We live in Virginia about 45 or 50 miles south of DC and same distance north of Richmond. We get DISH and love it. The picture is digital quality and we have never had picture problems except once which I will explain a little further down.
There is an antenna you can attach to mini's that supposedly picks up local channels. I have never met anyone using one. We get NYC news on the dish which is sometimes pretty cool. We can get local channels in our area with the addition of one more dish pointed in a different direction. We opted to make due with the New York stuff.
The Pay per view is better than the cable here. We have about 12 channels give or take a few. Many movies are beamed down in dolby digital. One cool thing (especially for when Episode 1 comes out in PPV) is when a movie is set to play all day, you buy it once and can watch it all day as many times as your little Star Wars freak self can handle.
Pricing blows cable away. We pay for the year in advance and have 5 channels of HBO along with the regular hundred and some-odd channels we get normally. Pile on top of that more PPV, and a bunch (never bothered to count, but there are plenty) of all music channels playing everything from big band to eurodancecrap. All this plus dolby digital on some ppv movies and digital feed elsewhere for pretty close; read: give or take a few dollars/month; as we pay for basic cable with no SciFi, Comedy Central, HGTV, History Channel, ESPN2, etc, etc, etc...
The only bad thing we have noticed is pretty trivial. Every now and then, the Fox broadcast out of New York really pumps up the red color settings. Have not seen it on any other channel and the color controls on the big screen are all centered up. It was especially bad during the last Super Bowl. It may just be noticeable on a big screen, but I know it wasn't the TV. Like I said, pretty trivial.
The only complaint I have about DISH that I am not sure is specific to this company, is you only get the ability to hook up two boxes to the dish, or at least with the dish we got. The box we use is a JVC, I am not sure what brand the dish is.
Yes, Star Wars has a cult following to rival most any other movie. George Lucas did not HAVE to hype the movie. He would have packed the theaters with the rabid fans for weeks and made millions anyway. But, that is not the point. You can never have enough fans. That is a cardinal rule of Hollywood and neither Lucas nor Spielberg are above it. The goal of all this is the same as when ID4, MIB, and the future WWW came or will come out. (WWW= Wild Wild West - funny how all the big-hype movies have acronymed titles)- to get kids interested in it. To get more and more fans. Guess what folks, how many people on this site stood in line and got tix? How many people plan on skipping work to see it? How many people plan on seeing it more than once in the theaters? How many people scoffed at Lliam Nieson's comment, "It's just a movie."? How many people would download a pirated copy at the first inklng of a chance? The hype worked.
Another thing, all this talk about pirated copies of the movie... wasn't this already discussed? I got the general impression that folks who replied to that thgouht the same thing, people will pirate stuff. There is nothing any law enforcement agency can do to stamp it out for the simple reason that the majority of people don't care if it gets stamped out or not. Why is there so much discussion about it again on this poll? Get over it folks, the money-makers will always bitch about people pirating their stuff, and the money-givers will always look for cheaper ways of getting the stuff.
Last thing. Someone said people either love or hate Star Wars. Is anyone else out there as tired as I am of this lame explaination of absolutely nothing? It's like saying, "people either breathe and live or don't and die." No s**t sherlock. True fans will not blindly love anything Lucas puts out. A true fan is Lucas' biggest fear. This is the person who will be, in fact, should be the most critical person of TPM. This is a person who has waited longer, and wanted this movie more than the average person. If it sucks, the true fan should feel the most let down of anyone.
to steal a saying, "Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong."
One big problem with FP98 is that for so many of the really cool things you can do with it, you need a server capable of handling front page extensions. If you are coding pages that will use those, FP98 is you only choice.
Also, contrary to popular belief, most servers are still UNIX based and do not support those extensions even though NT proved it was faster in fair and equal testing;-). Other than that, FP98 is great for designing some sites. However, when it comes to doing a large commercial site, I would take Dreamweaver over all! My only beef with it is that the FTP capabilities are somewhat weak. Still useful and it works most of the time, but it can have a hard time with really large uploads.
Most WYSIWYG editors only produce redundant tags when people change things around on their site allot. A good case in point, if you constantly change font characteristics of a line or apply a style to a line, Dreamweaver will insert redundant tags. However, there are two very simple ways to correct this.
1. Be smart. When using styles or various different fonts and sizes, code the page with no font tags first and go back when you're done and "stylize" them.
2. Use DW's "Clean up HTML" feature. It clears out redundant and empty tags.
Most sites people see coded in WYSIWYG editors with bad HTML are coded by someone who learned on a WYSIWYG editor which I think any one would agree is a BAD thing. Everyone should learn by hand coding a few pages. For me, I use the clean up HTML function and then proofread the doc. I still save time, and proofing HTML takes much less time than coding and testing, coding and testing, coding and testing.
Not to mention, if you have to maintain a large site, hand coding sucks!
I am a web developer for a company in Fredericksburg. I would highly recommend Dreamweaver. Go Live is really only marginally better and costs a little more than Macromedia. Plus when paired with Macromedia Fireworks, DW is a very powerful tool.
One reason it is so good is that it is true WYSIWYG. I have rarely seen any browser show a page any differently than it is shown in the workspace. Als, you can customize Dreamweaver. All your object bars can be changed to add actions you use regularly. DW will also write standard simple java scripts for things like rollovers and whatnot. Fireworks (The Macromedia vector graphics tool) will also export rollovers and regular images to DW.
I would also recommend looking into Allair's Net Objects Fusion. You get a very comparable (though not as feature rich) HTML editor and you get the ability to program cold fusion apps which is a sweet deal. If you don't need CF capabilities, check out Home Site which is allaire's editor stand alone. Considerably cheaper than both the products you were asking about.
You can d/l demos of dreamweaver, Net Objects Fusion , and Home Site from each company's homesite which I have listed below. You can also check out Fireworks.
If you already use Illustrator for vector graphics. Let me sing you the web praises of Fireworks. It has the best image export utility out there, handles vector graphics as well as Illustrator, and you can get a Dreamweaver/Fireworks package for a sweet price. Not to mention, FW is very geared to WEB graphics whereas Illustrator runs the gammut and is somewhat lacking in creating web graphics with exporting images. Fireworks can strip images down to such a small size it is incredible.
Also, while Amaya has allot of potential, it is still pretty spartan compared to what DW and Fusion are capable of. I have played with fusion a bit and it is certainly powerful, however most of what it can do, DW does as well. Plus, I like the interface of DW better than any of them, very intuative and user friendly.
"high school is only a mere pin point as to what life will hold for you." "the same people who you think is "popular", will be the very ones after school to be failures."
Man, hindsight is a great thing isn't it?
Look, I remember high school all to well. I outright hated every second I had to spend in that pit of materialism and BS. I really related to the Nada Surf song "Popular" because it reminded me of all those popular pricks I could not stand. Made me laugh about them. And yes, I was suicidal for a little bit. I hated it that much. It is known as teen angst! Everyone has it at some point between 12 and 21. Hell, John Hughes made a living off of it!
I generally agree with your points I quoted above, the only problem is, I and most people in this bad situation High School can create did not know or believe that when we were IN high school.
You are right, people have a tendency to whine, and I myself wonder how many of these posts are authentic and how many are just jumping on the touchy-feely bandwagon. However considering the forum we are in, it seems entirely believable that most of the people (me included) are or were geeks in high school. And geeks have always been and always will be seen as outcasts by jocks, preps, and all the other little cliques formed in and by the public school system.
Your post makes sense, and is refreshing in the midst of all the "I feel their pain" postings, but before you chalk everything up as right and wrong, black and white; remember hindsight is always 20/20.
profits from the concession stands??? you've got to be shitting me!
And it does not suprise me that theaters break even on the tickets. When one considers how much is spent not in making the movie, but in inflating the actors' and actress' already overflowing pocketbooks and wallets! Is it just me, or does it seem hard to believe that these people get millions for working anywhere between a few months months and a year (only for the big epic films though)? Sorry about the ranting here, but it is the same problem that's happening with sports... the big names are getting paid too much to have fun and the fans take it in the rear. I want someone to try to convince me that Keannu is a good enough actor to be worth the money he makes.
And agents don't count. They're even worse than the talent they push. They are like remora... they would die but for others talents to feed off.
Poorly written article. I think this is my favorite bogus claim:
"While a song in MP3 format can be downloaded in a few minutes, it would take hours or even days to download a movie using a typical telephone connection to the Web."
Yeah right. Who on a 56K d-up connection can download anything more than a brief Beavis & Butthead clip or the Looney Tunes intro song in "a few minutes?"
Beside that point, even on a T3, 1.1gig download (size of the Matrix files) is longer than an hour.
But something's missing here... I have not seen any comments to the tune of the mp3 argument... If a person did not have to plan on spending $20 to see a movie with a coke and some popcorn, perhaps this would not be so prevalent. We say CD prices are inflated... $3.00 for a MEDIUM coke!? I mean I know I can get a large for ONLY $.25 more, but come on. Is it any wonder people sneak in food of their own, or that there is a bootleg movie market and has been for a long time? Simple formula... if it's not free people will bootleg. If it's overpriced, people bootleg out of spite.
Because the government created the monopoly when it handed the whois db over to nsi a few years back. Since then, nsi has been pretty much raking in the dough and doing very little in the area of upgrading the whois servers (slow as anything quite often) and speeding up the registration process. Why is it that sometimes domains can be completed and in the db for restart within an hour and other times it can take up to a week? Don't even talk about the frustrations that can arrise if you have to fax in any modification template.
I think the government is too caught up wasting money and armaments in some little country in the east to worry about. Not to mention despite all their chest-beating about how angry they are with NSI, the government still won't do anything about them.
Slashdot Mirror
We live in Virginia about 45 or 50 miles south of DC and same distance north of Richmond. We get DISH and love it. The picture is digital quality and we have never had picture problems except once which I will explain a little further down.
There is an antenna you can attach to mini's that supposedly picks up local channels. I have never met anyone using one. We get NYC news on the dish which is sometimes pretty cool. We can get local channels in our area with the addition of one more dish pointed in a different direction. We opted to make due with the New York stuff.
The Pay per view is better than the cable here. We have about 12 channels give or take a few. Many movies are beamed down in dolby digital. One cool thing (especially for when Episode 1 comes out in PPV) is when a movie is set to play all day, you buy it once and can watch it all day as many times as your little Star Wars freak self can handle.
Pricing blows cable away. We pay for the year in advance and have 5 channels of HBO along with the regular hundred and some-odd channels we get normally. Pile on top of that more PPV, and a bunch (never bothered to count, but there are plenty) of all music channels playing everything from big band to eurodancecrap. All this plus dolby digital on some ppv movies and digital feed elsewhere for pretty close; read: give or take a few dollars/month; as we pay for basic cable with no SciFi, Comedy Central, HGTV, History Channel, ESPN2, etc, etc, etc...
The only bad thing we have noticed is pretty trivial. Every now and then, the Fox broadcast out of New York really pumps up the red color settings. Have not seen it on any other channel and the color controls on the big screen are all centered up. It was especially bad during the last Super Bowl. It may just be noticeable on a big screen, but I know it wasn't the TV. Like I said, pretty trivial.
The only complaint I have about DISH that I am not sure is specific to this company, is you only get the ability to hook up two boxes to the dish, or at least with the dish we got. The box we use is a JVC, I am not sure what brand the dish is.
christian
Yes, Star Wars has a cult following to rival most any other movie. George Lucas did not HAVE to hype the movie. He would have packed the theaters with the rabid fans for weeks and made millions anyway. But, that is not the point. You can never have enough fans. That is a cardinal rule of Hollywood and neither Lucas nor Spielberg are above it. The goal of all this is the same as when ID4, MIB, and the future WWW came or will come out. (WWW= Wild Wild West - funny how all the big-hype movies have acronymed titles)- to get kids interested in it. To get more and more fans. Guess what folks, how many people on this site stood in line and got tix? How many people plan on skipping work to see it? How many people plan on seeing it more than once in the theaters? How many people scoffed at Lliam Nieson's comment, "It's just a movie."? How many people would download a pirated copy at the first inklng of a chance? The hype worked.
Another thing, all this talk about pirated copies of the movie... wasn't this already discussed? I got the general impression that folks who replied to that thgouht the same thing, people will pirate stuff. There is nothing any law enforcement agency can do to stamp it out for the simple reason that the majority of people don't care if it gets stamped out or not. Why is there so much discussion about it again on this poll? Get over it folks, the money-makers will always bitch about people pirating their stuff, and the money-givers will always look for cheaper ways of getting the stuff.
Last thing. Someone said people either love or hate Star Wars. Is anyone else out there as tired as I am of this lame explaination of absolutely nothing? It's like saying, "people either breathe and live or don't and die." No s**t sherlock. True fans will not blindly love anything Lucas puts out. A true fan is Lucas' biggest fear. This is the person who will be, in fact, should be the most critical person of TPM. This is a person who has waited longer, and wanted this movie more than the average person. If it sucks, the true fan should feel the most let down of anyone.
to steal a saying, "Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong."
One big problem with FP98 is that for so many of the really cool things you can do with it, you need a server capable of handling front page extensions. If you are coding pages that will use those, FP98 is you only choice.
;-). Other than that, FP98 is great for designing some sites. However, when it comes to doing a large commercial site, I would take Dreamweaver over all! My only beef with it is that the FTP capabilities are somewhat weak. Still useful and it works most of the time, but it can have a hard time with really large uploads.
Also, contrary to popular belief, most servers are still UNIX based and do not support those extensions even though NT proved it was faster in fair and equal testing
Most WYSIWYG editors only produce redundant tags when people change things around on their site allot. A good case in point, if you constantly change font characteristics of a line or apply a style to a line, Dreamweaver will insert redundant tags. However, there are two very simple ways to correct this.
1. Be smart. When using styles or various different fonts and sizes, code the page with no font tags first and go back when you're done and "stylize" them.
2. Use DW's "Clean up HTML" feature. It clears out redundant and empty tags.
Most sites people see coded in WYSIWYG editors with bad HTML are coded by someone who learned on a WYSIWYG editor which I think any one would agree is a BAD thing. Everyone should learn by hand coding a few pages. For me, I use the clean up HTML function and then proofread the doc. I still save time, and proofing HTML takes much less time than coding and testing, coding and testing, coding and testing.
Not to mention, if you have to maintain a large site, hand coding sucks!
I am a web developer for a company in Fredericksburg. I would highly recommend Dreamweaver. Go Live is really only marginally better and costs a little more than Macromedia. Plus when paired with Macromedia Fireworks, DW is a very powerful tool.
One reason it is so good is that it is true WYSIWYG. I have rarely seen any browser show a page any differently than it is shown in the workspace. Als, you can customize Dreamweaver. All your object bars can be changed to add actions you use regularly. DW will also write standard simple java scripts for things like rollovers and whatnot. Fireworks (The Macromedia vector graphics tool) will also export rollovers and regular images to DW.
I would also recommend looking into Allair's Net Objects Fusion. You get a very comparable (though not as feature rich) HTML editor and you get the ability to program cold fusion apps which is a sweet deal. If you don't need CF capabilities, check out Home Site which is allaire's editor stand alone. Considerably cheaper than both the products you were asking about.
You can d/l demos of dreamweaver, Net Objects Fusion , and Home Site from each company's homesite which I have listed below. You can also check out Fireworks.
If you already use Illustrator for vector graphics. Let me sing you the web praises of Fireworks. It has the best image export utility out there, handles vector graphics as well as Illustrator, and you can get a Dreamweaver/Fireworks package for a sweet price. Not to mention, FW is very geared to WEB graphics whereas Illustrator runs the gammut and is somewhat lacking in creating web graphics with exporting images. Fireworks can strip images down to such a small size it is incredible.
Also, while Amaya has allot of potential, it is still pretty spartan compared to what DW and Fusion are capable of. I have played with fusion a bit and it is certainly powerful, however most of what it can do, DW does as well. Plus, I like the interface of DW better than any of them, very intuative and user friendly.
Hope that helped.
Macromedia
Allaire
"high school is only a mere pin point as to what life will hold for you." "the same people who you think is "popular", will be the very ones after school to be failures."
Man, hindsight is a great thing isn't it?
Look, I remember high school all to well. I outright hated every second I had to spend in that pit of materialism and BS. I really related to the Nada Surf song "Popular" because it reminded me of all those popular pricks I could not stand. Made me laugh about them. And yes, I was suicidal for a little bit. I hated it that much. It is known as teen angst! Everyone has it at some point between 12 and 21. Hell, John Hughes made a living off of it!
I generally agree with your points I quoted above, the only problem is, I and most people in this bad situation High School can create did not know or believe that when we were IN high school.
You are right, people have a tendency to whine, and I myself wonder how many of these posts are authentic and how many are just jumping on the touchy-feely bandwagon. However considering the forum we are in, it seems entirely believable that most of the people (me included) are or were geeks in high school. And geeks have always been and always will be seen as outcasts by jocks, preps, and all the other little cliques formed in and by the public school system.
Your post makes sense, and is refreshing in the midst of all the "I feel their pain" postings, but before you chalk everything up as right and wrong, black and white; remember hindsight is always 20/20.
profits from the concession stands??? you've got to be shitting me!
And it does not suprise me that theaters break even on the tickets. When one considers how much is spent not in making the movie, but in inflating the actors' and actress' already overflowing pocketbooks and wallets! Is it just me, or does it seem hard to believe that these people get millions for working anywhere between a few months months and a year (only for the big epic films though)? Sorry about the ranting here, but it is the same problem that's happening with sports... the big names are getting paid too much to have fun and the fans take it in the rear. I want someone to try to convince me that Keannu is a good enough actor to be worth the money he makes.
And agents don't count. They're even worse than the talent they push. They are like remora... they would die but for others talents to feed off.
Poorly written article. I think this is my favorite bogus claim:
"While a song in MP3 format can be downloaded in a few minutes, it would take hours or even days to download a movie using a typical telephone connection to the Web."
Yeah right. Who on a 56K d-up connection can download anything more than a brief Beavis & Butthead clip or the Looney Tunes intro song in "a few minutes?"
Beside that point, even on a T3, 1.1gig download (size of the Matrix files) is longer than an hour.
But something's missing here... I have not seen any comments to the tune of the mp3 argument... If a person did not have to plan on spending $20 to see a movie with a coke and some popcorn, perhaps this would not be so prevalent. We say CD prices are inflated... $3.00 for a MEDIUM coke!? I mean I know I can get a large for ONLY $.25 more, but come on. Is it any wonder people sneak in food of their own, or that there is a bootleg movie market and has been for a long time? Simple formula... if it's not free people will bootleg. If it's overpriced, people bootleg out of spite.
Because the government created the monopoly when it handed the whois db over to nsi a few years back. Since then, nsi has been pretty much raking in the dough and doing very little in the area of upgrading the whois servers (slow as anything quite often) and speeding up the registration process. Why is it that sometimes domains can be completed and in the db for restart within an hour and other times it can take up to a week? Don't even talk about the frustrations that can arrise if you have to fax in any modification template.
I think the government is too caught up wasting money and armaments in some little country in the east to worry about. Not to mention despite all their chest-beating about how angry they are with NSI, the government still won't do anything about them.