When they were due for their booster shots, the doctor tested them and said their immunity levels were way higher then he expected and they didn't need the normal booster.
One single data point means nothing. It could just as well be that your kids of immune systems better suited to taking vaccines, or some sort of natural immunity against measles, or there were differing diets or environmental conditions, that resulted in higher than average immunity levels. Making a conclusion on one piece of anecdotal evidence, or even a thousand pieces of anecdotal evidence made outside of a controlled and fully documented testing environment are meaningless. There are just too many unknowns in play for any of it to be statistically valid.
Increasing DRM does work, you just fail to grasp what it is trying to do. DRM isn't supposed to stop pirates, or even the more technologically capable customers. DRM is to prevent the bulk of their customers from using their rightfully purchased content in a manner other than is desired by the publisher. In that sense, it is doing a great job.
Dirigibles are painfully slow, and if they're carrying a bunch of heavy batteries, they won't have the capacity for anything else. You would be better off using high speed trains through whatever circuitous route through the rail network they had to take.
Except that's not entirely what happens. Sure, those who are stupid enough to believe the FUD of non-scientific people allow their kids to be infected. However, vaccines are not 100% reliable. Some kids cannot receive those vaccines due to other medical reasons. Others, the vaccine simply doesn't take. Traditionally, those individuals are protected by the "herd immunity", where a sufficient percentage of the "herd" is immune, so the contagion does not have sufficient chance to infect and propagate. With enough people willfully ignoring these vaccines, immunity drops low enough that those individuals are no longer protected. They are the unwitting victims of the stupid.
Evolution does not produce more advanced life forms. It produces life forms better suited to the current environment. If that resultant life form happens to be a simpler, less complex version of its predecessor, so be it.
Really, all wars in whatever context rely on either winning the hearts and minds of the people, or brutally supressing them. The MPAA in it's war on piracy is attempting the latter, yet even the latter only works as a temporary stop gap, the former is the only permanent solution, yet that's a battle they've already long lost.
Let me ask you, what do you think the purpose of DRM is? Go up to a dozen people on the street and ask them the same thing. Nearly all of them will tell you DRM is to prevent media theft. With how quickly TV and movies show up on the internet, surely someone, somewhere in the industry would have realized all their efforts aren't doing a damn thing, and perhaps they should not spend all that money developing such measures.
DRM has nothing to do with anti-piracy measures. It exists to assert control over the consumer, and the consumer's rightfully purchased product, long after they have relinquished ownership of it. It exists to take away the rights and capabilities of the legitimate paying customer, so they can only consume their media in approved ways on approved hardware. The have sidelined the real issue, distracting people with this piracy red herring. The HAVE already won the hearts and minds of the people. It's a battle we've already long lost.
If you want to continue promoting the illegal duplication and distribution of copyrighted works, they you're just a dirty thief who wants all the things you don't want to pay for. If you actually want to "win the war" against the MPAA, find a way to campaign to the public about the real use for DRM. No on cares what happens to the pirates, but they will care when they understand how their own rights as law-abiding citizens are being taken away.
So in an effort to bring an end to DRM, you act in a manner that does nothing more than give excuse to the industry to increase the use of DRM to stop you?
Right, that's what I was getting at. All of these 'alternative fuel' studies are for cars, but who cares about cars. 20-30 years worth of power grid and generation capacity upgrades, and some modest improvements in battery tech, and there is no reason why nearly everything on the ground wouldn't be electric. Meanwhile butanol seems to have the same desirable properties as kerosene for aviation fuel. Only slightly higher viscosity, only slightly lower energy density, great low temperature properties. The problem is the octane, which is considerably lower than kerosene, or even automobile gasoline. I assume that's why you were talking about leading it. Gas turbines, and direct injection reciprocating engines, can't knock, so low octane rating shouldn't be an issue.
What I mean to say is... the aviation industry simply has no alternative to liquid hydrocarbon fuels, whether that be petroleum, syngas, or cellulose based.
Corn ethanol is a joke, created for the sole purpose of driving up food prices. Hydrogen and methane would have to be stored cryogenically, and under intense pressures, so an airliner crash would result in a massive fuel air bomb, comparable to a low yield nuclear explosion. A nuclear fired gas turbine would have the power/energy to weight ratio, but again, contamination issues during a crash. Batteries are simply too damn heavy. Without some unexpected revolutionary new power source, aviation won't see any significant advances in the foreseeable future.
I was thinking the same thing. 9 million barrels of gasoline comes to around 1.3 million tons per day, or just under 500 million tons per year. The article claims 'at least 323 million tons' of material would be available per year as feedstock, but it's not like all of that can be converted. A modest guess would say 5-10% of our current gasoline consumption could be offset by this mechanism, if it works as advertised. Far more desirable than your guess at 0.25%, but it won't be a "game changer". It will only be one of many technologies that will have to work together to become sustainable.
The bigger issue is that gasoline consumption is only about half of our yearly petroleum usage, and for some fields such as aviation, there is simply no alternative. The automotive and rail industries can use electric motors. Anything on a track can draw power straight off the grid, while cars can use heavy batteries. Aircraft don't have the luxury of weight, and our current batteries are a good order of magnitude too heavy to be used. A renewable fuel source for them would be far more important than for cars. Of course, if we convert everything else over to electric over the next few decades, there will be enough petroleum to last the aviation industry several centuries. Presumably we will have come up with something to replace the kerosene fired gas turbine by then.
Would not have been as easy as you say - the livestock had to be in the towns and cities for the simple reason that refrigeration wasn't around, so any meat that wasn't riddled with worms, flies and mold had to be from fresh kills.
Drying, salting, and smoking have been around for millennia, and were well understood during the Middle Ages. Refrigeration is not the only way to safely store food.
This is not something that github is enforcing. It is merely some third party application that interfaces with projects hosted on github. It can be given commit privileges and subsequently run by a project by their own admins, on their own systems.
The summary seems to indicate this is a service github is going to start offering, but that is far from the truth.
The users who are actually willing to put forth some effort and work to maintain the capabilities they want are great. I will gladly do what I can to encourage that. On the other hand, "you people" are the ones that have nothing to do with the community, other than they spring up and complain when their obsolete tech or detrimental code is being dropped for the betterment of the project. Every time we announce the removal of something, people demand that we continue to maintain it, but no one ever steps forward and offers to take ownership of it.
Any computer that can't manage playback of DVDs in software should simply not be used for anything media related, period.
You're very confused. TV-output is standard resolution by necessity... The INPUT however, could be ATSC, DVB2, whatever. You still need some way to OUTPUT that to a TV, and the old cards (like the PVR-350) can do that as well as anything, and these days may have become the only option to do.
You've very confused. The video output is irrelevant, its the video CONTENT that matters. The PVR-350 was only designed to handle whatever content it could record. That means standard definition MPEG2. DVDs just happened to nicely fit within those constraints, and can be played as well. That content can be decoded in software by most P3 or better hardware, so no real loss there. HD content off ATSC, and H264 content from DVB, cannot be decoded by this device at all. You can still use the X11 driver for the framebuffer output, bypassing the decoder chip, but those users with P2s and VIA systems won't be able to keep up with the CPU needs.
You are correct though, that the market for video cards with analog output is quickly drying up.
Past-tense... It's gone for the consumer, for all intents and purposes. Yet old analog TVs are out there in large, large numbers. Your only hope is to buy OLD hardware, like the PVR-350 (if that's all you can find).
Newegg still offers plenty of GF8400s new, although the prices are going back up now that they're no longer being produced. You can even buy older GF7300s and GF6200s, all of which are available with analog TV outputs. Even when all the retail units are sold and gone, what makes you think the resale market on PVR-350s will be any better than for these far far FAR more common graphics cards?
The worse your CPU, the better the XvMC speed-up, but you're generally correct. However, the fact that it's ONLY doubling the performance of your CPU is not to be underestimated. There's a large number of systems out there, even still being sold (refurbished) that can't play HDTV with CPU alone. I don't think the old hardware should need to be thrown away. And what's more, keeping the old hardware may be many peoples' only way of keeping their analog TV-output, so there's a pretty good rationale for it.
And those people why actually have a need for XvMC, and for whatever reason are unwilling to purchase new hardware, can simply continue using whatever version they are currently on. Nothing is forcing them to update. They can develop their own fork to maintain support for that output format. They can contract someone to maintain support for that output format. However as a non-paying, non-contributing user, they can't get onto mailing lists or message boards or forums and complain. Open source projects have no obligation to any user that is not contributing in some meaningful manner, just like how a commercial entity has no obligation to anyone who is not a paying customer.
For between $150 and $200, you can swap out those guts for a modern board, processor, memory, and video card, with much better low power operation
Yes, a modern board, processor, and video card, WITH NO TV-OUT SUPPORT, so this simple $200 upgrade has become at a $600 - $2,000 upgrade. Ouch.
Newegg has a GF9500 GT with S-Video output for $55, and Amazon has VGA scan converters starting at $20. I don't know where you're looking that will charge $400-$1800, but... whew... perhaps you shouldn't buy hardware there any longer...
I've got a nice new system next to me... Paid plenty to get a nice low-power 45W TDP Athlon X4 (Quad-core) CPU. Got an 80+ efficient Seasonic PSU in it. Nice silent fans. A "green" hard drive that stays nice and cool. And how much power does it use sitting there id
It has not even been legal to produce the PVR-350 since early 2007. There was an FCC mandate that went into effect that banned the production of analog tuners that were not accompanied by an ATSC capable digital tuner. There was a big stink when some retailers started shipping HVR-1600s in PVR-150 boxes, before a Linux driver for the card was available. The PVR-350 and PVR-250 had ceased manufacturing several years prior to that. Sure, you can pick up the devices used, but that card has not been sold retail in well over five years.
I specifically said the opposite, that the code WAS being improved, and that time would have to be spent on those interfaces in order to maintain compatibility with the rest of the code. Rather than spend the time, they were dropped. At that point, those users who choose to continue using such hardware can remain at their current version. There is nothing wrong with that decision. The problem is that when we announce the removal of those feature, people respond on the mailing list that they depend on such features, and very quickly resort to name calling. Rarely if ever do any of those people demanding continued support ever offer to actually write that support.
So those are the three options: keep using the existing version, replace the hardware, or provide support yourself. When people decide to take a fourth option and complain, they're accomplishing nothing but drawing the ire of developers.
The PVR-350 is an analog tuner, hardware encoder, hardware decoder, and framebuffer. In its day, it was a great little card. It hasn't been its day in a significant number of years. The hardware decoder only allowed a very crude on screen display, and was only good for DVD quality standard definition MPEG2. Any computer that can't manage playback of DVDs in software should simply not be used for anything media related, period.
You can still pick up PVR-150s, which offer an improved tuner and encoder but no output, for around $20 used. One of my frontends has a GF8400, which I bought on sale a couple years ago for $20 after rebate. It provides far better decoding, OpenGL support, and a better TV encoder than the old PVR-350. You are correct though, that the market for video cards with analog output is quickly drying up.
XvMC is garbage compared to modern decoding interfaces, and it was garbage when it was actually being supported by manufacturers. It only supported partial decoding of MPEG2, offering perhaps 40% better performance than CPU alone. In exchange, you're stuck with an awful black and white OSD. Any desktop system manufactured 2004 or later should have plenty of power to handle ATSC content. If you're doing DVB, then you're just out of luck, as that is likely to have some amount of MPEG4. That means you're trying to squeeze more life out of 8yr old mid-range P4s and Athlon XPs. For between $150 and $200, you can swap out those guts for a modern board, processor, memory, and video card, with much better low power operation. If you leave the machine on all the time, you will recover the cost in power consumption in 2-3 years.
Linux has often been used to squeeze all the life out of old, cheap hardware like you described, but many have actually done the math to discover its simply not worth maintaining those old systems in the face of cheap new hardware.
It was discussed as a means to lighten the load on that single developer mentioned above, and determined that would be too disruptive. Just about any video card will do Xv, but OpenGL takes a bit more power. Anything nVidia 8-series will do, and probably anything 7-series, but there are a lot of users with older 6200 and embedded 6150 graphics cards that likely are insufficient. Any of the Intel Extreme, and non-HD GMA units likely wouldn't cut it either. ATI stuff should work, but their Linux graphics drivers have always been flaky.
For what it's worth, XBMC went full OpenGL several years ago, which is why we were even considering it in the first place.
Right, it's not all graphical support they are removing, only 3D support. Surely anyone actually trying to do anything 3D has already upgraded to newer hardware, or can simply stick with the old software.
It's a similar situation in MythTV. Xv is still supported for software decoding, but XvMC and PVR-350 were (extremely limiting) hardware acceleration APIs. They only work with MPEG2, and the only people who would care to use them are those still running decade old processors that sufficiently powerful for software decoding. But, you remove them to allow an expansion in the capabilities in the OSD, and all sorts of people come out of the woodwork and complain.
Try as we might, we just can't manage to get you people to migrate to more modern hardware. Frozen and unchanging code means exactly that, the code is not being improved in any manner. We recently redid both the UI and video rendering interfaces. Say we want to further add some animation support to the video renderer for use on the OSD, that code needs to be written for each of Xshm, Xv, OpenGL, VDPAU, VAAPI, XvMC, and PVR-350 framebuffer output. In addition, that's primarily the work of one single guy. XvMC hasn't been supported on any useful hardware sold in the last couple years, and the PVR-350 hasn't been sold for over half a decade. So, we can either continue to support all of those modes, or we can drop the "old cruft" and maybe the people who aren't so cheap as to be unwilling to spend $20 on a video card can have something that looks a bit nicer.
Or that change has already happened, and someone finally noticed and opened a ticket saying it was broken. Rather than fix it, or attempt to do so blindly since no one else still has any of that hardware, they just drop support.
The perfect vector for piracy is DVDs and Bluray, which are fantastic quality, and have been cracked for years. Meanwhile HTML5 streaming is inherently low bitrate and low quality, plus depending on the source, the quality may auto-scale based off network throughput. Besides, PlayOn has already breached whatever security Netflix has, and retransmits the video over DRM-free UPNP.
DRM was never intended to prevent piracy. If it were, it's clearly an abysmal failure, and they would have given up on it a decade ago. No, DRM only exists to maintain control over the honest user who doesn't know how to get around it.
Let's look at why the Apple product can do those things while the Android product can't. There is an app to access The Economist. There is an app to access Netflix. WHY are there apps for this crap? Why can't you access The Economist through a specially formatted web page? Why can't you access it through a generic eBook format? Why can't you access Netflix through HTML5?
When the iPhone came out, there were to be no applications. Applications were bad. Applications were evil. Everyone must write webapps to use with the mandated data plan. Then Apple comes out with the SDK and everyone must write glorious applications. Rather than use standardized formats to implement these features so anyone can access it, we have to use Apps, so we can sell it, and get use it as a marketing gimmick. Support Apple if you want, but they ruined it for the rest of us.
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When they were due for their booster shots, the doctor tested them and said their immunity levels were way higher then he expected and they didn't need the normal booster.
One single data point means nothing. It could just as well be that your kids of immune systems better suited to taking vaccines, or some sort of natural immunity against measles, or there were differing diets or environmental conditions, that resulted in higher than average immunity levels. Making a conclusion on one piece of anecdotal evidence, or even a thousand pieces of anecdotal evidence made outside of a controlled and fully documented testing environment are meaningless. There are just too many unknowns in play for any of it to be statistically valid.
Increasing DRM does work, you just fail to grasp what it is trying to do. DRM isn't supposed to stop pirates, or even the more technologically capable customers. DRM is to prevent the bulk of their customers from using their rightfully purchased content in a manner other than is desired by the publisher. In that sense, it is doing a great job.
Dirigibles are painfully slow, and if they're carrying a bunch of heavy batteries, they won't have the capacity for anything else. You would be better off using high speed trains through whatever circuitous route through the rail network they had to take.
Except that's not entirely what happens. Sure, those who are stupid enough to believe the FUD of non-scientific people allow their kids to be infected. However, vaccines are not 100% reliable. Some kids cannot receive those vaccines due to other medical reasons. Others, the vaccine simply doesn't take. Traditionally, those individuals are protected by the "herd immunity", where a sufficient percentage of the "herd" is immune, so the contagion does not have sufficient chance to infect and propagate. With enough people willfully ignoring these vaccines, immunity drops low enough that those individuals are no longer protected. They are the unwitting victims of the stupid.
Evolution does not produce more advanced life forms. It produces life forms better suited to the current environment. If that resultant life form happens to be a simpler, less complex version of its predecessor, so be it.
Really, all wars in whatever context rely on either winning the hearts and minds of the people, or brutally supressing them. The MPAA in it's war on piracy is attempting the latter, yet even the latter only works as a temporary stop gap, the former is the only permanent solution, yet that's a battle they've already long lost.
Let me ask you, what do you think the purpose of DRM is? Go up to a dozen people on the street and ask them the same thing. Nearly all of them will tell you DRM is to prevent media theft. With how quickly TV and movies show up on the internet, surely someone, somewhere in the industry would have realized all their efforts aren't doing a damn thing, and perhaps they should not spend all that money developing such measures.
DRM has nothing to do with anti-piracy measures. It exists to assert control over the consumer, and the consumer's rightfully purchased product, long after they have relinquished ownership of it. It exists to take away the rights and capabilities of the legitimate paying customer, so they can only consume their media in approved ways on approved hardware. The have sidelined the real issue, distracting people with this piracy red herring. The HAVE already won the hearts and minds of the people. It's a battle we've already long lost.
If you want to continue promoting the illegal duplication and distribution of copyrighted works, they you're just a dirty thief who wants all the things you don't want to pay for. If you actually want to "win the war" against the MPAA, find a way to campaign to the public about the real use for DRM. No on cares what happens to the pirates, but they will care when they understand how their own rights as law-abiding citizens are being taken away.
So in an effort to bring an end to DRM, you act in a manner that does nothing more than give excuse to the industry to increase the use of DRM to stop you?
Right, that's what I was getting at. All of these 'alternative fuel' studies are for cars, but who cares about cars. 20-30 years worth of power grid and generation capacity upgrades, and some modest improvements in battery tech, and there is no reason why nearly everything on the ground wouldn't be electric. Meanwhile butanol seems to have the same desirable properties as kerosene for aviation fuel. Only slightly higher viscosity, only slightly lower energy density, great low temperature properties. The problem is the octane, which is considerably lower than kerosene, or even automobile gasoline. I assume that's why you were talking about leading it. Gas turbines, and direct injection reciprocating engines, can't knock, so low octane rating shouldn't be an issue.
What I mean to say is... the aviation industry simply has no alternative to liquid hydrocarbon fuels, whether that be petroleum, syngas, or cellulose based.
Corn ethanol is a joke, created for the sole purpose of driving up food prices. Hydrogen and methane would have to be stored cryogenically, and under intense pressures, so an airliner crash would result in a massive fuel air bomb, comparable to a low yield nuclear explosion. A nuclear fired gas turbine would have the power/energy to weight ratio, but again, contamination issues during a crash. Batteries are simply too damn heavy. Without some unexpected revolutionary new power source, aviation won't see any significant advances in the foreseeable future.
I was thinking the same thing. 9 million barrels of gasoline comes to around 1.3 million tons per day, or just under 500 million tons per year. The article claims 'at least 323 million tons' of material would be available per year as feedstock, but it's not like all of that can be converted. A modest guess would say 5-10% of our current gasoline consumption could be offset by this mechanism, if it works as advertised. Far more desirable than your guess at 0.25%, but it won't be a "game changer". It will only be one of many technologies that will have to work together to become sustainable.
The bigger issue is that gasoline consumption is only about half of our yearly petroleum usage, and for some fields such as aviation, there is simply no alternative. The automotive and rail industries can use electric motors. Anything on a track can draw power straight off the grid, while cars can use heavy batteries. Aircraft don't have the luxury of weight, and our current batteries are a good order of magnitude too heavy to be used. A renewable fuel source for them would be far more important than for cars. Of course, if we convert everything else over to electric over the next few decades, there will be enough petroleum to last the aviation industry several centuries. Presumably we will have come up with something to replace the kerosene fired gas turbine by then.
Would not have been as easy as you say - the livestock had to be in the towns and cities for the simple reason that refrigeration wasn't around, so any meat that wasn't riddled with worms, flies and mold had to be from fresh kills.
Drying, salting, and smoking have been around for millennia, and were well understood during the Middle Ages. Refrigeration is not the only way to safely store food.
This is not something that github is enforcing. It is merely some third party application that interfaces with projects hosted on github. It can be given commit privileges and subsequently run by a project by their own admins, on their own systems.
The summary seems to indicate this is a service github is going to start offering, but that is far from the truth.
The users who are actually willing to put forth some effort and work to maintain the capabilities they want are great. I will gladly do what I can to encourage that. On the other hand, "you people" are the ones that have nothing to do with the community, other than they spring up and complain when their obsolete tech or detrimental code is being dropped for the betterment of the project. Every time we announce the removal of something, people demand that we continue to maintain it, but no one ever steps forward and offers to take ownership of it.
You're very confused. TV-output is standard resolution by necessity... The INPUT however, could be ATSC, DVB2, whatever. You still need some way to OUTPUT that to a TV, and the old cards (like the PVR-350) can do that as well as anything, and these days may have become the only option to do.
You've very confused. The video output is irrelevant, its the video CONTENT that matters. The PVR-350 was only designed to handle whatever content it could record. That means standard definition MPEG2. DVDs just happened to nicely fit within those constraints, and can be played as well. That content can be decoded in software by most P3 or better hardware, so no real loss there. HD content off ATSC, and H264 content from DVB, cannot be decoded by this device at all. You can still use the X11 driver for the framebuffer output, bypassing the decoder chip, but those users with P2s and VIA systems won't be able to keep up with the CPU needs.
Past-tense... It's gone for the consumer, for all intents and purposes. Yet old analog TVs are out there in large, large numbers. Your only hope is to buy OLD hardware, like the PVR-350 (if that's all you can find).
Newegg still offers plenty of GF8400s new, although the prices are going back up now that they're no longer being produced. You can even buy older GF7300s and GF6200s, all of which are available with analog TV outputs. Even when all the retail units are sold and gone, what makes you think the resale market on PVR-350s will be any better than for these far far FAR more common graphics cards?
The worse your CPU, the better the XvMC speed-up, but you're generally correct. However, the fact that it's ONLY doubling the performance of your CPU is not to be underestimated. There's a large number of systems out there, even still being sold (refurbished) that can't play HDTV with CPU alone. I don't think the old hardware should need to be thrown away. And what's more, keeping the old hardware may be many peoples' only way of keeping their analog TV-output, so there's a pretty good rationale for it.
And those people why actually have a need for XvMC, and for whatever reason are unwilling to purchase new hardware, can simply continue using whatever version they are currently on. Nothing is forcing them to update. They can develop their own fork to maintain support for that output format. They can contract someone to maintain support for that output format. However as a non-paying, non-contributing user, they can't get onto mailing lists or message boards or forums and complain. Open source projects have no obligation to any user that is not contributing in some meaningful manner, just like how a commercial entity has no obligation to anyone who is not a paying customer.
Yes, a modern board, processor, and video card, WITH NO TV-OUT SUPPORT, so this simple $200 upgrade has become at a $600 - $2,000 upgrade. Ouch.
Newegg has a GF9500 GT with S-Video output for $55, and Amazon has VGA scan converters starting at $20. I don't know where you're looking that will charge $400-$1800, but... whew... perhaps you shouldn't buy hardware there any longer...
I've got a nice new system next to me... Paid plenty to get a nice low-power 45W TDP Athlon X4 (Quad-core) CPU. Got an 80+ efficient Seasonic PSU in it. Nice silent fans. A "green" hard drive that stays nice and cool. And how much power does it use sitting there id
It has not even been legal to produce the PVR-350 since early 2007. There was an FCC mandate that went into effect that banned the production of analog tuners that were not accompanied by an ATSC capable digital tuner. There was a big stink when some retailers started shipping HVR-1600s in PVR-150 boxes, before a Linux driver for the card was available. The PVR-350 and PVR-250 had ceased manufacturing several years prior to that. Sure, you can pick up the devices used, but that card has not been sold retail in well over five years.
I specifically said the opposite, that the code WAS being improved, and that time would have to be spent on those interfaces in order to maintain compatibility with the rest of the code. Rather than spend the time, they were dropped. At that point, those users who choose to continue using such hardware can remain at their current version. There is nothing wrong with that decision. The problem is that when we announce the removal of those feature, people respond on the mailing list that they depend on such features, and very quickly resort to name calling. Rarely if ever do any of those people demanding continued support ever offer to actually write that support.
So those are the three options: keep using the existing version, replace the hardware, or provide support yourself. When people decide to take a fourth option and complain, they're accomplishing nothing but drawing the ire of developers.
The PVR-350 is an analog tuner, hardware encoder, hardware decoder, and framebuffer. In its day, it was a great little card. It hasn't been its day in a significant number of years. The hardware decoder only allowed a very crude on screen display, and was only good for DVD quality standard definition MPEG2. Any computer that can't manage playback of DVDs in software should simply not be used for anything media related, period.
You can still pick up PVR-150s, which offer an improved tuner and encoder but no output, for around $20 used. One of my frontends has a GF8400, which I bought on sale a couple years ago for $20 after rebate. It provides far better decoding, OpenGL support, and a better TV encoder than the old PVR-350. You are correct though, that the market for video cards with analog output is quickly drying up.
XvMC is garbage compared to modern decoding interfaces, and it was garbage when it was actually being supported by manufacturers. It only supported partial decoding of MPEG2, offering perhaps 40% better performance than CPU alone. In exchange, you're stuck with an awful black and white OSD. Any desktop system manufactured 2004 or later should have plenty of power to handle ATSC content. If you're doing DVB, then you're just out of luck, as that is likely to have some amount of MPEG4. That means you're trying to squeeze more life out of 8yr old mid-range P4s and Athlon XPs. For between $150 and $200, you can swap out those guts for a modern board, processor, memory, and video card, with much better low power operation. If you leave the machine on all the time, you will recover the cost in power consumption in 2-3 years.
Linux has often been used to squeeze all the life out of old, cheap hardware like you described, but many have actually done the math to discover its simply not worth maintaining those old systems in the face of cheap new hardware.
It was discussed as a means to lighten the load on that single developer mentioned above, and determined that would be too disruptive. Just about any video card will do Xv, but OpenGL takes a bit more power. Anything nVidia 8-series will do, and probably anything 7-series, but there are a lot of users with older 6200 and embedded 6150 graphics cards that likely are insufficient. Any of the Intel Extreme, and non-HD GMA units likely wouldn't cut it either. ATI stuff should work, but their Linux graphics drivers have always been flaky.
For what it's worth, XBMC went full OpenGL several years ago, which is why we were even considering it in the first place.
Right, it's not all graphical support they are removing, only 3D support. Surely anyone actually trying to do anything 3D has already upgraded to newer hardware, or can simply stick with the old software.
It's a similar situation in MythTV. Xv is still supported for software decoding, but XvMC and PVR-350 were (extremely limiting) hardware acceleration APIs. They only work with MPEG2, and the only people who would care to use them are those still running decade old processors that sufficiently powerful for software decoding. But, you remove them to allow an expansion in the capabilities in the OSD, and all sorts of people come out of the woodwork and complain.
Removing 3D support for cards last manufactured before Mozilla even existed is unhealthy?
Doesn't Matrox provide their own proprietary drivers for Parhelia cards?
Try as we might, we just can't manage to get you people to migrate to more modern hardware. Frozen and unchanging code means exactly that, the code is not being improved in any manner. We recently redid both the UI and video rendering interfaces. Say we want to further add some animation support to the video renderer for use on the OSD, that code needs to be written for each of Xshm, Xv, OpenGL, VDPAU, VAAPI, XvMC, and PVR-350 framebuffer output. In addition, that's primarily the work of one single guy. XvMC hasn't been supported on any useful hardware sold in the last couple years, and the PVR-350 hasn't been sold for over half a decade. So, we can either continue to support all of those modes, or we can drop the "old cruft" and maybe the people who aren't so cheap as to be unwilling to spend $20 on a video card can have something that looks a bit nicer.
Or that change has already happened, and someone finally noticed and opened a ticket saying it was broken. Rather than fix it, or attempt to do so blindly since no one else still has any of that hardware, they just drop support.
Now that's an answer I can actually believe, if perhaps not one I will enjoy.
The perfect vector for piracy is DVDs and Bluray, which are fantastic quality, and have been cracked for years. Meanwhile HTML5 streaming is inherently low bitrate and low quality, plus depending on the source, the quality may auto-scale based off network throughput. Besides, PlayOn has already breached whatever security Netflix has, and retransmits the video over DRM-free UPNP.
DRM was never intended to prevent piracy. If it were, it's clearly an abysmal failure, and they would have given up on it a decade ago. No, DRM only exists to maintain control over the honest user who doesn't know how to get around it.
Let's look at why the Apple product can do those things while the Android product can't. There is an app to access The Economist. There is an app to access Netflix. WHY are there apps for this crap? Why can't you access The Economist through a specially formatted web page? Why can't you access it through a generic eBook format? Why can't you access Netflix through HTML5?
When the iPhone came out, there were to be no applications. Applications were bad. Applications were evil. Everyone must write webapps to use with the mandated data plan. Then Apple comes out with the SDK and everyone must write glorious applications. Rather than use standardized formats to implement these features so anyone can access it, we have to use Apps, so we can sell it, and get use it as a marketing gimmick. Support Apple if you want, but they ruined it for the rest of us.