Yep, at most, you would only need to send 2 horizontal lines and 2 vertical lines of data from one machine to the next so that you could stitch the panels together.
Don't think so badly of your dad. Drinking my have been the only way for him to deal with your mom having male "friends" that were "friendly" enough to buy her kids $600 gifts.
Bahhh! Who cares how many K of memory the device has. After typing the 10th page or so of code into the hexadecimal keypad because your Commodore KIM didn't have any external storage, the idea of counting your bytes by the THOUSANDS seems pretty unappealing.
The next version of XBMC that is currently in Beta will support the CEC. CEC is the Consumer Electronics Control standard that is part of HDMI. HDMI does not require devices to use it, but requires them not to interfere with it. Both of my Vizio TVs support CEC, so I assume it is not real hard to find. Some people have been reporting that their computers support it without an external adapter. For those who's HTPCs don't support it, there is the CEC-USB device that will add support for CEC to your PC.
This is likely the direction you want to look for long term remote consolidation.
Of course there is Netflix for a DIY box. Windows7 has Windows Media Center out of the box, and it plays Netflix just fine. It is even designed to run from a remote with a 6' interface. If you want to spend a little more effort (which I assume you do if you want a DIY solution), you can install Playon. This will allow you to use whatever you want for your frontend, as it will stream as a UPNP media device. Thus you can have an XBMC box running on linux and still watch Netflix and Hulu.
The direct interfaces for a lot of services are better than using Playon, but it allows me to use Roku in the bedrooms, a low end Acer Revo Atom based computer in the spare livingroom, and have access to anything that doesn't have a native client for those platforms. While I have the full PC in the living room for HTPC, if my son wants to watch Nicktoons shows streamed from their website, the best way to do it is for him to load up XBMC and have it find the Playon stream from the same computer so that the programs show up as a channel on XBMC.
Roku is moving to Bluetooth for their remotes. Expect Bluetooth to become the norm for entertainment system remotes. Also, there is the CEC standard for HDMI for remote consolidation. I would expect to see this catch on in the future as well. I know that both of my Vizio TVs have both Bluetooth and CEC. You will even be able to control your XBMC box using your TV remote soon. http://xbmc.org/natethomas/2011/11/01/the-usb-cec-adapter-is-a-look-into-the-future/
That part gets me. In what way are local playhouses better than TV? I have been to a lot of plays in my life for one reason or another. Universally, they suck. All of them. From the children's theaters, to the small local theater troops, to the big budget production plays. They are inherently inferior to the same production done in a studio.
I'm not going to say that you shouldn't enjoy them if that is your thing. Just as I wouldn't tell someone they shouldn't prefer knitting a blanket when they could buy a better quality one for less money at the store. But, there seems to be this obsession with people thinking that reading trash or watching trash live is somehow inherently better than watching trash on a television.
Being very "educated and professional" is not synonymous with being smart, thinking well, or even with knowing a lot of things. It is a common myth that doesn't hold up to reality. Being "Educated" generally means that you have successfully memorized a very narrow slice of information. It doesn't preclude being smart, or having a wide set of knowledge, but they are not the same thing.
That being said, smart people also can watch and enjoy these shows. Your point still stands.
As for the astronaut comment, I am not going to look up the exact number of American Idol winners, or Astronauts, but I think it is safe to say that your chances of becoming an astronaut are dramatically lower than your chances of becoming the winner of a reality TV show.
It would be nice, but our brief moment in the sun has faded on that one. For a while, we had Discovery, Animal Planet, History Channel, and the like.
Now, we see things like Animal Planet running 'documentaries' on Dragons. http://animal.discovery.com/convergence/dragons/ Where they tell you how they will "Make you believe that dragons were real, and still might be."
Your point is even more poignant when you factor in the percentage of these people that watch pro sports on TV. Pro sports IS reality TV. It is just less intellectual or useful than something like Top Chef.
Is that why my business of selling poo on a stick is failing???
Actually, for the most part, I agree with you. Although there is a huge segment of the population that don't even realize when they are watch reality TV. Many of them even complain about it, and then turn around and watch a dozen hours of it a week. What I am talking about is professional sports. NFL is just as much "reality TV" as the Kardashians. For some reason, spending 8 hours every Sunday for months, spending thousands of dollars a year on paraphernalia, obsessively talking about it, and generally acting like an ass because your characters or doing better or worse in the show, gets a pass if it is NFL.
Another aspect of 'reality TV' is that it isn't a specific genre. Really it is two different genres that get lumped into one because they are both low budget. Reality TV is almost always either documentaries, or game shows. The Kardasians is a documentary. Some will wail about scripting and editing, but those happen in National Geographic documentaries as well. The only difference between a documentary on Barak Obama done by National Geographic and The Kardashians done by E is the weight you give to the subject of the documentary, and whether it is one 90 minute broadcast, or ninety 30 minute broadcasts.
Top Chef is a sporting event. There isn't even a difference. The only difference between the PGA and Top Chef is game is being played, and the marketing.
People are choosing it. I don't have cable. I cut the cord almost two years ago. That being said, I go to extra lengths to get "Top Chef for my wife", as well as "The Apprentice" for me and my wife. We are well aware that these are crap shows. That doesn't matter. We don't want to spend every waking hour being "productive".
Completely avoiding pop culture also leaves one uneducated. These shows shape our culture. Just as I have read the "King James Bible" even though I am not a Christian, I try to keep one ear open on pop culture. There is a lot of quality information that makes far less sense if you don't actually know what is in the "King James Bible" do to references and analogies. The same is true for other forms of pop culture as well.
I don't care if my mechanic can find the USA on a map either, as long as they kn ow how to repair my car. That has little to do with whether they are dumb or not. I don't car if my mechanic is dumb as long as they know how to repair my car.
The difference between not knowing how to replace a serpentine belt and being able to find the USA on a map has to do with how often you are presented with the information. You may never have even seen a serpentine belt. No doubt, your mechanic has seen the USA and had it identified to him hundreds of times. Even if all he ever watches is reality TV. This is why being able to find the USA is used as an example of someone being dumb, while replacing a serpentine belt is not.
If you were shown how to change a serpentine belt 3 times, and still couldn't figure it out, then, yes, you may be dumb.
I know that this is off topic, but you hit on one on my pet peeves. An opinion is an opinion even if the speaker doesn't know it. A fact is a fact, even if it is wrong. If I say 2+2=5, it is not my 'opinion'. even if I say "My opinion is that 2+2=5." Either way, it is a statement fact AND is false. Facts are true or false irrelevant of whether you or I know it. Opinions are true or false BECAUSE you know it.
Because if everyone that Joe user knows has an %Platform of Choice%, Joe user is likely to get an %Platform of Choice% also unless there is some massively compelling reason not to. This causes a snowball effect that leads to no users on other platforms. It doesn't matter if users of other platforms are more likely to purchase or not. There just are not enough of them.
I have had conversations with my child (now 7) about his severe dislike of the people in character costumes. He only recently stopped avoiding them. He was very clear that he was never afraid of giant rats/bears/rabbits/etc... He was very clear that he always knew that they were people in costumes. He was just freaked out by PEOPLE in giant animal costumes.
Gog repackages games to run on newer OSes. They are a good example of how to sell old software for a new OS. They are not a good example to show a new OS' compatibility with old software.
I don't think that is an accident. MS is clearly trying to move windows into an OEM only situation. If I was the paranoid type, I would think that it was to eventually move into a Mac type system. MS has been producing locked down PCs for a decade now. While it would need to be done with caution, it wouldn't be hard for MS to push the entire consumer PC market over to MS built hardware.
You would only want it not to come to the US because you are bad at math. T-Mobile already has this. Instead of hiding the cost of the phone in the bill, they tell you the cost of the phone, and give you a 2 year interest free loan on the phone that gets put on your bill. For anyone on a 2 year cycle, nothing changes. For those that keep their phone for longer than 2 years, it is cheaper because at the end of two years, they don't have to keep paying for a new phone that they did not recieve. For those that upgrade more often, they can pay off the remaining balance on the old phone and get a new loan on the new phone.
The only thing happening with this is that people are being honestly told what they are paying for, and they are not being charged for phones they don't receive.
If the companies involved don't care about market share, they do so at their own peril.
As great as it would be to have multiple mobile OSes as major players forever, it is highly unlikely to happen. We saw this with PCs, and we are already starting to see this with mobile devices.
The Kindle Fire is a good example. For Google, it is way better for people to choose a Fire over an iPad, even though the Fire uses the Amazon market. The reason is that almost all of the other android applications will run on the Fire. In a year when dramatically better tablets come out, people will start thinking about their next tablet. If this years purchase was an iPad, next year's purchaser will be pushed to buy another iOS device so that they don't lose all of their existing software. If this year's purchase is a Fire, next year they can choose another Amazon device, OR a device that has the Google market while still keeping all of their existing software. If the Amazon devices started seriously siphoning away enough paying customers that it caused Google a problem, Google could just release the Google Android Market App as a downloadable.apk. Google could then sell apps to Fire users.
Looking at who is buying apps today is "this quarter" thinking. It can be very effective for improving short term profits, but long term profits sometimes require that you nurture products, activities, and users that don't contribute to the bottom line today.
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I could do without the Tequila.
Yep, at most, you would only need to send 2 horizontal lines and 2 vertical lines of data from one machine to the next so that you could stitch the panels together.
Don't think so badly of your dad. Drinking my have been the only way for him to deal with your mom having male "friends" that were "friendly" enough to buy her kids $600 gifts.
Bahhh! Who cares how many K of memory the device has. After typing the 10th page or so of code into the hexadecimal keypad because your Commodore KIM didn't have any external storage, the idea of counting your bytes by the THOUSANDS seems pretty unappealing.
The next version of XBMC that is currently in Beta will support the CEC. CEC is the Consumer Electronics Control standard that is part of HDMI. HDMI does not require devices to use it, but requires them not to interfere with it. Both of my Vizio TVs support CEC, so I assume it is not real hard to find. Some people have been reporting that their computers support it without an external adapter. For those who's HTPCs don't support it, there is the CEC-USB device that will add support for CEC to your PC.
This is likely the direction you want to look for long term remote consolidation.
Of course there is Netflix for a DIY box. Windows7 has Windows Media Center out of the box, and it plays Netflix just fine. It is even designed to run from a remote with a 6' interface. If you want to spend a little more effort (which I assume you do if you want a DIY solution), you can install Playon. This will allow you to use whatever you want for your frontend, as it will stream as a UPNP media device. Thus you can have an XBMC box running on linux and still watch Netflix and Hulu.
The direct interfaces for a lot of services are better than using Playon, but it allows me to use Roku in the bedrooms, a low end Acer Revo Atom based computer in the spare livingroom, and have access to anything that doesn't have a native client for those platforms. While I have the full PC in the living room for HTPC, if my son wants to watch Nicktoons shows streamed from their website, the best way to do it is for him to load up XBMC and have it find the Playon stream from the same computer so that the programs show up as a channel on XBMC.
Roku is moving to Bluetooth for their remotes. Expect Bluetooth to become the norm for entertainment system remotes. Also, there is the CEC standard for HDMI for remote consolidation. I would expect to see this catch on in the future as well. I know that both of my Vizio TVs have both Bluetooth and CEC. You will even be able to control your XBMC box using your TV remote soon. http://xbmc.org/natethomas/2011/11/01/the-usb-cec-adapter-is-a-look-into-the-future/
That part gets me. In what way are local playhouses better than TV? I have been to a lot of plays in my life for one reason or another. Universally, they suck. All of them. From the children's theaters, to the small local theater troops, to the big budget production plays. They are inherently inferior to the same production done in a studio.
I'm not going to say that you shouldn't enjoy them if that is your thing. Just as I wouldn't tell someone they shouldn't prefer knitting a blanket when they could buy a better quality one for less money at the store. But, there seems to be this obsession with people thinking that reading trash or watching trash live is somehow inherently better than watching trash on a television.
Being very "educated and professional" is not synonymous with being smart, thinking well, or even with knowing a lot of things. It is a common myth that doesn't hold up to reality. Being "Educated" generally means that you have successfully memorized a very narrow slice of information. It doesn't preclude being smart, or having a wide set of knowledge, but they are not the same thing.
That being said, smart people also can watch and enjoy these shows. Your point still stands.
As for the astronaut comment, I am not going to look up the exact number of American Idol winners, or Astronauts, but I think it is safe to say that your chances of becoming an astronaut are dramatically lower than your chances of becoming the winner of a reality TV show.
It would be nice, but our brief moment in the sun has faded on that one. For a while, we had Discovery, Animal Planet, History Channel, and the like.
Now, we see things like Animal Planet running 'documentaries' on Dragons. http://animal.discovery.com/convergence/dragons/ Where they tell you how they will "Make you believe that dragons were real, and still might be."
Your point is even more poignant when you factor in the percentage of these people that watch pro sports on TV. Pro sports IS reality TV. It is just less intellectual or useful than something like Top Chef.
Is that why my business of selling poo on a stick is failing???
Actually, for the most part, I agree with you. Although there is a huge segment of the population that don't even realize when they are watch reality TV. Many of them even complain about it, and then turn around and watch a dozen hours of it a week. What I am talking about is professional sports. NFL is just as much "reality TV" as the Kardashians. For some reason, spending 8 hours every Sunday for months, spending thousands of dollars a year on paraphernalia, obsessively talking about it, and generally acting like an ass because your characters or doing better or worse in the show, gets a pass if it is NFL.
Another aspect of 'reality TV' is that it isn't a specific genre. Really it is two different genres that get lumped into one because they are both low budget. Reality TV is almost always either documentaries, or game shows. The Kardasians is a documentary. Some will wail about scripting and editing, but those happen in National Geographic documentaries as well. The only difference between a documentary on Barak Obama done by National Geographic and The Kardashians done by E is the weight you give to the subject of the documentary, and whether it is one 90 minute broadcast, or ninety 30 minute broadcasts.
Top Chef is a sporting event. There isn't even a difference. The only difference between the PGA and Top Chef is game is being played, and the marketing.
People are choosing it. I don't have cable. I cut the cord almost two years ago. That being said, I go to extra lengths to get "Top Chef for my wife", as well as "The Apprentice" for me and my wife. We are well aware that these are crap shows. That doesn't matter. We don't want to spend every waking hour being "productive".
Completely avoiding pop culture also leaves one uneducated. These shows shape our culture. Just as I have read the "King James Bible" even though I am not a Christian, I try to keep one ear open on pop culture. There is a lot of quality information that makes far less sense if you don't actually know what is in the "King James Bible" do to references and analogies. The same is true for other forms of pop culture as well.
I don't care if my mechanic can find the USA on a map either, as long as they kn ow how to repair my car. That has little to do with whether they are dumb or not. I don't car if my mechanic is dumb as long as they know how to repair my car.
The difference between not knowing how to replace a serpentine belt and being able to find the USA on a map has to do with how often you are presented with the information. You may never have even seen a serpentine belt. No doubt, your mechanic has seen the USA and had it identified to him hundreds of times. Even if all he ever watches is reality TV. This is why being able to find the USA is used as an example of someone being dumb, while replacing a serpentine belt is not.
If you were shown how to change a serpentine belt 3 times, and still couldn't figure it out, then, yes, you may be dumb.
I know that this is off topic, but you hit on one on my pet peeves. An opinion is an opinion even if the speaker doesn't know it. A fact is a fact, even if it is wrong. If I say 2+2=5, it is not my 'opinion'. even if I say "My opinion is that 2+2=5." Either way, it is a statement fact AND is false. Facts are true or false irrelevant of whether you or I know it. Opinions are true or false BECAUSE you know it.
So, kind of like what happened to parts of Africa?
Those are my reasons as well. I have purchased more games from GOG in the last year than I have purchase from all other source in the last decade.
Are you really going to refrain from taking part the next time someone wants to sing "Happy Birthday" at a public location, like a restaurant?
Because if everyone that Joe user knows has an %Platform of Choice%, Joe user is likely to get an %Platform of Choice% also unless there is some massively compelling reason not to. This causes a snowball effect that leads to no users on other platforms. It doesn't matter if users of other platforms are more likely to purchase or not. There just are not enough of them.
I have had conversations with my child (now 7) about his severe dislike of the people in character costumes. He only recently stopped avoiding them. He was very clear that he was never afraid of giant rats/bears/rabbits/etc... He was very clear that he always knew that they were people in costumes. He was just freaked out by PEOPLE in giant animal costumes.
Gog repackages games to run on newer OSes. They are a good example of how to sell old software for a new OS. They are not a good example to show a new OS' compatibility with old software.
I don't think that is an accident. MS is clearly trying to move windows into an OEM only situation. If I was the paranoid type, I would think that it was to eventually move into a Mac type system. MS has been producing locked down PCs for a decade now. While it would need to be done with caution, it wouldn't be hard for MS to push the entire consumer PC market over to MS built hardware.
Exactly. Anyone using the first release date is making excuses, and not very good ones.
You would only want it not to come to the US because you are bad at math. T-Mobile already has this. Instead of hiding the cost of the phone in the bill, they tell you the cost of the phone, and give you a 2 year interest free loan on the phone that gets put on your bill. For anyone on a 2 year cycle, nothing changes. For those that keep their phone for longer than 2 years, it is cheaper because at the end of two years, they don't have to keep paying for a new phone that they did not recieve. For those that upgrade more often, they can pay off the remaining balance on the old phone and get a new loan on the new phone.
The only thing happening with this is that people are being honestly told what they are paying for, and they are not being charged for phones they don't receive.
If the companies involved don't care about market share, they do so at their own peril.
.apk. Google could then sell apps to Fire users.
As great as it would be to have multiple mobile OSes as major players forever, it is highly unlikely to happen. We saw this with PCs, and we are already starting to see this with mobile devices.
The Kindle Fire is a good example. For Google, it is way better for people to choose a Fire over an iPad, even though the Fire uses the Amazon market. The reason is that almost all of the other android applications will run on the Fire. In a year when dramatically better tablets come out, people will start thinking about their next tablet. If this years purchase was an iPad, next year's purchaser will be pushed to buy another iOS device so that they don't lose all of their existing software. If this year's purchase is a Fire, next year they can choose another Amazon device, OR a device that has the Google market while still keeping all of their existing software. If the Amazon devices started seriously siphoning away enough paying customers that it caused Google a problem, Google could just release the Google Android Market App as a downloadable
Looking at who is buying apps today is "this quarter" thinking. It can be very effective for improving short term profits, but long term profits sometimes require that you nurture products, activities, and users that don't contribute to the bottom line today.