> Err, no, but she can't do that with any remote I have. Why would she? As long as fast forward, rewind, play, stop, and the menu keys work, she's happy.
Maybe I meant reassign, not remap...
I've got the 45-button hauppage remote and she's remapped some of the extra keys so they shortcut to "videos" or "delete this file". On the Sage box, she just goes into the setup and can completly alter the key mappings. Back in the day, circa 2005, I remember this was all in a file somewhere on the MythTV box...
> She never goes into the MythTV setup menus.
Every new release of SageTV, mine is in the setup menus figuring out what is new. She is constantly changing the background to pictures she takes - even if they make the text harder to read.
Do the button mappings actually respect the printed labels on the remote? Can your girlfriend/partner reprogram them without editing text files? Can she change the background image without leaving the program? How about the menuing? How does conflict resolution work?
As a cheap shot, I'll assume you dont have one because if you did she'd be bitching about it. Trust me, MythTV has an almost subzero WAF...
MythTV is great for a non-production TV system, but it ain't ready to scale to a multi-person, household TV. It is just too much effort to get the baseline running, let alone any cool stuff like commercial skip or streaming media. The tinker facter was so high that the ladyfriend would constantly bitch. The kicker was she'd be bitching about shit that should just work, like the key mappings on the remote control.
$79 later and I am a happy SageTV user instead. It works out of the box, the lady loves it, and I can still tinker with it... only I'm tinkering on improvements (comskip for example) not just getting the baseline system running:-) Plus, the media extender in the bedroom just worked when I plugged it in. I'd hate trying to get those little guys working reliably on MythTV.
Moan and groan about firewalls and "what is the point?" but I'll tell you what... Vista now ships with IPv6 enabled by default! All that is left is getting my DSL connection, upstream, and the rest of the internet to speak it and I'll be golden.
But seriously, I used to think IPv6 would never catch on, but in a few years maybe 65-85% of the world will be running an operating system that has it on by default. Hard to argue with that!
One of Vista's own devs called the Windows codebase overly complicated, bloated, and full of circular dependencies. It's a mass of crufty spaghetti code dating back to 1985.
If that isn't Fear, Uncertianty, and Doubt I dont know what is pal...
The US judicial system is kinda like tech support tiers. You've got the Level 1 courts... you know "I broke into the 7-11 and here is the video to prove it". If the first tier guys cant solve it, it gets escalated up the food chain. Once it hits the supreme court, that means it is big shit - like "Is abortion legal?"
Besides, what if the jury in my region is a bunch of racist hicks and I'm black? I can't appeal it to a higher, possibly more sane, court of law? In western europe, am I basically screwed?
You are right, there is a huge market out there for video cards that come with high quality documentation and source code. HUGE!
Question, if there actually was a market for what you are asking, why can I not go to Fry's or Newegg and buy it? Surely if your idea had merit either you'd be working on it right now, or somebody else has already done it, right?
Indeed I've found the reason for most crappy Vista experiances is a clunker of a Video card. Even on my brand new machine, I've got 5.3+'s on everything but the video card (ATI x1650, 256mb) which is a mere 4.3 for desktop graphics. That is even with catalyst 7.4. I have no idea what Vista must be like with a 5.x card, but it has gotta be sweet:-)
I'd say the most important part of making sure your box is vista ready is the GPU. Without a modern video card, Vista will not get Aero and will hence run like crap. I figure a modern card is anything you can buy at Fry's right now.
Always, always get the latest driver from nVidia or ATI. They are pushing them out monthly these days so check often.
If you have a new card, and it doesn't do Aero out of the box, update the driver and update your experiance index. Dont rely on Windows Update to install the absolute latest driver for you! Once Vista "knows" you've got a modern card, it will automatically turn on Aero once it is done benchmarking your machine.
Yeah... I dont understand anything about my laptop's power maangement either. Some guy speculated how it might significantly drop the clockrate on the CPU when idle to save power and thus make it appear like the mouse uses 7% of my CPU but that is FUD from paid shills. What do they know!
Fuck Microsoft, I'll use linux instead! Than I wont even have a mouse to worry about because it doesn't support mine!
Awesome! Which processes that are enable on a stock Vista install make it slow. Further, what was your method of deducing they were, in fact, making it slow?
Right click on the program's short cut and go "Run as administrator". Now it only annoys you once when you start it up, not for the entire duration of the program. Ain't perfect, but really the fault is with the vendor. UAC is just annoying enough that I really think that if we properly educate our users who is really at fault than it just might put enough pressure under software vendors to clean up our app. Telling them "UAC sucks and you should turn it off, M$ sucks" is only enabling these lazy vendors to continue writing bad applications and than blaming Microsoft when they break. Microsoft gave us a really good, highly annoying tool to use to finally club these vendors into compliance!
As for jailroots, see also "virtual store". It ain't really the same as on unixy things but seroiusly; adding a whole damn layer under these crusty apps so they can happily think they are writting to program files or bad parts of the registry was simply brillant. Sadly, I've found that once you mark programs as "run as admin" the program can again start mucking around in program files just like it shouldn't be.
It is hard to describe. Vista's design just tries to make itself disappear while you are working.
- The window itself is transparent and very desaturated while the content is solid. Because of that, your eye naturally wants to focus on the content, not on the border.
- The buttons are the same brightness, saturation & opacity as the window itself unless you hover of them. On XP they were very bold and in your fact even when idle. Again, less distracting.
- Basically, on Vista/w Aero, the only stuff that is really important is the solid stuff. Far from eye candy, the transparency is really about making your eye want to look at the what is important--the content, not the OS.
As for UAC, you'll laugh, but at least for my parents computer it is the prime driver for upgrading. There is no reason for UAC to kick in unless the program is doing something wrong. Every time it pops up, my mom will me semi-panic'd asking "what is 'some crappy programm.exe', should I click okay"? That right there is awesome...
On my computer, I rarely get it unless it is some old application. Really, programs shouldn't need admin access! If UAC is popup up every five minutes like some people on slashdot seem to think it does, baby you've got big troubles!
Yeah... screw Microsoft - those bastards and their bloat! I know! I'll just fuck around with parts of the system I really know nothing about.
I know people like you. You are the kind of guy who takes off the catalytic converter because you think it reduces your milage. You are the kind of guy who turns of overdrive on modern cars because you think you'll wear the tranny out faster*. You are the kind of guy who tries to uninstall IE or deletes random files. Than, later when things stop working right, you blame Microsoft or GM for screwing up when it really was you fiddling!
I bet your computer is now more unstable, more insecure, and worse, slower, than it was when you installed it.
- On modern hardware Aero will make your system much more responsive.** - ReadyBoost = Faster. I'm assuming "kill every process I could kill" means you disabled this. - Superfetch = Faster. Again, I assume you turnen this off.
3 months from now you'll be bitching about how slow Vista is but it will only be your fault for fucking around with its internals.
* I turn it off in traffic so I get some engine-braking... **On semi-modern hardware with a semi-modern videocard that can do DirectX 9...
Dont you like how Firefox will come up with a list that narrows down when you type a URL in the address bar? It almost feels like tab completion, doesn't it?
Wouldn't it be sweet if you could do that on the start menu and just type "ca" + and run calc.exe or just type "not" + and get notepad? Next time you are on Vista, start typing into that "Start Search" box on the start menu and see what you get. Now do you like fast indexing?
Or my parents computer. Once I get vista on their machine, I'm gonna train my mom to call me every time that UAC business pops up. You shouldn't get UAC popups under normal use. Personally, UAC is the most compelling reason of all for me to recommend upgrading their computer.
You might try downloading the driver directly from nVidia rather than wait around for your laptop manufacturer to update their drivers. Dunno about nVidia, but for ATI is pumping out updated vista drivers once a month now that keep getting better & faster.
A huge disclaimer: while using the drivers on nvidia.com (or ati.com) is usually okay on a desktop, on a laptop you might start getting weird problems. I tried using nVidia's native XP drivers on my laptop once, and it would never wake up from hibernation again. YMMV.
Yup. Crappy old video cards = no Aero. Why? Cause Aero actually uses the video card's GPU. If the GPU can't do it, Aero can't run.
In the couple of installs I've done on older hardware, the video card was the only thing that needed to be upgraded. I figure just about anything you can get at Fry's above $75 will work...
I'll probably get modded down for this, but who cares....
Since it actually puts your video card to good use, Aero makes things faster, not slower. Would you want your fancy game to use some generic CPU instead of all the specalized functionaly provided by your GPU? Why should your OS be any different? Unless your hardware sucked, you would be a fool to turn Aero off--it just makes your CPU do more work!
What this power consumption business really means is hardware manufacturers need to optimize the parts of the GPU that Vista uses so they consume less power. In a year, new "Vista-Ready" laptops will probably use the same, if not significantly less power than their XP optimized counterparts. Less power you say? Hell yeah! Vista has all kinds of goodies for power management that didn't exist in XP; my desktop computer now suspends itself to... something.. after 5 minutes and will instantly wake up. Dunno if XP could that, but it sure as hell didn't on mine. It was default behavior on my Vista install.
Further, Aero is definitly not eye candy and I'd even argue that it is the first version of Windows that *doesn't* have eye candy. The user interface is crisp, snappy, and far more elegant than anything before it. You barely notice the OS is even there; XP & 95 are very "in your face". I personally love Vista - I dare say that when running on proper hardware it really makes you feel the PC has come of age. All prior windows versions feel clunky in comparison.
Not pointless at all. When it's so hard to actually burn a movie that will play in your DVD player, it pays to test it once on a RW then burn it as a final on a real disk.
Dude - the 71/72/73 are some of the best buses here if you catch the express buses. You get out of the tunnel, and next stop is the UW. Did you actually walk into the tunnel and catch those?
Slashdot Mirror
CableCards are trouble for any homebrew PVR be it SageTV, MCE, or MythTV. Which sucks :-(
> Err, no, but she can't do that with any remote I have. Why would she? As long as fast forward, rewind, play, stop, and the menu keys work, she's happy.
Maybe I meant reassign, not remap...
I've got the 45-button hauppage remote and she's remapped some of the extra keys so they shortcut to "videos" or "delete this file". On the Sage box, she just goes into the setup and can completly alter the key mappings. Back in the day, circa 2005, I remember this was all in a file somewhere on the MythTV box...
> She never goes into the MythTV setup menus.
Every new release of SageTV, mine is in the setup menus figuring out what is new. She is constantly changing the background to pictures she takes - even if they make the text harder to read.
Do the button mappings actually respect the printed labels on the remote? Can your girlfriend/partner reprogram them without editing text files? Can she change the background image without leaving the program? How about the menuing? How does conflict resolution work?
As a cheap shot, I'll assume you dont have one because if you did she'd be bitching about it. Trust me, MythTV has an almost subzero WAF...
MythTV is great for a non-production TV system, but it ain't ready to scale to a multi-person, household TV. It is just too much effort to get the baseline running, let alone any cool stuff like commercial skip or streaming media. The tinker facter was so high that the ladyfriend would constantly bitch. The kicker was she'd be bitching about shit that should just work, like the key mappings on the remote control.
:-) Plus, the media extender in the bedroom just worked when I plugged it in. I'd hate trying to get those little guys working reliably on MythTV.
$79 later and I am a happy SageTV user instead. It works out of the box, the lady loves it, and I can still tinker with it... only I'm tinkering on improvements (comskip for example) not just getting the baseline system running
Moan and groan about firewalls and "what is the point?" but I'll tell you what... Vista now ships with IPv6 enabled by default! All that is left is getting my DSL connection, upstream, and the rest of the internet to speak it and I'll be golden.
But seriously, I used to think IPv6 would never catch on, but in a few years maybe 65-85% of the world will be running an operating system that has it on by default. Hard to argue with that!
One of Vista's own devs called the Windows codebase overly complicated, bloated, and full of circular dependencies. It's a mass of crufty spaghetti code dating back to 1985.
If that isn't Fear, Uncertianty, and Doubt I dont know what is pal...
So basically than the original poster was full of shit and your court systems are pretty much like ours?
The US judicial system is kinda like tech support tiers. You've got the Level 1 courts... you know "I broke into the 7-11 and here is the video to prove it". If the first tier guys cant solve it, it gets escalated up the food chain. Once it hits the supreme court, that means it is big shit - like "Is abortion legal?"
Besides, what if the jury in my region is a bunch of racist hicks and I'm black? I can't appeal it to a higher, possibly more sane, court of law? In western europe, am I basically screwed?
You are right, there is a huge market out there for video cards that come with high quality documentation and source code. HUGE!
Question, if there actually was a market for what you are asking, why can I not go to Fry's or Newegg and buy it? Surely if your idea had merit either you'd be working on it right now, or somebody else has already done it, right?
I agree about FUD.
:-)
Indeed I've found the reason for most crappy Vista experiances is a clunker of a Video card. Even on my brand new machine, I've got 5.3+'s on everything but the video card (ATI x1650, 256mb) which is a mere 4.3 for desktop graphics. That is even with catalyst 7.4. I have no idea what Vista must be like with a 5.x card, but it has gotta be sweet
I'd say the most important part of making sure your box is vista ready is the GPU. Without a modern video card, Vista will not get Aero and will hence run like crap. I figure a modern card is anything you can buy at Fry's right now.
Always, always get the latest driver from nVidia or ATI. They are pushing them out monthly these days so check often.
If you have a new card, and it doesn't do Aero out of the box, update the driver and update your experiance index. Dont rely on Windows Update to install the absolute latest driver for you! Once Vista "knows" you've got a modern card, it will automatically turn on Aero once it is done benchmarking your machine.
You'll just make them jelious because on your machine things just work :-)
Yeah... I dont understand anything about my laptop's power maangement either. Some guy speculated how it might significantly drop the clockrate on the CPU when idle to save power and thus make it appear like the mouse uses 7% of my CPU but that is FUD from paid shills. What do they know!
Fuck Microsoft, I'll use linux instead! Than I wont even have a mouse to worry about because it doesn't support mine!
Awesome! Which processes that are enable on a stock Vista install make it slow. Further, what was your method of deducing they were, in fact, making it slow?
Right click on the program's short cut and go "Run as administrator". Now it only annoys you once when you start it up, not for the entire duration of the program. Ain't perfect, but really the fault is with the vendor. UAC is just annoying enough that I really think that if we properly educate our users who is really at fault than it just might put enough pressure under software vendors to clean up our app. Telling them "UAC sucks and you should turn it off, M$ sucks" is only enabling these lazy vendors to continue writing bad applications and than blaming Microsoft when they break. Microsoft gave us a really good, highly annoying tool to use to finally club these vendors into compliance!
As for jailroots, see also "virtual store". It ain't really the same as on unixy things but seroiusly; adding a whole damn layer under these crusty apps so they can happily think they are writting to program files or bad parts of the registry was simply brillant. Sadly, I've found that once you mark programs as "run as admin" the program can again start mucking around in program files just like it shouldn't be.
It is hard to describe. Vista's design just tries to make itself disappear while you are working.
/w Aero, the only stuff that is really important is the solid stuff. Far from eye candy, the transparency is really about making your eye want to look at the what is important--the content, not the OS.
- The window itself is transparent and very desaturated while the content is solid. Because of that, your eye naturally wants to focus on the content, not on the border.
- The buttons are the same brightness, saturation & opacity as the window itself unless you hover of them. On XP they were very bold and in your fact even when idle. Again, less distracting.
- Basically, on Vista
As for UAC, you'll laugh, but at least for my parents computer it is the prime driver for upgrading. There is no reason for UAC to kick in unless the program is doing something wrong. Every time it pops up, my mom will me semi-panic'd asking "what is 'some crappy programm.exe', should I click okay"? That right there is awesome...
On my computer, I rarely get it unless it is some old application. Really, programs shouldn't need admin access! If UAC is popup up every five minutes like some people on slashdot seem to think it does, baby you've got big troubles!
Yeah... screw Microsoft - those bastards and their bloat! I know! I'll just fuck around with parts of the system I really know nothing about.
I know people like you. You are the kind of guy who takes off the catalytic converter because you think it reduces your milage. You are the kind of guy who turns of overdrive on modern cars because you think you'll wear the tranny out faster*. You are the kind of guy who tries to uninstall IE or deletes random files. Than, later when things stop working right, you blame Microsoft or GM for screwing up when it really was you fiddling!
I bet your computer is now more unstable, more insecure, and worse, slower, than it was when you installed it.
- On modern hardware Aero will make your system much more responsive.**
- ReadyBoost = Faster. I'm assuming "kill every process I could kill" means you disabled this.
- Superfetch = Faster. Again, I assume you turnen this off.
3 months from now you'll be bitching about how slow Vista is but it will only be your fault for fucking around with its internals.
* I turn it off in traffic so I get some engine-braking...
**On semi-modern hardware with a semi-modern videocard that can do DirectX 9...
Dont you like how Firefox will come up with a list that narrows down when you type a URL in the address bar? It almost feels like tab completion, doesn't it?
Wouldn't it be sweet if you could do that on the start menu and just type "ca" + and run calc.exe or just type "not" + and get notepad? Next time you are on Vista, start typing into that "Start Search" box on the start menu and see what you get. Now do you like fast indexing?
Or my parents computer. Once I get vista on their machine, I'm gonna train my mom to call me every time that UAC business pops up. You shouldn't get UAC popups under normal use. Personally, UAC is the most compelling reason of all for me to recommend upgrading their computer.
You might try downloading the driver directly from nVidia rather than wait around for your laptop manufacturer to update their drivers. Dunno about nVidia, but for ATI is pumping out updated vista drivers once a month now that keep getting better & faster.
s upported.html
nVidia claims they support the 6150, but that might not mean it has the brains required to do Aero. It is a hardware thing, not just a memory thing:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x86_158.18_
A huge disclaimer: while using the drivers on nvidia.com (or ati.com) is usually okay on a desktop, on a laptop you might start getting weird problems. I tried using nVidia's native XP drivers on my laptop once, and it would never wake up from hibernation again. YMMV.
What video card did it have and did it have the latest and greatest drivers?
On good hardware with new drivers, things will be much more snappy with Aero on than off.
Yup. Crappy old video cards = no Aero. Why? Cause Aero actually uses the video card's GPU. If the GPU can't do it, Aero can't run.
In the couple of installs I've done on older hardware, the video card was the only thing that needed to be upgraded. I figure just about anything you can get at Fry's above $75 will work...
I'll probably get modded down for this, but who cares....
Since it actually puts your video card to good use, Aero makes things faster, not slower. Would you want your fancy game to use some generic CPU instead of all the specalized functionaly provided by your GPU? Why should your OS be any different? Unless your hardware sucked, you would be a fool to turn Aero off--it just makes your CPU do more work!
What this power consumption business really means is hardware manufacturers need to optimize the parts of the GPU that Vista uses so they consume less power. In a year, new "Vista-Ready" laptops will probably use the same, if not significantly less power than their XP optimized counterparts. Less power you say? Hell yeah! Vista has all kinds of goodies for power management that didn't exist in XP; my desktop computer now suspends itself to... something.. after 5 minutes and will instantly wake up. Dunno if XP could that, but it sure as hell didn't on mine. It was default behavior on my Vista install.
Further, Aero is definitly not eye candy and I'd even argue that it is the first version of Windows that *doesn't* have eye candy. The user interface is crisp, snappy, and far more elegant than anything before it. You barely notice the OS is even there; XP & 95 are very "in your face". I personally love Vista - I dare say that when running on proper hardware it really makes you feel the PC has come of age. All prior windows versions feel clunky in comparison.
(MadHungarian): "I vote for idaho, i hear they have free WiFi access in the airport"
Yeah, way to win one with the ladies dude...
Not pointless at all. When it's so hard to actually burn a movie that will play in your DVD player, it pays to test it once on a RW then burn it as a final on a real disk.
Dude - the 71/72/73 are some of the best buses here if you catch the express buses. You get out of the tunnel, and next stop is the UW. Did you actually walk into the tunnel and catch those?