I hadn't actually thought that shipping charges would add up quickly enough to where 5 or more movies mean no profit on your account for that month. if you want to keep Netflix around, make sure you ALWAYS send two movies back in each envelope, you'll be significantly reducing their cost. Remember, they are paying for BOTH directions.
I don't see how any word processor can justifiably require a 1.6Ghz processor and 512Mb of RAM. In fact, I think Office 97 on a Pentium Pro 200 was perfectly usable in it's day and is just as usable now, but that's not the whole story.
There's a whole plethora of applications which are now commonplace, which weren't even considered feasible ten (?) years ago. I can remember a piece of DOS software on my old 286 which displayed JPEG images. That was it. It took noticeable time just to decode the file, and then sample it down to 320x200 to display on a normal VGA monitor.
Nowadays, we don't even consider the decoding process when viewing JPGs.
There's other similar applications - DivX movies, strong encryption, even MP3 audio - which we now take for granted 'cos we've got so much horsepower to play with that processing overhead is no longer an issue. Now we're getting into the realm of PVRs, digital camcorders, encoding real-time video straight into DivX - applications which appeal to ordinary home users, and which require some *serious* megahertz. The games industry provides a convenient milestone - anyone can tell that Quake III looks better than the original Wolfenstein 3D, but more importantly, they can see that they're fundamentally the same thing. It's a lot harder to compare modern video editing software with that of ten years ago, because ten years ago the only people editing movies on their home PCs were masochistic millionaires.
Rather than focusing on all those wasted MHz driving more and more bloated word-processors, consider some of the things we just *couldn't* do with slower hardware, and wonder what we're going to be taking for granted ten years from now.:)
I agree with basically nothing on the list. Where's Trilogy of Error ? Brother's Little helper ? Whacking day ? Some of the ones in the list are just generic episodes.
On Another fucking note, We've got stories about WI-fi and, oh shit, a new FreeBSD is out, but my submission about Dalnet being utterly destroyed gets rejected in like 15 seconds. WAY TO GO.
Thanks. I really enjoyed that. Honestly, I did. Happy Troll Tuesday. I should have thrown in some random crap about pregnant korean men, no one would have suspected a thing. Ah well.
will build up a profile of what you like and dislike. Then, if you want it to, it will spend its idle time (when it's not recording programmes you've specifically asked it
It's said that becoming a new parent is one of the most life-enhancing moments one can ever experience. Well, a little over a month ago, our family gained a brand-new member... and we're besotted with it. It's called TiVo.
Okay, so it may sound incredibly sad to be writing in such terms about a shiny box with two lights on the front that plugs into your telly, but then TiVo really does change your outlook on life (the telly-related bits of life, anyway). It makes you want to do slightly odd things like run through the streets at midnight, yelling "I've seen the future of television and it's all silvery!"
TiVo is a PVR - Personal Video Recorder. At its most basic, it's a VCR that records onto hard disk rather than tape. This alone has significant benefits over conventional tape VCRs; the picture quality blows VHS out of the water, you get instant access to all your recordings (no tapes to wind through and everything's listed by programme name) and actually programming a recording is as easy as highlighting the name of the programme and pressing a button - forget about having to set start time, stop time, channel number and all that nonsense.
Even if that was all that TiVo did, it would still make conventional VCRs look like Stone Age technology... but we're only getting started.
As stated earlier, TiVo is Personal Video Recorder, and it's the "Personal" that's the key word. The entire concept is to free you from the tyranny of the broadcasters' own schedules and allow you to create what's effectively your own personal TV channel, showing only the programmes you want to watch, when you want to watch them.
At any given time, TiVo knows the complete programme schedules - every single programme on every single channel - for the next two to four weeks. Using an incredibly easy and comprehensive search system, you pick what you want to record and TiVo does the rest. You need never worry about accidentally recording over something you want to keep (it's not possible), needing to find "blank space" to record onto (TiVo handles that automatically), or recording something but then forgetting you have it or being unable to find it (everything you've recorded is listed by name).
You also don't need to worry should the broadcasters change the day or time of programmes after you've told TiVo you want to record them - because the schedule information is updated every day, TiVo will automatically adjust to take account of changes.
As well as picking individual programmes to record, you can also tell TiVo to record every single episode of any programme by setting a Season Pass. You can set as many Passes as you want.
But that's all the bread-and-butter stuff. The extra cleverness starts here:
Because it uses hard disk, TiVo can record and play at the same time. Say you've asked it to record EastEnders from 8.00 to 8.30, and you get home at 8.10; if you were recording with a conventional VCR, your only two choices would be to wait until the programme had finished and then watch the tape back, or watch the last 20 minutes live and see the first 10 minutes afterwards.
With TiVo, however, you can get in at 8.10 and start watching EastEnders from the beginning while it's still recording. Why do it any other way?
The TiVo remote control features a large green button with a "thumbs-up" on it, and a large red button featuring a "thumbs-down". You can use these buttons to rate how much you like any programme; you can give it from zero to three thumbs, with three thumbs-up meaning you love it, three thumbs-down meaning you loathe it.
By analysing what you record, and how you rate it, TiVo will build up a profile of what you like and dislike. Then, if you want it to, it will spend its idle time (when it's not recording programmes you've specifically asked it to) by recording programmes that it thinks you'll like, but you might not necessarily know about. These recordings are known as Suggestions.
Thanks to TiVo's Suggestions, we've enjoyed some great programmes we never knew existed on channels we'd never normally consider watching - and to stop the sniggering at the back, I'm talking about the likes of UK Style and Living!:)
It takes a few weeks for TiVo to build up a reasonably accurate profile of your viewing tastes, and even then it may still record things you won't like, but it's a terrific feature - and you can turn it off if you really want to.
Next, the live TV buffer. Whenever you're watching "normal" live TV, TiVo is constantly recording that channel. This means that, say, if the phone rings, all you need to do is press "pause" and the live TV picture will pause until you press "play" again - at which point it will carry on from where it left off, all the way through to the end of the programme. It also means, of course, that it's possible to rewind and fast-forward live TV if you want.
Before I got to know TiVo, I was pretty dismissive about it, because I was stuck in the "it's-just-a-glorified-video-recorder" mindset. I've now owned one for a month, and if you want it, you can have it - when you pry it from my cold, dead hands...
And even my wife loves it!:)
It really does revolutionise the way you watch television. Don't make the mistake of thinking that it's just a toy for dyed-in-the-wool couch potatoes; used properly, TiVo allows you to make much better use of the time you spend in front of the box, both by allowing you to zip through adverts at warp speed, and by ensuring that time spent watching TV is time spent watching what YOU WANT to watch, not what the broadcasters choose to show you at that particular time.
At a typical online price of £249 (sadly often £299 in "real" shops) and sometimes even less - £99 TiVos have been reported, but they sell out within seconds - TiVo is almost absurdly cheap for the lifestyle benefits it brings.
Unlike its competitor Sky+, it works with any TV platform, even if you only have an ordinary aerial and four or five channels - and if you're thinking that it's not going to be much use if you've only got four or five channels, think again. If you have multichannel digital TV, of course, it's damn-near essential.
It's important to remember that when you buy TiVo you're buying a service, not just a box. It needs to be connected to your phone line so that it can download the new schedule data every day; the phone call is free, but you must choose to pay EITHER a monthly subscription fee of £10 OR a one-off payment of £199 for the lifetime of the box.
I really can't recommend TiVo highly enough - in fact, it seems that everyone who buys one becomes a TiVangelist within days! Oh, and that reminds me that there's an incredibly helpful online community of TiVo addicts who can offer advice on just about anything TiVo-related.
So what are you waiting for? Give your VCR to a museum and join the 21st century!
Most of those huge books contain several hundred pages of pure reference in the back - for example, a large number of appendices. An html book I have here contains quick tag listings, number-->symbol conversions, etc. Sometimes they're more useful than the rest of the book's content.
Every six months, I burn everything to CD - TWICE. One copy stays at my current location, the other is sent off to a distant land in case of "catastrophic failure". Those Athlons get pretty hot, ya know. Got a DVD burner ? Even easier.
You've been involved in numerous high-profile animated series (from Star Trek:TAS to Futurama and Family Guy). How does work on shows like these compare to live-action acting for someone as well-known as yourself ?
Slashdot Mirror
I hadn't actually thought that shipping charges would add up quickly enough to where 5 or more movies mean no profit on your account for that month. if you want to keep Netflix around, make sure you ALWAYS send two movies back in each envelope, you'll be significantly reducing their cost. Remember, they are paying for BOTH directions.
This is the best idea in the history of humankind.
Indeed.
You find out your son/daughter is a hardcore spammer.
What do you do ?
WHAT do you DO ?
I don't see how any word processor can justifiably require a 1.6Ghz processor and 512Mb of RAM. In fact, I think Office 97 on a Pentium Pro 200 was perfectly usable in it's day and is just as usable now, but that's not the whole story.
:)
There's a whole plethora of applications which are now commonplace, which weren't even considered feasible ten (?) years ago. I can remember a piece of DOS software on my old 286 which displayed JPEG images. That was it. It took noticeable time just to decode the file, and then sample it down to 320x200 to display on a normal VGA monitor.
Nowadays, we don't even consider the decoding process when viewing JPGs.
There's other similar applications - DivX movies, strong encryption, even MP3 audio - which we now take for granted 'cos we've got so much horsepower to play with that processing overhead is no longer an issue. Now we're getting into the realm of PVRs, digital camcorders, encoding real-time video straight into DivX - applications which appeal to ordinary home users, and which require some *serious* megahertz. The games industry provides a convenient milestone - anyone can tell that Quake III looks better than the original Wolfenstein 3D, but more importantly, they can see that they're fundamentally the same thing. It's a lot harder to compare modern video editing software with that of ten years ago, because ten years ago the only people editing movies on their home PCs were masochistic millionaires.
Rather than focusing on all those wasted MHz driving more and more bloated word-processors, consider some of the things we just *couldn't* do with slower hardware, and wonder what we're going to be taking for granted ten years from now.
I agree with basically nothing on the list. Where's Trilogy of Error ? Brother's Little helper ? Whacking day ? Some of the ones in the list are just generic episodes.
Worst: The Bowling ep (first season)
Maybe the Dalnet administrators should worry about getting Dalnet UP and worry about policy later.
On Another fucking note, We've got stories about WI-fi and, oh shit, a new FreeBSD is out, but my submission about Dalnet being utterly destroyed gets rejected in like 15 seconds. WAY TO GO.
Sandwiches lose 400 lbs eating you !
Happy Troll Tuesday.
(4 Article text, here ya go.) posted on Tuesday November 26, @11:41AM (Replies:7; Score:-1, Informative)
This should be a new mod option. By the way, I have mod points, I think I'll run my own little bitchslap.pl on someone.
Thanks. I really enjoyed that. Honestly, I did. Happy Troll Tuesday. I should have thrown in some random crap about pregnant korean men, no one would have suspected a thing. Ah well.
KEEP READING
Sometimes tivo's suggestion can be about as accurate as Helen Keller's marksmanship
It's in the middle, genius.
will build up a profile of what you like and dislike. Then, if you want it to, it will spend its idle time (when it's not recording programmes you've specifically asked it
It's said that becoming a new parent is one of the most life-enhancing moments one can ever experience. Well, a little over a month ago, our family gained a brand-new member... and we're besotted with it. It's called TiVo.
:
:)
:)
Okay, so it may sound incredibly sad to be writing in such terms about a shiny box with two lights on the front that plugs into your telly, but then TiVo really does change your outlook on life (the telly-related bits of life, anyway). It makes you want to do slightly odd things like run through the streets at midnight, yelling "I've seen the future of television and it's all silvery!"
TiVo is a PVR - Personal Video Recorder. At its most basic, it's a VCR that records onto hard disk rather than tape. This alone has significant benefits over conventional tape VCRs; the picture quality blows VHS out of the water, you get instant access to all your recordings (no tapes to wind through and everything's listed by programme name) and actually programming a recording is as easy as highlighting the name of the programme and pressing a button - forget about having to set start time, stop time, channel number and all that nonsense.
Even if that was all that TiVo did, it would still make conventional VCRs look like Stone Age technology... but we're only getting started.
As stated earlier, TiVo is Personal Video Recorder, and it's the "Personal" that's the key word. The entire concept is to free you from the tyranny of the broadcasters' own schedules and allow you to create what's effectively your own personal TV channel, showing only the programmes you want to watch, when you want to watch them.
At any given time, TiVo knows the complete programme schedules - every single programme on every single channel - for the next two to four weeks. Using an incredibly easy and comprehensive search system, you pick what you want to record and TiVo does the rest. You need never worry about accidentally recording over something you want to keep (it's not possible), needing to find "blank space" to record onto (TiVo handles that automatically), or recording something but then forgetting you have it or being unable to find it (everything you've recorded is listed by name).
You also don't need to worry should the broadcasters change the day or time of programmes after you've told TiVo you want to record them - because the schedule information is updated every day, TiVo will automatically adjust to take account of changes.
As well as picking individual programmes to record, you can also tell TiVo to record every single episode of any programme by setting a Season Pass. You can set as many Passes as you want.
But that's all the bread-and-butter stuff. The extra cleverness starts here
Because it uses hard disk, TiVo can record and play at the same time. Say you've asked it to record EastEnders from 8.00 to 8.30, and you get home at 8.10; if you were recording with a conventional VCR, your only two choices would be to wait until the programme had finished and then watch the tape back, or watch the last 20 minutes live and see the first 10 minutes afterwards.
With TiVo, however, you can get in at 8.10 and start watching EastEnders from the beginning while it's still recording. Why do it any other way?
The TiVo remote control features a large green button with a "thumbs-up" on it, and a large red button featuring a "thumbs-down". You can use these buttons to rate how much you like any programme; you can give it from zero to three thumbs, with three thumbs-up meaning you love it, three thumbs-down meaning you loathe it.
By analysing what you record, and how you rate it, TiVo will build up a profile of what you like and dislike. Then, if you want it to, it will spend its idle time (when it's not recording programmes you've specifically asked it to) by recording programmes that it thinks you'll like, but you might not necessarily know about. These recordings are known as Suggestions.
Thanks to TiVo's Suggestions, we've enjoyed some great programmes we never knew existed on channels we'd never normally consider watching - and to stop the sniggering at the back, I'm talking about the likes of UK Style and Living!
It takes a few weeks for TiVo to build up a reasonably accurate profile of your viewing tastes, and even then it may still record things you won't like, but it's a terrific feature - and you can turn it off if you really want to.
Next, the live TV buffer. Whenever you're watching "normal" live TV, TiVo is constantly recording that channel. This means that, say, if the phone rings, all you need to do is press "pause" and the live TV picture will pause until you press "play" again - at which point it will carry on from where it left off, all the way through to the end of the programme. It also means, of course, that it's possible to rewind and fast-forward live TV if you want.
Before I got to know TiVo, I was pretty dismissive about it, because I was stuck in the "it's-just-a-glorified-video-recorder" mindset. I've now owned one for a month, and if you want it, you can have it - when you pry it from my cold, dead hands...
And even my wife loves it!
It really does revolutionise the way you watch television. Don't make the mistake of thinking that it's just a toy for dyed-in-the-wool couch potatoes; used properly, TiVo allows you to make much better use of the time you spend in front of the box, both by allowing you to zip through adverts at warp speed, and by ensuring that time spent watching TV is time spent watching what YOU WANT to watch, not what the broadcasters choose to show you at that particular time.
At a typical online price of £249 (sadly often £299 in "real" shops) and sometimes even less - £99 TiVos have been reported, but they sell out within seconds - TiVo is almost absurdly cheap for the lifestyle benefits it brings.
Unlike its competitor Sky+, it works with any TV platform, even if you only have an ordinary aerial and four or five channels - and if you're thinking that it's not going to be much use if you've only got four or five channels, think again. If you have multichannel digital TV, of course, it's damn-near essential.
It's important to remember that when you buy TiVo you're buying a service, not just a box. It needs to be connected to your phone line so that it can download the new schedule data every day; the phone call is free, but you must choose to pay EITHER a monthly subscription fee of £10 OR a one-off payment of £199 for the lifetime of the box.
I really can't recommend TiVo highly enough - in fact, it seems that everyone who buys one becomes a TiVangelist within days! Oh, and that reminds me that there's an incredibly helpful online community of TiVo addicts who can offer advice on just about anything TiVo-related.
So what are you waiting for? Give your VCR to a museum and join the 21st century!
For TT.
Most of those huge books contain several hundred pages of pure reference in the back - for example, a large number of appendices. An html book I have here contains quick tag listings, number-->symbol conversions, etc. Sometimes they're more useful than the rest of the book's content.
Maybe it's because it's late, but I laughed and laughed and laughed at this.
That is all.
Every six months, I burn everything to CD - TWICE. One copy stays at my current location, the other is sent off to a distant land in case of "catastrophic failure". Those Athlons get pretty hot, ya know. Got a DVD burner ? Even easier.
ATI needs to get their act together. There are entire forum sections dedicated to trying to get your ATI drivers to work.
Congrats on the easiest 10 karma ever (+5 for asking the question, +5 for answering it)
Fact or fiction ?
You've been involved in numerous high-profile animated series (from Star Trek:TAS to Futurama and Family Guy). How does work on shows like these compare to live-action acting for someone as well-known as yourself ?
Every conversation I have with my girlfriend (Cingular cell-to-cell) goes like this:
"Hello ? Sweetie are you there ? Hello ?"
".... (stttt) Call M--"
"Hello ? Hello ?"
(Disconnect)
g00z !!
One of the few true contributors to the encoding cause.
Thanks for your outstanding work.