Actually I lied a bit. After getting home and looking again I realize I don't have a Canon, I have a Nikon but the base point is still the same. Apparently his camera is a Handycam DCR-SR42. After a bit of googling on the specific model (I didn't bother to check at the time due to my irritation) I find that it does not seem to record in MPG4 as my friend said (I didn't exactly look at the documentation to verify, I assumed he knew his equipment). It seems it is doing mpeg-2 and from the looks of things it causes problems for a lot of people on a variety of platforms. From what I gather the correct codec can be a pain to fetch based on WMV version and Apple has chosen to charge an extra $20 for that capability with QT. I suspect I just didn't tinker long enough on the linux box, but after I bought my macbook I rebuilt my old laptop with Ubuntu and gave it to my wife so there could very well be missing pieces there I didn't look at.
Ultimitely this seems to be the issue with quite a few of the Sony Handycams. This certainly isn't the only reason I dislike Sony though, it was just another log on the fire so to speak.
By strange video codec I mean it is not included with the combination of full QT, Flip4Win, and Perian. So no joy on the Mac playing it without headache. Doesn't seem to play on the linux box with win32codec installed. And 3 of the 5 Windows machines would go looking for codec and return codec download failed. The two that worked had VLC installed so I suspect it includes the proper codec, but I'm not going to tell everyone I want to show the video to go install VLC on their chosen platform. So it could very well be one of those codecs but the fact that it makes it nearly impossible to just share the videos based on the codec it is using makes it rather irritating.
That said my Canon camera videos play fine on all of the mentioned boxes without any extra bullshit to make them play. As did every other digital camera I have owned (none Sony) over the years. I did in fact purchase a Sony camera once, but we didn't even get home before we turned around and took it back when we realized it used that double priced memory stick duo nonsense and would not use the SD cards that all of our other devices use.
I don't remember supporting HD-DVD anywhere in my post. So yes, you are an irrational Sony fanboy on that front. I never once spoke to the quality or worthiness of HD-DVD or how/why it was defeated. I just said I am sick of Sony's bullshit. And given that they have such a horrible track record of screwing consumers I am not very trusting of them. For what it is worth I think of the formats they have cooked up on their own BluRay is probably the least fucked since they are letting others play too. I think they at least learned a partial lesson when they got their dicks slapped out of their hands in the VHS Betamax thing. (And for all the people who bitch that Betamax was better, yes, it was technically better and murdered by shitty business decisions to try and fuck the consumer once again, which shows that regardless of the technical quality of their products they are still a shitty company.)
That said I still fail to see the point in BluRay or HD-DVD. Spending thousands of dollars on extra gear to make a movie slightly more shiney seems pretty stupid to me. But I am more impressed by content than I am by "OMFG look at the resolution!" Same reason I am unimpressed by xbox and PS3. Its the same damed thing rehashed with better graphics. Wii, even for its lack of graphics, is actually pretty new and interesting. Same problem with movies, I don't give a fuck about Saw I, II, III, IV, XXXIV. I want a damned movie with a decent thinking plot that doesn't just rely on sick shock value or dumb ass slapstick to bring in viewers.
As far as the camera goes it uses MPEG4 which is just a container of sorts. I'm not sure at all what video codec it uses, but it doesn't play on my Mac with Flip4Win, full QT, and Perian installed. It won't play on the linux box with the win32codecs installed. It has played correctly one 1 out of 5 Windows machines with a second one playing it back with shitty horrible choppiness and 3 failing altogether. Irritating to say the least as I am not much for screwing with video stuff and have been too lazy to convert it to something more reasonable.
Congratulations. I do the same thing with music (albeit very very rarely). Buy used:) You get what you want and don't have to give the money to a bad behaving megacorp. I have done the same thing with every Sony PS1/PS2 I have ever purchased. I also paid about half of the shelf price in every case.
The million dollar question here is also which PS3 did you get? Apparently not all of them are backwards compatible since Sony opted to remove the hardware that allowed that in an attempt to bring down the price. I don't know much about them, but I loathe that different versions of the same thing shit. MS does it, Sony does it, and I generally refuse to buy products that exist that way since it is such a royal pain in the ass to figure out WTF capabilities you actually have since the boxes are very very rarely upfront on the technical end about what does and doesn't work. Linksys and Belkin network cards are fucking horrible that way...Belkin sells the 7 different wireless network cards under the same name and you don't know which one you get until you open the damned box.
vegans are in it for ethical reasons. vegetarians are for health reasons. I have not seen an obese vegan or vegetarian, but I have met more than a few suffering the other imbalances related to no animal input. Vegans more than vegetarians, most vegetarians will still eat things like eggs and drink milk which helps their diet considerably. Vegans I think suffer from brain rot. No animal products period, no milk, no eggs, and even non food products that have animal parts. Welcome to living completely out of touch with reality and nature. I also don't understand the complete disconnect in thinking it is ok to murder plants but not murder animals as science has been so kind to show that plants do react chemically when other plants are being diced up nearby (creepy as hell but it doesn't stop me from eating em).
I can respect a vegetarians choice. But I think the Vegan is the mindless zealot. Kinda boils down to the same thing with software. You probably won't find any vegetarians that would rather die than to go outside of their no meat preference to fix a body problem. Vegans you are more likely to find that kind of nonsense. Then of course there is the bloated fat ass that doesn't eat anything than triple bacon burger melts on the opposite end too.
You do realize that you probably just signed yourself up for some hate from the Sony Fanclub? I really liked the PS1 and PS2, but Sony seems to be back to inspecting their own colon again. Beta, Minidisk, MemoryStickDuo, and now BluRay. It's like these assholes can't get enough of themselves. Not to mention my Sony fanboy friend has a Sony digital camera on top of all his other Sony shit and that piece of crap that uses some strange video codec. I have been able to play videos off of that damned camera without headache on ONE computer out of 6 so far. Most don't have the codecs and even the "just works" Windows installs fail on finding the appropriate codec most of the time. All of this coupled with their dealings with the RIAA lawsuit mess. Oh and the PS3 flops of "oh well our stuff is so sensitive we can't make the controller vibrate cuz 6 axis is too good" when the real story was "lawsuits are kicking us in the balls and we can't do it without getting in trouble...so all of you need to forget the fact that the Wii can do everything we can't in a controller and believe our stupid lines about why it won't work". Sony really needs to pull their heads out of their collective ass and get with the program.
Personally, I still want my money for that stupid ass claim about "if you can find a PS3 on the shelves we will pay you!" In the mean time, years later and I am still having a damned hard time finding the latest Wii accessory and I am apparently some kind of luck God for just walking into a Gamestop and buying a Wii because they are STILL perpetually sold out.
I really don't understand this purist nonsense. I certainly understand a preference for F/OSS stuff, but at some point it becomes more religious than practical. Why screw up your own capabilities just to prove a VERY shallow point like this? Computers aren't here to be religious icons, and anyone with an ounce of sense is going to look at movements like this and say "ok, this is just a bit stupid".
If driver XYZ wants to keep their stuff super secret for whatever reason fine. Let them invest the resources to maintain a working copy for the ever growing variety of linux deployments. Because unless they follow the same path of zeaoltry they will eventually look at their prediciment and say "ok, this is just a bit stupid".
I think F/OSS in general is a better model, and I advocate for it whenever possible. But at the end of the day the computer and the software it is running is a tool to support getting a job done. The computer and the software is not a holy temple and holy writ to be protected.
I haven't tried it myself. Though I think looking at a game based on sitting still as a challenge is a little disturbing. I imagine your staring contests are quite riveting to watch.
And flight was demoed by the wright brothers but they sure as hell didn't produce a commercial airliner now did they? There is a world of difference between showing something can work and actually making a functional product out of said technology.
As I understand it that is already included as one of the balance games in Wii Fit. I had wondered this myself when I first heard about the Wii Balance board and everyone talking about how innovative it was. But it seems that intentionally or not Nintendo may have given a nod to that particular forerunner.
Apparently there is a game where you must sit on the balance board lotus style and be very still in front of a candle. If you move the candle goes out. The game keeps track of how long you stay still. Sounds a hell of a lot like the original if you ask me.
McCain scares me more these days. Not so much during his first run. But he has become such a sellout to lobbyists and special interests its pathetic. He also intends to latch on and continue miserable failures of Bush policy. Hell the only thing I respect about him anymore is his opposition to torture, but even then he has been a bit flakey on doing anything serious about that. The wiretaps and all of that Soviet mentality crap.
I figure rather than fretting about paying taxes over what will likely be a screwup program of universal healthcare I will look at it in a different light. There is a possibility that taxes will be raised by a guy who has a pretty strong pro tech platform and is against all of this Soviet style paranoia our current crop loonies have been up to. In the end I would rather have a young idealist Jr senator that isn't a DC insider waste my money on bad ideas than to let another paranoid old guard Republican waste my money stealing my freedoms. The lost freedoms are far harder to regain than the lost dollars on a stupid government initiative. In the end I would like a REAL Republican, the old kind, the ones that supported small government, staying out of peoples personal lives, doesn't like spending government money, doesn't like taxes. The current crop are a disturbing mix of Soviet style leadership ideals and theocratic desires and the Democrats scare me a hell of a lot less than this Theocratic Soviet style Republican.
This is getting pretty pathetic. I am even willing to give XP some credit for being a decent OS, even more so now compared to Vista. (Maybe that is the secret plan, release Vista, demo Windows 7, and then triple the cost of XP since it is "out of support"). But seriously, Vista Aero (Sounds alot like Aqua), then we have the Sideboard vs Dashboard, now multitouch. MS is clearly clueless to what is really happening. They apparently think it is the eye candy wizbang stuff from Apple that makes it attractive. So (true to their origins) they copy Apple innovations and find a stunning way to make them completely useless or unusable.
MS is losing huge ground when it comes to "just works". The non computer savvy have come to accept that computers crash, behave erratically, or otherwise do flakey things on a whim due to the tremendous amount of glitchy nonsense that MS foists upon the user. OS X and even Linux are gaining some pretty significant traction while MS fuddles around in circles forcing upgrades into more garbage the user doesn't really want or need.
Though I suppose the other secret plan could be that fact that this type of feature crap continues to bloat the OS at an alarming rate requiring much faster and newer hardware just to make your computer usable. I think they are setting up to recieve kickbacks from hardware vendors on sales to make up for their other failures.
I generally agree with the points here, but I would point out that the money sunk into insurance would be replaced with that tax. Insurance companies are no less scandelous about this kind of crap than the government could be. Blue Cross Blue Shield for example managed to deny payment to a local woman who had a miscarraige by calling it an "elective abortion" because the doctor tried to administer medication and help before the baby actually died. Through my own surgery I have learned that you have to time your major surgeries or illnesses at the proper time of the year or they stick you with crap like "well you paid last year's deductible, but this is a new year so pay up again".
Also, the only people I have actually heard bitch about the Canadian system and the waiting list and all of that nonsense are Americans that have never dealt with it. Not that it isn't bad, but I only hear people scream and moan about it that don't deal with it. The people that I know that DO deal with Canadian healthcare seem to be pretty fond of it. So the horror stories seem to be little more then right wing nonsense and cherry picking of evidence.
All in all you are right. I would rather not the government be in charge of any of this, but if they are going to take my money anyways (and they will) I would rather have them spend it on something that will at least marginally benefit someone who needs it. Them blowing all of my money on a War against (Some Word). Terrorists, Iraq, Drugs, Poverty, or whatever other clever word they come up with to waste my money on.
If you think Universal Health Care will cost more than the 3 trillion we have blown on this grossly mismanaged war adventure I think you have far better drugs than any health care plan could ever hope to offer. The "long run" required to make a screwed up healthcare plan cost more than adding a 3rd and or 4th front to this disaster is a very very "long" run indeed. My point is we can fix a botched healthcare plan FAR faster and at much less expense than we have been able to fix our current war situation, and with McCain saber rattling so much at Iran I don't think we could even hope to fix that situation anytime in the reasonably near future. But don't take it from me, McCain himself claims the 100 years in Iraq plan is a good idea.
Well...on the debt side, which do you think will be easier to fix? A botched healthcare plan or a botched war plan? So far we are going on quite a few years with no end in sight of fixing a botched war plan. I'm not fond of any of the choices but I think a botched healthcare plan is a little less disasterous at this point. That and at least we will get SOMETHING out of it even if it is less than what we put into it. The botched war plan has yet to have any kind of return and has only driven up the costs of nearly everything.
You are clearly unfamiliar with anything the Wii Fit does. No, it isn't some professional sports star training regiment, nor is it meant to be. The Wii Fit has things broken into a number of categories, Yoga, Strength Training, Aerobics, and Balance Games.
Now, I'm no fan of yoga nor am I knowledgable enough on the subject to critique it.
The strength training exercises are the standard group of exercises that you would normally do, pushups/side planks, various leg lifts, jackknives, all the Wii Fit does is watch your center of balance and in some cases count what you are doing. It also does almost all of these excercises at an excruciatingly slow pace, which if you know anything about most strength training exercises is the correct way to do it. 30 very slow and controlled pushups will put a burn in your muscles far beyond 100 rocket fast pushups.
The aerobics piece is basically the same. The game does very little more than give you something to play along with while exercising. How much workout you get is entirely dependent on the effort you put into it, not what the game is doing. As you spend more time on the thing it unlocks more exercises and more options. The hulahoop thing on TV eventaully can go into longer time frames and it measures your balance and movement control while you are doing it.
The balance games are pretty amazing themselves. They force you to shift your center of balance around and are far more difficult than they look. I had major reconstructive surgery on my ankle and I thought it was getting quite a bit better until I played with this for a while. I realized that all I was doing was shifting more of my weight onto the opposite leg rather than really rehabilitating. These balance games are forcing me to rebalance my weight and build the muscles required for better stability.
Finally it lets you do little body tests every day for weight and body control and tracks that information. The game isn't meant to make you fit. The game is meant to give you motivation to get fit yourself, let you set goals and track them. The little beast is very effective at giving you a solid measure of progress.
I don't think this has anything to do with Nintendo trying to be a "responsible" gaming company. They did it because there was a demand for it and those devices are flying off shelves. I think it is obvious to anyone who has actually played with one of these that you probably haven't seen anything other than some commercials. Also, your S=$ isn't that clever. They are profiting off of a real demand, not some enforced monopoly status like MS. And the S=$ isn't even that clever there.
Clearly the concern here is that they will replace our "mexican food" of taco bell and other garbage with authentic mexican food and that is clearly unacceptable.
I think the real solution here is to give up on this border patrol nonsense. Please...the cops can't find shit, are easily bribed, undermanned, underfunded, and so on. It barely works anywhere else, it won't work here. However, what WILL work... The IRS. You can't hide from those fuckers! Line up IRS agents across the border. "Welcome to America! Here is your SSN, please pay your taxes or we WILL come find you". That simple. Problem solved. Even better would be to do something like Fair Tax so you can't dodge taxes. Your taxes are rolled into every item you purchase and the costs of good will generally go down or stay the same since close to 50% of the cost of a good these days is corporate taxes being passed down.
It pisses me off to no ends to listen to "We don't want no more smelly immegrant" crap coupled with "If you don't like your shitty nation and don't want to get blown up you should live in America". Draconian immegration policy keeps them sending money home out of our country rather than just bringing the rest of the family up.
One of the few days I wish I had mod points to use. I have smoked on and off for years. A previous smoker telling me I should quit doesn't bother me much, even when they talk about the benefits of quitting or the risks of smoking. But when these self rightous assholes come out of the woodwork to condemn any behavior they deem stupid I just want to shove a whole pack straight up their asses and light em up. I hear more nonsmokers bitch about that whole "it is a choice" shit than I have ever heard from smokers. In fact, I don't think I have EVER met a smoker cry about how they can't quit because its a disease or some shit. Most smokers don't quit because they don't want to quit. That simple.
Oh...and for all you self rightous pricks bitching about lost productivity you might want to wander out to a smoke pit sometime. I have observed more important decisions and work being accomplished at a picnic table by a few smokers than coming from any meetingroom agenda. And for all you whiners saying "but that is second hand smoke" then you shouldn't leave your house because walking through the parking lot every day is going to expose you to just as many toxins if not more than standing upwind from a smoker outside.
Actually what you mention there is already illegal through antitrust laws (You can only sell our product if you refuse to sell product X). (I forget the specific law that covers this specific behavior, but I still have my economics book that covers it.) Now, that of course wouldn't stop MS (a convicted monopolist) of attempting that kind of bull, but it wouldn't hold up in court for a second.
I don't think the "retailer contract" would be a per box kind of deal. If anything it would put the power in the hands of the retailer I would think. "You want your software sold, then you sign this piece of paper that promises that you cannot hold us to the individual license agreements of the products we are reselling for you".
Only learned about it when the payday-loan outfit caleld to collect on the loan.
So...because they know of 87 that means it only happened 87 times? Because they caught one when he got a phone call about collections that was the only one? This also doesn't account for a tremendous variety of things that you can use someone's identity for that won't generate credit checks.
You clearly haven't thought this out very well. What makes you think you could buy software from Best Buy anymore? Best Buy would have had to purchase said software to put on their shelf in the first place and thus be bound by this type of agreement. In this case I would have actually hoped AutoDesk would have won this nonsense. I could have made MILLIONS! I walk into court with a ruling in favor of this kind of draconian nonsense and a phone call to the BSA asking for my reward for reporting piracy on all of the software resellers. I get my millions and the software resellers are afraid to touch commercial software.
I mean, First Sale being defended is all fine and all but what really happened here is one of those giant self destruct events in the software/patent/licensing world of Imaginary Property was avoided. We need more of these insane IP implosions to succeed or we will never see large scale reform. You see, reform will never come from a sense of justice or rightness, it will come from economic motivations. Right now this IP nonsense is incredibly profitable, we need to make it unbelievably painful to get tied up in this crap and THEN the big boys will want to make the rules fair again.
His "service" is billing you for something you can do for free. On top of that the fact that he has been all over TV, radio, and the internet doing this crap makes him considerably more recognizable than the average person off the street. You don't usually want to steal the identity of someone who will be recognized.
I have never seen the ambient light sensing on a PC laptop, and the few people I have talked to that say they have said it was a horrible implementation. The MBP turns down your LCD and backlights the keyboard when it sees that it is getting dark in the room. You don't burn your eyes out and you can see your keys, and you don't have to dork with your settings manually every time the light conditions change.
The motion sensing that can be used to save harddrives from a fall, make lightsaber sounds, or alarm the notebook so you can grab a drink and it screams if someone touches it. Though I have heard some IBM notebooks have this, but it certainly isn't widespread.
Magnetic power cable. This has already saved my laptop once as my 4yr old ran past and rather than doing damage to cable, laptop, or child, it popped out and saved all 3 from any damage. I have never seen this on any PC laptop.
Slot loading CD/DVD drive. This is pretty simple, but I have never seen it on a PC laptop. Those flimsy little drawers are begging to be snapped off and require that much extra space around the laptop to use. Unpleasant to deal with in tight spaces like coach seating on a jet.
Case construction. They are much more sturdy than most PC laptops. Place palms on top corners of LCD and torque forward/back and watch the screen distort on most PC laptops. The same with pushing on the back of the LCD you can see the distortion from your fingers. To be fair there are more than a few PC laptop makers that do good job here too, but the majority are shitty plastic construction leaving one of the most expensive replacement parts on a laptop vulnerable to easy damage.
Keyboard. The F-Keys that you rarely use anyways are mapped to the Fn-Keys that you normally do use on a laptop fairly fequently. You can still get F-Key functionality, but the default is reversed. So adjusting your brightness, sound, etc are just quick one button adjustments. Also, the letters aren't painted on so they won't rub off, they are clear. This also makes the keyboard backlight that much better.
Multitouch mouse but you already touched on that.
No connectors on the back! All of the connections are on the side. I hate laptops that I have to reach around and blindly grope about trying to find the cable I need, or having to flip over. Again, not restricted to Apple, but just more evidence of better design.
In the end it is about design more than just hardware. You can bemoan the fact that some station wagon has the same engine, a steering wheel, and 4 tires as a more expensive luxery car, but the luxery car has other things that go along with it. When you focus on processor, memory, and HDD only, then of course the Apple laptops are overpriced. I always thought they were just overpriced nonsense myself until I sat and tinkered with one for a while. If you do get a PC laptop that has all of that well thought out design and additional features and you compare it to an Apple laptop you will see that they aren't exactly overpriced. The problem is people compare cheap commodity PC laptops with high end Apple laptops and moan about the price difference. Some of those features I mentioned grow on you pretty quick too. Two finger scrolling is amazing, and you won't even notice many of the more subtle design features until you have used one for a while and go back to a PC laptop and wonder why the hell they didn't do some of those simple things.
You can't compare them to similar spec'd PC hardware because it doesn't exist. There is more to your computer than RAM, Memory, and Video. The MBP laptops have a large range of hardware based features that PC laptops simply do not offer. If anything you will see how overpriced PC laptops are charging you a decent chunk of change for a plasticy and cheaply manufactured device.
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Actually I lied a bit. After getting home and looking again I realize I don't have a Canon, I have a Nikon but the base point is still the same. Apparently his camera is a Handycam DCR-SR42. After a bit of googling on the specific model (I didn't bother to check at the time due to my irritation) I find that it does not seem to record in MPG4 as my friend said (I didn't exactly look at the documentation to verify, I assumed he knew his equipment). It seems it is doing mpeg-2 and from the looks of things it causes problems for a lot of people on a variety of platforms. From what I gather the correct codec can be a pain to fetch based on WMV version and Apple has chosen to charge an extra $20 for that capability with QT. I suspect I just didn't tinker long enough on the linux box, but after I bought my macbook I rebuilt my old laptop with Ubuntu and gave it to my wife so there could very well be missing pieces there I didn't look at.
Ultimitely this seems to be the issue with quite a few of the Sony Handycams. This certainly isn't the only reason I dislike Sony though, it was just another log on the fire so to speak.
I wish I had some +Funny points for you today.
By strange video codec I mean it is not included with the combination of full QT, Flip4Win, and Perian. So no joy on the Mac playing it without headache. Doesn't seem to play on the linux box with win32codec installed. And 3 of the 5 Windows machines would go looking for codec and return codec download failed. The two that worked had VLC installed so I suspect it includes the proper codec, but I'm not going to tell everyone I want to show the video to go install VLC on their chosen platform. So it could very well be one of those codecs but the fact that it makes it nearly impossible to just share the videos based on the codec it is using makes it rather irritating.
That said my Canon camera videos play fine on all of the mentioned boxes without any extra bullshit to make them play. As did every other digital camera I have owned (none Sony) over the years. I did in fact purchase a Sony camera once, but we didn't even get home before we turned around and took it back when we realized it used that double priced memory stick duo nonsense and would not use the SD cards that all of our other devices use.
I don't remember supporting HD-DVD anywhere in my post. So yes, you are an irrational Sony fanboy on that front. I never once spoke to the quality or worthiness of HD-DVD or how/why it was defeated. I just said I am sick of Sony's bullshit. And given that they have such a horrible track record of screwing consumers I am not very trusting of them. For what it is worth I think of the formats they have cooked up on their own BluRay is probably the least fucked since they are letting others play too. I think they at least learned a partial lesson when they got their dicks slapped out of their hands in the VHS Betamax thing. (And for all the people who bitch that Betamax was better, yes, it was technically better and murdered by shitty business decisions to try and fuck the consumer once again, which shows that regardless of the technical quality of their products they are still a shitty company.)
That said I still fail to see the point in BluRay or HD-DVD. Spending thousands of dollars on extra gear to make a movie slightly more shiney seems pretty stupid to me. But I am more impressed by content than I am by "OMFG look at the resolution!" Same reason I am unimpressed by xbox and PS3. Its the same damed thing rehashed with better graphics. Wii, even for its lack of graphics, is actually pretty new and interesting. Same problem with movies, I don't give a fuck about Saw I, II, III, IV, XXXIV. I want a damned movie with a decent thinking plot that doesn't just rely on sick shock value or dumb ass slapstick to bring in viewers.
As far as the camera goes it uses MPEG4 which is just a container of sorts. I'm not sure at all what video codec it uses, but it doesn't play on my Mac with Flip4Win, full QT, and Perian installed. It won't play on the linux box with the win32codecs installed. It has played correctly one 1 out of 5 Windows machines with a second one playing it back with shitty horrible choppiness and 3 failing altogether. Irritating to say the least as I am not much for screwing with video stuff and have been too lazy to convert it to something more reasonable.
Congratulations. I do the same thing with music (albeit very very rarely). Buy used :) You get what you want and don't have to give the money to a bad behaving megacorp. I have done the same thing with every Sony PS1/PS2 I have ever purchased. I also paid about half of the shelf price in every case.
The million dollar question here is also which PS3 did you get? Apparently not all of them are backwards compatible since Sony opted to remove the hardware that allowed that in an attempt to bring down the price. I don't know much about them, but I loathe that different versions of the same thing shit. MS does it, Sony does it, and I generally refuse to buy products that exist that way since it is such a royal pain in the ass to figure out WTF capabilities you actually have since the boxes are very very rarely upfront on the technical end about what does and doesn't work. Linksys and Belkin network cards are fucking horrible that way...Belkin sells the 7 different wireless network cards under the same name and you don't know which one you get until you open the damned box.
vegans are in it for ethical reasons. vegetarians are for health reasons. I have not seen an obese vegan or vegetarian, but I have met more than a few suffering the other imbalances related to no animal input. Vegans more than vegetarians, most vegetarians will still eat things like eggs and drink milk which helps their diet considerably. Vegans I think suffer from brain rot. No animal products period, no milk, no eggs, and even non food products that have animal parts. Welcome to living completely out of touch with reality and nature. I also don't understand the complete disconnect in thinking it is ok to murder plants but not murder animals as science has been so kind to show that plants do react chemically when other plants are being diced up nearby (creepy as hell but it doesn't stop me from eating em).
I can respect a vegetarians choice. But I think the Vegan is the mindless zealot. Kinda boils down to the same thing with software. You probably won't find any vegetarians that would rather die than to go outside of their no meat preference to fix a body problem. Vegans you are more likely to find that kind of nonsense. Then of course there is the bloated fat ass that doesn't eat anything than triple bacon burger melts on the opposite end too.
You do realize that you probably just signed yourself up for some hate from the Sony Fanclub? I really liked the PS1 and PS2, but Sony seems to be back to inspecting their own colon again. Beta, Minidisk, MemoryStickDuo, and now BluRay. It's like these assholes can't get enough of themselves. Not to mention my Sony fanboy friend has a Sony digital camera on top of all his other Sony shit and that piece of crap that uses some strange video codec. I have been able to play videos off of that damned camera without headache on ONE computer out of 6 so far. Most don't have the codecs and even the "just works" Windows installs fail on finding the appropriate codec most of the time. All of this coupled with their dealings with the RIAA lawsuit mess. Oh and the PS3 flops of "oh well our stuff is so sensitive we can't make the controller vibrate cuz 6 axis is too good" when the real story was "lawsuits are kicking us in the balls and we can't do it without getting in trouble...so all of you need to forget the fact that the Wii can do everything we can't in a controller and believe our stupid lines about why it won't work". Sony really needs to pull their heads out of their collective ass and get with the program.
Personally, I still want my money for that stupid ass claim about "if you can find a PS3 on the shelves we will pay you!" In the mean time, years later and I am still having a damned hard time finding the latest Wii accessory and I am apparently some kind of luck God for just walking into a Gamestop and buying a Wii because they are STILL perpetually sold out.
I really don't understand this purist nonsense. I certainly understand a preference for F/OSS stuff, but at some point it becomes more religious than practical. Why screw up your own capabilities just to prove a VERY shallow point like this? Computers aren't here to be religious icons, and anyone with an ounce of sense is going to look at movements like this and say "ok, this is just a bit stupid".
If driver XYZ wants to keep their stuff super secret for whatever reason fine. Let them invest the resources to maintain a working copy for the ever growing variety of linux deployments. Because unless they follow the same path of zeaoltry they will eventually look at their prediciment and say "ok, this is just a bit stupid".
I think F/OSS in general is a better model, and I advocate for it whenever possible. But at the end of the day the computer and the software it is running is a tool to support getting a job done. The computer and the software is not a holy temple and holy writ to be protected.
I haven't tried it myself. Though I think looking at a game based on sitting still as a challenge is a little disturbing. I imagine your staring contests are quite riveting to watch.
And flight was demoed by the wright brothers but they sure as hell didn't produce a commercial airliner now did they? There is a world of difference between showing something can work and actually making a functional product out of said technology.
As I understand it that is already included as one of the balance games in Wii Fit. I had wondered this myself when I first heard about the Wii Balance board and everyone talking about how innovative it was. But it seems that intentionally or not Nintendo may have given a nod to that particular forerunner.
Apparently there is a game where you must sit on the balance board lotus style and be very still in front of a candle. If you move the candle goes out. The game keeps track of how long you stay still. Sounds a hell of a lot like the original if you ask me.
McCain scares me more these days. Not so much during his first run. But he has become such a sellout to lobbyists and special interests its pathetic. He also intends to latch on and continue miserable failures of Bush policy. Hell the only thing I respect about him anymore is his opposition to torture, but even then he has been a bit flakey on doing anything serious about that. The wiretaps and all of that Soviet mentality crap.
I figure rather than fretting about paying taxes over what will likely be a screwup program of universal healthcare I will look at it in a different light. There is a possibility that taxes will be raised by a guy who has a pretty strong pro tech platform and is against all of this Soviet style paranoia our current crop loonies have been up to. In the end I would rather have a young idealist Jr senator that isn't a DC insider waste my money on bad ideas than to let another paranoid old guard Republican waste my money stealing my freedoms. The lost freedoms are far harder to regain than the lost dollars on a stupid government initiative. In the end I would like a REAL Republican, the old kind, the ones that supported small government, staying out of peoples personal lives, doesn't like spending government money, doesn't like taxes. The current crop are a disturbing mix of Soviet style leadership ideals and theocratic desires and the Democrats scare me a hell of a lot less than this Theocratic Soviet style Republican.
This is getting pretty pathetic. I am even willing to give XP some credit for being a decent OS, even more so now compared to Vista. (Maybe that is the secret plan, release Vista, demo Windows 7, and then triple the cost of XP since it is "out of support"). But seriously, Vista Aero (Sounds alot like Aqua), then we have the Sideboard vs Dashboard, now multitouch. MS is clearly clueless to what is really happening. They apparently think it is the eye candy wizbang stuff from Apple that makes it attractive. So (true to their origins) they copy Apple innovations and find a stunning way to make them completely useless or unusable.
MS is losing huge ground when it comes to "just works". The non computer savvy have come to accept that computers crash, behave erratically, or otherwise do flakey things on a whim due to the tremendous amount of glitchy nonsense that MS foists upon the user. OS X and even Linux are gaining some pretty significant traction while MS fuddles around in circles forcing upgrades into more garbage the user doesn't really want or need.
Though I suppose the other secret plan could be that fact that this type of feature crap continues to bloat the OS at an alarming rate requiring much faster and newer hardware just to make your computer usable. I think they are setting up to recieve kickbacks from hardware vendors on sales to make up for their other failures.
I generally agree with the points here, but I would point out that the money sunk into insurance would be replaced with that tax. Insurance companies are no less scandelous about this kind of crap than the government could be. Blue Cross Blue Shield for example managed to deny payment to a local woman who had a miscarraige by calling it an "elective abortion" because the doctor tried to administer medication and help before the baby actually died. Through my own surgery I have learned that you have to time your major surgeries or illnesses at the proper time of the year or they stick you with crap like "well you paid last year's deductible, but this is a new year so pay up again".
Also, the only people I have actually heard bitch about the Canadian system and the waiting list and all of that nonsense are Americans that have never dealt with it. Not that it isn't bad, but I only hear people scream and moan about it that don't deal with it. The people that I know that DO deal with Canadian healthcare seem to be pretty fond of it. So the horror stories seem to be little more then right wing nonsense and cherry picking of evidence.
All in all you are right. I would rather not the government be in charge of any of this, but if they are going to take my money anyways (and they will) I would rather have them spend it on something that will at least marginally benefit someone who needs it. Them blowing all of my money on a War against (Some Word). Terrorists, Iraq, Drugs, Poverty, or whatever other clever word they come up with to waste my money on.
If you think Universal Health Care will cost more than the 3 trillion we have blown on this grossly mismanaged war adventure I think you have far better drugs than any health care plan could ever hope to offer. The "long run" required to make a screwed up healthcare plan cost more than adding a 3rd and or 4th front to this disaster is a very very "long" run indeed. My point is we can fix a botched healthcare plan FAR faster and at much less expense than we have been able to fix our current war situation, and with McCain saber rattling so much at Iran I don't think we could even hope to fix that situation anytime in the reasonably near future. But don't take it from me, McCain himself claims the 100 years in Iraq plan is a good idea.
Well...on the debt side, which do you think will be easier to fix? A botched healthcare plan or a botched war plan? So far we are going on quite a few years with no end in sight of fixing a botched war plan. I'm not fond of any of the choices but I think a botched healthcare plan is a little less disasterous at this point. That and at least we will get SOMETHING out of it even if it is less than what we put into it. The botched war plan has yet to have any kind of return and has only driven up the costs of nearly everything.
You are clearly unfamiliar with anything the Wii Fit does. No, it isn't some professional sports star training regiment, nor is it meant to be. The Wii Fit has things broken into a number of categories, Yoga, Strength Training, Aerobics, and Balance Games.
Now, I'm no fan of yoga nor am I knowledgable enough on the subject to critique it.
The strength training exercises are the standard group of exercises that you would normally do, pushups/side planks, various leg lifts, jackknives, all the Wii Fit does is watch your center of balance and in some cases count what you are doing. It also does almost all of these excercises at an excruciatingly slow pace, which if you know anything about most strength training exercises is the correct way to do it. 30 very slow and controlled pushups will put a burn in your muscles far beyond 100 rocket fast pushups.
The aerobics piece is basically the same. The game does very little more than give you something to play along with while exercising. How much workout you get is entirely dependent on the effort you put into it, not what the game is doing. As you spend more time on the thing it unlocks more exercises and more options. The hulahoop thing on TV eventaully can go into longer time frames and it measures your balance and movement control while you are doing it.
The balance games are pretty amazing themselves. They force you to shift your center of balance around and are far more difficult than they look. I had major reconstructive surgery on my ankle and I thought it was getting quite a bit better until I played with this for a while. I realized that all I was doing was shifting more of my weight onto the opposite leg rather than really rehabilitating. These balance games are forcing me to rebalance my weight and build the muscles required for better stability.
Finally it lets you do little body tests every day for weight and body control and tracks that information. The game isn't meant to make you fit. The game is meant to give you motivation to get fit yourself, let you set goals and track them. The little beast is very effective at giving you a solid measure of progress.
I don't think this has anything to do with Nintendo trying to be a "responsible" gaming company. They did it because there was a demand for it and those devices are flying off shelves. I think it is obvious to anyone who has actually played with one of these that you probably haven't seen anything other than some commercials. Also, your S=$ isn't that clever. They are profiting off of a real demand, not some enforced monopoly status like MS. And the S=$ isn't even that clever there.
Clearly the concern here is that they will replace our "mexican food" of taco bell and other garbage with authentic mexican food and that is clearly unacceptable.
I think the real solution here is to give up on this border patrol nonsense. Please...the cops can't find shit, are easily bribed, undermanned, underfunded, and so on. It barely works anywhere else, it won't work here. However, what WILL work... The IRS. You can't hide from those fuckers! Line up IRS agents across the border. "Welcome to America! Here is your SSN, please pay your taxes or we WILL come find you". That simple. Problem solved. Even better would be to do something like Fair Tax so you can't dodge taxes. Your taxes are rolled into every item you purchase and the costs of good will generally go down or stay the same since close to 50% of the cost of a good these days is corporate taxes being passed down.
It pisses me off to no ends to listen to "We don't want no more smelly immegrant" crap coupled with "If you don't like your shitty nation and don't want to get blown up you should live in America". Draconian immegration policy keeps them sending money home out of our country rather than just bringing the rest of the family up.
One of the few days I wish I had mod points to use. I have smoked on and off for years. A previous smoker telling me I should quit doesn't bother me much, even when they talk about the benefits of quitting or the risks of smoking. But when these self rightous assholes come out of the woodwork to condemn any behavior they deem stupid I just want to shove a whole pack straight up their asses and light em up. I hear more nonsmokers bitch about that whole "it is a choice" shit than I have ever heard from smokers. In fact, I don't think I have EVER met a smoker cry about how they can't quit because its a disease or some shit. Most smokers don't quit because they don't want to quit. That simple.
Oh...and for all you self rightous pricks bitching about lost productivity you might want to wander out to a smoke pit sometime. I have observed more important decisions and work being accomplished at a picnic table by a few smokers than coming from any meetingroom agenda. And for all you whiners saying "but that is second hand smoke" then you shouldn't leave your house because walking through the parking lot every day is going to expose you to just as many toxins if not more than standing upwind from a smoker outside.
Actually what you mention there is already illegal through antitrust laws (You can only sell our product if you refuse to sell product X). (I forget the specific law that covers this specific behavior, but I still have my economics book that covers it.) Now, that of course wouldn't stop MS (a convicted monopolist) of attempting that kind of bull, but it wouldn't hold up in court for a second.
I don't think the "retailer contract" would be a per box kind of deal. If anything it would put the power in the hands of the retailer I would think. "You want your software sold, then you sign this piece of paper that promises that you cannot hold us to the individual license agreements of the products we are reselling for you".
One out of AT LEAST 87.
Only learned about it when the payday-loan outfit caleld to collect on the loan.
So...because they know of 87 that means it only happened 87 times? Because they caught one when he got a phone call about collections that was the only one? This also doesn't account for a tremendous variety of things that you can use someone's identity for that won't generate credit checks.
You clearly haven't thought this out very well. What makes you think you could buy software from Best Buy anymore? Best Buy would have had to purchase said software to put on their shelf in the first place and thus be bound by this type of agreement. In this case I would have actually hoped AutoDesk would have won this nonsense. I could have made MILLIONS! I walk into court with a ruling in favor of this kind of draconian nonsense and a phone call to the BSA asking for my reward for reporting piracy on all of the software resellers. I get my millions and the software resellers are afraid to touch commercial software.
I mean, First Sale being defended is all fine and all but what really happened here is one of those giant self destruct events in the software/patent/licensing world of Imaginary Property was avoided. We need more of these insane IP implosions to succeed or we will never see large scale reform. You see, reform will never come from a sense of justice or rightness, it will come from economic motivations. Right now this IP nonsense is incredibly profitable, we need to make it unbelievably painful to get tied up in this crap and THEN the big boys will want to make the rules fair again.
His "service" is billing you for something you can do for free. On top of that the fact that he has been all over TV, radio, and the internet doing this crap makes him considerably more recognizable than the average person off the street. You don't usually want to steal the identity of someone who will be recognized.
I have never seen the ambient light sensing on a PC laptop, and the few people I have talked to that say they have said it was a horrible implementation. The MBP turns down your LCD and backlights the keyboard when it sees that it is getting dark in the room. You don't burn your eyes out and you can see your keys, and you don't have to dork with your settings manually every time the light conditions change.
The motion sensing that can be used to save harddrives from a fall, make lightsaber sounds, or alarm the notebook so you can grab a drink and it screams if someone touches it. Though I have heard some IBM notebooks have this, but it certainly isn't widespread.
Magnetic power cable. This has already saved my laptop once as my 4yr old ran past and rather than doing damage to cable, laptop, or child, it popped out and saved all 3 from any damage. I have never seen this on any PC laptop.
Slot loading CD/DVD drive. This is pretty simple, but I have never seen it on a PC laptop. Those flimsy little drawers are begging to be snapped off and require that much extra space around the laptop to use. Unpleasant to deal with in tight spaces like coach seating on a jet.
Case construction. They are much more sturdy than most PC laptops. Place palms on top corners of LCD and torque forward/back and watch the screen distort on most PC laptops. The same with pushing on the back of the LCD you can see the distortion from your fingers. To be fair there are more than a few PC laptop makers that do good job here too, but the majority are shitty plastic construction leaving one of the most expensive replacement parts on a laptop vulnerable to easy damage.
Keyboard. The F-Keys that you rarely use anyways are mapped to the Fn-Keys that you normally do use on a laptop fairly fequently. You can still get F-Key functionality, but the default is reversed. So adjusting your brightness, sound, etc are just quick one button adjustments. Also, the letters aren't painted on so they won't rub off, they are clear. This also makes the keyboard backlight that much better.
Multitouch mouse but you already touched on that.
No connectors on the back! All of the connections are on the side. I hate laptops that I have to reach around and blindly grope about trying to find the cable I need, or having to flip over. Again, not restricted to Apple, but just more evidence of better design.
In the end it is about design more than just hardware. You can bemoan the fact that some station wagon has the same engine, a steering wheel, and 4 tires as a more expensive luxery car, but the luxery car has other things that go along with it. When you focus on processor, memory, and HDD only, then of course the Apple laptops are overpriced. I always thought they were just overpriced nonsense myself until I sat and tinkered with one for a while. If you do get a PC laptop that has all of that well thought out design and additional features and you compare it to an Apple laptop you will see that they aren't exactly overpriced. The problem is people compare cheap commodity PC laptops with high end Apple laptops and moan about the price difference. Some of those features I mentioned grow on you pretty quick too. Two finger scrolling is amazing, and you won't even notice many of the more subtle design features until you have used one for a while and go back to a PC laptop and wonder why the hell they didn't do some of those simple things.
You can't compare them to similar spec'd PC hardware because it doesn't exist. There is more to your computer than RAM, Memory, and Video. The MBP laptops have a large range of hardware based features that PC laptops simply do not offer. If anything you will see how overpriced PC laptops are charging you a decent chunk of change for a plasticy and cheaply manufactured device.