Am I the only one who actually likes the business model that BlockBuster has over Netflix? I like going down to the rental store, and getting the movie that I want. I had Zip.ca for a while, and I didn't like that I had to watch whatever they chose to send me. I also didn't like that sometimes movies didn't show up in my locked mail box (I'm in an apartment building), and I would lose a slot for many days while they tried to resolve the issue.
I would also like to add that last I checked (Windows XP), Notepad's search function could only search "up" or "down" and would not wrap the search. So searching for something requires that you always do 2 things. You can either move to the beginning (or end, but same effect) of the document and then search, or you can search up, and then down, from your current position.
I actually find the equation editor on OpenOffice vastly superior to MSWord. The main reason is that the OpenOffice equation editor allows you to type in all the syntax to define your equation. This takes a little longer at first, but once you get used to it, you can type out an equation almost as fast as you can write it with a pencil and paper. With MSOffice, I found that I had to create the equation with point and click, making it an extemely long process even to type short equations.
Speaking of Microsoft, maybe they can take a few pointers on how to design a nice desktop without hogging all the resources on the computer. I'm currently running KDE 3.5, with Metisse on a laptop with 512 MB of RAM, 1.5 GHz Celeron, and Intel GMA. Runs extremely smooth, despite all the fancy eyecandy. Nothing like what Vista (which came preinstalled) runs like.
It's only 184 KM from Ottawa, the capital of Canada, and it's directly beside the Trans-Canada highway, which is a pretty popular route. It's not the most popular place in the country, but it is by no means in the middle of nowhere. Especially not compared to a lot of other places in Canada.
I switched to using a trackball instead of a mouse because I didn't like keeping my desk clear of clutter. I actually got good enough so that I could beat most of my mouse-wielding friends in most FPS games. The advantages of the trackball are that you never run out of desk space, IE, you don't have to reposition it all the time, and also that you can hold it perfectly still while shooting, by removing your fingers (or thumb depending on the model), from the ball. Once I got used to it I found that there was a whole lot more I could do with a trackball than with a mouse.
Well, they do have a Pocket Reference. I haven't seen it myself, so it's hard to gauge how good it is. However, from what I can gather, it seems like the last for chapters of the full version. Basically a syntax reference for.Net, PHP,Perl and Java. Which I've found extremely valuable.
One O'Reilly book I would recommend is Mastering Regular Expressions. It contains a lot of insight into how regular expressions work, and how you can optimize your Regex's to get faster results. It also has language specific sections on.Net, PHP, Perl, and Java. I used it for learning regular expressions, and still find that it's a good reference even now that I am more skilled.
It's been over a year since I've settled on SageTV. So maybe things have changed. The difference is, with SageTV, I didn't have to search, I didn't have to ask, It just worked. Why can't MythTV be more like VMWare, OpenOffice, Firefox, and many other Linux Programs where I can download it and run it, without having to do a million things and make a research project out of just trying to get the application working. If you want your PVR to be working in half an hour, use SageTV. It you want it to be infinitely configurable, and have the set-up process be a research project, then use MythTV.
Yeah, but mythbusters disproved it, so they probably just got conned by some salesmen who said "think of the diving children". Everybody knows that mythbusters are always right.
I messed around with MythTV a long time before trying and settling on SageTV. The set up of MythTV is just too difficult. You should not have to have a MySQL database to tape TV shows. Or if you do, there should be a single script that your run, which configures the entire database, just supplying the username and password for the database. There's also quite a bit of other stuff to set up. TV Listings now have to be paid for, and getting your TV tuner, even a "supported" one, working in Linux can be quite time consuming. With SageTV I was up and running withing 30 minutes. Everything just worked. MythTV is good if you want to set up a PVR as a hobby, but if you just want a working PVR, and couldn't care less about the fun in setting it up, then SageTV is probably the better choice.
That only works if your city is a grid. The town that I grew up in was not laid out in a grid, and hence, if you took 3 rights, you may not end up doing a left turn. There was even one street that intersected with itself. If you go on that street and keep on turning right, you'll be stuck in an infinite loop.
Copyright has existed for 200 years. However it used to be 17 years. Now it's life of the author + 70 years. It used to weeks, months, years for information to travel from one end of the country to the other. Selling millions of copies of a song use to take a long time for people to even find out about it. Now we have the internet, and media can be spread across the entire country in a matter of minutes. It doesn't take years to gain popularity if you are producing good content.
You're probably better off just picking up an OEM copy of windows XP home if all you want to do is run a SageTV box. It will suck less resources than Vista, and will cost less.
Even those that are networked, can be left behind a firewall with no access to the internet. It might be nice to use these machines as a little network server. Or possible as a media center box. Put the box behind a firewall, and only give it access to the places it needs to download TV listings, and you should be set.
Which brings up the old story about the bridge builder throwing his hammer into the water as he was falling to save his life. The hardest part about falling into water is breaking the surface tension on the top. After that it's quite a bit easier on your body. The story goes that if you're falling into water from a great height, you can break surface of the water by throwing a heavy object (like a hammer) into the water just before you hit it. I think I saw this on mythbusters. Although I can't remember if it was busted or not.
They want to do this so they can inform customers that they are going over their allotted limit. They probably figure that this will create less problems then users calling up after they receive the bill, claiming that they should have been warned that they were approaching their limit.
Couldn't it just leave a message though? How hard would it be to design an automated calling system the recognized it was an answering machine (by detecting the double ring, and waiting for the beep), and then leave a message on the machine?
Another reason they might do this is so that you buy more. If you have a 200 points left in your account, you might want to add more points to you account, just so you can spend those points, because it's just money that's waiting to be spent. I have the same situation with my Wii Points account. I've had 200 points sitting on my account for months. Since you can only buy points in multiples of 500, and SNES/Genesis games are 800 points, you almost always have points sitting around. Once you buy a SNES game, it takes 4 more SNES games before your account get zeroed out. I guess you could buy 1000 points, and then buy 2 TG16 games. Anyway, it's pretty annoying, and I'm sure they all just do it so you'll spend more money.
The difference with the stock market is that once you stop investing your money, you stop getting more money. By investing your money, you are letting others use it for their own gain, so you should be entitle to make money. However, once your money is pulled out, you stop making money off it. You are no longer providing a service to anyone. You want to keep making money, you have to keep the money invested. With music, you could write a song, which may take a certain amount of work. Time invested on your part. But now you can live off the sales of that item for the rest of your life. That doesn't really push the artist to create any new work. They can just continue to make new money off work they did years ago. As well as collect interest or invest all the money they made from the work they produced years ago.
Also, once a work slips into the public domain, there's very little money to be made off of it, and it becomes very easy to get a copy of that work. If a network wanted to play a 5 year old movie on their TV station, they could just get a copy of the DVD and broadcast it. Companies could make money off of it, just like they make money from selling Shakespeare's plays. But there's not a whole lot of money to be made, because anybody could print the same thing. So there's less incentive to sell these works, because there would be extremely low profit margins. You could sell copies of that 5 year old movie on DVD, but you wouldn't make much, because so could everybody else. And it would also be available for download on the internet.
Possibly 5 years is a bit too short, but it's better than 70 years after the artist dies. We are going to lose a lot of works because of laws like that. Things will get lost and forgotten, because they will stop selling copies of a lot of works after 5-10 years, and in 100 years when they go out of copyright, nobody will have a copy, and the work will have been lost.
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Am I the only one who actually likes the business model that BlockBuster has over Netflix? I like going down to the rental store, and getting the movie that I want. I had Zip.ca for a while, and I didn't like that I had to watch whatever they chose to send me. I also didn't like that sometimes movies didn't show up in my locked mail box (I'm in an apartment building), and I would lose a slot for many days while they tried to resolve the issue.
I would also like to add that last I checked (Windows XP), Notepad's search function could only search "up" or "down" and would not wrap the search. So searching for something requires that you always do 2 things. You can either move to the beginning (or end, but same effect) of the document and then search, or you can search up, and then down, from your current position.
I actually find the equation editor on OpenOffice vastly superior to MSWord. The main reason is that the OpenOffice equation editor allows you to type in all the syntax to define your equation. This takes a little longer at first, but once you get used to it, you can type out an equation almost as fast as you can write it with a pencil and paper. With MSOffice, I found that I had to create the equation with point and click, making it an extemely long process even to type short equations.
I believe this is what you're looking for.
Speaking of Microsoft, maybe they can take a few pointers on how to design a nice desktop without hogging all the resources on the computer. I'm currently running KDE 3.5, with Metisse on a laptop with 512 MB of RAM, 1.5 GHz Celeron, and Intel GMA. Runs extremely smooth, despite all the fancy eyecandy. Nothing like what Vista (which came preinstalled) runs like.
It's only 184 KM from Ottawa, the capital of Canada, and it's directly beside the Trans-Canada highway, which is a pretty popular route. It's not the most popular place in the country, but it is by no means in the middle of nowhere. Especially not compared to a lot of other places in Canada.
I switched to using a trackball instead of a mouse because I didn't like keeping my desk clear of clutter. I actually got good enough so that I could beat most of my mouse-wielding friends in most FPS games. The advantages of the trackball are that you never run out of desk space, IE, you don't have to reposition it all the time, and also that you can hold it perfectly still while shooting, by removing your fingers (or thumb depending on the model), from the ball. Once I got used to it I found that there was a whole lot more I could do with a trackball than with a mouse.
Well, they do have a Pocket Reference. I haven't seen it myself, so it's hard to gauge how good it is. However, from what I can gather, it seems like the last for chapters of the full version. Basically a syntax reference for .Net, PHP,Perl and Java. Which I've found extremely valuable.
One O'Reilly book I would recommend is Mastering Regular Expressions. It contains a lot of insight into how regular expressions work, and how you can optimize your Regex's to get faster results. It also has language specific sections on .Net, PHP, Perl, and Java. I used it for learning regular expressions, and still find that it's a good reference even now that I am more skilled.
Try going into the Wii configuration. There's setting there that let's you adjust how sensitive the the sensor bar is.
It's been over a year since I've settled on SageTV. So maybe things have changed. The difference is, with SageTV, I didn't have to search, I didn't have to ask, It just worked. Why can't MythTV be more like VMWare, OpenOffice, Firefox, and many other Linux Programs where I can download it and run it, without having to do a million things and make a research project out of just trying to get the application working. If you want your PVR to be working in half an hour, use SageTV. It you want it to be infinitely configurable, and have the set-up process be a research project, then use MythTV.
Yeah, but mythbusters disproved it, so they probably just got conned by some salesmen who said "think of the diving children". Everybody knows that mythbusters are always right.
I messed around with MythTV a long time before trying and settling on SageTV. The set up of MythTV is just too difficult. You should not have to have a MySQL database to tape TV shows. Or if you do, there should be a single script that your run, which configures the entire database, just supplying the username and password for the database. There's also quite a bit of other stuff to set up. TV Listings now have to be paid for, and getting your TV tuner, even a "supported" one, working in Linux can be quite time consuming. With SageTV I was up and running withing 30 minutes. Everything just worked. MythTV is good if you want to set up a PVR as a hobby, but if you just want a working PVR, and couldn't care less about the fun in setting it up, then SageTV is probably the better choice.
That only works if your city is a grid. The town that I grew up in was not laid out in a grid, and hence, if you took 3 rights, you may not end up doing a left turn. There was even one street that intersected with itself. If you go on that street and keep on turning right, you'll be stuck in an infinite loop.
Copyright has existed for 200 years. However it used to be 17 years. Now it's life of the author + 70 years. It used to weeks, months, years for information to travel from one end of the country to the other. Selling millions of copies of a song use to take a long time for people to even find out about it. Now we have the internet, and media can be spread across the entire country in a matter of minutes. It doesn't take years to gain popularity if you are producing good content.
You're probably better off just picking up an OEM copy of windows XP home if all you want to do is run a SageTV box. It will suck less resources than Vista, and will cost less.
Even those that are networked, can be left behind a firewall with no access to the internet. It might be nice to use these machines as a little network server. Or possible as a media center box. Put the box behind a firewall, and only give it access to the places it needs to download TV listings, and you should be set.
Why not just run Linux? Last I checked, SageTV ran fine on Linux.
That's funny, Google thinks that PLF is something completely different.
Which brings up the old story about the bridge builder throwing his hammer into the water as he was falling to save his life. The hardest part about falling into water is breaking the surface tension on the top. After that it's quite a bit easier on your body. The story goes that if you're falling into water from a great height, you can break surface of the water by throwing a heavy object (like a hammer) into the water just before you hit it. I think I saw this on mythbusters. Although I can't remember if it was busted or not.
They want to do this so they can inform customers that they are going over their allotted limit. They probably figure that this will create less problems then users calling up after they receive the bill, claiming that they should have been warned that they were approaching their limit.
Couldn't it just leave a message though? How hard would it be to design an automated calling system the recognized it was an answering machine (by detecting the double ring, and waiting for the beep), and then leave a message on the machine?
Couldn't they just sniff it out of the TCP stream anyway?
Another reason they might do this is so that you buy more. If you have a 200 points left in your account, you might want to add more points to you account, just so you can spend those points, because it's just money that's waiting to be spent. I have the same situation with my Wii Points account. I've had 200 points sitting on my account for months. Since you can only buy points in multiples of 500, and SNES/Genesis games are 800 points, you almost always have points sitting around. Once you buy a SNES game, it takes 4 more SNES games before your account get zeroed out. I guess you could buy 1000 points, and then buy 2 TG16 games. Anyway, it's pretty annoying, and I'm sure they all just do it so you'll spend more money.
The difference with the stock market is that once you stop investing your money, you stop getting more money. By investing your money, you are letting others use it for their own gain, so you should be entitle to make money. However, once your money is pulled out, you stop making money off it. You are no longer providing a service to anyone. You want to keep making money, you have to keep the money invested. With music, you could write a song, which may take a certain amount of work. Time invested on your part. But now you can live off the sales of that item for the rest of your life. That doesn't really push the artist to create any new work. They can just continue to make new money off work they did years ago. As well as collect interest or invest all the money they made from the work they produced years ago.
Also, once a work slips into the public domain, there's very little money to be made off of it, and it becomes very easy to get a copy of that work. If a network wanted to play a 5 year old movie on their TV station, they could just get a copy of the DVD and broadcast it. Companies could make money off of it, just like they make money from selling Shakespeare's plays. But there's not a whole lot of money to be made, because anybody could print the same thing. So there's less incentive to sell these works, because there would be extremely low profit margins. You could sell copies of that 5 year old movie on DVD, but you wouldn't make much, because so could everybody else. And it would also be available for download on the internet.
Possibly 5 years is a bit too short, but it's better than 70 years after the artist dies. We are going to lose a lot of works because of laws like that. Things will get lost and forgotten, because they will stop selling copies of a lot of works after 5-10 years, and in 100 years when they go out of copyright, nobody will have a copy, and the work will have been lost.