That's true. But for more obscure hardware, finding a driver can be a killer. And as you said, even for common hardware other things (kernel version, stack size, glibc version, phase of the moon) can make things tough. And things are probably much worse if you operate on a non-x86 platform.
I agree. Windows has gotten MUCH better over the years. But I have noticed one thing that consistantly forces me to reboot my computer: disk activity. I can run my computer for weeks doing normal things and have no problem (XP Pro, 900mhz, 512mb for the record).
But disk activity kills the machine. It's a laptop, so disk access is a little slow, but if I work with large files (open, close, save, copy, etc) especiallyi zip/rar files (lots of file operations) the system begins to slow to a crawl. Now I understand that the disk activity can slow the computer, but after all the transfers are complete, the computer is still slow. Opening IE goes from near instant (before all that) to seconds of the computer chugging. After that if I close IE and open it again, it still has to chug to open it (so it's not some simple cache thing). The computer is just slow as heck to respond to anything untill I reboot it. At that point it's fine! The same happens after defragging my disk if it's bad (and requires lots of operations to fix it).
I swear, it's like there is some internal limit in Windows when after a certain number of file operations, the system purposly slows down. Frankly I wouldn't be suprised if a little box popped up saying "You are doing too much heavy disk activity. Please buy Windows Server.Net 2003 for better performance" or something.
Never happens with Linux on the same machine, so it has to be something Windows is doing. Windows has gotten much MUCH better from the 3.1/95 days, but it still has some problems.
I know what you mean. The other day I bought a USB key drive and plugged it into my Windows computer and... it just worked! I can't remember the last time that kind of thing happened. No drivers, no install, no utilities, it just WORKED. Now that was because the driver was already in Windows. Sometimes that happens with other hardware too that Windows already has the driver for.
But when Windows DOESN'T have the driver, good luck. Windows has (and has had for quite a while) the ability to search for the driver on the internet (it's a choice in the add hardware/change driver dialog), but I've NEVER seen it actually find a driver off the internet. I think it would be FANTASTIC if a user could buy hardware, stick it in the machine, and have that happen. If the kernel has the driver, it works. If it doesn't, it finds it on the internet and gives you the option to download and install it. No web searches, no checking obscure folders on driver CDs, nothing weird. Just plug it in and in a few seconds you're ready to go. That would be awesome.
Linux could have it, cool. Windows "has" it but I've never seen it work (has anyone else? Maybe it's just the hardware I use, maybe if I used server hardware like SCSI cards that would be in there). With Macs many things "Just work", but can OS X do anything like this?
A little thing like this will go a long way to make Linux seem more grown up and appealing to the average user (the concept of drivers confuses most computer newbies I help, so automating it would be a big help).
Yes. Unfortunatly for many people Science Fiction is what they see from Hollywood. It's Star Trek, Star Wars, Robocop, X-Men, Terminator, and a few other things. And if people think that's what Sci-Fi is, they won't go pick up that book. With all those great ideas out there, you think they'd use SOME of them. I can see why they might "dumb it down" to to things people have seen before (so audiences will be more "comforatble" with it), but it doesn't have to be a freeking carbon copy future that's the same as any other movie.
I agree. It's also harder to get lost in something, to escape, when you've heard/seen/read things like it many times before. If things just remind you of other Sci-Fi works, it can be hard to suspend disbelief and get into it.
And you're right. I was refering to the fantasy side. As you said, the "true future" can be very effective for social commentary and such. But for fantasy it can get boring to see the same thing over and over with only little variations.
I loved Futurama. It's that they made is specifically absurd and in many ways parodied the standard vision of the future that really helped make it so great.
As for the offtopic comment, yeah. I've been thinking about it for a while but while my comment is relativly OT, this is about the most on-topic I expect my comment to be any time soon so I thought I'd post it before I forgot.
Am I the only one who is getting bored with the future? I can only see aliens trying to kill Earth so many times. There are some interesting things here and there but so many future predictions are very similar.
I've found myself liking what I call the "past-future" more. Things like Sky Captain or that animated feature that will come out later this year about a world powered entirely by steam. These kinds of things seem very interesting to me. If you want to make a movie or book about the question on whether or not replacing people's jobs with robots is good or bad, why set it in the distant future? The robots could be powered by nukes, sure, but you could also power them with steam! Or hampsters! Or SOMETHING other than some kind of atomic battery.
The future has been done. It's time to lay off the true future for a while, and look at the alternate futures that won't be. Use what people thought the future would look like in the 1880s, or the 1920s, or something like that. I've seen enough "future of the 1990s/2000s". Show me something different.
That would be true, to a degree. After a while I cut my service down to the lowest level because I stop watching so many movies. I can't watch a movie or two every day.
Then I realized the great thing about NetFlix. TV. I am currently watching ALL of Stargate SG-1 (episode 19, on disc 5 of season 3 is playing right now, "Crystal Skull"). I've already watched ALL of Neon Genesis Evangelion, Bubblegum Crisis 2040, and various other random things. I got to see The Singing Detective (the miniseries from England, not the recent movie) and other things. You can watch old TV shows without having to pay $50 per season (or whatever that price is). And because it's TV, they are all in 30 or 60 minute chunks (actually 23 and 45 or so, but you get the point). So I can catch up (or just see) shows, from the begining, IN ORDER (if that matters). It's fantastic.
After discovering this, I moved my service back up to the normal level. With a NetFlix warehouse in the large city that's only 30 miles away, I get great service. A disc goes out on Monday, they get it Tuesday and ship me a new one, I get it Wednesday or Thursday at the latest. So because I'm always cross-shipping, I am always getting new ones in the mail and almost always have something to watch.
I also especially like my queue. I can add movies before they are released, and as they are they are automatically put at the end of my queue. That way I can add things that I hear about or what to see that I would ordinarily forget about and there they are!
If you only want to rent a handful of big name movies, NetFlix isn't for you. If you want to watch TV series, obscure movies and miniseries, and other great stuff, NetFlix is a godsend.
I've seen the ads on TV and don't understand it. For $2 more per month that I pay with NetFlix, I get 1 less movie, and their lower selection. Unless the coupons make up for it for you (not for me), I see no reason why I should dump NetFlix in favor of BB.
As a side note, I've been on a bit of a tear again BB. In the last few months, they raised the price of videogame rentals from $4 to $6.50 (more than a 50% hike), added new releases for video games (so now some rentals are only 2 or 3 days instead of the week). If you add onto that the fact that the selection of games and movies at all my local BBs (near a very large city) seem to be getting smaller and worse (let's buy 200 copies of Driv3r, and 1 of Full Spectrum Warrior/Metroid Prime/insert other great and highly anticipated game here), I'm really starting to hate them. I am VERY close to switching to GameFly, but I don't think I rent enough to save money that way.
I don't know what story that's from, but I don't think it's that plausable. You would have to get it into orbit without the company launching it knowing that. I would think that would be hard to do and they would inspect things. After all, if you turned space into a death trap for satellites, their business would dry up and they would fail. It's in their best interest to try to prevent that.
So if you wanted to do that, I think you would have to launch it yourself. Build a rocket that could get it into the right orbit and what not. It would be next to impossible. And let's not forget that if you were caught (either before or after) your life would end. Not only could you be sued to oblivian by anyone who has put a satellite into orbit, the government would lock you up indefinatly for treasons, sabatoge, and anything else for (attempting to) destroy their GPS satellites/weather satellites/spy satellites/etc. You would "disappear" off the face of the Earth, or be locked in jail untill the end of time. Same basic thing either way.
And to quote Moe Sizlack: "God help you if that thing carried the Spice channel".
Wouldn't work anymore. As another poster pointed out, EMACS was once sold that way. That said, I don't think it would work anymore. If it's under the GPL, people can redistribute it. So anyone could buy it, and then once they got their hands on the source, publish it to the web for everyone else for free. Now there is no point is selling the source with it anymore. While it may have once worked (and I don't know about that), it wouldn't work anymore unless EVERY SINGLE USER kept the source to themselves. I don't think that would happen.
True. But I think we are nearing the limits of what I can percieve at 1024x768. Sure we can make things better, but untill higher resolution monitors become more affordable for the majority of people, the apparent increase in graphics from each new generation will get smaller. Jumping from untextured flat light polygons (StarFox) to textured virtex light polygons (PS1 games) was a big jump. Going from Doom 3 to whatever is next won't seem nearly so large because many things look so good already.
As a side note, my biggest complaints aren't the graphics but the logic behind them. How many times do you see someone's arm go into a wall when they run against it? It's a tiny thing, but fixing that (and people hair "cutting through" their shoulders, etc) will make graphics look better. But I don't think we are in for any more big leaps any time soon (unless someone comes up with a fast hardware raytracer or something).
Ah. The last time I looked was a few years ago when you still had to buy closed drivers from some company. The lack of 3D audio support for Aureal cards on Linux is sad, but it's not that much of a loss.
PS: My favorite card was my Aureal 2 based Turtle Beach Montego A3D Xtreme Studio Edition (or something like that). I still have it. It had a little daughter board that had RCA and optical S/PDIF interfaces for in and out. Hook it to my MiniDisc player to copy things on, it was great. Too bad I could never get it to transfer the track markers...
I understand. Games used to use MIDI sound tracks. They didn't sound that great because of the FM systhesis. Then we got wavetable, and things sounded better. But by about that time it started to get common to get REAL soundtracks (wav files, cd-audio, etc) which sounded better than the synthesised MIDI (even with wavetable). These days MIDI is only there because... it's there. It seems like next to no one uses MIDI anymore (in games).
It's all been downhill since Aureal bit the dust, as far as I'm concerned.
For many years there were advancements in sound back in the DOS days. You could make audio sound better with 16 bits, or 44.1khz. You could do wavetable systhesis so MIDI sounded realistic (at least compared to the beeps and boops of FM systhesis). There was advancement.
Then CDs came. As games moved to CDs and hard drives got bigger, suddenly it was possible to play real music, and it didn't matter how good your MIDI was because the game producers could use real music. Now we see it in MP3s and Ogg files used to store the music.
So for a long time, the sound world has been stagnate. Years ago we saw "3D" sound, but it never took off. Creative had EAX, which simulated it somehow, and Aureal had A3D which did wave-tracing or something like that. What I can tell you was that A3D was QUITE superior. But many games didn't use it, and it did have a CPU impact. People were more interested in better 3D graphics, sound didn't seem that important. Aureal eventually died and was bought by Creative Labs. As far as I know they haven't used any of the technology that they aquired.
So without competition things stagnated. With Aureal dead, no one really cared about 3D sound. So all we've gotten is "standard" sound cards that do 2D. Sure you can get 5.1 and 7.1 and stuff, but nothing amazing. And worst of all, there are no drivers for my favorite soundcard for newer versions of Windows or for Linux (at least not without paying).
So here we are. Aureal is dead, and people are starting to care again. Now all we have is Creative. There is no real competition. But now that Doom 3 supports it (HL2 probably will too) and it's claimed that you really need it for the best expiriance you can get, things will hopefully advance again. Now that graphics are very near "good enough", perhaps sound (which in many ways hasn't changed since the SB16 as far as today's games are concerned) will catch up.
Good luck. Intel is sneekily raising prices on people. What's even worse is that AMD tries to tie their prices to Intel's, so unless the break with tradition (and I hope they do), they will technically raise prices too.
Now I should note that they aren't "raising" prices in that everything will cost more. Instead, the next time they release a processor, instead of putting it at the top price point and moving everything else down, they will introduce a new higher price point for it, and everything else stays the same. Very sneeky.
It's MPEG2. That's pretty good. I wouldn't be suprised to see MPEG4 in the next year or two. As for the audio, transcoding that takes no time at all.
Yes, codecs change fast, but when you can offload 95% of the work the box would be doing, that's nothing to sneeze at.
Besides, you could record in MPEG2, and use your now free CPU time to do the transcoding (which you can also do when nothing is being recorded). That way you get the instant gratification of having things recorded small (and your CPU could handle 2 or 3 recordings at once as long as the HD could) and you could run a low priority cron job to transcode things when nothing else is going on so you get the space advantage.
But if you plan to backup (or just copy) onto DVDs (which are MPEG2), then recording in MPEG2 makes even more sense (because you wouldn't need to transcode to make a disc that would play in any player).
As for the Athlon 64, yes it could handle one or two encodes in real time, but with a RAID and a few cards, you could record 4 or 5 streams with hardware encoding. Also, MythTV supports multiple front/backends. That means you can take your old PII 233, stick a PVR-250 in it, and with a little setup it would look like an extra tuner to your main MythTV box. That would only cost you $99 or the card. Your idea would require a much faster computer.
The ideal solution would be some very fast ASIC/DSP/PGA that you could configure on the fly to do hardware encoding of any format, but that probably won't show up for years.
Also note that a hardware encoding chip does the work much more efficently (in terms of electricity used and heat produced) than a general purpose processor like a P4 or Athlon 64.
After posting I checked on the DirecTV site to see if I could find the price. I could barely find the page, so I figured that might be true.
But, if you've got the money for a HDTV and want a PVR and could afford the $650 to build one, there is a decent chance that you can afford a HD TiVo instead.
Not a bad list, but you really should "splurge" on the Happguage PVR-250 card. It does the encoding in hardware, so even a low end box could easily support two tuners. With the card you put in your list, all the encoding would fall on the CPU. Not only that, I'm not sure that nVidia's personal cinema is supported under Linux. An integrated video card (on the motherboard) would do fine as long as it had TV out that was supported under Linux (and looked half decent). Wouldn't even need that if you used a monitor.
I messed around with MythTV about a year ago. From what I could tell it was nice, but it wasn't usable for me (my computer was WAY underpowered for video encoding, which I knew going in). That said I've since gotten a DirecTiVo and I LOVE it.
So just for comparison, a low end brand new TiVo is $99 after rebates. A lifetime service contract is $299. The total is there for about $400. That's still about $250 under what the box in the article is. For that extra money you could get a 140 hour TiVo and still have $50 to spend on something else.
Or, if you have DirecTV, you can buy a DirecTiVo for about $100 and monthly service is $5 on top of your DirecTV bill. So that $650 will buy you the lowest end DirecTiVo and 110 months of service (about 9 years). DirecTiVos are wonderful machies, and can record two things at once, and it's all pure digital. I don't know the prices, but for $650 you could probably get a HD-DirecTiVo and a few months of HD/TiVo at least.
All that said, check out MythTV. If you already have parts on hand, it would be cheaper. It's a fun little project that can do tons of stuff, and there is no DRM (always a/. favorite). It was facinating watching the development list when I did. At that time they were discussing (and testing) ways of automaticaly skipping commercials, and it was very interesting to read. They talked about blank frame detecting (but you have to be careful so you don't miss a Simpsons's "eyeball" scene), using time (commercials come at fairly regular intervals), "bug" detection (the logo in the corner), etc.
MythTV can also show you weather, they were working on DVD and video playing as I remember, and MP3 playback. Plus you can have different frontend and backend boxes which would allow for very cool things.
All that said, if you just want a DVR, a TiVo is probably better. If you want your own Home Theater PC that can do all sorts of stuff and you want to be able to extend it yourself, check out MythTV.
Something mechanical like this would be my guess. I would think it would have upset the mechanism as the parent said. Making the shaft the DVD sits on slightly crooked or off place, maybe hitting the laser or something so that it doesn't aim/focus correctly. If you're willing, open up the drive (or the drive in the stand alone player) and see if you can see anything. The disc might have scratched the lens or some such.
My guess is it's something reparable like that. It may be something you can fix with an adjustment screw and a little time.
If it is something "good" though (like scratching the lens or something), then go after the manufacturer of the disk or the place that rented it to you (if you rented it) and ask that they do something about it. They should be nice enough. If not, you may want to go through small claims court as another poster suggested. And if you keep the "killer" disc, you'll have great evidence.
Like I said, I expect it to be done. But it WON'T be Nintendo to do it. The EyeToy is a video game peripheral, it wasn't made specifically for videoconferencing.
Nintendo doesn't like those "all in one" things that do everything (convergence). I would be amazed if Nintendo allowed you to use the DS as a phone. It's just not going to happen.
I think it's there to allow voice chat when playing against other people wirelessly, ala X-Box Live. I don't see what else it could be used for. Nice that the support is there. I'd like to see what else companies come up with for a way to use it, I certanly can't think of anything.
Now all that said, I fully expect some company to release a piece of software for the DS to let you use it as a phone. I just don't think it will be built in, or that the software will be released by the big N.
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That's true. But for more obscure hardware, finding a driver can be a killer. And as you said, even for common hardware other things (kernel version, stack size, glibc version, phase of the moon) can make things tough. And things are probably much worse if you operate on a non-x86 platform.
But disk activity kills the machine. It's a laptop, so disk access is a little slow, but if I work with large files (open, close, save, copy, etc) especiallyi zip/rar files (lots of file operations) the system begins to slow to a crawl. Now I understand that the disk activity can slow the computer, but after all the transfers are complete, the computer is still slow. Opening IE goes from near instant (before all that) to seconds of the computer chugging. After that if I close IE and open it again, it still has to chug to open it (so it's not some simple cache thing). The computer is just slow as heck to respond to anything untill I reboot it. At that point it's fine! The same happens after defragging my disk if it's bad (and requires lots of operations to fix it).
I swear, it's like there is some internal limit in Windows when after a certain number of file operations, the system purposly slows down. Frankly I wouldn't be suprised if a little box popped up saying "You are doing too much heavy disk activity. Please buy Windows Server .Net 2003 for better performance" or something.
Never happens with Linux on the same machine, so it has to be something Windows is doing. Windows has gotten much MUCH better from the 3.1/95 days, but it still has some problems.
But when Windows DOESN'T have the driver, good luck. Windows has (and has had for quite a while) the ability to search for the driver on the internet (it's a choice in the add hardware/change driver dialog), but I've NEVER seen it actually find a driver off the internet. I think it would be FANTASTIC if a user could buy hardware, stick it in the machine, and have that happen. If the kernel has the driver, it works. If it doesn't, it finds it on the internet and gives you the option to download and install it. No web searches, no checking obscure folders on driver CDs, nothing weird. Just plug it in and in a few seconds you're ready to go. That would be awesome.
Linux could have it, cool. Windows "has" it but I've never seen it work (has anyone else? Maybe it's just the hardware I use, maybe if I used server hardware like SCSI cards that would be in there). With Macs many things "Just work", but can OS X do anything like this?
A little thing like this will go a long way to make Linux seem more grown up and appealing to the average user (the concept of drivers confuses most computer newbies I help, so automating it would be a big help).
Yes. Unfortunatly for many people Science Fiction is what they see from Hollywood. It's Star Trek, Star Wars, Robocop, X-Men, Terminator, and a few other things. And if people think that's what Sci-Fi is, they won't go pick up that book. With all those great ideas out there, you think they'd use SOME of them. I can see why they might "dumb it down" to to things people have seen before (so audiences will be more "comforatble" with it), but it doesn't have to be a freeking carbon copy future that's the same as any other movie.
And you're right. I was refering to the fantasy side. As you said, the "true future" can be very effective for social commentary and such. But for fantasy it can get boring to see the same thing over and over with only little variations.
As for the offtopic comment, yeah. I've been thinking about it for a while but while my comment is relativly OT, this is about the most on-topic I expect my comment to be any time soon so I thought I'd post it before I forgot.
I've found myself liking what I call the "past-future" more. Things like Sky Captain or that animated feature that will come out later this year about a world powered entirely by steam. These kinds of things seem very interesting to me. If you want to make a movie or book about the question on whether or not replacing people's jobs with robots is good or bad, why set it in the distant future? The robots could be powered by nukes, sure, but you could also power them with steam! Or hampsters! Or SOMETHING other than some kind of atomic battery.
The future has been done. It's time to lay off the true future for a while, and look at the alternate futures that won't be. Use what people thought the future would look like in the 1880s, or the 1920s, or something like that. I've seen enough "future of the 1990s/2000s". Show me something different.
Just a thought.
Then I realized the great thing about NetFlix. TV. I am currently watching ALL of Stargate SG-1 (episode 19, on disc 5 of season 3 is playing right now, "Crystal Skull"). I've already watched ALL of Neon Genesis Evangelion, Bubblegum Crisis 2040, and various other random things. I got to see The Singing Detective (the miniseries from England, not the recent movie) and other things. You can watch old TV shows without having to pay $50 per season (or whatever that price is). And because it's TV, they are all in 30 or 60 minute chunks (actually 23 and 45 or so, but you get the point). So I can catch up (or just see) shows, from the begining, IN ORDER (if that matters). It's fantastic.
After discovering this, I moved my service back up to the normal level. With a NetFlix warehouse in the large city that's only 30 miles away, I get great service. A disc goes out on Monday, they get it Tuesday and ship me a new one, I get it Wednesday or Thursday at the latest. So because I'm always cross-shipping, I am always getting new ones in the mail and almost always have something to watch.
I also especially like my queue. I can add movies before they are released, and as they are they are automatically put at the end of my queue. That way I can add things that I hear about or what to see that I would ordinarily forget about and there they are!
If you only want to rent a handful of big name movies, NetFlix isn't for you. If you want to watch TV series, obscure movies and miniseries, and other great stuff, NetFlix is a godsend.
As a side note, I've been on a bit of a tear again BB. In the last few months, they raised the price of videogame rentals from $4 to $6.50 (more than a 50% hike), added new releases for video games (so now some rentals are only 2 or 3 days instead of the week). If you add onto that the fact that the selection of games and movies at all my local BBs (near a very large city) seem to be getting smaller and worse (let's buy 200 copies of Driv3r, and 1 of Full Spectrum Warrior/Metroid Prime/insert other great and highly anticipated game here), I'm really starting to hate them. I am VERY close to switching to GameFly, but I don't think I rent enough to save money that way.
So if you wanted to do that, I think you would have to launch it yourself. Build a rocket that could get it into the right orbit and what not. It would be next to impossible. And let's not forget that if you were caught (either before or after) your life would end. Not only could you be sued to oblivian by anyone who has put a satellite into orbit, the government would lock you up indefinatly for treasons, sabatoge, and anything else for (attempting to) destroy their GPS satellites/weather satellites/spy satellites/etc. You would "disappear" off the face of the Earth, or be locked in jail untill the end of time. Same basic thing either way.
And to quote Moe Sizlack: "God help you if that thing carried the Spice channel".
Wouldn't work anymore. As another poster pointed out, EMACS was once sold that way. That said, I don't think it would work anymore. If it's under the GPL, people can redistribute it. So anyone could buy it, and then once they got their hands on the source, publish it to the web for everyone else for free. Now there is no point is selling the source with it anymore. While it may have once worked (and I don't know about that), it wouldn't work anymore unless EVERY SINGLE USER kept the source to themselves. I don't think that would happen.
As a side note, my biggest complaints aren't the graphics but the logic behind them. How many times do you see someone's arm go into a wall when they run against it? It's a tiny thing, but fixing that (and people hair "cutting through" their shoulders, etc) will make graphics look better. But I don't think we are in for any more big leaps any time soon (unless someone comes up with a fast hardware raytracer or something).
PS: My favorite card was my Aureal 2 based Turtle Beach Montego A3D Xtreme Studio Edition (or something like that). I still have it. It had a little daughter board that had RCA and optical S/PDIF interfaces for in and out. Hook it to my MiniDisc player to copy things on, it was great. Too bad I could never get it to transfer the track markers...
I understand. Games used to use MIDI sound tracks. They didn't sound that great because of the FM systhesis. Then we got wavetable, and things sounded better. But by about that time it started to get common to get REAL soundtracks (wav files, cd-audio, etc) which sounded better than the synthesised MIDI (even with wavetable). These days MIDI is only there because... it's there. It seems like next to no one uses MIDI anymore (in games).
For many years there were advancements in sound back in the DOS days. You could make audio sound better with 16 bits, or 44.1khz. You could do wavetable systhesis so MIDI sounded realistic (at least compared to the beeps and boops of FM systhesis). There was advancement.
Then CDs came. As games moved to CDs and hard drives got bigger, suddenly it was possible to play real music, and it didn't matter how good your MIDI was because the game producers could use real music. Now we see it in MP3s and Ogg files used to store the music.
So for a long time, the sound world has been stagnate. Years ago we saw "3D" sound, but it never took off. Creative had EAX, which simulated it somehow, and Aureal had A3D which did wave-tracing or something like that. What I can tell you was that A3D was QUITE superior. But many games didn't use it, and it did have a CPU impact. People were more interested in better 3D graphics, sound didn't seem that important. Aureal eventually died and was bought by Creative Labs. As far as I know they haven't used any of the technology that they aquired.
So without competition things stagnated. With Aureal dead, no one really cared about 3D sound. So all we've gotten is "standard" sound cards that do 2D. Sure you can get 5.1 and 7.1 and stuff, but nothing amazing. And worst of all, there are no drivers for my favorite soundcard for newer versions of Windows or for Linux (at least not without paying).
So here we are. Aureal is dead, and people are starting to care again. Now all we have is Creative. There is no real competition. But now that Doom 3 supports it (HL2 probably will too) and it's claimed that you really need it for the best expiriance you can get, things will hopefully advance again. Now that graphics are very near "good enough", perhaps sound (which in many ways hasn't changed since the SB16 as far as today's games are concerned) will catch up.
So long... Aureal.
Now I should note that they aren't "raising" prices in that everything will cost more. Instead, the next time they release a processor, instead of putting it at the top price point and moving everything else down, they will introduce a new higher price point for it, and everything else stays the same. Very sneeky.
Check it out at Overclockers.com
Yes, codecs change fast, but when you can offload 95% of the work the box would be doing, that's nothing to sneeze at.
Besides, you could record in MPEG2, and use your now free CPU time to do the transcoding (which you can also do when nothing is being recorded). That way you get the instant gratification of having things recorded small (and your CPU could handle 2 or 3 recordings at once as long as the HD could) and you could run a low priority cron job to transcode things when nothing else is going on so you get the space advantage.
But if you plan to backup (or just copy) onto DVDs (which are MPEG2), then recording in MPEG2 makes even more sense (because you wouldn't need to transcode to make a disc that would play in any player).
As for the Athlon 64, yes it could handle one or two encodes in real time, but with a RAID and a few cards, you could record 4 or 5 streams with hardware encoding. Also, MythTV supports multiple front/backends. That means you can take your old PII 233, stick a PVR-250 in it, and with a little setup it would look like an extra tuner to your main MythTV box. That would only cost you $99 or the card. Your idea would require a much faster computer.
The ideal solution would be some very fast ASIC/DSP/PGA that you could configure on the fly to do hardware encoding of any format, but that probably won't show up for years.
Also note that a hardware encoding chip does the work much more efficently (in terms of electricity used and heat produced) than a general purpose processor like a P4 or Athlon 64.
But, if you've got the money for a HDTV and want a PVR and could afford the $650 to build one, there is a decent chance that you can afford a HD TiVo instead.
Not a bad list, but you really should "splurge" on the Happguage PVR-250 card. It does the encoding in hardware, so even a low end box could easily support two tuners. With the card you put in your list, all the encoding would fall on the CPU. Not only that, I'm not sure that nVidia's personal cinema is supported under Linux. An integrated video card (on the motherboard) would do fine as long as it had TV out that was supported under Linux (and looked half decent). Wouldn't even need that if you used a monitor.
So just for comparison, a low end brand new TiVo is $99 after rebates. A lifetime service contract is $299. The total is there for about $400. That's still about $250 under what the box in the article is. For that extra money you could get a 140 hour TiVo and still have $50 to spend on something else.
Or, if you have DirecTV, you can buy a DirecTiVo for about $100 and monthly service is $5 on top of your DirecTV bill. So that $650 will buy you the lowest end DirecTiVo and 110 months of service (about 9 years). DirecTiVos are wonderful machies, and can record two things at once, and it's all pure digital. I don't know the prices, but for $650 you could probably get a HD-DirecTiVo and a few months of HD/TiVo at least.
All that said, check out MythTV. If you already have parts on hand, it would be cheaper. It's a fun little project that can do tons of stuff, and there is no DRM (always a /. favorite). It was facinating watching the development list when I did. At that time they were discussing (and testing) ways of automaticaly skipping commercials, and it was very interesting to read. They talked about blank frame detecting (but you have to be careful so you don't miss a Simpsons's "eyeball" scene), using time (commercials come at fairly regular intervals), "bug" detection (the logo in the corner), etc.
MythTV can also show you weather, they were working on DVD and video playing as I remember, and MP3 playback. Plus you can have different frontend and backend boxes which would allow for very cool things.
All that said, if you just want a DVR, a TiVo is probably better. If you want your own Home Theater PC that can do all sorts of stuff and you want to be able to extend it yourself, check out MythTV.
If it is something "good" though (like scratching the lens or something), then go after the manufacturer of the disk or the place that rented it to you (if you rented it) and ask that they do something about it. They should be nice enough. If not, you may want to go through small claims court as another poster suggested. And if you keep the "killer" disc, you'll have great evidence.
Like I said, I expect it to be done. But it WON'T be Nintendo to do it. The EyeToy is a video game peripheral, it wasn't made specifically for videoconferencing.
I think it's there to allow voice chat when playing against other people wirelessly, ala X-Box Live. I don't see what else it could be used for. Nice that the support is there. I'd like to see what else companies come up with for a way to use it, I certanly can't think of anything.
Now all that said, I fully expect some company to release a piece of software for the DS to let you use it as a phone. I just don't think it will be built in, or that the software will be released by the big N.
Ladies and gentlemen: intergalactic loogies!
Now we just have to figure out who keeps spitting at us.
Cheese and crackers.
Sorry, that's the only joke I can come up with ;)