But women have to BUY those magazines in the first place for all that ultra-powerful advertising to reach them and strip them of their ability to think for themselves. They have to seek it out, by deciding that they really WANT to buy the magazine with the pretty girl in the nice dress on the cover, which kind of blows your whole conspiracy theory out of the water. Is it brainwashing if the subject asks to be mind-wiped?
Question, especially for the guys here: when is the last time you bought a fitness magazine or went to a fitness website, even? If the answer is never it's probably because you don't care about fitness.
Well, I run four miles a day, even when it's cold out, which is not at all fun... so I must care about fitness a lot. I don't buy fitness magazines or go to fitness websites because they will only tell me what I already know: That to be fit I need to exercise, limit food intake, and make sure the food I do eat is properly nourishing. You don't need a magazine subscription to figure that out.
And aside from values, I doubt there are many women who actually enjoy looking at women that they know are better looking then themselves especially when they could be looking at...well...men.
You doubt that there are, but I know otherwise for a fact. Sit in a crowded restaurant for a while, and pick out two or three women to pay attention to. Look at where their eyes go. They spend A LOT more time looking at other women in the room than they do looking at guys. That doesn't make them lesbians, it just means that they admire beauty.
You presume incorrectly. Gay men like looking at women too. Madonna owes a great deal of her career success to her status as a gay icon.
It all comes back to my main point, and one which you are not going to be able to refute:
Women are pretty.
The media does not prop up a certain concept of feminine beauty which we would not otherwise arrive at. All it does is reflect what we all want to see. They have no agenda to change our appetites, because there's far more money in feeding the ones we already have.
The problem is that today people are being raised by the video channels showing Jay-Z dancing around with 50 big breasted beautiful women, it gives some sick expectations.
Nothing that didn't happen in Busby Berkley movies back in the 1930s.
Female curves look nice. People don't like breasts because Jay-Z dances with 100 of them bouncing around him. Jay-Z has 100 of them bouncing around him because people like them.
Men are judged by what they do. Women are judged by how they look.
That is abundantly untrue.
Hillary Clinton looks pretty good for a woman her age, yet is universally detested by those who disagree with her politics. Mother Theresa had a face like a horse, yet was venerated probably more than any woman of the 20th Century.
Likewise, a lot of men manage to get ahead on their good looks (or are held back by the lack of them.)
If women fixed everything that is perceived as 'wrong' with them, half of us would be falling apart like Michael Jackson from too much plastic surgery!
That is also fundamentally false. Any woman who is not obese to the point of being unhealthy, badly disfigured, or a total slob, can walk into any bar in America and find dozens of men who would want to sleep with them. The standard of beauty at which men are attracted to women is a hell of a lot lower than the standard of beauty which gets you high-paying modelling contracts.
The only way to fix your sentence to make it true would be thus:
"If neurotic and narcisistic women fixed everything that which they perceive as 'wrong' with them, half of us would be falling apart like Michael Jackson from too much plastic surgery!"
If your a perfectly attractive woman who still can't cope with the fact that you don't look like Heidi Klum, that's not the fault of any magazine. Sooner or later you'd see a woman walking down the street who looks like that, and hop on the same downward spiral.
Women don't look at those photos on the front of magazines to fawn over them. We look, to try and figure out how to look like them, as that is the culturally accepted norm, though that norm is hopelessly skewed. Anorexics with implants are hardly a sensible norm to choose.
You obviously know different women than I do. Most of the women I know are positivley rivited by beauty, and not out of some analytical curiousity for their own self-improvement. Many of them like the way clothes hang off Calista Flockhart's shoulders, but would never in a million years want their bodies to actually be that thin.
Most women look at sexy women because they want to evoke the same reaction and are looking for the guidelines. Ergo, women look at sexy women not because they like looking at sexy women, but because they like getting positive attention especially from men.
Most women I know who are vain enough to incorporate the kind of fashion tips one would take from the covers of Allure and Cosmo are not the least bit interested in whether other people consider their look sexy, men or otherwise. They aspire to beauty for their own sake.
The whole debate about the ethics or morality of the media promoting imagery of sexy women is the question of whether women should be encouraged to pursue a particular version of beauty simply because it pleases men.
The question begins with several incorrect axioms. The first is that women need any encouragement to pursue a chosen standard of beauty. The second is that the do so "simply" for the sake of male attention. The third is that morality has anything to do with it.
I reject the entire concept that the love of beauty is a vice. A woman with a nice figure and a pretty face who wears a flattering outfit, styles her hair just so, and selects jewelry which most enhances her feminine allure is doing the same thing with fashion which Michelangelo did with a paint brush: Creating a beautiful image which makes the world a nicer place to be in. Shame on those who would have her stop.
I'll never be as tall, strong, fast, or rich as Kevin Garnett.
Being shorter, weaker, slower, and poorer than him all make me far, far less successful at impressing members of the opposite sex that I would be if I had all that going for me.
Why am I able to enjoy a Timberwolves game and admire Kevin Garnett's remarkable athleticism without becoming "intimidated and demoralized" by the unrealistic ideal of manhood which he projects? If half of what various feminist wonks are saying is true, seeing KG play a ball game should make me hate myself.... or are these feminists saying that the female ego is far more fragile than the male one?
Women who see Lara Croft's enormous hooters and react with anything more than dismissive laughter are clearly in need of therapy. Yes, she's an "unrealistic ideal," but you clearly have a dangerous mental separation from reality if you feel it's one you need to aspire to.
Plus, your argument (that because many popular magazines feature pictures of only certain types of women this means that women value that too) is not logically valid. Economics is driving what's on the magazine, and perhaps there are a subset of women who buy the magazines and like the pictures and spend a lot of money, but a large group of other women don't.
First you say it's not valid, then you say economics (in other words, SALES) is what drives them to do it.
Fashion magazines vastly out-sell female-targeted magazines which feature photos of men. Even in the teen market, YM out-sells Tiger Beat by a long shot. This is simple economics pointing out that women like looking at pretty women.
Or perhaps women buy the magazines for other reasons (informative content) and simply tolerate the images.
If there was any truth to that at all, some ambitious publisher could make a killing by publishing an informative women's magazine which doesn't feature all the ultra-expensive photo-shoots of beautiful models. Apart from "Martha Stuart Living" (which has a promotional agenda outside of sales of the magazine itself), I'm at a loss to think of a magazine which even attempts to do so.
Finally, even if many women do have the attitude that the pictures on the magazines are the ideal of female beauty, does that mean it's all okay? No, not necessarily.
It also doesn't mean that it's not okay.
Can you look like Tyra Banks? Probably not, but by the time you are in your mid-twenties one would hope that you've learned to come to terms with that fact. It actually is possible for you to gawk at how shockingly pretty Adrianna Lima is without turning into a quivering mass of self-loathing every time you look in a mirror. Most well-adjusted womwn learn to do so.
But all this is drifting away from my point. It's a very simple point, which is that sexual imagery in media boils down to one very simple truths:
(in anime, the lead love interest if often voiced by a woman)
Actually, even the most girly-looking "bishounen" in anime have deep, husky voices in the original Japanese track, especially if the male love interest is somewhat shrouded in mystery.
It's generally American animation houses which think women have better "cartoon" voices. Bart Simpson, for example, is voiced by a woman.
Female beauty is worshipped by men and women alike.
A quick scan of the covers of the most popular magazines with women confirm this fact. They like looking at Katherine Zeta Jones in an elegant, tight black dress just as much as we do, though for slightly different reasons.
As long as this is true, female game avatars will continue to be hotties, no matter who the game is "targeted" at.
This is why my religion regarding movies on TV is not "full frame", and not "wide screen", but "OAR" (original aspect ratio.)
If the movie was meant to be in wide-screen, I want it in wide-screen. If it was meant to be 4:3, I want it 4:3.
IMHO, movies released in both formats ought to put an "OAR" label on the disk with the "correct" ratio, and a "modified to fit your TV" (or your expectations) disclaimer on the bogus one.
Another hint: don't get taken in by these "HDTV" antennas. There's nothing special about an HDTV antenna, and unless you live on the outskirts and get poor reception anyway, there's no need to spend more than a few bucks on one.
If their old roof antenna was VHF-only, then they probably need to get a new one.
HDTV is tuned in on a UHF antenna. As a result of this, a lot of your better UHF antennas (btw, it's only "antennae" if you are talking about the biological kind) have been re-badged as "HDTV" antennas, partly as a marketing move, but also to save consumers a lot of confusion and sales people a lot of questions from said confused consumers.
I happen to live in a spot which seems to have a crapload of RF noise (even my Wi-Fi and Bluetooth devices get about a third of their expected range), so I had to spend the money on a massive YAGI UHF antenna and some signal amps... but most people can probably get by with the little UHF section of their UHF/VHF antenna.
Hockey and soccer are, by far, the worst sports to watch on TV, especially hockey.
In hockey, all the action you really need to see to follow the game is happening away from the puck. If you can't see pretty much the whole rink at once, it just looks like a bunch of guys randomly skating into each other. On a 4:3 standard def broadcast, they need to stay zoomed in relatively close, or the puck simply disapears from view. (They experimented with digitally highlighting it a few years ago, but most people agreed that it looks pretty stupid.) Once you are zoomed in on two or three players, you can't see much of anything else, even where they are relative to the goal.
On HD, you can back up. This, along with the wider screen shape, allows you to show about 2/3 of the rink most of the time. It makes a huge difference. It's still not as good as being at the game (unlike football, where watching the TV broadcast can actually be a better experience than being there), but it's a big step up from what it used to be like.
If you are tuning in the free over-the-air signal, I'm pretty sure PBS has all of its member stations broadcasting the full 1080i stream.
Personally, I prefer the 720p broadcast from FOX and ABC, especially when watching sports in HD. A Monday Night football game on ABC looks a lot better than the NCAA Basketball Finals on CBS... but then again, my preference is massively distorted by the fact that 720p is my projector's native resoltution. I'm actually watching a de-interlaced and re-scaled image whenever anything is in 1080i.
PBS does a great job with HD... if you want to watch the same "Low-carb Kitchen" broadcast over and over, it looks crystal clear. You can almost tell what brand of tooth whitener that grey-haired dude (who's pimping the use of Splenda in all their desert recepies) is using.
Honestly! They've got this great tech, but forgot to buy any programming for it! At any given time, I can flip over to their crappy SD broadcast and see a show which is abundantly more interesting. How many times can one person watch a documentary about the covered bridges of Iowa???
Watching:Lost" on ABC in HD is extremely cool, though. When the tail-section of the plane was crashing into the bay in the flashback at the start of season 2, it was just like watching a big-budget movie in a good theater.
But oddly, it looks a little bit like a stereoscope where you have one eye closed. Or a 3-D Viewmaster (remember that little thing you put up to your eye and pull the lever to change the picture that came on the disk).
That's not the fault of PBS.
What you are most likely seeing is the "rainbow effect" of a DLP system.
Unlike LCD, DLP difracts light through a color wheel to create the image. This generally allows the set to produce a much brighter image and higher contrast, but it does also tend to create the effect you are describing.
Some people are very sensitive to DLP rainbows, while other people can't even see them. If you are one of the lucky people who doesn't notice them, then a DLP set is often a good way to go. I've been told that some of the newer DLP sets do a better job of avoiding this problem, but as I'm currently very happy with the projector I have (a Panasonic LCD-based system), I haven't really been shopping around lately.
(a fork of G-Force was licensed by Apple in 2001 for iTunes but G-Force has continued to grow and improve since then).
Interesting. The iTunes visualizer has dramatically improved over time as well. I wonder if they are doing their own improvements, or if they are continuing to roll in the G-Force changes (if in fact that is what the visualizer is based on.) The screen shots certainly do look similar, and I've heard a lot of Windows users comment on how the iTunes visuals seem so much more advanced than the ones in WMP.
The G-Force Standalone feature sounds particularilly intriguing to me, because as somewhat of a garage musician, I could have a big-screen monitor or projector stand as a light-show replacement when playing gigs.
Not sure how I'd go about dropping you an e-mail, as it's not given in your post. Are you, by any chance, the "Andy O'Meara" referenced in the "About Us" section of that page?
Double-click on your newly-downloaded song. iTunes sticks a copy of it into the folder where it needs to be and starts playing it.
Right-click on the song in the iTunes library, and choose "Get Info" (or just hit command-i when the song is selected.)
From there you can type in the artist, album, name, genre, year, track number, etc., and iTunes will move the file to the appropriate folder automatically based on the ID3 tag data you enter!!!
Once you get used to using iTunes, you will never, ever have to move a file yourself.
To me, the notion that all the apps have to look the same is meaningless dogma.
UI widgets behave the same way, the top menu (what makes a Mac a Mac, as far as I'm concerned) is still there for each app, and each app is instantly identifiable at a glance.
I don't want Garage Band to look like Mail.app. There's no reason why they need to look alike.
Lets see here.... Who is making the chips??? IBM? Correct? Think this is IBM's way of getting back at M$ for buying "licenses" from SCO?
Actually, I was just thinking, "Microsoft is now seeing why Jobs decided to drop IBM for Intel. Looks like the X-Box changed platforms in the wrong direction."
Yes. It downloads cover art from Amazon.com based on the artist and album names in your library. iTunes didn't do that last time I checked.
Still doesn't, although I understand that there are a couple of dashboard widgets floating around out there that do exactly that, and load them in for you.
The Wikipedia thing sounded really interesting, except it's nothing you can't see in a browser window anyway. It's really just a matter of interface choices. I'm not saying that to bash Amarok, I'm just saying it doesn't sound like a feature I'd be likely to use.
It sounds interesting... but try as I might, I can't fathom why I'd want a "Wikipedia tab" (what is that exactly? Something to read bios of the artist you currently have selected???) on my music player. I'm sure others might have a use for it, though.
The built-in lyrics browser is a keen idea. Some iTunes users do that via Dashboard widgets, which integrates with iTunes rather well, or so I'm told.
Last.fm... I have no idea what last.fm is. Can you elaborate on why I would want it? Maybe start with what it is?
Does the "album cover manager" do something that the cover art feature in iTunes doesn't?
The quicktime framework might be great but the player is just a crippled sample to try and get you to buy quicktime pro which you can finally :
- resize - play full screen
Or you can just play your video back through iTunes, which uses the Quicktime framework the parent post was raving about, plays back in full screen mode, and is free.
Oh... and you can resize the free Quicktime crippleware player, but I don't know why you'd bother, when there are so many other players which use the framework. (EyeTV does as well.)
I've never bothered buying Quicktime Pro, and I doubt I ever will, since I don't actually need it for much of anything.
I can't live without VLC on a Windows or Linux box, but on OS X, VLC and MPlayer are pretty much redundant, as Quicktime does a better job with just about everything. (Although you do need to install an extra codec to play DivX files. H264 is slowly usurping DivX anyway, though, and Quicktime 7 does a fantastic job at H264.)
So, where are all these surveys you are talking about in which people proclaim that they bought their iPods for "status" rather than listening to music? Links, please?
I realize that people I know is not a statistically valid data set, but as a case sample, every last one of them who bought an iPod did so because they wanted to listen to their music on it.
And those who chose an iPod did so because they went to Best Buy, saw it next to the iRiver and others, and noticed how much those other players look and feel like exactly what they are: knock-offs. Those looking to save a few bucks bought the iRiver or something like it.
(In my parent's case, they bought a player that had a built-in FM player, partly because it was cheaper, and partly because they were willing to gamble on a more dodgy player for the sake of that feature... a decision they came to deeply regret, as the Windows set-up program for it was sufficiently byzantine that they can hardly operate it. Worse yet, they discovered the damn thing only had enough storage space for a couple albums.)
Those who payed attention to the overwhelming consumer satisfaction among iPod owners they know spent the extra couple bucks for the real thing. You call it "status", I call it "word of mouth."
Jordan sneakers are not analogous. Middle school kids in the late 80s thought of them as status symbols because: 1) They were endorsed by the most popular athelete in the world, who kids that age worshipped, and 2) $100 for a pair of kid's shoes at that time was considered shockingly expensive. The kid might as well have shown up to school wearing a Rolex watch.
By the mid-90s, most other brands of well-made athletic shoes were just about as expensive as the Air Jordans, and once MJ went from being a superstar with the Bulls to being a bench player with the Wizzards, the prestige value of those shoes kind of faded.
Slashdot Mirror
But women have to BUY those magazines in the first place for all that ultra-powerful advertising to reach them and strip them of their ability to think for themselves. They have to seek it out, by deciding that they really WANT to buy the magazine with the pretty girl in the nice dress on the cover, which kind of blows your whole conspiracy theory out of the water. Is it brainwashing if the subject asks to be mind-wiped?
Question, especially for the guys here: when is the last time you bought a fitness magazine or went to a fitness website, even? If the answer is never it's probably because you don't care about fitness.
Well, I run four miles a day, even when it's cold out, which is not at all fun... so I must care about fitness a lot. I don't buy fitness magazines or go to fitness websites because they will only tell me what I already know: That to be fit I need to exercise, limit food intake, and make sure the food I do eat is properly nourishing. You don't need a magazine subscription to figure that out.
And aside from values, I doubt there are many women who actually enjoy looking at women that they know are better looking then themselves especially when they could be looking at...well...men.
You doubt that there are, but I know otherwise for a fact. Sit in a crowded restaurant for a while, and pick out two or three women to pay attention to. Look at where their eyes go. They spend A LOT more time looking at other women in the room than they do looking at guys. That doesn't make them lesbians, it just means that they admire beauty.
(I presume you mean straight) men
You presume incorrectly. Gay men like looking at women too. Madonna owes a great deal of her career success to her status as a gay icon.
It all comes back to my main point, and one which you are not going to be able to refute:
Women are pretty.
The media does not prop up a certain concept of feminine beauty which we would not otherwise arrive at. All it does is reflect what we all want to see. They have no agenda to change our appetites, because there's far more money in feeding the ones we already have.
The problem is that today people are being raised by the video channels showing Jay-Z dancing around with 50 big breasted beautiful women, it gives some sick expectations.
Nothing that didn't happen in Busby Berkley movies back in the 1930s.
Female curves look nice. People don't like breasts because Jay-Z dances with 100 of them bouncing around him. Jay-Z has 100 of them bouncing around him because people like them.
Is there really any point in arguing about it?
Men are judged by what they do. Women are judged by how they look.
That is abundantly untrue.
Hillary Clinton looks pretty good for a woman her age, yet is universally detested by those who disagree with her politics. Mother Theresa had a face like a horse, yet was venerated probably more than any woman of the 20th Century.
Likewise, a lot of men manage to get ahead on their good looks (or are held back by the lack of them.)
If women fixed everything that is perceived as 'wrong' with them, half of us would be falling apart like Michael Jackson from too much plastic surgery!
That is also fundamentally false. Any woman who is not obese to the point of being unhealthy, badly disfigured, or a total slob, can walk into any bar in America and find dozens of men who would want to sleep with them. The standard of beauty at which men are attracted to women is a hell of a lot lower than the standard of beauty which gets you high-paying modelling contracts.
The only way to fix your sentence to make it true would be thus:
"If neurotic and narcisistic women fixed everything that which they perceive as 'wrong' with them, half of us would be falling apart like Michael Jackson from too much plastic surgery!"
If your a perfectly attractive woman who still can't cope with the fact that you don't look like Heidi Klum, that's not the fault of any magazine. Sooner or later you'd see a woman walking down the street who looks like that, and hop on the same downward spiral.
Women don't look at those photos on the front of magazines to fawn over them. We look, to try and figure out how to look like them, as that is the culturally accepted norm, though that norm is hopelessly skewed. Anorexics with implants are hardly a sensible norm to choose.
You obviously know different women than I do. Most of the women I know are positivley rivited by beauty, and not out of some analytical curiousity for their own self-improvement. Many of them like the way clothes hang off Calista Flockhart's shoulders, but would never in a million years want their bodies to actually be that thin.
Most women look at sexy women because they want to evoke the same reaction and are looking for the guidelines. Ergo, women look at sexy women not because they like looking at sexy women, but because they like getting positive attention especially from men.
Most women I know who are vain enough to incorporate the kind of fashion tips one would take from the covers of Allure and Cosmo are not the least bit interested in whether other people consider their look sexy, men or otherwise. They aspire to beauty for their own sake.
The whole debate about the ethics or morality of the media promoting imagery of sexy women is the question of whether women should be encouraged to pursue a particular version of beauty simply because it pleases men.
The question begins with several incorrect axioms. The first is that women need any encouragement to pursue a chosen standard of beauty. The second is that the do so "simply" for the sake of male attention. The third is that morality has anything to do with it.
I reject the entire concept that the love of beauty is a vice. A woman with a nice figure and a pretty face who wears a flattering outfit, styles her hair just so, and selects jewelry which most enhances her feminine allure is doing the same thing with fashion which Michelangelo did with a paint brush: Creating a beautiful image which makes the world a nicer place to be in. Shame on those who would have her stop.
I'll never be as tall, strong, fast, or rich as Kevin Garnett.
... or are these feminists saying that the female ego is far more fragile than the male one?
Being shorter, weaker, slower, and poorer than him all make me far, far less successful at impressing members of the opposite sex that I would be if I had all that going for me.
Why am I able to enjoy a Timberwolves game and admire Kevin Garnett's remarkable athleticism without becoming "intimidated and demoralized" by the unrealistic ideal of manhood which he projects? If half of what various feminist wonks are saying is true, seeing KG play a ball game should make me hate myself.
Women who see Lara Croft's enormous hooters and react with anything more than dismissive laughter are clearly in need of therapy. Yes, she's an "unrealistic ideal," but you clearly have a dangerous mental separation from reality if you feel it's one you need to aspire to.
Plus, your argument (that because many popular magazines feature pictures of only certain types of women this means that women value that too) is not logically valid. Economics is driving what's on the magazine, and perhaps there are a subset of women who buy the magazines and like the pictures and spend a lot of money, but a large group of other women don't.
First you say it's not valid, then you say economics (in other words, SALES) is what drives them to do it.
Fashion magazines vastly out-sell female-targeted magazines which feature photos of men. Even in the teen market, YM out-sells Tiger Beat by a long shot. This is simple economics pointing out that women like looking at pretty women.
Or perhaps women buy the magazines for other reasons (informative content) and simply tolerate the images.
If there was any truth to that at all, some ambitious publisher could make a killing by publishing an informative women's magazine which doesn't feature all the ultra-expensive photo-shoots of beautiful models. Apart from "Martha Stuart Living" (which has a promotional agenda outside of sales of the magazine itself), I'm at a loss to think of a magazine which even attempts to do so.
Finally, even if many women do have the attitude that the pictures on the magazines are the ideal of female beauty, does that mean it's all okay? No, not necessarily.
It also doesn't mean that it's not okay.
Can you look like Tyra Banks? Probably not, but by the time you are in your mid-twenties one would hope that you've learned to come to terms with that fact. It actually is possible for you to gawk at how shockingly pretty Adrianna Lima is without turning into a quivering mass of self-loathing every time you look in a mirror. Most well-adjusted womwn learn to do so.
But all this is drifting away from my point. It's a very simple point, which is that sexual imagery in media boils down to one very simple truths:
1. Most men like looking at sexy women.
2. Most women also like looking at sexy women.
The (obvious) lesson here:
Women are pretty.
(in anime, the lead love interest if often voiced by a woman)
Actually, even the most girly-looking "bishounen" in anime have deep, husky voices in the original Japanese track, especially if the male love interest is somewhat shrouded in mystery.
It's generally American animation houses which think women have better "cartoon" voices. Bart Simpson, for example, is voiced by a woman.
Female beauty is worshipped by men and women alike.
A quick scan of the covers of the most popular magazines with women confirm this fact. They like looking at Katherine Zeta Jones in an elegant, tight black dress just as much as we do, though for slightly different reasons.
As long as this is true, female game avatars will continue to be hotties, no matter who the game is "targeted" at.
This is why my religion regarding movies on TV is not "full frame", and not "wide screen", but "OAR" (original aspect ratio.)
If the movie was meant to be in wide-screen, I want it in wide-screen. If it was meant to be 4:3, I want it 4:3.
IMHO, movies released in both formats ought to put an "OAR" label on the disk with the "correct" ratio, and a "modified to fit your TV" (or your expectations) disclaimer on the bogus one.
Another hint: don't get taken in by these "HDTV" antennas. There's nothing special about an HDTV antenna, and unless you live on the outskirts and get poor reception anyway, there's no need to spend more than a few bucks on one.
If their old roof antenna was VHF-only, then they probably need to get a new one.
HDTV is tuned in on a UHF antenna. As a result of this, a lot of your better UHF antennas (btw, it's only "antennae" if you are talking about the biological kind) have been re-badged as "HDTV" antennas, partly as a marketing move, but also to save consumers a lot of confusion and sales people a lot of questions from said confused consumers.
I happen to live in a spot which seems to have a crapload of RF noise (even my Wi-Fi and Bluetooth devices get about a third of their expected range), so I had to spend the money on a massive YAGI UHF antenna and some signal amps... but most people can probably get by with the little UHF section of their UHF/VHF antenna.
Bummer. Here in the Twin Cities, the HD signal has a band to itself, while they use a separate band for a multiplexed selection of SD broadcasts.
2-1: PBS HD
17-1: TPT2 (a 480p dupe of their analog broadcast on VHF Ch. 2)
17-2: TPT-MN (a dupe of their alternate analog broadcast on UHF Ch. 17)
17-3: PBS-Kids
17-4: PBS-You (educational programming)
17-5: PBS-WX (weather)
Wide-screen HD just might save televised hockey.
Hockey and soccer are, by far, the worst sports to watch on TV, especially hockey.
In hockey, all the action you really need to see to follow the game is happening away from the puck. If you can't see pretty much the whole rink at once, it just looks like a bunch of guys randomly skating into each other. On a 4:3 standard def broadcast, they need to stay zoomed in relatively close, or the puck simply disapears from view. (They experimented with digitally highlighting it a few years ago, but most people agreed that it looks pretty stupid.) Once you are zoomed in on two or three players, you can't see much of anything else, even where they are relative to the goal.
On HD, you can back up. This, along with the wider screen shape, allows you to show about 2/3 of the rink most of the time. It makes a huge difference. It's still not as good as being at the game (unlike football, where watching the TV broadcast can actually be a better experience than being there), but it's a big step up from what it used to be like.
If you are tuning in the free over-the-air signal, I'm pretty sure PBS has all of its member stations broadcasting the full 1080i stream.
:Lost" on ABC in HD is extremely cool, though. When the tail-section of the plane was crashing into the bay in the flashback at the start of season 2, it was just like watching a big-budget movie in a good theater.
Personally, I prefer the 720p broadcast from FOX and ABC, especially when watching sports in HD. A Monday Night football game on ABC looks a lot better than the NCAA Basketball Finals on CBS... but then again, my preference is massively distorted by the fact that 720p is my projector's native resoltution. I'm actually watching a de-interlaced and re-scaled image whenever anything is in 1080i.
PBS does a great job with HD... if you want to watch the same "Low-carb Kitchen" broadcast over and over, it looks crystal clear. You can almost tell what brand of tooth whitener that grey-haired dude (who's pimping the use of Splenda in all their desert recepies) is using.
Honestly! They've got this great tech, but forgot to buy any programming for it! At any given time, I can flip over to their crappy SD broadcast and see a show which is abundantly more interesting. How many times can one person watch a documentary about the covered bridges of Iowa???
Watching
But oddly, it looks a little bit like a stereoscope where you have one eye closed. Or a 3-D Viewmaster (remember that little thing you put up to your eye and pull the lever to change the picture that came on the disk).
That's not the fault of PBS.
What you are most likely seeing is the "rainbow effect" of a DLP system.
Unlike LCD, DLP difracts light through a color wheel to create the image. This generally allows the set to produce a much brighter image and higher contrast, but it does also tend to create the effect you are describing.
Some people are very sensitive to DLP rainbows, while other people can't even see them. If you are one of the lucky people who doesn't notice them, then a DLP set is often a good way to go. I've been told that some of the newer DLP sets do a better job of avoiding this problem, but as I'm currently very happy with the projector I have (a Panasonic LCD-based system), I haven't really been shopping around lately.
(a fork of G-Force was licensed by Apple in 2001 for iTunes but G-Force has continued to grow and improve since then).
Interesting. The iTunes visualizer has dramatically improved over time as well. I wonder if they are doing their own improvements, or if they are continuing to roll in the G-Force changes (if in fact that is what the visualizer is based on.) The screen shots certainly do look similar, and I've heard a lot of Windows users comment on how the iTunes visuals seem so much more advanced than the ones in WMP.
The G-Force Standalone feature sounds particularilly intriguing to me, because as somewhat of a garage musician, I could have a big-screen monitor or projector stand as a light-show replacement when playing gigs.
Not sure how I'd go about dropping you an e-mail, as it's not given in your post. Are you, by any chance, the "Andy O'Meara" referenced in the "About Us" section of that page?
Pffft!
Double-click on your newly-downloaded song. iTunes sticks a copy of it into the folder where it needs to be and starts playing it.
Right-click on the song in the iTunes library, and choose "Get Info" (or just hit command-i when the song is selected.)
From there you can type in the artist, album, name, genre, year, track number, etc., and iTunes will move the file to the appropriate folder automatically based on the ID3 tag data you enter!!!
Once you get used to using iTunes, you will never, ever have to move a file yourself.
To me, the notion that all the apps have to look the same is meaningless dogma.
UI widgets behave the same way, the top menu (what makes a Mac a Mac, as far as I'm concerned) is still there for each app, and each app is instantly identifiable at a glance.
I don't want Garage Band to look like Mail.app. There's no reason why they need to look alike.
You must mean There is...
Nope. I'm posting on Slashdot. Only conversational English rules apply.
Lets see here....
Who is making the chips???
IBM? Correct?
Think this is IBM's way of getting back at M$ for buying "licenses" from SCO?
Actually, I was just thinking, "Microsoft is now seeing why Jobs decided to drop IBM for Intel. Looks like the X-Box changed platforms in the wrong direction."
Yes. It downloads cover art from Amazon.com based on the artist and album names in your library. iTunes didn't do that last time I checked.
Still doesn't, although I understand that there are a couple of dashboard widgets floating around out there that do exactly that, and load them in for you.
The Wikipedia thing sounded really interesting, except it's nothing you can't see in a browser window anyway. It's really just a matter of interface choices. I'm not saying that to bash Amarok, I'm just saying it doesn't sound like a feature I'd be likely to use.
It sounds interesting... but try as I might, I can't fathom why I'd want a "Wikipedia tab" (what is that exactly? Something to read bios of the artist you currently have selected???) on my music player. I'm sure others might have a use for it, though.
The built-in lyrics browser is a keen idea. Some iTunes users do that via Dashboard widgets, which integrates with iTunes rather well, or so I'm told.
Last.fm... I have no idea what last.fm is. Can you elaborate on why I would want it? Maybe start with what it is?
Does the "album cover manager" do something that the cover art feature in iTunes doesn't?
The quicktime framework might be great but the player is just a crippled sample to try and get you to buy quicktime pro which you can finally :
- resize
- play full screen
Or you can just play your video back through iTunes, which uses the Quicktime framework the parent post was raving about, plays back in full screen mode, and is free.
Oh... and you can resize the free Quicktime crippleware player, but I don't know why you'd bother, when there are so many other players which use the framework. (EyeTV does as well.)
I've never bothered buying Quicktime Pro, and I doubt I ever will, since I don't actually need it for much of anything.
I can't live without VLC on a Windows or Linux box, but on OS X, VLC and MPlayer are pretty much redundant, as Quicktime does a better job with just about everything. (Although you do need to install an extra codec to play DivX files. H264 is slowly usurping DivX anyway, though, and Quicktime 7 does a fantastic job at H264.)
So, where are all these surveys you are talking about in which people proclaim that they bought their iPods for "status" rather than listening to music? Links, please?
I realize that people I know is not a statistically valid data set, but as a case sample, every last one of them who bought an iPod did so because they wanted to listen to their music on it.
And those who chose an iPod did so because they went to Best Buy, saw it next to the iRiver and others, and noticed how much those other players look and feel like exactly what they are: knock-offs. Those looking to save a few bucks bought the iRiver or something like it.
(In my parent's case, they bought a player that had a built-in FM player, partly because it was cheaper, and partly because they were willing to gamble on a more dodgy player for the sake of that feature... a decision they came to deeply regret, as the Windows set-up program for it was sufficiently byzantine that they can hardly operate it. Worse yet, they discovered the damn thing only had enough storage space for a couple albums.)
Those who payed attention to the overwhelming consumer satisfaction among iPod owners they know spent the extra couple bucks for the real thing. You call it "status", I call it "word of mouth."
Jordan sneakers are not analogous. Middle school kids in the late 80s thought of them as status symbols because: 1) They were endorsed by the most popular athelete in the world, who kids that age worshipped, and 2) $100 for a pair of kid's shoes at that time was considered shockingly expensive. The kid might as well have shown up to school wearing a Rolex watch.
By the mid-90s, most other brands of well-made athletic shoes were just about as expensive as the Air Jordans, and once MJ went from being a superstar with the Bulls to being a bench player with the Wizzards, the prestige value of those shoes kind of faded.