One of the consumer-tech chains up here—I think it’s Future Shop—has been advertising their products as the best in digital DVD technology
. I’m glad the industry has finally upgraded from that analog DVD tech we’ve been putting up with for so long.
Please.
Ordering a movie via digital cable is a pain in the ass (PITA). iTV has always been still-born service. Netflix works well because you can do all you ordering online on a well designed website via a computer. After you do that, the service runs itself. Interactivity belongs on the computer.
I’ve got to disagree. With a capable interactive television system, ordering a VOD (or SVOD) movie is as easy as selecting it from a menu and entering your PIN. (I do this every day at work—it’s not some idealistic fantasy.) You don’t have to leave your sofa, let alone wait “2-4 days” for the movies to arrive in your mailbox. And you don’t need a dedicated computer, just the settop box you’ve already renting from the cable company. Netflix does have an advantage (currently) in that they’ve got a big selection of DVDs, but more convenient? Nuh-uh.
My personal e-mail address was spammed for the first time today. I’ve got about 80 aliases on my mailserver that I’ve set up at various times in the past to communicate with potentially-disreputable parties, but someone I’ve communicated with personally has passed on my address—probably innocently—and now the flood is going to begin. As a result, I’ve spent the last 10 hours installing SpamAssassin and various other blocking tools.
SA looks like it will be useful, but I’m completely unable to get spamc to work from .procmailrc or /etc/procmailrc. The silly thing is that spamassassin -P does work, so I’m stuck with starting a new Perl instance for every message that arrives.