With my youngest child graduated from High School, I felt free to let my inner geek out and save $$. Out with the Dish, and in with Free. I installed an antenna, on a 30' mast with a directional motor and power booster. I ran cable to each TV. Then in the living room and bedrooms, I installed Happague TV tuner cards into Win 7-64 bit PC's. With Windows media player, and an hour or so setup, I now have DVR features on each and all the major networks along with some funny ones, like RTV, ThisTV, and CoolTV, (who knew, right?). Netflix is built into media center, and with Hulu+, I am getting much more for less. Most Stations broadcast 2 or 3 channels now, with the main one in HD. Most are 1080i, and uncompressed so you get awesome quality that Dish or Charter only dream of. Others at 720p are still better than the compressed signal you get from any provider. Weather? No problem yet, and that's though several awesome thunderstorms. As for snowstorms well, in time I will discover. So living in central Michigan, I can get up to 47 stations. To eliminate repeats (I mean how many pbs/nbs/abc/fox/cw.etc do I really need?) and some I have no use for (TCT, and other single issue religious stations) I still have 32. Media center downloads program info for free, and I schedule DVR same as dish, just better quality. I also bought some infrared remotes cheap off Amazon. So, yeah, if I get squezzed financially I can drop netflix and Hulu+, but still enjoy the rest as it is FREE! And the hardware is paid for and owned by me, so no rental fees or anything. If I knew it was this good before now, I would have done this years ago and saved a bundle. I hope this helps!
Plain Fear mongering at work, nothing more. I have worked in Power Plants for 30 years now, from analog to digital, and he is so full of fear mongering and "what ifs" worse than a Long Island housewife. First, there being no money or "secrets" in hacking a power plant, why bother? If this was such a problem, then why don't we see it happening? Also, there is a huge cost on manpower, material, resources and lost revenue to take a powerplant down on someones fantasy security exploit, and those resources are much better spent on repair, and upgrades for efficiency and emissions. I use these systems daily, and they (unlike most computer systems available) work 24/7/365 going years without problems, quietly doing the job designed for, dumping data for engineers to study and just humming along nicely. Every now and then another fear monger comes along with new fantasy's of death and destruction if we don't drop everything and buy his/her service or patch of whatever snake oil he has for sale. Being engineers (practical, operating, not desk bound) we simply learn to ignore and move on, fixing what is broken and leaving what works alone. Our operating record speaks volumes for our work.
I recently dug an old Compaq out of the closet and on a whim, installed Warp-4. After a few hours of fiddling and updating I was surfing! The old pc has a 1ghz PIII and 512MB Ram and onboard intel graphics, and ran smooth as silk. The WPS is still smooth, just looks old. I also enjoy safe surfing--no virus/malware/trojans or other crapola out there can touch OS/2!I have found it easy to download files to warp, then unzip, inspect then transfer to my windows pc for use. This is proving a very easy and safe way to prevent unwanted stuff from installing its self in my windows PC. I also resurrected some old DOS and Windows 3.1 software (games mostly) for fun. So, besides a walk down memory lane, was it worth the effort? well, to surf, and download software of dubious origin, yes. For daily use? Nope, not even close.
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With my youngest child graduated from High School, I felt free to let my inner geek out and save $$. Out with the Dish, and in with Free. I installed an antenna, on a 30' mast with a directional motor and power booster. I ran cable to each TV. Then in the living room and bedrooms, I installed Happague TV tuner cards into Win 7-64 bit PC's. With Windows media player, and an hour or so setup, I now have DVR features on each and all the major networks along with some funny ones, like RTV, ThisTV, and CoolTV, (who knew, right?). Netflix is built into media center, and with Hulu+, I am getting much more for less. Most Stations broadcast 2 or 3 channels now, with the main one in HD. Most are 1080i, and uncompressed so you get awesome quality that Dish or Charter only dream of. Others at 720p are still better than the compressed signal you get from any provider. Weather? No problem yet, and that's though several awesome thunderstorms. As for snowstorms well, in time I will discover. So living in central Michigan, I can get up to 47 stations. To eliminate repeats (I mean how many pbs/nbs/abc/fox/cw.etc do I really need?) and some I have no use for (TCT, and other single issue religious stations) I still have 32. Media center downloads program info for free, and I schedule DVR same as dish, just better quality. I also bought some infrared remotes cheap off Amazon. So, yeah, if I get squezzed financially I can drop netflix and Hulu+, but still enjoy the rest as it is FREE! And the hardware is paid for and owned by me, so no rental fees or anything. If I knew it was this good before now, I would have done this years ago and saved a bundle. I hope this helps!
Plain Fear mongering at work, nothing more. I have worked in Power Plants for 30 years now, from analog to digital, and he is so full of fear mongering and "what ifs" worse than a Long Island housewife. First, there being no money or "secrets" in hacking a power plant, why bother? If this was such a problem, then why don't we see it happening? Also, there is a huge cost on manpower, material, resources and lost revenue to take a powerplant down on someones fantasy security exploit, and those resources are much better spent on repair, and upgrades for efficiency and emissions. I use these systems daily, and they (unlike most computer systems available) work 24/7/365 going years without problems, quietly doing the job designed for, dumping data for engineers to study and just humming along nicely. Every now and then another fear monger comes along with new fantasy's of death and destruction if we don't drop everything and buy his/her service or patch of whatever snake oil he has for sale. Being engineers (practical, operating, not desk bound) we simply learn to ignore and move on, fixing what is broken and leaving what works alone. Our operating record speaks volumes for our work.
I recently dug an old Compaq out of the closet and on a whim, installed Warp-4. After a few hours of fiddling and updating I was surfing! The old pc has a 1ghz PIII and 512MB Ram and onboard intel graphics, and ran smooth as silk. The WPS is still smooth, just looks old. I also enjoy safe surfing--no virus/malware/trojans or other crapola out there can touch OS/2!I have found it easy to download files to warp, then unzip, inspect then transfer to my windows pc for use. This is proving a very easy and safe way to prevent unwanted stuff from installing its self in my windows PC. I also resurrected some old DOS and Windows 3.1 software (games mostly) for fun. So, besides a walk down memory lane, was it worth the effort? well, to surf, and download software of dubious origin, yes. For daily use? Nope, not even close.