Sounds like they use a system of ranking on your records - if you've already 'claimed' your service then your record will be flagged as 'hes cost us too much money already' and the computer will give the customer rep a new excuse every time you call. Lost records is a new one, but kinda insulting. America needs a data protection act so you can call them up and say 'give me a copy of all my records and any memos you have ever written about me'
It sounds like you have something set up badly at a particular stage or just a poor card. Generally TV cards go all the way from having absolutely no encoding hardware and the CPU does it, to full expensive pro mpeg encoders. It takes abit of setting right (which is what TiVo has done), make sure you HD is fast enough to record the resulting stream and that you've chosen a suitable frame rate, resolution and codec - you want a codec that only does just enough compression so that the video will be recordable by your hard drive in real time, DivX'ing on the fly is likely to bring your CPU a headache. And digital cable/sat/arial cards are good too because the TV station does all the encoding for you and you just grab the mpeg-2 stream...
Im guessing TiVo was just using a decent TV card. As long as the PC is powerful enough it should be OK. Plus, you can get DVB (digital) cards which can just give you the raw mpeg video AFAIK, which TV companies like to keep at a low bandwidth anyway so it can go straight to disk.
Eh TiVo will probably die, they have the entire TV industry against them. As long as I can easily buy a clone or make my own (with no restrictions) why should I care?
Advertisers will realise that pop-ups suck and everyone hates them, where as old fashioned banner ads are perfectly fine and few people block them. Systems like salon are also ok if a bit annoying. The general rule is if its too annoying then people will find a way around it or just go somewhere else. Every format has its own optimum advertising style - TV for example is suited to having reasonably spaced breaks - eg 15-30 minutes apart that have mostly interesting adverts that people want to watch. If you fuck with that or start putting banner ads in TV programs then people get pissed off and skip them like in the US.
I don't get it.. can't he reserve tickets or see it a week later? Infact scrap that, why doesnt he just turn up the night before it opens when all the other hardcore star-wars geeks will show up - he would still get to the front of the line? am I missing the point??
All of these reality shows talk big. but the trouble is none of them actually do anything even slightly controversial. If its against the law then send the show to a country where you can get away with it! people want to see killing, fighting, animal sex etc.. Go stick helmet cams on soldiers in Iraq. Hide cameras in Baghdad. There was a potentially cool show in the UK where thieves were set up - e.g. a truck door was left open and someone would eventually get in to nick the stuff in it, then the door was locked on them and they were driven around town with the cover off in a sort of cage. Take things like this to the next level, take reality TV to 3rd world countries where you can get away with more and lets get some damn good depraved entertainment for a change instead of all this pussy "ooh im really a man" - "hey actually im not a millionaire" - "lets have sex on tv oh we're so bad" bullshit. And as for anything involving making over people, houses, gardens or pets - they need to be all axed today.
To be a fully usable system for 'home' users it needs root access so it can install spyware etc. It also needs to be able to hide some file somewhere to implement those 30-day trial counters. Also if it could handle installing absolutely anything, from source, and fix all dependencies in a single click i'd be happy.
Its all about who you know. Engineering is a low job, like window cleaning, as Dilbert says, Engineers don't get offices or promotions unless they have the fortune of starting their own successful company. You can graduate from the top university or the bottom with a good degree and you can still quite easily end up in the same situation, but if you know the right people you're going to get on a board and be playing golf and earning that pay check while the lackeys do their science stuff. It just so happens that the powerful people you'll meet are more likely to be in a respectable university. Here in the UK it used to be that in order to get into a good uni you needed to be from a good school, which if you were poor but intelligent the government would pay for, then they stopped paying and so now you just need to be rich and the university will take on a quota of 'token' state-school kids (as long as they don't have a cockney accent)..
Unfortunately Starbucks 'office-space' sucks as much as their coffee, the sofas are always filthy, the tables rarely cleaned and the decor is er.. shit. But its good enough when you're in a shopping street and desperate for somewhere to sit inside and more comfortable than McDonalds..
Shhhhh SHHHHHH!!! for fucks sake don't talk about non-capitalist ideas or the anti-red police will be knocking! Yes I also think that certain things are best in the public sector but I know when to keep my mouth shut.
The story is that people are morally outraged but don't exactly know why. We can feel that this sort of commercialisation of genetic engineering is wrong but we just can't put our finger on why its wrong for someone to sign a contract like this. I've said it before, customers need unions, people get pissed off at companies all the time for rip-off prices, terrible service, exploitation and bad treatment of other people for minor crimes, but do we all band together and seriously boycott the products and say "hey fuck you, you will produce and sell this to us on our terms or you will go bankrupt next week"? Fuck no! we go on buying. Sure one or two people say "oh well im going to do my part and boycott it, because if everyone thinks like I do then it will stop" How often does that work? People just don't bother banding together and sticking up for each other for a greater good. If we want corporations to treat us fairly we have to get together and demand it. Most companies in the same market will stick together and keep prices at some level - its called a cartel and it works very well, especially if the customers don't have one too. These farmers signed the contract because growing Monsanto(tm) crops is a hell of allot easier than doing it the old way and if all the other farms are doing it then you don't have a choice if you want to keep up production and lower costs, but if the farmers formed a cartel or union they would be able to keep the prices and contract terms in check, both sides would have to keep it fair or the other side would drop out.
In the end its all about the application, if you're using XML to describe an entire website for example, then you can compress it in whatever way you want (remember, no matter how long tag names are or how much they are repeated, a good compression system will see this redundancy) and if its done right, you can even process it while its compressed! (im looking at you Huffman!) Yes I did RTFA, the point is XML isn't about this layer, its about the overall way of storing data in its most natural form, which isn't going to be the smallest way. XML is supposed to be big and wasteful of memory, its like maths, it doesn't care about the logistics.
Obviously people using it do care about the logistics and there are going to be cases where you don't know in advance if something can handle a particular compression or binary format, hence you need a way to tell the other system what you are trying to send or what you can send: eg.. an XML exchange format (in _raw_ XML) which basically says 'this stream of bytes is an XML file compressed in gz format' etc.. and a way for two machines to negotiate - ie the first says 'i understand these formats' and the second sends it in the best understood format/compression scheme. Thats almost certainly been done already, in fact I know SVG browsers are ment to be able to accept gzipped SVG for example.
Actually technically any given XML stream is already in a binary format technically, you have to know how each character is stored before you can read it...
Actually evolution is a theory, thats why its called the Theory of Evolution.. no-one is disputing that, we've yet to find the missing link. There are two parts to evolution: 1) accepting that as a theory the idea works and that things do evolve, and 2) that evolution is the full and only explination for all life on eart, the start of life and human life.
if you don't accept 1, you're an idiot plain and simple, just as if you don't accept that the earth is round, its just an obvious fact. if you don't accept 2 then fair enough, science is still looking for evidence either way.
Lawyers are just like hackers, they don't make the stupid piece of shit rules, they just find the loop holes, sometimes for bad reasons, ok so they are black-hat but still hackers. If I had law skilez I would use them for money too, granted I would start out as the young graduate keen to make a difference and bring some good to the world, but after a couple of years I'd be suing 12 year old girls and their grand-parents and still sleeping good at night..
Slashdot Mirror
not sure who looks worse :\ is she trying to fart or something?
Sounds like they use a system of ranking on your records - if you've already 'claimed' your service then your record will be flagged as 'hes cost us too much money already' and the computer will give the customer rep a new excuse every time you call. Lost records is a new one, but kinda insulting. America needs a data protection act so you can call them up and say 'give me a copy of all my records and any memos you have ever written about me'
It sounds like you have something set up badly at a particular stage or just a poor card. Generally TV cards go all the way from having absolutely no encoding hardware and the CPU does it, to full expensive pro mpeg encoders. It takes abit of setting right (which is what TiVo has done), make sure you HD is fast enough to record the resulting stream and that you've chosen a suitable frame rate, resolution and codec - you want a codec that only does just enough compression so that the video will be recordable by your hard drive in real time, DivX'ing on the fly is likely to bring your CPU a headache. And digital cable/sat/arial cards are good too because the TV station does all the encoding for you and you just grab the mpeg-2 stream...
Im guessing TiVo was just using a decent TV card. As long as the PC is powerful enough it should be OK. Plus, you can get DVB (digital) cards which can just give you the raw mpeg video AFAIK, which TV companies like to keep at a low bandwidth anyway so it can go straight to disk.
Eh TiVo will probably die, they have the entire TV industry against them. As long as I can easily buy a clone or make my own (with no restrictions) why should I care?
Advertisers will realise that pop-ups suck and everyone hates them, where as old fashioned banner ads are perfectly fine and few people block them. Systems like salon are also ok if a bit annoying. The general rule is if its too annoying then people will find a way around it or just go somewhere else. Every format has its own optimum advertising style - TV for example is suited to having reasonably spaced breaks - eg 15-30 minutes apart that have mostly interesting adverts that people want to watch. If you fuck with that or start putting banner ads in TV programs then people get pissed off and skip them like in the US.
Not if he wants to spend the next few years in jail. Now if he threatens to shoot anyone who cuts in line thats ok..
I don't get it.. can't he reserve tickets or see it a week later? Infact scrap that, why doesnt he just turn up the night before it opens when all the other hardcore star-wars geeks will show up - he would still get to the front of the line? am I missing the point??
All of these reality shows talk big. but the trouble is none of them actually do anything even slightly controversial. If its against the law then send the show to a country where you can get away with it! people want to see killing, fighting, animal sex etc.. Go stick helmet cams on soldiers in Iraq. Hide cameras in Baghdad. There was a potentially cool show in the UK where thieves were set up - e.g. a truck door was left open and someone would eventually get in to nick the stuff in it, then the door was locked on them and they were driven around town with the cover off in a sort of cage. Take things like this to the next level, take reality TV to 3rd world countries where you can get away with more and lets get some damn good depraved entertainment for a change instead of all this pussy "ooh im really a man" - "hey actually im not a millionaire" - "lets have sex on tv oh we're so bad" bullshit. And as for anything involving making over people, houses, gardens or pets - they need to be all axed today.
no over here, that just wouldn't be proper..
To be a fully usable system for 'home' users it needs root access so it can install spyware etc. It also needs to be able to hide some file somewhere to implement those 30-day trial counters. Also if it could handle installing absolutely anything, from source, and fix all dependencies in a single click i'd be happy.
Its all about who you know. Engineering is a low job, like window cleaning, as Dilbert says, Engineers don't get offices or promotions unless they have the fortune of starting their own successful company. You can graduate from the top university or the bottom with a good degree and you can still quite easily end up in the same situation, but if you know the right people you're going to get on a board and be playing golf and earning that pay check while the lackeys do their science stuff. It just so happens that the powerful people you'll meet are more likely to be in a respectable university. Here in the UK it used to be that in order to get into a good uni you needed to be from a good school, which if you were poor but intelligent the government would pay for, then they stopped paying and so now you just need to be rich and the university will take on a quota of 'token' state-school kids (as long as they don't have a cockney accent)..
If you find a way of making coffee from a cuecat, please let me know..
Unfortunately Starbucks 'office-space' sucks as much as their coffee, the sofas are always filthy, the tables rarely cleaned and the decor is er.. shit. But its good enough when you're in a shopping street and desperate for somewhere to sit inside and more comfortable than McDonalds..
unspecified commercial surveillance tools are employed now Gator software??
How many crabs do you know that are half a meter wide with inch long spikes?
Thats great for stopping big things like pollution, but if you're pissed off about something legal, what are you gonna do?
Shhhhh SHHHHHH!!! for fucks sake don't talk about non-capitalist ideas or the anti-red police will be knocking! Yes I also think that certain things are best in the public sector but I know when to keep my mouth shut.
The story is that people are morally outraged but don't exactly know why. We can feel that this sort of commercialisation of genetic engineering is wrong but we just can't put our finger on why its wrong for someone to sign a contract like this. I've said it before, customers need unions, people get pissed off at companies all the time for rip-off prices, terrible service, exploitation and bad treatment of other people for minor crimes, but do we all band together and seriously boycott the products and say "hey fuck you, you will produce and sell this to us on our terms or you will go bankrupt next week"? Fuck no! we go on buying. Sure one or two people say "oh well im going to do my part and boycott it, because if everyone thinks like I do then it will stop" How often does that work? People just don't bother banding together and sticking up for each other for a greater good. If we want corporations to treat us fairly we have to get together and demand it. Most companies in the same market will stick together and keep prices at some level - its called a cartel and it works very well, especially if the customers don't have one too. These farmers signed the contract because growing Monsanto(tm) crops is a hell of allot easier than doing it the old way and if all the other farms are doing it then you don't have a choice if you want to keep up production and lower costs, but if the farmers formed a cartel or union they would be able to keep the prices and contract terms in check, both sides would have to keep it fair or the other side would drop out.
This is the same corporation that brought us Agent Orange..
In the end its all about the application, if you're using XML to describe an entire website for example, then you can compress it in whatever way you want (remember, no matter how long tag names are or how much they are repeated, a good compression system will see this redundancy) and if its done right, you can even process it while its compressed! (im looking at you Huffman!) Yes I did RTFA, the point is XML isn't about this layer, its about the overall way of storing data in its most natural form, which isn't going to be the smallest way. XML is supposed to be big and wasteful of memory, its like maths, it doesn't care about the logistics.
Obviously people using it do care about the logistics and there are going to be cases where you don't know in advance if something can handle a particular compression or binary format, hence you need a way to tell the other system what you are trying to send or what you can send: eg.. an XML exchange format (in _raw_ XML) which basically says 'this stream of bytes is an XML file compressed in gz format' etc.. and a way for two machines to negotiate - ie the first says 'i understand these formats' and the second sends it in the best understood format/compression scheme. Thats almost certainly been done already, in fact I know SVG browsers are ment to be able to accept gzipped SVG for example.
Actually technically any given XML stream is already in a binary format technically, you have to know how each character is stored before you can read it...
When your software comes with 99% of new PC's and is already recognised as part of a computer itself, who needs advertising?
Actually evolution is a theory, thats why its called the Theory of Evolution.. no-one is disputing that, we've yet to find the missing link. There are two parts to evolution: 1) accepting that as a theory the idea works and that things do evolve, and 2) that evolution is the full and only explination for all life on eart, the start of life and human life.
if you don't accept 1, you're an idiot plain and simple, just as if you don't accept that the earth is round, its just an obvious fact. if you don't accept 2 then fair enough, science is still looking for evidence either way.
You might get a similar response with..
"Why did 9 out of 10 WTC workers prefer United? - They take you straight from the airport to your office building"
Lawyers are just like hackers, they don't make the stupid piece of shit rules, they just find the loop holes, sometimes for bad reasons, ok so they are black-hat but still hackers. If I had law skilez I would use them for money too, granted I would start out as the young graduate keen to make a difference and bring some good to the world, but after a couple of years I'd be suing 12 year old girls and their grand-parents and still sleeping good at night..