Good luck doing a full-text search on your Minidisc.
What you wind up with is the equivalent of unsearchable transcripts of the lectures, organized chronologically--except even worse because you can't skim a disc as easily as your eyes can skim over a transcript. Maybe that's better than ten legal pads filled with your scrawled notes, but not by much if you need to find information quickly.
Whoa. If any existing ReplayTV models support HDTV, that is news to me. Better double-check that statement... AFAIK, there are no currently existing PVRs that record HDTV, only a couple of expensive S-VHS machines. Tivo has a HD model in the works, I've heard, and I imagine Replay will too, but not yet.
Unless they've added more in recent models (I have an old 3030), ReplayTV has three settings:
High: Live TV is buffered at this quality. It looks great but takes a lot of space. If you're watching something live and hit Record (and select the default Standard quality), you can immediately see the drop in quality.
Medium: Very good quality, to my eyes. Again, takes space. I routinely record one show on Medium to save to tape and take to a friend's house. I figure with VHS I better start with a decent-quality source...
Standard: Artifacts occasionally visible, especially in animation or in scenes with running water. Still, I record most stuff on Standard unless I plan to watch it with other people.
FWIW, I have analog cable (didn't want to bother with the IR blaster) and a 27" standard-definition TV. I've heard that regular cable looks lousy on HDTVs and I suspect PVRs would worsen that problem on the lower quality settings. (As intrigued by HDTV as I am, I'm holding off because there's not yet an HDTV-capable PVR, and I'd rather watch what I want when I want at lower resolution than be tied to broadcast schedules.)
As for comparing to DivX, VCD, etc... quality for those formats varies widely--too many variables (bitrate, quality of source material, encoder settings). I guess ANY of this stuff, including TV with or without a PVR, looks so crummy compared to DVDs that I don't worry much about picture quality. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being DVD, I'd say my analog cable is about a 5; standard-quality Replay is maybe a 4. Cat barf would be a 1. Bottom line is, it's good enough until high-def PVRs become available and affordable.
I wish there were a way to filter out the smug, self-righteous "kill your television" evangelists who invade every TV-related thread for the sole purpose of telling us we're wasting our lives.
TV is no more evil than books or movies, and avoiding TV does not make your life inherently better.
Gee, it must be nice to feel so superior to your parents. And Slashdot is the perfect forum to declare that extroverts with a steady strem of visitors in their houses live inherently richer lives. And we all know that stories delivered via television are sludge while stories delivered via dead trees are precious, noble cultural artifacts.
I usually use plain white paperboard sleeves from Recorded Media Supply. (No affiliation, just a customer.) They have glossy white paperboard sleeves without a flap, which you can either write on or--if you're feeling meticulous--print up some of those big Avery shipping labels, the ones that are maybe 3x3". The labels don't cover the whole sleeve, but they're big enough for a track listing or description of CD contents.
These fit nicely in those cases designed for CD sleeves (I just don't like the sleeves that come with the cases).
For video CDs I have a big faux-leather binder near the TV. Kind of annoying to flip through, but I was getting tired of stacking cases on cases.
Excellent point. Here in Minneapolis they've been pushing a light rail project that will really only benefit the handful of people who live along the industrial zone where they're laying the tracks. Everybody else will have to drive to the station, and that's *if* they happen to work downtown. I work in the burbs and live in the city. For me, neither end of the light rail line is anywhere near the places I need to be.
I don't think there's any way to transition this so-called city to real public transport.
I purchased a used Honda Civic and decreased the amount of gas I had to buy each week... by about 2 gallons.
2 gallons? You must not drive much. My Civic gets TWICE the mileage of my friends' SUVs and pickups. I run through maybe 10 gallons a week, tops, and that's with a 36-mile-round-trip daily commute and a bunch of errands.
There's something very wrong with full-grown men who watch childrens' cartoons.
So, if you watch cartoons, are people going to think you're immature, or are they going to question your masculinity? Interesting that you're narrowing it down to one gender here.
I'm 34. I occasionally watch the old Warner Bros cartoons; I love Futurama and seasons 1 through 9 of the Simpsons. My DVD shelf has a whole bunch of computer-animated stuff, including Veggie Tales (despite the fact that I'm basically an atheist, I just can't resist a series that's part Muppets, part Python, and computer-animated, with really funny and catchy music). My boyfriend lumps all these things into the category of "cartoon" and disdains them because cartoons are for kids. Meanwhile, I'm sitting on the couch laughing my head off. As far as I'm concerned, he's missing out on a lot of fun just because he has this preconceived notion that adults aren't supposed to watch anything silly.
It seems like SVCD compatibility seems to correlate more with brand than date of manufacture. When I've looked over the compatibility list, it seems like some brands have a ton of models supporting the format, while others don't go near it.
I bought a JVC player within the last couple of years that plays (S)VCD, albeit a little choppily under certain circumstances (I think I've narrowed it down to overly high bitrate, poor-quality CDRs, or too-high burn speed). A few months ago I picked up a Sony progressive-scan player that plays SVCDs flawlessly.
I wish. I lend (S)VCDs to people or bring stuff to their houses, and half the time it turns out they've managed to find a DVD player that can't handle that format. I wanted to send my folks some videos, so I made sure they had an SVCD-compatible player: I bought them one.
Check the compatibility list at dvdrhelp.com.
Has anyone actually had this happen to them??
on
Brain Privacy
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· Score: 1
Sorry, but that sounds a little paranoid to me. Every place I've worked, I have not been the only person there with a mood disorder (in my case, recurrent depression, mostly in remission thanx to expensive meds). If they're trying to filter us out, they're doing a lousy job of it.
And every place I've worked, I've had to hand over the insurance enrollment form to an HR person--they've never offered me the option to mail it to the insurance company, and I've generally figured it would seem suspicious if I insisted, so I held my nose and gave them the form. I have a medical history a mile long consisting of depression (2-3x/yr visits to my psychiatrist plus meds costing at least $200/month) and an assortment of manageable chronic disorders (low thyroid, hypertension, acid reflux). I'll even put the little stuff on the form, the urinary tract infections and minor back pain, just to be complete and reasonably honest. I either have to attach an extra page or write reeeeeally small. There's always a column for noting the date you recovered from the ailment. Recovered? Ha. I'm doing just fine, thanx, but who "recovers" from hypothyroidism? I take a handful of pills with breakfast. Then I go to work and do good work; and that seems to be what they care about.
...is beyond me. I had one of these (C3 "800"mhz, earlier system without native MPEG2 decoding, which I don't care about anyway because I can burn MPEG2 to SVCD and stick it in my DVD player...).
It was miserable at DivX decoding. Anything beyond a 20-minute pretty-low-bitrate TV cap was unplayable. I couldn't watch a DivX movie on it to save my life. Was it a quiet box? Sure: I had it turned off most of the time.
Funny you should mention kidneys. My friend just got her blood test results back (creatinine, etc) and her numbers were normal.
Her cholesterol is down to 220 (it was over 400 when she was eating more carbs and less meat). Her triglycerides are down to 150 (from about 800 when she was eating the "healthy" low-fat way). In short, her lipids numbers are the best they've ever been and her kidneys are doing just great.
Parrot the "conventional wisdom" all you want, I can see the truth with my own eyes. Cholesterol in food does not equate to serum cholesterol.
Ugh. I wouldn't say this makes you look like a real company.
I worked for a contracting agency once that had space in one of those generic office-space farms. Driving up to the building for my initial interview, I didn't realize what it was, and was mildly impressed by the size and location of their apparent premises. Once I got in the door, it rapidly became obvious that they were renting the space as needed. They interviewed me in a generic conference room with no identifying logo/decorations/etc. I left feeling vaguely uneasy, thinking I'd just gotten involved with some fly-by-night operation.
A year or so later, they realized it would be cheaper to buy a house in the burbs and set up shop there. So they did. I don't know which was more unsettling--interviewing in generic conference room #32, or meeting with them in a sparsely furnished suburban living room. (On the bright side, the unprofessional setting made it easier to attribute their shady payroll tactics to cluelessness rather than crookedness.)
. . . that would mean lots of meat which could adversely affect your health in other ways.
Meat is not the problem. Carbs are bad; "trans fats" (hydrogenated fats) are awful. Protein and natural fats are your friend.
I have a friend who's diabetic. She has lost 35 pounds in the last year on a low-carb diet and she now only needs one long-acting insulin shot per day (and her doc even lowered her dose of that) because her blood sugar has gotten so stable. In the process, her cholesterol and triglycerides have decreased dramatically. She is much healthier now, eating lots of meat and cheese and vegetables, than she was when she followed the government's dietary recommendations.
Me, I eat a LOT of red meat and full-fat dairy products; my cholesterol is 177 (HDL is 65) and triglyerides are at 99.
Most VCRs have a way to set up a 30-minute or 60-minute (or 90-minute, or 120...) recording. On mine, I press Record a couple of times until the display reads "1:00."
A lot of people bought lifetime subscriptions--in the beginning, that was the only option--but I think there are still a lot of ReplayTV owners paying the monthly fee. If D&M keeps the channel guide servers going for those folks, how much would it really cost them to let the lifetime subscribers dial in too (literally, or figuratively for the broadband units)?
1. White noise helps. I didn't realize we even had it until one day it cut out, and then I could hear a coworker's radio two cubes away and it drove me bonkers. (How anyone could work with that endless stream of caterwauling and insult-to-your-intelligence radio ads is beyond me.)
2. Make sure everybody knows how to turn off their speakers and turn their phone way down. In our office you need to dig out the manual to figure out the phone thing, and evidently a lot of people lost the manual. Or else they want to be able to hear their phone ring from the rest rooms.
3. Impress upon people the concept that nobody wants to smell you. Cologne or perfume on men or women is distracting, allergenic, and just plain irritating. I've worked around people who literally leave a cloud behind them wherever they walk--you can tell if they've been down that hallway in the last hour or so. It's worse than noise--at least you can block out noise with headphones. Stink is inescapable.
A lot of stores just don't know how to set up their monitors, or they have a whole bunch hooked up to a splitter, as others have pointed out. Walk around Best Buy and half the monitors are like strobe lights because of the 60hz default refresh rate. I went to Microcenter and they were all like that.
I bought my monitor, a Samsung 900NF, based on reviews. My criteria: 19", aperture grille, high refresh rates at high resolutions. It was worth every cent of the $400+ I paid for it a couple of years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Good luck doing a full-text search on that.
Good luck doing a full-text search on your Minidisc.
What you wind up with is the equivalent of unsearchable transcripts of the lectures, organized chronologically--except even worse because you can't skim a disc as easily as your eyes can skim over a transcript. Maybe that's better than ten legal pads filled with your scrawled notes, but not by much if you need to find information quickly.
Whoa. If any existing ReplayTV models support HDTV, that is news to me. Better double-check that statement... AFAIK, there are no currently existing PVRs that record HDTV, only a couple of expensive S-VHS machines. Tivo has a HD model in the works, I've heard, and I imagine Replay will too, but not yet.
Unless they've added more in recent models (I have an old 3030), ReplayTV has three settings:
High: Live TV is buffered at this quality. It looks great but takes a lot of space. If you're watching something live and hit Record (and select the default Standard quality), you can immediately see the drop in quality.
Medium: Very good quality, to my eyes. Again, takes space. I routinely record one show on Medium to save to tape and take to a friend's house. I figure with VHS I better start with a decent-quality source...
Standard: Artifacts occasionally visible, especially in animation or in scenes with running water. Still, I record most stuff on Standard unless I plan to watch it with other people.
FWIW, I have analog cable (didn't want to bother with the IR blaster) and a 27" standard-definition TV. I've heard that regular cable looks lousy on HDTVs and I suspect PVRs would worsen that problem on the lower quality settings. (As intrigued by HDTV as I am, I'm holding off because there's not yet an HDTV-capable PVR, and I'd rather watch what I want when I want at lower resolution than be tied to broadcast schedules.)
As for comparing to DivX, VCD, etc... quality for those formats varies widely--too many variables (bitrate, quality of source material, encoder settings). I guess ANY of this stuff, including TV with or without a PVR, looks so crummy compared to DVDs that I don't worry much about picture quality. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being DVD, I'd say my analog cable is about a 5; standard-quality Replay is maybe a 4. Cat barf would be a 1. Bottom line is, it's good enough until high-def PVRs become available and affordable.
I wish there were a way to filter out the smug, self-righteous "kill your television" evangelists who invade every TV-related thread for the sole purpose of telling us we're wasting our lives.
TV is no more evil than books or movies, and avoiding TV does not make your life inherently better.
Gee, it must be nice to feel so superior to your parents. And Slashdot is the perfect forum to declare that extroverts with a steady strem of visitors in their houses live inherently richer lives. And we all know that stories delivered via television are sludge while stories delivered via dead trees are precious, noble cultural artifacts.
Oh brother.
I usually use plain white paperboard sleeves from Recorded Media Supply. (No affiliation, just a customer.) They have glossy white paperboard sleeves without a flap, which you can either write on or--if you're feeling meticulous--print up some of those big Avery shipping labels, the ones that are maybe 3x3". The labels don't cover the whole sleeve, but they're big enough for a track listing or description of CD contents.
These fit nicely in those cases designed for CD sleeves (I just don't like the sleeves that come with the cases).
For video CDs I have a big faux-leather binder near the TV. Kind of annoying to flip through, but I was getting tired of stacking cases on cases.
Excellent point. Here in Minneapolis they've been pushing a light rail project that will really only benefit the handful of people who live along the industrial zone where they're laying the tracks. Everybody else will have to drive to the station, and that's *if* they happen to work downtown. I work in the burbs and live in the city. For me, neither end of the light rail line is anywhere near the places I need to be.
I don't think there's any way to transition this so-called city to real public transport.
I purchased a used Honda Civic and decreased the amount of gas I had to buy each week... by about 2 gallons.
2 gallons? You must not drive much. My Civic gets TWICE the mileage of my friends' SUVs and pickups. I run through maybe 10 gallons a week, tops, and that's with a 36-mile-round-trip daily commute and a bunch of errands.
Uh, sure. Then who's gonna pay for the roads and schools? The Public Works Fairy?
There's something very wrong with full-grown men who watch childrens' cartoons.
So, if you watch cartoons, are people going to think you're immature, or are they going to question your masculinity? Interesting that you're narrowing it down to one gender here.
I'm 34. I occasionally watch the old Warner Bros cartoons; I love Futurama and seasons 1 through 9 of the Simpsons. My DVD shelf has a whole bunch of computer-animated stuff, including Veggie Tales (despite the fact that I'm basically an atheist, I just can't resist a series that's part Muppets, part Python, and computer-animated, with really funny and catchy music). My boyfriend lumps all these things into the category of "cartoon" and disdains them because cartoons are for kids. Meanwhile, I'm sitting on the couch laughing my head off. As far as I'm concerned, he's missing out on a lot of fun just because he has this preconceived notion that adults aren't supposed to watch anything silly.
It seems like SVCD compatibility seems to correlate more with brand than date of manufacture. When I've looked over the compatibility list, it seems like some brands have a ton of models supporting the format, while others don't go near it.
I bought a JVC player within the last couple of years that plays (S)VCD, albeit a little choppily under certain circumstances (I think I've narrowed it down to overly high bitrate, poor-quality CDRs, or too-high burn speed). A few months ago I picked up a Sony progressive-scan player that plays SVCDs flawlessly.
. . . 99% of DVD players also play VCDs.
I wish. I lend (S)VCDs to people or bring stuff to their houses, and half the time it turns out they've managed to find a DVD player that can't handle that format. I wanted to send my folks some videos, so I made sure they had an SVCD-compatible player: I bought them one.
Check the compatibility list at dvdrhelp.com.
Sorry, but that sounds a little paranoid to me. Every place I've worked, I have not been the only person there with a mood disorder (in my case, recurrent depression, mostly in remission thanx to expensive meds). If they're trying to filter us out, they're doing a lousy job of it.
And every place I've worked, I've had to hand over the insurance enrollment form to an HR person--they've never offered me the option to mail it to the insurance company, and I've generally figured it would seem suspicious if I insisted, so I held my nose and gave them the form. I have a medical history a mile long consisting of depression (2-3x/yr visits to my psychiatrist plus meds costing at least $200/month) and an assortment of manageable chronic disorders (low thyroid, hypertension, acid reflux). I'll even put the little stuff on the form, the urinary tract infections and minor back pain, just to be complete and reasonably honest. I either have to attach an extra page or write reeeeeally small. There's always a column for noting the date you recovered from the ailment. Recovered? Ha. I'm doing just fine, thanx, but who "recovers" from hypothyroidism? I take a handful of pills with breakfast. Then I go to work and do good work; and that seems to be what they care about.
...is beyond me. I had one of these (C3 "800"mhz, earlier system without native MPEG2 decoding, which I don't care about anyway because I can burn MPEG2 to SVCD and stick it in my DVD player...).
It was miserable at DivX decoding. Anything beyond a 20-minute pretty-low-bitrate TV cap was unplayable. I couldn't watch a DivX movie on it to save my life. Was it a quiet box? Sure: I had it turned off most of the time.
Funny you should mention kidneys. My friend just got her blood test results back (creatinine, etc) and her numbers were normal.
Her cholesterol is down to 220 (it was over 400 when she was eating more carbs and less meat). Her triglycerides are down to 150 (from about 800 when she was eating the "healthy" low-fat way). In short, her lipids numbers are the best they've ever been and her kidneys are doing just great.
Parrot the "conventional wisdom" all you want, I can see the truth with my own eyes. Cholesterol in food does not equate to serum cholesterol.
Ugh. I wouldn't say this makes you look like a real company.
I worked for a contracting agency once that had space in one of those generic office-space farms. Driving up to the building for my initial interview, I didn't realize what it was, and was mildly impressed by the size and location of their apparent premises. Once I got in the door, it rapidly became obvious that they were renting the space as needed. They interviewed me in a generic conference room with no identifying logo/decorations/etc. I left feeling vaguely uneasy, thinking I'd just gotten involved with some fly-by-night operation.
A year or so later, they realized it would be cheaper to buy a house in the burbs and set up shop there. So they did. I don't know which was more unsettling--interviewing in generic conference room #32, or meeting with them in a sparsely furnished suburban living room. (On the bright side, the unprofessional setting made it easier to attribute their shady payroll tactics to cluelessness rather than crookedness.)
I was an English major, and I could've answered that one. Sheesh.
. . . that would mean lots of meat which could adversely affect your health in other ways.
Meat is not the problem. Carbs are bad; "trans fats" (hydrogenated fats) are awful. Protein and natural fats are your friend.
I have a friend who's diabetic. She has lost 35 pounds in the last year on a low-carb diet and she now only needs one long-acting insulin shot per day (and her doc even lowered her dose of that) because her blood sugar has gotten so stable. In the process, her cholesterol and triglycerides have decreased dramatically. She is much healthier now, eating lots of meat and cheese and vegetables, than she was when she followed the government's dietary recommendations.
Me, I eat a LOT of red meat and full-fat dairy products; my cholesterol is 177 (HDL is 65) and triglyerides are at 99.
alt.binaries.multimedia
Um, well, three words.
Most VCRs have a way to set up a 30-minute or 60-minute (or 90-minute, or 120...) recording. On mine, I press Record a couple of times until the display reads "1:00."
Let me guess. You own stock in Post-It Notes, right?
A lot of people bought lifetime subscriptions--in the beginning, that was the only option--but I think there are still a lot of ReplayTV owners paying the monthly fee. If D&M keeps the channel guide servers going for those folks, how much would it really cost them to let the lifetime subscribers dial in too (literally, or figuratively for the broadband units)?
...each other's inconsiderate habits.
1. White noise helps. I didn't realize we even had it until one day it cut out, and then I could hear a coworker's radio two cubes away and it drove me bonkers. (How anyone could work with that endless stream of caterwauling and insult-to-your-intelligence radio ads is beyond me.)
2. Make sure everybody knows how to turn off their speakers and turn their phone way down. In our office you need to dig out the manual to figure out the phone thing, and evidently a lot of people lost the manual. Or else they want to be able to hear their phone ring from the rest rooms.
3. Impress upon people the concept that nobody wants to smell you. Cologne or perfume on men or women is distracting, allergenic, and just plain irritating. I've worked around people who literally leave a cloud behind them wherever they walk--you can tell if they've been down that hallway in the last hour or so. It's worse than noise--at least you can block out noise with headphones. Stink is inescapable.
Reviews, yes.
Store, no.
A lot of stores just don't know how to set up their monitors, or they have a whole bunch hooked up to a splitter, as others have pointed out. Walk around Best Buy and half the monitors are like strobe lights because of the 60hz default refresh rate. I went to Microcenter and they were all like that.
I bought my monitor, a Samsung 900NF, based on reviews. My criteria: 19", aperture grille, high refresh rates at high resolutions. It was worth every cent of the $400+ I paid for it a couple of years ago.