SD (standard definition) looks like shit on just about every HDTV I've looked at. I have satellite and so does my friend's dad. On his 50" Samsung or whatever DLP HDTV he has the picture looks absolutely shitty compared to my 52" SD Toshiba. We've tried every mode and setting and the only thing that does make a difference is "movie mode". Another relative has a large plasma and has the same problem with digital cable. And except for the occasional sports broadcast the HD programming never looks as good as the test channel, so what's the use? About the only thing that does look great on these TVs is a good quality DVD.
I realize that the crappy picture has a lot to do with a low quality signal input into a high quality TV. In that situation you're going to notice the difference and until satellite and cable providers get a clue and start to broadcast to the capabilites of existing SD TVs (compress much?), never mind HD, they just aren't going to sell me and many others on it.
Actually, a search on Yahoo for the creature was initiated on the Bell South network millions of years ago and since Yahoo did not pay for the "enhanced service" the results are just coming in now. Should have used MSN Search, but then again the only search result for "dinosaur +'will not fly' +crashes" would have been Internet Explorer.
I once bought a Fuji Finepix camera with a $100 rebate, which is excellent when the selling price was $400. I followed all the directions and received the rebate cheque in five days! I couldn't believe it. I bought a second camera with the rebate for my mother at Christmas and received the rebate cheque seven days later, and that was during the Christmas season. Needless to say I was pleasantly surprised.
On the flip side, against my better judgement my brother bought a stack of CD-Rs on a Boxing Day sale with a $20 rebate (or around there). Months later he still did not receive his rebate so he called and called and went to store and called again. After a months of this and several "told you it would happen" from me I joking mentioned he should take the company to small claims court. Long story short he filed a claim, paid the $100 filing fee and had the company (which luckily was based in the province we lived in otherwise he would not have been able to file a claim to begin with) served with the statement of claim (or whatever they call it in small claims terms). He received a call a few days later from the company which was all apologetic and a cheque for the rebate and the $100 filing fee. All this for $20, but I guess he made his point.
Mac Mini with 512 MB RAM running 10.4.3 and it runs just about perfectly -- nice and fast. I do find the text selection does not work properly on occasion, ie. selecting and dragging the text oftens occurs in the wrong direction. On the plus side, Citrix works fine while it does not work for me in Safari. I like the ability to re-order tabs and the tab behavior controls are much more comprehensive then Safari, but I will miss the Flashblock plugin as it does not work (yet) with 1.5 or later (any release candidate).
I found Firefox 1.3 sluggish but 1.5 is swift, so I am switching to Firefox from Safari for now.
I have a friend in Dubai that bugs me for "business documents" so I zip, encrypt and email him these "documents" from time to time. He seems to get them just fine, but I wonder what would happen to him if the authorities ever checked his laptop. There's a lot more spread in that "spreadsheet" I sent him than the file name lets on.
I read, ok I skimmed the article and out of all the shenanigins it describes it doesn't go into how the current script and director, Bryan Singer, came to be. If even half of what is described in the article is true it's an understatement to say that it took a miracle for this movie to ever get made.
My initial impressions of the story that did develop from the point Bryan Singer joined were very negative, but after watching Bryan's video blog of the production, reading everything I could on the web and having seen the teaser trailer it looks like Bryan Singer has done the impossible and made a good movie. It appears to keep the best elements of the original movies -- Brando and Reeve's iconic performance, the generally serious treatement given to the Superman mythology, and breakthrough special effects -- while losing the slapstick comedy that worked in the 70's but doesn't work with a modern audience (Bryan is quoted somewhere that the comedy of the original series just wouldn't work today).
That said, it could be we've only seen the polish on the turd, so to speak and the finished product may very well suck. I thought he did an excellent job on Xmen and the follow up, X-2, so he certainly has the pedigree to produce a good comic book based movie.
It seems a lot of companies are moving to voice based rather than touch tone based IVRs and that pisses me off. Where before I could simply press the number that corresponds to the choice I now have to say such bullshit phrases as "Help with my bill" rather than simply pressing "1" or "2" or whatever the number is that day (out of frustration I sometimes say "Molest young children" or something equally ridiculous just to see what the IVR's response will be). How is this easier? If I am in a noisy environment, which pretty much precludes any cell phone based call, the voice triggered IVR fails to understand your response and you have to virtually yell into the phone for it to recognize your input. On top of that the powers that be are so enamoured with the voice technology that there is no backup touch tone option. Why not offer both? It's a lot of fancy techno hooey with no real improvement over the old touch tone system.
Secondly, why do most companies ask you to enter your account number or phone number only ask you a second time once your connected to an operator? It's probably just a ruse to pad the time while you wait.
Once I do get a person on the line more often then not I do get some real help, but companies don't make this easy. I always make a point of being courteous and polite as you do eventually speak to a real human being.
There are a lot of testable myths surrounding the moon landing without actually going to the moon. Apparent optical anomalies in photos taken by the Apollo astronauts that moon landing "debunkers" cling to as evidence for example or whether radiation or the cold vacuum of space would affect the film in the Hasselbach cameras used on the moon.
I think this would make an excellent show, but they would really need to devote the entire episode to give the material the proper treatment. This myth would probably fall in the category of taking too much time and/or money or be too technically demanding.
My friend just bought a new Samsung phone (or was it LG?) through Rogers here in Canada that supports wave or Mp3 downloadable ring tones. He didn't want a musical ring tone he wanted a real mechanical bell ring like that from his old rotary dial phone. We recorded the phone ring as a wave file and uploaded it to the phone, easy as pie. We could have chosen any song in his collection without purchasing a ring tone, although Rogers certainly offers that option.
I know at least a half dozen other friends whose phone will do the same thing given the proper cable. Why are people paying for ring tones? It must be convenience or perhaps its due to Rogers not crippling the features of their phones like other carriers in the U.S.
The U.S. has the Sullivan decision that defined libel and, if memory serves, ruled that the offending party has to prove that the particular writings at issue were made with malice and without regard to the truth. Prior to this the defendant had to prove that what he said was the truth.
This could prove to be an excellent test case of Canada's libel laws vis a vis our Charter or Rights. If Activa Holdings is successful in their lawsuit then just about any negative comment about any company made in the press, on the radio or TV or by the public is actionable. Some provinces, such as British Columbia, have SLAPP legislation that helps in defending such lawsuits but Ontario, where this lawsuit was filed, to my knowledge does not.
Tinker Tool still appears to work with 10.4.3, but it's pretty safe given that it makes changes to preference files that can also be made through terminal.
and it was cable TV. Cable TV in Canada grew enormously in the 1970s and one major reason for the popularity was access to American TV.
Fast forward to the 90s and the advent of the Internet over the already existing cable networks worked well for a cable market that had grown into a series of regional monopolies. We had Shaw and Rogers in the West and Cogego, Shaw and Rogers in the East. In the late 90s Shaw and Rogers swapped territories and you ended up with a Shaw monopoly in Western Canada and a Rogers monopoly in Central Canada.
The success of cable Internet forced the major phone companies to pour money into rolling out DSL and upgrading their infrastructure. Telus in Western Canada and Bell in Eastern Canada grew into the dominant service providers and what you ended up with is a duopoly of a major DSL provider and a major cable provider each competing in their own sector of the country for our dollars.
In the end, the consumer wins as cheap, reliable DSL and cable are available from an extremely competitive environment. I live in Alberta, a relatively unpopulated province by American standards and high speed service is available everywhere in every small hamlet and hick village bewteen Calgary and Edmonton. I think a large part of that success was the unique makeup of Canada that pushes technological solutions to the vast distances this country occupies, with a desire for American entertainment and lifestyle coupled with government incentives to create large scale networks.
Obviously, a country the size of Canada does not have total Internet availability and the one area where this is true is the very far north. Most of the Northwest Territories does not have access to high speed other than satellite.
In all, I think Canada is extremely lucky in this regard but we still lag behind countries like Korea and Japan in terms of raw bandwidth. It all could have worked out very differently in Canada if the market, government influence and consumer interest had played out differently.
Quote: If downloading episodes over the Internet proves popular...
Uh, what do they mean if? It's already exceedingly popular on BitTorrent and the like, just not sanctioned by the media companies until now (OK, the BBC is doing it but not many others). The genie is already out of this bottle and yet another industry wants to bury it's head in the sand. They have to realize that people, including myself, are willing to pay money to see shows we've missed or cannot get in our area. Where's a capitalist when you need one? Steve Jobs yet again has pulled off a marvelous coup and now the affliates, Hollywood, SAG and anyone else who didn't have the forsight to start this on there own want a piece.
According to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, signed 1982 and entered into force 1994, and ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1996:
Section 2. LIMITS OF THE TERRITORIAL SEA Article 3 Breadth of the territorial sea Every State has the right to establish the breadth of its territorial sea up to a limit not exceeding 12 nautical miles, measured from baselines determined in accordance with this Convention.
As someone pointed out, a three mile limit would be difficult to impossible to navigate without interceding at some point Canada's waters nevermind that ice must still be navigated in an "ice free" Arctic. A twelve mile territorial limit makes this impossible.
Not that any of this will stop nations (read: the U.S.) from attempting to navigate the Arctic, my point was Canada isn't going to sit idly by while ships transit their north.
And, if I may point out, no nation may claim exclusive dominion over space, the Moon or any celestial object according to the Outer Space Treaty of 1966, and entered into force 1967 by agreement of the three signatories, the United Kingdom, the United States of America and the U.S.S.R. Specifically:
Outer space is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means;
Among other articles.
The problem I have with the United States is an agreement or treaty is not worth the paper it's printed on. The Geneva Convention, the North American Free Trade Agreement, The Outer Space Treaty (article on non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in space) these are all considered barriers to American power and when and where the U.S. wants to violate them it does. While it is certainly true that treaties are violated and argued over all the time it certainly does no nation any particular good to treat their committments lightly and in an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world economies and securities are at stake. Obviously a nation with the power of the U.S. can and will flaunt that power as other nations are dependent on the U.S., but a middle power like Canada has to maintain their committments and credibility. You can afford to lose credibility when you're the largest economy on Earth.
Canada considers the Artic to be an internal water way and as such maintains dominion over all shipping in the area. The U.S., no surprise, considers the area to be international waters. As the ice recedes and the fabled Northwest Passage becomes a reality look for increased tension between the United States and Canada over control of shipping in the area (like we need more tension than already exists).
Unfortunately, Canada will probably roll over and let the U.S. have it's way on the sovereignty issue as we've done in the past when the U.S. ice breaker Polar Sea transited the Northwest Passage in 1985.
I read the comment and found it completely illogical. How is the lawful access provision going to give a third party, non-governmental agency access to private information when the courts have refused to do so? The lawful access legislation is simply an attempt to move cellular and internet communications into the telephone wiretap section of the Criminal Code of Canada. The same legal standards that apply to telephone wiretaps (judicial oversight, etc.) will apply to email and the internet. The CRIA tried in civil court to subpoena the information from Canadian ISPs and failed, this is about criminal matters.
The real controversy for ISPs and cellular carriers as I understand it is the cost of the new legislation. It's going to cost them a lot of money to meet the access standards the government wants.
Slashdot Mirror
SD (standard definition) looks like shit on just about every HDTV I've looked at. I have satellite and so does my friend's dad. On his 50" Samsung or whatever DLP HDTV he has the picture looks absolutely shitty compared to my 52" SD Toshiba. We've tried every mode and setting and the only thing that does make a difference is "movie mode". Another relative has a large plasma and has the same problem with digital cable. And except for the occasional sports broadcast the HD programming never looks as good as the test channel, so what's the use? About the only thing that does look great on these TVs is a good quality DVD.
I realize that the crappy picture has a lot to do with a low quality signal input into a high quality TV. In that situation you're going to notice the difference and until satellite and cable providers get a clue and start to broadcast to the capabilites of existing SD TVs (compress much?), never mind HD, they just aren't going to sell me and many others on it.
it makes me so mad that I want throw down my controller and punch them in the face!
Actually, a search on Yahoo for the creature was initiated on the Bell South network millions of years ago and since Yahoo did not pay for the "enhanced service" the results are just coming in now. Should have used MSN Search, but then again the only search result for "dinosaur +'will not fly' +crashes" would have been Internet Explorer.
I once bought a Fuji Finepix camera with a $100 rebate, which is excellent when the selling price was $400. I followed all the directions and received the rebate cheque in five days! I couldn't believe it. I bought a second camera with the rebate for my mother at Christmas and received the rebate cheque seven days later, and that was during the Christmas season. Needless to say I was pleasantly surprised.
On the flip side, against my better judgement my brother bought a stack of CD-Rs on a Boxing Day sale with a $20 rebate (or around there). Months later he still did not receive his rebate so he called and called and went to store and called again. After a months of this and several "told you it would happen" from me I joking mentioned he should take the company to small claims court. Long story short he filed a claim, paid the $100 filing fee and had the company (which luckily was based in the province we lived in otherwise he would not have been able to file a claim to begin with) served with the statement of claim (or whatever they call it in small claims terms). He received a call a few days later from the company which was all apologetic and a cheque for the rebate and the $100 filing fee. All this for $20, but I guess he made his point.
So it can go both ways.
Mac Mini with 512 MB RAM running 10.4.3 and it runs just about perfectly -- nice and fast. I do find the text selection does not work properly on occasion, ie. selecting and dragging the text oftens occurs in the wrong direction. On the plus side, Citrix works fine while it does not work for me in Safari. I like the ability to re-order tabs and the tab behavior controls are much more comprehensive then Safari, but I will miss the Flashblock plugin as it does not work (yet) with 1.5 or later (any release candidate).
I found Firefox 1.3 sluggish but 1.5 is swift, so I am switching to Firefox from Safari for now.
I have a friend in Dubai that bugs me for "business documents" so I zip, encrypt and email him these "documents" from time to time. He seems to get them just fine, but I wonder what would happen to him if the authorities ever checked his laptop. There's a lot more spread in that "spreadsheet" I sent him than the file name lets on.
I read, ok I skimmed the article and out of all the shenanigins it describes it doesn't go into how the current script and director, Bryan Singer, came to be. If even half of what is described in the article is true it's an understatement to say that it took a miracle for this movie to ever get made.
My initial impressions of the story that did develop from the point Bryan Singer joined were very negative, but after watching Bryan's video blog of the production, reading everything I could on the web and having seen the teaser trailer it looks like Bryan Singer has done the impossible and made a good movie. It appears to keep the best elements of the original movies -- Brando and Reeve's iconic performance, the generally serious treatement given to the Superman mythology, and breakthrough special effects -- while losing the slapstick comedy that worked in the 70's but doesn't work with a modern audience (Bryan is quoted somewhere that the comedy of the original series just wouldn't work today).
That said, it could be we've only seen the polish on the turd, so to speak and the finished product may very well suck. I thought he did an excellent job on Xmen and the follow up, X-2, so he certainly has the pedigree to produce a good comic book based movie.
A free verse rap-off between Steve Balmer and Richard Stallman?
It seems a lot of companies are moving to voice based rather than touch tone based IVRs and that pisses me off. Where before I could simply press the number that corresponds to the choice I now have to say such bullshit phrases as "Help with my bill" rather than simply pressing "1" or "2" or whatever the number is that day (out of frustration I sometimes say "Molest young children" or something equally ridiculous just to see what the IVR's response will be). How is this easier? If I am in a noisy environment, which pretty much precludes any cell phone based call, the voice triggered IVR fails to understand your response and you have to virtually yell into the phone for it to recognize your input. On top of that the powers that be are so enamoured with the voice technology that there is no backup touch tone option. Why not offer both? It's a lot of fancy techno hooey with no real improvement over the old touch tone system.
Secondly, why do most companies ask you to enter your account number or phone number only ask you a second time once your connected to an operator? It's probably just a ruse to pad the time while you wait.
Once I do get a person on the line more often then not I do get some real help, but companies don't make this easy. I always make a point of being courteous and polite as you do eventually speak to a real human being.
There are a lot of testable myths surrounding the moon landing without actually going to the moon. Apparent optical anomalies in photos taken by the Apollo astronauts that moon landing "debunkers" cling to as evidence for example or whether radiation or the cold vacuum of space would affect the film in the Hasselbach cameras used on the moon.
I think this would make an excellent show, but they would really need to devote the entire episode to give the material the proper treatment. This myth would probably fall in the category of taking too much time and/or money or be too technically demanding.
My friend just bought a new Samsung phone (or was it LG?) through Rogers here in Canada that supports wave or Mp3 downloadable ring tones. He didn't want a musical ring tone he wanted a real mechanical bell ring like that from his old rotary dial phone. We recorded the phone ring as a wave file and uploaded it to the phone, easy as pie. We could have chosen any song in his collection without purchasing a ring tone, although Rogers certainly offers that option.
I know at least a half dozen other friends whose phone will do the same thing given the proper cable. Why are people paying for ring tones? It must be convenience or perhaps its due to Rogers not crippling the features of their phones like other carriers in the U.S.
the only command someone who needs this book should know is shutdown -g0 -y.
The U.S. has the Sullivan decision that defined libel and, if memory serves, ruled that the offending party has to prove that the particular writings at issue were made with malice and without regard to the truth. Prior to this the defendant had to prove that what he said was the truth.
This could prove to be an excellent test case of Canada's libel laws vis a vis our Charter or Rights. If Activa Holdings is successful in their lawsuit then just about any negative comment about any company made in the press, on the radio or TV or by the public is actionable. Some provinces, such as British Columbia, have SLAPP legislation that helps in defending such lawsuits but Ontario, where this lawsuit was filed, to my knowledge does not.
You're not alone, but you're in a pretty much irrelevant minority. Most people who buy XBoxes/Playstations etc don't have racks
Come on, I have a few gamer friends with nice racks.
...volcanoes, nuclear bombs and body thetans.
Wouldn't Scientology get a tickle out of that one?
to coincide with Safari 2.02 and, by extention, 10.4.3. Main change is that most features now do not require admin access to enable.
Can be found at http://www.lordofthecows.com/
Tinker Tool still appears to work with 10.4.3, but it's pretty safe given that it makes changes to preference files that can also be made through terminal.
The patent on the design just expired. Still waiting for the copyright to expire though...
and it was cable TV. Cable TV in Canada grew enormously in the 1970s and one major reason for the popularity was access to American TV.
Fast forward to the 90s and the advent of the Internet over the already existing cable networks worked well for a cable market that had grown into a series of regional monopolies. We had Shaw and Rogers in the West and Cogego, Shaw and Rogers in the East. In the late 90s Shaw and Rogers swapped territories and you ended up with a Shaw monopoly in Western Canada and a Rogers monopoly in Central Canada.
The success of cable Internet forced the major phone companies to pour money into rolling out DSL and upgrading their infrastructure. Telus in Western Canada and Bell in Eastern Canada grew into the dominant service providers and what you ended up with is a duopoly of a major DSL provider and a major cable provider each competing in their own sector of the country for our dollars.
In the end, the consumer wins as cheap, reliable DSL and cable are available from an extremely competitive environment. I live in Alberta, a relatively unpopulated province by American standards and high speed service is available everywhere in every small hamlet and hick village bewteen Calgary and Edmonton. I think a large part of that success was the unique makeup of Canada that pushes technological solutions to the vast distances this country occupies, with a desire for American entertainment and lifestyle coupled with government incentives to create large scale networks.
Obviously, a country the size of Canada does not have total Internet availability and the one area where this is true is the very far north. Most of the Northwest Territories does not have access to high speed other than satellite.
In all, I think Canada is extremely lucky in this regard but we still lag behind countries like Korea and Japan in terms of raw bandwidth. It all could have worked out very differently in Canada if the market, government influence and consumer interest had played out differently.
Just my opinion.
Quote: If downloading episodes over the Internet proves popular...
Uh, what do they mean if? It's already exceedingly popular on BitTorrent and the like, just not sanctioned by the media companies until now (OK, the BBC is doing it but not many others). The genie is already out of this bottle and yet another industry wants to bury it's head in the sand. They have to realize that people, including myself, are willing to pay money to see shows we've missed or cannot get in our area. Where's a capitalist when you need one? Steve Jobs yet again has pulled off a marvelous coup and now the affliates, Hollywood, SAG and anyone else who didn't have the forsight to start this on there own want a piece.
he had a "prior business arrangement" with them.
According to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, signed 1982 and entered into force 1994, and ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1996:
Section 2. LIMITS OF THE TERRITORIAL SEA Article 3
Breadth of the territorial sea
Every State has the right to establish the breadth of its territorial sea up to a limit not exceeding 12 nautical miles, measured from baselines determined in accordance with this Convention.
As someone pointed out, a three mile limit would be difficult to impossible to navigate without interceding at some point Canada's waters nevermind that ice must still be navigated in an "ice free" Arctic. A twelve mile territorial limit makes this impossible.
Not that any of this will stop nations (read: the U.S.) from attempting to navigate the Arctic, my point was Canada isn't going to sit idly by while ships transit their north.
And, if I may point out, no nation may claim exclusive dominion over space, the Moon or any celestial object according to the Outer Space Treaty of 1966, and entered into force 1967 by agreement of the three signatories, the United Kingdom, the United States of America and the U.S.S.R. Specifically:
Outer space is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means;
Among other articles.
The problem I have with the United States is an agreement or treaty is not worth the paper it's printed on. The Geneva Convention, the North American Free Trade Agreement, The Outer Space Treaty (article on non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in space) these are all considered barriers to American power and when and where the U.S. wants to violate them it does. While it is certainly true that treaties are violated and argued over all the time it certainly does no nation any particular good to treat their committments lightly and in an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world economies and securities are at stake. Obviously a nation with the power of the U.S. can and will flaunt that power as other nations are dependent on the U.S., but a middle power like Canada has to maintain their committments and credibility. You can afford to lose credibility when you're the largest economy on Earth.
Canada considers the Artic to be an internal water way and as such maintains dominion over all shipping in the area. The U.S., no surprise, considers the area to be international waters. As the ice recedes and the fabled Northwest Passage becomes a reality look for increased tension between the United States and Canada over control of shipping in the area (like we need more tension than already exists).
Unfortunately, Canada will probably roll over and let the U.S. have it's way on the sovereignty issue as we've done in the past when the U.S. ice breaker Polar Sea transited the Northwest Passage in 1985.
I read the comment and found it completely illogical. How is the lawful access provision going to give a third party, non-governmental agency access to private information when the courts have refused to do so? The lawful access legislation is simply an attempt to move cellular and internet communications into the telephone wiretap section of the Criminal Code of Canada. The same legal standards that apply to telephone wiretaps (judicial oversight, etc.) will apply to email and the internet. The CRIA tried in civil court to subpoena the information from Canadian ISPs and failed, this is about criminal matters.
The real controversy for ISPs and cellular carriers as I understand it is the cost of the new legislation. It's going to cost them a lot of money to meet the access standards the government wants.
could read Italian. Maybe we should run the result through Babelfish...
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
Apparently at the cost of coherent thought, judging by your post.