XP is trying so hard to be everything to everyone, that it can't even pop up a delete confirmation fast enough to not make me wait for it (On an Athlon XP 2700+ with 1GB of DDR333, fresh from boot).
(emphasis added)
This is because Windows Explorer scans the directory tree of whatever you have highlighted when you press the delete (icon, button, menu item, whatever) so that it will be able to show you a pretty little progress window and give you an estimated time remaining while it's doing the delete.
For some reason, though, there is even still a small delay when trying to delete a single file.
I was even thinking of buying the app until I surfed to the company's site and found it was >$2K US. [...] I didn't have anything critical on there, but it woudl have been very time consuming to re-rip my CDs again.
Like, say, maybe more than $2k worth of your time?
Yes, the IR blasters suck, and there's the remote possibility of the set top box not being on when needed, but the former can be solved using a serial connection (supported on many Motorola digital cable boxes and most Sony or RCA DirecTV boxes), and the latter is a pretty damn rare problem.
You haven't had my In-Laws over trying to figure out how to watch the TV and then trying to figure out how to turn off the TV and the amplifier.
I'm willing to bet that part of the reason that this passed is that no politician in their right mind would vote against a bill like this.
Can you imagine the campaign ads that could be used against them in the future? "Robert Lawmaker voted against a law protecting the privacy of consumers from evil private corporations. Do you want this man to be your President? Paid for by the Running Against Robert Lawmaker campaign."
Man, Bravo's "The Restaurant" has the most obvious and offensive product placement I've ever seen. It's almost painful to watch. ... Well, the reason it was so obvious is largely that the only time I've seen it was during a marathon.. I watched 'em all in one sitting, hehe.
The product placement was so offensive and "almost" painful to watch that you sat through an entire marathon? Apparently it's working, because you remembered all the sponsors. Even better, they're now getting free advertisement in your posting on Slashdot! Dollars well spent by the marketing departments of those companies.
OS X's close and minimize (and zoom) buttons are all separated by several pixels, so you're much less likely to hit one when you mean to hit another. Windows, on the other hand, has no separation between the buttons, so if you miss the maximize button by one pixel, you close the window.
Which is why I double-click the title bar to maximize and un-maximize, and use the minimize button to minimize a window. The close button does not get anywhere close to my accidental clickiness then.
The difference in behavior in double-clicking the title bar messed me up more than anything when I switched from Windows to Gnome.
I don't see how they would know if I'm watching a program live. If I'm running at the tip of the live feed, then I'm not going to be pressing any buttons during the program. Sure, I hardly ever make it through a program without using the -8 seconds button at least once, or pausing it.
The article discusses how some live events and reality television have a larger percentage of watched ads. I would guess that would be because most people watch those shows when they're actually being broadcast, as opposed to watching them later. It would be more interesting to see statistics of what % of the commercials are watched when it was watched live versus what % people are watching when watching it previously recorded.
For the live/reality events, those are conversation pieces for some people at work the next day (*gasp* Did you see who the Bachelor picked?). I'd bet that those programs are watched live more, and therefore people are unable to skip the commercials.
All you need to do is cron a job to wget the license agreement, run an MD5 against it, and then compare the MD5 against the MD5 the last time you read it. If they mismatch, time to read.
Each machine needs to record 4 channels simultaneously. Taking a look at throughput requirements for storage, it looks like to record at "normal" TV speed, you're talking about 15 megabytes/sec in storage.
With needing nearly 4 gigabytes per hour of TV recorded at that rate, a 160 gigabyte HD would only yield 40 hours of recording time, or 10 hours per tuner card.
Writing to a HD at 60 MB/sec means that you're probably not going to be reading from it at the same time to watch something that you have previously recorded. Therefore, you're going to want to break this out into multiple IDE channels, perhaps one drive per channel.
Something seriously has to be asked here -- if you're recording 4 hours of TV per hour, when are you going to watch all the stuff? Even assuming that you're skipping commercials (turning a 30 minute program into a 22 minute program), you're still going to be falling behind at a good clip.
If you're doing that with four machines, 16 hours per hour of realtime, what the hell are you going to do with all the data? I think the editor has been trolled with this article.
The TREAD (Transportation, Recall, Enhancement, Accountability and Documentation) Act requires tire makers to track all of their tires in case they need to recall them. Blame Congress, not the tire makers.
Personally, I would like it if I went into my car dealership (Jiffy Lube, whatever), and when they scanned my tires they said "Hey, these have been recalled". With all the recalls that are out in the market today, there is no central authority (that I could find with a quick Google, anyhow) that shows all the recalls. Even if there is, I doubt that most people are bothered enough to check every day for things that could be affecting their lives.
The Ford Explorer tragedies were horrible. My friend's cousin was the fourth documented case in the state of Florida. If implementing technology like this can save one life, I say go for it!
Many people do use cdrs and cdrws to distribute pirated music.
Just because there are some people that do it, does not mean that everyone else does. Punishing the whole for what only a portion of the people are (as you admit!) does not seem morally correct to me.
At work, we use blank CDs to fulfill orders from customers and mail their data to them. Why should our customers end up paying levies on media (like we're going to absorb the cost? HA!) to have their data delivered to them?
Granted, most of the CDs burned that I see my friends make are for copying software, not music, but you don't hear about the SPA asking for levies on blank CDs.
As for blank DVD's, the only thing that I do with those is convert my home movies to DVD for me to send to my family.
...does this look like from the outside? Can anyone who's outside your house see what you're watching? I don't see what the real benefit of this is, other than the "gee whiz!" factor. Not to mention what happens when your kids playing catch in the house break your window *and* TV at the same time!
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This is because Windows Explorer scans the directory tree of whatever you have highlighted when you press the delete (icon, button, menu item, whatever) so that it will be able to show you a pretty little progress window and give you an estimated time remaining while it's doing the delete.
For some reason, though, there is even still a small delay when trying to delete a single file.
Like, say, maybe more than $2k worth of your time?
You haven't had my In-Laws over trying to figure out how to watch the TV and then trying to figure out how to turn off the TV and the amplifier.
And on what information are you basing that opinion? By the fact that big corporations get lots of patents?
Even if the patent office rejected 50% of all patents, the big corporations would still get a lot of them because they submit more patents.
Can you imagine the campaign ads that could be used against them in the future? "Robert Lawmaker voted against a law protecting the privacy of consumers from evil private corporations. Do you want this man to be your President? Paid for by the Running Against Robert Lawmaker campaign."
Today = 2004-04-15
Linked article = 2004-02-21
Difference = 54 days ... maybe then I could get everything done on the weekends!
Oh how I wish there were 18 days in a week
The product placement was so offensive and "almost" painful to watch that you sat through an entire marathon? Apparently it's working, because you remembered all the sponsors. Even better, they're now getting free advertisement in your posting on Slashdot! Dollars well spent by the marketing departments of those companies.
Which is why I double-click the title bar to maximize and un-maximize, and use the minimize button to minimize a window. The close button does not get anywhere close to my accidental clickiness then.
The difference in behavior in double-clicking the title bar messed me up more than anything when I switched from Windows to Gnome.
The article discusses how some live events and reality television have a larger percentage of watched ads. I would guess that would be because most people watch those shows when they're actually being broadcast, as opposed to watching them later. It would be more interesting to see statistics of what % of the commercials are watched when it was watched live versus what % people are watching when watching it previously recorded.
For the live/reality events, those are conversation pieces for some people at work the next day (*gasp* Did you see who the Bachelor picked?). I'd bet that those programs are watched live more, and therefore people are unable to skip the commercials.
All you need to do is cron a job to wget the license agreement, run an MD5 against it, and then compare the MD5 against the MD5 the last time you read it. If they mismatch, time to read.
With needing nearly 4 gigabytes per hour of TV recorded at that rate, a 160 gigabyte HD would only yield 40 hours of recording time, or 10 hours per tuner card.
Writing to a HD at 60 MB/sec means that you're probably not going to be reading from it at the same time to watch something that you have previously recorded. Therefore, you're going to want to break this out into multiple IDE channels, perhaps one drive per channel.
Something seriously has to be asked here -- if you're recording 4 hours of TV per hour, when are you going to watch all the stuff? Even assuming that you're skipping commercials (turning a 30 minute program into a 22 minute program), you're still going to be falling behind at a good clip.
If you're doing that with four machines, 16 hours per hour of realtime, what the hell are you going to do with all the data? I think the editor has been trolled with this article.
The Ford Explorer tragedies were horrible. My friend's cousin was the fourth documented case in the state of Florida. If implementing technology like this can save one life, I say go for it!
What they really need to do is levy the AOL CDs that keep clogging my mailbox! Now that's a law I would get behind!
Just because there are some people that do it, does not mean that everyone else does. Punishing the whole for what only a portion of the people are (as you admit!) does not seem morally correct to me.
At work, we use blank CDs to fulfill orders from customers and mail their data to them. Why should our customers end up paying levies on media (like we're going to absorb the cost? HA!) to have their data delivered to them?
Granted, most of the CDs burned that I see my friends make are for copying software, not music, but you don't hear about the SPA asking for levies on blank CDs.
As for blank DVD's, the only thing that I do with those is convert my home movies to DVD for me to send to my family.
So, if they charge a levy, don't they end up legitimizing copying, and therefore making it legal for me to make copies with levied media?
Someone had to do it.
...does this look like from the outside? Can anyone who's outside your house see what you're watching? I don't see what the real benefit of this is, other than the "gee whiz!" factor. Not to mention what happens when your kids playing catch in the house break your window *and* TV at the same time!
- Faz