Re:Obligatory product bashing
on
TiVo to Go Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Same situation here - Series 2 TiVo and a nice orphaned Windows PC-turned-MythTV box give me some experience with both.
I find myself hardly using the TiVo these days. I've moved all the "season pass" show schedules over to the Myth box. Originally got going with Myth because it would let me play my assortment of DivX movie files and let me record/watch tv simultaneously with a second tuner card, and the level of control linux/myth give me is keeping me on it.
One oddity - the best way to share video in multiple rooms with myth seems to be to NFS a huge volume with your recorded video. I remember Tivo's multi-room viewing gave you a combined list of programs and, when requesting one from another Tivo unit, simply downloaded the program to the one requesting the video and played it when ready. It'd be nice if I had each frontend contribute storage to the other frontends without having to build a huge storage machine and worry about it frying one night and losing all my saved programs.
Anyway.
I agree that the 350 is more needless hair-pulling for most, but if you're setting up separate backend/frontend boxen, a 350 is a nice one-card solution for watching TV on a cheap-o linux machine. Then again, so is a motherboard with on-board TV-out and ethernet.
My main concern right now (and one of the reasons I've not dumped another grand into building a nicer backend machine and some frontends around the house) is Myth is currently only useful for analog cable. The HDTV cards out there can only receive OTA signals (unencrypted) and the future of cable TV seems to be cable company-provided receivers w/ PVR capability that aren't easily controlled from a PC. Sure, there's some work being done for the firewire ports on some of the newer receivers, and you can usually get an IRblaster going or something to control the unit, but, bye-bye multiple recordings to my backend, and so on.
Myth could use some polish (I still like the satisfying little beeps and blurps when I use the Tivo) but I'm surprised at how much it does already. KnoppMyth is making strides to lower the learning curve for new setups. DVD burning still takes some hard work, but it's getting easier, and MythDVD has built-in background ripping/transcoding. Cool add-ons like MythPhone and mfe are fun to play with and could become more useful soon. And the Hauppauge cards are just wonderful - kudos and much thanks to Chris Kennedy and the IvyTV community for supporting this hardware so diligently. I'll be a Myth user for a long time if I can get an acceptable HD solution working with it.
It's usually in their terms of service, wherein an ISP can say, "Yes, modify your modem, do whatever you want with it, but do take your business elsewhere" - as TOS violators are not welcome on their network.
You'd probably have to deal with the nightmare that is LIRC to get it to work.
C'mon, lirc's not so bad. I built a Myth box running debian but couldn't find myself a lirc deb, so I downloaded it, compiled from source, and followed the instructions. Detected and configured my WinMCE remote and receiver just fine. They even have a default remote layout available on their site for practically every remote available (or programmable). Very handy.
Chipset is similar, I believe. The 250s (and the "Media Center Edition" 250s) add additional inputs - I believe the 150 only has S-Video and a tuner - and a remote on the non-MCE model. The 350 adds its own tv-out (though it's a bit of a pain to get working properly) and can do nice things like re-interlace the tv signal so your set gets the extra niceties like closed-captioning, and better picture quality from what I've heard. The 350 is up around $150-170 if memory serves.
They're not great gamer cards, btw, so you might be better off looking at an nvidia chipset if you want to play games on your homebrew pvr.
You mean he bought it at a retail joint or online? Not that he "bought" it at a lan party for $1, right? And I assume his legally obtained code was never used and afterward safely tucked away and not provided to anyone on, say, IRC as well, correct?
VGM was my first high-bandwidth addiction, seeking out the underground sites with mp3 rips from the Japanese OSV soundtracks and such and running up the bill on our school's T1's.
I miss the truly creative experience of the older games; FF2 (US) had some wonderful music for what was essentially an Apple IIGS and a television. FF7 was pretty decent but even it didn't use the full capabilities of the PSX - although Tactics did and it was awesome. I still listen to the soundtracks every so often, but newer games don't really pay much attention to the added benefit a rich score can give a fantasy/RPG game - or, at least, they don't really push the limits of the sound hardware in the newer consoles. Too bad.
True, but I think people are more eager to write off $800 than they are $2500. Gotta start somewhere, and at least there's an answer somewhere in the pipeline. I figure the goal of selling "discount" macs would be to get them to eventually graduate to the bigger iron and shell out more for the next edition. My own experience has been more toward always ponying up for the higher-priced hardware, but, to each his own. I think Apple's right to have some cheaper options available even if they eventually want you buying their latest/greatest.
The Powerbooks are gorgeous, yeah. I think the iBooks have appeal because they're just cheap, mainly, which was the point I was making about the eMac - it's not so much about performance, when that's obviously the PB's game - but they've had their problems too. As for abuse - depends on the environment, I guess. I've never personally dropped a laptop, but that's just between home and office use. If we're talking schools, well... I seem to remember a whole lab of iMacs where we had to yank the cdrom's because the kids had started wadding up bubble gum inside the components. Other horror stories abound, I'm sure.
Good question, but easy answer: the "switcher" crowd Apple hopes to attract from the Wintel markets with its free iLife apps, its gorgeous and nearly-passe-as-a-fashion-statement iPod, and so on. One of the Wintel crowd's biggest advantage has ALWAYS been price point, and with the original smash success of the iMac, Apple has made strides to combat that. The eMac, remember, was supposed to be a cheap way to take back schools, where Apple II's used to dominate in the 80s and now Dells and Compaqs are starting to take over the educational sector. So lots of people looking at a price point of, say, a dual-G5 minitower are supposedly comforted by the presence of a cheaper option, even if it's not top of the line. Maybe they've seen OS X and want to try it out - and realize they can do it cheaply. Lots of my Linux-nerd friends and generally Windows users have fallen in love with the iBook - not because it's fast or plays the latest games or what have you, but because it's a Mac, and it's cheap, and they want to try it out on a budget.
Try reading David Zeuthen's analysis of the FC boot process (with charts) over on the fedora archives. Very interesting - among other things, nearly 200 MB of files(!) are buffered while starting GNOME - quite a footprint - and apparently by putting those files on a separate (non-fragged) partition he sped process by nearly 30 seconds and reports OOo and Firefox start times of around 3 seconds.
Actually, the memory effect article you linked to talks about mem effect on nickel-cads. And again, this is a lithium ion battery, which doesn't suffer from it to the same degree (or so I've read).
Well, this is a li-ion, right? And those don't take to full charge-discharge cycles very well, if my iPod is any indication. But the author points out many times that they could've plugged in the unit any number of times to recharge it, and a quick discharge-recharge isn't going to impact it much. Unless you want them to cycle it a few hundred times (500 hours?) I think you're out of luck for a little while.
No, that's crap - isn't this the same Apple that blocked access to a specific 3rd-party app in the 4.7 build of iTunes? Everyone likes to hold Apple up as the standard of tight hardware integration since they control the platform. Is it any wonder they would leverage it to make hacking their products a bit harder to do on Apple hardware?
You don't have to do tech work, you don't have to work at EA, you can take a lower-paying job and not work weekends.
True, and I tend to side with you on this one. But this is another case of an employer exploiting its workforce to a degree that's arguably criminal. Remember the genesis of labor unions was at a time where ungodly workdays and incredibly cruel punishment was seen as the norm, and often these people didn't have a choice, they were just happy to have a job. You'd think that the talent being hired at EA would be an exception, but the trap seems to be this idealism that game developers have about making games - the sort of rose-colored glasses mentality that comes from playing games all your life and getting to work on the next big one. EA's the big dog on the block, so it's no wonder they're recruiting people that will work themselves to the bone for them.
This is a step that's long overdue, it was a matter of time before some company pushed idealistic people like these game developers (or music industry interns, film students, etc) past their limits and undercompensated them for it. Argue what you want about how you would handle the situation, but I prefer to live in a country whose laws allow me to push back on an employer I feel is treating me badly rather than slink away and declare some kind of moral victory. EA would have continued this nonsense had we not seen the snowball effect from ea_spouse and others airing their grievances. They are well within their rights to do so and we shouldn't criticize them for it.
Rumsfeld resigned? Where the frig did you read that?
The article mentions, as is conventional wisdom, that he'll stay on for a few years to oversee operations in Iraq and transitions to national elections (assuming they ever happen). Of course, they were saying the same thing about Powell before the election.
He's sporting a "Radeon X800" from the looks of the pamphlet next to the keyboard in the second pic. Which reminds me: I heard somewhere that ATI's are relatively bad gamer cards and was wondering, what with D3 and HL2 around, what are the gamers using these days?
Agreed, but holy crap, did it take a long time to get running. The kernel that ships with the Debian installer image (a 2.4-based one) had a kernel panic just from inserting my wifi PC card on the old wallstreet g3 I was installing it on. Same deal when booting. I had to manually adjust the memory allocation in the pcmcia config from the debian installer.
And this problem is symptomatic; if you're going to run Debian on a Mac, try to get it on a newworld machine so you're not left tooling with BootX or (god forbid) Quik. There's very little documentation for oldworld machines and it seems like most people who went the Linux-on-Mac-hardware route stuck with vanilla distros like Yellowdog. I tried YD but hated yum; and now that everything (finally) works, I'm happy as a pig in shit with my Wallstreet laptop running Debian.
It just irritates me that these numbers are being celebrated in any way by either party. Like Slate said, do you call a baseball game based on the score in the 4th inning?
These are provided by the National Election Pool, the successor to Voter News Services, disbanded after the 2000 election froo-fraw. And these numbers have been available all afternoon (well, since 2pm EST) to anyone in the media who would've been interested. Salon's readers would've learned about it any numberof times reading the War Room this afternoon. And as always, these early returns are to be taken with a HUGE - repeat, HUGE - grain of salt. The networks won't report these because they are unreliable at this point and because of the great caution they are taking to avoid another 2000 debacle.
You should look up "whiskey wagon voting" or something similar. It was commonplace in the 50's in the deep south, places like Louisiana and Missouri used to have voters literally booze it up on a cart/wagon/truck and drive people around to vote at several different polling places multiple times.
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Same situation here - Series 2 TiVo and a nice orphaned Windows PC-turned-MythTV box give me some experience with both.
I find myself hardly using the TiVo these days. I've moved all the "season pass" show schedules over to the Myth box. Originally got going with Myth because it would let me play my assortment of DivX movie files and let me record/watch tv simultaneously with a second tuner card, and the level of control linux/myth give me is keeping me on it.
One oddity - the best way to share video in multiple rooms with myth seems to be to NFS a huge volume with your recorded video. I remember Tivo's multi-room viewing gave you a combined list of programs and, when requesting one from another Tivo unit, simply downloaded the program to the one requesting the video and played it when ready. It'd be nice if I had each frontend contribute storage to the other frontends without having to build a huge storage machine and worry about it frying one night and losing all my saved programs.
Anyway.
I agree that the 350 is more needless hair-pulling for most, but if you're setting up separate backend/frontend boxen, a 350 is a nice one-card solution for watching TV on a cheap-o linux machine. Then again, so is a motherboard with on-board TV-out and ethernet.
My main concern right now (and one of the reasons I've not dumped another grand into building a nicer backend machine and some frontends around the house) is Myth is currently only useful for analog cable. The HDTV cards out there can only receive OTA signals (unencrypted) and the future of cable TV seems to be cable company-provided receivers w/ PVR capability that aren't easily controlled from a PC. Sure, there's some work being done for the firewire ports on some of the newer receivers, and you can usually get an IRblaster going or something to control the unit, but, bye-bye multiple recordings to my backend, and so on.
Myth could use some polish (I still like the satisfying little beeps and blurps when I use the Tivo) but I'm surprised at how much it does already. KnoppMyth is making strides to lower the learning curve for new setups. DVD burning still takes some hard work, but it's getting easier, and MythDVD has built-in background ripping/transcoding. Cool add-ons like MythPhone and mfe are fun to play with and could become more useful soon. And the Hauppauge cards are just wonderful - kudos and much thanks to Chris Kennedy and the IvyTV community for supporting this hardware so diligently. I'll be a Myth user for a long time if I can get an acceptable HD solution working with it.
It's usually in their terms of service, wherein an ISP can say, "Yes, modify your modem, do whatever you want with it, but do take your business elsewhere" - as TOS violators are not welcome on their network.
Pretty standard these days.
C'mon, lirc's not so bad. I built a Myth box running debian but couldn't find myself a lirc deb, so I downloaded it, compiled from source, and followed the instructions. Detected and configured my WinMCE remote and receiver just fine. They even have a default remote layout available on their site for practically every remote available (or programmable). Very handy.
Chipset is similar, I believe. The 250s (and the "Media Center Edition" 250s) add additional inputs - I believe the 150 only has S-Video and a tuner - and a remote on the non-MCE model. The 350 adds its own tv-out (though it's a bit of a pain to get working properly) and can do nice things like re-interlace the tv signal so your set gets the extra niceties like closed-captioning, and better picture quality from what I've heard. The 350 is up around $150-170 if memory serves.
They're not great gamer cards, btw, so you might be better off looking at an nvidia chipset if you want to play games on your homebrew pvr.
I'd have written it, "CBS, NBC, ABC, and some other crap," but, to each his own.
You mean he bought it at a retail joint or online? Not that he "bought" it at a lan party for $1, right? And I assume his legally obtained code was never used and afterward safely tucked away and not provided to anyone on, say, IRC as well, correct?
VGM was my first high-bandwidth addiction, seeking out the underground sites with mp3 rips from the Japanese OSV soundtracks and such and running up the bill on our school's T1's.
I miss the truly creative experience of the older games; FF2 (US) had some wonderful music for what was essentially an Apple IIGS and a television. FF7 was pretty decent but even it didn't use the full capabilities of the PSX - although Tactics did and it was awesome. I still listen to the soundtracks every so often, but newer games don't really pay much attention to the added benefit a rich score can give a fantasy/RPG game - or, at least, they don't really push the limits of the sound hardware in the newer consoles. Too bad.
True, but I think people are more eager to write off $800 than they are $2500. Gotta start somewhere, and at least there's an answer somewhere in the pipeline. I figure the goal of selling "discount" macs would be to get them to eventually graduate to the bigger iron and shell out more for the next edition. My own experience has been more toward always ponying up for the higher-priced hardware, but, to each his own. I think Apple's right to have some cheaper options available even if they eventually want you buying their latest/greatest.
The Powerbooks are gorgeous, yeah. I think the iBooks have appeal because they're just cheap, mainly, which was the point I was making about the eMac - it's not so much about performance, when that's obviously the PB's game - but they've had their problems too. As for abuse - depends on the environment, I guess. I've never personally dropped a laptop, but that's just between home and office use. If we're talking schools, well... I seem to remember a whole lab of iMacs where we had to yank the cdrom's because the kids had started wadding up bubble gum inside the components. Other horror stories abound, I'm sure.
Good question, but easy answer: the "switcher" crowd Apple hopes to attract from the Wintel markets with its free iLife apps, its gorgeous and nearly-passe-as-a-fashion-statement iPod, and so on. One of the Wintel crowd's biggest advantage has ALWAYS been price point, and with the original smash success of the iMac, Apple has made strides to combat that. The eMac, remember, was supposed to be a cheap way to take back schools, where Apple II's used to dominate in the 80s and now Dells and Compaqs are starting to take over the educational sector. So lots of people looking at a price point of, say, a dual-G5 minitower are supposedly comforted by the presence of a cheaper option, even if it's not top of the line. Maybe they've seen OS X and want to try it out - and realize they can do it cheaply. Lots of my Linux-nerd friends and generally Windows users have fallen in love with the iBook - not because it's fast or plays the latest games or what have you, but because it's a Mac, and it's cheap, and they want to try it out on a budget.
Actually he said "this fall's hot Mac games," so that probably means Myth 2 and Marathon Infinity.
(i kid, i kid.)
Try reading David Zeuthen's analysis of the FC boot process (with charts) over on the fedora archives. Very interesting - among other things, nearly 200 MB of files(!) are buffered while starting GNOME - quite a footprint - and apparently by putting those files on a separate (non-fragged) partition he sped process by nearly 30 seconds and reports OOo and Firefox start times of around 3 seconds.
Wow, WIKIPEDIA! Thanks, AC!
Actually, the memory effect article you linked to talks about mem effect on nickel-cads. And again, this is a lithium ion battery, which doesn't suffer from it to the same degree (or so I've read).
Well, this is a li-ion, right? And those don't take to full charge-discharge cycles very well, if my iPod is any indication. But the author points out many times that they could've plugged in the unit any number of times to recharge it, and a quick discharge-recharge isn't going to impact it much. Unless you want them to cycle it a few hundred times (500 hours?) I think you're out of luck for a little while.
No, that's crap - isn't this the same Apple that blocked access to a specific 3rd-party app in the 4.7 build of iTunes? Everyone likes to hold Apple up as the standard of tight hardware integration since they control the platform. Is it any wonder they would leverage it to make hacking their products a bit harder to do on Apple hardware?
I've never used Software Update to apply 5.333 fixes before. This should be fun.
True, and I tend to side with you on this one. But this is another case of an employer exploiting its workforce to a degree that's arguably criminal. Remember the genesis of labor unions was at a time where ungodly workdays and incredibly cruel punishment was seen as the norm, and often these people didn't have a choice, they were just happy to have a job. You'd think that the talent being hired at EA would be an exception, but the trap seems to be this idealism that game developers have about making games - the sort of rose-colored glasses mentality that comes from playing games all your life and getting to work on the next big one. EA's the big dog on the block, so it's no wonder they're recruiting people that will work themselves to the bone for them.
This is a step that's long overdue, it was a matter of time before some company pushed idealistic people like these game developers (or music industry interns, film students, etc) past their limits and undercompensated them for it. Argue what you want about how you would handle the situation, but I prefer to live in a country whose laws allow me to push back on an employer I feel is treating me badly rather than slink away and declare some kind of moral victory. EA would have continued this nonsense had we not seen the snowball effect from ea_spouse and others airing their grievances. They are well within their rights to do so and we shouldn't criticize them for it.
Rumsfeld resigned? Where the frig did you read that?
The article mentions, as is conventional wisdom, that he'll stay on for a few years to oversee operations in Iraq and transitions to national elections (assuming they ever happen). Of course, they were saying the same thing about Powell before the election.
He's sporting a "Radeon X800" from the looks of the pamphlet next to the keyboard in the second pic. Which reminds me: I heard somewhere that ATI's are relatively bad gamer cards and was wondering, what with D3 and HL2 around, what are the gamers using these days?
Agreed, but holy crap, did it take a long time to get running. The kernel that ships with the Debian installer image (a 2.4-based one) had a kernel panic just from inserting my wifi PC card on the old wallstreet g3 I was installing it on. Same deal when booting. I had to manually adjust the memory allocation in the pcmcia config from the debian installer.
And this problem is symptomatic; if you're going to run Debian on a Mac, try to get it on a newworld machine so you're not left tooling with BootX or (god forbid) Quik. There's very little documentation for oldworld machines and it seems like most people who went the Linux-on-Mac-hardware route stuck with vanilla distros like Yellowdog. I tried YD but hated yum; and now that everything (finally) works, I'm happy as a pig in shit with my Wallstreet laptop running Debian.
Well then, IHL, and I will HAND. :)
I think you've been trolled.
It just irritates me that these numbers are being celebrated in any way by either party. Like Slate said, do you call a baseball game based on the score in the 4th inning?
Please.
These are provided by the National Election Pool, the successor to Voter News Services, disbanded after the 2000 election froo-fraw. And these numbers have been available all afternoon (well, since 2pm EST) to anyone in the media who would've been interested. Salon's readers would've learned about it any number of times reading the War Room this afternoon. And as always, these early returns are to be taken with a HUGE - repeat, HUGE - grain of salt. The networks won't report these because they are unreliable at this point and because of the great caution they are taking to avoid another 2000 debacle.
You should look up "whiskey wagon voting" or something similar. It was commonplace in the 50's in the deep south, places like Louisiana and Missouri used to have voters literally booze it up on a cart/wagon/truck and drive people around to vote at several different polling places multiple times.
Fun!