Reading for comprehension time.:) Lincoln was indeed a leading light in the formative years of the Republican party and was it's first President.
As for being a "Butcher" what was the body count in the War of Northern Aggression again? Ignore shredding the Constituition and just look at the body count and the wanton destruction in the conquered States. Saddam has probably killed more but he has been at it for over twenty years.
Yup, but why confuse people who are already confused with extra detail? SSB is efficient but until quite recently the difficulty in getting a perfect zero beat rendered it impractical for consumer applications. And now nobody in their right mind would propose a new AM based radio service in this all digital world we now live in. (Even if the bandwidth usage is better and the other problems are all solved tech.)
The actual political problems leading to the "Lost Cause" were actually much more complex than just abolition. Taxes and import duties were also at the heart of the matter.
And yes the Emancipation Proclamation being political, yes it was, just not for the reasons you think. It was all about elevating the War to some high moral plane (which it hadn't really been on, see above) to prevent the French from recognizing the CSA. The blockade of the Confederate ports would have been hard to maintain had a French fleet sailed up to New Orleans. (So yet again, another attempt at liberty scuttled by French indecision..... [grin])
But if you still don't think the EP was a political stunt try actually reading it. Notice that it only 'frees' slaves that Lincoln has no authority over while leaving a non-trivial number of slaves enslaved in slave holding states that hadn't secceeded.
History is fascinating when you get beyond the sanitized soundbites on The History Channel and in public education/indoctrination.
> Democracy cannot be just about the majority and winning.
But that is where you are wrong. Democracy is just that. Democracy is 51 people voting to piss in the corn flakes of the 49 and the 49 being expected to just sigh and say "It was the will of the majority. We got to voice our opinion and it was indeed a fair vote. Guess we just have to drink the piss now." And that is why the Founding Fathers wanted nothing to do with Democracy, which they rightly deridded as nothing less than Mob Rule. Which is why our Constituition protects (on paper at least, about as effective as a UN resolution) against it by ensuring a republican form of government.
Note small r in republican. The modern Republican Party believes in republicanism/federalism a little more than the original founders (Lincoln the Butcher and his ilk) of the party but they hold the idea in about same regard as the Democratic Party holds democracy; nice to pay lip service to but nothing to change a position over.
Where are our allies from the last war? Well which ones put major troops into the last one? Oh, whats that? Great Britian and the Aussies? Wonder where they wandered off to this time...... Must of been someone else's commando's dying in a chopper crash with four of our warmongering marines as the first allied casualties.
The middle eastern countries that provided bases and overflight rights like Saudi Arabia, Qutar[sp] and the like. Yea it has been a real complication invading by sea through that nasty swamp of a sliver of coastline Iraq has. Damned ungrateful Kuawaities, Saudis and Jordanians. And don't forget those utter bastards in Qutar building that big ass airstrip and stuff, only to deny us teh use of it at the last minute.
And I guess that unamanious decision of the Security Council a couple of months ago, including SYRIA!!!, Yes fucking SYRIA, that Saddam had to disarm or hace "Serious Consequences" were just blowing smoke outta their butts.
> This nation would not even exist if not for the French > during Revolutionary War. And they also helped out the > Union side during the Civil War.
And you say that last part like it was a good thing. Some of us know enough of the history of the War of Northern Aggression to realize we 'owe' them for that.
Actually it is the title of a book written by a bunch of military theorists who were advocating it ias a strategy. The principle author was on one of the news channels. No I don't know which one.
> For AM transmissions, theoretically a single, exact frequency > can suffice. Assuming the transmitter is truly on the expected > frequency, all you need is a very narrow bandpass filter.
Wrong. To send a 1KHz signal via AM you need 2KHz of bandwidth under theoretical best case conditions. You need bandwidth to even send Morse. If you are sending CW at a fast enough speed the bandwidth usage actually becomes non-trivial.
If you can't be bothered to actually study some information theory before opening your butt, at least study and pass a Ham radio exam.
Nah, I'm working at a public library where the only Windows licenses are a) copies of Win95 we bought for $5-10 each to run in VMWare sessions or b) NT4 licenses donated by the Gates Library Foundation which are also now running in VMWare sessions. The BSA goons would never dream of giving us any grief. They wouldn't find any real violations and the last thing they would want is to take a goofy case of EULA enforcement into a LOUISIANA courthouse. We are totally insane down here with our French inspired Napoleanic laws. (Only state in the Empire not based on British Common Law.)
Eh? Getting CSV back out of Postgres should be easier than taking a dump. In fact, start with "man pg_dump" and imagine a bit of AWK or PERL to tweak the output to speed up the conversion.
I'm sure that is what Microsoft 'teaches' in their classes, but that doesn't make it the law of the land. If you actually sign a License Agreement with them then you are correct. If both parties agree to a contract it is generally enforcable. But if I BUY a Gateway with Win98 on it I am perfectly within my rights to seperate the parts and dispose/reuse them as I see fit since I didn't LICENSE anything. So long as I do not violate Copyright I'm clear since I don't live in a UCITA state that makes click wrap EULAs enforcable. Whether I can break the copy restrictions in XP to exercise my rights and not violate the DMCA is a matter that the courts have yet to tackle.
Remember, a click wrap EULA isn't worth the photons it is painted on your eyeballs with in most of the world, even if Bill sez so or Balmer leaps around the room yelling "Licenses, Licenses, Licenses".;)
And I'm even in the clear when I buy surplus OEM licenses at flea markets (1st Saturday in Dallas for example) since I never signed the OEM agreement. Now Dell & Compaq probably ARE in violation, but that is between them and Microsoft.
Wrong. And since you got modded up it appears others share your mistaken view. Any UNSOLICITED email is spam, especially if it is for a commercial purpose (including 'non-profits' begging for money or pols wanting votes), but even missing children notices are SPAM if broadcast at random. And yes, I have had an account closed for sending a message about a missing child. Zero Tolerance.
An abrupt transfer would indeed be painful, which is why a slow planned migration is usually the answer when a decision is taken to abandon one platform for another. Few companies abruptly ditched their mainframes for PCs, they just started buying PCs and not buying more mainframes. Start with the servers, then the single app workstations (point of sale, data entry, etc) then eventually start moving all functions over to the back end servers instead of the Windows clients. Eventually the Doze boxes are only accessing back end apps and playing freecell. That is when they get replaced with thin clients.
But espousing a Kruschez doctrine of "Once on Windows, Always on Windows" is dumb. Granted that some shops probably couldn't migrate even if they wanted to, because they are entangled with too many closed apps that won't run anywhere else. But even there a long term plan should be in place to locate and install replacments as they are available and avoid locking into any more such anchors. Longterm, dependence on Windows is dangerous and anyone with vision will be making plans to escape the ship before it sinks with them.
Microsoft's financial structure is predicated on rapid stock value appreciation and they must do any and everything in their power to get that price moving upwards again soon. Market share growth is no longer possible (try doubling 90% market share) and to date their attempts to assimilate new markets aren't working. That only leaves dramatic increases in per customer revenue to boost earnings. And as the smarter folks leave that will only mean the sheep remaining will get fleeced that much harder to keep the cash flowing to Redmond. Eventually you WILL get fired for buying Microsoft because your company will be outcompeted by those with lower overhead and you will be 'rightsized' out or declared 'redundent' when your company gets bought by a leaner one.
Ok, I can see EOLing 6.2, that one is a bit long in the tooth. But 7.3? Lets think this through a bit. Peeps who have been using RedHat for any length of time know that.0 and.1 releases are for one's own machine to get a feel for what is coming in the next.2 release to be unleased into the production environment after it stabilizes a month or so. So here we get this new EOL schedule and RH7.3 stops getting updates via up2date on Dec 31. Meanwhile, 8.2 will have shipped somewhere around October. Give it a month to stabilize, do a few test installs, etc and you are in late Nov or early Dec. and have about a month to complete the rollout, during the month with the most problems keeping all hands available. Uh huh.
And THIS is supposed to make me want to buy RHAS? After they spent the last two years pitching RHN to everyone, they canibalize those sales to drive RHAS? And they give you a whole three years on that product. Wow!
To be honest, I hadn't yet even drank the RHN kool-aid deeply, only buying a single sub for my laptop just to try it out. Yes it works nice but it wasn't that much better than grabbing the rpms and installing them myself. Certainly didn't see why I'd want to buy it for individual desktops when I already have effective ways to update them in mass.
I really pity the fool who bet his ass on it only to see it yanked away unless one is willing to either pay $800/year/cpu or climb on the upgrade treadmill. Upgrades should only happen when you actually NEED the improved functionality, otherwise they are just a productivity drain.
I suspect that if KRUD promises better than one year update lifetimes they could make a killing since their subscriptions are a heck of a lot less expensive (not being sold per CPU) than RHN, even if it isn't a pretty web interface. I know I'm now looking for options. Our desktop hardware really isn't ready for RH 8.x's bulk and with 7.x dead in less than a year....
The executable is signed with M$'s PRIVATE key. The signature is checked against the PUBLIC key in the chip. No connectivity needed either. Cracking the chip only gets you the PUBLIC key. Please don't confuse encryption with signing. If you are still fuzzy go read the PGP docs by Phil Zimmerman, he explains it a lot better than I am going to here.
No depending on how what was recounted and how, the margin of victory changed. All recount methods that limited themselves to counting marks on actual ballots had Bush winning. "Reimagining" the admittedly odd Buchanan votes would have yielded a Gore victory but you just can't do that sort of thing and still call it an election.
1. It isn't a mutant PC so no easy port of Linux with good hardware support. Lets compare. The PS/2 needs a $200 add on to run a crippled version of Linux. You don't get access to the DVD/CD drive and you get to jump through hoops to replace the kernel. You don't have enough RAM to run a modern distro. On the plus side you do get a fairly generous 40G hard drive and normal USB/fireware ports. An X-box has double the RAM, a fairly normal Intel CPU and access to ALL of the hardware once you get it past the hurdle of modding it to allow a boot in the first place. The X-box lacks firewire and has mutant USB plugs.
2. The PS/2 has a very alien programming model to get effective use from the hardware. The Emotion Engine is supposed to be powerful, and from looking at the games it can run it obviously CAN do some impressive tricks, but it ain't going to happen by coding to the subset of OpenGL Sony provides. The X-box has hope of getting a hacked Nvidia driver up. It already has Xv support so video apps can already run unmodified, including linking to WIN32 dlls to support WMA and crap.
3. Cost. The PS/2 Linux kit is $200 vs $50 for an X-box modchip. Blowing $50 to try something hackish is cheap enough to make it an impulse buy.
Personally I haven't owned a console since the 2600, but as soon as an XBox Media Player type app shows up running via Linux instead of bootleg MS dev tools I'm probably going to take the plunge. Probably won't ever buy a game, just hook it up as a player in the AV stack with an ethernet cable up it's bum and a SPIDF to TOSLINK converter on the audio outs. Assuming drivers don't get released for the Hauppage WinTV-PVR 350 before then, if that happens I'm going to be to busy trying to homebrew a Linux PVR.
It's when it gets as easy to mod an xbox and download the readymade media player.iso from gnutella as downloading a screener for The Two Towers. Smell the fear, it is a beautiful thing.
Actually you are wrong. The press eventually did a full hand recount and Al Gore still lost in Florida. Get over it.
I won't hold it against you that you didn't know about the recount though, it isn't like the press put the story on page one or anything since it didn't yield the result they were looking for.
I think Brian said more than he intended perhaps. Notice how he went out of his way to hammer home the fact that WE aren't the customer/user from his/AMI's POV. Now re-read all of the bits about where the 'user' could disable this junk and think about it. Dell being able to disable isn't the same thing as thee and me being able to control this monster.
And why is it that anytime TCM/Palladium come up I have this recurring vision of this being a retelling of Belling the Cat with us in the role of the Cat and the MPAA/RIAA (And of course Disney [grin]) being in the role of the Mice? Except in this dope smoking surreal version one of the mice is an MBA with a minor in Marketing who stands up and says, "No! No! You guys are doing this the hard way. Forget drawing lots to see who will go on the suicide mission to put the bell on the Cat. I will handle it. Whereupon the smart mouse takes the bell and goes and SELLS it to the Cat."
Ever heard of Public Key Crypto? If they decide to ignore their prior promises of allowing the end user to load keys it is over. You won't need to crack the keys out of the module, the BIOS will happily SHOW them because they are the Public keys. The software vendors (i.e. M$) will have the Private keys. Think XBox.
The problem is that good hardware is still rare, and none yet has good Linux support. So by the time somebody could build up an ISO and an exact shopping list one or more of the parts would be out of production.
The only way a bulletproof system can come to be is if one of the major hardware vendors gets involved. What we need is a hardware tuner MPEG encoder TV out all in one board with vendor support for Linux. With all of those hard bits on one board the rest of the system isn't as critical.
Ok, replying to my own post a minute later is lame. But I had this gadget confused with a different Onkyo receiver I was looking at a day or so ago. This one has its own HDD unlike the Net Receiver I was pondering earlier.
Because if it is running Linux there is hope of reflashing the bugger and getting a useful piece of gear. I.E. no dependence on a Windows file server (which the current software depends on) and getting OGG support.
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Reading for comprehension time. :) Lincoln was indeed a leading light in the formative years of the Republican party and was it's first President.
As for being a "Butcher" what was the body count in the War of Northern Aggression again? Ignore shredding the Constituition and just look at the body count and the wanton destruction in the conquered States. Saddam has probably killed more but he has been at it for over twenty years.
Yup, but why confuse people who are already confused with extra detail? SSB is efficient but until quite recently the difficulty in getting a perfect zero beat rendered it impractical for consumer applications. And now nobody in their right mind would propose a new AM based radio service in this all digital world we now live in. (Even if the bandwidth usage is better and the other problems are all solved tech.)
The actual political problems leading to the "Lost Cause" were actually much more complex than just abolition. Taxes and import duties were also at the heart of the matter.
And yes the Emancipation Proclamation being political, yes it was, just not for the reasons you think. It was all about elevating the War to some high moral plane (which it hadn't really been on, see above) to prevent the French from recognizing the CSA. The blockade of the Confederate ports would have been hard to maintain had a French fleet sailed up to New Orleans. (So yet again, another attempt at liberty scuttled by French indecision..... [grin])
But if you still don't think the EP was a political stunt try actually reading it. Notice that it only 'frees' slaves that Lincoln has no authority over while leaving a non-trivial number of slaves enslaved in slave holding states that hadn't secceeded.
History is fascinating when you get beyond the sanitized soundbites on The History Channel and in public education/indoctrination.
> Democracy cannot be just about the majority and winning.
But that is where you are wrong. Democracy is just that. Democracy is 51 people voting to piss in the corn flakes of the 49 and the 49 being expected to just sigh and say "It was the will of the majority. We got to voice our opinion and it was indeed a fair vote. Guess we just have to drink the piss now." And that is why the Founding Fathers wanted nothing to do with Democracy, which they rightly deridded as nothing less than Mob Rule. Which is why our Constituition protects (on paper at least, about as effective as a UN resolution) against it by ensuring a republican form of government.
Note small r in republican. The modern Republican Party believes in republicanism/federalism a little more than the original founders (Lincoln the Butcher and his ilk) of the party but they hold the idea in about same regard as the Democratic Party holds democracy; nice to pay lip service to but nothing to change a position over.
Where are our allies from the last war? Well which ones put major troops into the last one? Oh, whats that? Great Britian and the Aussies? Wonder where they wandered off to this time...... Must of been someone else's commando's dying in a chopper crash with four of our warmongering marines as the first allied casualties.
The middle eastern countries that provided bases and overflight rights like Saudi Arabia, Qutar[sp] and the like. Yea it has been a real complication invading by sea through that nasty swamp of a sliver of coastline Iraq has. Damned ungrateful Kuawaities, Saudis and Jordanians. And don't forget those utter bastards in Qutar building that big ass airstrip and stuff, only to deny us teh use of it at the last minute.
And I guess that unamanious decision of the Security Council a couple of months ago, including SYRIA!!!, Yes fucking SYRIA, that Saddam had to disarm or hace "Serious Consequences" were just blowing smoke outta their butts.
> This nation would not even exist if not for the French
> during Revolutionary War. And they also helped out the
> Union side during the Civil War.
And you say that last part like it was a good thing. Some of us know enough of the history of the War of Northern Aggression to realize we 'owe' them for that.
Yea, but his face was still all over Iraq in "617-Red Sleigh Down". Something just isn't right in the South Park universe.
Actually it is the title of a book written by a bunch of military theorists who were advocating it ias a strategy. The principle author was on one of the news channels. No I don't know which one.
> For AM transmissions, theoretically a single, exact frequency
> can suffice. Assuming the transmitter is truly on the expected
> frequency, all you need is a very narrow bandpass filter.
Wrong. To send a 1KHz signal via AM you need 2KHz of bandwidth under theoretical best case conditions. You need bandwidth to even send Morse. If you are sending CW at a fast enough speed the bandwidth usage actually becomes non-trivial.
If you can't be bothered to actually study some information theory before opening your butt, at least study and pass a Ham radio exam.
Nah, I'm working at a public library where the only Windows licenses are a) copies of Win95 we bought for $5-10 each to run in VMWare sessions or b) NT4 licenses donated by the Gates Library Foundation which are also now running in VMWare sessions. The BSA goons would never dream of giving us any grief. They wouldn't find any real violations and the last thing they would want is to take a goofy case of EULA enforcement into a LOUISIANA courthouse. We are totally insane down here with our French inspired Napoleanic laws. (Only state in the Empire not based on British Common Law.)
Eh? Getting CSV back out of Postgres should be easier than taking a dump. In fact, start with "man pg_dump" and imagine a bit of AWK or PERL to tweak the output to speed up the conversion.
I'm sure that is what Microsoft 'teaches' in their classes, but that doesn't make it the law of the land. If you actually sign a License Agreement with them then you are correct. If both parties agree to a contract it is generally enforcable. But if I BUY a Gateway with Win98 on it I am perfectly within my rights to seperate the parts and dispose/reuse them as I see fit since I didn't LICENSE anything. So long as I do not violate Copyright I'm clear since I don't live in a UCITA state that makes click wrap EULAs enforcable. Whether I can break the copy restrictions in XP to exercise my rights and not violate the DMCA is a matter that the courts have yet to tackle.
;)
Remember, a click wrap EULA isn't worth the photons it is painted on your eyeballs with in most of the world, even if Bill sez so or Balmer leaps around the room yelling "Licenses, Licenses, Licenses".
And I'm even in the clear when I buy surplus OEM licenses at flea markets (1st Saturday in Dallas for example) since I never signed the OEM agreement. Now Dell & Compaq probably ARE in violation, but that is between them and Microsoft.
Wrong. And since you got modded up it appears others share your mistaken view. Any UNSOLICITED email is spam, especially if it is for a commercial purpose (including 'non-profits' begging for money or pols wanting votes), but even missing children notices are SPAM if broadcast at random. And yes, I have had an account closed for sending a message about a missing child. Zero Tolerance.
An abrupt transfer would indeed be painful, which is why a slow planned migration is usually the answer when a decision is taken to abandon one platform for another. Few companies abruptly ditched their mainframes for PCs, they just started buying PCs and not buying more mainframes. Start with the servers, then the single app workstations (point of sale, data entry, etc) then eventually start moving all functions over to the back end servers instead of the Windows clients. Eventually the Doze boxes are only accessing back end apps and playing freecell. That is when they get replaced with thin clients.
But espousing a Kruschez doctrine of "Once on Windows, Always on Windows" is dumb. Granted that some shops probably couldn't migrate even if they wanted to, because they are entangled with too many closed apps that won't run anywhere else. But even there a long term plan should be in place to locate and install replacments as they are available and avoid locking into any more such anchors. Longterm, dependence on Windows is dangerous and anyone with vision will be making plans to escape the ship before it sinks with them.
Microsoft's financial structure is predicated on rapid stock value appreciation and they must do any and everything in their power to get that price moving upwards again soon. Market share growth is no longer possible (try doubling 90% market share) and to date their attempts to assimilate new markets aren't working. That only leaves dramatic increases in per customer revenue to boost earnings. And as the smarter folks leave that will only mean the sheep remaining will get fleeced that much harder to keep the cash flowing to Redmond. Eventually you WILL get fired for buying Microsoft because your company will be outcompeted by those with lower overhead and you will be 'rightsized' out or declared 'redundent' when your company gets bought by a leaner one.
Ok, I can see EOLing 6.2, that one is a bit long in the tooth. But 7.3? Lets think this through a bit. Peeps who have been using RedHat for any length of time know that .0 and .1 releases are for one's own machine to get a feel for what is coming in the next .2 release to be unleased into the production environment after it stabilizes a month or so. So here we get this new EOL schedule and RH7.3 stops getting updates via up2date on Dec 31. Meanwhile, 8.2 will have shipped somewhere around October. Give it a month to stabilize, do a few test installs, etc and you are in late Nov or early Dec. and have about a month to complete the rollout, during the month with the most problems keeping all hands available. Uh huh.
And THIS is supposed to make me want to buy RHAS? After they spent the last two years pitching RHN to everyone, they canibalize those sales to drive RHAS? And they give you a whole three years on that product. Wow!
To be honest, I hadn't yet even drank the RHN kool-aid deeply, only buying a single sub for my laptop just to try it out. Yes it works nice but it wasn't that much better than grabbing the rpms and installing them myself. Certainly didn't see why I'd want to buy it for individual desktops when I already have effective ways to update them in mass.
I really pity the fool who bet his ass on it only to see it yanked away unless one is willing to either pay $800/year/cpu or climb on the upgrade treadmill. Upgrades should only happen when you actually NEED the improved functionality, otherwise they are just a productivity drain.
I suspect that if KRUD promises better than one year update lifetimes they could make a killing since their subscriptions are a heck of a lot less expensive (not being sold per CPU) than RHN, even if it isn't a pretty web interface. I know I'm now looking for options. Our desktop hardware really isn't ready for RH 8.x's bulk and with 7.x dead in less than a year....
The executable is signed with M$'s PRIVATE key. The signature is checked against the PUBLIC key in the chip. No connectivity needed either. Cracking the chip only gets you the PUBLIC key. Please don't confuse encryption with signing. If you are still fuzzy go read the PGP docs by Phil Zimmerman, he explains it a lot better than I am going to here.
No depending on how what was recounted and how, the margin of victory changed. All recount methods that limited themselves to counting marks on actual ballots had Bush winning. "Reimagining" the admittedly odd Buchanan votes would have yielded a Gore victory but you just can't do that sort of thing and still call it an election.
The PS/2 just isn't as attractive a target.
1. It isn't a mutant PC so no easy port of Linux with good hardware support. Lets compare. The PS/2 needs a $200 add on to run a crippled version of Linux. You don't get access to the DVD/CD drive and you get to jump through hoops to replace the kernel. You don't have enough RAM to run a modern distro. On the plus side you do get a fairly generous 40G hard drive and normal USB/fireware ports. An X-box has double the RAM, a fairly normal Intel CPU and access to ALL of the hardware once you get it past the hurdle of modding it to allow a boot in the first place. The X-box lacks firewire and has mutant USB plugs.
2. The PS/2 has a very alien programming model to get effective use from the hardware. The Emotion Engine is supposed to be powerful, and from looking at the games it can run it obviously CAN do some impressive tricks, but it ain't going to happen by coding to the subset of OpenGL Sony provides. The X-box has hope of getting a hacked Nvidia driver up. It already has Xv support so video apps can already run unmodified, including linking to WIN32 dlls to support WMA and crap.
3. Cost. The PS/2 Linux kit is $200 vs $50 for an X-box modchip. Blowing $50 to try something hackish is cheap enough to make it an impulse buy.
Personally I haven't owned a console since the 2600, but as soon as an XBox Media Player type app shows up running via Linux instead of bootleg MS dev tools I'm probably going to take the plunge. Probably won't ever buy a game, just hook it up as a player in the AV stack with an ethernet cable up it's bum and a SPIDF to TOSLINK converter on the audio outs. Assuming drivers don't get released for the Hauppage WinTV-PVR 350 before then, if that happens I'm going to be to busy trying to homebrew a Linux PVR.
Nah, what has M$ and the MPAA quivering in fear is:
.iso from gnutella as downloading a screener for The Two Towers. Smell the fear, it is a beautiful thing.
[user@xbox movies]$ xine harry_potter_and_the_chamber_of_secrets.avi
It's when it gets as easy to mod an xbox and download the readymade media player
Actually you are wrong. The press eventually did a full hand recount and Al Gore still lost in Florida. Get over it.
I won't hold it against you that you didn't know about the recount though, it isn't like the press put the story on page one or anything since it didn't yield the result they were looking for.
I think Brian said more than he intended perhaps. Notice how he went out of his way to hammer home the fact that WE aren't the customer/user from his/AMI's POV. Now re-read all of the bits about where the 'user' could disable this junk and think about it. Dell being able to disable isn't the same thing as thee and me being able to control this monster.
And why is it that anytime TCM/Palladium come up I have this recurring vision of this being a retelling of Belling the Cat with us in the role of the Cat and the MPAA/RIAA (And of course Disney [grin]) being in the role of the Mice? Except in this dope smoking surreal version one of the mice is an MBA with a minor in Marketing who stands up and says, "No! No! You guys are doing this the hard way. Forget drawing lots to see who will go on the suicide mission to put the bell on the Cat. I will handle it. Whereupon the smart mouse takes the bell and goes and SELLS it to the Cat."
[flame]
Ever heard of Public Key Crypto? If they decide to ignore their prior promises of allowing the end user to load keys it is over. You won't need to crack the keys out of the module, the BIOS will happily SHOW them because they are the Public keys. The software vendors (i.e. M$) will have the Private keys. Think XBox.
[/flame]
The problem is that good hardware is still rare, and none yet has good Linux support. So by the time somebody could build up an ISO and an exact shopping list one or more of the parts would be out of production.
The only way a bulletproof system can come to be is if one of the major hardware vendors gets involved. What we need is a hardware tuner MPEG encoder TV out all in one board with vendor support for Linux. With all of those hard bits on one board the rest of the system isn't as critical.
Ok, replying to my own post a minute later is lame. But I had this gadget confused with a different Onkyo receiver I was looking at a day or so ago. This one has its own HDD unlike the Net Receiver I was pondering earlier.
Because if it is running Linux there is hope of reflashing the bugger and getting a useful piece of gear. I.E. no dependence on a Windows file server (which the current software depends on) and getting OGG support.