Well, for better or for worse, that's the rule. Which means that it penalizes the trustworthy and encourages those others who do violate it to break more laws, since they're already criminals. If you truly believe that only registered workers should be allowed to work, than the better ID card is a good thing. If not, don't trash the ID card, change the bloody law already! That's the way that the system works, you know.
What I don't understand here is why the blind person can't still do all the other stuff involved in hunting but, oh, not pull the trigger? Everyone seems to argue that pulling the trigger is such a trivial part of the hunting experience, but if that's the case, why make such a big deal out of it?
Real VoIP (plugging in a Vonage black box doesn't count) is still the domain of hackers, at least in the SOHO market. Apple has the talent and the marketing skills to really kick it to the next level.
Also consider that its likely that, with inflation, the average electric bill will continue to increase whereas the amortized 30 year mortgage payment will not. So that $150 savings will effectively increase over time. Will that offset the potential efficiency issues? I have no idea, but its something to consider.
Motorola phones use USB - at least, several (including the RAZR) do that I know of. That was a consideration when I bought mine, since being able to charge the phone off the laptop is a big help when traveling.
VHS won't die until the HTPC appliance fully matures, and a DRM-free medium is adapted en masse, and can record both NTSC and ATSC.
Most purchasers these days don't care about DRM and have no idea what NTSC or ATSC are. Those who do know NTSC don't know what ATSC is.
DVD recordable is almost there, but is less flexible than an HTPC and won't record high-def, so why bother upgrading?
I agree that DVD*R is pretty much DOA, mainly because it was just too complicated for a lot of people though.
Tivo almost has it, except...
tivo decides how long you can keep recordings (in some cases at least), NOT you
Well, it is a FIFO setup, at least for content that you select, although not all DVRs work this way. But that's usually okay, and given the choice many people would prefer dropping the oldest footage they've asked for rather than the newest. In any case, if you try to put 22 hours of content into a 20 hour space, 2 hours of it are going to be lost.
PLUS it requires a monthly subscription and either a land line or ethernet connection to phone home.
Well, that's for namebrand Tivo. Almost all cable companies offer DVRs. Besides, compared to the cost of cable/sattelite, most people don't care about a Tivo subscription fee if they make use of the Tivo-specific features.
Also, Tivo makes it FAR to difficult to record say, Smallville or Desperate Housewives or whatever it is you and your friends all want to watch, then take that recording over to a friend's house or simply lend it out
Yup. Turns out that most of your friends probably have DVRs too. Those who don't, generally don't care. Those who do care will come and visit you to watch it if its that important.
It's FAR to difficult for the average joe to record a show for you while you're on vacation and then give you the timeshifted content.
So what? With many providers, you can just go online and add it yourself. Besides, unlike a traditional VCR you've probably set up a Season Pass to record what you want before you leave the house in the first place.
I think that VHS will be around until the HTPC is easy to use, DRM-free, HDTV capable, AND the public is made aware of it.
DVRs are easy to use, HDTV capable, and the public is aware of them. And almost nobody outside of/. gives a damn about the DRM, like it or not.
Of course, the problem with that is that it makes "magical" the act of traveling into the future via time machine, as opposed to doing it the normal way, by waiting around. We're all traveling into the future as we speak (or type, whatever).
One thing to consider is that right now its getting pretty easy to have "enough" RAM for 99% of all users. I mean, if you get a new machine today that had 1.5-2.0gb in it, the odds of even wanting to upgrade would be slim to none. The fact is that most people live quite reasonably with 256-512mb right now, and will never upgrade. Note: most/. readers != most people. For modern machines if you're not running anything more brutal than Office, having a gig permanently attached would probably make sense for most people who would be using an integrated graphics type of system.
You can fit an HD movie on a normal DVD with H.264 or similar CODECs. EVD does this. There isn't much point though; if you're going to break backwards compatibility then you may as well have a more major upgrade.
Not quite that simple, I'm afraid. Besides, your argument is, to put it bluntly, bunk. You say that there's not much point - I've got a good one: money. You can buy a red-laser DVD player for $30. Add a firmware upgrade and all of a sudden you've got an HD player for $30. Call it $35 with the new licensing costs. Sure beats $999, doesn't it? Don't you think that someone, some studio, some manufacturer, would have figured this out before if it was realistic?
Besides, according to the wikiGods, H.264 at 1080p requires 50-200 mbps, depending on encoding quality. Even at 50mbps, that would be 22.5 gigabytes per hour. At 720p/1080i its only 20mbps, or 9 gigabytes per hour. Unless you're happy with, say, the quality of the average bittorrent files, but personally I'm not - I think they're often worse than standard DVDs run through a decent upconverter.
A full length HD format movie would be around 5 Gigabytes
A current DVD holds over 7GB, but doesn't hold a sufficiently high quality HD movie to make people happy. Article or not, if we could have simply added a new decoder to existing hardware and been blessed with 1080p HD goodness, we would have done.
One of the least-known features of Vonage (and probably a ton of other things as well, but hey, I'll pay $25/mo rather than do the work myself) is that you can set it up to simultaneously ring a bunch of lines. I have a Vonage number, and it rings my office, my mobile, and occasionally my house phone as well. You can do up to five numbers IIRC. Whichever one gets picked up first gets the call transferred. No extra fees, no metering, nothing - even the Caller ID information gets passed along correctly. All this and setup is as easy as adding numbers to a web form. Its almost worth it for the convenience even if you never use the phone attached to your router (or, for that matter, plug in the router in the first place).
You just won't have spent the last 700+ days carrying around the means to swap out the battery in your pocket, waiting for the one day when it's ready to be changed.
You know, that's an incredibly good point; its also one that I've never thought of before. Its totally true, though. The only gadgets I change the batteries on are things like my camera, where I have two batteries because the power can last less time than a day's shooting. Since swapping the battery is commonplace, replacing one wouldn't seem like a big deal.
However, with my laptop I just get really annoyed at the fact that my battery life sucks after a while and then end up buying a new one. Sure, there's a lot of good reasons to upgrade as well, but a new battery would probably have bought me 6-12 months of additional use. But I've never done that, and I'd be even less likely to for an iPod (or a celphone for that matter). Heck, my RAZR is nearing two years old and the battery is not what it used to be, but I'm not rushing out to get a new one - I'd rather buy an iPhone.
Where they make it work is that if you only want to use the iPod to play music, you never even need to know that it can do all that other stuff. This is a skill that a surprisingly large number of "feature-rich" products lack.
First off, I agree with your point. But oddly enough, I think you'd find that there were very few people who kept a mobile phone for more than a couple of years...
Now I've got a Motorola RAZR, and they've somehow lost the ability to recognize that a single person can have multiple numbers.
Sounds like you're storing your phone numbers on the SIM card, which does have this problem. Store them on the phone instead and you can absolutely store multiple numbers per name. There are lots of annoyances with the RAZR, sure, but that's not one of them.
Are you sure the difference isn't related to the graphics card in your home entertainment desktop being capable of whupping the chipset in your laptop? I know that there are exceptions, but most laptops really suck at 3D graphics (comparatively speaking, at least).
We need a system where a guy like Jacobsen here can just go down to the court, tell the judge in plain words what this fucker Katzer is doing to him, and get relief without having to put up big bucks for a lawyer and without facing $30,000 in essentially fines because of a technical screwup that someone without legal training can't be expected to have forseen.
Good luck. So far we haven't even come up with a system where people can just randomly plug together electronic components that were designed to be plugged together and expect them to work more than about 2/3 of the time without putting up big bucks for a tech. Law is way more complicated, and way more important.
Its the same with Demerol, or Vicodin. I've had both, and I've never experienced even the slightest buzz from them. They did make some truly horrific headaches go away though, for which I was mighty grateful. I had to take enough of them when I was younger (much) that I've often wondered what effect I was *supposed* to get from them. Ah, well; probably all for the best.
Then why don't they use the Dvorak layout? It's theoretically more efficient and the punctuation will be grouped to one key.
Why on Earth would it be more efficient to group all punctuation to a single key? Its already on 1 right now which really sucks when you're trying to use it for clarity. I'd love to see a layout based on avoiding predictive text clashes, personally. Probably different for each language, of course, but still if you're limiting yourself to 12 keys...
On a regular MacBook, the 2ghz Core Duo variant (so therefore somewhat more power-hungry than the new ones as I understand it) I regularly get 3:30-4:00 with the screen down at about 1/3 (very usable with the new screens), full use of applications (Office via Rosetta, and/or Eclipse as needed) and moderate use of Airport (xTorrent, web-browsing, etc) and no other significant power saving measures.
Sun is under no obligation to only release Java under the GPL. They can continue to release the code to Apple under whatever license they currently use, and nothing changes. Apple, in the face of this, may or may not choose to make their modifications available under the GPL (something that, depending on the license they had with Sun, they may or may not have been allowed to do in the past).
Uh, yes, you can install alternatives to Microsoft products. I'm not sure how that invalidates my assertion that Microsoft's products tend to be somewhat mediocre offerings.
Because until that statement, the discussion was about Windows vs Linux. You seemed to be arguing against Windows on the basis that IIS-on-Windows is crappy compared to Apache-on-Linux. I was trying to point out that Apache-on-Windows was a better comparison.
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Well, for better or for worse, that's the rule. Which means that it penalizes the trustworthy and encourages those others who do violate it to break more laws, since they're already criminals. If you truly believe that only registered workers should be allowed to work, than the better ID card is a good thing. If not, don't trash the ID card, change the bloody law already! That's the way that the system works, you know.
What I don't understand here is why the blind person can't still do all the other stuff involved in hunting but, oh, not pull the trigger? Everyone seems to argue that pulling the trigger is such a trivial part of the hunting experience, but if that's the case, why make such a big deal out of it?
You mean like, uh, Vonage has?
Also consider that its likely that, with inflation, the average electric bill will continue to increase whereas the amortized 30 year mortgage payment will not. So that $150 savings will effectively increase over time. Will that offset the potential efficiency issues? I have no idea, but its something to consider.
Motorola phones use USB - at least, several (including the RAZR) do that I know of. That was a consideration when I bought mine, since being able to charge the phone off the laptop is a big help when traveling.
Ask it four times, and then go with answer it gives twice.
Sorry about that...
Don't you think that you should wait more than 20 minutes before stealing other people's posts (not mine, but one I replied to) for Karma?
8 78422 @ 6:25pm
Reference : http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=207016&cid=16
And shame on you.
VHS won't die until the HTPC appliance fully matures, and a DRM-free medium is adapted en masse, and can record both NTSC and ATSC.
/. gives a damn about the DRM, like it or not.
Most purchasers these days don't care about DRM and have no idea what NTSC or ATSC are. Those who do know NTSC don't know what ATSC is.
DVD recordable is almost there, but is less flexible than an HTPC and won't record high-def, so why bother upgrading?
I agree that DVD*R is pretty much DOA, mainly because it was just too complicated for a lot of people though.
Tivo almost has it, except...
tivo decides how long you can keep recordings (in some cases at least), NOT you
Well, it is a FIFO setup, at least for content that you select, although not all DVRs work this way. But that's usually okay, and given the choice many people would prefer dropping the oldest footage they've asked for rather than the newest. In any case, if you try to put 22 hours of content into a 20 hour space, 2 hours of it are going to be lost.
PLUS it requires a monthly subscription and either a land line or ethernet connection to phone home.
Well, that's for namebrand Tivo. Almost all cable companies offer DVRs. Besides, compared to the cost of cable/sattelite, most people don't care about a Tivo subscription fee if they make use of the Tivo-specific features.
Also, Tivo makes it FAR to difficult to record say, Smallville or Desperate Housewives or whatever it is you and your friends all want to watch, then take that recording over to a friend's house or simply lend it out
Yup. Turns out that most of your friends probably have DVRs too. Those who don't, generally don't care. Those who do care will come and visit you to watch it if its that important.
It's FAR to difficult for the average joe to record a show for you while you're on vacation and then give you the timeshifted content.
So what? With many providers, you can just go online and add it yourself. Besides, unlike a traditional VCR you've probably set up a Season Pass to record what you want before you leave the house in the first place.
I think that VHS will be around until the HTPC is easy to use, DRM-free, HDTV capable, AND the public is made aware of it.
DVRs are easy to use, HDTV capable, and the public is aware of them. And almost nobody outside of
Of course, the problem with that is that it makes "magical" the act of traveling into the future via time machine, as opposed to doing it the normal way, by waiting around. We're all traveling into the future as we speak (or type, whatever).
One thing to consider is that right now its getting pretty easy to have "enough" RAM for 99% of all users. I mean, if you get a new machine today that had 1.5-2.0gb in it, the odds of even wanting to upgrade would be slim to none. The fact is that most people live quite reasonably with 256-512mb right now, and will never upgrade. Note: most /. readers != most people. For modern machines if you're not running anything more brutal than Office, having a gig permanently attached would probably make sense for most people who would be using an integrated graphics type of system.
Not quite that simple, I'm afraid. Besides, your argument is, to put it bluntly, bunk. You say that there's not much point - I've got a good one: money. You can buy a red-laser DVD player for $30. Add a firmware upgrade and all of a sudden you've got an HD player for $30. Call it $35 with the new licensing costs. Sure beats $999, doesn't it? Don't you think that someone, some studio, some manufacturer, would have figured this out before if it was realistic?
Besides, according to the wikiGods, H.264 at 1080p requires 50-200 mbps, depending on encoding quality. Even at 50mbps, that would be 22.5 gigabytes per hour. At 720p/1080i its only 20mbps, or 9 gigabytes per hour. Unless you're happy with, say, the quality of the average bittorrent files, but personally I'm not - I think they're often worse than standard DVDs run through a decent upconverter.
A full length HD format movie would be around 5 Gigabytes
A current DVD holds over 7GB, but doesn't hold a sufficiently high quality HD movie to make people happy. Article or not, if we could have simply added a new decoder to existing hardware and been blessed with 1080p HD goodness, we would have done.
One of the least-known features of Vonage (and probably a ton of other things as well, but hey, I'll pay $25/mo rather than do the work myself) is that you can set it up to simultaneously ring a bunch of lines. I have a Vonage number, and it rings my office, my mobile, and occasionally my house phone as well. You can do up to five numbers IIRC. Whichever one gets picked up first gets the call transferred. No extra fees, no metering, nothing - even the Caller ID information gets passed along correctly. All this and setup is as easy as adding numbers to a web form. Its almost worth it for the convenience even if you never use the phone attached to your router (or, for that matter, plug in the router in the first place).
You just won't have spent the last 700+ days carrying around the means to swap out the battery in your pocket, waiting for the one day when it's ready to be changed.
You know, that's an incredibly good point; its also one that I've never thought of before. Its totally true, though. The only gadgets I change the batteries on are things like my camera, where I have two batteries because the power can last less time than a day's shooting. Since swapping the battery is commonplace, replacing one wouldn't seem like a big deal.
However, with my laptop I just get really annoyed at the fact that my battery life sucks after a while and then end up buying a new one. Sure, there's a lot of good reasons to upgrade as well, but a new battery would probably have bought me 6-12 months of additional use. But I've never done that, and I'd be even less likely to for an iPod (or a celphone for that matter). Heck, my RAZR is nearing two years old and the battery is not what it used to be, but I'm not rushing out to get a new one - I'd rather buy an iPhone.
Thanks for the insight - and the introspection!
Where they make it work is that if you only want to use the iPod to play music, you never even need to know that it can do all that other stuff. This is a skill that a surprisingly large number of "feature-rich" products lack.
First off, I agree with your point. But oddly enough, I think you'd find that there were very few people who kept a mobile phone for more than a couple of years...
Are you sure the difference isn't related to the graphics card in your home entertainment desktop being capable of whupping the chipset in your laptop? I know that there are exceptions, but most laptops really suck at 3D graphics (comparatively speaking, at least).
Good luck. So far we haven't even come up with a system where people can just randomly plug together electronic components that were designed to be plugged together and expect them to work more than about 2/3 of the time without putting up big bucks for a tech. Law is way more complicated, and way more important.
Its the same with Demerol, or Vicodin. I've had both, and I've never experienced even the slightest buzz from them. They did make some truly horrific headaches go away though, for which I was mighty grateful. I had to take enough of them when I was younger (much) that I've often wondered what effect I was *supposed* to get from them. Ah, well; probably all for the best.
Why on Earth would it be more efficient to group all punctuation to a single key? Its already on 1 right now which really sucks when you're trying to use it for clarity. I'd love to see a layout based on avoiding predictive text clashes, personally. Probably different for each language, of course, but still if you're limiting yourself to 12 keys...
On a regular MacBook, the 2ghz Core Duo variant (so therefore somewhat more power-hungry than the new ones as I understand it) I regularly get 3:30-4:00 with the screen down at about 1/3 (very usable with the new screens), full use of applications (Office via Rosetta, and/or Eclipse as needed) and moderate use of Airport (xTorrent, web-browsing, etc) and no other significant power saving measures.
Sun is under no obligation to only release Java under the GPL. They can continue to release the code to Apple under whatever license they currently use, and nothing changes. Apple, in the face of this, may or may not choose to make their modifications available under the GPL (something that, depending on the license they had with Sun, they may or may not have been allowed to do in the past).
Because until that statement, the discussion was about Windows vs Linux. You seemed to be arguing against Windows on the basis that IIS-on-Windows is crappy compared to Apache-on-Linux. I was trying to point out that Apache-on-Windows was a better comparison.