But... PC: You're on one Tuner card: $50-150 Hard Drive: $50 PVR Software: Negligible ----- Sticking it to TIVO and having your own PVR, priceless.
You've forgotten the CPU, RAM, video card, motherboard, case. Don't forget that you'll want it quiet so standard components (with fans) won't cut it. And most of the remotes that come with PC cards are crap so you'll need a better solution there. Not so cheap, or easy.
your decision to deprive someone of potential earnings
That's a meaningless statement. If I went out and killed 10 people I'd be depriving hundreds or thousands of businesses "potential earnings" of the money those victims would never get to spend. But that is not the crime I would've committed. Potential earnings are irrelevant. Depriving actual earnings is what matters.
It's yet another to understand all of this and still believe that you're not doing anything wrong.
Now some non-zero percentage of people who justify copyright infringement by saying "I wouldn't have bought it anyway" are not being honest. There are actual earnings being deprived in that case. But it is also true that some of those people are being honest, and they have not cost the copyright holder any earnings, potential or actual. In that case I can't see much harm in the crime. It's still a crime, but then so is speeding, so is parking illegally. I think it's important to keep some perspective of just what harm is being done, but it's difficult when the media industries insist of obviously flawed approaches such as equating every illegal copy to a lost sale.
Yes, actually, I would. If I can buy a CPU with X GHz off the shelf, then telling me you have an X GHz CPU isn't very cool. But if you tell me you have a 5X GHz CPU, then I'm listening. You're probably no more productive than me with it. You're probably not getting more frags in Quake than I am. Your machine might even crash a little more. But I'll be genuinely impressed and curious about your achievement.
Ok the analogy wasn't perfect: with clock speeds you've still got a useful absolute comparison. That's not the case here. 13,467,980 miles per watt doesn't mean anything. It's only useful if you know the actual distance or wattage as well. The problem is that signal strength drops with the square of the distance, not linearly. I.e. 12.5 million miles per watt at 500 miles and 40 uW is not comparable to 12.5 million miles per watt at 1000 miles and 80 uW. The latter is a much weaker signal and therefore a greater achievement. So, again, miles per watt is a useless measure.
It's nerdy. It's what we do. You never know the unrelated or unexpected spinoff value of wierd hacks.
Sure, not denying it. But measure that achievement with something useful, please.
While most of the numbers leave me with a blank look, one thing is clear: the poster missed the point. The accomplishment is cool because of the geek factor, not because it's going to lead to a new radio in your car. Therefore, the measurement of the achievement doesn't *have* to be "useful".
Would you feel the same way about someone bragging about their CPUs clock frequency? That's the same situation: getting excited about a practically useless measurement. Just as most computer geeks know that MHz is meaningless, so ham radio geeks know that miles per watt is meaningless.
Interesting and true, yet we can not ask animals if they are emotionally attracted to or simply satisfying sexual urges with the same sex. With humans it is pretty clear that homosexuals do both - we can't ask an animal if they love the creature they are having sex with.
At least in some cases these homosexual pairings are exclusive. If it were merely "satisfying sexual urges" you would not expect that to be the case. Take a look at this recent article, for example.
Well the reason I went with my PIC-based IR receiver was that I had already built it several months ago, when I did not find any of the remote control solutions suitable for my purposes. When I created it back then, I re-used a custom scripting engine that I had made. All I did this time around was solder together a second IR/PIC combo unit (which took me a half hour) and I had a working remote receiver. Granted, I had to tweak the code to move from a least-squares recognition algorithm to a pulse-tolerance algorithm to improve reception, but that was really more fun than anything.
That's reasonable, if you can reuse past work with minimal effort that's usually the way to go.
I'm actually really sad that I couldn't use Linux for it, because I had the time constraint of having to give it to my sister for Christmas, and that was not enough time for me to learn everything I'd need to do the equivalent in Linux.
Fair enough. These sorts of things are still fiddly with Linux, though I found the LIRC stuff pretty straight forward (I use it both to receive and to send IR remote codes to my satelite TV box).
The circuits on the listed page use the RTC and other flow control lines. These must be polled in software, and is fairly CPU intensive in comparision. Basically the PIC solution gives a dedicated processor to the tasks. It allows much simpler PC based software as well.
You're wrong about the polling, read the page I linked to. And the LIRC software has already been written, so that's definitely simpler to implement than the PIC-based solution. The complexity doesn't really matter if it's already been dealt with.
What's unique about this particular incarnation of the digital picture frame is that mine includes a homebrew remote control recognizer made out of a programmable
IC, the Microchip PIC16F628.
Perhaps it's unique because it's unnecessarily complex? I'm using LIRC under Linux on my home theatre PC for remote control with a homebrew receiver that connects to a serial port. The reciever is very simple (see circuit diagram on this page). I guess if you're determined to use Windows you might need to build this sort of PIC-based solution, but surely the LIRC based solution is cheaper and easier? No wonder his "Linux loving friends" gave him a lot of flak for going with Win 98.
I also saw the 1,000 MT figure for 9.0 magnitude quakes on other pages. I'm not sure where the discrepancy lies, though perhaps there is a range of energy possible for a given magnitude of quake. Since the possible range for an impact of 2004MN4 is in same order of magnitude, it makes for a fair approximation.
I suspect some of these tables are created by figuring out one of the lower magnitudes and then just multiplying up the scale. Any small error would get magnified. I see this quake has now been revised to a 9.0 so the comparison is even more valid now.
That table looks wrong. For example, they have a 1.0 equivalent to 30 pounds of TNT, but a 2.0 (which should be 32 times more energy) equivalent to 1 ton of TNT. But 30 x 32 = 960 pounds = 0.5 tons. Most sources seem to work about 1000MT for a 9.0, so that table seems to have the Richter magnitude out by one.
That's way too high. I found a powerpoint presentation that contains that figure, but they've got the calculation wrong.
They say the energy released by a 9.0 is 3.98 x 10^18 J or 32,000MT, but since 1 MT is 4.18x10^15 J the correct megatonnage of a 9.0 is around 950MT.
All the other sources I've found work out to about 300MT for a 8.9, which agrees with 950MT for a 9.0 (since an increase in Richter scale magnitude of 1.0 represents an 32-fold increase in energy release). See here (cached, original no longer found) for one reference.
The way I see it, we've got about 24 years to party before the world ends. Have another glögg!
"A close encounter, with 1% or greater chance of a collision capable of causing regional devastation."
Hardly world-ending.
Seriously, if it hits 5 or greater on the scale, then we'll have reason to really worry. In the meantime, it's sufficient to just watch and see what happens. As phreakuencies pointed out, right now there's a 97.8% chance of absolutely nothing happening.
The theft claim comes from the idea that part of the value (in the form of potential profits) is removed. ...
So splitting hairs with dictionary entriesmight make you feel good. But it isn't going to convince any judges, anyone leaning toward the other side, or bring any significant numbers of fence-sitters around to your position. Instead it makes you look like you're disconnected from economic reality, making it counter-productive.
That's all very well, but the media industries are not just claiming that copyright infringement is theft because of lost potential profit. They are claiming that it is identical to stealing a physical good. In my part of the world every movie in theatres is prefaced with an advert saying:
You wouldn't steal a car
You wouldn't steal a handbag
You wouldn't steal a movie (showing someone taking a DVD package of a shelf)
Movie Piracy is Stealing.
Stealing is Against the Law.
Piracy. It's A Crime.
No amount of reasoning based on the doctorine of partial taking is going to convince me that the media industries are not attempting to deliberately confuse physical theft and copyright infringement, in exactly the same way they previously usurped the term "piracy". If they want to take the moral highground (which they have every right to), they might want to start acting honestly themselves, rather than trying to introduce this sort of spin. Then again this is the industry who routinely arrange for movies like the Matrix to show no profit so they can screw over investors, so I guess they aren't big on morals.
Wow. When I saw your chart, I was about to make a smarmy remark about "sure it's higher, but it had nothing to do with SCO, it just followed the market". Then I compared SCO with the Dow, Nasdaq, and S&P. You were dead on. Absolutely dead on.
Kudos on a good observation.
However that only means a profit for people who owned shares before the middle of May 2003. If you got in after that you've lost. And if you do still have SCOX shares from before mid-May you've effectively lost from when the price was over $20. Either way, anyone still holding SCOX shares has less money than would have had if they either didn't buy SCOX or sold before now.
Watched Stepford Wives the other night. Wasn't at all impressed.
That was Frank Oz, not Tim Burton. Burton had nothing to do with it.
He really hasn't made anything good since Nightmare Before Christmas.
Many people consider Ed Wood and Big Fish to be very good. Both are in the top 200 on IMDB (and have better ratings than The Nightmare Before Christmas), for whatever that's worth. Incidentally, Burton wrote and produced The Nightmare Before Christmas, but didn't direct.
Now, to be fair - you might similarly inflate movie industry tallies with TV and home theater sales. My point is that it's hard to draw clear lines around "the industry," and that these metrics are a lot more subjective than they first appear.
Right, you have to draw the line somewhere. But those game numbers are already counting dedicated hardware (consoles), yet the movies numbers are not counting DVD players. Broadband is driven far more by downloading (much of it movies, btw) than by gaming. Including arcade machines would be a big stretch - the companies involved in that industry are quite separate from the home gaming industry. Sure there is an argument for including PC hardware sales that are driven by games, but then that argument could be applied to the hardware theatres buy as well (let alone home theatre equipment). The bottom line is that if you're being at all reasonable about where you draw the line you'll see that the movie industry is far bigger. Whatever extra revenue you want to pull into the "games" category can be easily countered on the "movies" side. Merchandising, TV licensing, studio based themeparks - there's plenty of movie related money we're not counting.
The article also makes the very good point that if the games industry is bigger as people are claiming, then where is the evidence of that in terms of money being spent? Game budgets are a fraction of movie budgets. There's nothing like the affluence of Hollywood on display in the gaming industry. The top people in games (Carmack et al) have 6 figure salaries, but the top actors and directors have 7 figure salaries, and there are a lot more in that group.
And, of course, consider the back-and-forth between the movie and videogame industries. On the one hand: movies like Tomb Raider, House of the Dead, Resident Evil, and the upcoming Metroid film. On the other hand: The Lord of the Rings games (primarily inspired by the films), James Bond games, and of course the Star Wars game franchise (a stand-alone industry by now, but inspired by the films.)
As I've said elsewhere, this is not a problem at all. Just follow the licensing money. The makers of the Tomb Raider movie will have paid some amount of money to the owners of the game property. That money should count as "games", the rest of the revenue from the movie should count as "movie".
(1) If you count DVD sales and rentals, aren't you double counting sales to the big rental chains? And of course, studios don't see the money from rentals any more than a game developer sees money from blockbuster renting a game, so why should that be counted?
No, the sales to rental chains aren't counted in the publically reported sales figures (which are sales and rentals to consumers). Rentals should be counted because we are measuring the size of the industries, not just the money the studios bring in.
(2) Does the $10B figure for the game industry include game rentals? Or is it possible that perhaps the rentals of games at, say, Blockbuster, got grouped into the movie rental business, since they do so much game renting?
It probably doesn't include game rentals, though it might (since it does include console sales). Game rentals will not be counted as DVD and VHS rentals though.
(3) How does resale figure into this? There's a huge market for "pre-owned" games AND movies, including a lot of trade-in credits. Personally, I'd expect movies to be rented more but traded in less (at least as a percentage of their sales revenue).
In neither case is the secondhand market counted. There isn't any point.
(4) How do you account for cross-licensed stuff? It seems silly to count the Spider-Man 2 game as a purely "video game industry" thing, as it wouldn't even exist without the movie. And when Doom comes out in theatres, how does one account for that? Clearly, the brand names generated in each industry create value and that value is hard to measure solely off sales in one genre or another.
Just count the licensing fees in the appropriate industry numbers. I.e. The licensing fees for the Spider-Man 2 game would count toward the movie industry and the rest would count toward games. Note that licensing is not counted in either set of figures here, but will be much higher for movie properties than game properties.
(5) What about subscriptions? There's obviously plenty of license money being thrown around by HBO when they get movies, and likewise, on the Video Games side, how much are all those MMO subscriptions worth?
As I said the licensing money isn't be counted, but would heavily favor the movie industry. Subscriptions probably are counted in the $10B game number.
Who chalks up the bucks for "The Incredibles" for XBox? The video game industry? The movie industry?
Whoever gets to keep the money, obviously. In the case of "The Incredibles" for XBox, the developers and/or publishers will be paying a license fee (be it fixed, per unit, or percentage of sales). That money will be counted towards the movie, the rest will be counted as "video game".
My point is, the money ends up in the same pockets, for the most part.
So what? It's still useful to compare the size of the two industries.
Slashdot Mirror
It appears to come from here.
The circuits on the listed page use the RTC and other flow control lines. These must be polled in software, and is fairly CPU intensive in comparision. Basically the PIC solution gives a dedicated processor to the tasks. It allows much simpler PC based software as well. You're wrong about the polling, read the page I linked to. And the LIRC software has already been written, so that's definitely simpler to implement than the PIC-based solution. The complexity doesn't really matter if it's already been dealt with.
Can you provide a source for that? Most of the stuff I've been able to find has a 9.0 around 1000MT, or 300MT for an 8.9 (e.g. here).
That table looks wrong. For example, they have a 1.0 equivalent to 30 pounds of TNT, but a 2.0 (which should be 32 times more energy) equivalent to 1 ton of TNT. But 30 x 32 = 960 pounds = 0.5 tons. Most sources seem to work about 1000MT for a 9.0, so that table seems to have the Richter magnitude out by one.
All the other sources I've found work out to about 300MT for a 8.9, which agrees with 950MT for a 9.0 (since an increase in Richter scale magnitude of 1.0 represents an 32-fold increase in energy release). See here (cached, original no longer found) for one reference.
Hardly world-ending. It can only go to 5 or 9.
The article also makes the very good point that if the games industry is bigger as people are claiming, then where is the evidence of that in terms of money being spent? Game budgets are a fraction of movie budgets. There's nothing like the affluence of Hollywood on display in the gaming industry. The top people in games (Carmack et al) have 6 figure salaries, but the top actors and directors have 7 figure salaries, and there are a lot more in that group.
As I've said elsewhere, this is not a problem at all. Just follow the licensing money. The makers of the Tomb Raider movie will have paid some amount of money to the owners of the game property. That money should count as "games", the rest of the revenue from the movie should count as "movie".US game and console sales: $10B
US box office: $9B
US DVD sales and rentals: $16B
US VHS sales and rentals: $6.4B
US movie total: $30B+
Do you really think game rentals are going to close that $20B gap?
Of course you can do it that way, but why would you?