Also, VHF is not going away (some DTV stations will still be using VHF). Only the top part of the UHF band will no longer be available for TV stations.
As a matter of fact, in the New York area, all three of ABC, TheWB, and PBS (VHF 7, 11, and 13 respectively) are moving their digital broadcasts to those VHF frequencies when the cut over occurs. PBS actually has to change as their current DTV broadcast is on 61 which is in the band being sold.
So yea...VHF will be very much alive...unfortunately for everyone who got scammed into buying those over-priced "HDTV Antennas" that are UHF only.
Using an inflammatory and inflated claim that "95% of all downloads are pirated" is just showing how greedy the music industry is. But we all knew that already.
...and if the claim is in fact true, the industry needs to stop spending the billions it must cost to monitor the entire internet 24/7 and use it to find some real talent.
I don't understand why manufacturer's keep insisting on writing the apps for Windows or DOS, with the growing trend to use these drives in other systems.
One company I worked for bought 80 Dells and installed Linux on them, only to find that the OEM CDR drives had a serious firmware problem and needed to be upgraded. The updates on the Dell site were intended to be run from Windows. We managed to find an update that could be run from a DOS floppy and that worked out. It was just dumb luck that we ordered machines with floppy drives or we would have had to try flashing the CD we were booting from...good luck with that...jeez.
What kills me are all those system BIOS upgrades that actually run from within Windows...jeez...Isn't that a little like changing your oil while driving the car??
When are these "experts" going to make up their freaking mind?!
In this case it seems they have for quite some time, and it's more the general public that still seems to think it's bad for you. From what I've seen, the consensus about coffee in the medical community is this: Within the limits (your own personal limits) of consumption that don't cause you to have bad side affects (digestive, insomnia, whatever), the more the better...period. While stuff like the affect on Alzheimer's may be theoretical, coffee is without question one of the best sources of antioxidants you'll find, and I've heard absolutely no evidence of any long term dangers of any degree of coffee consumption. Many (if not most) doctors these days won't even tell you not to drink more that x cups a day unless more than x cups a day causes problems for you...so even the usual "it's ok in moderation" thing doesn't necessarily apply.
Much like the belief that cold weather or "getting a chill" causes the common cold, I think it's more the general public that doesn't get it on this one.
I don't mind boot time so much - what really gets on my nerves is when a machine comes on, pretends it's ready but is then maybe five minutes doing other stuff before you can actually use it while you stare at the screen and frustratedly try to click on things. That's especially bad in the roaming profile scenario you mentioned.
That's been one of my #1 annoyances about Windows for some time now. I primarily use Gentoo with a really lean fluxbox desktop which of course doesn't suffer from that. However even with heavier environments like KDE/Gnome the fact remains that with Linux, the desktop starts last and is generally ready to use when you see it.
I recently bought a notebook running XP for development and that stuff drives me nuts. There have been times that I thought it was all ready and attempted to navigate the programs menu with the keyboard only to have the focus stolen by something and the menu vanish....two or three things like that and you're about ready to throw it under a bus.
I don't know if it's still true, but I remember at a previous job seeing situations where Win 2k would let you do things that actually wouldn't work correctly because, for example, networking hadn't properly started yet. That goes beyond annoying to plain old bad design.
I've always felt this was a poor attempt to make it appear that the OS was booting faster than it really is...just awful.
It's funny, actually, but the Linux version of RealPlayer is not loaded with garbage. It just looks like a vanilla video player. It is not at all like the Windows version.
I've always figured they simply didn't have the manpower to spam-bloat the Linux version;).
In any case...whenever I think of the the Linux version of realplayer I'm reminded of a version upgrade (don't recall which one) when they chose to obsolete the one codec that amazon.com was using for song samples. At the time that was the only thing I needed it for...brilliant.
Thanks so much for those links! I'm listening to them now. I've been hoping to find something that explains this mess better. On mainstream commercial news I've yet to even hear the term Credit Default Swap.
Good Lord...NINA loans...no income no assets. Reminds me of the old Henny Youngman joke:
"Can I borrow $20 until payday?"
"It depends...when's payday?"
"How should I know? You're the one who's working.":D
I would love this kind of solution if IR blasters were 100% reliable. But they occasionally fail to change channels properly, resulting in missed shows. One year, I missed an important playoff game and that was the last time I used an IR blaster setup -- I changed TV providers to one that used integrated TiVo receivers.
As an OTA only user of mythtv, I've never had the pleasure of working with IR blasters;). In the past when I've commented on the stuff people put up with from their cable companies I've been flamed for calling IR blasters a kludge.
Seriously...a computer changing channels for you with a pseudo-remote???...to be more kludged requires squirrels and treadmills.
MythTV is great if you like to fiddle with your DVR hardware instead of actually WATCHING the television.
Not sure I follow you. While I regularly update by gentoo frontend/backend machine (just because I do that with all my systems) I could just as well do nothing but watch it if I wanted. I have cron processes that do stuff like log rotating etc and, if left alone, I'm sure it would run flawlessly for years barring any hardware failure. It's certainly as user friendly as anything I could buy.
Not to mention I have 3 ATSC tuners and a TB of disk...where could I buy that for any price? The only possible advantage I could imagine in something commercial would be the handling of encrypted stuff (via a cablecard for example)...but all that anti-consumer crap is off the radar for me...I'm only using OTA DTV.
Not to mention the assumtion that commercial DVRs don't have bugs as well...the difference being that you often can't do jack about them.
Sure, not just anybody is going to build a system like that, I don't get the "people need to stop mentioning mythtv" comment when it's so totally ideal for some...it sure is in my case.
In terms of the number of channels you may be correct, though in my area I'm not loosing anything I ever watched.
In terms of reception I've seen the exact opposite however. The reliability of tuning for digital broadcasts has been way more reliable that I ever got with analog....not to mention getting HD.
Having said that, the whole selling off of frequencies that were essentially used by the public is something I've always questioned.
My only experience with Firefox 3 is on the new XP machine I just built for doing development. I installed Firefox 3 only because that was the default for Windows on the download site. I'm still running 2.0.0.16 on all my Linux machines.
After two failed attempts to send a zip file to a fellow developer using the Horde webmail on my website, I discovered that Firefox 3 was apparently dropping about 30 bytes from the zip file every time when I uploaded the file. Downgrading to Firefox 2.0.0.16 corrected this.
My gut tells me that it's very unlikely that this is a bug in Horde. I mean the multi-part mime spec used for file uploads just hasn't changed in forever. Anyone else run into that?
Important note!...I don't know where the original poster is (or if they're even in the U.S.), but in many areas, as of the 2/2009 switch to all digital many DTV stations are moving from their current UHF frequencies to the VHF frequency where they now have their analog broadcast. In the New York area this is true for ABC, TheWB, and PBS, whose DTV broadcasts will be moved to 7, 11, and 13 respectively. I don't believe this is true for any VHF frequencies lower below channel 7.
...not that that stopped a slew of companies from screwing the public by marketing over-prices UHF-only antennas as "HDTV" antennas.
Does anyone watch the output of their MythTV on anything other than their computer screen? Every time I look at MythTV, a solution for getting the video onto a TV set-- in either SD or HD is a completely unsolved, undocumented and glossed over issue. When someone solves that problem, MythTV may finally not really be a myth.
Getting DVI output from an nVidia card to work with an HD TV isn't too difficult at all. Mine is hooked up to my 52" RP CRT (a Hitachi 51F500). About the only caveat is that, with a native 1080i display like mine, you still have to enable de-interlacing as the nVidia Linux drivers simply don't handle output of 1080i content to a native 1080i display without tearing and motion blur (unless you de-interlace the content). It appears that, rather than fix this or even admit there's a bug, nVidia has chosen to wait for the day when there are no interlcaed displays left.
Aside from that one annoyance, mythtv is quite east to get working with HD TVs.
I truly wish MythTV were practical (I hate DRM and the hassles of moving video from one form to another as much as anyone). But with an increasingly hostile cable companies (that want to lock you into THEIR DVR's), I don't think it is or will be again. It's hard enough to even get a Tivo to work on most cable systems today (with cablecards being wonky and Tivo still not able to do SDV), much less a DIY DVR.
MythTV is only irrelevant to the extent that consumers choose to bend over and accept all the blatantly anti consumer practices of pay TV. I record all free OTA on my MythTV system in absolutely stunning HD (including the Olympics sans commercials...very cool) and from where I sit it's far from irrelevant.
One of the reasons I've avoided Verified by Visa is that the way they implement the "authentication" page it's impossible for the customer to tell whether they're entering their password into the Visa site or some random black-hat site.
Are you saying that they actually implemented it in a way where you can't clearly see an address bar??? That's simply beyond belief! That's the first thing anyone with any knowledge of phishing looks for. I'm using a Mastercard...I hope they don't start this crap...jeez.
It may have been the most ridiculously stupid comment ever, but it definitely had the effect of making the issue partisan.
I've often wondered if that comment was an intentional move to ensure that all future criticisms if his company a) immediately get branded as partisan bickering, and b) not be interpreted by the general public as valid complaints about a company that seriously doesn't know what they're doing. If so, from what I've seen, it's worked brilliantly.
Had they used the word tone, it probably would have been the layman's definition, which typically means "visible muscle definition due to low body fat."
It kills me when I hear people say "I don't want to put on muscle mass, I just want tone", or "I just want definition" when both terms are just misnomers for more muscle and less fat. It seems virtually nobody I talk to understands this.
The answer to weight lifting vs cardio is to do both.
Absolutely...they're both important. I row on an indoor rowing machine (a Concept II...can't recommend it enough) three times a week for 20 minutes (a pretty rough 20 minutes usually covering about 2.8 miles) and lift weights extensively two to three times a week.
I read that the average male, between the ages of 50 and 70 looses a full third of their muscle mass. You can prevent that with enough weight training. I'm 54 and have about 10% body fat and am still gaining muscle mass (though somewhat slowly).
So yes...they're both important, and the weight training gets more important with age.
-- until I pointed out to him that it was a 4:3 show that the TV was stretching to 16:9. He never would have known if I hadn't told him.
The vast majority of people moving to wide screen TVs do the exact same thing and see nothing wrong with it...I see it all the time and it simply boggles my mind. There are also many who know they're doing this but don't care...why not buy a $3000 TV only to intentionally distort the picture in the worst possible way....amazing.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, VHF is not going away (some DTV stations will still be using VHF). Only the top part of the UHF band will no longer be available for TV stations.
As a matter of fact, in the New York area, all three of ABC, TheWB, and PBS (VHF 7, 11, and 13 respectively) are moving their digital broadcasts to those VHF frequencies when the cut over occurs. PBS actually has to change as their current DTV broadcast is on 61 which is in the band being sold.
So yea...VHF will be very much alive...unfortunately for everyone who got scammed into buying those over-priced "HDTV Antennas" that are UHF only.
Thanks for the links. This was quite some time ago, but the usb key might have been an option.
My point about booting from the CD was that the CD was in fact the device we needed to flash...somehow that doesn't sound safe.
Using an inflammatory and inflated claim that "95% of all downloads are pirated" is just showing how greedy the music industry is. But we all knew that already.
...and if the claim is in fact true, the industry needs to stop spending the billions it must cost to monitor the entire internet 24/7 and use it to find some real talent.
I don't understand why manufacturer's keep insisting on writing the apps for Windows or DOS, with the growing trend to use these drives in other systems.
One company I worked for bought 80 Dells and installed Linux on them, only to find that the OEM CDR drives had a serious firmware problem and needed to be upgraded. The updates on the Dell site were intended to be run from Windows. We managed to find an update that could be run from a DOS floppy and that worked out. It was just dumb luck that we ordered machines with floppy drives or we would have had to try flashing the CD we were booting from...good luck with that...jeez.
What kills me are all those system BIOS upgrades that actually run from within Windows...jeez...Isn't that a little like changing your oil while driving the car??
When are these "experts" going to make up their freaking mind?!
In this case it seems they have for quite some time, and it's more the general public that still seems to think it's bad for you. From what I've seen, the consensus about coffee in the medical community is this: Within the limits (your own personal limits) of consumption that don't cause you to have bad side affects (digestive, insomnia, whatever), the more the better...period. While stuff like the affect on Alzheimer's may be theoretical, coffee is without question one of the best sources of antioxidants you'll find, and I've heard absolutely no evidence of any long term dangers of any degree of coffee consumption. Many (if not most) doctors these days won't even tell you not to drink more that x cups a day unless more than x cups a day causes problems for you...so even the usual "it's ok in moderation" thing doesn't necessarily apply.
Much like the belief that cold weather or "getting a chill" causes the common cold, I think it's more the general public that doesn't get it on this one.
I don't mind boot time so much - what really gets on my nerves is when a machine comes on, pretends it's ready but is then maybe five minutes doing other stuff before you can actually use it while you stare at the screen and frustratedly try to click on things. That's especially bad in the roaming profile scenario you mentioned.
That's been one of my #1 annoyances about Windows for some time now. I primarily use Gentoo with a really lean fluxbox desktop which of course doesn't suffer from that. However even with heavier environments like KDE/Gnome the fact remains that with Linux, the desktop starts last and is generally ready to use when you see it.
I recently bought a notebook running XP for development and that stuff drives me nuts. There have been times that I thought it was all ready and attempted to navigate the programs menu with the keyboard only to have the focus stolen by something and the menu vanish....two or three things like that and you're about ready to throw it under a bus.
I don't know if it's still true, but I remember at a previous job seeing situations where Win 2k would let you do things that actually wouldn't work correctly because, for example, networking hadn't properly started yet. That goes beyond annoying to plain old bad design.
I've always felt this was a poor attempt to make it appear that the OS was booting faster than it really is...just awful.
Oprah also gave away a Kindle to everyone in her audience on Friday, which oddly enough, caused one woman in the crowd to tear up.
Actually the person next to her explained the concept of DRM during the commercial.
You're confusing it with Google's soon to be released Trol Debates ©
It's funny, actually, but the Linux version of RealPlayer is not loaded with garbage. It just looks like a vanilla video player. It is not at all like the Windows version.
I've always figured they simply didn't have the manpower to spam-bloat the Linux version ;).
In any case...whenever I think of the the Linux version of realplayer I'm reminded of a version upgrade (don't recall which one) when they chose to obsolete the one codec that amazon.com was using for song samples. At the time that was the only thing I needed it for...brilliant.
Thanks so much for those links! I'm listening to them now. I've been hoping to find something that explains this mess better. On mainstream commercial news I've yet to even hear the term Credit Default Swap.
Good Lord...NINA loans...no income no assets. Reminds me of the old Henny Youngman joke:
"Can I borrow $20 until payday?"
"It depends...when's payday?"
"How should I know? You're the one who's working." :D
I would love this kind of solution if IR blasters were 100% reliable. But they occasionally fail to change channels properly, resulting in missed shows. One year, I missed an important playoff game and that was the last time I used an IR blaster setup -- I changed TV providers to one that used integrated TiVo receivers.
As an OTA only user of mythtv, I've never had the pleasure of working with IR blasters ;). In the past when I've commented on the stuff people put up with from their cable companies I've been flamed for calling IR blasters a kludge.
Seriously...a computer changing channels for you with a pseudo-remote???...to be more kludged requires squirrels and treadmills.
MythTV is great if you like to fiddle with your DVR hardware instead of actually WATCHING the television.
Not sure I follow you. While I regularly update by gentoo frontend/backend machine (just because I do that with all my systems) I could just as well do nothing but watch it if I wanted. I have cron processes that do stuff like log rotating etc and, if left alone, I'm sure it would run flawlessly for years barring any hardware failure. It's certainly as user friendly as anything I could buy.
Not to mention I have 3 ATSC tuners and a TB of disk...where could I buy that for any price? The only possible advantage I could imagine in something commercial would be the handling of encrypted stuff (via a cablecard for example)...but all that anti-consumer crap is off the radar for me...I'm only using OTA DTV.
Not to mention the assumtion that commercial DVRs don't have bugs as well...the difference being that you often can't do jack about them.
Sure, not just anybody is going to build a system like that, I don't get the "people need to stop mentioning mythtv" comment when it's so totally ideal for some...it sure is in my case.
In terms of the number of channels you may be correct, though in my area I'm not loosing anything I ever watched.
In terms of reception I've seen the exact opposite however. The reliability of tuning for digital broadcasts has been way more reliable that I ever got with analog....not to mention getting HD.
Having said that, the whole selling off of frequencies that were essentially used by the public is something I've always questioned.
My only experience with Firefox 3 is on the new XP machine I just built for doing development. I installed Firefox 3 only because that was the default for Windows on the download site. I'm still running 2.0.0.16 on all my Linux machines.
After two failed attempts to send a zip file to a fellow developer using the Horde webmail on my website, I discovered that Firefox 3 was apparently dropping about 30 bytes from the zip file every time when I uploaded the file. Downgrading to Firefox 2.0.0.16 corrected this.
My gut tells me that it's very unlikely that this is a bug in Horde. I mean the multi-part mime spec used for file uploads just hasn't changed in forever. Anyone else run into that?
Important note!...I don't know where the original poster is (or if they're even in the U.S.), but in many areas, as of the 2/2009 switch to all digital many DTV stations are moving from their current UHF frequencies to the VHF frequency where they now have their analog broadcast. In the New York area this is true for ABC, TheWB, and PBS, whose DTV broadcasts will be moved to 7, 11, and 13 respectively. I don't believe this is true for any VHF frequencies lower below channel 7.
...not that that stopped a slew of companies from screwing the public by marketing over-prices UHF-only antennas as "HDTV" antennas.
Does anyone watch the output of their MythTV on anything other than their computer screen? Every time I look at MythTV, a solution for getting the video onto a TV set-- in either SD or HD is a completely unsolved, undocumented and glossed over issue. When someone solves that problem, MythTV may finally not really be a myth.
Getting DVI output from an nVidia card to work with an HD TV isn't too difficult at all. Mine is hooked up to my 52" RP CRT (a Hitachi 51F500). About the only caveat is that, with a native 1080i display like mine, you still have to enable de-interlacing as the nVidia Linux drivers simply don't handle output of 1080i content to a native 1080i display without tearing and motion blur (unless you de-interlace the content). It appears that, rather than fix this or even admit there's a bug, nVidia has chosen to wait for the day when there are no interlcaed displays left.
Aside from that one annoyance, mythtv is quite east to get working with HD TVs.
I truly wish MythTV were practical (I hate DRM and the hassles of moving video from one form to another as much as anyone). But with an increasingly hostile cable companies (that want to lock you into THEIR DVR's), I don't think it is or will be again. It's hard enough to even get a Tivo to work on most cable systems today (with cablecards being wonky and Tivo still not able to do SDV), much less a DIY DVR.
MythTV is only irrelevant to the extent that consumers choose to bend over and accept all the blatantly anti consumer practices of pay TV. I record all free OTA on my MythTV system in absolutely stunning HD (including the Olympics sans commercials...very cool) and from where I sit it's far from irrelevant.
One of the reasons I've avoided Verified by Visa is that the way they implement the "authentication" page it's impossible for the customer to tell whether they're entering their password into the Visa site or some random black-hat site.
Are you saying that they actually implemented it in a way where you can't clearly see an address bar??? That's simply beyond belief! That's the first thing anyone with any knowledge of phishing looks for. I'm using a Mastercard...I hope they don't start this crap...jeez.
It may have been the most ridiculously stupid comment ever, but it definitely had the effect of making the issue partisan.
I've often wondered if that comment was an intentional move to ensure that all future criticisms if his company a) immediately get branded as partisan bickering, and b) not be interpreted by the general public as valid complaints about a company that seriously doesn't know what they're doing. If so, from what I've seen, it's worked brilliantly.
Had they used the word tone, it probably would have been the layman's definition, which typically means "visible muscle definition due to low body fat."
It kills me when I hear people say "I don't want to put on muscle mass, I just want tone", or "I just want definition" when both terms are just misnomers for more muscle and less fat. It seems virtually nobody I talk to understands this.
The answer to weight lifting vs cardio is to do both.
Absolutely...they're both important. I row on an indoor rowing machine (a Concept II...can't recommend it enough) three times a week for 20 minutes (a pretty rough 20 minutes usually covering about 2.8 miles) and lift weights extensively two to three times a week.
I read that the average male, between the ages of 50 and 70 looses a full third of their muscle mass. You can prevent that with enough weight training. I'm 54 and have about 10% body fat and am still gaining muscle mass (though somewhat slowly).
So yes...they're both important, and the weight training gets more important with age.
-- until I pointed out to him that it was a 4:3 show that the TV was stretching to 16:9. He never would have known if I hadn't told him.
The vast majority of people moving to wide screen TVs do the exact same thing and see nothing wrong with it...I see it all the time and it simply boggles my mind. There are also many who know they're doing this but don't care...why not buy a $3000 TV only to intentionally distort the picture in the worst possible way....amazing.
Really...Try telling your spouse that you have to take her/his computer to a "private investigator" to get it "fixed"...outside of Texas anyway.
Wannabe internet
Really. You can get 56 kilobits-per-second at home now.
That's "up to" 56 kilobits-per-second.
I think the Dover, PA case is probably (hopefully) a pretty good preview of what they're in for.