I actually donated through Amazon's link before I noticed that Something Awful was taking donations. A few hours later, I checked my GMail account and saw that my donation had been denied. Turned out I used an old CC# by mistake. No big deal, and now I could donate through SA and get some free merchandise, too!
But the SA page was showing that the account was closed. And now I'd like to donate, but I'd like to do it through SA. I want to do it this way because I'd like to inspire competition among net communities to see who can donate the most money. It's a great way to constructively use people's egotistical motivations, in my opinion.
Wouldn't it be awesome if SA, Slashdot, Genmay, Fark, and all the other popular internet communities all tried to outdo each other in contributions? I guarantee this kind of competition would inspire tremendous giving.
I'm interested in this, but I don't understand the practical implications (mainly because I have no idea what most of the acronyms mean). Does this mean I could plug my computer into my digital TV tuner somehow and be able to watch it on my TV? If so, does it work with US digital TV equipment (such as the Motorola set-top boxes that Comcast provides)?
Interesting movie, but I've never heard "patent" spoken like that.
Here's why TiVo won't live on
on
Can TiVo be Saved?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
TiVo doesn't have direct access to the broadband cable stream. It has to rely on stupid little dongles like IR transmitters to communicate with the cable box and change the channel.
This means that dual-tuner TiVos won't work unless you have two cable boxes, too.
And then there's the HD problem: TiVos other than DirecTiVos can't record it. This is a big deal for those of us who have switched over to HDTV. I like being able to time-shift a prettier picture.
I have the Motorola HDTV dual-tuner DVR at home, on Comcast cable. It may not do exactly what a TiVo does, but it's very close. I can set it up to record every time a new episode of a show comes on. I can make it record 2 TV shows, in HD, simultaneously. I can get on-demand programming. And you can even hack the remote (and I use "hack" loosely here) to give you back your precious 30-second skip.
It doesn't make show recommendations for me, but honestly, I don't care. It does everything else, and it does it well. My parents have TiVo, and they can't record one show while watching another, nor can they time-shift HDTV content.
TiVo has to fix these shortcomings somehow. It may be that the only way is to partner with the cable companies to get access to the cable box hardware.
But what incentive would the companies have to start an OSS project? Why not just make it closed-source and, at the very least, have "security through obscurity" (which DOES work, at least for a while)?
In a commercial organization, people are able to have face-to-face meetings and ask each other questions with few problems. In a widely-distributed open-source project, communication can be much slower and misunderstandings abound.
All of this should be incentive to make clear, concise interfaces with method names and variables that are clear to another programmer. So it seems to me that the most successful open source projects (the ones with the most developers) probably have very clean and maintainable code.
If anyone who has participated in Firefox would like to comment, I'd be interested in the clarity of Mozilla's code.
This is my biggest gripe with Linux, especially in X...
When I install a program, I want to know how to run it. In fact, I want it to give me options on how it should install itself. I want to be able to choose whether I get an icon on the desktop, or in the menuing system.
Windows does this quite well; people seem to have settled on an installer system. But in Linux, even RPMs can be a bitch to install. And you should never have to use the command line to install a program unless you want to do something very specialized with it.
I also agree about standardizing on the look and feel of application windows.
I know that Peer to Peer is a "big thing" these days, but this is too much of a stretch.
Broadcasting over shortwave is not peer to peer, it's one-way! It costs a lot of money and requires a lot of permits to build a shortwave station strong enough to actually send data long distances.
So, what will you say if it is proven that television does cause violence?
Re:Not to say television is all good, but....
on
Cable TV Ruins Bhutan
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Slashdot put the right spin on it. Kinda.
The Bhutanese government is now considering whether TV has a damaging effect on the people. It's still an open question. But you have to understand that TV has a much greater immediate impact on those people than we're accustomed to.
Kids there have started emulating their favorite stars because they treat the TV stars like they treat anyone else. They don't necessarily understand that TV is a caricature of real life. We understand that now; we now have filters in place that tell us that TV isn't real.
They also haven't gotten accustomed to advertisements. They assume that when a product makes people happy in an ad, it will make them happy, too. So they want more money to purchase that product. Maybe they don't have the means to get that product yet, so they steal. After all, isn't happiness the most important value?
Some people here may assume that this is a good thing. They're becoming capitalistic, and may become productive in the global economy. But that's not the way that people have to be. Our culture just has the means to project that way of life onto others. That doesn't mean that we should.
There are thousands of game releases every year. Some are amazingly cool, but most of them are rehashed old themes or just plain crap. How do we know which ones to buy?
Simple...marketing. Which games get the TV display at Electronics Boutique? Which ones have cardboard cutout displays?
Most people can't afford to buy any game they want. They have to rely on others to tell them which games are genuinely good. Occasionally a game will get by on its own merits, but most of the time, it succeeds based on a costly marketing campaign. Just like music and movies.
And this marketing costs money, too, so companies decide to market the games that they are relatively sure will benefit the most from it. They don't bet on the little guys with no track record, they bet on the tried-and-true formulas. So, in the end, even an incredibly smart, interesting new title will sit on the shelves because it wasn't marketed well.
I don't like spam either, but be reasonable about this.
American Idol is a show that millions of people watched every week. They went to work and talked about it around the water cooler. The total time that humanity spent talking about American Idol probably amounted to a few thousand years. Should we sue Fox because of this? No.
Get over it. 9 hours over a year isn't that much. It's annoying, yes, but it's not an issue to get that riled up about.
Well, first, I said "as scarce." Your HD could probably handle more spam than a fax machine with an average amount of paper.
And, honestly, I get really annoyed with people who claim that their time is incredibly valuable. It's arrogant to act like those 2-3 minutes that it takes to delete your spam are that important. I mean, sure, it's annoying, but in the grand scheme of things, it's irrelevant.
Normally I would agree with you, but take a look at the law this was modeled on.
It prevented people from sending you unsolicited faxes. That makes sense, right? You pay for that paper. Allowing fax spam would be disastrous...wasted money, wasted paper, and an environmental nightmare.
Now, e-mail spam isn't exactly the same. Your hard drive space isn't as scarce of a resource, and neither is bandwidth. But the principle remains the same: someone is using your resources against your will.
I'm still a little unsure as to why we should use a scripting language to print. In my untrained, extremely naive opinion, printers should be sent the data that they are expected to print.
Shouldn't the actual processing of data be solely handled by the computer? I mean, this article clearly says that it can tie up the printer for a long time if you actually try this.
Slashdot Mirror
For every conditional, you chug a beer.
For every loop, you chug a beer.
And, of course, for every save, you do a shot of tequila.
I actually donated through Amazon's link before I noticed that Something Awful was taking donations. A few hours later, I checked my GMail account and saw that my donation had been denied. Turned out I used an old CC# by mistake. No big deal, and now I could donate through SA and get some free merchandise, too! But the SA page was showing that the account was closed. And now I'd like to donate, but I'd like to do it through SA. I want to do it this way because I'd like to inspire competition among net communities to see who can donate the most money. It's a great way to constructively use people's egotistical motivations, in my opinion. Wouldn't it be awesome if SA, Slashdot, Genmay, Fark, and all the other popular internet communities all tried to outdo each other in contributions? I guarantee this kind of competition would inspire tremendous giving.
I'm interested in this, but I don't understand the practical implications (mainly because I have no idea what most of the acronyms mean). Does this mean I could plug my computer into my digital TV tuner somehow and be able to watch it on my TV? If so, does it work with US digital TV equipment (such as the Motorola set-top boxes that Comcast provides)?
Interesting movie, but I've never heard "patent" spoken like that.
TiVo doesn't have direct access to the broadband cable stream. It has to rely on stupid little dongles like IR transmitters to communicate with the cable box and change the channel.
This means that dual-tuner TiVos won't work unless you have two cable boxes, too.
And then there's the HD problem: TiVos other than DirecTiVos can't record it. This is a big deal for those of us who have switched over to HDTV. I like being able to time-shift a prettier picture.
I have the Motorola HDTV dual-tuner DVR at home, on Comcast cable. It may not do exactly what a TiVo does, but it's very close. I can set it up to record every time a new episode of a show comes on. I can make it record 2 TV shows, in HD, simultaneously. I can get on-demand programming. And you can even hack the remote (and I use "hack" loosely here) to give you back your precious 30-second skip.
It doesn't make show recommendations for me, but honestly, I don't care. It does everything else, and it does it well. My parents have TiVo, and they can't record one show while watching another, nor can they time-shift HDTV content.
TiVo has to fix these shortcomings somehow. It may be that the only way is to partner with the cable companies to get access to the cable box hardware.
But what incentive would the companies have to start an OSS project? Why not just make it closed-source and, at the very least, have "security through obscurity" (which DOES work, at least for a while)?
In a commercial organization, people are able to have face-to-face meetings and ask each other questions with few problems. In a widely-distributed open-source project, communication can be much slower and misunderstandings abound. All of this should be incentive to make clear, concise interfaces with method names and variables that are clear to another programmer. So it seems to me that the most successful open source projects (the ones with the most developers) probably have very clean and maintainable code. If anyone who has participated in Firefox would like to comment, I'd be interested in the clarity of Mozilla's code.
Has anyone here tried satellite radio? What's the quality of their feeds like?
Nah, it's possible. It's done on ham radio all the time. In fact, you could probably run a local BBS this way.
Or you could encode the data in TV signals, teletext style.
Where do they have stations that are .2 MHz apart? I think that's just the minimum interval between stations.
This is my biggest gripe with Linux, especially in X...
When I install a program, I want to know how to run it. In fact, I want it to give me options on how it should install itself. I want to be able to choose whether I get an icon on the desktop, or in the menuing system.
Windows does this quite well; people seem to have settled on an installer system. But in Linux, even RPMs can be a bitch to install. And you should never have to use the command line to install a program unless you want to do something very specialized with it.
I also agree about standardizing on the look and feel of application windows.
Honestly, I think that adults shouldn't be asked to sit still and work for hours during the middle of the day.
People need variety. Otherwise they develop disorders. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
Haven't any of you read Aldous Huxley's "Island"?
I know that Peer to Peer is a "big thing" these days, but this is too much of a stretch.
Broadcasting over shortwave is not peer to peer, it's one-way! It costs a lot of money and requires a lot of permits to build a shortwave station strong enough to actually send data long distances.
So, what will you say if it is proven that television does cause violence?
Slashdot put the right spin on it. Kinda.
The Bhutanese government is now considering whether TV has a damaging effect on the people. It's still an open question. But you have to understand that TV has a much greater immediate impact on those people than we're accustomed to.
Kids there have started emulating their favorite stars because they treat the TV stars like they treat anyone else. They don't necessarily understand that TV is a caricature of real life. We understand that now; we now have filters in place that tell us that TV isn't real.
They also haven't gotten accustomed to advertisements. They assume that when a product makes people happy in an ad, it will make them happy, too. So they want more money to purchase that product. Maybe they don't have the means to get that product yet, so they steal. After all, isn't happiness the most important value?
Some people here may assume that this is a good thing. They're becoming capitalistic, and may become productive in the global economy. But that's not the way that people have to be. Our culture just has the means to project that way of life onto others. That doesn't mean that we should.
Actually...
from page 4:
"Of course I waited for Mrs. Mike to go shopping first because it got a bit smelly."
But it isn't about the laptop not getting stolen. It's about the data not getting stolen. Clean hard drive = no theft of data.
Playlist 1.0
There are thousands of game releases every year. Some are amazingly cool, but most of them are rehashed old themes or just plain crap. How do we know which ones to buy?
Simple...marketing. Which games get the TV display at Electronics Boutique? Which ones have cardboard cutout displays?
Most people can't afford to buy any game they want. They have to rely on others to tell them which games are genuinely good. Occasionally a game will get by on its own merits, but most of the time, it succeeds based on a costly marketing campaign. Just like music and movies.
And this marketing costs money, too, so companies decide to market the games that they are relatively sure will benefit the most from it. They don't bet on the little guys with no track record, they bet on the tried-and-true formulas. So, in the end, even an incredibly smart, interesting new title will sit on the shelves because it wasn't marketed well.
This is bullshit. You can't play devil's advocate around here without getting modded as a troll?
If both sides of an issue can't freely be discussed, then this is just a big anti-MS circle-jerk.
I don't like spam either, but be reasonable about this. American Idol is a show that millions of people watched every week. They went to work and talked about it around the water cooler. The total time that humanity spent talking about American Idol probably amounted to a few thousand years. Should we sue Fox because of this? No. Get over it. 9 hours over a year isn't that much. It's annoying, yes, but it's not an issue to get that riled up about.
Well, first, I said "as scarce." Your HD could probably handle more spam than a fax machine with an average amount of paper. And, honestly, I get really annoyed with people who claim that their time is incredibly valuable. It's arrogant to act like those 2-3 minutes that it takes to delete your spam are that important. I mean, sure, it's annoying, but in the grand scheme of things, it's irrelevant.
Normally I would agree with you, but take a look at the law this was modeled on.
It prevented people from sending you unsolicited faxes. That makes sense, right? You pay for that paper. Allowing fax spam would be disastrous...wasted money, wasted paper, and an environmental nightmare.
Now, e-mail spam isn't exactly the same. Your hard drive space isn't as scarce of a resource, and neither is bandwidth. But the principle remains the same: someone is using your resources against your will.
I'm still a little unsure as to why we should use a scripting language to print. In my untrained, extremely naive opinion, printers should be sent the data that they are expected to print.
Shouldn't the actual processing of data be solely handled by the computer? I mean, this article clearly says that it can tie up the printer for a long time if you actually try this.
...it auto-generated ASCII porn.