try doing anything networking-wise with Vista. It's 5 years behind even XP. Well, maybe 2 1/2 years due to recent updates.
On mac I had both file and print sharing set up in 25 seconds (X.4 even found my network laser printer, which only is supported on Windows [a 2300DL, which I believe has a CUPS driver - I use CUPS/foo2zfs on Linux]). On Linux about 1/2 hour. On Vista 2 1/2 days (because the stupid thing didn't enable it when I turned it on, which has since been fixed, but it is far from the only network issue I had with Vista).
As I recall, Ubuntu has an OSS-only policy (with a preference toward GNU), so commercial software like flash will never be included and will only be available through a package manager.
The resize issue and knowing the workaround (Alt-drag or something like that) is knowledge of X, though some window managers don't use default X behavior, so I'd need to check on that (I haven't used GNOME in a while, I'm also using KDE/Mandriva at the moment, but I used GNOME extensively when I had Debian and really have no preference). Windows can usually be resized from the top, dragged up, and then from the bottom (just like on Windows). Really, the best approach would be to fix the dialog window to have scroll bars when it is too small to be displayed, but this is historically a problem on every GUI (dialogs on Windows/Mac had a static size and can't be resized, dialogs on X can be resized, but not scrolled when too small). I say historically because I haven't tried it on mac recently and don't currently have access to a mac gui (I can ssh to one, but I'm not going to waste my time setting up tunneling just for this post).
I've mentioned this before: Names like Transmission should be Transmission BitTorrent Client
Ubuntu has done some work in this area since I've used it last (e.g. with Firefox), but as can be seen, more work is needed.
ah, right - it wasn't a backup service - they kept one copy of the mp3 and you could authenticate or upload to the service. You still needed a username and password to access your music, so in essence it really was a backup service, just with a centralized copy of the rip.
I disagree with it being an easily defeatable distribution service - you needed to prove you had or could get the mp3, and it required authentication which is no less secure than ripping it and dumping it on a network drive as this service is. A distribution service like Kazaa gives you the mp3 with no proof of ownership. I can borrow, rip, and upload a CD, so I don't see why you even mentioned that - neither has DRM, so neither is provable.
I personally didn't have any problem with what mp3.com was doing - why keep 23 million backup copies of the same song the person proved they had access to? The record companies obviously differed.
The difference however minor, may be enough - since the individual is actually creating and storing the backup themselves without the third party actually being aware of what it is, it may be enough to make it legal - we'll have to see.
I'm pretty sure some MUDs had graphical clients long before that came out, but they still were essentially multiplayer adventure games and cycled in turns (you attack, they attack, rinse, repeat). I remember hearing about graphical MUDs back in the early 1990s when I was stuck on a terminal based mini (6 1MHz processors - the good ol' days;) ).
My point was much simpler and didn't have anything to do with radio waves themselves - if they don't have ears, they wouldn't be transmitting and thus listening to radio. What I was really getting to is if their senses are different than ours, they would be using signals differently than we do. For all we know, they see in the radio spectrum and we blind them with our noise.
I recall this fight being fought and lost before, I believe it was by MP3.com (the old version that promoted indie artists) so I don't think EMI's case is baseless.
The legal issue is not that the users are making a copy under fair use - it's that they are storing it on a server they do not own and the server owner knows about it.
Just because we haven't received radio signals from aliens doesn't solve anything - count the number of years we've been sending radio/TV signals and ask why THEY haven't received signals from US.
At best we have what, a little over 100 light years? For all we know, they had their radio age 500 years ago and realized high frequency radio waves caused alien-cancer and switched to light only, or heck, maybe they're telepathic or don't have ears (or have primitive hearing) so radio is pointless. Even if the aliens did receive a signal and sent one back, you only have a little over 50 light years coverage at best (if they were listening). That is a tiny sampling of even the Milky Way (100000 light years in diameter). Put in perspective, the farthest star in the Milky way may have developed radio 100000 years ago and we'd just be finding out about it today.
and Uwe Boll has exactly the opposite incentive - if his movies lose money, he gets a tax shelter (though he has said he would like to see them do well), so it really is a conflict of interest.
Actually, from my experience knowing a liberal minded doctoral student (in history) that dropped out with only his thesis left due to close-minded professors, I'd say you really are spending 5/10 years sucking up to the establishment. If you add any insight in a US school, make sure it's US centric - he basically got tossed out by suggesting Communism could have succeeded if it weren't for the economic burden of the Cold War. He was not suggesting that Communism was better or worse than Capitalism, only that it was viable.
The whole issue boils down to one thing: Q) can we prove Intelligent Design without reasonable doubt? A) No. So should we teach it? Go ahead - in church.
When you have certain or near certain proof, bring it to schools, but leave the specific God out of it, unless you can prove without a doubt that the design was by a Christian God or Allah, or Buddha, or any other specific God (or gods). The biggest problem I have with the ID people I have met is they ONLY believe it is the Christian God and yet no Christian has ever proven to me that, say, Allah deserves any less respect as potentially being the true God (having faith and believing it is a different matter - for church). A school that is not supposed to have religious bias needs to respect that. Somehow I don't see that ever happening - the fanatics in Kansas would never allow it and make sure it's Christian only.
Apple also supports hybrid rendering, so if you aren't doing too much in software, you may be able to get away with it. I actually use software mode for testing, but my mac is ancient (it can't even run X.5), so it isn't much good.
You're right - SSE5 was only a spec, and it looks like it is expected in the same timeframe as AVX. I actually heard someone talk about them both in a podcast, but I was at work and apparently wasn't paying enough attention. So much for multitasking:)
Anyhow, that wasn't my point - I was wondering if it worked in software mode.
I'd be curious to know how well AMD CPUs running software OpenGL (which actually uses those SSE instructions). Supposedly AMD supports it, in fact, they released SSE5 while Intel continues working on its replacement, AVX
You underestimate musicians. Sure, there are the drug and booze soaked ones that only sing about sex and booze, but even the worst are sometimes incredibly well informed and insightful.
Take for instance the early industrial band Skinny Puppy (I remember one member OD'd on heroin) on this track about Saddam's use of VX gas (in this particular attack on rebels outside Karbala, it was later found that Sarin was used - Saddam used VX on Halabja later, however, killing many, many more). Note that the exact chemical agents weren't known - as the lyrics go: "we are still analyzing water, soil, and human tissue samples..." Look here for more recent analysis. The references to Israel were political, from the belief that Iraq would use the weapons on Israel if attacked in retaliation.
On that song, this always bothered me - "In a shop in a working class district one day last week one man demonstrated the idea of a chemical warfare protector by putting a plastic shopping bag over his head."
oh - I missed something - in Minnesota if you are over some threshold in purchases, you need to pay quarterly instead of yearly, so the magic accounting system would need to keep track of that, as well.
There is no way this will work without a unified sales tax system. State taxing is ridiculously complex and there is no easy way to automate it.
First off, Internet businesses are not avoiding sales tax; they are exempt from collecting it in states they don't operate in because every state has a different law on how much to collect and when it needs to be paid, therefore it is left to the consumer to pay this tax.
I'd say 90% of the people I know could currently be thrown in jail for tax evasion for failure to pay Use Tax (mentioned in TFA).
This is non-trivial, and NOT solvable by changing a program on PayPal. Why? Take Minnesota, with a 6.5% Use Tax, but a threshold of $770 payable yearly on Tax Day (April 15). Until $770 is spent, purchasers don't need to pay tax on catalog or Internet sales - how does PayPal know when $770 is spent? It doesn't - it only knows what is spent on PayPal. Furthermore, this tax is paid separately using a different form (as it is in every state that has it, I believe), so prepaying and rebating it is giving the government a free loan on a purchaser's money (I certainly would take it to court on those grounds).
Then there are the punishments for late payment - say you live in Vermont (due monthly on the 20th) and your PayPal account doesn't have enough cash on the 20th of the month. Suddenly you owe $50 more, 5% additional penalty per month + interest. Do you assess that on each purchased item, once for each purchase, or just once for the entire thing? The law isn't clear.
What we need is uniform sale and use tax laws like the mentioned Streamlined Sales and Use Tax proposal, but some states don't want to concede because if the tax is, say, set at 5%, you piss off brick-and-mortar retailers in states where tax is greater than 5%. To be fair to all states you need to set the tax at the maximum tax used in any state, which is currently Tennessee's 9.4%. I have serious doubts states with no sales tax will agree to a 9.4% tax.
I've covered a fraction of the states - now lets toss in counties, boroughs, and municipalities. Alaska, for instance, has no state sales tax, but 95% of boroughs issue one, so to be fair to retailers, you would also need to collect for the borough.
So there you have it, all the issues involved (at least that I can think of) - got an easy solution? I certainly can't think of one.
Dude, that greeting line is typical for a slashdot user whose user ID is between 10,000 and 50,000 (ask any decent HR department if you don't believe me).
I've gotten a few ideas to work around issues in the short term, but my point is upgrading obsoletes all my old hardware and so eventually I need to replace it all, which costs thousands.
I have neither an HDTV or PS3 (for blu ray), so I'd have to purchase both (PS3 first or both at the same time). Upgrading my DVR to one with HDMI should be trivial, but upgrading my service to HD costs some. I also have a problem with connecting in my current DVD burner/player VCR combo which I use for archiving because that doesn't have HDMI. At some point I'd want to replace that with a blu-ray burner (if the DRM doesn't kill it) and eventually replace my tuner as well. The net cost is in the thousands, but yes, it could be done over a period of time.
well duh - from what I read, it sounds like it's mostly a bunch of formerly undocumented API calls. I haven't looked at them, but they're probably stuff like IE's faster rendering functions that were hidden so Netscape couldn't use them (to give IE an unfair speed boost).
If I had a dollar for every undocumented API call I've been forced to use from MS and Apple, I'd probably have a couple hundred bucks. In fact, I just used a couple more recently (thanks to some hackers documenting them in one case, and an engineer's reply on an Apple's mailing list in another).
Whether they contribute much (if anything) is another question entirely.
Microsoft does keep a FUD campaign about OSS being hard to use, a toy, lacking support, worse than equivalent commercial software, etc., some of which is true and some just plain smear.
I can smear Vista as well: Vista wipes hard drives and drags your machine to a crawl. The first is a fact, at least for me - Vista automatic update left my machine in an unbootable state during the pre-SR1 patch and I had to erase my drive with an image to get it to work again. The second is smear - running OpenGL on Vista in a window is incredibly slow, but I'm applying it to the entire OS just like they do in some of their comparisons.
Keep in mind here that I don't hate MS, I hate MS's business practices (heck, I hate most business practices, but they're rich and I'm a peon, so who am I to talk?).
Let's face it - Americans on a whole can't manage money outside a few of us that live "behind the times." 60% of Americans can't pay off their credit cards each month. I believe the number for Americans with no debt is under 17% (can't remember where I saw that number). According to that same link, most Americans live at 10% above their annual income. I'm sure that will grow as more people invest in Blu-ray on credit. I'll wait a while and budget for it eventually - maybe when the price hits $100.
You're not seeing the whole picture. I don't have a digital tuner (HDMI capable), so (I believe) I would need to replace it to drive my existing surround system or at minimum get some sort of converter box. If the new tuner can't drive 4 ohm (Magnaplanar) speakers, I need to replace them, as well. At best I'm probably looking at $1000 just for a 37" setup and a cheap surround system or a converter box and probably less control (everything routes through my Tuner, so not routing the TV thru means more buttons to push), and that TV is already too small for the room and replaces a much more expensive sound system and larger TV.
I'd rather suffer without for a few years and get a proper setup when I can afford it.
heh - that's what the "economic stimulus" package is for.
But blu-ray is worthless without an HDTV and HD capable receiver, which will set you back several thousand more if you don't already have them. With the push for digital only, an HDTV/receiver is far more important than Blu-ray - maybe in 2-5 years when those prices drop and Blu-ray drops we'll see 80%.
I'm still debating whether to do what I'm supposed to, buy cheap Chinese goods with the government loan from the Chinese (like an HDTV) with my economic stimulus, or doing the 'wrong' thing and paying another month on my mortgage. Never mind - I'm paying off my debt first - I can always move to a debt free country.
yeah - I have a feeling the situation is a lot worse than this with botnets - my blog server was hit with a comment spam bot slowing that machine to a crawl. After shutting down my forum for two days, I dumped the database for 200000 'pending' posts that failed a graphical word ID check (meaning they would get trashed from pending in a week), wrote a script to grep out the IPs and got almost 120000 as unique (all now blocked). I re-enabled comments and got 80000 more before I disabled it again yesterday and now plan to completely block posts that fail a graphical ID check. Some of these may be attributable to dynamic IP leases, but I still suspect over 150000-200000 machines are involved. I'm still getting severe network performance problems today, so it's like having a denial-of-service attack. I've submitted a list of IPs and timestamps to my ISP, so hopefully they'll be able to do something about it, but I imagine that will take a while.
Realize that this is a while ago (2003?). When I had Comcast, they had NO realistic competition in the area and the former cable companies in the area were cheaper than satellite (after Comcast bought AT&T who had bought King prices skyrocketed because they stuffed more channels I never watch in their packages).
Qwest offered 256k service for $10 cheaper than Comcast's 3Mbps service. Not only that, Qwest had no available lines and said they might start a waiting list. Several months later they finally bumped their service to 1.5Mbps and added lines in my area, and have since bumped to 7Mbps, not to mention finally started offering static IPs, but I had gone to Speakeasy long before that (which cost me more than Comcast, but offered static IPs). Anyhow, that's also why I said Qwest is really a market follower, not a leader - they wait to see what the competition does, then a few months later follows them.
I don't necessarily hate Qwest - they've improved a LOT since I hated them (back when they bought out US West, which I called US Worst and dubbed them Qworst - terrible service, terrible lines, terrible prices). I just wish they'd be more like Verizon and be proactive - if they want to differentiate, add WiMax instead of FIOS - just something proactive for once. Verizon has even started to be less evil - the decision to open their phone network, for instance (I HATE having to buy phone unlocks to undo their cripples - about damn time).
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try doing anything networking-wise with Vista. It's 5 years behind even XP. Well, maybe 2 1/2 years due to recent updates.
On mac I had both file and print sharing set up in 25 seconds (X.4 even found my network laser printer, which only is supported on Windows [a 2300DL, which I believe has a CUPS driver - I use CUPS/foo2zfs on Linux]). On Linux about 1/2 hour. On Vista 2 1/2 days (because the stupid thing didn't enable it when I turned it on, which has since been fixed, but it is far from the only network issue I had with Vista).
As I recall, Ubuntu has an OSS-only policy (with a preference toward GNU), so commercial software like flash will never be included and will only be available through a package manager.
The resize issue and knowing the workaround (Alt-drag or something like that) is knowledge of X, though some window managers don't use default X behavior, so I'd need to check on that (I haven't used GNOME in a while, I'm also using KDE/Mandriva at the moment, but I used GNOME extensively when I had Debian and really have no preference). Windows can usually be resized from the top, dragged up, and then from the bottom (just like on Windows). Really, the best approach would be to fix the dialog window to have scroll bars when it is too small to be displayed, but this is historically a problem on every GUI (dialogs on Windows/Mac had a static size and can't be resized, dialogs on X can be resized, but not scrolled when too small). I say historically because I haven't tried it on mac recently and don't currently have access to a mac gui (I can ssh to one, but I'm not going to waste my time setting up tunneling just for this post).
I've mentioned this before:
Names like
Transmission
should be
Transmission BitTorrent Client
Ubuntu has done some work in this area since I've used it last (e.g. with Firefox), but as can be seen, more work is needed.
ah, right - it wasn't a backup service - they kept one copy of the mp3 and you could authenticate or upload to the service. You still needed a username and password to access your music, so in essence it really was a backup service, just with a centralized copy of the rip.
I disagree with it being an easily defeatable distribution service - you needed to prove you had or could get the mp3, and it required authentication which is no less secure than ripping it and dumping it on a network drive as this service is. A distribution service like Kazaa gives you the mp3 with no proof of ownership. I can borrow, rip, and upload a CD, so I don't see why you even mentioned that - neither has DRM, so neither is provable.
I personally didn't have any problem with what mp3.com was doing - why keep 23 million backup copies of the same song the person proved they had access to? The record companies obviously differed.
The difference however minor, may be enough - since the individual is actually creating and storing the backup themselves without the third party actually being aware of what it is, it may be enough to make it legal - we'll have to see.
I'm pretty sure some MUDs had graphical clients long before that came out, but they still were essentially multiplayer adventure games and cycled in turns (you attack, they attack, rinse, repeat). I remember hearing about graphical MUDs back in the early 1990s when I was stuck on a terminal based mini (6 1MHz processors - the good ol' days ;) ).
My point was much simpler and didn't have anything to do with radio waves themselves - if they don't have ears, they wouldn't be transmitting and thus listening to radio. What I was really getting to is if their senses are different than ours, they would be using signals differently than we do. For all we know, they see in the radio spectrum and we blind them with our noise.
I recall this fight being fought and lost before, I believe it was by MP3.com (the old version that promoted indie artists) so I don't think EMI's case is baseless.
The legal issue is not that the users are making a copy under fair use - it's that they are storing it on a server they do not own and the server owner knows about it.
Just because we haven't received radio signals from aliens doesn't solve anything - count the number of years we've been sending radio/TV signals and ask why THEY haven't received signals from US.
At best we have what, a little over 100 light years? For all we know, they had their radio age 500 years ago and realized high frequency radio waves caused alien-cancer and switched to light only, or heck, maybe they're telepathic or don't have ears (or have primitive hearing) so radio is pointless. Even if the aliens did receive a signal and sent one back, you only have a little over 50 light years coverage at best (if they were listening). That is a tiny sampling of even the Milky Way (100000 light years in diameter). Put in perspective, the farthest star in the Milky way may have developed radio 100000 years ago and we'd just be finding out about it today.
and Uwe Boll has exactly the opposite incentive - if his movies lose money, he gets a tax shelter (though he has said he would like to see them do well), so it really is a conflict of interest.
Actually, from my experience knowing a liberal minded doctoral student (in history) that dropped out with only his thesis left due to close-minded professors, I'd say you really are spending 5/10 years sucking up to the establishment. If you add any insight in a US school, make sure it's US centric - he basically got tossed out by suggesting Communism could have succeeded if it weren't for the economic burden of the Cold War. He was not suggesting that Communism was better or worse than Capitalism, only that it was viable.
The whole issue boils down to one thing:
Q) can we prove Intelligent Design without reasonable doubt?
A) No.
So should we teach it? Go ahead - in church.
When you have certain or near certain proof, bring it to schools, but leave the specific God out of it, unless you can prove without a doubt that the design was by a Christian God or Allah, or Buddha, or any other specific God (or gods). The biggest problem I have with the ID people I have met is they ONLY believe it is the Christian God and yet no Christian has ever proven to me that, say, Allah deserves any less respect as potentially being the true God (having faith and believing it is a different matter - for church). A school that is not supposed to have religious bias needs to respect that. Somehow I don't see that ever happening - the fanatics in Kansas would never allow it and make sure it's Christian only.
Apple also supports hybrid rendering, so if you aren't doing too much in software, you may be able to get away with it. I actually use software mode for testing, but my mac is ancient (it can't even run X.5), so it isn't much good.
You're right - SSE5 was only a spec, and it looks like it is expected in the same timeframe as AVX. I actually heard someone talk about them both in a podcast, but I was at work and apparently wasn't paying enough attention. So much for multitasking :)
Anyhow, that wasn't my point - I was wondering if it worked in software mode.
I'd be curious to know how well AMD CPUs running software OpenGL (which actually uses those SSE instructions). Supposedly AMD supports it, in fact, they released SSE5 while Intel continues working on its replacement, AVX
You underestimate musicians. Sure, there are the drug and booze soaked ones that only sing about sex and booze, but even the worst are sometimes incredibly well informed and insightful.
Take for instance the early industrial band Skinny Puppy (I remember one member OD'd on heroin) on this track about Saddam's use of VX gas (in this particular attack on rebels outside Karbala, it was later found that Sarin was used - Saddam used VX on Halabja later, however, killing many, many more). Note that the exact chemical agents weren't known - as the lyrics go: "we are still analyzing water, soil, and human tissue samples..." Look here for more recent analysis. The references to Israel were political, from the belief that Iraq would use the weapons on Israel if attacked in retaliation.
On that song, this always bothered me - "In a shop in a working class district one day last week one man demonstrated the idea of a chemical warfare protector by putting a plastic shopping bag over his head."
oh - I missed something - in Minnesota if you are over some threshold in purchases, you need to pay quarterly instead of yearly, so the magic accounting system would need to keep track of that, as well.
There is no way this will work without a unified sales tax system. State taxing is ridiculously complex and there is no easy way to automate it.
First off, Internet businesses are not avoiding sales tax; they are exempt from collecting it in states they don't operate in because every state has a different law on how much to collect and when it needs to be paid, therefore it is left to the consumer to pay this tax.
I'd say 90% of the people I know could currently be thrown in jail for tax evasion for failure to pay Use Tax (mentioned in TFA).
This is non-trivial, and NOT solvable by changing a program on PayPal. Why? Take Minnesota, with a 6.5% Use Tax, but a threshold of $770 payable yearly on Tax Day (April 15). Until $770 is spent, purchasers don't need to pay tax on catalog or Internet sales - how does PayPal know when $770 is spent? It doesn't - it only knows what is spent on PayPal. Furthermore, this tax is paid separately using a different form (as it is in every state that has it, I believe), so prepaying and rebating it is giving the government a free loan on a purchaser's money (I certainly would take it to court on those grounds).
Then there are the punishments for late payment - say you live in Vermont (due monthly on the 20th) and your PayPal account doesn't have enough cash on the 20th of the month. Suddenly you owe $50 more, 5% additional penalty per month + interest. Do you assess that on each purchased item, once for each purchase, or just once for the entire thing? The law isn't clear.
What we need is uniform sale and use tax laws like the mentioned Streamlined Sales and Use Tax proposal, but some states don't want to concede because if the tax is, say, set at 5%, you piss off brick-and-mortar retailers in states where tax is greater than 5%. To be fair to all states you need to set the tax at the maximum tax used in any state, which is currently Tennessee's 9.4%. I have serious doubts states with no sales tax will agree to a 9.4% tax.
I've covered a fraction of the states - now lets toss in counties, boroughs, and municipalities. Alaska, for instance, has no state sales tax, but 95% of boroughs issue one, so to be fair to retailers, you would also need to collect for the borough.
So there you have it, all the issues involved (at least that I can think of) - got an easy solution? I certainly can't think of one.
You're an idiot - it's ID's between 10k and 100k
sorry - I couldn't pass that up
I've gotten a few ideas to work around issues in the short term, but my point is upgrading obsoletes all my old hardware and so eventually I need to replace it all, which costs thousands.
I have neither an HDTV or PS3 (for blu ray), so I'd have to purchase both (PS3 first or both at the same time). Upgrading my DVR to one with HDMI should be trivial, but upgrading my service to HD costs some. I also have a problem with connecting in my current DVD burner/player VCR combo which I use for archiving because that doesn't have HDMI. At some point I'd want to replace that with a blu-ray burner (if the DRM doesn't kill it) and eventually replace my tuner as well. The net cost is in the thousands, but yes, it could be done over a period of time.
well duh - from what I read, it sounds like it's mostly a bunch of formerly undocumented API calls. I haven't looked at them, but they're probably stuff like IE's faster rendering functions that were hidden so Netscape couldn't use them (to give IE an unfair speed boost).
If I had a dollar for every undocumented API call I've been forced to use from MS and Apple, I'd probably have a couple hundred bucks. In fact, I just used a couple more recently (thanks to some hackers documenting them in one case, and an engineer's reply on an Apple's mailing list in another).
I can think of an entire website, which is linked from Microsoft's open source website open source page link.
Whether they contribute much (if anything) is another question entirely.
Microsoft does keep a FUD campaign about OSS being hard to use, a toy, lacking support, worse than equivalent commercial software, etc., some of which is true and some just plain smear.
I can smear Vista as well:
Vista wipes hard drives and drags your machine to a crawl. The first is a fact, at least for me - Vista automatic update left my machine in an unbootable state during the pre-SR1 patch and I had to erase my drive with an image to get it to work again. The second is smear - running OpenGL on Vista in a window is incredibly slow, but I'm applying it to the entire OS just like they do in some of their comparisons.
Keep in mind here that I don't hate MS, I hate MS's business practices (heck, I hate most business practices, but they're rich and I'm a peon, so who am I to talk?).
Let's face it - Americans on a whole can't manage money outside a few of us that live "behind the times." 60% of Americans can't pay off their credit cards each month. I believe the number for Americans with no debt is under 17% (can't remember where I saw that number). According to that same link, most Americans live at 10% above their annual income. I'm sure that will grow as more people invest in Blu-ray on credit. I'll wait a while and budget for it eventually - maybe when the price hits $100.
You're not seeing the whole picture. I don't have a digital tuner (HDMI capable), so (I believe) I would need to replace it to drive my existing surround system or at minimum get some sort of converter box. If the new tuner can't drive 4 ohm (Magnaplanar) speakers, I need to replace them, as well. At best I'm probably looking at $1000 just for a 37" setup and a cheap surround system or a converter box and probably less control (everything routes through my Tuner, so not routing the TV thru means more buttons to push), and that TV is already too small for the room and replaces a much more expensive sound system and larger TV.
I'd rather suffer without for a few years and get a proper setup when I can afford it.
heh - that's what the "economic stimulus" package is for.
But blu-ray is worthless without an HDTV and HD capable receiver, which will set you back several thousand more if you don't already have them. With the push for digital only, an HDTV/receiver is far more important than Blu-ray - maybe in 2-5 years when those prices drop and Blu-ray drops we'll see 80%.
I'm still debating whether to do what I'm supposed to, buy cheap Chinese goods with the government loan from the Chinese (like an HDTV) with my economic stimulus, or doing the 'wrong' thing and paying another month on my mortgage. Never mind - I'm paying off my debt first - I can always move to a debt free country.
yeah - I have a feeling the situation is a lot worse than this with botnets - my blog server was hit with a comment spam bot slowing that machine to a crawl. After shutting down my forum for two days, I dumped the database for 200000 'pending' posts that failed a graphical word ID check (meaning they would get trashed from pending in a week), wrote a script to grep out the IPs and got almost 120000 as unique (all now blocked). I re-enabled comments and got 80000 more before I disabled it again yesterday and now plan to completely block posts that fail a graphical ID check. Some of these may be attributable to dynamic IP leases, but I still suspect over 150000-200000 machines are involved. I'm still getting severe network performance problems today, so it's like having a denial-of-service attack. I've submitted a list of IPs and timestamps to my ISP, so hopefully they'll be able to do something about it, but I imagine that will take a while.
Realize that this is a while ago (2003?). When I had Comcast, they had NO realistic competition in the area and the former cable companies in the area were cheaper than satellite (after Comcast bought AT&T who had bought King prices skyrocketed because they stuffed more channels I never watch in their packages).
Qwest offered 256k service for $10 cheaper than Comcast's 3Mbps service. Not only that, Qwest had no available lines and said they might start a waiting list. Several months later they finally bumped their service to 1.5Mbps and added lines in my area, and have since bumped to 7Mbps, not to mention finally started offering static IPs, but I had gone to Speakeasy long before that (which cost me more than Comcast, but offered static IPs). Anyhow, that's also why I said Qwest is really a market follower, not a leader - they wait to see what the competition does, then a few months later follows them.
I don't necessarily hate Qwest - they've improved a LOT since I hated them (back when they bought out US West, which I called US Worst and dubbed them Qworst - terrible service, terrible lines, terrible prices). I just wish they'd be more like Verizon and be proactive - if they want to differentiate, add WiMax instead of FIOS - just something proactive for once. Verizon has even started to be less evil - the decision to open their phone network, for instance (I HATE having to buy phone unlocks to undo their cripples - about damn time).