If anybody ever needed a reason to use a home-brew PC as a PVR as opposed to a TiVo, this is it.
It's not that hard to extract video from a TiVo. Certainly no harder than putting together a home-brew PC as a PVR. And if it's a DirecTV TiVo, the image quality is much better than you'll get from most cable systems, no matter how good your PC is.
It's easy to find things to kick yourself about. If you look at the last year -- or any year -- you can probably find 10 investments that would have made you really wealthy if only you'd known about them ahead of time, all of them shady or of questionable long-term value. That this particular one happens to be in a field that you care about just means you notice it, not that it's unusual.
Trouble is, you can also find 100 investments that looked just like the great bargain-basement opportunities, but went from low-valued to zero-valued during the same year. Nobody knows for sure which ones are which until after the fact. Some people are better at guessing than others; those people go on to be successful mutual fund managers, but even the successful ones get it wrong a lot of the time. They keep making money because they have their funds spread out over a lot of stocks, not because they have crystal balls in their closets.
Here's an interesting fact: Very few stock funds, even the successful ones, outperform market indexes over the long term. Lots of high-profile funds do really well for a year or five but then have a lousy year or two and lose all their gains relative to the market as a whole.
If you want to build wealth trading stock in public companies, history says the most successful strategy is to buy a wide, diverse portfolio. Keep buying into it over time, whether the market is up or down ("dollar cost averaging.") Then ignore the people who happen to get lucky on a particular stock pick -- because you know if you try to do that, you're much more likely to end up broke than rich.
I got an average of about 380 spams a day in December, of which all but 10 or so (total for the month) were caught by my spam filter. I attribute that spam count mostly to the fact that I've had the same personal E-mail address for a decade, since long before spam was any kind of problem. My address is already out there -- no amount of caution today will erase my 1994 Usenet postings from the archives.
Ironically, that makes me less paranoid about posting my address on web pages or Usenet -- since my address is probably already on just about every list-of-million-addresses CD out there, there's no real additional harm in posting it again. As long as my spam filter stays as effective as it is, I'm in okay shape.
That said, for the last 5 years or so, I've been running a mail server that lets me invent unique aliases whenever I feel like it. Every time I register at a web site I use a different alias just to see who's selling their registration data to spammers. And I have to say, almost none of the spam I get comes to those aliases. It all comes to the addresses I used for Usenet or that I published on my various web pages over the years. I'm actually a bit surprised by that; I expected my registration information to be sold by a lot more web sites than it has been.
I usually participate in polls when someone calls, because I want to see my point of view reflected in the results -- to the extent that the poll is going to influence someone's policy somewhere, I'd rather have them do something closer to what I want.
The trouble is, it seems like many of the polls I'm hit with don't really account for someone as weird as me.
For example, a couple months ago I got a call from someone doing a poll on consumer electronics and home automation. Great, I thought, that's right up my alley. Unfortunately, a lot of the questions were along the lines of, "Do you plan to purchase a computer capable of recording TV shows in the next six months?" The honest answer is, "Not unless one of the two I already own breaks." So I have to decide on the spot how I want to misrepresent myself: do I answer honestly and underrepresent my interest in such things, or lie and overrepresent my interest in purchasing such a thing? (I answered "no" to that one.)
Political polls aren't quite as bad in that regard, but they also usually fail to include reasonable options for someone with, say, a vehemently pro-personal-freedom point of view, so you're stuck with five or ten seconds to figure out which of the unsuitable multiple choices will skew the poll closest to what you'd like to see.
Now, obviously in most cases this is due to poor poll design, but in my experience most polls aren't all that well designed. So if I decide to switch off my landline at some point, I don't think I'll lose much sleep over pollsters' inability to get highly inaccurate poll results out of me.
Media Center is awesome. I've been using it (and its predecessor, Media Jukebox) for years, and I had to suppress a big shrug when someone tried to show me how great iTunes' library and playlist management was. Been there, done more than that.
On the other hand, even a rabid Media Center fan like me has to admit that nothing else comes close to the iTunes+iTMS combination for buying music online.
Next week on Battlestar Galactica: Commander Adama finally gets a full night's sleep! Adama like you've never seen him before -- he's wide awake and ready for action!
People want a calendar in their email client, and that's that.
Not me! I want email reading in my email client. What does a calendar app have to do with email? The two should be able to talk to one another, sure, but that's easily done with MIME types and existing mail-sending protocols.
What's gained by having both in the same executable?
Folding calendar functionality into Thunderbird would seem to go against the whole point of Thunderbird/Firebird, which was to unfold unrelated pieces of functionality from the monolithic Mozilla application.
Vote absentee. Then you know there's a paper record, since you punched the card yourself. (Plus you have all the time you need to check for hanging chad.)
I've voted in every election in the last fifteen years and have yet to wait in line at a polling place.
Bear in mind that most of Microsoft's installed base is still Windows 95/98/ME.
Is that really true? Judging by the web logs from my employer's site, it looks like about 65% of our users are on NT/2K/XP. Our customers are all in the construction industry, not the tech industry, so they aren't likely to be early adopters.
If you're talking MS's home users, then that's pretty plausible, but home users aren't the majority of Microsoft's installed base.
I'd be interested to see some numbers, though, if you have them -- I may well be wrong.
people turn their machine off, and you're stuck waiting for a chunk in the middle
Generally it's a good idea to run a seed for your files if you're running a tracker. That way everyone will always have at least one source for the file -- i.e., you fall back to roughly the download performance level you'd have without BitTorrent, with people downloading from your server.
If you just run a tracker and don't provide an always-on source for the actual underlying files, then yeah, BitTorrent will pretty much suck for infrequently-accessed files.
And until enough people use it, it's still wrong. English changes, but it doesn't change just because a few people can't be bothered to crack open a dictionary. Otherwise "lose" and "loose" would be synonyms, because a hell of a lot more people mistake those than choose a bogus pluralization of "virus."
And since you're clearly an authority on the history of English, you're no doubt already aware that the trend over at least the last century has been toward stricter disciplines of spelling and grammar, not looser. Thanks to mass publication, we're no longer in the era of Andrew Jackson's "It's a damn poor mind that can think of only one way to spell a word!"
The rules change over time, it's true, but that doesn't mean there aren't any rules.
This will probably get modded down as flamebait, but someone has to say it: the plural of "virus" is "viruses." It is not "virii" because that isn't an actual English word.
Agreed. Most of the TV I watch these days is in the company of a group of friends who come over every Sunday to eat dinner and watch the week's shows. Sometimes I'll watch one or two other things during the week (if it's something that appeals to me but not to most of the others) but for the most part, TV watching is a social activity for me.
When I'm home by myself and want to relax, I reach for my PS2 controller a lot more reflexively than my TiVo remote.
Ironically, though, I really don't care much for most multiplayer games, especially the massively-multiplayer ones -- I like to immerse myself in a game and there are usually too many jerks playing online games who seem intent on ruining the experience for the other players (cheating, spewing garbage text messages, etc.)
Okay, so the redvsblue site has BT links for the most recent few episodes, which is great -- now does anyone have BT links for the trailer and early episodes, for those of us who've never seen any of it?
Coding smartlist: All songs except the ones on my Distracting playlist
Dance Practice smartlist: All songs between 80 and 105 beats per minute on my Waltzes playlist but not on the Inconsistent Tempo playlist.
Relaxing Dinner smartlist: All jazz songs on my Music For Dinner Parties playlist but not on the Has Lyrics playlist.
Believe me or don't, I don't care, but those are three representative examples of my set of smartlists. I use all three frequently, and none of them would be easy to do in iTunes.
If iTunes does it for you, great! But your unrealistic scenarios are my everyday listening habits.
The particular app I'm talking about is (in my opinion) about as easy to use as iTunes. The extra features don't get in the way if you don't want to use them -- everything has a reasonable default -- but they're there if you do. Dragging tracks to playlists and all the other usual GUI stuff is there.
I do agree that there is no single "best choice" for everyone. For some people, WinAmp is probably better than anything else. But I rather suspect most people who use iTunes aren't even aware of some of the alternatives, so aren't in any position to know whether or not it's the best thing for their needs.
Make me a smartlist that says, "All songs from 1950 to 1958 except the ones on my Melancholy Love Songs playlist." Or how about, "All the rock tracks from my Melancholy Love Songs playlist that are less than 80 beats per minute."
You can't.
It's not an issue of metadata. It's an issue of the software not having the flexibility to deal with my common use cases. I've entered tons of metadata, some of which iTunes can't even represent in any sane way due to its lack of customizable fields (e.g. which language song's lyrics are in). And I use the "playlist membership as a search criterion" feature of Media Center all over the place.
No, the original article is ignoring that difference. It didn't say iTunes was "the best free choice," just "the best choice." For those of us who value the hours it would take to work around the missing features in iTunes (manually piecing together playlists or writing external apps to auto-generate them), the $40 choice is in fact less expensive than the $0 one. I'm not one of those people who'll put in a week's worth of extra effort to save myself an hour's worth of money.
If the article had said iTunes is the best free choice, fair enough. But it said "the best choice," which isn't true.
Besides, $40 is less than the cost of a new-release video game, and I've certainly gotten far, far more hours of enjoyment out of my jukebox app than any single game. $40 is worth less to me than the time it would constantly take me to work around iTunes' limitations -- money isn't the only resource that a piece of software can cost.
Besides, iPod is growing market share, and iTunes will be the best choice for windows users who own it.
Can't disagree with the first point, but the second? Not really. There's at least one other jukebox app that has a substantially better feature set than iTunes and is just as easy to use. I tried iTunes for a day and got frustrated with its limitations. Other than purchasing the occasional track from the iTunes Store, I can't see myself firing it up again. (And no, I'm not one of those people who had stability problems; it worked just fine for me.)
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It's not that hard to extract video from a TiVo. Certainly no harder than putting together a home-brew PC as a PVR. And if it's a DirecTV TiVo, the image quality is much better than you'll get from most cable systems, no matter how good your PC is.
Who's saying that? Where? I haven't seen any liberals saying that.
Trouble is, you can also find 100 investments that looked just like the great bargain-basement opportunities, but went from low-valued to zero-valued during the same year. Nobody knows for sure which ones are which until after the fact. Some people are better at guessing than others; those people go on to be successful mutual fund managers, but even the successful ones get it wrong a lot of the time. They keep making money because they have their funds spread out over a lot of stocks, not because they have crystal balls in their closets.
Here's an interesting fact: Very few stock funds, even the successful ones, outperform market indexes over the long term. Lots of high-profile funds do really well for a year or five but then have a lousy year or two and lose all their gains relative to the market as a whole.
If you want to build wealth trading stock in public companies, history says the most successful strategy is to buy a wide, diverse portfolio. Keep buying into it over time, whether the market is up or down ("dollar cost averaging.") Then ignore the people who happen to get lucky on a particular stock pick -- because you know if you try to do that, you're much more likely to end up broke than rich.
Ironically, that makes me less paranoid about posting my address on web pages or Usenet -- since my address is probably already on just about every list-of-million-addresses CD out there, there's no real additional harm in posting it again. As long as my spam filter stays as effective as it is, I'm in okay shape.
That said, for the last 5 years or so, I've been running a mail server that lets me invent unique aliases whenever I feel like it. Every time I register at a web site I use a different alias just to see who's selling their registration data to spammers. And I have to say, almost none of the spam I get comes to those aliases. It all comes to the addresses I used for Usenet or that I published on my various web pages over the years. I'm actually a bit surprised by that; I expected my registration information to be sold by a lot more web sites than it has been.
The trouble is, it seems like many of the polls I'm hit with don't really account for someone as weird as me.
For example, a couple months ago I got a call from someone doing a poll on consumer electronics and home automation. Great, I thought, that's right up my alley. Unfortunately, a lot of the questions were along the lines of, "Do you plan to purchase a computer capable of recording TV shows in the next six months?" The honest answer is, "Not unless one of the two I already own breaks." So I have to decide on the spot how I want to misrepresent myself: do I answer honestly and underrepresent my interest in such things, or lie and overrepresent my interest in purchasing such a thing? (I answered "no" to that one.)
Political polls aren't quite as bad in that regard, but they also usually fail to include reasonable options for someone with, say, a vehemently pro-personal-freedom point of view, so you're stuck with five or ten seconds to figure out which of the unsuitable multiple choices will skew the poll closest to what you'd like to see.
Now, obviously in most cases this is due to poor poll design, but in my experience most polls aren't all that well designed. So if I decide to switch off my landline at some point, I don't think I'll lose much sleep over pollsters' inability to get highly inaccurate poll results out of me.
On the other hand, even a rabid Media Center fan like me has to admit that nothing else comes close to the iTunes+iTMS combination for buying music online.
But since I've switched to only downloading free music that's not too big an issue for me.
Next week on Battlestar Galactica: Commander Adama finally gets a full night's sleep! Adama like you've never seen him before -- he's wide awake and ready for action!
Not me! I want email reading in my email client. What does a calendar app have to do with email? The two should be able to talk to one another, sure, but that's easily done with MIME types and existing mail-sending protocols.
What's gained by having both in the same executable?
Folding calendar functionality into Thunderbird would seem to go against the whole point of Thunderbird/Firebird, which was to unfold unrelated pieces of functionality from the monolithic Mozilla application.
Of course they don't. Everyone knows Texans drive pickup trucks, not wimpy little Japanese passenger cars.
I've voted in every election in the last fifteen years and have yet to wait in line at a polling place.
Is that really true? Judging by the web logs from my employer's site, it looks like about 65% of our users are on NT/2K/XP. Our customers are all in the construction industry, not the tech industry, so they aren't likely to be early adopters.
If you're talking MS's home users, then that's pretty plausible, but home users aren't the majority of Microsoft's installed base.
I'd be interested to see some numbers, though, if you have them -- I may well be wrong.
Generally it's a good idea to run a seed for your files if you're running a tracker. That way everyone will always have at least one source for the file -- i.e., you fall back to roughly the download performance level you'd have without BitTorrent, with people downloading from your server.
If you just run a tracker and don't provide an always-on source for the actual underlying files, then yeah, BitTorrent will pretty much suck for infrequently-accessed files.
And since you're clearly an authority on the history of English, you're no doubt already aware that the trend over at least the last century has been toward stricter disciplines of spelling and grammar, not looser. Thanks to mass publication, we're no longer in the era of Andrew Jackson's "It's a damn poor mind that can think of only one way to spell a word!"
The rules change over time, it's true, but that doesn't mean there aren't any rules.
Deal with it.
This will probably get modded down as flamebait, but someone has to say it: the plural of "virus" is "viruses." It is not "virii" because that isn't an actual English word.
Either that, or it would have been an explosion so big that it would have blown two letters clear off the word "devastate." Now that's a big boom.
When I'm home by myself and want to relax, I reach for my PS2 controller a lot more reflexively than my TiVo remote.
Ironically, though, I really don't care much for most multiplayer games, especially the massively-multiplayer ones -- I like to immerse myself in a game and there are usually too many jerks playing online games who seem intent on ruining the experience for the other players (cheating, spewing garbage text messages, etc.)
Okay, so the redvsblue site has BT links for the most recent few episodes, which is great -- now does anyone have BT links for the trailer and early episodes, for those of us who've never seen any of it?
If they don't, after all, why do parents give their kids bedrooms with windowless doors?
Believe me or don't, I don't care, but those are three representative examples of my set of smartlists. I use all three frequently, and none of them would be easy to do in iTunes.
If iTunes does it for you, great! But your unrealistic scenarios are my everyday listening habits.
Try following the link in my message. If the list there is too vague, I'm afraid I can't help you.
I do agree that there is no single "best choice" for everyone. For some people, WinAmp is probably better than anything else. But I rather suspect most people who use iTunes aren't even aware of some of the alternatives, so aren't in any position to know whether or not it's the best thing for their needs.
Make me a smartlist that says, "All songs from 1950 to 1958 except the ones on my Melancholy Love Songs playlist." Or how about, "All the rock tracks from my Melancholy Love Songs playlist that are less than 80 beats per minute."
You can't.
It's not an issue of metadata. It's an issue of the software not having the flexibility to deal with my common use cases. I've entered tons of metadata, some of which iTunes can't even represent in any sane way due to its lack of customizable fields (e.g. which language song's lyrics are in). And I use the "playlist membership as a search criterion" feature of Media Center all over the place.
No, the original article is ignoring that difference. It didn't say iTunes was "the best free choice," just "the best choice." For those of us who value the hours it would take to work around the missing features in iTunes (manually piecing together playlists or writing external apps to auto-generate them), the $40 choice is in fact less expensive than the $0 one. I'm not one of those people who'll put in a week's worth of extra effort to save myself an hour's worth of money.
Besides, $40 is less than the cost of a new-release video game, and I've certainly gotten far, far more hours of enjoyment out of my jukebox app than any single game. $40 is worth less to me than the time it would constantly take me to work around iTunes' limitations -- money isn't the only resource that a piece of software can cost.
Can't disagree with the first point, but the second? Not really. There's at least one other jukebox app that has a substantially better feature set than iTunes and is just as easy to use. I tried iTunes for a day and got frustrated with its limitations. Other than purchasing the occasional track from the iTunes Store, I can't see myself firing it up again. (And no, I'm not one of those people who had stability problems; it worked just fine for me.)