You don't want to do a sub-par MythTV box. Usually you'd want a very large hardrive (or four), a good TV tuner (or two), and enough processing power to encode a show or two and still watch TV. TiVo is a good option when you don't want to fork over $1k+ and want it to just work.
Wouldn't a sub-par MythTV box be TiVo?
I haven't priced it all out, but I'd imagine you could build a MythTV box for under $500 that would still beat TiVo. That's about the cost of 3 years of TiVo prepaid.
Wow, that's pretty rough. Windows is similar by default: with hardware acceleration enabled that part of the screencap is just black. But if you disable hardware acceleration for video, it works fine. Or use a different program besides WMP/WinDVD.
Maybe Apple uses similar hardware acceleration for DVDs?
Strange how all these other high profile sites do the same thing with no problems.
I suppose I should have put a disclaimer that I was already aware of issues with fair use, editorial use, the percentage of a work that qualifies as fair use, etc.
The only real problem is whether DRM prevents using them with programs that are capable of screen captures, or even with computers at all.
I rent DVDs from NetFlix and take screen captures and short clips for one of my sites, and would love to use HD movies instead. For the same subscription price, I'd be getting 1920x1080 images instead of ~640x480 or 852x480, a huge difference for stills.
But then again, I don't even know if I'd be able to take screen captures from a computer, with all the DRM they have.
I have social anxiety as well. It was pretty bad for a while after I lost my job. I became a hermit living off savings (lump sum 401k) for a while. Even going into convenience stores was hard. But I remained social on the internet, and aware of what was going on in the world, even if I didn't know about the new stores going up around town in rural VT, or a damn thing about local politics.
Returning to the real world was much easier because while I didn't keep up with what was going on locally, I was still very aware of national news and events, and wasn't culturally behind where anyone else was, even if I didn't have as much of the local flavor. It's still weird knowing what I know about IT on a national level, then going in for consulting jobs and realizing that locally, it's a much different story, but that will always be the case now that I get most of my news and knowledge of IT from the web.
Since I got my first computer in 2002 and really got into the web, I haven't so much cared what was going on locally. I don't even read/watch local news, even though in the past, I've written for a local newspaper. I even know more about other countries' events than what I know about my hometown. But it doesn't matter: I'd rather live in the world community and culture than my own boring local one anyway.
Just get Permit Cookies. In your Firefox options, block all cookies. Then when you want to accept/reject cookies for a particular site, press Alt-C or click the little icon on the left of the status bar.
Yeah I disable the close button entirely too. I use my thumb button on my mouse, mapped to CTRL-W. It's the most convenient of all my mappings, even moreso than horizontal scroll and back/forward.
You're right in a sense that there's no problem creating demand. There is a problem limiting supply.
But another important aspect of the equation is that "something that can be infinitely and freely copied" costs nothing to the artist to (re-)distribute. Whether 1,000 people or 1,000,000 people hear it, that costs the same. It is no more work for the artist.
Like any business you can make more money by selling your products for less (on average--only some people actually buy it) but selling many more of them. So if you can sell 1,000 or freely redistribute 1,000,000 and convince 2,000 of those to pay for it, congratulations: you just made more money by letting people redistribute it.
Does anyone find it odd that those that redistribute music are actually doing the record label's job, for free no less?
Just because Apple doesn't "do a SUSE linux" and go from version 6.4 -> 7.0 for bragging rights, doesn't mean their point releases are "service packs you pay for". 10.3 -> 10.4 was huge. comparing it with XP -> XPSP2 (as many do) is ridiculous.
It's unusual in the industry to version that way. I think they just liked the X. And several companies change their versioning past 10. MS is worse. They jumped from 3.1 to 95 and XBox 1 to 360.
>You can't stay on 10.1 and still be up to date, for free, can you?
this is just the same thing as "You can't stay on Win98 and still be up to date, for free, can you?".
I'm not arguing that you didn't get a few new features for your money. I was just clarifying that (I think) the GGGP was saying that you *must* pay to stay up to date with fixes, all of which have been since 2001. Now you're talking about an OS that was released in 98.
So in other words, you could remain up-to-date with the latest fixes for XP for the past 5 years. To remain up-to-date with Mac would require $129-390, depending on how far you wanted to lag behind all that time.
The biggest deal is that the ability to rip a DVD is only in the home upgraded version, and the ability to use non-M$ networking protocols is only in the pro.
You'll still have the ability to rip a DVD the old-fashioned way, without the DRM. Just use the programs you do now to decrypt and rip. You just won't have it built into Media Player/Center. And you won't have Media Center at all if you get Home Basic. Home Premium is essentially what is currently Media Center Edition.
Also, I wouldn't think you'd need non-MS networking protocols unless it's actually a work laptop, which would necessitate getting one of the Pro versions. Unless Novell can ship their own driver or something.
Starter Edition isn't really even worth mentioning in this country. It's a POS.
>Apple releases an OS, and the service packs as another OS
total BS.
Tiger gives you Spotlight, Dashboard, Automator etc.
are you saying MS gives these "service pack features" for free? NO, that's what you're paying for Vista for (except you don't get Automator).
You each are saying different things. You talk about features that aren't service pack updates and asking if MS gives them away. He's talking about service pack updates that you need to pay to receive. You can't stay on 10.1 and still be up to date, for free, can you?
Apple service packs are free (security updates and "minor" program updates).
What are the '"minor" program updates'? MS gives you free updates to DirectX (think of it as CoreImage, etc.), Windows Movie Maker, and the obvious ones: WMP and IE. Mac has similar updates except you need to upgrade to get CoreImage and all that. MS doesn't have the whole iLife suite, but the photo app, mail app, etc. that will be included with Vista will probably have years of free updates as well. So what program updates do you mean?
Also the OS X licence requires no activation and is legal to use on several computers (not sure the exact number since I only have 1 anyway).
That's illegal, actually. They wouldn't sell Family Packs of licenses if that was legal.
At this point, the technology doesn't exist to do it well enough to keep it from getting repetitive. You just can't link things together with the subtlety and detail that a human can. So in games that do it (Freelancer would be an example) the variation actually makes it more rote. Sure no two missions are precisely the same, but they are all the same general thing.
I think you need a mix of scripted and random aspects of missions. For example, in FFX, if you had random battles and missions that were all influenced by how much Sin had taken over the world, plus previous decisions you had made, the plot would still be semi-random, but each time the randomizer ran it would be altered by those factors.
Kinda like real life: some things are pretty much random, some things were caused by previous events or decisions. The trick is to make all that fit together as seamless as possible.
"in a Windows vs OS X comparison, you resort to the argument that you don't use Windows or OS X because you prefer Linux" - good point
"you don't think it's a problem that the out-of-box experience for Windows is poor because it's the OEM's fault" - good point
"you've got a smug attitude about how your set of values is more important than other users'." - ad hominem
"Can't argue with you - you're definitely a classic early-stage techie." - ad hominem
"When I hear a end users complaining about the fact that when they leave their computer alone, it runs up a few CPU cycles, I'll start giving that kind of logic some weight." - good point
It was more like 40%. I didn't parse it right the first time I read it, and missed a few points.
Oh yeah, and I wasn't accusing you of karma whoring. Just wondering how it got modded up from my interpretation of what you said.
My post probably wasn't worth posting. Maybe I was in a bad mood....oh....3 hours ago, lol.
I thought that bundling was a really bad problem when my mom bought a Dell a couple years ago. It had 5-10 registration wizards and notices pop up the first time she booted it.
Then my dad bought a Dell a couple of months ago. Almost nothing interfered with that first boot. Norton Ghost and McAfee asked for registration within the first couple of boots. But that's it.
He was up and running as soon as I showed him how to use Windows Update that first time, and it does it automatically anyway.
Prior to this article, I've heard about Dell's recycling program several times. I've never heard about Apple's. Don't you think that if Apple has a recycling program, that they should promote it heavily, so people can actually use it?
Right now, you pay your ISP. Google pays for their access to the internet. That's the simple part. In between, your connection to Google hops through several different routers owned by several different companies. Those providers use "peering" if they each pass the same amount of traffic to each other, and no money is exchanged. Otherwise, one of the providers pays access to the others' customers, or "transit." So that's how it works now, and it works fairly well.
But what if each of those hops forces Google to pay them or they will slow down Google's traffic? Suddenly, you and your neighbors on the same ISP, as well as scattered neighborhoods around the country get a slow or inaccessible Google. Other neighborhoods might get slow Yahoo. The web suddenly becomes spotty. It's no longer a level playing field.
That's without even considering the kind of unreasonable deals (practically extortion) that could happen and cause interruptions in some people's service. Or the potential for some companies to choose not to allow certain types of speech to traverse through their network.
Regrettably a car analogy. If in a particular city, most people drive Toyota Corollas, you can bet car thiefs will learn how to break into Corollas and they will be broken into more frequently than the 2-3% of Daewoos. Because they're already so familiar with Corollas, those cars will probably be stolen in an even higher percentage than its marketshare. So it has at least some significance in some cases.
Your IIS/Apache analogy may show a different story though. I'm just saying that comparing a security system to a non-security system isn't the best analogy. Of course the thieves would do the one that doesn't require any work.
The biggest flaw in Windows is stuff running as SYSTEM. Try this in Windows: schedule a command in a terminal to run cmd.exe the next minute using the "at" command. As you will notice, you will get your cmd.exe... running as SYSTEM. You don't even have to be a very privileged user to do that, kill your own explorer.exe and start explorer.exe in that cmd.exe you have and guess what: you're running your system as SYSTEM.
You actually do have to be a "very priviledged user to do that." You have to be an Administrator, which you could generally consider to be root. If you already have access as an Administrator, it's not very significant that you can get to System. You could do it in any number of other ways, besides escalating with at. Moral of the story: don't run as Administrator.
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Wouldn't a sub-par MythTV box be TiVo?
I haven't priced it all out, but I'd imagine you could build a MythTV box for under $500 that would still beat TiVo. That's about the cost of 3 years of TiVo prepaid.
Wow, that's pretty rough. Windows is similar by default: with hardware acceleration enabled that part of the screencap is just black. But if you disable hardware acceleration for video, it works fine. Or use a different program besides WMP/WinDVD.
Maybe Apple uses similar hardware acceleration for DVDs?
Thanks for the tip. That is good news. It's not quite as convenient as VirtualDub's or Quicktime's capture functions, but it's better than nothing.
Strange how all these other high profile sites do the same thing with no problems.
I suppose I should have put a disclaimer that I was already aware of issues with fair use, editorial use, the percentage of a work that qualifies as fair use, etc.
The only real problem is whether DRM prevents using them with programs that are capable of screen captures, or even with computers at all.
I rent DVDs from NetFlix and take screen captures and short clips for one of my sites, and would love to use HD movies instead. For the same subscription price, I'd be getting 1920x1080 images instead of ~640x480 or 852x480, a huge difference for stills.
But then again, I don't even know if I'd be able to take screen captures from a computer, with all the DRM they have.
I have social anxiety as well. It was pretty bad for a while after I lost my job. I became a hermit living off savings (lump sum 401k) for a while. Even going into convenience stores was hard. But I remained social on the internet, and aware of what was going on in the world, even if I didn't know about the new stores going up around town in rural VT, or a damn thing about local politics.
Returning to the real world was much easier because while I didn't keep up with what was going on locally, I was still very aware of national news and events, and wasn't culturally behind where anyone else was, even if I didn't have as much of the local flavor. It's still weird knowing what I know about IT on a national level, then going in for consulting jobs and realizing that locally, it's a much different story, but that will always be the case now that I get most of my news and knowledge of IT from the web.
Since I got my first computer in 2002 and really got into the web, I haven't so much cared what was going on locally. I don't even read/watch local news, even though in the past, I've written for a local newspaper. I even know more about other countries' events than what I know about my hometown. But it doesn't matter: I'd rather live in the world community and culture than my own boring local one anyway.
Just get Permit Cookies. In your Firefox options, block all cookies. Then when you want to accept/reject cookies for a particular site, press Alt-C or click the little icon on the left of the status bar.
Oh yeah, your question. You can disable the 1.x red close button with Tab Mix Plus.
(and moreso should be too words)
Yeah I disable the close button entirely too. I use my thumb button on my mouse, mapped to CTRL-W. It's the most convenient of all my mappings, even moreso than horizontal scroll and back/forward.
You're right in a sense that there's no problem creating demand. There is a problem limiting supply.
But another important aspect of the equation is that "something that can be infinitely and freely copied" costs nothing to the artist to (re-)distribute. Whether 1,000 people or 1,000,000 people hear it, that costs the same. It is no more work for the artist.
Like any business you can make more money by selling your products for less (on average--only some people actually buy it) but selling many more of them. So if you can sell 1,000 or freely redistribute 1,000,000 and convince 2,000 of those to pay for it, congratulations: you just made more money by letting people redistribute it.
Does anyone find it odd that those that redistribute music are actually doing the record label's job, for free no less?
OK, I've come to the conclusion that I've been trolled. Good Work.
It's unusual in the industry to version that way. I think they just liked the X. And several companies change their versioning past 10. MS is worse. They jumped from 3.1 to 95 and XBox 1 to 360.
I'm not arguing that you didn't get a few new features for your money. I was just clarifying that (I think) the GGGP was saying that you *must* pay to stay up to date with fixes, all of which have been since 2001. Now you're talking about an OS that was released in 98.
So in other words, you could remain up-to-date with the latest fixes for XP for the past 5 years. To remain up-to-date with Mac would require $129-390, depending on how far you wanted to lag behind all that time.
You'll still have the ability to rip a DVD the old-fashioned way, without the DRM. Just use the programs you do now to decrypt and rip. You just won't have it built into Media Player/Center. And you won't have Media Center at all if you get Home Basic. Home Premium is essentially what is currently Media Center Edition.
Also, I wouldn't think you'd need non-MS networking protocols unless it's actually a work laptop, which would necessitate getting one of the Pro versions. Unless Novell can ship their own driver or something.
Starter Edition isn't really even worth mentioning in this country. It's a POS.
You each are saying different things. You talk about features that aren't service pack updates and asking if MS gives them away. He's talking about service pack updates that you need to pay to receive. You can't stay on 10.1 and still be up to date, for free, can you?
What are the '"minor" program updates'? MS gives you free updates to DirectX (think of it as CoreImage, etc.), Windows Movie Maker, and the obvious ones: WMP and IE. Mac has similar updates except you need to upgrade to get CoreImage and all that. MS doesn't have the whole iLife suite, but the photo app, mail app, etc. that will be included with Vista will probably have years of free updates as well. So what program updates do you mean?
That's illegal, actually. They wouldn't sell Family Packs of licenses if that was legal.
Replace FFX with any game. That wasn't the point.
I think you need a mix of scripted and random aspects of missions. For example, in FFX, if you had random battles and missions that were all influenced by how much Sin had taken over the world, plus previous decisions you had made, the plot would still be semi-random, but each time the randomizer ran it would be altered by those factors.
Kinda like real life: some things are pretty much random, some things were caused by previous events or decisions. The trick is to make all that fit together as seamless as possible.
It was more like 40%. I didn't parse it right the first time I read it, and missed a few points.
Oh yeah, and I wasn't accusing you of karma whoring. Just wondering how it got modded up from my interpretation of what you said.
My post probably wasn't worth posting. Maybe I was in a bad mood....oh....3 hours ago, lol.
Hmm...I guess 90% ad hominem is worth +5 insightful.
I'll have to remember that next time I want karma.
I thought that bundling was a really bad problem when my mom bought a Dell a couple years ago. It had 5-10 registration wizards and notices pop up the first time she booted it.
Then my dad bought a Dell a couple of months ago. Almost nothing interfered with that first boot. Norton Ghost and McAfee asked for registration within the first couple of boots. But that's it.
He was up and running as soon as I showed him how to use Windows Update that first time, and it does it automatically anyway.
Prior to this article, I've heard about Dell's recycling program several times. I've never heard about Apple's. Don't you think that if Apple has a recycling program, that they should promote it heavily, so people can actually use it?
I've always wanted to feel what it was like to be a prostitute!
Oh, I see. So she understands how video games' chemistry affects the environment.
At first I thought she was totally unqualified to comment on violent video games.
Right now, you pay your ISP. Google pays for their access to the internet. That's the simple part. In between, your connection to Google hops through several different routers owned by several different companies. Those providers use "peering" if they each pass the same amount of traffic to each other, and no money is exchanged. Otherwise, one of the providers pays access to the others' customers, or "transit." So that's how it works now, and it works fairly well.
But what if each of those hops forces Google to pay them or they will slow down Google's traffic? Suddenly, you and your neighbors on the same ISP, as well as scattered neighborhoods around the country get a slow or inaccessible Google. Other neighborhoods might get slow Yahoo. The web suddenly becomes spotty. It's no longer a level playing field.
That's without even considering the kind of unreasonable deals (practically extortion) that could happen and cause interruptions in some people's service. Or the potential for some companies to choose not to allow certain types of speech to traverse through their network.
Regrettably a car analogy. If in a particular city, most people drive Toyota Corollas, you can bet car thiefs will learn how to break into Corollas and they will be broken into more frequently than the 2-3% of Daewoos. Because they're already so familiar with Corollas, those cars will probably be stolen in an even higher percentage than its marketshare. So it has at least some significance in some cases.
Your IIS/Apache analogy may show a different story though. I'm just saying that comparing a security system to a non-security system isn't the best analogy. Of course the thieves would do the one that doesn't require any work.
You actually do have to be a "very priviledged user to do that." You have to be an Administrator, which you could generally consider to be root. If you already have access as an Administrator, it's not very significant that you can get to System. You could do it in any number of other ways, besides escalating with at. Moral of the story: don't run as Administrator.