All annoyances pale compared to Customer "Service"
on
PC Annoyances
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· Score: 1
I've spent the ENTIRE DAY on the telephone trying to get HP to service my laptop. Calls back and forth to HP's various telephone numbers - all of which lead me speak to unfailingly polite, but utterly clueless, people in Bangalore, India.
Re:I DON'T CARE -- I BUY MUSIC LATELY
on
Kazaa-lite Shut Down
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I've found that the time it takes to get good (192kbps+) versions of songs off of a complete album is much longer and expensive than simply shelling out 10 bucks for the CD at a music store.
That's fine, assuming that everything you want is available for sale. My wife and I have several thousand CDs and an even larger number of LPs (remember those?).You'd be amazed at how many things that were issued on vinyl have never re-appeared on CD.
During the "Golden Age" of file sharing we were in that group of people who were uploading far more tracks than we ever downloaded. And the vast majority of our uploads were tracks we had ripped from vinyl and cleaned up. Tracks like obscure Siouxsie Sioux EPs and b-sides. We were the first people to rip the "Will Powers" album.
It's fine if you don't know what I'm talking about and it's also fine if you don't care. But the point is that there were a lot of people who wanted these tracks and the no way to get them. What are they supposed to do? For instance, it's the Xmas season. Labels release special tracks to radio stations - Warner Brothers' collection used to be called "Winter Warnerland" and had some really bizzare stuff. Fans want every track and every track simply isn't for sale.
Your "close examination" of my points was not even close to scientific.
No, but it wasn't pulled out of my ass either. I've done the tests, and anyone with the equipment can repeat it. All you need is a matched pair of monitors that can handle both NTSC and HD, a recent generation HD receiver that can output HD and SD at the same time and some viewers.
Try again with other test subjects, sitting 12 feet away, watching a moving sequence.
12 feet from a 15" image? That's just silly. You're trying to find some extreme example to justify your unfounded opinion. I've set up the test...with moving material...and this is my result. You do the test and report back with your own results.
If you don't tell them there's a difference, I'm betting noone will notice or care on a 15" screen.
I didn't have a sign identifying one as "HD" and the other as "SD". Just the same image on two monitors. And people who had no idea what was going on independently volunteered that one of them looked better than the other.
Not exactly. The human eye sees moving images in less detail than it sees still images.
Agreed. I wasn't giving a complete example, just countering an often-repeated (but rarely tested) canard. I have set up two equal-sized, carefuly matched, 4:3 15" monitors and fed an HD signal to one and a standard definition down-conversion of the HD signal to the other, and untrained observers consistently identified the HD source. And even more to the point, others offered unprompted opinions that one of the monitors looked a lot better than the other.
A lot of the things that "everyone knows" don't bear close examination. The belief that HD is only for huge screens is one of them.
Not entirely true. If you have an incredibly large screen it will be very easily noticable, but most people will still have relatively small TVs where the difference is extremely subtle, even if the resolution is much higher.
Respectfully, I disagree. I have a very large TV, true (90" wide projection system). But the difference is clear on the VGA monitor I use for preview and cueing.
Any SVGA or better monitor can display HD depending on the source (one might need a component to VGA transcoder). Conduct a simple experiment: scan something at high res. Make two scaled down versions, one at 640 x 480 (roughly equal to 480P) and one at 1280 x 1024 (again, very roughly equal 1080i). Display each on your PC at native res. On any monitor 15" and above, the difference hardly "subtle". A little experimentation goes a long way to discovering the truth.
I'm not saying there's no difference, or that there's no market for it, but since the difference is so subtle for most people, it will be a luxury item that not many will buy for a long time. Just think about how long VHS remained the standard for home movies, even though beta was available with much higher quality.
The failure of Beta had more to do with Sony's squeemishness and refusal to allow porn titles to be issued on the format. That, and the fact that VHS had 2 hour tapes when Beta was limited to 1. And lastly, Sony chose mediocre licencing partners like Sanyo, diluting the market with crappy Beta machines. Beta didn't become the quality choice until the battle was already lost. Trust me on this...I owned a VCR back in 1979, so I've seen the whole battle.
I'd rather not be inspecting the pores on Keanu's nose when I want to watch the Matrix.
I have The Matrix in HD (from Dish Networks via the Dish 5000, the 8VSB modulator and the Panasonic tuner/D-VHS combo)...and I assure you that I'm not closely inspecting Keanu's nose. On the other hand, I am familiar with every crease in Trinity's leather catsuit.
The only problem with watching movies in HD is that you cannot watch a DVD immediately afterwards. Doing so will make your eyes hurt from the strain. The difference is not subtle - my wife and I watched a movie in HD, then I showed her a bit of one of her favorite DVDs and she asked "What happened to the screen?" Nothing happened at all - it was just the difference between 480 x 720 and 1080 x 1920. Even the very best DVD will look sick compared to DVD.
First out of the door is the Israeli employment agency, which will replace 550 out of 700 users with OpenOffice. The contract represents a hardware win for IBM. Some 150 staff will stay on Microsoft Office.
150 staff to remain on MS Office? Can you say "manager"?
These people have such an bizzare facility with language that it would make Orwell's Big Brother blush. "Innovation" is NewSpeak for thwarting innovation, and "competition" means eliminating all competitors.
"When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less" - Humpty Dumpty - Through the Looking Glass
I support a lot of computers for individuals and their families. Inevitably, I get the parents asking me for something to monitor their kid's internet usage. I hate doing this for several reasons: First, because it make me a shit in the eyes of the kids. Second, because it only will will result in sneaky kids. And third, because any system requires attention (reading logs, etc) and the type of parent who wants to see exactly what their kids are looking at are always both less technically knowledgable than their kids and too lazy to put in the effort needed.
From what I've seen, it's sexually hung-up "soccer Mom's" worried that their litte soccer players are looking at "dirty pictures". A 14 year old boy who isn't interested in that is the one I'd worry about.
When tablets first became viable, GO Corporation came up with a beautiful operating system for them - PenPoint. And Microsoft killed them. Crushed them like a bug.
PenPoint avoided most of the things that people are complaining about. For a start, PenPoint did not have a menuing interface. Menus don't work in a tablet structure. It was entirely gestural. The paradigm was a "page". The user started with a blank page, and started writing. If the user started writing letters, it would start converting that to text. Deletion was by crossing text out. Insertion was with the proofreader's "reverse carat" checkmark. The user would get a new blank page by "flicking". p>
Microsoft saw that they had to kill it for one reason - PenPoint didn't use the OS/Applications model. If you started writing letters, text tools would be available. If you drew a square, graphing tools would appear, etc. There was no concept of "open a program, browse for a file, load the file into the application". All pages were available, and the tools needed were connected to the pages. Important pages could be marked with tabs.
Microsoft announced a terrible product called "Pen for Windows". It was credible enough (because it was from Microsoft) to kill PenPoint in the market. But it was also terrible (because it was a 1.0 product from Microsoft) and would up killing the entire Tablet catagory.
Don't assume tablets are awful because Microsoft makes tablets awful. Tablets require a totally different way of thinking about things, and PenPoint was (IMO) the last real re-thinking of the computer interface (if you don't believe me, read up on it.)
I fly a couple of times a month and I am always "randomly selected". Every single time. And the reason is that I fly:
At the last minute.
Paying cash.
One way
This is the profile. Everyone knows this is the profile. Which is why the 9/11 highjackers flew:
With tickets bought months before.
Bought on credit cards.
Round trip.
...and this is the really nasty bit...First Class. Even fllowing the airlines current policy, there is no way the 9/11 highjackers would be subject to extra searches currently. Because they don't fit the "highjacker profile".
A sense of peace? Please share how you arrived there.
When I assumed that "most" people were reasonably intelligent, I would get frustrated, angry and depressed at how stupid the "average" person could be. Now it no longer bothers me. Oh, of course individual acts of stupidity can be annoying, but the general stupidity of the masses is no longer unexpected, and therefore no longer frustrating.
That little realization is really scary to me. I don't FEEL above average. Actually I feel I could be a hell of a lot smarter. My IQ is above 150, and I'm well educated. (It's not bragging from an "anonymous handle" is it?) Yet I feel dumb often.
"Feeling dumb" is a sign of intelligence. Actual dumb people usually feel they are smarter than they are. Limbaugh listeners, for instance, feel they are more well-informed about news than average. When tested, they prove to be less well-informed than average.
Note: I had originally typed "median", and replaced it with "mean". I knew that it was a Gaussian distribution and that the mean and median in this case were the same. But I also knew that, this being Slashdot, there would be a dozen people to "correct" me no matter which one I used.
The Taipei 101 has a pendulum-style damper, I think. I wonder how it's controlled if its motion is detected as contributing to oscillation rather than dampening it?
Now there's a system that you want reliable. I wonder what operating system is running the mass damper control system?
I use mine for everything that the TiVo can do, plus a lot of the stuff that you can hack the TiVo to do.
Not really. Besides all the software capabilities the TiVo has that do no exist with the All-In-Wonder (the weak point is the quality of the guide data available). The main difference is in the quality of the MPEG encoding, especially in the case of the DirecTivo. When I record using DirecTivo, I'm getting the material already compressed by DirecTV, using their super high-end MPEG2 compressers at the head-end. And, and possibly even more important, I'm not un-compressing and re-compressing the material, like you are if you have a DirecTV receiver and a All-In-Wonder. Double MPEG sucks.
Every year I pull out the old Amiga 1000, find the Kickstart and Workbench floppies, plug in the "Live" board and SuperGen and boot up Elan's "Invision" software. Hard to believe, but even with all the video digitizers and processing power available, I've not found a video processing tool as cool. And the old Amiga still works. Built like a fricken tank!
Re:PVRs are already making TV unrecognizable
on
TV's Tipping Point
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· Score: 3, Informative
So very true. I got a pair of DirecTivos and upgraded both of them, and my wife hasn't watched anything in real time since. She watches what I call the "Vickie Channel", a channel that has programs that would never appear on the same channel, all of which match her tastes. For instance, she put all the actors from the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy in her "Wish List" (except Christopher Lee who has been in hundreds of films). So her Tivo has delivered her a number of great films from New Zealand and Australia starring Miranda Otto.
Sorry I got it wrong. But I do have a problem with PAL DVDs - the films are shot at 24 frames per second. While NTSC DVDs are converted to 30 frames per second by repeating frames (leading to judder), PAL films are just speed up to 25 frames per second to match the PAL frame rate. Normally, this is not too bothersome, but it really screws up music, making it sharp. The extra resolution is not worth having the music wrong.
It's because DVD prices vary to suit local economic conditions. Look at a map of the DVD regions, and you'll see that it's gerrymandered. Europe and South Africa are one price, while the poor parts of Africa, India and the former Soviet Union are another, Australia and South America are another, Southeast Asia is one, China is it's own region. It's all about money. DVDs intended for the Indian market are considerably cheaper than those coded Region 3 for Australia, even though they are both PAL.
This of course begs the question: if they can sell DVDs profitably in India for the equivilant for $6 US, why are we paying $29 for the same thing.
P.S. Yes, I know all that crap about Adam Smith and his invisible hands. Bite me.
Slashdot Mirror
I've spent the ENTIRE DAY on the telephone trying to get HP to service my laptop. Calls back and forth to HP's various telephone numbers - all of which lead me speak to unfailingly polite, but utterly clueless, people in Bangalore, India.
That's fine, assuming that everything you want is available for sale. My wife and I have several thousand CDs and an even larger number of LPs (remember those?).You'd be amazed at how many things that were issued on vinyl have never re-appeared on CD.
During the "Golden Age" of file sharing we were in that group of people who were uploading far more tracks than we ever downloaded. And the vast majority of our uploads were tracks we had ripped from vinyl and cleaned up. Tracks like obscure Siouxsie Sioux EPs and b-sides. We were the first people to rip the "Will Powers" album.
It's fine if you don't know what I'm talking about and it's also fine if you don't care. But the point is that there were a lot of people who wanted these tracks and the no way to get them. What are they supposed to do? For instance, it's the Xmas season. Labels release special tracks to radio stations - Warner Brothers' collection used to be called "Winter Warnerland" and had some really bizzare stuff. Fans want every track and every track simply isn't for sale.
I just want to be the guy on the set in charge of applying her ass-polish every morning.
No, but it wasn't pulled out of my ass either. I've done the tests, and anyone with the equipment can repeat it. All you need is a matched pair of monitors that can handle both NTSC and HD, a recent generation HD receiver that can output HD and SD at the same time and some viewers.
12 feet from a 15" image? That's just silly. You're trying to find some extreme example to justify your unfounded opinion. I've set up the test...with moving material...and this is my result. You do the test and report back with your own results.
I didn't have a sign identifying one as "HD" and the other as "SD". Just the same image on two monitors. And people who had no idea what was going on independently volunteered that one of them looked better than the other.
Agreed. I wasn't giving a complete example, just countering an often-repeated (but rarely tested) canard. I have set up two equal-sized, carefuly matched, 4:3 15" monitors and fed an HD signal to one and a standard definition down-conversion of the HD signal to the other, and untrained observers consistently identified the HD source. And even more to the point, others offered unprompted opinions that one of the monitors looked a lot better than the other.
A lot of the things that "everyone knows" don't bear close examination. The belief that HD is only for huge screens is one of them.
Respectfully, I disagree. I have a very large TV, true (90" wide projection system). But the difference is clear on the VGA monitor I use for preview and cueing.
Any SVGA or better monitor can display HD depending on the source (one might need a component to VGA transcoder). Conduct a simple experiment: scan something at high res. Make two scaled down versions, one at 640 x 480 (roughly equal to 480P) and one at 1280 x 1024 (again, very roughly equal 1080i). Display each on your PC at native res. On any monitor 15" and above, the difference hardly "subtle". A little experimentation goes a long way to discovering the truth.
The failure of Beta had more to do with Sony's squeemishness and refusal to allow porn titles to be issued on the format. That, and the fact that VHS had 2 hour tapes when Beta was limited to 1. And lastly, Sony chose mediocre licencing partners like Sanyo, diluting the market with crappy Beta machines. Beta didn't become the quality choice until the battle was already lost. Trust me on this...I owned a VCR back in 1979, so I've seen the whole battle.My mistake...I'm a little weak on the finer points of fetishware. Dan Farmer I ain't.
I have The Matrix in HD (from Dish Networks via the Dish 5000, the 8VSB modulator and the Panasonic tuner/D-VHS combo)...and I assure you that I'm not closely inspecting Keanu's nose. On the other hand, I am familiar with every crease in Trinity's leather catsuit.
The only problem with watching movies in HD is that you cannot watch a DVD immediately afterwards. Doing so will make your eyes hurt from the strain. The difference is not subtle - my wife and I watched a movie in HD, then I showed her a bit of one of her favorite DVDs and she asked "What happened to the screen?" Nothing happened at all - it was just the difference between 480 x 720 and 1080 x 1920. Even the very best DVD will look sick compared to DVD.
150 staff to remain on MS Office? Can you say "manager"?
These people have such an bizzare facility with language that it would make Orwell's Big Brother blush. "Innovation" is NewSpeak for thwarting innovation, and "competition" means eliminating all competitors.
"When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less" - Humpty Dumpty - Through the Looking Glass
I support a lot of computers for individuals and their families. Inevitably, I get the parents asking me for something to monitor their kid's internet usage. I hate doing this for several reasons: First, because it make me a shit in the eyes of the kids. Second, because it only will will result in sneaky kids. And third, because any system requires attention (reading logs, etc) and the type of parent who wants to see exactly what their kids are looking at are always both less technically knowledgable than their kids and too lazy to put in the effort needed.
From what I've seen, it's sexually hung-up "soccer Mom's" worried that their litte soccer players are looking at "dirty pictures". A 14 year old boy who isn't interested in that is the one I'd worry about.
Er...that was supposed to be "locate". Brevity may be the soul of wit, but it hasn't done much for my spelling.
...it sre will make it easy to local land mines!
When tablets first became viable, GO Corporation came up with a beautiful operating system for them - PenPoint. And Microsoft killed them. Crushed them like a bug.
PenPoint avoided most of the things that people are complaining about. For a start, PenPoint did not have a menuing interface. Menus don't work in a tablet structure. It was entirely gestural. The paradigm was a "page". The user started with a blank page, and started writing. If the user started writing letters, it would start converting that to text. Deletion was by crossing text out. Insertion was with the proofreader's "reverse carat" checkmark. The user would get a new blank page by "flicking". p>
Microsoft saw that they had to kill it for one reason - PenPoint didn't use the OS/Applications model. If you started writing letters, text tools would be available. If you drew a square, graphing tools would appear, etc. There was no concept of "open a program, browse for a file, load the file into the application". All pages were available, and the tools needed were connected to the pages. Important pages could be marked with tabs.
Microsoft announced a terrible product called "Pen for Windows". It was credible enough (because it was from Microsoft) to kill PenPoint in the market. But it was also terrible (because it was a 1.0 product from Microsoft) and would up killing the entire Tablet catagory.
Don't assume tablets are awful because Microsoft makes tablets awful. Tablets require a totally different way of thinking about things, and PenPoint was (IMO) the last real re-thinking of the computer interface (if you don't believe me, read up on it.)
Yeah, I have no choice. I have no way of knowing when I'll have to travel, I have no credit cards and I don't know when I'll return (freelance geek).
What's so dumb is that any reasonably bright person could get knives aboard a plane.
I fly a couple of times a month and I am always "randomly selected". Every single time. And the reason is that I fly:
This is the profile. Everyone knows this is the profile. Which is why the 9/11 highjackers flew:
...and this is the really nasty bit...First Class. Even fllowing the airlines current policy, there is no way the 9/11 highjackers would be subject to extra searches currently. Because they don't fit the "highjacker profile".
When I assumed that "most" people were reasonably intelligent, I would get frustrated, angry and depressed at how stupid the "average" person could be. Now it no longer bothers me. Oh, of course individual acts of stupidity can be annoying, but the general stupidity of the masses is no longer unexpected, and therefore no longer frustrating.
"Feeling dumb" is a sign of intelligence. Actual dumb people usually feel they are smarter than they are. Limbaugh listeners, for instance, feel they are more well-informed about news than average. When tested, they prove to be less well-informed than average.
Note: I had originally typed "median", and replaced it with "mean". I knew that it was a Gaussian distribution and that the mean and median in this case were the same. But I also knew that, this being Slashdot, there would be a dozen people to "correct" me no matter which one I used.
A few years ago I had a rather nasty realization; as 100 is the mean IQ, that means fully one half of the population has an IQ below 100.
This realization has brought me peace. I'm no longer frustrated at the stupidity of the "average" person...they just can't help it.
Now there's a system that you want reliable. I wonder what operating system is running the mass damper control system?
Not really. Besides all the software capabilities the TiVo has that do no exist with the All-In-Wonder (the weak point is the quality of the guide data available). The main difference is in the quality of the MPEG encoding, especially in the case of the DirecTivo. When I record using DirecTivo, I'm getting the material already compressed by DirecTV, using their super high-end MPEG2 compressers at the head-end. And, and possibly even more important, I'm not un-compressing and re-compressing the material, like you are if you have a DirecTV receiver and a All-In-Wonder. Double MPEG sucks.
Every year I pull out the old Amiga 1000, find the Kickstart and Workbench floppies, plug in the "Live" board and SuperGen and boot up Elan's "Invision" software. Hard to believe, but even with all the video digitizers and processing power available, I've not found a video processing tool as cool. And the old Amiga still works. Built like a fricken tank!
So very true. I got a pair of DirecTivos and upgraded both of them, and my wife hasn't watched anything in real time since. She watches what I call the "Vickie Channel", a channel that has programs that would never appear on the same channel, all of which match her tastes. For instance, she put all the actors from the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy in her "Wish List" (except Christopher Lee who has been in hundreds of films). So her Tivo has delivered her a number of great films from New Zealand and Australia starring Miranda Otto.
Sorry I got it wrong. But I do have a problem with PAL DVDs - the films are shot at 24 frames per second. While NTSC DVDs are converted to 30 frames per second by repeating frames (leading to judder), PAL films are just speed up to 25 frames per second to match the PAL frame rate. Normally, this is not too bothersome, but it really screws up music, making it sharp. The extra resolution is not worth having the music wrong.
8 AM AKA Very, very, very late at night.
It's because DVD prices vary to suit local economic conditions. Look at a map of the DVD regions, and you'll see that it's gerrymandered. Europe and South Africa are one price, while the poor parts of Africa, India and the former Soviet Union are another, Australia and South America are another, Southeast Asia is one, China is it's own region. It's all about money. DVDs intended for the Indian market are considerably cheaper than those coded Region 3 for Australia, even though they are both PAL.
This of course begs the question: if they can sell DVDs profitably in India for the equivilant for $6 US, why are we paying $29 for the same thing.
P.S. Yes, I know all that crap about Adam Smith and his invisible hands. Bite me.