If I didn't already own a ps2, I might be willing to pay $600 for the combo presented here. Sure, I could build a pvr myself, but FROM SCRATCH, getting one that would be able to handle pvr duties well and burn dvds would cost at least $600 plus my time.
What I really want to know is if I would be able to access the files across a network. Ps2 has the ethernet adapter you can buy, so it seems like a reasonable idea, but I imagine there's tons of reasons why sony might not want to add that capability.
Since it's relevant and I haven't had time to hit google yet to research it myself, I'm just curious if there's any other products out right now that are a pvr, can burn dvds, and are accessible across the network. Heck, any two of those are cool in my opinion if they're decently priced.
It IS NOT censorship if a company who pays a singer to perform complains afterwords or wants her to do things their way. Rules created by corporations to "self censor" are not real censorship. That's just them catering to what they think the market wants. It's good business.
That's not what's going on though. When the government tells people what they can/cannot say or do, that is censorship. Last I checked, the constitution is pretty clear that the government "shall make no law" restricting the freedom of speech.
I've never been a big fan of first person shooters, but Onslaught has me hooked right now.
It's possible to come back from behind. It's just a matter of working together to take back that first power node. The problem though is that too many new people get caught up defending the base when some of them really should be attacking.
Onslaught is great because if you have two good teams, it's basically like tug-o-war, going back and forth a few times until finally someone wears out.
Why not just make the tax system so simple that we don't need the IRS to monitor returns. The only cheaters would be the ones not paying, not the ones that take advantage of stupid loopholes.
Oh wait, that's too easy, and the government certainly wouldn't want to do something easy for people to understand. We might catch on to how much we're actually paying them.
When a software designer releases code, the only math he uses is statistics: he will have some degree of certainty that his code will work under the working conditions he expects. Anything that deviates from his perception of the use cases will introduce uncertainty regarding the reliability of the software.
In theory, you could prove that a piece of software is correct, but in practice, the complexity makes it impractical to do so. The best one can hope for under normal conditions is a percentage.
This isn't about 2D vs. 3D. This is about traditional hand drawn animation vs. modern techniques using computers.
There's technically nothing you can do with hand drawn animation that you can't do on a computer, it's just a different workflow that cuts out some of the cost. Traditional animation requires an army of animators doing key frames, in-betweening, and background art, but some of that is cut out on a computer if it can do some of the work for you. That's why there's still going to be animators in Burbank.
While I'm certainly sad that a bunch of great animators are losing their jobs, and I still don't really like the corporation, let's at least be clear that this is about Disney trying to cut costs. It does not necessarily mean that every animation they make from now on is going to look like Pixar stuff.
What I would like to see is a good wireless solution that just takes direct video and sound and dumps that, skipping the decoder part. Then, you could just treat the tv like a second monitor. So far, most of the wireless solutions all include specific codecs when I would mainly need it for watching movies that might be in other codecs besides MPEG or Divx.
Yes, I know that there are Wireless Radio Frequency solutions that you can get, but so far I have yet to find one that works. They generally work on the 2.4Ghz range and get crappy reception and interference. Perhaps it's just the environment I'm in though which makes that option unavailable.
Ok, so you may or may not get to work for that big name engineering corporation, but that doesn't mean work doesn't exist for decent pay.
There are still a large number of industries that have yet to catch up to the rest in terms of technology. It seems natural to me that as the engineering bubble bursts a bit, we'll just migrate to those other industries that either can't afford to go offshore or that just haven't setup for it yet. So, instead of working for HP, Dell, or Sun, you might be working for Ma and Pa's house of fabrics or Jo Blo's delivery service. Perhaps they have the money right now and are looking to improve their systems.
I personally so far have never had any problems finding work, but maybe that's because I have no interest in the big companies anyway.
Now, I'm certainly not excusing the attitudes of some CEOs, but that's another issue. They're basically making rational decisions in an irrational, greed driven system.
Since you seem so comfortable opening up so long as it isn't "illegal," I suppose that means you wouldn't mind if I came to your house and video taped you and your wife having sex.
I mean, it's not anything illegal right, so why should you care?
Yeah, I wouldn't really need all that space for music either, but you could always use it as a portable harddrive also. It supports transfer of any type of file.
It appears you didn't read the follow up in the same journal which specifically comments on people trying to draw the same conclusions you are from their article..
You would see a few interesting quotes:
"Under even the most liberal assumptions, gay and bisexual men in this urban centre were experiencing a life expectancy similar to that experienced by men in Canada in the year 1871. In contrast, if we were to repeat this analysis today the life expectancy of gay and bisexual men would be greatly improved. Deaths from HIV infection have declined dramatically in this population since 1996. As we have previously reported there has been a threefold decrease in mortality in Vancouver as well as in other parts of British Columbia."
and conveniently enough considering your previous arguments, this:
"Death is a product of the way a person lives and what physical and environmental hazards he or she faces everyday. It cannot be attributed solely to their sexual orientation or any other ethnic or social factor. If estimates of an individual gay and bisexual man's risk of death is truly needed for legal or other purposes, then people making these estimates should use the same actuarial tables that are used for all other males in that population. Gay and bisexual men are included in the construction of official population-based tables and therefore these tables for all males are the appropriate ones to be used."
Let's be honest here. I'm more interested in your implied meaning. It's called reading between the lines. You had no real reason to post that argument except to imply that homosexual couplings would cost more to insurance companies or just be more "destabalizing." So far, you have yet to show any evidence to support either of those claims. Most of what you have said has been personal opinion so far.
"That's a misleading figure. 70-80% of first time marriages last."
http://www.divorcereform.org/rates.html from that site: "The National Center for Health Statistics recently released a report which found that 43 percent of FIRST MARRIAGES end in separation or divorce within 15 years. The study is based on the National Survey of Family Growth, a nationally representative sample of women age 15 to 44 in 1995."
Now, unless you have other evidence to support your claims, my argument still stands.
"I just have a problem with one small group pressuring the rest of society into altering one of its most fundamental institutions in the name of diversity."
I just have a problem with one group thinking it's ok to deny equal rights to another (even a minority) based on speculation and personal opinion with very little hard evidence.
Again, you're using subjective opinions to make your point. "fundamental institution" to whom? Not everyone sees marriage the same way you do. In reality, most people who have this argument are talking about the religious definition vs. the basic civil union. Most people in support of homosexuals are talking about the civil union because that's the only legal version that comes with benefits. They could care less about the religious aspects.
Re:Saying something is wrong because of a words...
on
10 Ads The US Won't See
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
As with most people who try to justify their subjective opinions, your arguments have very little objective substance.
"Actuarial data shows that male-female married couples cause cause less loss for insurance companies, so guess what...They get better rates. "
While it's true that married couples get better rates and may even cause less loss, I'm not sure how this applies to your argument against homosexuality. I don't suppose you have evidence to suggest that male-male or female-female unions cause more loss, do you? All you've shown is that married couples cause less loss than single individuals.
"Marriage (as it currently exists) is a stabilizing force in society"
"stabalizing force" is a rather subjective phrase, don't you think? Stabalizing by whose standards? I mean, divorce rates have generally hung around the same amount (between 40 and 50 percent). Doesn't seem that stabalizing to me. Besides, a recent article published by the University of Washington suggests that homosexual couples have a similar rate of relationship dissolution compared to heterosexual divorce rates ( http://web.psych.washington.edu/news/index.php? opt ion=article&news_id=75), so even if you are right about it being stabalizing, you still have not shown any evidence to suggest homosexual couples are different.
Of course, what you really meant to say was that it was destabalizing for you since you don't like seeing men in love with other men, right?
"the government has to spend less money in housing and rehabilitating prisoners when society is stable."
That statement is a no brainer, but again I ask to see your evidence that homosexual couples somehow cause more instability. The most frequent instability I can think of are the crimes commited against them by bigots, but I hardly think it's fair to blame homosexuals for that.
is that he thinks there's some magical universal solution that will work for every person. It's not true.
I remember reading Clay Shirky's open letter to him and they were debating the same sort of thing over web standards compliance. Clay Shirky was taking the position that diversity and experimentation in user interface design ultimately creates a better system. I tend to agree with that.
Anyway, back to the topic. While I agree IM is not the best solution to everything, it works for me quite well.
I work from home as a programming consultant. I work with a few other people, and IM is the most common way we communicate. It's faster than email and telephone in general when you have quick questions, and is convenient when you have longer conversations throughout the day and want to leave the information up on the desktop.
Sure it's not perfect. One of it's best (and worst) features is the the ability to know when someone is online. It's annoying when you're trying to eat dinner and someone from work sees that you were just online. Yes, you can ignore it, but it can still be annoying if you don't manage it properly. It just requires a bit of discipline.
As for IM spam, if you just have your settings so that you only receive messages from people on your contact list, you should generally be fine. It doesn't disable the requests for people to add you to the list, so if anybody really wants to talk to you, they can still reach you.
Email is still more convenient when you're sending things back and forth that you want to save for a long time. IM doesn't do that well (yet.).
I think what's really needed is a way to store and search all the different forms of information you get from day to day in email and IM and strip out the fluff. I have tons of emails in my mailbox that I may just keep around for one or two lines in them, but would be nice if there was a simple way to delete all the stuff I don't need and keep the info I do.
I've always thought that elections should be a bit more like most other "competitions." Rather than having the elections based on party primaries, why not just randomly assign them to groups and do a tier based system like in most sports?
so, everyone starts out on the bottom tier, either they are randomly assigned against each other or maybe just the top group goes to the semifinals, then eventually, they move onto the finals with two candidates.
I'm sure it has flaws, but I always figured it would take care of the issue of people ignoring who they really want since they can vote for them in the early stages and then vote again in the next tiers if their candidate doesn't get through.
I think you're missing the impact that college students play in all this.
Just as many new ideas come from young college students or grad students, who later go on to build startups or who publish papers that are capitalized on by larger companies.
I do agree that some large companies do alot, but to rule out the impact of other smaller groups is just insulting and plain wrong.
Does the Rio let you copy non music files to the hard drive? I was looking on the site and I couldn't find any mention. It sounded like the music manager only supported music files. Isn't that the same problem with the iPod?
I think I would probably go with the neuros or the iriver if I had to choose one right now since they both let you copy any type of file and I like the idea of it doubling as a portable hard drive.
"Is that the kind of country you would like to live in, one that does the will of the majority, rather than the right thing?"
The problem here is that you're thinking exactly like the people who are currently in power. Why let all the people make decisions, when it's really only the rich or "intelligent" who are important, right?
The main thing stopping direct democracy from working is the flow of information. I tend to believe that people are capable of making reasonable decisions if they're given enough information from both sides.
Of course that's the problem when you consider Fox News and all the other big media monopolies. It's almost impossible to get unfiltered information. Everything is slanted to fit the current regimes idea of the truth.
Plus, people have to actually have the time to care and think about these things which is difficult when they're working so many hours so they can buy crap from those same monopolies.
Basically, people are already getting used to technologies like Tivo and other DVRs. This is one of those cases where common people that don't normally pay attention to these sorts of things will take notice, but it will be as soon as they suddenly can't access their favorite sitcoms or their sports events anymore. The MPAA is doing too little, too late in its lobbying efforts.
The technology is already rooting itself in society enough I think that people will complain when they suddenly try to limit it. I'm sure the MPAA will continue to find ways to limit other technologies, but I don't think they'll be able to stop the recording of tv broadcasts anymore. Also, just wait another year when this is supposed to take effect and we'll see what sorts of recorders are out then.
I thought of Phillip Morris also when I read this.
The sad thing is that most people are probably going to fall for this sort of marketing tactic. Most of these companies only need to trick the people who aren't paying attention.
I know many non-technical people who were actually starting to recognize Gator since it's the most common, and now they have to start over again.
"With all the money invested in trying to build a better lock, they could have changed buisness models numerous times."
There's a reason for that. Any fair business model that rewarded the artists and didn't control distribution would most likely limit the RIAA's power. Why would the RIAA want that?
Yeah, I wasn't really referring to the articles since I did read them. It was a more general comment about the attitudes I see in/. posts and elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
If I didn't already own a ps2, I might be willing to pay $600 for the combo presented here. Sure, I could build a pvr myself, but FROM SCRATCH, getting one that would be able to handle pvr duties well and burn dvds would cost at least $600 plus my time.
What I really want to know is if I would be able to access the files across a network. Ps2 has the ethernet adapter you can buy, so it seems like a reasonable idea, but I imagine there's tons of reasons why sony might not want to add that capability.
Since it's relevant and I haven't had time to hit google yet to research it myself, I'm just curious if there's any other products out right now that are a pvr, can burn dvds, and are accessible across the network. Heck, any two of those are cool in my opinion if they're decently priced.
Let's clear something up.
It IS NOT censorship if a company who pays a singer to perform complains afterwords or wants her to do things their way. Rules created by corporations to "self censor" are not real censorship. That's just them catering to what they think the market wants. It's good business.
That's not what's going on though. When the government tells people what they can/cannot say or do, that is censorship. Last I checked, the constitution is pretty clear that the government "shall make no law" restricting the freedom of speech.
"Lets be honest with ourselves. Who plagarizes anymore and thinks its okay?"
Um, a large number of open source developers. Nothing wrong with it, in my opinion, but it's true.
I've never been a big fan of first person shooters, but Onslaught has me hooked right now.
It's possible to come back from behind. It's just a matter of working together to take back that first power node. The problem though is that too many new people get caught up defending the base when some of them really should be attacking.
Onslaught is great because if you have two good teams, it's basically like tug-o-war, going back and forth a few times until finally someone wears out.
Why not just make the tax system so simple that we don't need the IRS to monitor returns. The only cheaters would be the ones not paying, not the ones that take advantage of stupid loopholes.
Oh wait, that's too easy, and the government certainly wouldn't want to do something easy for people to understand. We might catch on to how much we're actually paying them.
That's easy to say, but impractical to implement.
When a software designer releases code, the only math he uses is statistics: he will have some degree of certainty that his code will work under the working conditions he expects. Anything that deviates from his perception of the use cases will introduce uncertainty regarding the reliability of the software.
In theory, you could prove that a piece of software is correct, but in practice, the complexity makes it impractical to do so. The best one can hope for under normal conditions is a percentage.
Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
-Benjamin Franklin
You are absolutely right.
This isn't about 2D vs. 3D. This is about traditional hand drawn animation vs. modern techniques using computers.
There's technically nothing you can do with hand drawn animation that you can't do on a computer, it's just a different workflow that cuts out some of the cost. Traditional animation requires an army of animators doing key frames, in-betweening, and background art, but some of that is cut out on a computer if it can do some of the work for you. That's why there's still going to be animators in Burbank.
While I'm certainly sad that a bunch of great animators are losing their jobs, and I still don't really like the corporation, let's at least be clear that this is about Disney trying to cut costs. It does not necessarily mean that every animation they make from now on is going to look like Pixar stuff.
I agree.
What I would like to see is a good wireless solution that just takes direct video and sound and dumps that, skipping the decoder part. Then, you could just treat the tv like a second monitor. So far, most of the wireless solutions all include specific codecs when I would mainly need it for watching movies that might be in other codecs besides MPEG or Divx.
Yes, I know that there are Wireless Radio Frequency solutions that you can get, but so far I have yet to find one that works. They generally work on the 2.4Ghz range and get crappy reception and interference. Perhaps it's just the environment I'm in though which makes that option unavailable.
Ok, so you may or may not get to work for that big name engineering corporation, but that doesn't mean work doesn't exist for decent pay.
There are still a large number of industries that have yet to catch up to the rest in terms of technology. It seems natural to me that as the engineering bubble bursts a bit, we'll just migrate to those other industries that either can't afford to go offshore or that just haven't setup for it yet. So, instead of working for HP, Dell, or Sun, you might be working for Ma and Pa's house of fabrics or Jo Blo's delivery service. Perhaps they have the money right now and are looking to improve their systems.
I personally so far have never had any problems finding work, but maybe that's because I have no interest in the big companies anyway.
Now, I'm certainly not excusing the attitudes of some CEOs, but that's another issue. They're basically making rational decisions in an irrational, greed driven system.
Since you seem so comfortable opening up so long as it isn't "illegal," I suppose that means you wouldn't mind if I came to your house and video taped you and your wife having sex.
I mean, it's not anything illegal right, so why should you care?
Yeah, I wouldn't really need all that space for music either, but you could always use it as a portable harddrive also. It supports transfer of any type of file.
It appears you didn't read the follow up in the same journal which specifically comments on people trying to draw the same conclusions you are from their article..
You would see a few interesting quotes:
"Under even the most liberal assumptions, gay and bisexual men in this urban centre were experiencing a life expectancy similar to that experienced by men in Canada in the year 1871. In contrast, if we were to repeat this analysis today the life expectancy of gay and bisexual men would be greatly improved. Deaths from HIV infection have declined dramatically in this population since 1996. As we have previously reported there has been a threefold decrease in mortality in Vancouver as well as in other parts of British Columbia."
and conveniently enough considering your previous arguments, this:
"Death is a product of the way a person lives and what physical and environmental hazards he or she faces everyday. It cannot be attributed solely to their sexual orientation or any other ethnic or social factor. If estimates of an individual gay and bisexual man's risk of death is truly needed for legal or other purposes, then people making these estimates should use the same actuarial tables that are used for all other males in that population. Gay and bisexual men are included in the construction of official population-based tables and therefore these tables for all males are the appropriate ones to be used."
Let's be honest here. I'm more interested in your implied meaning. It's called reading between the lines. You had no real reason to post that argument except to imply that homosexual couplings would cost more to insurance companies or just be more "destabalizing." So far, you have yet to show any evidence to support either of those claims. Most of what you have said has been personal opinion so far.
"That's a misleading figure. 70-80% of first time marriages last."
http://www.divorcereform.org/rates.html
from that site:
"The National Center for Health Statistics recently released a report which found that 43
percent of FIRST MARRIAGES end in separation or divorce within 15 years. The study is based on
the National Survey of Family Growth, a nationally representative sample of women age 15 to
44 in 1995."
Now, unless you have other evidence to support your claims, my argument still stands.
"I just have a problem with one small group pressuring the rest of society into altering one of its most fundamental institutions in the name of diversity."
I just have a problem with one group thinking it's ok to deny equal rights to another (even a minority) based on speculation and personal opinion with very little hard evidence.
Again, you're using subjective opinions to make your point. "fundamental institution" to whom? Not everyone sees marriage the same way you do. In reality, most people who have this argument are talking about the religious definition vs. the basic civil union. Most people in support of homosexuals are talking about the civil union because that's the only legal version that comes with benefits. They could care less about the religious aspects.
As with most people who try to justify their subjective opinions, your arguments have very little objective substance.
? opt ion=article&news_id=75), so even if you are right about it being stabalizing, you still have not shown any evidence to suggest homosexual couples are different.
"Actuarial data shows that male-female married couples cause cause less loss for insurance companies, so guess what...They get better rates. "
While it's true that married couples get better rates and may even cause less loss, I'm not sure how this applies to your argument against homosexuality. I don't suppose you have evidence to suggest that male-male or female-female unions cause more loss, do you? All you've shown is that married couples cause less loss than single individuals.
"Marriage (as it currently exists) is a stabilizing force in society"
"stabalizing force" is a rather subjective phrase, don't you think? Stabalizing by whose standards? I mean, divorce rates have generally hung around the same amount (between 40 and 50 percent). Doesn't seem that stabalizing to me. Besides, a recent article published by the University of Washington suggests that homosexual couples have a similar rate of relationship dissolution compared to heterosexual divorce rates (
http://web.psych.washington.edu/news/index.php
Of course, what you really meant to say was that it was destabalizing for you since you don't like seeing men in love with other men, right?
"the government has to spend less money in housing and rehabilitating prisoners when society is stable."
That statement is a no brainer, but again I ask to see your evidence that homosexual couples somehow cause more instability. The most frequent instability I can think of are the crimes commited against them by bigots, but I hardly think it's fair to blame homosexuals for that.
"Married couples have children,..."
Homosexuals can adopt children...
is that he thinks there's some magical universal solution that will work for every person. It's not true.
I remember reading Clay Shirky's open letter to him and they were debating the same sort of thing over web standards compliance. Clay Shirky was taking the position that diversity and experimentation in user interface design ultimately creates a better system. I tend to agree with that.
Anyway, back to the topic. While I agree IM is not the best solution to everything, it works for me quite well.
I work from home as a programming consultant. I work with a few other people, and IM is the most common way we communicate. It's faster than email and telephone in general when you have quick questions, and is convenient when you have longer conversations throughout the day and want to leave the information up on the desktop.
Sure it's not perfect. One of it's best (and worst) features is the the ability to know when someone is online. It's annoying when you're trying to eat dinner and someone from work sees that you were just online. Yes, you can ignore it, but it can still be annoying if you don't manage it properly. It just requires a bit of discipline.
As for IM spam, if you just have your settings so that you only receive messages from people on your contact list, you should generally be fine. It doesn't disable the requests for people to add you to the list, so if anybody really wants to talk to you, they can still reach you.
Email is still more convenient when you're sending things back and forth that you want to save for a long time. IM doesn't do that well (yet.).
I think what's really needed is a way to store and search all the different forms of information you get from day to day in email and IM and strip out the fluff. I have tons of emails in my mailbox that I may just keep around for one or two lines in them, but would be nice if there was a simple way to delete all the stuff I don't need and keep the info I do.
I've always thought that elections should be a bit more like most other "competitions." Rather than having the elections based on party primaries, why not just randomly assign them to groups and do a tier based system like in most sports?
so, everyone starts out on the bottom tier, either they are randomly assigned against each other or maybe just the top group goes to the semifinals, then eventually, they move onto the finals with two candidates.
I'm sure it has flaws, but I always figured it would take care of the issue of people ignoring who they really want since they can vote for them in the early stages and then vote again in the next tiers if their candidate doesn't get through.
I think you're missing the impact that college students play in all this.
Just as many new ideas come from young college students or grad students, who later go on to build startups or who publish papers that are capitalized on by larger companies.
I do agree that some large companies do alot, but to rule out the impact of other smaller groups is just insulting and plain wrong.
Does the Rio let you copy non music files to the hard drive? I was looking on the site and I couldn't find any mention. It sounded like the music manager only supported music files. Isn't that the same problem with the iPod?
I think I would probably go with the neuros or the iriver if I had to choose one right now since they both let you copy any type of file and I like the idea of it doubling as a portable hard drive.
"Is that the kind of country you would like to live in, one that does the will of the majority, rather than the right thing?"
The problem here is that you're thinking exactly like the people who are currently in power. Why let all the people make decisions, when it's really only the rich or "intelligent" who are important, right?
The main thing stopping direct democracy from working is the flow of information. I tend to believe that people are capable of making reasonable decisions if they're given enough information from both sides.
Of course that's the problem when you consider Fox News and all the other big media monopolies. It's almost impossible to get unfiltered information. Everything is slanted to fit the current regimes idea of the truth.
Plus, people have to actually have the time to care and think about these things which is difficult when they're working so many hours so they can buy crap from those same monopolies.
I have a feeling this won't last very long.
Basically, people are already getting used to technologies like Tivo and other DVRs. This is one of those cases where common people that don't normally pay attention to these sorts of things will take notice, but it will be as soon as they suddenly can't access their favorite sitcoms or their sports events anymore. The MPAA is doing too little, too late in its lobbying efforts.
The technology is already rooting itself in society enough I think that people will complain when they suddenly try to limit it. I'm sure the MPAA will continue to find ways to limit other technologies, but I don't think they'll be able to stop the recording of tv broadcasts anymore. Also, just wait another year when this is supposed to take effect and we'll see what sorts of recorders are out then.
I thought of Phillip Morris also when I read this.
The sad thing is that most people are probably going to fall for this sort of marketing tactic. Most of these companies only need to trick the people who aren't paying attention.
I know many non-technical people who were actually starting to recognize Gator since it's the most common, and now they have to start over again.
"With all the money invested in trying to build a better lock, they could have changed buisness models numerous times."
There's a reason for that. Any fair business model that rewarded the artists and didn't control distribution would most likely limit the RIAA's power. Why would the RIAA want that?
It'll get worse before it gets better.
This is also very useful for people that dual boot between multiple operating systems.
Why should they wait for linux to boot for 3-4 minutes if windows will be up faster?
Yeah, I wasn't really referring to the articles since I did read them. It was a more general comment about the attitudes I see in /. posts and elsewhere.