The best way to gauge any printer's photo capabilities is looking at sample prints at the store
Except that these are often highly tweaked images and are sometimes even printed from a demo application that doesn't even use the usual printer driver.
Then print from your digital camera using pictbridge. Most stores are agreeable if you bring in your own paper so long as you leave the prints there. You get some clue as to how well each printer will work for you and they get free demos that can be shown to other customers.
The only exception being Epson which their prosumer models don't offer pictbridge. I understand the logic... the target market are for people who edit then print... just people like my self might edit, save to card, and print from the camera or other pictbridge enabled device.
I hate repsonding to my self... but I should add that the Japanese verion of the Pixma is known as the pixus. The model numbers are a wee bit different... in most cases 10 or 100 higher than the rest of the world models for example pixus ip3100 = pixma ip3000 i990 = i960 IIRC
Most canon models can be set to their japanese counterparts if nessicary through the service menu... with the notable exception of the new series of ip4200/ip5200.... or simply put any new canon printer that takes the chipped tanks. It seems in Japan that they are still using what we know of as the BCI series inktanks (bci-3/3e/6)... the bci-7s which use the new fancy chromalife100 formula... where in the rest of the world the new printers take the cli-8 & PGI-5 tanks. Basicly from my understanding... if you switch these printers to Japan mode.. they see they are using the wrong tanks and complain about it.... but also still complain if you use non-chipped tanks... so from what i've been told your stuck with a printer that won't print. Not an issue on the older ip3000/4000/5000/6000/8500.
Yeah, I got bit by the DOS3 thing a couple times. DOS 2.5 and SpartaDOS 3.2d were pretty much what I stuck with. I was mostly a kid during the heyday of the Atari and my family wasn't in a financial position to get the best of the goodies, so unfortunately I've never experienced the joys of mass storage. I lusted after a Happy Drive too:) We did have an R-verter and an 850 Interface, both of which are apparently somewhat rare today, as well as a couple of US Doubler'd 1050s
Problem with SpartaDOS, while being a spiffy command line super duper useful that you can jump to to peform disk maintance or hell even enable basic was that alot of programs wouldn't work under it.
For the most part... There was a very basic form of dos that acted as a bootstrap that simply presented a list of programs you could run. This was one of the few ways you could have your enhanced 180k or 360k floppies and run your games. Unfortunatly most of the offical user groups were so against piracy that they wouldn't even share this software, this freeware software. Quite sad as I saw no issue with having a stack of 10 to 20 games backing them up onto a single floppy for convenient access.
I had no direct experence with happy enanced drives or US doubler drives... or that other odd ball disk drive that had the nice smoked plastic dust lid that foled down over the slot. But I did own a Percom controler that could accept standard PC drives... up to 4 per controler IIRC. Cost a pretty penny... but considering the time period it was worth it. It was a tad querky.. as all things for the Atari were.
But I would never use inkjet, well anywhere. On photos because it would always smear and generally give out crappy results (you can see the intermittent lines). Plus it looks god-awful on regular paper and that ink cartridge dries out if you don't tend to regularly use it every few weeks.
Always smear? Ummmm... on microporous paper I can run my prints under water without bleeding provided I wait at least 24hours. I tested a fresh print on Kirkland paper and it did bleed some but not all that much. I'll agree if we were talking the HP vivera inks which have a cure time of weeks but both Canon and Epson inks are microporous paper reasonably smuge resistant... and these are water based inks. There are other options for inks that use other solvents, just not typicaly on consumer grade printers. For added protection you can always spray your prints.
Plus my photos have a life of 99 years - I don't think the same can be said for inkjet (imagine that stored in someplace moderately humid).
You got me there.... I know Epson's durabright and ultrachrome pigment inks as well as hp's vivera inks are rated for a very long time... but on this level I gotta agree silver halide is really the way to go. You do have your waterfast, gasfast, lightfast all in one package.
There are those of us who bought into Epsons to do CD printing... and well... their sub $300 printers are rather high maintance creatures. My experence with the r200 was not pleasent at all, and they only have one AIO printer that prints on CDs... and it's not cheap.
Fortunatly most of the Canon Pixmas can print on CDs as well, just the feature is disabled for the North American market and it's not shipped with a CD tray. You can e-bay a tray... canon wasn't hip to places like partsnow selling them so you are dependent on people importing them independently. You can make your own or hack one from an old epson tray.
While I prefer the Epsons for flat out photo quality, colors that look good out of the box on most media without tweeking, and the ink's tendancy to wick less.... their low end printers clog if you look at them funny, they don't have anything resembling a frame, and diaper replacement can not be done without breaking plastic nor can you reassemble it without a jig. Not that there are not ways to extend the life of epsons... just my experence was I spent more time mucking with the printer than printing, and I prefer buying hardware either outlasts the warranty or at the very least can be maintained.
For example, someone posted that after connecting the Canon Pixma iP5200 printer to their computer they had to replace the motherboard. Personally I still prefer to send out for pictures than to print them myself. Cheaper and better quality.
If you go OEM ink, without a doubt it's cheaper to send out your prints. If you use 3rd party ink... well the price is so similar i'm not willing to say which is cheaper. At about $2.50 an ounce for ink matched to your printhead and $20ish for 100+ sheets of store branded photo paper, we are talking a nickle for the ink, about a nickle for each 4x6 plus another nickle for various costs depending on the printer model and what is needed to run bulk ink. It's when you start talking odd sizes of prints like CD and DVD covers, 8x10 or heck 8.5 x 11 that you start seeing that lab prints are not so cost effective depending where you shop.
Quality.. well inkjets while not the most reliable technology look good, really good... better than many vending machine dye sub printers.
Even the 8-bit Ataris supported hard drives with later versions of DOS (I always liked SpartaDOS personally). The flash is just an adapter that makes the CF show up as a standard HD to the Atari. Nothing too terribly fancy there. And it only makes sense that an Atari would support its own DOS;)
These days you can even get ethernet and an IDE adapter for the things (though not cheaply).
"MyDOS 4.53 for maximum drive size of 16 megabytes"
I had an atari back in the day with a 15gig drive using a scsi to mfm controler... so I imagine with the right hardware anything ide could be supported. I recently saw an "ICD multi-io" with scsi and 1meg sold on ebay for $700ish. While the ram wasn't an expantion it could act as a printbuffer or ramdisk and was powered seperatly so it acted like a small hard drive. That's there and abouts of what they cost new in 1990 or so. Atari dos near as I'm aware never supported anything above and beyond 360k or 720k floppies... the largest drive Atari them selves came out with was 360k drive called an XF-551.
I got the atari when the whole atari dos thing went crazy. You had atari dos 2.0 which supported only 90k floppies, but then they came out with some odd ball enhanced density dos which but shipped with atari dos 3 which wasn't compatable the old disks... not even the discs that shipped with the drive. It had a utility that would convert old disks to the new format... but not back again which was a problem as most disks that were shipped employed copy protection... so atari dos3 had a nice feature to render disks totally unreadable. And the only reason anyone knew this is if they had access to a handy dandy user's group... it's not like the places that sold them actually were able to support them.
Eventaully I was able to get the newer dos 2.5 which was compatable with the new enhanced density yet could read the older single dos 2.0 disks... which was the standard of all boxed software. Most annoying was when they released a double sized double density drive and didn't ship it with a version of dos that supported it. Probally the most interesting were the various other DOSes that were on the market including SpartaDOS and MyDOS both of which could support hard drives and just about any disk standard available.
There was lots of really good hardware for the Atari... the problem is that most games didn't support anything above a single drive, and those that did only used flippable disks and didn't allow you to say copy side B to another floppy and run the game flipless.
My mom (almost 70 yrs old) has been using email for about a year or so now. she still uses l and O for 1's and 0's because that's the way she learned to type.
This is totally not uncommon. From my limited understanding even the eletric typewriters of the 50s didn't have zero or one keys, and even if you went to school in the 60s odds are your typewriter was at least 10 years old. It was NEVER an issue till computers...
Cheated, hell! My first... TYPEWRITER (yes, mechanical, yes, really, no power cord... no "correction paper", either)... didn't have a "1" or "0" key, it expected you to use l and O. I remember being confused by this the very first time I tried to type on it.
If you look at classic invoices from the mid/late 60s... nice type written ones that were clearly from the IBM Selectric, those often had lowercase "o"s for double zero cents. Either this was a throwback to the pre 60s where the touch typists just got into the habit of doing this or it was the style [$1.oo. I was going to say pre-electric but it's clear that at least IBM came out with electrics without a #1 or #0.
I remember back in the late 80s - early 90s reading about people getting sued for the cable company's mistake (basically, getting service you never asked for and not telling the cable company!), and still getting screwed.
I remember also a few cases where people got arrested because the jackasses forgot to install the filter taps... and IIRC the cases were thrown out. At least in my region i've talked with the technicians and they refuse to install them. In my case it was written on my work order. Their logic was "these thing cause nothing but problems". But these were cases where they were subscribed to cable modem service but not TV.
This is rather why people did their homework and subscribed to cable tv service, the lowest priced option available... so there would be no chance in hell of being accused for theft of service.
Get a dell or compaq or something. I hear they suck less.
What's really bad about those vaios isn't so much the fact that many in the past were unreliable pieces of garbage. It was the fact that buying a replacement motherboard for those suckers cost as much as another laptop. But on the up side they had really good e-bay sale value dead or alive.
> But that's not what he did. It sounds like he bought a box to "get most of the stations he > lost". Sounds like circumvention to me.
Nope, asked for an adressable converter box to order pay per view movies as part of the ultra basic (lifeline) plan. In order to provide this service they have to remove the filter tap so the higher numbered stations can be viewed, and it's their job to provide a filter tap to filter out the frequencies you are not paying for, which it just so happens that TCI in this region never ever had any, so they made the choice to provide extra channels at no extra cost rather than spending extra to block them. The alternative was to not offer an addressable cable box in the first place to customers who only had basic cable.
Just like basic cable customers who are actually getting extended basic. This isn't theft of service... they are being given services they didn't order. This isn't circumvention but their choice. Most customers don't have clue one.
Hey, way to go! You may want to check with your state to see if you're committing a class C felony, as in my state. Saving $7-12/mo is worth the risk of having a felony conviction on record when you're looking for a job.
It's not a felony if you order cable service, pay for it monthly, and it just so happens they don't install the filter taps and through no fault of your own your getting stuff your not paying for. If for example you remove the filter tap or jack your TV into the cable modem socket without actually paying for cable.. totally a class C felony. But if they offer a service that gives you cable tv, that actually costs less than not getting cable with cable modem service not only are you not commiting a class c felony... there is no way they can even accuse you of a class c felony... and your not even tempted to commit a class c felony.
Nor is it a felany to ask the cable company for a digital converter box for the purpose of ordering on demand with the cheapest service they have.
Hell... most people don't know any better. I've met many people who have comcast who are paying for basic but are getting extended basic... and just have no clue they are getting channels they are not paying for.
When I can get zero "always on" channels for $0/month and get any show On-Demand for $1 I'll be ecstatic.
Talk to your local cable company. It was a trick in my region to ask for ultra-basic service that was called "life-line" IIRC which was a dumbed down version of basic cable... channels 2-13 with everything else filtered out. According to rumor users could ask for a cable box for the express purpose of ordering on demand shows without a fee.... which had the side effect of unfiltering everything else. Note I don't know of anyone who had to do this... just a few odd balls that ordered "lifeline" from old TCI cause it was cheaper then the extra fee for cable modem service without cable. My memory was vague... but I'm remembering $5ish bucks/month vs $7ish bucks a month.
At the last minute he asked, "do you have DSL?" We did, and now it looks like we have to use the actual phone to order OnDemand shows. We never have, since it's such a pain, though we constantly watch the free ones, expecially the kid shows.
Many of those cable boxes are able to phone home without using a phone line, it's just a question of what is implemented in the region. According to my cable guy... it phones home if you order shows and only at night... which he explained frustrated users who thought their cable box would stop working for no obvious cause.
While the rest of the world is looking at leaked photos of Janet Jackson or Paris Hilton, we're looking at photos of AMDs new processor.
I know I'd rather see a cpu than Paris Hilton. You can at least try to carry on a convo with a cpu.. and odds are it will have something more intelligent to say.
Was that from the SNL skit? I thought is was at first, but then the whole "priceline" part threw me.
The "I am Canadian" speech was first a molson commercial... but a parity of it was on something called "Just for laughs" which I quoted verbatium from wikipedia... hince the quotes and the link.
The SNL sketch I don't remember all that well and isn't quite as funny.
After watching all the DVDs, does William Shatner appear and tell you to "Get A Life"?
Or this from "Just for laughs"
"I'm not a Starfleet commander, or T.J. Hooker. I don't live on Starship NCC-170... (some audience members say "1"), or own a phaser. I don't know anybody named Bones, Sulu, or Spock (picture of Dr. Benjamin Spock is shown on screen behind him). And no, I've never had green alien sex, but I'm sure it'd be quite an evening. (Pomp and Circumstance begins playing.) I speak English and French, not Klingon! I drink Labatt's, not Romulan ale! And when someone says to me 'live long and prosper', I seriously mean it when I say, 'get a life'. My doctor's name is not McCoy, it's Ginsberg (nude picture of Dr. Ginsberg shown on screen). And tribbles were puppets, not real animals. PUPPETS! And when I speak, I never, ever talk like Every. Word. Is. Its. Own. Sentence. I live in California, but I was raised in Montreal. And I believe in priceline.com, where you never have to pay full price for airline tickets, hotels, and car rentals! I've appeared onstage at Stratford, at Carnegie Hall, Albert Hall, and the Monkland Theatre in NDG. And, yes, I've gone where no man has gone before, but... I was in Mexico and her father gave me permission! My name is William Shatner, and I am Canadian!" --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shatner
And the basic plot device was used in Independence Day... when everything else failed the aliens were vulnerable to a computer virus... but since their computer network was not compatable with anything on earth, and appletalk is also not compatable with anything on earth... makes for a simple resolution.
> I look at South Park, Dead Like Me, and my Battlestar Galactica fix and I say "Buy the > season on DVD". My wife wants Buffy the Vampire Slayer seasons 1-6 and DVD is the way to go.
DVD is pretty cool, but pretty bulky with officaly pressed DVD-9. A given 16 to 24 episode season is going to be 4 to 6 discs, which easily becomes 36 discs. This adds up really quick. I'm happy to burn my self but at $2/episode I would enjoy the option of getting the stuff on a pressed disc, with a pre-printed cover. But even if that were not the case, let's say for example I take the time to buy "24". Given the choice between 30 discs or 5 to 10 discs i'd pick 5-10 discs.
It's their software, shouldn't they be able to sell it or not sell it where they wish?
This *MIGHT* be true, and I stress "might". But what's to stop S.Korea from buying copies from their neighbors, or heck, legalize flat out piracy of it. Sure Microsoft can pull out but that doesn't mean it's not stupid.
I have an issue where I can no longer play Civ III because my game CD cracked in the center and is no longer readable.
There's no real solution to this problem except for me to buy a whole new version of the game which is a total waste.
IF you're going to demand my CD, you should give me an easy/free way to keep on playing if something happens to my original disk.
Valid enough point if they employ disc protection. There is a NOCD crack for it IIRC. But anyhow in the past they offered a low cost disk replacement program. I admit I couldn't get an Amiga version but I could understand there were issues like no longer having the hardware to make copies. I remember hearing that there wasn't really a replacement program in the UK, but US and Canada there was. Try looking in the box, if you still have the box. Try e-mailing them or mailing via post a polite letter with a nice photo copy of your damaged disc.
Isn't it wonderful that 20 years later, those low res, obsolete games which many of would want to play as a trip down memory lane are STILL COPYRIGHTED, and will be for another 100 years or so?
It wouldn't be "so bad" if the media was 100% reliable. I remember my copy of civ for the Amiga was buggered and the box said I could get a replacement for a nominal fee. Well, I couldn't because they didn't have any anymore, or the ability to copy it. Granted this was slightly less than a decade ago but a valid enough point.
But yes, software copyrights should at the very least be an opt in system where total apathy causes them to expire earlier.
> Um, guys...look at the title of the article. "20 years of NES". > Doesn't that make it...1985?
The grandparent said their game was copyrighted 1984. Assuming it's one of the first games it was probally developed and written before the offical release of the console. 1985 sounds reasonable.
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Except that these are often highly tweaked images and are sometimes even printed from a demo application that doesn't even use the usual printer driver.
Then print from your digital camera using pictbridge. Most stores are agreeable if you bring in your own paper so long as you leave the prints there. You get some clue as to how well each printer will work for you and they get free demos that can be shown to other customers.
The only exception being Epson which their prosumer models don't offer pictbridge. I understand the logic... the target market are for people who edit then print... just people like my self might edit, save to card, and print from the camera or other pictbridge enabled device.
ftp://download.canon.jp/pub/driver/bj/linux/
I hate repsonding to my self... but I should add that the Japanese verion of the Pixma is known as the pixus. The model numbers are a wee bit different... in most cases 10 or 100 higher than the rest of the world models
for example
pixus ip3100 = pixma ip3000
i990 = i960 IIRC
Most canon models can be set to their japanese counterparts if nessicary through the service menu... with the notable exception of the new series of ip4200/ip5200.... or simply put any new canon printer that takes the chipped tanks. It seems in Japan that they are still using what we know of as the BCI series inktanks (bci-3/3e/6)... the bci-7s which use the new fancy chromalife100 formula... where in the rest of the world the new printers take the cli-8 & PGI-5 tanks. Basicly from my understanding... if you switch these printers to Japan mode.. they see they are using the wrong tanks and complain about it.... but also still complain if you use non-chipped tanks... so from what i've been told your stuck with a printer that won't print. Not an issue on the older ip3000/4000/5000/6000/8500.
Yeah, I got bit by the DOS3 thing a couple times. DOS 2.5 and SpartaDOS 3.2d were pretty much what I stuck with. I was mostly a kid during the heyday of the Atari and my family wasn't in a financial position to get the best of the goodies, so unfortunately I've never experienced the joys of mass storage. I lusted after a Happy Drive too :) We did have an R-verter and an 850 Interface, both of which are apparently somewhat rare today, as well as a couple of US Doubler'd 1050s
Problem with SpartaDOS, while being a spiffy command line super duper useful that you can jump to to peform disk maintance or hell even enable basic was that alot of programs wouldn't work under it.
For the most part... There was a very basic form of dos that acted as a bootstrap that simply presented a list of programs you could run. This was one of the few ways you could have your enhanced 180k or 360k floppies and run your games. Unfortunatly most of the offical user groups were so against piracy that they wouldn't even share this software, this freeware software. Quite sad as I saw no issue with having a stack of 10 to 20 games backing them up onto a single floppy for convenient access.
I had no direct experence with happy enanced drives or US doubler drives... or that other odd ball disk drive that had the nice smoked plastic dust lid that foled down over the slot. But I did own a Percom controler that could accept standard PC drives... up to 4 per controler IIRC. Cost a pretty penny... but considering the time period it was worth it. It was a tad querky.. as all things for the Atari were.
But I would never use inkjet, well anywhere. On photos because it would always smear and generally give out crappy results (you can see the intermittent lines). Plus it looks god-awful on regular paper and that ink cartridge dries out if you don't tend to regularly use it every few weeks.
Always smear? Ummmm... on microporous paper I can run my prints under water without bleeding provided I wait at least 24hours. I tested a fresh print on Kirkland paper and it did bleed some but not all that much. I'll agree if we were talking the HP vivera inks which have a cure time of weeks but both Canon and Epson inks are microporous paper reasonably smuge resistant... and these are water based inks. There are other options for inks that use other solvents, just not typicaly on consumer grade printers. For added protection you can always spray your prints.
Plus my photos have a life of 99 years - I don't think the same can be said for inkjet (imagine that stored in someplace moderately humid).
You got me there.... I know Epson's durabright and ultrachrome pigment inks as well as hp's vivera inks are rated for a very long time... but on this level I gotta agree silver halide is really the way to go. You do have your waterfast, gasfast, lightfast all in one package.
There are those of us who bought into Epsons to do CD printing... and well... their sub $300 printers are rather high maintance creatures. My experence with the r200 was not pleasent at all, and they only have one AIO printer that prints on CDs... and it's not cheap.
http://pixma.webpal.info/
Fortunatly most of the Canon Pixmas can print on CDs as well, just the feature is disabled for the North American market and it's not shipped with a CD tray. You can e-bay a tray... canon wasn't hip to places like partsnow selling them so you are dependent on people importing them independently. You can make your own or hack one from an old epson tray.
While I prefer the Epsons for flat out photo quality, colors that look good out of the box on most media without tweeking, and the ink's tendancy to wick less.... their low end printers clog if you look at them funny, they don't have anything resembling a frame, and diaper replacement can not be done without breaking plastic nor can you reassemble it without a jig. Not that there are not ways to extend the life of epsons... just my experence was I spent more time mucking with the printer than printing, and I prefer buying hardware either outlasts the warranty or at the very least can be maintained.
For example, someone posted that after connecting the Canon Pixma iP5200 printer to their computer they had to replace the motherboard. Personally I still prefer to send out for pictures than to print them myself. Cheaper and better quality.
If you go OEM ink, without a doubt it's cheaper to send out your prints. If you use 3rd party ink... well the price is so similar i'm not willing to say which is cheaper. At about $2.50 an ounce for ink matched to your printhead and $20ish for 100+ sheets of store branded photo paper, we are talking a nickle for the ink, about a nickle for each 4x6 plus another nickle for various costs depending on the printer model and what is needed to run bulk ink. It's when you start talking odd sizes of prints like CD and DVD covers, 8x10 or heck 8.5 x 11 that you start seeing that lab prints are not so cost effective depending where you shop.
Quality.. well inkjets while not the most reliable technology look good, really good... better than many vending machine dye sub printers.
no, the most important specification for /. readers: Does it run linux? if not, Can it run linux?
Most linux users know about turboprint, some already posted a link to the epson drivers... here is the link to the offical canon linux drivers
ftp://download.canon.jp/pub/driver/bj/linux/
Even the 8-bit Ataris supported hard drives with later versions of DOS (I always liked SpartaDOS personally). The flash is just an adapter that makes the CF show up as a standard HD to the Atari. Nothing too terribly fancy there. And it only makes sense that an Atari would support its own DOS ;)
These days you can even get ethernet and an IDE adapter for the things (though not cheaply).
"MyDOS 4.53 for maximum drive size of 16 megabytes"
I had an atari back in the day with a 15gig drive using a scsi to mfm controler... so I imagine with the right hardware anything ide could be supported. I recently saw an "ICD multi-io" with scsi and 1meg sold on ebay for $700ish. While the ram wasn't an expantion it could act as a printbuffer or ramdisk and was powered seperatly so it acted like a small hard drive. That's there and abouts of what they cost new in 1990 or so. Atari dos near as I'm aware never supported anything above and beyond 360k or 720k floppies... the largest drive Atari them selves came out with was 360k drive called an XF-551.
I got the atari when the whole atari dos thing went crazy. You had atari dos 2.0 which supported only 90k floppies, but then they came out with some odd ball enhanced density dos which but shipped with atari dos 3 which wasn't compatable the old disks... not even the discs that shipped with the drive. It had a utility that would convert old disks to the new format... but not back again which was a problem as most disks that were shipped employed copy protection... so atari dos3 had a nice feature to render disks totally unreadable. And the only reason anyone knew this is if they had access to a handy dandy user's group... it's not like the places that sold them actually were able to support them.
Eventaully I was able to get the newer dos 2.5 which was compatable with the new enhanced density yet could read the older single dos 2.0 disks... which was the standard of all boxed software. Most annoying was when they released a double sized double density drive and didn't ship it with a version of dos that supported it. Probally the most interesting were the various other DOSes that were on the market including SpartaDOS and MyDOS both of which could support hard drives and just about any disk standard available.
There was lots of really good hardware for the Atari... the problem is that most games didn't support anything above a single drive, and those that did only used flippable disks and didn't allow you to say copy side B to another floppy and run the game flipless.
My mom (almost 70 yrs old) has been using email for about a year or so now. she still uses l and O for 1's and 0's because that's the way she learned to type.
This is totally not uncommon. From my limited understanding even the eletric typewriters of the 50s didn't have zero or one keys, and even if you went to school in the 60s odds are your typewriter was at least 10 years old. It was NEVER an issue till computers...
http://www.etypewriters.com/history.htm
Cheated, hell! My first ... TYPEWRITER (yes, mechanical, yes, really, no power cord... no "correction paper", either) ... didn't have a "1" or "0" key, it expected you to use l and O. I remember being confused by this the very first time I tried to type on it.
If you look at classic invoices from the mid/late 60s... nice type written ones that were clearly from the IBM Selectric, those often had lowercase "o"s for double zero cents. Either this was a throwback to the pre 60s where the touch typists just got into the habit of doing this or it was the style [$1.oo. I was going to say pre-electric but it's clear that at least IBM came out with electrics without a #1 or #0.
I remember back in the late 80s - early 90s reading about people getting sued for the cable company's mistake (basically, getting service you never asked for and not telling the cable company!), and still getting screwed.
I remember also a few cases where people got arrested because the jackasses forgot to install the filter taps... and IIRC the cases were thrown out. At least in my region i've talked with the technicians and they refuse to install them. In my case it was written on my work order. Their logic was "these thing cause nothing but problems". But these were cases where they were subscribed to cable modem service but not TV.
This is rather why people did their homework and subscribed to cable tv service, the lowest priced option available... so there would be no chance in hell of being accused for theft of service.
Get a dell or compaq or something. I hear they suck less.
What's really bad about those vaios isn't so much the fact that many in the past were unreliable pieces of garbage. It was the fact that buying a replacement motherboard for those suckers cost as much as another laptop. But on the up side they had really good e-bay sale value dead or alive.
> But that's not what he did. It sounds like he bought a box to "get most of the stations he
> lost". Sounds like circumvention to me.
Nope, asked for an adressable converter box to order pay per view movies as part of the ultra basic (lifeline) plan. In order to provide this service they have to remove the filter tap so the higher numbered stations can be viewed, and it's their job to provide a filter tap to filter out the frequencies you are not paying for, which it just so happens that TCI in this region never ever had any, so they made the choice to provide extra channels at no extra cost rather than spending extra to block them. The alternative was to not offer an addressable cable box in the first place to customers who only had basic cable.
Just like basic cable customers who are actually getting extended basic. This isn't theft of service... they are being given services they didn't order. This isn't circumvention but their choice. Most customers don't have clue one.
Hey, way to go! You may want to check with your state to see if you're committing a class C felony, as in my state. Saving $7-12/mo is worth the risk of having a felony conviction on record when you're looking for a job.
It's not a felony if you order cable service, pay for it monthly, and it just so happens they don't install the filter taps and through no fault of your own your getting stuff your not paying for. If for example you remove the filter tap or jack your TV into the cable modem socket without actually paying for cable.. totally a class C felony. But if they offer a service that gives you cable tv, that actually costs less than not getting cable with cable modem service not only are you not commiting a class c felony... there is no way they can even accuse you of a class c felony... and your not even tempted to commit a class c felony.
Nor is it a felany to ask the cable company for a digital converter box for the purpose of ordering on demand with the cheapest service they have.
Hell... most people don't know any better. I've met many people who have comcast who are paying for basic but are getting extended basic... and just have no clue they are getting channels they are not paying for.
When I can get zero "always on" channels for $0/month and get any show On-Demand for $1 I'll be ecstatic.
Talk to your local cable company. It was a trick in my region to ask for ultra-basic service that was called "life-line" IIRC which was a dumbed down version of basic cable... channels 2-13 with everything else filtered out. According to rumor users could ask for a cable box for the express purpose of ordering on demand shows without a fee.... which had the side effect of unfiltering everything else. Note I don't know of anyone who had to do this... just a few odd balls that ordered "lifeline" from old TCI cause it was cheaper then the extra fee for cable modem service without cable. My memory was vague... but I'm remembering $5ish bucks/month vs $7ish bucks a month.
At the last minute he asked, "do you have DSL?" We did, and now it looks like we have to use the actual phone to order OnDemand shows. We never have, since it's such a pain, though we constantly watch the free ones, expecially the kid shows.
Many of those cable boxes are able to phone home without using a phone line, it's just a question of what is implemented in the region. According to my cable guy... it phones home if you order shows and only at night... which he explained frustrated users who thought their cable box would stop working for no obvious cause.
While the rest of the world is looking at leaked photos of Janet Jackson or Paris Hilton, we're looking at photos of AMDs new processor.
I know I'd rather see a cpu than Paris Hilton. You can at least try to carry on a convo with a cpu.. and odds are it will have something more intelligent to say.
Was that from the SNL skit? I thought is was at first, but then the whole "priceline" part threw me.
The "I am Canadian" speech was first a molson commercial... but a parity of it was on something called "Just for laughs" which I quoted verbatium from wikipedia... hince the quotes and the link.
The SNL sketch I don't remember all that well and isn't quite as funny.
Or this from "Just for laughs"
> In 1938, it was pretty damn clever, actually.
And the basic plot device was used in Independence Day... when everything else failed the aliens were vulnerable to a computer virus... but since their computer network was not compatable with anything on earth, and appletalk is also not compatable with anything on earth... makes for a simple resolution.
> I look at South Park, Dead Like Me, and my Battlestar Galactica fix and I say "Buy the
> season on DVD". My wife wants Buffy the Vampire Slayer seasons 1-6 and DVD is the way to go.
DVD is pretty cool, but pretty bulky with officaly pressed DVD-9. A given 16 to 24 episode season is going to be 4 to 6 discs, which easily becomes 36 discs. This adds up really quick. I'm happy to burn my self but at $2/episode I would enjoy the option of getting the stuff on a pressed disc, with a pre-printed cover. But even if that were not the case, let's say for example I take the time to buy "24". Given the choice between 30 discs or 5 to 10 discs i'd pick 5-10 discs.
It's their software, shouldn't they be able to sell it or not sell it where they wish?
This *MIGHT* be true, and I stress "might". But what's to stop S.Korea from buying copies from their neighbors, or heck, legalize flat out piracy of it. Sure Microsoft can pull out but that doesn't mean it's not stupid.
I have an issue where I can no longer play Civ III because my game CD cracked in the center and is no longer readable.
There's no real solution to this problem except for me to buy a whole new version of the game which is a total waste.
IF you're going to demand my CD, you should give me an easy/free way to keep on playing if something happens to my original disk.
Valid enough point if they employ disc protection. There is a NOCD crack for it IIRC. But anyhow in the past they offered a low cost disk replacement program. I admit I couldn't get an Amiga version but I could understand there were issues like no longer having the hardware to make copies. I remember hearing that there wasn't really a replacement program in the UK, but US and Canada there was. Try looking in the box, if you still have the box. Try e-mailing them or mailing via post a polite letter with a nice photo copy of your damaged disc.
Isn't it wonderful that 20 years later, those low res, obsolete games which many of would want to play as a trip down memory lane are STILL COPYRIGHTED, and will be for another 100 years or so?
It wouldn't be "so bad" if the media was 100% reliable. I remember my copy of civ for the Amiga was buggered and the box said I could get a replacement for a nominal fee. Well, I couldn't because they didn't have any anymore, or the ability to copy it. Granted this was slightly less than a decade ago but a valid enough point.
But yes, software copyrights should at the very least be an opt in system where total apathy causes them to expire earlier.
> Um, guys...look at the title of the article. "20 years of NES".
> Doesn't that make it...1985?
The grandparent said their game was copyrighted 1984. Assuming it's one of the first games it was probally developed and written before the offical release of the console. 1985 sounds reasonable.