Instead of using such app, just choose a provider that doesn't cap you.
. . . and when you are limited to a choice of only one or two providers, both of whom have bandwidth caps (published or unlimited*) what do you propose as the solution?
I can't wait until MPAA members' and attorneys' get hit because their kids downloaded content.
Remember: if a movie isn't worth paying for, it's not worth "pirating," because then the MPAA members will claim a "loss" because they are able to buy one less yacht and three fewer exotic cars and five fewer rolexes than usual this year.
You don't want to give them intact military avionics - especially not our jammer and radar technology, nor our FLIR systems. Even if the aircraft is not classified, the US isn't going to give up avionics tech to an established enemy or otherwise hostile entity. What they ought to do though is have explosive devices within each component - a stable incendiary device (not shock sensitive so getting hit by enemy fire won't ignite it) but remotely triggered, like you see in Sci-Fi and action films where a vehicle self-destructs. Even having a device ignite a small block of magnesium would be enough to completely incinerate a FLIR camera module, a RADAR antenna array, etc.
I never believed in karma, but this is making me rethink it.:-)
Sony is reaping what they've sown. I can't say I feel bad for them, nor for Sony shareholders. They've been too greedy for too long, between root kits, proprietary connectors and memory cards, eliminating the UMD from the PSP, unreasonable DRM on blu-ray, and now apparently the straw that broke the camel's back was the bait-and-switch they tried to pull with the Playstation. They're only getting what they deserve after they've been screwing customers for so many years.
For a couple decades Sony was the brand to buy if you wanted decent consumer electronics, between their trinitron televisions, well thought out (and innovative! they made "walkman" style radios practical even though they weren't the first on the block) walkmans and watchmans, decent compact stereo systems, and so on. They were the gold standard for televisions for a long time. Unfortunately when they married into record labels, they have abandoned their core market in favor of trying to control the customer, and instead of making reliable and serviceable electronics, they have jacked up replacement parts to unreasonable levels, obfuscated circuits by using fusible resistors in place of fuses and breakers to complicate troubleshooting, and have been lowering build quality, treating electronics as disposable, when with the "green" movement going on, they ought to have been doing the opposite and making electronic goods easier to service, not more difficult.
My phone has replaced my PSP (I "needed" a new one but with the UMD gone, I can't play my games on a new PSP. F$%@ you Sony!), and my gaming console is from Microsoft, whom I view to be far less evil than Sony (it's telling when you can say Microsoft is more ethical than Sony).
And then change the law to be more reasonable, such as 85 on the interstate (which is actually designed to handle 120 per the original Congressional act).
. . . and those laws were based on what 1960s' suspension and brake technology can handle. Now the limit on those designs should be much higher, given that practically every car in showrooms today will pull.7g lateral acceleration (most will do.8 or better, and many will do better than.9), have disc brakes all around (so little to no fade), will tend to spin out rather than roll when drivers domake mistakes, the tires produced today can actually handle sustained high speeds, and seat belts and even air bags are now standard equipment.
Why we continue to put up with the designed-by-revenue-opportunity speed limits and the drive-around-the-block-K-Mart driving test today is quite beyond me.
. . . until you need to deal with lots of forms where no PDF is available but you want to ensure the form is entirely legible, or when you need to complete a form with carbon copies.
For the former, geeks can scan in the form, import it into photoshop or gimp and rotate/align and crop it, then overlay text over the fields. Do you expect the typical administrative assistant to be able to do that?
There will always likely be some need for manual typewriters, and dot matrix printers as well for that matter.
Dot matrix printers: When it comes to debugging very poorly written undocumented spaghetti code (especially VB with goto abuse all over the place) nothing beats a wide dot matrix printer and tractor paper for making sense of spaghetti code because you can see all the code at once and trace through the spaghetti. A smart project manager would let you rewrite but you don't always have intelligent project managers.
True, but Netflix is going to eventually force Comcast to lower their prices significantly.
No, that is not true at all. Netflix reaching critical mass is what prompted Comcast to introduce the bandwidth cap. The way Comcast will compete is not by continuing to improve their network, or improving product or cutting prices, but by lowering bandwidth caps further. Comcast is old media which is dabbling in interweb technology. Comcast is not an ISP - at least not in mindset.
Length: car lengths or football fields (American football, not the rest-of-the-world football which we call soccer, so that further confuses everyone) Volume: volkswagens (the orignal "bug" Type 1 Beetle, not the new beetle) Weight: volkswagens (the orignal "bug" Type 1 Beetle, not the new beetle) Date storage: Libraries of Congress
. . . which is why it took a team in Japan to solve the problems. Between Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and now Fukushima sharks are no longer required, thanks to the recent development of angry mutated sea bass!
Almost every DVD player lets you skip the stupid advertisements, FBI warnings (they should just remove those, the Copyright notice is sufficient), and so on. Few Blu-Ray players allow you to skip all that bullshit. Some Blu-Ray discs display 5-10 minutes of advertisements before you can play the movie, What the fuck? You pay a price premium for that shit?
* the price premium for Blu-Ray discs (when I buy Blu-Ray I look specifically for DVD/BluRay combo packages)
* DRM: what happens when Samsung, Toshiba, Sony, etc. sunset a particular player, and new keys are required?
* DRM: why the hell can't I easily rip it to my iPhone/iPad/iPod
* Lack of native Mac support. Apple seems to have an anti-BluRay stance due to the fascist DRM
* Lack of Linux support: you might say this affects a minority and for desktop users in the US it's true. But worldwide Linux enjoys rapid growth, plus even in the US lots of set top boxes, in-dash auto entertainment systems, and so on use embedded Linux.
* Lack of blu-ray recorders
* High cost of BD-R discs
DRM should just be dropped; a few mainstream films have shipped on DVD without CSS encoding and yet they sold very well (this was the case for at least one of the Harry Potter flicks - I thought about buying it to support the idea of DRM-free media but I am not into Harry Potter). Blu-Ray DRM is a pain in the rump for the average user. If you look at any torrent site, you see loads of blu-ray rips, and more often than not, high quality camcorder/DVCam "rips" of movies taken in the theater long before the movie makes it to DVD or Blu-Ray. DRM does not slow down the "pirates" in the slightest bit. They just annoy the fuck out of legitimate paying customers. It's a pretty sad situation when counterfeit goods are superior in every possible way than the legitimately-purchased goods.
BluRay drives need to come down in price, and BD-R discs need to come down in price. I'm sure plenty of folks would snap them up for backing up photos, home movies, and their other crap once BD-R media becomes affordable, just like how DVD really didn't overtake crummy old analog 240-line VHS until a) the cost of prerecorded movies became available and b) DVD-R became available.
Tell them that the second they reimburse you for the server they can not only get a login, but they can become responsible for its maintenance and security and they had better be sure it has a solid uptime. That only seems reasonable.:-)
Nintendo is releasing a new platform at a point when the 360 and PS3 platforms are starting to stagnate, resorting to parlor tricks like the Kinect and Move to cover up the fact that it's not economically viable to release a new "next generation" platform at this point in time.
Or, perhaps, maybe, just maybe, the current generation consoles are "good enough" that continued investments would produced diminished returns, since graphics have a hard limit of 1920x1080 (thanks to the high def standard), they can all display photorealistic graphics rendered in realtime, and all that might be need is a tweak here (Blu-Ray drive in the case of the Xbox) and a tweak there (new controllers - see Kinect).
World of Goo and Defend Your Castle are great fun though.:-) Call it shovelware if you wish but you can't knock that the games are clever, unique and fun and with Defend Your Castle in particular, the focus is 90% fun gameplay, 5% intentionally-cheesy graphics, and 5% intentionally-corny sound effects.
Hint: perfectly rendered eye candy does not make for a good gaming experience. Smart game design does, and if the graphics happen to be photorealistic, so be it. In most cases photorealistic graphics don't improve game mechanics. Give me fun gameplay with so-so graphics or a game that devotes more time to 3D rendered movie intermissions then a few minutes of boring game time in between, I'll take the fun but lesser graphics game.
Where I would like to see excellent graphics is combat flight simulators, but the good ones seem to be a thing of the past. I would love to see an updated F-15 Strike Eagle, or a decent attack helicopter simulator (all I can find is Apache: Air Assault, It wasn't out last time I checked for one, so I should check out the demo).
The new slim model is amazingly quiet. The original was frighteningly loud and even for all of the racket the fans made I still ran into the RROD. I modded it with the usual heatsink mod, added a couple fans to the system and got a couple more years out of it. It finally gave up the ghost and the processors need reballing so I canned it and bought the new slim model. It is amazingly quiet. I don't think I've ever heard the fans come on and yet when I check it after gaming or streaming movies, it's only slightly warm to the touch, whereas the original would be hot to the touch. The power supply is also much cooler as well.:-)
It's spelled goatsescape, that's why. It's the whole reason the Wii was standard def - they discovered an amazing rendering algorithm using goatse-based graphics (hence the term goatsescape) which would have revolutionized GPU technology everywhere, until they realized that if it were high def then users would be able to see that each pixel is actually goatse so it would kill sales. That is the real reason the Wii is standard def. Of course, at the time they overestimated consumers' intelligence and did not realize that 99% of the marketplace is comprised of drooling mouth breathers who would proceed to connect their $3,000-$5,000 high definition televisions to components using the composite NTSC ports.
Exactly. Nothing will make a film look amateurish quicker than having a higher-than-normal frame rate.
No, it's when something is recorded on sensors and with apertures so small that anything further than a few inches from the lens is is in perfect focus; no isolation of the subject, with the hyperfocal distance just inches from the lens it will "feel" like it was shot on a cheap $200 sony camcorder.
Add in camcorder-style videography (deep depth of field, 4:3 aspect ratio, NTSC quality color) and you achieve that dismal feel.
Throw a camera with a larger sensor and wider aperture at it, with a good videographer and on a decent (read: not NTSC) standard and you'll achieve a better result regardless of framerate.
I for one find 24fps very distracting - the flicker is very noticeable to me, which is why I like 120fps frame interpolation so much. 24fps is headache-inducing - but my roommates dislike it because it doesn't "feel" like a movie. The problem is, they have grown accustomed to the herky-jerky 24fps standard, but aren't so sensitive to it that they don't see the individual frames, so they have come to expect that stop-motion "feel" from any video lasting longer than 43 minutes.
The problem with spicy foods is that you apparently gain tolerance to the effects.
You do. I used to eat habaneros all the time - raw (yes, just eating them whole, seeds and all), stir fried with chicken, etc. but now I rarely eat chilis, so the little red peppers you get in vietnamese or thai dishes are very hot to me, and so is even the lowly jalapeno. I had a tolerance for it before and was quite addicted to hot peppers but after years of eating chili peppers infrequently I have near zero tolerance for them.
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. . . and when you are limited to a choice of only one or two providers, both of whom have bandwidth caps (published or unlimited*) what do you propose as the solution?
*("unlimited*" = !unlimited)
I can't wait until MPAA members' and attorneys' get hit because their kids downloaded content.
Remember: if a movie isn't worth paying for, it's not worth "pirating," because then the MPAA members will claim a "loss" because they are able to buy one less yacht and three fewer exotic cars and five fewer rolexes than usual this year.
You don't want to give them intact military avionics - especially not our jammer and radar technology, nor our FLIR systems. Even if the aircraft is not classified, the US isn't going to give up avionics tech to an established enemy or otherwise hostile entity. What they ought to do though is have explosive devices within each component - a stable incendiary device (not shock sensitive so getting hit by enemy fire won't ignite it) but remotely triggered, like you see in Sci-Fi and action films where a vehicle self-destructs. Even having a device ignite a small block of magnesium would be enough to completely incinerate a FLIR camera module, a RADAR antenna array, etc.
they'd rather be hacked and incur weeks of downtime by doing the wrong thing,m rather than a couple of minutes of downtime doing the right thing.
This is typical Sony as of late. Why should their infrastructure management be any better than the way they treat customers?
I never believed in karma, but this is making me rethink it. :-)
Sony is reaping what they've sown. I can't say I feel bad for them, nor for Sony shareholders. They've been too greedy for too long, between root kits, proprietary connectors and memory cards, eliminating the UMD from the PSP, unreasonable DRM on blu-ray, and now apparently the straw that broke the camel's back was the bait-and-switch they tried to pull with the Playstation. They're only getting what they deserve after they've been screwing customers for so many years.
For a couple decades Sony was the brand to buy if you wanted decent consumer electronics, between their trinitron televisions, well thought out (and innovative! they made "walkman" style radios practical even though they weren't the first on the block) walkmans and watchmans, decent compact stereo systems, and so on. They were the gold standard for televisions for a long time. Unfortunately when they married into record labels, they have abandoned their core market in favor of trying to control the customer, and instead of making reliable and serviceable electronics, they have jacked up replacement parts to unreasonable levels, obfuscated circuits by using fusible resistors in place of fuses and breakers to complicate troubleshooting, and have been lowering build quality, treating electronics as disposable, when with the "green" movement going on, they ought to have been doing the opposite and making electronic goods easier to service, not more difficult.
My phone has replaced my PSP (I "needed" a new one but with the UMD gone, I can't play my games on a new PSP. F$%@ you Sony!), and my gaming console is from Microsoft, whom I view to be far less evil than Sony (it's telling when you can say Microsoft is more ethical than Sony).
. . . and those laws were based on what 1960s' suspension and brake technology can handle. Now the limit on those designs should be much higher, given that practically every car in showrooms today will pull .7g lateral acceleration (most will do .8 or better, and many will do better than .9), have disc brakes all around (so little to no fade), will tend to spin out rather than roll when drivers domake mistakes, the tires produced today can actually handle sustained high speeds, and seat belts and even air bags are now standard equipment.
Why we continue to put up with the designed-by-revenue-opportunity speed limits and the drive-around-the-block-K-Mart driving test today is quite beyond me.
. . . until you need to deal with lots of forms where no PDF is available but you want to ensure the form is entirely legible, or when you need to complete a form with carbon copies.
For the former, geeks can scan in the form, import it into photoshop or gimp and rotate/align and crop it, then overlay text over the fields. Do you expect the typical administrative assistant to be able to do that?
There will always likely be some need for manual typewriters, and dot matrix printers as well for that matter.
Dot matrix printers: When it comes to debugging very poorly written undocumented spaghetti code (especially VB with goto abuse all over the place) nothing beats a wide dot matrix printer and tractor paper for making sense of spaghetti code because you can see all the code at once and trace through the spaghetti. A smart project manager would let you rewrite but you don't always have intelligent project managers.
Not with 2GB and 5GB caps, they're not going to be the new ISP. They'll be the "internet in a pinch" solution, just like they are now.
No, that is not true at all. Netflix reaching critical mass is what prompted Comcast to introduce the bandwidth cap. The way Comcast will compete is not by continuing to improve their network, or improving product or cutting prices, but by lowering bandwidth caps further. Comcast is old media which is dabbling in interweb technology. Comcast is not an ISP - at least not in mindset.
What I want to know is this: when will this technology be used to make HID headlamps even brighter? 5,000 lumens from 55W isn't enough! :-)
Slashdot units of measure
Length: car lengths or football fields (American football, not the rest-of-the-world football which we call soccer, so that further confuses everyone)
Volume: volkswagens (the orignal "bug" Type 1 Beetle, not the new beetle)
Weight: volkswagens (the orignal "bug" Type 1 Beetle, not the new beetle)
Date storage: Libraries of Congress
. . . which is why it took a team in Japan to solve the problems. Between Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and now Fukushima sharks are no longer required, thanks to the recent development of angry mutated sea bass!
What were you ripping it on - a PC XT running at a glorious 4.77 MHz?
Oh, and another major reason:
Almost every DVD player lets you skip the stupid advertisements, FBI warnings (they should just remove those, the Copyright notice is sufficient), and so on. Few Blu-Ray players allow you to skip all that bullshit. Some Blu-Ray discs display 5-10 minutes of advertisements before you can play the movie, What the fuck? You pay a price premium for that shit?
The counterfeit product is superior.
It's obvious:
* the price premium for Blu-Ray discs (when I buy Blu-Ray I look specifically for DVD/BluRay combo packages)
* DRM: what happens when Samsung, Toshiba, Sony, etc. sunset a particular player, and new keys are required?
* DRM: why the hell can't I easily rip it to my iPhone/iPad/iPod
* Lack of native Mac support. Apple seems to have an anti-BluRay stance due to the fascist DRM
* Lack of Linux support: you might say this affects a minority and for desktop users in the US it's true. But worldwide Linux enjoys rapid growth, plus even in the US lots of set top boxes, in-dash auto entertainment systems, and so on use embedded Linux.
* Lack of blu-ray recorders
* High cost of BD-R discs
DRM should just be dropped; a few mainstream films have shipped on DVD without CSS encoding and yet they sold very well (this was the case for at least one of the Harry Potter flicks - I thought about buying it to support the idea of DRM-free media but I am not into Harry Potter). Blu-Ray DRM is a pain in the rump for the average user. If you look at any torrent site, you see loads of blu-ray rips, and more often than not, high quality camcorder/DVCam "rips" of movies taken in the theater long before the movie makes it to DVD or Blu-Ray. DRM does not slow down the "pirates" in the slightest bit. They just annoy the fuck out of legitimate paying customers. It's a pretty sad situation when counterfeit goods are superior in every possible way than the legitimately-purchased goods.
BluRay drives need to come down in price, and BD-R discs need to come down in price. I'm sure plenty of folks would snap them up for backing up photos, home movies, and their other crap once BD-R media becomes affordable, just like how DVD really didn't overtake crummy old analog 240-line VHS until a) the cost of prerecorded movies became available and b) DVD-R became available.
Tell them that the second they reimburse you for the server they can not only get a login, but they can become responsible for its maintenance and security and they had better be sure it has a solid uptime. That only seems reasonable. :-)
Or, perhaps, maybe, just maybe, the current generation consoles are "good enough" that continued investments would produced diminished returns, since graphics have a hard limit of 1920x1080 (thanks to the high def standard), they can all display photorealistic graphics rendered in realtime, and all that might be need is a tweak here (Blu-Ray drive in the case of the Xbox) and a tweak there (new controllers - see Kinect).
World of Goo and Defend Your Castle are great fun though. :-) Call it shovelware if you wish but you can't knock that the games are clever, unique and fun and with Defend Your Castle in particular, the focus is 90% fun gameplay, 5% intentionally-cheesy graphics, and 5% intentionally-corny sound effects.
Hint: perfectly rendered eye candy does not make for a good gaming experience. Smart game design does, and if the graphics happen to be photorealistic, so be it. In most cases photorealistic graphics don't improve game mechanics. Give me fun gameplay with so-so graphics or a game that devotes more time to 3D rendered movie intermissions then a few minutes of boring game time in between, I'll take the fun but lesser graphics game.
Where I would like to see excellent graphics is combat flight simulators, but the good ones seem to be a thing of the past. I would love to see an updated F-15 Strike Eagle, or a decent attack helicopter simulator (all I can find is Apache: Air Assault, It wasn't out last time I checked for one, so I should check out the demo).
The new slim model is amazingly quiet. The original was frighteningly loud and even for all of the racket the fans made I still ran into the RROD. I modded it with the usual heatsink mod, added a couple fans to the system and got a couple more years out of it. It finally gave up the ghost and the processors need reballing so I canned it and bought the new slim model. It is amazingly quiet. I don't think I've ever heard the fans come on and yet when I check it after gaming or streaming movies, it's only slightly warm to the touch, whereas the original would be hot to the touch. The power supply is also much cooler as well. :-)
It's spelled goatsescape, that's why. It's the whole reason the Wii was standard def - they discovered an amazing rendering algorithm using goatse-based graphics (hence the term goatsescape) which would have revolutionized GPU technology everywhere, until they realized that if it were high def then users would be able to see that each pixel is actually goatse so it would kill sales. That is the real reason the Wii is standard def. Of course, at the time they overestimated consumers' intelligence and did not realize that 99% of the marketplace is comprised of drooling mouth breathers who would proceed to connect their $3,000-$5,000 high definition televisions to components using the composite NTSC ports.
No, it's when something is recorded on sensors and with apertures so small that anything further than a few inches from the lens is is in perfect focus; no isolation of the subject, with the hyperfocal distance just inches from the lens it will "feel" like it was shot on a cheap $200 sony camcorder.
TV soaps are horrible to begin with.
Add in camcorder-style videography (deep depth of field, 4:3 aspect ratio, NTSC quality color) and you achieve that dismal feel.
Throw a camera with a larger sensor and wider aperture at it, with a good videographer and on a decent (read: not NTSC) standard and you'll achieve a better result regardless of framerate.
I for one find 24fps very distracting - the flicker is very noticeable to me, which is why I like 120fps frame interpolation so much. 24fps is headache-inducing - but my roommates dislike it because it doesn't "feel" like a movie. The problem is, they have grown accustomed to the herky-jerky 24fps standard, but aren't so sensitive to it that they don't see the individual frames, so they have come to expect that stop-motion "feel" from any video lasting longer than 43 minutes.
Sure there is: cable (internet, TV, telephone). They've been pulling similar crap for ages.
You do. I used to eat habaneros all the time - raw (yes, just eating them whole, seeds and all), stir fried with chicken, etc. but now I rarely eat chilis, so the little red peppers you get in vietnamese or thai dishes are very hot to me, and so is even the lowly jalapeno. I had a tolerance for it before and was quite addicted to hot peppers but after years of eating chili peppers infrequently I have near zero tolerance for them.
Yeah - they are either on here, on facebook, fark, or twitter.