I was going to moderate this topic, but wanted to post about the difference between the ability to write and the skill of penmanship. They are not at all the same. Being able to write simply means that you know what a letter looks like and are physically capible of holding a writing utensil with enough dextarity to form that symbol.
Good penmanship, on the otherhand, is almost an art. It's a step below calligraphy, and a step above your average scrawl. My HANDWRITING is horrible, but I can still write; I have seen some beautiful penmanship on old letters, though. I agree that the ability to write like that is fairly unneeded now-a-days, but I don't think that the GP poster was suggesting we give up handwriting all together.
To paraphrase Douglas Adams: anyone capable of getting themselves elected to public office is automatically unqualified to be there. THe best solution is to try and get an equal mix of people who oppose one another, let them duke it out while you sit back and get on with your life.
This one party controlling everything thing is getting old. Let's go back to the good old days where there was a SLIGHT party majority in the Congress but a President of the opposing party. Nothing got done, so they had a tough time screwing stuff up.
I was going to burn my last mod point on this post, but there is no "-1 lacks logic"... Barcodes don't have serial number information. They are all the same, for each like item in the world. It would track the MODEL you bought (link your CC to the particular TYPE of printer) but not exactly which one. The warranty cardm as mentioned, could do that though.
Either waym I need to remember to start buying all my printers with cash!
Comcast is pretty decent in terms of HD and SD digital quality. They offer INHD, INHD2, Discovery HD, TNT HD, and ESPN HD to all digital subscribers who have the right box ($5 a month, and it replaces the digital box you would otherwise pay ~$3-4 for anyways). The have varies states of network HD channels, based on the deals with the local affiliates. In my area, it's just NBC, Fox, and PBS. In the other parts of my state they get CBS and ABC as well, and a few places have a part time WB HD feed.
The non-HD digital channels look pretty good, too. Comcast has in the past made commitments to not degrade signal quality beyond what they get fed from the source (wether it be a national network like NBC or a cable only channel like FX). It's got some definate pixelation from time to time, and it's not as good as a really strong/clean analog signal. But it is better than any of the digital sat. offerings, with a possible exception for the few test amrkets where DTV is going to MPEG4 compression.
I'm personally excited as hell about HDTV. I can't wait for EVERYTHING to be broadcast in HD. For one thing, the 16:9 aspect ratio just looks so much more natural than 4:3. I stopped watching non-letterboxed video tapes like 10 years ago. The 5.1 Dolby sound is just as impressive for TV as it is for DVDs, and the massively improved video quality is frosting on the cake (albeit like 6" thick frosting). I'm looking forward to the HD DVDs as well, but I'm scared that the MPAA and Co. will jack it up so bad that it fails the first time around.
Like it or not HD TV is coming, and so is digital cable. I suspect it won't be too long before the only thing you can get analog is the basic 12 channels (6 real channels and 6 home shopping and public access channels), if that. For every one analog channel they transmit they are stealing a significant amount of room for several digital only channels. With many TVs starting to become digital cable ready with CableCards and the cost of the boxes getting cheaper and cheaper, I can see this day in the not so distant future.
I agree the DVD needs to be an add on after the film is over. An option in the menu somewhere that lets you buy the DVDs of PPV movies you've watched. What I would really like to see, tho, is for Comcast to add an optical drive to their DVR boxes. You could get 2 hours of HD quality movie on a DVD9 with the right codecs, and THAT would make the Comcast model the most attractive movie distrobution scheme in town.
2) Hack it. You want to make my DVDs unrippable so when I'm on a plane I can't switch between 20 movies I paid for? What's to stop me from getting an adapter to go Blu-Ray Player--->Adapter---->Laptop---->Capture
HDMI. THe next gen HiDef DVDs will most likely only play through the 'protected' HDMI ports on newer TVs. The only way to make the connection work is to use HDMI on both ends, and the only way to have an HDMI input port is to have a device that doesn't have recording capabilities. It's pretty clever, really, but ultimately means the format is going to fail because Joe Six-pack can't just go pickup a cheap BluRay/HDDVD player; he'll need a whole new TV.
Most movies -- even the best of movies -- 90% of box office gross happens in the first weekend
That's the part that I was thinking about before I even read the article, which was quite interesting, btw. I've got no problem with having a theatrical "pre-release" of a film, but they should only run movies for about 8 weeks and then close them down with the DVD release. People would still go to the theatre, and probably not less, or much less anyways, for the experience... especially if more places built IMAX (or just IMAX style - giant screen, super high resolution digital projection, extremely deep and large stadium seats, amazing sound) theatres.
I also like the idea about selling the movie on the way out of the theatre, but instead a more realistic idea may be to simply make each movie ticket a coupon for s discount on that movies DVD release. Most new movies are about $20 nowadays, minus the inevitable sale prices, so between $15 and $17 for the first few weeks. If the movie stub was a $5 off coupon, a $10 DVD may not look like such a bad deal.
While that's true, there isn't anything stopping a large retailer from placing an order for say 100,000 of them and reselling them to the public at large. In this case, "not available" means "we don't want to deal with small scale distibution hassles".
I'd buy one right now for $200 if $100 of that was classified as a 'charitable doantion' (tax write off) and they sent a unit to someone who really needed it, preferably here in the US, but abroad is OK as well.
A handheld sized unit with a touch screen and a low power B&W screen mode, that is very rugged (flash = no moving parts), expandable (USB), WiFi ready, and that I can charge with a built in crank is the absolutely greatest thing I have every seen. I would love to take it camping/on vacation (as a communications tool, an eBook, and an entertainment device); I can see people who are backpacking around Europe LOVING this.
Hopefully the idea of licencing this to a reseller takes off and you can buy one ($200 = 100 production + 30 license fee + 70 retailer markup, seems likea good deal to me).
Well, I've spent most of the day reading, downloading, testing, and evaluating... not to say that one day is even close to enough research to make a choice, I am going to recommend that you take a look at Lucane. It's a set of server and client software that is all based on java and uses a database (MySQL compatible, ships with something else which name escapes me at the moment).
The mail client sucks, but you don't have to use it. Given an SMTP server the backend will mail out notifications to a users assigned email address, so you can keep on using Outlook/Thunderbird/whatever. The client runs in the system tray, and can do event notifications (albeit limited to 15min before the event only). The meeting scheduler has a open time slot search feature (manual only, will show you a graphical timeline of all invited participants for a given day so you can try and line up an opening), and shows via a nice color coding system who has accepted and who has rejected the meeting invite.
One of the main gripes, and this is silly, but it's ugly. You can make it look a bit better by changing one of the options in the client config file to use Java's Windows Look'n'Feel settings. Still kind of looks like a Win98 app, though.
It has about a million modules (email, chat, forums, file sharing, voice chat, drawing board, etc, etc, etc) but you can choose which modules and services load for each user from the admin menu, which is really nice, imo.
Good luck in your search, I think we are going to roll out a small (4 users + me) test group with this application next week. Feel free to add me to you friend list and remind me to let you know how it goes, if you are interested... I'm always happy to help out other non-profit IT guys.:)
I'm trying to implement a shared calendar and meeting management system for my medium sized non-profit employer (roughly 30 users). We aren't tied to a particular email client, but are using Outlook 2002 right now. Currently our email is provided by out ISP via simple POP3 accounts, but we are going to go to a new provider soon, meaning our email system will have to change anyway.
I'm not to keen on setting up an email server in house (I am the IT department, among other things), so we will likely use a webhost who offers us IMAP mail accounts in our webspace. Currently we have no shared calendar system, and I've been charged with implementing one. The budget is small, so Exchange, etc are out of reach. Aside from that, we don't need a ton of features, just a way to view individual shared calendars, departmental/team calendars (which have multiple readers, one writer), and also allow users to create project calendar's (again with multiple readers and one writer). A system to send and accept meeting invitations is also high on the list. Lastly, being able to view a group of calendars overlayed on one another would be ideal (so you could view departmental calendar and the individual shared calendars of everyone in that department on one calendar.
The client end has to run on Windows, the server can be Windows or Linux. OSS is ideal, for it's free as in beer aspects. I'd like to have email and calendar software in one package, but really they just need to be able to integrate (so I can send you a meeting invite, you get a notice of it, decline or accept it, and the calendar is updated to reflect all of this).
I've looked through all the packages link in this thread, and another semi recent Slashdot story; so Zimbra, OpenGroupware, Citadel, eGroupware, and a few others have all been looked at. They all look like nice software, but I'm not sure which ones I should devote my time to really evaluating. A webbased calendar is completely doable (maybe even nice to not have to deploy any new software to the desktops) but the UI has to be intuitive and effective. (eGroupware's web UI, for example, seemed overly complex for what it had to do).
Uh, MOST of the 'cheaper' mp3 players just let you drag music files into it as if it where a disk. Mac, Linux, whatever, anything will work fine for that. If you are talking about the players compatible with the other online music stores out there then it's more an issue of those stores not selling to Mac users. If there was a store willing to do it, it would work. But iTMS is such a monolith, especially among Mac users that they figure 'why bother?'.
How exactly is iTunes the same price a the CD again? It's not like I can go into a record shop and ask for the part of the CD with just tracks 2 and 5 on them can I? No I have to buy a bunch of other crap to get what I want. So, you tell me where I can pay $1.98 for the tracks I want and I will agree that iTunes costs the same as the CD.
Korn just signed a new agreement with their record label. The label gets a cut of EVERYTHING now, including merchandise and tour proceeds. It seems that nowadays the labels are making their last stand as they wither away.
Well, that was stupid of them. A band like Korn is well known enough that they could actually make money selling records direct from the web and touring. Probably as much as they are making with the label or more; plus they get complete control and ownership of EVERYTHING.
Uh, ok, so our car getting 25mpg now gets 10-40% more, lets make it 25%, as an average. so 25*1.25 = 31.25, we'll round up to 32 to give this guy the benefit of the doubt. Take your 4000 miles divide it by 32 for gallons used and again by 15 for an average tank size and you get... about 8 tanks between water fillups.
I'd argue that's fairly accurate. Smaller cars have roughly 10-11 gallon tanks, midsize cars and small trucks around 14-16, and large trucks SUVs are somewhere in the 20's. Plus you don't run the tank completely dry, so putting 15 gallons into a car is likely fairly typical.
How about this, instead of yelling that I am wrong, and telling me to shut up and go away, why don't YOU come up with a better model?
Huh? Okay, simple math here... 80 hours at an avaerage of say 50mph is 4000 miles. Say an average car gets 25mpg, that's 160 gallons. WIth a 15 gallon tank/fillup it's about every 10 tanks that you would need to add water.
Why push buttons at all? Fighting games are one genre that was mentioned in an interview or two relating that while they aren't going to tell you how it works, there is something very innovative, clever, intuitive, and workable being done behind closed doors.
Well, for a SNES game you do have to actually port it to the GBA, which involves some work (tweaking and recompiling the code for the GBA - it can't emulate a SNES - redrawing the sprites for a slightly shorter display, reworking the controls for 2 less buttons), then you have the cost of the cart, the packaging, cost of getting it to the store, and the stores markup. Also, I'm PRETTY sure (not positive) that most of the older ported games (not all) started at $19.99.
The Rev. will certainly be powerful enough to just emulate the NES/SNES/N64, so there is no actual porting work to be done. The method of delivery is via a digital download, so almost no cost there, and there is no "middle-man" to take a cut, so I can easily see SNES games in the sub-$5 range, N64 games at sub-$10, and NES games as freebies, or at most $0.99.
That can only help Nintendo. They get the ports from other consoles using the GCN controllers (or hopefully the WaveBird is compatible without the adaptor), they get all of the first party innovative games, and they get any games that 3rd party developers feel like doing for the Revolution specific control. Plus, now that I am thinking about it, they get to have ports that have a new and improved control scheme grafted onto it. You can bet that pretty much all the EA sports games will have the controls from the PS3/360 mapped onto a GCN controller AS WELL AS implementing a system to use the revolution "remote". Same for FPS type games.
I don't think it's going to be a huge issue for them.
Uh, so? Yes, YOU may have already paid for some of those games, so feel free to keep playing them in your SNES/N64 whatever.
As long as the prices are reasonable (say $8-10 or less for N64 games and $3 or 4 for SNES) it'll be a good service and will let people buy games that are FUN and CHEAP. Something that's its competitors are, at best, only going to do half of... most likely they won't be able to either.
I was going to just mod you down as flamebait, but decided posting would be better...
The car analogy is COMPLETELY wrong. COMPLETELY. If you want to use that analogy, it would be more like this: "Well, this car doesn't have a V6 engine or great acceleration, but it does have excellent reliablity scores, terrific safety features, automatic speed adjusting cruise control, built in low tire pressure gauges, built in GPS navigation with voice prompting, and it gets 40mpg!", to which the car salesmen replies "but this one has a V8 and a towing package and a DVD player in the back seat!", to which the wife replies "how does any of that help him get to work, save any money, time being lost, or frustration having to fix the damn thing?"
The TiVo is great because it JUST WORKS. If I didn't know better I would think it's an Apple product. It has an interface that is simple yet elegant, and it does exactly what it is supposed to do (until this out content protection system came on line, that's a whole different story).
Well, personally, I don't want to listen to the radio, ever. That's why I have an iPod. I used to listen to the radio for NPR shows, but with most of the "good stuff" from NPR being available as podcasts, well, my car radio stays on "Aux Input" all the time now, and I don't own another radio reciever at all.
I think Apple intentionally doesn't include an FM tuner on purpose, as they are theying to replace radio, not just replace CD players, with the iPod. They're doing a good job of it, too.
The mini was pretty scratch proof with it's solid anodized aluminum shell. Apple must not have been selling enough cases for them, so they needed to replace it with a polycarb based model.:)
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I was going to moderate this topic, but wanted to post about the difference between the ability to write and the skill of penmanship. They are not at all the same. Being able to write simply means that you know what a letter looks like and are physically capible of holding a writing utensil with enough dextarity to form that symbol.
Good penmanship, on the otherhand, is almost an art. It's a step below calligraphy, and a step above your average scrawl. My HANDWRITING is horrible, but I can still write; I have seen some beautiful penmanship on old letters, though. I agree that the ability to write like that is fairly unneeded now-a-days, but I don't think that the GP poster was suggesting we give up handwriting all together.
This one party controlling everything thing is getting old. Let's go back to the good old days where there was a SLIGHT party majority in the Congress but a President of the opposing party. Nothing got done, so they had a tough time screwing stuff up.
Either waym I need to remember to start buying all my printers with cash!
The non-HD digital channels look pretty good, too. Comcast has in the past made commitments to not degrade signal quality beyond what they get fed from the source (wether it be a national network like NBC or a cable only channel like FX). It's got some definate pixelation from time to time, and it's not as good as a really strong/clean analog signal. But it is better than any of the digital sat. offerings, with a possible exception for the few test amrkets where DTV is going to MPEG4 compression.
I'm personally excited as hell about HDTV. I can't wait for EVERYTHING to be broadcast in HD. For one thing, the 16:9 aspect ratio just looks so much more natural than 4:3. I stopped watching non-letterboxed video tapes like 10 years ago. The 5.1 Dolby sound is just as impressive for TV as it is for DVDs, and the massively improved video quality is frosting on the cake (albeit like 6" thick frosting). I'm looking forward to the HD DVDs as well, but I'm scared that the MPAA and Co. will jack it up so bad that it fails the first time around.
Like it or not HD TV is coming, and so is digital cable. I suspect it won't be too long before the only thing you can get analog is the basic 12 channels (6 real channels and 6 home shopping and public access channels), if that. For every one analog channel they transmit they are stealing a significant amount of room for several digital only channels. With many TVs starting to become digital cable ready with CableCards and the cost of the boxes getting cheaper and cheaper, I can see this day in the not so distant future.
I agree the DVD needs to be an add on after the film is over. An option in the menu somewhere that lets you buy the DVDs of PPV movies you've watched. What I would really like to see, tho, is for Comcast to add an optical drive to their DVR boxes. You could get 2 hours of HD quality movie on a DVD9 with the right codecs, and THAT would make the Comcast model the most attractive movie distrobution scheme in town.
HDMI. THe next gen HiDef DVDs will most likely only play through the 'protected' HDMI ports on newer TVs. The only way to make the connection work is to use HDMI on both ends, and the only way to have an HDMI input port is to have a device that doesn't have recording capabilities. It's pretty clever, really, but ultimately means the format is going to fail because Joe Six-pack can't just go pickup a cheap BluRay/HDDVD player; he'll need a whole new TV.
That's the part that I was thinking about before I even read the article, which was quite interesting, btw. I've got no problem with having a theatrical "pre-release" of a film, but they should only run movies for about 8 weeks and then close them down with the DVD release. People would still go to the theatre, and probably not less, or much less anyways, for the experience... especially if more places built IMAX (or just IMAX style - giant screen, super high resolution digital projection, extremely deep and large stadium seats, amazing sound) theatres.
I also like the idea about selling the movie on the way out of the theatre, but instead a more realistic idea may be to simply make each movie ticket a coupon for s discount on that movies DVD release. Most new movies are about $20 nowadays, minus the inevitable sale prices, so between $15 and $17 for the first few weeks. If the movie stub was a $5 off coupon, a $10 DVD may not look like such a bad deal.
While that's true, there isn't anything stopping a large retailer from placing an order for say 100,000 of them and reselling them to the public at large. In this case, "not available" means "we don't want to deal with small scale distibution hassles".
A handheld sized unit with a touch screen and a low power B&W screen mode, that is very rugged (flash = no moving parts), expandable (USB), WiFi ready, and that I can charge with a built in crank is the absolutely greatest thing I have every seen. I would love to take it camping/on vacation (as a communications tool, an eBook, and an entertainment device); I can see people who are backpacking around Europe LOVING this.
Hopefully the idea of licencing this to a reseller takes off and you can buy one ($200 = 100 production + 30 license fee + 70 retailer markup, seems likea good deal to me).
The mail client sucks, but you don't have to use it. Given an SMTP server the backend will mail out notifications to a users assigned email address, so you can keep on using Outlook/Thunderbird/whatever. The client runs in the system tray, and can do event notifications (albeit limited to 15min before the event only). The meeting scheduler has a open time slot search feature (manual only, will show you a graphical timeline of all invited participants for a given day so you can try and line up an opening), and shows via a nice color coding system who has accepted and who has rejected the meeting invite.
One of the main gripes, and this is silly, but it's ugly. You can make it look a bit better by changing one of the options in the client config file to use Java's Windows Look'n'Feel settings. Still kind of looks like a Win98 app, though.
It has about a million modules (email, chat, forums, file sharing, voice chat, drawing board, etc, etc, etc) but you can choose which modules and services load for each user from the admin menu, which is really nice, imo.
Good luck in your search, I think we are going to roll out a small (4 users + me) test group with this application next week. Feel free to add me to you friend list and remind me to let you know how it goes, if you are interested... I'm always happy to help out other non-profit IT guys. :)
I'm not to keen on setting up an email server in house (I am the IT department, among other things), so we will likely use a webhost who offers us IMAP mail accounts in our webspace. Currently we have no shared calendar system, and I've been charged with implementing one. The budget is small, so Exchange, etc are out of reach. Aside from that, we don't need a ton of features, just a way to view individual shared calendars, departmental/team calendars (which have multiple readers, one writer), and also allow users to create project calendar's (again with multiple readers and one writer). A system to send and accept meeting invitations is also high on the list. Lastly, being able to view a group of calendars overlayed on one another would be ideal (so you could view departmental calendar and the individual shared calendars of everyone in that department on one calendar.
The client end has to run on Windows, the server can be Windows or Linux. OSS is ideal, for it's free as in beer aspects. I'd like to have email and calendar software in one package, but really they just need to be able to integrate (so I can send you a meeting invite, you get a notice of it, decline or accept it, and the calendar is updated to reflect all of this).
I've looked through all the packages link in this thread, and another semi recent Slashdot story; so Zimbra, OpenGroupware, Citadel, eGroupware, and a few others have all been looked at. They all look like nice software, but I'm not sure which ones I should devote my time to really evaluating. A webbased calendar is completely doable (maybe even nice to not have to deploy any new software to the desktops) but the UI has to be intuitive and effective. (eGroupware's web UI, for example, seemed overly complex for what it had to do).
Uh, MOST of the 'cheaper' mp3 players just let you drag music files into it as if it where a disk. Mac, Linux, whatever, anything will work fine for that. If you are talking about the players compatible with the other online music stores out there then it's more an issue of those stores not selling to Mac users. If there was a store willing to do it, it would work. But iTMS is such a monolith, especially among Mac users that they figure 'why bother?'.
How exactly is iTunes the same price a the CD again? It's not like I can go into a record shop and ask for the part of the CD with just tracks 2 and 5 on them can I? No I have to buy a bunch of other crap to get what I want. So, you tell me where I can pay $1.98 for the tracks I want and I will agree that iTunes costs the same as the CD.
Korn just signed a new agreement with their record label. The label gets a cut of EVERYTHING now, including merchandise and tour proceeds. It seems that nowadays the labels are making their last stand as they wither away. Well, that was stupid of them. A band like Korn is well known enough that they could actually make money selling records direct from the web and touring. Probably as much as they are making with the label or more; plus they get complete control and ownership of EVERYTHING.
Uh, ok, so our car getting 25mpg now gets 10-40% more, lets make it 25%, as an average. so 25*1.25 = 31.25, we'll round up to 32 to give this guy the benefit of the doubt. Take your 4000 miles divide it by 32 for gallons used and again by 15 for an average tank size and you get ... about 8 tanks between water fillups.
I'd argue that's fairly accurate. Smaller cars have roughly 10-11 gallon tanks, midsize cars and small trucks around 14-16, and large trucks SUVs are somewhere in the 20's. Plus you don't run the tank completely dry, so putting 15 gallons into a car is likely fairly typical.
How about this, instead of yelling that I am wrong, and telling me to shut up and go away, why don't YOU come up with a better model?
Huh? Okay, simple math here... 80 hours at an avaerage of say 50mph is 4000 miles. Say an average car gets 25mpg, that's 160 gallons. WIth a 15 gallon tank/fillup it's about every 10 tanks that you would need to add water.
I don't get your comment.
Why push buttons at all? Fighting games are one genre that was mentioned in an interview or two relating that while they aren't going to tell you how it works, there is something very innovative, clever, intuitive, and workable being done behind closed doors.
The Rev. will certainly be powerful enough to just emulate the NES/SNES/N64, so there is no actual porting work to be done. The method of delivery is via a digital download, so almost no cost there, and there is no "middle-man" to take a cut, so I can easily see SNES games in the sub-$5 range, N64 games at sub-$10, and NES games as freebies, or at most $0.99.
I don't think it's going to be a huge issue for them.
As long as the prices are reasonable (say $8-10 or less for N64 games and $3 or 4 for SNES) it'll be a good service and will let people buy games that are FUN and CHEAP. Something that's its competitors are, at best, only going to do half of... most likely they won't be able to either.
The car analogy is COMPLETELY wrong. COMPLETELY. If you want to use that analogy, it would be more like this: "Well, this car doesn't have a V6 engine or great acceleration, but it does have excellent reliablity scores, terrific safety features, automatic speed adjusting cruise control, built in low tire pressure gauges, built in GPS navigation with voice prompting, and it gets 40mpg!", to which the car salesmen replies "but this one has a V8 and a towing package and a DVD player in the back seat!", to which the wife replies "how does any of that help him get to work, save any money, time being lost, or frustration having to fix the damn thing?"
The TiVo is great because it JUST WORKS. If I didn't know better I would think it's an Apple product. It has an interface that is simple yet elegant, and it does exactly what it is supposed to do (until this out content protection system came on line, that's a whole different story).
Well, personally, I don't want to listen to the radio, ever. That's why I have an iPod. I used to listen to the radio for NPR shows, but with most of the "good stuff" from NPR being available as podcasts, well, my car radio stays on "Aux Input" all the time now, and I don't own another radio reciever at all.
I think Apple intentionally doesn't include an FM tuner on purpose, as they are theying to replace radio, not just replace CD players, with the iPod. They're doing a good job of it, too.
The mini was pretty scratch proof with it's solid anodized aluminum shell. Apple must not have been selling enough cases for them, so they needed to replace it with a polycarb based model. :)
The 17" PowerBook is 1" thick already.
2) Sounds like you work at a crappy place.