Posts by God of Biscuits

Apple TV 160GB media player

One hitch

@Paul: can't really see why you would bother with this when you can have a mac mini

The trouble here *might* be the mismatch between your HDTV's panel resolution and TV overscan issues. Sure, you can buy a DVI-to-HDMI cable, but that only gets you the connection.

The direct way around this is to use the TVs VGA/DVI port. One of the most overlooked features in an HDTV--at least here in the States--is that the HDTV's VGA/DVI port (if it even has one!) isn't always the full resolution of the panel itself.

I consider myself quite versed in all of this and I still missed the fact that my JVC 46" 1080p set's VGA port only drives the monitor at 1024x768. My friends with newer Sharps and Sonys have ports which drive the full 1920x1080.

So if you know your TVs VGA port can drive the panel at the full 1920x1080, then a mini is 90% better.

I say 90% because the appleTV is utterly a consumer component. No tinkering needed for anything. No keyboard needed, nothing. The Mac mini, since it's a full computer, has some edge cases where you need to be sure you have a keyboard and mouse around "just in case".

I've had an appleTV since they first came out in the States. I sync NOTHING to it. I've got a Mac mini in the other room with 2TB of storage attached to it and that STREAMS everything to the appleTV.

It's brilliant. I just sit down at my TV and all of my media content is right there, accessible with a 6-button remote.

It makes no noise and it's small and out of the way. I hardly remember it's even there. I use it far more than I use my iPod.

BBC confirms Doctor Who series five

Jaded much?

Wow, you Brits are more jaded than most Americans.

Which is a direct contradiction to DW viewers' fear of change.

NBC to Apple: 'You're fired!'

That's funny...

DrXym said:

"iTunes used to be a sleek and sexy application, but since version 7 the thing is a buggy mess. On Vista, the thing doesn't even paint properly half the time, and the H264 playback of Quicktime is more like a slideshow than a movie. I use iTunes to track podcasts but it's quite crashy and the awful H264 playback means it's almost unusable. The user interface is also slug like, quite possibly because Apple have seen fit to inflict an OS X style interface on it, complete with grids that take an age to scroll through."

Funny, I run iTunes on XP in a virtual machine on a Mac and it exhibits NONE of that behavior. It works as expected. And its appearance has a better "fit-n-finish" that almost all Windows apps.

Victor Szulc wrote:

"Why worship an loathsome company like Apple with your money, WHEN YOU CAN DOWNLOAD IT FOR FREE!?!?"

You can? Legally? It may not make much difference to some, but NBC is going to lose out by people using Bit Torrent like this guy. And they'll probably end up buying a shiny new iPod to play it on.

Victor, buy a Zune if you don't want to give $$$ to a "loathesome" company. Obviously you think Microsoft ISN'T loathesome, because you've obviously given them money for Vista.

or did you "download [that] for free!?!?" as well?

not 30 or 40% "or ALL downloads"

how misleading is that? the percentage is the percentage of TV SHOW DOWNLOADS. which ends up being 1% of sales?

assuming NBC is gouging apple as much as the rest have been, apple probably makes 2 or 3 cents per sale. Let's say Apple sells 10M tv shows in 6 months. that's, oooh, $30,000 profit in 6 months, or $15,000 a quarter.

if apple sells a billion songs in the next year, that's profit of about $30M at most. divided by 4 is $75M a quarter. nothing to sneeze at, but still in the ballpark of 5% . $15,000 is 0.0002 % profit.

iTunes works well (contrary to the author's pissy statement) because it's simple, its DRM (evil but necessary for the studios) is reasonable for most people, and most of all, it works with the iPod. "Made for iPod" is far more important than almost anything in this context.

Let's see where NBCs videos will run. Zune2? Oh wait, Hulu won't play there.

Doctor Who signs up thinking man's crumpet

Homophobia is...

...different to not wanting sexual content.

What's to explain about two men kissing? it's the exact same thing as a man and a woman kissing, except for the genders of the participants.

There's no explaining. Leave it at that.

If you can't do that, then yes, you're homophobic.

American here.

It's unfortunate to see that the old "why must gays flaunt their sexuality" argument is alive and well in England. It's nice to see someone calling them on it, though. Some of you Brits sound like unfortunately all-too-common Americans.

I was never a fan of Doctor Who. Ever. I tried watching it on our PBS (Public Broadcasting System) channel back in the 70s when I was a teen, but it was just too hokey and ridiculous.

Then came RTD. Well, John Barrowman, actually. I saw his performance in "The Producers" and went to google and imdb him. From there it led to Captain Jack. Not wanting to step in to Doctor Who right when Barrowman entered, I started to watch Season (Series) 1 from the beginning and discovered a program that exalted when violence DIDN'T happen, a program with great characters and, perhaps, most importantly to long-time Doctor Who fans, a program which informed new fans about the history of Doctor Who.

Since then, I can say I've now seen all three Series of Doctor Who, AND Doctor Who Confidential, AND the first series of Torchwood and Torchwood Declassified. I can't get enough of this world that RTD created.

So complain all you want about how the show isn't "how it used to be", because NOTHING is exactly how it used to be. I didn't like Christopher Eccleston in the beginning, but came to love him. Then was disappointed when "Barty Crouse....Junior!" was his replacement. That disappointment lasted until about 5 minutes into the first Tennant episode.

As for Catherine Tate, after seeing her turn on DW and remembering the YouTube video of her as the stand-in translator, I've also become a big Tate fan (this is where you start castigating the stupid and boorish American sense of humour).

Does your hatred of RTD and the new Who mean that all your old beloved Doctors and series are suddenly crap? I seriously don't think so.