Historians already had a good grasp of the scope and impact of the events under discussion. This is one of those things that sounds really exciting to a layman but is much less of a surprise to those that actually study the field.
> and Windows Media Center just works, right out of the box
No it doesn't. There's a lot of futzing with code plugins and driver plugins and media manager plugins that you need to do with MCE before it "just works".
Plus there's the whole problem that MCE can only use an xbox as an extender. Using a cheap ION PC is not an option.
My current Myth setup would likely be not possible with MCE.
The promptly got sued over it and had to disable it. Probably didn't help their position in the market relative to their main rival Tivo.
Now Replay is little more than a historical footnote to bring up during Tivo patent trolling flame fests to highlight the fact that Tivo wasn't being terribly inventive at the time.
One nice thing about MythTV is that I can do a SQL query to see what we've been watching. I can see what shows have been recorded and which ones have been watched. I can slice it and dice it by channel and series.
With the notable exception of Mythbusters, most of those channels mentioned by the OP seem pretty worthless really.
SciFi isn't what it once was. All of the proper sci-fi seems to be on other channels with very little left on SyFy itself.
> OTA isn't uncompressed, it's just a higher bandwidth connection.
It is the most pristine form of a particular broadcast channel available.
Cable companies will typically take that signal and mess around with it to enable better compression within their own transmission medium. There are even websites that track the level of compression that cable operators use for a particular channel.
Cable is like taking a DVD, ripping it, and then running it through mencoder.
When I first started using MythTV, an mp3 streamer would set you back at least $300. Video streamers are so cheap now that the lack of Netflix in MythTV itself is a lot less of a problem.
A cheap Roku could be an MCE extender if not for the DRM nonsense with cable TV these days.
My distribution handles all of my IR remote issues automagically. This is as it should be because it really has nothing to do with MythTV. It's a basic OS level hardware support issue.
Your own description of the situation seems to highlight why a lot of people still have a considerable amount of "skepticism" when it comes to ATI.
ATI has been a "vendor best avoided" since the bt879 days.
Even on Windows it helps to ask the community for recommendations and actually listen to them.
> Doesn't do me much good if I can't use it on my cable system without a jerry-rigged IR blaster/multiple tuner setup.
Worked well enough for Tivos.
Since cable cards are not a simple CAM, it's not really a one for one comparison. Using draconian encryption comes with it's own tradeoffs. They aren't something to be casually ignored.
> > who the hell cares. > > Everyone who loves commercial auto-skip?
I dumped Netflix streaming as soon as they started charging extra for it. If you already have a good PVR attached to a cable box, the selection of stuff on Netflix is just laughable.
Who the hell cares about Netflix Streaming?
Netflix streaming is lame. All the wishful thinking in the world won't turn it into a triple crown winner.
You mean like Windows users that steal anything that's not nailed down?
I use Free Software because it's not crap. It helps that it's a re-implementation of a good design (namely Unix). I would pay a pretty penny for it if I had to. Nearly did with Solaris x86.
That said: I wouldn't trust my taxes to free software, expensive software, or underpaid drones that aren't real tax professionals.
Taxes are the only part of the legal profession where a post-JD degree is required to practice in the field.
Tax law is constantly in flux. So tax software is more like a service than a product. You need yearly updates to remain current. You can't just use last year's software even if it is a commercial version.
This "support" model is not what Free Software is good at.
Taxes are also not simple. If yours are non-trivial, then you are far better off paying a competent professional instead of trying to be miserly with the attempts to replace an accountant with software.
The value of even the commercial tax software is highly debatable regardless of how it was developed or what license it sues.
Anyone who is not an Apple fan, see alternatives being driven from the market by dirty tricks and litigation worthy of Microsoft. Of course people are going to get cranky when they are forced to use something they don't want or are presented with the prospect.
There's nothing irrational about that kind of negativity.
That's pretty much it. If Apple is so great then it should not need to muscle out the competition. It should be able to thrive despite of many other companies trying to copy them. Apple should simply stand out as the best among many.
Clearly, Apple doesn't have nearly as much confidence in their superiority as the average fanboy does.
"Creating the market" doesn't give you the right to own it. That kind of idea is a serious perversion of the free market that will quickly cause our entire economy to collapse. Turning the US into a 3rd world economy just because of your personal brand fetish is just stupid.
> The only tablets I remember before the iPad were laptops with touchscreens. There wasn't anything resembling a consumer focused ultra-portable entertainment hub which is what the iPad is.
Sounds a lot like an Archos really.
The problem here is that people are fixating on the big visible brands to the exclusion of all else. When the big visible brand finally addresses a need, it's like Big Shiny brand invented that thing rather than adding a few extra tweaks or just some improved marketing.
An "entertainment hub" should play all my stuff. Not just what Big Shiny brand wants to sell me from their company store.
> Most inventions feels "obvious" once you have used them
If all you need to reinvent the thing is to see it in action, it's not something that's remotely patent worthy.
Patents are weapons of mass destruction and they are treated like candy. The point is not whether or not something impresses a clueless layman. The point is whether or not something impresses an actual professional so much that you stiffle innovation for the next two decades.
"Stiffle innovation for the NEXT TWO DECADES"
What was your computing experience like 20 years ago? Would you like to go back in time and give a company the ability to force that on you today?
You are also glossing over the actual cost of litigating this.
This is basic pro-corporate propaganda.
It would be nice if there were some criminal cause of action here and the relevant prosecutor(s) actually cared. In the absence of that, the only thing keeping the Soylent Corporation at bay is some self-interested lawyer.
They don't have to worry. They will get bailed out by Washington any time they need it. They are "too big to fail". Have been for a rather long while now.
...which means that you could just get the same effect with some mocked up stuff inside of a regular casino. They even kind of did that for awhile but they never took it far enough.
Slashdot Mirror
Historians already had a good grasp of the scope and impact of the events under discussion. This is one of those things that sounds really exciting to a layman but is much less of a surprise to those that actually study the field.
> and Windows Media Center just works, right out of the box
No it doesn't. There's a lot of futzing with code plugins and driver plugins and media manager plugins that you need to do with MCE before it "just works".
Plus there's the whole problem that MCE can only use an xbox as an extender. Using a cheap ION PC is not an option.
My current Myth setup would likely be not possible with MCE.
The promptly got sued over it and had to disable it. Probably didn't help their position in the market relative to their main rival Tivo.
Now Replay is little more than a historical footnote to bring up during Tivo patent trolling flame fests to highlight the fact that Tivo wasn't being terribly inventive at the time.
Sometimes it's not the technology. It's "policy".
> So you sned your cable company $80/month because the $8/month cost of Netflix streaming is just outrageous?
$80 for something is better than $8 for nothing.
> What's a "commercial"?
I haven't had to watch commercials since the 90s. Perhaps you would like to catch up on recent technology developments.
> See, this is precisely the standard shitty linux user attitude that causes problems.
"Try to use stuff that is known to work" is not a "shitty" response. It is a sane one.
You obviously have no interest in having this work. You just want something to bitch and moan and troll about.
One nice thing about MythTV is that I can do a SQL query to see what we've been watching. I can see what shows have been recorded and which ones have been watched. I can slice it and dice it by channel and series.
With the notable exception of Mythbusters, most of those channels mentioned by the OP seem pretty worthless really.
SciFi isn't what it once was. All of the proper sci-fi seems to be on other channels with very little left on SyFy itself.
> OTA isn't uncompressed, it's just a higher bandwidth connection.
It is the most pristine form of a particular broadcast channel available.
Cable companies will typically take that signal and mess around with it to enable better compression within their own transmission medium. There are even websites that track the level of compression that cable operators use for a particular channel.
Cable is like taking a DVD, ripping it, and then running it through mencoder.
When I first started using MythTV, an mp3 streamer would set you back at least $300. Video streamers are so cheap now that the lack of Netflix in MythTV itself is a lot less of a problem.
A cheap Roku could be an MCE extender if not for the DRM nonsense with cable TV these days.
Anything not involving a tuner should be trivial and accomplished with little more than an invocation of "apt-get".
My distribution handles all of my IR remote issues automagically. This is as it should be because it really has nothing to do with MythTV. It's a basic OS level hardware support issue.
Your own description of the situation seems to highlight why a lot of people still have a considerable amount of "skepticism" when it comes to ATI.
ATI has been a "vendor best avoided" since the bt879 days.
Even on Windows it helps to ask the community for recommendations and actually listen to them.
> Doesn't do me much good if I can't use it on my cable system without a jerry-rigged IR blaster/multiple tuner setup.
Worked well enough for Tivos.
Since cable cards are not a simple CAM, it's not really a one for one comparison. Using draconian encryption comes with it's own tradeoffs. They aren't something to be casually ignored.
> > who the hell cares.
>
> Everyone who loves commercial auto-skip?
I dumped Netflix streaming as soon as they started charging extra for it. If you already have a good PVR attached to a cable box, the selection of stuff on Netflix is just laughable.
Who the hell cares about Netflix Streaming?
Netflix streaming is lame. All the wishful thinking in the world won't turn it into a triple crown winner.
> I wish there was a way to integrate MythTV with Uverse....but until I can find a way to do that
Use the old style S1 Tivo approach. People used PVRs with digital cable long before digital tuners of any sort came out.
You mean like Windows users that steal anything that's not nailed down?
I use Free Software because it's not crap. It helps that it's a re-implementation of a good design (namely Unix). I would pay a pretty penny for it if I had to. Nearly did with Solaris x86.
That said: I wouldn't trust my taxes to free software, expensive software, or underpaid drones that aren't real tax professionals.
Taxes are the only part of the legal profession where a post-JD degree is required to practice in the field.
Tax law is constantly in flux. So tax software is more like a service than a product. You need yearly updates to remain current. You can't just use last year's software even if it is a commercial version.
This "support" model is not what Free Software is good at.
Taxes are also not simple. If yours are non-trivial, then you are far better off paying a competent professional instead of trying to be miserly with the attempts to replace an accountant with software.
The value of even the commercial tax software is highly debatable regardless of how it was developed or what license it sues.
Anyone who is not an Apple fan, see alternatives being driven from the market by dirty tricks and litigation worthy of Microsoft. Of course people are going to get cranky when they are forced to use something they don't want or are presented with the prospect.
There's nothing irrational about that kind of negativity.
That's pretty much it. If Apple is so great then it should not need to muscle out the competition. It should be able to thrive despite of many other companies trying to copy them. Apple should simply stand out as the best among many.
Clearly, Apple doesn't have nearly as much confidence in their superiority as the average fanboy does.
"Creating the market" doesn't give you the right to own it. That kind of idea is a serious perversion of the free market that will quickly cause our entire economy to collapse. Turning the US into a 3rd world economy just because of your personal brand fetish is just stupid.
> The only tablets I remember before the iPad were laptops with touchscreens. There wasn't anything resembling a consumer focused ultra-portable entertainment hub which is what the iPad is.
Sounds a lot like an Archos really.
The problem here is that people are fixating on the big visible brands to the exclusion of all else. When the big visible brand finally addresses a need, it's like Big Shiny brand invented that thing rather than adding a few extra tweaks or just some improved marketing.
An "entertainment hub" should play all my stuff. Not just what Big Shiny brand wants to sell me from their company store.
> Most inventions feels "obvious" once you have used them
If all you need to reinvent the thing is to see it in action, it's not something that's remotely patent worthy.
Patents are weapons of mass destruction and they are treated like candy. The point is not whether or not something impresses a clueless layman. The point is whether or not something impresses an actual professional so much that you stiffle innovation for the next two decades.
"Stiffle innovation for the NEXT TWO DECADES"
What was your computing experience like 20 years ago? Would you like to go back in time and give a company the ability to force that on you today?
...except you are neglecting the actual breach.
You are also glossing over the actual cost of litigating this.
This is basic pro-corporate propaganda.
It would be nice if there were some criminal cause of action here and the relevant prosecutor(s) actually cared. In the absence of that, the only thing keeping the Soylent Corporation at bay is some self-interested lawyer.
Don't worry. People like you are slowly making that a reality.
They don't have to worry. They will get bailed out by Washington any time they need it. They are "too big to fail". Have been for a rather long while now.
...which means that you could just get the same effect with some mocked up stuff inside of a regular casino. They even kind of did that for awhile but they never took it far enough.
The other guy was probably talking abut the REPLICAS of those things.
It's like you've never been to Vegas ever.
That and the guy from Paramount too. They're fine with blowing up a local landmark and puting a redundant Italian themed casino in it's place.
The current corn subsidy regime is already causing consolidation of farms and depopulating rural areas.