In the unregulated spectrum's, the more the spectrum got "polluted", the more people created technologies that could intelligently allocate, detect, shift, and route around.
Wrong on several counts.
First, people didn't create new signaling technologies when they noticed their phones and computers were getting interference. The signaling technologies have existed for many years, they're merely getting incrementally utilized in popular equipment.
Second, the "unregulated spectrum" you speak of simply does not exist. There is spectrum that unlicensed individuals can use. However, it remains usable because they are STRICTLY REGULATED to low power levels, and fairly modest antenna. If Verizon/Cingular/Sprint could set-up their towers to use the unlicensed spectrum, at very high power levels, with massive antennas, all the technology you can come up with isn't going to get your weak signal cleanly through that interference (except maybe very directional antennas).
So you're making current hardware purchasing decisions in order to hang on to old memory cards?
Wow, you really missed that one...
Continuing to use the old CF cards is only one of the more minor benefits. It's about maintaining interoperability, a better form-factor, as well as the lower price of NEW cards.
If they were purchased before SD was ubiquitous, those CF must be like 64MB!
I'd have to say you have a very fuzzy memory. It was only very recently that SD became ubiquitous. There were somewhat popular in some applications for a long time, but everything from PDAs and Notebooks to digital cameras came with CF support, and not SD, until quite recently... Less than two years ago, I'd say. And I can assure you 4GB CF cards were common (it's taken _much_ longer for SD/MMC to get up to large capacities).
I don't know about the rest of you, but I have these worthless PCMCIA memory cards lying around, which I replaced with now worthless CF memory cards, which I've now replaced with SD.
I only had one old PCMCIA card, which I'm now using as the hard drive in my firewall.
I have several CF cards, and I stubbornly avoid buying devices that won't take them. SD/MMC cards are twice as expensive as a CF card of the same capacity, and until that changes (as it did with PCMCIA) I'll continue to stick to CF. It's as small as I could ever want, and I don't need to buy yet another adapter for it to work in my devices like my slightly older PDAs and MP3 players which take CF.
the nuclear industry is hugely subsidised by the government, and that's the _only_ way that nukes are at all cost-comparable with coal.
It's mainly that building a nuclear plant is so expensive, and it takes so long to get a return, that the economics don't work out for private companies. The benefits for the country, however, are much more significant than the direct profit would lead you to believe, so it's only right that the government offers incentives, since the population at large stands to benefit.
You can compare it to any other massive infrastructure project... The interstate system certainly wouldn't have come to exist if private companies had to build it themselves, and collect tolls for many years to pay for it, but the benefits to the public are worth more than the cost of building it.
I think I can accurately say that solar power is second-hand nuclear power.
To be more accurate, it's second-hand fusion power. We don't yet have the ability to make first-hand use of fusion.
even if you make the solar 100% efficient (wouldn't that be something!) you still have to store or transport it - since on average the sun is hitting half the Earth's surface at any given time (with much of that surface being water).
With inexpensive, 100% efficient solar panels, we'd be awash in free electricity. Even the most inefficient storage methods would store more energy than we could possibly use for the next century or so.
And more than that, fairly efficient energy storage methods are well-known and reasonably inexpensive. It's fairly inexpensive to a pump to existing dams, and use your excess daytime electricity to pump water (uphill) into the dam, and then use that stored water to generate all the electricity needed at night. You see about 80% efficiency with that. You can do maybe 10% better if you spend the money to construct underground facilities, to prevent evaporation.
I have high hopes for solar - but it always strikes me as strange that we already have this amazing technology of nuclear power - it's here now! We HAVE it!
Nuclear is good, but it's on the expensive side. Solar at least allows smaller facilities, and gradually expanding existing facilities.
Plus, nuclear power can make a nuclear rocket! I don't know of any solar rockets yet.
I have an aging Win98-era Pentium II@350 Mhz with 392 megs of RAM, and running Win98, it simply flies....
I have to call BS on you.
First, 400MBs of RAM is definately not Win98-era, unless you were rich. My 300MHz Win98 box came with 64MBs of EDO RAM.
It responds to user input and opens regular programs noticeably faster than the few computers I've bought since
I have 98 running on a spare hard drive. I installed it for just that reason. Unfortunately, I discovered that while boot-up time is faster, once you get it up and running, it gets unresponsive, and really just slow. Certain things still happen much faster like opening certain dialog boxes, but all too often I'll launch an app, and be unable to do anything else until it's fully started.
I know we all have fond memories of the old days, but the truth is less pleasant. The switch to the NT kernel was a very important one. If you want to compare, stick with Windows 2000 or NT4...
mplayer counts for.. perhaps.. 5 % of our codebase?
How does code size count for anything? Is Windows superior because it has more code than a base Linux system?
no replay gain support, no cue sheet support afaik.
MPlayer has both.
OH NOES. how dare we reuse other opensource code?
There's no recrimination here. There's nothing wrong with you using MPlayer either. It is, however, relevant to your attempt at drastically minimizing MPlayer's importance.
mplayer doesnt do dvd menus now does it?
Yes it does. There was an initial patch for dvd menu support for MPlayer before the XBMC DVD player came to exist, and most of it has been integrated into MPlayer for quite a while now... Since you are already extensively patching MPlayer for XBMC, one more DVD-menu patch shouldn't hurt.
mplayer doesnt support overlapping csc / decoding of the next frame in any efficient way
"csc" is a new one to me, care to expand that acronym?
MPlayer is certainly far more than fast enough to play DVDs on a 700MHz PIII, so I really don't see what you're getting at with the performance/efficiency comment.
can your prefered solution stack movies?
Of course.
play movies straight from rar files?
I can't see any use for that. Almost no space savings to be had, that's for sure.
Admittedly, it would take me a couple minutes to write a script to handle playing files inside compressed archives, but then it also wouldn't be limited to just RAR files either... It would be just as easy to also include support for playing files compressed with bz2, gz, zip, 7z, tar, cab, ISO, DSK, etc. etc.
can you add python scripts to extend it into doing anything from playing stuff from youtube to games like tetris and space invaders?
I can extend my DVR machine with ANYTHING that will run on Linux, from Python to C++. I use a script that downloads NullsoftTV listings which I can select from. I have a button on my remote that will open the selected video with an editor (for removing commercials or anything else).
And with Linux, my selection of games is any of the thousands mame/mess can play, as well as any natively written ones.
does it have a skin system that is so flexible that you can completely redesign the whole look of the app? does it contain a profile system so your wife can run with her preferred settings, have her own databases, individual favorites? can you easily lock your kids out from your pr0n?
All things easily handled by the underlying operating system... GTK themes work quite well. "Profiles" are just different users. Limiting what is shared is just a question of permissions, which can be easily pre-set on a few folders or files.
Perhaps slightly more set-up time than XBMC, but not much.
Admittedly, my DVR doesn't do movie and TV look-ups, but that's because it doesn't even sounds interesting to me, and I'm sure there is an Linux app out there that could do it if I cared to look for it. I already have the show/movie name, length, and year. I can't say I care about any of the other details, at all.
i'm ranting on. my point is; you obviously havent tried xbmc. and you have no idea what xbmc is and what it can do. stop the FUD and READ / try it out before you talk.
The more you complain about my ignorance, the more it seems I pretty well understand what it does.
Except that I wasn't recommending XUL for web apps.
And if you are going to require that users install you app as an extension, the question becomes why use the browser at all? Why not use a real VM like Java?
I think you missed the point. See the "file manager" comment.
It's very easy to make a very simple interface that works. I don't believe you could make anything any simpler than a normal file manager. What's complicated is making it keeping it simple, while adding lots of functionality. Since XBMC doesn't schedule recordings, manage conflicts, etc., etc., comparing it with MythTV or Freevo is extremely unfair. When it gets all that functionality, while staying simple, then it would be a good recommendation. Until then, I still don't see any draw. It seems like there's a religious devotion to it, for reasons that nobody can explain. It's starting to sound to me like the fanaticism is because people like media center PCs, and XBMC is perhaps the only one they've used, and they're confusing the two very different issues.
Mplayer is just part of it - there is 3 playback cores - 2 of which were developed specifically for XBMC.
MPlayer appears to be 99%+ of it.
The DVD Player doesn't do anything that MPlayer doesn't, and besides that it is based on libavcodec, which is MPlayer's sister project (same server, mostly the same devs).
The music player (assuming that's core 3) also doesn't appear to support any formats that MPlayer doesn't (or that XMMS doesn't, for that matter).
I'm looking for someone to convince me, but I'm not seeing anything.
Except that they aren't. They have to be specifically written for and tested to ensure cross-platform (cross-browser) compatibility, and even then, only the well-supported browsers are likely to work.
Also, they don't really require that you install anything or have admin privileges to install things,
No (normal) well-designed app requires admin privlidges to install or use.
and they're accessible from any computer with an internet connection and web browser.
That's a much higher barrier to entry than a computer with USB ports...
The downside of web apps is that you can't take them with you.
No, the downside of web apps is the horrific performance, interface, configurability, integration, responsiveness, resource requirements, etc., etc.
Sometimes I think it might make more sense to make a browser-like framework for programs, but built from the ground up for applications instead of static pages.
How much easier can it get than to use a file manager with keyboard (actually remote control) navigation?
You should try it,
Not having an XBox, I can't. Even when it works on Linux, I still probably won't bother to try it, since nobody can name one reason it's useful or unique at all.
The article then goes on into more feature/function details, it is recommended reading;)
I read it. 99% of it is talking about what it can play, which really has nothing to do with XBMC and everything to do with MPlayer, which XBMC uses.
As far as the Wiki or XBMC's page says, only thing "special" about XBMC over any other MPlayer GUI seems to be that it displays weather and uses IMDB to show info about your movies...
I'm not getting a warm fuzzy feeling. Certainly doesn't sound like the "best project of all time" as some are pitching it.
I don't have a land line. Why? The cell phone is _cheaper_. If you're going to be pragmatic, ditch the land line.
I am entirely pragmatic.
Cell phones are vastly more expensive, any way you figure it. If you make few (long-distance) calls, you can get a very cheap calling plan on a landline. If you make numerous calls, you can get some fixed-rate unlimited calling plan.
For DSL, you need to have a landline to begin with. Cable internet access is practically always much more expensive. Not to mention that cable internet generally requires you pay for cable service, which is almost universally more expensive than satellite despite lower quality and fewer channels...
Then there's the pragmatic issue of having telephone calls not sounding like completely crap, in addition to dropping off left and right. And as an added bonus, you don't have every idiot with a scanner listening to every call you make.
Bullshit. They failed for technical reasons or for DRM reasons or for a combination of technical and DRM reasons and may get an assist from bad or no design.
That's HILARIOUS.
For the DRM comment, iTMS is popular, but it's clearly not a killer app. A small minority of iPod owners have ever bought a single track.
For "technical" and "design" issues, the article (which you obviously didn't read) fully addresses those. The players being listed are cheaper, more full featured than Apple's offerings, commonly smaller, and got very positive critical reviews.
In conclusion, you are the one who is full of "bullshit" blindly defending the iPod against ALL OTHER music players in the world, even though you've never used any of the competing products in question. It's ironic that while trying to claim that there is no iPod hype, you are showing with your ignorance just how much baseless hype there really is behind the iPod.
How on Earth do you create the *illusion* of problem free computer usage?
Simple. "It's not a bug, it's a feature. Every time you click save, Office is supposed to quit."
Hardware support guys blame the software. The software support guys blame the hardware. The users are left to fend for themselves.
In reality, 99% of the time it's a software bug, but you'll absolutely NEVER get Microsoft to admit fault, let alone fix it. Open Source products are at least honest about their own bugs and limitations, unlike Microsoft, which claims no bugs, and everything working as it should.
When I disrupt your valuable crypto channel long enough you simply can't use it and have to fall back to other means of less secure means of communication which I then can intercept.
Yeah, you said that the first time, and I responded: "a line crew goes out, fixes the line, and they're back up and running before they even want/need to change the encryption key."
Other lines of communication can be easily made redundant, since they don't have to directly go from A to B.
No, they actually have to directly go from A to the telco and from the telco to B... It's pretty easy to find. Probably in public documents.
Hey, if the two offices want to communicate very securely, why don't they just generate a key of sufficient length and send it across town on a physical medium?
It's hard to prove that the physical medium wasn't quietly intercepted. Quantum is provably secure.
That also doesn't allow frequent key changes, and after a short while the quantum link should be less expensive than physically sending people across town.
They could even just use PKC and call each other to verify the hashes.
Public-key isn't fast or invulnerable, calling someone isn't all that secure, and neither can assure that nothing was intercepted.
Soda rots your teeth and probably contributes to diabetes II.
Orange Juice rots your teeth and probably contributes to diabetes II.
Drink Water or at worst carbonated water. Maybe a little tea or iced tea made from decent leaves (not the garbage leaves in lipton surrounded by bleached paper to dunk in water), or even a little expresso.
Your refreshment preferences have no bearing. You have no scientific basis for claiming they are more or less healthy than anything else.
And for god's sake leave out anything sweetened with high fructose corn syrup - poison.
People have been eating corn for a very long time. Ditto for drinking milk, and the like.
Our ancestors were able to make due with water as a drink and so our bodies should be acclimated to it.
The funny thing is, we have access to the cleanest water in history, without it being muddy or full of minerals,
Our ancestors didn't drink water with chlorine and fluoride in it. They didn't drink distilled or reverse-osmosis filtered water with all the crucial minerals removed from it.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong on several counts.
First, people didn't create new signaling technologies when they noticed their phones and computers were getting interference. The signaling technologies have existed for many years, they're merely getting incrementally utilized in popular equipment.
Second, the "unregulated spectrum" you speak of simply does not exist. There is spectrum that unlicensed individuals can use. However, it remains usable because they are STRICTLY REGULATED to low power levels, and fairly modest antenna. If Verizon/Cingular/Sprint could set-up their towers to use the unlicensed spectrum, at very high power levels, with massive antennas, all the technology you can come up with isn't going to get your weak signal cleanly through that interference (except maybe very directional antennas).
Come now, everyone knows there's no man behind Google's page rank. It's handled entirely by an army of birds.
http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html
definition
f. The clarity of detail in an optically produced image, such as a photograph, effected by a combination of resolution and contrast.
An HD microphone, huh? Where does it fit the screen? Kinda big to attach to a tiny microphone isn't it?
Wow, you really missed that one...
Continuing to use the old CF cards is only one of the more minor benefits. It's about maintaining interoperability, a better form-factor, as well as the lower price of NEW cards.
I'd have to say you have a very fuzzy memory. It was only very recently that SD became ubiquitous. There were somewhat popular in some applications for a long time, but everything from PDAs and Notebooks to digital cameras came with CF support, and not SD, until quite recently... Less than two years ago, I'd say. And I can assure you 4GB CF cards were common (it's taken _much_ longer for SD/MMC to get up to large capacities).
Pricewatch.com thinks you're an idiot...
I only had one old PCMCIA card, which I'm now using as the hard drive in my firewall.
I have several CF cards, and I stubbornly avoid buying devices that won't take them. SD/MMC cards are twice as expensive as a CF card of the same capacity, and until that changes (as it did with PCMCIA) I'll continue to stick to CF. It's as small as I could ever want, and I don't need to buy yet another adapter for it to work in my devices like my slightly older PDAs and MP3 players which take CF.
It's mainly that building a nuclear plant is so expensive, and it takes so long to get a return, that the economics don't work out for private companies. The benefits for the country, however, are much more significant than the direct profit would lead you to believe, so it's only right that the government offers incentives, since the population at large stands to benefit.
You can compare it to any other massive infrastructure project... The interstate system certainly wouldn't have come to exist if private companies had to build it themselves, and collect tolls for many years to pay for it, but the benefits to the public are worth more than the cost of building it.
To be more accurate, it's second-hand fusion power. We don't yet have the ability to make first-hand use of fusion.
With inexpensive, 100% efficient solar panels, we'd be awash in free electricity. Even the most inefficient storage methods would store more energy than we could possibly use for the next century or so.
And more than that, fairly efficient energy storage methods are well-known and reasonably inexpensive. It's fairly inexpensive to a pump to existing dams, and use your excess daytime electricity to pump water (uphill) into the dam, and then use that stored water to generate all the electricity needed at night. You see about 80% efficiency with that. You can do maybe 10% better if you spend the money to construct underground facilities, to prevent evaporation.
Nuclear is good, but it's on the expensive side. Solar at least allows smaller facilities, and gradually expanding existing facilities.
Show me a nuclear car.
Will that stop him from "squatting in [my] case?" It leaves such an awful mess.
I have to call BS on you.
First, 400MBs of RAM is definately not Win98-era, unless you were rich. My 300MHz Win98 box came with 64MBs of EDO RAM.
I have 98 running on a spare hard drive. I installed it for just that reason. Unfortunately, I discovered that while boot-up time is faster, once you get it up and running, it gets unresponsive, and really just slow. Certain things still happen much faster like opening certain dialog boxes, but all too often I'll launch an app, and be unable to do anything else until it's fully started.
I know we all have fond memories of the old days, but the truth is less pleasant. The switch to the NT kernel was a very important one. If you want to compare, stick with Windows 2000 or NT4...
How does code size count for anything? Is Windows superior because it has more code than a base Linux system?
MPlayer has both.
There's no recrimination here. There's nothing wrong with you using MPlayer either. It is, however, relevant to your attempt at drastically minimizing MPlayer's importance.
Yes it does. There was an initial patch for dvd menu support for MPlayer before the XBMC DVD player came to exist, and most of it has been integrated into MPlayer for quite a while now... Since you are already extensively patching MPlayer for XBMC, one more DVD-menu patch shouldn't hurt.
"csc" is a new one to me, care to expand that acronym?
MPlayer is certainly far more than fast enough to play DVDs on a 700MHz PIII, so I really don't see what you're getting at with the performance/efficiency comment.
Of course.
I can't see any use for that. Almost no space savings to be had, that's for sure.
Admittedly, it would take me a couple minutes to write a script to handle playing files inside compressed archives, but then it also wouldn't be limited to just RAR files either... It would be just as easy to also include support for playing files compressed with bz2, gz, zip, 7z, tar, cab, ISO, DSK, etc. etc.
I can extend my DVR machine with ANYTHING that will run on Linux, from Python to C++. I use a script that downloads NullsoftTV listings which I can select from. I have a button on my remote that will open the selected video with an editor (for removing commercials or anything else).
And with Linux, my selection of games is any of the thousands mame/mess can play, as well as any natively written ones.
All things easily handled by the underlying operating system... GTK themes work quite well. "Profiles" are just different users. Limiting what is shared is just a question of permissions, which can be easily pre-set on a few folders or files.
Perhaps slightly more set-up time than XBMC, but not much.
Admittedly, my DVR doesn't do movie and TV look-ups, but that's because it doesn't even sounds interesting to me, and I'm sure there is an Linux app out there that could do it if I cared to look for it. I already have the show/movie name, length, and year. I can't say I care about any of the other details, at all.
The more you complain about my ignorance, the more it seems I pretty well understand what it does.
Except that I wasn't recommending XUL for web apps.
Don't ask me, ask the GP.
I think you missed the point. See the "file manager" comment.
It's very easy to make a very simple interface that works. I don't believe you could make anything any simpler than a normal file manager. What's complicated is making it keeping it simple, while adding lots of functionality. Since XBMC doesn't schedule recordings, manage conflicts, etc., etc., comparing it with MythTV or Freevo is extremely unfair. When it gets all that functionality, while staying simple, then it would be a good recommendation. Until then, I still don't see any draw. It seems like there's a religious devotion to it, for reasons that nobody can explain. It's starting to sound to me like the fanaticism is because people like media center PCs, and XBMC is perhaps the only one they've used, and they're confusing the two very different issues.
MPlayer appears to be 99%+ of it.
The DVD Player doesn't do anything that MPlayer doesn't, and besides that it is based on libavcodec, which is MPlayer's sister project (same server, mostly the same devs).
The music player (assuming that's core 3) also doesn't appear to support any formats that MPlayer doesn't (or that XMMS doesn't, for that matter).
I'm looking for someone to convince me, but I'm not seeing anything.
Except that they aren't. They have to be specifically written for and tested to ensure cross-platform (cross-browser) compatibility, and even then, only the well-supported browsers are likely to work.
No (normal) well-designed app requires admin privlidges to install or use.
That's a much higher barrier to entry than a computer with USB ports...
No, the downside of web apps is the horrific performance, interface, configurability, integration, responsiveness, resource requirements, etc., etc.
You mean XUL?
MPlayer supports Myth-produced NUV files, so, yes, xbmc just incidentally gets that feature without trying.
Meh.
How much easier can it get than to use a file manager with keyboard (actually remote control) navigation?
Not having an XBox, I can't. Even when it works on Linux, I still probably won't bother to try it, since nobody can name one reason it's useful or unique at all.
That's setting the bar pretty low.
I read it. 99% of it is talking about what it can play, which really has nothing to do with XBMC and everything to do with MPlayer, which XBMC uses.
As far as the Wiki or XBMC's page says, only thing "special" about XBMC over any other MPlayer GUI seems to be that it displays weather and uses IMDB to show info about your movies...
I'm not getting a warm fuzzy feeling. Certainly doesn't sound like the "best project of all time" as some are pitching it.
Interesting... You believe I posted a comment logged-in to my account, while AT THE EXACT SAME MINUTE posted an entirely different comment as an AC?
Your mental prowess continues to astound.
That's called an "illustration." Perhaps one of your teachers will cover that sometime next year...
I am entirely pragmatic.
Cell phones are vastly more expensive, any way you figure it. If you make few (long-distance) calls, you can get a very cheap calling plan on a landline. If you make numerous calls, you can get some fixed-rate unlimited calling plan.
For DSL, you need to have a landline to begin with. Cable internet access is practically always much more expensive. Not to mention that cable internet generally requires you pay for cable service, which is almost universally more expensive than satellite despite lower quality and fewer channels...
Then there's the pragmatic issue of having telephone calls not sounding like completely crap, in addition to dropping off left and right. And as an added bonus, you don't have every idiot with a scanner listening to every call you make.
That's HILARIOUS.
For the DRM comment, iTMS is popular, but it's clearly not a killer app. A small minority of iPod owners have ever bought a single track.
For "technical" and "design" issues, the article (which you obviously didn't read) fully addresses those. The players being listed are cheaper, more full featured than Apple's offerings, commonly smaller, and got very positive critical reviews.
In conclusion, you are the one who is full of "bullshit" blindly defending the iPod against ALL OTHER music players in the world, even though you've never used any of the competing products in question. It's ironic that while trying to claim that there is no iPod hype, you are showing with your ignorance just how much baseless hype there really is behind the iPod.
Simple. "It's not a bug, it's a feature. Every time you click save, Office is supposed to quit."
Hardware support guys blame the software. The software support guys blame the hardware. The users are left to fend for themselves.
In reality, 99% of the time it's a software bug, but you'll absolutely NEVER get Microsoft to admit fault, let alone fix it. Open Source products are at least honest about their own bugs and limitations, unlike Microsoft, which claims no bugs, and everything working as it should.
Yeah, you said that the first time, and I responded: "a line crew goes out, fixes the line, and they're back up and running before they even want/need to change the encryption key."
No, they actually have to directly go from A to the telco and from the telco to B... It's pretty easy to find. Probably in public documents.
It's hard to prove that the physical medium wasn't quietly intercepted. Quantum is provably secure.
That also doesn't allow frequent key changes, and after a short while the quantum link should be less expensive than physically sending people across town.
Public-key isn't fast or invulnerable, calling someone isn't all that secure, and neither can assure that nothing was intercepted.
Orange Juice rots your teeth and probably contributes to diabetes II.
Your refreshment preferences have no bearing. You have no scientific basis for claiming they are more or less healthy than anything else.
People have been eating corn for a very long time. Ditto for drinking milk, and the like.
Our ancestors didn't drink water with chlorine and fluoride in it. They didn't drink distilled or reverse-osmosis filtered water with all the crucial minerals removed from it.