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Media

Windows 8 Won't Play DVDs Unless You Pay For the Media Center Pack 734

Posted by Soulskill from the special-thanks-to-the-dvd-cca dept.
An anonymous reader writes "You may already know that Microsoft plans to sell Windows Media Center as a separate, paid pack, but now the company has revealed that Windows 8 will also stop default support for DVD playback. You'll only be able to play DVDs and Blu-rays if you upgrade to the Media Center pack. 'Acquiring either the Windows 8 Media Center Pack or the Windows 8 Pro Pack gives you Media Center, including DVD playback (in Media Center, not in Media Player), broadcast TV recording and playback (DBV-T/S, ISDB-S/T, DMBH, and ATSC), and VOB file playback. Pricing for these Packs, as well as retail versions of Windows 8, will be announced closer to the release date. To give you some indication of Media Center Pack pricing, it will be in line with marginal costs.'" In a comment, Microsoft's Steven Sinofsky elaborates: "(marginal is small, honest, and we just haven't determined the final prices yet based on ongoing work but we are aiming for single digit dollars but we don't control the truly marginal costs). We wanted to include Media Player for everyone without everyone incurring the cost even if they don't even have an optical drive."

Comment Re:Free market at work (Score 1) 469

by keith_nt4 (#39222183) Attached to: Why Didn't the Internet Take Off In 1983?

This seems somehow revisionist history to me. Bush didn't "put anyone in charge" of the FCC: Powell was nominated and had to be voted upon to get into that position. And if you remember the senate was 50/50 (something like that) back then and pretty much every vote for judges and the like was filibustered in the senate. If the the opposing party didn't want Powell he would not have had that job. Also, phone calls are more expensive today than in 1997? Really?

Also, dial-up internet had taken off before 1996. Even in my tiny little town I was using a dial-up in ISP in 1992/93 with "spry mosiac" (windows 3.1!) and...well i forgot the name of the dial up software we had...point is ISPs were taking off and Win95 including a browser (along with netscape's success) brought the idea of the web to the masses and contributed to internet popularity in the 90s. Actually AOL was still around and quite popular in 2000. Took years for them to finally collapse in subscriber numbers. Not any where near "suddenly".

The ISPs, from what evidence I've observed first hand, started going out of business thanks to readily available DSL/Cable/microwave/fiber connections for roughly the same price as dial-up. In rural areas that still don't have DSL as an option dial-up is still in use (there's still a dial-up ISP in my tiny town and I know multiple people still using dialup living "in the sticks").
Japan

Japan Creates Earthquake-Proof Levitating House System 243

Posted by samzenpus from the rising-above dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Japanese company Air Danshin Systems Inc. has developed an innovative system that levitates houses in the in the event of an earthquake to protect them from structural damage. When an earthquake hits, a sensor responds within one second by activating a compressor, which forces an incredible amount of air under the home, pushing the structure up and apart from its foundation. The air pressure can keep the home levitating up to 3cm from the shaking foundation below. In the wake of last year's Fukushima disaster the company is set to install the levitation system in 88 houses across Japan."

Comment Re:Home porn videos? (Score 5, Informative) 332

by keith_nt4 (#38851305) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Money-Making Home-Based Tech Skills?

* Medical coding/transcriptionist. I know this is a very common work-from-home job, though it requires a fair amount of relatively expensive training. It pays roughly as well as a junior level sysadmin job in many areas, I've noticed. You can work from home, usually at odd hours (doctors need their notes transcribed at all hours of the day), with a fair amount of flexibility for things like "the kids need dinner". You'd have to be able to type fairly quickly, know the coding of medications, and things like that. I'm not sure about the costs or time requirements associated with the training, however. Anywhere with a regional hospital nearby is going to need quite a few people to do this (a 100-workstation private practice I'm familiar with had 6+ doing this).

I work for a relatively small hospital in a relatively rural area and we just got through outsourcing/cutting out our transcriptionists: some of them are still working for the hospital but now employed by an off-shore company while the doctors are apparently going to be using "Dragon Medical" speech dictation software. Point is this option's future my have a shelf life.

Comment Re:javascript tetris (Score 1) 237

by keith_nt4 (#38505448) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Tools For Teaching High School Kids How To Make Games?

I agree with the JavaScript/HTML approach. I would also point out the some what language similarities between JS and the likes of C++/Java.

I was also going to mention there's a HTML developer-oriented editor already included with office that few actually know is even there, called Microsoft Script Editor. Default located at:
"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\MSE7.EXE"

It's actually pretty good even if it does seem to default to VBScript for some reason. It's kind of like Visual basic (drag buttons/elements around then put in the event-based coding). Just has the HTML coding instead. Even create HTAs (does anybody remember HTAs? Doubt it!)

Comment Amahi? (Score 1) 355

by keith_nt4 (#38494790) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Kit For a Home Media Server?

I've been mostly skimming this thread but I don't think anybody has pointed to Amahi: seems like at least software-wise it would cover all the requirements for media storage and add/removal of HDDs. I should mention my favorite forum merely recommends Amahi as a FOSS alternate to WHS but that I have not actually used Amahi.

Also, I thought XFS was supposed to be a good/possibly best file system for large files?

Comment Re:It's too bad... (Score 1) 281

by keith_nt4 (#38463556) Attached to: AMD Radeon HD 7970 Launched, Fastest GPU Tested

Which version are you having trouble with? Are you sure that you're not just mindlessly repeating a 7 year old meme? Are you also one of the people who switched to Chrome because "Firefox uses too much memory" when simple tests show that Chrome uses more? I know it feels like you're a part of the club when you repeat what you hear from the other club members. But don't confuse groupthink with truth - especially when it comes to the quickly-changing world of tech.

Well there's been a few version changes in firefox since this time but at my last job 6 or so months ago I had to run chrome because the employer-issued laptop simply couldn't run firefox or couldn't anything *besides* firefox... Chrome on the other hand ran perfectly on this pathetic laptop. So chrome is taking up less of something. If not memory than...something else? All I know is on a laptop with very limited resources Chrome ran great and FF ran crap.

Comment Host yourself (Score 2) 137

by keith_nt4 (#38292934) Attached to: Webhosting For A Large Art Project?

Based on the description I don't see why hosting it yourself isn't an option. If you literally have 500 gigs of data get two 1TB drives and build a NAS with the two drives mirrored. For OS you could use either a Linux server with LVM/RAID or a FreeNAS set up with ZFS. You could even virtualize it if you wanted to get fancy (easy to switch physical hardware used if nothing else). Open a port on your router and hand out the IP or setup a DynDNS sort of deal for others to access. You also want a separate USB hard drive to back the data up.

For the amount of money it would take to host all this data the Linux/FreeNAS solution would be much, much cheaper (less than $400US). Also, ridiculously easy to setup an SSH daemon on linux/FrreeBSD.

You sound like you're at some kind of college or university so I assume it wouldn't be too difficult to bribe a local computer scientist with mountain due and pizza to help you out as needed.

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