Don't go ahead and get the non-HD DirecTiVo. The fuckers at DirecTV have crippled it so that it won't run the Home Media Option.
I don't know if you get email responses here, but see http://www.dealdatabase.com/forum/ about 'fixing' your DirecTivo. Many happy satellite subscribers using HMO and all that.
I get DirecTV HD, but there's no way I'm spending one dime on anything so close to bankruptcy as Tivo.
Okay, I can't just let this dog lie undisturbed. TiVo is not close to bankruptcy, despite their misgivings on Wall Street. In fact, as of their last conference call, they are expecting to turn profitable by the end of this year. They intend to balance revenue from three streams: hardware, subscriptions, and ad sponsers. That's good news for TiVo faithful.
The bad news is that they plan to reach profitability by sacrificing the ideals which brought them the love in the first place. Their hardware gets less reliable each iteration and harder to hack (for your own software patches). They sell ad space on the interface top menu. And now they are beginning to push pop-up ads on their paying subscribers (while you fast-forward). The recent deal with Comcast will put some variation of TiVo software on Comcast DVRs, most likely with the pop-up ads.
It remains to be seen how losing 2/3 of their base from DirecTV (in 2007) will affect TiVo, but they should be profitable by then. Don't hate TiVo for 'dying' like BSD and Apple. Instead, hate TiVo for sacrificing their own ideals.
The point is that Microsoft claimed they didn't keep the files and messages for the Burst case (a strange 18-month "black hole" in their email records) after claiming in another case that they kept everything. This self-incrimination is the only thing that managed to help Burst.
To this day, I am still baffled by how many people actually like the PS controller.
You've got to be kidding. I've owned nearly all consoles since the Atari VCS days, and I've always found the PlayStation (and subsequent PS2) controllers the absolute best design -- to the point where I wonder why it took so long for a company to come up with such a simple yet brilliant design. I'd describe them as the improved button layout of the SNES controller with the comfort of a Sega Genesis control.
I like my Dreamcast, and these days I appreciate it even more than I did a few years ago. But that controller was pretty bad. Likewise with the Xbox, especially the teardrop buttons which you can't figure out except for looking down at the darn thing.
Side note: My vote for worst controller would probably go to the Atari 5200, because of mushy and extremely poor button positions. Although the original Atari 7800 controls would be a close second-place for worst controller.
I guess people have short memories. Intuit is the same company that provided all kinds of grief to its own TurboTax customers a couple years ago. This Quicken thing is even worse, as they are discontinuing (i.e. disallowing) you to even import data.
I'm glad I've completely sworn off Intuit products.
I just got a TracFone here in the U.S. (pre-pay cards, up to a year in advance), and the handset is a Nokia 1100b. Small, slim, lightweight, plain B&W display, and runs for a week on a charge (unless you chat quite a lot, at which point a monthly service might be better for you anyway).
No camera, no battery-eating color display, no Java, no mini web browser, no bluetooth (no exploits!). In a nutshell, NO CRAP. My perfect phone, maybe could be yours as well.
Ugh, no you don't. Until recently I had a Motorola V60 (TDMA) through Cingular, and it was the crappiest, call-droppingliest phone I've ever used. Half the time it couldn't recieve incoming calls, usually the urgent ones, and the resulting voice mail would sometimes take *hours* before showing up. When you do manage to receive or make a call, the other end can't hear you because your voice breaks up too badly. Also, the V60 is somewhat small, but rather fat at the same time, so it doesn't go well in either a pocket nor a belt clip. Gawd, I only suffered with the thing because it was on my brother's family plan and I didn't have to pay anything for it. Stay away.
Since then I've happily replaced it with a simple Nokia 1100 from TracFone. Its an easy pre-paid service, with 1-year cards available (other plans only have 60-day cards). And the Nokia 1100 is a thin, lightweight, no-nonsense black & white phone than runs for a week on a charge. Lovin' it!
Best Buy has no idea that i'm gone, but I personally have no idea how they stay in business.
They stay in business because they push suckers really hard for their maintenance contract/extended warranties. Its been a few years since I've kept track, but at the time Best Buy's SEC filings indicated a *huge* amount of their revenue comes from those mostly worthless 'service plans'.
I probably wouldn't bother responding to something like this, but the Home Depot nearby started implementing a similar 'policy' (checking receipts at the door), and it irks the hell out of me. I always walk right past and adamantly refuse to let them peek in my bag, and most of the time they recognize they can't actually do anything and give a "Have a nice day" with a smile.
Do you have a cite for this assertion?
Yes, the technical term is "purchased goods" which means as soon as the transaction is complete at the register, those items are now your personal property. They cannot _legally_ force you to hand over your items, although restrictions will vary from state to state.
This is why they have to be ultra special sure about grabbing shoplifters, they usually need to have surveillance (human or machine) to back up the arrest.
While I appreciate the risk some manufacturers are taking bringing 'tapeless' camcorders to market, many of these MPEG-4 thingies don't produce great results, especially when you show the family on a TV. There are a couple (subjectively) better options on the market which do DVD quality MPEG-2. All of these are small and extremely portable.
Panasonic SV-AV100 which I own and love, but you need to rename the.MOD files it creates to.MPG. Then they are pretty much ready to be burned to DVD. Cradle interface and software sucks (and not Mac compatible), but everyone simply uses a USB2.0 card reader.
JVC GZ-MC100 Slightly bigger than the SV-AV100 but it has better optics and supports large CF storage.
If you want to stick with tapes, Sony is coming out with a fairly small DCR-PC350 which still uses miniDV tapes.
"Besides, Belkin sells an external media reader for $99 that does the job without messing up iPod's famous simplicity."
Except that the Belkin reader thing totally blows. It's horrendously slow, and itself is bigger than an iPod.
I agree with the parent... I'd love an Apple iPod digital wallet, with a little SD or CF slot in the side. Until then, I don't have much use for this reported device which displays pictures but cannot read them in (by itself).
Instead of the bling-bling, fat and ugly pen drives out there, I prefer the secret spy pen drive. It is a real pen which sports a hidden USB connector and flash drive inside the barrel.
Others who need pocket tools on their job may prefer a swiss army drive.
I was reading that movie studios will now accept advertising
in movies.
Because in the near future "...all restaurants are Taco Bell" -- Demolition Man, 1993
Advertising and product placement in movies is nothing new. The earliest example I can personally think of is Attack of the 50 foot woman (1958) where 7*up soda is featured prominently.
Working in the internet marketing industry (not spam) I can tell you that Boca Raton in particular has a reputation for being host to some extra-shady operations.
There are some shady travel firms which operate out of there, as well. I believe it is more than coincidence that all these firms operate in a place named for the "mouth of the rat".
Now UPS can read your hard drive as well as open your packages.
I hate to break it to you, but any of the shipping companies can already (legally) check your packages. Including the U.S. Post Office -- on anything but first-class mail. The local postmaster told me that other mail rates are designed for "merchandise" and not protected as "correspondence".
If you have more than a couple of kids, you need to have a larger vehicle and an SUV is now the only choice you have, unless you buy a bus.
Ok, this is silly, but I admit I'm younger than the glory days of giant Ford LTD wood-grain station wagons. A mini-van solves most "kid" problems nicely, and minivans (at least in my state) happen to be classified as station wagons, with lower license plate registration cost and lower insurance costs.
Anyone with kids who has had both a minivan and an SUV monster should be able to tell you that the minivan offers far more usable room than your SUV. And minivans drive better. I've experienced it, my folks can attest, and even my yuppie keep-up-with-the-Jones' neighbors have recently ditched their SUV for a minivan for the same reasons. Its a shame that minivans seem to hold a certain stigma, but they're often the better choice.
Oh and so I'm not completely off topic, my Grand Caravan right now gets about 18/23 mpg, but probably low because it needs new tires.
First It comes out that Intel's making Dual Core Prescotts what would do better as hotplates than processors, and now they're announcing that they're preventing you from overclocking?
I would think there is more than a casual relationship between the two, perhaps just to prevent their "hotplates" from becoming open-flame barbeque pits.
Mr. Dicks wanted to put the markers into holes drilled into the road surface. The key, he said, was finding self-healing resins for the top lenses that would be flush with the surface and subjected to much wear and tear.
Yeah, great. Dig holes in the pavement for these things. Now you have a new problem: water seeping in and around the LED units and resin which then freezes during winter. Writing as someone from Michigan (U.S.), every spring we get tons of potholes from water expanding and contracting under the pavement.
The CNN article is light on details, but I suspect these stories are related.
My wife is a bakruptcy attorney (in the Detroit area), which means she deals with the federal bar and federal courts, instead of local district courts. Anyway, one of her counterparts across town had an Exchange server zombied. Somehow I think having a pissed-off federal lawyer probably caused more action than the "10,000 complaints" from regular joes cited in the article.
I guess the morale is: If you're going to commit cybercrime, don't do it against a lawyer.
I always thought they did a decent job on Resident Evil, -- enough to warrent a sequel anyway.
The new movie ("Apocalypse") is supposed to feature the Jill Valentine character. I wonder if as in the game she'll have to spin around in place to turn around.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know if you get email responses here, but see http://www.dealdatabase.com/forum/ about 'fixing' your DirecTivo. Many happy satellite subscribers using HMO and all that.
Okay, I can't just let this dog lie undisturbed. TiVo is not close to bankruptcy, despite their misgivings on Wall Street. In fact, as of their last conference call, they are expecting to turn profitable by the end of this year. They intend to balance revenue from three streams: hardware, subscriptions, and ad sponsers. That's good news for TiVo faithful.
The bad news is that they plan to reach profitability by sacrificing the ideals which brought them the love in the first place. Their hardware gets less reliable each iteration and harder to hack (for your own software patches). They sell ad space on the interface top menu. And now they are beginning to push pop-up ads on their paying subscribers (while you fast-forward). The recent deal with Comcast will put some variation of TiVo software on Comcast DVRs, most likely with the pop-up ads.
It remains to be seen how losing 2/3 of their base from DirecTV (in 2007) will affect TiVo, but they should be profitable by then. Don't hate TiVo for 'dying' like BSD and Apple. Instead, hate TiVo for sacrificing their own ideals.
The point is that Microsoft claimed they didn't keep the files and messages for the Burst case (a strange 18-month "black hole" in their email records) after claiming in another case that they kept everything. This self-incrimination is the only thing that managed to help Burst.
You can get the new Plextor TV402U (with built-in tuner) which alleviates most of the "problems" with the M402U.
You've got to be kidding. I've owned nearly all consoles since the Atari VCS days, and I've always found the PlayStation (and subsequent PS2) controllers the absolute best design -- to the point where I wonder why it took so long for a company to come up with such a simple yet brilliant design. I'd describe them as the improved button layout of the SNES controller with the comfort of a Sega Genesis control.
I like my Dreamcast, and these days I appreciate it even more than I did a few years ago. But that controller was pretty bad. Likewise with the Xbox, especially the teardrop buttons which you can't figure out except for looking down at the darn thing.
Side note: My vote for worst controller would probably go to the Atari 5200, because of mushy and extremely poor button positions. Although the original Atari 7800 controls would be a close second-place for worst controller.
I'm glad I've completely sworn off Intuit products.
I just got a TracFone here in the U.S. (pre-pay cards, up to a year in advance), and the handset is a Nokia 1100b. Small, slim, lightweight, plain B&W display, and runs for a week on a charge (unless you chat quite a lot, at which point a monthly service might be better for you anyway).
No camera, no battery-eating color display, no Java, no mini web browser, no bluetooth (no exploits!). In a nutshell, NO CRAP. My perfect phone, maybe could be yours as well.
Ugh, no you don't. Until recently I had a Motorola V60 (TDMA) through Cingular, and it was the crappiest, call-droppingliest phone I've ever used. Half the time it couldn't recieve incoming calls, usually the urgent ones, and the resulting voice mail would sometimes take *hours* before showing up. When you do manage to receive or make a call, the other end can't hear you because your voice breaks up too badly. Also, the V60 is somewhat small, but rather fat at the same time, so it doesn't go well in either a pocket nor a belt clip. Gawd, I only suffered with the thing because it was on my brother's family plan and I didn't have to pay anything for it. Stay away.
Since then I've happily replaced it with a simple Nokia 1100 from TracFone. Its an easy pre-paid service, with 1-year cards available (other plans only have 60-day cards). And the Nokia 1100 is a thin, lightweight, no-nonsense black & white phone than runs for a week on a charge. Lovin' it!
Oh geat! Now what happens in 10 years after kids start eating the peeling "aluminum and copper" paint chips?
They stay in business because they push suckers really hard for their maintenance contract/extended warranties. Its been a few years since I've kept track, but at the time Best Buy's SEC filings indicated a *huge* amount of their revenue comes from those mostly worthless 'service plans'.
I probably wouldn't bother responding to something like this, but the Home Depot nearby started implementing a similar 'policy' (checking receipts at the door), and it irks the hell out of me. I always walk right past and adamantly refuse to let them peek in my bag, and most of the time they recognize they can't actually do anything and give a "Have a nice day" with a smile.
Yes, the technical term is "purchased goods" which means as soon as the transaction is complete at the register, those items are now your personal property. They cannot _legally_ force you to hand over your items, although restrictions will vary from state to state.
This is why they have to be ultra special sure about grabbing shoplifters, they usually need to have surveillance (human or machine) to back up the arrest.
Panasonic SV-AV100 which I own and love, but you need to rename the .MOD files it creates to .MPG. Then they are pretty much ready to be burned to DVD. Cradle interface and software sucks (and not Mac compatible), but everyone simply uses a USB2.0 card reader.
JVC GZ-MC100 Slightly bigger than the SV-AV100 but it has better optics and supports large CF storage.
If you want to stick with tapes, Sony is coming out with a fairly small DCR-PC350 which still uses miniDV tapes.
Except that the Belkin reader thing totally blows. It's horrendously slow, and itself is bigger than an iPod.
I agree with the parent... I'd love an Apple iPod digital wallet, with a little SD or CF slot in the side. Until then, I don't have much use for this reported device which displays pictures but cannot read them in (by itself).
A rather nice overall post, but I submit that MacOS 7.6 was certainly not lean. MacOS system bloat began with v7.5 and spiralled out of control since.
It's also impossible to find anything with Freenet.
(Giving up my mod points for this stupid post)
Others who need pocket tools on their job may prefer a swiss army drive.
Because in the near future "...all restaurants are Taco Bell" -- Demolition Man, 1993
Advertising and product placement in movies is nothing new. The earliest example I can personally think of is Attack of the 50 foot woman (1958) where 7*up soda is featured prominently.
There are some shady travel firms which operate out of there, as well. I believe it is more than coincidence that all these firms operate in a place named for the "mouth of the rat".
I hate to break it to you, but any of the shipping companies can already (legally) check your packages. Including the U.S. Post Office -- on anything but first-class mail. The local postmaster told me that other mail rates are designed for "merchandise" and not protected as "correspondence".
Ok, this is silly, but I admit I'm younger than the glory days of giant Ford LTD wood-grain station wagons. A mini-van solves most "kid" problems nicely, and minivans (at least in my state) happen to be classified as station wagons, with lower license plate registration cost and lower insurance costs.
Anyone with kids who has had both a minivan and an SUV monster should be able to tell you that the minivan offers far more usable room than your SUV. And minivans drive better. I've experienced it, my folks can attest, and even my yuppie keep-up-with-the-Jones' neighbors have recently ditched their SUV for a minivan for the same reasons. Its a shame that minivans seem to hold a certain stigma, but they're often the better choice.
Oh and so I'm not completely off topic, my Grand Caravan right now gets about 18/23 mpg, but probably low because it needs new tires.
I would think there is more than a casual relationship between the two, perhaps just to prevent their "hotplates" from becoming open-flame barbeque pits.
Now, the problem I have with this service is that the food (not counting the very high priced steaks, etc.) is, to my mind, almost totally snack food.
:-)
Sounds like a good business model... Get you all fat and lethargic so you're even less likely to leave the house to do your own shopping.
Mr. Dicks wanted to put the markers into holes drilled into the road surface. The key, he said, was finding self-healing resins for the top lenses that would be flush with the surface and subjected to much wear and tear.
Yeah, great. Dig holes in the pavement for these things. Now you have a new problem: water seeping in and around the LED units and resin which then freezes during winter. Writing as someone from Michigan (U.S.), every spring we get tons of potholes from water expanding and contracting under the pavement.
The CNN article is light on details, but I suspect these stories are related.
My wife is a bakruptcy attorney (in the Detroit area), which means she deals with the federal bar and federal courts, instead of local district courts. Anyway, one of her counterparts across town had an Exchange server zombied. Somehow I think having a pissed-off federal lawyer probably caused more action than the "10,000 complaints" from regular joes cited in the article.
I guess the morale is: If you're going to commit cybercrime, don't do it against a lawyer.
I always thought they did a decent job on Resident Evil, -- enough to warrent a sequel anyway.
The new movie ("Apocalypse") is supposed to feature the Jill Valentine character. I wonder if as in the game she'll have to spin around in place to turn around.