>Not sure why anyone spends the $$ on a big screen CRT/FPTV/RPTV anymore.
Well, not everyone has a nice dark room to put a projector in. My smallish townhouse doesn't give me a good place. The living room has a sliding door on one side and an open kitchen on the other side. My roommates are usually home the same times I am and do whatever cooking they;re into at different times, including during the few good shows on these days, and I use the grill outside that sliding door quite a bit. So it's a lighting nightmare for using a projector, and in many other similar cases, CRTs and other non-front projectors are better suited.
Sure, I'd love to have a nice giant projected screen, but I'd like it to look OK too. Perhaps in my next house, but I don't plan on that until I'm either rich or married, neither of which seem to be going to happen real soon. So I've made my dilemma the choice between the Sony 40" CRT and the new Samsung 50" DLP for my situation.
I hope the EU courts/lawwyers are smarter than their US counterparts, and won't basically let MS off with no real incentive to be nice.
And exactly how does not bundling a media player make the underlying OS a substandard product? A video/music application doesn't seem to me to have any affect whatsoever on an OS's quality.
Well, I have a Windows98 box, and would use Windows iTunes if it was available for 98. Not planning to upgrade to XP or 2000 as some small amount of my software won't work then. I'd of course use Linux iTunes if that existed, but again am foiled. Oh well, guess I'll just have to buy CDs and hope I can play them...
>As far as I can see from a quick reading, the idea >is not that you see what people are typing, but >that you have an indicator which lets you know that >they are typing.
Is not the ability to see one typing in real time an indicator that that person is typing or not?
>Or, alternately, it allowed you to SEE the other >people typing in real time.
Heh, I used talk or phone (or both, don't remember now) on the VMS cluster at college back in '93 that did this realtime watch them type stuff. It was almost annoying to watch people back up half a sentence to fix a single character typo...:) Repeatedly and often... This was my freshman year, certainly these talk/phone programs existed a few years before I used them...
I still use mine. An old 66MHz 68060 CPU (well, a 50MHz chip overclocked). I use it for email, web browsing, maintaining my web page, occasional games, word processor, basically what any normal Windows user uses a PC for, and what many of you guys use Linux for.
Realize, there are lots of people out there that have no clue what anyone would actually use Linux for, your assumption is no more educated than theirs is about you not having anything at all to actually use with Linux.
> If we don't stamp that out, the incentives for industrial innovation and cultural creativity will > be weakened.
Hey, I've got a great idea on how to improve the safety and useful life time of a set of tires for my Ford automobile. Oh, too bad I don't have the legal right to use non-Ford approved tires and my car refuses to run so I can't test my idea on my own Ford car. Guess it's now illegal for me to have ideas on how to improve tires, so I won't waste my time with such safety innovations. Or any ideas for other products/markets/industries either. As a chip designer, am I going to be arrested every time I think of a way to improve an electronic product?? I'm not allowed to get sick of my cheesy universal TV remote, gut the curcuitry and put in an entirely new circuit that better suits my needs, because I put it in a plastic remote "case" made by RCA or some other big company like that? Will that plastic shell radio in to the mothership that I replaced the circuit board and order a set of lots of guys with big guns to take me in for re-educationing?
Yea. This law is going to be great for innovation!!!!!!
>IPv6 will increase the supply of addresses from 4 billion today to a number in excess of 35 trillion >that is "so big that there's not a word for the number,"
Said with the same confidence that Gates used when announcing that 640KB memory should be enough for anyone...:)
managment never lets us do things well. They want it now more than they want it right or good. Today at work, the office manager told my chip design group that we will tape out the chip we're currently working on by the 31st of this month, a bit less than 3 weeks from now. A rush job now, some testing and timing verification will now go undone, and we'll most likely spend the rest of this time dong DRC and LVS, the two checks that see if the design is manufacturable (DRC) and if the silicon layout matches the schematic/netlist (LVS). Screw power analisys. Screw timing checks for some things. Screw the remaining functional checks to see if it actually does what we think it does.
Yea, the poster got it right. Managment doesn't want proper documentation. They don't want testing and verification and quality. They want due dates, and apparently whatever is avilable on that date will have to be "good enough"...:/
Maybe the 3.0/3.1 roms were needed then. I never had any 2.x stuff so maybe I'm just not remembering other people's adventures trying to use it with graphics cards. Anyone still actually using an Amiga today really should have the 3.1 roms, which are required for AmigaOS 3.5 and 3.9 releases, and will be required for the 4.0 release as well when used on old hardware, and had fixed some issues in the 3.0 roms.
The AGA chipset machines came with 3.0 and later 3.1 roms, so it makes sense that 2.x might not work right with them, and thus not be able to deal with AGA emulation.
>1. Would browsing in 8bit color or above graphics require a specific rom set?
No, just a graphics card supported by either the Picasso96 or CynerGraphX APIs. Such cards can display 24bit screens quite easily. I myself run my Amiga4000T in 800x600x24bit. 1024x768 starts to get too small things for my poor eyes to cope with... I also have an Amiga3000 with a Voodoo3 card and also an ATI Radeon that I am helping develop drivers for, currently at beta level and about to go out for public beta testing. The system ROM has nothing to do with it, the software does. As I remember, your Retina card probably wasn't supported by either Picasso96 or CyberGraphX, came with some p-roprietary API that wasn't as system-friendly as the new ones are.
That meant the low end. Anything written system-friendly would still run on the new machines, and should be easy to then port to powerPC native for the new machines. Why would you limit yourself to ONLY classic hardware if you were participating in this project??
>I don't think drivers are the best way to defend ATI considering they tend to shrug off other OS's >and nVidia has committed themselves to supporting Alternate OS's.
Odd, I feel this sentence was written backwards. I'm working with a group of guys writing drivers for AmigaOS to use Radeon cards, drivers which are in beta right now with a couple of us and we're planning to soon have a larger beta group have a look. We tried contacting Nvidia first about supporting this effort (we're doing all the work, spending all the money, and taking all the rist, and signing NDAs to make that a binding legal situation) but Nvidia never even had the couresy to write back with a "No" answer. ATI gave us NDA contracts and we're nearly done with support for their cards. Sorry dude, but my experience is completely the opposite of your statement here.
>For instance, what is the Just and Fair thing to happen to an American guy who things the taliban is >morally correct and goes to Afghanistan to join them? Ok, now ask what should be done to prevent >such a man from harming Americans. Different question, and a much more practical one.
OK, interesting example. So, say they discover some dude named John Schmoe goes to Afghanistan to join the Taliban effort. It's discovered that at some point he returns to the US, they put his name in their database to keep an eye on but get the social security number wrong and it coincidentally gets tham watching some completely different guy that happens to have the same name, Joe Schmoe. They track this second, non-dangerous dude down and make sure he won't hurt the American people, and consider the situation dealt with and finished.
Now, because they don't have to maintain accuracy for the purpose of fairness, this second guy that was going about his life, going to work, watching TV and eating at restaurants got "taken care of", even though he was of no threat whatsoever. The fed goons think there's no problem anymore, yet the real threat Joe Schmoe is still out there someplace.
It's completely possible that a corrupt database can punish perfectly innocent people and allow dangerous people to continue threatening the American populace. How can that be an improvement over making sure the database is accurate?
It's similar to my dead-beat dad, who I'm named after, who's bad credit has shown up on my credit report before, credit cards that are not mine and such, because they don't take much care in making sure that account's social security # matches my credit report file. Heck, I've even found wrong last names listed on my credit reports before, all because they are somewhat careless. I really don't like the idea of similar wrong things showing up in any files the FBI might have on me...
Getting a credit application declined for reasons not my fault is annoying, but surely less annoying than being thrown in a cell for a few days and getting grilled about things I know nothing about, just because they got the wrong guy. It's really not helpful in protecting the populace IMHO if you don't keep your data accurate...
>If they can't put it together themselves after you >tell them what parts to get and install an OS on >their own, just let them buy the Dell and deal with >their tech support department.
But that won't help. My sister had a Gateway, and guess who's living room it sits in right now? Mine. Getting a Dell or some other big brand won't change a single thing, you'll still end up being the one that gets called for anything. I don't knw why they picked me, as they know very well how much I hate PCs and how much I hate their OS. But I have a degree in "computer engineering", which they all horribly wrongly assume means I studies PCs and Windows for 4 years. (It was a combo of comp sci and electrical engineering, all Unix or VMS, no PCs in any labs until very shortly before I graduated in the late '90's.)
If you're labeled the computer person in the family, you WILL be doing all the tech support. Dell will NEVER hear from them. Why give Dell any warranty/customer support money as part of the purchase price then?
I'm not sure what the reason was really, perhaps it wasn't helpful, perhaps it got in our way too much, or perhaps the company just didn't want to pay for it anymore in this frugal economy, but we don't have it anymore.
When we did, it was the WebSense filtering tool. It was annoying as it had a tendency to block sites useful for work, such as looking up something about Perl scripting, and other things. And it also didn't encourage us to stay late to wait for simulations or chip place/route operations to complete, which was nearly all computer time, and start the next step in whatever the design flow was. Staring at the screen or the wall got boring, and less people stayed after hours, especially as we're mostly salary and don't get overtime or any other benefits as a reason not to go home "on time". At least the web has news or some other interesting stuff to keep us occupied while the CPU chugs away on a couple-hour-long (sometimes couple-day-long) job.
Ironically, our sys admin tried to update the WebSense stuff one time and the filter blocked WebSense's own web site.:) How useful that was...
I've very rarely been one to agree with anyone critiquing a movie, and this is no different. I enjoyed the film, and though it was rather good by Star Trek standards.
The only thing that didn't make sense to me was the new Data double, they seemed awfully amazed that there was another android of similar build and looked just like Data. It was like they had completely forgotten their previous interactions with Lore, the previous Data twin we know from the TV series. After confronting Lore a couple times they shouldn't have been that suprised to find an android that looks like Data. (what happened to Lore last we saw him? I can't even remember now)
> It won't run any old Amiga games without an Amiga emulator
>Good thing they built one in!
This is only for system friendly stuff that uses the official AmigaOS API calls. A lot of older games directly hit the hardware for additional speed or due to lack of APIs built into the OS at the time. Anything that hits the hardware or sidesteps OS-friendly methods will not work, as the hardware it's trying to hit is now absent.
Emulation for these things is more of a UAE task, as UAE emulates the Amiga graphics/sound/etc. chipset as well as just the 68K CPU and actually runs a full copy of AmigaOS, while MorphOS's emulation is only for the 68K CPU and AmigaOS API.
Re:Ah! The crowd has fulfilled it's expectations!
on
What MorphOS Is All About
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm not into games much, so 2GHz CPU speed doesn't do much for me. I like the YAM email client, I don't like Outlook or Mozilla's email side. While there are Amiga viruses and security holes, they are fewer and less frequent than for Windows or Linux, because the people writing viruses and taking advantage of security holes don't care about us Amiga users. It's easier to use than Linux, and I just haet Windows from the user interface/experience perspective. Ido also have a couple Windows PCs and am trying to get another running Linux, but linux is still too hard to get configured before normal use can happen.
I'm trying to get MythTV working for PVR stuff, but am still trying to get Linux installed and configured with the new drivers, Xfree doesn't seem to want to start at all if I select ATI drivers that came with Debian 3 (Woody) on my AIW 8500DV Radeon card, and even with apt-get I've spent a lot of time searching and searching for the right versions of the right dependencies. I've also tried Red Hat 6.x and 7.x and given up on getting it configured for my purposes. Call me stupid or lazy or whatever, Linux is still just too much work to get it to go for us non-kernel-hackers.
I heard good things about BeOS back in the day, but it flopped and at the time I went searching for apps to run on it, I found far less to choose from than was available even for Amiga.
Now, I do of course realize a lot of stuff in Amigaland is out of date. We do need OS feature updates, not just simple PPC ports of the old OS. We need new apps, not just the ability to run old ones. We need our apps updated, such as getting web browsers up to speed with current standards.
But I have looked at alternatives and found them unsuitable to me. Windows, well, it's Windows. Linux is beyond my attention span to install and configure the first time, I have yet to get it to the general usability state. BeOS didn't have enough stuff to do with it. QNX looks cool, but again lacks apps more than Amiga does. I haven't found a reason for me to leave Amiga.
I also feel that no Amiga related posts should be made to Slashdot, because these people don't care. They don't care to learn the reality instead of the "It's been totally dead for 10 years and has zero apps and zero games and nobody in the universe can possibly find it useful anymore" illusion they revel in. A very small number of people here know the truth, like the poster I'm replying to, but most of you guys don't even want to know if or why someone finds it useful.
Just like a friend of mine that cannot fathom what I would ever actually use Linux for, you guys are wrong, there's plenty to do with AmigaOS and it's variants like Morphos or AROS. Just because the vast majority of Slashdot types stopped following all things Amiga years ago doesn't mean that nothing has happened since then. That would be like me saying I tried Linux 68K 6 years ago but it wasn't useful back then and I quite watching Linux, so obviously absolutely nothing in Linux land has happened since. It's just silly.
Anyway, I do still find my Amiga useful. You didn't anymore. You found something else more useful to you, I have not, so I remain with Amiga.
>Intel will detail its efforts to bring out higher performing chips at the 90 nanometer level--the next >chip manufacturing step, expected in 2005. (The nanometer measurement refers to the average distance >between transistors on the chip.)
Ack! I've been designing my chips wrong all these years... Now where's that goof that told me the 90nm things was a measure of the minimum length of a transistor gate channel??:)
I remember hearing about VCRs with this feature and looking for one, but never found one to buy. A bit of a disappointment. My Mitsubishi VCR does have a button to skip past the movie previews on a prerecorded tape, so I can get right to the very beginning of the movie (and it has not got it wrong once) Sometimes you just don't need to see what is "coming soon to a theater near you" when the tape was made 15 years ago...:)
For me, PVRs are a smarter and higher-capacity VCR. It can know to record a show that I would otherwise forget to set my VCR for, and has more storage than a tape does so that I can record more stuff if I'll be out of town for a few weeks. It should let me take prerecorded shows with me via a laptop, to catch up on things during plane trips, bus rides, etc.
I'm too lazy to edit out commercials, and until some PVR tool can do that automatically without accidentally deleting part of the show, my archives will include commercials, which provide me regular opportinities to visit the kitchen or bathroom should the desire or need arise. Why would I want to delete them? While the Time Warner guy thinks of me as a thief should I answer the call of nature, I'll continue doing so as I don't feel that is an immoral thing to do.
There's issues with these though. I'm on my second AIW card, third motherboard, second CPU, second sound card and second capture software package for my TV capture Tivo-alike.
Now, I did finally get it to work acceptably well for the most part, except that Windows2000 hangs a couple times a week. But...
The first thing I got was the AIW 8500DV. After receiving it I find it isn't supported under Win98SE, my OS at home as some of my software apps just don't work at all on 2000 or XP. But rumor had it the card should stil work using the ME drivers. I was able to watch TV, but the second I hit record, the machine crashed. 100% guaranteed insteant death to Windows. This was with the ATI software included wiht the card.
So I get an AIW 7500, officially supporting 98SE. Same thing, I can watch TV but recording is instant death.
OK, it's an older machine, a 400MHz K6-2+ overclocked to 500MHz. Soes I gets me an Athlon 1700+ XP rig. Both AIW cards are now able to record, but the audio and video get out of synch, with the audio playing just a bit fast, enough to sound a bit odd and after 20 minutes or so sounds happen noticably sooner than the corresponding picture. (non-synched lip movements, etc)
www.rage3d.com forums tell me there's issues between AIW cards and Via chipsets. Oh crap, I see people recommending SIS chipsets and get a new motherboard. Again.
Still the audio synch problem. rage3d's forums tell me AIW cards have issues with Creative's Soundblaster Live! card. Oh crap, I buy a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz card.
Still the audio synch problem. Hmmm, U've been using ATI's software all this time, maybe I'll try showshifter. I install that, and everything's cool. Audio synchs and sounds right now. It gives me the feature to recompress recorded shows to DiVX in the background. Cool.
Then the D: drive, 115gigs worth of a 120gig drive, fills up and Windows 2000, the OS on this box now, hangs. CTRL/ALT/DEL doesn't work. Great, I get to know the case's reset button quite well, as this happens a lot.
So, I've spent a good bit of money now, and am still not happy. I intend to get happy with this thing though, add the new Sony DVD+/-RW burner and one of them neat little cube towers from Shuttle, and use it for a fwe other things Tivo doesn't do, and move on to the next headache of a project.
Perhaps Intel CPUs don't have the problems I went through. Perhaps ATI's software has improved in the last month or so, though I've heard they have not yet released the 8.x software other than the AIW 9700 package. (Which sounds likea very cool card, when will Linux support it and the video cleanup features???) But the AIW cards do have their fair share of problems to deal with.
I've been trying for the last week to get MythTV set up. My TV box had been Win2000, but that kept hanging every time the D partition filled up and I had to reboot 2 or 3 times a week. Why it didn't just cache/swap using the 1gig empty space on C I'll never understand...
But, as a Linux newbie, I've had problems getting things to work. I'm using Debian 3 (woody) stable, and am having trouble getting the ATI drivers working. Choosing ATI for my graphics card during the Debian install does something that breaks X, startx fails with an error along the lines of "no screens found" or something close to that. Choosing the standard vesa gives me a working X/gnome setup.
I got the gatos stuff for the capture drivers, mythtv.deb packages, and spent some time apt-getting to try and satisfy all mythtv's dependencies, but in the end I always end up breaking X and get stuck with an old-school console-only view and no GUI.
So, while you linux gurus might find MythTV install "ISN'T hard", some of us could use some hints of how to deal with these problems. For an ATI 8500DV AllInWonder, Turtle beach Santa Cruz card for sound, what exactly do I need and where do I get all of it? Do I need the new ATI Linux drivers, or won't they work for TV capture? (As in is there anything special abot the gatos stuff that makes ATI's new release nusable?) I haven't got far enough to try sound, so I'm not sure if the Santa Cruz card does anything yet either.
Please help! Preferrably along the lines of "MythTV for Dummies who have never installed Linux before"... I appreciate any tips that get me away from Windows, as that has proven unsuitable.
Slashdot Mirror
>Not sure why anyone spends the $$ on a big screen CRT/FPTV/RPTV anymore.
Well, not everyone has a nice dark room to put a projector in. My smallish townhouse doesn't give me a good place. The living room has a sliding door on one side and an open kitchen on the other side. My roommates are usually home the same times I am and do whatever cooking they;re into at different times, including during the few good shows on these days, and I use the grill outside that sliding door quite a bit. So it's a lighting nightmare for using a projector, and in many other similar cases, CRTs and other non-front projectors are better suited.
Sure, I'd love to have a nice giant projected screen, but I'd like it to look OK too. Perhaps in my next house, but I don't plan on that until I'm either rich or married, neither of which seem to be going to happen real soon. So I've made my dilemma the choice between the Sony 40" CRT and the new Samsung 50" DLP for my situation.
I hope the EU courts/lawwyers are smarter than their US counterparts, and won't basically let MS off with no real incentive to be nice.
And exactly how does not bundling a media player make the underlying OS a substandard product? A video/music application doesn't seem to me to have any affect whatsoever on an OS's quality.
Well, I have a Windows98 box, and would use Windows iTunes if it was available for 98. Not planning to upgrade to XP or 2000 as some small amount of my software won't work then. I'd of course use Linux iTunes if that existed, but again am foiled. Oh well, guess I'll just have to buy CDs and hope I can play them...
>As far as I can see from a quick reading, the idea
>is not that you see what people are typing, but
>that you have an indicator which lets you know that
>they are typing.
Is not the ability to see one typing in real time an indicator that that person is typing or not?
>Or, alternately, it allowed you to SEE the other
:) Repeatedly and often... This was my freshman year, certainly these talk/phone programs existed a few years before I used them...
>people typing in real time.
Heh, I used talk or phone (or both, don't remember now) on the VMS cluster at college back in '93 that did this realtime watch them type stuff. It was almost annoying to watch people back up half a sentence to fix a single character typo...
I still use mine. An old 66MHz 68060 CPU (well, a 50MHz chip overclocked). I use it for email, web browsing, maintaining my web page, occasional games, word processor, basically what any normal Windows user uses a PC for, and what many of you guys use Linux for.
Realize, there are lots of people out there that have no clue what anyone would actually use Linux for, your assumption is no more educated than theirs is about you not having anything at all to actually use with Linux.
> If we don't stamp that out, the incentives for industrial innovation and cultural creativity will
> be weakened.
Hey, I've got a great idea on how to improve the safety and useful life time of a set of tires for my Ford automobile. Oh, too bad I don't have the legal right to use non-Ford approved tires and my car refuses to run so I can't test my idea on my own Ford car. Guess it's now illegal for me to have ideas on how to improve tires, so I won't waste my time with such safety innovations. Or any ideas for other products/markets/industries either. As a chip designer, am I going to be arrested every time I think of a way to improve an electronic product?? I'm not allowed to get sick of my cheesy universal TV remote, gut the curcuitry and put in an entirely new circuit that better suits my needs, because I put it in a plastic remote "case" made by RCA or some other big company like that? Will that plastic shell radio in to the mothership that I replaced the circuit board and order a set of lots of guys with big guns to take me in for re-educationing?
Yea. This law is going to be great for innovation!!!!!!
>IPv6 will increase the supply of addresses from 4 billion today to a number in excess of 35 trillion
:)
>that is "so big that there's not a word for the number,"
Said with the same confidence that Gates used when announcing that 640KB memory should be enough for anyone...
> It's like sex.
:)
.sig on slashdot at some point...)
One mistake and you support it for the rest of your life.
(probably remembered seeing this from someone's
managment never lets us do things well. They want it now more than they want it right or good. Today at work, the office manager told my chip design group that we will tape out the chip we're currently working on by the 31st of this month, a bit less than 3 weeks from now. A rush job now, some testing and timing verification will now go undone, and we'll most likely spend the rest of this time dong DRC and LVS, the two checks that see if the design is manufacturable (DRC) and if the silicon layout matches the schematic/netlist (LVS). Screw power analisys. Screw timing checks for some things. Screw the remaining functional checks to see if it actually does what we think it does.
:/
Yea, the poster got it right. Managment doesn't want proper documentation. They don't want testing and verification and quality. They want due dates, and apparently whatever is avilable on that date will have to be "good enough"...
> Except now, you had bums popping in a quarter, and having a free room for the night.
:p
Man. It's a sad day when even a free room costs 25cents...
Maybe the 3.0/3.1 roms were needed then. I never had any 2.x stuff so maybe I'm just not remembering other people's adventures trying to use it with graphics cards. Anyone still actually using an Amiga today really should have the 3.1 roms, which are required for AmigaOS 3.5 and 3.9 releases, and will be required for the 4.0 release as well when used on old hardware, and had fixed some issues in the 3.0 roms.
The AGA chipset machines came with 3.0 and later 3.1 roms, so it makes sense that 2.x might not work right with them, and thus not be able to deal with AGA emulation.
>1. Would browsing in 8bit color or above graphics require a specific rom set?
No, just a graphics card supported by either the Picasso96 or CynerGraphX APIs. Such cards can display 24bit screens quite easily. I myself run my Amiga4000T in 800x600x24bit. 1024x768 starts to get too small things for my poor eyes to cope with... I also have an Amiga3000 with a Voodoo3 card and also an ATI Radeon that I am helping develop drivers for, currently at beta level and about to go out for public beta testing. The system ROM has nothing to do with it, the software does. As I remember, your Retina card probably wasn't supported by either Picasso96 or CyberGraphX, came with some p-roprietary API that wasn't as system-friendly as the new ones are.
That meant the low end. Anything written system-friendly would still run on the new machines, and should be easy to then port to powerPC native for the new machines. Why would you limit yourself to ONLY classic hardware if you were participating in this project??
>I don't think drivers are the best way to defend ATI considering they tend to shrug off other OS's
>and nVidia has committed themselves to supporting Alternate OS's.
Odd, I feel this sentence was written backwards. I'm working with a group of guys writing drivers for AmigaOS to use Radeon cards, drivers which are in beta right now with a couple of us and we're planning to soon have a larger beta group have a look. We tried contacting Nvidia first about supporting this effort (we're doing all the work, spending all the money, and taking all the rist, and signing NDAs to make that a binding legal situation) but Nvidia never even had the couresy to write back with a "No" answer. ATI gave us NDA contracts and we're nearly done with support for their cards. Sorry dude, but my experience is completely the opposite of your statement here.
>For instance, what is the Just and Fair thing to happen to an American guy who things the taliban is
>morally correct and goes to Afghanistan to join them? Ok, now ask what should be done to prevent
>such a man from harming Americans. Different question, and a much more practical one.
OK, interesting example. So, say they discover some dude named John Schmoe goes to Afghanistan to join the Taliban effort. It's discovered that at some point he returns to the US, they put his name in their database to keep an eye on but get the social security number wrong and it coincidentally gets tham watching some completely different guy that happens to have the same name, Joe Schmoe. They track this second, non-dangerous dude down and make sure he won't hurt the American people, and consider the situation dealt with and finished.
Now, because they don't have to maintain accuracy for the purpose of fairness, this second guy that was going about his life, going to work, watching TV and eating at restaurants got "taken care of", even though he was of no threat whatsoever. The fed goons think there's no problem anymore, yet the real threat Joe Schmoe is still out there someplace.
It's completely possible that a corrupt database can punish perfectly innocent people and allow dangerous people to continue threatening the American populace. How can that be an improvement over making sure the database is accurate?
It's similar to my dead-beat dad, who I'm named after, who's bad credit has shown up on my credit report before, credit cards that are not mine and such, because they don't take much care in making sure that account's social security # matches my credit report file. Heck, I've even found wrong last names listed on my credit reports before, all because they are somewhat careless. I really don't like the idea of similar wrong things showing up in any files the FBI might have on me...
Getting a credit application declined for reasons not my fault is annoying, but surely less annoying than being thrown in a cell for a few days and getting grilled about things I know nothing about, just because they got the wrong guy. It's really not helpful in protecting the populace IMHO if you don't keep your data accurate...
>If they can't put it together themselves after you
>tell them what parts to get and install an OS on
>their own, just let them buy the Dell and deal with
>their tech support department.
But that won't help. My sister had a Gateway, and guess who's living room it sits in right now? Mine. Getting a Dell or some other big brand won't change a single thing, you'll still end up being the one that gets called for anything. I don't knw why they picked me, as they know very well how much I hate PCs and how much I hate their OS. But I have a degree in "computer engineering", which they all horribly wrongly assume means I studies PCs and Windows for 4 years. (It was a combo of comp sci and electrical engineering, all Unix or VMS, no PCs in any labs until very shortly before I graduated in the late '90's.)
If you're labeled the computer person in the family, you WILL be doing all the tech support. Dell will NEVER hear from them. Why give Dell any warranty/customer support money as part of the purchase price then?
I'm not sure what the reason was really, perhaps it wasn't helpful, perhaps it got in our way too much, or perhaps the company just didn't want to pay for it anymore in this frugal economy, but we don't have it anymore.
:) How useful that was...
When we did, it was the WebSense filtering tool. It was annoying as it had a tendency to block sites useful for work, such as looking up something about Perl scripting, and other things. And it also didn't encourage us to stay late to wait for simulations or chip place/route operations to complete, which was nearly all computer time, and start the next step in whatever the design flow was. Staring at the screen or the wall got boring, and less people stayed after hours, especially as we're mostly salary and don't get overtime or any other benefits as a reason not to go home "on time". At least the web has news or some other interesting stuff to keep us occupied while the CPU chugs away on a couple-hour-long (sometimes couple-day-long) job.
Ironically, our sys admin tried to update the WebSense stuff one time and the filter blocked WebSense's own web site.
I've very rarely been one to agree with anyone critiquing a movie, and this is no different. I enjoyed the film, and though it was rather good by Star Trek standards.
The only thing that didn't make sense to me was the new Data double, they seemed awfully amazed that there was another android of similar build and looked just like Data. It was like they had completely forgotten their previous interactions with Lore, the previous Data twin we know from the TV series. After confronting Lore a couple times they shouldn't have been that suprised to find an android that looks like Data. (what happened to Lore last we saw him? I can't even remember now)
> It won't run any old Amiga games without an Amiga emulator
>Good thing they built one in!
This is only for system friendly stuff that uses the official AmigaOS API calls. A lot of older games directly hit the hardware for additional speed or due to lack of APIs built into the OS at the time. Anything that hits the hardware or sidesteps OS-friendly methods will not work, as the hardware it's trying to hit is now absent.
Emulation for these things is more of a UAE task, as UAE emulates the Amiga graphics/sound/etc. chipset as well as just the 68K CPU and actually runs a full copy of AmigaOS, while MorphOS's emulation is only for the 68K CPU and AmigaOS API.
I'm not into games much, so 2GHz CPU speed doesn't do much for me. I like the YAM email client, I don't like Outlook or Mozilla's email side. While there are Amiga viruses and security holes, they are fewer and less frequent than for Windows or Linux, because the people writing viruses and taking advantage of security holes don't care about us Amiga users. It's easier to use than Linux, and I just haet Windows from the user interface/experience perspective. Ido also have a couple Windows PCs and am trying to get another running Linux, but linux is still too hard to get configured before normal use can happen.
I'm trying to get MythTV working for PVR stuff, but am still trying to get Linux installed and configured with the new drivers, Xfree doesn't seem to want to start at all if I select ATI drivers that came with Debian 3 (Woody) on my AIW 8500DV Radeon card, and even with apt-get I've spent a lot of time searching and searching for the right versions of the right dependencies. I've also tried Red Hat 6.x and 7.x and given up on getting it configured for my purposes. Call me stupid or lazy or whatever, Linux is still just too much work to get it to go for us non-kernel-hackers.
I heard good things about BeOS back in the day, but it flopped and at the time I went searching for apps to run on it, I found far less to choose from than was available even for Amiga.
Now, I do of course realize a lot of stuff in Amigaland is out of date. We do need OS feature updates, not just simple PPC ports of the old OS. We need new apps, not just the ability to run old ones. We need our apps updated, such as getting web browsers up to speed with current standards.
But I have looked at alternatives and found them unsuitable to me. Windows, well, it's Windows. Linux is beyond my attention span to install and configure the first time, I have yet to get it to the general usability state. BeOS didn't have enough stuff to do with it. QNX looks cool, but again lacks apps more than Amiga does. I haven't found a reason for me to leave Amiga.
I also feel that no Amiga related posts should be made to Slashdot, because these people don't care. They don't care to learn the reality instead of the "It's been totally dead for 10 years and has zero apps and zero games and nobody in the universe can possibly find it useful anymore" illusion they revel in. A very small number of people here know the truth, like the poster I'm replying to, but most of you guys don't even want to know if or why someone finds it useful.
Just like a friend of mine that cannot fathom what I would ever actually use Linux for, you guys are wrong, there's plenty to do with AmigaOS and it's variants like Morphos or AROS. Just because the vast majority of Slashdot types stopped following all things Amiga years ago doesn't mean that nothing has happened since then. That would be like me saying I tried Linux 68K 6 years ago but it wasn't useful back then and I quite watching Linux, so obviously absolutely nothing in Linux land has happened since. It's just silly.
Anyway, I do still find my Amiga useful. You didn't anymore. You found something else more useful to you, I have not, so I remain with Amiga.
>Intel will detail its efforts to bring out higher performing chips at the 90 nanometer level--the next
:)
>chip manufacturing step, expected in 2005. (The nanometer measurement refers to the average distance
>between transistors on the chip.)
Ack! I've been designing my chips wrong all these years... Now where's that goof that told me the 90nm things was a measure of the minimum length of a transistor gate channel??
I remember hearing about VCRs with this feature and looking for one, but never found one to buy. A bit of a disappointment. My Mitsubishi VCR does have a button to skip past the movie previews on a prerecorded tape, so I can get right to the very beginning of the movie (and it has not got it wrong once) Sometimes you just don't need to see what is "coming soon to a theater near you" when the tape was made 15 years ago... :)
For me, PVRs are a smarter and higher-capacity VCR. It can know to record a show that I would otherwise forget to set my VCR for, and has more storage than a tape does so that I can record more stuff if I'll be out of town for a few weeks. It should let me take prerecorded shows with me via a laptop, to catch up on things during plane trips, bus rides, etc.
I'm too lazy to edit out commercials, and until some PVR tool can do that automatically without accidentally deleting part of the show, my archives will include commercials, which provide me regular opportinities to visit the kitchen or bathroom should the desire or need arise. Why would I want to delete them? While the Time Warner guy thinks of me as a thief should I answer the call of nature, I'll continue doing so as I don't feel that is an immoral thing to do.
There's issues with these though. I'm on my second AIW card, third motherboard, second CPU, second sound card and second capture software package for my TV capture Tivo-alike.
Now, I did finally get it to work acceptably well for the most part, except that Windows2000 hangs a couple times a week. But...
The first thing I got was the AIW 8500DV. After receiving it I find it isn't supported under Win98SE, my OS at home as some of my software apps just don't work at all on 2000 or XP. But rumor had it the card should stil work using the ME drivers. I was able to watch TV, but the second I hit record, the machine crashed. 100% guaranteed insteant death to Windows. This was with the ATI software included wiht the card.
So I get an AIW 7500, officially supporting 98SE. Same thing, I can watch TV but recording is instant death.
OK, it's an older machine, a 400MHz K6-2+ overclocked to 500MHz. Soes I gets me an Athlon 1700+ XP rig. Both AIW cards are now able to record, but the audio and video get out of synch, with the audio playing just a bit fast, enough to sound a bit odd and after 20 minutes or so sounds happen noticably sooner than the corresponding picture. (non-synched lip movements, etc)
www.rage3d.com forums tell me there's issues between AIW cards and Via chipsets. Oh crap, I see people recommending SIS chipsets and get a new motherboard. Again.
Still the audio synch problem. rage3d's forums tell me AIW cards have issues with Creative's Soundblaster Live! card. Oh crap, I buy a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz card.
Still the audio synch problem. Hmmm, U've been using ATI's software all this time, maybe I'll try showshifter. I install that, and everything's cool. Audio synchs and sounds right now. It gives me the feature to recompress recorded shows to DiVX in the background. Cool.
Then the D: drive, 115gigs worth of a 120gig drive, fills up and Windows 2000, the OS on this box now, hangs. CTRL/ALT/DEL doesn't work. Great, I get to know the case's reset button quite well, as this happens a lot.
So, I've spent a good bit of money now, and am still not happy. I intend to get happy with this thing though, add the new Sony DVD+/-RW burner and one of them neat little cube towers from Shuttle, and use it for a fwe other things Tivo doesn't do, and move on to the next headache of a project.
Perhaps Intel CPUs don't have the problems I went through. Perhaps ATI's software has improved in the last month or so, though I've heard they have not yet released the 8.x software other than the AIW 9700 package. (Which sounds likea very cool card, when will Linux support it and the video cleanup features???) But the AIW cards do have their fair share of problems to deal with.
I've been trying for the last week to get MythTV set up. My TV box had been Win2000, but that kept hanging every time the D partition filled up and I had to reboot 2 or 3 times a week. Why it didn't just cache/swap using the 1gig empty space on C I'll never understand...
.deb packages, and spent some time apt-getting to try and satisfy all mythtv's dependencies, but in the end I always end up breaking X and get stuck with an old-school console-only view and no GUI.
But, as a Linux newbie, I've had problems getting things to work. I'm using Debian 3 (woody) stable, and am having trouble getting the ATI drivers working. Choosing ATI for my graphics card during the Debian install does something that breaks X, startx fails with an error along the lines of "no screens found" or something close to that. Choosing the standard vesa gives me a working X/gnome setup.
I got the gatos stuff for the capture drivers, mythtv
So, while you linux gurus might find MythTV install "ISN'T hard", some of us could use some hints of how to deal with these problems. For an ATI 8500DV AllInWonder, Turtle beach Santa Cruz card for sound, what exactly do I need and where do I get all of it? Do I need the new ATI Linux drivers, or won't they work for TV capture? (As in is there anything special abot the gatos stuff that makes ATI's new release nusable?) I haven't got far enough to try sound, so I'm not sure if the Santa Cruz card does anything yet either.
Please help! Preferrably along the lines of "MythTV for Dummies who have never installed Linux before"... I appreciate any tips that get me away from Windows, as that has proven unsuitable.