If Amazon (or anyone else) tries to charge me more after the transaction has been completed, they'll be hearing from my credit card dispute resolution people. Either be more careful and don't make mistakes, or accept that when you do make a mistake I will not be paying for it. Consider that to be motivation for you to do it correctly the first (ie. only) time.
It'd be funny of countries with rational copyright laws put the USA on some moral rights blackist next to China and friends because we're an evil country run by tyrants who value the dollar far more than the citizens.
The solution is obvious, we need even tighter, more intrusive DRM!
Indeed. In the future, every device capable of reading HD media will come with a guy named Guido. If Guido detects the user attempting to crack, reverse engineer, or in any way compromize the security built in to the HD reader device, Mr. Guido will break the users kneecaps with a baseball bat. The HD Media content industry believes this will finally demotivate the evil people in our society who believe they have some bizarre things they refer to as "rights", whatever that means, these evil people seem to think these "rights" somehow make it OK to do really evil things. The heroic Guidos shall discover who these evildoers are and bring them to the light, using their mighty baseball bats of justice to convince the supervillans that their wicked ways are wrong, that they will not be tolerated under any circumstances, and that there is no escape. Yes, the Guidos will be a far superior content protection method than relying merely on technology and the weak assumptions that this technology is smarter than the evil superillans are.
I'm curious as to why this organization is attempting to get the states to standardize on tax rates. While it might be somewhat convenient in calculating things, it would only be slightly different than having a table of tax rates in the calculation process to send out taxes due to various states. I don't get why that detail would be so important to the people trying to make this happen. Would they rather dictate rates to the states, or would they rather have states "with the program" at whatever rate the state chooses for itself?
What really bothers me is the pharma commercials that don't even say what the stuff is used for. I understadn there's some rule that in order to say what the drug is for then they also have to list the known side-effects, and in order to not scare people away with the side-effect listing they sometimes just don't tell us what it does and how we might benefit from it. They show some people looking happy because they apparently had some unnamed medical situation and this magic pill was just what they needed for whatever it was they were suffering from. Why get the public all excited about something, sick people run to the doctor and pay for visits only to find out that this thing they want to try is intended to ease the pain of cronic lymphoma cancer and all I have is high cholesterol. It's a dumb idea IMHO.
But sometimes you can see why pharma wouldn't want you or me knowing the side-effects. Some of those sound far worse than what the pill treats. Such as some arthritis pain medication or somesuch causing cancer and things like that, maybe I'll just try and tough it out with ibuprofen instead of going into a new treatment that has a known possibility to make life a lot more miserable.
My county landfill is very eco-friendly. They have a station to put all the toxic stuff like mercury (fluorescent bulbs, thermostats, etc), paint, and that sort of thing. OK, I don't believe you can leave that wtuff out with the weekly trash or recycling materials for pickup, you have to actually go there and drop it off. But it's a better option that simply putting it in the generic trash can.
I replaced the motherboard in my sister's computer, and had to call MS for reactivation. They asked what was up, I said I was replacing a broken motherboard, they said OK and reactivated the thing. There was nothing OEM about this, it was a purely home-built PC with a full 98SE license and XP Home upgrade. Whether I should have had to call and ask for permission is another thing, and I wasn't happy that I had to, but it was less hassle than I'd expected.
(My family doesn't seem to have any interest in talking to computer company support since they have a computer guy only 300 miles away, so I might as well give them my leftovers if they won't have anyone else service the things)
I use my hotmail account for all internet-order things in order to keep my "real" email clean. Then I've recently learned of the temporary email places that you can get a workable email address for the purpose of satisfying any requirements that the email you give works, sign up for or order your thing, and then a few minutes later that email ceases to exist. I think I'm going to be using those a lot more, it was pretty nice.
Yea, I know it's hopeless to avoid spam, and my "real" e,ail still gets tons of it. Thunderbird does a pretty good job of keepign my inbox clean. But if all I want is a download link for your free software (stuffit expander in my case), I don't want to spend the rest of my life getting your "legit business relationship" spam.
Re:Let it rest in peace!
on
AmigaOS 4
·
· Score: 1
The Amiga died for one reason. Closed Source on a Closed Platform.
If that's such a huge reason for a platform to die, then why is Microsoft doing so much better than Linux? Why did I buy an iBook, because so much of OSX is proprietary and only a tiny bit is open-sourced, and their hardware is a very closed platform. (Apple doesn't provide much documentation for the proprietary chips and all that)
Sorry, but I do not have enough obsession with GPL to believe that proprietary stuff will fail by definition.
Yep. Hardware is currently the big problem. Contracts are in place so that a company named Hyperion is doing the actual programming and everything to make the OS4 product. Amiga Inc. has ultimate control over what hardware it is licensed to run on. Somewhere in there they have a lot of resistance to making it run on x86, so no general PC motherboards.
People don't want to port it to Mac PPC hardware, giving the reasoning that there is no register-level documentation available for some things, which makes it difficult to properly support and keep their commercial, proprietary OS product running well. (How is that Apple designed chip intended to work, what are the register and field definitions, etc) Sure, some people have obviously figured some of that out because Linux and BSD work on it to some degree, but this is a proprietary OS and they don't want to deal with the same reverse-engineering, disassembly and debugging process, and they don't want to deal with the issue of combining GPL source code with their proprietary stuff. There is an effort to try and discover and collect as much information as possible about Mac hardware at amigamac.wikispaces.com to make some attempt to fill in that hole. I'd really love to run OS4 on a laptop, and I like my iBook G4 a lot, and there doesn't seem to be any other possible way to get a PowerPC in a laptop shape.
There are a couple boards from Genesi that were/are pretty good hardware, the Pegasos and Efika. Pegasos is now out of production, and Efika is built for low-power-consumption embedded things and does not have a case that it fits into, and apparently can only operate one IDE device at a time (not HD and CDROM at the same time) on its single PATA port. Plus, a number of efforts to get a license from Amiga Inc. allowing OS4 to be ported to any Genesi product have failed to get a genuine response from Amiga Inc.
There's also been a number of other attempts to get an OS4 license with the intention of making a new PowerPC board design. Most of these that are known publically are also known to have not got a good response to their license inquiries to Amiga Inc. Amy05 and Panda from Troika http://www.troikang.com/index.html and a couple designs from ACK http://safir.amigaos.se/article_ack_eng.html and a G4 board that I can't find more than IRC logs about at http://amigaworld.net/modules/news/article.php?sto ryid=3097 and continued at http://amigaworld.net/modules/news/article.php?sto ryid=3112 which have been announced but not a great deal has been seen about these, and a number of Amiga fans have chosen to believe they are not likely to be completed and sold with OS4. I hope those naysayers turn out to be wrong in the end, but only time will tell.
But there is currently one hope, that was announced by Amiga Inc even. The Samantha project is also a low-power-consumption device, but comes in a standard Mini-ITX format, and is said to have a license to run OS4. http://www.sam440.com/eng/index.html
Yes, the hardware situation has been a huge headache for Amiga fans for some time, as Eyetech's AmigaOne board ceased production a year or two ago. Unfortunately they ended up using a northbridge with some problems, and the fabless designer makign it seems to have gone kaput. Most who have tried to offer a solution have been totally ignored by Amiga Inc. It almost seems that Amiga Inc. specifically does not want to make any money with "their product", considering that a handful of people have said publically that they tried contacting Amiga's designated technology licensing email address only to be completely ignored. (And how many people do Slashdot readers believe would genuinely try to get an OS4 license?) You don'
This may be true in USA and some other countries. But what about other places where there is more social medicine system in place? Maybe a government somewhere would sponsor the research, and eventualy big pharma in USA will pick up the finished product to sell to dieing people here, without having to bother with all that expensive research themselves.
So, since I've only read abot half the article summary, not the article, and none of the comments of which a few I'm likely redundant to, would it then be illegal for me to make a podcast, add some music which I myself composed, directed and performed, without applying industry-grade DRM to it?
Does that mean that anyone who releases a podcast or webstream or whatever covered by such a law is thus legally required to pay some fee to some DRM IP owner? Thus there will be no such thing as free because if nothing else, at least the creator of the content has to send off a check to some IP troll eery time someone listens to his production? And thus it gets far less likely that any such production will be free to the listener?
Quite simple. The content industry will simply dump the format, after all, there's an alternative.
Sony goon #1: How do we win this format war?
Sony goon #2: Well, if ours was more secure than the other, the DRM-obsessed executives at the other studios would have to choose ours.
Sony goon #1: So, what you're saying, is we should hire up some hackers to ruin the competition's technology, post the crack to some public forums, and we win! Brilliant!
I don't see much point in yet another desktop standard. We've laready got a number of good standards there. ATX, MicroATX, BTX, Mini-ITX, Nano-ITX, etc...
What I'd really love to see is a motherboard standard for the laptop. Let me choose the motherboard, the CPU, and other features on it, and let me choose the shell, and let me choose the screen to put into the shell with this chosen motherboard. Why is thre no LTX?
I agree that most people don't understand DRM. Heck, I work at a semiconductor design office, and haven't been able to get these guys to understand my one concern with FIOS, can I record HDTV to a MythTV box or not? They don't realize that there doesn't seem to be a component "tuner" card. How would I get an HD signal into my Myth box to record? That's effectively DRM by lack of capability, surely someone out there wanted to put component inputs on TV cards like they have Svideo inputs, but it seems someone has the ability to say "don't do that". And it hasn't been done that I can find. Same for DVI or HDMI inputs. Is digital TV usng HDCP? Dunno, but even if not there's still no DVI/HDMI inputs on TV cards for me to use.
I'm trying to explain to chip designers that hollywood has decided that I should not be able to to record HD from a cable box output for either digital cable, FIOS, satellite, or whatever. I'd rather use MythTV than Verizon's DVR box for openness, ease of adding hard drive space, features, and because I can own the computer where I cannot own the FIOS/cable box.
Does this ruling apply to FIOS as well? Verizon is digging my neighborhood right now... But I'd like hte same possibility of box choice if I get FIOS TV as this would allow with Comcast.
Will this allow TV tuner cards for computers that take cable cards? Which are usable with Linux and MythTV?
I've got a MythTV box with two of the pcHDTV 3000 cards. Is there any way to make use of this with FIOS to record HD programming? Will there be such a thing as a FIOS "tuner card" for computers?
What is wrong with using nVidia's drivers for nVidia's cards? Is there some issue with the nVidia 3D driver implementation that would encourage an open-source reverse-engineering effort?
For an x86 box I'm quite happy to use the proprietary driver.
But I also have a PowerPC based system. NVidia's proprietary driver doesn't work on that. Same for others who lack the proprietary supported CPU architecture. And I don't use a Mac either, so if some closed-source thing worked OK enough on Macs but some detail made it not work or buggy on my unusual system I'd still be stuck. I didn't think much of this project either until I realized that. I happen to have a Radeon in mine, as it's better supported, but some people would like to use Nvidia without x86, so I pledged to support for them. I'd be willing to put more than $10 toward it as well, but oh well.
I got my Tivo for use until I get MythTV working. Due to the unacceptable unstability if Kubuntu, my loss of interest in Gentoo (due to failed installs and one update that made the thing unbootable after it did work), and failed attempts to get a couple other distros working properly, I'm starting to suspect bad hardware. One of my friends had decided that the moment I get this thing working will mark the end of the universe. So until then I'd like to enjoy the few shows I like even though I'm likely not home or remembering to stare at the TV at the time. I'll order a new motherboard & CPU next paycheck to try again.
But for the moment I'm safe from Tivo conspiracies. The Linksys USB200M network adaptor broke. It didn't quit working, it broke. The stupid and very delicate plastic tab that retains the ethernet cable connector against the wire contacts on the adaptor is very fiddly to get everything connected, and it breaks right off quite easily too. Due to that, I'm lacking network connectivity and it can't phone home to tell mommy what I've been doing until I get a new one. (Already ordered, just waiting for shipment) Of course that also means it has no guide data and is not recording anything, but luckily we're still in mid-season break for anything I care about.
The fan in my Xbox 360 makes it unsuitable for a cable box IMHO. While I hear some don't have a fan, mine does, and the thing freakin screams when playing a DVD, which can be distracting. None of my other stuff is that loud, not the original Xbox, not the PS2, not my MythTV box which has a lot more goodies in it...
If I had a blueray player, I don't need to care what politics at the movie studios are doing, I can play any disk format.
Oops. Of course I meant to say if I had an all-format player then I don't need to worry about studio politics... I should proofread more often before clicking submit...
Yea, because all those people that don't have access to broadband are not worth selling to. All those people who are too poor to pay for internet connection consistently every single month (or Cable TV with digital and pay-per-view fees, or plain old standard telephone line even) , but who could afford a DVD or two now and then are also not worth selling to. You'd be suprised how many people that don't have any phone, TV cable, and other basic services have quite nice stereos, TVs, game consoles, DVD players, etc. They just choose what to save up for and what to not keep paying for again and again and again. Do neither of those two groups of people deserve to watch movies?
Sorry, but we're not quite to a point where your everything from the internet and nowhere else market works.
This new disk format is a neat idea, but til probably only be used by those who already release their films in both Blueray and HDDVD formats. Will Sony choose to use these disks, or will it continue releasing their movies only in Blueray? That's the difference between the disk and the player. If I had a blueray player, I don't need to care what politics at the movie studios are doing, I can play any disk format. With the new dual-format TotalHD disk, the politics at the studios still have plenty of opportunity to cause me grief.
Nope. Until there's a player that does both, you can count me out. I've got a nice 108" 720P projector image that I enjoy low-def DVDs on. I bet that by the time I don't have to worry about studio politics and all-format players are at an acceptable price, that I'll be able to afford a 1080P projector to replace it.
That's the main question. While there once was a wider variety of CPUs in different computers back in the 1980's, the software developers graviatated toward x86 with Microsoft OS. As a result, most software that many people want to use is only available on Windoex/x86. Want to play HalfLife 2? How many choices are there? WOW is available for PPC Macs, but I would use it on my x86 PC instead because my Mac is an iBook G4 with Radeon 9000 mobile, and the user experience would suffer in comparison to the PC version on my AMD64 with GeForce 6600. While there is a version of TaxCut software for Mac, it's a cheaper version that is not suitable for my tax return, therefore I use the more advanced PC/x86 version.
It is curious that all current-gen game consoles have some form of PowerPC in them. But am I going to choose a console based on the CPU in it, or am I going to choose a console based on what games I like?
This question becomes less important with FOSS where many things don't depend on any particular OS or CPU, and can be ported to new platforms, but for the mass market this will remain a big theme so long as a lot of software is Windows-only.
And with the market the way it is today, still having such a dependency on Windows, it's nigh-insanity to produce harware with alternative CPUs. I'm a fan of AmigaOS, which is PowerPC based today. The one PowerPC desktop manufacturer that was licensed to support AmigaOS is now defunct. Apple left PowerPC. And the other PowerPC desktop maker just stopped shipping their "performance" motherboard with G3 and G4 options. Their current product is a low-performance 5200 CPU and the board is said to not fit any desktop case standard. AmigaOS of course finds itself between a big rock and a very hard place, as you cannot right now today buy any hardware that it runs on for general computing uses. There's companies working to bring new hardware soon, but they will surely find the market challenging to survive in. I'm happy someone seems willing to try. A number of users want AmigaOS to convert to x86 in order to ease the burden of keeping hardware available for it and for no other reason, the performance or features ofthe CPUs are irrelevant to many.
I very serously looked into a PowerPC laptop project, but the hurdles are humungous and come in large numbers. It would take a large, established, and wealthy company to actually do such a thing, and all of them seem to prefer x86 for desktop/laptop general-use computers. How do people "choose" anything in such an environment?
Slashdot Mirror
If Amazon (or anyone else) tries to charge me more after the transaction has been completed, they'll be hearing from my credit card dispute resolution people. Either be more careful and don't make mistakes, or accept that when you do make a mistake I will not be paying for it. Consider that to be motivation for you to do it correctly the first (ie. only) time.
I hope we get a Southpark episode out of this.
It'd be funny of countries with rational copyright laws put the USA on some moral rights blackist next to China and friends because we're an evil country run by tyrants who value the dollar far more than the citizens.
The solution is obvious, we need even tighter, more intrusive DRM!
Indeed. In the future, every device capable of reading HD media will come with a guy named Guido. If Guido detects the user attempting to crack, reverse engineer, or in any way compromize the security built in to the HD reader device, Mr. Guido will break the users kneecaps with a baseball bat. The HD Media content industry believes this will finally demotivate the evil people in our society who believe they have some bizarre things they refer to as "rights", whatever that means, these evil people seem to think these "rights" somehow make it OK to do really evil things. The heroic Guidos shall discover who these evildoers are and bring them to the light, using their mighty baseball bats of justice to convince the supervillans that their wicked ways are wrong, that they will not be tolerated under any circumstances, and that there is no escape. Yes, the Guidos will be a far superior content protection method than relying merely on technology and the weak assumptions that this technology is smarter than the evil superillans are.
I'm curious as to why this organization is attempting to get the states to standardize on tax rates. While it might be somewhat convenient in calculating things, it would only be slightly different than having a table of tax rates in the calculation process to send out taxes due to various states. I don't get why that detail would be so important to the people trying to make this happen. Would they rather dictate rates to the states, or would they rather have states "with the program" at whatever rate the state chooses for itself?
What really bothers me is the pharma commercials that don't even say what the stuff is used for. I understadn there's some rule that in order to say what the drug is for then they also have to list the known side-effects, and in order to not scare people away with the side-effect listing they sometimes just don't tell us what it does and how we might benefit from it. They show some people looking happy because they apparently had some unnamed medical situation and this magic pill was just what they needed for whatever it was they were suffering from. Why get the public all excited about something, sick people run to the doctor and pay for visits only to find out that this thing they want to try is intended to ease the pain of cronic lymphoma cancer and all I have is high cholesterol. It's a dumb idea IMHO.
But sometimes you can see why pharma wouldn't want you or me knowing the side-effects. Some of those sound far worse than what the pill treats. Such as some arthritis pain medication or somesuch causing cancer and things like that, maybe I'll just try and tough it out with ibuprofen instead of going into a new treatment that has a known possibility to make life a lot more miserable.
My county landfill is very eco-friendly. They have a station to put all the toxic stuff like mercury (fluorescent bulbs, thermostats, etc), paint, and that sort of thing. OK, I don't believe you can leave that wtuff out with the weekly trash or recycling materials for pickup, you have to actually go there and drop it off. But it's a better option that simply putting it in the generic trash can.
I replaced the motherboard in my sister's computer, and had to call MS for reactivation. They asked what was up, I said I was replacing a broken motherboard, they said OK and reactivated the thing. There was nothing OEM about this, it was a purely home-built PC with a full 98SE license and XP Home upgrade. Whether I should have had to call and ask for permission is another thing, and I wasn't happy that I had to, but it was less hassle than I'd expected.
(My family doesn't seem to have any interest in talking to computer company support since they have a computer guy only 300 miles away, so I might as well give them my leftovers if they won't have anyone else service the things)
I use my hotmail account for all internet-order things in order to keep my "real" email clean. Then I've recently learned of the temporary email places that you can get a workable email address for the purpose of satisfying any requirements that the email you give works, sign up for or order your thing, and then a few minutes later that email ceases to exist. I think I'm going to be using those a lot more, it was pretty nice.
Yea, I know it's hopeless to avoid spam, and my "real" e,ail still gets tons of it. Thunderbird does a pretty good job of keepign my inbox clean. But if all I want is a download link for your free software (stuffit expander in my case), I don't want to spend the rest of my life getting your "legit business relationship" spam.
The Amiga died for one reason. Closed Source on a Closed Platform.
If that's such a huge reason for a platform to die, then why is Microsoft doing so much better than Linux? Why did I buy an iBook, because so much of OSX is proprietary and only a tiny bit is open-sourced, and their hardware is a very closed platform. (Apple doesn't provide much documentation for the proprietary chips and all that)
Sorry, but I do not have enough obsession with GPL to believe that proprietary stuff will fail by definition.
Yep. Hardware is currently the big problem. Contracts are in place so that a company named Hyperion is doing the actual programming and everything to make the OS4 product. Amiga Inc. has ultimate control over what hardware it is licensed to run on. Somewhere in there they have a lot of resistance to making it run on x86, so no general PC motherboards.
People don't want to port it to Mac PPC hardware, giving the reasoning that there is no register-level documentation available for some things, which makes it difficult to properly support and keep their commercial, proprietary OS product running well. (How is that Apple designed chip intended to work, what are the register and field definitions, etc) Sure, some people have obviously figured some of that out because Linux and BSD work on it to some degree, but this is a proprietary OS and they don't want to deal with the same reverse-engineering, disassembly and debugging process, and they don't want to deal with the issue of combining GPL source code with their proprietary stuff. There is an effort to try and discover and collect as much information as possible about Mac hardware at amigamac.wikispaces.com to make some attempt to fill in that hole. I'd really love to run OS4 on a laptop, and I like my iBook G4 a lot, and there doesn't seem to be any other possible way to get a PowerPC in a laptop shape.
There are a couple boards from Genesi that were/are pretty good hardware, the Pegasos and Efika. Pegasos is now out of production, and Efika is built for low-power-consumption embedded things and does not have a case that it fits into, and apparently can only operate one IDE device at a time (not HD and CDROM at the same time) on its single PATA port. Plus, a number of efforts to get a license from Amiga Inc. allowing OS4 to be ported to any Genesi product have failed to get a genuine response from Amiga Inc.
There's also been a number of other attempts to get an OS4 license with the intention of making a new PowerPC board design. Most of these that are known publically are also known to have not got a good response to their license inquiries to Amiga Inc. Amy05 and Panda from Troika http://www.troikang.com/index.html and a couple designs from ACK http://safir.amigaos.se/article_ack_eng.html and a G4 board that I can't find more than IRC logs about at http://amigaworld.net/modules/news/article.php?sto ryid=3097 and continued at http://amigaworld.net/modules/news/article.php?sto ryid=3112 which have been announced but not a great deal has been seen about these, and a number of Amiga fans have chosen to believe they are not likely to be completed and sold with OS4. I hope those naysayers turn out to be wrong in the end, but only time will tell.
But there is currently one hope, that was announced by Amiga Inc even. The Samantha project is also a low-power-consumption device, but comes in a standard Mini-ITX format, and is said to have a license to run OS4. http://www.sam440.com/eng/index.html
Yes, the hardware situation has been a huge headache for Amiga fans for some time, as Eyetech's AmigaOne board ceased production a year or two ago. Unfortunately they ended up using a northbridge with some problems, and the fabless designer makign it seems to have gone kaput. Most who have tried to offer a solution have been totally ignored by Amiga Inc. It almost seems that Amiga Inc. specifically does not want to make any money with "their product", considering that a handful of people have said publically that they tried contacting Amiga's designated technology licensing email address only to be completely ignored. (And how many people do Slashdot readers believe would genuinely try to get an OS4 license?) You don'
So, to avoid being observed, we all need to learn how to speak without moving out lips?
This may be true in USA and some other countries. But what about other places where there is more social medicine system in place? Maybe a government somewhere would sponsor the research, and eventualy big pharma in USA will pick up the finished product to sell to dieing people here, without having to bother with all that expensive research themselves.
So, since I've only read abot half the article summary, not the article, and none of the comments of which a few I'm likely redundant to, would it then be illegal for me to make a podcast, add some music which I myself composed, directed and performed, without applying industry-grade DRM to it?
Does that mean that anyone who releases a podcast or webstream or whatever covered by such a law is thus legally required to pay some fee to some DRM IP owner? Thus there will be no such thing as free because if nothing else, at least the creator of the content has to send off a check to some IP troll eery time someone listens to his production? And thus it gets far less likely that any such production will be free to the listener?
Quite simple. The content industry will simply dump the format, after all, there's an alternative.
Sony goon #1: How do we win this format war?
Sony goon #2: Well, if ours was more secure than the other, the DRM-obsessed executives at the other studios would have to choose ours.
Sony goon #1: So, what you're saying, is we should hire up some hackers to ruin the competition's technology, post the crack to some public forums, and we win! Brilliant!
So, they agree that it's more than just a hypothesis? That's pretty progressive. Maybe they're warming up to the idea?
I don't see much point in yet another desktop standard. We've laready got a number of good standards there. ATX, MicroATX, BTX, Mini-ITX, Nano-ITX, etc...
What I'd really love to see is a motherboard standard for the laptop. Let me choose the motherboard, the CPU, and other features on it, and let me choose the shell, and let me choose the screen to put into the shell with this chosen motherboard. Why is thre no LTX?
That'd be wicked cool.
I agree that most people don't understand DRM. Heck, I work at a semiconductor design office, and haven't been able to get these guys to understand my one concern with FIOS, can I record HDTV to a MythTV box or not? They don't realize that there doesn't seem to be a component "tuner" card. How would I get an HD signal into my Myth box to record? That's effectively DRM by lack of capability, surely someone out there wanted to put component inputs on TV cards like they have Svideo inputs, but it seems someone has the ability to say "don't do that". And it hasn't been done that I can find. Same for DVI or HDMI inputs. Is digital TV usng HDCP? Dunno, but even if not there's still no DVI/HDMI inputs on TV cards for me to use.
I'm trying to explain to chip designers that hollywood has decided that I should not be able to to record HD from a cable box output for either digital cable, FIOS, satellite, or whatever. I'd rather use MythTV than Verizon's DVR box for openness, ease of adding hard drive space, features, and because I can own the computer where I cannot own the FIOS/cable box.
Does this ruling apply to FIOS as well? Verizon is digging my neighborhood right now... But I'd like hte same possibility of box choice if I get FIOS TV as this would allow with Comcast.
Will this allow TV tuner cards for computers that take cable cards? Which are usable with Linux and MythTV?
I've got a MythTV box with two of the pcHDTV 3000 cards. Is there any way to make use of this with FIOS to record HD programming? Will there be such a thing as a FIOS "tuner card" for computers?
What is wrong with using nVidia's drivers for nVidia's cards? Is there some issue with the nVidia 3D driver implementation that would encourage an open-source reverse-engineering effort?
For an x86 box I'm quite happy to use the proprietary driver.
But I also have a PowerPC based system. NVidia's proprietary driver doesn't work on that. Same for others who lack the proprietary supported CPU architecture. And I don't use a Mac either, so if some closed-source thing worked OK enough on Macs but some detail made it not work or buggy on my unusual system I'd still be stuck. I didn't think much of this project either until I realized that. I happen to have a Radeon in mine, as it's better supported, but some people would like to use Nvidia without x86, so I pledged to support for them. I'd be willing to put more than $10 toward it as well, but oh well.
I got my Tivo for use until I get MythTV working. Due to the unacceptable unstability if Kubuntu, my loss of interest in Gentoo (due to failed installs and one update that made the thing unbootable after it did work), and failed attempts to get a couple other distros working properly, I'm starting to suspect bad hardware. One of my friends had decided that the moment I get this thing working will mark the end of the universe. So until then I'd like to enjoy the few shows I like even though I'm likely not home or remembering to stare at the TV at the time. I'll order a new motherboard & CPU next paycheck to try again.
But for the moment I'm safe from Tivo conspiracies. The Linksys USB200M network adaptor broke. It didn't quit working, it broke. The stupid and very delicate plastic tab that retains the ethernet cable connector against the wire contacts on the adaptor is very fiddly to get everything connected, and it breaks right off quite easily too. Due to that, I'm lacking network connectivity and it can't phone home to tell mommy what I've been doing until I get a new one. (Already ordered, just waiting for shipment) Of course that also means it has no guide data and is not recording anything, but luckily we're still in mid-season break for anything I care about.
The fan in my Xbox 360 makes it unsuitable for a cable box IMHO. While I hear some don't have a fan, mine does, and the thing freakin screams when playing a DVD, which can be distracting. None of my other stuff is that loud, not the original Xbox, not the PS2, not my MythTV box which has a lot more goodies in it...
If I had a blueray player, I don't need to care what politics at the movie studios are doing, I can play any disk format.
Oops. Of course I meant to say if I had an all-format player then I don't need to worry about studio politics... I should proofread more often before clicking submit...
Disc-based media needs to be retired.
Yea, because all those people that don't have access to broadband are not worth selling to. All those people who are too poor to pay for internet connection consistently every single month (or Cable TV with digital and pay-per-view fees, or plain old standard telephone line even) , but who could afford a DVD or two now and then are also not worth selling to. You'd be suprised how many people that don't have any phone, TV cable, and other basic services have quite nice stereos, TVs, game consoles, DVD players, etc. They just choose what to save up for and what to not keep paying for again and again and again. Do neither of those two groups of people deserve to watch movies?
Sorry, but we're not quite to a point where your everything from the internet and nowhere else market works.
This new disk format is a neat idea, but til probably only be used by those who already release their films in both Blueray and HDDVD formats. Will Sony choose to use these disks, or will it continue releasing their movies only in Blueray? That's the difference between the disk and the player. If I had a blueray player, I don't need to care what politics at the movie studios are doing, I can play any disk format. With the new dual-format TotalHD disk, the politics at the studios still have plenty of opportunity to cause me grief.
Nope. Until there's a player that does both, you can count me out. I've got a nice 108" 720P projector image that I enjoy low-def DVDs on. I bet that by the time I don't have to worry about studio politics and all-format players are at an acceptable price, that I'll be able to afford a 1080P projector to replace it.
That's the main question. While there once was a wider variety of CPUs in different computers back in the 1980's, the software developers graviatated toward x86 with Microsoft OS. As a result, most software that many people want to use is only available on Windoex/x86. Want to play HalfLife 2? How many choices are there? WOW is available for PPC Macs, but I would use it on my x86 PC instead because my Mac is an iBook G4 with Radeon 9000 mobile, and the user experience would suffer in comparison to the PC version on my AMD64 with GeForce 6600. While there is a version of TaxCut software for Mac, it's a cheaper version that is not suitable for my tax return, therefore I use the more advanced PC/x86 version.
It is curious that all current-gen game consoles have some form of PowerPC in them. But am I going to choose a console based on the CPU in it, or am I going to choose a console based on what games I like?
This question becomes less important with FOSS where many things don't depend on any particular OS or CPU, and can be ported to new platforms, but for the mass market this will remain a big theme so long as a lot of software is Windows-only.
And with the market the way it is today, still having such a dependency on Windows, it's nigh-insanity to produce harware with alternative CPUs. I'm a fan of AmigaOS, which is PowerPC based today. The one PowerPC desktop manufacturer that was licensed to support AmigaOS is now defunct. Apple left PowerPC. And the other PowerPC desktop maker just stopped shipping their "performance" motherboard with G3 and G4 options. Their current product is a low-performance 5200 CPU and the board is said to not fit any desktop case standard. AmigaOS of course finds itself between a big rock and a very hard place, as you cannot right now today buy any hardware that it runs on for general computing uses. There's companies working to bring new hardware soon, but they will surely find the market challenging to survive in. I'm happy someone seems willing to try. A number of users want AmigaOS to convert to x86 in order to ease the burden of keeping hardware available for it and for no other reason, the performance or features ofthe CPUs are irrelevant to many.
I very serously looked into a PowerPC laptop project, but the hurdles are humungous and come in large numbers. It would take a large, established, and wealthy company to actually do such a thing, and all of them seem to prefer x86 for desktop/laptop general-use computers. How do people "choose" anything in such an environment?