But for now, I can go to Wally World and pick up a nice 27" CRT set with multiple inputs for $150 that will last me 10 years or more.
My recommendation is to wait a while before jumping onboard the HDTV "bandwagon". And it has nothing to do with the picture, though that helps.
With HD sets starting at $500, my recommendation is to "jump onboard" to get a progressive scan picture. Walmart had a 42" plasma for $999 with an HD tuner built-in, though the display was technically EDTV, it's still better than interlaced and will look fantastic with digital broadcasts.
The old interlaced sets are starting to drive me nuts with their lower refresh rate.
Ouch. I assume it's the European counterpart to the T1, T1s in the US are a lot cheaper, like 2% of that cost. I suppose you really mean the "remote part of the word" part.
But yes, I wouldn't be surprised if web pages are getting larger. On average, web pages are a lot more complex than in the past, with lots of links and sections and borders done with lots of little images. There are more ways to post images now, probably less care in compressing them, rather than compress them with care to not ruin the image too much and yet keep the file small, they might be less compressed or simply PNG-ed which can result in pretty large files.
The thing is way too freaking large and heavy for a PDA. It's about as heavy as maybe three PDAs and as thick as two.
Also, I'm guessing that Sony would rather not sell a PSP to a person that's likely only to run an emulator.
I think the PSP is cool and all, it's pretty expensive. One PSP game costs about as much as two GBA games, 1.5 DS games. One PSP costs about as much as three SPs or two DSs. It's not hard to imagine why the PSP might not perform so well (economically) in comparison despite the unit being pretty nice looking.
Perhaps they recognize that search engine results are effectively free targeted advertising for them. They just see the loss of control over what is and isn't news, and with that a loss of identity in the on-line news business.
Unfortunately, I can't think of a better way to describe it other than the old stupid metaphor: "can't have your cake and eat it too".
It's possible that they want to negotiate with Google over specific terms on how information is presented, but with what? Unless there is an industry-wide embargo against Google, that basically means anyone that declines search engine indexing are off the radar and their competitors benefit. The power here is on the side of search engines, any news agency can take their ball and go home, but they won't. I doubt there would be enough solidarity for all the news agencies to set up an embargo because anyone that breaks gets the traffic.
I suppose this is fine for missing a single episode, but for me and episodes of currently running series, I'm thinking a DVR is going to be a better way to go. I have MythTV set up 95%, I've just been putting off finishing it up, and for those that don't go for self-flagellation like installing Myth, there are commercial DVRs too that don't seem too bad. For TV shows that aren't run anymore, the DVDs are better deals anyway, I'm hoping there will be easier conversion software.
It may be too late for current owners, but I'd say this is another reason to not buy Sony consumer electronics in the first place. That said, PSP is primarily a game device and secondarily a media device. Any use outside of that is not a major priority in the design and should probably be considered a bonus.
Then it's time to demand it. It seems neary every other major type of intensive software is available such that it benefits from multiple CPUs, except games. Server and workstation (digital media, engineering, etc.) software benefit, the downside being that those are more niche.
I think the self checkouts cause more problems than they solve. Some of the ones I've used were horribly slow, some were misaligned such that the bar code would only read at a specific height *above* the glass. Some were simply erratic or otherwise failure prone.
On average, the systems were twice to four times as slow as using a cashier and still required one or two people watching four machines, nullifying the cost, time and labor savings. Or I could choose the *one* open cash register that has a long line, though that one line seemed to be moving about as many customers and items as four of the self-checout units. No thanks. I tend to avoid Home Depot because of those pieces of trash. Thankfully, my local Lowe's haven't installed them.
"razor and blade" would qualify as an overused analogy for marketing, though it kind of fits, because the software is free or cheap and the hardware is sadly exorbitantly priced.
People complain want at least almost high resolutions on a 17" monitor, so you care to explain to me how this is going to look on a 36" TV screen (probably even bigger)
Most TVs are pretty low resolution, and don't exceed 60Hz, so I don't see the problem here. Actually, most HDTVs have the resolution of a 15" widescreen desktop monitor. Faster game cards would likely have obnoxious noise issues, undesirable as a HTPC.
and it's a pretty freakin safe assumption that anymone who builds themself a $2,500 computer is probably a gamer.
Actually, I think it's a safer assumption that someone putting four tuner cards in a chassis is probably not going to be using the system as a major game system.
No you don't. Plasma TV's are junk. They go dim after a few years and you can't play games on them because they are susceptible to burn in.
Things have changed. The phosphor half-life of the current generation is 60,000 hours. I think that's 20 years of 8 hours a day operation.
The current generation is no more succeptible to burn-in than a standard direct-view TV. Still, it's best to turn down the brightness.
I don't own one, but it doesn't make sense to allow old information to continue to perpetuate.
I personally prefer LCD for the resolution, a 1080p LCD TV is available at 37", a 1080p plasma is something like 60". Plasmas also seem to have more screen door effect, making the picture look grainy because of the black portions between pixels.
I thought the comics code was done voluntarily by the comic industry, though only because of threatened legislation. It was a bad system, but it was one devised by a coalition of companies to try to shut out one particularly notorious comics company.
The issue isn't about what should and shouldn't be sold period, but what should and shouldn't be sold to minors.
I really don't buy the free speach idea, especially in regard to minors, I mean, they are restricted from buying firearms, yet these lobbies don't seem to mind that despite being a potential violation of the second ammendment.
If a law tried to prohibit the production and sale of a game/movie to anyone, then I would be against that.
The ONLY other way would be to refund the amounts to the stores, or have the stores handle the discounts on the sales.
Your explaination doesn't explain why the stores also carry out rebates.
I think the rebate system is absolute garbage, and I wonder why these shenanigans are allowed. I don't see why this tedium and pedantcy is necessary, or why paying customers should have to deal with unnecessary paperwork. I generally try to avoid products promoted using them them, besides, many times, buying items online gets the same price without this rebate crap.
It is possible I made a mistake in the numbers, but I used 8c/kwh, something I thought I found somewhere as being the average cost of electricity in the US.
Keep in mind that the original poster also suggested that the firewall just be a firewall, security-minded people avoid piling on other tasks onto the firewall simply because that opens up more avenues of attacks.
One thing I will grant is that if the Linksys really is unreliable, then there's the aggravation and time in replacing faulty equipment, though old PCs have that risk too. Personally, I've had no reliability issues with the Linksys, and a Linksys replaced a PC that was having reliability issues.
One thing I've found is that the dedicated hardware firewall like a Linksys could pay for itself in electricity in less than a year over a repurposed desktop PC, assuming the Linksys was $40 USD, the PC was free (technically, it's a sunk cost, so I count it as zero) and that the PC consumed 30W more power than a Linksys.
It's also standard in Visa's contracts that you can't set a minimum purchase price either.
This is true, and I think is somewhat unfortunate because a minimum fee is charged for credit card transactions, I forget the amount. That minimum fee generally means that there is a loss on small-ticket sales. On this issue, I don't hold a grudge against retailers that have this if the minimum purchase is $5.
I think it is another case of the credit card companies wanting the best of all worlds for themselves and shafting the retailer, because they shouldn't demand a set minimum fee and then expect retailers to not set a minimum transaction.
I'm not convinced it is a matter of parenting because it is simply not possible to watch older children or teens every waking moment.
I also really don't understand what is so special about game retailing that makes it special vs. existing underage restrictions on porn, booze, tobacco and R movies.
I agree that the current problems are horrible. I don't understand why such garbage-looking stuff is being made available and marketed as if it was something cool.
I don't think it is attainable, I don't want glasses that protrude into my ear canal.
Of course it's been possible, maybe the cable box system might have to change. Look at c-band satellite. Just a few days ago, I ordered a basic package plus three other channels that I wanted that wasn't in that package. Descrambling is and can be done on a per-channel basis.
Unfortunately, c-band is very slowly going away such that I don't think new installations are economical, in part because of the size of the dishes, relegating them to rural or if you are lucky, light suburban installations. At least the picture quality is fantastic, the analog channels don't have smearing or static like I've see on analog cable and the digital channels don't seem to have macroblocking or other digital compression artifacts like I've seen on other digital cable and satellite systems. I bought my dish from a relative that had to give his house up, so that's how it was economical for me, the dish, mount and turner are the most expensive part of the system.
But I'd love to get rid of shopping channels, crazy religious channels, and other channels that I will never watch (spanish, BET, etc).
Your best bet is to just block them. The shopping and religious channels are probably provided to the cable and satellite systems for free. At least, those channels have no encryption on c-band, thus no subscription or extra money is required to see them. If there are only a few channels in a package you would never watch, just program them out of your cable box listings, it's likely not worth going a la carte to remedy your complaint unless you only watch a third of the channels or fewer.
It would appear that "cooltechzone" needs to be on my personal blacklist then. Any tech site where a writer that writes whole articles about what they don't understand certainly doesn't deserve my traffic.
Then again, with Zonk and ScuttleMonkey, I don't really know why I come here, the only thing those two seem to understand is the art of the Dupe (tm).
There was a "Science of Star Wars" show that interviewed the founder of SpaceX for a segment. He said the Falcon rocket's name was derived from the Millennium Falcon of Star Wars, I guess he's more than just a fan.
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But for now, I can go to Wally World and pick up a nice 27" CRT set with multiple inputs for $150 that will last me 10 years or more.
My recommendation is to wait a while before jumping onboard the HDTV "bandwagon". And it has nothing to do with the picture, though that helps.
With HD sets starting at $500, my recommendation is to "jump onboard" to get a progressive scan picture. Walmart had a 42" plasma for $999 with an HD tuner built-in, though the display was technically EDTV, it's still better than interlaced and will look fantastic with digital broadcasts.
The old interlaced sets are starting to drive me nuts with their lower refresh rate.
Dictionaries never were and never will be a source of information about the english language, expecially not about what words /don't/ exist.
"never" is an absolute that isn't true about your statement.
Why? It works fine for Scrabble(TM).
Ouch. I assume it's the European counterpart to the T1, T1s in the US are a lot cheaper, like 2% of that cost. I suppose you really mean the "remote part of the word" part.
But yes, I wouldn't be surprised if web pages are getting larger. On average, web pages are a lot more complex than in the past, with lots of links and sections and borders done with lots of little images. There are more ways to post images now, probably less care in compressing them, rather than compress them with care to not ruin the image too much and yet keep the file small, they might be less compressed or simply PNG-ed which can result in pretty large files.
The thing is way too freaking large and heavy for a PDA. It's about as heavy as maybe three PDAs and as thick as two.
Also, I'm guessing that Sony would rather not sell a PSP to a person that's likely only to run an emulator.
I think the PSP is cool and all, it's pretty expensive. One PSP game costs about as much as two GBA games, 1.5 DS games. One PSP costs about as much as three SPs or two DSs. It's not hard to imagine why the PSP might not perform so well (economically) in comparison despite the unit being pretty nice looking.
Perhaps they recognize that search engine results are effectively free targeted advertising for them. They just see the loss of control over what is and isn't news, and with that a loss of identity in the on-line news business.
Unfortunately, I can't think of a better way to describe it other than the old stupid metaphor: "can't have your cake and eat it too".
It's possible that they want to negotiate with Google over specific terms on how information is presented, but with what? Unless there is an industry-wide embargo against Google, that basically means anyone that declines search engine indexing are off the radar and their competitors benefit. The power here is on the side of search engines, any news agency can take their ball and go home, but they won't. I doubt there would be enough solidarity for all the news agencies to set up an embargo because anyone that breaks gets the traffic.
I suppose this is fine for missing a single episode, but for me and episodes of currently running series, I'm thinking a DVR is going to be a better way to go. I have MythTV set up 95%, I've just been putting off finishing it up, and for those that don't go for self-flagellation like installing Myth, there are commercial DVRs too that don't seem too bad. For TV shows that aren't run anymore, the DVDs are better deals anyway, I'm hoping there will be easier conversion software.
It may be too late for current owners, but I'd say this is another reason to not buy Sony consumer electronics in the first place. That said, PSP is primarily a game device and secondarily a media device. Any use outside of that is not a major priority in the design and should probably be considered a bonus.
Then it's time to demand it. It seems neary every other major type of intensive software is available such that it benefits from multiple CPUs, except games. Server and workstation (digital media, engineering, etc.) software benefit, the downside being that those are more niche.
I think the self checkouts cause more problems than they solve. Some of the ones I've used were horribly slow, some were misaligned such that the bar code would only read at a specific height *above* the glass. Some were simply erratic or otherwise failure prone.
On average, the systems were twice to four times as slow as using a cashier and still required one or two people watching four machines, nullifying the cost, time and labor savings. Or I could choose the *one* open cash register that has a long line, though that one line seemed to be moving about as many customers and items as four of the self-checout units. No thanks. I tend to avoid Home Depot because of those pieces of trash. Thankfully, my local Lowe's haven't installed them.
"razor and blade" would qualify as an overused analogy for marketing, though it kind of fits, because the software is free or cheap and the hardware is sadly exorbitantly priced.
People complain want at least almost high resolutions on a 17" monitor, so you care to explain to me how this is going to look on a 36" TV screen (probably even bigger)
Most TVs are pretty low resolution, and don't exceed 60Hz, so I don't see the problem here. Actually, most HDTVs have the resolution of a 15" widescreen desktop monitor. Faster game cards would likely have obnoxious noise issues, undesirable as a HTPC.
and it's a pretty freakin safe assumption that anymone who builds themself a $2,500 computer is probably a gamer.
Actually, I think it's a safer assumption that someone putting four tuner cards in a chassis is probably not going to be using the system as a major game system.
No you don't. Plasma TV's are junk. They go dim after a few years and you can't play games on them because they are susceptible to burn in.
Things have changed. The phosphor half-life of the current generation is 60,000 hours. I think that's 20 years of 8 hours a day operation.
The current generation is no more succeptible to burn-in than a standard direct-view TV. Still, it's best to turn down the brightness.
I don't own one, but it doesn't make sense to allow old information to continue to perpetuate.
I personally prefer LCD for the resolution, a 1080p LCD TV is available at 37", a 1080p plasma is something like 60". Plasmas also seem to have more screen door effect, making the picture look grainy because of the black portions between pixels.
I thought the comics code was done voluntarily by the comic industry, though only because of threatened legislation. It was a bad system, but it was one devised by a coalition of companies to try to shut out one particularly notorious comics company.
The issue isn't about what should and shouldn't be sold period, but what should and shouldn't be sold to minors.
I really don't buy the free speach idea, especially in regard to minors, I mean, they are restricted from buying firearms, yet these lobbies don't seem to mind that despite being a potential violation of the second ammendment.
If a law tried to prohibit the production and sale of a game/movie to anyone, then I would be against that.
From my understanding, theater owners started restricting entry because of the threat of judicial or legislative action.
So how does the green party fit in? or the liberitarians?
Unfortunately, neither are really influential or notable enough to be worthy of a joke.
The ONLY other way would be to refund the amounts to the stores, or have the stores handle the discounts on the sales.
Your explaination doesn't explain why the stores also carry out rebates.
I think the rebate system is absolute garbage, and I wonder why these shenanigans are allowed. I don't see why this tedium and pedantcy is necessary, or why paying customers should have to deal with unnecessary paperwork. I generally try to avoid products promoted using them them, besides, many times, buying items online gets the same price without this rebate crap.
It is possible I made a mistake in the numbers, but I used 8c/kwh, something I thought I found somewhere as being the average cost of electricity in the US.
Keep in mind that the original poster also suggested that the firewall just be a firewall, security-minded people avoid piling on other tasks onto the firewall simply because that opens up more avenues of attacks.
One thing I will grant is that if the Linksys really is unreliable, then there's the aggravation and time in replacing faulty equipment, though old PCs have that risk too. Personally, I've had no reliability issues with the Linksys, and a Linksys replaced a PC that was having reliability issues.
One thing I've found is that the dedicated hardware firewall like a Linksys could pay for itself in electricity in less than a year over a repurposed desktop PC, assuming the Linksys was $40 USD, the PC was free (technically, it's a sunk cost, so I count it as zero) and that the PC consumed 30W more power than a Linksys.
It's also standard in Visa's contracts that you can't set a minimum purchase price either.
This is true, and I think is somewhat unfortunate because a minimum fee is charged for credit card transactions, I forget the amount. That minimum fee generally means that there is a loss on small-ticket sales. On this issue, I don't hold a grudge against retailers that have this if the minimum purchase is $5.
I think it is another case of the credit card companies wanting the best of all worlds for themselves and shafting the retailer, because they shouldn't demand a set minimum fee and then expect retailers to not set a minimum transaction.
I'm not convinced it is a matter of parenting because it is simply not possible to watch older children or teens every waking moment.
I also really don't understand what is so special about game retailing that makes it special vs. existing underage restrictions on porn, booze, tobacco and R movies.
I agree that the current problems are horrible. I don't understand why such garbage-looking stuff is being made available and marketed as if it was something cool.
I don't think it is attainable, I don't want glasses that protrude into my ear canal.
Of course it's been possible, maybe the cable box system might have to change. Look at c-band satellite. Just a few days ago, I ordered a basic package plus three other channels that I wanted that wasn't in that package. Descrambling is and can be done on a per-channel basis.
Unfortunately, c-band is very slowly going away such that I don't think new installations are economical, in part because of the size of the dishes, relegating them to rural or if you are lucky, light suburban installations. At least the picture quality is fantastic, the analog channels don't have smearing or static like I've see on analog cable and the digital channels don't seem to have macroblocking or other digital compression artifacts like I've seen on other digital cable and satellite systems. I bought my dish from a relative that had to give his house up, so that's how it was economical for me, the dish, mount and turner are the most expensive part of the system.
But I'd love to get rid of shopping channels, crazy religious channels, and other channels that I will never watch (spanish, BET, etc).
Your best bet is to just block them. The shopping and religious channels are probably provided to the cable and satellite systems for free. At least, those channels have no encryption on c-band, thus no subscription or extra money is required to see them. If there are only a few channels in a package you would never watch, just program them out of your cable box listings, it's likely not worth going a la carte to remedy your complaint unless you only watch a third of the channels or fewer.
I thought the conclusion for those solder points was that it couldn't be for a dock because the number and spacing of pins was wrong.
It would appear that "cooltechzone" needs to be on my personal blacklist then. Any tech site where a writer that writes whole articles about what they don't understand certainly doesn't deserve my traffic.
Then again, with Zonk and ScuttleMonkey, I don't really know why I come here, the only thing those two seem to understand is the art of the Dupe (tm).
There was a "Science of Star Wars" show that interviewed the founder of SpaceX for a segment. He said the Falcon rocket's name was derived from the Millennium Falcon of Star Wars, I guess he's more than just a fan.
I wish the company luck.