Well, I never saw the photo in question on apple's website, but from what several people are claiming, the aspect ratio problem was because the poster of the article was sloppy (or deliberately deceptive) in resizing the image and didn't maintain the same aspect ratio. He stretched the photo disproportionately and made the iPhone appear wider than it really is.
I just did a quick check. I copied that image into photoshop, then went to apple website and copied some of the navbar images. I scaled down the navbar images to the same height as the ones shown in that photo. What I was left with was an image that wasn't as wide as the one in the supposedly photoshopped (by apple) photo. Unless apple has rescaled their navbar since then, I think that supports the claim that the submitter was the photoshopper, and not apple.
And thus points out my biggest annoyance by far with Digg. There are WAY too many people submitting false/incorrect articles, and then people go around spouting off the incorrect stuff as fact. The same happens on slashdot, but not nearly as often, and at least here the article summary gets updated (often fairly quickly) so that people who read just the article and not the comments can find out the truth. You would think the problem could be solved by burying the articles, but I've seen so many times when an article gets 1000+ diggs even though the first or second comment posted pointed out the error.
The size is the same, but they did a heavily photoshopped ad where it had a different scale. The consensus is that the model of the ad just has bigger hands.
Wait. So now using a bigger model when you take your photograph is considered photoshopping?
That would probably require a rewrite to several portions of MythTV, and it would be a gigantic kludge. Not to mention, it wouldn't even work if you want to do things like making wish lists based on the description of the program.
First issue: you need to handle data for every individual market. Remember, showtimes and even the show lineup can be different in each town, plus any local channels.
Second issue: Now you are going to be hosting the scraped data for download. I'm sure you'll run into copyright issues (yes, you can copyright a compilation of facts)
Now they overlay advertisements on top of the advertisements you are fast forwarding through.
But are they actually doing this? I still haven't seen a single instance of that on my series 2 tivo, so I just assumed it was something they rolled out on a limited basis to gauge the response and then backed off the idea.
don't forget that you'd have to have that data localized. You'd have to deal with things like stations that carry their own programming at non-prime time hours, and the difference in airtime between timezones (sports are often live everywhere, where as prime time show are usually aired simultaneously in a couple of timezones and then an hour or 2 later in the other timezones).
Again, what enormous amount of data are you talking about? No one's proposing downloading the entire site. Each user would only download the same HTML pages as if he was looking at the listings in person. And because of this, there's no way for the website to tell if it's a real human or just a script.
Sure, if all you want is the show name and episode name. I'd prefer information like:
start/end times - remember, you can't just go by the grid, because some shows start 1 minute early or run several minutes late. I'd rather not try to reverse engineer the times from the pixel widths of the table cells or anything like that.
episode descriptions - its nice to be able to see what the episode is about.
original airdate - I could live without this as long as the grid provides listings of whats new vs rerun. Zap2it appears to do that, though I'm not sure what they consider a rerun. If an episode is only a few weeks old, I'd probably still prefer to consider it new so that it could be picked up if there was a conflict during the original airing.
actors, genre, and other stuff like that I could live without, though I bet some people would feel differently. Especially if they do things like "wow...I've never seen that actor, but he's great. I want to see what else he's done" and then setup an actor record list. I personally don't do that, but I'm sure many do.
All of the above details would require going to a separate web page for each episode. Thats one web page per timeslot, per channel, per day.
We're talking about text, which is small data any more
Are you kidding? The zap2it guide data for a single day is about 350K, and thats just for basic cable...not including all the digital channels and movie channels. Now take that 350K, spread it out over dozens of pages (possibly thousands, if you need to go to a separate page for each episode to get the full details) then add in the tons of html on each of those pages. In the end, you will probably be looking at a huge amount of data downloaded. Then you need to at least double it, as at a minimum you'll want to load the data as soon as its available, then refresh it the day before to account for any changes. For myself, I have my mythbox load the data a third time 4 days ahead so that I get a chance to be notified of most of the significant changes.
This may not seem to be a lot of data from an end user standpoint, but from the standpoint of a company serving this data to thousands of mythtv users (how many of us are there, anyway?) each day, I suspect they will notice and take action rather quickly.
Honestly, I don't want user entered data for my MythTV. I really don't want to be recording every rerun because some user typo-ed the episode number, or worse yet...not picking up the episode because somebody typo-ed the show name. Yes, peer review the data and let other people fix the errors....like a wiki or something. But that's a lot more complicated...now you have to worry about people mischievously corrupting the data.
Plus, there is just so much info in there that I believe would never get hand entered at all. Things like original air date, plot summary, actor list, etc.
If you took an educated man from 1907 and brought him to 2007, he'd be able to understand just about everything we have except for our computational devices.
Oh yeah. He'd be able to understand just about everything....except for the backbone of pretty much our entire society. Not to mention things like mass flight, space travel, satellites, our extraordinary medical techniques, etc.
Look, back in the 1400s, Leonardo da Vinci understood the basic principles of things like helicopters, computers, and advanced weaponry, among many other things. Would you thus downplay the advances we've made in the 5-6 centuries since then?
Yeah, but none of those magic wands of the past went directly against the principles of sound scientific knowledge at the time. I feel the speed of light barrier is going to keep us from reaching Star Trek, ever.
Yeah, but wasn't it pretty well accepted belief back then that you could never break the sound barrier?
As far as "sound scientific principles"....remember Newtons laws of motion? They were well accepted as "sound scientific principles" back then, and they held their ground for a couple of centuries. Then we started figuring out that they aren't exactly accurate in some scenarios. Who's to say that in the next century or two we won't start figuring out scenarios in which our current scientific understanding isn't exactly applicable.
Actually, I do consider that fast hardware....however, please take into account that my mythbox is a P3-450 with a Hauppauge PVR-350 and PVR-500. With that hardware, I can easily record 3 SD shows while playing back another, all on the same box.:-)
You need to be even clearer than that. If you have a proper ATSC/QAM HD tuner for you mythbox, then you can even record any HD channels broadcast over the air as well as any HD channels broadcast over cable that don't require a converter box (ie: any channel you can receive by hooking your HDTV directly to the cable line). That usually (always?) means you can't get stuff like Discovery HD, ESPN HD, HBO HD, etc. Usually its just your local broadcast channels (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, PBS, etc). However, depending on what you like to watch, that might be sufficient.
Although I honestly have no idea what is reasonable pricing for wiring these days, when I wired my house a few years ago I did a lot of research on pricing. I bought from CyberXLink. They had (at least at that time) good pricing on the wiring, and very good pricing on the keystone terminating jacks.
Here's what they currently charge for 1000ft: CAT6 Solid = $102 CAT6 Plenum = $245 CAT5E Solid = $66 CAT5E Plenum = $155
For the most part, I'll agree that the Gamecube controller is best, especially with all of its different size/shape buttons. However, the one thing I don't like is that the should triggers are a bit uncomfortable if you use them excessively. In game like Metroid Prime, where you are really using them, sometimes holding them down for several seconds at a time, it does seem to be a bit tiring after a few hours. Maybe it's just my hands or my grip, but it seems like the direction of the button's movement is at a slight angle to the natural direction my finger wants to move. The XBOX (original...never played the 360) on the other hand....I could hold those triggers down all day.
I suppose if you don't want the poor to have money that's one way of doing it. Must be nice in your rich ivory tower.
Don't be a fool. Payday loans don't give them money...it just timeshifts their money, while slowly (or not so slowly) siphoning it off.
It actually makes the problem worse for those poor. If I'm in a financial crunch, I'm gonna have to find ways to come up with the money. If I have an easy solution, I'll take it. If I don't have an easy solution, I'll eventually have to get creative or make some more sacrifices. Here, the payday loan is the easy "solution". I get money now and I'll worry about the effects of that later (probably using another payday loan). The thing is, the payday loan didn't actually solve anything....it just delayed my problem a couple weeks. In addition, the payday loan added some pretty significant fees, so it actually compounded the problem. Instead of being $500 behind this week, I'll be $600 behind two weeks from now. So I take another payday loan and 2 weeks later I'm $700 behind.
At some point that can't keep growing (they won't start lending me more than my paycheck) so I'll be FORCED to find a creative solution to make up the difference. Maybe I'll sell my TV, start picking up pop cans for the deposit, try to work a deal with my creditors, or something. The problem is, I can't sell my TV every 2 weeks. I can only do it once. If I had sold it at the beginning, I would have gotten out of the hole and been alright. But now selling my TV only keeps me from getting further behind instead of getting me caught up.
Having the easy "solution" of a payday loan actually made my problem MUCH worse. If I didn't have an easy way out, I would have taken the difficult path and actually SOLVED the problem. But taking the easy way out, I STILL had to take the difficult path, and I STILL didn't even solve the problem.
It's like having a cavity and not going to the dentist because you don't like going to the dentist. Eventually, you are going to HAVE to go to the dentist, and when you do you'll probably need a root canal instead of a simple filling.
No, you've misunderstood. There are only 2 factors there: an 80 digit number and a 227 digit number. 7691122230 is just some digits in the middle of the 227 digit one.
Thats an odd definition of "winning the round"...that the key won't be useful on future discs? That's kind of like a boxer getting the crap beat out of them in round 1 and then claiming they won round 1 because they are going to come back fighting in round 2.
And if anything, I'm underimpressed by the quality of my admittedly dirt cheap Canon 50/1.8
If you are "underimpressed" by that lens, then I'd guess either: 1) You have VERY high standards....standards higher than almost any zoom lens is likely to satisfy. 2) You don't know how to use the lens or camera 3) You have a defective/misconfigured lens or camera
The 50mm 1.8 lens has very good (even excellent if you stop down a bit) sharpness, contrast, and color. About the only areas where it really fails is build quality (it's mostly plastic) and bokeh (terrible, mostly because of the 5 blade aperture). Most of the complaints I've seen about this lens can be traced back to out of focus pictures due to the incredibly shallow depth of field when used at f/1.8. If you stop down to f/8 and are still unimpressed, I'd suggest something is seriously wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I never saw the photo in question on apple's website, but from what several people are claiming, the aspect ratio problem was because the poster of the article was sloppy (or deliberately deceptive) in resizing the image and didn't maintain the same aspect ratio. He stretched the photo disproportionately and made the iPhone appear wider than it really is.
I just did a quick check. I copied that image into photoshop, then went to apple website and copied some of the navbar images. I scaled down the navbar images to the same height as the ones shown in that photo. What I was left with was an image that wasn't as wide as the one in the supposedly photoshopped (by apple) photo. Unless apple has rescaled their navbar since then, I think that supports the claim that the submitter was the photoshopper, and not apple.
And thus points out my biggest annoyance by far with Digg. There are WAY too many people submitting false/incorrect articles, and then people go around spouting off the incorrect stuff as fact. The same happens on slashdot, but not nearly as often, and at least here the article summary gets updated (often fairly quickly) so that people who read just the article and not the comments can find out the truth. You would think the problem could be solved by burying the articles, but I've seen so many times when an article gets 1000+ diggs even though the first or second comment posted pointed out the error.
Wait. So now using a bigger model when you take your photograph is considered photoshopping?
That would probably require a rewrite to several portions of MythTV, and it would be a gigantic kludge. Not to mention, it wouldn't even work if you want to do things like making wish lists based on the description of the program.
First issue: you need to handle data for every individual market. Remember, showtimes and even the show lineup can be different in each town, plus any local channels.
Second issue: Now you are going to be hosting the scraped data for download. I'm sure you'll run into copyright issues (yes, you can copyright a compilation of facts)
But are they actually doing this? I still haven't seen a single instance of that on my series 2 tivo, so I just assumed it was something they rolled out on a limited basis to gauge the response and then backed off the idea.
don't forget that you'd have to have that data localized. You'd have to deal with things like stations that carry their own programming at non-prime time hours, and the difference in airtime between timezones (sports are often live everywhere, where as prime time show are usually aired simultaneously in a couple of timezones and then an hour or 2 later in the other timezones).
Sure, if all you want is the show name and episode name. I'd prefer information like:
start/end times - remember, you can't just go by the grid, because some shows start 1 minute early or run several minutes late. I'd rather not try to reverse engineer the times from the pixel widths of the table cells or anything like that.
episode descriptions - its nice to be able to see what the episode is about.
original airdate - I could live without this as long as the grid provides listings of whats new vs rerun. Zap2it appears to do that, though I'm not sure what they consider a rerun. If an episode is only a few weeks old, I'd probably still prefer to consider it new so that it could be picked up if there was a conflict during the original airing.
actors, genre, and other stuff like that I could live without, though I bet some people would feel differently. Especially if they do things like "wow...I've never seen that actor, but he's great. I want to see what else he's done" and then setup an actor record list. I personally don't do that, but I'm sure many do.
All of the above details would require going to a separate web page for each episode. Thats one web page per timeslot, per channel, per day.
We're talking about text, which is small data any more
Are you kidding? The zap2it guide data for a single day is about 350K, and thats just for basic cable...not including all the digital channels and movie channels. Now take that 350K, spread it out over dozens of pages (possibly thousands, if you need to go to a separate page for each episode to get the full details) then add in the tons of html on each of those pages. In the end, you will probably be looking at a huge amount of data downloaded. Then you need to at least double it, as at a minimum you'll want to load the data as soon as its available, then refresh it the day before to account for any changes. For myself, I have my mythbox load the data a third time 4 days ahead so that I get a chance to be notified of most of the significant changes.
This may not seem to be a lot of data from an end user standpoint, but from the standpoint of a company serving this data to thousands of mythtv users (how many of us are there, anyway?) each day, I suspect they will notice and take action rather quickly.
Honestly, I don't want user entered data for my MythTV. I really don't want to be recording every rerun because some user typo-ed the episode number, or worse yet...not picking up the episode because somebody typo-ed the show name. Yes, peer review the data and let other people fix the errors....like a wiki or something. But that's a lot more complicated...now you have to worry about people mischievously corrupting the data.
Plus, there is just so much info in there that I believe would never get hand entered at all. Things like original air date, plot summary, actor list, etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_embargo _against_Cuba
Oh yeah. He'd be able to understand just about everything....except for the backbone of pretty much our entire society. Not to mention things like mass flight, space travel, satellites, our extraordinary medical techniques, etc.
Look, back in the 1400s, Leonardo da Vinci understood the basic principles of things like helicopters, computers, and advanced weaponry, among many other things. Would you thus downplay the advances we've made in the 5-6 centuries since then?
Yeah, but wasn't it pretty well accepted belief back then that you could never break the sound barrier?
As far as "sound scientific principles"....remember Newtons laws of motion? They were well accepted as "sound scientific principles" back then, and they held their ground for a couple of centuries. Then we started figuring out that they aren't exactly accurate in some scenarios. Who's to say that in the next century or two we won't start figuring out scenarios in which our current scientific understanding isn't exactly applicable.
Hey....I like the McRib, thank you very much. I may not be exactly sure what it tastes like (certainly not ribs) but it's good.
Actually, I do consider that fast hardware....however, please take into account that my mythbox is a P3-450 with a Hauppauge PVR-350 and PVR-500. With that hardware, I can easily record 3 SD shows while playing back another, all on the same box. :-)
You need to be even clearer than that. If you have a proper ATSC/QAM HD tuner for you mythbox, then you can even record any HD channels broadcast over the air as well as any HD channels broadcast over cable that don't require a converter box (ie: any channel you can receive by hooking your HDTV directly to the cable line). That usually (always?) means you can't get stuff like Discovery HD, ESPN HD, HBO HD, etc. Usually its just your local broadcast channels (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, PBS, etc). However, depending on what you like to watch, that might be sufficient.
Although I honestly have no idea what is reasonable pricing for wiring these days, when I wired my house a few years ago I did a lot of research on pricing. I bought from CyberXLink. They had (at least at that time) good pricing on the wiring, and very good pricing on the keystone terminating jacks.
Here's what they currently charge for 1000ft:
CAT6 Solid = $102
CAT6 Plenum = $245
CAT5E Solid = $66
CAT5E Plenum = $155
For the most part, I'll agree that the Gamecube controller is best, especially with all of its different size/shape buttons. However, the one thing I don't like is that the should triggers are a bit uncomfortable if you use them excessively. In game like Metroid Prime, where you are really using them, sometimes holding them down for several seconds at a time, it does seem to be a bit tiring after a few hours. Maybe it's just my hands or my grip, but it seems like the direction of the button's movement is at a slight angle to the natural direction my finger wants to move. The XBOX (original...never played the 360) on the other hand....I could hold those triggers down all day.
Don't be a fool. Payday loans don't give them money...it just timeshifts their money, while slowly (or not so slowly) siphoning it off.
It actually makes the problem worse for those poor. If I'm in a financial crunch, I'm gonna have to find ways to come up with the money. If I have an easy solution, I'll take it. If I don't have an easy solution, I'll eventually have to get creative or make some more sacrifices. Here, the payday loan is the easy "solution". I get money now and I'll worry about the effects of that later (probably using another payday loan). The thing is, the payday loan didn't actually solve anything....it just delayed my problem a couple weeks. In addition, the payday loan added some pretty significant fees, so it actually compounded the problem. Instead of being $500 behind this week, I'll be $600 behind two weeks from now. So I take another payday loan and 2 weeks later I'm $700 behind.
At some point that can't keep growing (they won't start lending me more than my paycheck) so I'll be FORCED to find a creative solution to make up the difference. Maybe I'll sell my TV, start picking up pop cans for the deposit, try to work a deal with my creditors, or something. The problem is, I can't sell my TV every 2 weeks. I can only do it once. If I had sold it at the beginning, I would have gotten out of the hole and been alright. But now selling my TV only keeps me from getting further behind instead of getting me caught up.
Having the easy "solution" of a payday loan actually made my problem MUCH worse. If I didn't have an easy way out, I would have taken the difficult path and actually SOLVED the problem. But taking the easy way out, I STILL had to take the difficult path, and I STILL didn't even solve the problem.
It's like having a cavity and not going to the dentist because you don't like going to the dentist. Eventually, you are going to HAVE to go to the dentist, and when you do you'll probably need a root canal instead of a simple filling.
No, you've misunderstood. There are only 2 factors there: an 80 digit number and a 227 digit number. 7691122230 is just some digits in the middle of the 227 digit one.
But the fact is, there are already sloppy players out there. What are they going to do...make it so those players don't work on any new movies?
Thats an odd definition of "winning the round"...that the key won't be useful on future discs? That's kind of like a boxer getting the crap beat out of them in round 1 and then claiming they won round 1 because they are going to come back fighting in round 2.
True, but I'm pretty sure the implication being made was that it has a Zeiss lens so it's not really that crappy.
If you are "underimpressed" by that lens, then I'd guess either:
1) You have VERY high standards....standards higher than almost any zoom lens is likely to satisfy.
2) You don't know how to use the lens or camera
3) You have a defective/misconfigured lens or camera
The 50mm 1.8 lens has very good (even excellent if you stop down a bit) sharpness, contrast, and color. About the only areas where it really fails is build quality (it's mostly plastic) and bokeh (terrible, mostly because of the 5 blade aperture). Most of the complaints I've seen about this lens can be traced back to out of focus pictures due to the incredibly shallow depth of field when used at f/1.8. If you stop down to f/8 and are still unimpressed, I'd suggest something is seriously wrong.
So, if you slap the BMW name on a hot cycle, does that make it a high performance, luxury vehicle?
Cello! Don't forget it also comes with half empty "starter" ink cartridges.