Run Windows Media center (Win7) on a Fit2PC (it has an HDMI output and a bay for a 2.5 inch drive) pair it with a Silicon Dust HDHomeRun network cable tuner.
Or
Run a EyeTV on a Mac Mini with a Silicon Dust HDHomeRun network cable tuner and pair that combo with an AppleTV
The first option using WMC is much easier and costs less, EyeTV requires a Channel listing subscription.
Personally I'm still experimenting, but WMC makes a lot of sense and its well established, plus the channel listing subscription is free.
Rumor has it Microsoft will be coming out with a split personality XBox offering, with a high end Xbox for media and gaming, and a low end Xbox offering called xTV to compete with AppleTV - but that's strictly rumor.
I'd recommend a return to the Pre-Apollo Era Space SciFi when Chesley Bonstel was popular - http://www.amazon.com/Battle-Mercury-Winston-Science-Fiction/dp/B000OP9M4Q/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1340228543&sr=8-1&keywords=battle+on+mercury
At a pre-teen I really enjoyed the stories that seemed to resonate with the movies like the Day the Earth Stood Still - but went much much further.
"Battle on Mercury" has space travel, robots, alien life forms and just a ton of stuff in a nice sized book.
"The Windows of Forever" was a nice story in which the main character discovers wormholes all around them just outside the corner of your eye to the past or the future. A boy learns how to detect them and ends up helping future colonists battling alien invaders on a distant future earth.
"They Might be Gods or Demons" is another light scifi story in which the travelers track down ancient astronauts bent on conquering the earth but who run afoul of a group of students who discover time travel and foil their plans tens of thousands of years ago, unable to time travel the ancient astronauts threaten to find them whenever they go. A "grown up" Back to the Future story.
"Son of the Stars" a trilogy in which a young man discovers a crashed spaceship and helps a humonoid alien learn about earth, launch a rescue beacon and then is invited to visit the federation of worlds - only to find out Earth was under observation the whole time, and it was all a test to find out if Earth was worthy to take its seat in the governing body of this area of the galaxy.
"Marooned on Mars" an escape mission to return to Earth from Mars, but the dead do not reast easy on Mars, and these dead wiped out all life on multiple planets long ago and Earth is next. (maybe a bit too intense for a young child).
I wouldn't worry too much about the language barrier, if he's interested in SciFi he'll learn to sustitute what he knows for what he doesn't and reconcile later. It's what kids do to keep from going bonkers over anxiety worrying about details.
1950 and 1960's scifi for the most part should be relatively safe and mostly gloss over the ideas and concepts people find too difficult.
Stephen Baxter is a great writer and his TimeShips spanned what seemed like one dimension of the Universe, from now to the End of time.
In a similar way I thought Sliders was on the cusp of charting space and time but in the sideways sense of possibilties.
It would have been cool to explore the limits of habitable Earths and maybe even have gone extraterrestrial. It always seemed artificial for them to arrive only on Earths with a population, and never explain that. There were rules like they would not time travel on the show and that felt artificial too.. in a lot of ways.. all the limiting rules storylines seemed its undoing. It became believe it or not more comedy and then theatrical tragedy. It was an exterme, focusing too much on individuals and then a single individual, until that individual left.. and then they jumped the shark for sure.. it could have easily opened up and passed the batton or went oribus and explained how a single individual got so lucky.. and felt very satisfying.. even leaving open the franchise to others.. remember the Quinn that tossed him a fully functional timer? One that actually worked?
As it is Sliders will have to be re-imagined one day.
I just hope like Stephen Baxter they think larger and less limiting.. they hinted at coordinates and ways of navigating the ethereal plains of existence.. and that others out there might be doing the same.. "Slide like an Egyptian" hinted at that tongue in cheek.
What I had against the Kromags was the overt beating over the head with the idea that Neaderthals or some evolved Nazi's could go maurading and conquering alternate worlds.. as if mere resources or emotion were good enough to justify why they were pursuing it. I rather liked the individual idea of exploration and curiousity (like the original HG Wells time traveler) was more likely and interesting.. coming across say one or two civilizations who thought pandimensional travel was interesting.. was okay.. but making it a focal point of storyline was hard to relate to.. (it would be like making star travel common place).
Rather it would have been nicer if they got themselves into serious trouble and the mysterious Quinn with the working timer reappeared with some answers but not all.. and they discovered they were being sponsored by a different civilization.. or one totally outside our experience..like the ones from Contact.. for their own reasons that probably would have nothing to do with us.. somethings we simply will never know.
In a lot of ways it was the American Doctor Who saga rather junior style.. as if it were Doctor Who "the early years".. keeping it grounded in hard science would have been a challenge bit fun.. and if they lifted the ban on time travel, even if only the rate of time on different worlds allowed limited travel they could have explored things that left the planet, or warming of the earth, or space and star travel.
Handing off the technology to different travelers would have been rather like the Doctor changing faces every few seasons, with only the mysterious sponsors or Quinn with the Cheshire cat grin left to maintain continuity.
There was once a "can't loose, this time its different, the world has changed" event called the Holland Bulb bubble.
It ended poorly for them, patents and copyrights will end poorly for the world.
In the final analysis to criminalize thinking destablizes or distorts perceptions of reality.
Only two outcomes from attempting to distort reality:
A. Rude awakening, you find yourself in a world in which the fiction is someday ignored, or B... well historically there have been no alternatives.
Probability is the majority of the world already ignores patents, and the internet and the documentation will distribute and drive a subculture of innovation. They have become a "right to sue" federal grant and have nothing to do with their original intended purpose in a small out of the way country isolated from the rest of the world at the end of the 18th Century. They are a kind of proxy for a world government when they cross license and attempt to set up similar federal grants in foreign countries.. they become the Universal Euro. They are the ultimate credit swap derivative. And I think we have a lot of recent experience with those.
I think it is unlikely anyone will unwind this credit default swap, the odds are stacked against it. Civilization will get on with the business of business and life. Investors in companies that inflate their values with patent and copyright portfolios will experience rapid deflation or uncertainty then lose a lot of real money.
XP (like many operating systems) is (a) an installer (b) a boot loader (c) a device detection and driver loading system (d) a gui file management systems (c) a socket based network system, and a collection of well know precompiled libraries
It fits nicely in a virtual machine and can boot off a cdrom iso image direct into memory
Its evolved over the years into a tool or a widget, its odd that over years there has been more and better documentation written and indexed about it on the web than by its parent vendor.
If you trim off the legacy subsystems or let them plug into a virtual machine, like KVM it becomes less dependent on hardware and more stable.
Consider Windows 7 and Windows 8 merely the latest "Hypervisor" from Microsoft and be done with it.
If you need XP for the GUI to support legacy staff, then use the Windows 8 metro tiles to launch an XP desktop (ditto for Win 7).
XP is becoming more like Unix "X" in that its becoming a "window manager" with a complement of features, its more the job of the hypervisor to secure its communciations. That's the best explaination I can come up with for Snofsky's Microsoft abandoning selling "eXPerience" for function.
Standard is 720p with omnidirectional sound, about 3-4 hour recording time on a single charge, the memory cards can hold up to 8 hours.
But it can shoot 1080p and it is not advertised as Low Light, but works very good in low light.
The camera settings can be configured by manipulating a text file on the memory card that it reads on start up.
The native recording format is H.264 MOV files, so all the compression is done up front.
The ContourROAM camera I have has a standard 1/4 inch-20 UNC screw mount point on the bottom so send a little table top tripod along with it.
It's basically fool proof even though it doesn't have a view finder, just aim and shoot. It has a single slider switch for On and Off.
So if you recorded the interview with one of these and conducted Q&A over the web with a web client, you'd get the best of both world, extremely high quality, hi-res interviews with low noise and a wide angle lens. But still be able to conduct the interview in a conversational manner.
The fact that sound is recorded along with the video could be plus and minus, it could be a primary source, or a backup source, or a sync source to couple with the web audio and video.
Like Time Travel, playing "What If?" is fun to a point.
Of course we live in the only alternative time line we know is possible.
But I'll play.
In the 70s all the rage was speculation on power generation plants to solve the oil crisis.
In the 00s all the rage has been sun-brellas to deflect sunlight from the poles to reduce global warning.
Combine the two and in a history where the shuttle program didn't get going and we might have satellite power generation stations in the 80s and the conversion of those into satellite solar shields in the 90s. Instead the money went to boosters that bootstrapped the solar power generation industry. Then NASA was spun off as a quasi commercial business and ran a space shuttle program in the 00s. Later generations might be looking at passive solar sails to explore the near earth objects for building materials, and using sails in some kind of paper scissors rock game of wrapping dangerous near earth objects and deflecting them further out into space, or bringing them into approved manufacturing plant corridors in earth orbit.
And the headline should be.. IF your running Safari on Win7-64 Bit.. how many people "really" do that? Hands? Okay.. now how many run Chrome instead of IE? Hands?
If you took a ball of Iron the size of say planet Earth, and it were to plunge into the heart of the Sun. What would be the result.. a Nova, SuperNova.. fizzle.
And what if it were slightly off target and merely circled the center for a while.. would it retain its shape or spinout into a smeared ball of plasma.. undoing the star? Something somewhat like this probably already happened.. the Lithium content of our star for example.. guess it just wasn't significant emough.
Funny side thought.. what if "Looking for Intelligent Life" is the real problem.. and our only hope of finding alien life is finding the altruistic, benevolent or "not so smart" type. Which rather than abundant might be somewhat harder to find.
Look at it this way, a bacterium could be "intelligent" but might focus all that intellect on healthy self interests and getting on with its own life.. rather than expending enormous resources to speculate and think up ways of sending messages to other star systems that could never be answered in its life time.
On the otherhand a fairly "not so smart" bacterium with abundant resources might splurge on all sorts of unlikely projects in its lifetime, only to end up extinct.. but we might actually detect one of its messages.
Glass is half Full or Glass if half Empty.. by the Third law of Thermodynamics.. it always seems to be running a bit low. Optimism aside it might take a fortunate alien civilization to have the surplus of resources to contemplate sending text messages to the stars.
Perhaps it explains why intelligent life hasn't been detected in the Universe. First they develop Telnet then they come to their senses and develop SSH - a bit in line with Stephen Hawking's idea that the recipients of an encounter with an alien civilization might wish they weren't... and would do better to actively "hide" or make their communications hard to decode.
Quantum entanglement also brings to mind, if it can be done in a laboratory, shouldn't it be possible in nature. And if that is so perhaps there are bits of quantum entangled matter all over the Cosmos. Perhaps it is so common that's it rarer to find matter that isn't quantum entangled nearby. Wouldn't it be cool to work out the approximate location of a bit of quantum entangled matter a long ways away and use it for communications.. like a wormhole.. only not a wormhole. The best delivery agent I could think of on a very large scale would be the jet firing out of black hole, neutron star, or some other stellar event. But its all pure science fiction speculation right now.. hmm a Quantum "telescope".
Perhaps it won't be long before its known for certain. Jobs had his DNA sequenced and structural differences as they relate to DNA sequencing is becoming possible just now. It will depend upon the wishes of his family whether its ever known. Rather like Einstein he may continue to surprise and inform us for years.
If you need to explain why you were hacked with a common exploit that's been in the wild.. say 12 hours after Defcon.. you need real support, even if it appears passive and monitors your vulnerability and sends you a little reminder to "patch". One of the realy nice things about Red Hat Network is it "proactively" monitors the status of your machines and "suggests" patching for specific vulnerabilities by CVE.
I can't imagine "anyone" with experience suggesting such a thing.
CentOS is great.. and has stated goals.. but no one is paid on the CentOS project to create patches and update systems using CentOS.. its best effort only. At times its only porting of a patch released by Red Hat with no testing. And it almost always, by definition "lags" behind RHEL. CentOS does not port forward, patches originate upstream and port downstream.
While some third party software that you buy will state "should work with CentOS" that rarely extends to "supported" since they would be on the hook to support the OS as well.. or defend their position its an incompatibility with CentOS.
The more binary capability you need the worse the situation gets, for example with Tape Libraries and Backup Software, Antivirus software, SarBox software.
You might get away with it for a very short time, but as the subrelease numbers increase the differences begin to appear.
The most sensitive point is CentOS cannot be recomplied to be identical to RHEL, they have to use different kernels and or compilers since they only have access to source.. so its not a true clone. It strives to be that, but its still not the real thing. And with recent changes in packaging greater differences are going to appear.
Its such an obviously, strange suggestion, its almost not really worth discussing.
People who arrive at a conclusion "irrationally" without all the facts can rarely be "reasoned" out of the conclusion.
Bottom line, it is not Red Hat Linux.. it strives to be as much as possible and that is its charter.. but there are differences.
Paying for support is a whole other issue.
Support can be defined to be "community forum support", "email support", "phone call support", "remote login and fix my problem support", "custom software development support", "patch support" which can be broken down into "security patch support" and "bug fix support".
At a bare minimum you want "security and bug fix" support that's the real reason for signing up for Red Hat Network. You get proactive monitoring and timely patches for known documented CVE exploits that are retroactively tested and easy to apply. You get access to a bug tracking and resolution system which lets you log a bug, and see it progress throughout the system. You get access to incremental subrelease media so that you can deploy new systems without rolling all of the patches released since the initial release across the new system.. it keeps the install system up to date and concise.
I mentioned before, but really like that the agent you run on the system notifies Red Hat of the patches installed, they diff those between what they know is available and proactively send you an email to remind you if one of your systems is "exploitable" by a known CVE. Red Hat documents or converts bugs into CVEs that are industry wide that can be referenced and tracked across distributions, even across different Operating Systems. That is "Hugely" important, it becoming the gold standard for stating "yes we are test and verified and safe from that exploit" to a co-worker, a boss, or a judge.
Fuel depots seem like an interesting idea. Except for the boil off of cryogenic fuel.
Makes me wonder though about collecting solar wind and distilling the ions down to something that could be used for reaction mass, perhaps less than a fluid more like a plasma. Then accelerating that for drive thrust.
On the other hand (due to the recent viral video on youtube) what about using the Meissner effect to collect and redistribute magnetic flux tubes already in space. If I understand the idea.. chilling something down to make it superconduct could act as a drive plate and generate thrust when it expels magnet fields in various ways. Probably not great for human space flight but maybe a way of generating a reactionless space drive while within a magnetic field.
Aspirations of tackling a large coding project are usually less than imagined. Most successful projects start as the kernel of one programmer who strikes the landscape and envisions how things will work. Then they flesh it out to a degree and move on or otherwise becomes involved in managing the code base. At some point they leave or move on. So the majority of new or junior programmers end up interpreting that code base, usually with little or no documentation. In the best of all worlds they attempt to internalize or get inside the mind of the missing programmer.. and "figure things out" for themselves and extend it.. often making assumptions and mistakes the original programmer might laugh at or never intended.. but that is how the code lives on. Programming Libraries, APIs and application sdk's are all formalized examples of this.. sometimes with better documentation, or supplemental documentation and work even better as learning tools. In the distant past Language standards served the same purpose before formal libraries were common, and to a degree still do until new libraries for new languages are built up.
There are two fundamental reasons for wanting to work on "big" coding projects anyway, one is that your curious or have the need to extend or work with an existing product, application or code base.. that probably isn't well documented, or doesn't have "learners notes" or "examples" of how to get things done.
The other is the perception that it is career enhancing or will give one an edge over less experienced programmers.
For the first, the best way is to tackle intimidation with small projects and just going for it.. experience good or bad breeds confidence and eventually success.
For the second, a whole lot has to do with personality and experience and confidence, part of which can come from working with big projects and code.. but the personality is better worked on in a coffee shop and basically communicating with people in a sociable way.. even on the internet through email.
Open source projects are a great way to collaborate and work on all of the above in a safe non-litigious environment, and its high profile.. and you can find people willing to help.
Schools and colleges are a more traditional way, but cost a lot and there are some barriers to entry put in place by convention and societal expectations.
The interface between the real world and the digital hasn't changed since Woz and Steve Jobs invented the Apple computer or Bill Gates commercialized the free software disk in the back of a book. How can this tool, software, help me do things that I couldn't do before?
In the early days it was a lack of hardware that forced us to reach with our minds and know the capacity of the code better than the designers of the language.. more with less. That world is gone.
Today another economic, the embarrassment of hardware riches, tons of ram and lots of hard disk space.. but a limited human lifespan.. causes us to re-evaluate the old rule of "re-invent it yourself -- you'll learn something".. we just have the perception that to make something worthwhile.. it has to be totally and completely unique. Rather I think we should "get over it" and use Libraries or examples as if they were hardware building blocks and move on.. if you need a smaller code base then "that is the project" build from something that's already working.. and don't try to place magic crystal bricks in perfect celestial harmony.. before you get started.
There is an example of this happening before.. when we used to pontificate over RTL versus TTL which circuits should I use to build a Flip-Flop to build my microcomputer.. now we're moving into the age of when the Mobile computer replaces the Microcomputer and the Data cloud replaces the Database. What is a Mobile computer? It's not a PET Commodore anymore.. I don't even think I know.. its still being made.. but the effect on Apple and Microsoft are being felt.. safety seems to be in the cloud.. but maybe not.. what about distributed emergent data stores? Like bittorrent, dropbox, and programs that aren't programs but organize our lives like calendars? eh..
And don't go simpleton here.. let the far point (the bank) validate the path.. make it part of the protocol, do your cheap SSL setup.. though I'd prefere public/private keys with finger prints. Then submit a path via a traceroute report from client back to server and let the server validate the path. Certain "markers" along the path should make sense.. or the server could disallow the connection. Common log format could "log" the path and investigate certain reports that make little or no sense and "track" hijackers.
Basically stop treating SSL/TLS like a finished protocol and resume its construction.
Browsers generally have a plugin foundation, build a new SSL/TLS framework. Servers also have plugin frameworks, build modules to support the framework. SPDY from Google is an excellent example of "resuming" the job of building communications channels.
Slashdot Mirror
Run Windows Media center (Win7) on a Fit2PC (it has an HDMI output and a bay for a 2.5 inch drive) pair it with a Silicon Dust HDHomeRun network cable tuner.
Or
Run a EyeTV on a Mac Mini with a Silicon Dust HDHomeRun network cable tuner and pair that combo with an AppleTV
The first option using WMC is much easier and costs less, EyeTV requires a Channel listing subscription.
Personally I'm still experimenting, but WMC makes a lot of sense and its well established, plus the channel listing subscription is free.
Rumor has it Microsoft will be coming out with a split personality XBox offering, with a high end Xbox for media and gaming, and a low end Xbox offering called xTV to compete with AppleTV - but that's strictly rumor.
I'd recommend a return to the Pre-Apollo Era Space SciFi when Chesley Bonstel was popular - http://www.amazon.com/Battle-Mercury-Winston-Science-Fiction/dp/B000OP9M4Q/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1340228543&sr=8-1&keywords=battle+on+mercury
At a pre-teen I really enjoyed the stories that seemed to resonate with the movies like the Day the Earth Stood Still - but went much much further.
"Battle on Mercury" has space travel, robots, alien life forms and just a ton of stuff in a nice sized book.
"The Windows of Forever" was a nice story in which the main character discovers wormholes all around them just outside the corner of your eye to the past or the future. A boy learns how to detect them and ends up helping future colonists battling alien invaders on a distant future earth.
"They Might be Gods or Demons" is another light scifi story in which the travelers track down ancient astronauts bent on conquering the earth but who run afoul of a group of students who discover time travel and foil their plans tens of thousands of years ago, unable to time travel the ancient astronauts threaten to find them whenever they go. A "grown up" Back to the Future story.
"Son of the Stars" a trilogy in which a young man discovers a crashed spaceship and helps a humonoid alien learn about earth, launch a rescue beacon and then is invited to visit the federation of worlds - only to find out Earth was under observation the whole time, and it was all a test to find out if Earth was worthy to take its seat in the governing body of this area of the galaxy.
"Marooned on Mars" an escape mission to return to Earth from Mars, but the dead do not reast easy on Mars, and these dead wiped out all life on multiple planets long ago and Earth is next. (maybe a bit too intense for a young child).
I wouldn't worry too much about the language barrier, if he's interested in SciFi he'll learn to sustitute what he knows for what he doesn't and reconcile later. It's what kids do to keep from going bonkers over anxiety worrying about details.
1950 and 1960's scifi for the most part should be relatively safe and mostly gloss over the ideas and concepts people find too difficult.
It does have the odor of a Leo moment for Microsoft.
Difference being this Leo owns a lot of Microsoft stock.
I wonder how institutional investors will react.
Stephen Baxter is a great writer and his TimeShips spanned what seemed like one dimension of the Universe, from now to the End of time.
In a similar way I thought Sliders was on the cusp of charting space and time but in the sideways sense of possibilties.
It would have been cool to explore the limits of habitable Earths and maybe even have gone extraterrestrial. It always seemed artificial for them to arrive only on Earths with a population, and never explain that. There were rules like they would not time travel on the show and that felt artificial too.. in a lot of ways.. all the limiting rules storylines seemed its undoing. It became believe it or not more comedy and then theatrical tragedy. It was an exterme, focusing too much on individuals and then a single individual, until that individual left.. and then they jumped the shark for sure.. it could have easily opened up and passed the batton or went oribus and explained how a single individual got so lucky.. and felt very satisfying.. even leaving open the franchise to others.. remember the Quinn that tossed him a fully functional timer? One that actually worked?
As it is Sliders will have to be re-imagined one day.
I just hope like Stephen Baxter they think larger and less limiting.. they hinted at coordinates and ways of navigating the ethereal plains of existence.. and that others out there might be doing the same.. "Slide like an Egyptian" hinted at that tongue in cheek.
What I had against the Kromags was the overt beating over the head with the idea that Neaderthals or some evolved Nazi's could go maurading and conquering alternate worlds.. as if mere resources or emotion were good enough to justify why they were pursuing it. I rather liked the individual idea of exploration and curiousity (like the original HG Wells time traveler) was more likely and interesting.. coming across say one or two civilizations who thought pandimensional travel was interesting.. was okay.. but making it a focal point of storyline was hard to relate to.. (it would be like making star travel common place).
Rather it would have been nicer if they got themselves into serious trouble and the mysterious Quinn with the working timer reappeared with some answers but not all.. and they discovered they were being sponsored by a different civilization.. or one totally outside our experience..like the ones from Contact.. for their own reasons that probably would have nothing to do with us.. somethings we simply will never know.
In a lot of ways it was the American Doctor Who saga rather junior style.. as if it were Doctor Who "the early years".. keeping it grounded in hard science would have been a challenge bit fun.. and if they lifted the ban on time travel, even if only the rate of time on different worlds allowed limited travel they could have explored things that left the planet, or warming of the earth, or space and star travel.
Handing off the technology to different travelers would have been rather like the Doctor changing faces every few seasons, with only the mysterious sponsors or Quinn with the Cheshire cat grin left to maintain continuity.
'scare the heck' out of every creature in the area
Is that your medical opinion Bones?
Oh yeah.. just ask the Ganymedens about their project Icarus.. that ended well [ http://www.amazon.com/The-Gentle-Giants-Ganymede-2/dp/0345323270 ]
A spaceship, a blackhole and alien refugees fleeing a dying sun.
Just another day a the the beach 25 millions years long.
Children tend to play with toys in their crib first.. then with the ones in the neighbors backyard.
Just say'in..
But we're a habitually meddlesome species.. we can't see to leave well enough alone.
While we're workin on the stellar engineering degree there's bound to be a few.. "whoopsies"
There was once a "can't loose, this time its different, the world has changed" event called the Holland Bulb bubble.
It ended poorly for them, patents and copyrights will end poorly for the world.
In the final analysis to criminalize thinking destablizes or distorts perceptions of reality.
Only two outcomes from attempting to distort reality:
A. Rude awakening, you find yourself in a world in which the fiction is someday ignored, or .. well historically there have been no alternatives.
B.
Probability is the majority of the world already ignores patents, and the internet and the documentation will distribute and drive a subculture of innovation. They have become a "right to sue" federal grant and have nothing to do with their original intended purpose in a small out of the way country isolated from the rest of the world at the end of the 18th Century. They are a kind of proxy for a world government when they cross license and attempt to set up similar federal grants in foreign countries.. they become the Universal Euro. They are the ultimate credit swap derivative. And I think we have a lot of recent experience with those.
I think it is unlikely anyone will unwind this credit default swap, the odds are stacked against it. Civilization will get on with the business of business and life. Investors in companies that inflate their values with patent and copyright portfolios will experience rapid deflation or uncertainty then lose a lot of real money.
Probably sooner than later.
I subscribed and watched like two shows. Boring as cardboard. Cancelled the service, to user unfriendly.
Truth is my life is busy enough as it is, commercials and debacles that confuse me?
Dragging me to their scheduled events? At work we use to call them 'meetings'.
Come to think of it some productions look a lot like Powerpoint.
I buy the shows I want now, if I'm interested. Six seasons of Lost? I do not have the time.
A thirteen episode season of a good story, maybe.
Content providers are going to loose customers because they are not catering to their customer base.
The old days of multigenerational television shows like Happy Days are over.
Multigenerational Cable service is going the same way.
Even Tivo is a bit out dated. Institutionalizing the 'commercial' dodge was amusing at best.. stand back and its pure insanity to put up with it.
Make it easy.. or I've better things to do with my time.
Make it less expensive.. or I just can't afford to pay.
The human race has lived without TV for a long time, I doubt they'll notice its passing.
XP (like many operating systems) is (a) an installer (b) a boot loader (c) a device detection and driver loading system (d) a gui file management systems (c) a socket based network system, and a collection of well know precompiled libraries
It fits nicely in a virtual machine and can boot off a cdrom iso image direct into memory
Its evolved over the years into a tool or a widget, its odd that over years there has been more and better documentation written and indexed about it on the web than by its parent vendor.
If you trim off the legacy subsystems or let them plug into a virtual machine, like KVM it becomes less dependent on hardware and more stable.
Consider Windows 7 and Windows 8 merely the latest "Hypervisor" from Microsoft and be done with it.
If you need XP for the GUI to support legacy staff, then use the Windows 8 metro tiles to launch an XP desktop (ditto for Win 7).
XP is becoming more like Unix "X" in that its becoming a "window manager" with a complement of features, its more the job of the hypervisor to secure its communciations. That's the best explaination I can come up with for Snofsky's Microsoft abandoning selling "eXPerience" for function.
Gosh.. I almost got excited by this new feature.
Then I realized it was an Eyeball typo..
If only
Actually that's a stellar idea.
I recently bought a POV cam from Contour cameras.
Standard is 720p with omnidirectional sound, about 3-4 hour recording time on a single charge, the memory cards can hold up to 8 hours.
But it can shoot 1080p and it is not advertised as Low Light, but works very good in low light.
The camera settings can be configured by manipulating a text file on the memory card that it reads on start up.
The native recording format is H.264 MOV files, so all the compression is done up front.
The ContourROAM camera I have has a standard 1/4 inch-20 UNC screw mount point on the bottom so send a little table top tripod along with it.
It's basically fool proof even though it doesn't have a view finder, just aim and shoot. It has a single slider switch for On and Off.
So if you recorded the interview with one of these and conducted Q&A over the web with a web client, you'd get the best of both world, extremely high quality, hi-res interviews with low noise and a wide angle lens. But still be able to conduct the interview in a conversational manner.
The fact that sound is recorded along with the video could be plus and minus, it could be a primary source, or a backup source, or a sync source to couple with the web audio and video.
more episodes of "Lost"
Like Time Travel, playing "What If?" is fun to a point.
Of course we live in the only alternative time line we know is possible.
But I'll play.
In the 70s all the rage was speculation on power generation plants to solve the oil crisis.
In the 00s all the rage has been sun-brellas to deflect sunlight from the poles to reduce global warning.
Combine the two and in a history where the shuttle program didn't get going and we might have satellite power generation stations in the 80s and the conversion of those into satellite solar shields in the 90s. Instead the money went to boosters that bootstrapped the solar power generation industry. Then NASA was spun off as a quasi commercial business and ran a space shuttle program in the 00s. Later generations might be looking at passive solar sails to explore the near earth objects for building materials, and using sails in some kind of paper scissors rock game of wrapping dangerous near earth objects and deflecting them further out into space, or bringing them into approved manufacturing plant corridors in earth orbit.
And the headline should be.. IF your running Safari on Win7-64 Bit.. how many people "really" do that? Hands? Okay.. now how many run Chrome instead of IE? Hands?
I rest my case.
A thought experiment worthy.
If you took a ball of Iron the size of say planet Earth, and it were to plunge into the heart of the Sun. What would be the result.. a Nova, SuperNova.. fizzle.
And what if it were slightly off target and merely circled the center for a while.. would it retain its shape or spinout into a smeared ball of plasma.. undoing the star?
Something somewhat like this probably already happened.. the Lithium content of our star for example.. guess it just wasn't significant emough.
.. the only winning move is to choose not to play.
Funny side thought.. what if "Looking for Intelligent Life" is the real problem.. and our only hope of finding alien life is finding the altruistic, benevolent or "not so smart" type. Which rather than abundant might be somewhat harder to find.
Look at it this way, a bacterium could be "intelligent" but might focus all that intellect on healthy self interests and getting on with its own life.. rather than expending enormous resources to speculate and think up ways of sending messages to other star systems that could never be answered in its life time.
On the otherhand a fairly "not so smart" bacterium with abundant resources might splurge on all sorts of unlikely projects in its lifetime, only to end up extinct.. but we might actually detect one of its messages.
Glass is half Full or Glass if half Empty.. by the Third law of Thermodynamics.. it always seems to be running a bit low. Optimism aside it might take a fortunate alien civilization to have the surplus of resources to contemplate sending text messages to the stars.
Perhaps it explains why intelligent life hasn't been detected in the Universe. First they develop Telnet then they come to their senses and develop SSH - a bit in line with Stephen Hawking's idea that the recipients of an encounter with an alien civilization might wish they weren't... and would do better to actively "hide" or make their communications hard to decode.
Quantum entanglement also brings to mind, if it can be done in a laboratory, shouldn't it be possible in nature. And if that is so perhaps there are bits of quantum entangled matter all over the Cosmos. Perhaps it is so common that's it rarer to find matter that isn't quantum entangled nearby. Wouldn't it be cool to work out the approximate location of a bit of quantum entangled matter a long ways away and use it for communications.. like a wormhole.. only not a wormhole. The best delivery agent I could think of on a very large scale would be the jet firing out of black hole, neutron star, or some other stellar event. But its all pure science fiction speculation right now.. hmm a Quantum "telescope".
Perhaps it won't be long before its known for certain. Jobs had his DNA sequenced and structural differences as they relate to DNA sequencing is becoming possible just now. It will depend upon the wishes of his family whether its ever known. Rather like Einstein he may continue to surprise and inform us for years.
If you need to explain why you were hacked with a common exploit that's been in the wild .. say 12 hours after Defcon.. you need real support, even if it appears passive and monitors your vulnerability and sends you a little reminder to "patch". One of the realy nice things about Red Hat Network is it "proactively" monitors the status of your machines and "suggests" patching for specific vulnerabilities by CVE.
I can't imagine "anyone" with experience suggesting such a thing.
CentOS is great.. and has stated goals.. but no one is paid on the CentOS project to create patches and update systems using CentOS.. its best effort only. At times its only porting of a patch released by Red Hat with no testing. And it almost always, by definition "lags" behind RHEL. CentOS does not port forward, patches originate upstream and port downstream.
While some third party software that you buy will state "should work with CentOS" that rarely extends to "supported" since they would be on the hook to support the OS as well.. or defend their position its an incompatibility with CentOS.
The more binary capability you need the worse the situation gets, for example with Tape Libraries and Backup Software, Antivirus software, SarBox software.
You might get away with it for a very short time, but as the subrelease numbers increase the differences begin to appear.
The most sensitive point is CentOS cannot be recomplied to be identical to RHEL, they have to use different kernels and or compilers since they only have access to source.. so its not a true clone. It strives to be that, but its still not the real thing. And with recent changes in packaging greater differences are going to appear.
Its such an obviously, strange suggestion, its almost not really worth discussing.
People who arrive at a conclusion "irrationally" without all the facts can rarely be "reasoned" out of the conclusion.
Bottom line, it is not Red Hat Linux.. it strives to be as much as possible and that is its charter.. but there are differences.
Paying for support is a whole other issue.
Support can be defined to be "community forum support", "email support", "phone call support", "remote login and fix my problem support", "custom software development support", "patch support" which can be broken down into "security patch support" and "bug fix support".
At a bare minimum you want "security and bug fix" support that's the real reason for signing up for Red Hat Network. You get proactive monitoring and timely patches for known documented CVE exploits that are retroactively tested and easy to apply. You get access to a bug tracking and resolution system which lets you log a bug, and see it progress throughout the system. You get access to incremental subrelease media so that you can deploy new systems without rolling all of the patches released since the initial release across the new system.. it keeps the install system up to date and concise.
I mentioned before, but really like that the agent you run on the system notifies Red Hat of the patches installed, they diff those between what they know is available and proactively send you an email to remind you if one of your systems is "exploitable" by a known CVE. Red Hat documents or converts bugs into CVEs that are industry wide that can be referenced and tracked across distributions, even across different Operating Systems. That is "Hugely" important, it becoming the gold standard for stating "yes we are test and verified and safe from that exploit" to a co-worker, a boss, or a judge.
Fuel depots seem like an interesting idea. Except for the boil off of cryogenic fuel.
Makes me wonder though about collecting solar wind and distilling the ions down to something that could be used for reaction mass, perhaps less than a fluid more like a plasma. Then accelerating that for drive thrust.
On the other hand (due to the recent viral video on youtube) what about using the Meissner effect to collect and redistribute magnetic flux tubes already in space. If I understand the idea.. chilling something down to make it superconduct could act as a drive plate and generate thrust when it expels magnet fields in various ways. Probably not great for human space flight but maybe a way of generating a reactionless space drive while within a magnetic field.
Aspirations of tackling a large coding project are usually less than imagined. Most successful projects start as the kernel of one programmer who strikes the landscape and envisions how things will work. Then they flesh it out to a degree and move on or otherwise becomes involved in managing the code base. At some point they leave or move on. So the majority of new or junior programmers end up interpreting that code base, usually with little or no documentation. In the best of all worlds they attempt to internalize or get inside the mind of the missing programmer.. and "figure things out" for themselves and extend it.. often making assumptions and mistakes the original programmer might laugh at or never intended.. but that is how the code lives on. Programming Libraries, APIs and application sdk's are all formalized examples of this.. sometimes with better documentation, or supplemental documentation and work even better as learning tools. In the distant past Language standards served the same purpose before formal libraries were common, and to a degree still do until new libraries for new languages are built up.
There are two fundamental reasons for wanting to work on "big" coding projects anyway, one is that your curious or have the need to extend or work with an existing product, application or code base.. that probably isn't well documented, or doesn't have "learners notes" or "examples" of how to get things done.
The other is the perception that it is career enhancing or will give one an edge over less experienced programmers.
For the first, the best way is to tackle intimidation with small projects and just going for it.. experience good or bad breeds confidence and eventually success.
For the second, a whole lot has to do with personality and experience and confidence, part of which can come from working with big projects and code.. but the personality is better worked on in a coffee shop and basically communicating with people in a sociable way.. even on the internet through email.
Open source projects are a great way to collaborate and work on all of the above in a safe non-litigious environment, and its high profile.. and you can find people willing to help.
Schools and colleges are a more traditional way, but cost a lot and there are some barriers to entry put in place by convention and societal expectations.
The interface between the real world and the digital hasn't changed since Woz and Steve Jobs invented the Apple computer or Bill Gates commercialized the free software disk in the back of a book. How can this tool, software, help me do things that I couldn't do before?
In the early days it was a lack of hardware that forced us to reach with our minds and know the capacity of the code better than the designers of the language.. more with less. That world is gone.
Today another economic, the embarrassment of hardware riches, tons of ram and lots of hard disk space.. but a limited human lifespan.. causes us to re-evaluate the old rule of "re-invent it yourself -- you'll learn something".. we just have the perception that to make something worthwhile.. it has to be totally and completely unique. Rather I think we should "get over it" and use Libraries or examples as if they were hardware building blocks and move on.. if you need a smaller code base then "that is the project" build from something that's already working.. and don't try to place magic crystal bricks in perfect celestial harmony.. before you get started.
There is an example of this happening before.. when we used to pontificate over RTL versus TTL which circuits should I use to build a Flip-Flop to build my microcomputer.. now we're moving into the age of when the Mobile computer replaces the Microcomputer and the Data cloud replaces the Database. What is a Mobile computer? It's not a PET Commodore anymore.. I don't even think I know.. its still being made.. but the effect on Apple and Microsoft are being felt.. safety seems to be in the cloud.. but maybe not.. what about distributed emergent data stores? Like bittorrent, dropbox, and programs that aren't programs but organize our lives like calendars? eh..
And don't go simpleton here.. let the far point (the bank) validate the path.. make it part of the protocol, do your cheap SSL setup.. though I'd prefere public/private keys with finger prints. Then submit a path via a traceroute report from client back to server and let the server validate the path. Certain "markers" along the path should make sense.. or the server could disallow the connection. Common log format could "log" the path and investigate certain reports that make little or no sense and "track" hijackers.
Basically stop treating SSL/TLS like a finished protocol and resume its construction.
Browsers generally have a plugin foundation, build a new SSL/TLS framework. Servers also have plugin frameworks, build modules to support the framework. SPDY from Google is an excellent example of "resuming" the job of building communications channels.