"The laptop I buy has to wieght less than 5lbs, have more than 5hrs battery time (without an extra battery) and have kickass specs. So maybe in 2010..."
You mean like an IBM T-series? The T-41's we just got in at my office get about 5hrs w/extended battery (only one). And they've got hi-res screens, and Pentium-M processors. Not sure about the video card off the top of my head, but they seem pretty good to me.
Look closely at the photo. It's got the little MagicGate symbol (it's DRM for the proprietary Memory Stick they sell) on the upper right corner of the device.
Taking Sony's previous approach to loading things not purchased by them (you know, the way you can only load the OS that came with their laptop?) and copy protection, I wonder if they're heading down the same road as the RCA ebook readers? The restrictions on those were pretty bad. Yeah, yeah, most people here could get around them, but my buddy's wife who got a "1200" model recently wasn't too happy to hear they wouldn't be selling anymore books and had locked down her account.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed and wishing really hard they just let me do what I want with it.
Here in Nothern VA (& DC I believe), the camera only snaps a shot from the rear of your car. It gets your license, then mails off the ticket. Of course, no points are awarded, strictly fines. The units are painfully obvious, too. They have their own post, and there are two of them. One's the detetction unit, the other is the camera. I've seen a couple that have been mowed down by "careless" drivers too.:-)
DC even has mobile speed cameras they shift around to various "trouble spots". Looks like the gatso's finally made it across the pond, eh?
After checking out the preview, it does indeed look cool, but as for eliminating the need for multiple desktops, I dunno about that. Didn't Apple say that the "Snapback" feature of Safari would do the same thing to tabbed browsing, and since they had the snapback, there was no way they'd do tabbed browsing?
Looking over the preview, if I had to choose between the two (and being able to choose at all is what I'd really prefer) I'd choose the multiple desktops.
What about making DVD's from the shows on the player? From what I see, MythTV doesn't encode to MPEG-2. It does formats that require you to watch the show on a computer, which is something I'd like to avoid. Or did I miss it? That's whay I went ahead and networked my house and TiVo. I can pull the direct streams off, yank the commercials, then burn a DVD without changing formats (and losing quality).
"This is stealing. The theif has not infringed upon copyrights."
Then why aren't the lawsuits about theft? Why are they about copyright infringement? Seems to me that the RIAA has at least enough sense to sue for the actual crime committed.
Well, you've kind of answered your own question. You can play one dvd, he can play at least 4 (assuming a long runtime of 2hrs a movie). Your powerbook weighs about 4 times what his device(s) does.
Startup times are also (admittedly not by much) in his favor. I've seen them start up, and it's like a calculator. Press "power", and it's on. No 2 second delay. But I have to admit, the 2 seconds isn't that big a deal.
Then there's price. Best Buy has those portable players for a few hundred, plus another few hundred for a PDA, and you're at half the price of a powerbook.
And as he said, there's the convenience factor. Pretend you're standing there talking to someone and want to jot down a note, or look up an associate's phone number. You pull out the PB, I'd rather pull out a PDA, which would you rather do?
I think it's more a matter of preference. You chose the laptop for more versatility. The laptop solution "doesn't cut it" for him. I guess you could say he's going the "UNIX" route of doing just one thing and doing it well, rather than shooting for "Jack of all trades, master of none."
Now, about that price drop on the 12" G4, was that $200?? Mmmmm, just might be enough to make me go for it and not wait around for the PPC970 laptops.:-)
To each his own, I guess. I actually like commercials. Well, the ones for other shows at least.:-) I've scheduled about 6 shows on my TiVo in the last 2 days that were all due to seeing the commercial while fast fowarding to get back to the show I was watching. I just feel like I'd miss out with commercial advance (or whatever it's called).
I know I could turn it off, but why get something you're going to disable anyway?:-)
You either deal with the hassles (and shortcomings) of building a PVR yourself. Or you pay a higher amount to the people who have already done it. Luxury(laziness??) comes at a price.
I was all gung-ho to build my own PVR, then I used a TiVo for a bit. Very very very, easy to use. Got one from ebay for ~$130, put in a 120GB drive for another $100(mail-in rebate), and my girlfriend paid the lifetime subscription fee (the TiVo lives over there, man can she bargain!!) A hair under $500, and about 4 hours total of my time. No contest IMHO. But hey, different strokes and all...
You mean like this thing? They're kinda expensive, but I think they're exactly what you're talking about. I had to research them about 6 months ago or so, and if I remember correctly, the price is not too bad here in the states.
Seriously, I've taken countless hand-held shots with my old Canon AE-1 down to 1/60 with 200 speed film. Methinks you've consumed too much 'Dew, maybe??;-)
I haven't seen any references to my favorite case here, the Supermicro SC-750. So here's a few quick tidbits about it.
I chose this one because I got tired of having to move cables around when I changed anything (video card, new drive, etc.)
It's a full tower, with the bottom half for the motherboard, and upper half is reserved for drives. It's got 6 5.25 bays, and a mounting bracket for 2 3.5 hard drives, with a mount point for another 2 3.5 hard drives.
The front pops off, then you loosen a screw, and swing the side open like a door. I love working on my system ever since I got it. It was kinda pricey at about $200, but they've come out with a new version (SC-760) and it can be found for close to $100 if you look.
"Also, LCDs develop burn-in rather quickly (24 hours or less, iirc) and expensive CRTs(though still cheaper than LCDs) won't burn in for months."
What??? I managed to get my boss to supply our IS dept with viewsonic 15" LCD displays over a year ago. Half of us leave them on overnight, and the screen saver/dimming feature doesn't kick in for at least an hour. No burn in yet. People in our office with laptops have used them more than 24hrs, all are running windows, with the start button on the lower left, I've never seen that burned in.
Where did you hear this? As my roommate says, "I'm gonna have to call bullsh*t on that one."
Wow, this could bring my favorite device to
on
Spy v. Spy
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· Score: 1
"So yeah, I agree, this new keyboard sounds like an RSI nightmare - keeping your fingers hovering is immensely more expensive (physically) than being able to relax and rest on the keys."
It's been awhile since my old high-school typing days (about 12 years), but your positioning sounds like an RSI nightmare waiting to happen. As I recall, you're NEVER supposed to type with your hands resting on the keyboard. You're supposed to have your elbows at a 90 degree angle, your forearms and wrists level, and hands should hover above the keyboard. My mother (a legal secretary) is a stickler for this, and she sustains over 100wpm easily for way more than a couple of minutes doing documents and transcriptions(been typing for as long as I can remember).
It may seem physically taxing at first to hold your hands above the keys, but it is faster, and besides, doing 30 push-ups may be taxing, at first. But if you do it all the time, soon they are nothing at all.
Yep, just like every story published out there did.
You and I and probably 99% of the readers of this site can differentiate between the two, but the media can't/won't. Why waste your time preaching to the choir? Try to convince the media. 'course you'd probably have more productive results converting lead into gold.....
Personally I've given up on the VERY old argument of hacker vs. cracker. I have better things to spend (ok, ok, waste) my energy on.
Installing win98 is pretty painless. Guess that's why the above statement should be moderated down to -1. Could be even easier if your machine boots from the cdrom. But we can't let this be known right? MS is _always_ complicated!!
I see your point, but keyboards (and mice in linux) can be hot swapped. I do it all the time. For the mouse issue in linux you just restart gpm. I've left keyboards unplugged for entire weekends and come back to a bunch of "keyboard error" messages, but nothing more. I just connect it and type. I know in windows you have to restart it to restart the mouse drivers, but you can hot-swap those as well if you're quick (do that all the time to, geez I really need a KVM switch!!).
The issue here is that the record company takes some 80% of the money and gives the artist some paltry token payment in a trickle-down kind of effect. The issue here is to cut out the blood-sucking leech that is the record company and make money (the artist that is) directly. Moron.
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"The laptop I buy has to wieght less than 5lbs, have more than 5hrs battery time (without an extra battery) and have kickass specs. So maybe in 2010..."
You mean like an IBM T-series? The T-41's we just got in at my office get about 5hrs w/extended battery (only one). And they've got hi-res screens, and Pentium-M processors. Not sure about the video card off the top of my head, but they seem pretty good to me.
Look closely at the photo. It's got the little MagicGate symbol (it's DRM for the proprietary Memory Stick they sell) on the upper right corner of the device.
Taking Sony's previous approach to loading things not purchased by them (you know, the way you can only load the OS that came with their laptop?) and copy protection, I wonder if they're heading down the same road as the RCA ebook readers? The restrictions on those were pretty bad. Yeah, yeah, most people here could get around them, but my buddy's wife who got a "1200" model recently wasn't too happy to hear they wouldn't be selling anymore books and had locked down her account.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed and wishing really hard they just let me do what I want with it.
Depending on your location, of course. :-)
:-)
Here in Nothern VA (& DC I believe), the camera only snaps a shot from the rear of your car. It gets your license, then mails off the ticket. Of course, no points are awarded, strictly fines. The units are painfully obvious, too. They have their own post, and there are two of them. One's the detetction unit, the other is the camera. I've seen a couple that have been mowed down by "careless" drivers too.
DC even has mobile speed cameras they shift around to various "trouble spots". Looks like the gatso's finally made it across the pond, eh?
A somewhat insightful post, marred by racism. Sigh...
After checking out the preview, it does indeed look cool, but as for eliminating the need for multiple desktops, I dunno about that. Didn't Apple say that the "Snapback" feature of Safari would do the same thing to tabbed browsing, and since they had the snapback, there was no way they'd do tabbed browsing?
Looking over the preview, if I had to choose between the two (and being able to choose at all is what I'd really prefer) I'd choose the multiple desktops.
What about making DVD's from the shows on the player? From what I see, MythTV doesn't encode to MPEG-2. It does formats that require you to watch the show on a computer, which is something I'd like to avoid. Or did I miss it? That's whay I went ahead and networked my house and TiVo. I can pull the direct streams off, yank the commercials, then burn a DVD without changing formats (and losing quality).
"This is stealing. The theif has not infringed upon copyrights."
Then why aren't the lawsuits about theft? Why are they about copyright infringement? Seems to me that the RIAA has at least enough sense to sue for the actual crime committed.
So you'd rather encode 1.5hrs of video to MPEG-2 format before burning with a 1ghz cpu rather than a 3ghz cpu?
Well, you've kind of answered your own question. You can play one dvd, he can play at least 4 (assuming a long runtime of 2hrs a movie). Your powerbook weighs about 4 times what his device(s) does.
:-)
Startup times are also (admittedly not by much) in his favor. I've seen them start up, and it's like a calculator. Press "power", and it's on. No 2 second delay. But I have to admit, the 2 seconds isn't that big a deal.
Then there's price. Best Buy has those portable players for a few hundred, plus another few hundred for a PDA, and you're at half the price of a powerbook.
And as he said, there's the convenience factor. Pretend you're standing there talking to someone and want to jot down a note, or look up an associate's phone number. You pull out the PB, I'd rather pull out a PDA, which would you rather do?
I think it's more a matter of preference. You chose the laptop for more versatility. The laptop solution "doesn't cut it" for him. I guess you could say he's going the "UNIX" route of doing just one thing and doing it well, rather than shooting for "Jack of all trades, master of none."
Now, about that price drop on the 12" G4, was that $200?? Mmmmm, just might be enough to make me go for it and not wait around for the PPC970 laptops.
To each his own, I guess. I actually like commercials. Well, the ones for other shows at least. :-) I've scheduled about 6 shows on my TiVo in the last 2 days that were all due to seeing the commercial while fast fowarding to get back to the show I was watching. I just feel like I'd miss out with commercial advance (or whatever it's called).
:-)
I know I could turn it off, but why get something you're going to disable anyway?
True, but from what I've come to understand, when you have a monopoly, the rules change. You can't "do anything you can to protect that lead".
I don't know....Maybe you have to....CHOOSE! :-)
You either deal with the hassles (and shortcomings) of building a PVR yourself. Or you pay a higher amount to the people who have already done it. Luxury(laziness??) comes at a price.
I was all gung-ho to build my own PVR, then I used a TiVo for a bit. Very very very, easy to use. Got one from ebay for ~$130, put in a 120GB drive for another $100(mail-in rebate), and my girlfriend paid the lifetime subscription fee (the TiVo lives over there, man can she bargain!!) A hair under $500, and about 4 hours total of my time. No contest IMHO. But hey, different strokes and all...
Yeah, ok I did. It said that the Battle of Verdun was in 1916. Which means it was World War 1, not 2.
;-)
What was it you were saying again?
I'm no military history buff, but I can use google!!
You mean like this thing?
They're kinda expensive, but I think they're exactly what you're talking about. I had to research them about 6 months ago or so, and if I remember correctly, the price is not too bad here in the states.
1/2000 of a second?? Who are you? Harold Edgerton??? :-)
;-)
Seriously, I've taken countless hand-held shots with my old Canon AE-1 down to 1/60 with 200 speed film. Methinks you've consumed too much 'Dew, maybe??
I haven't seen any references to my favorite case here, the Supermicro SC-750. So here's a few quick tidbits about it. I chose this one because I got tired of having to move cables around when I changed anything (video card, new drive, etc.) It's a full tower, with the bottom half for the motherboard, and upper half is reserved for drives. It's got 6 5.25 bays, and a mounting bracket for 2 3.5 hard drives, with a mount point for another 2 3.5 hard drives. The front pops off, then you loosen a screw, and swing the side open like a door. I love working on my system ever since I got it. It was kinda pricey at about $200, but they've come out with a new version (SC-760) and it can be found for close to $100 if you look.
"Also, LCDs develop burn-in rather quickly (24 hours or less, iirc) and expensive CRTs(though still cheaper than LCDs) won't burn in for months."
What??? I managed to get my boss to supply our IS dept with viewsonic 15" LCD displays over a year ago. Half of us leave them on overnight, and the screen saver/dimming feature doesn't kick in for at least an hour. No burn in yet. People in our office with laptops have used them more than 24hrs, all are running windows, with the start button on the lower left, I've never seen that burned in.
Where did you hear this? As my roommate says, "I'm gonna have to call bullsh*t on that one."
the masses!!!
The "Trace-busta-busta-busta" !!
"So yeah, I agree, this new keyboard sounds like an RSI nightmare - keeping your fingers hovering is immensely more expensive (physically) than being able to relax and rest on the keys."
It's been awhile since my old high-school typing days (about 12 years), but your positioning sounds like an RSI nightmare waiting to happen. As I recall, you're NEVER supposed to type with your hands resting on the keyboard. You're supposed to have your elbows at a 90 degree angle, your forearms and wrists level, and hands should hover above the keyboard. My mother (a legal secretary) is a stickler for this, and she sustains over 100wpm easily for way more than a couple of minutes doing documents and transcriptions(been typing for as long as I can remember).
It may seem physically taxing at first to hold your hands above the keys, but it is faster, and besides, doing 30 push-ups may be taxing, at first. But if you do it all the time, soon they are nothing at all.
Yep, just like every story published out there did.
You and I and probably 99% of the readers of this site can differentiate between the two, but the media can't/won't. Why waste your time preaching to the choir? Try to convince the media. 'course you'd probably have more productive results converting lead into gold.....
Personally I've given up on the VERY old argument of hacker vs. cracker. I have better things to spend (ok, ok, waste) my energy on.
Just what we need. A high-profile company that has decent lobbying skills getting hacked just as we face more and more legislation against hacking.
And this on the hells of the story below about pushing for more UCITA support. crap.
Installing win98 is pretty painless. Guess that's why the above statement should be moderated down to -1. Could be even easier if your machine boots from the cdrom. But we can't let this be known right? MS is _always_ complicated!!
Space at a premium??? Like one poster above said, the VAIO's are ~1 inch thick, and they have real modems!!! It's not about space, it's about profit.
I see your point, but keyboards (and mice in linux) can be hot swapped. I do it all the time. For the mouse issue in linux you just restart gpm. I've left keyboards unplugged for entire weekends and come back to a bunch of "keyboard error" messages, but nothing more. I just connect it and type. I know in windows you have to restart it to restart the mouse drivers, but you can hot-swap those as well if you're quick (do that all the time to, geez I really need a KVM switch!!).
Here comes the cluestick.....thwack!!
The issue here is that the record company takes some 80% of the money and gives the artist some paltry token payment in a trickle-down kind of effect. The issue here is to cut out the blood-sucking leech that is the record company and make money (the artist that is) directly. Moron.