Obviously there is some value to the metric, however programming skill is not a function of one variable:)
I wonder how many bad pieces Michelangelo did before he did a good one? Did he copy other people and then modify his style as he progressed? Did he just do one piece or was he prolific?
It would seem these types of "ad sponsered" services can only work if they perform "editorial" functions. Otherwise the "dark side" can just flood them with garbage, overloading them with junk and causing them to shutdown in frustration. That's basically another form of DOS attack, it's more subtle though and even sounds like a "free speech issue". Look at the problems of "junk speech" showing up on slashdot to get the idea. It's obviously done to degrade the service and cause harm... In such cases I think a vigorous response is required.
Anyhow let them have the tools to do the job. Personally I think they ought to offer the service for a small fee, something like a web hosting service but tune'd for the software distributor. I already keep a seperate web space and could just as easily host at sourceforge. They should also have shopping cart service for shareware and for developers that do both freeware and commercial software. Finally a small fee based update subscription service would be great for people who don't have the time to track all the different projects. Something that auto-pulls stuff to your system but lets you control install/backup...
Oh, please, go back to your caves and freeze to death why don't you!
You do realize we HAVE to leave earth or we die here! What, you think the Sun is going to burn forever? Long before that, we will get hammered by some multi km asteroid that will barbecue most of life here anyhow! Wake up, get your act in gear, it's time to colonize space while we still can.
The solution to this problem is also simple. Each piece needs to be aerodynamic anyhow, so add some flight control surfaces so it can "fly" apart under control...
These things(ReplayTV) are not that hard to setup, and they are EASIER to program than a VCR. Way easier! On the ReplayTV press one button to get the channel guide, cursor around to the show you want, press one button to record it! Press the record button again to record all episodes! Can you make it any easier?
Most "early adopters" are people who already know where the technology is at and are waiting for someone to build the product. Once those people buy in(some 1 million PVR's sold) then the market moves on to the people who listen to the early adopters, see that something works(it does nicely) and then buy in. Most consumers(the bulk of any market) wait till they have several friends who have them, and people start saying "you don't have a PVR!".
These things are as big as the remote control, in 10 years most everyone will have one and start wondering what the heck they did before PVR's. Of course by then you will be able to record all your shows on terabytes of storage devices(if not more)! Multi-giga bit wan connections will be the norm and transferring video and other multi-media will be as common place as banner ads are today!
Go back 10 years ago, imagine someone telling you that you would soon be getting animated ads when you dial up your BBS...
Anyhow, just wait, this is only the beginning. Internet channels, collaborative filtering, planetary media(TV) access... is coming. The TV industry is going to go through the same disruptive change as publishing, music,...
Add a TV card with closed caption capture to your Linux box. Then setup a schedule to capture the text from shows that you might be interested in(use cron anyone). Then use that to build the search data base. Search with grep... Now the tricky part. Use the same schedule to record things on your ReplayTV/TiVo. How? Well to make it easy use a computer controled IR remote, such as a RedRat2 on Linux. Then when you get search hit's lookup the database of shows you recorded and have a macro to jump you to the show and the appropriate offset. A ReplayTV can jumpto specific offsets in a show...
To find shows to record you can use something like the power search utility that I wrote for my ReplayTV -> ReplayTV Search Tools for Linux.
If your really up for some fun you could get a number of PVR's and play them in concert. The new ReplayTV's (4k's) can transfer shows via the netowrk/lan. Some hackers are now pulling shows off to the PC and viewing them there as well! Archiving to CD/DVD!!!! I suppose you could do the jumpto right on the PC as well, if you have the 4k.
Well not the downloading, but I can remote control the beast and watch it on my computer. Why do I need to store the stuff on my computer, that's what the PVR is for!
Yeah TV ain't what it used to be, there are occasionally some good programs on now adays! Man some of those educational courses are actual college courses!
I watch TV while browsing the web, listening to mp3's and doing development ->
1000x800 jpeg
I was playing the stereo so could not hear anything, sigh! On the other hand I saw 10 doubles, one exploder, a number of green and red ones. Not to mention a few mini bursts 3-5 in a couple of seconds. All in all rather nice shower! Although I'm still sleep deprived because of it.
You can setup remote control of your PC with an IRman from Evation. I use this to control xmms, there is a plug in so it's trivial to setup. You can also setup a much more complex IR gateway using software from LIRC. This will allow you to map IR input to shell scripts.
For IR output I quite like the RedRat2 as an IR driver. I wrote some GUI software for it, initially to drive my ReplayTV, but eventually to drive my whole A/V stack. See Linux RedRat2 Software. The package can easily be used to wrap a simple control panel around most any mechanism(IR, X10, web,...). For example I used the same software to create a control panel for my TV card(All in Wonder Pro). Here is a screenshot
The home grown package I have put together gives me most of what I want. It's lacking some integration, the ability to use the TV as the visual interface, a web gateway... Then there are some features such as librarian and presentation tools. It would be rather cool to be able to script a Music/Video/Picture/X10 party mix!!!
You could head off and start your own company. Then and only then are you free to chart your own course. It works for some people, Bill Gates for example, but it's not for everyone. Until you prove yourself in the market place you will be considered a failure, a nut, a weirdo, a reject, a nobody, a dot.com dreamer,... Out of a 1000 people you will be lucky to find one that understands and agrees with you. But you never know unless you try.
Of course on the flip side you can't build a cathedral unless you know how to pick the right rock, know how to cut it, know how to lay it... More education will give you more insight into the tools/knowledge that you can leverage.
Lastly, remember that the best won rewards are always the result of overcoming the hurdles along the way. Boredom is one of the more insideous ones.
Choose your path wisely and don't let others do it for you.
I worked on the AT&T Bell Labs 5ESS in 83-85, that system did indeed use Unix. Unix RTR(real time reliable) to be precise. The system was/is a geographically distributed multi-processor with the main core being fully duplexed. Even in 83 remote modules were transitioning over to fiber, and the trend towards light based communications continues. I think pulses, now light pulses, are back in favor again.
Other TelCo switches use different operating systems, some use varieties of Unix or Unix like OS's.
I shared an office with one of the guys who wrote call processing software. Each time you picked up the phone to make a call a new process would be started to handle your call... I worked on the GUI, which had an interesting architecture all it's own. Something like an early HTML/JavaScript language drove the displays and one could browse through them... I also was lucky enough to get a BitMaped workstation(Blit) with mouse/windows... before the Mac made it all popular! Cool stuff.
One of the artifacts of my time at Bell Labs can be seen today in my Treeps App, which runs on linux. I studied the tree drawing algorithms using papers from Bell Labs extensive library.
You know the one where the pherengi were transported into the delta quadrant and were controlling a whole population using their advanced technology(replicators). Voyager came along and out technologied them and the scam was ended.
The problem with the TV bis is they now feel entitled to the profits/power afforded them by the limited distribution channels of days gone by. They wan't to live in a fantasy land devoid of the reality of cheap digital video production and cheap digital(Internet) distribution. Their world is about to come tumbling down and they are freaked out about it. Look out they will sue/slander anyone who presents any kind of easy target.
Pretty soon you'll here that the Internet was the cause of 9/11 and "has to be destroyed to save us all!!!".
You can also use a PVR as a peripheral. I have been doing this for 8 months and it's great, all the advantages of seperate components plus all the advantages of an integrated system. See
Why try and pile everything in one box? If you just want to use your Linux box you can make it a "Media Mestro" right now! I currently do all my Audio/Video from my RH systems. That includes MP3 playing, TV/PVR/DVD/VCR watching, net browsing, here is a 3D'eyesed image! I use external components controled by a serial port based IR learning remote. Add some easy custom control panels and voila, instantly you become the master and conductor of your media devices!!!
Wind Plants can produce the energy and at not much more than the cost of fossil fuels. Long term it's actually a good idea, at least it would help avoid rolling blackouts!
I don't follow the X series developments too closely, but I recall seeing a program on it recently expressing some deep concerns about it's viability. It seems like "single shot to orbit" became a mantra withoug looking at the obvious that multi-stage always has cost savings(less dead weight to orbit). Perhaps multi-stage reusable might be more cost effective and reasonable next step.
I also find it a bit odd that we ship a lot of stuff up using human based g-force limits when it would be far cheaper to shoot small high-g pellets that get assembled on orbit! I mean you freeze a kilo of water and blast the thing at 150g's it don't care much when it gets melted on orbit.
Video cameras have become incredibly small over the past few years, not only that but also power usage has dropped dramatically! Here is a "videoBug" that is small and light enough to put on your flag/whip antenna. Super Circuits Video Bug.
Perhaps you could wire up a few of these with some switches on the handlebars to send them power and feed video input to the digitizer. HeadCam, RackCam, AxilCam,... It would be cool if you could let someone toggle the camera input remotely!
If you have the budget and want to do high speed relay links via a support vehicle, then have a look at:
At the high end are 115k spread spectrum RF modems from FreeWave. Upto 20 mile range, I believe they were used on an Everest expedition. One of them has adjustable range so you can operate it legally in restricted areas without a license. They also have repeaters... Of course the more range/bandwidth the more current used to transmit, so pick your comms accordingly! Doing streaming video through a cellular modem might yeild very poor frame rates and/or low res, but then again you have to think of your target audience. Do you wan't to serve people with high speed connections as well as people on dialup? With a high speed link you could do both and also perhaps do higher quality one image at a time pages for people on slow links.
Off the shelf computer notebooks/pads chew up batteries pretty quickly. Of course they also offer off the shelf video encoding solutions. Apple's powerbooks might give you the greatest run time(dual battery) and also with the ability to encode the video, they also have firewire which would let you hook up some lightweight digital video cameras! Hmm, image stablization would be kinda nice too!
Apple Power Book. This would put you in the "pannier" solution space though!.
If you want to get exotic on the power supply then check out some of the recent breakthroughs in gel pack based power supplies, they get at least twice the KWhr/Kg ratio over Lithium-Ion.
If you don't need any feedback you can IR control most devices with a serial port based learning remote control called a RedRat2. I got one a couple of months ago and have been writing a bunch of software for it:
I can control my DVD/CD/VCR/TV/PVR(ReplayTV) and the Gatos TV viewing program on Linux. I'm about to add a MP3 remote panel so I can control the mp3 player on one of my other computers. I suppose I could use the network to do that, but I already have an IRman setup to handle the IR inputs:)
There is a site in Germany that has some LANC based stuff, don't recall the link at the moment. Try search on Yahoo for LANC...
If you don't need the editing or external storage capabilities you can just connect up a PVR as a peripheral. Feed the PVR output into your computer and/or TV/stereo/VCR. A RedRat2 serial port based remote control allows you to control the PVR from your Linux Box. Here is a Screenshot showing my Linux box driving a ReplayTV.
I have a hacked 40Gig ReplayTV(they go upto 160 gig now) which is more than enough for my needs. The dedicated device handles all the channel aggregation(cable/sat), scheduling conflicts, space management. It has channel guides which exactly match my locale and also provides many other features(web interface, theme based recording,...) Most importantly it's never in the middle of a reboot when I want to record something nor does it ever slow down my computer while it's recording. See my web site for more details:
I use a sightly modified version of GATOS with my All-in-wonder pro card. I added the ability to control the program from the shell or another program(GUI remote). Subsequently I added a ReplayTV, DVD and VCR combo to the mix, feeding the input through the video input port. To control all of this I got a RedRat2 serial port based IR remote control. Then I threw together some code to drive it all, here is a photo:
http://www.slip.net/~gmd/RedRat/i2k.jpg
Details/code at my web site:
http://www.slip.net/~gmd
Sometimes it's better to use peripherals.
Slashdot Mirror
Scottish weather being what it is ...
Obviously there is some value to the metric, however programming skill is not a function of one variable :)
I wonder how many bad pieces Michelangelo did before he did a good one? Did he copy other people and then modify his style as he progressed? Did he just do one piece or was he prolific?
It would seem these types of "ad sponsered" services can only work if they perform "editorial" functions. Otherwise the "dark side" can just flood them with garbage, overloading them with junk and causing them to shutdown in frustration. That's basically another form of DOS attack, it's more subtle though and even sounds like a "free speech issue". Look at the problems of "junk speech" showing up on slashdot to get the idea. It's obviously done to degrade the service and cause harm... In such cases I think a vigorous response is required.
...
Anyhow let them have the tools to do the job. Personally I think they ought to offer the service for a small fee, something like a web hosting service but tune'd for the software distributor. I already keep a seperate web space and could just as easily host at sourceforge. They should also have shopping cart service for shareware and for developers that do both freeware and commercial software. Finally a small fee based update subscription service would be great for people who don't have the time to track all the different projects. Something that auto-pulls stuff to your system but lets you control install/backup
Oh, please, go back to your caves and freeze to death why don't you!
You do realize we HAVE to leave earth or we die here! What, you think the Sun is going to burn forever? Long before that, we will get hammered by some multi km asteroid that will barbecue most of life here anyhow! Wake up, get your act in gear, it's time to colonize space while we still can.
The solution to this problem is also simple. Each piece needs to be aerodynamic anyhow, so add some flight control surfaces so it can "fly" apart under control...
These things(ReplayTV) are not that hard to setup, and they are EASIER to program than a VCR. Way easier! On the ReplayTV press one button to get the channel guide, cursor around to the show you want, press one button to record it! Press the record button again to record all episodes! Can you make it any easier?
... is coming. The TV industry is going to go through the same disruptive change as publishing, music, ...
Most "early adopters" are people who already know where the technology is at and are waiting for someone to build the product. Once those people buy in(some 1 million PVR's sold) then the market moves on to the people who listen to the early adopters, see that something works(it does nicely) and then buy in. Most consumers(the bulk of any market) wait till they have several friends who have them, and people start saying "you don't have a PVR!".
These things are as big as the remote control, in 10 years most everyone will have one and start wondering what the heck they did before PVR's. Of course by then you will be able to record all your shows on terabytes of storage devices(if not more)! Multi-giga bit wan connections will be the norm and transferring video and other multi-media will be as common place as banner ads are today!
Go back 10 years ago, imagine someone telling you that you would soon be getting animated ads when you dial up your BBS...
Anyhow, just wait, this is only the beginning. Internet channels, collaborative filtering, planetary media(TV) access
Add a TV card with closed caption capture to your Linux box. Then setup a schedule to capture the text from shows that you might be interested in(use cron anyone). Then use that to build the search data base. Search with grep ... Now the tricky part. Use the same schedule to record things on your ReplayTV/TiVo. How? Well to make it easy use a computer controled IR remote, such as a RedRat2 on Linux. Then when you get search hit's lookup the database of shows you recorded and have a macro to jump you to the show and the appropriate offset. A ReplayTV can jumpto specific offsets in a show ...
To find shows to record you can use something like the power search utility that I wrote for my ReplayTV -> ReplayTV Search Tools for Linux.
If your really up for some fun you could get a number of PVR's and play them in concert. The new ReplayTV's (4k's) can transfer shows via the netowrk/lan. Some hackers are now pulling shows off to the PC and viewing them there as well! Archiving to CD/DVD!!!! I suppose you could do the jumpto right on the PC as well, if you have the 4k.
Well not the downloading, but I can remote control the beast and watch it on my computer. Why do I need to store the stuff on my computer, that's what the PVR is for!
A/V Control from your Linux Machine
Yeah TV ain't what it used to be, there are occasionally some good programs on now adays! Man some of those educational courses are actual college courses!
I watch TV while browsing the web, listening to mp3's and doing development ->
1000x800 jpeg
I was playing the stereo so could not hear anything, sigh! On the other hand I saw 10 doubles, one exploder, a number of green and red ones. Not to mention a few mini bursts 3-5 in a couple of seconds. All in all rather nice shower! Although I'm still sleep deprived because of it.
:)
I saw one shoot like an arrow from orions bow
You can setup remote control of your PC with an IRman from Evation. I use this to control xmms, there is a plug in so it's trivial to setup. You can also setup a much more complex IR gateway using software from LIRC. This will allow you to map IR input to shell scripts.
...). For example I used the same software to create a control panel for my TV card(All in Wonder Pro). Here is a screenshot
... Then there are some features such as librarian and presentation tools. It would be rather cool to be able to script a Music/Video/Picture/X10 party mix!!!
For IR output I quite like the RedRat2 as an IR driver. I wrote some GUI software for it, initially to drive my ReplayTV, but eventually to drive my whole A/V stack. See Linux RedRat2 Software. The package can easily be used to wrap a simple control panel around most any mechanism(IR, X10, web,
The home grown package I have put together gives me most of what I want. It's lacking some integration, the ability to use the TV as the visual interface, a web gateway
You could head off and start your own company. Then and only then are you free to chart your own course. It works for some people, Bill Gates for example, but it's not for everyone. Until you prove yourself in the market place you will be considered a failure, a nut, a weirdo, a reject, a nobody, a dot.com dreamer, ... Out of a 1000 people you will be lucky to find one that understands and agrees with you. But you never know unless you try.
... More education will give you more insight into the tools/knowledge that you can leverage.
Of course on the flip side you can't build a cathedral unless you know how to pick the right rock, know how to cut it, know how to lay it
Lastly, remember that the best won rewards are always the result of overcoming the hurdles along the way. Boredom is one of the more insideous ones.
Choose your path wisely and don't let others do it for you.
I worked on the AT&T Bell Labs 5ESS in 83-85, that system did indeed use Unix. Unix RTR(real time reliable) to be precise. The system was/is a geographically distributed multi-processor with the main core being fully duplexed. Even in 83 remote modules were transitioning over to fiber, and the trend towards light based communications continues. I think pulses, now light pulses, are back in favor again.
... I also was lucky enough to get a BitMaped workstation(Blit) with mouse/windows ... before the Mac made it all popular! Cool stuff.
Other TelCo switches use different operating systems, some use varieties of Unix or Unix like OS's.
I shared an office with one of the guys who wrote call processing software. Each time you picked up the phone to make a call a new process would be started to handle your call... I worked on the GUI, which had an interesting architecture all it's own. Something like an early HTML/JavaScript language drove the displays and one could browse through them
One of the artifacts of my time at Bell Labs can be seen today in my Treeps App, which runs on linux. I studied the tree drawing algorithms using papers from Bell Labs extensive library.
I thought the first *real* program on Unix was a game!
It's the pipes I tell ya!!!!!
You know the one where the pherengi were transported into the delta quadrant and were controlling a whole population using their advanced technology(replicators). Voyager came along and out technologied them and the scam was ended.
The problem with the TV bis is they now feel entitled to the profits/power afforded them by the limited distribution channels of days gone by. They wan't to live in a fantasy land devoid of the reality of cheap digital video production and cheap digital(Internet) distribution. Their world is about to come tumbling down and they are freaked out about it. Look out they will sue/slander anyone who presents any kind of easy target.
Pretty soon you'll here that the Internet was the cause of 9/11 and "has to be destroyed to save us all!!!".
You can also use a PVR as a peripheral. I have been doing this for 8 months and it's great, all the advantages of seperate components plus all the advantages of an integrated system. See
Linux based PVR with ReplayTV and Controling A/V stacks from LinuxWhy try and pile everything in one box? If you just want to use your Linux box you can make it a "Media Mestro" right now! I currently do all my Audio/Video from my RH systems. That includes MP3 playing, TV/PVR/DVD/VCR watching, net browsing, here is a 3D'eyesed image! I use external components controled by a serial port based IR learning remote. Add some easy custom control panels and voila, instantly you become the master and conductor of your media devices!!!
Someone hacks on me site, I shut it down using whatever mechanism required, including pulling the plug.
Don't hack on me!Wind Plants can produce the energy and at not much more than the cost of fossil fuels. Long term it's actually a good idea, at least it would help avoid rolling blackouts!
I don't follow the X series developments too closely, but I recall seeing a program on it recently expressing some deep concerns about it's viability. It seems like "single shot to orbit" became a mantra withoug looking at the obvious that multi-stage always has cost savings(less dead weight to orbit). Perhaps multi-stage reusable might be more cost effective and reasonable next step.
I also find it a bit odd that we ship a lot of stuff up using human based g-force limits when it would be far cheaper to shoot small high-g pellets that get assembled on orbit! I mean you freeze a kilo of water and blast the thing at 150g's it don't care much when it gets melted on orbit.
Now talk to me about that space elevator thingy!!
Video cameras have become incredibly small over the past few years, not only that but also power usage has dropped dramatically! Here is a "videoBug" that is small and light enough to put on your flag/whip antenna. Super Circuits Video Bug.
Perhaps you could wire up a few of these with some switches on the handlebars to send them power and feed video input to the digitizer. HeadCam, RackCam, AxilCam, ... It would be cool if you could let someone toggle the camera input remotely!
If you have the budget and want to do high speed relay links via a support vehicle, then have a look at:
Radio Based Communications
At the high end are 115k spread spectrum RF modems from FreeWave. Upto 20 mile range, I believe they were used on an Everest expedition. One of them has adjustable range so you can operate it legally in restricted areas without a license. They also have repeaters ... Of course the more range/bandwidth the more current used to transmit, so pick your comms accordingly! Doing streaming video through a cellular modem might yeild very poor frame rates and/or low res, but then again you have to think of your target audience. Do you wan't to serve people with high speed connections as well as people on dialup? With a high speed link you could do both and also perhaps do higher quality one image at a time pages for people on slow links.
Off the shelf computer notebooks/pads chew up batteries pretty quickly. Of course they also offer off the shelf video encoding solutions. Apple's powerbooks might give you the greatest run time(dual battery) and also with the ability to encode the video, they also have firewire which would let you hook up some lightweight digital video cameras! Hmm, image stablization would be kinda nice too! Apple Power Book. This would put you in the "pannier" solution space though!.
If you want to get exotic on the power supply then check out some of the recent breakthroughs in gel pack based power supplies, they get at least twice the KWhr/Kg ratio over Lithium-Ion.
If you don't need any feedback you can IR control most devices with a serial port based learning remote control called a RedRat2. I got one a couple of months ago and have been writing a bunch of software for it:
http://www.slip.net/~gmd/RedRat/index.html
I can control my DVD/CD/VCR/TV/PVR(ReplayTV) and the Gatos TV viewing program on Linux. I'm about to add a MP3 remote panel so I can control the mp3 player on one of my other computers. I suppose I could use the network to do that, but I already have an IRman setup to handle the IR inputs :)
There is a site in Germany that has some LANC based stuff, don't recall the link at the moment. Try search on Yahoo for LANC ...
These links might also be useful to you:
http://members.home.net/ncherry/http://Commander-X.com/hardware.htm
I have a hacked 40Gig ReplayTV(they go upto 160 gig now) which is more than enough for my needs. The dedicated device handles all the channel aggregation(cable/sat), scheduling conflicts, space management. It has channel guides which exactly match my locale and also provides many other features(web interface, theme based recording, ...) Most importantly it's never in the middle of a reboot when I want to record something nor does it ever slow down my computer while it's recording. See my web site for more details:
http://www.slip.net/~gmd/index.html
B.t.w. I'm just about to release 0.3 of the software, which includes a Gtk based interface.
My Web Site contains GATOS software mods for the ATI All-In-Wonder pro, as well as the code for the RedRat2(ReplayTV/DVD/VCR) GUI remotes.
Art'sy ScreenShot called "Millenium Wall" showing all of the above in action!
I modified GATOS a bit to allow it to be controlled from the shell or a remote GUI panel. See:
My Web Site for details.
I use a sightly modified version of GATOS with my All-in-wonder pro card. I added the ability to control the program from the shell or another program(GUI remote). Subsequently I added a ReplayTV, DVD and VCR combo to the mix, feeding the input through the video input port. To control all of this I got a RedRat2 serial port based IR remote control. Then I threw together some code to drive it all, here is a photo: http://www.slip.net/~gmd/RedRat/i2k.jpg Details/code at my web site: http://www.slip.net/~gmd Sometimes it's better to use peripherals.