Some DVDs only provide bitmap captions, without the text encoded anywhere. In fact, more of my DVDs work that way than actually have a text CC stream. If you have a bitmap of some text, OCR is the way to go to extract it.

Kind of like furniture rental, right? You've got to provide locations close to your customers, and your prices have to reflect the additional overhead. You don't have to have lower prices *over time* as long as you have lower prices *right now*. Sell (or better, rent out) a $50 streaming stick+bluetooth gamepad, and offer subscription plans for $20/month, or something. $70 to start playing right now is easier to stomach than a minimum of $250 for a console and $20 for a game, the same way that $50/month (or whatever) for a couch is easier to stomach than $500 to buy the thing outright. It's a good idea in theory, going after the people that can afford a small-ish monthly payment, but can't (or won't) pay a larger upfront fee to actually own the system that they're using.

The first nasty thing from Sony that really stands out in my memory was the root kit in 2005. I'm sure that their history of customer-hostile amoral actions goes back farther than that, but I'm not specifically aware of what those actions were. It was before the time that I really had a reason to pay attention (since it wasn't my money that they were taking before right around that time).

My point is that there's always someone getting impacted by their first Sony Evil Action, so it's expected that every time they do something shitty, some new person is going to be surprised by them. I'm sure that they were also doing questionable things before 1992...yet you were also their customer at one point. You obviously should've known better, for the same reasons that the GP should've known better, right?

"An Em-Oh-Oh-See", or "A mook". The choice of indefinite article tells you which way the writer was thinking about the acronym.

I'm almost positive that it's just some guy's little project, not anything that Nintendo had any part in. He's got Mac, Windows, and Linux binaries posted, as well as the Unity project itself, so even when Nintendo knocks the files down, I wouldn't be surprised to see someone else continue with enhancements to it.

One of my first exposures to programming was when I was 9 and someone gave me a book full of Basic games. I couldn't type worth beans, and I suspect that the dialect that the book's software was in was different than the MS QBasic interpreter on the family computer. It sucked to spend an hour a day for a week to type in a program, have a typo or incompatibility somewhere, and to not have any idea where the problem was.

That was a much more reasoned and informative post than most of the others I've seen in this thread, thank you. Generally, what I've been seeing is a lot of "If you do X, then fuck you! Why? You're an asshole, that's why! Evidence? Details? We don't need no stinkin' information!" Seeing something with at least a fair amount of explanation behind it is refreshing.

I think you're missing my point. Define "sugar". Which subset of saccharides are you talking about skipping out on?

Crackers, pizza crust, etc are carbs, and carbs are sugar, unless I'm missing something.

1) What does "not necessarily the case" mean, to you? To me, it means that the equipment is available, but it's not something that one carries around with oneself all the time.

I'll give you the point on digital broadcast radio; a copy of the bitstream should be easy to record. I tend to forget about its existence, since I don't have a receiver.

2) It's fine for non-audiophiles. Digital radio is transmitted at 48-128kbit/s in the U.S.using lossy compression anyhow, and it would still outperform FM, which is more than likely playing from digital audio sources anyhow, even for the analog transmissions.

Vinyl's a non sequitur here. How many people would be able to record to vinyl anyhow? And if they've got their own higher-quality recording of the music, then they aren't going to be listening to it on the radio (let alone recording it from there), so it's a moot point.

You failed to learn multiplication in grade school, I take it. A large number of people times a small cost per person can still be a large cost, especially if you're looking at some of the advertising-only services, where the company's paying a tiny price for bandwidth, but also getting a tiny income from the ad sales. Old radio didn't have that particular extra cost.

Each extra listener increases bandwidth costs, which old radio didn't. This is a trade-off for all the demographic info that the publishers get, so it's a direct cost paid for some marketing information.

I'd disagree with that. On Spotify et al, I've got my recording+processing equipment built into my listening equipment. That's not necessarily the case with radio, and the best I could hope for is a 2nd-gen analog copy anyhow.

Change is risk, and big business is vehemently opposed to risk. Better the enemy you know than the one you don't.

Irrelevant. With my Toyota, I can buy standard parts, jack the car up, and do the work myself if I choose. Changing the oil or other fluids, changing filters, and other things that comprise regular maintenance aren't that hard to do.

It's the same with my laptop (Sager in a Clevo case). I can replace the RAM, CPU, storage, optical drive, and GPU. The battery is removable and replaceable. What I'm expected to do or not doesn't really matter to me; what I can do matters a great deal. Soldered-on parts would've meant that my laptop would have been replaced several years ago. Instead, I bought new standard parts and upgraded the sucker. If I had an older Mac where the drive, RAM, and battery were still removable, I would've upgraded it too. Years ago, I helped a friend do the same with an iBook. It was a pain in the ass, but it was doable. Not anymore.

Computer science isn't "research skills"? It isn't math? Well, that's news to me...Now, if you were talking about a master's degree in software engineering, then maybe you'd have a point.

Python's great for throwing data around, and implementing all the glue code that holds a program together. All the interesting parts of the program are in libraries written in C, though. I feel the same way about OSX. It's wonderful, clean, and smooth for everyday desktop use, but if you want to start doing something a little "off the beaten track", it's more hassle to get things working, partly because the culture of "it just works" discourages tinkering and customization. Similarly, Python's culture seems to frown on getting down into the nitty-gritty of how things work.

Having homogenous hardware facilitates learning the "how" of getting something to work, but that's only important in the short term. Long term, I think it's much more important to learn the "why" of the functionality. Linux forces you to find out *why* it matters that the other person's setup is different. It's more work, but I see value in it.

Standards are good, but being able to depart from them, if you choose to do so, is even better.