I am really sick of the Obama bandwagoners who are going around the internet insinuating that we're all supposed to give up our right to vote for whom we want to vote for, even if they aren't necessarily popular or have the best chance of winning. And its sad to see that creeping its way on to/. now too. What is the point of this article? Since there is supposedly only one guy watchng over Hillary's page, we can conclude that she's in political trouble and we shouldn't vote for her? WTF?
Hell, I am going to head over there right now and volunteer to help this guy out if it will shut up the author of this article and people like him. I know it's bad, but I have less of a problem with this when it's against leftist candidates. I sure would love to have a more pro-capitalism government. We're spending too much to be considered "pro-capitalist" because eventually those debts must be repaid from a tax which comes out of citizens pockets, which decreases consumption of goods produced, which decreases corporate profits, which reduces their operating margin, which reduces the incentive to function in America. Just take a look at all the European businesses that jumped ship to Scotland because of the lower taxes.
How dare you compare the present administration to a bunch of carrots. Carrots are far to intelligent to warrant such a comparison. We have found the April 1st 2008 slashdot meme! Carrots!
I can't see anybody from the far left acting with that particular brand of blind hatred, can you?
To be honest, I sure can. That's the problem with anyone on the far {left,right,top,bottom}. Reddit, digg, and youtube are prime examples of this left hate.
I've never seen such hate and stupidity combined at once. With the republicans at least they seem to be smart about it, or represent a smarter voting group.
"I have been offered 100,000 dollars for the break, but I replied that it was not enough." Any 4 year old can break an XBox 360 with their own toys.
Tonka trucks > all. I wonder if this means it would take over 3x the work for him to crack it, or if it's only not enough because the benefit to the buyer (MS) is much greater than $100k. IE, with MS's Xbox360 install base, they should be willing to pay a lot more than that.
Your child porn, sadly, will not download any faster. Freenet users are disgusting. Your information to fight totalitarian governments, sadly, will not download any faster.
There, fixed that for you. In China they just sack you for using too much encryption, and have government run TOR servers.
I would help run this network but I am convinced it is full of child porn.
Considering how popular these little machines seem to become, Microsoft surely has plans. I would think something like this:
*Freshen up XP a bit with some new theme and some gadgets. *Give it a new flashy name. *Then practically give it away to the manufacturers of these machines.
Rather that, then to let linux machines get a foothold in the consumer market. And the awesome thing is that 2008 really IS the year of Linux on the Desktop, and I have little reason to think that it's going to do anything but keep getting better.
As for why I mean by "it's finally the year of Linux on the Desktop" is that, prior to this point, all of my system builds with the cheapest components available inevitably had hardware issues, getting everything to work, drivers installed, video working, etc. Except, this last system I just built, a $60 IP35-E motherboard with $80 e2180 (and overclocked it) and $190 8800GT graphics card, worked right out of the box (well, I did have to move the harddrive from ports 1-4 on sata to 5-6 for IDE mode or something, but once I found that out, all was smooth sailing). I'm not worried about the minor problem I had because hardly anybody has it and it'll probably get fixed in software updates later.
So what's going to happen is this pressure on MS is only going to get greater and greater with a few more years and they're going to have to keep giving us the free crap or make something better than crap.
Personally I've no problem whatsoever spotting a girl's interest in someone, except when the someone's me. Then I keep telling myself that I shouldn't be so presumptuous, it must be my imagination, she couldn't possibly be interested in me, etc. etc. Of course, it's a self-fulfilling prophesy, because she soon loses interest if you act like that. You pretty much have to grab me by the lapels and drag me into the bedroom, not because I don't Get It, but because I can't see the appeal. I think for a lot of us it's just plain fear of failure that makes us dismiss it. Fail? She goes and talks with her friends about it, now they all know you have interest in her. What then? You can't do that more than twice in a group of girls before you're out of chances.
... whereas women can overlook ugly and stupid, as long as he's rich? As opposed to men? Granted, there's not that many women rich enough to be gold digging for but if you're some ugly, stupid billionaire's daughter I doubt they have problems finding men... Yes, as opposed to men, in my opinion. Most men, too. Would you take a woman who makes millions and is ugly, or a woman who doesn't make any more than you make but is just as nice as the ugly woman but is hot?
I have little use for money other than surviving and buying stuff here and there that increases comfort level. As long as there is beer in the fridge and food on the table under the roof of a house, I take the hot woman.
I do actually think that geeks, and other similar (mostly male, seemingly) types have the tendency to want one woman only. I don't know, when I fall for someone I find it hard to focus on any other one. I stop "looking around" - I'm simply not interested. This might be a huge problem because when you get rejected it hurts so much more, but it might in the end (as seems to have been your case) be a very good quality. And those "false signals" can actually get a guy like me in pretty deep, even though there was nothing behind it.
I think it has something to do with focus, and that slightly obsessive mentality that is necessary to be able to do the kind of work geeks (and similar types) do. This is in opposition to those "stupid, STUPID, scatter-brained jerks that seem to get all the pretty ones and have the attention span of a housefly and the intelligence of a jellyfish" (sorry 'bout, that, I couldn't help it). Yes, they end up with having sex with a lot of women, but they also often seem to be unable to truly appreciate them.
Of course I'm a little biased here, but I hope my two cents are worth something. Also, men are stupid jerks usually. But we know that in so many things men and women are equal. After all, each make up about 50% of the poplulation. So it is actually with some satisfaction that I declare women to be stupid jerks also. It never ceases to amaze me how often they simply don't KNOW what they are doing to those poor guys they are leading on. It's not just about men reading too much into things, it's also women failing to realize what effect they can have. Or, in some cases, misusing those powers for their own gain.
Am I being too cynical? A little misanthropic even? Well, hell, at least SOME of it is justified. So, being the geeks that we are, we should hack around this. Does anyone have experience with being "the jerk" for once? I'm considering a balanced approach, enough jerk to challenge her but enough real you to keep her.
I agree and neither do I, but having 24 hours of music is nice because you don't have to 2nd guess yourself on when you need to recharge. Do I have one bar left (on the creative)? Yes...this means I have about 8 hours of music to listen to. No bars left? I have about 2.4 hours of music to listen to. So you find yourself plugging in once a week, as opposed to once every other day (to be safe).
Carbon nanotubes (existing material) would have been much more suited to the job...
At any rate I think we should start on another planet/moon first. We don't have the materials to build a strong enough cable for earths gravity, but we DO have the materials strong enough for another planet/moon's gravity. I say start mining the moon.
Not necessarily. The Ipod clearly has the majority market, but that didn't stop them from making a crap alternative.
I've wished since about week two of owning my Creative Zen Touch (40GB) that I had bought something else. Namely, the Ipod. Creative is a pain to deal with if you have support issues. So is their player. Disconnected three times after being on hold 17 minutes each time (HMMM....). If you just want something to listen to music with, their players will work. But don't expect any of the promised firmware updates to fix any issues with the player, so make sure you know all the current problems with it. The problems with mine? Scrolling accuracy to select songs is horrible. 10x worse than the Ipods (which is perfect). You move your finger down the strip to move the selector bar that selects songs, and the UI responds a quarter second later. On top of the that, it's inaccurate and unpredictable. Sometimes moving your finger 1mm will move the song selector one song, sometimes not at all, and sometimes it'll jump down three. You simply can't select songs safely when you're driving. In contrast, the Ipod's scroll wheel is predictable and goes where you want it. Every single time. Move thumb 1mm, it moves 1 song (or might be 2mm I don't know).
Other issues: -after about 6 months of use the "forward/skip" [>>|] button halfway breaks. By that I mean sometimes you want to fast forward in the song (this is another frustrating thing I'll get to later) so you have to hold down the forward/skip button until the slider gets to the point in the song you want to listen to...so you let go of the fast forward, and then, strangely, the player skips to the next track. Apparently sometimes taking your finger off this button after having it held down tells the player to stop fast forwarding and skip to the end of the song. -As for fast forwarding, it's the most un-intuitive design ever. It isn't at all easy like on the Ipod, where you press the middle button and then move your thumb around the wheel. When you do this, the Ipod moves the slider that marks what part of the song is playing. You find the part you want, stop moving your thumb on the wheel, press the middle button again, and it plays. On Creative's players, you have to press forward and hold it down for about 5 seconds to skip 30 seconds. A total PITA. Like to listen to your songs gapless (IE you've ripped a CD as one whole MP3)? Be prepared to hold that button down and watch the UI for 20 seconds--(the slider movement speed increases exponentially, which means) when you finally hit the minute mark you want to listen to, and thanks to the laggy UI, you let go and find that it keeps moving ahead for the equivalent of two-ish minutes. Then it starts playing. So until you get used to letting go early, you'll be holding "[|]" down for another 5 seconds till you get back to wherever you originally wanted to be. On top of all that, the player doesn't anticipate "jee, you know, this guy is scrolling forward and this part of the song isn't in my memory, I better spin up the harddrive to be ready for it", it waits until you've stopped fast-forwarding, and then decides to spin up the harddrive, load that part of the song, and play it. And then if you overshoot where you were fastforwarding to, it does the exact same thing, it stops spinning and waits till you've stopped rewinding to spin up the harddrive and load that part of the song (which can't be good for the harddrive anyways, I'm sure this is what broke my first harddrive in the Zen Touch. Thankfully no problems with the warrant replacement). Like I said, don't expect to use this when you're driving. -If something about your player breaks, be prepared to pay the shipping costs [and insurance if you want to be safe] on your end as well as $35 (when mine broke this was how much it was, it has now changed to $25) as a "processing" fee. -good luck finding player covers if you want it protected. There's two that I know of, but they're both only available online. One is leather and costs something l
Downloads are a novelty that will require multi-billion dollar infrastructure investments to make feasible on a large scale. Blu-Ray will outgrow DVD long, long before that ever happens. That makes Blu-Ray is 100% of the HD market. But bittorrent is eaz-ay mode. Have you tried downloading a Linux DVD recently? So the people with their 20mbps up/down (both) Verizon FIOS are adding up and there's so many of them it's getting ridiculous. Just the other day, I was downloading ubuntu 8.04 Beta at about 3mBytes/second.
This just made me think of how annoying it was for noscript to update every single day it seems (well having to deal with it on 3 machines and multiple OS installs on each doesn't help), almost just to make that darn tab open up after update and direct me to the noscript page (so I can click ads maybe for revenue? Who knows).
You can disable that new tab that gets opened after every update by opening a new tab to about:config and searching for
noscript.firstrunredirection and setting to false.
Just wanted to put that out there in case nobody thought of searching the about:config for something to let you turn off that pesky new tab every time it updates.
I don't think it's very important that we've cracked it though. Quality BD-R dual layer media is pretty expensive, about just as expensive as the movie itself. Harddrives? 1TB drive is $225, you can only put 20, maybe 40 BD movies on there, taking the original mpeg4/vc-1/whatever stream and dumping it straight to harddrive. Factor in the cost of building a media center PC with a decent enough power supply to hold multiple 1TB hdds, and all the time (and therefor risk) you spend downloading these movies...and downloading them all/storing them yourself simply seems a little difficult. For me at least, I won't bother doing it. There's not a big enough savings advantage to downloading them and saving them vs. just buying them myself.
Can anyone comment on the best ways to remove mercury from your system? I've heard a sort of fast can enable your body to cleanse itself of the mercury (and lead too). Anyone know how long? How often should we do this? Does intermittent fasting cut it (fast a day, every other week for example). I absolutely love fish (om num num grilled salmon!), but if eating it frequently means I need to fast for 2 days every month then that would be good to know. Also the effects of eating that much fish (lets say not salmon since salmon can be bread on salmon farms and thus does not contain mercury) and NOT fasting, IE how long it would take before you start to see problems or go crazy.
For instance, pregnant women are now not supposed to eat fish, due to the mercury content.
Worse: In Georgia, we are having legislation passed that mandates use of CCFLs in place of incand's by 2012 IIRC. I think they're going to phase it out of the stores.
Sure sounds wonderful. All the mercury you save from getting into the atmosphere from coal plants now gets into the environment because of the CCFLs. What do people do when they expire? Throw them away, or better, take the big long tubes and throw them at the dumpster and watch them explode.
I'm afraid stuff like this is reducing my hate of MS. For several reasons, I am finding MS products less and less frustrating.
1). Open sourcing weird stuff like this. 2). Silverlight is pretty good. 3). I disabled UAC in Vista. Now Vista is just like XP, but it has a prettier (albeit inconsistent at times) UI. 4). Realizing that as much as I may like free as in freedom with Linux, in XP, my stuff just works, and it's fast and snappy and doesn't get bogged down (of course I'm not doing stupid stuff like using IE visiting sketchy websites that install things). It works great for all my games, etc. Solid OS; I just had to get over my Linux vigilatism to notice it. 5). I just found the speach recognition built into Vista 2 nights ago. For just about everything but typing, it works flawlessly. As much as I love my mouse; sitting back, relaxing with both hands comfortably unbound from a keyboard and mouse, feels absolutely wonderful. So instead of clicking minimize/maximize/close, alt+tab'ing until you see the window you want, clicking start, etc; you just say into your headset "Minimize" "Maximize" or the name of the window you want to use. So to change focus back to Firefox, I would say "Mozilla Firefox". Then you can say things like "Bookmarks" and it opens the menu for your bookmaks. Say the name of the bookmark and it selects it, then "ok" or "enter" to open it. If you've got several bookmarks it thinks you're saying, it highlights all of them with a transparent bar that you can see through, and places a number in the middle of that bar. So if I say "Slashdot", it highlights the 8 slashdot bookmarks I have, and then I say "7" and it opens the one under the bar labelled "7". "Scroll Down", "Scroll down 10", "Press control w" to close a tab. If you have a list of sites you usually like to go to, and have them all bookmarked (for me they're all in the bookmarks toolbar folder), then browsing your favorite sites that you check daily is easy. "GM [gmail]" "Reddit" etc. Since I have all these bookmarks on the toolbar, it automatically finds them and clicks them. When you're surfing the net, just say the name of the link on the page and it opens it for you.
The Start Menu works nicely too. Just say "Start" and then the name of the program you want to open. Then it opens it. If it thinks there's several things you could be referring to, it shows these in the search results pane and uses the same number scheme to select which one you want. You can access windows here as well; after saying "Start" say "Show numbers" and then the number of the window you want to restore.
This is the same tech they're putting in Ford/Lincoln/Mercuries for the GPS and music system that you've been seeing commercials for lately. After using the Vista version for just about 30 minutes, I've quickly gotten used to it; the commands are very intuitive. Gotta say it's really cool stuff. Yes I know OSX has had this since who knows when, but meh, OSX can't play my games. It feels much closer to what I'm thinking I want to do, because there's no physical motion besides just speaking what I want to do and it does it. Seems like they're progressing towards the synergy between brain and computer control very nicely.
I still don't think this is sustainable. People are buying this because they, too, want to stick it to the record companies. After there's more of this digital release going on than we can count on our hands and feet, people are going to stop buying just for the sake of buying non-labelled music.
Then we will have lots of people go back to pirating. Right now we're still in the "theifs don't steal from theifs" stage, ie the people infringing copyrighted content (who have spite for the RIAA) are not going to, at the moment, steal from other people with spite for the RIAA (Trent).
Anyways, I'm suprised why Trent didn't just do the whole thing through his own bittorrent tracker. Require a login, which would be generated on a per buyer basis, to give buyers access to their download; but not any other guy that didn't pay for the music. This would have saved Trent the server costs and crashing from tons of people downloading. Also, and this is the part of interest to us, this would be a great day in history for bittorrent, because every time someone has a court case about Comcast shutting down or throttling access, that person could say "well look, if they do this they're directly interfering with NIN's and others bands' busines model. I purchased access to the lossless recording bittorrent tracker, but Comcast is interfering with the download, which I paid for-- both in access to unlimited, good-faith-uninterrupted high speed internet, as well as in buying NIN's album. How can you let them do this? They're interfering with someone's business model against what they guaranteed me when I signed up for internet access with them!" Plus, it would open up access to any band with the funds (like NIN) to suing Comcast and anyone else throttling.
So, for our embedded systems, my software friend was telling me that it's about the availability of the support. That there are a billion more MS trained guys than Linux guys that they can have on site any time they need help.
The important thing is that they weren't pushing a crappy format
Not to beat a dead horse but hasn't your argument changed to it's ok for Sony to use money and marketing might because its products aren't crappy rather than your original argument that Sony products are technically superior but suffer from bad corporate management?
I don't have anything against the quality of Sony products though, like a lot of people, I find some of their corporate practices the last couple of years to be questionable and occasionally borderline criminal. My problem with the Blu-ray victory is that it appears to be in line with that trend. The adoption of an ends-justifies-the-means argument, as you have made here regarding Blu-ray, seems to be exactly what gets Sony in trouble in the first place.
Well, so you asked if I thought Blu-ray had succeeded on it's technical merit. I don't. But I do think it is the superior product.
Slashdot Mirror
OMGPHOTONS!!!
?
Mmm, very intriguing.
Hell, I am going to head over there right now and volunteer to help this guy out if it will shut up the author of this article and people like him. I know it's bad, but I have less of a problem with this when it's against leftist candidates. I sure would love to have a more pro-capitalism government. We're spending too much to be considered "pro-capitalist" because eventually those debts must be repaid from a tax which comes out of citizens pockets, which decreases consumption of goods produced, which decreases corporate profits, which reduces their operating margin, which reduces the incentive to function in America. Just take a look at all the European businesses that jumped ship to Scotland because of the lower taxes.
To be honest, I sure can. That's the problem with anyone on the far {left,right,top,bottom}. Reddit, digg, and youtube are prime examples of this left hate.
I've never seen such hate and stupidity combined at once. With the republicans at least they seem to be smart about it, or represent a smarter voting group.
Tonka trucks > all. I wonder if this means it would take over 3x the work for him to crack it, or if it's only not enough because the benefit to the buyer (MS) is much greater than $100k. IE, with MS's Xbox360 install base, they should be willing to pay a lot more than that.
Or maybe only 5 euros doesn't float his boat.
There, fixed that for you. In China they just sack you for using too much encryption, and have government run TOR servers.
I would help run this network but I am convinced it is full of child porn.
*Freshen up XP a bit with some new theme and some gadgets.
*Give it a new flashy name.
*Then practically give it away to the manufacturers of these machines.
Rather that, then to let linux machines get a foothold in the consumer market. And the awesome thing is that 2008 really IS the year of Linux on the Desktop, and I have little reason to think that it's going to do anything but keep getting better.
As for why I mean by "it's finally the year of Linux on the Desktop" is that, prior to this point, all of my system builds with the cheapest components available inevitably had hardware issues, getting everything to work, drivers installed, video working, etc. Except, this last system I just built, a $60 IP35-E motherboard with $80 e2180 (and overclocked it) and $190 8800GT graphics card, worked right out of the box (well, I did have to move the harddrive from ports 1-4 on sata to 5-6 for IDE mode or something, but once I found that out, all was smooth sailing). I'm not worried about the minor problem I had because hardly anybody has it and it'll probably get fixed in software updates later.
So what's going to happen is this pressure on MS is only going to get greater and greater with a few more years and they're going to have to keep giving us the free crap or make something better than crap.
Personally I've no problem whatsoever spotting a girl's interest in someone, except when the someone's me. Then I keep telling myself that I shouldn't be so presumptuous, it must be my imagination, she couldn't possibly be interested in me, etc. etc. Of course, it's a self-fulfilling prophesy, because she soon loses interest if you act like that. You pretty much have to grab me by the lapels and drag me into the bedroom, not because I don't Get It, but because I can't see the appeal. I think for a lot of us it's just plain fear of failure that makes us dismiss it. Fail? She goes and talks with her friends about it, now they all know you have interest in her. What then? You can't do that more than twice in a group of girls before you're out of chances.
... whereas women can overlook ugly and stupid, as long as he's rich? As opposed to men? Granted, there's not that many women rich enough to be gold digging for but if you're some ugly, stupid billionaire's daughter I doubt they have problems finding men... Yes, as opposed to men, in my opinion. Most men, too. Would you take a woman who makes millions and is ugly, or a woman who doesn't make any more than you make but is just as nice as the ugly woman but is hot?I have little use for money other than surviving and buying stuff here and there that increases comfort level. As long as there is beer in the fridge and food on the table under the roof of a house, I take the hot woman.
I think it has something to do with focus, and that slightly obsessive mentality that is necessary to be able to do the kind of work geeks (and similar types) do. This is in opposition to those "stupid, STUPID, scatter-brained jerks that seem to get all the pretty ones and have the attention span of a housefly and the intelligence of a jellyfish" (sorry 'bout, that, I couldn't help it). Yes, they end up with having sex with a lot of women, but they also often seem to be unable to truly appreciate them.
Of course I'm a little biased here, but I hope my two cents are worth something. Also, men are stupid jerks usually. But we know that in so many things men and women are equal. After all, each make up about 50% of the poplulation. So it is actually with some satisfaction that I declare women to be stupid jerks also. It never ceases to amaze me how often they simply don't KNOW what they are doing to those poor guys they are leading on. It's not just about men reading too much into things, it's also women failing to realize what effect they can have. Or, in some cases, misusing those powers for their own gain.
Am I being too cynical? A little misanthropic even? Well, hell, at least SOME of it is justified. So, being the geeks that we are, we should hack around this. Does anyone have experience with being "the jerk" for once? I'm considering a balanced approach, enough jerk to challenge her but enough real you to keep her.
I agree and neither do I, but having 24 hours of music is nice because you don't have to 2nd guess yourself on when you need to recharge. Do I have one bar left (on the creative)? Yes...this means I have about 8 hours of music to listen to. No bars left? I have about 2.4 hours of music to listen to. So you find yourself plugging in once a week, as opposed to once every other day (to be safe).
They have frickin 160GB now???
Wow am I behind the times.
Carbon nanotubes (existing material) would have been much more suited to the job...
At any rate I think we should start on another planet/moon first. We don't have the materials to build a strong enough cable for earths gravity, but we DO have the materials strong enough for another planet/moon's gravity. I say start mining the moon.
Not necessarily. The Ipod clearly has the majority market, but that didn't stop them from making a crap alternative.
I've wished since about week two of owning my Creative Zen Touch (40GB) that I had bought something else. Namely, the Ipod. Creative is a pain to deal with if you have support issues. So is their player. Disconnected three times after being on hold 17 minutes each time (HMMM....). If you just want something to listen to music with, their players will work. But don't expect any of the promised firmware updates to fix any issues with the player, so make sure you know all the current problems with it. The problems with mine? Scrolling accuracy to select songs is horrible. 10x worse than the Ipods (which is perfect). You move your finger down the strip to move the selector bar that selects songs, and the UI responds a quarter second later. On top of the that, it's inaccurate and unpredictable. Sometimes moving your finger 1mm will move the song selector one song, sometimes not at all, and sometimes it'll jump down three. You simply can't select songs safely when you're driving. In contrast, the Ipod's scroll wheel is predictable and goes where you want it. Every single time. Move thumb 1mm, it moves 1 song (or might be 2mm I don't know).
Other issues:
-after about 6 months of use the "forward/skip" [>>|] button halfway breaks. By that I mean sometimes you want to fast forward in the song (this is another frustrating thing I'll get to later) so you have to hold down the forward/skip button until the slider gets to the point in the song you want to listen to...so you let go of the fast forward, and then, strangely, the player skips to the next track. Apparently sometimes taking your finger off this button after having it held down tells the player to stop fast forwarding and skip to the end of the song.
-As for fast forwarding, it's the most un-intuitive design ever. It isn't at all easy like on the Ipod, where you press the middle button and then move your thumb around the wheel. When you do this, the Ipod moves the slider that marks what part of the song is playing. You find the part you want, stop moving your thumb on the wheel, press the middle button again, and it plays. On Creative's players, you have to press forward and hold it down for about 5 seconds to skip 30 seconds. A total PITA. Like to listen to your songs gapless (IE you've ripped a CD as one whole MP3)? Be prepared to hold that button down and watch the UI for 20 seconds--(the slider movement speed increases exponentially, which means) when you finally hit the minute mark you want to listen to, and thanks to the laggy UI, you let go and find that it keeps moving ahead for the equivalent of two-ish minutes. Then it starts playing. So until you get used to letting go early, you'll be holding "[|]" down for another 5 seconds till you get back to wherever you originally wanted to be. On top of all that, the player doesn't anticipate "jee, you know, this guy is scrolling forward and this part of the song isn't in my memory, I better spin up the harddrive to be ready for it", it waits until you've stopped fast-forwarding, and then decides to spin up the harddrive, load that part of the song, and play it. And then if you overshoot where you were fastforwarding to, it does the exact same thing, it stops spinning and waits till you've stopped rewinding to spin up the harddrive and load that part of the song (which can't be good for the harddrive anyways, I'm sure this is what broke my first harddrive in the Zen Touch. Thankfully no problems with the warrant replacement). Like I said, don't expect to use this when you're driving.
-If something about your player breaks, be prepared to pay the shipping costs [and insurance if you want to be safe] on your end as well as $35 (when mine broke this was how much it was, it has now changed to $25) as a "processing" fee.
-good luck finding player covers if you want it protected. There's two that I know of, but they're both only available online. One is leather and costs something l
That makes Blu-Ray is 100% of the HD market. But bittorrent is eaz-ay mode. Have you tried downloading a Linux DVD recently? So the people with their 20mbps up/down (both) Verizon FIOS are adding up and there's so many of them it's getting ridiculous. Just the other day, I was downloading ubuntu 8.04 Beta at about 3mBytes/second.
http://www.torproject.org/ ?
You can disable that new tab that gets opened after every update by opening a new tab to about:config and searching for noscript.firstrunredirection and setting to false.
Just wanted to put that out there in case nobody thought of searching the about:config for something to let you turn off that pesky new tab every time it updates.
I don't think it's very important that we've cracked it though. Quality BD-R dual layer media is pretty expensive, about just as expensive as the movie itself. Harddrives? 1TB drive is $225, you can only put 20, maybe 40 BD movies on there, taking the original mpeg4/vc-1/whatever stream and dumping it straight to harddrive. Factor in the cost of building a media center PC with a decent enough power supply to hold multiple 1TB hdds, and all the time (and therefor risk) you spend downloading these movies...and downloading them all/storing them yourself simply seems a little difficult. For me at least, I won't bother doing it. There's not a big enough savings advantage to downloading them and saving them vs. just buying them myself.
Can anyone comment on the best ways to remove mercury from your system? I've heard a sort of fast can enable your body to cleanse itself of the mercury (and lead too). Anyone know how long? How often should we do this? Does intermittent fasting cut it (fast a day, every other week for example). I absolutely love fish (om num num grilled salmon!), but if eating it frequently means I need to fast for 2 days every month then that would be good to know. Also the effects of eating that much fish (lets say not salmon since salmon can be bread on salmon farms and thus does not contain mercury) and NOT fasting, IE how long it would take before you start to see problems or go crazy.
For instance, pregnant women are now not supposed to eat fish, due to the mercury content.
Worse: In Georgia, we are having legislation passed that mandates use of CCFLs in place of incand's by 2012 IIRC. I think they're going to phase it out of the stores.
Sure sounds wonderful. All the mercury you save from getting into the atmosphere from coal plants now gets into the environment because of the CCFLs. What do people do when they expire? Throw them away, or better, take the big long tubes and throw them at the dumpster and watch them explode.
I'm afraid stuff like this is reducing my hate of MS. For several reasons, I am finding MS products less and less frustrating.
1). Open sourcing weird stuff like this.
2). Silverlight is pretty good.
3). I disabled UAC in Vista. Now Vista is just like XP, but it has a prettier (albeit inconsistent at times) UI.
4). Realizing that as much as I may like free as in freedom with Linux, in XP, my stuff just works, and it's fast and snappy and doesn't get bogged down (of course I'm not doing stupid stuff like using IE visiting sketchy websites that install things). It works great for all my games, etc. Solid OS; I just had to get over my Linux vigilatism to notice it.
5). I just found the speach recognition built into Vista 2 nights ago. For just about everything but typing, it works flawlessly. As much as I love my mouse; sitting back, relaxing with both hands comfortably unbound from a keyboard and mouse, feels absolutely wonderful. So instead of clicking minimize/maximize/close, alt+tab'ing until you see the window you want, clicking start, etc; you just say into your headset "Minimize" "Maximize" or the name of the window you want to use. So to change focus back to Firefox, I would say "Mozilla Firefox". Then you can say things like "Bookmarks" and it opens the menu for your bookmaks. Say the name of the bookmark and it selects it, then "ok" or "enter" to open it. If you've got several bookmarks it thinks you're saying, it highlights all of them with a transparent bar that you can see through, and places a number in the middle of that bar. So if I say "Slashdot", it highlights the 8 slashdot bookmarks I have, and then I say "7" and it opens the one under the bar labelled "7". "Scroll Down", "Scroll down 10", "Press control w" to close a tab. If you have a list of sites you usually like to go to, and have them all bookmarked (for me they're all in the bookmarks toolbar folder), then browsing your favorite sites that you check daily is easy. "GM [gmail]" "Reddit" etc. Since I have all these bookmarks on the toolbar, it automatically finds them and clicks them. When you're surfing the net, just say the name of the link on the page and it opens it for you.
The Start Menu works nicely too. Just say "Start" and then the name of the program you want to open. Then it opens it. If it thinks there's several things you could be referring to, it shows these in the search results pane and uses the same number scheme to select which one you want. You can access windows here as well; after saying "Start" say "Show numbers" and then the number of the window you want to restore.
This is the same tech they're putting in Ford/Lincoln/Mercuries for the GPS and music system that you've been seeing commercials for lately. After using the Vista version for just about 30 minutes, I've quickly gotten used to it; the commands are very intuitive. Gotta say it's really cool stuff. Yes I know OSX has had this since who knows when, but meh, OSX can't play my games. It feels much closer to what I'm thinking I want to do, because there's no physical motion besides just speaking what I want to do and it does it. Seems like they're progressing towards the synergy between brain and computer control very nicely.
I still don't think this is sustainable. People are buying this because they, too, want to stick it to the record companies. After there's more of this digital release going on than we can count on our hands and feet, people are going to stop buying just for the sake of buying non-labelled music.
Then we will have lots of people go back to pirating. Right now we're still in the "theifs don't steal from theifs" stage, ie the people infringing copyrighted content (who have spite for the RIAA) are not going to, at the moment, steal from other people with spite for the RIAA (Trent).
Anyways, I'm suprised why Trent didn't just do the whole thing through his own bittorrent tracker. Require a login, which would be generated on a per buyer basis, to give buyers access to their download; but not any other guy that didn't pay for the music. This would have saved Trent the server costs and crashing from tons of people downloading. Also, and this is the part of interest to us, this would be a great day in history for bittorrent, because every time someone has a court case about Comcast shutting down or throttling access, that person could say "well look, if they do this they're directly interfering with NIN's and others bands' busines model. I purchased access to the lossless recording bittorrent tracker, but Comcast is interfering with the download, which I paid for-- both in access to unlimited, good-faith-uninterrupted high speed internet, as well as in buying NIN's album. How can you let them do this? They're interfering with someone's business model against what they guaranteed me when I signed up for internet access with them!" Plus, it would open up access to any band with the funds (like NIN) to suing Comcast and anyone else throttling.
So, for our embedded systems, my software friend was telling me that it's about the availability of the support. That there are a billion more MS trained guys than Linux guys that they can have on site any time they need help.
The important thing is that they weren't pushing a crappy format
Not to beat a dead horse but hasn't your argument changed to it's ok for Sony to use money and marketing might because its products aren't crappy rather than your original argument that Sony products are technically superior but suffer from bad corporate management?
I don't have anything against the quality of Sony products though, like a lot of people, I find some of their corporate practices the last couple of years to be questionable and occasionally borderline criminal. My problem with the Blu-ray victory is that it appears to be in line with that trend. The adoption of an ends-justifies-the-means argument, as you have made here regarding Blu-ray, seems to be exactly what gets Sony in trouble in the first place.
Well, so you asked if I thought Blu-ray had succeeded on it's technical merit. I don't. But I do think it is the superior product.