Different projects with different goals - however, that said, in spirit they are very similar. The television based user interfaces share a lot of the same ideas. I'd rate XBMC as a more user friendly product but Myth is closeer to it than any other working app I've seen. Myth and XBMC would make a good pairing - one for managing, watching, and recording your television shows, the other for connecting you to any other media on any network or server. MythTV would make a good addition to XBMC's front menu with a label of "Television". XBMC does have plugins to communicate with Myth, but they are a bit primitive at this stage. Rolling them together would be a fine project for Ubuntu Studio or some other media center distribution like LinuxMCE or Pluto@Home.
I'll second the previous poster's comment of "not even close." I know nothing that can replace this app once you've come to use it for a while. There are no comparable programs out there of similar quality - the closest to it I mentioned above but they are not nearly as good.
This is absolutely as much of a killer app for TV-based computers as Apache was for commodity web servers. Far too many people are assuming this is just another media player. It's not. It's a frontend for anything you could possibly want to do on a television set with a computer, and the best one going. Pictures do not do it justice, no more than a picture of an Ubuntu desktop tells you what happens when you start digging into the menus and programs. Try it before you knock it.
I've played with it. XBMC has more stability and a much better interface, and is far easier to set up and get working, and requires far cheaper hardware and a lot less hacking even to get on a modded xbox. XBMC has a much more active community, is more feature rich, and has better support. Frankly, LinuxMCE is for linux weenies - the kind who want to play with a computer. I don't want to play - I want to turn something on, get a killer media center, and then *use it* to watch media without ever worrying about anything other than the occasional update. Let me know when the LinuxMCE folks are selling something that does that in a half hour out of the box.
I do agree though that eventually, all of these things could/should be rolled into one solid media center distribution. Don't overlook Pluto@Home either. It's got some very clever ideas even if the implementation is a bit hacky as well.
All of the media center implementation attempts I've seen others make fell flat for me as well. They always came off as a half baked idea that was never properly implemented, and in Microsoft's case, always tied to a windows box somewhere. The teams looking at them didn't see them the way we do. They've failed to understand their customers - a problem XBMC does not have.
The reason you'd do the 1TB thing is because it's portable and all you need is a TV to enjoy your entire DVD library (XBMC will play raw ISOs flawlessly). You can't touch that in a portable computer - the xbox has plenty of travel cases, rather like a suitcase for your data if you like. If you just want something for your own home that will never move, you can hack it and install this in under ten minutes flat from opening the box, and stream everything off of your own fileservers. If you don't need to replace the original 8-10gb disk, then 95% of the hacking (and the worst of it) goes completely away.
Of course, there are still plenty of format problems, mainly to do with that bass-ackwards bastardized semi-Fat12/16 filesystem. Max partition size of 256GB (the 257th wraps over the first, found that out the hard way), the 39.3 filename limitations, no defragmentation, slow access... it's hardly optimal. Once it is on linux we'll all be a lot better off.
Heh, xentoo runs fine on the xbox. When this port is solid I'll probably install xentoo on my xbox and use the linux port just to get away from all of the other limitations of the original xbox operating system.
Xbox Media Center is one of the best kept secrets in the programming world. After all, it only runs on the original Xbox, and while there is a healthy modding community that has been hacking them since release, it isn't exactly mainstream. It's been a crying shame that this exceptional media program has been tied to the original Xbox for so long, and I'm thrilled that it's being ported over to Linux and set free for everyone to use.
The killer feature of this program is *not* what it does. It's a very powerful and robust media player, certainly, but the true power comes from the user interface, which is simple, effective, straightforward and very pretty to look at (and fully skinnable). Anyone who has used a TiVo or similar television media interface should have no problems using XBMC. Now that it is no longer tied to the Xbox, it will be possible to create small form factor media center systems running linux and give them a truly excellent user interface.
The interface supports running external programs (in particular, games and game emulators), python scripting to handle writing widgets to interface with popular media sites like YouTube, file management, and streaming from nearly any source. It also works as an FTP/Samba/HTTP server to serve out whatever media is stored on the disk to other sources. There is a web interface for remote management. It'll work with USB joysticks and remote control as well as keyboards. There is a web browser but it's a bit hinky - I'm sure that someone will merge it with Firefox after it is ported.
If you're wondering why anyone would give a damn about the original Xbox or this program, the upshot is this... for $129 you could buy a P3 system (xbox), hack it with software exploits (fairly easily), install a hard disk up to 1TB in side to replace the original, and have a portable media player box that could hold hundreds of hours of content and play it back in 480p/720p/1080i and DTS. The price to do that with any computer was far higher at the time (and frankly still is, especially in setup time). I've been carting mine around for years and have had a great many friends request that I make one for them. I think I've done around thirty of them by now.
I think Microsoft/Sony completely missed the boat by overlooking this application for their gaming consoles. Either they just didn't see it or they don't like this behavior and see it as a liability of some kind. Either way, we won't be needing them much longer. A clever company could probably turn this into a killer set-top app with some business savvy. All it needs is a bit-torrent backend for sharing content with other users and connectivity to media sites, and you've got a TV channel killer on your hands and a new distribution network (if it ever gets big).
Heh, thirded. INTJ and into more genres and styles than I can remember. I'm the guy my friends come to when they need some fresh music recommendations.
Learning to like a style is like picking a lock. Sooner or later you hit on an album in that style that really appeals to you. After going through a few more like that first one, suddenly everything in that genre starts getting more appealing. I somehow doubt that this is restricted to INTJ, though. I'd wager it works for everyone, but only certain personality types are going to want to spend the time acquiring the tastes. Music is a background thing for most people, rather than a hobby or a passion.
I've learned three things in my musical travels...
- Nothing is ever old until after you've heard it yourself.
- The masterpiece reveals itself when the listener is ready. (Thank you, Amarok)
- Some music (usually the best of all) requires your full, undivided attention.
Not bad - I'm surpised it took them this long to adopt the obvious solution, but the implementation details are much better than expected, so good on them for taking the time to get the implementation right. Now, all they need to do is build the logic of how pages are 'protected' into the system directly, so that when certain edit patterns or questionable new content is detected (presence of dirty words, etc), the pages go into protected mode automatically and flag an administrator to investigate. If it's legit, approval is no problem. If it isn't, dumping the changes and the user is also no problem.
I see two trending targets - edit behaviour of all users on a single page, and single user behaviour across all pages. If appropriate heuristics can be developed and applied (perhaps a form of bayesian matching) it should be possible to automatically recognize and flag almost all kinds of vandalism for administrative review without the need to involve people in the process. That would make it a hell of a lot harder for the subtle, quiet vandalizations to continue unnoticed.
Stick some interfaces into the wiki for tweaking what kinds of behaviours set off the auto-protection, and over time you'll be able to fine tune things very well.
Evolution appears to be emergent behavior. You've seen the evolution in nature - as you say, it's fantastic and incredibly diverse, filling every possible nook.
Have you observed that ideas are now competing in the exact same way in their own ecosystem - the human mind, and lately, the internet (which is basically just a big whiteboard for everyone to scribble on at this point)? This strikes me as history repeating itself in a slightly different way. I'm not advocating memetics - we're a bit underequipped at this point to give that science a proper treatment - however the early observations of competing ideas do seem to suggest some kind of evolutionary pattern.
All of this singularity talk stems from the realization that evolution - the idea, the process - may become aware of itself on some level using humans (or other suitable intelligences) as its agents (genetic engineering, who knows what the real mechanism will turn out to be). Evolution that is aware of itself can direct itself, and the timescales on which it completes an iteration compress from millenia into, at the very least, years. It becomes a feedback curve. The type of curve, the steepness - all of these things are debatable, but the idea that the curve will come to exist is a very sound one. The details won't really matter in the end. Evolution - the algorithm - will evolve itself into a more efficient, faster acting version of its original self. You could argue that it has done this many times already - just creating a multi-organism ecosystem, for example. Evolution is recursive.
To me this looks like the same evolutionary algorithm you describe - it's just another stage that apparently life on this planet has never reached before. I can't really imagine life anywhere else unfolding any differently - maybe with different trappings, but that same algorithm will play out over and over again because it's just a kind of best-fit emergent behavior for this universe.
Frankly my own opinion is that the journey may be just as important as the destination. Whatever intelligences are racing up that curve are going to want to stop and take a breath, take a look around from time to time. It'll self-regulate one way or another - everything always reaches some kind of equilibrium. If immortality and interplanetary mobility are the low hanging fruit that they appear to be, there will certainly be no reason to hurry - basic survival is pretty much taken care of at that point.
3Ware has been a mixed bag for us. The 7xxx/8xxx series are running in a number of our production servers (the little kind - the kind slated to become VMWare images in a year or three). They weren't exactly top performers, but they have been very reliable and easy to manage, good with notification of problems, and a breeze to rebuild. We had a bad run in one time with one of the original 9000 series models dropping zeros to the disk and causing us some bad database corruption (and it was a pain in the ass to track down). We're using a pair of the 9550-SATA models for two of our backup servers and those new models are top-notch and fast as hell. I think they've matured. We use them on linux and windows - they always perform far better in linux no matter how much tuning we do.
I'd still like to sink my teeth into an Areca at some point for comparison, though.;)
I'll second this. A lot of people are recommending OpenVPN, however setting up a firewall with OpenVPN from scratch isn't exactly a trivial task, even for a netadmin. If you use IPCop you'll be getting the firewall ready to go, with the option for support, and OpenVPN is a drop-in-and-execute mod. I've been using IPCop/OpenVPN for over a year now and loving it. IPCop's web interface is as easy to use as any Linksys router, only far more powerful.
You can use the built in FreeSWAN VPN features to establish net-to-net VPNs between your offices, and use OpenVPN to allow your clients to access those offices remotely.
There are several other OpenVPN-capable firewall distros out there... m0n0wall comes to mind as being the most secure, and it'll even run on appliances without requiring a full PC or a hard disk. Thing is, a lot of them don't offer much in the way of logging capability - IPCop does. That's the main reason I ended up settling on it over the other firewall distros.
Dear InPhase, please STFU and ship this shit already. This is the 1000th pointless article I've seen about this on the last two (is it three now?) years and I'm getting tired of hearing about it. I've got data that needs backing up, and whoever comes out with a 50+GB/item WORM non-tape media first is going to get my cash. At this point I use hard drives to back up instead of tapes because they cost far less per GB than the damn tapes do.
Hey, we all take these 'revolutionary game' ideas with a bit of salt, since we've been let down so many times in the past, but... still, that was a pretty damn awesome demo. Sooner or later, someone is bound to actually come up with a brilliant game.
This is interesting. Aren't these inconsistent gravitational variations the kind of thing that ties in with Modified Newtonian Dynamics, one of the Dark Matter alternatives?
Decent $900 model assembled from Newegg without needing the foam. Even using the same caliber of components that they use in the linked article it would cost less than $2k and be far easier to assemble.
We're moving some of our development and most of our testing into VMs for the flexibility. We gave Microsoft Virtual PC a spin, but compared to VMWare it's pretty lacking in features, so we ended up going with VMWare Workstation. The advanced networking features, broad platform support, and snapshotting capability are huge wins for us. We had been planning to use Microsoft's Virtual PC Server product for collaborative development efforts because we get licenses with our MSDN subscriptions, whereas GSX was really damn pricey. Now, thanks to this rather canny offer of free GSX server, we won't even need to do that. This is most excellent.
Any university worth its salt gives practical exams. You walk in, sit down, and are handed a programming assignment you have two or three hours to complete, one which includes all topics for the course. If you fail the practical, you fail the course, regardless of what your grade is with the practical figured into it. Most practicals don't even allow crib sheets. Anyone who outsources or otherwise shirks their homework won't be able to pass the practical because they won't know how to do it under pressure in a short time frame. So where's the problem?
There's no magic bullet for finding a good batch or a good vendor. I'm in a line of work where I deploy a fuckload of hard disks, so I can tell you that over the last few years the Maxtors have had horrific failure rates (and we have since stopped using them). The Western Digital Raptors and the Seagates we've had have been wonderful. Even the Western Digital Caviar series have done quite well, though not as well as the Seagates and Raptors.
A few years ago Maxtor and Western Digital were the ones to buy. Before that it was IBM and Seagate (or Micropolis, which is still the world's most indestructible drive IMO).
Sooner or later Seagate will fuck up and deliver a bad batch, just like everyone else. The lesson here is to make sure you've got good backups (a backup that hasn't been tested is no backup at all, by the way). RAID your disks, they've gotten cheap enough that even home users can afford to do it.
Generally I put my money on the vendor who's willing to back up their product with a lengthy warranty. Seagate's drives and Western Digital's Raptor line have five year warranties. Since a rash of failures at the 4 year mark will cost these companies a whole lot of money, I tend to expect them to be more reliable, and so far they have been. Maxtor had a one year warranty. That to me is like hanging a sign in the window that says, "our drives are the absolute worst drives in history, and we know it!"
I've got a 500GB Hitachi in my media center that's been running great as well. Fast, but a bit hot.
Generally, heat is the ultimate enemy of hard disks. It's what causes those IBM Deskstar 75GXP's to die, folks who keep them cool have had no failures because the ball bearing lubricant doesn't begin to turn into glue until it hits a certain temperature.
If you are really concerned about the welfare of your disks, fork over the cash for a case that's got a fan blowing directly on the hard disks, or a little more for a good cage from Enhance-Tech or SuperMicro. You can get a decent 5-in-3 model for $130, and it'll greatly extend the life of your disks.
We won't go down the same road. There are plenty of roads leading to worse places that no one has been down before. It is possible for a form of societal repression to appear that can exist despite these changes, and it won't look like the kind of fascism we all know and love. History and human nature guarantee it'll happen eventually. We'll probably have a different name for it when it does happen. That doesn't mean it'll be less dangerous when it gets here. While I'd like to believe you, I think you woefully underestimate the laziness of most Americans. Most people won't lift a finger until well after it is too late, just like every other nation in history. People have not changed. At least we'll stand a better chance of throwing it off than other countries if it does happen.
I'm in agreement, but I'd like to point out something I think is rather important.
Fascism as we have seen it in the past is not likely to recur. We're all familiar with it, and after WWII it isn't likely to be tolerated when it appears. What is likely to happen, however, is the emergence of a different (modern, if you like) form of fascism that is not immediately recognizable as such. I don't think this has happened yet, but it is certainly a possibility.
I do think that the current political and economic climate in the USA has become more closed and dogmatic lately, which is not a good sign. I don't suppose it's any worse than the kinds of things that were happening when Nixon was in office, so calling it fascist is probably premature. It does bear watching closely, however.
Check up on how Germany became fascist sometime. The chain of events that led them into fascism is not all that dissimilar from some of our own social and political movements. We're just lucky enough to have an environment that is less tolerant of them, for now at least. Most Germans certainly weren't fascists... they simply allowed it to happen. That's the mistake we can't afford to repeat.
Science is the driving force of industry, technology, and every existing economic market. It is unassailable except by paradigms that provide better benefits, and religion does not provide better benefits, or really even the same set of benefits. Religion is the old guard's paradigm, and science has largely replaced it as a dominant force driving humanity. Also, they aren't mutually exclusive, depite attempts by organized religion and idiot mass media to make you think that they are. One can be a scientist and a follower of any religion. The only aspects of religion that 'science' can be construed as attacking are the fanatical fringe elements of many religions who insist on a literal interpretation that science can clearly demonstrate is not consistent with reality.
Even if, by some unimaginable feat of brainwashing, the majority of americans do become 'anti-science', it won't matter in the long run. Those who have the better science and technology are the dominant forces in the world, and have always been, and always will be. If America falls from that top spot, some other nation will take over, and progress will continue. America is not nearly as important in the grand scheme of things as people would have you believe. It's just another country. It's not even that... it's just one small government that can be replaced effortlessly by its citizens if they decide to do so. By any measure of history, this is precisely what America's fate will be, and probably not too far off in the future.
So, now that we've cleared up science's role in the world, let's talk about the real issue here.
Look at church attendance. Look at the numbers of young people who 'believe' in the bible, or whatever other religion is on the table. You'll find that by any measure, the number of young people who are active in religious circles is declining. Perhaps I should say more like dropping off of a cliff. This is not to say that they don't have religious views; what I mean is that they don't actively preach, attend church or religious functions as often, and are generally less visible as active 'bible thumpers'. They are also more likely to donate to humanitarian causes and charity instutitions than they are to religious agencies. This is, in one sense, a crisis of funding.
This drastic decline in young clergy and churchgoers in recent years has scared the hell out of the remaining religious powerbase. They can see that they are literally 'dying off' and the world is becoming less and less interested in them or their beliefs. They were once the premiere force in the world, for thousands of years, and they are not taking modern marginalization of their beliefs, traditions, and opinions lightly. They've known this was coming for centuries; all scientists in the middle ages were required to work for the church, where they could be controlled and supervised.
All of the thunder once posessed by religion has been stolen by science. Feats of science that people can touch and see in the real world are far greater these days than anything accomplished in the bible, and they are tangible, so more and more people place their 'faith' or at least their thoughts and minds into scientific activities. Moses parted the red sea, big fucking deal, we've moved oceans and put men on the moon with science. Given enough time we'll be capable of working miracles reserved for Jesus on a daily basis: curing paralysis (done), curing blindness (getting close), resurrecting the dead (only on animals so far, but we've done it).
Science is the new power in the world, and religion is attacking it as a kind of last-ditch attempt to cling to what they once were and hope to become again. I find it amusing that in order to attack science, they had to assume its form with intelligent design. Using your enemy's methods is an admission of defeat. The battle is lost, but they will still try to fight it.
Religion as a personal or small community affair is not threatened by science in the least, mind you. Organized religion, the kind that
This is a bit off topic, but since we're talking about cursing, well, what the hell.
There's a movie by the name of The Aristocrats floating around in the art house cinema circuit right now that is all about profanity and shock. If any of you have seen a South Park clip where Cartman is telling a particularly vile joke to the other boys that none of them seems to understand, you've seen the bit that Trey Parker and Matt Stone did for this movie (and trust me, that's one of the most boring bits in it).
Penn Gilette (of Penn & Teller) got the idea in his head to make a sort of documentary about this format joke called The Aristocrats, whose sole purpose is to be as vile and vulgar as possible. Comedians won't typically perform it in public because it'd be censored utterly in any venue. Instead, they tell it to each other as a kind of secret handshake... the joke really brings out each comedian's style clearly when they tell it.
There's about a hundred comedians on the cast list, and it contains just about every one you've ever heard of. See for yourself over at IMDB.
You won't find it in any major chain, since it's unrated (the profanity would have undoubtedly merited an NC-17). You probably can find it in some of these independent theaters.
No torrents yet. I suspect it's damn hard to pirate a film out of an art house... if the patrons catch you, chances are you won't last long enough for the police to arrive and haul you off. The DVD will be on sale from ThinkFilm in a few months if you can't find it elsewhere.
Don't go thinking it's just one long retelling of the same ditry joke. There's several narrative threads about profanity, censorship, and society in general, and the good versions of the joke are radically different from each other, so there's nothing repetitive (except the theme, anyway). Wait until you see Billy the Mime's version... and just watch the people walking by on the street behind him when they see what he's doing.
Man, you really haven't got a clue why Novell failed. You're spitting out Microsoft's version, and that should tell you something about your level of gullibility. Here, let me enlighten you.
Novell provided that mythical 'perfect' opertaing system everyone wants. You install it once, and it simply runs and does its job. That's it. No new versions, no expensive upgrades, just some incremental service packs once in a while.
Compare that to Microsoft... version after version, expensive iterations and upgrades, constant handholding, constant maintenance.
Now, if you are a salesman, take a wild guess which platform makes you the most money if you sell it to your customers? Yeah, Microsoft. If a customer bought Novell, the salesman never heard from them again, because it worked and there was no need to upgrade. If they bought Microsoft, it was a guaranteed revenue stream of support, maintenance, updates, and upgrades for years to come.
Money. Plain and simple, that's why Novell got clobbered. Novell gave the cutsomers precisely what they wanted, and paid the price for it, because salesmen wanted the opposite of what the customers were after.
That said, the fact that they are still here, are profitable, and are now pushing Linux counts for a lot, especially considering their repeated defeats from everyone's favorite convicted monopolist. Not one company on a hundred that Microsoft targeted survived, but Microsoft could never quite kill off Novell.
That's because Novell gained quite a loyal following due to the awesomeness of their software. Customer loyalty runs pretty high in their neck of the woods... higher than any other tech company, I'd wager. Keep in mind that Novell Linux is replacing Netware, giving it a substantial installed base. Novell has been managing thousands of enterprise-level deployments for years; they know exactly what to do and how to do it. I would not be surprised in the least to see a 'best breed' of corporate linux appear in their product line, since everything in their track record screams 'best of breed' network operating system.
I'd get used to seeing the big red N if I were you. It's not going away any time soon.
I verified them against this list. Everything that isn't listed as a missing episode is present and accounted for. Perhaps I should have said "every episode known to exist" but I expected people would be able to figure that out for themselves. Last time I checked, eDonkey didn't do quantum reconstruction. Maybe I should add that to the feature list for the next version. I wonder what the lawyers would say about that.
I've played with perhaps a dozen little firewall distros like these and I'd prefer any of them to the default linksys setup. These three are my favorites for features, power, ease of use, speed, and tinkering ability. m0n0wall isn't easy to tinker with, but runs quite well from a 6MB ISO image and strikes me as pretty unhackable. Maybe someone should hack that onto the linksys.
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Different projects with different goals - however, that said, in spirit they are very similar. The television based user interfaces share a lot of the same ideas. I'd rate XBMC as a more user friendly product but Myth is closeer to it than any other working app I've seen. Myth and XBMC would make a good pairing - one for managing, watching, and recording your television shows, the other for connecting you to any other media on any network or server. MythTV would make a good addition to XBMC's front menu with a label of "Television". XBMC does have plugins to communicate with Myth, but they are a bit primitive at this stage. Rolling them together would be a fine project for Ubuntu Studio or some other media center distribution like LinuxMCE or Pluto@Home.
I'll second the previous poster's comment of "not even close." I know nothing that can replace this app once you've come to use it for a while. There are no comparable programs out there of similar quality - the closest to it I mentioned above but they are not nearly as good.
This is absolutely as much of a killer app for TV-based computers as Apache was for commodity web servers. Far too many people are assuming this is just another media player. It's not. It's a frontend for anything you could possibly want to do on a television set with a computer, and the best one going. Pictures do not do it justice, no more than a picture of an Ubuntu desktop tells you what happens when you start digging into the menus and programs. Try it before you knock it.
I've played with it. XBMC has more stability and a much better interface, and is far easier to set up and get working, and requires far cheaper hardware and a lot less hacking even to get on a modded xbox. XBMC has a much more active community, is more feature rich, and has better support. Frankly, LinuxMCE is for linux weenies - the kind who want to play with a computer. I don't want to play - I want to turn something on, get a killer media center, and then *use it* to watch media without ever worrying about anything other than the occasional update. Let me know when the LinuxMCE folks are selling something that does that in a half hour out of the box.
I do agree though that eventually, all of these things could/should be rolled into one solid media center distribution. Don't overlook Pluto@Home either. It's got some very clever ideas even if the implementation is a bit hacky as well.
All of the media center implementation attempts I've seen others make fell flat for me as well. They always came off as a half baked idea that was never properly implemented, and in Microsoft's case, always tied to a windows box somewhere. The teams looking at them didn't see them the way we do. They've failed to understand their customers - a problem XBMC does not have.
The reason you'd do the 1TB thing is because it's portable and all you need is a TV to enjoy your entire DVD library (XBMC will play raw ISOs flawlessly). You can't touch that in a portable computer - the xbox has plenty of travel cases, rather like a suitcase for your data if you like. If you just want something for your own home that will never move, you can hack it and install this in under ten minutes flat from opening the box, and stream everything off of your own fileservers. If you don't need to replace the original 8-10gb disk, then 95% of the hacking (and the worst of it) goes completely away.
Of course, there are still plenty of format problems, mainly to do with that bass-ackwards bastardized semi-Fat12/16 filesystem. Max partition size of 256GB (the 257th wraps over the first, found that out the hard way), the 39.3 filename limitations, no defragmentation, slow access... it's hardly optimal. Once it is on linux we'll all be a lot better off.
Heh, xentoo runs fine on the xbox. When this port is solid I'll probably install xentoo on my xbox and use the linux port just to get away from all of the other limitations of the original xbox operating system.
Xbox Media Center is one of the best kept secrets in the programming world. After all, it only runs on the original Xbox, and while there is a healthy modding community that has been hacking them since release, it isn't exactly mainstream. It's been a crying shame that this exceptional media program has been tied to the original Xbox for so long, and I'm thrilled that it's being ported over to Linux and set free for everyone to use.
The killer feature of this program is *not* what it does. It's a very powerful and robust media player, certainly, but the true power comes from the user interface, which is simple, effective, straightforward and very pretty to look at (and fully skinnable). Anyone who has used a TiVo or similar television media interface should have no problems using XBMC. Now that it is no longer tied to the Xbox, it will be possible to create small form factor media center systems running linux and give them a truly excellent user interface.
The interface supports running external programs (in particular, games and game emulators), python scripting to handle writing widgets to interface with popular media sites like YouTube, file management, and streaming from nearly any source. It also works as an FTP/Samba/HTTP server to serve out whatever media is stored on the disk to other sources. There is a web interface for remote management. It'll work with USB joysticks and remote control as well as keyboards. There is a web browser but it's a bit hinky - I'm sure that someone will merge it with Firefox after it is ported.
If you're wondering why anyone would give a damn about the original Xbox or this program, the upshot is this... for $129 you could buy a P3 system (xbox), hack it with software exploits (fairly easily), install a hard disk up to 1TB in side to replace the original, and have a portable media player box that could hold hundreds of hours of content and play it back in 480p/720p/1080i and DTS. The price to do that with any computer was far higher at the time (and frankly still is, especially in setup time). I've been carting mine around for years and have had a great many friends request that I make one for them. I think I've done around thirty of them by now.
I think Microsoft/Sony completely missed the boat by overlooking this application for their gaming consoles. Either they just didn't see it or they don't like this behavior and see it as a liability of some kind. Either way, we won't be needing them much longer. A clever company could probably turn this into a killer set-top app with some business savvy. All it needs is a bit-torrent backend for sharing content with other users and connectivity to media sites, and you've got a TV channel killer on your hands and a new distribution network (if it ever gets big).
Heh, thirded. INTJ and into more genres and styles than I can remember. I'm the guy my friends come to when they need some fresh music recommendations.
Learning to like a style is like picking a lock. Sooner or later you hit on an album in that style that really appeals to you. After going through a few more like that first one, suddenly everything in that genre starts getting more appealing. I somehow doubt that this is restricted to INTJ, though. I'd wager it works for everyone, but only certain personality types are going to want to spend the time acquiring the tastes. Music is a background thing for most people, rather than a hobby or a passion.
I've learned three things in my musical travels...
- Nothing is ever old until after you've heard it yourself.
- The masterpiece reveals itself when the listener is ready. (Thank you, Amarok)
- Some music (usually the best of all) requires your full, undivided attention.
Missed the point? I figured he was just getting the bullshit over with as quickly as possible!
Not bad - I'm surpised it took them this long to adopt the obvious solution, but the implementation details are much better than expected, so good on them for taking the time to get the implementation right. Now, all they need to do is build the logic of how pages are 'protected' into the system directly, so that when certain edit patterns or questionable new content is detected (presence of dirty words, etc), the pages go into protected mode automatically and flag an administrator to investigate. If it's legit, approval is no problem. If it isn't, dumping the changes and the user is also no problem.
I see two trending targets - edit behaviour of all users on a single page, and single user behaviour across all pages. If appropriate heuristics can be developed and applied (perhaps a form of bayesian matching) it should be possible to automatically recognize and flag almost all kinds of vandalism for administrative review without the need to involve people in the process. That would make it a hell of a lot harder for the subtle, quiet vandalizations to continue unnoticed.
Stick some interfaces into the wiki for tweaking what kinds of behaviours set off the auto-protection, and over time you'll be able to fine tune things very well.
Evolution appears to be emergent behavior. You've seen the evolution in nature - as you say, it's fantastic and incredibly diverse, filling every possible nook.
Have you observed that ideas are now competing in the exact same way in their own ecosystem - the human mind, and lately, the internet (which is basically just a big whiteboard for everyone to scribble on at this point)? This strikes me as history repeating itself in a slightly different way. I'm not advocating memetics - we're a bit underequipped at this point to give that science a proper treatment - however the early observations of competing ideas do seem to suggest some kind of evolutionary pattern.
All of this singularity talk stems from the realization that evolution - the idea, the process - may become aware of itself on some level using humans (or other suitable intelligences) as its agents (genetic engineering, who knows what the real mechanism will turn out to be). Evolution that is aware of itself can direct itself, and the timescales on which it completes an iteration compress from millenia into, at the very least, years. It becomes a feedback curve. The type of curve, the steepness - all of these things are debatable, but the idea that the curve will come to exist is a very sound one. The details won't really matter in the end. Evolution - the algorithm - will evolve itself into a more efficient, faster acting version of its original self. You could argue that it has done this many times already - just creating a multi-organism ecosystem, for example. Evolution is recursive.
To me this looks like the same evolutionary algorithm you describe - it's just another stage that apparently life on this planet has never reached before. I can't really imagine life anywhere else unfolding any differently - maybe with different trappings, but that same algorithm will play out over and over again because it's just a kind of best-fit emergent behavior for this universe.
Frankly my own opinion is that the journey may be just as important as the destination. Whatever intelligences are racing up that curve are going to want to stop and take a breath, take a look around from time to time. It'll self-regulate one way or another - everything always reaches some kind of equilibrium. If immortality and interplanetary mobility are the low hanging fruit that they appear to be, there will certainly be no reason to hurry - basic survival is pretty much taken care of at that point.
3Ware has been a mixed bag for us. The 7xxx/8xxx series are running in a number of our production servers (the little kind - the kind slated to become VMWare images in a year or three). They weren't exactly top performers, but they have been very reliable and easy to manage, good with notification of problems, and a breeze to rebuild. We had a bad run in one time with one of the original 9000 series models dropping zeros to the disk and causing us some bad database corruption (and it was a pain in the ass to track down). We're using a pair of the 9550-SATA models for two of our backup servers and those new models are top-notch and fast as hell. I think they've matured. We use them on linux and windows - they always perform far better in linux no matter how much tuning we do.
;)
I'd still like to sink my teeth into an Areca at some point for comparison, though.
I'll second this. A lot of people are recommending OpenVPN, however setting up a firewall with OpenVPN from scratch isn't exactly a trivial task, even for a netadmin. If you use IPCop you'll be getting the firewall ready to go, with the option for support, and OpenVPN is a drop-in-and-execute mod. I've been using IPCop/OpenVPN for over a year now and loving it. IPCop's web interface is as easy to use as any Linksys router, only far more powerful.
You can use the built in FreeSWAN VPN features to establish net-to-net VPNs between your offices, and use OpenVPN to allow your clients to access those offices remotely.
There are several other OpenVPN-capable firewall distros out there... m0n0wall comes to mind as being the most secure, and it'll even run on appliances without requiring a full PC or a hard disk. Thing is, a lot of them don't offer much in the way of logging capability - IPCop does. That's the main reason I ended up settling on it over the other firewall distros.
Dear InPhase, please STFU and ship this shit already. This is the 1000th pointless article I've seen about this on the last two (is it three now?) years and I'm getting tired of hearing about it. I've got data that needs backing up, and whoever comes out with a 50+GB/item WORM non-tape media first is going to get my cash. At this point I use hard drives to back up instead of tapes because they cost far less per GB than the damn tapes do.
Google Video has a video of Spore's gameplay demonstration.
Hey, we all take these 'revolutionary game' ideas with a bit of salt, since we've been let down so many times in the past, but... still, that was a pretty damn awesome demo. Sooner or later, someone is bound to actually come up with a brilliant game.
This is interesting. Aren't these inconsistent gravitational variations the kind of thing that ties in with Modified Newtonian Dynamics, one of the Dark Matter alternatives?
http://www.eqluclin.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9977
Decent $900 model assembled from Newegg without needing the foam. Even using the same caliber of components that they use in the linked article it would cost less than $2k and be far easier to assemble.
We're moving some of our development and most of our testing into VMs for the flexibility. We gave Microsoft Virtual PC a spin, but compared to VMWare it's pretty lacking in features, so we ended up going with VMWare Workstation. The advanced networking features, broad platform support, and snapshotting capability are huge wins for us. We had been planning to use Microsoft's Virtual PC Server product for collaborative development efforts because we get licenses with our MSDN subscriptions, whereas GSX was really damn pricey. Now, thanks to this rather canny offer of free GSX server, we won't even need to do that. This is most excellent.
Any university worth its salt gives practical exams. You walk in, sit down, and are handed a programming assignment you have two or three hours to complete, one which includes all topics for the course. If you fail the practical, you fail the course, regardless of what your grade is with the practical figured into it. Most practicals don't even allow crib sheets. Anyone who outsources or otherwise shirks their homework won't be able to pass the practical because they won't know how to do it under pressure in a short time frame. So where's the problem?
There's no magic bullet for finding a good batch or a good vendor. I'm in a line of work where I deploy a fuckload of hard disks, so I can tell you that over the last few years the Maxtors have had horrific failure rates (and we have since stopped using them). The Western Digital Raptors and the Seagates we've had have been wonderful. Even the Western Digital Caviar series have done quite well, though not as well as the Seagates and Raptors.
A few years ago Maxtor and Western Digital were the ones to buy. Before that it was IBM and Seagate (or Micropolis, which is still the world's most indestructible drive IMO).
Sooner or later Seagate will fuck up and deliver a bad batch, just like everyone else. The lesson here is to make sure you've got good backups (a backup that hasn't been tested is no backup at all, by the way). RAID your disks, they've gotten cheap enough that even home users can afford to do it.
Generally I put my money on the vendor who's willing to back up their product with a lengthy warranty. Seagate's drives and Western Digital's Raptor line have five year warranties. Since a rash of failures at the 4 year mark will cost these companies a whole lot of money, I tend to expect them to be more reliable, and so far they have been. Maxtor had a one year warranty. That to me is like hanging a sign in the window that says, "our drives are the absolute worst drives in history, and we know it!"
I've got a 500GB Hitachi in my media center that's been running great as well. Fast, but a bit hot.
Generally, heat is the ultimate enemy of hard disks. It's what causes those IBM Deskstar 75GXP's to die, folks who keep them cool have had no failures because the ball bearing lubricant doesn't begin to turn into glue until it hits a certain temperature.
If you are really concerned about the welfare of your disks, fork over the cash for a case that's got a fan blowing directly on the hard disks, or a little more for a good cage from Enhance-Tech or SuperMicro. You can get a decent 5-in-3 model for $130, and it'll greatly extend the life of your disks.
We won't go down the same road. There are plenty of roads leading to worse places that no one has been down before. It is possible for a form of societal repression to appear that can exist despite these changes, and it won't look like the kind of fascism we all know and love. History and human nature guarantee it'll happen eventually. We'll probably have a different name for it when it does happen. That doesn't mean it'll be less dangerous when it gets here. While I'd like to believe you, I think you woefully underestimate the laziness of most Americans. Most people won't lift a finger until well after it is too late, just like every other nation in history. People have not changed. At least we'll stand a better chance of throwing it off than other countries if it does happen.
I'm in agreement, but I'd like to point out something I think is rather important.
Fascism as we have seen it in the past is not likely to recur. We're all familiar with it, and after WWII it isn't likely to be tolerated when it appears. What is likely to happen, however, is the emergence of a different (modern, if you like) form of fascism that is not immediately recognizable as such. I don't think this has happened yet, but it is certainly a possibility.
I do think that the current political and economic climate in the USA has become more closed and dogmatic lately, which is not a good sign. I don't suppose it's any worse than the kinds of things that were happening when Nixon was in office, so calling it fascist is probably premature. It does bear watching closely, however.
Check up on how Germany became fascist sometime. The chain of events that led them into fascism is not all that dissimilar from some of our own social and political movements. We're just lucky enough to have an environment that is less tolerant of them, for now at least. Most Germans certainly weren't fascists... they simply allowed it to happen. That's the mistake we can't afford to repeat.
Eternal vigilance, and all that...
Science is the driving force of industry, technology, and every existing economic market. It is unassailable except by paradigms that provide better benefits, and religion does not provide better benefits, or really even the same set of benefits. Religion is the old guard's paradigm, and science has largely replaced it as a dominant force driving humanity. Also, they aren't mutually exclusive, depite attempts by organized religion and idiot mass media to make you think that they are. One can be a scientist and a follower of any religion. The only aspects of religion that 'science' can be construed as attacking are the fanatical fringe elements of many religions who insist on a literal interpretation that science can clearly demonstrate is not consistent with reality.
Even if, by some unimaginable feat of brainwashing, the majority of americans do become 'anti-science', it won't matter in the long run. Those who have the better science and technology are the dominant forces in the world, and have always been, and always will be. If America falls from that top spot, some other nation will take over, and progress will continue. America is not nearly as important in the grand scheme of things as people would have you believe. It's just another country. It's not even that... it's just one small government that can be replaced effortlessly by its citizens if they decide to do so. By any measure of history, this is precisely what America's fate will be, and probably not too far off in the future.
So, now that we've cleared up science's role in the world, let's talk about the real issue here.
Look at church attendance. Look at the numbers of young people who 'believe' in the bible, or whatever other religion is on the table. You'll find that by any measure, the number of young people who are active in religious circles is declining. Perhaps I should say more like dropping off of a cliff. This is not to say that they don't have religious views; what I mean is that they don't actively preach, attend church or religious functions as often, and are generally less visible as active 'bible thumpers'. They are also more likely to donate to humanitarian causes and charity instutitions than they are to religious agencies. This is, in one sense, a crisis of funding.
This drastic decline in young clergy and churchgoers in recent years has scared the hell out of the remaining religious powerbase. They can see that they are literally 'dying off' and the world is becoming less and less interested in them or their beliefs. They were once the premiere force in the world, for thousands of years, and they are not taking modern marginalization of their beliefs, traditions, and opinions lightly. They've known this was coming for centuries; all scientists in the middle ages were required to work for the church, where they could be controlled and supervised.
All of the thunder once posessed by religion has been stolen by science. Feats of science that people can touch and see in the real world are far greater these days than anything accomplished in the bible, and they are tangible, so more and more people place their 'faith' or at least their thoughts and minds into scientific activities. Moses parted the red sea, big fucking deal, we've moved oceans and put men on the moon with science. Given enough time we'll be capable of working miracles reserved for Jesus on a daily basis: curing paralysis (done), curing blindness (getting close), resurrecting the dead (only on animals so far, but we've done it).
Science is the new power in the world, and religion is attacking it as a kind of last-ditch attempt to cling to what they once were and hope to become again. I find it amusing that in order to attack science, they had to assume its form with intelligent design. Using your enemy's methods is an admission of defeat. The battle is lost, but they will still try to fight it.
Religion as a personal or small community affair is not threatened by science in the least, mind you. Organized religion, the kind that
This is a bit off topic, but since we're talking about cursing, well, what the hell.
There's a movie by the name of The Aristocrats floating around in the art house cinema circuit right now that is all about profanity and shock. If any of you have seen a South Park clip where Cartman is telling a particularly vile joke to the other boys that none of them seems to understand, you've seen the bit that Trey Parker and Matt Stone did for this movie (and trust me, that's one of the most boring bits in it).
Penn Gilette (of Penn & Teller) got the idea in his head to make a sort of documentary about this format joke called The Aristocrats, whose sole purpose is to be as vile and vulgar as possible. Comedians won't typically perform it in public because it'd be censored utterly in any venue. Instead, they tell it to each other as a kind of secret handshake... the joke really brings out each comedian's style clearly when they tell it.
There's about a hundred comedians on the cast list, and it contains just about every one you've ever heard of. See for yourself over at IMDB.
You won't find it in any major chain, since it's unrated (the profanity would have undoubtedly merited an NC-17). You probably can find it in some of these independent theaters.
No torrents yet. I suspect it's damn hard to pirate a film out of an art house... if the patrons catch you, chances are you won't last long enough for the police to arrive and haul you off. The DVD will be on sale from ThinkFilm in a few months if you can't find it elsewhere.
Don't go thinking it's just one long retelling of the same ditry joke. There's several narrative threads about profanity, censorship, and society in general, and the good versions of the joke are radically different from each other, so there's nothing repetitive (except the theme, anyway). Wait until you see Billy the Mime's version... and just watch the people walking by on the street behind him when they see what he's doing.
Man, you really haven't got a clue why Novell failed. You're spitting out Microsoft's version, and that should tell you something about your level of gullibility. Here, let me enlighten you.
Novell provided that mythical 'perfect' opertaing system everyone wants. You install it once, and it simply runs and does its job. That's it. No new versions, no expensive upgrades, just some incremental service packs once in a while.
Compare that to Microsoft... version after version, expensive iterations and upgrades, constant handholding, constant maintenance.
Now, if you are a salesman, take a wild guess which platform makes you the most money if you sell it to your customers? Yeah, Microsoft. If a customer bought Novell, the salesman never heard from them again, because it worked and there was no need to upgrade. If they bought Microsoft, it was a guaranteed revenue stream of support, maintenance, updates, and upgrades for years to come.
Money. Plain and simple, that's why Novell got clobbered. Novell gave the cutsomers precisely what they wanted, and paid the price for it, because salesmen wanted the opposite of what the customers were after.
That said, the fact that they are still here, are profitable, and are now pushing Linux counts for a lot, especially considering their repeated defeats from everyone's favorite convicted monopolist. Not one company on a hundred that Microsoft targeted survived, but Microsoft could never quite kill off Novell.
That's because Novell gained quite a loyal following due to the awesomeness of their software. Customer loyalty runs pretty high in their neck of the woods... higher than any other tech company, I'd wager. Keep in mind that Novell Linux is replacing Netware, giving it a substantial installed base. Novell has been managing thousands of enterprise-level deployments for years; they know exactly what to do and how to do it. I would not be surprised in the least to see a 'best breed' of corporate linux appear in their product line, since everything in their track record screams 'best of breed' network operating system.
I'd get used to seeing the big red N if I were you. It's not going away any time soon.
Interesting reading over there. Thanks for the reference. I'll start recommending USR for folks who need a simple hardware home router.
I verified them against this list. Everything that isn't listed as a missing episode is present and accounted for. Perhaps I should have said "every episode known to exist" but I expected people would be able to figure that out for themselves. Last time I checked, eDonkey didn't do quantum reconstruction. Maybe I should add that to the feature list for the next version. I wonder what the lawyers would say about that.
The new 2005 series is quite good, by the way.
Is it? Remarkably bad performance for a linux box. I was thinking of this linux distro for linksys routers. Maybe it's the hardware. /shrug
It's still no substitute for a real firewall IMO.
IpCop
Smoothwall
m0n0wall
I've played with perhaps a dozen little firewall distros like these and I'd prefer any of them to the default linksys setup. These three are my favorites for features, power, ease of use, speed, and tinkering ability. m0n0wall isn't easy to tinker with, but runs quite well from a 6MB ISO image and strikes me as pretty unhackable. Maybe someone should hack that onto the linksys.