The technical support forums for the game clearly show some people having sound issues on Linux, but I managed to get away clean.
For reference, I'm running Ubuntu 8.04 with PulseAudio on an AMD X2 using whatever integrated sound (Realtek, I think) is built into the motherboard. Sound works perfectly well, no stuttering, no lag.
It isn't necessarily the best game of the year (I'd give that to Portal), but it was such an astonishing shift in the way first-person games are played. The control interface is the first time the motion controls on the Wii have been absolutely perfect, the design is beautiful and varied and the gameplay is fluid and intuitive. I've never before encountered such a radical shift in my expectations of how an entire game genre should be played.
Check the first link in this post. It's the same handout I was given when I started PT, it gives a basic depiction of what you should be doing. I'm sure if you Google "wrist tendinitis exercises" you should be able to find more information. Don't overdo the exercises, either; you over-extend your wrists and its just going to set you back a few days again.
One more thing: I was told by the orthopedic surgeon and by the physical therapist to not rely on wrist braces. Use them only when necessary (i.e. when you're starting to feel pain), wear them for an hour and then see whether you can make do without them again. Wear them at night to sleep, but only for the first month. It was explained that you can become reliant on them to enforce the correct positioning of your arms and wrists. Then you may not keep up with exercises as much as you should because, with the braces on, the pain is decreased enough that it isn't an issue and you think you're doing all right.
This applies for tendinitis, I have no idea whether the same advice makes any sense if you have carpal tunnel damage.
This is, I think, the exact handout that I was started with.
I needed a fair amount of work to get back to my normal grip strength. For that, I was given therapy putty in lower grade (yellow) followed by a higher one (green). It's basically silly putty formulated in a specific way to provide different levels of resistance.
Once I was back to a normal grip strength, I started using a Powerball (you should be able to get them cheaper than that, mind you). I was told by the therapist that exercise with any decent set of free weights should provide the necessary workout and resistance, but the Powerball is a lot smaller and easier to travel with and can be used at the office (the noise is annoying, but not more so than some peoples' desk fans).
I really do recommend the physical therapy as well, though, because that included massage and heat treatment that made a huge difference at the beginning, and especially because you can make sure you're doing the exercises properly under professional supervision. Once I was back to having functional hands without pain, the therapy was done and I've continued on my own, doing the stretches and using the Powerball, for two years now without any relapses.
I would suggest that you had tendinitis and not carpal tunnel. I'm basing this on my own experience, since I developed tendinitis and was taught that the way to control it was through regular hand and forearm exercises. Rock climbing fits that bill perfectly, of course. Since carpal tunnel is nerve damage, I'm not aware that you can cure/quell it through exercise.
I'm completely serious. I had the same problem as you, diagnosed as tendinitis in the backs of my hands, and it made typing at a keyboard all day extremely painful. Physical therapy for two months, twice a week helped immensely and I learned a number of exercises that I can do at my desk that eliminate the pain entirely, if not all of the tension. I'll have to do the exercises for the rest of my life (or stop using my hands for a few straight months and let them rest and heal finally), but they're ten minutes a day and not hard. Physical therapy may be expensive if you can't get it covered under your health insurance/worker's comp, but it's a cost you have to pay now in order to not be suffering for the rest of your life. It's absolutely worth it.
Plus, for any of you who have gone to a general practitioner who was entirely clueless about RSI, go see an orthopedic surgeon. That was my GP's recommendation and it was spot on. The surgeon knew exactly what sort of damage might have been caused, knew how to check whether it was muscle/tendon damage or nerve damage, and was the one who referred me to the physical therapist. Your GP isn't necessarily clueless, but he or she is a generalist. A specialist will (hopefully) have a lot better understanding of the specific problems and possible solutions that RSI entails.
U.S. labor laws that govern overtime pay don't say anything about computers, but I do understand where you're coming from. The original overtime laws that were put into place differentiated between factory workers (unskilled labor) and management (skilled labor), basically, mandating overtime for the workers and "exempting" management from receiving overtime pay by law. The problem now, of course, is that far fewer people work in factories since we've shifted to a service economy, and many of us who aren't in management have roles, job responsibilities, training and education that now place us in the "exempt" category as well.
I have the interesting situation that I am exempt from overtime pay according to U.S. labor law but my employer chooses to pay me overtime wages anyway, on the grounds that it's the right thing to do and increases job satisfaction. It's like some sort of reverse-Dilbert cartoon here, I tell you.
Mine can't be the only company that chooses business practices that actively benefit workers beyond the legal minimums, but it's nice to see that other companies are publicly speaking out in support of working this way.
Sorry, that just isn't true in all cases. I know that some cable providers encrypt the digital cable feed, but it seems that there are a number that don't, as was discussed a few weeks ago: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/05/195225 1
In my case, I have a home-built PVR and digital cable (RCN Chicago). Works like a charm. The digital cable is unencrypted QAM, so I have an HDTV card (Kworld HD PCI-115) that supports QAM. No DRM, no encryption, works well. I was worried when RCN was pushing to go all-digital in my building, but it actually has been an improvement. I can record anything that comes over the line, burn it to DVD, compress down to watch on the commute, whatever I want. If you're worried about switching to digital cable or HD cable because you have a PVR and don't want to lose that functionality, check first to see whether your local cable provider is encrypting the stream. If not, you're good to go.
Manufacturer's website for an HDTV will usually say if it has a QAM tuner in addition to ATSC/NTSC. Vizio does this for their televisions, for instance, it's one of the reasons I went with them. Consumer Reports (consumerreports.org) will also say whether a television they're reviewing has a QAM tuner. QAM tuners are still not common, though, so your selection is somewhat limited.
Thief: The Dark Project
on
Games and Fear
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I was playing Thief on a stormy night with a cheap 4.1 speaker setup, because you need some reasonable positional audio for Thief. On the second level, where you're trying to get into the prison through the abandoned mines, I came upon a decayed corpse lying on the ground. First in the game, mind you. After waiting a moment at the edge of the room to see whether it would rise up and try and eat my brains (as decayed corpses are wont to do in such situations), I decided everything was safe and walked right over to it and looked down to see whether it was anything interesting.
That's when it chose to jump up and take a swipe at me. I screamed bloody murder and yanked the power cable from the back of my computer, turned on all the lights in the apartment and didn't turn the damn computer back on until the next day.
For serious immersion in a game, Thief is amazing. Much, much more interesting than most of your regular first-person games. Like a lot of people here, I am a huge fan of Half-Life 2 and Ravenholm, though.
I just have to step in here. I'm pretty liberal, but I have a lot of respect for real conservatives. That means people who believe in smaller government, lower taxes, and less governmental interference in the private lives of citizens. The real conservatives I know are decent, intelligent people who just want to live quietly, work hard and build good lives for themselves.
The "social conservative" and "religious conservative" groups that have co-opted the term are practically anathema to the real meaning of the word and are destroying the Republican party, a party that used to garner some respect and due consideration. Nowadays the party is a bloated, corrupt sham of its former self that seems determined to drive itself into the ditch. Sadly, the Democratic Party isn't really any better, leaving a sour taste in my mouth whenever I vote. I realize it's currently hopeless, but we could really use some more major political parties in this country (Bull Moose Party!)
I'm a translator, so I'd lose access to online dictionaries and specialized technical sites that I use every day to make a living. I have friends on two other continents and I and my immediate family members travel all over the world a minimum of once a year. I send at least one e-mail to somewhere outside of the United States at least once a day, usually more. Furthermore, chopping up the Internet by country and/or region would hamper my ability to get new clients from outside my region.
If we lose the worldwide Internet, I'm stuck not being able to do my job as well and having much less contact with the people I care about. Segmenting the Internet (because of jingoistic idiocy or any other reason) is just not something I'm willing to consider or accept. Who on Earth would think it's a good idea?
eMusic does lack a lot of what plays on the radio, but I stopped regularly listening to the radio about five years ago when I decided it was too much trouble sitting through thirty minutes of terrible, over-played garbage while waiting for a song I liked. eMusic has a huge catalog of excellent Jazz, Cuban, Classic Rock, Indie Rock and Comedy, and it's cheaper by far than the other pay-per-file download services (the most you're going to pay is $0.25 US/track, it gets cheaper if you buy more per month).
Another nice thing about eMusic is that the music isn't just MP3, it's MP3 encoded at high variable bitrate (LAME 3.90, I believe, alt-preset-standard). It's pretty much the same setting I'll use for the CDs I buy myself.
And in the end, I have a music file that sounds good and that has no restrictions against copying to my notebook, MP3 player, a CD for playing in the car or anything else. That's worth a lot to me.
Of all things, the Organization for Prosecuting Copyright Infringements (GVU) was targeted in the large search action against the piracy scene. The state attorney's office of Ellwangen suspects the private tracking organization of the film and software industry of having actively supported the distribution of what are called "warez". On Tuesday, investigators of the state Office of Criminal Investigation searched the Hamburg offices and the apartment of a high-ranking employee.
According to the joint research of the computer magaine c't and the news portal onlinekosten.de, evidence indicates that the GVU went beyond the pale in their investigations against pirates. For a fairly long time, the editorial staffs had received leads from an informant close to the GVU that had been supported by a second source. According to this informant, the GVU is reported to have regularly paid at least one administrator of a central exchange server of the warez scene. It attained log files and with them access IP addresses of this "box" in this way. It is reported to additionally have contributed hardware to equip the platform.
The server stood in a Frankfurt data center and was called IOH in the scene. It was confiscated today by the police. In a press release regarding the raid, today the GVU themselves emphasized that precisely this server in addition to one other had served "for mass distibution of pirated copies on the Internet".
For months, multiple release groups copied pirated film copies from their own servers onto IOH via the File Exchange Protocol (FXP) in order to make them accessible for the purpose of faster distribution. From what are called flash servers such as IOH, the files also reach operators of pay servers, for example, where they can be downloaded for payment by consumers. Moreover, the servers act as a source for supplying file sharing services.
Alongside many pirates, the GVU is reported to have also had access to IOH. Consequently, the private investigators could have had a large interest in ensuring that the "honeypot" remained attractive via a good Internet connection and powerful hardware. If it should be the case that the GVU helped finance the instrastructure of the pirates, this would establish a suspicion of criminally relevant aid to the distribution of warez material.
The state attorney's office of Ellwangen is clearly entertaining precisely this suspicion. To all appearances, through the seizure today of files of the GVU it would like to glean whether the GVU actually used such questionable investigation methods. The state's attorneys will also have to resolve whether the GVU management and the members, primarily large corporations from the film and software industry, had knowledge of the supposed operations. The investigation results from c't and onlinekosten.de indicate that at least one member of the GVU management (which also once designated its organization as a "small BKA [Federal Criminal Police Office] for copyright infringements") was informed about the operations.
In a comment, today at midday the GVU merely acknowledged that "the GVU center in Hamburg was also investigated". It was assumed that "it was presumably for the purpose of verifying the information that the GVU had surrendered to the authorities". That surely does not explain why the state attorney's office of Ellwangen required a judicial search warrant for an organization that, according to its own representation, cooperates particularly closely and well with the investigative authorities. The GVU did not comply with a request for a response to the investigation results by c't.
In my mind, this raid on the Hamburg offices of the GVU is even more jaw-dropping than the MPAA copying one single movie and distributing it to employees. Here's my summary, I don't have time to hack out a full translation right now:
<summary>
The GVU (The German analog to the MPAA) had its Hamburg offices raided today after a criminal investigation into the German warez scene turned up at least one server and warez group being actively funded by the the GVU. The GVU paid the admin of the server (called "IOH", located in Frankfurt) for access to server logs, sort of as a "honeypot" setup. They were collecting information about warez distribution, but they additionally paid for hardware upgrades to the server as well. The investigation is trying to determine whether they also paid for the bandwidth and additional infrstructure for the server operation.
</summary>
I'm sorry, this takes astonishing gall. The article denotes this as a major, high-capacity warez server, which would mean it hosted and handled a huge amount of copyrighted material. It looks to me like a case where the GVU decided "we're the good guys, so we don't have to follow the laws." I can only hope some nice, schadenfreude-laden prosecution comes out of this.
Saw it this past Friday, it's an amazing movie. The direction and art design is by Dave McKean; his style is absolutely beautiful, but it might throw some people off. I loved it.
After the show a friend noted that it has a feel very similar to "The Neverending Story", and I think that's accurate.
I'm one of those people who rides a CTA bus to work every day, and I own an Archos Gmini 400 (one model revision older than the 402 shown here). Having the option to watch a show or two on the ride into or from work is a real joy; some days I don't have the mental capacity to read a novel prior to my cup of coffee, but I can still chuckle at a Simpsons episode or catch up on episodes of "Spooks".
Sargon already answered the first and third questions (yes, you can do continuous recording and it's user-definable; I think I have my buffer set to an hour).
As to the second, yes, by standby I mean sleep mode. As in, the computer is essentially shut down aside from a minimal voltage on the motherboard that allows you to bring it back up by hitting a keyboard combination (or however you have it set up) and voltage applied to the RAM so that it doesn't get erased. All fans are shut down, nothing is running, but the PVR can come back out of standby in about twenty or thirty seconds (and does so in order to grab any shows I have set up to record).
I really love this feature, since it means I don't have to leave the PVR on 24/7 and thereby waste electricity.
I run BeyondTV 3.7, and I have to say you're way off base here. The major setup is for Windows and the drivers for your video card, sound card and tuner card, and while those aren't as simple as just plugging in a set top box, they're really not all that difficult either.
The BeyondTV install is quite simple: you go through a quick and decently-designed series of questions and prompts, and then it works. No crashes, no weird messages, no screwing up a planned recording when you're out of the house. In fact, I leave my PVR in standby mode almost all the time; the computer will wake up, record a show, then put itself back into standby when a recording has finished, and it does it flawlessly every time.
For BeyondTV at least there is no administration beyond deciding what to delete if your hard drive starts to fill up. Even counting in the installation time for a clean copy of Windows and device drivers, you can easily have a home PVR up and running in a couple hours and never have to pay a subscription cost.
When I visited the Checkpoint Charlie Museum in Berlin, there was an exhibit on automatic sentry guns that East Germany put up on their side of the wall to prevent people from escaping into West Berlin. They were pulled after a public outcry when one attempting escapee was shot over fifty times by automatic guns but lived, essentially crippled for life. The rationale given for pulling the sentry guns was that it was more ethical to have a human marksman kill you in one or two shots than have an inaccurate machine riddle you with bullets but let you live a broken wreck.
I'm not sure how much RAM Azureus eats up on my system (never bothered to check), but I've run it for three days straight to get some larger files and never had it cause the problems you describe. And I only have a half-gigabyte of memory.
I have a Canon LiDE 30 that I picked up for work (scanning patent documents). It's light, quiet, cheap (cost me $70), relatively quick, and draws power over the USB connection so it uses only that one cable. I use it primarily for black-and-white and greyscale images, but it's done color very nicely as well.
I believe the current model in this line is the LiDE 35, but all of the above should apply.
Slashdot Mirror
The technical support forums for the game clearly show some people having sound issues on Linux, but I managed to get away clean.
For reference, I'm running Ubuntu 8.04 with PulseAudio on an AMD X2 using whatever integrated sound (Realtek, I think) is built into the motherboard. Sound works perfectly well, no stuttering, no lag.
Not going to disagree there. I would pay good money for a re-release with the Wii control scheme, similar to the Resident Evil 4 for the Wii.
It isn't necessarily the best game of the year (I'd give that to Portal), but it was such an astonishing shift in the way first-person games are played. The control interface is the first time the motion controls on the Wii have been absolutely perfect, the design is beautiful and varied and the gameplay is fluid and intuitive. I've never before encountered such a radical shift in my expectations of how an entire game genre should be played.
Check the first link in this post. It's the same handout I was given when I started PT, it gives a basic depiction of what you should be doing. I'm sure if you Google "wrist tendinitis exercises" you should be able to find more information. Don't overdo the exercises, either; you over-extend your wrists and its just going to set you back a few days again.
One more thing: I was told by the orthopedic surgeon and by the physical therapist to not rely on wrist braces. Use them only when necessary (i.e. when you're starting to feel pain), wear them for an hour and then see whether you can make do without them again. Wear them at night to sleep, but only for the first month. It was explained that you can become reliant on them to enforce the correct positioning of your arms and wrists. Then you may not keep up with exercises as much as you should because, with the braces on, the pain is decreased enough that it isn't an issue and you think you're doing all right.
This applies for tendinitis, I have no idea whether the same advice makes any sense if you have carpal tunnel damage.
I needed a fair amount of work to get back to my normal grip strength. For that, I was given therapy putty in lower grade (yellow) followed by a higher one (green). It's basically silly putty formulated in a specific way to provide different levels of resistance.
Once I was back to a normal grip strength, I started using a Powerball (you should be able to get them cheaper than that, mind you). I was told by the therapist that exercise with any decent set of free weights should provide the necessary workout and resistance, but the Powerball is a lot smaller and easier to travel with and can be used at the office (the noise is annoying, but not more so than some peoples' desk fans).
I really do recommend the physical therapy as well, though, because that included massage and heat treatment that made a huge difference at the beginning, and especially because you can make sure you're doing the exercises properly under professional supervision. Once I was back to having functional hands without pain, the therapy was done and I've continued on my own, doing the stretches and using the Powerball, for two years now without any relapses.
I would suggest that you had tendinitis and not carpal tunnel. I'm basing this on my own experience, since I developed tendinitis and was taught that the way to control it was through regular hand and forearm exercises. Rock climbing fits that bill perfectly, of course. Since carpal tunnel is nerve damage, I'm not aware that you can cure/quell it through exercise.
Get physical therapy now.
I'm completely serious. I had the same problem as you, diagnosed as tendinitis in the backs of my hands, and it made typing at a keyboard all day extremely painful. Physical therapy for two months, twice a week helped immensely and I learned a number of exercises that I can do at my desk that eliminate the pain entirely, if not all of the tension. I'll have to do the exercises for the rest of my life (or stop using my hands for a few straight months and let them rest and heal finally), but they're ten minutes a day and not hard. Physical therapy may be expensive if you can't get it covered under your health insurance/worker's comp, but it's a cost you have to pay now in order to not be suffering for the rest of your life. It's absolutely worth it.
Plus, for any of you who have gone to a general practitioner who was entirely clueless about RSI, go see an orthopedic surgeon. That was my GP's recommendation and it was spot on. The surgeon knew exactly what sort of damage might have been caused, knew how to check whether it was muscle/tendon damage or nerve damage, and was the one who referred me to the physical therapist. Your GP isn't necessarily clueless, but he or she is a generalist. A specialist will (hopefully) have a lot better understanding of the specific problems and possible solutions that RSI entails.
I was unaware of that revision to mention computer workers. Thanks for the information.
U.S. labor laws that govern overtime pay don't say anything about computers, but I do understand where you're coming from. The original overtime laws that were put into place differentiated between factory workers (unskilled labor) and management (skilled labor), basically, mandating overtime for the workers and "exempting" management from receiving overtime pay by law. The problem now, of course, is that far fewer people work in factories since we've shifted to a service economy, and many of us who aren't in management have roles, job responsibilities, training and education that now place us in the "exempt" category as well.
I have the interesting situation that I am exempt from overtime pay according to U.S. labor law but my employer chooses to pay me overtime wages anyway, on the grounds that it's the right thing to do and increases job satisfaction. It's like some sort of reverse-Dilbert cartoon here, I tell you.
Mine can't be the only company that chooses business practices that actively benefit workers beyond the legal minimums, but it's nice to see that other companies are publicly speaking out in support of working this way.
Sorry, that just isn't true in all cases. I know that some cable providers encrypt the digital cable feed, but it seems that there are a number that don't, as was discussed a few weeks ago: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/05/195225 1
In my case, I have a home-built PVR and digital cable (RCN Chicago). Works like a charm. The digital cable is unencrypted QAM, so I have an HDTV card (Kworld HD PCI-115) that supports QAM. No DRM, no encryption, works well. I was worried when RCN was pushing to go all-digital in my building, but it actually has been an improvement. I can record anything that comes over the line, burn it to DVD, compress down to watch on the commute, whatever I want. If you're worried about switching to digital cable or HD cable because you have a PVR and don't want to lose that functionality, check first to see whether your local cable provider is encrypting the stream. If not, you're good to go.
Manufacturer's website for an HDTV will usually say if it has a QAM tuner in addition to ATSC/NTSC. Vizio does this for their televisions, for instance, it's one of the reasons I went with them. Consumer Reports (consumerreports.org) will also say whether a television they're reviewing has a QAM tuner. QAM tuners are still not common, though, so your selection is somewhat limited.
That's when it chose to jump up and take a swipe at me. I screamed bloody murder and yanked the power cable from the back of my computer, turned on all the lights in the apartment and didn't turn the damn computer back on until the next day. For serious immersion in a game, Thief is amazing. Much, much more interesting than most of your regular first-person games. Like a lot of people here, I am a huge fan of Half-Life 2 and Ravenholm, though.
I just have to step in here. I'm pretty liberal, but I have a lot of respect for real conservatives. That means people who believe in smaller government, lower taxes, and less governmental interference in the private lives of citizens. The real conservatives I know are decent, intelligent people who just want to live quietly, work hard and build good lives for themselves.
The "social conservative" and "religious conservative" groups that have co-opted the term are practically anathema to the real meaning of the word and are destroying the Republican party, a party that used to garner some respect and due consideration. Nowadays the party is a bloated, corrupt sham of its former self that seems determined to drive itself into the ditch. Sadly, the Democratic Party isn't really any better, leaving a sour taste in my mouth whenever I vote. I realize it's currently hopeless, but we could really use some more major political parties in this country (Bull Moose Party!)
I'm a translator, so I'd lose access to online dictionaries and specialized technical sites that I use every day to make a living. I have friends on two other continents and I and my immediate family members travel all over the world a minimum of once a year. I send at least one e-mail to somewhere outside of the United States at least once a day, usually more. Furthermore, chopping up the Internet by country and/or region would hamper my ability to get new clients from outside my region.
If we lose the worldwide Internet, I'm stuck not being able to do my job as well and having much less contact with the people I care about. Segmenting the Internet (because of jingoistic idiocy or any other reason) is just not something I'm willing to consider or accept. Who on Earth would think it's a good idea?
eMusic does lack a lot of what plays on the radio, but I stopped regularly listening to the radio about five years ago when I decided it was too much trouble sitting through thirty minutes of terrible, over-played garbage while waiting for a song I liked. eMusic has a huge catalog of excellent Jazz, Cuban, Classic Rock, Indie Rock and Comedy, and it's cheaper by far than the other pay-per-file download services (the most you're going to pay is $0.25 US/track, it gets cheaper if you buy more per month).
Another nice thing about eMusic is that the music isn't just MP3, it's MP3 encoded at high variable bitrate (LAME 3.90, I believe, alt-preset-standard). It's pretty much the same setting I'll use for the CDs I buy myself.
And in the end, I have a music file that sounds good and that has no restrictions against copying to my notebook, MP3 player, a CD for playing in the car or anything else. That's worth a lot to me.
(Original article is at http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/68760)
GVU is reported to have sponsored piracy
Of all things, the Organization for Prosecuting Copyright Infringements (GVU) was targeted in the large search action against the piracy scene. The state attorney's office of Ellwangen suspects the private tracking organization of the film and software industry of having actively supported the distribution of what are called "warez". On Tuesday, investigators of the state Office of Criminal Investigation searched the Hamburg offices and the apartment of a high-ranking employee.
According to the joint research of the computer magaine c't and the news portal onlinekosten.de, evidence indicates that the GVU went beyond the pale in their investigations against pirates. For a fairly long time, the editorial staffs had received leads from an informant close to the GVU that had been supported by a second source. According to this informant, the GVU is reported to have regularly paid at least one administrator of a central exchange server of the warez scene. It attained log files and with them access IP addresses of this "box" in this way. It is reported to additionally have contributed hardware to equip the platform.
The server stood in a Frankfurt data center and was called IOH in the scene. It was confiscated today by the police. In a press release regarding the raid, today the GVU themselves emphasized that precisely this server in addition to one other had served "for mass distibution of pirated copies on the Internet".
For months, multiple release groups copied pirated film copies from their own servers onto IOH via the File Exchange Protocol (FXP) in order to make them accessible for the purpose of faster distribution. From what are called flash servers such as IOH, the files also reach operators of pay servers, for example, where they can be downloaded for payment by consumers. Moreover, the servers act as a source for supplying file sharing services.
Alongside many pirates, the GVU is reported to have also had access to IOH. Consequently, the private investigators could have had a large interest in ensuring that the "honeypot" remained attractive via a good Internet connection and powerful hardware. If it should be the case that the GVU helped finance the instrastructure of the pirates, this would establish a suspicion of criminally relevant aid to the distribution of warez material.
The state attorney's office of Ellwangen is clearly entertaining precisely this suspicion. To all appearances, through the seizure today of files of the GVU it would like to glean whether the GVU actually used such questionable investigation methods. The state's attorneys will also have to resolve whether the GVU management and the members, primarily large corporations from the film and software industry, had knowledge of the supposed operations. The investigation results from c't and onlinekosten.de indicate that at least one member of the GVU management (which also once designated its organization as a "small BKA [Federal Criminal Police Office] for copyright infringements") was informed about the operations.
In a comment, today at midday the GVU merely acknowledged that "the GVU center in Hamburg was also investigated". It was assumed that "it was presumably for the purpose of verifying the information that the GVU had surrendered to the authorities". That surely does not explain why the state attorney's office of Ellwangen required a judicial search warrant for an organization that, according to its own representation, cooperates particularly closely and well with the investigative authorities. The GVU did not comply with a request for a response to the investigation results by c't.
In my mind, this raid on the Hamburg offices of the GVU is even more jaw-dropping than the MPAA copying one single movie and distributing it to employees. Here's my summary, I don't have time to hack out a full translation right now:
<summary>
The GVU (The German analog to the MPAA) had its Hamburg offices raided today after a criminal investigation into the German warez scene turned up at least one server and warez group being actively funded by the the GVU. The GVU paid the admin of the server (called "IOH", located in Frankfurt) for access to server logs, sort of as a "honeypot" setup. They were collecting information about warez distribution, but they additionally paid for hardware upgrades to the server as well. The investigation is trying to determine whether they also paid for the bandwidth and additional infrstructure for the server operation.
</summary>
I'm sorry, this takes astonishing gall. The article denotes this as a major, high-capacity warez server, which would mean it hosted and handled a huge amount of copyrighted material. It looks to me like a case where the GVU decided "we're the good guys, so we don't have to follow the laws." I can only hope some nice, schadenfreude-laden prosecution comes out of this.
Saw it this past Friday, it's an amazing movie. The direction and art design is by Dave McKean; his style is absolutely beautiful, but it might throw some people off. I loved it.
After the show a friend noted that it has a feel very similar to "The Neverending Story", and I think that's accurate.
I'm one of those people who rides a CTA bus to work every day, and I own an Archos Gmini 400 (one model revision older than the 402 shown here). Having the option to watch a show or two on the ride into or from work is a real joy; some days I don't have the mental capacity to read a novel prior to my cup of coffee, but I can still chuckle at a Simpsons episode or catch up on episodes of "Spooks".
Sargon already answered the first and third questions (yes, you can do continuous recording and it's user-definable; I think I have my buffer set to an hour).
As to the second, yes, by standby I mean sleep mode. As in, the computer is essentially shut down aside from a minimal voltage on the motherboard that allows you to bring it back up by hitting a keyboard combination (or however you have it set up) and voltage applied to the RAM so that it doesn't get erased. All fans are shut down, nothing is running, but the PVR can come back out of standby in about twenty or thirty seconds (and does so in order to grab any shows I have set up to record).
I really love this feature, since it means I don't have to leave the PVR on 24/7 and thereby waste electricity.
I run BeyondTV 3.7, and I have to say you're way off base here. The major setup is for Windows and the drivers for your video card, sound card and tuner card, and while those aren't as simple as just plugging in a set top box, they're really not all that difficult either.
The BeyondTV install is quite simple: you go through a quick and decently-designed series of questions and prompts, and then it works. No crashes, no weird messages, no screwing up a planned recording when you're out of the house. In fact, I leave my PVR in standby mode almost all the time; the computer will wake up, record a show, then put itself back into standby when a recording has finished, and it does it flawlessly every time.
For BeyondTV at least there is no administration beyond deciding what to delete if your hard drive starts to fill up. Even counting in the installation time for a clean copy of Windows and device drivers, you can easily have a home PVR up and running in a couple hours and never have to pay a subscription cost.
When I visited the Checkpoint Charlie Museum in Berlin, there was an exhibit on automatic sentry guns that East Germany put up on their side of the wall to prevent people from escaping into West Berlin. They were pulled after a public outcry when one attempting escapee was shot over fifty times by automatic guns but lived, essentially crippled for life. The rationale given for pulling the sentry guns was that it was more ethical to have a human marksman kill you in one or two shots than have an inaccurate machine riddle you with bullets but let you live a broken wreck.
I'm not sure how much RAM Azureus eats up on my system (never bothered to check), but I've run it for three days straight to get some larger files and never had it cause the problems you describe. And I only have a half-gigabyte of memory.
I have a Canon LiDE 30 that I picked up for work (scanning patent documents). It's light, quiet, cheap (cost me $70), relatively quick, and draws power over the USB connection so it uses only that one cable. I use it primarily for black-and-white and greyscale images, but it's done color very nicely as well.
I believe the current model in this line is the LiDE 35, but all of the above should apply.