I find the economics of this sudden SUV abandonment to be completely absurd. First of all, no one wants them. Second, everyone who has one suddenly wants out of it. So the economic answer is of course that the bottom falls out and they sell for pennies on the dollar.
Very few people are actually doing the math.
One thing that is important to understand: GM, Ford, and Chrysler have been selling these things with 0% financing and allowing 0% down for some time now. As a buyer, taking this offer is a good idea, even if you can afford to pay cash. Most people can't though, and the financing is the only thing that allows them to afford the vehicle.
As we all know, any new car depreciates the moment you drive it off the lot. So everyone taking these 0%/0-down deals is upside-down on their vehicle on day one. (Whereas someone with a "traditional" car loan where 20% of the money or so was used as a down payment would still be right-side-up on day one).
Now you have the current energy crisis on top of it, and a sudden spike of 30% in gas prices has eroded another 30% of equity for a guy who wasn't right-side-up to begin with.
Small cars are hot now, and they're in shorter supply. So manufacturers don't need to offer 0% loans on them.
So here's what the idiots do: sell the SUV at any price, get a smaller car. Eat the negative equity. Go from a 0% loan into a 6% loan.
Example:
You have a 2007 Chevy Tahoe. It gets 17mpg city/highway combined according to the new 2008 EPA numbers. 1 year old, 0% loan on $40,000 for 5 years. You've paid back $8,000, owe $32,000. It's worth $20,000 on the market if you're lucky. $12,000 in negative equity there.
According to the fueleconomy.gov site, the Tahoe will cost $3475/year @ 15k miles per year. The Accord will be $2464/year. So it will take roughly TWELVE YEARS or 180,000 miles to overcome the negative equity alone. Heaven forbid we include sales tax and depreciation on the new vehicle into the equation.
Even if you bought a Prius (46mpg, $1282/yr) it'd take 65k miles, or 5.5 years, to make up the difference.
So to summarize your comment, Wireless, RAID, and dual-head failed.
Yeah, those are the type of problems I've seen with Ubuntu as well (though I've never done RAID myself). Dual head was a complete pain in the ass on my 7.10 box, it required a hand-crafted xorg.conf to make it work. Wireless has worked out of the box on some systems, and been a fairly big issue on others...it's about on par with Windows in this regard though.
At the end of the day, you still have to make your hardware selections toward supported hardware with Linux. This is definitely a problem, and it needs to be resolved. The fact that it does not support your specific hardware does not make the operating system "junk". I agree that OS X is a very nice operating system (I use it about 25% of the time on my Macbook), but I still far prefer the Ubuntu Gnome UI.
Didn't we just read that they're breaking binary compatibility with Windows XP/Vista in 7? I laud them for doing this, but the idea that a modular, completely-rethought, bloat-free, and binary incompatible Windows is one year away strikes me as nothing short of absurd. The only cases I can see where both of these facts being correct is either that 7 has been in development for at least three years, or the new item is a steaming pile.
The more likely scenario is that we're being mislead (e.g., the inference that he's talking about Windows 7 is wrong, or that the previous article today regarding binary incompatibility is hogwash).
Re:the problem with drupal...
on
Drupal 5 Themes
·
· Score: 1
... is (unless they've fixed this) that if you want to update your site, you have to update every incremental update to finally get the latest update. basically the whole updating thing is a lot more complicated than it should be. I upgraded from 5.5 to 5.7 without hitting 5.6. Just removed the main drupal directory, replaced it with the 5.7 directory, then moved the files (uploads) and 3rd party modules back into place. Then visited their update scripts. By far the most painless upgrade experience I've ever seen on an PHP-based item.
I don't claim to be an expert on Drupal, and I did try this on a test server first.
I left one company and went to another. Email addresses were identical but for the domains, i.e., myname@oldcompany.com/myname@newcompany.com. Friends who had me in their work address books (Outlook/Exchange setups) reported that they simply could not get rid of the old entry. Every time they typed my name in, Outlook would complete the old address. The new address was present in the address book, and the old one was nowhere to be found.
I recently visited dell.com to price out a new system. When they finally present the full specs, they use a "reveal" transition to display the page. On my 2.4GHz P4 under Firefox, this effect took about 30 seconds. Infuriating.
It's especially bothersome given that it is trivial to get this right. The obvious "trick" is to spec the amount of time a transition should take, rather than the number of frames that should be rendered. The transition-rendering loop then draws the appropriate frame for the time at which it is being executed. On fast systems, it looks perfectly smooth. On slow systems, it may be more notchy, but it's over in the correct amount of time. But alas, it seems everyone opts for the "I need to draw these 50 frames" implementation.
If these things are done right, there's absolutely no reason to hate them, and I'm sure they can be turned off.
I've been running adblockplus for quite a while now and have effectively forgotten about issues like this. So have most others who would get upset by it. Of course then I'll unknowingly send friends/family to sites such as snopes without a second thought about malware concerns. To me it looked like a nice wholesome/clean site.
You'll never see $1 per gallon again. I bet people said that in previous oil crises as well. We saw 89 cents/gallon six years ago. In the United States, it's perfectly feasible that we might see the equivalent of $1/gallon gas again.
$1/gallon would be great if it were gasoline, but one gallon of ethanol doesn't store the same amount of energy as a gallon of gas.
How many joules per dollar does that work out to compared to gas?
Or, even better, how many miles per dollar does that work out to in today's ethanol-powered cars? E85=83263 BTUs gasoline=114000 BTUs So 73%
Chevrolet Silverado 4WD FlexFuel (5000lb pickup truck) MPG, from fueleconomy.gov:
Gas city 14 hwy 19 annual fuel cost: $2878
E85 city 11 hwy 14 annual fuel cost: $2999
I think that'll make a difference. Heck even if it's the same price, it's less greenhouse gas, more stability, and less (or no) dependence on you-know-where for our fuel.
Everyone I know who has ever had their car broken into has lost all of their CDs.
So if my car is broken into, am I responsible for the millions of dollars in lost "revenue" for burned tracks when the thieves share them with others on P2P?
Other common scenarios of course are laptop theft, network intrusion, and ipod theft.
No, GM's REAL problem is that they either make crap cars or used to make crap cars and American's have gotten tired of crap quality.
American car companies still average ~1.5-2x as many defects per vehicle than the Japanese do and Americans are tired of it. If you owned an American car in the 1990s( and I owned 2), then you probably got pieces of junk like I did.
Whereas every Japanese car I have ever owned has run till it died with minimum problems.
GM needs to spend some of their "research" budget on QUALITY and RELIABILITY (as well as a way to make their UGLY cars prettier), and then maybe they will sell some cars.
Until then, why would I buy an ugly car, with poor gas mileage and worse quality? Just so I can say I "buy American"? No way. Especially since the Japanese cars are more likely to actually be made in the USA while the GM cars are likely partially built in Mexico...
FWIW, I like the idea of cars driving themselves... maybe we could get rid of the traffic jams and stop DUIs with this tech... but if GM doesn't figure out how to sell more cars, they won't be around in 2018... Maybe it's just a truck thing, but...
I've owned GM pickups since I was 17. I hear this argument about quality and reliability from so many people: GM is crap, buy a Toyota. But my GM pickups have never left me stranded and have never had any major problems (knock on wood). I'm sure one will break someday, but I'm just not seeing this horrible quality rate the Toyota/Honda club always seems to bring up. And I'm a nut about cars working correctly...any squeak/rattle/weird noise/sight change in the way the engine runs or the way the truck handles is cause for alarm IMO. My trucks also tend to perform as well as the Monroney sticker suggests, getting the EPA mileage (pre 2008 adjustment, even).
Contrast this with something like the new Toyota Tundra. 1.) They're pigs on fuel. I can't believe this supposed "super green" car company is putting out trucks that need to weigh 1,000lb more than mine to do the same thing. 2.) Their initial quality has been horrible. Go read tundrasolutions.com and you'll see a plethora of failures. Transmissions slipping and failing, rear end gears whining, camshafts breaking. But the worst flaw of all is that the tailgates weren't designed correctly and literally fall apart if you drive with a few hundred pounds resting on them: http://www.tundrasolutions.com/forums/tundra/117206-tundra-tailgate-failures-i-am-club/ I'd hate to see how these things work with 100k on the clock.
To give an idea of how much I believe in JD Power-type statistics, e.g., the "defect count"...take a look at this: http://www.jdpower.com/autos/ratings/segment-quality-ratings/large-pickup Compare the first truck "Chevrolet Silverado Classic HD" versus the last truck "GMC Sierra Classic HD". The first is the award recipient, with fantastic results. The second is pretty mediocre. They're the *EXACT* same truck with slightly different front end styling (different hood, bumper, quarter panels..that's it). "Defect count" smells a bit like "OS Vulnerability Count" to me. The only explanation is flawed/non-comparable data.
Hmmm... Ok so tell me how often are you going to be visiting the Microsoft website if you happen to be a Linux and Firefox user?
Probably 0.... For web-based app development, I quite frequently visit Microsoft's site for MSDN documentation on the Internet Explorer API. Just an example, but I'm sure many Linux users have their own such examples.
I for one am glad to see legislation forcing energy conservation, because without it, there's a significant portion of the US population that will refuse to conserve energy because it requires effort on their part, and another (overlapping) portion that do the opposite of what people suggest that they do, because they're rebels and good 'merkins who'll do the opposite of what people say "because they can". People need to be protected from their own stupidity sometimes. Where are you getting this data regarding these supposed "opposite people"? The fact that your hillbilly cousin Joe Bob deliberately goads your liberal views when you're around is not indicative of a nationwide trend.
People in Norway manage fine with small cars. People in the Northern parts of Russia manage fine with small cars. Snow really is no excuse for large cars unless you are actually going to drive off road or your local government can't do their job properly and keep the roads clear. It's a culture thing.
In the cities, Americans don't have any problem driving small cars (or no cars at all), just like folks in other countries.
But whether you like it or not, this country has a tremendous amount of suburban population. When density is lower, it takes quite a bit more time to clear the snow. The suburbs also require a vehicle to get anywhere (little to nothing is in walking distance) and there is no worthwhile public transportation. Add to this the fact that American culture is not a fan of waiting on its government to fix things.
Quality is crap in fullscreen, even though there's a 2" margin on each side of the screen in that mode. It played a 30 second ad for "Scrubbing Bubbles" shower cleaner before letting me watch it (fine with me). I then tested the use case of "I missed the last part of this show" and tried to get toward the end. This resulted in the ad playing again, twice.
Good luck competing with BitTorrent on that. It would take 30 minutes to BitTorrent an HD version of that show, transcoded into a 350MB XVID file in 480p quality. The file would be entirely free of commercials of any kind.
If they want to make this work, they need to offer shows for download in an unencrypted format. Feel free to play a 30 second or even minute-long video ad before allowing the download of a show. Feel free to add commercial breaks to the file. Feel free to require registration and include your zip code, such that local ads can be provided. But don't try to enforce any special player requirements, DRM, or mandatory commercial watching. Don't make me watch it in a web browser, or with a border around it (each additional inch of TV screen is exponentially more expensive). Make sure the video is at least 480p.
Do this and you won't have anyone downloading the ad-free version of a show on BitTorrent/p2p.
Um, not like I want to defend cable companies and their pricing, but "93% in 10 years" is to my mind an inflammatory way of saying "an average of 6.7% per year over the last 10 years." Given that overall the consumer price index has averaged about a 3% increase per year over that period, cable prices are bad, but not as bad as the quote makes it sound. Then again, entire industries (credit cards, for example) owe their existence due to people's inability to compute compounded interest, so perhaps the wording should be no surprise. Of course, cable TV expenses are factored into that: http://www.bls.gov/cex/csx801p.pdf and are helping it out. Most of my "technology" related expenses have gone DOWN or stayed the same in the past ten years. In my experience, Internet access and cell phones have stayed the same, while computers, televisions, electronics, and land lines, have all gone down (even though they have improved). Cable keeps going up. It's so bad that everyone seems to offer "for a year" or "for 3 months" deals, sometimes disguised as a cell-phone-contract-like "commitment" when in fact its a teaser rate. Additionally rate structures are ridiculously biased to upsell the customer...for example, the analog "2-73" package that used to be universally $30 is now $55 after taxes with Comcast (Beaverton, Oregon). The higher end packages haven't gone up as much, but they're trying damn hard to make the consumer ask himself "why not get the top-of-the-line package, it's hardly any more expensive?"
I personally got sick enough of it to build a high-def MythTV at a cost of about $700 + $20/year for TV listings. The cost will be negated with 8 months of my previous cable TV bill, and the DVR is a far better item than the horribly unstable HD DVR the cable co gave me. The only downside is that I have to wait for cable-only TV shows to come out on DVD.
I was thinking about picking this up tomorrow evening, but I was first curious to know if it had any new anti-piracy features like Vista? Is there any activation/mandatory phoning home of any kind? Is there anything preventing me from installing it on more than one computer (I do not intend to, but anything that does this is likely to prevent some fraction of people from using it legally). Are there any new MPAA/RIAA-oriented features in it similar to Vista's protected video path?
I only want to buy this thing if it's a step forward from 10.4.
Based on what I have read online, all the onstar components are on this circuit, but I haven't seen anyone specifically verify that all components are dead though. I know for a fact it disables onstar's ability to communicate with the PCM (powertrain control module), as you must remove this fuse when uploading new firmware to the PCM (otherwise onstar may try to talk to it during reprogramming).
Perhaps a better approach would be to physically disconnect the onstar's VCIM (vehicle control interface module) behind the glove box. Also just read that some vehicles have the remote in-dash CD changer conncted to the INFO fuse as well, so pulling the VCIM is probably the best bet.
Pulling the "INFO" fuse in my GMC Sierra renders OnStar entirely inert. The fuse is located in the underhood fuse box. I have had this fuse removed since I purchased the truck 3 years ago and have found no ill effects from its removal. Having reasonable knowledge of network security, I've never liked the idea of my truck being connected to a network.
Removing this fuse should work on 2000-2007 Chevy/GMC pickups and full size SUVs (built on the "GMT 800" platform). I believe the procedure is similar for all other GM vehicles.
Someday, when Google takes over the world, everything will be ad-supported, and everything will be free. My cell phone will be free and display ads to get a free ad-supported car. The car, in turn, will be painted with an ad for a free ad-supported house. The house will be totally free as well, but be plastered in advertising for free ad-supported cell phones.
According to statistics provided by Market Share by Net Applications, starting in December 2006 and through September 2007, Linux doubled its market share. This detail would sound nothing short of promising, except for the fact that the doubling in market share is equivalent to a jump from 0.37% to 0.81%. In the past month, the open source operating system only increased its footprint on the market by 0.4%, from 0.77% to 0.81%. Only increased by 0.4%?
Try again, that's a 5.2% increase in a month...after more than doubling in the previous year. That is huge. If adoption doubled every year as a percentage of the marketplace, Linux would have 100% of the market within 7 years.
Hey Softpedia...I'll give you $100 a day for a month, if you give me 1 cent on the first day of the month, 2 cents on the second day, and so on, doubling the amount each day for the 30 days.
...is that Flash video won't play in Firefox on Linux. All us Linux knobs who have had nightmares diagnosing bad RAM (it's the most common cause of a flaky Linux machine in my experience, and a giant PITA to find) are thus screaming about the nature of the test and talking about disk corruption.:D
Slashdot Mirror
I find the economics of this sudden SUV abandonment to be completely absurd. First of all, no one wants them. Second, everyone who has one suddenly wants out of it. So the economic answer is of course that the bottom falls out and they sell for pennies on the dollar.
Very few people are actually doing the math.
One thing that is important to understand: GM, Ford, and Chrysler have been selling these things with 0% financing and allowing 0% down for some time now. As a buyer, taking this offer is a good idea, even if you can afford to pay cash. Most people can't though, and the financing is the only thing that allows them to afford the vehicle.
As we all know, any new car depreciates the moment you drive it off the lot. So everyone taking these 0%/0-down deals is upside-down on their vehicle on day one. (Whereas someone with a "traditional" car loan where 20% of the money or so was used as a down payment would still be right-side-up on day one).
Now you have the current energy crisis on top of it, and a sudden spike of 30% in gas prices has eroded another 30% of equity for a guy who wasn't right-side-up to begin with.
Small cars are hot now, and they're in shorter supply. So manufacturers don't need to offer 0% loans on them.
So here's what the idiots do: sell the SUV at any price, get a smaller car. Eat the negative equity. Go from a 0% loan into a 6% loan.
Example:
You have a 2007 Chevy Tahoe. It gets 17mpg city/highway combined according to the new 2008 EPA numbers. 1 year old, 0% loan on $40,000 for 5 years. You've paid back $8,000, owe $32,000. It's worth $20,000 on the market if you're lucky. $12,000 in negative equity there.
Buy a 2008 Honda Accord, 4 cylinder. EPA combined mileage = 24mpg.
According to the fueleconomy.gov site, the Tahoe will cost $3475/year @ 15k miles per year. The Accord will be $2464/year. So it will take roughly TWELVE YEARS or 180,000 miles to overcome the negative equity alone. Heaven forbid we include sales tax and depreciation on the new vehicle into the equation.
Even if you bought a Prius (46mpg, $1282/yr) it'd take 65k miles, or 5.5 years, to make up the difference.
Moral of the story: keep the gas guzzler.
So to summarize your comment, Wireless, RAID, and dual-head failed.
Yeah, those are the type of problems I've seen with Ubuntu as well (though I've never done RAID myself). Dual head was a complete pain in the ass on my 7.10 box, it required a hand-crafted xorg.conf to make it work. Wireless has worked out of the box on some systems, and been a fairly big issue on others...it's about on par with Windows in this regard though.
At the end of the day, you still have to make your hardware selections toward supported hardware with Linux. This is definitely a problem, and it needs to be resolved. The fact that it does not support your specific hardware does not make the operating system "junk". I agree that OS X is a very nice operating system (I use it about 25% of the time on my Macbook), but I still far prefer the Ubuntu Gnome UI.
Didn't we just read that they're breaking binary compatibility with Windows XP/Vista in 7? I laud them for doing this, but the idea that a modular, completely-rethought, bloat-free, and binary incompatible Windows is one year away strikes me as nothing short of absurd. The only cases I can see where both of these facts being correct is either that 7 has been in development for at least three years, or the new item is a steaming pile.
The more likely scenario is that we're being mislead (e.g., the inference that he's talking about Windows 7 is wrong, or that the previous article today regarding binary incompatibility is hogwash).
... is (unless they've fixed this) that if you want to update your site, you have to update every incremental update to finally get the latest update. basically the whole updating thing is a lot more complicated than it should be. I upgraded from 5.5 to 5.7 without hitting 5.6. Just removed the main drupal directory, replaced it with the 5.7 directory, then moved the files (uploads) and 3rd party modules back into place. Then visited their update scripts. By far the most painless upgrade experience I've ever seen on an PHP-based item.I don't claim to be an expert on Drupal, and I did try this on a test server first.
I left one company and went to another. Email addresses were identical but for the domains, i.e., myname@oldcompany.com/myname@newcompany.com. Friends who had me in their work address books (Outlook/Exchange setups) reported that they simply could not get rid of the old entry. Every time they typed my name in, Outlook would complete the old address. The new address was present in the address book, and the old one was nowhere to be found.
I recently visited dell.com to price out a new system. When they finally present the full specs, they use a "reveal" transition to display the page. On my 2.4GHz P4 under Firefox, this effect took about 30 seconds. Infuriating.
It's especially bothersome given that it is trivial to get this right. The obvious "trick" is to spec the amount of time a transition should take, rather than the number of frames that should be rendered. The transition-rendering loop then draws the appropriate frame for the time at which it is being executed. On fast systems, it looks perfectly smooth. On slow systems, it may be more notchy, but it's over in the correct amount of time. But alas, it seems everyone opts for the "I need to draw these 50 frames" implementation.
If these things are done right, there's absolutely no reason to hate them, and I'm sure they can be turned off.
I've been running adblockplus for quite a while now and have effectively forgotten about issues like this. So have most others who would get upset by it. Of course then I'll unknowingly send friends/family to sites such as snopes without a second thought about malware concerns. To me it looked like a nice wholesome/clean site.
How many joules per dollar does that work out to compared to gas?
Or, even better, how many miles per dollar does that work out to in today's ethanol-powered cars? E85=83263 BTUs
gasoline=114000 BTUs
So 73%
Chevrolet Silverado 4WD FlexFuel (5000lb pickup truck) MPG, from fueleconomy.gov:
Gas
city 14
hwy 19
annual fuel cost: $2878
E85
city 11
hwy 14
annual fuel cost: $2999
I think that'll make a difference. Heck even if it's the same price, it's less greenhouse gas, more stability, and less (or no) dependence on you-know-where for our fuel.
Everyone I know who has ever had their car broken into has lost all of their CDs.
So if my car is broken into, am I responsible for the millions of dollars in lost "revenue" for burned tracks when the thieves share them with others on P2P?
Other common scenarios of course are laptop theft, network intrusion, and ipod theft.
American car companies still average ~1.5-2x as many defects per vehicle than the Japanese do and Americans are tired of it. If you owned an American car in the 1990s( and I owned 2), then you probably got pieces of junk like I did.
Whereas every Japanese car I have ever owned has run till it died with minimum problems.
GM needs to spend some of their "research" budget on QUALITY and RELIABILITY (as well as a way to make their UGLY cars prettier), and then maybe they will sell some cars.
Until then, why would I buy an ugly car, with poor gas mileage and worse quality? Just so I can say I "buy American"? No way. Especially since the Japanese cars are more likely to actually be made in the USA while the GM cars are likely partially built in Mexico...
FWIW, I like the idea of cars driving themselves... maybe we could get rid of the traffic jams and stop DUIs with this tech... but if GM doesn't figure out how to sell more cars, they won't be around in 2018... Maybe it's just a truck thing, but...
I've owned GM pickups since I was 17. I hear this argument about quality and reliability from so many people: GM is crap, buy a Toyota. But my GM pickups have never left me stranded and have never had any major problems (knock on wood). I'm sure one will break someday, but I'm just not seeing this horrible quality rate the Toyota/Honda club always seems to bring up. And I'm a nut about cars working correctly...any squeak/rattle/weird noise/sight change in the way the engine runs or the way the truck handles is cause for alarm IMO. My trucks also tend to perform as well as the Monroney sticker suggests, getting the EPA mileage (pre 2008 adjustment, even).
Contrast this with something like the new Toyota Tundra. 1.) They're pigs on fuel. I can't believe this supposed "super green" car company is putting out trucks that need to weigh 1,000lb more than mine to do the same thing. 2.) Their initial quality has been horrible. Go read tundrasolutions.com and you'll see a plethora of failures. Transmissions slipping and failing, rear end gears whining, camshafts breaking. But the worst flaw of all is that the tailgates weren't designed correctly and literally fall apart if you drive with a few hundred pounds resting on them: http://www.tundrasolutions.com/forums/tundra/117206-tundra-tailgate-failures-i-am-club/ I'd hate to see how these things work with 100k on the clock.
To give an idea of how much I believe in JD Power-type statistics, e.g., the "defect count"...take a look at this: http://www.jdpower.com/autos/ratings/segment-quality-ratings/large-pickup Compare the first truck "Chevrolet Silverado Classic HD" versus the last truck "GMC Sierra Classic HD". The first is the award recipient, with fantastic results. The second is pretty mediocre. They're the *EXACT* same truck with slightly different front end styling (different hood, bumper, quarter panels..that's it). "Defect count" smells a bit like "OS Vulnerability Count" to me. The only explanation is flawed/non-comparable data.
Probably 0.... For web-based app development, I quite frequently visit Microsoft's site for MSDN documentation on the Internet Explorer API. Just an example, but I'm sure many Linux users have their own such examples.
In the cities, Americans don't have any problem driving small cars (or no cars at all), just like folks in other countries.
But whether you like it or not, this country has a tremendous amount of suburban population. When density is lower, it takes quite a bit more time to clear the snow. The suburbs also require a vehicle to get anywhere (little to nothing is in walking distance) and there is no worthwhile public transportation. Add to this the fact that American culture is not a fan of waiting on its government to fix things.
Is this what they're talking about:
http://www.nbc.com/Chuck/video/episodes.shtml
Quality is crap in fullscreen, even though there's a 2" margin on each side of the screen in that mode. It played a 30 second ad for "Scrubbing Bubbles" shower cleaner before letting me watch it (fine with me). I then tested the use case of "I missed the last part of this show" and tried to get toward the end. This resulted in the ad playing again, twice.
Good luck competing with BitTorrent on that. It would take 30 minutes to BitTorrent an HD version of that show, transcoded into a 350MB XVID file in 480p quality. The file would be entirely free of commercials of any kind.
If they want to make this work, they need to offer shows for download in an unencrypted format. Feel free to play a 30 second or even minute-long video ad before allowing the download of a show. Feel free to add commercial breaks to the file. Feel free to require registration and include your zip code, such that local ads can be provided. But don't try to enforce any special player requirements, DRM, or mandatory commercial watching. Don't make me watch it in a web browser, or with a border around it (each additional inch of TV screen is exponentially more expensive). Make sure the video is at least 480p.
Do this and you won't have anyone downloading the ad-free version of a show on BitTorrent/p2p.
That site literally made my eyes hurt.
I personally got sick enough of it to build a high-def MythTV at a cost of about $700 + $20/year for TV listings. The cost will be negated with 8 months of my previous cable TV bill, and the DVR is a far better item than the horribly unstable HD DVR the cable co gave me. The only downside is that I have to wait for cable-only TV shows to come out on DVD.
I was thinking about picking this up tomorrow evening, but I was first curious to know if it had any new anti-piracy features like Vista? Is there any activation/mandatory phoning home of any kind? Is there anything preventing me from installing it on more than one computer (I do not intend to, but anything that does this is likely to prevent some fraction of people from using it legally). Are there any new MPAA/RIAA-oriented features in it similar to Vista's protected video path?
I only want to buy this thing if it's a step forward from 10.4.
....did they find our fake moon landing set yet?
Based on what I have read online, all the onstar components are on this circuit, but I haven't seen anyone specifically verify that all components are dead though. I know for a fact it disables onstar's ability to communicate with the PCM (powertrain control module), as you must remove this fuse when uploading new firmware to the PCM (otherwise onstar may try to talk to it during reprogramming).
Perhaps a better approach would be to physically disconnect the onstar's VCIM (vehicle control interface module) behind the glove box. Also just read that some vehicles have the remote in-dash CD changer conncted to the INFO fuse as well, so pulling the VCIM is probably the best bet.
Pulling the "INFO" fuse in my GMC Sierra renders OnStar entirely inert. The fuse is located in the underhood fuse box. I have had this fuse removed since I purchased the truck 3 years ago and have found no ill effects from its removal. Having reasonable knowledge of network security, I've never liked the idea of my truck being connected to a network.
Removing this fuse should work on 2000-2007 Chevy/GMC pickups and full size SUVs (built on the "GMT 800" platform). I believe the procedure is similar for all other GM vehicles.
Someday, when Google takes over the world, everything will be ad-supported, and everything will be free. My cell phone will be free and display ads to get a free ad-supported car. The car, in turn, will be painted with an ad for a free ad-supported house. The house will be totally free as well, but be plastered in advertising for free ad-supported cell phones.
Try again, that's a 5.2% increase in a month...after more than doubling in the previous year. That is huge. If adoption doubled every year as a percentage of the marketplace, Linux would have 100% of the market within 7 years.
Hey Softpedia...I'll give you $100 a day for a month, if you give me 1 cent on the first day of the month, 2 cents on the second day, and so on, doubling the amount each day for the 30 days.
...is that Flash video won't play in Firefox on Linux. All us Linux knobs who have had nightmares diagnosing bad RAM (it's the most common cause of a flaky Linux machine in my experience, and a giant PITA to find) are thus screaming about the nature of the test and talking about disk corruption. :D
There already is an MPL, the Mozilla Public License. It's frequently referred to by that acronym. This one should be abbreviated MSPL