The university demographic is probably one of the least likely to be their cash cows, i.e., many, if not most students aren't living fat and happy on exorbitant budgets (I know, some are). They don't have tons of money to fill the RIAA and cohort's coffers.
I agree with all of what you say, however, I'd have to say that if anything the RIAA is shooting themselves in the foot even more in this crowd due to one overlook in the statement you made above. Kids in Universities (I know, I was there once) may not have tons of money, but a higher percentage of what they do have is disposible. They have student loans, they have parents assistance, they have federal grants, etc... and they have lots of free time and not as much forsight as some like to believe... Not to say they're stupid, they're spending habbits are just different. Go to an average college campus and check out the kids in the dorms for instance, they have more CDs, Game Systems, Up to date PCs, and are probably the single largest demographic for purcahsing many genre's CDs. All the people I knew in college had lan parties, got the latest CDs, watched movies all the time when not at class, etc... By sueing these people they're taking the money right out of their own mouth. They're also one of the most technologically impresionable group out there. If it's cool and high tech they'll go for it, however the RIAA seem to want to punish them for that because they don't know how to use it to their own potential.
Off that topic, but part of the main article, I've noticed people saying that we should just not buy CDs to boycott the RIAA. Sounds like a good plan except when you notice that CD sales are down according to the RIAA and they don't blame it on themselves or crappy CDs, they blame it on piracy. So the more we boycott, the more it shows they're right. Maybe they should go back to school...
And just for the record, I've been sharing files since 8" disks. I guess it was harder to sniff those, maybe I should go back to them... or atleast USB Drives. This may be the perfect time for a group of students to put up some WAPs and start sharing over that instead.
Exactly like you program in FreeBSD, Windows, OSX, DOS or whatever you feel like using as an OS. Using C, c++, PHP, Perl, etc.., and either nano or vi.
How do you program in windows? You write code, you compile it, you run it. I guess I'm missing something here.
And I'm not showing off. This is frickin Slashdot, I'm sure there are many people here that program more complex things that I do. Obiviously you're not one of them, so I apologize if my post went over your head. You can go back to your pr0n now.
I've been programming since I was 6. Had a C=128 and just HAD to figure out how to program it. Not sure why, just made it my quest. Then we got a 386, and I learned C. I didn't think it was that hard then (in fact, c made a lot more sense to me than BASIC did). After that I took a class in HS in which they taught Turbo Pascal, which I thought was kinda boring until I figured out that I could use ASM statements inline... Now I program in linux.
Now let's look at the one continuity there, they were ALL Command Line environments. Sure I had Win 3.1 but I never did that much in it. And when 95 came out and I wanted to program MFC it seemed like way too much trouble for what I was trying to do. I was eventually able to come up with a patern for setting up the window and everything, but it was kinda more a pain in the ass than it was really productive. And I come to the last part... Now I program in linux. Sure you can do X-windows programming in linux (which I think is easier than MFC and Visual WhatEver++), but I've always gravitated towards simple things like kernel programming and utilities.
Back to my point, the command line based OSes were easy to learn to program with. Minimal setup for your program (heck, include and you're pretty much done.) output is exactly what you want (it's all just text anyway), it's easy to visualize, it's easy to learn, it's easy to get results quickly. Kids have short attention spans in general, so you want something that allows them to be somewhat productive quickly, so they can do a few things and see the fruit of their labor and think "Wow! That's cool! I just made that!" instead of some random windows error. That'll Hook them and they'll want to do more and learn more... sitting down to read a book to figure out the best windowing setup or if they want a DirectX window or a menu bar is kinda a pain and isn't going to grab many kids.
I think it would work if we didn't buy it... if it was just part of the normal cable setup. Then you could buy one that let you block all the commercials (I'm talking Cable/Sat DVRs, not Tivo/Myth obviously).
I do think it's a cool idea, 'cause there are plenty of times I've seen a commercial and thought "OH HAILLLL NOO, Not this Sh!t again!" and I've muted it and walked away. Which if you think of it from the commerical maker's perspective is terrible. Say there were 5 commercials in that block. (I wish they only showed 5 at a time...) Commercial number 1's crappiness just made me, the potential customer/audience to the other ones leave and not see the other 4. Now it's entirely possible (however unlikely) that commercial #4 was for some earth shattering product that I never knew I would want before until I saw this awesomely made nobel winning commercial (Like a Razor with 8 blades or a Firewire 8 Track player, or maybe a Machine that Goes Bing (tm)). Too bad I didn't see it because Commercial #1 in the series sucked so much. So if I simply blocked the sucky one, I get to see the others (well, atleast from their point of view) so they're benifiting from it, and who knows I may actually buy something.
But I would hope that the zap of crappy commercial #1 hits the producer of commercial #1 in the ass and he never makes annoying dumb ass commercials again. So we get feed back both ways. They know what works, I don't have to see the commercial.
Wow, you should get modded up for that. Either you made that up and it just seems close enough to be correct, or you've watched that episode too many times... Either way, Nice.
Yeah, and the quality in the screen caps shows that a camera doesn't pickup everything from LCD's well... nor does the lense properly deal with aspherical issues at such a close distance, nor are the colors great, etc...
But you gotta admit, if all it is, is a camera, for 30 bucks, I can use it on ANYTHING I want to put on the TV. Just duct-tape this thing to your favorite portable console or laptop screen or whatever and plug it in. My Game Gear will be great with this adapter. But you could even use this on one of those little portible LCD TVs!!! Yeah! Then you could watch TV on your TV! (which is about as effecient a solution I believe).
Philips suggests adding flags to commercial breaks to stop a viewer from changing channels until the adverts are over.
So I'm surfing through channels, click, don't want that, click, nope, click, nope, click, nope, click ADVERTISEMENT and I'm stuck. I have to watch the add according to this until it's over and then i can go back to surfing to find out there's nothing on. Now THAT will suck.
Using a HD rather than a videotape was surely obvious
People make it seem like this is easy and obvious.
I hate to say it... but it is both easy and obvious. But that doesn't mean you can't get a patent for it, nor does it mean that the patent should not be upheld. I think this is a great day for patent law and a great day for Tivo. They said "Hold on, that's our idea, we had it, announced it and followed through with it first and here's our proof!" and deserve that credit and some kick back from everyone that wants to put an offering out using that patent.
I agree. What is there to Real.com that warrents that high of a rank? Does anyone actually use Realplayer anymore?? (seriously here.. does anyone?) I know I haven't played an rm in years! Every site I see that has streaming media available has it in windows media or quicktime, real player got pushed aside. I actually kinda forgot about it until this story. Figured it went the way of Kings Quest and After Dark.
62% of those surveyed clicked on a result on the first page, up from 48% in 2002
Doesn't that just prove that people got better in their ability to put in useful key terms? I mean, I can search for "this thing" and get a billion hits, but not want to click on any of them, but if I put in "1953 corvette right fender puce HAF-9384 IL" I'll probably find what I'm looking for quicker and actually want to click on ot. 62% of people are learning just that.
Chances are, if you're packin' you're not conceling it. In which case the guy knows you have one and sneaks up with the iron on the back of your head, in a dark alleyway, you don't really have a chance. Unless you wait until he grabs it and you happen to be a good enough shot to pick him off running away from you with the goods. Baring that you get a head shot within the first few rounds (before he turns around to return fire) he falls to the ground and *hopefully* decides to fall on the side where you're precious laptop isn't going to get crushed, what then? What are the legal ramifications? I mean, it would have been self defense if he was shooting at you, but he wasnt. You were already mugged and at that point, though a few pounds lighter, in the clear so to speak. You took the law into your own hands... and usually that's not a good thing as far as police are concerned. So what happens to you legally? Is it really worth it? I mean if you have a backup of what's on there, your important docs are encrypted, and your insurance covers theft, go buy another laptop, it'll probably be newer and shinier too.
Ok, I don't pretend to be an Apple guru, but I have this scenario at home. There are a number of apps I want to run from windows that don't run on linux. I use linux 90% of the time and don't want to dual boot to get the other apps. Guess What, I run Wine. Everything from windows I want to run, runs in Wine with almost no issues what-so-ever. Isn't there something like this for OS-X? Can Wine be ported to OS-X? If so, that's the solution that a lot of people are looking for. A way to natively run a Windows App in OS-X.
Yeah, I mean, you could actually find a woman, go for dinner and a movie and you might actually get something out of it! (I mean, the movies out suck, so you're not really going to be watching the screen anyway...)
First off, not everyone buys JUST one console. Most of my friends have BOTH an X-BOX and and PS-2. These were both, say $350 purchases ($150 console + controllers + a few games + memory cards). So $350 goes to MS, the other $350 goes to Sony. Now, if MS bought Sony, they'd get both halves of this, baring nothing changed. Effectively (all things on the backend being equal) doubling their income ($700 per similar consumer). So tanking the Playstation outright would be quite a bad idea considering that they'd probably come close to loosing HALF their income that way. Sure people may buy a few more games, but I highly doubt that I would instantly take that $350 I didn't spend on Console X and put it towards Console Y. I mean, I can only have so many controllers/memory cards/accessories). PLUS MS still has crappy market penentration in Japan and other areas outside the US. The PS-X is still rocking there and if MS tanked it, they'd loose all that, or have to advertise the hell out of whatever the Combined PS-X/X-Box Platform was so that people knew that the new "PSX-720" was something that these Sony PS-# buyers wanted AND something that the X-Box people wanted. Everyone who's got a PS-X now aready knows what's coming down the pike when they walk in the store and see the new PS-(X+1).
Also, on the surface, adding to the R&D dept. over at MS would seem to help, but you have to realize that one reason the PS-X is cool is because the R&D is COMPLETELY different than the US one (I mean, check out the game genres between the two). Also, there's always the Inverse IQ Law that states that The IQ of a group of people is inversely proportionate to the amount of people in the group. More people saying "My Idea is Better" means more indecision and more crappy common denominator games/hardware.
However, I'm sure after reading this many Nintendo fanbois will be saying "Sweet, Do it! Nintendo will take over the lost market share!!"...
I agree, I mean, [Best Buy | Circuit City | Wal Mart | ] isn't that far away. AND I actually get a case with liner notes and a place to put the DVD, and maybe some special features.. and that "New CD Smell".
I'll have to say that if video games trained people to do things all the time, then I'd be trying to refuel my F-14 at 2500mph, and I'd be able to do it! (Top Gun. Ahh, the good old days. Just keep holding the nose down and you'll go faster and faster, you never go into the water, and somehow the huge refueling jet can not only keep up with you, but sometimes throw a prompt on the screen saying "Speed Up".)
Wow. I need to move to where you are. The people around here WON'T turn up the sound. There's nothing as frustrating as paying $8.25 a head to go see a theator, wait in line, spend more money on food and be pissed off with other people in the audience when they don't even turn up the sound to a decent level. New theators around here have expensive systems that COULD shake the room, and did at one point-- Then they turned it down and it's been to the point where during some dialog you have to strain to hear it (and I'm not deaf)! If I'm going to pay all that I want the theator to litterally shake when the explosion happens, I want to hear the wind wizzing by, I want not only great picture quality, but awesome sound that sucks you in. Doesn't happen around here. Heck, the last time I went to an IMAX or an Omnimax theator they even turned those down.
The last omnimax I went to was when I was in Cincinnati (we only have IMAX here). I remembered when I first went to the theator they had a trailer at the beginning showcasing the awesome 15,000 watt per channel sound system. Extremely clear and when it needed to, it DID shake the theator. So much for that experience, I'll just stay at home where my system is better than half the theators out there and I can actually USE it.
Theators have to realize that when a ticket costs 8 bucks and you can buy the DVD for $10-$20 they have competition. Taking a date to a theator costs $8*2+ $4.50 (drink) + $4 (popcorn) = $24.50. I'll stick with playing the DVD on my HDTV thank you.
I think the only smart thing to do is to keep the baby ourselves and leave them both empty handed, by not buying the players or the discs. If the two camps could just get past their greed and see that their actions mean both of them will lose revenue, they might rethink their strategies.
You do realize who you are talking about, right? They're not going to ever rethink their strategies... They'll just blame piracy.
"My main concern was they were focusing on trying to transcribe every word that was I saying, rather than thinking and analyzing,"
What's funny is this is EXACTLY what happens with pen and paper as well! I don't see how laptops alone really change this fact. What needs to happen is not a change to paper and pencil, but a change away from transcribing and towards note taking. There is a big difference and no one ever seemed to have taught either the kids or the prof's this. I found it hard to go to a class where all the prof did was recite because I'd end up just transcribing. When the prof did examples and made you think, interact with the kids and such, that's where learning takes over. If your prof is good, YOU DON'T NEED NOTES.
Funny thing is if all the teacher wants is for us to transcribe, laptops help... I can type 100-120 WPM on a laptop, I'm lucky if I can write 20 WPM on paper. Which means I can slap down a sentence and then go back to listening. Maybe the prof should do what I've had a few of mine do. Require the notes to be turned in at the end of the class for credit (after skimming/grading while working on problems, they give them back).
NetBSD, maybe not, but then how much high end GPU usage do you frequent in there? There are drivers for many linux flavors, and they tend to work quite well. (I have a Geforce 4 in my linux box and rock the fps on tuxracer...)
People still use Real Player? I honestly haven't used real player in YEARS! I thought it had gone by the wayside. Last time I used it was in the G2 days and it wasn't the best video quality. I technically have it sort of installed, if i needed to use it, Xine has all the plugin's for real player codecs, so I'd just use that, but again, I haven't seen any content for it in a while that isn't also available in much higher quality WMV or MOV streams. Honestly, how many people use RMs anymore?
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I completely agree. XP still has plenty of life to it... and it runs on a P2 with 256MB perfectly fine.
The university demographic is probably one of the least likely to be their cash cows, i.e., many, if not most students aren't living fat and happy on exorbitant budgets (I know, some are). They don't have tons of money to fill the RIAA and cohort's coffers.
I agree with all of what you say, however, I'd have to say that if anything the RIAA is shooting themselves in the foot even more in this crowd due to one overlook in the statement you made above. Kids in Universities (I know, I was there once) may not have tons of money, but a higher percentage of what they do have is disposible. They have student loans, they have parents assistance, they have federal grants, etc... and they have lots of free time and not as much forsight as some like to believe... Not to say they're stupid, they're spending habbits are just different. Go to an average college campus and check out the kids in the dorms for instance, they have more CDs, Game Systems, Up to date PCs, and are probably the single largest demographic for purcahsing many genre's CDs. All the people I knew in college had lan parties, got the latest CDs, watched movies all the time when not at class, etc... By sueing these people they're taking the money right out of their own mouth.
They're also one of the most technologically impresionable group out there. If it's cool and high tech they'll go for it, however the RIAA seem to want to punish them for that because they don't know how to use it to their own potential.
Off that topic, but part of the main article, I've noticed people saying that we should just not buy CDs to boycott the RIAA. Sounds like a good plan except when you notice that CD sales are down according to the RIAA and they don't blame it on themselves or crappy CDs, they blame it on piracy. So the more we boycott, the more it shows they're right. Maybe they should go back to school...
And just for the record, I've been sharing files since 8" disks. I guess it was harder to sniff those, maybe I should go back to them... or atleast USB Drives. This may be the perfect time for a group of students to put up some WAPs and start sharing over that instead.
Exactly like you program in FreeBSD, Windows, OSX, DOS or whatever you feel like using as an OS. Using C, c++, PHP, Perl, etc.., and either nano or vi.
How do you program in windows? You write code, you compile it, you run it. I guess I'm missing something here.
And I'm not showing off. This is frickin Slashdot, I'm sure there are many people here that program more complex things that I do. Obiviously you're not one of them, so I apologize if my post went over your head. You can go back to your pr0n now.
I've been programming since I was 6. Had a C=128 and just HAD to figure out how to program it. Not sure why, just made it my quest. Then we got a 386, and I learned C. I didn't think it was that hard then (in fact, c made a lot more sense to me than BASIC did). After that I took a class in HS in which they taught Turbo Pascal, which I thought was kinda boring until I figured out that I could use ASM statements inline... Now I program in linux.
Now let's look at the one continuity there, they were ALL Command Line environments. Sure I had Win 3.1 but I never did that much in it. And when 95 came out and I wanted to program MFC it seemed like way too much trouble for what I was trying to do. I was eventually able to come up with a patern for setting up the window and everything, but it was kinda more a pain in the ass than it was really productive. And I come to the last part... Now I program in linux. Sure you can do X-windows programming in linux (which I think is easier than MFC and Visual WhatEver++), but I've always gravitated towards simple things like kernel programming and utilities.
Back to my point, the command line based OSes were easy to learn to program with. Minimal setup for your program (heck, include and you're pretty much done.) output is exactly what you want (it's all just text anyway), it's easy to visualize, it's easy to learn, it's easy to get results quickly. Kids have short attention spans in general, so you want something that allows them to be somewhat productive quickly, so they can do a few things and see the fruit of their labor and think "Wow! That's cool! I just made that!" instead of some random windows error. That'll Hook them and they'll want to do more and learn more... sitting down to read a book to figure out the best windowing setup or if they want a DirectX window or a menu bar is kinda a pain and isn't going to grab many kids.
I think it would work if we didn't buy it... if it was just part of the normal cable setup. Then you could buy one that let you block all the commercials (I'm talking Cable/Sat DVRs, not Tivo/Myth obviously).
I do think it's a cool idea, 'cause there are plenty of times I've seen a commercial and thought "OH HAILLLL NOO, Not this Sh!t again!" and I've muted it and walked away. Which if you think of it from the commerical maker's perspective is terrible. Say there were 5 commercials in that block. (I wish they only showed 5 at a time...) Commercial number 1's crappiness just made me, the potential customer/audience to the other ones leave and not see the other 4. Now it's entirely possible (however unlikely) that commercial #4 was for some earth shattering product that I never knew I would want before until I saw this awesomely made nobel winning commercial (Like a Razor with 8 blades or a Firewire 8 Track player, or maybe a Machine that Goes Bing (tm)). Too bad I didn't see it because Commercial #1 in the series sucked so much. So if I simply blocked the sucky one, I get to see the others (well, atleast from their point of view) so they're benifiting from it, and who knows I may actually buy something.
But I would hope that the zap of crappy commercial #1 hits the producer of commercial #1 in the ass and he never makes annoying dumb ass commercials again. So we get feed back both ways. They know what works, I don't have to see the commercial.
Wow, you should get modded up for that. Either you made that up and it just seems close enough to be correct, or you've watched that episode too many times... Either way, Nice.
Yeah, and the quality in the screen caps shows that a camera doesn't pickup everything from LCD's well... nor does the lense properly deal with aspherical issues at such a close distance, nor are the colors great, etc...
But you gotta admit, if all it is, is a camera, for 30 bucks, I can use it on ANYTHING I want to put on the TV. Just duct-tape this thing to your favorite portable console or laptop screen or whatever and plug it in. My Game Gear will be great with this adapter. But you could even use this on one of those little portible LCD TVs!!! Yeah! Then you could watch TV on your TV! (which is about as effecient a solution I believe).
I didn't realize that the 2.6 kernel ran on vaccuum tubes! Suppose they just compiled it all "-O2 -march=eniac"
Philips suggests adding flags to commercial breaks to stop a viewer from changing channels until the adverts are over.
So I'm surfing through channels, click, don't want that, click, nope, click, nope, click, nope, click ADVERTISEMENT and I'm stuck. I have to watch the add according to this until it's over and then i can go back to surfing to find out there's nothing on. Now THAT will suck.
Using a HD rather than a videotape was surely obvious
T O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm &r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6,727,830.WKU.&OS=PN/6,727,830&RS =PN/6,727,830
then that proves that being easy and obvious doesn't mean you can't get a patent.
People make it seem like this is easy and obvious.
I hate to say it... but it is both easy and obvious. But that doesn't mean you can't get a patent for it, nor does it mean that the patent should not be upheld. I think this is a great day for patent law and a great day for Tivo. They said "Hold on, that's our idea, we had it, announced it and followed through with it first and here's our proof!" and deserve that credit and some kick back from everyone that wants to put an offering out using that patent.
I mean, come on, if MS can get this patent, #6,727,830: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=P
I agree. What is there to Real.com that warrents that high of a rank? Does anyone actually use Realplayer anymore?? (seriously here.. does anyone?) I know I haven't played an rm in years! Every site I see that has streaming media available has it in windows media or quicktime, real player got pushed aside. I actually kinda forgot about it until this story. Figured it went the way of Kings Quest and After Dark.
62% of those surveyed clicked on a result on the first page, up from 48% in 2002
Doesn't that just prove that people got better in their ability to put in useful key terms? I mean, I can search for "this thing" and get a billion hits, but not want to click on any of them, but if I put in "1953 corvette right fender puce HAF-9384 IL" I'll probably find what I'm looking for quicker and actually want to click on ot. 62% of people are learning just that.
Chances are, if you're packin' you're not conceling it. In which case the guy knows you have one and sneaks up with the iron on the back of your head, in a dark alleyway, you don't really have a chance. Unless you wait until he grabs it and you happen to be a good enough shot to pick him off running away from you with the goods. Baring that you get a head shot within the first few rounds (before he turns around to return fire) he falls to the ground and *hopefully* decides to fall on the side where you're precious laptop isn't going to get crushed, what then? What are the legal ramifications? I mean, it would have been self defense if he was shooting at you, but he wasnt. You were already mugged and at that point, though a few pounds lighter, in the clear so to speak. You took the law into your own hands... and usually that's not a good thing as far as police are concerned. So what happens to you legally? Is it really worth it? I mean if you have a backup of what's on there, your important docs are encrypted, and your insurance covers theft, go buy another laptop, it'll probably be newer and shinier too.
Ok, I don't pretend to be an Apple guru, but I have this scenario at home. There are a number of apps I want to run from windows that don't run on linux. I use linux 90% of the time and don't want to dual boot to get the other apps. Guess What, I run Wine. Everything from windows I want to run, runs in Wine with almost no issues what-so-ever. Isn't there something like this for OS-X? Can Wine be ported to OS-X? If so, that's the solution that a lot of people are looking for. A way to natively run a Windows App in OS-X.
Yeah, I mean, you could actually find a woman, go for dinner and a movie and you might actually get something out of it! (I mean, the movies out suck, so you're not really going to be watching the screen anyway...)
First off, not everyone buys JUST one console. Most of my friends have BOTH an X-BOX and and PS-2. These were both, say $350 purchases ($150 console + controllers + a few games + memory cards). So $350 goes to MS, the other $350 goes to Sony. Now, if MS bought Sony, they'd get both halves of this, baring nothing changed. Effectively (all things on the backend being equal) doubling their income ($700 per similar consumer). So tanking the Playstation outright would be quite a bad idea considering that they'd probably come close to loosing HALF their income that way. Sure people may buy a few more games, but I highly doubt that I would instantly take that $350 I didn't spend on Console X and put it towards Console Y. I mean, I can only have so many controllers/memory cards/accessories). PLUS MS still has crappy market penentration in Japan and other areas outside the US. The PS-X is still rocking there and if MS tanked it, they'd loose all that, or have to advertise the hell out of whatever the Combined PS-X/X-Box Platform was so that people knew that the new "PSX-720" was something that these Sony PS-# buyers wanted AND something that the X-Box people wanted. Everyone who's got a PS-X now aready knows what's coming down the pike when they walk in the store and see the new PS-(X+1).
Also, on the surface, adding to the R&D dept. over at MS would seem to help, but you have to realize that one reason the PS-X is cool is because the R&D is COMPLETELY different than the US one (I mean, check out the game genres between the two). Also, there's always the Inverse IQ Law that states that The IQ of a group of people is inversely proportionate to the amount of people in the group. More people saying "My Idea is Better" means more indecision and more crappy common denominator games/hardware.
However, I'm sure after reading this many Nintendo fanbois will be saying "Sweet, Do it! Nintendo will take over the lost market share!!"...
They better have it soon, the number of pirate's is decreasing rapidly... Which, btw, is why global warming is occuring.. observe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Pirateschart.jp g
I agree, I mean, [Best Buy | Circuit City | Wal Mart | ] isn't that far away. AND I actually get a case with liner notes and a place to put the DVD, and maybe some special features.. and that "New CD Smell".
I'll have to say that if video games trained people to do things all the time, then I'd be trying to refuel my F-14 at 2500mph, and I'd be able to do it! (Top Gun. Ahh, the good old days. Just keep holding the nose down and you'll go faster and faster, you never go into the water, and somehow the huge refueling jet can not only keep up with you, but sometimes throw a prompt on the screen saying "Speed Up".)
Just food for thought.
Wow. I need to move to where you are. The people around here WON'T turn up the sound. There's nothing as frustrating as paying $8.25 a head to go see a theator, wait in line, spend more money on food and be pissed off with other people in the audience when they don't even turn up the sound to a decent level. New theators around here have expensive systems that COULD shake the room, and did at one point-- Then they turned it down and it's been to the point where during some dialog you have to strain to hear it (and I'm not deaf)! If I'm going to pay all that I want the theator to litterally shake when the explosion happens, I want to hear the wind wizzing by, I want not only great picture quality, but awesome sound that sucks you in. Doesn't happen around here. Heck, the last time I went to an IMAX or an Omnimax theator they even turned those down.
The last omnimax I went to was when I was in Cincinnati (we only have IMAX here). I remembered when I first went to the theator they had a trailer at the beginning showcasing the awesome 15,000 watt per channel sound system. Extremely clear and when it needed to, it DID shake the theator. So much for that experience, I'll just stay at home where my system is better than half the theators out there and I can actually USE it.
Theators have to realize that when a ticket costs 8 bucks and you can buy the DVD for $10-$20 they have competition. Taking a date to a theator costs $8*2+ $4.50 (drink) + $4 (popcorn) = $24.50. I'll stick with playing the DVD on my HDTV thank you.
I agree... However:
I think the only smart thing to do is to keep the baby ourselves and leave them both empty handed, by not buying the players or the discs. If the two camps could just get past their greed and see that their actions mean both of them will lose revenue, they might rethink their strategies.
You do realize who you are talking about, right? They're not going to ever rethink their strategies... They'll just blame piracy.
"My main concern was they were focusing on trying to transcribe every word that was I saying, rather than thinking and analyzing,"
What's funny is this is EXACTLY what happens with pen and paper as well! I don't see how laptops alone really change this fact. What needs to happen is not a change to paper and pencil, but a change away from transcribing and towards note taking. There is a big difference and no one ever seemed to have taught either the kids or the prof's this. I found it hard to go to a class where all the prof did was recite because I'd end up just transcribing. When the prof did examples and made you think, interact with the kids and such, that's where learning takes over. If your prof is good, YOU DON'T NEED NOTES.
Funny thing is if all the teacher wants is for us to transcribe, laptops help... I can type 100-120 WPM on a laptop, I'm lucky if I can write 20 WPM on paper. Which means I can slap down a sentence and then go back to listening. Maybe the prof should do what I've had a few of mine do. Require the notes to be turned in at the end of the class for credit (after skimming/grading while working on problems, they give them back).
NetBSD, maybe not, but then how much high end GPU usage do you frequent in there? There are drivers for many linux flavors, and they tend to work quite well. (I have a Geforce 4 in my linux box and rock the fps on tuxracer...)
What, like Borg? (sorry, this thread went too far without a trek reference.)
People still use Real Player? I honestly haven't used real player in YEARS! I thought it had gone by the wayside. Last time I used it was in the G2 days and it wasn't the best video quality. I technically have it sort of installed, if i needed to use it, Xine has all the plugin's for real player codecs, so I'd just use that, but again, I haven't seen any content for it in a while that isn't also available in much higher quality WMV or MOV streams. Honestly, how many people use RMs anymore?