I hope you Americans will use your vote to fix the broken patent system.
If you were American, you would realize how we can't use our vote to fix this. The problem is that in the 1990s, the Patent Office was made to be self-supporting. This made it in their best interests to approve every patent they can. The more patents they approve, the more people will apply for other patents and the more money they make. The more money they make, the more employees they can have. The more employees they have, the more managers it takes along with management salaries. They have every incentive in the world to approve every patent application they get now because they make money from it. To change the system would decrease the amount of money they make and they will never do that on their own.
No one running for office seems to care about this. It's not a hot issue. Most Americans have no idea what is going on with patents. In fact, patents seem to work well for the pharmaceutical industry and perhaps for people who actually make devices. They make our lives worse when business methods and software can be patented. Nothing will change because the only way to change the system is to put the Patent Office back on the federal payroll where they get paid to do their job and have no financial incentive to approve as many patents as possible. This will never happen because no one in Congress wants to start supporting an organization that is now self supporting.
No, im not at all shocked Tivo hasnt turned a profit.
Nor am I. Despite what Slashdotters might think, most people don't own a TIVO. My brother is the only person I know who owns one.
I'm technologically adept. I work in IT. Friends and family ask me all the time to help them with computer problems. Why don't I own a TIVO? Simple. I refuse to pay the monthly premium. I don't care if it's 1 cent. I refuse to pay any monthly charge for what is essentially a VCR. I have a PC in my spare bedroom/office that has a Hauppauge TV card it and I use it as a TIVO. I pay nothing to use it. When TIVO comes out with a model that requires no monthly surcharge, then I might think about. A lot of people I know have told me that as long as there is a monthly charge for using TIVO, they'll never buy one. The point is not the size of the charge, it's that it exists at all. For my dad, a TIVO would be great, but he is still OK with his ancient VCR. How on earth do I convince him that it's worth his while to pay a monthly charge to use TIVO when he can use his VCR all he wants for no monthly charge? I have to admit that also more than one person has expressed fear of buying a TIVO and then being stuck with an unusable device should TIVO go bankrupt, which is a real possibility. If you have a VCR made by the Defunct Cheap Chinese Electronic Company, who is now bankrupt but the VCR still works, no problem. My understanding of TIVO is that it is unusable if you don't pay the monthly fee. As long as the device works like that, I'll never own one.
The surprise for me is not that TIVO has never turned a profit. The surprise for me is that they are still in business.
FTA: Movies can't be "burned" or copied onto disks that can be played on other devices, such DVD players. The movies, however, can be copied to play on as many as two other PCs
USA Today had an article today about this. The movies use WMV, which as we all know if very DRM-friendly, which the industry wants. I don't think it would be unreasonable to expect these expensive downloads to be at less than DVD resolutions AND have inferior sound to go along with the DRM. The article I read said something cryptic about how it would "look OK on your PC" which I am sure is code for a VCD type resolution such as 356x240.
You are right in what you say, but neither HD-DVD nor Blu Ray will support 1080p. In fact, your arguments apply equally well to Blu Ray, which adds the following negatives of its own:
1)Blu Ray DVDs will cost more than HD-DVD. 2)Blu Ray DVD players will cost even more than HD-DVD players. In fact, as has been discussed on Slashdot, Sony may be losing $600 (!!!) per PS3 just on the cost of the electronics to support Blu Ray. 3)Blu Ray doesn't support anything right now except MPEG-2. In theory, some other codecs can be supported, but they don't work with Blu Ray right now. In fact, the first Blu Ray DVDs will be good ol' MPEG-2 video and will not use any of the advanced codecs that will work out of the box on HD-DVD. What this means, in terms that Slashdot geeks can understand, is that with the technology as it is today, you can fit _Return Of The King: Expanded Edition_ with all material on one HD-DVD disc. You can't even fit the movie alone on one Blu Ray single layer disc because of the use of the inefficient MPEG-2 codec, which requires very high bitrates for HD. The first Blu Ray discs will be limted to about 2 hours of movie time because they don't have any more efficient codecs working.
IMHO, I'm not sure consumers anywhere really want to pay extra for either format, but based on what I've read on varios forums, I have to conclude that at least HD-DVD is ready and Blu Ray isn't.
How odd that releases in the UK of American movies are so far behind the American release. I have spent a good amount of time in Ukraine in the past few years and I was surprised at how many American movies open there at exactly the same time as they open in America. Of course, that might have something to do with the fact that piracy is a big problem in Ukraine and if they delay movies too much, a bootleg DVD or VCD will be on the streets before the film even plays in the theatres. Frankly, you guys in the UK may be getting screwed because piracy is not a big problem there, so the studios have no icentive to show the films at the same time as in America.
This crap gets modded insightful? Some guy pulls some stuff out of his butt, says it's true, and it's insightful ? Give me a break! As someone who actually does go to church, I can tell you that NONE of the pastor's kids I have ever known have become atheists. A few did stop going to church, but none became atheists. Quite a large number of the boys followed in dad's footsteps and quite a few of the girls married a pastor.
Apple Records exists mostly to look out for the Beatles interests. The Beatles have been involved in some VERY lengthy court battles with their record labels (essentially Capitol in the USA and EMI everywhere else. That's not 100% accurate as Capitol was in Mexico too, but it's close enough to accurate.). The Beatles reached a deal with EMI/Capitol where basically they got paid a lot of money, all future releases have an Apple logo on them and the Beatles basically don't challenge EMI/Capitol's technical ownership of the recorded tracks as long as EMI/Capitol do only what the Beatles say with those tracks. The Beatles may not technically own their old recorded material, but they have 100% control over it.
It is now more or less a holding company. Their most successful non-Beatles artists were Badfinger and Mary Hopkin. Apple stopped releasing records under its own label in 1975. They did re-issue some non-Beatles material on CD in the early 1990s, but almost all of that is now out of print.
Apple (the Beatles' Apple) is privately owned and as such, they are under no obligation to sell it.
Michael Jackson owned only the publishing rights to the Beatles' songs. To raise the money to start Apple Records, the group foolishly sold the publishing rights around 1968. Michael has no control over the recorded versions themselves. The publishing rights changed hands a few times and eventually Michael bought it by secretly outbidding Paul McCartney by a lot. Paul has said that he tried to get Yoko to offer more as he felt that as John's widow she should own half of the publishing, but Yoko wanted to get them cheap and refused to pay what Paul thought it would take to get it. While he was trying to talk Yoko into paying more, Michael offered maybe 3 or 4 times what Paul/Yoko's offer was and the guy who owned the songs jumped at it.
The sad truth is that the Beatles will NEVER own their publishing again. I would guess its value is at least half a billion dollars. Neither Paul nor Yoko will fork over that kind of money to get it. It could be worth more than half a billion.
The Beatles and their organization are run very strangely. They think that the less they do, they more valuable their stuff becomes. About once every 5 years, they re-issue something and act like they have given us fans some piece of gold. There are still unreleased tracks in the vaults and I doubt they will ever see the light of day, at least not until Paul and Ringo have died. They ought to try to get as much money as they can now from the old catalog and release the best of the unreleased stuff now while someone still cares. My 13 year old nephew and his friends barely know who they are. I was born in the 60s and to my nephew, the Beatles are as far removed from him in time as the Big Band guys of the 1930s were to me.
The price that Apple Computers will continue to pay until the end of time is that they will have to keep forking money over to Apple Records because they used a name too close to that of the Beatles' organization. Yes, this is pure greed. I say that as a Beatles fan and I'm not particularly an Apple fanboy either.
I think it's like when Chris Rock used to do "Late Night With Nat X" on "Saturday Night Live" that he used to have a top 5 list because "The man won't let me have 10 of anything!"
Let's see... if true, this would mean that consumers would get a double benefit - they would pay MORE for an Apple PC than a non-Apple PC AND (drumroll, please!) they would get to use "quality" Microsoft software on this PC!
If true, let me tell you what over 90% of the consumers out there would say. These are the people who are not Apple fanboys. "You seriously expect me to pay MORE for an Apple PC than a non-Apple PC just to run Windows?!? When both PCs will run it? Are you out of your freakin' mind?!?" And Apple soon joins DEC in the computer afterlife.
I think it all started with the first Vax 780, or possibly the first IBM 370 channel controller. Those old machines booted with a 7" floppy that had a capacity of 0.5k. Yep, 512 bytes. Early bootstraps could store the entire contents on to a hard disk with very few instructions if the sector size matched.
Man that takes me back. Where's my toupee....
I think it's in the same place as your vacuum tubes.
Re:A lot less than meets the eye
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Region-free PS3
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this is a non issue on modern tvs... and has been for years.
Actually, it's a big issue in NTSC land (Canada, the USA, Japan and some other countries). I'm guessing that you live in either the UK or Australia or perhaps some other PAL country. PAL TVs have a way to natively support NTSC signals as a subset of PAL. There is no way to support a PAL signal under NTSC. It must be converted to NTSC. Fortunately, many DVD players are able to do this type of conversion, but it remains to be seen whether or not such conversion will be offered by the PS3.
You should be aware that it is almost impossible to buy a multi-standard TV in the USA. If you want to do it, you will have to do a web search for specialty web sites that can sell those. In Europe, you can walk into any electronics store and buy a PAL TV that is also capable of displaying NTSC signals. This is not true at all in America. None of our big electronics stores even offer multi-standard TVs as an option. After all, "Why would anyone want that?"
I wouldn't recommend ATI on linux at all at this point. The drivers are barely even useable, let alone give good performance.
My bit of advice, if you're buying a video card for a linux PVR, stay far, far away from ATI. You'll thank me for saving you from countless hours of trying to get a good picture in vain.
Why oh why do so many people act like crack addicted junkies and think that ATI is the only option they have? Hauppauge cards work just fine on Linux. Although the parent doesn't say what he uses instead of ATI, I'd bet it's Hauppauge. The guy who wrote the original article obviously didn't do his research and just assumed he could get ATI to work for him. HA HA HA HA HA!
Plus, warp does not make the ship go fater then light. It makes it so it doesn't travel all the distance.
While I partly shudder at the thought of arguing about a fictional TV show, you, sir, are dead freakin' wrong. Warp drive DOES indeed go faster than light. Had you watched more than a handful of Star Trek episodes, you would clearly understand this. To educate yourself, please see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warp_drive_(Star_Trek ) You have obviously confused warp drive with some type of jump drive technology which does not involve faster than light travel but makes ships jump large distances essentially instantaneously.
"It would be wonderful if these entities could share some of the wealth to keep us going."
Wow, that's a weak response. It sounds like they're basically asking other F/OSS projects to fork over cash because OpenBSD can't raise money. And it makes F/OSS groups look like the business-challenged hippies that some people think they are.
Man this is astute. The problem as I see it is that OpenBSD relied on a revenue generating source (people buying CDs) that was a dead end. Go back, say, 2 years ago and yes, I can see someone buying a CD because they don't want to keep their dialup connection tied up for 24 hours to download one CD. I have plenty of friends and relatives who I thought would never, ever get broadband internet who have indeed gotten broadband internet in the past year. When you have DSL or cable modem, why should you pay OpenBSD for the CDs when you download everything you need in, I don't know, say 10-15 minutes and get instant FREE gratification? Any business model they have that relies on people buying CDs from them is doomed to fail.
I work for Cingular, and we DON'T give out unlock codes, ever, no matter who the customer is or what they say. I doubt if any US wireless provider does. If you can figure out how to unlock it yourself, then great, but there is simply no reason for a wireless provider to help you switch to another network.
T-Mobile DOES give out unlock codes after you have been a paying customer for 3 months. That is EXACTLY why I am their customer and not yours. I did my research prior to getting my phone and I knew that T-Mobile would unlock it for free for me.
Now, why in the hell is he saying that another season was in the works if he didn't have a contract signed for it? One would muse that the lead voice actor for a television show would wait until the ink has at least dried on his contract before announcing his next venture.
I think the parent should be modded "flame bait", but I'll give a better answer than it deserves anyway.
If you loved the show and listened to the DVD commentaries, it's obvious that everyone connected with the show loved working on it. It's also obvious that any negotiations for resuming work on the show were done at the management level and did not involve the voice talent, so I think it's certainly possible that he may have gotten some incorrect info passed down the chain of command or maybe he's a little overzealous or both.
Am I pissed at the western press for giving Bush a free pass for so many years, and still showing a suprising lack of backbone even today? You bet. Does that mean the press offers nothing of value (even on those subjects it slants in ways I disagree with)? No.
Obviously you don't read The New York Times. I am not suggesting that everything Bush has done is great, but their coverage is so slanted against everything he and his administration do that it's difficult for me to think of them as an objective news source. I could image the Times criticizing Bush for going to sleep for 6 hours a night when they think he should be running the country 24x7. Then if he skipped sleeping to run the country, they'd criticize him for not getting enough sleep and being "dangerously tired" or some such nonsense. I travel several times to Europe every year and everything I see in the press there about Bush is overwhelmingly negative so I don't see any basis in fact for this claim that the western press has given him a free pass. I think your definition of "western press" would be limited to Fox News and some conservative American papers.
Almost certainly this will not be exactly what the NYT thinks it means. Possibilities include: 1) Costs so high that people will decide that they'd rather just wait and buy the official DVD because it will have extras or else download it off a P2P network for free. 2) Use of a lower resolution image that while technically DVD burnable, offers an inferior viewing experience for the consumer. One such option would be to make 352x240 NTSC or 352x286 PAL resolutions available, which are legal DVD resolutions. Such video, if a sufficiently low bitrate were used, would provide an inferior VCD-like viewing experience that would not really be able to compete with an official DVD release to stores later. 3) They'll let you burn it to DVD, but not in DVD format. You'll have to burn it as a DVD data disc and it will have DRM that keep standalone DVD players from playing it and it will only be playable on a PC.
I totally agree that if any burning process isn't fairly idiot-proof, it will definitely fail.
What a lot of people realize is that despite the bitching about "working for the man", working for yourself has a downside too. I have a friend who is an attorney and works for himself. On the positive side, if he needs to go to work late one morning he can if he has no clients coming in. If he wants to leave at 4 PM and go home, he goes. There is a downside. You would not believe what he pays for health insurance for him and his family and he has the highest deductable possible. He also can't ever take vacation for more than 1 week at a time. He told me that if he was ever gone for 2 weeks, he might as well go out of business. My company (US based) gives very generous vacation time and I have often taken 2-3 weeks of vacation time to go to various places in Europe. He told me that he'll never be able to leave the US to go on vacation because it's not really worth it if he can only be gone for 1 week.
I don't find brutal corporal punishment or rape to be "funny" or a reasonable solution to botnet operators. History will, hopefully, look back at our barbarous culture, where threat of homosexual rape is a prime deterrent, with abhorrence.
Nobody thinks that homosexual rape is a detterent. It's meant as a punishment, nothing more. In fact, nothing is a detterent at all, not even death, for some people. Every year people from Australia try to smuggle drugs into Singapore and Malaysia knowing full well that if they get caught, they WILL die. Singapore executed one person last month for this and Malaysia recently sentenced 2 Australians to death for drug smuggling. Yet I have no doubt that next year we will read about more Australians who get caught in those countries and get sentenced to death.
Gay Cowboys and Pimps == Movies about topics that most people don't really give a shit about. Don't believe me, look at the ticket sales. BBM may have had great writing, and even been a great movie (i don't know, haven't seen it) but very few people cared about the topic.
Brokeback Mountain was made so cheaply (mostly because expensive American actors were afraid it might be a career killer) that it turned a profit, but it didn't make much more money than The Dukes Of Hazzard . Despite what some might think, the fact is that most of America did NOT have any interest in Brokeback Mountain .
There aren't many companies who don't provide such guidance and offhand I don't know of any others. However, guidance is not a legal requirement. As others have said, Wall Street loves guidance because they hate uncertainty. But even the guidance is a scam. I've seen cases where companies made exactly what they predicted and then were punished in the market for not doing better. I've seen companies do better than expected and the stock drops. I've seen companies do worse than expected and the stock goes up. I have friends who are college educated and not conspiracy theorists who are absolutely convinced that the stock market is a scam and they have pulled all of their money out of it and won't go back. I am starting to become more and more skeptical about the stock market myself. Too much of it defies all rational thought.
I totally agree that there is something phony about SBC masquerading as AT&T. If it makes you feel any better, USA Today ran a large article in the business section on March 8 about the proposed merger of AT&T and BellSouth. Some market analysts have described this as "a merger out of weakness". AT&T has massive debt and they are going to have even more after getting BellSouth. Some feel that this acquisition does nothing to address the fact that their successful cell phone business can't keep the entire company afloat and they have nothing else that looks like a revenue producer. I live in Bell South's region and I am seeing more and more people switch their phone service to VOIP providers like Vonage and even cable companies, so business may not be as great for the new AT&T as they hope.
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I hope you Americans will use your vote to fix the broken patent system.
If you were American, you would realize how we can't use our vote to fix this. The problem is that in the 1990s, the Patent Office was made to be self-supporting. This made it in their best interests to approve every patent they can. The more patents they approve, the more people will apply for other patents and the more money they make. The more money they make, the more employees they can have. The more employees they have, the more managers it takes along with management salaries. They have every incentive in the world to approve every patent application they get now because they make money from it. To change the system would decrease the amount of money they make and they will never do that on their own.
No one running for office seems to care about this. It's not a hot issue. Most Americans have no idea what is going on with patents. In fact, patents seem to work well for the pharmaceutical industry and perhaps for people who actually make devices. They make our lives worse when business methods and software can be patented. Nothing will change because the only way to change the system is to put the Patent Office back on the federal payroll where they get paid to do their job and have no financial incentive to approve as many patents as possible. This will never happen because no one in Congress wants to start supporting an organization that is now self supporting.
I'm a geek. I work for IBM. I run several websites in my spare time. I play German board games. ... I play DDR.
I find it interesting that a person who plays German board games also plays DDR. How do you do this exactly? Does it involve Trabants?
(For those who don't know, DDR is the German anagram for the former country of East Germany.)
No, im not at all shocked Tivo hasnt turned a profit.
Nor am I. Despite what Slashdotters might think, most people don't own a TIVO. My brother is the only person I know who owns one.
I'm technologically adept. I work in IT. Friends and family ask me all the time to help them with computer problems. Why don't I own a TIVO? Simple. I refuse to pay the monthly premium. I don't care if it's 1 cent. I refuse to pay any monthly charge for what is essentially a VCR. I have a PC in my spare bedroom/office that has a Hauppauge TV card it and I use it as a TIVO. I pay nothing to use it. When TIVO comes out with a model that requires no monthly surcharge, then I might think about. A lot of people I know have told me that as long as there is a monthly charge for using TIVO, they'll never buy one. The point is not the size of the charge, it's that it exists at all. For my dad, a TIVO would be great, but he is still OK with his ancient VCR. How on earth do I convince him that it's worth his while to pay a monthly charge to use TIVO when he can use his VCR all he wants for no monthly charge? I have to admit that also more than one person has expressed fear of buying a TIVO and then being stuck with an unusable device should TIVO go bankrupt, which is a real possibility. If you have a VCR made by the Defunct Cheap Chinese Electronic Company, who is now bankrupt but the VCR still works, no problem. My understanding of TIVO is that it is unusable if you don't pay the monthly fee. As long as the device works like that, I'll never own one.
The surprise for me is not that TIVO has never turned a profit. The surprise for me is that they are still in business.
FTA: Movies can't be "burned" or copied onto disks that can be played on other devices, such DVD players. The movies, however, can be copied to play on as many as two other PCs
USA Today had an article today about this. The movies use WMV, which as we all know if very DRM-friendly, which the industry wants. I don't think it would be unreasonable to expect these expensive downloads to be at less than DVD resolutions AND have inferior sound to go along with the DRM. The article I read said something cryptic about how it would "look OK on your PC" which I am sure is code for a VCD type resolution such as 356x240.
You are right in what you say, but neither HD-DVD nor Blu Ray will support 1080p. In fact, your arguments apply equally well to Blu Ray, which adds the following negatives of its own:
1)Blu Ray DVDs will cost more than HD-DVD.
2)Blu Ray DVD players will cost even more than HD-DVD players. In fact, as has been discussed on Slashdot, Sony may be losing $600 (!!!) per PS3 just on the cost of the electronics to support Blu Ray.
3)Blu Ray doesn't support anything right now except MPEG-2. In theory, some other codecs can be supported, but they don't work with Blu Ray right now. In fact, the first Blu Ray DVDs will be good ol' MPEG-2 video and will not use any of the advanced codecs that will work out of the box on HD-DVD. What this means, in terms that Slashdot geeks can understand, is that with the technology as it is today, you can fit _Return Of The King: Expanded Edition_ with all material on one HD-DVD disc. You can't even fit the movie alone on one Blu Ray single layer disc because of the use of the inefficient MPEG-2 codec, which requires very high bitrates for HD. The first Blu Ray discs will be limted to about 2 hours of movie time because they don't have any more efficient codecs working.
IMHO, I'm not sure consumers anywhere really want to pay extra for either format, but based on what I've read on varios forums, I have to conclude that at least HD-DVD is ready and Blu Ray isn't.
How odd that releases in the UK of American movies are so far behind the American release. I have spent a good amount of time in Ukraine in the past few years and I was surprised at how many American movies open there at exactly the same time as they open in America. Of course, that might have something to do with the fact that piracy is a big problem in Ukraine and if they delay movies too much, a bootleg DVD or VCD will be on the streets before the film even plays in the theatres. Frankly, you guys in the UK may be getting screwed because piracy is not a big problem there, so the studios have no icentive to show the films at the same time as in America.
This crap gets modded insightful? Some guy pulls some stuff out of his butt, says it's true, and it's insightful ? Give me a break! As someone who actually does go to church, I can tell you that NONE of the pastor's kids I have ever known have become atheists. A few did stop going to church, but none became atheists. Quite a large number of the boys followed in dad's footsteps and quite a few of the girls married a pastor.
Apple Records exists mostly to look out for the Beatles interests. The Beatles have been involved in some VERY lengthy court battles with their record labels (essentially Capitol in the USA and EMI everywhere else. That's not 100% accurate as Capitol was in Mexico too, but it's close enough to accurate.). The Beatles reached a deal with EMI/Capitol where basically they got paid a lot of money, all future releases have an Apple logo on them and the Beatles basically don't challenge EMI/Capitol's technical ownership of the recorded tracks as long as EMI/Capitol do only what the Beatles say with those tracks. The Beatles may not technically own their old recorded material, but they have 100% control over it.
It is now more or less a holding company. Their most successful non-Beatles artists were Badfinger and Mary Hopkin. Apple stopped releasing records under its own label in 1975. They did re-issue some non-Beatles material on CD in the early 1990s, but almost all of that is now out of print.
Apple (the Beatles' Apple) is privately owned and as such, they are under no obligation to sell it.
Michael Jackson owned only the publishing rights to the Beatles' songs. To raise the money to start Apple Records, the group foolishly sold the publishing rights around 1968. Michael has no control over the recorded versions themselves. The publishing rights changed hands a few times and eventually Michael bought it by secretly outbidding Paul McCartney by a lot. Paul has said that he tried to get Yoko to offer more as he felt that as John's widow she should own half of the publishing, but Yoko wanted to get them cheap and refused to pay what Paul thought it would take to get it. While he was trying to talk Yoko into paying more, Michael offered maybe 3 or 4 times what Paul/Yoko's offer was and the guy who owned the songs jumped at it.
The sad truth is that the Beatles will NEVER own their publishing again. I would guess its value is at least half a billion dollars. Neither Paul nor Yoko will fork over that kind of money to get it. It could be worth more than half a billion.
The Beatles and their organization are run very strangely. They think that the less they do, they more valuable their stuff becomes. About once every 5 years, they re-issue something and act like they have given us fans some piece of gold. There are still unreleased tracks in the vaults and I doubt they will ever see the light of day, at least not until Paul and Ringo have died. They ought to try to get as much money as they can now from the old catalog and release the best of the unreleased stuff now while someone still cares. My 13 year old nephew and his friends barely know who they are. I was born in the 60s and to my nephew, the Beatles are as far removed from him in time as the Big Band guys of the 1930s were to me.
The price that Apple Computers will continue to pay until the end of time is that they will have to keep forking money over to Apple Records because they used a name too close to that of the Beatles' organization. Yes, this is pure greed. I say that as a Beatles fan and I'm not particularly an Apple fanboy either.
I only counted 6.
I think it's like when Chris Rock used to do "Late Night With Nat X" on "Saturday Night Live" that he used to have a top 5 list because "The man won't let me have 10 of anything!"
Let's see... if true, this would mean that consumers would get a double benefit - they would pay MORE for an Apple PC than a non-Apple PC AND (drumroll, please!) they would get to use "quality" Microsoft software on this PC!
If true, let me tell you what over 90% of the consumers out there would say. These are the people who are not Apple fanboys. "You seriously expect me to pay MORE for an Apple PC than a non-Apple PC just to run Windows?!? When both PCs will run it? Are you out of your freakin' mind?!?" And Apple soon joins DEC in the computer afterlife.
I think it all started with the first Vax 780, or possibly the first IBM 370 channel controller. Those old machines booted with a 7" floppy that had a capacity of 0.5k. Yep, 512 bytes. Early bootstraps could store the entire contents on to a hard disk with very few instructions if the sector size matched.
Man that takes me back. Where's my toupee....
I think it's in the same place as your vacuum tubes.
this is a non issue on modern tvs... and has been for years.
Actually, it's a big issue in NTSC land (Canada, the USA, Japan and some other countries). I'm guessing that you live in either the UK or Australia or perhaps some other PAL country. PAL TVs have a way to natively support NTSC signals as a subset of PAL. There is no way to support a PAL signal under NTSC. It must be converted to NTSC. Fortunately, many DVD players are able to do this type of conversion, but it remains to be seen whether or not such conversion will be offered by the PS3.
You should be aware that it is almost impossible to buy a multi-standard TV in the USA. If you want to do it, you will have to do a web search for specialty web sites that can sell those. In Europe, you can walk into any electronics store and buy a PAL TV that is also capable of displaying NTSC signals. This is not true at all in America. None of our big electronics stores even offer multi-standard TVs as an option. After all, "Why would anyone want that?"
I wouldn't recommend ATI on linux at all at this point. The drivers are barely even useable, let alone give good performance.
My bit of advice, if you're buying a video card for a linux PVR, stay far, far away from ATI. You'll thank me for saving you from countless hours of trying to get a good picture in vain.
Why oh why do so many people act like crack addicted junkies and think that ATI is the only option they have? Hauppauge cards work just fine on Linux. Although the parent doesn't say what he uses instead of ATI, I'd bet it's Hauppauge. The guy who wrote the original article obviously didn't do his research and just assumed he could get ATI to work for him. HA HA HA HA HA!
Plus, warp does not make the ship go fater then light. It makes it so it doesn't travel all the distance.
k )
While I partly shudder at the thought of arguing about a fictional TV show, you, sir, are dead freakin' wrong. Warp drive DOES indeed go faster than light. Had you watched more than a handful of Star Trek episodes, you would clearly understand this. To educate yourself, please see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warp_drive_(Star_Tre
You have obviously confused warp drive with some type of jump drive technology which does not involve faster than light travel but makes ships jump large distances essentially instantaneously.
"It would be wonderful if these entities could share some of the wealth to keep us going."
Wow, that's a weak response. It sounds like they're basically asking other F/OSS projects to fork over cash because OpenBSD can't raise money. And it makes F/OSS groups look like the business-challenged hippies that some people think they are.
Man this is astute. The problem as I see it is that OpenBSD relied on a revenue generating source (people buying CDs) that was a dead end. Go back, say, 2 years ago and yes, I can see someone buying a CD because they don't want to keep their dialup connection tied up for 24 hours to download one CD. I have plenty of friends and relatives who I thought would never, ever get broadband internet who have indeed gotten broadband internet in the past year. When you have DSL or cable modem, why should you pay OpenBSD for the CDs when you download everything you need in, I don't know, say 10-15 minutes and get instant FREE gratification? Any business model they have that relies on people buying CDs from them is doomed to fail.
I work for Cingular, and we DON'T give out unlock codes, ever, no matter who the customer is or what they say. I doubt if any US wireless provider does. If you can figure out how to unlock it yourself, then great, but there is simply no reason for a wireless provider to help you switch to another network.
T-Mobile DOES give out unlock codes after you have been a paying customer for 3 months. That is EXACTLY why I am their customer and not yours. I did my research prior to getting my phone and I knew that T-Mobile would unlock it for free for me.
Now, why in the hell is he saying that another season was in the works if he didn't have a contract signed for it? One would muse that the lead voice actor for a television show would wait until the ink has at least dried on his contract before announcing his next venture.
I think the parent should be modded "flame bait", but I'll give a better answer than it deserves anyway.
If you loved the show and listened to the DVD commentaries, it's obvious that everyone connected with the show loved working on it. It's also obvious that any negotiations for resuming work on the show were done at the management level and did not involve the voice talent, so I think it's certainly possible that he may have gotten some incorrect info passed down the chain of command or maybe he's a little overzealous or both.
Am I pissed at the western press for giving Bush a free pass for so many years, and still showing a suprising lack of backbone even today? You bet. Does that mean the press offers nothing of value (even on those subjects it slants in ways I disagree with)? No.
Obviously you don't read The New York Times. I am not suggesting that everything Bush has done is great, but their coverage is so slanted against everything he and his administration do that it's difficult for me to think of them as an objective news source. I could image the Times criticizing Bush for going to sleep for 6 hours a night when they think he should be running the country 24x7. Then if he skipped sleeping to run the country, they'd criticize him for not getting enough sleep and being "dangerously tired" or some such nonsense. I travel several times to Europe every year and everything I see in the press there about Bush is overwhelmingly negative so I don't see any basis in fact for this claim that the western press has given him a free pass. I think your definition of "western press" would be limited to Fox News and some conservative American papers.
"c'est une bouche" translated as "he's full of mouth"...
Maybe you need to go back to language school. "c'est une bouche" literally means "that one is a mouth", not "he's full of mouth".
Almost certainly this will not be exactly what the NYT thinks it means.
Possibilities include:
1) Costs so high that people will decide that they'd rather just wait and buy the official DVD because it will have extras or else download it off a P2P network for free.
2) Use of a lower resolution image that while technically DVD burnable, offers an inferior viewing experience for the consumer. One such option would be to make 352x240 NTSC or 352x286 PAL resolutions available, which are legal DVD resolutions. Such video, if a sufficiently low bitrate were used, would provide an inferior VCD-like viewing experience that would not really be able to compete with an official DVD release to stores later.
3) They'll let you burn it to DVD, but not in DVD format. You'll have to burn it as a DVD data disc and it will have DRM that keep standalone DVD players from playing it and it will only be playable on a PC.
I totally agree that if any burning process isn't fairly idiot-proof, it will definitely fail.
What a lot of people realize is that despite the bitching about "working for the man", working for yourself has a downside too. I have a friend who is an attorney and works for himself. On the positive side, if he needs to go to work late one morning he can if he has no clients coming in. If he wants to leave at 4 PM and go home, he goes. There is a downside. You would not believe what he pays for health insurance for him and his family and he has the highest deductable possible. He also can't ever take vacation for more than 1 week at a time. He told me that if he was ever gone for 2 weeks, he might as well go out of business. My company (US based) gives very generous vacation time and I have often taken 2-3 weeks of vacation time to go to various places in Europe. He told me that he'll never be able to leave the US to go on vacation because it's not really worth it if he can only be gone for 1 week.
I don't find brutal corporal punishment or rape to be "funny" or a reasonable solution to botnet operators. History will, hopefully, look back at our barbarous culture, where threat of homosexual rape is a prime deterrent, with abhorrence.
Nobody thinks that homosexual rape is a detterent. It's meant as a punishment, nothing more. In fact, nothing is a detterent at all, not even death, for some people. Every year people from Australia try to smuggle drugs into Singapore and Malaysia knowing full well that if they get caught, they WILL die. Singapore executed one person last month for this and Malaysia recently sentenced 2 Australians to death for drug smuggling. Yet I have no doubt that next year we will read about more Australians who get caught in those countries and get sentenced to death.
Gay Cowboys and Pimps == Movies about topics that most people don't really give a shit about. Don't believe me, look at the ticket sales. BBM may have had great writing, and even been a great movie (i don't know, haven't seen it) but very few people cared about the topic.
Brokeback Mountain was made so cheaply (mostly because expensive American actors were afraid it might be a career killer) that it turned a profit, but it didn't make much more money than The Dukes Of Hazzard . Despite what some might think, the fact is that most of America did NOT have any interest in Brokeback Mountain .
There aren't many companies who don't provide such guidance and offhand I don't know of any others. However, guidance is not a legal requirement. As others have said, Wall Street loves guidance because they hate uncertainty. But even the guidance is a scam. I've seen cases where companies made exactly what they predicted and then were punished in the market for not doing better. I've seen companies do better than expected and the stock drops. I've seen companies do worse than expected and the stock goes up. I have friends who are college educated and not conspiracy theorists who are absolutely convinced that the stock market is a scam and they have pulled all of their money out of it and won't go back. I am starting to become more and more skeptical about the stock market myself. Too much of it defies all rational thought.
I totally agree that there is something phony about SBC masquerading as AT&T. If it makes you feel any better, USA Today ran a large article in the business section on March 8 about the proposed merger of AT&T and BellSouth. Some market analysts have described this as "a merger out of weakness". AT&T has massive debt and they are going to have even more after getting BellSouth. Some feel that this acquisition does nothing to address the fact that their successful cell phone business can't keep the entire company afloat and they have nothing else that looks like a revenue producer. I live in Bell South's region and I am seeing more and more people switch their phone service to VOIP providers like Vonage and even cable companies, so business may not be as great for the new AT&T as they hope.