MythTv is great but linux GPU drivers for ATI/Intel/Nvidia suck.
Ion + VDPAU disagree with you.
The last time I tried MythTv, I could not get hardware acceleration and GPU decoding for HD content (for mpeg2 and H264). I tried both the open source drivers and the binary blob but it just doesn't work.
Could you date that? I saw VDPAU working correctly a few months back.
Handy tip! Great idea for making an HTPC out of old hardware.
However, I prefer to let my CPU handle the decoding, and load my GPU up with quality enhancing shaders. Since I usually watch videos on my gaming computer, CPU speed is a non-issue.
I'm not certain how it does it, but I assume they're filtering the sound coming out of the speakers against the mic input.
Shifting windows. The software waits for a unique and easy to identify sound or frequency to be played, then tries to detect it. It checks how long it took for it to be picked up, then establishes a rough time for when the filtering has to be done, which is usually accurate within 1ms.
The filtering is beyond me - but I'm surprised programs can get the first bit so wrong. Measuring audio "ping" is easy - and if you don't immediately discard your played back audio from the buffer, surely some smart coder or mathematician can figure out how to filter it out?
I suppose skype also considers acoustic characteristics like distance from speakers to mic, and records how the frequency is altered when playing/hearing a "control" sound, to make the filtering more effective?
I knew there was a purpose for the startup sounds programs play!:P
We were using Ventrilo, but one person had a really crackly mic, so I googled for alternatives and suggested Mumble. We tried it, and the guy was instantly clearer. Nobody had any problems hearing him.
Too bad the crackly mic syndrome was passed on to me. On two computers, Mumble is completely useless - it's so bad they can barely hear me.
We're back in Vent, because even with his crackly mic, he's more understandable than I was.:P
I am sure you are not convinced, correct? And this is my point: Apple is right. Their secret recipe is no longer how to make great computers but how to make their users feel superior. "The difference between a Mac and crappy PC" in the eyes of a Mac user is that the PC is crappy by nature while the Mac is not. It's a delusion, but one that feeds Apple since the 90s.
The thing you have to remember is, Apple is a hardware company. Nokia is also a hardware company. Linksys/Cisco appears to be a hardware company. All these companies make their money off selling hardware, so they need 100% (or higher) margins.
Exception: Apple iTunes
Now, keeping that in mind, compare all the crapware Lenovo bundles. For an educated user like you, it's no problem wiping it out. For most people, it's less hassle to fork over a few hundred extra dollars, because if they actually use that software, they'll soon have viruses and have to pay that money anyway. But unlike you, they won't connect the dots. They'll just assume "the PC is crappy and gets viruses".
You're fuming because you can build your own desktop for cheap - but why aren't you fuming over $700 phones($199 with contract) that cost $140 to make?
Companies are greedy. They aim to please their shareholders, and they do a good job. I applaud Apple for not bundling crapware with their OS, and for matching prices with overpriced PC OEMs. (There are plenty:/ )
If you had say... Cable, and all your neighbours were active too, then this would make your speed drop. Your torrents choke their webpage browsing and youtube streaming, but with congestion control, it doesn't choke them as much. Is it perfect? Nope. Will it affect you negatively? Not really. I'd happily download 20% slower for 80ms ping instead of 2000ms. (and yes, it can get that bad when networks opt for low or no packet loss.)
When there is no congestion, it has no effect, so most of the time you won't even notice it.
If MS included this in Windows, you'd never get to see the login screen because the CPU would be so busy fixing bugs.
If MS included this in windows, it'd be blazing fast, because all those stupid thread lockups would be gone, along with endlessly increasing numbers of file handles. Responsiveness would shoot through the roof, even if ClearView was eating a core or two for breakfast...
But I would prefer to see stuff like this built into compilers, rather than on an end user system. This article described what I thought compilers were supposed to do, before I learned programming. Turns out profiling is actually a rather dumb operation, and JITs like Java's don't aim to correct so much as stop & alert.:/
Don't forget that processor cost isn't just the price of the CPU.
ARM-based SoCs integrate many peripheral controllers right into the SoC. What might require a $30 atom and $100 board for x86 could require a $45 ARM SoC and $30 board, plus consumes 1/5th the power and is 1/4th the size. That's a big impact for power and space efficient devices.
Intel has been trying to do the same thing for their new Atoms - but driver support isn't there yet, and power consumption is still many magnitudes higher. (500mw, vs ~8 watts?)
Example: most people don't think that brutally raping a young girl (say, 8 years old) and then slaughtering her is particularly good. What would people say to a video game where you play a protagonist that brutally rapes a young girl and then slaughters her. One is doing it in real life, one is doing it virtually; both in order to do it virtually, there must be some desire to "do it," right?
I vote with my money. You won't see me buying games like these. About the most violent game I have is Left4Dead or TF2. I'm far more attracted to RTS/TBS and RPGs.
I don't know about you but when I travel long distances on the highway I expect a 500 km trip to take about 4.5 hours, not 9 hours.
1) You cannot base the Roadster's max distance on what one guy got. Base it on the official specs(390km max) 2) You can drive it up to ~90mph and still get ~390km on highways.
That makes a lot more sense than trying to make an electric car into something that it can't be.
Until we get that 20 times improvement in battery technology it makes more sense to optimise electric vehicles for commuting, not long distance.
You want a distance of 8000-9000km on a charge?
Think about it. 390km currently - double the capacity and you get 780km. I think just twice the energy density would be enough for electric to take over, especially if they keep the long lasting batteries and 3 hour charging.
Welll, you are partly to blame for backups, since folks slow down for people stopped on the side of the road. Yea, idiot rubberneckers but it still happens.
Interesting!
Usually I go for a parking lot if one is available, but I have stopped on the side of the road from time to time. I try to make sure I'm highly visible(not hidden around a bend or anything), so I guess that makes it worse?;)
Nah. I don't even drink coffee. Can't stand the stuff. And it's hard to keep it balanced on the tank. I ride a motorcycle to work 99% of the time (today it's snowing hard so I took the wife's car:( ).
That's a good way to reduce your environmental footprint - and I'm told it's also fun. But after being in a few close calls, I feel far safer with some metal around me.:P A car is probably harder to not notice, too.
I find people talking on cellphones tend to be looking roughly straight ahead. Attention is diverted, but it's not as bad as a lot of other situations.
All my close calls involved other devices. One woman was putting on lipstick. Another guy was changing a CD. Another pulled into a 3-way intersection while looking for sunglasses.
I was able to swerve (slightly) into the wrong lane to avoid all three, but in busier locations that'd make the situation far worse. I happen to live in a small city in BC(<100k people), but in a large city of millions, with dozens of lanes of traffic, you just can't pull off the moves I did. It'd mean bad accidents, so I fully understand the desire to prevent it.
Regarding cellphones... many young people can operate them without looking at the screen or phone, and can drop them in an instant if necessary to grab the wheel. I'm really worried about other stuff more. Anything that takes your eyes off the road...
(Oh, and FYI - I'm responsible and pull over when making calls. You like to drink morning coffee huh, on the way to work? Well screw you!)
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MythTv is great but linux GPU drivers for ATI/Intel/Nvidia suck.
Ion + VDPAU disagree with you.
The last time I tried MythTv, I could not get hardware acceleration and GPU decoding for HD content (for mpeg2 and H264). I tried both the open source drivers and the binary blob but it just doesn't work.
Could you date that? I saw VDPAU working correctly a few months back.
It could very well be the same hardware - just mass-produced by a company, resulting in cheaper prices.
Handy tip! Great idea for making an HTPC out of old hardware.
However, I prefer to let my CPU handle the decoding, and load my GPU up with quality enhancing shaders. Since I usually watch videos on my gaming computer, CPU speed is a non-issue.
Correct. Western Digital's WDTV, Asus's O!Play, and others...
Texas Instruments has the OMAP 3530 playing back 1080p H.264; all that remains is an open source codec being created to do the same task...
I'm not certain how it does it, but I assume they're filtering the sound coming out of the speakers against the mic input.
Shifting windows. The software waits for a unique and easy to identify sound or frequency to be played, then tries to detect it. It checks how long it took for it to be picked up, then establishes a rough time for when the filtering has to be done, which is usually accurate within 1ms.
The filtering is beyond me - but I'm surprised programs can get the first bit so wrong. Measuring audio "ping" is easy - and if you don't immediately discard your played back audio from the buffer, surely some smart coder or mathematician can figure out how to filter it out?
I suppose skype also considers acoustic characteristics like distance from speakers to mic, and records how the frequency is altered when playing/hearing a "control" sound, to make the filtering more effective?
I knew there was a purpose for the startup sounds programs play! :P
My experience was a bit different.
We were using Ventrilo, but one person had a really crackly mic, so I googled for alternatives and suggested Mumble. We tried it, and the guy was instantly clearer. Nobody had any problems hearing him.
Too bad the crackly mic syndrome was passed on to me. On two computers, Mumble is completely useless - it's so bad they can barely hear me.
We're back in Vent, because even with his crackly mic, he's more understandable than I was. :P
Surely there are security concerns around sites using fonts where the letters are 'swapped' to obfusicate where links are actually directed?
Statusbar fonts can't be messed with. Mouse over those links!
I heard that stupid people also reproduce more, so clearly all the intelligent people will dry up by 2409 as well!
I like the two-inch thick laptops. They don't get warm, so they can actually be used on laps.
I am sure you are not convinced, correct? And this is my point: Apple is right. Their secret recipe is no longer how to make great computers but how to make their users feel superior. "The difference between a Mac and crappy PC" in the eyes of a Mac user is that the PC is crappy by nature while the Mac is not. It's a delusion, but one that feeds Apple since the 90s.
The thing you have to remember is, Apple is a hardware company. Nokia is also a hardware company. Linksys/Cisco appears to be a hardware company. All these companies make their money off selling hardware, so they need 100% (or higher) margins.
Exception: Apple iTunes
Now, keeping that in mind, compare all the crapware Lenovo bundles. For an educated user like you, it's no problem wiping it out. For most people, it's less hassle to fork over a few hundred extra dollars, because if they actually use that software, they'll soon have viruses and have to pay that money anyway. But unlike you, they won't connect the dots. They'll just assume "the PC is crappy and gets viruses".
You're fuming because you can build your own desktop for cheap - but why aren't you fuming over $700 phones($199 with contract) that cost $140 to make?
Companies are greedy. They aim to please their shareholders, and they do a good job. I applaud Apple for not bundling crapware with their OS, and for matching prices with overpriced PC OEMs. (There are plenty :/ )
You can throttle on your end, and your end only.
If you had say... Cable, and all your neighbours were active too, then this would make your speed drop. Your torrents choke their webpage browsing and youtube streaming, but with congestion control, it doesn't choke them as much. Is it perfect? Nope. Will it affect you negatively? Not really. I'd happily download 20% slower for 80ms ping instead of 2000ms. (and yes, it can get that bad when networks opt for low or no packet loss.)
When there is no congestion, it has no effect, so most of the time you won't even notice it.
TCP Vegas?
I remember reading how AT&T's iPhone "zero-packet-loss" was causing network congestion and 8-second ping times.
Coconuts are good for so many things.
For example, making the sound of horses, or even making soap!
My Compaq laptop with XP only has 112 MB of memory.
Aim for that. ;-)
Okay man. Here you go:
http://www.puppylinux.org/
I'm pretty sure nobody did, but just to be clear, his Onboard Video is using up 16MiB of the 128MiB installed.
The Pandora devs posted power consumption of individual parts on the gp32x forums. I've lost most of the links, but someone devoted could find them.
I recall that the LED backlit LCD and CPU running an emulator full throttle was under 700mw.
The Pandora battery is also at a lower voltage - 3.7v, I think, instead of whatever most laptops run at.
If MS included this in Windows, you'd never get to see the login screen because the CPU would be so busy fixing bugs.
If MS included this in windows, it'd be blazing fast, because all those stupid thread lockups would be gone, along with endlessly increasing numbers of file handles. Responsiveness would shoot through the roof, even if ClearView was eating a core or two for breakfast...
But I would prefer to see stuff like this built into compilers, rather than on an end user system. This article described what I thought compilers were supposed to do, before I learned programming. Turns out profiling is actually a rather dumb operation, and JITs like Java's don't aim to correct so much as stop & alert. :/
view slashdot
Unless I'm mistaken, this requires a 2.0ghz quadcore, so you're not likely to see it in a handheld any time soon!
Don't forget that processor cost isn't just the price of the CPU.
ARM-based SoCs integrate many peripheral controllers right into the SoC. What might require a $30 atom and $100 board for x86 could require a $45 ARM SoC and $30 board, plus consumes 1/5th the power and is 1/4th the size. That's a big impact for power and space efficient devices.
Intel has been trying to do the same thing for their new Atoms - but driver support isn't there yet, and power consumption is still many magnitudes higher. (500mw, vs ~8 watts?)
Remember kids - SSD garbage collection works the same way as Java. You ideally you want ~50% of the heap to be empty. ;)
If this market is to mature they need a company to step in with the emphasis on quality.
FusionIO?
Oh wait - look at the price!
Example: most people don't think that brutally raping a young girl (say, 8 years old) and then slaughtering her is particularly good. What would people say to a video game where you play a protagonist that brutally rapes a young girl and then slaughters her. One is doing it in real life, one is doing it virtually; both in order to do it virtually, there must be some desire to "do it," right?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RapeLay
I vote with my money. You won't see me buying games like these. About the most violent game I have is Left4Dead or TF2. I'm far more attracted to RTS/TBS and RPGs.
@Wonko the Sane:
I don't know about you but when I travel long distances on the highway I expect a 500 km trip to take about 4.5 hours, not 9 hours.
1) You cannot base the Roadster's max distance on what one guy got. Base it on the official specs(390km max)
2) You can drive it up to ~90mph and still get ~390km on highways.
That makes a lot more sense than trying to make an electric car into something that it can't be.
Until we get that 20 times improvement in battery technology it makes more sense to optimise electric vehicles for commuting, not long distance.
You want a distance of 8000-9000km on a charge?
Think about it. 390km currently - double the capacity and you get 780km. I think just twice the energy density would be enough for electric to take over, especially if they keep the long lasting batteries and 3 hour charging.
Welll, you are partly to blame for backups, since folks slow down for people stopped on the side of the road. Yea, idiot rubberneckers but it still happens.
Interesting!
Usually I go for a parking lot if one is available, but I have stopped on the side of the road from time to time. I try to make sure I'm highly visible(not hidden around a bend or anything), so I guess that makes it worse? ;)
Nah. I don't even drink coffee. Can't stand the stuff. And it's hard to keep it balanced on the tank. I ride a motorcycle to work 99% of the time (today it's snowing hard so I took the wife's car :( ).
That's a good way to reduce your environmental footprint - and I'm told it's also fun. But after being in a few close calls, I feel far safer with some metal around me. :P A car is probably harder to not notice, too.
I too would much prefer a more broad rule.
I find people talking on cellphones tend to be looking roughly straight ahead. Attention is diverted, but it's not as bad as a lot of other situations.
All my close calls involved other devices. One woman was putting on lipstick. Another guy was changing a CD. Another pulled into a 3-way intersection while looking for sunglasses.
I was able to swerve (slightly) into the wrong lane to avoid all three, but in busier locations that'd make the situation far worse. I happen to live in a small city in BC(<100k people), but in a large city of millions, with dozens of lanes of traffic, you just can't pull off the moves I did. It'd mean bad accidents, so I fully understand the desire to prevent it.
Regarding cellphones... many young people can operate them without looking at the screen or phone, and can drop them in an instant if necessary to grab the wheel. I'm really worried about other stuff more. Anything that takes your eyes off the road...
(Oh, and FYI - I'm responsible and pull over when making calls. You like to drink morning coffee huh, on the way to work? Well screw you!)