What's funny is that this in-house DVD was most likely created and recorded without region encoding or CSS - it's far more cost-effective to produce these things on "consumer" DVD recorders and DVD recordable media which cannot utilize CSS. In that case, there would be no DMCA violation because there's no CSS to circumvent. Since the video was produced by the department asking you for the copying information, there's no infringement issue either.
If they wanted to ask about extracting a few minutes of video from a Region-2 DVD to include in an in-house production on Japanese culture, then you have a valid point.
When I subscribed several months ago, QoS was broken in the "Public" release (definitely the last one). Only subscribers could get the firmware with the fixed QoS. I am unaware if anything changed since then since I no longer need to download public releases.
Voting for a 3rd party is ideal, especially in my state (California) where voting Republican is just throwing a vote in the toilet. I'd rather give it to the Libertarian party where it'll do some good.
Problem is, the DVD-R burning TiVo does not allow transferred programs from other TiVos to be burned, only programs originally recorded on that particular TiVo. In fact it does not even allow programs transferred from another DVD-R burning TiVo to be recorded either. Supposedly it is because the Pioneer units save the files in a more DVD-friendly format than other TiVO units.
Sorry to say, $40 will manage to fill up an empty '98 Toyota Camry (or a recent model Highlander) with 18.1 gallons of 87 Octane here in California. I'd hate to see what an SUV would cost with 30+ gallon tanks.
Reminds me of my 1st iPod. I had a 10GB unit and the new 30GB model came out which was oh-so-much nicer.
I also picked up a 2-year replacement plan at CompUSA because at the time, iPods had a 90-day warranty and I did not like the idea of having a $500 paperweight. The extended plan at CompUSA was a bargain at less than 8% of the unit's cost, and they were willing to sell me one even though I bought the unit at the Apple Store.
After a year and a half, I found a bug in the firmware update that trashed the startup files on the iPod which caused it to start up with a "bad disk" icon. Somehow, all the files were there but it could not boot. After that, the firmware installer refused to work at all. I did discover copying certain files to the iPod got it into a state where the firware updater worked again. Updating the firmware in the same "manner" caused the unit to fail once again.
I returned the unit (I simply and truthfully told them it failed to start up) and in the end got a new 30GB unit as a replacement with no out-of-pocket expense. Yes, I could have easily fixed it myself, but I paid good money for someone else to figure that out for me.
This trick sometimes works for new items and often for open box items:
Ask for a better price if you buy the extended warranty. Oddly enough, they will sometimes bite and knock $$$ off of the price to get that warranty sale. It is THAT important to them.
Buy notebook. Service plan is, say, $160. Store knocks off $100 off the price of the notebook if the customer pays the full $160 for the plan (net cost is $60 for the plan). If the plan is a very low percentage of the purchase price it becomes an acceptable risk. It works even better on open box items - I've seen store managers discount off the price to essentially bundle in the service plan for "free"*.
The managers can be that aggressive to meet their quotas.
* If you wish, drop in within the next 30 days to get a refund on the service plan.
Not really. It was quite fun aside from the above-mentioned incident.
The school would not give him any TA's so he let me in his class, gave me the semester's assignments and asked me to complete them as fast as possible. A few days later, I handed him all of the assignments. He tossed them aside and told me I had an "A" for the semester. The grade will drop every time I screw up. My assignment from then on was to play games on the Apple II and answer questions from the students who labored on Atari 800s.
The Atari 800s booted up MS BASIC from a floppy. when they started without a boot disk they were in "notepad" mode, which is essentially a TV typewriter. Sometimes we'd type something like:
MS BASIC v1.0 READY >
on the screen. Someone would then come in, think it was ready to go and spend a whole class typing in a program only to find out there's no way to run or save it. Other times we'd find the ASCII string 0x4E 0x45 0x57 in memory and poke in 0x52 0x55 0x4E (and vice-versa) to mess with the other students.
After a day or two of this the instructor told the class to boot off a floppy before doing any work. I went back to printing out pictures of the Enterprise on the dot-matrix printer with a 300 baud acoustic modem and playing Tai-Pan, Dark Crystal and Transylvania on the Apple.
Mars was an example. Titan's atmosphere is about 1.6 bars at -178C. I'm surprised it's denser than the Earth's. Nothing I've read talks about liquid water at that temperature or pressure. It's just a solid at that temp and pressure.
That's true. Anywhere to the left of the triple point water can only exist as a liquid or a solid. However, on Mars I doubt the pressure from the atmosphere is actually that high anywhere on the planet, in fact I am positive the pressure is considerably less than Earth's atmospheric pressure. The only (rocky) planet in the solar system with really high pressures is Venus. There's another factor in it. The recent water "slurry" found on mars was actually a brine of some sort. Salts dissolved in the water lowers the freezing point further, making liquid water possible. Pure water would probably freeze then sublime into the atmosphere as a gas in the warmer regions of the planet. Just like frozen dry ice does on Earth.
FYI: Just temperature alone isn't enough to determine the freezing (or boiling) point of water or any liquid. Pressure has a lot to do with it. With a low atmospheric pressure (such as some of these moons and planets) the boiling point lowers, as well as the freezing point. Water can exist as a liquid at much lower temperatures when the pressure is low.
It is possible that liquid water cannot exist under these conditions, it depends on where the triple point is. The solid water may just sublime to a gas.
Back in 1983 or 1984 when I was in my last year of high school, we used to carry around our 5 1/4" floppies in plastic boxes. Those of us that were quite proficient on the Apple II were assigned as teachers' assistants and had our assignments plus pirated games on these disks.
The problem was, while we were helping other students, some people would steal disks because they were expensive and we had all the coolest games.
One day after my entire box disappearing, I sat in the lab pissed. I wrote an INIT program for the Apple DOS that would ask for a password, two wrong guesses and it would trash the disk and erase itself from RAM. My first attempt was pretty much done, but I had no disks because they were recently stolen. So I saved it on the classroom disk everyone stores their work on. I named it "DO NOT RUN THIS PROGRAM" and left for the day.
The following day, I arrived and the instructor grabbed be by the shirt and shoved me up against the wall and shouted: "Did you save a program the the class disk called 'do not run this program'? Because some little asshole decided to run it and we lost all the assignments and all of my grades for the semester!"
I did what anyone would do in that situation. I lied my ass off.
Another example:
Flash forward 12 years or so. In the lab at my company. We are trying out control software for relay control on an electrical switches about the size of filing cabinets. There are about 128 relays in each, and the suckers were hooked up on 120VAC. This was our only time to run test software before they got shipped out to the customer the next day.
Started up the software and all seemed ok. An odd smell started and I noticed the room's ambient light was changing... sorta orangish. I turned around and they were glowing hot and smoke was billowing out. I killed power, but it was way too late. 2-3" holes were burned in the PC boards. Later I found out the tech who hooked up the power didn't know what to hook the relays up to, so he wired them straight to ground. That didn't stop me from crapping bricks for the next few hours as the entire company showed up at the lab doors to see what the horrible smell was coming from.
Don't get me wrong. Ideally, I'd love for companies to make a buck on the net. Provided they do it reasonably.
I also am not going to demand that novices keep off of the Internet. I prefer everyone benefit from technology.
For your example, the act of pickpocketing one customer does not result in that customer writing graffitti on the walls or walking around with posters of young shaven rabbits. That customer does not suddenly become a pickpocket themselves either.
It's more like Day of the Dead, where one zombie bites a customer, that customer then turns into a zombie and runs about biting others. After a while, no more customers (except smart ones with guns). Take a cue from the movie 28 Days Later: let the infection run its course and let the infected victims starve themselves out. Cull the herd, it needs it.
I am tired of trying to propose solutions to the problems brought about with the large numbers of ignorant users using MS software. I'm also tired of trying to fix problems that these users repeatedly cause. Government and law enforcement doesn't seem to care, so I'll propose this solution:
In nature, when a population gets too large there's a die-off. Usually this die-off is caused by disease or starvation. The better adapted creatures survive and live on.
The malware writers are the foxes and the ignorant users are the rabbits. In our case the foxes don't eat the rabbits, but instead hijack the rabbits' computers for fraud, spam, pop-ups, etc. Foxes die by giving up and moving on to more lucrative off-line crimes.
The rabbits don't eat anything but are increasing in numbers by simply hooking up machines to the Internet. Rabbits die by cancelling their AOL accounts and stop using the Internet.
Right now there are a ton of rabbits (and more every day) and the fox population is exploding.
If we just sit back and let natural selection take its course, the ignorant rabbits will become sufficiently frustrated with their Internet experience and give up. The foxes will concentrate even harder on the remaining rabbits (who will be better adapted to counter the foxes' attacks) or start writing malware for the rest of the rabbits or face a massive die-off as well.
Those that are able to adapt do so by either keeping their machines properly patched or learn to use alternative browsers (or operating systems). These rabbits will then have a better Internet in the end because we will have a better class of users and software.
There's plenty of educational material out there for ignorant users to read. Practically every day there's something in the newspaper about how to protect oneself from these attacks.
The Zombies and SpamBots will make life a hell for the rest of us, but that's a short-term problem in this model. That should fix itself after the die-off itself.
FOX is the only one that I know of that is run by a group of politicians (all ex-reagan/bush/republican types). But CNN and other major are not what I would call liberal.
While I agree that the media has in general been pro-war since 9/11, beforehand I have seen bias on the media. The best example of bias was during the 2000 campaign when Florida was hanging in the balance.
CNN's anchors broke in and said the state went to Gore. The appearance of both announcers were as if they found out they just won the lottery. The female could not keep the grin off her face.
Not even an hour later, they flipped the results and the same two came on and said the state went to Bush, and they both looked like someone shot their dog.
You are right and sensationalism will win out over ideology in the end. What captures viewers and advertising dollars will always trump political leanings.
The best thing for the media now would be a near 50-50 split between Kerry and Bush in the polls going into the election. Toss in a few flips on who the leader is and hope for a close call in the vote and they can enjoy another 4-6 months of court battles and nastiness over the voting results.
I dunno about the soliciting, since I needed to give them my email address for them to send the invite in the first place. So the invite itself isn't unsolicited, it's a response to an inquiry. Or am I totally wrong now and Gmail is spamming (cold calling) for new accounts?
I registered my interest on/about April 1st, I still have not gotten an invite. That'll teach me to use Hotmail.
And Spielberg made this wonderful documentary about it back in 1979 starring John Belushi. He got the year wrong though.
Major General Joseph W. Stillwell: "Bombs! I don't hear any bombs! Now they're up there. They came all the way from Asia. Don't you think they'd bring a few bombs along?"
I am aware that my answer was overly simplistic. I was trying to point out that the changes the grandparent stated were not the likely reason for the speedups. Still, thanks for pointing it out.
Apple removed striping from everywhere in Panther. Quite a bit of it was replaced by brushed-metal. Even so, all it is doing is replacing one bitmap with another. The only possible gain is if they do not need to use alpha for transparency. Yet not all of this is by "removing" stuff. Quite a bit of tweaking is being done to speed up the OS, the most recent software update resulted in quite a few reports of faster system operation, and there was no discernable change in the featureset or operation of the UI.
The reason X runs slowly compared to Aqua is that Apple optimizes Aqua and allows harware acceleration (Quartz Extreme) and offloads lots of tasks to the GPU. I know of no X windowing system (aside from Apple's own implementation) that does this in OS X.
10.0 and 10.1 were dog-slow. Especially when you had a couple of hundred files in a folder. Jaguar was a huge increase in speed and performance. Quite a bit of that was due to the Quartz Extreme, but even my lowly 500MHz dual-USB iBook saw quite a boost from Jaguar and it was not able to use QE at all. Panther did very little to the iBook, except make it take forever to boot. I need to check on that bootcache issue.
My dual 800MHz Quicksilver is now almost three years old and I am still very happy with its performance. I expected to be wanting to replace it after two years, or after clock speeds have doubled, which is what I did when I used Wintel systems. Instead, I am considering keeping it around for the 10.4 release and at least another year or two. I attribute quite a bit of this to Apple's tweaks and performance enhancements of the OS.
Awkward does not describe an operating system, it describes a user-interface. If he said: "but because of its awkward Linux-based user interface and sluggish response" I would feel better - but only slightly so. An improperly designed UI would make the best operating system appear to be a pig.
Whether it was Linux, Windows CE, or some QNX based system is irrelevant because the user interface is at issue.
The other issues he has with lockups *IS* an OS, hardware, or driver issue. He never seemed to contact Roku to see what the possible issues were, so who knows what the problem was. Perhaps he got some bad hardware? Roku has a user forum, and from that they are discussing, it seems there are a few problems yet to solve, and development is still occurring fast and furious.
That is not "fair use". While I share your grief that some classic older shows stand little chance of getting on DVD (Get Smart series, anyone?) Time shifting on a VCR is not the same as archiving entire seasons of television programs though many people see no problem with it.
As for the card, I don't think it is any different than what is used with DirecTV or Dishnetwork here, except that it is perhaps a universal card that works with all DRM-encumbered devices. Here's what NHK says about it:
A new system for protecting digital content delivered over the broadcast airwaves will be introduced on April 5. Content will be encrypted and carry a copy-control signal which will allow the viewers to record the program only once, and will be decrypted by inserting a B-CAS card into the TV set. From April 5, viewers can continuously enjoy watching TV with the B-CAS card, but without it, nothing will be shown on the screen. We will inform the viewers step by step of installing the B-CAS card before the new system takes effect.
I am pretty much resigned to believe that once the broadcast flag is available, it will be set on ALL programming by default. Even if they do manage to show some sense on when to use it, good luck taping any of those sporting events. Better to be safe than sorry if you are a broadcaster, right?
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That's likely true. But commercial DVDs usually contain both.
What's funny is that this in-house DVD was most likely created and recorded without region encoding or CSS - it's far more cost-effective to produce these things on "consumer" DVD recorders and DVD recordable media which cannot utilize CSS. In that case, there would be no DMCA violation because there's no CSS to circumvent. Since the video was produced by the department asking you for the copying information, there's no infringement issue either.
If they wanted to ask about extracting a few minutes of video from a Region-2 DVD to include in an in-house production on Japanese culture, then you have a valid point.
When I subscribed several months ago, QoS was broken in the "Public" release (definitely the last one). Only subscribers could get the firmware with the fixed QoS. I am unaware if anything changed since then since I no longer need to download public releases.
What? Replacing one loser with another?
Voting for a 3rd party is ideal, especially in my state (California) where voting Republican is just throwing a vote in the toilet. I'd rather give it to the Libertarian party where it'll do some good.
Problem is, the DVD-R burning TiVo does not allow transferred programs from other TiVos to be burned, only programs originally recorded on that particular TiVo. In fact it does not even allow programs transferred from another DVD-R burning TiVo to be recorded either. Supposedly it is because the Pioneer units save the files in a more DVD-friendly format than other TiVO units.
So was this one particular Japanese chick on a particular internet video...
Sorry to say, $40 will manage to fill up an empty '98 Toyota Camry (or a recent model Highlander) with 18.1 gallons of 87 Octane here in California. I'd hate to see what an SUV would cost with 30+ gallon tanks.
Reminds me of my 1st iPod. I had a 10GB unit and the new 30GB model came out which was oh-so-much nicer.
I also picked up a 2-year replacement plan at CompUSA because at the time, iPods had a 90-day warranty and I did not like the idea of having a $500 paperweight. The extended plan at CompUSA was a bargain at less than 8% of the unit's cost, and they were willing to sell me one even though I bought the unit at the Apple Store.
After a year and a half, I found a bug in the firmware update that trashed the startup files on the iPod which caused it to start up with a "bad disk" icon. Somehow, all the files were there but it could not boot. After that, the firmware installer refused to work at all. I did discover copying certain files to the iPod got it into a state where the firware updater worked again. Updating the firmware in the same "manner" caused the unit to fail once again.
I returned the unit (I simply and truthfully told them it failed to start up) and in the end got a new 30GB unit as a replacement with no out-of-pocket expense. Yes, I could have easily fixed it myself, but I paid good money for someone else to figure that out for me.
Thanks CompUSA!
This trick sometimes works for new items and often for open box items:
Ask for a better price if you buy the extended warranty. Oddly enough, they will sometimes bite and knock $$$ off of the price to get that warranty sale. It is THAT important to them.
Buy notebook. Service plan is, say, $160. Store knocks off $100 off the price of the notebook if the customer pays the full $160 for the plan (net cost is $60 for the plan). If the plan is a very low percentage of the purchase price it becomes an acceptable risk. It works even better on open box items - I've seen store managers discount off the price to essentially bundle in the service plan for "free"*.
The managers can be that aggressive to meet their quotas.
* If you wish, drop in within the next 30 days to get a refund on the service plan.
Those employees are most likely being harassed even worse than you were by their managers over their PSP and PRP percentages.
The horror stories I've read and experienced myself as an employee in another chain of stores describe it well enough.
Not really. It was quite fun aside from the above-mentioned incident.
The school would not give him any TA's so he let me in his class, gave me the semester's assignments and asked me to complete them as fast as possible. A few days later, I handed him all of the assignments. He tossed them aside and told me I had an "A" for the semester. The grade will drop every time I screw up. My assignment from then on was to play games on the Apple II and answer questions from the students who labored on Atari 800s.
The Atari 800s booted up MS BASIC from a floppy. when they started without a boot disk they were in "notepad" mode, which is essentially a TV typewriter. Sometimes we'd type something like:
MS BASIC v1.0
READY
>
on the screen. Someone would then come in, think it was ready to go and spend a whole class typing in a program only to find out there's no way to run or save it. Other times we'd find the ASCII string 0x4E 0x45 0x57 in memory and poke in 0x52 0x55 0x4E (and vice-versa) to mess with the other students.
After a day or two of this the instructor told the class to boot off a floppy before doing any work. I went back to printing out pictures of the Enterprise on the dot-matrix printer with a 300 baud acoustic modem and playing Tai-Pan, Dark Crystal and Transylvania on the Apple.
Mars was an example. Titan's atmosphere is about 1.6 bars at -178C. I'm surprised it's denser than the Earth's. Nothing I've read talks about liquid water at that temperature or pressure. It's just a solid at that temp and pressure.
That's true. Anywhere to the left of the triple point water can only exist as a liquid or a solid. However, on Mars I doubt the pressure from the atmosphere is actually that high anywhere on the planet, in fact I am positive the pressure is considerably less than Earth's atmospheric pressure. The only (rocky) planet in the solar system with really high pressures is Venus. There's another factor in it. The recent water "slurry" found on mars was actually a brine of some sort. Salts dissolved in the water lowers the freezing point further, making liquid water possible. Pure water would probably freeze then sublime into the atmosphere as a gas in the warmer regions of the planet. Just like frozen dry ice does on Earth.
FYI: Just temperature alone isn't enough to determine the freezing (or boiling) point of water or any liquid. Pressure has a lot to do with it. With a low atmospheric pressure (such as some of these moons and planets) the boiling point lowers, as well as the freezing point. Water can exist as a liquid at much lower temperatures when the pressure is low.
It is possible that liquid water cannot exist under these conditions, it depends on where the triple point is. The solid water may just sublime to a gas.
Back in 1983 or 1984 when I was in my last year of high school, we used to carry around our 5 1/4" floppies in plastic boxes. Those of us that were quite proficient on the Apple II were assigned as teachers' assistants and had our assignments plus pirated games on these disks.
The problem was, while we were helping other students, some people would steal disks because they were expensive and we had all the coolest games.
One day after my entire box disappearing, I sat in the lab pissed. I wrote an INIT program for the Apple DOS that would ask for a password, two wrong guesses and it would trash the disk and erase itself from RAM. My first attempt was pretty much done, but I had no disks because they were recently stolen. So I saved it on the classroom disk everyone stores their work on. I named it "DO NOT RUN THIS PROGRAM" and left for the day.
The following day, I arrived and the instructor grabbed be by the shirt and shoved me up against the wall and shouted:
"Did you save a program the the class disk called 'do not run this program'? Because some little asshole decided to run it and we lost all the assignments and all of my grades for the semester!"
I did what anyone would do in that situation. I lied my ass off.
Another example:
Flash forward 12 years or so. In the lab at my company. We are trying out control software for relay control on an electrical switches about the size of filing cabinets. There are about 128 relays in each, and the suckers were hooked up on 120VAC. This was our only time to run test software before they got shipped out to the customer the next day.
Started up the software and all seemed ok. An odd smell started and I noticed the room's ambient light was changing... sorta orangish. I turned around and they were glowing hot and smoke was billowing out. I killed power, but it was way too late. 2-3" holes were burned in the PC boards. Later I found out the tech who hooked up the power didn't know what to hook the relays up to, so he wired them straight to ground. That didn't stop me from crapping bricks for the next few hours as the entire company showed up at the lab doors to see what the horrible smell was coming from.
Don't get me wrong. Ideally, I'd love for companies to make a buck on the net. Provided they do it reasonably.
I also am not going to demand that novices keep off of the Internet. I prefer everyone benefit from technology.
For your example, the act of pickpocketing one customer does not result in that customer writing graffitti on the walls or walking around with posters of young shaven rabbits. That customer does not suddenly become a pickpocket themselves either.
It's more like Day of the Dead, where one zombie bites a customer, that customer then turns into a zombie and runs about biting others. After a while, no more customers (except smart ones with guns). Take a cue from the movie 28 Days Later: let the infection run its course and let the infected victims starve themselves out. Cull the herd, it needs it.
I am tired of trying to propose solutions to the problems brought about with the large numbers of ignorant users using MS software. I'm also tired of trying to fix problems that these users repeatedly cause. Government and law enforcement doesn't seem to care, so I'll propose this solution:
In nature, when a population gets too large there's a die-off. Usually this die-off is caused by disease or starvation. The better adapted creatures survive and live on.
We can use the fox and rabbit scenario here.
The malware writers are the foxes and the ignorant users are the rabbits. In our case the foxes don't eat the rabbits, but instead hijack the rabbits' computers for fraud, spam, pop-ups, etc. Foxes die by giving up and moving on to more lucrative off-line crimes.
The rabbits don't eat anything but are increasing in numbers by simply hooking up machines to the Internet. Rabbits die by cancelling their AOL accounts and stop using the Internet.
Right now there are a ton of rabbits (and more every day) and the fox population is exploding.
If we just sit back and let natural selection take its course, the ignorant rabbits will become sufficiently frustrated with their Internet experience and give up. The foxes will concentrate even harder on the remaining rabbits (who will be better adapted to counter the foxes' attacks) or start writing malware for the rest of the rabbits or face a massive die-off as well.
Those that are able to adapt do so by either keeping their machines properly patched or learn to use alternative browsers (or operating systems). These rabbits will then have a better Internet in the end because we will have a better class of users and software.
There's plenty of educational material out there for ignorant users to read. Practically every day there's something in the newspaper about how to protect oneself from these attacks.
The Zombies and SpamBots will make life a hell for the rest of us, but that's a short-term problem in this model. That should fix itself after the die-off itself.
While I agree that the media has in general been pro-war since 9/11, beforehand I have seen bias on the media. The best example of bias was during the 2000 campaign when Florida was hanging in the balance.
CNN's anchors broke in and said the state went to Gore. The appearance of both announcers were as if they found out they just won the lottery. The female could not keep the grin off her face.
Not even an hour later, they flipped the results and the same two came on and said the state went to Bush, and they both looked like someone shot their dog.
You are right and sensationalism will win out over ideology in the end. What captures viewers and advertising dollars will always trump political leanings.
The best thing for the media now would be a near 50-50 split between Kerry and Bush in the polls going into the election. Toss in a few flips on who the leader is and hope for a close call in the vote and they can enjoy another 4-6 months of court battles and nastiness over the voting results.
I dunno about the soliciting, since I needed to give them my email address for them to send the invite in the first place. So the invite itself isn't unsolicited, it's a response to an inquiry. Or am I totally wrong now and Gmail is spamming (cold calling) for new accounts?
I registered my interest on/about April 1st, I still have not gotten an invite. That'll teach me to use Hotmail.
And Spielberg made this wonderful documentary about it back in 1979 starring John Belushi. He got the year wrong though.
Major General Joseph W. Stillwell: "Bombs! I don't hear any bombs! Now they're up there. They came all the way from Asia. Don't you think they'd bring a few bombs along?"
Well, Aliso Viejo here in California came really close to banning water not too long ago . So oxygen would not be too far of a leap.
I am aware that my answer was overly simplistic. I was trying to point out that the changes the grandparent stated were not the likely reason for the speedups. Still, thanks for pointing it out.
Apple removed striping from everywhere in Panther. Quite a bit of it was replaced by brushed-metal. Even so, all it is doing is replacing one bitmap with another. The only possible gain is if they do not need to use alpha for transparency. Yet not all of this is by "removing" stuff. Quite a bit of tweaking is being done to speed up the OS, the most recent software update resulted in quite a few reports of faster system operation, and there was no discernable change in the featureset or operation of the UI.
The reason X runs slowly compared to Aqua is that Apple optimizes Aqua and allows harware acceleration (Quartz Extreme) and offloads lots of tasks to the GPU. I know of no X windowing system (aside from Apple's own implementation) that does this in OS X.
10.0 and 10.1 were dog-slow. Especially when you had a couple of hundred files in a folder. Jaguar was a huge increase in speed and performance. Quite a bit of that was due to the Quartz Extreme, but even my lowly 500MHz dual-USB iBook saw quite a boost from Jaguar and it was not able to use QE at all. Panther did very little to the iBook, except make it take forever to boot. I need to check on that bootcache issue.
My dual 800MHz Quicksilver is now almost three years old and I am still very happy with its performance. I expected to be wanting to replace it after two years, or after clock speeds have doubled, which is what I did when I used Wintel systems. Instead, I am considering keeping it around for the 10.4 release and at least another year or two. I attribute quite a bit of this to Apple's tweaks and performance enhancements of the OS.
The problem definitely is in the wording.
Awkward does not describe an operating system, it describes a user-interface. If he said: "but because of its awkward Linux-based user interface and sluggish response" I would feel better - but only slightly so. An improperly designed UI would make the best operating system appear to be a pig.
Whether it was Linux, Windows CE, or some QNX based system is irrelevant because the user interface is at issue.
The other issues he has with lockups *IS* an OS, hardware, or driver issue. He never seemed to contact Roku to see what the possible issues were, so who knows what the problem was. Perhaps he got some bad hardware? Roku has a user forum, and from that they are discussing, it seems there are a few problems yet to solve, and development is still occurring fast and furious.
As for the card, I don't think it is any different than what is used with DirecTV or Dishnetwork here, except that it is perhaps a universal card that works with all DRM-encumbered devices. Here's what NHK says about it:
I am pretty much resigned to believe that once the broadcast flag is available, it will be set on ALL programming by default. Even if they do manage to show some sense on when to use it, good luck taping any of those sporting events. Better to be safe than sorry if you are a broadcaster, right?