The number of pins per device or layers oer board isn't the hard part. Current technology has some really fast stuff happening, and the timing and impedance matching will be the truely hard things to cope with.
I majored in computer engineering in college but we didn't take any EM fields classes. I would love to know this stuff today, but textbooks on the subject aren't easy recreational reads... Does anyone have recommendations for good books or web pages or courses that are good for those who are interested particularly in learning high-speed PCB layout? I've bought the two "Black Magic" books by Johnson and Graham but haven't had much time to study them yet. I'd love any other recommendations and advice I can find on the subject.
Well, you could get licenses from the chipset vendors and hire up a layout guy to do the dirty work. Realize that one vendor refusing to NDA can toast the whole idea though, and Nvidia doesn't have a reputation for signing with just anyone that applies. A few years ago I asked them for an NDA that would allow my employer to develop proprietary (not open-source) drivers for their graphics chips, and they never even bothered to write back with a polite "no" answer. Good luck...
And this may not be a totally insane idea. FX support for muliprocessor issues aside, if you have an idea that's worth a profound amount of money for you yourself to have one, you might as well build a few extras and sell to other people too, and get at least some portion of your costs back... There's a few big companies that had their beginnings this way.
>People always say "Oh, but installing is oh so >hard!!!" But how often does your every day user >install anything? THe last time my mother-in-law >installed anything on her ancient P2 system was >to put Norton AV on there. Which you don't even >need under Linux.
Yea, you don't need Norton AV on Linux. You need something called crab, or clam, or something like that instead. I never actually got it working myself... Don't just tell everyone that Linux is impervious to intrusion or virus, because it isn't. We claim it happens less often than it does on Windows, and even if we're right we're still not impervious, just less popular.
Besides, installation should become an issue every now and then. Important Linux patches, which do happen on occasion, should not be left ignored just so an average Joe can avoid having to deal with the chore of installing it.
I'm hoping that someday I'll have a successful Linux/MythTV install that is configured to and actually works the way I want it to in all aspects. Hasn't happened yet, and I've been fighting this battle on and off for a couple years. Last attempt was FC3 with the apt-get myth-suite thing as seen on some howto. It covered both my TV tuners, neither of which produce an image or sound for a TV show, the user interface is flaky, and has no TV output from my Nvidia card. The closest I've come to a suitable install for my rig was using Gentoo, it only lacked TV output support from teh Nvidia card, but a month later an emerge update messed up and wasted the whole machine, KDE hung on boot and no amount of resintalling or recompiling would get it working again, so it got wiped clean for a fresh start.
I think Linux has a ways to go before I'd call it a successful product suitable for the Average joe user, regardless of if you or some other Linux pro is willing to do the initial install/config. The world doesn't remain constant, and if you're not willing to do regular maintenence to keep Joe's computer running smoothly over time, then he's better off not having Linux installed at all.
We're all entitled to our opinions. While CA isn't interested in more drivers or game support, other users are. Conversely, things CA will want are less important to other users.
I myself would like better multimedia drivers, good solid and easy to install and configure drivers for my PVR-250 and pcHDTV tuner cards in my MythTV box. CA may not give a darn about those at all, but this is my primary Linux goal and getting my particular MythTV rig running is the only application I myself presently give a darn about in all of Linux land.
I myself do not give a darn about gaming support either right now. That may change in the future if I decide to expand on MythTV and turn the thing into a high-end game console as well. But for the moment I'm not interested, just as many gamers may not be particularly interested in TV tuner drivers.
Though keeping stability and efficiency as primary goalsagreeably is a good idea. But I think high-quality (ie. NOT alpha or beta) drivers for more hardware should also be important.
I agree with the article's comments on Hauppauge image quality. I have a PVR-250 (before they added the MCE part) and see much of the same artifacting mentioned in the article. I was disappointed with that. I haven't seen it running on Windows though, only Linux with the ivtv driver.
I've since bought a pcHDTV-3000 card. Haven't got it running jsut yet due to lack of time, but hopefully I'll be happier with this one.
Anyone know if there are good Linux drivers for the better cards reviewed here?
And I've been told many times that I should have gotten a Tivo a couple years ago rather than try to get MythTV working. I even did have it pretty much working a few months ago, the only piece missing was working TV output via my NVidia card. A Gentoo update (emerge -uD world) ruined that in January, and it's been a very very senile computer since. Here comes round 27...
While that would have been the easy way out, and would have gotten me going long ago compared to the difficulty I've had working with MythTV/Linux (Gentoo and more recently Fedora Core 3), I would then not have had the opportunity to learn as much about Linux as I have. And trying to get MythTV working on Gentoo, a newbie is going to have to learn a great deal about Linux.
Besides, if I did it the easy way and bought a Tivo, or actually get MythTV running as I'd like it to, then I'd have to actually watch the stuff on TV today... Ech.
>The first round of fun comes when the teller gives >me the money- usually tellers count money very >fast, but when they get to the $2 bills, they slow >down significanty (it's funny to me, at least).
Yea, funny. May not be because of trying to count by twos though. $2 notes, because they are so uncommon, don't wear like more common notes do. You'll nearly always find them in brand new, fresh off the rpessed mint condition. These brand spanking new notes tend to stick together, they don't slide off each other like "used" bills do.
For kicks, go to the bank and get yourself a $50 stack of brand new $1 notes. They'll be sequential serial numbers too. They'll stick together. Try and count through them nice and fast and see what you come up with.
Then go get yourself a stack of food stamps and try to count those, I remember they were even sticker than the new $1 bills were. Being handed a number of booklets of foodstamps was not fun to count. I hated customers using them because they were a pain, and you can't use food stamps larger than $1 that were not still in their issue booklet (at least not at the store I worked at) or give ANY foodstamp note as change or anything, so they are by definition brand new and sticky.
When I was a cashier in high school during the 1990's, I loved it when people paid with uncommon currency. I bought a bunch of stuff out of my drawer from the manager at the end of my day. It was great. Now that I'm a cubicle-dwelling engineer, I rarely see neat currency anymore. I even think I have not yet seen the most recent 4 or 5 state quarters now. Using my debit card so often has greatly reduced my chances of seeing the new stuff.
I've now got piles of "wheat pennies" that have the two stalks of wheat on the back instead of the building, a few of them made of silver or whatever the non-copper material was, a buffalo nickel, many Susan B Anthonys, Many of the older and larger silver dollars, a $5 bill printed in the '50s with a red seal, a $10 bill from teh 60's with a blue seal, a couple $1 silver certificates, a pure-silver quarter (not a copper sandwich), about $50 worth of 50 cent pieces, and about $80 worth of bicentennial quarters, in addition to my own pile of $2 bills.
I've taken the $2 bills to work to show off to the foreigners in the office, as they didn't believe me about having them. I haven't met an American that doesnt' know they exist, but it is true they don't get seen often in the wild. About half of the bills I have are stamped with the name of the same bank somewhere, which is fun to theorize conspiracies about.:) Anyone else ever noticed that? I think they're the neatest looking bills we've got in the USA, even if they aren't worth much.
I probably should have backed off on a couple items after a while, but if there's ever a shortage of them I've got the collectors market covered for a little while.:)
> Hey, why not just stop all the clocks at noon permanently?
Because then we'd need to invent power-hungry dark generators to turn on when we want to sleep. While dark generators could possibly be more energy efficient than light bulbs, do we really want to take that risk?
Why not just swich and stay with daylight savings forever? I haven't adjusted my own clocks since goin gfrom standard to daylight savings four years ago. I rather like it. My winter evenings have daylight until 5PM, compared to 4PM for everyone else standing next to me. I think its dumb and thus haven't participated in the last few changes back and forth. Sure, my friends think I'm wacky, but I still use an Amiga computer too, so think what you will.
My job doesn't have set hours I need to be there, so no problem there. Meetings and TV schedules can be tricky at times, but I don't watch much TV anyway, and I'll catch the Alias episodes I missed on DVD when they're available. It mostly works OK, I just need to remember the rest of the east coast is mistakenly on central time for 6 months and I'm fine.:)
>Each business if different but getting one running >for 90K is just about impossible. That won't even >cover two people for six months.
Have you considered the possibility of doing your startup part-time for a while, and having another job to pay the bills? This would of course take longer to get things going, but could help with the money situation a bit.
A friend of mine and I are working on an idea, and we're doing this part-time. He's left his job to do self-employed contracting work to pay his bills and our idea is secondary to that work, while I am still full-time employed elsewhere. I get the benefit of paying my bills without the nagging of venture capitalists as well as other engineers at my day job to get advice from, plus we get to keep more control over things ourselves, but yea, it'll take a long time to get a finished product. As at least one of the chips we're intrested in using is not available until 2H 2005 anyway, time is not currently a big worry for product completion.
The biggest inconvenience we've had is scheduling phone calls with device and IP vendors, which can be a problem if things get out of hand, but we're managing respectably so far.
Re:PSP modification outlawed?
on
Inside the PSP
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· Score: 1
So I can't hack the thing into a car dash mount and move the controls to either a wired joypad setup or build them into the dash as well?
I don't get into piracy, I just like to fiddle with things. If I want to add a cellphone to a PSP, I'll mess it up seeing if it can be done. If I want to try and use it for a universal TV remote, I will.
I'll treat that page hidden in the middle of the user manual like I treat any other hidden terms that a manufacturer tries to spring on me after they have my money. If you didn't tell me before I paid for it, then it's void in my opinion. Will that ever get me in trouble with the courts? Time will tell.
But Sony will sigh a huge sigh of relief to know that I don't have the money or interest to buy a PSP. They don't have to worry about me actually trying to merge it with my car or a cellphone, and I don't have or want a cellphone either. They need not fear that the PSP they would otherwise like to sell to me would be messed with in any way. (I never had or wanted a Gameboy either)
I just bought a pcHDTV card for my Gentoo box. pcHDTV advertizes support for Linux users, but I cannot find out how to get teh thing working on my particular distro.
Well, they made it for Fedora Core, you say? Huh, it's all open-sourced... Doesn't that make it magically supported? While I expected I'd probably have some waiting around to do for Gentoo drivers, I bought the card to have it before broadcast-flag day. Hopefully the open-source gnomes will get my Linux TV card working with Linux someday.:) Heck, I'm still waiting for MythTV 0.17 to be unmasked, and I've raraly been able to get teh ivtv driver for my PVR-250 card working.
I don't believe that open-source magically makes everything forever supported or even well supported when it is. Look at all the dead projects on sourceforge... Just because the source is there doesn't mean anything is being done well or at all for certain.
>let me get this straight. you know a single parent >who earned $5000 in a year. They paid $4000 in >taxes, because people who are living below the >poverty line are in the 80% tax bracket, and then >they got all of their money back at the end of the >year?
Absolutely not. The Earned Income Credit is a form of socialism, where a person who qualifies gets a refund far larger, as in many times the amoutn of taxes that were withheld from their paycheck by their employer. A person making $5000 would never pay $4000 in taxes up-front. They may pay a couple hundred dollars via paycheck withholdings. But they don't ONLY get that cuple hundred bucks back, they get a respctable few thousand dollers in addition to that.
$8950 is in the realm of double the original $5000 salary...
I've worked at H&R Block before. I've seen this happen, a number of times, for a umber of clients. If you would like proof, and live in the USA, spend a month or so this fall taking the H&R Block tax course and then work there preparing tax returns. You'll get a whole new perspective on American income tax stuff.
>Friend, if everyone could take their one W-2 form >and fill out the 1040 EZ in the comfort of their >one-bedroom apartment, do you really think >companies like H&R block would be in the business >of helping people out with their income taxes?
You'd be suprised. People with lower incomes and kids, especially single parents, get huge refunds due to Earned Income Credit. I've seen yearly income W2's in the $5000 range get $4000 tax refunds. That's not a typo. Yes, the refund nearly doubles their annual total income. All part of the welfare portion of our society...
Now, why would these people pay a tax preparer instead of learning how to do this themselves? Some will answer that thee lower-income people tend to be on the low end of the educated scale as well. That might be true in some cases, but not all.
Some of these people jsut want their cash as fast as possible. How long would it take to wait for a check or even direct deposit from the IRS? A couple weeks, maybe a month for a paper check. With some companies offering refund loans where the customer can pick up the check the next day, many of these customers don't have the patience to wait as long as the IRS money would take, even if it would save them $140 or so in preparation and loan fees.
>Do you save that much money spending $70 on >software? It sounds like you have a crapload of >forms to deal with. Isn't your sanity and time >worth another $70? Just curious. It is for me, and >I'm a long time do-it-yourself.
Well, the year I worked at H&R Block after taking their classes to learn some tax stuff, I ran my own return through their store software. Retail price, over US$400. $70 is noticably less than $400-some to pay another H&R Block employee to do it again, since I no longer work there to get it for free. My main complaint of that whole situation is they listed two rental property-specific classes, but these two classes ere not offered in my district, so I'm left with a few holes in my tax knowledge that weren't covered in the classes I did take, including my peculiar depreciation thing. I did the whole H&R Block thing as I was tired of paying their fees and wanted to become a do-it-myself guy.:)
I have since spent a couple hours trolling through the IRS web site and found something that seems to make sense with their calculation results on this peculiar item. But I don't think I should hav had to. I bought a Tax Preparation product, they should help me use it, and help me understand what it calculates and why, as I consider those "functional elements" of their product.
I was just anything but impressed when their customer service explained that they do not offer "tax advice", or that they at H&R Block do not have anyone on hand QUALIFIED to answer tax questions, that they only support the "functionality" of their product. When I questioned the correctness of their product functioning to calculate that number, they wanted me to take my taxes elsewhere. So I'm planning to request a refund, and in the future go elsewhere as H&R Block/TaxCut advised me to do, and leave them out of it.
And by the way, I checked out their product packaging at the store yesterday. Nowhere on the box does it say anything about a disclaimer, refusing to answer "tax advice" topic questions at customer support... I haven't searched the EULA or anything, but I believe that sort of thing shouldn't be hidden inside a package only to maybe be found after they already have my money... Anyone I know will of course learn of this without buying another Taxcut package/download first.
I'd love to see alternative programs, because I have reasons to not buy TaxCut or TurboTax (The whole secret big-brother install thing a year or some ago), I'm running out of options. But considering a company with as much money as H&R Block refuses to offer tax advice in fear of being wrong and sued (my assumption, they didn't give reasons as to why even when I asked), I'm not optimistic that open-source hackers will take on that much legal responsibility or liability. I may look up TaxAct as I've seen mentioned around, and I really don't like the idea of hand-calculating depreciation tables for 43 items... (Furnished rental housing)
Well, the Open Tax Solver sounded interesting for a minute. Perhaps it has potential in the future, but for me, for now, it and other things there are useless. I need a schedule E (3 rental properties), and the forms and worksheets for depreciating stuff. I also live in Maryland state.
I think it may be hard for an open-source program to do all of the tax code. Tax law in USA is enormously complex. It's vague in certain areas. Every rule has an exception, some of those exceptions have exceptions to them, and then even those on occasion have exceptions. Every year the law changes, so you may not get to reuse algorithms from last year.
There's also the fact that if something goes wrong, the user may be royally in trouble. Do you want someone to end up owing enormouse penalty fees or going to jail because of a bug in the open-source tax program screwed up his return? Would an open-source program have tax lawyers involved in quality checks, to verify it is correct, and to interpret the vague parts of the law? What happens if such an interpretation of a vague detail is disagreed with by the tax court?
I worked at H&R Block as a tax preparer a few years ago. I wouldn't do it again. I wouldn't wan tto be involved in writing software that produces correct results for all users, and I certainly wouldn't want to have to deal with users complaining their tax returns got sent back by the IRS and they're now facing audits and other unpleasantness. I wouldn't want to be an open-source coder possibly facing lawsuits or IRS investigations if anything goes wrong.
I am annoyed with TaxCut though. I had a question about something this program did for my tax return this year involving depreciating an item that broke and I threw in the trash, I didn't understand their calculation in this case. Their customer support refuses to answer this kind of question, using the excuse that such an answer would constitute tax advice, and they (H&R Block owns TaxCut) do not give tax advice. They told me I must go to a tax professional to get an answer to my question about their own product's calculation. If H&R Block doesn't have qualified tax professionals to answer a question about a calculation done by their own product, well, let's just say I won't be recommending this program or its producer to my friends anymore... And they have money to hire "tax preparers" and lawyers to verify the software, or at least the different software they use in their numerous offices to serve customers with.
Am I overly paranoid? Maybe. If there's guys out there that were willing and able to make a complete tax preparation product and hire lawyers to interpret things and approve results, that'd be cool. I'm just not very optimistic that I'll be able to use such an open-source product for my own particular tax situation any time soon.
>Torvalds is the figurehead for the movement though, >whether he likes it or not. I'd venture a guess >that over 90% of linux users use x86 platforms; it >feels a bit like the BMW CEO driving a Mercedes.
I think you have a rather limited view of what Linux is used for. People using Linux on their computers to do general computing tasks are possibly a minority of the total worlwide computing devices running Linux.
There's a large number of embedded systems running Linux, from Tivo to PDAs to networking equipment to automotive navigation systems, and numerous other things that you wouldn't sit on your desk with a monitor and keyboard. A lot of these other things use PowerPC processors.
Besides, this is not the end of Linux on x86. He can still write and cross-compile x86 code, I'm sure he still has a number of x86 computers that he's accumulated over the years to test such cross-compiled code on, and I can't imagine that Red Hat or other distributions will all throw their x86 machines in the trash to make room for new Macs on their desks.
I come from a niche of PowerPC fanboys. This certainly sounds good for PowerPC Linux, it may get more attention in kernel development that it has in the past from "The Man" himself, which is good for me and the other few in my niche, but it in no way will hurt your use of commodity x86 computers in the country you live in.
Lots of embedded devices use PowerPC processors. Many such embedded PowerPC applications also run Linux. You might think of a Macintosh box running Linux as a convenient development platform for these things, to get code working to some level before moving it to an evaluation board for the particular PowerPC device used in the embedded application.
MacOS is great, but isn't as suitable for developing embedded PowerPC LinuxPPC code as LinuxPPC is.
Its' got a ways to go before LinuxPPC is as usable as LinuxX86 is for some normal things, as a lot of stuff that isn't open-sourced is only available as x86 Linux binaries. But hopefuly this will change. Plus you can always run MacOnLinux and boot OSX inside a LinuxPPC hosted virtual Macintosh similar to what VirtualPC does, and have the best of both worlds.
Besides, this is slashdot. Isn't it some satanic thing to denouce Linux around here??
>Wine does not work on a non-intel system. It >doesn't handle different opcodes, only a different >API. There are solutions for running Windows on >PPC, both closed and open source, but Wine is not >one of them.
But isn't it only a matter of time before we see a "Mine" (AKA Mine Is Not an Emulator) implementing the MacOS API under LinuxPPC the same way Wine does Windows API for LinuxX86?:)
I'd actually find such a thing useful, as I have a PPC computer next to my x86 PC. Run TaxCut or TurboTax for Mac, perhaps play some Mac games that don't have Linux ports, maybe iTunes or iDVD... (My PPC computer is not a Mac hardware...)
Sure, there's MacOnLinux for LinuxPPC, but I'd rather only run a single OS on each machine at a time rather than multiple ones via virtual machines...
>The best possible impact this could have would be >forcing scammers to move their operations out of >state.
Yes. But then the problem is no longer Ohio's problem, and they don't have to deal with it anymore. While residents of Ohio could still fall victim to scams, it's not Ohio's problem, it's the scammer's state's problem to fix.
Think of all the money Ohio can save by not having to prosecute these guys anymore. What more should Ohio care about?
I wouldn't quit a job without a new one lined up, or a hefty savings account to live off of until a new job is found.
I've turned down a couple offers. One was a temp contract position a couple years ago when the semiconductor industry was in a deep hole, and I didn't want to be unemployed 6 months later. The other was full-time and better pay than my current employer, but going in a different direction than I'd like my career to go. I currently do VLSI layout and verification. This position was developing verification flows for customer companies, but I'd rather move in the direction of system design.
If you have a plan, and quitting the old job was part of that plan for bigger and better things, then that's great. If you quit and are now unemployed and have nowhere to go, simply because you didn't want to be a C# guy, that's pushing the constraints of sanity. And that's coming from a guy who uses an Amiga computer to this day...:p
Slashdot Mirror
>Dude, what you're asking for is the single most ridiculous thing I've ever heard on /.
:)
I'd like an Amiga laptop computer. Now that I just made this guy look totally sane, go get to work and build his totally sane motherboard for him...
The number of pins per device or layers oer board isn't the hard part. Current technology has some really fast stuff happening, and the timing and impedance matching will be the truely hard things to cope with.
I majored in computer engineering in college but we didn't take any EM fields classes. I would love to know this stuff today, but textbooks on the subject aren't easy recreational reads... Does anyone have recommendations for good books or web pages or courses that are good for those who are interested particularly in learning high-speed PCB layout? I've bought the two "Black Magic" books by Johnson and Graham but haven't had much time to study them yet. I'd love any other recommendations and advice I can find on the subject.
Well, you could get licenses from the chipset vendors and hire up a layout guy to do the dirty work. Realize that one vendor refusing to NDA can toast the whole idea though, and Nvidia doesn't have a reputation for signing with just anyone that applies. A few years ago I asked them for an NDA that would allow my employer to develop proprietary (not open-source) drivers for their graphics chips, and they never even bothered to write back with a polite "no" answer. Good luck...
And this may not be a totally insane idea. FX support for muliprocessor issues aside, if you have an idea that's worth a profound amount of money for you yourself to have one, you might as well build a few extras and sell to other people too, and get at least some portion of your costs back... There's a few big companies that had their beginnings this way.
>People always say "Oh, but installing is oh so
>hard!!!" But how often does your every day user
>install anything? THe last time my mother-in-law
>installed anything on her ancient P2 system was
>to put Norton AV on there. Which you don't even
>need under Linux.
Yea, you don't need Norton AV on Linux. You need something called crab, or clam, or something like that instead. I never actually got it working myself... Don't just tell everyone that Linux is impervious to intrusion or virus, because it isn't. We claim it happens less often than it does on Windows, and even if we're right we're still not impervious, just less popular.
Besides, installation should become an issue every now and then. Important Linux patches, which do happen on occasion, should not be left ignored just so an average Joe can avoid having to deal with the chore of installing it.
I'm hoping that someday I'll have a successful Linux/MythTV install that is configured to and actually works the way I want it to in all aspects. Hasn't happened yet, and I've been fighting this battle on and off for a couple years. Last attempt was FC3 with the apt-get myth-suite thing as seen on some howto. It covered both my TV tuners, neither of which produce an image or sound for a TV show, the user interface is flaky, and has no TV output from my Nvidia card. The closest I've come to a suitable install for my rig was using Gentoo, it only lacked TV output support from teh Nvidia card, but a month later an emerge update messed up and wasted the whole machine, KDE hung on boot and no amount of resintalling or recompiling would get it working again, so it got wiped clean for a fresh start.
I think Linux has a ways to go before I'd call it a successful product suitable for the Average joe user, regardless of if you or some other Linux pro is willing to do the initial install/config. The world doesn't remain constant, and if you're not willing to do regular maintenence to keep Joe's computer running smoothly over time, then he's better off not having Linux installed at all.
We're all entitled to our opinions. While CA isn't interested in more drivers or game support, other users are. Conversely, things CA will want are less important to other users.
I myself would like better multimedia drivers, good solid and easy to install and configure drivers for my PVR-250 and pcHDTV tuner cards in my MythTV box. CA may not give a darn about those at all, but this is my primary Linux goal and getting my particular MythTV rig running is the only application I myself presently give a darn about in all of Linux land.
I myself do not give a darn about gaming support either right now. That may change in the future if I decide to expand on MythTV and turn the thing into a high-end game console as well. But for the moment I'm not interested, just as many gamers may not be particularly interested in TV tuner drivers.
Though keeping stability and efficiency as primary goalsagreeably is a good idea. But I think high-quality (ie. NOT alpha or beta) drivers for more hardware should also be important.
I agree with the article's comments on Hauppauge image quality. I have a PVR-250 (before they added the MCE part) and see much of the same artifacting mentioned in the article. I was disappointed with that. I haven't seen it running on Windows though, only Linux with the ivtv driver.
I've since bought a pcHDTV-3000 card. Haven't got it running jsut yet due to lack of time, but hopefully I'll be happier with this one.
Anyone know if there are good Linux drivers for the better cards reviewed here?
And I've been told many times that I should have gotten a Tivo a couple years ago rather than try to get MythTV working. I even did have it pretty much working a few months ago, the only piece missing was working TV output via my NVidia card. A Gentoo update (emerge -uD world) ruined that in January, and it's been a very very senile computer since. Here comes round 27...
While that would have been the easy way out, and would have gotten me going long ago compared to the difficulty I've had working with MythTV/Linux (Gentoo and more recently Fedora Core 3), I would then not have had the opportunity to learn as much about Linux as I have. And trying to get MythTV working on Gentoo, a newbie is going to have to learn a great deal about Linux.
Besides, if I did it the easy way and bought a Tivo, or actually get MythTV running as I'd like it to, then I'd have to actually watch the stuff on TV today... Ech.
>The first round of fun comes when the teller gives
>me the money- usually tellers count money very
>fast, but when they get to the $2 bills, they slow
>down significanty (it's funny to me, at least).
Yea, funny. May not be because of trying to count by twos though. $2 notes, because they are so uncommon, don't wear like more common notes do. You'll nearly always find them in brand new, fresh off the rpessed mint condition. These brand spanking new notes tend to stick together, they don't slide off each other like "used" bills do.
For kicks, go to the bank and get yourself a $50 stack of brand new $1 notes. They'll be sequential serial numbers too. They'll stick together. Try and count through them nice and fast and see what you come up with.
Then go get yourself a stack of food stamps and try to count those, I remember they were even sticker than the new $1 bills were. Being handed a number of booklets of foodstamps was not fun to count. I hated customers using them because they were a pain, and you can't use food stamps larger than $1 that were not still in their issue booklet (at least not at the store I worked at) or give ANY foodstamp note as change or anything, so they are by definition brand new and sticky.
When I was a cashier in high school during the 1990's, I loved it when people paid with uncommon currency. I bought a bunch of stuff out of my drawer from the manager at the end of my day. It was great. Now that I'm a cubicle-dwelling engineer, I rarely see neat currency anymore. I even think I have not yet seen the most recent 4 or 5 state quarters now. Using my debit card so often has greatly reduced my chances of seeing the new stuff.
:) Anyone else ever noticed that? I think they're the neatest looking bills we've got in the USA, even if they aren't worth much.
:)
I've now got piles of "wheat pennies" that have the two stalks of wheat on the back instead of the building, a few of them made of silver or whatever the non-copper material was, a buffalo nickel, many Susan B Anthonys, Many of the older and larger silver dollars, a $5 bill printed in the '50s with a red seal, a $10 bill from teh 60's with a blue seal, a couple $1 silver certificates, a pure-silver quarter (not a copper sandwich), about $50 worth of 50 cent pieces, and about $80 worth of bicentennial quarters, in addition to my own pile of $2 bills.
I've taken the $2 bills to work to show off to the foreigners in the office, as they didn't believe me about having them. I haven't met an American that doesnt' know they exist, but it is true they don't get seen often in the wild. About half of the bills I have are stamped with the name of the same bank somewhere, which is fun to theorize conspiracies about.
I probably should have backed off on a couple items after a while, but if there's ever a shortage of them I've got the collectors market covered for a little while.
> Hey, why not just stop all the clocks at noon permanently?
Because then we'd need to invent power-hungry dark generators to turn on when we want to sleep. While dark generators could possibly be more energy efficient than light bulbs, do we really want to take that risk?
Why not just swich and stay with daylight savings forever? I haven't adjusted my own clocks since goin gfrom standard to daylight savings four years ago. I rather like it. My winter evenings have daylight until 5PM, compared to 4PM for everyone else standing next to me. I think its dumb and thus haven't participated in the last few changes back and forth. Sure, my friends think I'm wacky, but I still use an Amiga computer too, so think what you will.
:)
My job doesn't have set hours I need to be there, so no problem there. Meetings and TV schedules can be tricky at times, but I don't watch much TV anyway, and I'll catch the Alias episodes I missed on DVD when they're available. It mostly works OK, I just need to remember the rest of the east coast is mistakenly on central time for 6 months and I'm fine.
>Each business if different but getting one running
>for 90K is just about impossible. That won't even
>cover two people for six months.
Have you considered the possibility of doing your startup part-time for a while, and having another job to pay the bills? This would of course take longer to get things going, but could help with the money situation a bit.
A friend of mine and I are working on an idea, and we're doing this part-time. He's left his job to do self-employed contracting work to pay his bills and our idea is secondary to that work, while I am still full-time employed elsewhere. I get the benefit of paying my bills without the nagging of venture capitalists as well as other engineers at my day job to get advice from, plus we get to keep more control over things ourselves, but yea, it'll take a long time to get a finished product. As at least one of the chips we're intrested in using is not available until 2H 2005 anyway, time is not currently a big worry for product completion.
The biggest inconvenience we've had is scheduling phone calls with device and IP vendors, which can be a problem if things get out of hand, but we're managing respectably so far.
So I can't hack the thing into a car dash mount and move the controls to either a wired joypad setup or build them into the dash as well?
I don't get into piracy, I just like to fiddle with things. If I want to add a cellphone to a PSP, I'll mess it up seeing if it can be done. If I want to try and use it for a universal TV remote, I will.
I'll treat that page hidden in the middle of the user manual like I treat any other hidden terms that a manufacturer tries to spring on me after they have my money. If you didn't tell me before I paid for it, then it's void in my opinion. Will that ever get me in trouble with the courts? Time will tell.
But Sony will sigh a huge sigh of relief to know that I don't have the money or interest to buy a PSP. They don't have to worry about me actually trying to merge it with my car or a cellphone, and I don't have or want a cellphone either. They need not fear that the PSP they would otherwise like to sell to me would be messed with in any way. (I never had or wanted a Gameboy either)
I just bought a pcHDTV card for my Gentoo box. pcHDTV advertizes support for Linux users, but I cannot find out how to get teh thing working on my particular distro.
:) Heck, I'm still waiting for MythTV 0.17 to be unmasked, and I've raraly been able to get teh ivtv driver for my PVR-250 card working.
Well, they made it for Fedora Core, you say? Huh, it's all open-sourced... Doesn't that make it magically supported? While I expected I'd probably have some waiting around to do for Gentoo drivers, I bought the card to have it before broadcast-flag day. Hopefully the open-source gnomes will get my Linux TV card working with Linux someday.
I don't believe that open-source magically makes everything forever supported or even well supported when it is. Look at all the dead projects on sourceforge... Just because the source is there doesn't mean anything is being done well or at all for certain.
>let me get this straight. you know a single parent
>who earned $5000 in a year. They paid $4000 in
>taxes, because people who are living below the
>poverty line are in the 80% tax bracket, and then
>they got all of their money back at the end of the
>year?
Absolutely not. The Earned Income Credit is a form of socialism, where a person who qualifies gets a refund far larger, as in many times the amoutn of taxes that were withheld from their paycheck by their employer. A person making $5000 would never pay $4000 in taxes up-front. They may pay a couple hundred dollars via paycheck withholdings. But they don't ONLY get that cuple hundred bucks back, they get a respctable few thousand dollers in addition to that.
$5000 salary - $250 tax withholdings + $4200 Earned Income Credit = $8950.
$8950 is in the realm of double the original $5000 salary...
I've worked at H&R Block before. I've seen this happen, a number of times, for a umber of clients. If you would like proof, and live in the USA, spend a month or so this fall taking the H&R Block tax course and then work there preparing tax returns. You'll get a whole new perspective on American income tax stuff.
I live in Maryland state and have three Schedule E forms, and 43 depreciation items (from 4562).
From the description at their web page, I simply cannot use it at all.
>Friend, if everyone could take their one W-2 form
>and fill out the 1040 EZ in the comfort of their
>one-bedroom apartment, do you really think
>companies like H&R block would be in the business
>of helping people out with their income taxes?
You'd be suprised. People with lower incomes and kids, especially single parents, get huge refunds due to Earned Income Credit. I've seen yearly income W2's in the $5000 range get $4000 tax refunds. That's not a typo. Yes, the refund nearly doubles their annual total income. All part of the welfare portion of our society...
Now, why would these people pay a tax preparer instead of learning how to do this themselves? Some will answer that thee lower-income people tend to be on the low end of the educated scale as well. That might be true in some cases, but not all.
Some of these people jsut want their cash as fast as possible. How long would it take to wait for a check or even direct deposit from the IRS? A couple weeks, maybe a month for a paper check. With some companies offering refund loans where the customer can pick up the check the next day, many of these customers don't have the patience to wait as long as the IRS money would take, even if it would save them $140 or so in preparation and loan fees.
>Do it by hand just to make some IRS guy have to :)
>type it in. At least, that is my petty rationale
>for fighting the system in my miniscule way
For some people this isn't hard to do. For others of us, it's far more torture than we're willing to go through by hand ourselves.
>Do you save that much money spending $70 on
:)
>software? It sounds like you have a crapload of
>forms to deal with. Isn't your sanity and time
>worth another $70? Just curious. It is for me, and
>I'm a long time do-it-yourself.
Well, the year I worked at H&R Block after taking their classes to learn some tax stuff, I ran my own return through their store software. Retail price, over US$400. $70 is noticably less than $400-some to pay another H&R Block employee to do it again, since I no longer work there to get it for free. My main complaint of that whole situation is they listed two rental property-specific classes, but these two classes ere not offered in my district, so I'm left with a few holes in my tax knowledge that weren't covered in the classes I did take, including my peculiar depreciation thing. I did the whole H&R Block thing as I was tired of paying their fees and wanted to become a do-it-myself guy.
I have since spent a couple hours trolling through the IRS web site and found something that seems to make sense with their calculation results on this peculiar item. But I don't think I should hav had to. I bought a Tax Preparation product, they should help me use it, and help me understand what it calculates and why, as I consider those "functional elements" of their product.
I was just anything but impressed when their customer service explained that they do not offer "tax advice", or that they at H&R Block do not have anyone on hand QUALIFIED to answer tax questions, that they only support the "functionality" of their product. When I questioned the correctness of their product functioning to calculate that number, they wanted me to take my taxes elsewhere. So I'm planning to request a refund, and in the future go elsewhere as H&R Block/TaxCut advised me to do, and leave them out of it.
And by the way, I checked out their product packaging at the store yesterday. Nowhere on the box does it say anything about a disclaimer, refusing to answer "tax advice" topic questions at customer support... I haven't searched the EULA or anything, but I believe that sort of thing shouldn't be hidden inside a package only to maybe be found after they already have my money... Anyone I know will of course learn of this without buying another Taxcut package/download first.
I'd love to see alternative programs, because I have reasons to not buy TaxCut or TurboTax (The whole secret big-brother install thing a year or some ago), I'm running out of options. But considering a company with as much money as H&R Block refuses to offer tax advice in fear of being wrong and sued (my assumption, they didn't give reasons as to why even when I asked), I'm not optimistic that open-source hackers will take on that much legal responsibility or liability. I may look up TaxAct as I've seen mentioned around, and I really don't like the idea of hand-calculating depreciation tables for 43 items... (Furnished rental housing)
Well, the Open Tax Solver sounded interesting for a minute. Perhaps it has potential in the future, but for me, for now, it and other things there are useless. I need a schedule E (3 rental properties), and the forms and worksheets for depreciating stuff. I also live in Maryland state.
I think it may be hard for an open-source program to do all of the tax code. Tax law in USA is enormously complex. It's vague in certain areas. Every rule has an exception, some of those exceptions have exceptions to them, and then even those on occasion have exceptions. Every year the law changes, so you may not get to reuse algorithms from last year.
There's also the fact that if something goes wrong, the user may be royally in trouble. Do you want someone to end up owing enormouse penalty fees or going to jail because of a bug in the open-source tax program screwed up his return? Would an open-source program have tax lawyers involved in quality checks, to verify it is correct, and to interpret the vague parts of the law? What happens if such an interpretation of a vague detail is disagreed with by the tax court?
I worked at H&R Block as a tax preparer a few years ago. I wouldn't do it again. I wouldn't wan tto be involved in writing software that produces correct results for all users, and I certainly wouldn't want to have to deal with users complaining their tax returns got sent back by the IRS and they're now facing audits and other unpleasantness. I wouldn't want to be an open-source coder possibly facing lawsuits or IRS investigations if anything goes wrong.
I am annoyed with TaxCut though. I had a question about something this program did for my tax return this year involving depreciating an item that broke and I threw in the trash, I didn't understand their calculation in this case. Their customer support refuses to answer this kind of question, using the excuse that such an answer would constitute tax advice, and they (H&R Block owns TaxCut) do not give tax advice. They told me I must go to a tax professional to get an answer to my question about their own product's calculation. If H&R Block doesn't have qualified tax professionals to answer a question about a calculation done by their own product, well, let's just say I won't be recommending this program or its producer to my friends anymore... And they have money to hire "tax preparers" and lawyers to verify the software, or at least the different software they use in their numerous offices to serve customers with.
Am I overly paranoid? Maybe. If there's guys out there that were willing and able to make a complete tax preparation product and hire lawyers to interpret things and approve results, that'd be cool. I'm just not very optimistic that I'll be able to use such an open-source product for my own particular tax situation any time soon.
>Torvalds is the figurehead for the movement though,
>whether he likes it or not. I'd venture a guess
>that over 90% of linux users use x86 platforms; it
>feels a bit like the BMW CEO driving a Mercedes.
I think you have a rather limited view of what Linux is used for. People using Linux on their computers to do general computing tasks are possibly a minority of the total worlwide computing devices running Linux.
There's a large number of embedded systems running Linux, from Tivo to PDAs to networking equipment to automotive navigation systems, and numerous other things that you wouldn't sit on your desk with a monitor and keyboard. A lot of these other things use PowerPC processors.
Besides, this is not the end of Linux on x86. He can still write and cross-compile x86 code, I'm sure he still has a number of x86 computers that he's accumulated over the years to test such cross-compiled code on, and I can't imagine that Red Hat or other distributions will all throw their x86 machines in the trash to make room for new Macs on their desks.
I come from a niche of PowerPC fanboys. This certainly sounds good for PowerPC Linux, it may get more attention in kernel development that it has in the past from "The Man" himself, which is good for me and the other few in my niche, but it in no way will hurt your use of commodity x86 computers in the country you live in.
Lots of embedded devices use PowerPC processors. Many such embedded PowerPC applications also run Linux. You might think of a Macintosh box running Linux as a convenient development platform for these things, to get code working to some level before moving it to an evaluation board for the particular PowerPC device used in the embedded application.
MacOS is great, but isn't as suitable for developing embedded PowerPC LinuxPPC code as LinuxPPC is.
Its' got a ways to go before LinuxPPC is as usable as LinuxX86 is for some normal things, as a lot of stuff that isn't open-sourced is only available as x86 Linux binaries. But hopefuly this will change. Plus you can always run MacOnLinux and boot OSX inside a LinuxPPC hosted virtual Macintosh similar to what VirtualPC does, and have the best of both worlds.
Besides, this is slashdot. Isn't it some satanic thing to denouce Linux around here??
>Wine does not work on a non-intel system. It
:)
>doesn't handle different opcodes, only a different
>API. There are solutions for running Windows on
>PPC, both closed and open source, but Wine is not
>one of them.
But isn't it only a matter of time before we see a "Mine" (AKA Mine Is Not an Emulator) implementing the MacOS API under LinuxPPC the same way Wine does Windows API for LinuxX86?
I'd actually find such a thing useful, as I have a PPC computer next to my x86 PC. Run TaxCut or TurboTax for Mac, perhaps play some Mac games that don't have Linux ports, maybe iTunes or iDVD... (My PPC computer is not a Mac hardware...)
Sure, there's MacOnLinux for LinuxPPC, but I'd rather only run a single OS on each machine at a time rather than multiple ones via virtual machines...
>The best possible impact this could have would be
>forcing scammers to move their operations out of
>state.
Yes. But then the problem is no longer Ohio's problem, and they don't have to deal with it anymore. While residents of Ohio could still fall victim to scams, it's not Ohio's problem, it's the scammer's state's problem to fix.
Think of all the money Ohio can save by not having to prosecute these guys anymore. What more should Ohio care about?
I wouldn't quit a job without a new one lined up, or a hefty savings account to live off of until a new job is found.
:p
I've turned down a couple offers. One was a temp contract position a couple years ago when the semiconductor industry was in a deep hole, and I didn't want to be unemployed 6 months later. The other was full-time and better pay than my current employer, but going in a different direction than I'd like my career to go. I currently do VLSI layout and verification. This position was developing verification flows for customer companies, but I'd rather move in the direction of system design.
If you have a plan, and quitting the old job was part of that plan for bigger and better things, then that's great. If you quit and are now unemployed and have nowhere to go, simply because you didn't want to be a C# guy, that's pushing the constraints of sanity. And that's coming from a guy who uses an Amiga computer to this day...