Counties in Massachusetts didn't really do much of anything on their own since, well, before I was born. Jury duty notices and prison administration were pretty much the only things that were county-specific. There is no use for that extra layer of government in Massachusetts anymore.
Not so much anymore. State income tax is currently 5.3%, though you can voluntarily pay 5.9% (I'm not kidding, there's a checkbox in the tax form for this). Romney's trying to get that down to 5%, however, but given the heavily old-boy Democrat leaning of the Legislature, it will be a tough fight. There's also a 5% state sales tax, but it's a short ride to "tax free New Hampshire", so that's generally not a problem.
"The US is WAY behind in IPv6 adoption" makes no sense. ISPs in the US are behind, sure, but don't blame the government for that. How exactly does the US "hoard its control of DNS on the IPv4 internet" in a way that is harmful to users outside the US? IPv6 adoption and DNS zone file administration are different issues altogether.
What's the point of a hard drive in a console? Put in CD. Play.
And wait, because loading all of the code, maps, textures, etc. takes a long time. With a HDD, a game can cache this stuff, allow downloadable content and patches, etc.
Lots of small, handheld devices use hard drives, why is it a stretch to make it a standard console component? It wouldn't need to have much capacity, and with a quick glance at pricewatch, it seems that 20GB 3.5" drives are less than $30, which is less than 10% of what the console will cost.
Well, if you're in Canada, as your email and site suggest, you probably don't have much use for a SSN.
But, if you're in the States, and your parents want to claim you as a dependent, they need to put your SSN on their tax forms. A book I just read (Freakonomics) says that 10% of American "children" disappeared between 1987 and 1988, when the tax code changed to require parents to provide the SSNs for their claimed dependents.
Of late, whenever I do an "emerge -u system", I have to spend days firefighting the inevitable borkage.
That's, of course, assuming that the emerge completes at all. Invariably, ebuilds are not properly tested, and will fail halfway through leaving my machine in an even more spacked-up state than to begin with.
The only time this has ever happened to me on four Gentoo machines was when I did
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge -u foo
which is a Bad Thing to Do.
And then it takes eight bloody hours to install a new version of Firefox. Urgh.
emerge mozilla-firefox-bin is pretty quick.
I admit it, I was wrong. I was attracted to Gentoo because I thought it would make me l33t and cool.
That's not in the documentation; you've got to work that out on your own.
If you don't need or want to see the advertisements, why should you waste your own bandwidth sending more requests to the server and downloading ads?
Because in most cases, the advertiser pays the "developer" each time you download that ad, which the developer can use to provide more content, which is the reason you went to the site in the first place.
As far as cookies go, at the "bodega on the corner" the "guy who works there" writes down *in his own records* when you came and what you bought. He doesn't give you a piece of paper and ask you to file it in your records and then bring it back to him next time you visit.
Many sites do the exact same thing as the bodega: they give you a cookie so it can recognize you when you come back. The guy at the bodega does it by remembering what you look like. The site does it by assigning you a number.
I don't think the "halo effect" is causing many switchers. I know lots of iPod users who aren't even thinking of leaving their PCs. I would guess a lot of Apple's growth has to do with three things (not necessarily in this order)
Unix geeks who want a modern, well supported platform, that is more "mainstream" than Linux.
Windows users who are fed-up with security problems and the like, real or imagined, and who aren't tied down by existing apps that don't run on the Mac.
Former Mac users that are coming back into the fold.
People seduced by the reality distortion field and the cool turtlenecks.
I got my Mac mini a month ago, and I'm not sure if I'll ever run Linux on a desktop (that I own) again.
Because the motherboard manufacturer's only control the motherboard, and in some cases either the video card or the CPU, not the memory, hard drive, sound card, TV tuner card, Firewire card, network card or pretty much anything else that Apple keeps tightly under their control.
More and more motherboards have this stuff on board, particularly Firewire and USB controllers. With a smarter BIOS (maybe even LinuxBIOS), those manufacturers could provide a service similar to Apple's Target Disk Mode.
FWIW, Apple doesn't have tight control over drives and memory; these are commonly swapped out with commodity parts with higher capacity by end users.
And, as someone else mentioned here, there's at least one PC laptop manufacturer that has this feature.
I would guess that "geek with a Linux box" is a very small segment of TiVo's market. They're probably seeing a lot more competition with cable companies' set-top-box "DVR" functionality, which frankly sucks. And they're probably seeing some competition with Windows Media Center, too.
As for HD capture cards, those currently only recieve over-the-air broadcasts, so you're stuck with network television, and not movie or other cable-only channels. And the cable companies aren't going to make it easy to pull HD content to an external machine, even if CableCard becomes more widespread.
Clearly, a geek with MythTV can provide more functionality than TiVo or any other commercial offering, but there's the time factor (aka "how much is your time worth?"), which is TiVo's greatest strength: ease of installation and use.
Wow, NASA sure can use more brilliant engineers like you! You clearly have better ideas than the thousands of engineers and scientists who have made a living figuring this kind of stuff out! Here's a link to the JPL career site!
"Standard" PCI has 1056Mbps of bandwith. According to the site he mentioned, they are using a machine that has a 64 bit bus at 66MHz, which yields 4224Mbps of bandwidth. So you'll need to spend at least $200 for a motherboard that can hold your $16k capture card.:^)
One of the reasons this is so expensive is that the amount of data coming in from an uncompressed source (like component cables or DVI) is immense. This is why the pcHDTV card only accepts compressed broadcast streams: it captures the already encoded video stream. A device that can capture raw video would have to compress it before it can be feed to the computer.
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Counties in Massachusetts didn't really do much of anything on their own since, well, before I was born. Jury duty notices and prison administration were pretty much the only things that were county-specific. There is no use for that extra layer of government in Massachusetts anymore.
Not so much anymore. State income tax is currently 5.3%, though you can voluntarily pay 5.9% (I'm not kidding, there's a checkbox in the tax form for this). Romney's trying to get that down to 5%, however, but given the heavily old-boy Democrat leaning of the Legislature, it will be a tough fight. There's also a 5% state sales tax, but it's a short ride to "tax free New Hampshire", so that's generally not a problem.
Have you tried blowing on the DVD, and wiggling it around a bit?
Lets take bets on what TV franchise from the 80's they will bastardize next. I've got $50 down for He-Man. Paris Hilton can be Skeletor.
Way too late, by almost twenty years. That honor went to Frank Langella.
"The US is WAY behind in IPv6 adoption" makes no sense. ISPs in the US are behind, sure, but don't blame the government for that. How exactly does the US "hoard its control of DNS on the IPv4 internet" in a way that is harmful to users outside the US? IPv6 adoption and DNS zone file administration are different issues altogether.
What's the point of a hard drive in a console? Put in CD. Play.
And wait, because loading all of the code, maps, textures, etc. takes a long time. With a HDD, a game can cache this stuff, allow downloadable content and patches, etc.
Lots of small, handheld devices use hard drives, why is it a stretch to make it a standard console component? It wouldn't need to have much capacity, and with a quick glance at pricewatch, it seems that 20GB 3.5" drives are less than $30, which is less than 10% of what the console will cost.
iPod even helped get me in the store to play with them.
They let you in even if you don't have an iPod, you know...
- RSS aggregator
- Bookmark search (probably not 'til Longhorn)
- Privacy Mode^W^W (I don't expect MS to copy this one)
And maybe:MS innovation, at it's best!
Opera fans can chime in here too, if they want.
Well, if you're in Canada, as your email and site suggest, you probably don't have much use for a SSN.
But, if you're in the States, and your parents want to claim you as a dependent, they need to put your SSN on their tax forms. A book I just read (Freakonomics) says that 10% of American "children" disappeared between 1987 and 1988, when the tax code changed to require parents to provide the SSNs for their claimed dependents.
fragging the Covenant is something we can share as a species
But not as friends, apparently. The lack of Co-op play over XBox Live really sucks.
So how do they tell the user that it's going to take like 3 days to do a stage 1 install?
They (and the GUI) would be better off only installing the GRP packages, then... "Power users" can upgrade as they see fit...
Of late, whenever I do an "emerge -u system", I have to spend days firefighting the inevitable borkage.
That's, of course, assuming that the emerge completes at all. Invariably, ebuilds are not properly tested, and will fail halfway through leaving my machine in an even more spacked-up state than to begin with.
The only time this has ever happened to me on four Gentoo machines was when I did
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge -u foo
which is a Bad Thing to Do.
And then it takes eight bloody hours to install a new version of Firefox. Urgh.
emerge mozilla-firefox-bin is pretty quick.
I admit it, I was wrong. I was attracted to Gentoo because I thought it would make me l33t and cool.
That's not in the documentation; you've got to work that out on your own.
It doesn't look like this new installer will prevent you from doing that. Because we all know "bragging rights" is what it's all about.
If you don't need or want to see the advertisements, why should you waste your own bandwidth sending more requests to the server and downloading ads?
Because in most cases, the advertiser pays the "developer" each time you download that ad, which the developer can use to provide more content, which is the reason you went to the site in the first place.
As far as cookies go, at the "bodega on the corner" the "guy who works there" writes down *in his own records* when you came and what you bought. He doesn't give you a piece of paper and ask you to file it in your records and then bring it back to him next time you visit.
Many sites do the exact same thing as the bodega: they give you a cookie so it can recognize you when you come back. The guy at the bodega does it by remembering what you look like. The site does it by assigning you a number.
I got my Mac mini a month ago, and I'm not sure if I'll ever run Linux on a desktop (that I own) again.
What are you, some sort of terrorist?
Because the motherboard manufacturer's only control the motherboard, and in some cases either the video card or the CPU, not the memory, hard drive, sound card, TV tuner card, Firewire card, network card or pretty much anything else that Apple keeps tightly under their control.
More and more motherboards have this stuff on board, particularly Firewire and USB controllers. With a smarter BIOS (maybe even LinuxBIOS), those manufacturers could provide a service similar to Apple's Target Disk Mode.
FWIW, Apple doesn't have tight control over drives and memory; these are commonly swapped out with commodity parts with higher capacity by end users.
And, as someone else mentioned here, there's at least one PC laptop manufacturer that has this feature.
The only reason Apple can giveyou cool features like that is because they have a tight control of their systems.
What's stopping an x86 motherboard manufacturer from providing the exact same feature? I would hope they have tight control of their systems, too.
I would guess that "geek with a Linux box" is a very small segment of TiVo's market. They're probably seeing a lot more competition with cable companies' set-top-box "DVR" functionality, which frankly sucks. And they're probably seeing some competition with Windows Media Center, too.
As for HD capture cards, those currently only recieve over-the-air broadcasts, so you're stuck with network television, and not movie or other cable-only channels. And the cable companies aren't going to make it easy to pull HD content to an external machine, even if CableCard becomes more widespread.
Clearly, a geek with MythTV can provide more functionality than TiVo or any other commercial offering, but there's the time factor (aka "how much is your time worth?"), which is TiVo's greatest strength: ease of installation and use.
Don't hold your breath for a PC that has this processor in it. Besides, if you really want a MIPS box running Linux, get a Playstation2...
Looks like Eric finally accepted the job offer from Microsoft.
:^)
Just kidding Eric, don't shoot me!
Any other snappy comebacks?
I'll take this one.
Wow, NASA sure can use more brilliant engineers like you! You clearly have better ideas than the thousands of engineers and scientists who have made a living figuring this kind of stuff out! Here's a link to the JPL career site!
"Standard" PCI has 1056Mbps of bandwith. According to the site he mentioned, they are using a machine that has a 64 bit bus at 66MHz, which yields 4224Mbps of bandwidth. So you'll need to spend at least $200 for a motherboard that can hold your $16k capture card. :^)
One of the reasons this is so expensive is that the amount of data coming in from an uncompressed source (like component cables or DVI) is immense. This is why the pcHDTV card only accepts compressed broadcast streams: it captures the already encoded video stream. A device that can capture raw video would have to compress it before it can be feed to the computer.
They can use the rights they already have to GTA 1 and 2, and do the same...