It's also good to use multiple types of renewable energy in the mix. Wind is often at its best on cloudy days when solar is inefficient. Hydro is only seriously affected by long term issues like droughts. Geothermal and tidal act as baseline sources that are constantly available.
Another thing that's mostly in the past: radio stations that signed off at night. Back in the 60s many stations would close up shop at midnight and return to the air at 5 or 6 am. It was also the custom to play The Star Spangled Banner at sign on and sign off.
Adios, cartoons on broadcast television. Once upon a time, stations had cartoon blocks on weekday afternoons and on Saturday and Sunday mornings. (A few even had weekday morning cartoons.) VCRs (and later DVDs) and cable killed them all, and now we also have streaming.
Most of the Sunday morning religious programming is also gone. (But nowadays we have full time religious cable channels.) Anybody out there remember The Christophers? "If everyone lit just one little candle what a bright world it would be."
The later models would turn on in a couple of seconds, though. First they had pre-heaters that kept the tube filaments on all the time at a low voltage so they took less time to heat up; later fast-heating cathodes were developed that needed less warm-up time. But my family's first TV took nearly 30 seconds to come on from a cold start; that set was all tubes, not just the CRT.
I remember the days when TVs didn't have remote controls at all. The kids were the remote; the grownups would ask them to go over and change the channel.
I also remember tube electronics - radios and TVs that didn't turn on immediately. You had to wait for them to warm up before they would work. (Pet peeve: movies set before 1960 where somebody turns on a radio and it plays right away.) Some new electronics are an odd sort of throwback to those days; now you have to wait for them to boot up.
The headline says "a third of Americans still buy AND rent videos" (emphasis added). The final statement says "54% of people surveyed said they still buy OR rent video" (emphasis added). Both statements can be true if there are people who only buy or only rent.
Sometimes the best version IS streaming. There are films where HD versions are available to stream, but there has never been a Blu-Ray release so the only physical version available is SD on DVD. The same logic applies to 4K, where there are some films that are available for 4K streaming but not on Ultra HD Blu-Ray discs. There are films available to stream that were never released on disc at all, only VHS. (But some of those have streaming versions that look like they were transferred from VHS!) And of course, there are original films and series from streaming services that you can't get any other way.
That said, if all else is equal the disc version will almost always look better than the streaming version. There are fewer encoding artifacts because the disc uses a higher bit rate. The disc often also has higher quality audio. So far as I know, no streaming service is offering lossless audio, whereas Blu-Ray discs often have Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio tracks, and concert DVDs and Blu-Ray discs may have PCM tracks.
Nearly all of them. New movies are all being released digitally in either 2K or 4K DCP. Transcoding those formats to 1080p is simple to do and causes nearly no loss in quality. Most Blu-Ray releases are made that way, with the exception of computer animated films which are sometimes re-rendered to 1080p from the computer models to yield the absolute maximum possible image quality. (I know that Disney and Pixar do that.) There are still some new Blu-Ray releases of older films with sub-par image quality, though some re-releases are made from new 4K digital transfers and represent as good a Blu-Ray of those films as it is possible to make from the surviving film elements.
A modest number of films have been released in Ultra HD Blu-Ray format. All the ones I know about are either films that were released theatrically in 4K (and either shot on film, or digitally with 4K or higher resolution cameras), or are old films that were shot in large formats (like 70mm) with new 4K digital transfers. So far, only films that will effectively use the higher resolution format are being released that way.
You're likely to be stuck with buying a smart TV because most sets on the market are now. If you want something high end like an OLED TV you won't have any dumb choices at all.
That said, there is nothing requiring you to use the smart features, or even to connect the TV to the internet at all. You might have to hook it up once in a while for software upgrades (though they aren't so important if you're not trying to use the smart features), but you can keep it unplugged the rest of the time. In some cases the only way to keep the TV from getting a wireless internet connection will be to firewall it at your router.
There are quite a few characters and sub-plots that have been omitted for all the movies so that they aren't impossibly long. There is probably enough story in LoTR for a couple of season's worth of episodes if you use everything in the books.
That said, I'd rather see Hollywood spend its time and money on telling a story that hasn't already been told multiple times. LoTR was actually done pretty well once by the Peter Jackson movies. (No, they're not perfect and I don't want to open that debate. A TV series might be able to improve on them, but the net utility to the world would still be greater in my opinion if they do something else.)
The best candidates for this will be people who have a small area of the house, like a foyer, mud room, or covered porch - that can be isolated from the rest of the house. The Amazon Key would grant access to the isolated area to leave packages there but would not allow the delivery person into the rest of the house.
People has said that the games are EA's intellectual property and they have the right to control them. But what about the intellectual property rights of people who bought the game, and had it turned into useless slabs of polycarbonate or collections of digital bits by EA's decision to shut down the servers? EA is stealing THEIR intellectual property by refusing to allow alternate servers to continue operation.
"Self defence defence" is correct English in this phrase - specifically British English because of the spelling of "defence", the customary US spelling is "defense". The first "defence" is part of the phrase "self defence", meaning that the violence happened because of a need to protect oneself from violence by others. The second "defence" refers to a legal defence, what you present in court to counter a plaintiff who is accusing you of a crime or a civil infraction.
I will grant that the sentence sounds awkward, and that a native English speaker might have chosen to rephrase it to avoid the awkwardness. They might have instead said "defence of self defence", which means the same thing but avoids the doubled appearance of the word "defence".
True. But the Essential phone has flagship-level hardware - Snapdragon 835, 4GB RAM, 128GB flash, above-1080p display with small bezels. At $699 it was ho-hum because it was around the same price as other phones with similar specs, and those other phones come from companies with a longer track record. At $499 the Essential is a good value if you want that class of hardware, and it should get a lot more attention from potential buyers.
Cloud is also great when your load is highly variable. For example, it makes sense for companies that offer software downloads: there is a big burst of demand when an update comes out, and much less use the rest of the time. Hosting your download on something like Amazon S3 lets you fulfill that high demand when it comes along.
Well, kind of. It used the Windows GDI and font rendering to draw the characters on the screen. But it did them one at a time so they could get the character spacing right; the positions were calculated internally by the software.
That led to one odd bit of behavior that I didn't mind but that drove some users crazy. When you were actively typing, Ami Pro would put characters on the screen quickly by using the standard Windows calls. That's why it was able to keep up with your typing even on an early slow Windows machine like an 8 MHz 286, while other word processors for Windows struggled. If you stopped typing for a second or two the current line would get redrawn to make the spacing more accurate, using the slower one character at a time method. Lines other than the current one were always done the slow way. (Scrolling on Windows does not involve rerendering, it's done with a block transfer of memory from the old location to the new one which is much faster.)
The redrawing hack would not be necessary on a modern computer. There is enough computing power on hand to do things the slower way all the time.
Sure, you can hunt with members of the AR-15 family. But it's also too easy to convert them back into fully automatic military weapons. And there is no easy way to tell apart the military weapon and the hunting weapon by looking at it from a distance, as a police officer would be doing. That's bad, because if law enforcement sees you carrying something that looks like it could be a military weapon they are going to take you out with maximum force and without asking questions.
The only way to address that it to require that hunting rifles be visually distinct from military weapons. That would cost the hunters some extra money because they would no longer be able to piggyback on the volume production of weapons for other purposes. (The price of the military weapons might also go up a bit but those buyers aren't as price sensitive.) For the same reason, we should ban guns that are deliberately designed to look like other things such as cell phones.
So Apple has copied Windows Hello. Now that Microsoft is out of the phone business, I suspect they will be happy to license it to Android phone makers if the buyers want it.
NetWare did not work fine on Windows during the critical period during the mid-90s when people were switching to Windows 95 and 98. Novell had a lot of trouble producing a client that worked reliably, in part because the Windows API was poorly documented and because Microsoft's own networking was using undocumented APIs. By the time Novell finally managed to produce an acceptable Windows client, Microsoft had largely captured the market.
Novell's servers were definitely superior to Microsoft's offerings of the time. NetWare had gone through some growing pains in the early 90s when they were pushing the limits of their 16-bit version, but then they released NetWare 386 and that took care of that problem. NetWare servers were amazingly stable; it was not uncommon for them to have uptimes measured in YEARS. That stopped being true in their later years once servers started to be routinely connected to the internet - nothing is THAT secure - but Novell's servers remained more stable and secure than Microsoft's.
The final nail in the coffin of NetWare was the rise of Linux and the various BSDs. Now they not only had to compete with a larger and better funded competitor, but also another one that offered its products at a price that Novell could not match.
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It's also good to use multiple types of renewable energy in the mix. Wind is often at its best on cloudy days when solar is inefficient. Hydro is only seriously affected by long term issues like droughts. Geothermal and tidal act as baseline sources that are constantly available.
A link to The Christopher Program on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Another thing that's mostly in the past: radio stations that signed off at night. Back in the 60s many stations would close up shop at midnight and return to the air at 5 or 6 am. It was also the custom to play The Star Spangled Banner at sign on and sign off.
Adios, cartoons on broadcast television. Once upon a time, stations had cartoon blocks on weekday afternoons and on Saturday and Sunday mornings. (A few even had weekday morning cartoons.) VCRs (and later DVDs) and cable killed them all, and now we also have streaming.
Most of the Sunday morning religious programming is also gone. (But nowadays we have full time religious cable channels.) Anybody out there remember The Christophers? "If everyone lit just one little candle what a bright world it would be."
I remember those! Some airports still had them until 9/11 happened.
The later models would turn on in a couple of seconds, though. First they had pre-heaters that kept the tube filaments on all the time at a low voltage so they took less time to heat up; later fast-heating cathodes were developed that needed less warm-up time. But my family's first TV took nearly 30 seconds to come on from a cold start; that set was all tubes, not just the CRT.
I remember the days when TVs didn't have remote controls at all. The kids were the remote; the grownups would ask them to go over and change the channel.
I also remember tube electronics - radios and TVs that didn't turn on immediately. You had to wait for them to warm up before they would work. (Pet peeve: movies set before 1960 where somebody turns on a radio and it plays right away.) Some new electronics are an odd sort of throwback to those days; now you have to wait for them to boot up.
It's nearly impossible to buy a new car with manual windows, but there are still some cars that have them in the installed base.
The headline says "a third of Americans still buy AND rent videos" (emphasis added). The final statement says "54% of people surveyed said they still buy OR rent video" (emphasis added). Both statements can be true if there are people who only buy or only rent.
Somebody is selling. Otherwise stores wouldn't have all those used discs for sale.
Sometimes the best version IS streaming. There are films where HD versions are available to stream, but there has never been a Blu-Ray release so the only physical version available is SD on DVD. The same logic applies to 4K, where there are some films that are available for 4K streaming but not on Ultra HD Blu-Ray discs. There are films available to stream that were never released on disc at all, only VHS. (But some of those have streaming versions that look like they were transferred from VHS!) And of course, there are original films and series from streaming services that you can't get any other way.
That said, if all else is equal the disc version will almost always look better than the streaming version. There are fewer encoding artifacts because the disc uses a higher bit rate. The disc often also has higher quality audio. So far as I know, no streaming service is offering lossless audio, whereas Blu-Ray discs often have Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio tracks, and concert DVDs and Blu-Ray discs may have PCM tracks.
Nearly all of them. New movies are all being released digitally in either 2K or 4K DCP. Transcoding those formats to 1080p is simple to do and causes nearly no loss in quality. Most Blu-Ray releases are made that way, with the exception of computer animated films which are sometimes re-rendered to 1080p from the computer models to yield the absolute maximum possible image quality. (I know that Disney and Pixar do that.) There are still some new Blu-Ray releases of older films with sub-par image quality, though some re-releases are made from new 4K digital transfers and represent as good a Blu-Ray of those films as it is possible to make from the surviving film elements.
A modest number of films have been released in Ultra HD Blu-Ray format. All the ones I know about are either films that were released theatrically in 4K (and either shot on film, or digitally with 4K or higher resolution cameras), or are old films that were shot in large formats (like 70mm) with new 4K digital transfers. So far, only films that will effectively use the higher resolution format are being released that way.
The OP clearly had Personal Video Recorder in mind. The alternate acronym DVR - Digital Video Recorder - is more common for that sort of thing.
You're likely to be stuck with buying a smart TV because most sets on the market are now. If you want something high end like an OLED TV you won't have any dumb choices at all.
That said, there is nothing requiring you to use the smart features, or even to connect the TV to the internet at all. You might have to hook it up once in a while for software upgrades (though they aren't so important if you're not trying to use the smart features), but you can keep it unplugged the rest of the time. In some cases the only way to keep the TV from getting a wireless internet connection will be to firewall it at your router.
There are quite a few characters and sub-plots that have been omitted for all the movies so that they aren't impossibly long. There is probably enough story in LoTR for a couple of season's worth of episodes if you use everything in the books.
That said, I'd rather see Hollywood spend its time and money on telling a story that hasn't already been told multiple times. LoTR was actually done pretty well once by the Peter Jackson movies. (No, they're not perfect and I don't want to open that debate. A TV series might be able to improve on them, but the net utility to the world would still be greater in my opinion if they do something else.)
The best candidates for this will be people who have a small area of the house, like a foyer, mud room, or covered porch - that can be isolated from the rest of the house. The Amazon Key would grant access to the isolated area to leave packages there but would not allow the delivery person into the rest of the house.
One theater near me had a special Blade Runner double feature on the night of the release of the new one.
People has said that the games are EA's intellectual property and they have the right to control them. But what about the intellectual property rights of people who bought the game, and had it turned into useless slabs of polycarbonate or collections of digital bits by EA's decision to shut down the servers? EA is stealing THEIR intellectual property by refusing to allow alternate servers to continue operation.
"Self defence defence" is correct English in this phrase - specifically British English because of the spelling of "defence", the customary US spelling is "defense". The first "defence" is part of the phrase "self defence", meaning that the violence happened because of a need to protect oneself from violence by others. The second "defence" refers to a legal defence, what you present in court to counter a plaintiff who is accusing you of a crime or a civil infraction.
I will grant that the sentence sounds awkward, and that a native English speaker might have chosen to rephrase it to avoid the awkwardness. They might have instead said "defence of self defence", which means the same thing but avoids the doubled appearance of the word "defence".
True. But the Essential phone has flagship-level hardware - Snapdragon 835, 4GB RAM, 128GB flash, above-1080p display with small bezels. At $699 it was ho-hum because it was around the same price as other phones with similar specs, and those other phones come from companies with a longer track record. At $499 the Essential is a good value if you want that class of hardware, and it should get a lot more attention from potential buyers.
Cloud is also great when your load is highly variable. For example, it makes sense for companies that offer software downloads: there is a big burst of demand when an update comes out, and much less use the rest of the time. Hosting your download on something like Amazon S3 lets you fulfill that high demand when it comes along.
Well, kind of. It used the Windows GDI and font rendering to draw the characters on the screen. But it did them one at a time so they could get the character spacing right; the positions were calculated internally by the software.
That led to one odd bit of behavior that I didn't mind but that drove some users crazy. When you were actively typing, Ami Pro would put characters on the screen quickly by using the standard Windows calls. That's why it was able to keep up with your typing even on an early slow Windows machine like an 8 MHz 286, while other word processors for Windows struggled. If you stopped typing for a second or two the current line would get redrawn to make the spacing more accurate, using the slower one character at a time method. Lines other than the current one were always done the slow way. (Scrolling on Windows does not involve rerendering, it's done with a block transfer of memory from the old location to the new one which is much faster.)
The redrawing hack would not be necessary on a modern computer. There is enough computing power on hand to do things the slower way all the time.
Sure, you can hunt with members of the AR-15 family. But it's also too easy to convert them back into fully automatic military weapons. And there is no easy way to tell apart the military weapon and the hunting weapon by looking at it from a distance, as a police officer would be doing. That's bad, because if law enforcement sees you carrying something that looks like it could be a military weapon they are going to take you out with maximum force and without asking questions.
The only way to address that it to require that hunting rifles be visually distinct from military weapons. That would cost the hunters some extra money because they would no longer be able to piggyback on the volume production of weapons for other purposes. (The price of the military weapons might also go up a bit but those buyers aren't as price sensitive.) For the same reason, we should ban guns that are deliberately designed to look like other things such as cell phones.
So Apple has copied Windows Hello. Now that Microsoft is out of the phone business, I suspect they will be happy to license it to Android phone makers if the buyers want it.
It might also have something to do with generic ones selling for $2 on Amazon and eBay.
NetWare did not work fine on Windows during the critical period during the mid-90s when people were switching to Windows 95 and 98. Novell had a lot of trouble producing a client that worked reliably, in part because the Windows API was poorly documented and because Microsoft's own networking was using undocumented APIs. By the time Novell finally managed to produce an acceptable Windows client, Microsoft had largely captured the market.
Novell's servers were definitely superior to Microsoft's offerings of the time. NetWare had gone through some growing pains in the early 90s when they were pushing the limits of their 16-bit version, but then they released NetWare 386 and that took care of that problem. NetWare servers were amazingly stable; it was not uncommon for them to have uptimes measured in YEARS. That stopped being true in their later years once servers started to be routinely connected to the internet - nothing is THAT secure - but Novell's servers remained more stable and secure than Microsoft's.
The final nail in the coffin of NetWare was the rise of Linux and the various BSDs. Now they not only had to compete with a larger and better funded competitor, but also another one that offered its products at a price that Novell could not match.