I doubt if you are going to read this, since you obviously made up your mind that I'm some kind of anti-transgender bigot (which you would find to be hilarious, if you actually knew me.)
so I'll assume you're quoting Parent from something you found on some dungeon on the Faux News website.
First of all, you're a complete idiot to make such an assumption.
Getting back to the point, the most important paper on the topic to date is probably Sex and Gender are Different by world-leading sexologist Dr. Milton Diamond.
In his paper, he acknowledges the following:
For the last several decades the term gender has come into common usage particularly as a synonym for sex. The term has proved useful in many ways although distinctions between the two words, sex and gender, when one might be more appropriate than the other, has not been firmly established.
You see what he's saying here? He feels that using the words "gender" and "sex" within the medical community the way you would like to see them used would be useful for the sake of clarity, but in real-world usage, no such distinction is commonly used.
Frankly, I think it's far more useful to speak of transgender issues using the more accurate terms "physical gender", "gender role" and "gender identity", in order to distinguish between the 1. The genital and non-genital physical characteristics of biology, excluding the brain, 2. The societal assignment of a masculine or feminine role of the individual, mostly based on appearance, and 3. The sex which the individual self-identifies himeself or herself, which is almost always based on the biological structure of the brain.
Using such terminology is not only far more specific, it does not run afoul of common lay usage of the word "gender."
A lot of people use a PC at work, and most corporate seat licenses allow you to install Windows on one additional machine at home, so not everybody has to run out and buy retail Windows to be legal.
The product name is not a logo. The only logo is that picture of an apple right above the word "iPod." You can't trademark the use of a sans-serif font, any more than you can trademark the use of the color white.
The copyright at the bottom is referring to the interface software, not the word iPod.
"Currently Dungeons and Dragons Online only supports certain Windows operating systems. There are no plans at this time to make a Macintosh compatible version."
the RIAA has already filed suit...we'll here about it next week...
No it hasn't, and you will not there about it next week, whatever that means.
What possible objection could the RIAA have to feeding MP3 files to your iPod from this gizmo vs. ripping the CD with iTunes and loading it from that on to your iPod (the way 90% of music gets on to iPods right now)?
'Don't look at what the industry is doing,' Erchak says. 'Look at what they're not doing and focus on that. That's where the real disruptive technology comes from.'
Actually, that's incredibly stupid advice.
The industry is not making a Linux enterprise server which is powered by an exercise bike. The industry is not making a faraday-shielded mobile phone antenna (safe for use in hospitals!) The industry is not making a toilet with remote login. The industry is not making an accessory for the two-player console fighter which castrates the loser with a piano wire. The industry is not making caskets with built-in LCD monitors.
Which of those ideas will make me a millionaire the fastest?
Small rooms for entertaining are very popular in Japan. They'll seat a small group of people and have a TV or perhaps a karaoke system. It's a sort of rent-a-living-room concept.
Here in America, we have actual living rooms of our own, so the need for such places is not as great. Even a typical 20-something fresh out of college probably has an apartment with a main room where guests can be entertained.
The face another problem though. Within a month of such places catching on, I guarantee you there will be a national news story out of some Midwest town about a 13-year old girl hooking up with some 40-year old pervert at one of them, or that inside one of these private rooms some honor student got sexually assaulted by four members of the local High School basketball team's starting line-up, and suddenly parents will forbid their kids from ever going to them, and suburban zoning laws will be used to push them all into red-light districts, where they will become just another venue for lap dances.
Every okay-sized town has a couple cheapo theaters with inexpensive snacks. Those places generally do even worse than the overpriced joints.
Why?
Because people can now have a *very good* theater experience at home. I've got a relatively cheap ($1800) 720p projector, and when I go to any theater around town that isn't an IMAX, the first thing I notice is "this theater is not as nice as the one in my living room."
There was a day when people would go to a movie just to sit in an air-conditioned room for an hour and a half. Those days are gone. Our homes are much more comfortable than they were in 1955.
Theaters, in order to survive, must create an experience worth driving across town for. Doing so costs money, which means either higher ticket/popcorn prices, or those goddamn ads which have driven a lot of people away from going to the theater forever.
It's a rough time to be in that business. I wonder if there will even be movie theaters 20 years from now, and if there are none, I wonder where teens will take their dates.
You are pointing out "box specs" as if they have any relationship whatsoever to reality. You really should know better, no matter what company you're talking about.
Depends on the size you want. UHF YAGIs of about 4' or less can sometimes be found in hardware stores, true.
For the weak-ass HDTV signal a lot of stations choose to go with (minimum to keep the FFC off their backs), one big enough to be seen from space by the naked eye seems to just barely do the trick. That's when you get into mail order stuff.
You're making it harder than it is. With OS X (or, indeed, any REAL operating system with proper network support), you can mount network drives on your local machine, and they behave pretty much exactly the same as if they were connected directly to your internal bus. No need for any special "backend" software at all.
Yup, that's what I want in my living room: an ever expanding 2006 revision of the Atari 800.
Living room? Who said anything about keeping the external drives in the living room!?
I've got 1.75 TB of storage in my basement directly connected to my media Mac. Firewire cables can run fairly long, you know. All drives are noisy, even internal ones. The fewer you have in the room, the better.
(Ethernet can go even longer, if network storage is the solution you prefer. Hell, even 802.11g is probably fast enough to play a DVD image over, if your signal quality is good enough. You could do it all wirelessly!)
Correction: The Quicktime PLAYER will do it for an extra $20.
EyeTV, which runs on Quicktime, plays MPEG-2 just fine. I haven't tried it yet, but I'll bet dimes to donuts that iTunes does as well.
The Quicktime Player is crippleware, for reasons that continue to escape me. It can't possibly be a big money-maker for Apple to be nickel-and-diming people over "Pro" suits and plug-ins.
If you don't have luck with the antenna you bought, I reccomend going with one of those huge YAGI ones. You can mail-order them for about $60 (plus shipping, which ain't cheap).
I have version 7.0.4. I gave in and grabbed a serial number to "upgrade" to Pro so it does fullscreen and whatever else "pro" gives you, so I guess that took care of the nagware problem.
You're clearly not listening. The "nagware problem" DOES NOT EXIST with any recent version of Quicktime.
Neither to most of the other playback problems you are citing, at least not in my experience. I don't know what it is that you are doing wrong, but it seems you almost gotta be deliberately making things hard on yourself to be having half as much trouble as you claim.
For one thing, you are mostly using the Quicktime Player app, which is really only there as an ultra-simple playback and conversion tool, as if it was the only option available to Macs, or even the only available option for playack with Quicktime!
You want playlists? Use iTunes! (which plays back via Quicktime, by the way.)
Your whole post reads like those old "it took me 4 hours to copy a file" trolls.
Seriously, you are either making shit up or you're not ready to use computers yet.
I had a mini running my HDTV projector for almost a year (before I got a sweet deal on a dual-G5 tower.)
Let's look at your complaints, one by one:
First headache was hooking it up to the TV. No computer does completely well with overscan, but at least the Windows rig I built had nVidia drivers where I could tweak the exact resolution I wanted. On Mac I got a single checkbox that said "Overscan" (didn't do the trick) and I couldn't get DisplayX, ResX, etc to properly change the resolution.
Plugging the DVI cable right into the HDMI input on my projector was easy enough.
On my projector, I lose about 12 vertical pixels at 720p. (Fewer in 1080i, but 720 is the native resolution for my projector.)
Tweaked my view to lose them mostly from the bottom rather than the top... Put the dock on the side of the screen... Got on with my life.
Watching shows, I lose less of the screen image than people with ordinary HDTV sets do. Watching movies I usually lose nothing, since the aspect ratio is usually even wider than 16:9. Done.
It refused to play VIDEO_TS folders (my Media Center box does). I won't fault it for that, but I will fault it for having no kind of zoom feature for 4:3/16:9.
The Mac has this very obscure application called "DVD Player" which plays VIDEO_TS folders just fine, and also has the zoom feature you are so depressed about missing. Best of all, I am able to use my universal remote to browse through my entire DVD library on my firewire drives, select the one I want, and watch it in full-screen 16:9 mode. This is all just from the basic OS with a cheap Keyspan IR sensor, mind you. No need for fancy apps.
And don't get me started with the 3rd-party TV recording app. Having to use 2 remotes defeats the purpose of Apple's "simple" design.
My EyeTV remote hasn't come out of the kitchen drawer since the week that I bought it. Nor do I use the Keyspan remote for my Mac.
I do everything with the programmable remote that came with my Amp. Have you never heard of universal remotes?
But as a media center, it absolutely sucks. I ended up returning it.
You're nuts. I would NEVER part with my Mac in favor of a Windows-based media center.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt if you are going to read this, since you obviously made up your mind that I'm some kind of anti-transgender bigot (which you would find to be hilarious, if you actually knew me.)
so I'll assume you're quoting Parent from something you found on some dungeon on the Faux News website.
First of all, you're a complete idiot to make such an assumption.
Getting back to the point, the most important paper on the topic to date is probably Sex and Gender are Different by world-leading sexologist Dr. Milton Diamond.
In his paper, he acknowledges the following:
For the last several decades the term gender has come into common usage particularly as a synonym for sex. The term has proved useful in many ways although distinctions between the two words, sex and gender, when one might be more appropriate than the other, has not been firmly established.
You see what he's saying here? He feels that using the words "gender" and "sex" within the medical community the way you would like to see them used would be useful for the sake of clarity, but in real-world usage, no such distinction is commonly used.
Frankly, I think it's far more useful to speak of transgender issues using the more accurate terms "physical gender", "gender role" and "gender identity", in order to distinguish between the 1. The genital and non-genital physical characteristics of biology, excluding the brain, 2. The societal assignment of a masculine or feminine role of the individual, mostly based on appearance, and 3. The sex which the individual self-identifies himeself or herself, which is almost always based on the biological structure of the brain.
Using such terminology is not only far more specific, it does not run afoul of common lay usage of the word "gender."
Your friendly neighborhood BOFH should have all the info you need.
Okay, now I've tried it.
My "take" on PlaneShift is the same as for every other Open Source MMO I've ever tried:
1. Full of promise.
2. Not very complete.
3. Might never be.
I'll check back in a year or so.
A lot of people use a PC at work, and most corporate seat licenses allow you to install Windows on one additional machine at home, so not everybody has to run out and buy retail Windows to be legal.
The product name is not a logo. The only logo is that picture of an apple right above the word "iPod." You can't trademark the use of a sans-serif font, any more than you can trademark the use of the color white.
The copyright at the bottom is referring to the interface software, not the word iPod.
What's your take on Planet Shift?
My take is, you might have just saved me fifteen bucks a month by sending me that link. Thanks, AC!
"Currently Dungeons and Dragons Online only supports certain Windows operating systems. There are no plans at this time to make a Macintosh compatible version."
Guess that means I'll stick with WoW. kthxbye.
the RIAA has already filed suit...we'll here about it next week...
No it hasn't, and you will not there about it next week, whatever that means.
What possible objection could the RIAA have to feeding MP3 files to your iPod from this gizmo vs. ripping the CD with iTunes and loading it from that on to your iPod (the way 90% of music gets on to iPods right now)?
"iPod logo"? Wuzzat?
The only logo on an iPod is the Apple Computer logo.
(Unless you bought one of those HP models from a couple years ago.)
I thought you guys were the natives here.
That is, assuming you didn't buy your UID on eBay or something.
'Don't look at what the industry is doing,' Erchak says. 'Look at what they're not doing and focus on that. That's where the real disruptive technology comes from.'
Actually, that's incredibly stupid advice.
The industry is not making a Linux enterprise server which is powered by an exercise bike.
The industry is not making a faraday-shielded mobile phone antenna (safe for use in hospitals!)
The industry is not making a toilet with remote login.
The industry is not making an accessory for the two-player console fighter which castrates the loser with a piano wire.
The industry is not making caskets with built-in LCD monitors.
Which of those ideas will make me a millionaire the fastest?
Small rooms for entertaining are very popular in Japan. They'll seat a small group of people and have a TV or perhaps a karaoke system. It's a sort of rent-a-living-room concept.
Here in America, we have actual living rooms of our own, so the need for such places is not as great. Even a typical 20-something fresh out of college probably has an apartment with a main room where guests can be entertained.
The face another problem though. Within a month of such places catching on, I guarantee you there will be a national news story out of some Midwest town about a 13-year old girl hooking up with some 40-year old pervert at one of them, or that inside one of these private rooms some honor student got sexually assaulted by four members of the local High School basketball team's starting line-up, and suddenly parents will forbid their kids from ever going to them, and suburban zoning laws will be used to push them all into red-light districts, where they will become just another venue for lap dances.
Then again, maybe I'm just too cynical...
Every okay-sized town has a couple cheapo theaters with inexpensive snacks. Those places generally do even worse than the overpriced joints.
Why?
Because people can now have a *very good* theater experience at home. I've got a relatively cheap ($1800) 720p projector, and when I go to any theater around town that isn't an IMAX, the first thing I notice is "this theater is not as nice as the one in my living room."
There was a day when people would go to a movie just to sit in an air-conditioned room for an hour and a half. Those days are gone. Our homes are much more comfortable than they were in 1955.
Theaters, in order to survive, must create an experience worth driving across town for. Doing so costs money, which means either higher ticket/popcorn prices, or those goddamn ads which have driven a lot of people away from going to the theater forever.
It's a rough time to be in that business. I wonder if there will even be movie theaters 20 years from now, and if there are none, I wonder where teens will take their dates.
You are pointing out "box specs" as if they have any relationship whatsoever to reality. You really should know better, no matter what company you're talking about.
Depends on the size you want. UHF YAGIs of about 4' or less can sometimes be found in hardware stores, true.
For the weak-ass HDTV signal a lot of stations choose to go with (minimum to keep the FFC off their backs), one big enough to be seen from space by the naked eye seems to just barely do the trick. That's when you get into mail order stuff.
You're making it harder than it is. With OS X (or, indeed, any REAL operating system with proper network support), you can mount network drives on your local machine, and they behave pretty much exactly the same as if they were connected directly to your internal bus. No need for any special "backend" software at all.
Yup, that's what I want in my living room: an ever expanding 2006 revision of the Atari 800.
Living room? Who said anything about keeping the external drives in the living room!?
I've got 1.75 TB of storage in my basement directly connected to my media Mac. Firewire cables can run fairly long, you know. All drives are noisy, even internal ones. The fewer you have in the room, the better.
(Ethernet can go even longer, if network storage is the solution you prefer. Hell, even 802.11g is probably fast enough to play a DVD image over, if your signal quality is good enough. You could do it all wirelessly!)
Correction: The Quicktime PLAYER will do it for an extra $20.
EyeTV, which runs on Quicktime, plays MPEG-2 just fine. I haven't tried it yet, but I'll bet dimes to donuts that iTunes does as well.
The Quicktime Player is crippleware, for reasons that continue to escape me. It can't possibly be a big money-maker for Apple to be nickel-and-diming people over "Pro" suits and plug-ins.
If you don't have luck with the antenna you bought, I reccomend going with one of those huge YAGI ones. You can mail-order them for about $60 (plus shipping, which ain't cheap).
It's unclear. Is the DivX codec free, and just the converter trial and time-limited? Or would he have to shell out $20 to see a cheesy video?
Is there any free MPEG-2 codec for Quicktime?
1. The DivX codec is free.
2. Quicktime already plays MPEG-2.
I have version 7.0.4. I gave in and grabbed a serial number to "upgrade" to Pro so it does fullscreen and whatever else "pro" gives you, so I guess that took care of the nagware problem.
You're clearly not listening. The "nagware problem" DOES NOT EXIST with any recent version of Quicktime.
Neither to most of the other playback problems you are citing, at least not in my experience. I don't know what it is that you are doing wrong, but it seems you almost gotta be deliberately making things hard on yourself to be having half as much trouble as you claim.
For one thing, you are mostly using the Quicktime Player app, which is really only there as an ultra-simple playback and conversion tool, as if it was the only option available to Macs, or even the only available option for playack with Quicktime!
You want playlists? Use iTunes! (which plays back via Quicktime, by the way.)
Your whole post reads like those old "it took me 4 hours to copy a file" trolls.
Seriously, you are either making shit up or you're not ready to use computers yet.
I had a mini running my HDTV projector for almost a year (before I got a sweet deal on a dual-G5 tower.)
Let's look at your complaints, one by one:
First headache was hooking it up to the TV. No computer does completely well with overscan, but at least the Windows rig I built had nVidia drivers where I could tweak the exact resolution I wanted. On Mac I got a single checkbox that said "Overscan" (didn't do the trick) and I couldn't get DisplayX, ResX, etc to properly change the resolution.
Plugging the DVI cable right into the HDMI input on my projector was easy enough.
On my projector, I lose about 12 vertical pixels at 720p. (Fewer in 1080i, but 720 is the native resolution for my projector.)
Tweaked my view to lose them mostly from the bottom rather than the top... Put the dock on the side of the screen... Got on with my life.
Watching shows, I lose less of the screen image than people with ordinary HDTV sets do. Watching movies I usually lose nothing, since the aspect ratio is usually even wider than 16:9. Done.
It refused to play VIDEO_TS folders (my Media Center box does). I won't fault it for that, but I will fault it for having no kind of zoom feature for 4:3/16:9.
The Mac has this very obscure application called "DVD Player" which plays VIDEO_TS folders just fine, and also has the zoom feature you are so depressed about missing. Best of all, I am able to use my universal remote to browse through my entire DVD library on my firewire drives, select the one I want, and watch it in full-screen 16:9 mode. This is all just from the basic OS with a cheap Keyspan IR sensor, mind you. No need for fancy apps.
And don't get me started with the 3rd-party TV recording app. Having to use 2 remotes defeats the purpose of Apple's "simple" design.
My EyeTV remote hasn't come out of the kitchen drawer since the week that I bought it. Nor do I use the Keyspan remote for my Mac.
I do everything with the programmable remote that came with my Amp. Have you never heard of universal remotes?
But as a media center, it absolutely sucks. I ended up returning it.
You're nuts. I would NEVER part with my Mac in favor of a Windows-based media center.
Nagware.
Thanks for proving you haven't even opened the Quicktime player in over a year. (Either that, or you never update your software.)
Maybe if you use current software, you won't have so many problems playing your media files.
When is Apple going to either stop making Quicktime suck or enable it to play all of the codecs out there?
It just took me 2 computers and "Divx Doctor" to watch a low quality fight video off of video.google.com, that is ridiculous.
Why didn't you just download the 3rd-party divx codec for Quicktime?
For that matter, why didn't you just use VLC? That app plays pretty much everything.
Sounds like you were making things tougher on yourself than you had to.
Oh... I also just noticed. They were talking about 1080p.
Almost nothing is broadcast in 1080p right now. It's 720p or 1080i, both of which have about the same bandwidth requirements.
So the mini will do fine with just about any currently-available HD signal.