People have been encoding burnable 4.53 GB DivX/XviD movie rips from HD television broadcasts for a long time now. On many torrent trackers that mainly cater to people who care about quality, these DivX HD DVD-5 rips are slowly starting to push out regular MPEG-2 DVD-5's. An added bonus is that many set-top players can play them just fine. It is my guess that in countries where people don't regularly buy legal DVDs, this will be the format of choice. It has enough quality for an average Joe to tell that it's better quality than a DVD-9, and is comparable enough to true HD releases on HDDVD or Blueray to keep video buffs satisfied. As rips like this will flood the torrent networks, and with more set-top players supporting the full DivX/XviD specifications, it will catch on in the West, and is likely to be the standard of choice until we get HDDVD-R or Blueray-R discs for under $1 (if we ever do). With the spread of piracy and availability of bandwidth, it may take much longer for HDDVD or Blueray to catch on than many people expect, so we might just see another format come in and take over before the battle between HDDVD and Blueray is settled.
I'd have to say that my experience with self-checkout at my local grocery store (Price Chopper) has been very positive overall. Sure there are idiots who can't get the thing to work, but they comprise a suprisingly low percentage (around 10%, I'd say). The only issue to ever bug me are the seemingly random "please wait for cashier assistance" messages, which the cashier usually makes go away within a few seconds from his station. In general, if there is at least 1 person waiting at a manned checkout line, it's faster to use self-checkout, unless you're buying a bunch of produce you have to enter the codes for. One bonus of the manned stations, however, is that you can scan your credit card while the clerk is scanning the items, shaving off a couple of seconds.
I also like to think that since there's only one employee watching over 4 self-checkout counters, they may end up passing the savings on to me. Given that they're saving 3*$6*24*365= $157,680 per year, part of that money might just go into 50%-off sales on HotPockets or Mountain Dew.
On a side note, the self-checkout counters finally satisfied my curiousity about what happens when you scan something that isn't sold at the store (I used a pack of gum which isn't sold in the US). The answer is: the system locks up for 1-2 minutes (I think it tries to access alternate barcode databases or something), and the cashier gets really annoyed with you.
Another observation I made is that in the first few months after they installed the machines, if you scanned two items of the same kind in a row, the system would tell you to "wait for cashier assistance", probably as a precaution against people accidentally scanning an item twice (which I would always get around by scanning another item in between the two of the same kind). Eventually, they got rid of it, I guess when they realised how often people buy more than one of the same product. However, sometimes I like to imagine that instead of having a pre-made database of the product weights, some sort of learning algorithm was implemented, where the possibility of customers cheating in the first few months was an acceptable risk, and eventually the database was filled with average weights and standard deviations for each item through regular use, though maybe I'm overestimating the competenecy of the coders who write those programs.
And concering impulse buys near the checkout, I'm proud to say I've never made one.
Maybe this is part of the reason why adventure games have nearly died out (not the only reason, obviously). It's one of the few genres where continuous playing for a long time is crucial to an enjoyable experience.
With, say, an FPS, as long as you stop playing when you finish an area/level, it's easy to pick up again on the next day. With an adventure game, it can be pretty crucial to have a lot of things fresh in your memory, like "I've definitely tried using my rabbit's foot with that checkout counter" or "I think the blind hermit mentioned something about frogs and WD-40 being an explosive combination".
Otherwise, trying things over and over again in separate gaming session gets really old really fast. So older folk don't have the time to enjoy playing them, while the kids, dumbed down by TV and MySpace, don't have the attention span.
Manufacturers are aware of your concerns, which is why there are a number of business phones out there with all the latest in technology, but without a camera, such as the Siemens SK65. Some are even specifically made to be almost equivalent to another phone model sans the camera, for example the near-identical Nokia 6020 and 6021, where the latter doesn't have a camera. This is also handy for preventing corporate espionage and making gathering evidence for whistleblowing harder.
Oh, and please stop referring to mobile service operators like Sprint and Nextel as handset manufacturers. They do not make phones.
You're a little confused, the parent was talking about the portfolio page, which only lists the prices of stocks in your protfolio without the news stories about them.
You don't have to wait for software to require Vista. There's already major stuff out there that requres Windows XP and won't run under Windows 2000, for instance the latest versions of Adobe Premiere, AfterEffects and Audition.
Let's hope Photoshop won't be the next to require XP, even though, like Windows, Photoshop hasn't seen a single major improvement since they added edit history in Photoshop 5 (except maybe RAW camera image support in the more recent versions).
It's good to see that Microsoft thinks that the most important information you need to know about a folder, thus warranting the largest font in the explorer view, is...how many items there are in that folder.
I own the S55 and it's definately the most feature-packed phone out there + it's tiny, but...the battery life...it sucks bad enough if you just make & recieve a few calls/SMSs in a day, but when you actually use all those extra functions, it hardly lasts you through half a day. Now that's bad. Oh yeah, the ringtones sound too quiet to hear most of the time (strong vibration makes up for it though) and buttons are incredibly hard to press (only affects playing games though).
Otherwise, great phone! It goes for only $300 on eBay. Would definitely recommend.
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People have been encoding burnable 4.53 GB DivX/XviD movie rips from HD television broadcasts for a long time now. On many torrent trackers that mainly cater to people who care about quality, these DivX HD DVD-5 rips are slowly starting to push out regular MPEG-2 DVD-5's. An added bonus is that many set-top players can play them just fine. It is my guess that in countries where people don't regularly buy legal DVDs, this will be the format of choice. It has enough quality for an average Joe to tell that it's better quality than a DVD-9, and is comparable enough to true HD releases on HDDVD or Blueray to keep video buffs satisfied. As rips like this will flood the torrent networks, and with more set-top players supporting the full DivX/XviD specifications, it will catch on in the West, and is likely to be the standard of choice until we get HDDVD-R or Blueray-R discs for under $1 (if we ever do). With the spread of piracy and availability of bandwidth, it may take much longer for HDDVD or Blueray to catch on than many people expect, so we might just see another format come in and take over before the battle between HDDVD and Blueray is settled.
Just my 0.02 roubles.
I'd have to say that my experience with self-checkout at my local grocery store (Price Chopper) has been very positive overall. Sure there are idiots who can't get the thing to work, but they comprise a suprisingly low percentage (around 10%, I'd say). The only issue to ever bug me are the seemingly random "please wait for cashier assistance" messages, which the cashier usually makes go away within a few seconds from his station. In general, if there is at least 1 person waiting at a manned checkout line, it's faster to use self-checkout, unless you're buying a bunch of produce you have to enter the codes for. One bonus of the manned stations, however, is that you can scan your credit card while the clerk is scanning the items, shaving off a couple of seconds.
I also like to think that since there's only one employee watching over 4 self-checkout counters, they may end up passing the savings on to me. Given that they're saving 3*$6*24*365= $157,680 per year, part of that money might just go into 50%-off sales on HotPockets or Mountain Dew.
On a side note, the self-checkout counters finally satisfied my curiousity about what happens when you scan something that isn't sold at the store (I used a pack of gum which isn't sold in the US). The answer is: the system locks up for 1-2 minutes (I think it tries to access alternate barcode databases or something), and the cashier gets really annoyed with you.
Another observation I made is that in the first few months after they installed the machines, if you scanned two items of the same kind in a row, the system would tell you to "wait for cashier assistance", probably as a precaution against people accidentally scanning an item twice (which I would always get around by scanning another item in between the two of the same kind). Eventually, they got rid of it, I guess when they realised how often people buy more than one of the same product. However, sometimes I like to imagine that instead of having a pre-made database of the product weights, some sort of learning algorithm was implemented, where the possibility of customers cheating in the first few months was an acceptable risk, and eventually the database was filled with average weights and standard deviations for each item through regular use, though maybe I'm overestimating the competenecy of the coders who write those programs.
And concering impulse buys near the checkout, I'm proud to say I've never made one.
Maybe this is part of the reason why adventure games have nearly died out (not the only reason, obviously). It's one of the few genres where continuous playing for a long time is crucial to an enjoyable experience.
With, say, an FPS, as long as you stop playing when you finish an area/level, it's easy to pick up again on the next day. With an adventure game, it can be pretty crucial to have a lot of things fresh in your memory, like "I've definitely tried using my rabbit's foot with that checkout counter" or "I think the blind hermit mentioned something about frogs and WD-40 being an explosive combination".
Otherwise, trying things over and over again in separate gaming session gets really old really fast. So older folk don't have the time to enjoy playing them, while the kids, dumbed down by TV and MySpace, don't have the attention span.
Manufacturers are aware of your concerns, which is why there are a number of business phones out there with all the latest in technology, but without a camera, such as the Siemens SK65. Some are even specifically made to be almost equivalent to another phone model sans the camera, for example the near-identical Nokia 6020 and 6021, where the latter doesn't have a camera. This is also handy for preventing corporate espionage and making gathering evidence for whistleblowing harder.
Oh, and please stop referring to mobile service operators like Sprint and Nextel as handset manufacturers. They do not make phones.
You're a little confused, the parent was talking about the portfolio page, which only lists the prices of stocks in your protfolio without the news stories about them.
You don't have to wait for software to require Vista. There's already major stuff out there that requres Windows XP and won't run under Windows 2000, for instance the latest versions of Adobe Premiere, AfterEffects and Audition.
Let's hope Photoshop won't be the next to require XP, even though, like Windows, Photoshop hasn't seen a single major improvement since they added edit history in Photoshop 5 (except maybe RAW camera image support in the more recent versions).
It's good to see that Microsoft thinks that the most important information you need to know about a folder, thus warranting the largest font in the explorer view, is...how many items there are in that folder.
I own the S55 and it's definately the most feature-packed phone out there + it's tiny, but...the battery life...it sucks bad enough if you just make & recieve a few calls/SMSs in a day, but when you actually use all those extra functions, it hardly lasts you through half a day. Now that's bad. Oh yeah, the ringtones sound too quiet to hear most of the time (strong vibration makes up for it though) and buttons are incredibly hard to press (only affects playing games though). Otherwise, great phone! It goes for only $300 on eBay. Would definitely recommend.