Wow, didn't think other people still ran wp. We've found that having 8 and 10 installed at the same time can cause some problems. I think there were issues with the spellcheck and picture insert, but can't remember exactly. 95% of 8 works, but there are a few things that don't. It was a good excuse to force people to upgrade so we didn't have any stragglers still using 8.
Yeah, the worst offenders were under windows 3.1, that's true, but because of the mix of apps our users install, we still see it occassionally. They like older versions of WordPerfect, like 6.0, 6.1 and some old proprietary research apps that weren't well written. Because they are still in use, we still see problems now and again. But not nearly as bad as we used to. "Ok, just remember that you always have to start WordPerfect 6.1 *before* you start Eudora 3.0, otherwise WP won't work right." And even now WP 8 and MS Office don't play well together, and you can't have WP and 10 on at the same time either.
The AmigaOS solutions sounds great (and windows and linux have some of your points already) but I don't know if either windows or linux could enforce the Law of backward compatibility. Too many people writing too much software.
This same problem occurs in the windows world as well, dll hell as it is often called. Here's how it works for windows. Say your program needs vbrun32.dll. You have a choice. You can put the dll in the same folder as the executable, in which case your program will find it and load the right dll. Or you can put it in the system or system32 dll in which case your program and others can find it and load it. However, if vbrun32.dll is already loaded into memory, your program will use that one. I remember we used to have problems with apps only working if loaded in the right order so the right dll would load.
As with Linux, if there's a bug in the library you have to update either one file or search through the computer and update all instances. But, as with linux, the update can mess up some programs, others might be poorly coded and not run with newer versions of the dll. I've seen this last problem in both windows and linux; it looks like the programmer did if version != 3.001 then fail instead of if version 3.001 then fail.
If everyone is forced to use the same library, you get these problems and benefits:
--1 easy point of update
--1 easy point of failure
--older software may not run with newer versions
--programmers may insist on a specific version number
--updates to the libraries can benefit all programs; if kde or windows gets a new file open dialog box, then all programs that link to the common library can have the newer look and feel by updating just one library.
On the other hand, if you let each program have its own, you get these problems and benefits:
--difficult to update libraries when bugs are found
--can run into problems if a different version of the library is already loaded into memory (does this happen with linux?)
--guarantee that libraries are compatible with your app
--compartmentalization; everything you need for an app is in it's directory. Want to uninstall? Just delete the directory. No need to worry that deleting the app will affect anything else.
--no weird dependencies. Why does app X need me to install app Y when they clearly aren't related at all. The answer is shared libraries. Which is why many people like Gentoo and building from source.
Microsoft has waffled back and forth on the issue. Under dos, everything just went into one directory and that was it. Windows brought in the system directory for shared dll's. Now the latest versions of windows are back to having each app and all of its dlls in one directory.
Personally, I think compartmentalization is the key, provided we get some intelligent updaters. If libthingy needs to be updated, the install procedure should do a search and find all instances of the library, back up existing versions and then update all of them. This wouldn't be that hard to do.
I'm of mixed minds about this idea. It sounds too much like a blame the victim mentality.
"You used Windows, it's your fault your server was hacked. You should only use XXX."
"She was wearing a sexy blouse, she was asking to be raped. Women should only wear burkas."
"You left your car door unlocked, you were asking for it to be stolen. Everyone should lock their car doors and buy a Club (tm)."
If you want to use the clean needle program as an analogy, what we should do is provide public honeypots for people to test their skills against. Something along these lines:
"Hey Kids, try and crack Kevin Mitnick's computer. This is a special setup for you to test your skills against."
"It's the Call Captain Crunch from the Vatican challenge! Captain Crunch has enabled caller id on his phone. Your job is to determine the Pope's private phone number and get it to appear as the originating phone number on the good Captain's caller id box."
But vandalism, and that's what we're talking about here, is different than drug use. Drug use is at it's most basic, a crime against yourself. A consensual crime. Yes, addicts steal and kill, but the act of taking the drug itself only harms the user. That's why drug give away programs are supposed to work -- they eliminate the addicts need to commit a crime to feed the habit.
People in IT, especially consultants won't like to hear this, but if you hire a consultant to manage your server and it gets broken into, you should go after both the criiminal for the vandalization and the consultant for malpractice. Madonna should have a cause of action for malpractice against whoever designed her site so poorly that it was easily cracked. And the vandal, like all vandals, should be punished.
Ahh, I see you didn't read the article at all. To quote Ann Harris from the article, "The Firebird BBS project from Taiwan uses "Firebird BBS" as their mark. Pontiac uses "Pontiac Firebird" as a mark. If Mozilla wants to use "Mozilla Firebird" -- that may be acceptable in a legal sense."
Also, if you read the article, you'd know that software is the entire category. That's why the Linux, as the sole name of a word processor, is out of the question, no matter what os it ran on.
Read the article. Think about it. They were using the name first for a software product. The Mozilla people should have done their homework. AOL's lawyers should have done their homework. Doing a quick google even points you to a whole heirarchy of sites devoted to the software ( Computers > Software > Databases > InterBase ).
Define a field. This is in regards to software applications. See? One field. But then you say, "That's too broad. One's a database application, the other's a web browser." To which I respond, do you think that Linus would let Microsoft call a word processor that only ran on Windows the Linux Word Processor program? Do you think RMS would like the Microsoft GNU Database program? (Is GNU trademarked?) You get the idea.
That $250 Tivo is a 40 hour model, 20 hours or less if you want a decent picture. Start saving an HD signal and you're looking at maybe a 5 hour capacity.
So if you get more than 5 hours saved on the hd, just burn it on a dvd rewritable. That's one of the reasons to have the dvd-rw.
And let's not forget the box now needs to output an HD signal.
That's the point of the hd card I priced in. It had hd outputs as well I thought. May have misread the specs though. I thought it had both hd in and out on it so you could either view hd on your monitor or route the signal through the computer and out to your tv. As I say, I could have misread the specs.
It's really not valid to say this part costs $x and this part costs $y so putting them in the same box should be $x+y.
True. But that's one of the reasons I used off the shelf prices. I tried to compensate for that by getting higher priced products. Also, since all of these components work with the same kind of information, video signals, it shouldn't be that hard. A lot of the work has already been done.
If you can build a box that will record at least 20 hours of HDTV off digital cable and display it at HD quality, and put that box on the shelf at a price of $900, I'd say you need to go into business.
Heh. If I could, I would.;) Seriously though, except for the digital cable, this site http://www.ramelectronics.net/html/HTPC.html built it from scratch. Unfortunately, they didn't report their final cost. But they also did just a little more on the computing end. An Athlon 1200 is probably a little overkill. Better to get a lower cpu and kill some of the fan noise I think. These should be quiet units.
Scroll down to the Theatre Stylus. Runs $958. Just need to add in a dvd-/+rw and digital cable descrambler. If they ran linux instead of xp pro, that would more than make up for the price difference in dvd vs dvd recordable. And if they made these in bulk the price would come down quickly.
I question the $2000 price. A Best Buy internal dvd recorder is around $250 now (internal model priced because it just has to slide into the tivo box) and tivo runs you another $250, and an hdtv decoder card I found priced at $300. That's 800 total, and if they were packaged as a unit I'm sure the price would be less because there's some base functionality that's duplicated in them. That means that the cable decoder would cost $1200? No way. If it cost them more than $100 to make that box I'd be surprised. I couldn't find a price on a digital cable descrambler. The regular cable descramblers go for somewhere around $200, which means they probably only cost $50 to produce at most. I'm willing to listen if you have information about how much it really costs to add the digital descrambler chip into the box.
So using just off the shelf parts I could assemble the same functionality for around $900 (assuming the parts for the digital descrambler run around $100.) That's less than half the price you are using and I purposely didn't look for the cheapest, white box components. These are "I'm a sucker, I buy off the shelf at Best Buy" prices. The unit could probably be produced for under $300 dollars and sold for $499 initially. If it wasn't for digital cable, the whole thing could be done with a wal-mart computer and linux for under $500. Slashdot has had several stories about roll your own linux media boxes.
What's the facination with bloating products, adding unnecessary features?
It should be an entertainment center, not a rat's nest of cables and remotes.
Right now I have a vcr, dvd player, and a cable decoder. I have 4 remotes. To watch dvd's, I have to turn on the vcr and change inputs. I've got six pairs of cables routing video and audio around. The additional features are trivial. My Sarny brand dvd player plays dvd, cd, svcd, mp3, and jpeg discs. I don't need to do anything special to switch between types. I just put a disc in and it does the appropriate thing.
Re:I need just three things to replace my vcr
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Rabid TiVo Fanaticism
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· Score: 2, Interesting
You're too cheap to get a second cable box so you can watch and record at the same time, but you won't consider a PVR until it has features that will drive the cost to about $2,000.
Let's see, I had something that cost me $50 a month and gave me X functionality. The cable company shifts channels around, so to get the same channels I have to pay $80 a month and get X-1 functionality. I have 1 tv. Paying the cable company even more money to get back the functionality I had a year ago, that I use maybe once every two months, is ridiculous. They *took* functionality away from me. And I can't believe it would cost $2000 to implement the digital cable descrambler circuitry.
It isn't so much the money as the principle of the thing. What really got me was when they started advertising that satellite tv was worse than cable because it had the same features as digital cable.
I need just three things to replace my vcr
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Rabid TiVo Fanaticism
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· Score: 3, Informative
1) Be able to watch one program and record another. With the gol darn digital cable, I can't do that any more. My VCR was cable ready for regular cable, why can't I get a PVR that's digital cable ready? As it is, I can get around this for cannels in the regular cable line up by bypassing the digital cable box, but since my cable provider puts all premium channels on digital, I can't tape a movie and watch Junkyard Wars at the same time. It also makes the timer feature on the vcr practically worthless.
I love the hypocrisy of our local cable company; they have anti-satellite dish commercials that point out that you can't tape one show and watch another without a separate descrambler. No different than digital cable.
2) Like the poster said, it needs a dvd recordable. I'll still buy the dvd collections, but sometimes I want to take a show on the road or loan it to a friend. I can do that just fine with my vcr.
3) HDTV ready. Just to be future safe.
You give me those things and then we'll talk price.
That you are asking for tax advice on Slashdot because you are too cheap to get a decent accountant? If I found out the business I was working for or doing business with was getting its advice from the chowderheads here, I would be out the door so fast Einstein would spin in his grave.
The only good advice you'll see on this board is to fork over the money and do it right: get an accountant.
Yeah, I know this is a snarky comment, but please, this question begged for it.
Yeah, I think you are alone. When ever I read Slashdot, it sounds like most of the people are either conservatives or libertarians. It seems like there's very little liberal bias here. At least to this liberal, you all seem awfully damn conservative.
From http://www.smith-lawfirm.com/mandatory_reporting.h tm:
"All states require certain professionals and institutions to report suspected child abuse, including health care providers and facilities of all types, mental health care providers of all types, teachers and other school personnel, social workers, day care providers and law enforcement personnel. Many states require film developers to report.
A number of states have broad statutes requiring "any person" to report. "
In Iowa, my state, the rule of law is:
b. Any of the following persons who, in the scope of professional practice or in their employment responsibilities, examines, attends, counsels, or treats a child and reasonably believes a child has suffered abuse:
(1) A social worker.
(2) An employee or operator of a public or private health care facility as defined in section 135C.1.
(3) A certified psychologist.
(4) A licensed school employee, certified para-educator, or holder of a coaching authorization issued under section 272.31.
(5) An employee or operator of a licensed child care center, registered child care home, head start program, family development and self-sufficiency grant program under section 217.12, or healthy opportunities for parents to experience success-healthy families Iowa program under section 135.106.
(6) An employee or operator of a substance abuse program or facility licensed under chapter 125.
(7) An employee of a department of human services institution listed in section 218.1.
(8) An employee or operator of a juvenile detention or juvenile shelter care facility approved under section 232.142.
(9) An employee or operator of a foster care facility licensed or approved under chapter 237.
(10) An employee or operator of a mental health center.
Other people may, and certainly should, report suspected child abuse, but mandatory reporters, in Iowa at least, are guilty of a simple misdemeanor and can be held civily liable if they do not report child abuse.
What code of ethis should system administrators operate under? Should there be an external code, agreed upon by some standards body or should a sysadmin simply do whatever the policies of the company she works for dictate?
Some examples:
1) A person in management who is not the boss of employee Jane Doe asks the sysadmin for files in Jane's network space. The person asking is above Jane in the heirarchy, but not in the the org chart path to Jane. Say a manager in another department. Should the sysadmin just give the files to the manager or ask that the request come from either the sysadmin's boss or from Jane's boss.
2) Should a company that doesn't actively close ports used by file sharing programs be liable for employees that use those programs. The company provided the bandwidth after all and could easily have blocked the ports.
3) Jane brings her computer to you as a professional repair person to fix a part. While fixing the computer, you browse through her files to make sure everything is working correctly. You notice some files have interesting names and discover that Jane is having an affair. Do you tell her husband? Should Jane be able to sue you for breach of confidentiality if you do?
4) Should tech people be made mandatory reporters? School teachers, doctors, and counselors can be made mandatory reporters of child abuse. What if we aren't talking about kiddie porn, but the parents are drug dealers? What if it is "just" pot?
5) What responsibility, if any, do users/resellers have for groundwater contamination by the dumping of old computers?
6) You work for a nonprofit organization that must use Microsoft Access to work with some data (in other words, you can't just shout, "Switch to open source alternatives" and make the problem go away). You can't afford the 10 copies of Access you need, so you say that since only 1 person will probably use it at a time, you can install 1 copy on 10 different computers. Is this moral? It is illegal, but the class wasn't about legalities, it was about morality. This is akin to the steal a loaf of bread to feed a starving family question. Well, what if your family don't like bread? What if they like cigarettes? And what if instead of stealing them, they were selling them at a price that was practically giving them away?
I've seen licensing for academic software that had the non-commercial only restriction, so that isn't surprising. It usually applies to languages, j++, visual c++,.net studio, etc. The idea is that the student should be able to use the language to learn it, write apps for class, etc., but if you want to write a commercial application you should buy the full commercial version.
Umm. It isn't hard at all. I've set up OOo and Star Office to use ODBC connections to mysql plenty of times. All you need to know is your server name, login and password.
I found the tone of the article arrogant to the extreme. People contribute code to the movement because they are enthusiasts; if someone wants to write "yet another MP3 player," who's to say he can't? You want him to "focus on" an application about which he has less enthusiasm? Fine; we call that "work," so toss him some coin.
The article isn't saying you can't right yam (Yet Another MP3 player) it is saying that if your goal is to help foster the widespread acceptance of OSS, then your talents and energies are put to better use by perfecting and polishing an existing MP3 player than in writing your own from scratch.
Yeah, on second or third glance it looks more like it is pointed in the direction of the guy in white seated on the ground but above his head. Depending on the angle between the soldier, the camera and the man with child, we may not see the butt of the gun. Soldier is to our left and the man is ever so slightly to our right. Depending on the lens, we may see side of the gun. The foreshortening affect of what looks like a digital photo compresses the space between the soldier and the man. (That's one of the problems with the digital: the soldier looks more out of scale there. I think he's been enlarged, but I haven't checked.) As it is, he is side on from the camera, but twisted slightly. No, he's not aiming at any one, but the gun is pointed at a couple of people. As someone else pointed out, his finger is off the trigger. He isn't aiming it, but it is clear that if anyone stands up, the gun will be ready.
The picture also looks flattened a little. I forget if the article said if it was originally a digital shot, but it looks it. Having everything in focus at once can mess with the distance. It is hard for me to tell just how far way the man with the child is.
Another subtle thing that give an *impression* regardless of the facts is that there's a nice straight line down the gun and across the child. You can almost lay a ruler across the gun and the child down to the guy in white's shoulder. (That's what I meant by pointing at the child. I also said it was very subtle.) If we were critiqueing the artistic value of the photo, we could discuss the parrallels between the guy holding the gun and the father holding the child and how the angles work to bring out the dichotomy of destructive force and creative force. Can a person create something physical without destroying? Can destruction itself be an act of creation? Etc.
As for the soldier's country of origin, I had simply forgotten it from the article.
No, he is casting a shadow. It's a very thin shadow (after all, he's a very thin boy and he's not going to cast a shadow like a tank) and it starts to blend in a little with the shadow from one of the posts. If you look closely, you can see the smaller shadow of his left foot extend out from the main shadow. Could still be faked, shadows aren't that hard to add in, but he does have one.
If anything, the altered photo is propaganda for the military, not those opposing the war. The real picture on the right shows a soldier seemingly pointing a machine gun of some kind at a man carrying a young child. The real picture on the left shows the gun pointing over the heads of people sitting down but also shows the soldier motioning the man with child to sit down just as the man starts to stand up or approach the soldier. The fake picture shows him motioning the man (now standing with child in arms) to sit down; the gun is pointed away from the child and the soldier is motioning the man to sit down.
If they had used the real photo on the right, it would be a picture of an American soldier pointing a gun at a man carrying his child. It is vaguely reminiscent of the photo of the guy pointing a gun at Elian Gonzales when the took him from Florida in the sense that it shows one of our boys pointing a gun at a young child.
The altered photo shows the soldier slightly more relaxed, the gun isn't pointed at anyone and the child is not in immediate harm at all.
It is subtle, I'll grant you that, but the original could have been much better propaganda for the anti-war crowd.
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Wow, didn't think other people still ran wp. We've found that having 8 and 10 installed at the same time can cause some problems. I think there were issues with the spellcheck and picture insert, but can't remember exactly. 95% of 8 works, but there are a few things that don't. It was a good excuse to force people to upgrade so we didn't have any stragglers still using 8.
Yeah, the worst offenders were under windows 3.1, that's true, but because of the mix of apps our users install, we still see it occassionally. They like older versions of WordPerfect, like 6.0, 6.1 and some old proprietary research apps that weren't well written. Because they are still in use, we still see problems now and again. But not nearly as bad as we used to. "Ok, just remember that you always have to start WordPerfect 6.1 *before* you start Eudora 3.0, otherwise WP won't work right." And even now WP 8 and MS Office don't play well together, and you can't have WP and 10 on at the same time either.
The AmigaOS solutions sounds great (and windows and linux have some of your points already) but I don't know if either windows or linux could enforce the Law of backward compatibility. Too many people writing too much software.
This same problem occurs in the windows world as well, dll hell as it is often called. Here's how it works for windows. Say your program needs vbrun32.dll. You have a choice. You can put the dll in the same folder as the executable, in which case your program will find it and load the right dll. Or you can put it in the system or system32 dll in which case your program and others can find it and load it. However, if vbrun32.dll is already loaded into memory, your program will use that one. I remember we used to have problems with apps only working if loaded in the right order so the right dll would load.
As with Linux, if there's a bug in the library you have to update either one file or search through the computer and update all instances. But, as with linux, the update can mess up some programs, others might be poorly coded and not run with newer versions of the dll. I've seen this last problem in both windows and linux; it looks like the programmer did if version != 3.001 then fail instead of if version 3.001 then fail.
If everyone is forced to use the same library, you get these problems and benefits:
--1 easy point of update
--1 easy point of failure
--older software may not run with newer versions
--programmers may insist on a specific version number
--updates to the libraries can benefit all programs; if kde or windows gets a new file open dialog box, then all programs that link to the common library can have the newer look and feel by updating just one library.
On the other hand, if you let each program have its own, you get these problems and benefits:
--difficult to update libraries when bugs are found
--can run into problems if a different version of the library is already loaded into memory (does this happen with linux?)
--guarantee that libraries are compatible with your app
--compartmentalization; everything you need for an app is in it's directory. Want to uninstall? Just delete the directory. No need to worry that deleting the app will affect anything else.
--no weird dependencies. Why does app X need me to install app Y when they clearly aren't related at all. The answer is shared libraries. Which is why many people like Gentoo and building from source.
Microsoft has waffled back and forth on the issue. Under dos, everything just went into one directory and that was it. Windows brought in the system directory for shared dll's. Now the latest versions of windows are back to having each app and all of its dlls in one directory.
Personally, I think compartmentalization is the key, provided we get some intelligent updaters. If libthingy needs to be updated, the install procedure should do a search and find all instances of the library, back up existing versions and then update all of them. This wouldn't be that hard to do.
So the game is 4 years old already. If it is a good game, then it doesn't matter.
I'm of mixed minds about this idea. It sounds too much like a blame the victim mentality.
"You used Windows, it's your fault your server was hacked. You should only use XXX."
"She was wearing a sexy blouse, she was asking to be raped. Women should only wear burkas."
"You left your car door unlocked, you were asking for it to be stolen. Everyone should lock their car doors and buy a Club (tm)."
If you want to use the clean needle program as an analogy, what we should do is provide public honeypots for people to test their skills against. Something along these lines:
"Hey Kids, try and crack Kevin Mitnick's computer. This is a special setup for you to test your skills against."
"It's the Call Captain Crunch from the Vatican challenge! Captain Crunch has enabled caller id on his phone. Your job is to determine the Pope's private phone number and get it to appear as the originating phone number on the good Captain's caller id box."
But vandalism, and that's what we're talking about here, is different than drug use. Drug use is at it's most basic, a crime against yourself. A consensual crime. Yes, addicts steal and kill, but the act of taking the drug itself only harms the user. That's why drug give away programs are supposed to work -- they eliminate the addicts need to commit a crime to feed the habit.
People in IT, especially consultants won't like to hear this, but if you hire a consultant to manage your server and it gets broken into, you should go after both the criiminal for the vandalization and the consultant for malpractice. Madonna should have a cause of action for malpractice against whoever designed her site so poorly that it was easily cracked. And the vandal, like all vandals, should be punished.
Ahh, I see you didn't read the article at all. To quote Ann Harris from the article, "The Firebird BBS project from Taiwan uses "Firebird BBS" as their mark. Pontiac uses "Pontiac Firebird" as a mark. If Mozilla wants to use "Mozilla Firebird" -- that may be acceptable in a legal sense."
Also, if you read the article, you'd know that software is the entire category. That's why the Linux, as the sole name of a word processor, is out of the question, no matter what os it ran on.
Read the article. Think about it. They were using the name first for a software product. The Mozilla people should have done their homework. AOL's lawyers should have done their homework. Doing a quick google even points you to a whole heirarchy of sites devoted to the software ( Computers > Software > Databases > InterBase ).
Define a field. This is in regards to software applications. See? One field. But then you say, "That's too broad. One's a database application, the other's a web browser." To which I respond, do you think that Linus would let Microsoft call a word processor that only ran on Windows the Linux Word Processor program? Do you think RMS would like the Microsoft GNU Database program? (Is GNU trademarked?) You get the idea.
That $250 Tivo is a 40 hour model, 20 hours or less if you want a decent picture. Start saving an HD signal and you're looking at maybe a 5 hour capacity.
;) Seriously though, except for the digital cable, this site http://www.ramelectronics.net/html/HTPC.html built it from scratch. Unfortunately, they didn't report their final cost. But they also did just a little more on the computing end. An Athlon 1200 is probably a little overkill. Better to get a lower cpu and kill some of the fan noise I think. These should be quiet units.
. htm
So if you get more than 5 hours saved on the hd, just burn it on a dvd rewritable. That's one of the reasons to have the dvd-rw.
And let's not forget the box now needs to output an HD signal.
That's the point of the hd card I priced in. It had hd outputs as well I thought. May have misread the specs though. I thought it had both hd in and out on it so you could either view hd on your monitor or route the signal through the computer and out to your tv. As I say, I could have misread the specs.
It's really not valid to say this part costs $x and this part costs $y so putting them in the same box should be $x+y.
True. But that's one of the reasons I used off the shelf prices. I tried to compensate for that by getting higher priced products. Also, since all of these components work with the same kind of information, video signals, it shouldn't be that hard. A lot of the work has already been done.
If you can build a box that will record at least 20 hours of HDTV off digital cable and display it at HD quality, and put that box on the shelf at a price of $900, I'd say you need to go into business.
Heh. If I could, I would.
Oh, I just found this:
https://www2.setssl.com/~hivizone/htpc/main_frame
Scroll down to the Theatre Stylus. Runs $958. Just need to add in a dvd-/+rw and digital cable descrambler. If they ran linux instead of xp pro, that would more than make up for the price difference in dvd vs dvd recordable. And if they made these in bulk the price would come down quickly.
I question the $2000 price. A Best Buy internal dvd recorder is around $250 now (internal model priced because it just has to slide into the tivo box) and tivo runs you another $250, and an hdtv decoder card I found priced at $300. That's 800 total, and if they were packaged as a unit I'm sure the price would be less because there's some base functionality that's duplicated in them. That means that the cable decoder would cost $1200? No way. If it cost them more than $100 to make that box I'd be surprised. I couldn't find a price on a digital cable descrambler. The regular cable descramblers go for somewhere around $200, which means they probably only cost $50 to produce at most. I'm willing to listen if you have information about how much it really costs to add the digital descrambler chip into the box.
So using just off the shelf parts I could assemble the same functionality for around $900 (assuming the parts for the digital descrambler run around $100.) That's less than half the price you are using and I purposely didn't look for the cheapest, white box components. These are "I'm a sucker, I buy off the shelf at Best Buy" prices. The unit could probably be produced for under $300 dollars and sold for $499 initially. If it wasn't for digital cable, the whole thing could be done with a wal-mart computer and linux for under $500. Slashdot has had several stories about roll your own linux media boxes.
What's the facination with bloating products, adding unnecessary features?
It should be an entertainment center, not a rat's nest of cables and remotes.
Right now I have a vcr, dvd player, and a cable decoder. I have 4 remotes. To watch dvd's, I have to turn on the vcr and change inputs. I've got six pairs of cables routing video and audio around. The additional features are trivial. My Sarny brand dvd player plays dvd, cd, svcd, mp3, and jpeg discs. I don't need to do anything special to switch between types. I just put a disc in and it does the appropriate thing.
You're too cheap to get a second cable box so you can watch and record at the same time, but you won't consider a PVR until it has features that will drive the cost to about $2,000.
Let's see, I had something that cost me $50 a month and gave me X functionality. The cable company shifts channels around, so to get the same channels I have to pay $80 a month and get X-1 functionality. I have 1 tv. Paying the cable company even more money to get back the functionality I had a year ago, that I use maybe once every two months, is ridiculous. They *took* functionality away from me. And I can't believe it would cost $2000 to implement the digital cable descrambler circuitry.
It isn't so much the money as the principle of the thing. What really got me was when they started advertising that satellite tv was worse than cable because it had the same features as digital cable.
1) Be able to watch one program and record another. With the gol darn digital cable, I can't do that any more. My VCR was cable ready for regular cable, why can't I get a PVR that's digital cable ready? As it is, I can get around this for cannels in the regular cable line up by bypassing the digital cable box, but since my cable provider puts all premium channels on digital, I can't tape a movie and watch Junkyard Wars at the same time. It also makes the timer feature on the vcr practically worthless.
I love the hypocrisy of our local cable company; they have anti-satellite dish commercials that point out that you can't tape one show and watch another without a separate descrambler. No different than digital cable.
2) Like the poster said, it needs a dvd recordable. I'll still buy the dvd collections, but sometimes I want to take a show on the road or loan it to a friend. I can do that just fine with my vcr.
3) HDTV ready. Just to be future safe.
You give me those things and then we'll talk price.
That you are asking for tax advice on Slashdot because you are too cheap to get a decent accountant? If I found out the business I was working for or doing business with was getting its advice from the chowderheads here, I would be out the door so fast Einstein would spin in his grave.
The only good advice you'll see on this board is to fork over the money and do it right: get an accountant.
Yeah, I know this is a snarky comment, but please, this question begged for it.
Yeah, I think you are alone. When ever I read Slashdot, it sounds like most of the people are either conservatives or libertarians. It seems like there's very little liberal bias here. At least to this liberal, you all seem awfully damn conservative.
Nope. It varies from state to state.
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From http://www.smith-lawfirm.com/mandatory_reporting.
"All states require certain professionals and institutions to report suspected child abuse, including health care providers and facilities of all types, mental health care providers of all types, teachers and other school personnel, social workers, day care providers and law enforcement personnel. Many states require film developers to report.
A number of states have broad statutes requiring "any person" to report. "
In Iowa, my state, the rule of law is:
b. Any of the following persons who, in the scope of professional practice or in their employment responsibilities, examines, attends, counsels, or treats a child and reasonably believes a child has suffered abuse:
(1) A social worker.
(2) An employee or operator of a public or private health care facility as defined in section 135C.1.
(3) A certified psychologist.
(4) A licensed school employee, certified para-educator, or holder of a coaching authorization issued under section 272.31.
(5) An employee or operator of a licensed child care center, registered child care home, head start program, family development and self-sufficiency grant program under section 217.12, or healthy opportunities for parents to experience success-healthy families Iowa program under section 135.106.
(6) An employee or operator of a substance abuse program or facility licensed under chapter 125.
(7) An employee of a department of human services institution listed in section 218.1.
(8) An employee or operator of a juvenile detention or juvenile shelter care facility approved under section 232.142.
(9) An employee or operator of a foster care facility licensed or approved under chapter 237.
(10) An employee or operator of a mental health center.
(11) A peace officer.
(12) A counselor or mental health professional. "
http://www.legis.state.ia.us/IACODE/2001SUPPLEM
Other people may, and certainly should, report suspected child abuse, but mandatory reporters, in Iowa at least, are guilty of a simple misdemeanor and can be held civily liable if they do not report child abuse.
What code of ethis should system administrators operate under? Should there be an external code, agreed upon by some standards body or should a sysadmin simply do whatever the policies of the company she works for dictate?
Some examples:
1) A person in management who is not the boss of employee Jane Doe asks the sysadmin for files in Jane's network space. The person asking is above Jane in the heirarchy, but not in the the org chart path to Jane. Say a manager in another department. Should the sysadmin just give the files to the manager or ask that the request come from either the sysadmin's boss or from Jane's boss.
2) Should a company that doesn't actively close ports used by file sharing programs be liable for employees that use those programs. The company provided the bandwidth after all and could easily have blocked the ports.
3) Jane brings her computer to you as a professional repair person to fix a part. While fixing the computer, you browse through her files to make sure everything is working correctly. You notice some files have interesting names and discover that Jane is having an affair. Do you tell her husband? Should Jane be able to sue you for breach of confidentiality if you do?
4) Should tech people be made mandatory reporters? School teachers, doctors, and counselors can be made mandatory reporters of child abuse. What if we aren't talking about kiddie porn, but the parents are drug dealers?
What if it is "just" pot?
5) What responsibility, if any, do users/resellers have for groundwater contamination by the dumping of old computers?
6) You work for a nonprofit organization that must use Microsoft Access to work with some data (in other words, you can't just shout, "Switch to open source alternatives" and make the problem go away). You can't afford the 10 copies of Access you need, so you say that since only 1 person will probably use it at a time, you can install 1 copy on 10 different computers. Is this moral? It is illegal, but the class wasn't about legalities, it was about morality. This is akin to the steal a loaf of bread to feed a starving family question. Well, what if your family don't like bread? What if they like cigarettes? And what if instead of stealing them, they were selling them at a price that was practically giving them away?
And that's just a few off the top of my head.
I've seen licensing for academic software that had the non-commercial only restriction, so that isn't surprising. It usually applies to languages, j++, visual c++, .net studio, etc. The idea is that the student should be able to use the language to learn it, write apps for class, etc., but if you want to write a commercial application you should buy the full commercial version.
Umm. It isn't hard at all. I've set up OOo and Star Office to use ODBC connections to mysql plenty of times. All you need to know is your server name, login and password.
The article isn't saying you can't right yam (Yet Another MP3 player) it is saying that if your goal is to help foster the widespread acceptance of OSS, then your talents and energies are put to better use by perfecting and polishing an existing MP3 player than in writing your own from scratch.
And this makes sense, at least to me.
Yeah, on second or third glance it looks more like it is pointed in the direction of the guy in white seated on the ground but above his head. Depending on the angle between the soldier, the camera and the man with child, we may not see the butt of the gun. Soldier is to our left and the man is ever so slightly to our right. Depending on the lens, we may see side of the gun. The foreshortening affect of what looks like a digital photo compresses the space between the soldier and the man. (That's one of the problems with the digital: the soldier looks more out of scale there. I think he's been enlarged, but I haven't checked.) As it is, he is side on from the camera, but twisted slightly. No, he's not aiming at any one, but the gun is pointed at a couple of people. As someone else pointed out, his finger is off the trigger. He isn't aiming it, but it is clear that if anyone stands up, the gun will be ready.
The picture also looks flattened a little. I forget if the article said if it was originally a digital shot, but it looks it. Having everything in focus at once can mess with the distance. It is hard for me to tell just how far way the man with the child is.
Another subtle thing that give an *impression* regardless of the facts is that there's a nice straight line down the gun and across the child. You can almost lay a ruler across the gun and the child down to the guy in white's shoulder. (That's what I meant by pointing at the child. I also said it was very subtle.) If we were critiqueing the artistic value of the photo, we could discuss the parrallels between the guy holding the gun and the father holding the child and how the angles work to bring out the dichotomy of destructive force and creative force. Can a person create something physical without destroying? Can destruction itself be an act of creation? Etc.
As for the soldier's country of origin, I had simply forgotten it from the article.
Good thing this was posted on April 2.
No, he is casting a shadow. It's a very thin shadow (after all, he's a very thin boy and he's not going to cast a shadow like a tank) and it starts to blend in a little with the shadow from one of the posts. If you look closely, you can see the smaller shadow of his left foot extend out from the main shadow. Could still be faked, shadows aren't that hard to add in, but he does have one.
If anything, the altered photo is propaganda for the military, not those opposing the war. The real picture on the right shows a soldier seemingly pointing a machine gun of some kind at a man carrying a young child. The real picture on the left shows the gun pointing over the heads of people sitting down but also shows the soldier motioning the man with child to sit down just as the man starts to stand up or approach the soldier. The fake picture shows him motioning the man (now standing with child in arms) to sit down; the gun is pointed away from the child and the soldier is motioning the man to sit down.
If they had used the real photo on the right, it would be a picture of an American soldier pointing a gun at a man carrying his child. It is vaguely reminiscent of the photo of the guy pointing a gun at Elian Gonzales when the took him from Florida in the sense that it shows one of our boys pointing a gun at a young child.
The altered photo shows the soldier slightly more relaxed, the gun isn't pointed at anyone and the child is not in immediate harm at all.
It is subtle, I'll grant you that, but the original could have been much better propaganda for the anti-war crowd.