Eh, it's not like Comcast is any worse that TimeWarner. In fact, if you can believe it - cable/internet got a ton WORSE in Southern California when TimeWarner took over for Comcast here. TimeWarner has just as crappy hold times, just as incompetent tech support, and don't worry - when you leave, they'll intentionally charge you for your returned hardware even though you returned it.
I don't want to defend Time Warner, because I'm sure they are as sucktastic as Comcast for the most part... but here in Kansas, Time Warner has been almost universally excellent in their service for providing Internet. At least that's been my experience since they started offering cable modems here back in the early 2000's. The speed has always been fast and the advertised speed has always matched the actual speed I've received. Customer service, at times was a little shaky but I've not had to call them very often so it's not been a problem.
A couple years after getting my cable modem service, I had some issues with the noise floor, and it did take several months to work out, but in TW's defense, they did just about everything they could to solve the problem. Ultimately, I knew it was a head end problem having worked in the cable modem industry prior to my move to Kansas, but of course no one at the help desk knew a wit about what was going on, so explaining to them what the problem was was completely useless. They sent out tech after tech to check the lines in my house, the cable modem, the computers, etc... but of course the noise floor was always way out of spec. They went so far as to dig up my yard and installed a ridiculously large cable (RG6 Flooded maybe?) from the box to my house to try to fix the noise floor... well, of course it didn't work. After talking with the techs that got sent out and finally getting a senior tech out, I was able to talk to her (she was pretty cute, too and her name was Raven, go figure)... anyway, she understood what I was saying, went back to corporate and eventually the problem was solved by replacing a card in the head end... exactly like I said at the beginning. The few times I have called them since then, when the tech looks at my cable modem noise specs he wonders if something is amiss because the connection is so good, I just laugh internally.
Anyway, my point is that Time Warner here in Kansas has been great - the quality of the cable modem service has been excellent - the price, meh... not so much. But I can't complain when I floor my 17 Mb/sec connection for days on end and they never complain. I don't do that so much anymore, but when I do download large files, I always seem to get about 1.5 - 1.7 MB/sec transfer rates. Outages are minimal (usually only during exceptionally heavy rains). TW is the only cable provider in the area, so it's an added bonus that they actually keep their infrastructure updated and running around here with no competition.
I contrast this to my parents, who are stuck with Comcast and how crappy their service is. If I were stuck with what they are stuck with, I would have probably have switched to DSL or something, just to stay away from Comcast. Strangely, TW is able to provide, at least to me, unlimited bandwidth for whatever I want, but Comcast isn't able to provide my parents with even their rated speed... and if they use even a fraction of their rated speed for more than an hour or so, they are cut down to dial up modem speeds for awhile. It's totally ridiculous. From that experience alone, I would never, ever, ever choose Comcast were I to move into one of their markets.
The Amazon Kindle. Is this even a legitimate competition?
Umm... no, it's not a legitimate competition. The Kindle loses hands down. The only thing it's got going for it is the display. From a technical perspective, other e-Readers beat the Kindle is almost every single category.
Kindle falls short in these categories:
1. Ergonomics (Keyboard is questionable, speed is terrible) 2. Lack of a built in light for reading at night. Spend that extra $0.01 for that LED! 3. Excessively crippled by DRM 4. Lack of supported formats 5. Price 6 Expandability
The list goes on... what's really scary is the fact that the Sony readers excel in almost every category. Sony. What's the world coming to when Sony is the good guy and Amazon is the evil money grubbing corporation that hates it's customers.
Do NOT look directly at the sun through the telescope, of course. Instead, you use the telescope as a projector. It takes a minute or two to aim: the trick is to use the shadow from the telescope to aim. When the shadow is smallest, you're pointing the right way.)
Doesn't the sun damage the telescope itself? I thought you had to use a solar filter no matter how you viewed it. Not having much luck with Google searches, so maybe some amateur astronomers can chime in here.
Yes, it will ruin a telescope. The heat will melt plastic and sometimes metal, depending on the size of the scope. I made the mistake of forgetting to cover my spotting scope one time while viewing the sun on my 10" SC and it melted the innards of the spotting scope almost immediately. It was a mistake that will never be repeated, I can tell you!
I can't imagine what would happen to the 10" if there were no solar filter on it and it were pointed at the sun... it would be like a laser, at least briefly.
I don't agree about censoring drug-related sites, but about the other contents...
The submitter of this article is a cock for including that summary, as is the editor who greenlit it.
Anonymous is not protesting this because the AU government is proposing censorship of "rape, drug use, bestiality and child sex abuse." They are doing it because they are proposing censoring "small breasted women" (because, you know, small breasted women MIGHT be under 18), among other things.
They are lashing out at the “ambiguity” of the often-used term “unwanted content”, the Australian Government is trying to crack down on pornography featuring female ejaculation and women with small breasts... yes, those things that are a threat to modern society. I mean, if females start ejaculating, we are all doomed!
So the entire article is a load of shit. I expect better from Slashdot editors than greenlighting a load of sensationalist horseshit about a technical issue.
MKV files don't work on bloody anything reliably except VLC, even though they're theoretically an h264 variant. Then you have various other mpeg4 flavors, and that's pretty much it in terms of getting HD content out there at reasonable bandwidth.
We've been using wrapper plug-ins as a dirty, hacky path to web video since the launch of the web proper. Enough's enough.
So TLDR: no, no, no, no no
MKV files work just fine in anything that uses mplayer as it's base, pretty much. Which describes a rather large portion of the available media players out there. I've not had any problems playing it back in the last year or so. Prior to that, I would have agreed with you, but the last year or so has seen it become pretty standard and a robust container format.
As a point of fact,.MKV has nothing to do with H.264. You can have just about any type of file in the MKV container, not just H.264.
I said absolutely nothing about wants in the quoted text. Sure, I WANT a huge SSD array. However, I do not need one
I think it's very unlikely you NEED a computer at all. Let's say you do, does it NEED to be faster than a 486sx25? Or do you just WANT to be able to compile something in less than an hour? When people talk about computer "needs" it's usually understood that we mean "needs to fulfill some desire", because very few people can claim to need any kind of computation device in the same way they need food, water or shelter.
I don't NEED 4TB of disk space (well, not an extra 4TB anyway), as you correctly point out. And no I don't NEED my system to boot in half the time it used to, or firefox to come up in 1 second vs 15. The point I was trying to make is that the $200 I spend on an SSD made more difference to the day-to-day general performance of my machine than the $500 I spent upgrading the CPU and memory. So it's better value as an upgrade, IMHO. That runs contrary to most people's common sense (as demonstrated by this thread) making it all the more important to try and spread the word as far as I'm concerned.
If you want to get pedantic about the word NEED, then you are correct. However, I qualified my definition of NEED in this context by saying:
Your life and livelihood are not going to be affected if your OS loads in 23 seconds vs 38 seconds. If your MS Word document takes 3 seconds to open up instead of 1, your world will not come crashing down and your customers are not going to leave in droves.
I'm not talking about base human needs, I'm talking about the needs of business or day to day life. The fact is, you do not NEED your Word documents to open in 1 second vs 3. You do not NEED your OS to boot in 23 seconds as opposed to 38.
There are people who do, an example would be a car computer that needs to boot up as fast as possible (I'm not talking about an ECU here, I'm talking about something like an aftermarket entertainment system or some such) - if the computer is slow to boot, people would not buy that product, whereas if it was on and running by the time they put the car in drive, they'd be happy with it. That is a NEED. People will not buy the product because it's too slow vs. buying the product because it is fast.
Another example is a high capacity data gathering system... it may NEED to write the data at 180 MB/s for a sustained period.
You and the majority of the people who feel they NEED an SSD drive are not in this category. They are in the WANT category.
There is NOTHING WRONG WITH THIS. I am not stating that there is, nor have I stated that there is in previous posts, which you and others seem to be unable to grasp. My original post said that purchasing one is ridiculous unless you have very specific needs, then you go on to list your wants. I submit, again, that it's ridiculous given the alternatives available. It may be acceptable to you to spend the money for the performance but that makes it no less ridiculous. People spend money on ridiculous things all the time, and again there is NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT. I do it myself. But to say that spending $600 to save 2 seconds on occasion and to save another 20 seconds on the occasions that you actually reboot or power on is reasonable is insulting to the majority of the world population.
I am glad you have that sort of disposable income and I am glad that _I_ have that sort of disposable income. However, I do not kid myself into believing that buying status symbols, such as SSDs, is anything but buying a status symbol when a mechanical hard drive will provide 75 - 90% of the performance at 1/8th the price.
Give it up man. Your points are inherently biased by your own cost:performance:size relationship values. Saying that SSDs have no value to anyone because they don't fit your own usage models is just RETARDED. I'm not even going to explain to you my usage models, or the other usage models like mine, for which an SSD has proven to be a very nice, and well worthwhile, upgrade, worth every penny. I'm not going to explain it because it's not necessary for me to use examples to make the very simple point that I am making: not everybody wants the same thing you do, so stop with the ridiculous generalizations and RETARDED references to "e-peen", which is just about the most juvenile phrase I have read in quite a long time.
You really don't have much in the way of reading comprehension, do you? My statements are not biased in any way, shape or form. They are merely statements of fact. Please quote where I said that SSDs have no value to anyone, or heck, even quote where I said they have no value. You can't, because I said just the opposite. They have a value and that value is different to different people. For the vast majority of people, it is a status symbol for the perceived differences in their day to day work. As I said, loading your Word document in 1 seconds as opposed to 3 seconds is not a huge deal. If that's worth $600 to you, great - I did not say that was wrong. I merely stated that the cost:performance ratio outside a reasonable realm for most people.
Since, by your post, you are asserting that the cost:performance ratio is NOT outside the realm of reasonable for most people, I would like you to point to some statistics that show SSDs have replaced mechanical hard drives, either in existing installations or in new sales. In fact, why are they still selling mechanical hard drives? Oh... it may be because the cost:performance ratio of a mechnanical hard drive is more reasonable.
There's no generalizations here. I said the majority of people do not NEED an SSD. Of those that say they NEED an SSD, the majority of those do not actually NEED one but WANT one.
So again, your post is completely devoid of any useful context as your whole argument is based off of things I did not say or imply. Way to go in setting up that straw man and good job in knocking it down!
"Very specific needs" like wanting my OS & apps to load as fast as possible? Putting OS, apps, pagefile etc on the SSD greatly improves system responsiveness. FLACs, MP4s & JPGs can stay on a spinning disk, I don't need to access them so quickly. A couple hundred bucks on a smallish SSD gives you a MUCH better performance kick that spending the equivalent on RAM or CPU, in my experience (provided of course you have at least an average spec machine to start with).
Haha... I don't know if you're trying to be serious or funny. If serious, then I kind of feel sorry for you, but your e-peen is huge, man, huge!
You quoted me saying "Very specific needs" and within 2 words, you use the word "want."
I said absolutely nothing about wants in the quoted text. Sure, I WANT a huge SSD array. However, I do not need one. Sure, you WANT your OS and apps to load as fast as possible, but you do not need it. Very few people NEED the speed of an SSD. The cost:performance ratio is outside the realm of reality for most people, you included I'm sorry to be the bearer of that bad news, but you do not NEED your OS and apps to load that extra 2 or 3 seconds faster than a mechanical hard drive. Your life and livelihood are not going to be affected if your OS loads in 23 seconds vs 38 seconds. If your MS Word document takes 3 seconds to open up instead of 1, your world will not come crashing down and your customers are not going to leave in droves. You do not NEED the speed of an SSD.
A couple hundred bucks will net you almost 4 TB of space vs the 128 - 256 GB of space the same money of an SSD drive will net you. You may not need 4 TB of space and 128 GB may be more than adequate for your needs... but we get back to the cost:performance ratio, which is what my whole post was about and which you failed to apparently understand. The cost:performance ratio, as measured against a mechanical hard drive is not there except in some very rare circumstances that very few people in the world will encounter at the present time; You are one of these people. I am also one of these people.
Now, if you want to talk about swinging your SSD e-peen around, as I said, you win my good man, you win. If this product performs as advertised, I will spend under $100 for the same performance you get and have 10x the space... at that point, you lose man, your e-peen just fell off!
Oh joy of joys, I was hoping you would be so kind as to bestow unto me the gift of another kind response.
You are a fucking idiot and can not read.
Clearly, you are the truest source of all wisdom. You are a gentleman of caliber previously unattained. I am not worthy of your kindness, dear sir and I bow to your civility.
Please do not continue to use the Internet, as even a short article is apparently beyond your comprehension.
You have graced us with so much kindness in so little space.
one of the ultimate forms of demonstration of your rank stupidity
Why thank you kindly sir. I hope you could be so kind as to continue to heap praise upon me.
Please destroy your computer now, or at the very least disconnect your computer from the internet so that you do not harm other people with your base ignorance
I am so glad that you devoted so much time to discussing the topic at hand. A lesser man might have resorted to slinging insults rather than actually talking about the (lack of) technical merit of the device that this slashvertisement is dedicated to. I am infinitely thankful to you for being so kind and considerate.
The depths of the technical aspects of this conversation are seldom reached or surpassed these days, I thank you for your immense insight and kindness in this matter.
Hence the "Derrr nevermind" post I made six minutes before you posted this diatribe.
Once again, you are full of fail. You don't think that maybe that was written just AFTER you made your uninformed post and PRIOR to when you decided to actually read the article and then post a correction?
Gosh, I dunno... maybe. We aren't in an IRC chat room. I know that's kind of hard to grasp for people with short attention spans, but really... we aren't. This is a message forum, it's not real time.
The device takes the form of a 2.5in to 3.5in hard disk caddy
So I thank you for your kind concern of
un a fucking cable from your HD to the caddy. Is this so fucking hard to get a grasp on? For christs sake
And I hope you have a very nice day kind sir.
Dear kind sir,
You are a fucking idiot and can not read. Please do not continue to use the Internet, as even a short article is apparently beyond your comprehension.
You even go so far as to quote the point that refutes your assertion, trying to use it as an example of why you are correct. This is, perhaps, one of the ultimate forms of demonstration of your rank stupidity. Please destroy your computer now, or at the very least disconnect your computer from the internet so that you do not harm other people with your base ignorance.
This adapter is for 2.5" hard drives - if you put a 3.5 drive in it, you wouldn't fit drive+adapter+SSD into a 3.5" bay. Who makes a 2TB 2.5" SATA drive currently? I am not aware of any...
Seriously... did not one read the article? You mount the fucking 2.5" drive in the caddy and mount your 3.5" HD where you would normally mount it and run a fucking cable from your HD to the caddy. Is this so fucking hard to get a grasp on? For christs sake.
The device takes the form of a 2.5in to 3.5in hard disk caddy with a couple of SATA connectors on the end.
Good job Claave! You apparently didn't even get to the second paragraph before submitting the article. You can't use a 2TB hard drive with this because there are no 2TB 2.5" drives yet.
Good job, GEvil! You didn't even read the article at ALL!
Please point to where it says you must use a 2.5" hard drive. Hmm, you don't think that maybe... JUST MAYBE... the 2.5" caddy is FOR THE SSD so that you can mount it in a 3.5" bay? Then you mount your 3.5" HD as normal!
Gosh... reading comprehension! Learn it. Live it! Love it! Take it home and call it George.
Well... it looks like there finally might be a reason to spend the money on an SSD. Up until now, it would be a nice speed boost, but the cost:performance ratio is so out of whack for SSDs, it just makes purchasing one ridiculous unless you have some very specific needs. For 95% of the people who have purchased them, they just want the biggest e-peen. That's fine and all, but my days of swinging around the biggest e-peen are over, so I've held off buying an SSD until the prices drop and capacity goes WAYYYY up.
However, with this particular device, it actually makes it worth it to spring for a lower capacity, fast SSD (for naturally less money than the higher capacity ones) that will cache the files I use the most. The question is, and it wasn't really clear from the article unfortunately, is it a real time "mirror" - in so far as over time, if I start using more file and others less, will the drive start caching those newer files that I use more than the older ones I am using less? Assuming it does (since it would be kind of useless if not), this makes an 80 GB SSD a viable option!
However, the one drawback I see to this is my current RAID 0 setup would be unusable and I'd have to switch back to using one drive. That's not a terrible thing, as I've never been too thrilled with the whole RAID 0 thing and if the minor speed advantages it imparts are fully mitigated by the SSD - switching over to a single 2TB drive is awesome.
I would definitely shell out some bucks for this solution, assuming it works as advertised.
The submitter of this article is apparently clueless as to what "0wnage" is... the router is not owned. You've hacked a password to allow you to use the router. To own the router, you would need root access. You don't have that with this attack... you have a simple WPA-PSK password. Big deal... anyone can do that with a bit of time on their hands and a Backtrack 4 CD on laptop. Wheeee... you are a l33t scr1pt k1ddie now!
It's an interesting article from the standpoint of how an unconfigured router is insecure (that is to say, it's the article isn't really that interesting since everyone should know by now that an unconfigured router is insecure) - but it's not news and it's not really useful. It's DEFINITELY not ownage in any way, shape or form.
I wonder what this means for Blue-Ray. It could be a major blow to Blue-Ray protection if this somehow allowed the interception of the encryption keys.
Umm... what rock have you been living under? Blu-Ray protection is an utter failure all on it's own. A hack PS3 isn't going to make a bit of difference to Blu-Ray protection; The BR encryption keys are already easily acquired.
If they are able to bypass the hypervisor and then do hack mods for the PS3 this might open up a whole new avenue for modders and interest in the platform that was not there before. In other words, this might not be a bad thing for the PS3 overall.
It would definitely be a bad thing for the PS3, just like it was for the original XBox. If people start buying the consoles, but NOT buying any games or content (since they'd be using the PS3 for something else) - then the PS3 becomes a major loss and drain on company profits. It's the razor and the content is the blades - sell the razor for cheap and rape them on the blades. If there are no blades being purchased then selling the razor is pointless.
Not the poster but in Australia movie tickets cost $15 for a standard ticket - more ritzier set-ups go as high as $30. What is the cost in the US and elsewhere? Are we getting ripped off?
It depends on what theater you go to...
Standard tickets are $5 - $7 for matinee, then you have prime time which usually runs $7 - $10. We are starting to see a lot more premium theaters that have suites and recliners, restaurants, etc... and those tickets are $15 - $20 each. I pay for the suites which are $20 a piece because, well, it's worth it and they give you "free" $7.50 in food, so the ticket is really only $12.50 if you plan on ordering something anyway... and no one under 18 is allowed. It's much more pleasant in the theater. Oh and there's only like 30 seats in the suite theaters. Worth the premium IMHO and the seats are comfortable. And they bring you food/snacks. Free refills on drinks, too.
So then what would the ultimate and the last one be?
While "irregardless" may not the be ultimate atrocity vis-a-vis the English language, it's definitely at the top of the list for "words" or phrases that scream "I'm from the rattiest trailer park in the country and have actually found a way to obtain a negative education level. I actually suck the intelligence out of people that are within earshot of me." Hmm... perhaps it is the ultimate.
XBMC, Sabnzbd+, Newzbin, Giganews on $350 worth of computer hardware. In their case, since there's no point in 1080p, I should have gone with a cheaper ION platform. I figure I could have put the whole thing together for $200 - $250 under the right sale circumstances.
Even if you have to pay $20 to buy the disc, it's still cheaper than taking a date to the movies.
I wanted to comment on this. While I disagree with some of the points of your post, it's somewhat immaterial to what I wanted to comment on so I won't get into it.
Yes, it's cheaper to pay $20 for a DVD - but what about Blu-Ray? Don't those tend to be $35 - $50 or something? I do not own nor will I ever own a Blu-ray player so I've not priced the discs lately. So disregarding the cost issue (though I do think this is a major factor, all the same) - lets say it's an acceptable sum to pay, be it $20 or $35 - I had the misfortune of pulling the dusty old DVD player out of the closet (literally) to test a TV I was selling last week. I popped the DVD in and literally had to wait nearly 2 minutes before I could even get the movie to play. It went through all the warnings and other associated crap before it would even get to the DVD menu, which was of course locked out so you are forced to go through all that crap.
I have been storing all of my media on my household server for going on 5 years now - I've not used a DVD in that time to speak of. After last week, it all came rushing back to me as to why I don't buy DVD's anymore. Not only is it excessively inconvenient to store discs and find the ones you want when you want them, but all the absolute junk you have to go through to even GET THE MOVIE TO PLAY is absolutely unacceptable. First run DVD's could be delivered to my house for $1 on opening day of a blockbuster movie and I would still not bother with it.
In time and frustration, a DVD, at any price, is not cheaper than taking a date to the movies. At least around here we have the suites and fork & screen theaters, so it pretty much negates all the douchebaggery in the regular theater's. Granted, though, I do have to sit through some crap in the theater as well, but at least I can have people bring me food and drink at my beck and call. I could buy a wife to handle that, but that comes with a lot of other aggravation.
I just set my parents up with a virtual copy of my media setup... they are technologically backwards and they are able to use the media setup. They point and the TV shows or movies they want and a little while later they are watching them in 720p HDTV (they have a small HDTV, so no point in doing 1080p). I suspect that after a month or two of this, much like when I finally convinced them Tivo was the wave of the future, which they can now not imagine watching TV without, they will not be able to imagine watching TV without the media center and all their content being available immediately, in glorious HD. No more shuffling discs or going to the store to rent a DVD. They want it and bam, there it is.
Anyway, my point is that paying $20 for a disc is on it's way out, regardless of how cheap or expensive it is. It's just not worth the hassle at any price.
Personally, I think you have a skewed sense of pricing between mediums. You equate a book to a music single. I would equate a book to an album or movie. A short story would be more equivalent to a single. In short, what you want is never going to realistically to happen. You can create a single in a day. You can't do that with a book. One has a greater production cost.
Right. I'm a published author, and the last tech book I wrote (some 1,200 pages) took about a year of researching, writing, checking for typos, layouting, rechecking, updating... etc. to complete. Equating this to one song is inappropriate, IMHO. Considering that a typical author gets some 12% to 14% of the publisher's (not seller's retail) price, you can imagine that writing any book that is not a bestseller is a matter of love anyway. Still... that the grand-parent poster considers this a $1 work is really discouraging. He may as well "pirate" it if that's what he thinks it is worth.
Technical books are different. When I wrote that, I was more thinking of works of fiction. I do not apply what I wrote above to non-fiction books that require more than imagination to write. I was thinking merely of the entertainment value of a book. A technical book or reference book is worth more than a buck.
While I do see equating a book more to a whole album and I would agree with that... I still am not going to pay exorbitant prices for them. A paperback costs $5 - $7 typically. An ebook should cost less. If they are making a profit, and a hefty profit at that, at $7 a book, with the cost of physically moving, printing, etc... the book, they can cut that cost in half and still make a profit.
Now, how much the author gets from the publisher is another matter entirely and does not matter to this particular thread, since if the author got more from the publisher (or eliminated the publisher entirely, which is perfectly reasonable given the Internet), then the cost per book should also come down.
Hell, even your technical book would be a the equivalent of a best seller if you sold it for $4 and only 200,000 people bought it.
While I am not in the same position as you, your post touches on the other issue with E-Books: Cost.
I absolutely refuse to pay $25 for an E-Book. That is ludicrous. Complete rape.
I will pay $1 for a book, maybe $2 and that would be severely pushing it. I will not pay $5, $10, $25 for an E-Book. Sorry, but no. There is virtually no cost to distributing an E-Book. There is no paper, ink, shipping, storage, typesetting, etc... there is simply pressing a button to make a copy.
That's all a book is worth to me. If a book costs more than that, I am being ripped off and I won't pay it. When is the publishing industry going to get it through their heads that overcharging by a factor of 25 is unreasonable and people aren't going to pay it indefinitely. They get pirated because they overcharge. I started to buy music again when Amazon started offering DRM free MP3s for a buck. I think 99c is still a bit overpriced, but it's within the realm of reasonability and thus I pay for my music. The same will go for books... but until then, I hope places like the Pirate Bay continue to exist to the benefit of the world at large.
Well that's not exactly true. An Atom N280 paired with 945 doesn't have the horsepower to playback 1080p and maybe jerky 720p - but a WD TV Live can. Unless you go for a ION chipset, but then you're in the $300 range where as with the WD TV you're closer to $100.
Screw the ION. Go with a quad core 9550 from Microcenter for $160. Add a couple gigs of ram for $30, a mITX motherboard for $100 and an Antec mITX case for $70. Pick your hard drive configuration and viola, you have a wicked computer system capable of playing anything you want AND a quad core beast that can handle any other task you throw at it.
Yes, it's more than $100, but it's also far more capable and flexible. The WD Live is a silly little thing simply because it can't play that many formats. If and when a company starts shipping a product that can play as many formats as XBMC, then we'll have a non-silly media center product... but until that day, any media center product that can't play what XBMC can play is a piece of shit.
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Eh, it's not like Comcast is any worse that TimeWarner. In fact, if you can believe it - cable/internet got a ton WORSE in Southern California when TimeWarner took over for Comcast here. TimeWarner has just as crappy hold times, just as incompetent tech support, and don't worry - when you leave, they'll intentionally charge you for your returned hardware even though you returned it.
I don't want to defend Time Warner, because I'm sure they are as sucktastic as Comcast for the most part... but here in Kansas, Time Warner has been almost universally excellent in their service for providing Internet. At least that's been my experience since they started offering cable modems here back in the early 2000's. The speed has always been fast and the advertised speed has always matched the actual speed I've received. Customer service, at times was a little shaky but I've not had to call them very often so it's not been a problem.
A couple years after getting my cable modem service, I had some issues with the noise floor, and it did take several months to work out, but in TW's defense, they did just about everything they could to solve the problem. Ultimately, I knew it was a head end problem having worked in the cable modem industry prior to my move to Kansas, but of course no one at the help desk knew a wit about what was going on, so explaining to them what the problem was was completely useless. They sent out tech after tech to check the lines in my house, the cable modem, the computers, etc... but of course the noise floor was always way out of spec. They went so far as to dig up my yard and installed a ridiculously large cable (RG6 Flooded maybe?) from the box to my house to try to fix the noise floor... well, of course it didn't work. After talking with the techs that got sent out and finally getting a senior tech out, I was able to talk to her (she was pretty cute, too and her name was Raven, go figure)... anyway, she understood what I was saying, went back to corporate and eventually the problem was solved by replacing a card in the head end... exactly like I said at the beginning. The few times I have called them since then, when the tech looks at my cable modem noise specs he wonders if something is amiss because the connection is so good, I just laugh internally.
Anyway, my point is that Time Warner here in Kansas has been great - the quality of the cable modem service has been excellent - the price, meh... not so much. But I can't complain when I floor my 17 Mb/sec connection for days on end and they never complain. I don't do that so much anymore, but when I do download large files, I always seem to get about 1.5 - 1.7 MB/sec transfer rates. Outages are minimal (usually only during exceptionally heavy rains). TW is the only cable provider in the area, so it's an added bonus that they actually keep their infrastructure updated and running around here with no competition.
I contrast this to my parents, who are stuck with Comcast and how crappy their service is. If I were stuck with what they are stuck with, I would have probably have switched to DSL or something, just to stay away from Comcast. Strangely, TW is able to provide, at least to me, unlimited bandwidth for whatever I want, but Comcast isn't able to provide my parents with even their rated speed... and if they use even a fraction of their rated speed for more than an hour or so, they are cut down to dial up modem speeds for awhile. It's totally ridiculous. From that experience alone, I would never, ever, ever choose Comcast were I to move into one of their markets.
The Amazon Kindle. Is this even a legitimate competition?
Umm... no, it's not a legitimate competition. The Kindle loses hands down. The only thing it's got going for it is the display. From a technical perspective, other e-Readers beat the Kindle is almost every single category.
Kindle falls short in these categories:
1. Ergonomics (Keyboard is questionable, speed is terrible)
2. Lack of a built in light for reading at night. Spend that extra $0.01 for that LED!
3. Excessively crippled by DRM
4. Lack of supported formats
5. Price
6 Expandability
The list goes on... what's really scary is the fact that the Sony readers excel in almost every category. Sony. What's the world coming to when Sony is the good guy and Amazon is the evil money grubbing corporation that hates it's customers.
Doesn't the sun damage the telescope itself? I thought you had to use a solar filter no matter how you viewed it. Not having much luck with Google searches, so maybe some amateur astronomers can chime in here.
Yes, it will ruin a telescope. The heat will melt plastic and sometimes metal, depending on the size of the scope. I made the mistake of forgetting to cover my spotting scope one time while viewing the sun on my 10" SC and it melted the innards of the spotting scope almost immediately. It was a mistake that will never be repeated, I can tell you!
I can't imagine what would happen to the 10" if there were no solar filter on it and it were pointed at the sun... it would be like a laser, at least briefly.
I don't agree about censoring drug-related sites, but about the other contents...
The submitter of this article is a cock for including that summary, as is the editor who greenlit it.
Anonymous is not protesting this because the AU government is proposing censorship of "rape, drug use, bestiality and child sex abuse." They are doing it because they are proposing censoring "small breasted women" (because, you know, small breasted women MIGHT be under 18), among other things.
They are lashing out at the “ambiguity” of the often-used term “unwanted content”, the Australian Government is trying to crack down on pornography featuring female ejaculation and women with small breasts... yes, those things that are a threat to modern society. I mean, if females start ejaculating, we are all doomed!
So the entire article is a load of shit. I expect better from Slashdot editors than greenlighting a load of sensationalist horseshit about a technical issue.
MKV files don't work on bloody anything reliably except VLC, even though they're theoretically an h264 variant. Then you have various other mpeg4 flavors, and that's pretty much it in terms of getting HD content out there at reasonable bandwidth.
We've been using wrapper plug-ins as a dirty, hacky path to web video since the launch of the web proper. Enough's enough.
So TLDR: no, no, no, no no
MKV files work just fine in anything that uses mplayer as it's base, pretty much. Which describes a rather large portion of the available media players out there. I've not had any problems playing it back in the last year or so. Prior to that, I would have agreed with you, but the last year or so has seen it become pretty standard and a robust container format.
As a point of fact, .MKV has nothing to do with H.264. You can have just about any type of file in the MKV container, not just H.264.
I think it's very unlikely you NEED a computer at all. Let's say you do, does it NEED to be faster than a 486sx25? Or do you just WANT to be able to compile something in less than an hour? When people talk about computer "needs" it's usually understood that we mean "needs to fulfill some desire", because very few people can claim to need any kind of computation device in the same way they need food, water or shelter.
I don't NEED 4TB of disk space (well, not an extra 4TB anyway), as you correctly point out. And no I don't NEED my system to boot in half the time it used to, or firefox to come up in 1 second vs 15. The point I was trying to make is that the $200 I spend on an SSD made more difference to the day-to-day general performance of my machine than the $500 I spent upgrading the CPU and memory. So it's better value as an upgrade, IMHO. That runs contrary to most people's common sense (as demonstrated by this thread) making it all the more important to try and spread the word as far as I'm concerned.
If you want to get pedantic about the word NEED, then you are correct. However, I qualified my definition of NEED in this context by saying:
Your life and livelihood are not going to be affected if your OS loads in 23 seconds vs 38 seconds. If your MS Word document takes 3 seconds to open up instead of 1, your world will not come crashing down and your customers are not going to leave in droves.
I'm not talking about base human needs, I'm talking about the needs of business or day to day life. The fact is, you do not NEED your Word documents to open in 1 second vs 3. You do not NEED your OS to boot in 23 seconds as opposed to 38.
There are people who do, an example would be a car computer that needs to boot up as fast as possible (I'm not talking about an ECU here, I'm talking about something like an aftermarket entertainment system or some such) - if the computer is slow to boot, people would not buy that product, whereas if it was on and running by the time they put the car in drive, they'd be happy with it. That is a NEED. People will not buy the product because it's too slow vs. buying the product because it is fast.
Another example is a high capacity data gathering system ... it may NEED to write the data at 180 MB/s for a sustained period.
You and the majority of the people who feel they NEED an SSD drive are not in this category. They are in the WANT category.
There is NOTHING WRONG WITH THIS. I am not stating that there is, nor have I stated that there is in previous posts, which you and others seem to be unable to grasp. My original post said that purchasing one is ridiculous unless you have very specific needs, then you go on to list your wants. I submit, again, that it's ridiculous given the alternatives available. It may be acceptable to you to spend the money for the performance but that makes it no less ridiculous. People spend money on ridiculous things all the time, and again there is NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT. I do it myself. But to say that spending $600 to save 2 seconds on occasion and to save another 20 seconds on the occasions that you actually reboot or power on is reasonable is insulting to the majority of the world population.
I am glad you have that sort of disposable income and I am glad that _I_ have that sort of disposable income. However, I do not kid myself into believing that buying status symbols, such as SSDs, is anything but buying a status symbol when a mechanical hard drive will provide 75 - 90% of the performance at 1/8th the price.
Give it up man. Your points are inherently biased by your own cost:performance:size relationship values. Saying that SSDs have no value to anyone because they don't fit your own usage models is just RETARDED. I'm not even going to explain to you my usage models, or the other usage models like mine, for which an SSD has proven to be a very nice, and well worthwhile, upgrade, worth every penny. I'm not going to explain it because it's not necessary for me to use examples to make the very simple point that I am making: not everybody wants the same thing you do, so stop with the ridiculous generalizations and RETARDED references to "e-peen", which is just about the most juvenile phrase I have read in quite a long time.
You really don't have much in the way of reading comprehension, do you? My statements are not biased in any way, shape or form. They are merely statements of fact. Please quote where I said that SSDs have no value to anyone, or heck, even quote where I said they have no value. You can't, because I said just the opposite. They have a value and that value is different to different people. For the vast majority of people, it is a status symbol for the perceived differences in their day to day work. As I said, loading your Word document in 1 seconds as opposed to 3 seconds is not a huge deal. If that's worth $600 to you, great - I did not say that was wrong. I merely stated that the cost:performance ratio outside a reasonable realm for most people.
Since, by your post, you are asserting that the cost:performance ratio is NOT outside the realm of reasonable for most people, I would like you to point to some statistics that show SSDs have replaced mechanical hard drives, either in existing installations or in new sales. In fact, why are they still selling mechanical hard drives? Oh... it may be because the cost:performance ratio of a mechnanical hard drive is more reasonable.
There's no generalizations here. I said the majority of people do not NEED an SSD. Of those that say they NEED an SSD, the majority of those do not actually NEED one but WANT one.
So again, your post is completely devoid of any useful context as your whole argument is based off of things I did not say or imply. Way to go in setting up that straw man and good job in knocking it down!
"Very specific needs" like wanting my OS & apps to load as fast as possible? Putting OS, apps, pagefile etc on the SSD greatly improves system responsiveness. FLACs, MP4s & JPGs can stay on a spinning disk, I don't need to access them so quickly. A couple hundred bucks on a smallish SSD gives you a MUCH better performance kick that spending the equivalent on RAM or CPU, in my experience (provided of course you have at least an average spec machine to start with).
Haha... I don't know if you're trying to be serious or funny. If serious, then I kind of feel sorry for you, but your e-peen is huge, man, huge!
You quoted me saying "Very specific needs" and within 2 words, you use the word "want."
I said absolutely nothing about wants in the quoted text. Sure, I WANT a huge SSD array. However, I do not need one. Sure, you WANT your OS and apps to load as fast as possible, but you do not need it. Very few people NEED the speed of an SSD. The cost:performance ratio is outside the realm of reality for most people, you included I'm sorry to be the bearer of that bad news, but you do not NEED your OS and apps to load that extra 2 or 3 seconds faster than a mechanical hard drive. Your life and livelihood are not going to be affected if your OS loads in 23 seconds vs 38 seconds. If your MS Word document takes 3 seconds to open up instead of 1, your world will not come crashing down and your customers are not going to leave in droves. You do not NEED the speed of an SSD.
A couple hundred bucks will net you almost 4 TB of space vs the 128 - 256 GB of space the same money of an SSD drive will net you. You may not need 4 TB of space and 128 GB may be more than adequate for your needs... but we get back to the cost:performance ratio, which is what my whole post was about and which you failed to apparently understand. The cost:performance ratio, as measured against a mechanical hard drive is not there except in some very rare circumstances that very few people in the world will encounter at the present time; You are one of these people. I am also one of these people.
Now, if you want to talk about swinging your SSD e-peen around, as I said, you win my good man, you win. If this product performs as advertised, I will spend under $100 for the same performance you get and have 10x the space... at that point, you lose man, your e-peen just fell off!
Oh joy of joys, I was hoping you would be so kind as to bestow unto me the gift of another kind response.
You are a fucking idiot and can not read.
Clearly, you are the truest source of all wisdom. You are a gentleman of caliber previously unattained. I am not worthy of your kindness, dear sir and I bow to your civility.
Please do not continue to use the Internet, as even a short article is apparently beyond your comprehension.
You have graced us with so much kindness in so little space.
one of the ultimate forms of demonstration of your rank stupidity
Why thank you kindly sir. I hope you could be so kind as to continue to heap praise upon me.
Please destroy your computer now, or at the very least disconnect your computer from the internet so that you do not harm other people with your base ignorance
I am so glad that you devoted so much time to discussing the topic at hand. A lesser man might have resorted to slinging insults rather than actually talking about the (lack of) technical merit of the device that this slashvertisement is dedicated to. I am infinitely thankful to you for being so kind and considerate.
The depths of the technical aspects of this conversation are seldom reached or surpassed these days, I thank you for your immense insight and kindness in this matter.
tl;dr. np.
Hence the "Derrr nevermind" post I made six minutes before you posted this diatribe.
Once again, you are full of fail. You don't think that maybe that was written just AFTER you made your uninformed post and PRIOR to when you decided to actually read the article and then post a correction?
Gosh, I dunno... maybe. We aren't in an IRC chat room. I know that's kind of hard to grasp for people with short attention spans, but really... we aren't. This is a message forum, it's not real time.
Dear kind sir
I suspect we may have read different articles. Your assertion of
You mount the fucking 2.5" drive in the caddy and mount your 3.5" HD where you would normally mount it
Does not match the article when it says
The device takes the form of a 2.5in to 3.5in hard disk caddy
So I thank you for your kind concern of
un a fucking cable from your HD to the caddy. Is this so fucking hard to get a grasp on? For christs sake
And I hope you have a very nice day kind sir.
Dear kind sir,
You are a fucking idiot and can not read. Please do not continue to use the Internet, as even a short article is apparently beyond your comprehension.
You even go so far as to quote the point that refutes your assertion, trying to use it as an example of why you are correct. This is, perhaps, one of the ultimate forms of demonstration of your rank stupidity. Please destroy your computer now, or at the very least disconnect your computer from the internet so that you do not harm other people with your base ignorance.
This adapter is for 2.5" hard drives - if you put a 3.5 drive in it, you wouldn't fit drive+adapter+SSD into a 3.5" bay. Who makes a 2TB 2.5" SATA drive currently? I am not aware of any...
Seriously... did not one read the article? You mount the fucking 2.5" drive in the caddy and mount your 3.5" HD where you would normally mount it and run a fucking cable from your HD to the caddy. Is this so fucking hard to get a grasp on? For christs sake.
The device takes the form of a 2.5in to 3.5in hard disk caddy with a couple of SATA connectors on the end.
Good job Claave! You apparently didn't even get to the second paragraph before submitting the article. You can't use a 2TB hard drive with this because there are no 2TB 2.5" drives yet.
Good job, GEvil! You didn't even read the article at ALL!
Please point to where it says you must use a 2.5" hard drive. Hmm, you don't think that maybe... JUST MAYBE... the 2.5" caddy is FOR THE SSD so that you can mount it in a 3.5" bay? Then you mount your 3.5" HD as normal!
Gosh... reading comprehension! Learn it. Live it! Love it! Take it home and call it George.
kthxbye
Well... it looks like there finally might be a reason to spend the money on an SSD. Up until now, it would be a nice speed boost, but the cost:performance ratio is so out of whack for SSDs, it just makes purchasing one ridiculous unless you have some very specific needs. For 95% of the people who have purchased them, they just want the biggest e-peen. That's fine and all, but my days of swinging around the biggest e-peen are over, so I've held off buying an SSD until the prices drop and capacity goes WAYYYY up.
However, with this particular device, it actually makes it worth it to spring for a lower capacity, fast SSD (for naturally less money than the higher capacity ones) that will cache the files I use the most. The question is, and it wasn't really clear from the article unfortunately, is it a real time "mirror" - in so far as over time, if I start using more file and others less, will the drive start caching those newer files that I use more than the older ones I am using less? Assuming it does (since it would be kind of useless if not), this makes an 80 GB SSD a viable option!
However, the one drawback I see to this is my current RAID 0 setup would be unusable and I'd have to switch back to using one drive. That's not a terrible thing, as I've never been too thrilled with the whole RAID 0 thing and if the minor speed advantages it imparts are fully mitigated by the SSD - switching over to a single 2TB drive is awesome.
I would definitely shell out some bucks for this solution, assuming it works as advertised.
The submitter of this article is apparently clueless as to what "0wnage" is ... the router is not owned. You've hacked a password to allow you to use the router. To own the router, you would need root access. You don't have that with this attack... you have a simple WPA-PSK password. Big deal... anyone can do that with a bit of time on their hands and a Backtrack 4 CD on laptop. Wheeee... you are a l33t scr1pt k1ddie now!
It's an interesting article from the standpoint of how an unconfigured router is insecure (that is to say, it's the article isn't really that interesting since everyone should know by now that an unconfigured router is insecure) - but it's not news and it's not really useful. It's DEFINITELY not ownage in any way, shape or form.
I wonder what this means for Blue-Ray. It could be a major blow to Blue-Ray protection if this somehow allowed the interception of the encryption keys.
Umm... what rock have you been living under? Blu-Ray protection is an utter failure all on it's own. A hack PS3 isn't going to make a bit of difference to Blu-Ray protection; The BR encryption keys are already easily acquired.
If they are able to bypass the hypervisor and then do hack mods for the PS3 this might open up a whole new avenue for modders and interest in the platform that was not there before. In other words, this might not be a bad thing for the PS3 overall.
It would definitely be a bad thing for the PS3, just like it was for the original XBox. If people start buying the consoles, but NOT buying any games or content (since they'd be using the PS3 for something else) - then the PS3 becomes a major loss and drain on company profits. It's the razor and the content is the blades - sell the razor for cheap and rape them on the blades. If there are no blades being purchased then selling the razor is pointless.
Not the poster but in Australia movie tickets cost $15 for a standard ticket - more ritzier set-ups go as high as $30. What is the cost in the US and elsewhere? Are we getting ripped off?
It depends on what theater you go to...
Standard tickets are $5 - $7 for matinee, then you have prime time which usually runs $7 - $10. We are starting to see a lot more premium theaters that have suites and recliners, restaurants, etc... and those tickets are $15 - $20 each. I pay for the suites which are $20 a piece because, well, it's worth it and they give you "free" $7.50 in food, so the ticket is really only $12.50 if you plan on ordering something anyway... and no one under 18 is allowed. It's much more pleasant in the theater. Oh and there's only like 30 seats in the suite theaters. Worth the premium IMHO and the seats are comfortable. And they bring you food/snacks. Free refills on drinks, too.
Isn't this question a bit like asking "Which turd is the best in the punch bowl?"
I mean... sure there might be one that outclasses the others, but they are still turds and they are still in your punchbowl.
No, that's antepenultimate.
So then what would the ultimate and the last one be?
While "irregardless" may not the be ultimate atrocity vis-a-vis the English language, it's definitely at the top of the list for "words" or phrases that scream "I'm from the rattiest trailer park in the country and have actually found a way to obtain a negative education level. I actually suck the intelligence out of people that are within earshot of me." Hmm... perhaps it is the ultimate.
XBMC, Sabnzbd+, Newzbin, Giganews on $350 worth of computer hardware. In their case, since there's no point in 1080p, I should have gone with a cheaper ION platform. I figure I could have put the whole thing together for $200 - $250 under the right sale circumstances.
Even if you have to pay $20 to buy the disc, it's still cheaper than taking a date to the movies.
I wanted to comment on this. While I disagree with some of the points of your post, it's somewhat immaterial to what I wanted to comment on so I won't get into it.
Yes, it's cheaper to pay $20 for a DVD - but what about Blu-Ray? Don't those tend to be $35 - $50 or something? I do not own nor will I ever own a Blu-ray player so I've not priced the discs lately. So disregarding the cost issue (though I do think this is a major factor, all the same) - lets say it's an acceptable sum to pay, be it $20 or $35 - I had the misfortune of pulling the dusty old DVD player out of the closet (literally) to test a TV I was selling last week. I popped the DVD in and literally had to wait nearly 2 minutes before I could even get the movie to play. It went through all the warnings and other associated crap before it would even get to the DVD menu, which was of course locked out so you are forced to go through all that crap.
I have been storing all of my media on my household server for going on 5 years now - I've not used a DVD in that time to speak of. After last week, it all came rushing back to me as to why I don't buy DVD's anymore. Not only is it excessively inconvenient to store discs and find the ones you want when you want them, but all the absolute junk you have to go through to even GET THE MOVIE TO PLAY is absolutely unacceptable. First run DVD's could be delivered to my house for $1 on opening day of a blockbuster movie and I would still not bother with it.
In time and frustration, a DVD, at any price, is not cheaper than taking a date to the movies. At least around here we have the suites and fork & screen theaters, so it pretty much negates all the douchebaggery in the regular theater's. Granted, though, I do have to sit through some crap in the theater as well, but at least I can have people bring me food and drink at my beck and call. I could buy a wife to handle that, but that comes with a lot of other aggravation.
I just set my parents up with a virtual copy of my media setup... they are technologically backwards and they are able to use the media setup. They point and the TV shows or movies they want and a little while later they are watching them in 720p HDTV (they have a small HDTV, so no point in doing 1080p). I suspect that after a month or two of this, much like when I finally convinced them Tivo was the wave of the future, which they can now not imagine watching TV without, they will not be able to imagine watching TV without the media center and all their content being available immediately, in glorious HD. No more shuffling discs or going to the store to rent a DVD. They want it and bam, there it is.
Anyway, my point is that paying $20 for a disc is on it's way out, regardless of how cheap or expensive it is. It's just not worth the hassle at any price.
Right. I'm a published author, and the last tech book I wrote (some 1,200 pages) took about a year of researching, writing, checking for typos, layouting, rechecking, updating... etc. to complete. Equating this to one song is inappropriate, IMHO. Considering that a typical author gets some 12% to 14% of the publisher's (not seller's retail) price, you can imagine that writing any book that is not a bestseller is a matter of love anyway. Still... that the grand-parent poster considers this a $1 work is really discouraging. He may as well "pirate" it if that's what he thinks it is worth.
Technical books are different. When I wrote that, I was more thinking of works of fiction. I do not apply what I wrote above to non-fiction books that require more than imagination to write. I was thinking merely of the entertainment value of a book. A technical book or reference book is worth more than a buck.
While I do see equating a book more to a whole album and I would agree with that... I still am not going to pay exorbitant prices for them. A paperback costs $5 - $7 typically. An ebook should cost less. If they are making a profit, and a hefty profit at that, at $7 a book, with the cost of physically moving, printing, etc... the book, they can cut that cost in half and still make a profit.
Now, how much the author gets from the publisher is another matter entirely and does not matter to this particular thread, since if the author got more from the publisher (or eliminated the publisher entirely, which is perfectly reasonable given the Internet), then the cost per book should also come down.
Hell, even your technical book would be a the equivalent of a best seller if you sold it for $4 and only 200,000 people bought it.
While I am not in the same position as you, your post touches on the other issue with E-Books: Cost.
I absolutely refuse to pay $25 for an E-Book. That is ludicrous. Complete rape.
I will pay $1 for a book, maybe $2 and that would be severely pushing it. I will not pay $5, $10, $25 for an E-Book. Sorry, but no. There is virtually no cost to distributing an E-Book. There is no paper, ink, shipping, storage, typesetting, etc... there is simply pressing a button to make a copy.
That's all a book is worth to me. If a book costs more than that, I am being ripped off and I won't pay it. When is the publishing industry going to get it through their heads that overcharging by a factor of 25 is unreasonable and people aren't going to pay it indefinitely. They get pirated because they overcharge. I started to buy music again when Amazon started offering DRM free MP3s for a buck. I think 99c is still a bit overpriced, but it's within the realm of reasonability and thus I pay for my music. The same will go for books... but until then, I hope places like the Pirate Bay continue to exist to the benefit of the world at large.
Well that's not exactly true. An Atom N280 paired with 945 doesn't have the horsepower to playback 1080p and maybe jerky 720p - but a WD TV Live can. Unless you go for a ION chipset, but then you're in the $300 range where as with the WD TV you're closer to $100.
Screw the ION. Go with a quad core 9550 from Microcenter for $160. Add a couple gigs of ram for $30, a mITX motherboard for $100 and an Antec mITX case for $70. Pick your hard drive configuration and viola, you have a wicked computer system capable of playing anything you want AND a quad core beast that can handle any other task you throw at it.
Yes, it's more than $100, but it's also far more capable and flexible. The WD Live is a silly little thing simply because it can't play that many formats. If and when a company starts shipping a product that can play as many formats as XBMC, then we'll have a non-silly media center product... but until that day, any media center product that can't play what XBMC can play is a piece of shit.