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Comment Re:Surface: the only Hope (Score 1) 379

Office for Mac always had differences from the Windows versions.The dates functions in Excel were always a problem since the epoch on Windows was different from the one on Mac OS. http://support.microsoft.com/k...

The only real push Microsoft made was to unify the file formats, which happened with Office for Mac 4.2. The Mac version also lacked a proper Outlook client between Office 2001 and Office 2011, you got that Entourage program for mail and contacts instead.

Comment Re:Productivity gains to the oligarchs! (Score 1) 343

The history of the past 30 years has been that all productivity gains from people working harder, etc. have gone to the corporate owners, not to employees. It's not in their interest to work harder or longer because they won't get paid any more. Slackers unite!

Wasn't getting a larger piece of the gains the point of unions/collective bargaining?

Comment JVC DigiPure SVHS/DVHS decks and/or Panny AG-1980 (Score 1) 201

Not one VCR is best for all tapes. For SP speed tapes like home movies, the JVC SVHS and DVHS decks equipped with JVC's "Digipure" TBC/noise reduction from the late 90s-early 00s have some of the best picture quality out there. The Mitsubishi HS-HD2000U DVHS deck is another recommended model. Expect to pay upwards of $200 for a working deck on ebay. The list of model numbers can be found here: http://www.digitalfaq.com/foru...

The Panasonic AG-1980P is best for EP/SLP tapes and is also better behaved with VHS-C tapes in the motorized adapter. The JVCs tend to have problems with the VHS-C adapters. The downside of the AG-1980 is that it is VERY prone to electrical problems. Almost all of them need to have full capacitor replacement, otherwise they have problems with herringbone noise, loss of color output, and "barber pole" patterns on the video output. Sometimes the deck even stops accepting tapes. Repair involves replacing close to 100 surface mount capacitors.

For capture, find an old Pentium 4 with an AGP slot running Windows XP and an ATI Radeon All-in-Wonder with the Rage Theater 100/200chip. They have excellent analog capture quality and the ADC doesn't do any sharpening or muck up the video with AGC. Both of which are common problems on modern capture cards, including ATI's own PCI "TV Wonder" cards.

To avoid frame dropping, you need an external TBC (different from the TBC in the VCR) acting as a frame sync. They also tend to strip Macrovision off of tapes *wink* *wink*. More info here: http://www.digitalfaq.com/foru...

Comment Re:Market saturation (Score 1) 333

There is, it's why you have to pay a $150 service charge to replace the battery. The planned obsolescence is the lifespan of the battery. Which should be around 2 - 3 years.

There is a market for that service and it usually costs less than Apple charges. Considering that the product is out of warranty by the time the battery goes flat, having it serviced by a 3rd party or DIYing it usually isn't a problem.

Comment Re:So don't buy Nest thermostats. (Score 1) 167

Wow, this one works with millivolt systems, nice. The Nest doesn't, even though I have the required 24VAC supply already wired but disused (a very old t-stat used it, current unit is battery powered). The only way I could do it with a Nest is clobber some sort of relay system to drive the boiler. The only downside is that the Cyberstat doesn't appear to have a battery backup. Millivolt systems have the advantage of providing heat without needing external utility power.

Comment Re:I strongly agree (Score 1) 247

After a several year hiatus away from computer stuff I agree completely. I gradated CS in 2002. There was much more priority given to imperative programming and arrays for everything than there should have been. Most of the lecturers were brainwashed by terms like "object oriented is the future", "extreme programming" and other such nonsense because it's "kewl". We did some Prolog but not nearly enough.

Of that list, maybe object oriented programming is important to "know". Otherwise computer science courses should be treated as language and platform agnostic, and only focus on stuff like data structures, arrays, etc. Basic theory that is applicable to any language.

It wasn't emphasized. We did no lisp! or Scheme.. It's sad that I'm more mature than many of those guys despite being younger.

I never did any LISP programming in school either. Oddly enough the language that always fascinated me was Postscript. Its amazing what a printer page description language is capable of.

Comment Re:Better tablets out there for your money (Score 1) 386

Personally, I bought the Surface 2 (not pro) last Christmas, and I like it a lot more than my wife's iPad. The expandable storage, plus again, not having to buy apps for things that should be standard, like playing videos from a network share, make it a good choice. I also like the UI a lot better than iPad or Android, and like the fact that I can open a command prompt or run a powershell script if I want to. The lack of apps is probably the only downfall, but I find that I'm still able to do everything I want to do on a tablet. There are many games I can't play, but there's enough games to keep me entertained.

The lack of playing files from a network share out of the box is likely Apple ecosystem lock-in. They want you to use iCloud. Meanwhile every cheapo Android device usually has support for DLNA.

The Windows RT tablet's days are likely numbered with the crop of new Atom based Windows 8.1 tablets that are coming out. Being able to run off the shelf Win32 stuff helps their case. A full 8.1 tablet has no problems connecting to VPNs for example.

Comment Re:Google Earth (Score 4, Informative) 25

The Google Earth feature was for satellite imagery. This new feature is for Street View images. Sadly it won't be of much use around here as the original 2007 photos are the latest available in many areas! I guess they are trying to give people an excuse to switch to the mostly broken new Google Maps interface.

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