First Episode of NerdTV Released

kurosawdust writes "The first ever episode of Robert Cringely's long-awaited NerdTV is now available for download. This episode features Andy Hertzfeld, member of the original Macintosh team who always has a few good stories to tell. Episode 1 is available in MP4 Video (whole episode and smaller-sized snippets) MP3, Ogg, AAC, and good old-fashioned text transcript (for those of you who watch your TV in vi, like God intended). NerdTV is released under the Creative Commons license."

Comments

He seems to dislike WindowsCE

[ReformedExCon]

One of his quotes is that he would feel very uneasy riding in an airplane where WindowsCE was controlling the cabin pressure. I realize that he is a diehard anti-Microsoft person, as his long history with Apple and recent history with Open Source suggests, but I wonder if he is taking his gut feeling about the company and judging the technical worth of its products sight unseen.

I'm no fan of WindowsCE. I think that it has a lot of warts, though these have been smoothed over in recent releases as Microsoft seems to be moving away from "it's just like Windows!" and more towards a real embedded OS. But it's still pretty slow in scheduling ISRs and requires a fair bit of fiddling to get power management working correctly in the drivers. But all-in-all it isn't a bad system. It's not prone to crashes any more than any other embedded system is, and it's much more resistant to crashes than desktop Windows is.

For something as straightforward as cabin pressure and lights in an airplane, something like WindowsCE is actually pretty easy to implement and use. I, for one, wouldn't worry a bit about it running such systems.

Re:He seems to dislike WindowsCE

[gowen]

It's not prone to crashes any more than any other embedded system is

That's just crap. It's about as stable as many other multi-purpose, palm-top OS... but none of those are good enough either.

If something's keeping me alive, I want something with extremely high-reliability, near hard realtime performance, coded in a language that's as errorproof as possible in language design (Ada, perhaps) and preferably that's been proven bugfree.

Windows CE is "good enough" for many many tasks. Life critical tasks are not among them.

Good for PBS!

[Ph33r th3 g(O)at]

For not requiring streaming of the show in a DRM format. It's exactly what taxpayer and donor subsidized entities should be doing. NPR, take note.

Tried to download it and must say

[Schlaefer]

you get what you paid for.

Re:No Torrent?

[whathappenedtomonday]

"poor man's Akamai."

...is giving me 6.7kbyte/s..no, 5.4...no...5.1 and falling.

people...would only seed the last one or two episodes

huh?! he could seed the missing files himself or only offer older episodes as direct download. nerds...

I hate javascript

[Jessta]

Why do I need javascript enabled to download these links?
Quite annoying, elinks doesn't do javascript.
I'm sick of people using javascript for pointless reasons.

Re:No Torrent?

[kwark]

Silly me was just thinking that a bunch of PBS owned seeds distributed over the net would lower their upload costs and speedup anyones download.

The current "solution" makes sure there are no seeders at all, ever. A brilliant solution for the possibility of no seeders for old stuff.

The net effect is that the average download is 5kb/s

Bill the used car salesman

[SamSeaborn]

he would feel very uneasy riding in an airplane where WindowsCE was controlling the cabin pressure. [...] I wonder if he is taking his gut feeling about the company and judging the technical worth of its products sight unseen.

A used car salesman has sold you problematic cars for the past 20 years, and he says he finally has a good car to sell you. Are you going to examine the car for "technical worth" or are you going to let your previous experiences with that salesman influence your buying decision?

Sam

Re:TORRENT

[Ingenium13]

The torrent link is dead now. Why would they remove a link to a torrent file that is saving them bandwidth??