would just be fussy, and you'd have to tweak the settings all the time to keep the phase right.
You think users care about petty crap? It would be a tough sell to even convince me they care much about the difference between the graphics on a Dreamcast and on an Xbox. Sony didn't win against Sega because of silly retail games. They won because the developers wrote for PS2, and because the developers wrote for Playstation. Even if your crackpot conspiracy theory is true, it doesn't matter. Those things you are describing aren't what get gamers to break out their wallets.
You say it yourself. They held off. Dreamcast wasn't dead yet when PS2 was released. If there was a compelling reason to buy a Dreamcast, they would have. No sense in crying because you wasted your $200.
Same answer in more words: It's the games that win, not the launch date. If they deliver the better lineup, they'll win. End of story.
If you know this happened, you can be sure they had a warrant. That means there was due process.
You've got it wrong. Everybody wants to see the wealth spread more fairly. They just have their own definition of 'fair'.
Did you respond to the right post? What the hell are you talking about?
I agree with your principals. I was just talking about wording your arguments in a way that is more persuasive to others that don't understand. Talking like you're talking won't win anybody over.