I have been a loyal ITMS customer since the onset, looking at my "purchased music" menu in iTunes (which includes TV shows) there's almost 900 items there (granted a couple of them are the 4 disc Final Fantasy soundtracks). I'm okay with the lax DRM on it, I burn CD's of the music for friends, and I burn both raw AAC files to DVD and AIFF copies on CD as backups. As I live in Ireland but use a US billing address, I use iTunes to watch the few TV shows I follow, namely Battlestar Galactica. Price-wise, an album costs less than half the price on iTunes than it does in shops here in Ireland (21 for a new album, that's about $29 - $30) so I haven't bought a CD in years.
I also have a couple UMD movies that I got fairly cheaply for the PSP (so I can be a sucker too... But really, UMD was a better format than this is, higher resolution, on a better screen and the occassional special feature. It was killed by 2 things: dumb prices, it should be $10, not more than a DVD, and the fact that they flooded the UMD market with crappy movies from the studios back catalogue. Who's gonna shell out for Cheaper By The Dozen on UMD? They ought to have made all the initial releases out of box office hits and films that got oscar nominations...)
But there's no way in hell I'll get a subscription based file. Thing is, I love movies, I am an animator in training so someday I may be working in movies... but the subscription model was why I could brag that iTunes was so much better than its competitors, now they buy into it... When I buy a movie, I like to scrutinize it privately, to observe editing, shot selection, etc, then I like to watch it with a few friends. I understand there's a hell of a lot of downright awful movies out there, but I dont even bother renting them, I wait for them to come on TV if I am at all bothered to see them. Thing is, the DRM on the iTunes music does allow you to share music with your friends just the same way CD's did, the only thing it stopped you from doing was making 30,000 copies or immediately dumping it onto limewire. It was designed to inconveniance people whose only intent was mass redistribution, but it let me give a copy to a buddy who was interested in it. The TV shows, on the other hand, don't let you burn the video to a readable DVD, thus, if I wasn't using it to keep up with TV shows that aren't in Ireland, it's just too closed for me to really be interested.
The problem is that the industry sees you loaning a DVD to a friend as a threat, a lost sale. This is crap, someone who's only willing to watch something if it's loaned wasn't necessarily inclined to buy it, and if the product is legitimately GOOD, after they watch the loaned copy, they should be more likely to buy it for themselves.
It all comes down to the industry finding ways to maximise profit without fostering good products. Sorry if the post is long and incohesive, I'm off to watch Zhang Ziyi on my PSP...
I didn't play HL2 for the story at first, because when I eventually got to Half Life 1 on the PS2 release, I really didn't see a remarkable story like what everyone was clamoring about. To me, the absolute pinnacle of early FPS storytelling was Marathon, and HL1 didn't come close to any of the Marathon games in terms of story telling. I ultimately didn't care because it was, after all, fun.
HL2 actually surprised me by how sophisticated its narrative style was. You were thrown into its world without any initial explanation, and you are never flat-out told why the world is the way it is. All of the answers, though, can be discovered by the player if they examine the world enough. I really, really liked that, the world of City 17 and its outlying areas was so much more effective when it was so jarringly out of context, and the depiction of the planet in thrall to an occupying alien force with no intention of keeping humanity alive much longer on Earth (Human sexuality was inhibited by the Combine's technology, and it's implied that some sort of wormhole such as those seen in the first game was opened beneath the Earth's oceans, and that the Combine were sapping Earth of all its water, hence many sections along the highway show beached ships and docks far away from water, as the oceans have receded. Also, the only form of humanity being preserved is the genetically mutilated half-human Combine soldiers who are being sent to other worlds the Combine are attacking) was very bleak and actually a bit disturbing.
Ultimately, Half Life 2 has a really intriguing story and setting (not so much in the way of characters though, its one real weakness) and is all the better for it by not spelling it all out for the player.
Looks like the EU won't see the PS3 until 2007, and Nintendo havent been forthcoming in their approach to the EU market, but with the painful price point on the PS3, I'm not looking forward to what they'll put it at in Europe before the 21% VAT sales tax...
That ethos is actually something that's been in use for quite some time by seemingly many groups, somewhat under our collective noses, Numbers Stations, shortwave radio transmissions with origin unknown that transmit codes of numbers or letters, repeat a few times, then disappear. Most likely they are for undercover operatives with a codebook.
The idea is that it's tough to track their origin (apart from perhaps the language of some of the short messages that accompany them, but even that could be a red herring) and it's impossible to track down who's recieving it. Also, if it's using a one-use key decoding system, it's impossible to decrypt a meaning from it. Finally, most of these stations reappear at regular intervals, there's no real way to tell if one day's message is "all clear" or if it's "commence with the plan tomorrow."
I find them fascinating, and for some reason, chilling to listen to.
Last year's event was available for free in audio form on iTunes, and is now only available there when you purchase the full comedy album of the speaker that year, Lewis Black. I've really like Lewis Black's insanely furious energy in the past, and at one point he even described being next to Dick Cheney as "I've never stood so close to pure evil before..."
Yet there he was, giving a followup speech to a speech by none other than... Dick Cheney. He didn't handle the venue nearly as well as Colbert did, most of his jokes were nervously commenting on how hard it was to be a comedian at that venue. The venue itself also didn't suit his form of humor, since his political material is so founded upon broad rage that it would likely be the same joke no matter who was in power, and combining that style with his inability to say "fuck" at such an event (a keystone of his style of delivery) and you got a bad performance.
Rest assured, What Colbert pulled off was extremely impressive. I could only hope I'd have the balls to follow in his footsteps were I ever to find myself in a similar situation.
Both of those are visible in Google Earth quite easily. Try checking the menu on the left and activating the Google community tabs, especially "military." Enthusiasts point out things like military bases, notable vehicles or facilities and, yes, nuclear test sites. There's an area where you can clearly see many of them in the American west.
No kidding. He also neglected to mention that the realm system sucks in Real Life. Why is it that in some realms my friends are playing in they get access to Alcohol items at level 18 but I have to grind to get to level 21 to activate Alcohol? I know a few people who tried to get around that limit and ran afoul of the moderators.
Re:How will this affect the Studio Ghibli deal?
on
Disney Buys Pixar
·
· Score: 1
With the combination of a a imaginative and sensitive director like Goro Miyazaki and effective marketing, I can't imagine how Earthsea wouldn't become a major blockbluster.
Uhh, just wondering how you know Goro Miyazaki is a great director, if I remember right his previous job was managing the Ghibli Museum and designing their gardens. I don't think he has any real animation experiance. Hayao Miyazaki actually protested Goro being given the directoral reigns for Earthsea.
Not to mention that prototypes ran into heating problems, resulting in in the use of cooling fans, which on a laptop was just full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
"Superman would literally crush LL's body in his arms, while simultaneously ripping her open from crotch to sternum, gutting her like a trout. Lastly, he'd blow off the top of her head."
Consider that one movie ticket bought because that is the hottest thing I've ever read.
Look at the BBC. They don't do advertising, yet they've made some of the finest shows in the history of television along with one of (if not the) best news services in the world. This is done with a very modest tax when you buy a TV. This tax can also be avoided if you just buy a monitor television with no tuner, thus only those who use TV pay the tax. Does the idea of a tax sound like anathema to you? You already sort of pay it in the states if you ever get cable television, you're paying extra for more channels that show you more ads.
These steps won't change the television companies' opinions on these new methods of watching TV, because their main use of these ratings has been to determimine how much they can charge for advertisisng time. A lot of PVR recordings can fast forward commercials, TV shows for ipods that Apple sells have no ads and anything downloaded via Bittorrent skips the ads. When consumers take control, first on their agenda is getting rid of ads, I'd daresay moreso than mere timeshifting. Considering that these networks enjoy lavish profits because of advertising, now that official ratings acknowledge these ad-less forms of viewership their ad time is likely to diminish in price.
This could lead the broadcasters stepping up their rather obnoxious practice of putting advertising around the edges of the screen during programming, as bittorrent downloaded shows can't get around that.
God I HATE advertising... It's killing television (not hard, but still...)
If, however, enough customers stop buying their products, the company will make whatever changes necessary to increase their profits (changing the price, changing the business practice, moving their factories to cheaper offshore companies, etc)
Everything you say makes perfect economic sense, but if that was how it actually worked for the RIAA there would be a lot less aggression targeted at the music industry. Thing is, whenever the RIAA in the past few years saw a drop or a potential drop in sales, rather than change their business model somehow, they lashed out against consumers with hundreds and thousands of lawsuits, government lobbying and DRM.
By making the customer their enemy, rather than a barometer of their own business effectiveness, they have earned the ire of most slashdotters. Not that slashdotters matter, because the people who matter are those who buy the millions of Eminem, Britney Spears or Black Eyed Peas albums.
Maybe because Casablanca is the greatest screenplay yet written (so sayeth Brian Cox as Robert McKee in Adaptation.) It's like saying that the only book you can read again and again is Ulysses and not being sure why. Casablanca is so perfect in formula that there are actually several plot holes of which few people notice, realize or care about. I feel the same way about Lawrence of Arabia, the full cut is four hours long, but I've watched it over a dozen times. It's just that good.
But... the point of this kind of set is not to see something again and again. Hell, as one person pointed out, if you did one episode a day it would take you two years to finish. And when you've gone through the entire set, hell, there will be a new series on TV by then. After that new series finished, begin rewatching your set, after two years, you'll probably have forgotten most of the episodes. This set is about possessing it, having he capacity to watch ANY given episode on a whim at any given moment. To no longer be the slave of the fickle schedules of TV re-runs. All that jazz. It doesn't have to be Casablanca, very little of it ever comes close. All it has to be is A LOT of Star Trek.
I'll admit that even a very casual fan like me finds that set rather attractive looking (though its presence in my house would remove any possibility of a date so long as it was visible). However there are a couple problems. I'm too lazy to do the math and see if buying the whole set at once is a bargain at all (I know that some would say the conveniance of having it all at once is worth it anyway.) Another problem is that if someone is hardcore enough of a fan to want all seven seasons of Voyager, well, they probably have it already, like the first user review on Amazon indicated. It is however a nice display of the great treatment Trek has gotten on DVD these last couple years.
While they seem to be the big dogs in the genre and have garnered a lot of mainstream attention, looks like they only won a couple of awards. (One of them being a "Best Series" award so I guess it's a pretty prominant one. It looks like some series called The Codex was a bigger winner here, with its 20th episode and 18th episode raking in a lot of awards.
As an animator myself, I would certainly say that most of Pixar's work could qualify as "great art."
While I was quite satisfied with the viewing experiance of Lost on iTunes, even on my 23" monitor, the quality on the Pixar short I got just didn't impress me. Part of the charm of Pixar's imagery relies on the ultra-clarity of the image.
I'm not seeing this as a death for regular paper. Let's say ePaper is adopted, I doubt that EVERY page of a newspaper will utilize it. In fact, I'd say only the front page would be used. I'm sure their new presses could still be put to good use.
This said, a lot of magazines are pretty pricey as it is, what'll they do to their prices if this new device is used on the cover of every issue, no matter what the cost of production? What if the main users of this device are a magazine's advertisers? How about you read an article if the adjoining page has a constantly moving ad? And is a moving image really better? A well composed still image can sometimes be more effective than a moving one. I am loathe to think that the likes of Newsweek or Time will turn into CNN lookalikes ith fancy current events themed graphics flying everywhere. I for one dread the advent of this ePaper. The only useful benefit I could see would be for a broadsheet newspaper to show a video of the top news story. That's it really.
One thing I noted was that I couldn't find a way to get the video to full screen from within iTunes. I opened the file from my paid copy of Quicktime to go full screen.
Anyway, as you say, the compression is impressive. For 100mb less than what you'll find on bittorrent (albiet not in 16:9) you get the whole program without ads, and also (and this is in my opinion pretty big) no intrusive messages along the bottom or top of the screen placed by the television network. It's one of the most obnoxious and annoying practices on U.S. TV (a network bloated with advertising places MORE advertising along the screen's margins during programming? No thanks.) If you were to download what is basically a TV rip from Bittorrent, these advertisements are unavoidable even if the normal ads are cut.
The quality looks just as good as what you're likely to find on BT, as is the sound. I even put it on fullscreen on my 23" cinema display, it still looks great. I give this a thumbs up. Not having seen more than a couple epsidoes of the original Lost, I'm tempted by the $34 download of season 1, a little cheaper than the DVD, but no extra features and lower res... Decisions decisions...
Okay, I understand what you mean, but this article was talking about valve repair. Valve damage is never the result of unhealthy diets. The unhealthy lifestyle you mentioned causes things like coronary artery blockages and the like.
Again, it was just a personal thing for me, so I prolly overreacted.
That's true. I have heard the ticking since I recieved this valve. It always seems louder whenever it's very quiet around me, so I usually like to have music playing in whatever room I find myself in these days. A couple of people have heard the ticking as well. It can be pretty amusing to make them figure out what it is as well:)
As someone who's had a congenital heart valve defect (aortic valve stenosis) since birth, and who's undergone 3 open heart surgeries before the age of 20, two of them in rapid sucession last christmas, and who now has an artificial valve ticking inside of him requireing lifelong warfarin consumption...
No it's not funny. Heart disease doesn't necessarily mean bad lifestyle. Some people just get screwed by fate. Have a stroll through a children's hospital lobby someday and see if your empathy still works.
I suppose this is an overreaction though. It's more of a personal thing. I don't find heart disease funny.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, let me put a bit of context here,
I have been a loyal ITMS customer since the onset, looking at my "purchased music" menu in iTunes (which includes TV shows) there's almost 900 items there (granted a couple of them are the 4 disc Final Fantasy soundtracks). I'm okay with the lax DRM on it, I burn CD's of the music for friends, and I burn both raw AAC files to DVD and AIFF copies on CD as backups. As I live in Ireland but use a US billing address, I use iTunes to watch the few TV shows I follow, namely Battlestar Galactica. Price-wise, an album costs less than half the price on iTunes than it does in shops here in Ireland (21 for a new album, that's about $29 - $30) so I haven't bought a CD in years.
I also have a couple UMD movies that I got fairly cheaply for the PSP (so I can be a sucker too... But really, UMD was a better format than this is, higher resolution, on a better screen and the occassional special feature. It was killed by 2 things: dumb prices, it should be $10, not more than a DVD, and the fact that they flooded the UMD market with crappy movies from the studios back catalogue. Who's gonna shell out for Cheaper By The Dozen on UMD? They ought to have made all the initial releases out of box office hits and films that got oscar nominations...)
But there's no way in hell I'll get a subscription based file. Thing is, I love movies, I am an animator in training so someday I may be working in movies... but the subscription model was why I could brag that iTunes was so much better than its competitors, now they buy into it... When I buy a movie, I like to scrutinize it privately, to observe editing, shot selection, etc, then I like to watch it with a few friends. I understand there's a hell of a lot of downright awful movies out there, but I dont even bother renting them, I wait for them to come on TV if I am at all bothered to see them. Thing is, the DRM on the iTunes music does allow you to share music with your friends just the same way CD's did, the only thing it stopped you from doing was making 30,000 copies or immediately dumping it onto limewire. It was designed to inconveniance people whose only intent was mass redistribution, but it let me give a copy to a buddy who was interested in it. The TV shows, on the other hand, don't let you burn the video to a readable DVD, thus, if I wasn't using it to keep up with TV shows that aren't in Ireland, it's just too closed for me to really be interested.
The problem is that the industry sees you loaning a DVD to a friend as a threat, a lost sale. This is crap, someone who's only willing to watch something if it's loaned wasn't necessarily inclined to buy it, and if the product is legitimately GOOD, after they watch the loaned copy, they should be more likely to buy it for themselves.
It all comes down to the industry finding ways to maximise profit without fostering good products. Sorry if the post is long and incohesive, I'm off to watch Zhang Ziyi on my PSP...
I didn't play HL2 for the story at first, because when I eventually got to Half Life 1 on the PS2 release, I really didn't see a remarkable story like what everyone was clamoring about. To me, the absolute pinnacle of early FPS storytelling was Marathon, and HL1 didn't come close to any of the Marathon games in terms of story telling. I ultimately didn't care because it was, after all, fun.
HL2 actually surprised me by how sophisticated its narrative style was. You were thrown into its world without any initial explanation, and you are never flat-out told why the world is the way it is. All of the answers, though, can be discovered by the player if they examine the world enough. I really, really liked that, the world of City 17 and its outlying areas was so much more effective when it was so jarringly out of context, and the depiction of the planet in thrall to an occupying alien force with no intention of keeping humanity alive much longer on Earth (Human sexuality was inhibited by the Combine's technology, and it's implied that some sort of wormhole such as those seen in the first game was opened beneath the Earth's oceans, and that the Combine were sapping Earth of all its water, hence many sections along the highway show beached ships and docks far away from water, as the oceans have receded. Also, the only form of humanity being preserved is the genetically mutilated half-human Combine soldiers who are being sent to other worlds the Combine are attacking) was very bleak and actually a bit disturbing.
Ultimately, Half Life 2 has a really intriguing story and setting (not so much in the way of characters though, its one real weakness) and is all the better for it by not spelling it all out for the player.
Unless they live in Europe of course.
Looks like the EU won't see the PS3 until 2007, and Nintendo havent been forthcoming in their approach to the EU market, but with the painful price point on the PS3, I'm not looking forward to what they'll put it at in Europe before the 21% VAT sales tax...
That ethos is actually something that's been in use for quite some time by seemingly many groups, somewhat under our collective noses, Numbers Stations, shortwave radio transmissions with origin unknown that transmit codes of numbers or letters, repeat a few times, then disappear. Most likely they are for undercover operatives with a codebook.
The idea is that it's tough to track their origin (apart from perhaps the language of some of the short messages that accompany them, but even that could be a red herring) and it's impossible to track down who's recieving it. Also, if it's using a one-use key decoding system, it's impossible to decrypt a meaning from it. Finally, most of these stations reappear at regular intervals, there's no real way to tell if one day's message is "all clear" or if it's "commence with the plan tomorrow."
I find them fascinating, and for some reason, chilling to listen to.
Last year's event was available for free in audio form on iTunes, and is now only available there when you purchase the full comedy album of the speaker that year, Lewis Black. I've really like Lewis Black's insanely furious energy in the past, and at one point he even described being next to Dick Cheney as "I've never stood so close to pure evil before..."
Yet there he was, giving a followup speech to a speech by none other than... Dick Cheney. He didn't handle the venue nearly as well as Colbert did, most of his jokes were nervously commenting on how hard it was to be a comedian at that venue. The venue itself also didn't suit his form of humor, since his political material is so founded upon broad rage that it would likely be the same joke no matter who was in power, and combining that style with his inability to say "fuck" at such an event (a keystone of his style of delivery) and you got a bad performance.
Rest assured, What Colbert pulled off was extremely impressive. I could only hope I'd have the balls to follow in his footsteps were I ever to find myself in a similar situation.
Both of those are visible in Google Earth quite easily. Try checking the menu on the left and activating the Google community tabs, especially "military." Enthusiasts point out things like military bases, notable vehicles or facilities and, yes, nuclear test sites. There's an area where you can clearly see many of them in the American west.
Speaking of other manmade items found on google, last september a man found ruins of a roman villa near his house via Google Earth. It is proving itself to be a very fun and useful tool indeed.
No kidding. He also neglected to mention that the realm system sucks in Real Life. Why is it that in some realms my friends are playing in they get access to Alcohol items at level 18 but I have to grind to get to level 21 to activate Alcohol? I know a few people who tried to get around that limit and ran afoul of the moderators.
With the combination of a a imaginative and sensitive director like Goro Miyazaki and effective marketing, I can't imagine how Earthsea wouldn't become a major blockbluster.
Uhh, just wondering how you know Goro Miyazaki is a great director, if I remember right his previous job was managing the Ghibli Museum and designing their gardens. I don't think he has any real animation experiance. Hayao Miyazaki actually protested Goro being given the directoral reigns for Earthsea.
Not to mention that prototypes ran into heating problems, resulting in in the use of cooling fans, which on a laptop was just full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
"Superman would literally crush LL's body in his arms, while simultaneously ripping her open from crotch to sternum, gutting her like a trout.
Lastly, he'd blow off the top of her head."
Consider that one movie ticket bought because that is the hottest thing I've ever read.
Look at the BBC. They don't do advertising, yet they've made some of the finest shows in the history of television along with one of (if not the) best news services in the world. This is done with a very modest tax when you buy a TV. This tax can also be avoided if you just buy a monitor television with no tuner, thus only those who use TV pay the tax. Does the idea of a tax sound like anathema to you? You already sort of pay it in the states if you ever get cable television, you're paying extra for more channels that show you more ads.
I still think advertising is killing TV.
These steps won't change the television companies' opinions on these new methods of watching TV, because their main use of these ratings has been to determimine how much they can charge for advertisisng time. A lot of PVR recordings can fast forward commercials, TV shows for ipods that Apple sells have no ads and anything downloaded via Bittorrent skips the ads. When consumers take control, first on their agenda is getting rid of ads, I'd daresay moreso than mere timeshifting. Considering that these networks enjoy lavish profits because of advertising, now that official ratings acknowledge these ad-less forms of viewership their ad time is likely to diminish in price.
This could lead the broadcasters stepping up their rather obnoxious practice of putting advertising around the edges of the screen during programming, as bittorrent downloaded shows can't get around that.
God I HATE advertising... It's killing television (not hard, but still...)
Am I the only one who read the headline and thought "What kind of magazine could they make out of a cancelled show? Get over it!"
Even on Slashdot, too much slashdot can mess up your interpretive skills
If, however, enough customers stop buying their products, the company will make whatever changes necessary to increase their profits (changing the price, changing the business practice, moving their factories to cheaper offshore companies, etc)
Everything you say makes perfect economic sense, but if that was how it actually worked for the RIAA there would be a lot less aggression targeted at the music industry. Thing is, whenever the RIAA in the past few years saw a drop or a potential drop in sales, rather than change their business model somehow, they lashed out against consumers with hundreds and thousands of lawsuits, government lobbying and DRM.
By making the customer their enemy, rather than a barometer of their own business effectiveness, they have earned the ire of most slashdotters. Not that slashdotters matter, because the people who matter are those who buy the millions of Eminem, Britney Spears or Black Eyed Peas albums.
Surprising? Remember, we're talking about the Xbox here...
Maybe because Casablanca is the greatest screenplay yet written (so sayeth Brian Cox as Robert McKee in Adaptation.) It's like saying that the only book you can read again and again is Ulysses and not being sure why. Casablanca is so perfect in formula that there are actually several plot holes of which few people notice, realize or care about. I feel the same way about Lawrence of Arabia, the full cut is four hours long, but I've watched it over a dozen times. It's just that good.
But... the point of this kind of set is not to see something again and again. Hell, as one person pointed out, if you did one episode a day it would take you two years to finish. And when you've gone through the entire set, hell, there will be a new series on TV by then. After that new series finished, begin rewatching your set, after two years, you'll probably have forgotten most of the episodes. This set is about possessing it, having he capacity to watch ANY given episode on a whim at any given moment. To no longer be the slave of the fickle schedules of TV re-runs. All that jazz. It doesn't have to be Casablanca, very little of it ever comes close. All it has to be is A LOT of Star Trek.
I'll admit that even a very casual fan like me finds that set rather attractive looking (though its presence in my house would remove any possibility of a date so long as it was visible). However there are a couple problems. I'm too lazy to do the math and see if buying the whole set at once is a bargain at all (I know that some would say the conveniance of having it all at once is worth it anyway.) Another problem is that if someone is hardcore enough of a fan to want all seven seasons of Voyager, well, they probably have it already, like the first user review on Amazon indicated. It is however a nice display of the great treatment Trek has gotten on DVD these last couple years.
But I heard here on Slashdot that Stephen King was dead...?
While they seem to be the big dogs in the genre and have garnered a lot of mainstream attention, looks like they only won a couple of awards. (One of them being a "Best Series" award so I guess it's a pretty prominant one. It looks like some series called The Codex was a bigger winner here, with its 20th episode and 18th episode raking in a lot of awards.
As an animator myself, I would certainly say that most of Pixar's work could qualify as "great art."
While I was quite satisfied with the viewing experiance of Lost on iTunes, even on my 23" monitor, the quality on the Pixar short I got just didn't impress me. Part of the charm of Pixar's imagery relies on the ultra-clarity of the image.
I'm not seeing this as a death for regular paper. Let's say ePaper is adopted, I doubt that EVERY page of a newspaper will utilize it. In fact, I'd say only the front page would be used. I'm sure their new presses could still be put to good use.
This said, a lot of magazines are pretty pricey as it is, what'll they do to their prices if this new device is used on the cover of every issue, no matter what the cost of production? What if the main users of this device are a magazine's advertisers? How about you read an article if the adjoining page has a constantly moving ad? And is a moving image really better? A well composed still image can sometimes be more effective than a moving one. I am loathe to think that the likes of Newsweek or Time will turn into CNN lookalikes ith fancy current events themed graphics flying everywhere. I for one dread the advent of this ePaper. The only useful benefit I could see would be for a broadsheet newspaper to show a video of the top news story. That's it really.
One thing I noted was that I couldn't find a way to get the video to full screen from within iTunes. I opened the file from my paid copy of Quicktime to go full screen.
Anyway, as you say, the compression is impressive. For 100mb less than what you'll find on bittorrent (albiet not in 16:9) you get the whole program without ads, and also (and this is in my opinion pretty big) no intrusive messages along the bottom or top of the screen placed by the television network. It's one of the most obnoxious and annoying practices on U.S. TV (a network bloated with advertising places MORE advertising along the screen's margins during programming? No thanks.) If you were to download what is basically a TV rip from Bittorrent, these advertisements are unavoidable even if the normal ads are cut.
The quality looks just as good as what you're likely to find on BT, as is the sound. I even put it on fullscreen on my 23" cinema display, it still looks great. I give this a thumbs up. Not having seen more than a couple epsidoes of the original Lost, I'm tempted by the $34 download of season 1, a little cheaper than the DVD, but no extra features and lower res... Decisions decisions...
Okay, I understand what you mean, but this article was talking about valve repair. Valve damage is never the result of unhealthy diets. The unhealthy lifestyle you mentioned causes things like coronary artery blockages and the like.
Again, it was just a personal thing for me, so I prolly overreacted.
That's true. I have heard the ticking since I recieved this valve. It always seems louder whenever it's very quiet around me, so I usually like to have music playing in whatever room I find myself in these days. A couple of people have heard the ticking as well. It can be pretty amusing to make them figure out what it is as well :)
"You have a loud watch."
"I'm not wearing a watch."
"...??"
As someone who's had a congenital heart valve defect (aortic valve stenosis) since birth, and who's undergone 3 open heart surgeries before the age of 20, two of them in rapid sucession last christmas, and who now has an artificial valve ticking inside of him requireing lifelong warfarin consumption...
No it's not funny. Heart disease doesn't necessarily mean bad lifestyle. Some people just get screwed by fate. Have a stroll through a children's hospital lobby someday and see if your empathy still works.
I suppose this is an overreaction though. It's more of a personal thing. I don't find heart disease funny.