Chances are the FM recording had a serious bug that's still being worked on, but the FM recording is being disabled to minimize the impact of the bug. If that's the case, a future update will probably re-enable it.
Dunno if Creative has released any official information, though.
They just lie about their age when they sign up. I know half a dozen local kids who have done this. Since MySpace doesn't do any verification, the admins essentially have to catch 'em in the act--not hard since most of the kids who do this are up-front about it, but first you have to find the profiles in a sea of legitimate ones.
The problem is that to run well, Microsoft's software needs more memory than Verizon's set top boxes ship with.
So, what happened? Did Verizon just not tell Microsoft how much memory they were shipping with? Did they give MS the spec, then reduce the memory on the production units? Or maybe they pulled a NASA, and gave MS a memory capacity in HD marketing MB (where 1MB=1000*1000) and MS assumed it was in real-world MB (where 1MB=1024x1024).
You mean like dropping DTV and using the S3 to watch 25 (give or take) local broadcast channels for the $12.95/mo TiVo fee? Okay, I'm joking there. I have to have ESPN, especially now that ABC has dropped MNF. It's true that TiVo fees are per receiver, but if you get HD, you have to pay $10.95 for the HD package (all three worthwhile channels),plus the $5 DVR fee. That's more than the $12.95 TiVo fee. And every extra receiver is $5 for DTV vs $6.95 for TiVo's multi-box discount. If I'm dropping $80/mo on TV entertainment (and it pains me to admit that), an extra $2-4 to get the interface I really like is a worthwhile expenditure.
Well, let's compare. We'll ignore the fact that 99% of US markets are lucky to have 4 OTA broadcasts, and we'll leave out basic package costs and just assume they're equal (even though they're not).
DirecTV:
HR20: $299
HD package: $9.99/mo
Lease fee: $4.99/mo
DVR fee (household): $5.99/mo
Total investment after 1st year: 319.97
Monthly cost: 20.97
Cable:
S3 TiVo: $799
2 HD CableCards: $20/mo
TiVo Service Fee: $12.95/mo
TiVo 2nd room: $6.95/mo
Total investment after 1st year: 838.90
Monthly cost: 39.90
And that's still not taking into account the fact that the cable company will probably force you to subscribe to a digital tier which is more expensive than the equivalents in DirecTV programming.
DirecTV has actually beaten TiVo to market with a pretty competitive feature set; yeah, it's not TiVo, but the $500 you won't be spending on the box, plus the $265 yearly you won't be spending on TiVo subscription fees ($13/mo) and cablecard rental fees ($10/mo ea.) will make a nice pillow.;) The HR20 launches today or tomorrow at retail channels for $299. Here's a breakdown of the featureset:
- Dual tuners? Check. - Dual ATSC tuners? Check. (they're not enabled yet, but the hardware's there) - 300GB SATA HD? check. - External SATA jack for external storage space? check. - Ethernet port for high-speed internet VOD? check. - Exclusive interactive features not found on any TiVo? check. - MPEG4 decoding (for up to 50 hours of HD from MPEG4 sources)? check. - DirecTV's HD and DVR fees are per-household, so you can keep the HR10-250 around in another room, deactivate an old SD receiver, and your bill stays the same.
Now, if you already have the HR10-250, DirecTV will have a swap available soon. But if you're impatient, you can run out to Best Buy today and grab one, and call DirecTV to get a free dish upgrade for the 99/103 satellites.
On my PC, even with the AHEM font, float 0 and height of lines 2 still fail (although just barely). The same tests fail in Opera 9, so I'm not too upset.;)
You wouldn't have needed to physically sign a contract; what probably happened is that after the internet equipment was connected, the first page that came up was the ISP's contract which someone clicked "I agree" to. And an electronic signature IS the same as a physical signature (at least in US law, probably Canada too).
This isn't a "click-though" license, it's a contract. When I had my cable internet set up, I purchased my cable modem at Wal-Mart. After the cable guy installed it, the first page I got was CableOne.Net's customer agreement, which outlined the terms of my contract (in my case, a 1-year commitment).
If your ISP did the same thing, they don't need proof. The fact that you're using the service means you must have agreed to it in order to get out of the "walled garden." But they very likely have the logs of your PC submitting the agreement.
Search Engine Optimization. It can be anything as innocuous as using alt tags and such to make sure your site shows up for certain keywords to something insidious like registering 100 domains and purposefuly interlinking them to artificially inflate the page rank.
The most common viruses are security exploits; a default deny policy would have no effect when the application being exploited would likely be on the white list anyway! And for the classical viruses attached to a legitimate looking file (or trojan passing itself off as a legitimate file), default deny only makes the user take a few extra steps before they fuck themselves over.
The only thing you really accomplish is annoying users who have to take those same extra steps to run legitimate downloads too.
You're ignoring opportunity costs; sure there's a higher cost ($90) for your scripted solution; however, in those three hours, maybe that $7.50/hour employee is occupied with other, more profitable tasks that he wouldn't have been able to complete if he was pulled away for 30 minutes of data entry. Maybe data integrity is critical and the cost of the scripted solution vs. the risk of a $7.50/hr employee mis-entering the data made the scripted solution much less.
Cost to purchase in crappy/lossy 192kb MP3 or AAC: $1.87
Cost to purchase in good lossy 320kB MP3 or AAC: $3.12
Cost to purchase lossless (flac, in this case): $8.78
Saving money and avoiding potential DRM rootkits from an innocuous-looking CD from harming your PC? Priceless.
Also worth noting, our ancestors have lived through a number of polar reversals, and we're still here, so no need to fret!
Sure, no need to fret. It's not like we haven't invested hundreds of years worth of technology and research based on magnetic reference points. Oh, wait...
Job sites make it incredibly easy for clueless HR people to set up a filter for skills X, Y, and Z. Know a lot about X and Y but not much about Z? Well, you either have to lie about it or get filtered out by a computer!
My other beef with job sites is the lack of standardization for the application process. The job site should be able to collect the relevant information and pass it on to the hiring manager. When I click "apply now" I should not be taken to some other e-HR site to enter all my information AGAIN and submit my resume AGAIN. Just make it work!
Lastly, the blatantly bogus listings for the work-from-home scams or ads with insufficient details (like, say, the actual employer). Please.
The article text was probably copy/pasted from a PDF. The lower-case "fi" is a pretty common ligature; my guess is that when the text was copy/pasted, it pasted the ligature instead of transforming it into the letters "fi". The HTML editor didn't know what do do with the ligature, and junked it.
Am I crazy for actually LIKING old-style phone menus ("for X, press 1..")? I absolutely hate dealing with menus that want me to talk. It's like playing Zork by voice! I'm sorry, but I don't want to say a word unless a human being is listening.
The absolute worst offenders are Qwest and UPS. Thankfully I dropped the former a couple months ago in favor of Vonage.
Actually, there was an episode last week that tested the efficacy of non-pharmeceutical seasickness remedies; and the "killer penny" has been covered too (answer: no, because terminal velocity for a penny isn't enough to break the skin--although it would hurt).
Dunno about the exploding pigeon, although the SPCA would probably complain about that experiment.;)
Slashdot Mirror
In my experience, you can do it with standards, or you can do it so it renders properly in Internet Explorer.
Nathan
Dude, it's BBspot. They're like The Onion Lite.
$body =~ s/<img .*>//g; # get rid of IMG tags
$body =~ s/url\(.*\)//g; # get rid of CSS links too.
Problem Solved (take 2)
$body =~ s///g; # get rid of IMG tags
$body =~ s/url\(.*\)//g; # get rid of CSS links too
Problem solved.
Nathan
Chances are the FM recording had a serious bug that's still being worked on, but the FM recording is being disabled to minimize the impact of the bug. If that's the case, a future update will probably re-enable it.
Dunno if Creative has released any official information, though.
Nathan
They just lie about their age when they sign up. I know half a dozen local kids who have done this. Since MySpace doesn't do any verification, the admins essentially have to catch 'em in the act--not hard since most of the kids who do this are up-front about it, but first you have to find the profiles in a sea of legitimate ones.
Nathan
... because this is a world-class WTF.
So, what happened? Did Verizon just not tell Microsoft how much memory they were shipping with? Did they give MS the spec, then reduce the memory on the production units? Or maybe they pulled a NASA, and gave MS a memory capacity in HD marketing MB (where 1MB=1000*1000) and MS assumed it was in real-world MB (where 1MB=1024x1024).
Nathan
Well, let's compare. We'll ignore the fact that 99% of US markets are lucky to have 4 OTA broadcasts, and we'll leave out basic package costs and just assume they're equal (even though they're not).
DirecTV:
HR20: $299
HD package: $9.99/mo
Lease fee: $4.99/mo
DVR fee (household): $5.99/mo
Total investment after 1st year: 319.97
Monthly cost: 20.97
Cable:
S3 TiVo: $799
2 HD CableCards: $20/mo
TiVo Service Fee: $12.95/mo
TiVo 2nd room: $6.95/mo
Total investment after 1st year: 838.90
Monthly cost: 39.90
And that's still not taking into account the fact that the cable company will probably force you to subscribe to a digital tier which is more expensive than the equivalents in DirecTV programming.
(full disclosure; I work for DirecTV)
;) The HR20 launches today or tomorrow at retail channels for $299. Here's a breakdown of the featureset:
DirecTV has actually beaten TiVo to market with a pretty competitive feature set; yeah, it's not TiVo, but the $500 you won't be spending on the box, plus the $265 yearly you won't be spending on TiVo subscription fees ($13/mo) and cablecard rental fees ($10/mo ea.) will make a nice pillow.
- Dual tuners? Check.
- Dual ATSC tuners? Check. (they're not enabled yet, but the hardware's there)
- 300GB SATA HD? check.
- External SATA jack for external storage space? check.
- Ethernet port for high-speed internet VOD? check.
- Exclusive interactive features not found on any TiVo? check.
- MPEG4 decoding (for up to 50 hours of HD from MPEG4 sources)? check.
- DirecTV's HD and DVR fees are per-household, so you can keep the HR10-250 around in another room, deactivate an old SD receiver, and your bill stays the same.
Now, if you already have the HR10-250, DirecTV will have a swap available soon. But if you're impatient, you can run out to Best Buy today and grab one, and call DirecTV to get a free dish upgrade for the 99/103 satellites.
Nathan
"Head On! Apply directly to the forehead!"
"Head On! Apply directly to the forehead!"
"Head On! Apply directly to the forehead!"
I think that would maximize the annoyance factor of an unchangable, un-disablable startup sound.
Nathan
Here's what we're talking about:
$69 + 12.99 * 12 = 224.88 for the 1st year.
$99 + 5.99 * 12 = 170.88 for the 1st year.
You save about $54 the first year, and the gap widens $84 each year following.
If you're able to get the DVR upgrade for free, the savings is even more.
Sure it's not break-the-bank expensive, but it's more than getting a vendor-specific DVR.
On my PC, even with the AHEM font, float 0 and height of lines 2 still fail (although just barely). The same tests fail in Opera 9, so I'm not too upset. ;)
Nathan
More like "World of Warcraft Weekly," AMIRITE?
Nathan
You wouldn't have needed to physically sign a contract; what probably happened is that after the internet equipment was connected, the first page that came up was the ISP's contract which someone clicked "I agree" to. And an electronic signature IS the same as a physical signature (at least in US law, probably Canada too).
This isn't a "click-though" license, it's a contract. When I had my cable internet set up, I purchased my cable modem at Wal-Mart. After the cable guy installed it, the first page I got was CableOne.Net's customer agreement, which outlined the terms of my contract (in my case, a 1-year commitment).
If your ISP did the same thing, they don't need proof. The fact that you're using the service means you must have agreed to it in order to get out of the "walled garden." But they very likely have the logs of your PC submitting the agreement.
Nathan
Search Engine Optimization. It can be anything as innocuous as using alt tags and such to make sure your site shows up for certain keywords to something insidious like registering 100 domains and purposefuly interlinking them to artificially inflate the page rank.
Nathan
Default deny wouldn't help at all.
The most common viruses are security exploits; a default deny policy would have no effect when the application being exploited would likely be on the white list anyway! And for the classical viruses attached to a legitimate looking file (or trojan passing itself off as a legitimate file), default deny only makes the user take a few extra steps before they fuck themselves over.
The only thing you really accomplish is annoying users who have to take those same extra steps to run legitimate downloads too.
Nathan
You're ignoring opportunity costs; sure there's a higher cost ($90) for your scripted solution; however, in those three hours, maybe that $7.50/hour employee is occupied with other, more profitable tasks that he wouldn't have been able to complete if he was pulled away for 30 minutes of data entry. Maybe data integrity is critical and the cost of the scripted solution vs. the risk of a $7.50/hr employee mis-entering the data made the scripted solution much less.
Nathan
Saving money and avoiding potential DRM rootkits from an innocuous-looking CD from harming your PC? Priceless.
Nathan
Sure, no need to fret. It's not like we haven't invested hundreds of years worth of technology and research based on magnetic reference points. Oh, wait...
Nathan
Job sites make it incredibly easy for clueless HR people to set up a filter for skills X, Y, and Z. Know a lot about X and Y but not much about Z? Well, you either have to lie about it or get filtered out by a computer!
My other beef with job sites is the lack of standardization for the application process. The job site should be able to collect the relevant information and pass it on to the hiring manager. When I click "apply now" I should not be taken to some other e-HR site to enter all my information AGAIN and submit my resume AGAIN. Just make it work!
Lastly, the blatantly bogus listings for the work-from-home scams or ads with insufficient details (like, say, the actual employer). Please.
Nathan
Broadband isn't too expensive, especially if you've been paying your telco for the second line so you can surf and not miss phone calls.
2nd line: $17
AOL: $21.95
Getting 20x the speed at around the same price as the above: priceless
Nathan
The article text was probably copy/pasted from a PDF. The lower-case "fi" is a pretty common ligature; my guess is that when the text was copy/pasted, it pasted the ligature instead of transforming it into the letters "fi". The HTML editor didn't know what do do with the ligature, and junked it.
Nathan
I caught a dimwit trying to do this at the Electronics Boutique I used to work at about 6 years ago. IIRC, he was claiming to return a GeForce 1 card.
The giveaways:
- The returned item included an RCA cord, but the card included did not have an RCA jack.
- The ATI logo on the chipset.
Nathan
Am I crazy for actually LIKING old-style phone menus ("for X, press 1..")? I absolutely hate dealing with menus that want me to talk. It's like playing Zork by voice! I'm sorry, but I don't want to say a word unless a human being is listening.
The absolute worst offenders are Qwest and UPS. Thankfully I dropped the former a couple months ago in favor of Vonage.
Nathan
Actually, there was an episode last week that tested the efficacy of non-pharmeceutical seasickness remedies; and the "killer penny" has been covered too (answer: no, because terminal velocity for a penny isn't enough to break the skin--although it would hurt).
;)
Dunno about the exploding pigeon, although the SPCA would probably complain about that experiment.
Nathan