The iPod "survived" (literally meaning it still worked, not that it was ever a living creature), therefore they found it amusing to describe the process as a "vivisection." Get over it.
They tried it in 1996 with the Fox/BBC co-production, made a number of compromises for the American market, and it still didn't do very well.
Many would argue that the "compromises for the American market" are the main reason why the show did not do well in America. Instead of an interesting British import, the result was a watered-down American style sci-fi/action drama.
If they had taken all the energy they spent on making it appealing to American audiences on simply making it good, they might have had a lot more luck.
To this day, I choose to believe that when Arthur, stuck on primitive Earth, declared "I think I shall go insane" the story of what actually happened to him ended.
Ford did not simply pop out from behind the rocks at that very moment and praise Arthur for his sensible decision. Arthur did not learn how to fly. There was no alternative Earth, no rain god, and no sex while listening to Mark Knopfler play the guitar. The final three and a half (or so) books were entirely delusions of Arthur's broken mind.
That might not have been the author's intent, but it works for me.
We must remember that, while British television has put out a lot of great programs, they also invented the vast majority of really shitty "reality shows" that currently pollute the US airwaves.
Men with a lisp, butch women, and all that. They're using homosexual characters as foils to enhance the heterosexual image of the non-gay characters, or otherwise treat the homosexual characters as living jokes.
You might not have noticed it, but Jack, the flamingly eccentric character on "Will & Grace" is not the only gay character.
Will, the male lead (and straight-man to contrast with Grace's goofiness... pardon the pun) is also exclusively homosexual, and conforms to none of the usual swishy stereotypes.
Actually, the ability to make shows concerning such topics is one of the best things about British TV. The results may not be great, but I'd have to say that British TV is far superior to American TV. British TV will deal with subjects that American TV cannot touch. Perhaps that's because many Americans have a far more extreme sense of religion than most Brits. Networks cannot air shows that may offend viewers, and thus decrease their ad reach. Topics such as bisexuality throw many a Christian into a tizzy.
Are you implying that Americans are offended by time travelers?
Because American TV is currently packed to the gills with gay characters, and they are portrayed sympathetically almost without exception.
He paid for the ability to skip dull content in favor of more entertaining stuff. Not how I'd spend my money... but live & let live, I say.
If the game companies were really smart, they would offer such an option themselves. There's clearly a demand for it.
I thought WoW finally got around the tedium of low-level grinding. There were all these quests and all this fun stuff to do, right at first level! Endless content! Woo-hoo!!!
Then I created my second human character, and discovered that if I wanted to advance my new character, I had to stay pretty much on the same "train track" of quests that my previous human was on. The same trip to Fargodeep mine. The same errands run for the guards. The same wandering around for the fucking soup recipie for the same fucking farmer. The magic was gone.
If I was going to keep playing, would I be tempted to simply buy a character in the race/class combo I wanted who had already completed all those quests I had seen before, so I could move on to newer ones? Hells yeah!
At first, I was a little disturbed that two people were arguing over whether I was a racist or a xenophobe, when I strive to be neither... but then I saw the hair-pulling food fight your discussion quickly devolved into, and realized that maybe I shouldn't take criticism from either of you very seriously.
To refer back to my original point:
Tyrannical governments who brutalize and/or murder people out of religious intolerance are really bad. I'm taking a bold stand here and calling it a bad thing. The killing of "infidels" is a practice which should probably stop, if it's not too much trouble. Sorry if you find that view to be somehow controversial.
I'm mostly with you on this one, although I wouldn't say it "kills it" for me... more like it has me seriously considering the wait for Rev. 2.
If this thing had enough horsepower to handle 640x480 (or better yet, 1/4 HD res, a.k.a. 540p) on H.264 files, scaled down for the iPod screen, but playing back at full resolution through the TV-out, I would find it much, much more compelling.
320x240 actually scales up okay on a conventional TV set... unfortunately, I seldom watch TV on a conventional TV set anymore. I downloaded an episode of "Lost" to see just how bad it would be... It was watch-able... I guess. However, it was not in wide-screen presentation, and on my 119" projector system it was kind of like playing DOOM on an old PC. I think I'm gonna hold off.
Then again, there are a lot of brand-new desktop computers currently on the market which can't handle processing H.264 at 1080i right now, so maybe I'm expecting too much out of something people will be mostly using to watch TV shows on the bus while riding to work.
Anybody who prefer mp3 to OGG has nothing of interest to say on the topic of audio formats.
We're talking pure market share, which H.264 have none of.
Um. When was anybody in that thread talking market share?
Unless you are a Thieving Bastard Pirate with dozens of divx bootlegs, there is no market share out there. There's no market at all yet.
What matters to us non-Thieving Bastard Pirate types is quality, and H.264 is clearly the best video compression format out there right now. It's not even close.
Besides, now that H.264 is not only an industry standard, but one which has been adopted by what will probably become the #1 selling portable video player in the world (the new iPod), guess what will enjoy the most market share?
Then again, maybe language is evolving the way it should.
Read the Declaration of Independence sometime. Could you imagine what it would be like if people in the modern age were still writing like that?
I mean, the British already think we're savages for dropping the "u" out of words like "colour."
Old fuddy-duddies everywhere are pissed that nobody uses the word "whose" correctly anymore.
So, traditions of grammar and spelling are getting stomped on at a faster pace then ever. the forces which speed our communication are also speeding the decay of our language... then again, maybe u r clinging to it 2 tightly, d00d. let it go, k?
That's already been out for a year and a half. It's called the Treo 650. Plays Music, movies, tv shows, is a palm organizer, has internet access.
Funny that you Apple nitwits ignore it, because it does't have a little fruit logo on it.
Wow!!!!! Please provide a link to where I can get a Treo 650 with a 60GB hard drive. I thought the Treo was just a PHONE with only 23 MB of available flash memory. Obviously I don't know shit, and need to get this miracle device.
Oh, also please, please, please tell me where I can get an unlocked Treo (with all that storage space you seem to think it has) for less that $500, without signing up for a two-year phone service contract along with it. I'll gladly paint my own fruit logo on it.
You might also consider that it refers to more than just onerous license fees. It could refer to paying for anything from unjust foreign wars, to the national endowment for the arts, to social security.
Um... yeah.
I'll still take all that over worrying about the whether my government might cut my balls off and then shoot me for the lewd and sinful crime of cross-dressing this upcoming Halloween weekend.
Mind you, I'm not saying that our flavor of Big Government isn't a problem. I fondly regard myself as a "small L" libertarian.
Of course, the archos gmini which has been out for a year or two can also be hooked up to the tv. only difference is the archos handle full dvd res.
Bullshit.
The Gmini res is 220x176.
That's considerably worse than the iPod.
Also, a warning from the designtechnica review:
"An important note about video support on the Gmini400 - it is only capable of playing MPEG 4 Simple Profile format. Other video file formats are not supported and will need to be converted first using translation software which is installable to your PC from the Gmini400 hard drive."
Why do people keep insisting on trotting out that P.O.S. Archos whenever discussion of a video iPod comes up???
The Archos Gmini 400: About the same price as the 30GB iPod Only a 20GB drive Slightly larger screen than the iPod, but at a lower res HALF the battery life Horse-shit interface No firewire compatibility No H.264 No AAC No support for any lossless audio compression codec (FLAC, Apple Lossless, etc.)
Furthermore... all the reviews I've seen report fuzzy video playback on TV screens, probably due to their obsolete choice of file format.
Mentioning the Archos player in a discussion of the new iPod sounds to me an awful lot like CmdrTaco's infamous three-sentence-fragment ("No wireless. Less space than Nomad. Lame.") review of the original iPod.
The original quote is: "There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him."
While that's certainly a bad kind of tyranny, I would say the kind where you torture and kill people because they refuse to think the same way as you about what pleases Allah (or whoever) is at least a little bit worse.
Forcing me to pay stupid license fees is an annoyance.
Calling me an "infidel" and brutally killing me because of my ethnicity, religion, or sexuality... that would downright ruin my whole day.
Heinlein was a terrific writer, but he was a little prone to hyperbole when speaking of objectionable politics.
I thought the whole point is, we shouldn't need a battery kit with a special tool and a sheet of instructions to do something trivial like change out a battery.
The "special tool" is a plastic pry-bar, and the instructions are mainly there to make sure you don't do something colossally stupid like jam a screwdriver into a soaking wet lithium-ion battery.
An integrated battery in a $300+ device is a poor design decision, now quit rationalizing it.
No, a poor design decision would be a flimsy snap-on door for easy access to a battery which only gets changed once every 2-3 years, at the expense of bulking up the device.
But how much of that revenue do they keep in terms of profit in both cases. Manufacturing costs a certain amount
Manufacturing... what? Exactly?
Everything the BBC needs to make is already made. There's nothing to manufacture.
Yes, Apple takes some, as do the credit card companies, but even if it's only a slice, it's a slice of a very big pie, with essentially no new costs taken on.
If being able to play PSP games was more important to me than being able to store a rather significant (up to 150 hours, depending on how much space is otherwise filled) video library, then I would probably make the same call.
I'm not a huge fan of hand-held games though. Nothing against Sony's offering. Apart from some early technical glitches, it sounds like theirs is probably the best... but I'd rather just have a music/video library.
Please note the assumption of 100 episodes of Dr. Who. While there may be numerous people on Slashdot who know the precise number, based on average human knowledge of actually relevant information, the number of 100 will be used to keep the math simple.
The number is 13 so far for the new series.
13x5 = $65
When you consider that ABC and Fox makes a fortune selling 26-episode boxed sets of their biggest shows on DVD for about $40 each, it's obvious that $65 for downloading low-res rips of a 13-episode series (Bring Your Own Storage Media), is downright extravagant. Even at $26 for the season, they would make a killing.
Consider this: Let's say that, of the 300 Million people in America, only 0.1% would be willing to pay for Doctor Who episodes. That's still 300,000 x $26, which would be an extra $7,800,000.00 made on a show which has already paid for itself via distribution in other markets!
Yeah... Just under 8 million dollars... hardly worth the trouble, eh?
When I'm on the road, whether for business or for tourism, I like to travel with a laptop, a case of DVD's, and an RF adapter for hacking my way into the TV sets typically found in hotel rooms.
I might still travel with the laptop sometimes, but for 90% of the non-business trips I take, this new iPod looks like it could be the ideal replacement. The small size makes it easier to carry around, and much easier to watch in a coach seat on a plane. With the AV cable, I'll also be able to use it on hotel TV sets, though with a slightly lower resolution.
Even with an external battery pack to extend run-time (such as the ones Belkin already sells for the current iPod), It will still occupy considerably less space than a carry-on bag than a laptop or portable DVD player, making it the perfect companion for a flight I'll be taking across the Pacific next Spring.
I've been pretty happy with my trusty old 3G 20GB iPod so far, but this new one, combined with the ability to download video content, really has me thinking seriously about upgrading.
Slashdot Mirror
Ever heard of this thing called a metaphor?
The iPod "survived" (literally meaning it still worked, not that it was ever a living creature), therefore they found it amusing to describe the process as a "vivisection." Get over it.
Lawyers don't get disbarred lightly. He's basically just been a world-class asshole. That's not bad enough to merit such a harsh punishment.
Hell, most lawfirms offer you a full partnership for that!
They tried it in 1996 with the Fox/BBC co-production, made a number of compromises for the American market, and it still didn't do very well.
Many would argue that the "compromises for the American market" are the main reason why the show did not do well in America. Instead of an interesting British import, the result was a watered-down American style sci-fi/action drama.
If they had taken all the energy they spent on making it appealing to American audiences on simply making it good, they might have had a lot more luck.
To this day, I choose to believe that when Arthur, stuck on primitive Earth, declared "I think I shall go insane" the story of what actually happened to him ended.
Ford did not simply pop out from behind the rocks at that very moment and praise Arthur for his sensible decision. Arthur did not learn how to fly. There was no alternative Earth, no rain god, and no sex while listening to Mark Knopfler play the guitar. The final three and a half (or so) books were entirely delusions of Arthur's broken mind.
That might not have been the author's intent, but it works for me.
Well said.
We must remember that, while British television has put out a lot of great programs, they also invented the vast majority of really shitty "reality shows" that currently pollute the US airwaves.
Mmm, that's a joke I always heard with viola players in it rather than oboe players...
I'm sure it is, especially when you re-write all the jokes about all the other instruments to be about the viola.
How do you get two oboe players to stay in tune with each other?
Shoot one.
Men with a lisp, butch women, and all that. They're using homosexual characters as foils to enhance the heterosexual image of the non-gay characters, or otherwise treat the homosexual characters as living jokes.
You might not have noticed it, but Jack, the flamingly eccentric character on "Will & Grace" is not the only gay character.
Will, the male lead (and straight-man to contrast with Grace's goofiness... pardon the pun) is also exclusively homosexual, and conforms to none of the usual swishy stereotypes.
Actually, the ability to make shows concerning such topics is one of the best things about British TV. The results may not be great, but I'd have to say that British TV is far superior to American TV. British TV will deal with subjects that American TV cannot touch. Perhaps that's because many Americans have a far more extreme sense of religion than most Brits. Networks cannot air shows that may offend viewers, and thus decrease their ad reach. Topics such as bisexuality throw many a Christian into a tizzy.
Are you implying that Americans are offended by time travelers?
Because American TV is currently packed to the gills with gay characters, and they are portrayed sympathetically almost without exception.
One of the real allures of these games is the time it takes.
Really? I've generally found these games to be chat rooms with time-killing pastimes bolted on to them.
When did he ever say he PK's?
He paid for the ability to skip dull content in favor of more entertaining stuff. Not how I'd spend my money... but live & let live, I say.
If the game companies were really smart, they would offer such an option themselves. There's clearly a demand for it.
I thought WoW finally got around the tedium of low-level grinding. There were all these quests and all this fun stuff to do, right at first level! Endless content! Woo-hoo!!!
Then I created my second human character, and discovered that if I wanted to advance my new character, I had to stay pretty much on the same "train track" of quests that my previous human was on. The same trip to Fargodeep mine. The same errands run for the guards. The same wandering around for the fucking soup recipie for the same fucking farmer. The magic was gone.
If I was going to keep playing, would I be tempted to simply buy a character in the race/class combo I wanted who had already completed all those quests I had seen before, so I could move on to newer ones? Hells yeah!
At first, I was a little disturbed that two people were arguing over whether I was a racist or a xenophobe, when I strive to be neither... but then I saw the hair-pulling food fight your discussion quickly devolved into, and realized that maybe I shouldn't take criticism from either of you very seriously.
To refer back to my original point:
Tyrannical governments who brutalize and/or murder people out of religious intolerance are really bad. I'm taking a bold stand here and calling it a bad thing. The killing of "infidels" is a practice which should probably stop, if it's not too much trouble. Sorry if you find that view to be somehow controversial.
I'm mostly with you on this one, although I wouldn't say it "kills it" for me... more like it has me seriously considering the wait for Rev. 2.
If this thing had enough horsepower to handle 640x480 (or better yet, 1/4 HD res, a.k.a. 540p) on H.264 files, scaled down for the iPod screen, but playing back at full resolution through the TV-out, I would find it much, much more compelling.
320x240 actually scales up okay on a conventional TV set... unfortunately, I seldom watch TV on a conventional TV set anymore. I downloaded an episode of "Lost" to see just how bad it would be... It was watch-able... I guess. However, it was not in wide-screen presentation, and on my 119" projector system it was kind of like playing DOOM on an old PC. I think I'm gonna hold off.
Then again, there are a lot of brand-new desktop computers currently on the market which can't handle processing H.264 at 1080i right now, so maybe I'm expecting too much out of something people will be mostly using to watch TV shows on the bus while riding to work.
Anybody who prefer mp3 to OGG has nothing of interest to say on the topic of audio formats.
We're talking pure market share, which H.264 have none of.
Um. When was anybody in that thread talking market share?
Unless you are a Thieving Bastard Pirate with dozens of divx bootlegs, there is no market share out there. There's no market at all yet.
What matters to us non-Thieving Bastard Pirate types is quality, and H.264 is clearly the best video compression format out there right now. It's not even close.
Besides, now that H.264 is not only an industry standard, but one which has been adopted by what will probably become the #1 selling portable video player in the world (the new iPod), guess what will enjoy the most market share?
Then again, maybe language is evolving the way it should.
Read the Declaration of Independence sometime. Could you imagine what it would be like if people in the modern age were still writing like that?
I mean, the British already think we're savages for dropping the "u" out of words like "colour."
Old fuddy-duddies everywhere are pissed that nobody uses the word "whose" correctly anymore.
So, traditions of grammar and spelling are getting stomped on at a faster pace then ever. the forces which speed our communication are also speeding the decay of our language... then again, maybe u r clinging to it 2 tightly, d00d. let it go, k?
That's already been out for a year and a half. It's called the Treo 650. Plays Music, movies, tv shows, is a palm organizer, has internet access.
Funny that you Apple nitwits ignore it, because it does't have a little fruit logo on it.
Wow!!!!! Please provide a link to where I can get a Treo 650 with a 60GB hard drive. I thought the Treo was just a PHONE with only 23 MB of available flash memory. Obviously I don't know shit, and need to get this miracle device.
Oh, also please, please, please tell me where I can get an unlocked Treo (with all that storage space you seem to think it has) for less that $500, without signing up for a two-year phone service contract along with it. I'll gladly paint my own fruit logo on it.
Agression based on religion is certainly bad. But your examples are racist.
Umm... what examples?
Are you perhaps replying to some other post?
You might also consider that it refers to more than just onerous license fees. It could refer to paying for anything from unjust foreign wars, to the national endowment for the arts, to social security.
Um... yeah.
I'll still take all that over worrying about the whether my government might cut my balls off and then shoot me for the lewd and sinful crime of cross-dressing this upcoming Halloween weekend.
Mind you, I'm not saying that our flavor of Big Government isn't a problem. I fondly regard myself as a "small L" libertarian.
I'm just calling for a little perspective.
Bullshit.
The Gmini res is 220x176.
That's considerably worse than the iPod.
Also, a warning from the designtechnica review:
Why do people keep insisting on trotting out that P.O.S. Archos whenever discussion of a video iPod comes up???
The Archos Gmini 400:
About the same price as the 30GB iPod
Only a 20GB drive
Slightly larger screen than the iPod, but at a lower res
HALF the battery life
Horse-shit interface
No firewire compatibility
No H.264
No AAC
No support for any lossless audio compression codec (FLAC, Apple Lossless, etc.)
Furthermore... all the reviews I've seen report fuzzy video playback on TV screens, probably due to their obsolete choice of file format.
Mentioning the Archos player in a discussion of the new iPod sounds to me an awful lot like CmdrTaco's infamous three-sentence-fragment ("No wireless. Less space than Nomad. Lame.") review of the original iPod.
'1337-ism at its worst.
The original quote is: "There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want
merely because you think it would be good for him."
While that's certainly a bad kind of tyranny, I would say the kind where you torture and kill people because they refuse to think the same way as you about what pleases Allah (or whoever) is at least a little bit worse.
Forcing me to pay stupid license fees is an annoyance.
Calling me an "infidel" and brutally killing me because of my ethnicity, religion, or sexuality... that would downright ruin my whole day.
Heinlein was a terrific writer, but he was a little prone to hyperbole when speaking of objectionable politics.
I thought the whole point is, we shouldn't need a battery kit with a special tool and a sheet of instructions to do something trivial like change out a battery.
The "special tool" is a plastic pry-bar, and the instructions are mainly there to make sure you don't do something colossally stupid like jam a screwdriver into a soaking wet lithium-ion battery.
An integrated battery in a $300+ device is a poor design decision, now quit rationalizing it.
No, a poor design decision would be a flimsy snap-on door for easy access to a battery which only gets changed once every 2-3 years, at the expense of bulking up the device.
But how much of that revenue do they keep in terms of profit in both cases.
Manufacturing costs a certain amount
Manufacturing... what? Exactly?
Everything the BBC needs to make is already made. There's nothing to manufacture.
Yes, Apple takes some, as do the credit card companies, but even if it's only a slice, it's a slice of a very big pie, with essentially no new costs taken on.
If being able to play PSP games was more important to me than being able to store a rather significant (up to 150 hours, depending on how much space is otherwise filled) video library, then I would probably make the same call.
I'm not a huge fan of hand-held games though. Nothing against Sony's offering. Apart from some early technical glitches, it sounds like theirs is probably the best... but I'd rather just have a music/video library.
Please note the assumption of 100 episodes of Dr. Who. While there may be numerous people on Slashdot who know the precise number, based on average human knowledge of actually relevant information, the number of 100 will be used to keep the math simple.
The number is 13 so far for the new series.
13x5 = $65
When you consider that ABC and Fox makes a fortune selling 26-episode boxed sets of their biggest shows on DVD for about $40 each, it's obvious that $65 for downloading low-res rips of a 13-episode series (Bring Your Own Storage Media), is downright extravagant. Even at $26 for the season, they would make a killing.
Consider this: Let's say that, of the 300 Million people in America, only 0.1% would be willing to pay for Doctor Who episodes. That's still 300,000 x $26, which would be an extra $7,800,000.00 made on a show which has already paid for itself via distribution in other markets!
Yeah... Just under 8 million dollars... hardly worth the trouble, eh?
When I'm on the road, whether for business or for tourism, I like to travel with a laptop, a case of DVD's, and an RF adapter for hacking my way into the TV sets typically found in hotel rooms.
I might still travel with the laptop sometimes, but for 90% of the non-business trips I take, this new iPod looks like it could be the ideal replacement. The small size makes it easier to carry around, and much easier to watch in a coach seat on a plane. With the AV cable, I'll also be able to use it on hotel TV sets, though with a slightly lower resolution.
Even with an external battery pack to extend run-time (such as the ones Belkin already sells for the current iPod), It will still occupy considerably less space than a carry-on bag than a laptop or portable DVD player, making it the perfect companion for a flight I'll be taking across the Pacific next Spring.
I've been pretty happy with my trusty old 3G 20GB iPod so far, but this new one, combined with the ability to download video content, really has me thinking seriously about upgrading.