Re:What we have in parts of Canada
on
Cable TV A La Carte?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The wonderful thing about "digital" cable is that it isn't. Only some of the channels are digital - generally everything below 80-100 is still analog. You can tell which are which by looking at the packages - the basic cable and extended basic are all analog. But any channels that get added by upgrading to a digital cable package are digital. Heck, if you're on digital cable you can still plug in a TV/VCR to the cable feed without a box and tune to any of the analog channels.
That's just a pass-through connection...if you plug a TV directly into the cable outlet, it'll pick up analog. Here in Las Vegas at least (maybe in other Cox markets as well), I'm fairly sure that if you subscribe to digital cable, all channels are delivered as digital channels. I saw some decoding glitches last night while watching Enterprise, which would indicate that even the local channels are converted to digital before they're sent out. (It's either that, or the hard drive in my TiVo is acting up...but I doubt that's the case.)
I put the parental block on HGTV, Lifetime and TLC after she started watching this crap and had me paint the whole fscking house.
I set the password to '1234'. She'll never figure it out...
Just hope that isn't the combination on her luggage...
Re:How many times can the Democrats pull this crap
on
Indecision 2002
·
· Score: 2
In major cities getting off work to go to you polling place can take time and cost money. Since voting is not a holiday, not everyone can afford to take time to get to the polling place early.
I can't remember the last time I voted on Election Day...was probably '94 or '96. I've taken advantage of early voting ever since it was introduced...polling places are set up in malls and other public places ~2 weeks before an election.
If early voting isn't available, I suppose there's absentee voting (which is admittedly somewhat more vulnerable to manipulation, as when Gore tried to get the military absentee vote thrown out in Florida in 2000)...either way, I don't see that there's any excuse to complain about not being able to vote. I'm one of the worst procrastinators you'll ever run across (never do today what you can put off until tomorrow:-) ), but that doesn't stop me from getting my vote turned in ASAP.
Re:International observers in Florida
on
Indecision 2002
·
· Score: 2
the person in charge of certifying the election was a state campaign leader for that candidate
And every move she made followed the law exactly and withstood intense international scrutiny.
Furthermore, if Katherine Harris was such a slimeball, what are the odds that she would've won her House race?
Prior to being president that father was the head of the nation's secret police.
So?
The notion that the CIA is some sort of "secret police" is absurd. They're not even permitted to assist the FBI and state & local law enforcement. Even the military isn't restricted to that extent (while the posse comitatus act prohibits the armed services from directly carrying out law-enforcement duties, they are permitted to provide technical assistance).
Even if it passes, it won't fly because a state can't legalize something that is federally outlawed.
Thankfully, Question 9 went up in smoke.:-) It was defeated by about 2-to-1. Now maybe the potheads will go bother some other state and leave Nevada alone.
Why is an article from a humor/satire site (Humorix) being posted main-page to/. ?
Hover your mouse pointer over the Monty Python foot at the top of the article. What does it say?
"It's funny. Laugh."
Hell, the foot itself ought to be a clue as to the nature of the article. If you're a humorless ass, just pass on this article and others like it. The rest of us won't miss you.
To tell the truth. Most american movies are pathetic, propagandistic, patriotic "shit".
Sure chinese movies are somehow propagandistic too. But they don't force their shit on the rest opf the world like americans do.
HTF did this tripe get modded +2, Insightful? I understand that people's tastes differ, but did someone hold a gun to your head and force you to blow the local equivalent of $8 on Crossroads? Didn't think so...so quit yer bitchin'. How is it our fault that your own film industry can't compete? Produce films that people want to watch and they'll watch. Produce tripe and they'll get them from elsewhere.
(AFAIK, Crossroads tanked at the box office...and it deserved to do so.)
There weren't a lot of pilots who could have been killed by jet fuel in WWII, were there?
You must not have heard of the Messerschmitt Me 262, or the Gloster Meteor. (There were some other jets in the works at the time, such as the Bell P-59, but the Me 262 and the Meteor are the ones I could find that actually flew in combat during WWII.)
Do we honestly expect MS to support 5 year old OS's?
Win2K isn't five years old. SP3 has been nothing but bad news...not only are there the privacy/security issues with its license (brought up here before), but every single machine I've seen that was "upgraded" to SP3 has started misbehaving in one way or another. On one machine, a FireWire webcam that always worked fine before would cause a bluescreen when a filter graph involving the camera was closed. Another machine was hosed so badly that MSN (the dial-up service, not the website) wouldn't work. As a result, all of my Win2K machines are at SP2. They still have most (all?) of the updates in SP3 and some of the updates that have come along since SP3, but they all still run properly and I didn't have to "accept" SP3's onerous EULA to get there.
Now, I run vm ware, and it's great. Yes, it's more expensive than crossover, and actually *RUNS* windows, requiring a license (or piracy, if you prefer). But it's stable as hell (considering windows' native limitations), pretty fast (faster than a crossover implementation on the same machine), runs effectively ALL windows programs (no more "We'll get that running next year").
It's been a while (about 2 years) since I've had a desktop machine running Linux. I had VMware installed on it because I needed IE and pcAnywhere (Mozilla didn't yet exist, and I'm not sure if VNC was available either). At the time, you couldn't run apps that needed DirectX under VMware...has that been fixed?
(I have Gentoo building on a spare computer right now and I'm inclined to give Wine a shot at running the Win32 apps for which I don't know of any Linux equivalents (stuff such as TMPGEnc), but I'm curious about where VMware has gotten in the past couple of years.)
but they've been taught at school that when such stuff starts to come up on the screen the correct response is to "crash" the computer -- meaning hit the power button (since popups spawn popups spawn popups and it's nearly impossible to close them all).
That's great advice if you want to screw up your filesystem.
If it's your computer or mine, I'd agree. In a school, though, I'd expect that there are plenty of other things the kids can do to hose a computer. To deal with that, if the school's IT staff is worth anything, they'll have Ghost images (or something similar) of the different systems they maintain. If Susie's hitting the Big Red Switch to kill a bunch of never-ending goatse.cx popups manages to FUBAR the computer, it should be nothing that a few minutes with a system-image CD won't fix.
800K Mac floppies are read/written at a variable rotation speed, which is impossible to simulate with a standard PC floppy controller.
They also don't use MFM encoding...they use GCR, which your average x86-box floppy controller doesn't grok. It's an encoding method Steve Wozniak came up with back in 1978 or so (first implemented on 5.25" floppies for the Apple II) as a means to reduce the hardware complexity of the floppy drive and its controller. (Check out this recent thread in comp.sys.apple2 for more info.)
Current-production 3.5" floppies aren't worth a sh*t (write 'em today and you'll be lucky if you can read 'em next week), but I have 5.25" floppies that came with my Apple IIe that are as readable now as they were back in 1985. I think I've taken reasonably good care of them...nothing special WRT environmetal conditions (no controlled humidity or temperature), but they've not been sitting in a shed or an attic all these years either. I think the advice on the sleeves that came with some disks (Elephant, maybe?) was something along the lines of "if it's comfortable for you, it's comfortable for your disks"...and that seems to have been the case.
That said, I still think it'd be a good idea to pack up all my disks in ShrinkIt archives and burn them to CD-R as a backup. A fair chunk of the Apple II software I have is already on CD-R (used to have 'em on QIC-24 tape for my BBS), but I still have a fair amount of old data, source code, etc. on floppies. That's one of the things I'll get around to doing eventually, along with scanning/OCRing my Nibble collection.
The real story is the part that Apple is not telling us: The fact that they have evolved an organic "force" capable of developing a kernel directly, as executable machine code, without human intervention.
Considering that Steve Wozniak wrote Integer BASIC without the aid of an assembler, I'd guess that anything is possible...:-)
If you're concerned about spyware, be very careful about who's DNS server you list in your PC.
Mine all use 192.168.100.1...anything that's not locally cached gets looked up at the root servers, IIRC. Once it's cached, a website comes up much more rapidly than if it had to be looked up through the ISP's nameserver.
By licensing the CODEC under the LGPL, the authors are preventing Microsoft's competitors from publishing improved versions that might give BillG a run for his money.
The LGPL doesn't preclude anybody from releasing a closed-source media player with this new codec, as long as they don't tinker with the codec itself. If they start tweaking the codec, they'll need to release their tweaks if they want to publish the entire program, but they can do whatever they want with the rest of it (UI, network code, etc.).
(At least that's my understanding of how the LGPL works...but if the codec is GPL and not LGPL (and the SourceForge pages would indicate that it's GPL), then your point stands.)
When the cable company sent the installer out, the most he might've done was tweak the network settings on my (at the time) Win98 box...and maybe not even that. Once he was gone, I put it back to its private IP address and configured my Linux router to start using the cable modem instead of demand-dialed PPP. (Even with DHCP, the cable-modem connection ended up being much easier to set up than a dial-up connection. Now the router's on a static IP address, which makes things easier still.)
I can see spyware getting loaded up on your computer if you're stuck getting your broadband from these clowns, but overall I've had very little hassle dealing with Cox.
While the player seems to support divx 3.11, 4 and 5 (of which only 3.11 is widely used), it doesn't seem to support xvid. Xvid is a rather new codec and a growing portion of movies are released in xvid. In maybe a year practically all new releases will be xvid, and these players won't play them.
I think XviD is aiming to be a standards-compliant MPEG-4 codec...if that's the case, the info on this player says it'll play MPEG-4 as well as DivX;-), so XviD ought to work as well.
(XviD is a Good Thing, especially in light of what DivXNetworks has done to hijack development (spyware-infested codecs, etc.). I've been archiving Good Eats with XviD for a little while now...the quality is good enough for reference usage, and fitting ~4 hours of video (12 episodes) and all of the accompanying recipes (in HTML) on one CD is cool.)
Did you know Dick Cheney was chief executive officer of Halliburton, a huge oil company?
Get your facts straight...Halliburton is not a "huge oil company." It is a supplier of equipment and services to Big Oil, but it is not itself Big Oil. Two seconds' worth of googling would've led you to this.
The point is that plenty of people will pay extra for convenience. This (And not early release) is why pay per view is so successful even though the least expensive movies tend to cost $8 or so.
Where do you live that PPV movies cost $8? I can see paying more for "special events," but PPV movies are usually closer to $3-$4 most places. (Even at $3, Netflix is still a better deal...everything on PPV is pan-and-scan.:-P )
Slashdot Mirror
That's just a pass-through connection...if you plug a TV directly into the cable outlet, it'll pick up analog. Here in Las Vegas at least (maybe in other Cox markets as well), I'm fairly sure that if you subscribe to digital cable, all channels are delivered as digital channels. I saw some decoding glitches last night while watching Enterprise, which would indicate that even the local channels are converted to digital before they're sent out. (It's either that, or the hard drive in my TiVo is acting up...but I doubt that's the case.)
You left out BBC America...where else are you going to get your Monty Python fix?
Just hope that isn't the combination on her luggage...
I can't remember the last time I voted on Election Day...was probably '94 or '96. I've taken advantage of early voting ever since it was introduced...polling places are set up in malls and other public places ~2 weeks before an election.
If early voting isn't available, I suppose there's absentee voting (which is admittedly somewhat more vulnerable to manipulation, as when Gore tried to get the military absentee vote thrown out in Florida in 2000)...either way, I don't see that there's any excuse to complain about not being able to vote. I'm one of the worst procrastinators you'll ever run across (never do today what you can put off until tomorrow :-) ), but that doesn't stop me from getting my vote turned in ASAP.
Furthermore, if Katherine Harris was such a slimeball, what are the odds that she would've won her House race?
The notion that the CIA is some sort of "secret police" is absurd. They're not even permitted to assist the FBI and state & local law enforcement. Even the military isn't restricted to that extent (while the posse comitatus act prohibits the armed services from directly carrying out law-enforcement duties, they are permitted to provide technical assistance).
Thankfully, Question 9 went up in smoke. :-) It was defeated by about 2-to-1. Now maybe the potheads will go bother some other state and leave Nevada alone.
Hover your mouse pointer over the Monty Python foot at the top of the article. What does it say?
"It's funny. Laugh."
Hell, the foot itself ought to be a clue as to the nature of the article. If you're a humorless ass, just pass on this article and others like it. The rest of us won't miss you.
"And now for something completely different..."
You've never watched South Park, have you?
HTF did this tripe get modded +2, Insightful? I understand that people's tastes differ, but did someone hold a gun to your head and force you to blow the local equivalent of $8 on Crossroads? Didn't think so...so quit yer bitchin'. How is it our fault that your own film industry can't compete? Produce films that people want to watch and they'll watch. Produce tripe and they'll get them from elsewhere.
(AFAIK, Crossroads tanked at the box office...and it deserved to do so.)
You must not have heard of the Messerschmitt Me 262, or the Gloster Meteor. (There were some other jets in the works at the time, such as the Bell P-59, but the Me 262 and the Meteor are the ones I could find that actually flew in combat during WWII.)
Here's the version for pre-SP3 Win2K and NT 4...needed it to install the Platform SDK.
Win2K isn't five years old. SP3 has been nothing but bad news...not only are there the privacy/security issues with its license (brought up here before), but every single machine I've seen that was "upgraded" to SP3 has started misbehaving in one way or another. On one machine, a FireWire webcam that always worked fine before would cause a bluescreen when a filter graph involving the camera was closed. Another machine was hosed so badly that MSN (the dial-up service, not the website) wouldn't work. As a result, all of my Win2K machines are at SP2. They still have most (all?) of the updates in SP3 and some of the updates that have come along since SP3, but they all still run properly and I didn't have to "accept" SP3's onerous EULA to get there.
It's been a while (about 2 years) since I've had a desktop machine running Linux. I had VMware installed on it because I needed IE and pcAnywhere (Mozilla didn't yet exist, and I'm not sure if VNC was available either). At the time, you couldn't run apps that needed DirectX under VMware...has that been fixed?
(I have Gentoo building on a spare computer right now and I'm inclined to give Wine a shot at running the Win32 apps for which I don't know of any Linux equivalents (stuff such as TMPGEnc), but I'm curious about where VMware has gotten in the past couple of years.)
If it's your computer or mine, I'd agree. In a school, though, I'd expect that there are plenty of other things the kids can do to hose a computer. To deal with that, if the school's IT staff is worth anything, they'll have Ghost images (or something similar) of the different systems they maintain. If Susie's hitting the Big Red Switch to kill a bunch of never-ending goatse.cx popups manages to FUBAR the computer, it should be nothing that a few minutes with a system-image CD won't fix.
They also don't use MFM encoding...they use GCR, which your average x86-box floppy controller doesn't grok. It's an encoding method Steve Wozniak came up with back in 1978 or so (first implemented on 5.25" floppies for the Apple II) as a means to reduce the hardware complexity of the floppy drive and its controller. (Check out this recent thread in comp.sys.apple2 for more info.)
Current-production 3.5" floppies aren't worth a sh*t (write 'em today and you'll be lucky if you can read 'em next week), but I have 5.25" floppies that came with my Apple IIe that are as readable now as they were back in 1985. I think I've taken reasonably good care of them...nothing special WRT environmetal conditions (no controlled humidity or temperature), but they've not been sitting in a shed or an attic all these years either. I think the advice on the sleeves that came with some disks (Elephant, maybe?) was something along the lines of "if it's comfortable for you, it's comfortable for your disks"...and that seems to have been the case.
That said, I still think it'd be a good idea to pack up all my disks in ShrinkIt archives and burn them to CD-R as a backup. A fair chunk of the Apple II software I have is already on CD-R (used to have 'em on QIC-24 tape for my BBS), but I still have a fair amount of old data, source code, etc. on floppies. That's one of the things I'll get around to doing eventually, along with scanning/OCRing my Nibble collection.
Considering that Steve Wozniak wrote Integer BASIC without the aid of an assembler, I'd guess that anything is possible...:-)
They're too busy giving head to all of the Hollywood bigshots for that to happen...
Mine all use 192.168.100.1...anything that's not locally cached gets looked up at the root servers, IIRC. Once it's cached, a website comes up much more rapidly than if it had to be looked up through the ISP's nameserver.
Has anyone checked to see if the password is 12345?
The LGPL doesn't preclude anybody from releasing a closed-source media player with this new codec, as long as they don't tinker with the codec itself. If they start tweaking the codec, they'll need to release their tweaks if they want to publish the entire program, but they can do whatever they want with the rest of it (UI, network code, etc.).
(At least that's my understanding of how the LGPL works...but if the codec is GPL and not LGPL (and the SourceForge pages would indicate that it's GPL), then your point stands.)
I can see spyware getting loaded up on your computer if you're stuck getting your broadband from these clowns, but overall I've had very little hassle dealing with Cox.
I think XviD is aiming to be a standards-compliant MPEG-4 codec...if that's the case, the info on this player says it'll play MPEG-4 as well as DivX;-), so XviD ought to work as well.
(XviD is a Good Thing, especially in light of what DivXNetworks has done to hijack development (spyware-infested codecs, etc.). I've been archiving Good Eats with XviD for a little while now...the quality is good enough for reference usage, and fitting ~4 hours of video (12 episodes) and all of the accompanying recipes (in HTML) on one CD is cool.)
Get your facts straight...Halliburton is not a "huge oil company." It is a supplier of equipment and services to Big Oil, but it is not itself Big Oil. Two seconds' worth of googling would've led you to this.
Where do you live that PPV movies cost $8? I can see paying more for "special events," but PPV movies are usually closer to $3-$4 most places. (Even at $3, Netflix is still a better deal...everything on PPV is pan-and-scan. :-P )