There's an intrinsic worth to all the maps, the (often quite bad) art, the stories and the histories.
This is an interesting point. I dunno if it's what you're referring to, but one thing I hate about modern RPGs is that the books are just so ridiculously gaudy! Every single page will be printed in four-color process. Every single text subhead will be adorned with all these twisty dragons and swords and silly-looking gems. And then all the pictures of the monsters are these overblown full-color computer paintings -- it's too much! I can't imagine reading 687 pages of a book with such attrocious design. Give me an Erol Otus pen and ink drawing over today's RPG art any day.
for those of us stuck with regular DVD. I imagine studios will use the single layer at 4.7 gigs for dvd and the dual layer at 30 gigs for HD-DVD, meaning we'll get lousy picture. As an anime nerd, several of my favorite movies and shows got release on dvd-5 and are almost unwatchable (Nadesico being the worse, what with all the red).
Not necessarily. Early DVD-5 movies often look like crap, but the authoring houses have learned since then, the equipment has improved, and the compression is generally better overall. Some of those DVD-5 movies were only filled up to 3.6GB capacity, also -- again, the people who made them had bought the line that "DVD is better than VHS" wholesale and figured that any kind of MPEG compression was going to be "fine."
What's more, some of the space on today's double-layer discs is taken up by "extras." These could be anything as useful as an extra DTS soundtrack to things as lame as "making-of documentaries" that are nothing more than marketing footage shot at press junkets. Any of these could easily be left off the regular-DVD version, allowing consumers to discover them when they upgrade to HD-DVD.
Try ripping just the main feature from a commercial DVD movie with DVDShrink sometime. When you chop off all the extraneous stuff, you seldom have to recompress them all that much. And there you're recompressing from a compressed source, so the shrunk version will look worse than a version compressed from an original hi-res master.
In short, I'm willing to bet most consumers will be OK with a "single layer" version of their movies for their regular DVD players if they know they are "investing" in HD versions at the same time. Not to mention the fact that it means you don't have to buy the same movie twice -- once for your hi-res screen at home, and again to play in the car-seat DVD player on the next family vacation.
Because most credit cards give you the money for free for about 20 days (or whatever the grace period is). It comes in handy, especially in a business.
OK, well in that case then they're talking about the same thing that I'm talking about. These people are just completely unwilling to pay any interest under any circumstances, which is understandable but perhaps a little overly inflexible.
What if that net profit of $5000 is eaten up by finance and interest charges?
You'd need to have a pretty crap annual percentage rate (APR) for that to happen. Young people like to think they're all flashy because they have credit cards with big spending limits. This ignores the fact that these limits are often artificial -- even American Express, which advertises an "unlimited credit line," will cut you off if it thinks you're spending beyond your means. What you really should be looking for in a credit card is the lowest interest you can find. I have cards with variable interest rates that have dipped as low as 4.25% and are currently hovering around 5.5%. That's lower than sales tax, where I come from. You need to watch out for hidden charges, though, too -- for example, if the "minimum finance charge" is $2, that might actually be more than 5% of your current balance, only you'll need to pay it in just a single month. All these charges are disclosed on the back side of the application, however. You need to read those things.
And, if the net profit gets eaten up and you're back to zero, you're still no worse off (in this completely hypothetical example) than if you had never tried to begin with. You're still in the widget business, which is better than sitting on your duff.
Do you think the employer wants to hear the part about the divorce and paying alimoney and child support? They probably don't care about that part...
In California, it's actually probably illegal for them to ask. So this way they get the benefit of that information via the credit agencies, without asking any uncomfortable questions face to face.
In BC here, almost every landlord is askig for credit info these days to run credit checks, and the housing market is F*ked - so in order to find a house you may have to look at 5-10 (or many more) places before you actually get one.
Similar deal here in San Francisco. It's not uncommon, though, to get housing listings from rental agencies, and typically the rental agency will run a credit check for you and give you several copies of it in sealed envelopes. Most prospective landlords accept these. So, in other words, many applications, only one credit check.
Not everybody does it this way, of course; some landlords want to run them themselves and will only do it that way. But then, landlords have to pay to run credit checks, too, so few of them are going to bother unless they're really seriously considering renting to you.
OK, "Matrix"-inspired elitist fantasies aside, exactly why do you want to be "outside of the credit system"? Seriously. I hear this kind of talk all the time and it just baffles me.
The credit system exists because it works. The credit card companies are not some kind of evil overlords. They are providing a service that has proven valuable to many, many people. Your gloating about how you've taken such great pains to avoid dealing with the credit companies just goes to show how useful credit is: Apparently it has been very difficult for you to stay away. In other words, avoiding credit makes your life more difficult. Why do that to yourself?
A lot of people claim they pay off their credit cards in full every month. That's fine -- but I do wonder, then, why they don't just pay cash? (Or, in this enlightened modern world, a debit card?) Repeat after me, folks: In capitalist America, credit is good.
What all counter-culture rhetoric really amounts to, as far as I can see, is fear of debt: fear that you will spend too much and not be able to pay your bills. You'll go out to the mall and be dazzled by all the shiny things in the windows and you'll think to yourself, "Oh who cares, it's only plastic!" And the bottom line is: If you do that, you're an idiot. The problem is not with the credit card companies. The problem lies with you, and you need to start acting like an adult and get a handle on your dumb, thoughtless spending habits.
On the contrary, credit is a good thing. Particularly when I was an independent contractor, I used credit cards for just about everything, even though I had money in the bank to pay for the stuff I was buying. I did this because revolving credit allowed me to control my cash flow. If I'm waiting on checks from clients for several invoices, the pattern of my cash flow in does not necessarily match the pattern of my cash flow out. Paying for things on credit allows me to pay what I want, when I want, so I never end up in a situation where my bank balances are dipping too close to bottom. Or, to put it another way, credit allows me to still pay my bills to suppliers but only part with the cash when I'm good and damn well ready. This gives me financial security.
Also, credit helps you create wealth. Suppose you have zero dollars in the bank, and a $5,000 credit card, and you know how to make widgets. You can take that credit card, buy $5,000 worth of widget parts, and assemble 5,000 widgets out of it. Then you can turn around and sell the widgets for $2 apiece. Net profit: $5,000. So let's recap: With a credit card, you have the ability to earn $5,000. Without the credit card, you have the ability to earn nothing. Ask yourself now: What's the opportunity cost of "staying off the grid"?
For a more real-world scenario, take, for example, a new computer. A new computer might allow you to compile faster, or run 3-D models faster, or whatever -- take your pick, whatever you want to do. But you don't have enough money for a new computer right now. Without credit, you don't get the computer, so you're not as productive, so it takes you longer to earn the money to buy the computer. With credit, you buy the computer now, begin realizing increased productivity early, get more work done, bring in more money. Again, it may turn out that the opportunity cost of waiting to buy the computer is higher than the opportunity cost of buying it right now. And the thing is, you actually get to make this up-front investment using somebody else's money, which you only have to pay back once you get the cash. How terrible is that?
By comparison, all this effort it has taken you to remain "off the grid," as far as I can see, nets you exactly one benefit: You get to pat yourself on the back and tell the world how clever you are. Me, I'll take the empowerment and financial security the credit system offers, thanks.
I always hated Star Trek. It creates such an unbelievable vision of the future. Everything is so pristine, but you never the the laborers or even robots to keep it that way... Contrast that with the original Star Wars trilogy. Everything is dirty, weathered and worn.
In the original show you see the support crew a couple times, in early episodes. Maintenance men don't typically make for great drama. And to be fair, the Enterprise is a military ship. Go tour a Navy aircraft carrier sometime and you'll probably find it's pretty clean and everybody's pretty well-behaved when they're on duty, because that's how you run a military. The inside of the Death Star was pretty clean too. It was just Tatooine that looked like a 70s party town. It sounds like you just prefer the aesthetic of Star Wars, but come on... do you think the Millennium Falcon would really look like it did, if it was designed to take off and land through planetary atmospheres? All those little panels and radars and things would fly right off. Look at the troubles the space shuttle has just putting a little paint and insulation on its fuel tank. Star Wars looks cool but that's not the same thing as being "more realistic."
Kind of a long commitment, especially considering that Hawking has ALS and could croak at any time
You've heard him talk. For TV interviews and the like, he usually has a number of preprogrammed responses for likely questions etc. An original response to a question takes a long time for him to cue up. So go figure how long it must take him to write and edit a book (for example). This assistant position is likely to be quite demanding, not the least of which requiring a lot of patience. One to two years sounds like a relatively brief time.
If it seems too complicated to someone, that person should not be responsible for running wireless access points at their organization.
Ehhh, that's simplistic logic. If you don't have a person in your organization to whom it does not seem complicated, and you don't have funds to hire one, should you forego wireless networking altogether? What about if there was a lazy alternative that provided "pretty good" access controls? What's wrong with making wireless security easier? Not every organization is Fort Knox. I work at a computer magazine. Is my "enterprise data" really under severe threat if my network admins choose to use fingerprint-based access control lists instead of WPA Enterprise? (FWIW, what we're really using is WEP with a 56-bit key. Put it into perspective now.)
It's kind of like television. You are not the networks' customer.
That's a flawed analogy. You can be as cynical as you want, but representatives in this country are still elected. On some level, if an elected official pursues a course of action that inflames his constituency to a sufficient degree, he will lose power, and possibly his chance of being re-elected. Power is what the politician craves most, even more so than money.
Yeah, but let's face it... you probably don't and neither do I.
Access control lists are a simple concept that administrators understand. It would be a good thing if they could be implemented reliably with ordinary Wi-Fi.
How will this even help? Will the browser shield require signatures and/or heuristics like virus scanners, and thus get outdated? If manpower needs to be invested in this technology, wouldn't the same manpower be better invested in solving the problem, rather than patching it?
I dunno about everybody else, but without having read TFA in any detail it sounds like this technology creates something similar to the Java "sandbox," which keeps code from accessing anything outside a certain scope. It's like a firewall, but within the OS, rather than pointed at the network. Of course, that would be a total hack to plug up holes that should never have been in IE/ActiveX to begin with, but it could still be a beneficial hack.
I agree. I have a Hitachi 32 inch that was 'new' in '95. I bought it used from a friend of mine in 2000. To this day it still has one of the best tube pictures that I've ever seen.
Full disclosure: I'm still running on a Panasonic 32 inch tube TV that I bought in maybe 1996 or 1997. The catch is that, if you use the component inputs, my ser does 480p anamorphic. So my picture quality is pretty darned good. Those flat screens are still attractive to me, though...
Actually, you might have pointed to the Wikipedia article on "Standard of living," rather than "quality of life."
But the point remains that the statement is vague. So Norwegians have a high standard of living. Relative to what, or to whom?
You reference an Economist study on quality of life. That's great! Better that the Wikipedia article itself referenced that, than just made a vague and unsubstantiated statement: "According to a study by The Economist, Norway ranked third..."
This is an interesting possibility, but history leans toward no. VCDs became the de facto replacement for VHS in Asia even while DVD took off among people who wanted higher-quality formats. VCD never went anywhere in the U.S., however, despite the fact that there are a lot of major metropolitan areas in the U.S. with thriving Asian communities where retailers do trade in VCDs. The download community is accustomed to the VCD format, but not retail consumers.
Technologies like this just don't seem to cross-pollinate from Asian markets into Western markets. Presumably this has to do with the Western media companies' loathing and distrust for Asian technologies, given the Asian markets' traditional indifference toward Western intellectual property standards.
It seems likely that some format similar to EVD will emerge, however... either that, or enough college kids with access to downloaded EVD images will drive some kind of market for DVD players that support the format (similar to how there is now a trickle of players appearing that support MPEG-4).
P.S. This seems like a pretty good FAQ on the various available formats, including EVD and FVD.
Its simply that the DVD market is saturated and since everyone (who wants one at least) already has one these hardware guys are seeing thier sales drop-off.
Well, true, but it's also a significant point that these are HD formats. The TV industry seems to be doing pretty well right now. Everybody I know has their eye on SOME kind of TV lately, be it plasma, LCD, or what-have-you. The government is actually fuelling this fire with the promise that, sooner or later, everybody will be forced to upgrade to a set that does HDTV. The problem is, of the people who are buying these sets, most of them aren't using them for HDTV. It's just not "there" for most markets and, you guessed it, the only format available for film buffs (the types of people who buy home theater equipment) is standard DVD.
To me, it totally stands to reason that the consumer electronics manufacturers would be falling all over themselves to release an HD format for home movies. You do the math -- it sounds like there's a huge market brewing out there. I think the problems are simply threefold: One, that the manufacturers have really shot themselves in the foot with this ongoing and very public standards battle that has left everyone leery of the first-generation equipment; Two, the first-generation equipment is widely perceived as too expensive, with a Blu-Ray player costing ten times what an acceptable-quality DVD player costs; and Three, the studios haven't shown any kind of commitment to the new formats, releasing bullshit recent movies that nobody cares about and not investing in restoring the quality of the video sources so that they pop your eyes out the way they were promised to do. Until the movie and electronics industries correct two out of three of these problems, whatever market there is will lie fallow.
One could actually well argue that the last claim I mention, what Norway is "generally perceived as" doesn't really belong in an encyclopedia, it's very subjective anyway, certainly it's not an undisputable fact.
The Wikipedia term for this kind of construction is "weasel words."
The first half of the sentence says that Norwegians "enjoy a high standard of living." What does that mean? Relative to what? The whole sentence is arbitrary and should probably be stricken.
I believe he was trying to install Oracle 10g R2 for Linux x86-64. He still had to install a ton of supplementary packages to get it working; in some cases he said the install tips wanted him to replace the existing libraries with versions compiled for 386. Kinda defeats the purpose of running an "enterprise Linux" on a 64-bit platform. I can't decide whether to blame Oracle or Red Hat, though... you'd figure one of the first markets for 64-bit Linux servers would be people who want to run great big databases. You might expect Red Hat to take some pains to make sure Oracle runs well, let alone that it installs.
Actually, the latest release of Oracle runs on pretty much everything.
With the possible exception of x64 Red Hat, apparently. A friend tried pretty much every hack in the book to get Oracle 10g up and running on 64-bit Linux and he couldn't do it. After negotiating error message after error message, he gave up when it became apparent that what he'd need to do to get it installed would basically render his OS an unsupportable hack. He re-installed with 32-bit Linux and 10g installed fine.
It was pretty obvious by then that the map was useless because they were in a cursed wood. They were already lost before that one idiot threw out the map, the others were just in denial, so I don't see how that's part of the setup. The setup is that they were in a magic forest from which there was no escape. That's just suspension of disbelief.
Really? That's what the Blair Witch was about? Because I never got anything about any cursed wood out of it at all. I just thought they were a bunch of dumb kids. If it was really supposed to be about a curse... wow. Now I have even less respect for that movie.
Protecting the consumer's ability to identify the source of goods and services is the purpose of trademarks.
That's a pleasantly utopian view of the world, but if it's really about some sort of consumer-rights issue then the consumer ought to be the one paying to register the trademarks.
On the contrary. When I register a trademark for my business, the reason I'm doing it is to establish a unique identifier for my goods and services, true -- but the reason I do that is because I don't want some other company cannibalizing the market I have built for those goods and services by pretending to be me. The trademark protects the existing investment I have made in building that business. That's why I take the additional step of investing yet more capital into registering the trademark (a process that is not necessarily cheap).
Well I actually liked Blair Witch a lot, it being one of the only horror movies to ever instill real emotions of fear in me (having been lost in the woods before helped me get into the movie though).
Wait. If you've been lost in the woods before, I would expect you to be the very first person to get exasperated at the dumb-ass script of Blair Witch.
I mean... if it were yours to do all over again, don't you think you might not have thrown away the map? Once you started feeling like you were getting lost, wouldn't you maybe have tried following the creek bed downstream? Or something? I mean, we knew going into the movie theater that the people were supposed to get lost in the woods, but the setup just insulted our intelligence. To say nothing of the fact that nothing happened in the whole movie.
BTW, though, if you want a similar experience done right -- this time about getting lost in an underground cave system -- go check out "The Descent." Highly recommended.
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This is an interesting point. I dunno if it's what you're referring to, but one thing I hate about modern RPGs is that the books are just so ridiculously gaudy! Every single page will be printed in four-color process. Every single text subhead will be adorned with all these twisty dragons and swords and silly-looking gems. And then all the pictures of the monsters are these overblown full-color computer paintings -- it's too much! I can't imagine reading 687 pages of a book with such attrocious design. Give me an Erol Otus pen and ink drawing over today's RPG art any day.
Not necessarily. Early DVD-5 movies often look like crap, but the authoring houses have learned since then, the equipment has improved, and the compression is generally better overall. Some of those DVD-5 movies were only filled up to 3.6GB capacity, also -- again, the people who made them had bought the line that "DVD is better than VHS" wholesale and figured that any kind of MPEG compression was going to be "fine."
What's more, some of the space on today's double-layer discs is taken up by "extras." These could be anything as useful as an extra DTS soundtrack to things as lame as "making-of documentaries" that are nothing more than marketing footage shot at press junkets. Any of these could easily be left off the regular-DVD version, allowing consumers to discover them when they upgrade to HD-DVD.
Try ripping just the main feature from a commercial DVD movie with DVDShrink sometime. When you chop off all the extraneous stuff, you seldom have to recompress them all that much. And there you're recompressing from a compressed source, so the shrunk version will look worse than a version compressed from an original hi-res master.
In short, I'm willing to bet most consumers will be OK with a "single layer" version of their movies for their regular DVD players if they know they are "investing" in HD versions at the same time. Not to mention the fact that it means you don't have to buy the same movie twice -- once for your hi-res screen at home, and again to play in the car-seat DVD player on the next family vacation.
OK, well in that case then they're talking about the same thing that I'm talking about. These people are just completely unwilling to pay any interest under any circumstances, which is understandable but perhaps a little overly inflexible.
You'd need to have a pretty crap annual percentage rate (APR) for that to happen. Young people like to think they're all flashy because they have credit cards with big spending limits. This ignores the fact that these limits are often artificial -- even American Express, which advertises an "unlimited credit line," will cut you off if it thinks you're spending beyond your means. What you really should be looking for in a credit card is the lowest interest you can find. I have cards with variable interest rates that have dipped as low as 4.25% and are currently hovering around 5.5%. That's lower than sales tax, where I come from. You need to watch out for hidden charges, though, too -- for example, if the "minimum finance charge" is $2, that might actually be more than 5% of your current balance, only you'll need to pay it in just a single month. All these charges are disclosed on the back side of the application, however. You need to read those things.
And, if the net profit gets eaten up and you're back to zero, you're still no worse off (in this completely hypothetical example) than if you had never tried to begin with. You're still in the widget business, which is better than sitting on your duff.
In California, it's actually probably illegal for them to ask. So this way they get the benefit of that information via the credit agencies, without asking any uncomfortable questions face to face.
Similar deal here in San Francisco. It's not uncommon, though, to get housing listings from rental agencies, and typically the rental agency will run a credit check for you and give you several copies of it in sealed envelopes. Most prospective landlords accept these. So, in other words, many applications, only one credit check.
Not everybody does it this way, of course; some landlords want to run them themselves and will only do it that way. But then, landlords have to pay to run credit checks, too, so few of them are going to bother unless they're really seriously considering renting to you.
OK, "Matrix"-inspired elitist fantasies aside, exactly why do you want to be "outside of the credit system"? Seriously. I hear this kind of talk all the time and it just baffles me.
The credit system exists because it works. The credit card companies are not some kind of evil overlords. They are providing a service that has proven valuable to many, many people. Your gloating about how you've taken such great pains to avoid dealing with the credit companies just goes to show how useful credit is: Apparently it has been very difficult for you to stay away. In other words, avoiding credit makes your life more difficult. Why do that to yourself?
A lot of people claim they pay off their credit cards in full every month. That's fine -- but I do wonder, then, why they don't just pay cash? (Or, in this enlightened modern world, a debit card?) Repeat after me, folks: In capitalist America, credit is good.
What all counter-culture rhetoric really amounts to, as far as I can see, is fear of debt: fear that you will spend too much and not be able to pay your bills. You'll go out to the mall and be dazzled by all the shiny things in the windows and you'll think to yourself, "Oh who cares, it's only plastic!" And the bottom line is: If you do that, you're an idiot. The problem is not with the credit card companies. The problem lies with you, and you need to start acting like an adult and get a handle on your dumb, thoughtless spending habits.
On the contrary, credit is a good thing. Particularly when I was an independent contractor, I used credit cards for just about everything, even though I had money in the bank to pay for the stuff I was buying. I did this because revolving credit allowed me to control my cash flow. If I'm waiting on checks from clients for several invoices, the pattern of my cash flow in does not necessarily match the pattern of my cash flow out. Paying for things on credit allows me to pay what I want, when I want, so I never end up in a situation where my bank balances are dipping too close to bottom. Or, to put it another way, credit allows me to still pay my bills to suppliers but only part with the cash when I'm good and damn well ready. This gives me financial security.
Also, credit helps you create wealth. Suppose you have zero dollars in the bank, and a $5,000 credit card, and you know how to make widgets. You can take that credit card, buy $5,000 worth of widget parts, and assemble 5,000 widgets out of it. Then you can turn around and sell the widgets for $2 apiece. Net profit: $5,000. So let's recap: With a credit card, you have the ability to earn $5,000. Without the credit card, you have the ability to earn nothing. Ask yourself now: What's the opportunity cost of "staying off the grid"?
For a more real-world scenario, take, for example, a new computer. A new computer might allow you to compile faster, or run 3-D models faster, or whatever -- take your pick, whatever you want to do. But you don't have enough money for a new computer right now. Without credit, you don't get the computer, so you're not as productive, so it takes you longer to earn the money to buy the computer. With credit, you buy the computer now, begin realizing increased productivity early, get more work done, bring in more money. Again, it may turn out that the opportunity cost of waiting to buy the computer is higher than the opportunity cost of buying it right now. And the thing is, you actually get to make this up-front investment using somebody else's money, which you only have to pay back once you get the cash. How terrible is that?
By comparison, all this effort it has taken you to remain "off the grid," as far as I can see, nets you exactly one benefit: You get to pat yourself on the back and tell the world how clever you are. Me, I'll take the empowerment and financial security the credit system offers, thanks.
In the original show you see the support crew a couple times, in early episodes. Maintenance men don't typically make for great drama. And to be fair, the Enterprise is a military ship. Go tour a Navy aircraft carrier sometime and you'll probably find it's pretty clean and everybody's pretty well-behaved when they're on duty, because that's how you run a military. The inside of the Death Star was pretty clean too. It was just Tatooine that looked like a 70s party town. It sounds like you just prefer the aesthetic of Star Wars, but come on ... do you think the Millennium Falcon would really look like it did, if it was designed to take off and land through planetary atmospheres? All those little panels and radars and things would fly right off. Look at the troubles the space shuttle has just putting a little paint and insulation on its fuel tank. Star Wars looks cool but that's not the same thing as being "more realistic."
You must be new here.
(Oh come on, you asked for it.)
Ehhh, that's simplistic logic. If you don't have a person in your organization to whom it does not seem complicated, and you don't have funds to hire one, should you forego wireless networking altogether? What about if there was a lazy alternative that provided "pretty good" access controls? What's wrong with making wireless security easier? Not every organization is Fort Knox. I work at a computer magazine. Is my "enterprise data" really under severe threat if my network admins choose to use fingerprint-based access control lists instead of WPA Enterprise? (FWIW, what we're really using is WEP with a 56-bit key. Put it into perspective now.)
That's a flawed analogy. You can be as cynical as you want, but representatives in this country are still elected. On some level, if an elected official pursues a course of action that inflames his constituency to a sufficient degree, he will lose power, and possibly his chance of being re-elected. Power is what the politician craves most, even more so than money.
Yeah, but let's face it ... you probably don't and neither do I.
Access control lists are a simple concept that administrators understand. It would be a good thing if they could be implemented reliably with ordinary Wi-Fi.
I dunno about everybody else, but without having read TFA in any detail it sounds like this technology creates something similar to the Java "sandbox," which keeps code from accessing anything outside a certain scope. It's like a firewall, but within the OS, rather than pointed at the network. Of course, that would be a total hack to plug up holes that should never have been in IE/ActiveX to begin with, but it could still be a beneficial hack.
...Korea. Or at least, that's where she belongs.
Full disclosure: I'm still running on a Panasonic 32 inch tube TV that I bought in maybe 1996 or 1997. The catch is that, if you use the component inputs, my ser does 480p anamorphic. So my picture quality is pretty darned good. Those flat screens are still attractive to me, though...
Actually, you might have pointed to the Wikipedia article on "Standard of living," rather than "quality of life."
But the point remains that the statement is vague. So Norwegians have a high standard of living. Relative to what, or to whom?
You reference an Economist study on quality of life. That's great! Better that the Wikipedia article itself referenced that, than just made a vague and unsubstantiated statement: "According to a study by The Economist, Norway ranked third..."
This is an interesting possibility, but history leans toward no. VCDs became the de facto replacement for VHS in Asia even while DVD took off among people who wanted higher-quality formats. VCD never went anywhere in the U.S., however, despite the fact that there are a lot of major metropolitan areas in the U.S. with thriving Asian communities where retailers do trade in VCDs. The download community is accustomed to the VCD format, but not retail consumers.
... either that, or enough college kids with access to downloaded EVD images will drive some kind of market for DVD players that support the format (similar to how there is now a trickle of players appearing that support MPEG-4).
Technologies like this just don't seem to cross-pollinate from Asian markets into Western markets. Presumably this has to do with the Western media companies' loathing and distrust for Asian technologies, given the Asian markets' traditional indifference toward Western intellectual property standards.
It seems likely that some format similar to EVD will emerge, however
P.S. This seems like a pretty good FAQ on the various available formats, including EVD and FVD.
Well, true, but it's also a significant point that these are HD formats. The TV industry seems to be doing pretty well right now. Everybody I know has their eye on SOME kind of TV lately, be it plasma, LCD, or what-have-you. The government is actually fuelling this fire with the promise that, sooner or later, everybody will be forced to upgrade to a set that does HDTV. The problem is, of the people who are buying these sets, most of them aren't using them for HDTV. It's just not "there" for most markets and, you guessed it, the only format available for film buffs (the types of people who buy home theater equipment) is standard DVD.
To me, it totally stands to reason that the consumer electronics manufacturers would be falling all over themselves to release an HD format for home movies. You do the math -- it sounds like there's a huge market brewing out there. I think the problems are simply threefold: One, that the manufacturers have really shot themselves in the foot with this ongoing and very public standards battle that has left everyone leery of the first-generation equipment; Two, the first-generation equipment is widely perceived as too expensive, with a Blu-Ray player costing ten times what an acceptable-quality DVD player costs; and Three, the studios haven't shown any kind of commitment to the new formats, releasing bullshit recent movies that nobody cares about and not investing in restoring the quality of the video sources so that they pop your eyes out the way they were promised to do. Until the movie and electronics industries correct two out of three of these problems, whatever market there is will lie fallow.
The Wikipedia term for this kind of construction is "weasel words."
The first half of the sentence says that Norwegians "enjoy a high standard of living." What does that mean? Relative to what? The whole sentence is arbitrary and should probably be stricken.
I believe he was trying to install Oracle 10g R2 for Linux x86-64. He still had to install a ton of supplementary packages to get it working; in some cases he said the install tips wanted him to replace the existing libraries with versions compiled for 386. Kinda defeats the purpose of running an "enterprise Linux" on a 64-bit platform. I can't decide whether to blame Oracle or Red Hat, though ... you'd figure one of the first markets for 64-bit Linux servers would be people who want to run great big databases. You might expect Red Hat to take some pains to make sure Oracle runs well, let alone that it installs.
With the possible exception of x64 Red Hat, apparently. A friend tried pretty much every hack in the book to get Oracle 10g up and running on 64-bit Linux and he couldn't do it. After negotiating error message after error message, he gave up when it became apparent that what he'd need to do to get it installed would basically render his OS an unsupportable hack. He re-installed with 32-bit Linux and 10g installed fine.
Anyone else have better success/know the secret?
Really? That's what the Blair Witch was about? Because I never got anything about any cursed wood out of it at all. I just thought they were a bunch of dumb kids. If it was really supposed to be about a curse ... wow. Now I have even less respect for that movie.
That's a pleasantly utopian view of the world, but if it's really about some sort of consumer-rights issue then the consumer ought to be the one paying to register the trademarks.
On the contrary. When I register a trademark for my business, the reason I'm doing it is to establish a unique identifier for my goods and services, true -- but the reason I do that is because I don't want some other company cannibalizing the market I have built for those goods and services by pretending to be me. The trademark protects the existing investment I have made in building that business. That's why I take the additional step of investing yet more capital into registering the trademark (a process that is not necessarily cheap).
Wait. If you've been lost in the woods before, I would expect you to be the very first person to get exasperated at the dumb-ass script of Blair Witch.
I mean ... if it were yours to do all over again, don't you think you might not have thrown away the map? Once you started feeling like you were getting lost, wouldn't you maybe have tried following the creek bed downstream? Or something? I mean, we knew going into the movie theater that the people were supposed to get lost in the woods, but the setup just insulted our intelligence. To say nothing of the fact that nothing happened in the whole movie.
BTW, though, if you want a similar experience done right -- this time about getting lost in an underground cave system -- go check out "The Descent." Highly recommended.