It's the same eTicket system that's been used for a few years, just with barcodes on the cellphone rathter than printed out.
It's pretty simple. If two people show up at the door with the same barcode, one of them stole it. From there it's a simple matter of seeing who purchased the tickets in the first place to decide which guy rides home in the back of a black and white.
I went to the theatre itself and had no problem buying tickets. Long after they went on sale, too.
eTickets are for chumps. Buy your tickets at the venue. No 900% TicketMaster or MovieFone markups, no paying a 20 dollar "convenience fee" to have TM email you your tickets. Yeah, a 0 cost delivery method should definately cost more than having FedEx deliver the tickets overnight, absolutely fucking brilliant, TM..
And you can resell paper tickets if something comes up and you can't attend. Selling tickets at or below face value is not scalping. Hell, scalping isn't illegal in many circumstances. I know around here it's illegal to scalp football tickets, but it's perfectly legal to scalp concert tickets.
I've been printing eTickets for a few years, all they do is scan the barcode at the door.
Nothing really new here, except for the mobile phone angle. Personally I wish people would leave their mobile phones at home just fucking once.
Everyone thinks their so fucking important that they need to take calls in the middle of the Phantom of the Opera.
If you're an emergency room doctor who's on call, by all means carry your cell phone around. But don't go out to 100 dollar a ticket broadway plays and ruin them you pretentious fucks.
Will we as a society ever get over the novelty of cell phones? You still see people talking in public with that stupid look of half-stupidity and half-conceit on their face and saying things like "GUESS WHERE I'M CALLING FROM!!!"
as far as the State attorney, I can't steal something thats given to me. I didn't mess with any of the cabling, etc, did not have a bootleg cable box. They can't sue me for having a TV in my house.
You sure? If I give or sell you a stolen car, you don't think you can be charged for driving it around?
I know a guy who got busted. He moved into an apartment, and it already had cable. The previous tenant hooked it up illegaly. They bent him over in a big way because he was dopey enough to try and fight it. Rather than just paying for the service, he has a couple thousand in fines to his name. Like I said, it's a witch hunt.
What matters is that you're recieving a service you haven't payed for. It's no different than going and getting your hair done and sprinting out before they can write you a bill.
They're looking to turn partners against each other. That's the only way to get a real conviction. A witness would have to see, or participate in the spamming for his testimony to be useful.
Ie; you couldn't go to court and testify "stratjakt is a spammer because he told me all about it at the bar!" That would be heresay. You could say "stratjakt and I ran a spamming operation, I rolled on him to avoid prosecution. I was just following orders, honest!"
I'm not a lawyer, of course.
Of course, you have to make the reward for rolling over on your partners greater than the rewards of staying loyal.
There's no honor among thieves. Computer criminals are the pussiest of all criminals. The warez rings crumble like a house of cards once they pick up a couple of easily intimidated 13 year old kids. Show em a list of charges, show em a picture of goatse, let them connect the dots, and get out your notebook to start jotting down names and numbers.
No, it implies (to me) that spammers are harder to track down than regular criminals without community help.
I mean you have no crime scene to investigate, no fingerprints or DNA or other physical evidence to link the suspect to the crime.
About the only real way to bag a spammer as I can see is with eye witness testimony. Any "evidence" you collect online is easily thrown out by an attorney with the "anyone could have forged that" or "my clients box was hacked because of an insecure OS".
About obvious shit like "hard drives will get bigger and video cards will get faster", sure.
But about the industry and where it's going, he sounds like a typical 14 year old slashbot zealot, which of course explains his popularity around here.
I don't know anyone in the industry who reads his column at all, let along gives any credence to his words.
Frankly, if he was any good at all, he wouldn't be on PBS. Sort of a slam at PBS out of nowhere, but it's true enough.
If MS patents any enhancements, they won't be part of any official USB specs, and few manufacturers will jump on them anyways.
They could come up with their own new connector and protocols, but that would be like saying that MSFT corrupted OpenGL with DirectX.
And it'd be stillborn anyways, USB is now ubiquitous. MSFT has no more power to redesign USB than they do the order of the power rails on the molex connectors of your PSU.
Everytime Cringley opens his mouth, you can hear his ass sucking wind.
Cringely knows very little about computers or technology. If you read his articles, you'd see that. He's just a PBS windbag. Don't pay this dork any heed.
You think Apple is going to start shipping iPods with a USB interface that "specifically excludes OS/X"? Hell, as much as I think they're a waste of bucks, I'd be the first to agree that the iPod is the "killer app" of USB at home.
What a moron this guy is. 100% pure tinfoil hat speculation.
MSFT added an option to be able to disable USB ports as part of the security policy. The Xbox controller ports are merely USB ports that are shaped more like something you would expect to see on a console.
Bobby Blowhard needs to publish X words per month or he's fired. So he took 2 and 2 and came up with 6.
USB is, and always will be, an open spec. That's what the "U" is for - universal. MSFT can propose all the changes it wants, and the kernel hackers can go ahead and implement them.
There IS a new USB standard in the works and it is at the heart of Microsoft's sudden interest in USB security. Co-developed with Intel, the new USB standard specifically excludes Linux and probably OS X devices as well. I'm told the Intel folks are quite embarrassed about this, but feel powerless to do anything about it.
Links? Can you back this up with any actual facts?
Show me the new published standard that "specifically excludes linux and probably OS/X".
And if he's so sure it specifically excludes Linux, why is he doubtful about OS/X?
I call bullshit and flamebait on this entire article.
MSFT isn't scared of linux on the desktop, they have absolutely no reason to be.
THX1138 is being re-made/re-released right now. Sith is just around the corner. Star Wars Battlegrounds and KOTOR2 and a whole slew of video games are hitting the market.
The level of George Lucas hype is as high right now as it will ever be. In 3 years, Star Wars will be completely forgotten.
That's why they're being released now.
This guy blames everything on piracy. Last interview I read with him, he ranted about how Episode II didn't do as well as he hoped in the theatres, and of course - he blamed piracy, and threatened to completely scrap Episode III because "piracy" would just ruin it too.
I mean, it couldn't possibly have anything to do with the movie sucking so bad that I can't even recall the plot with any clarity.
All I remember is they turned Boba Fett from a really cool, cold calculating faceless bounty hunter, into a Spanish kid with a grudge against the Jedi. "My name is Inigo Montoy^H^H^H^Boba Fett! You keel my fathor! Prepare to die!" OK, I read somewhere that the actor was maori. Either way, he's just a stereotyped hot-blooded latin now.
Should have left Boba alone. I could stomach everything else he did. I could deal with Jar Jar and the pod races. Greedo can shoot first all he wants. He could pencil in little furry boners on all the Ewoks, that's just fine.
But he ruined Boba Fett. Unforgivable!
The funny thing is, I can't recall seeing Ep II on any bittorrent sites or the other usual channels. It wasn't even good enough to be pirated far and wide.
I see more episodes of Will and Grace for download on sites like suprnova than I do Star Wars stuff... That should speak volumes.
Sorry George. You turned off most of the old fans, and failed to attact any newer younger ones to replace them.
AP: Why did you change your mind and decide to put the original three movies out on DVD now?
Lucas: Just because the market has shifted so dramatically. A lot of people are getting very worried about piracy. That has really eaten dramatically into the sales. It really just came down to, there may not be a market when I wanted to bring it out, which was like, three years from now. So rather than just sit by and watch the whole thing fall apart, better to bring it out early and get it over with.
No, George, there may very well not be a market for this in three years. And not because of piracy. Because Star Wars is dead. 20 years ago I was into Star Wars as a kid, I bought the toys and had light saber duels in the playground with the other kids.
20 years later, and my kids really don't give a shit about Star Wars. This time around, you lost their interest to such notable franchises as "Spy Kids".
I'm not kidding. I tried to take my boy to Star Wars when it was re-released in theatres. He was bored, and couldn't sit through it's dated effects and cheesy dialog. I know Jar-Jar was supposed to suck the little kids into the Star Wars world, but he didn't. My kids thought him as annoying as I did.
There will be no market for Star Wars in 3 years, simply because it's uncompelling poorly written and over-marketted crap.
Much like Star Wars, it's original hardcore fanbase is growing up and dying off. The new stuff is not attracting new fans.
There's no market for a sequel to Citizen Kane either.
But of course, this idiot is inable to comprehend the writing on the wall, and follows the industry standard of blaming it all on piracy.
Yes, but the budget personal computers outnumber the higher end ones by a huge margin in the wild. This product is aimed at the budget machines, ATi makes cheap-ass tuners.
And adding firewire isn't an option for most of these machines, nearly all are MicroATX or FlexATX based, and simply have no free expansion slots.
Like I said before, of all the machines I own or use, none have firewire, and none need it.
When political ads stopped being about the candidate, and his/her views and platforms, and when they started just being about bashing the other guy?
America has been successfully brainwashed into believing there are, and will only ever by, two choices. This makes politics simple, you only have to smear one guy, and it's just a contest to see who can smear the other guy better. Bushs platform is "Kerry sucks", Kerry's platform is "Bush sucks".
The last Bush commercial I saw said "John Kerry even voted against the Laci Perterson bill which would make it illegal to assault pregnant women." Well, it's obvious, of course, that Kerry is for assaults against pregnant women! What a bastard.
McCain was the rep. frontrunner, until a whisper campaign about his "mentally disabled black daughter" killed his hopes. The whispers of course didn't mention that she was adopted from Somalia or some country, the implied message was McCain knocked boots with a crack whore.
I haven't heard one real issue discussed during the entire pre-election smear fest. It's all about what Bush did or didn't do in the National Guard, and what Kerry did or didn't do in Vietnam. I haven't heard what either man plans to do or not do in Iraq, Syria or North Korea.
The ads are so shallow and transparent it amazes me. There's no subtlety or tact. I guess if Bush's commercials make him look like a petty asshole, it's irrelevant, as long as he's less petty and less of an asshole than Kerry.
The two party system we've imposed on ourselves have turned elections from "who will do the most good for our country?" into "who will do the least evil to our country?"
American politics are fucking sad. Two parties is not democracy, and not representative of the people. How could it be, when there are 50 states + D.C? How could the ideologies of 300 million people fit into either slot A or slot B?
Vote your conscience. Don't be satisfied with the lesser of two evils. Vote for someone you believe in. Whether or not they win, your vote sends a clear message.
I'd love to see the republicrats win, but with 50% or more of the votes going independant. That would send a real message, loud and clear, that people are sick of the way both parties have mangled the country.
Yeah, well I never bothered installing the firewire daughterboard in my machine at home. It plugs in right under the AGP card, and I have absolutely no use for it. All it would serve to do is block airflow to the card cooler.
Anyways, my point is, I have about 5 machines at home, and two on my desktop at work. None have firewire, all have USB. If I were to try and sell me gizmos, I'd be smart to make them USB.
Yes, firewire has a big niche, but a niche nonetheless. It's simply not ubiquitious. I'd even go as far to say Firewire is to USB what Zip drives are to CD burners.
Huh? Comcast won't let me have broadband at all without paying for basic cable. I'm in MD too.
BTW, MD's state attorney is on a TV-stealing witchhunt, after both cable and satellite pirates.
Analog cable isn't going anywhere soon. I know Comcast et al want rid of it, so they can charge me per TV in my home, and they've taken all the premium channels off of basic cable in hopes of coaxing me into "upgrading".
What they don't understand is, I'm not interested in paying 3x more for digital TV, just so I can pay another 20 bucks a month for HBO or PPV Wrestling matches.
I don't want their horrid digital tuner box uglying up my beautiful new 27" flatscreen either.
And all my composite, svideo and component in jacks are used up with game consoles, and what's the actual improvement if their digital signal is just modulated onto channel 3 or 4? At the end of the pipe, I still have an analog signal being fed to my TV over coax, I'm just paying a whole lot more for it.
Everyone I know still has analog cable, and if they tried to cut the service off there would be a huge outcry, as well as a huge migration to Millenium cable, or whoever the other company that keeps sending me flyers is.
Last 3 I stayed in had a TV with composite jacks in the front. Probably because it's impossible to find a TV without jacks in the front these days.
If it didn't, coax would do me no good since it was bolted into the little TV stand and it was impossible to get to the back of it.
It's really cool, I can just plug in my laptop and watch DVDs and DivXs, play some games..
Couple that with high speed internet in the room, and it beats the hell out of paying 9.99 for some crappy spanktrovision porn with all the money shots editted out!
This was in rural northwest Arkansas, so it wasn't like I was in some high-tech anomoly.
They barely provide Windows drivers. Do a couple searches on rage3d or any other ati site, and see how many pissed off TV Wonder or All-in-Wonder owners you come across.
ATi's support staff is all about Doom 3 framerates on their highest end card, just look at the driver's changelog if you dont believe me. The rest is just handwaving. My "obsolete" 9800 doesn't even get any real support these days.
Right now there's no ATSC being broadcast where I live. If I wanted to get a tuner for my PC, I'd want an NTSC tuner.
I wouldn't want the price to jump by 500 bucks or so to include HDTV features that I may or may not need 5 years from now, which is probably the minimum amount of time until HDTV actually means something around here.
Hell, the only reason to buy an HDTV, at this point in time, is that some XBox games can run at a higher resolution. Or I can keep watching that same underwater shark show that's always playing on the HDTV sets at Circuit City.
So buy this one now, and if in 5 years it's useless to you, replace it. Hock it on eBay for a couple of bucks, because even then there will still be plenty of rural folks with plain old analog cable or NTSC broadcasts.
5 years or so is a pretty long lifetime for a PC peripheral.
The compelling reason not to buy it, is that ATi has a well earned reputation for not supporting it's TV Wonder line at all.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the same eTicket system that's been used for a few years, just with barcodes on the cellphone rathter than printed out.
It's pretty simple. If two people show up at the door with the same barcode, one of them stole it. From there it's a simple matter of seeing who purchased the tickets in the first place to decide which guy rides home in the back of a black and white.
I went to the theatre itself and had no problem buying tickets. Long after they went on sale, too.
eTickets are for chumps. Buy your tickets at the venue. No 900% TicketMaster or MovieFone markups, no paying a 20 dollar "convenience fee" to have TM email you your tickets. Yeah, a 0 cost delivery method should definately cost more than having FedEx deliver the tickets overnight, absolutely fucking brilliant, TM..
And you can resell paper tickets if something comes up and you can't attend. Selling tickets at or below face value is not scalping. Hell, scalping isn't illegal in many circumstances. I know around here it's illegal to scalp football tickets, but it's perfectly legal to scalp concert tickets.
I've been printing eTickets for a few years, all they do is scan the barcode at the door.
Nothing really new here, except for the mobile phone angle. Personally I wish people would leave their mobile phones at home just fucking once.
Everyone thinks their so fucking important that they need to take calls in the middle of the Phantom of the Opera.
If you're an emergency room doctor who's on call, by all means carry your cell phone around. But don't go out to 100 dollar a ticket broadway plays and ruin them you pretentious fucks.
Will we as a society ever get over the novelty of cell phones? You still see people talking in public with that stupid look of half-stupidity and half-conceit on their face and saying things like "GUESS WHERE I'M CALLING FROM!!!"
as far as the State attorney, I can't steal something thats given to me. I didn't mess with any of the cabling, etc, did not have a bootleg cable box. They can't sue me for having a TV in my house.
You sure? If I give or sell you a stolen car, you don't think you can be charged for driving it around?
I know a guy who got busted. He moved into an apartment, and it already had cable. The previous tenant hooked it up illegaly. They bent him over in a big way because he was dopey enough to try and fight it. Rather than just paying for the service, he has a couple thousand in fines to his name. Like I said, it's a witch hunt.
What matters is that you're recieving a service you haven't payed for. It's no different than going and getting your hair done and sprinting out before they can write you a bill.
They're looking to turn partners against each other. That's the only way to get a real conviction. A witness would have to see, or participate in the spamming for his testimony to be useful.
Ie; you couldn't go to court and testify "stratjakt is a spammer because he told me all about it at the bar!" That would be heresay. You could say "stratjakt and I ran a spamming operation, I rolled on him to avoid prosecution. I was just following orders, honest!"
I'm not a lawyer, of course.
Of course, you have to make the reward for rolling over on your partners greater than the rewards of staying loyal.
There's no honor among thieves. Computer criminals are the pussiest of all criminals. The warez rings crumble like a house of cards once they pick up a couple of easily intimidated 13 year old kids. Show em a list of charges, show em a picture of goatse, let them connect the dots, and get out your notebook to start jotting down names and numbers.
He's certainly popular with linux and OS/X zealots..
Hmmm....
No, it implies (to me) that spammers are harder to track down than regular criminals without community help.
I mean you have no crime scene to investigate, no fingerprints or DNA or other physical evidence to link the suspect to the crime.
About the only real way to bag a spammer as I can see is with eye witness testimony. Any "evidence" you collect online is easily thrown out by an attorney with the "anyone could have forged that" or "my clients box was hacked because of an insecure OS".
I have a better solution.
Editors with enough interest in the job to actually read or at least monitor their own web site.
Start?
It's been this way for years.
Democratic Order Of Planets
Kind of like your UN.
What?
No like the Federation of Planets on Star Trek.
Oh!
No, punchcards are the solution.
Overheard in the dark recesses of the competitions corporate lair...
"I can't get this to compile! There's a peanut in one of the holes!"
Tends to be right?
About obvious shit like "hard drives will get bigger and video cards will get faster", sure.
But about the industry and where it's going, he sounds like a typical 14 year old slashbot zealot, which of course explains his popularity around here.
I don't know anyone in the industry who reads his column at all, let along gives any credence to his words.
Frankly, if he was any good at all, he wouldn't be on PBS. Sort of a slam at PBS out of nowhere, but it's true enough.
And yet, it is what this guy is saying.
If MS patents any enhancements, they won't be part of any official USB specs, and few manufacturers will jump on them anyways.
They could come up with their own new connector and protocols, but that would be like saying that MSFT corrupted OpenGL with DirectX.
And it'd be stillborn anyways, USB is now ubiquitous. MSFT has no more power to redesign USB than they do the order of the power rails on the molex connectors of your PSU.
Everytime Cringley opens his mouth, you can hear his ass sucking wind.
So how can commands be sent to the older devices?
Cringely knows very little about computers or technology. If you read his articles, you'd see that. He's just a PBS windbag. Don't pay this dork any heed.
You think Apple is going to start shipping iPods with a USB interface that "specifically excludes OS/X"? Hell, as much as I think they're a waste of bucks, I'd be the first to agree that the iPod is the "killer app" of USB at home.
What a moron this guy is. 100% pure tinfoil hat speculation.
MSFT added an option to be able to disable USB ports as part of the security policy. The Xbox controller ports are merely USB ports that are shaped more like something you would expect to see on a console.
Bobby Blowhard needs to publish X words per month or he's fired. So he took 2 and 2 and came up with 6.
USB is, and always will be, an open spec. That's what the "U" is for - universal. MSFT can propose all the changes it wants, and the kernel hackers can go ahead and implement them.
There IS a new USB standard in the works and it is at the heart of Microsoft's sudden interest in USB security. Co-developed with Intel, the new USB standard specifically excludes Linux and probably OS X devices as well. I'm told the Intel folks are quite embarrassed about this, but feel powerless to do anything about it.
Links? Can you back this up with any actual facts?
Show me the new published standard that "specifically excludes linux and probably OS/X".
And if he's so sure it specifically excludes Linux, why is he doubtful about OS/X?
I call bullshit and flamebait on this entire article.
MSFT isn't scared of linux on the desktop, they have absolutely no reason to be.
THX1138 is being re-made/re-released right now. Sith is just around the corner. Star Wars Battlegrounds and KOTOR2 and a whole slew of video games are hitting the market.
The level of George Lucas hype is as high right now as it will ever be. In 3 years, Star Wars will be completely forgotten.
That's why they're being released now.
This guy blames everything on piracy. Last interview I read with him, he ranted about how Episode II didn't do as well as he hoped in the theatres, and of course - he blamed piracy, and threatened to completely scrap Episode III because "piracy" would just ruin it too.
I mean, it couldn't possibly have anything to do with the movie sucking so bad that I can't even recall the plot with any clarity.
All I remember is they turned Boba Fett from a really cool, cold calculating faceless bounty hunter, into a Spanish kid with a grudge against the Jedi. "My name is Inigo Montoy^H^H^H^Boba Fett! You keel my fathor! Prepare to die!" OK, I read somewhere that the actor was maori. Either way, he's just a stereotyped hot-blooded latin now.
Should have left Boba alone. I could stomach everything else he did. I could deal with Jar Jar and the pod races. Greedo can shoot first all he wants. He could pencil in little furry boners on all the Ewoks, that's just fine.
But he ruined Boba Fett. Unforgivable!
The funny thing is, I can't recall seeing Ep II on any bittorrent sites or the other usual channels. It wasn't even good enough to be pirated far and wide.
I see more episodes of Will and Grace for download on sites like suprnova than I do Star Wars stuff... That should speak volumes.
Sorry George. You turned off most of the old fans, and failed to attact any newer younger ones to replace them.
AP: Why did you change your mind and decide to put the original three movies out on DVD now?
Lucas: Just because the market has shifted so dramatically. A lot of people are getting very worried about piracy. That has really eaten dramatically into the sales. It really just came down to, there may not be a market when I wanted to bring it out, which was like, three years from now. So rather than just sit by and watch the whole thing fall apart, better to bring it out early and get it over with.
No, George, there may very well not be a market for this in three years. And not because of piracy. Because Star Wars is dead. 20 years ago I was into Star Wars as a kid, I bought the toys and had light saber duels in the playground with the other kids.
20 years later, and my kids really don't give a shit about Star Wars. This time around, you lost their interest to such notable franchises as "Spy Kids".
I'm not kidding. I tried to take my boy to Star Wars when it was re-released in theatres. He was bored, and couldn't sit through it's dated effects and cheesy dialog. I know Jar-Jar was supposed to suck the little kids into the Star Wars world, but he didn't. My kids thought him as annoying as I did.
There will be no market for Star Wars in 3 years, simply because it's uncompelling poorly written and over-marketted crap.
Much like Star Wars, it's original hardcore fanbase is growing up and dying off. The new stuff is not attracting new fans.
There's no market for a sequel to Citizen Kane either.
But of course, this idiot is inable to comprehend the writing on the wall, and follows the industry standard of blaming it all on piracy.
Make a good movie, and I'll pay to watch it.
Yes, but the budget personal computers outnumber the higher end ones by a huge margin in the wild. This product is aimed at the budget machines, ATi makes cheap-ass tuners.
And adding firewire isn't an option for most of these machines, nearly all are MicroATX or FlexATX based, and simply have no free expansion slots.
Like I said before, of all the machines I own or use, none have firewire, and none need it.
When political ads stopped being about the candidate, and his/her views and platforms, and when they started just being about bashing the other guy?
America has been successfully brainwashed into believing there are, and will only ever by, two choices. This makes politics simple, you only have to smear one guy, and it's just a contest to see who can smear the other guy better. Bushs platform is "Kerry sucks", Kerry's platform is "Bush sucks".
The last Bush commercial I saw said "John Kerry even voted against the Laci Perterson bill which would make it illegal to assault pregnant women." Well, it's obvious, of course, that Kerry is for assaults against pregnant women! What a bastard.
McCain was the rep. frontrunner, until a whisper campaign about his "mentally disabled black daughter" killed his hopes. The whispers of course didn't mention that she was adopted from Somalia or some country, the implied message was McCain knocked boots with a crack whore.
I haven't heard one real issue discussed during the entire pre-election smear fest. It's all about what Bush did or didn't do in the National Guard, and what Kerry did or didn't do in Vietnam. I haven't heard what either man plans to do or not do in Iraq, Syria or North Korea.
The ads are so shallow and transparent it amazes me. There's no subtlety or tact. I guess if Bush's commercials make him look like a petty asshole, it's irrelevant, as long as he's less petty and less of an asshole than Kerry.
The two party system we've imposed on ourselves have turned elections from "who will do the most good for our country?" into "who will do the least evil to our country?"
American politics are fucking sad. Two parties is not democracy, and not representative of the people. How could it be, when there are 50 states + D.C? How could the ideologies of 300 million people fit into either slot A or slot B?
Vote your conscience. Don't be satisfied with the lesser of two evils. Vote for someone you believe in. Whether or not they win, your vote sends a clear message.
I'd love to see the republicrats win, but with 50% or more of the votes going independant. That would send a real message, loud and clear, that people are sick of the way both parties have mangled the country.
Yeah, well I never bothered installing the firewire daughterboard in my machine at home. It plugs in right under the AGP card, and I have absolutely no use for it. All it would serve to do is block airflow to the card cooler.
Anyways, my point is, I have about 5 machines at home, and two on my desktop at work. None have firewire, all have USB. If I were to try and sell me gizmos, I'd be smart to make them USB.
Yes, firewire has a big niche, but a niche nonetheless. It's simply not ubiquitious. I'd even go as far to say Firewire is to USB what Zip drives are to CD burners.
Huh? Comcast won't let me have broadband at all without paying for basic cable. I'm in MD too.
BTW, MD's state attorney is on a TV-stealing witchhunt, after both cable and satellite pirates.
Analog cable isn't going anywhere soon. I know Comcast et al want rid of it, so they can charge me per TV in my home, and they've taken all the premium channels off of basic cable in hopes of coaxing me into "upgrading".
What they don't understand is, I'm not interested in paying 3x more for digital TV, just so I can pay another 20 bucks a month for HBO or PPV Wrestling matches.
I don't want their horrid digital tuner box uglying up my beautiful new 27" flatscreen either.
And all my composite, svideo and component in jacks are used up with game consoles, and what's the actual improvement if their digital signal is just modulated onto channel 3 or 4? At the end of the pipe, I still have an analog signal being fed to my TV over coax, I'm just paying a whole lot more for it.
Everyone I know still has analog cable, and if they tried to cut the service off there would be a huge outcry, as well as a huge migration to Millenium cable, or whoever the other company that keeps sending me flyers is.
Last 3 I stayed in had a TV with composite jacks in the front. Probably because it's impossible to find a TV without jacks in the front these days.
If it didn't, coax would do me no good since it was bolted into the little TV stand and it was impossible to get to the back of it.
It's really cool, I can just plug in my laptop and watch DVDs and DivXs, play some games..
Couple that with high speed internet in the room, and it beats the hell out of paying 9.99 for some crappy spanktrovision porn with all the money shots editted out!
This was in rural northwest Arkansas, so it wasn't like I was in some high-tech anomoly.
They barely provide Windows drivers. Do a couple searches on rage3d or any other ati site, and see how many pissed off TV Wonder or All-in-Wonder owners you come across.
ATi's support staff is all about Doom 3 framerates on their highest end card, just look at the driver's changelog if you dont believe me. The rest is just handwaving. My "obsolete" 9800 doesn't even get any real support these days.
Well what are you going to do?
Right now there's no ATSC being broadcast where I live. If I wanted to get a tuner for my PC, I'd want an NTSC tuner.
I wouldn't want the price to jump by 500 bucks or so to include HDTV features that I may or may not need 5 years from now, which is probably the minimum amount of time until HDTV actually means something around here.
Hell, the only reason to buy an HDTV, at this point in time, is that some XBox games can run at a higher resolution. Or I can keep watching that same underwater shark show that's always playing on the HDTV sets at Circuit City.
So buy this one now, and if in 5 years it's useless to you, replace it. Hock it on eBay for a couple of bucks, because even then there will still be plenty of rural folks with plain old analog cable or NTSC broadcasts.
5 years or so is a pretty long lifetime for a PC peripheral.
The compelling reason not to buy it, is that ATi has a well earned reputation for not supporting it's TV Wonder line at all.