No, more like yesterday's news. Yes, this is a set top box rather than a portable, but it's the same thing under the hood, I'll wager.
Unlike what will no doubt be a "feature" of this new hand-luggable platform, VIA and APEX have assured the geek sector that this platform will not be locked to a particular software platform. Hence, ApeXtreme Linux is definitely a possibility, if not an inevitability.
The VIA record with the EPIA platform is rock-solid. VIA's record with Intel and AMD CPU platforms, on the other hand, leaves much to be desired. This new Entertainment Center computer is based on next-gen EPIA. This is going to rock. Hard.
Just a brief "thank you" to all the people who responded to my question.
I wanted to clarify a few things. First, I already have a candidate monitor I want to use with an external tuner. I am a great believer in "reduce, reuse, recycle." If I didn't want to reuse the monitor for these purposes I would have bought a new TV months ago.
Second, I have tried the PC/TV route, and it's just too fiddly to use it to replace a TV. With a TV, you want something that will be usable immediately, not something that will be ready after a delay for boot-up. And let's face it...Murphy is always involved in anything concerning a computer. Whatever OS you are running, be it Windows or Linux or QNX or DOS or whatever, there are always things that can go wrong and will require troubleshooting. Do I want to have to spend an entire evening chasing down a driver corruption issue so I can watch freakin' "Now with Bill Moyers?" I don't think so.
It looks like I'm going to either go with the high-end Aver or the midrange ViewSonic. Both have SVideo ins and multiple inputs. I kinda wish that they'd have component video because my main DVD player has that, but oh well, such is life. None of them has 5.1 audio. Again, such is life. Stereo+Sub-Woofer is OK and sounds decent. It's also a lot less expensive than 5.1.
Oh yeah...one of my computers will be attached to this new entertainment center configuration. Only this one will be connected using the VGA pass-through. All of these boxes can superimpose a Picture-in-picture of what's on the TV, which is great. And all of these boxes can be bypassed so that I can use my monitor as it was designed.
Cliff, thanks for giving this article the thumbs-up. Everyone else, thanks for your suggestions and your input.
It seems to me the people who need "a good talking-to" are Sigma Designs. This story is bigger than KiSS Technologies. Lite-On uses the same chipset, as do many others. Their Site Map mentions nothing about GPLed software and a means to download the code.
They WILL be at CES. Have at 'em. Don't rant and rave at them, just point out their errors in a kind and gentle but stern tone.
Shit, I'd say that takes the cake for WORST TECHNOLOGY OF 2003, no questions asked! Chip my dog, my cat, my guinea pigs, that's cool. Call me superstitious, but chipping human beings is too close to the "Mark of the Beast" for my comfort. [shudder]
Pain in the @$$. You have to hold down the F1 key and flick the power switch *at the same time* to get into their poor excuse for a "BIOS," Easy-Setup. Almost as hard to do as the 4-key combos to zap the PRAM or boot off an external device other than a CD-ROM on a Mac.
Easy-Setup is precisely what it sounds like: an interface for the brain dead that doesn't allow access to anything useful. It has diagnostics but they don't really work. Basically, to do any real setup of a ThinkPad, you have to use either the Windows program "ThinkPad Setup" or PS2.EXE, which is a DOS proggie for which you must have booted into DOS to use. Opening up a command line in Windows won't work. I think the latter is a leftover from the bad old days of MicroChannel. The Linux program tpctl can do some things that you can do in either ThinkPad Setup or PS2.EXE, but not everything.
That said, ThinkPads are still the best x86 Linux laptops. I guess that says less about the Linux friendliness of ThinkPads and more about the braindamaged design of other x86 laptops.The only thing that does Linux better on laptops are New World Macintosh laptops which have Open Firmware and can boot into Linux directly without even a nod or a wink to MacOS. It's interesting to see a lot of PowerBooks and iBooks being used by the really serious Linux developers...this is no accident. The advantages of a completely open standard booting system seem to outweigh the quirkiness that's still present in the PowerPC architecture.
BS. It's shilling. And I'm a Mac fan, been one since 1984 (although it took me until 1995 to get one of my own) and I'd gladly shill for them myself if Apple would pay me to do so. I'm sure Trent Reznor has a shiny new G5 in his studio now, gratis. I wouldn't mind one myself. (Mr. Jobs, are you listening?)
I'm sure that Microsoft slips David Byrne a new copy of Office every time they update. Although it would be poetic justice if Byrne suddenly started using OpenOffice.Org Impress instead...not bloody likely, however.
Dammit, why didn't someone unearth that clip during the recent Recall election here in California??? Looking at Ah-nold with that utterly crazed, depraved look in his eyes...man, that was scary!
California is going to need more than vitamin drink to perk up after the Governator is done with it, alas.
I suppose that all those looking for a similar device should look into VIA Mini-ITX. This one in particular looks like it could be very useful with its twin Ethernet interfaces and four (count 'em) serial ports. Router/RAS anyone?
Still...they just don't have the Kawaii factor of the Cobalt cube. I want one but I can't spare the money, dammit.
Get some ECS motherboard, generic RAM... bang. You're in for the evening.
There's plenty of good hardware to be had from places like Newegg, Directron and Computer Geeks. Just to name a few. Get yourself an ASUS motherboard, RAM from Crucial or from a reputable manufacturer like Kingston ValueRAM or Viking or Mushkin or Corsair, get a video card from a good manufacturer, and you have a nice solid machine that can handle anything.
I'd be more likely to blame the crappy courseware than Zone Alarm. Stupid freakin' Active X and it's lack of sandboxing... unfortunately we're stuck with it.
Win 2K crashed on me several times without having a hardware problem.
Mostly it crashed while trying to either Print or utilize the local area network.
One way to get ANY operating system running on x86 architecture to hard-lock is to introduce a conflict in networking.
Networking runs in Ring Zero regardless of what operating system you are running. I got Windows 2K to do the Windows 2K equivalent of a kernel panic when Zone Alarm and an ill-tempered piece of courseware I have to use in College that uses Active X and IE did battle. I had to pull the AC adapter and the battery to ungracefully shut down.
Look here. This is a rolling bag which can hold not one, but TWO laptops if you have a padded sleeve for one of them, like I do. Beefy, roomy, kick-ass. Less than $30, too. It also doesn't look like a laptop bag...it looks more like a piece of luggage. Which may or may not be an advantage.
If that's too much of a monster for you, try this. This is the Kensington Astro Pack. It has a very roomy padded compartment for your laptop. It was designed for the original "Clamshell" iBooks, and a 14.1" screen black PowerBook is very comfortable in there. Right now my ThinkPad 600e is very much at home in there, as is its power supply, trivet, external floppy drive, Palm sync cable, a couple of PCMCIA cards and a 25" ethernet cable. I could probably cram a partridge and a pear tree in there too if I pushed hard enough. ^_^ It looks stylish and spiffy and like something from Starfleet General Issue. It certainly does not look like a laptop bag, especially if you do as I do and put a patch over the Kensington logo.
You can't go wrong with either of them. I have both.
Forgotten studio? Not quite.
on
Despairing of Pixar
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Titan A.E. was done by Fox Animation at their defunct Arizona studio. They located their studio in Arizona to avoid paying animators union wages. The head of Fox Animation was Don Bluth. Titan A.E. basically bankrupted Fox Animation.
Fox recently bought Blue Sky Studios in upstate New York, the creators of the short "Bunny" and the feature "Ice Age." They are now working on "Robots" for early 1995 release.
Iraq was called the "Fertile Crescent" when it was a part of the Ottoman Empire, and Biblical legend had it that the Garden of Eden was at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The lush Hanging Gardens of Babylon was once one of the Seven Wonders of the World.
Yes, there are a lot more pressing needs for the Iraqi people as a whole. But F/OSS is certainly better for them, as a developing nation, than bondage to Microsoft which is no doubt in Bill Gates' plans.
There's an old Union organizing song which has a line that says "we need bread and roses too." Iraq needs all the things people are saying they need in this thread. But they also need access to technology, both for practical and not-so-practical reasons. A developing nation needs bread, but that doesn't mean roses are out of the question until the bread situation is dealt with. We could do worse than to encourage F/OSS in Iraq. Certainly the Bush Administration, Halliburton and their buddies at Microsoft are hard at work encouraging other things to base Iraq's computer infrastructure on.
No it isn't x86. It's a NEC VR5701, which is a MIPS CPU, running a 400 MHz. Uhh, sure it could emulate x86- you could port bochs and run Linux or Windows that way. haha, that'd suck.
Just pop onto eBay and they are all over the place at about $60 for one that can be used on any network. The phone was released officially only in Europe but it works like a charm here in the US. I'm using mine on T-Mobile, which is the geekiest Mobile Phone company on the planet. All You Can Eat 802.11b HotSpot usage (Borders, Starbucks) or AYCE GPRS connectivity only costs $20 more a month.
This is a no-BS phone. No color screen, no polyphonic or.WAV ringtones, no built-in camera, a couple of games (a Pong and a Quix clone) and a few black-and-white background images. It's also a bit on the bulky side compared to modern phones. However, it's light, it's cheap, it does Bluetooth, and it is compatible with just about all of the Ericsson gadgets, including the camera if you must. I have a serial cable and chatboard keyboard I got from eBay and I can grab a FM tuner/headset (wired) anytime I want, should I want one.
The battery lasts and lasts and lasts. Even the skinny one you get with the phone. And I have a second battery (also an eBay find) that I got for $3 that has even more standby/talk time. Yes, it's an Ericsson OEM battery.
I love my r520m and I actually will probably get a spare in case this one breaks.
Windows 2000 is usually better than XP on machines like these. I run Win2K as part of a dual-boot with Linux on my ThinkPad 600E (PII 400MHz 224MB RAM) and it is as comfortable as a broken-in pair of jeans. This includes Avast Antivirus, ZoneAlarm and the Palm Sync Link.
2000 is what the 600E was designed for. It shows in how well it performs. I'm sure if you killed a lot of eye candy XP would be just as nice, but I'm lazy.
Linux also runs beautifully on this machine...this was the one and only machine IBM was going to get certified for Red Hat Linux. It's running Knoppix/Debian and very happy.
OK, we're talking about degrees here. True, no Windows system can truly be called a secure, hardened system like a good hardened *BSD box. But you can have something that isn't going to fall over at the slightest push from someone with their CD of "leet hax0r toolz" they bought from Ye Olde Grey Market Software Booth at the Computer Fair.
Slashdot Mirror
Unlike what will no doubt be a "feature" of this new hand-luggable platform, VIA and APEX have assured the geek sector that this platform will not be locked to a particular software platform. Hence, ApeXtreme Linux is definitely a possibility, if not an inevitability.
The VIA record with the EPIA platform is rock-solid. VIA's record with Intel and AMD CPU platforms, on the other hand, leaves much to be desired. This new Entertainment Center computer is based on next-gen EPIA. This is going to rock. Hard.
Just a brief "thank you" to all the people who responded to my question.
I wanted to clarify a few things. First, I already have a candidate monitor I want to use with an external tuner. I am a great believer in "reduce, reuse, recycle." If I didn't want to reuse the monitor for these purposes I would have bought a new TV months ago.
Second, I have tried the PC/TV route, and it's just too fiddly to use it to replace a TV. With a TV, you want something that will be usable immediately, not something that will be ready after a delay for boot-up. And let's face it...Murphy is always involved in anything concerning a computer. Whatever OS you are running, be it Windows or Linux or QNX or DOS or whatever, there are always things that can go wrong and will require troubleshooting. Do I want to have to spend an entire evening chasing down a driver corruption issue so I can watch freakin' "Now with Bill Moyers?" I don't think so.
It looks like I'm going to either go with the high-end Aver or the midrange ViewSonic. Both have SVideo ins and multiple inputs. I kinda wish that they'd have component video because my main DVD player has that, but oh well, such is life. None of them has 5.1 audio. Again, such is life. Stereo+Sub-Woofer is OK and sounds decent. It's also a lot less expensive than 5.1.
Oh yeah...one of my computers will be attached to this new entertainment center configuration. Only this one will be connected using the VGA pass-through. All of these boxes can superimpose a Picture-in-picture of what's on the TV, which is great. And all of these boxes can be bypassed so that I can use my monitor as it was designed.
Cliff, thanks for giving this article the thumbs-up. Everyone else, thanks for your suggestions and your input.
They WILL be at CES. Have at 'em. Don't rant and rave at them, just point out their errors in a kind and gentle but stern tone.
http://www.pinkdot.com/
Kosmo's problem was that it tried to do its service nationwide. Stuff like this needs to be done locally.
The Kosmo story is well-chronicled in this movie, e-Dreams.
Shit, I'd say that takes the cake for WORST TECHNOLOGY OF 2003, no questions asked! Chip my dog, my cat, my guinea pigs, that's cool. Call me superstitious, but chipping human beings is too close to the "Mark of the Beast" for my comfort. [shudder]
Pain in the @$$. You have to hold down the F1 key and flick the power switch *at the same time* to get into their poor excuse for a "BIOS," Easy-Setup. Almost as hard to do as the 4-key combos to zap the PRAM or boot off an external device other than a CD-ROM on a Mac.
Easy-Setup is precisely what it sounds like: an interface for the brain dead that doesn't allow access to anything useful. It has diagnostics but they don't really work. Basically, to do any real setup of a ThinkPad, you have to use either the Windows program "ThinkPad Setup" or PS2.EXE, which is a DOS proggie for which you must have booted into DOS to use. Opening up a command line in Windows won't work. I think the latter is a leftover from the bad old days of MicroChannel. The Linux program tpctl can do some things that you can do in either ThinkPad Setup or PS2.EXE, but not everything.
That said, ThinkPads are still the best x86 Linux laptops. I guess that says less about the Linux friendliness of ThinkPads and more about the braindamaged design of other x86 laptops.The only thing that does Linux better on laptops are New World Macintosh laptops which have Open Firmware and can boot into Linux directly without even a nod or a wink to MacOS. It's interesting to see a lot of PowerBooks and iBooks being used by the really serious Linux developers...this is no accident. The advantages of a completely open standard booting system seem to outweigh the quirkiness that's still present in the PowerPC architecture.
BS. It's shilling. And I'm a Mac fan, been one since 1984 (although it took me until 1995 to get one of my own) and I'd gladly shill for them myself if Apple would pay me to do so. I'm sure Trent Reznor has a shiny new G5 in his studio now, gratis. I wouldn't mind one myself. (Mr. Jobs, are you listening?)
I'm sure that Microsoft slips David Byrne a new copy of Office every time they update. Although it would be poetic justice if Byrne suddenly started using OpenOffice.Org Impress instead...not bloody likely, however.
Dammit, why didn't someone unearth that clip during the recent Recall election here in California??? Looking at Ah-nold with that utterly crazed, depraved look in his eyes...man, that was scary!
California is going to need more than vitamin drink to perk up after the Governator is done with it, alas.
Still...they just don't have the Kawaii factor of the Cobalt cube. I want one but I can't spare the money, dammit.
Trent Reznor is squarely in the Mac camp. Here's a few URLs:n t/ o r/
http://www.apple.com/hotnews/articles/2000/06/tre
http://www.macminute.com/2002/01/31/01311710
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/09/17/rezn
There's plenty of good hardware to be had from places like Newegg, Directron and Computer Geeks. Just to name a few. Get yourself an ASUS motherboard, RAM from Crucial or from a reputable manufacturer like Kingston ValueRAM or Viking or Mushkin or Corsair, get a video card from a good manufacturer, and you have a nice solid machine that can handle anything.
Bugs in the NT Kernel? Why am I not surprised? ~_^
I'd be more likely to blame the crappy courseware than Zone Alarm. Stupid freakin' Active X and it's lack of sandboxing... unfortunately we're stuck with it.
Mostly it crashed while trying to either Print or utilize the local area network.
One way to get ANY operating system running on x86 architecture to hard-lock is to introduce a conflict in networking.
Networking runs in Ring Zero regardless of what operating system you are running. I got Windows 2K to do the Windows 2K equivalent of a kernel panic when Zone Alarm and an ill-tempered piece of courseware I have to use in College that uses Active X and IE did battle. I had to pull the AC adapter and the battery to ungracefully shut down.
If that's too much of a monster for you, try this. This is the Kensington Astro Pack. It has a very roomy padded compartment for your laptop. It was designed for the original "Clamshell" iBooks, and a 14.1" screen black PowerBook is very comfortable in there. Right now my ThinkPad 600e is very much at home in there, as is its power supply, trivet, external floppy drive, Palm sync cable, a couple of PCMCIA cards and a 25" ethernet cable. I could probably cram a partridge and a pear tree in there too if I pushed hard enough. ^_^ It looks stylish and spiffy and like something from Starfleet General Issue. It certainly does not look like a laptop bag, especially if you do as I do and put a patch over the Kensington logo.
You can't go wrong with either of them. I have both.
Again, mea culpa...I meant 2005.
...2005 release, sorry...
Titan A.E. was done by Fox Animation at their defunct Arizona studio. They located their studio in Arizona to avoid paying animators union wages. The head of Fox Animation was Don Bluth. Titan A.E. basically bankrupted Fox Animation.
Fox recently bought Blue Sky Studios in upstate New York, the creators of the short "Bunny" and the feature "Ice Age." They are now working on "Robots" for early 1995 release.
Iraq has suffered mightily from ecological disaster during the regime of Saddam Hussein and in the wake of the Iran-Iraq War, Gulf War I, and Gulf War II. However, it was once the garden spot of the Middle East, and there is work already underway in restoring ecosystems in the Tigris/Euphrates River Basin.
Yes, there are a lot more pressing needs for the Iraqi people as a whole. But F/OSS is certainly better for them, as a developing nation, than bondage to Microsoft which is no doubt in Bill Gates' plans.
There's an old Union organizing song which has a line that says "we need bread and roses too." Iraq needs all the things people are saying they need in this thread. But they also need access to technology, both for practical and not-so-practical reasons. A developing nation needs bread, but that doesn't mean roses are out of the question until the bread situation is dealt with. We could do worse than to encourage F/OSS in Iraq. Certainly the Bush Administration, Halliburton and their buddies at Microsoft are hard at work encouraging other things to base Iraq's computer infrastructure on.
It will run on just about anything that has 3D acceleration. It's oodles of fun. And it can be had for $10 in the bargain bin at CompUSA.
Not really, Debian has you covered. Native Linux, probably ready to go.
Just pop onto eBay and they are all over the place at about $60 for one that can be used on any network. The phone was released officially only in Europe but it works like a charm here in the US. I'm using mine on T-Mobile, which is the geekiest Mobile Phone company on the planet. All You Can Eat 802.11b HotSpot usage (Borders, Starbucks) or AYCE GPRS connectivity only costs $20 more a month.
.WAV ringtones, no built-in camera, a couple of games (a Pong and a Quix clone) and a few black-and-white background images. It's also a bit on the bulky side compared to modern phones. However, it's light, it's cheap, it does Bluetooth, and it is compatible with just about all of the Ericsson gadgets, including the camera if you must. I have a serial cable and chatboard keyboard I got from eBay and I can grab a FM tuner/headset (wired) anytime I want, should I want one.
This is a no-BS phone. No color screen, no polyphonic or
The battery lasts and lasts and lasts. Even the skinny one you get with the phone. And I have a second battery (also an eBay find) that I got for $3 that has even more standby/talk time. Yes, it's an Ericsson OEM battery.
I love my r520m and I actually will probably get a spare in case this one breaks.
Windows 2000 is usually better than XP on machines like these. I run Win2K as part of a dual-boot with Linux on my ThinkPad 600E (PII 400MHz 224MB RAM) and it is as comfortable as a broken-in pair of jeans. This includes Avast Antivirus, ZoneAlarm and the Palm Sync Link.
2000 is what the 600E was designed for. It shows in how well it performs. I'm sure if you killed a lot of eye candy XP would be just as nice, but I'm lazy.
Linux also runs beautifully on this machine...this was the one and only machine IBM was going to get certified for Red Hat Linux. It's running Knoppix/Debian and very happy.
OK, we're talking about degrees here. True, no Windows system can truly be called a secure, hardened system like a good hardened *BSD box. But you can have something that isn't going to fall over at the slightest push from someone with their CD of "leet hax0r toolz" they bought from Ye Olde Grey Market Software Booth at the Computer Fair.