I have 4 computers located a few feet from my bed which are on 24/7, and though still noisy, it just doesnt botther me, I guest Ive just dont have that great hearing that others have:(.
Sometimes my neighbour (I live in a terrace) plays music when I want to sleep. I'm not talking about music loud enough to be considered noise pollution -- I can just barely hear a murmur, but it stops me sleeping because I strain to try and work out what tune he's playing. I put a desk fan on at its lowest setting, and that drowns it out beautifully. The fan noise is quite soothing -- like the gentle lapping of sea water:)
OTOH there are other reasons to quieten PCs. I don't, for example, want fan noise in my front room when I want to listen to music or watch DVDs.
They have a Java applet interface that is nowhere near as clunky as it ought to be. It lets you scroll and zoom interactively, loading detail on the fly.
The same technology is licensed by the RAC, whos version covers more of Eastern Europe. For giggles, I asked it for a route from Birmingham (UK) to Minsk (Byelorussia) avoiding motorways, and it worked a treat, even finding appropriate ferry routes.
Yup. Especially in embedded scenarios. Cuz what use would my linux based DSL router be without ls? or my dad's linux based PVR without bash?
TiVo definitely has bash installed, and I'm willing to bet that at least some of its functionality relies on shell scripts. Once you're in the world of shell scripting, it's hard to avoid calling GNU textutils and fileutils.
If Richard Stallman's insistence on using the term "GNU/Linux" is really one of principle and not an attempt at grabbing some limelight away from a wildly successful software project that he didn't mastermind, why doesn't he insist we call bash "GNU/bash" or ls "GNU/ls?"
Well, it is called "GNU Bash" and "GNU ls". On some of my AIX systems I have a/usr/bin/date and a/usr/bin/gnudate, because GNU date does more than AIX's date.
But saying "GNU date" is different from saying "GNU/Linux", and here you're making a similar mistake to what the article does when it says "Stallman insists Torvalds' work should properly be called GNU/Linux".
This isn't true at all. "Torvalds' work" is the Linux kernel, and even RMS agrees that this piece of work is called "Linux".... but a kernel is useless on its own, and a typical Linux distribution will bundle the kernel with a whole raft of GNU products - and most of them won't boot without bash, sed, grep, and so on. So "GNU/Linux" does not mean "Linux: a GNU product", it means "Linux and GNU together".
A more valid anti-"GNU/Linux" argument is that if you follow things to their logical conclusion, the system ends up being called "GNU/MIT/Apache/XFree/Perl/.../Linux".... but I think there's a case for saying that the body of GNU software is more fundamental to the functionality of Linux as a platform than, say, Apache (just an application) or even X (which many uses of Linux can do without).
I think the proof of the pudding is that if you build all the GNU tools on a different OS (as, say, Cygwin has on Windows: hey -- GNU/Windows!) you get something that looks and feels for all the world like what most people think of as Linux (if you avoid stuff that's in the kernel's domain). If you deny yourself any GNU tools and try and build a Linux distribution from elsewhere, you'll find yourself with something unrecognisable, and not nearly as useful.
NB: I'd be interested to know whether anyone has built a GNU-free Linux distro, maybe using BSD's tools. I'd also be interested in examples of Linux-like distributions build on non-Linux kernels. The best example I can think of right now is Debian Hurd.
On the other side of the map, in a sick irony, there's my father (lost to Windows because of its apparent cheapness). I swear, it seems like he never uses his left mouse button. He just found the right-button one day and now he has no grasp of what the term "default action" means. I'm always like, "Open that!" And he's like, "Ok, Hmmm, let's see, Open, Edit, Play, Add to Archive, Scan for Viruses, Send to:, Delete, Cut, Paste, Properties..."
In Windows this is probably a good idea.
Certainly if you want to copy or move files between file windows, a right-drag is safer than a left-drag, because whether the default action is "cp" or "mv" depends on whether or not both windows are on the same filesystem. Yes, you can reason about what left-drag is going to do, but if you right drag, you can choose between "copy" and "move", and you get visual reinforcement of what's about to happen.
OK, the sofa is dumb, but there is at least one situation where a home appliance would benefit from a way to identify the individual who's controlling it, with as little interaction as possible.
TiVo makes recommendations based on the shows you tell it you like and the shows you tell it you hate, but if there's more than one person feeding it preferences, it has imperfect data and gives poorer suggestions than it otherwise could. The idea of user profiles is so common that TiVo's own suggestions message board puts it in its "please don't suggest this again: we know" list.
I'm guessing that one of the reasons it's not implemented is that TiVo care about UI, and it pretty tricky to design an ID switch UI that's both simple, reliable and convenient enough that it will always get used.
I can promise you that if there was a "switch user" option in the top level menu, my SO would never bother using it. Even if there were four "I am user n buttons on the remote, she'd probably not bother.
If the remote knew who was holding it (hmm, by analysing the grip? the palmprint?) there would be NO login stage, and it could work. The sofa kind of approaches this way of doing things... but is impractical -- I wouldn't want my PVR saying "Error, please sit on sofa before setting preferences".
I read a print review of the MediaMaster T a few months back, so I might be able to fill in a few blanks. This is all from memory, so don't take it as gospel.
The T model receives Digital Terrestrial broadcasts, rather than Digital Satellite broadcasts, but the technology is not much different, so most of what applies to the T will apply to the S.
Unlike a TiVo, the MM does not compress video: it simply dumps the MPEG stream that's being broadcast onto disk.
Pro: no loss of quality
Con: you don't get to choose your own quality/capacity tradeoff
Pro: in the UK at least, there are digital "TV" channels that are audio-only. TiVo wastes space recording the screen the STB displays in lieu of video. The MM can store hundreds of hours worth of audio.
I think the MM has two recievers built in, so you can watch one digital channel while recording another. I'm not sure you can record two at once, or pause one channel while recording another.
There are no suggestions or automatic recordings you didn't explicitly ask for. Nor are there any subscriptions to pay: it gets the EPG from the DTV service (a problem in the UK, because since OnDigital went bust, the EPG doesn't go all that far into the future, nor is there a great deal of detail in the program summaries.
Not much else to say: the review was positive, no complaints about build quality or UI.
An associate was saying this is basically a rebadged tivo...and if it's not tivo hardware, they are licensing TiVos technology.
AFAIK there is no such thing as TiVo hardware: their business model is to license the software. I don't own a TiVo: I own a "Thompson Scenium", although the TiVo brand is all over the UI, so everyone will always refer to it as TiVo.
Most "Series 1" standalone TiVos can be used manually without a subscription....
Hacking has nothing to do with this aspect of TiVo.
Not that by "used manually" stevel means you can program the tivo like a VCR: give it a start time, and end time and a channel number. Without the subscription, you cannot select a programme from the EPG, because it's the EPG you're paying for.
I daresay there are hacks to get EPGs from elsewhere, but the mainsteam TiVo hack sites don't discuss such matters, because TiVo have been very cooperative with the mod community, and people want to keep it that way.
Every mp3 player I've ever seen uses either a CD-ROM, hard drive, or ROM. With an O.
Are you trolling? ROM means "Read Only Memory". How then am I writing MP3s onto the CF my MP3 player uses? How does the Yepp manage to record radio onto read-only memory?
What I believe the issue to be, based off of observations, is that there's some nasty verbiage involved with the patent licensing for MPEG that precludes the release of the info or pressure from someone like the MPAA.
I think you could be right, but I also suspect that whoever (in VIA) is making this an issue is confused.
they may be confusing MPEG with CSS
I may be way off here, but isn't the whole point of the decoder that the driver software doesn't need to know anything about MPEG? The driver allows you to chuck an MPEG stream into the chip, and pull out uncompressed video the other end. The chip is a black box, and all the patented stuff happens within. Right?
With the ever-increasing clock speed of our CPUs, what is the point of having a hardware MPEG decoder?
Some of these VIA processors run cool enough that you can build fanless machines around them. That's a big deal because I for one don't want my video watching disturbed by fans. The cool ones are the slow ones.
Does anyone know if hardware MPEG encoders are supported on Linux?
If you have to reverse-engineer a driver, what the fuck good is it?
Hmm, and someone mods this "+1 Funny" because you said "fuck". Ouch my sides.
Anyhow, VIA released binary-only drivers which work, but which are problematic if you don't happen to be running the exact same kernel as they've targetted (which pretty much means you have to pick from the short list of distributions they support).
So the binary only drivers were of some use, but by reverse engineering them and creating an open-source driver, this guy's made something that's more generally useful.
I believe that VIA, or some people in VIA, are keen to be helpful to the Open Source crowd, but I'm guessing they have problems with corporate lawyers, managers who miss the point, etc. I'm also guessing that someone somewhere is confused between MPEG decoding ("it allows you to watch DVDs") and DeCSS ("it allows you to watch DVDs"), so things are being held up by that.
Re:Why go back to the CLI
on
GTK+ TTY Port
·
· Score: 1
Why, except for a pathetic fetish for obsolete technology, would you want to use a text-based interface to your X-Server?
Perhaps for bandwidth preservation? Of course, then why use text-GUI if you've got CLI?
Here's a scenario: you've been asked to develop a new stock management system for a retail chain. They have TTYs in their warehouses left over from previous systems, they have Windows boxes on their execs desks and in stores, and they're interested in saving money by deploying Linux boxes in the stores instead.
Now you can develop *one* GTK app, and deploy it everywhere, cheap. I think that's pretty neat.
Once known as the country that taxes everything, the UK will now be known as the country that fines everything.
We already fine speeding and dangerous driving.
I have absolutely no problem with catching and fining speeding drivers, and drivers who break the law in other ways. Even if it's me.
I'm astounded at the number of people responding to this with horror, their logic basically being "how dare they catch me".
I do worry about what else the data collected by this system could be used for, and I wouldn't support such a scheme until I'd seen safeguards that would prevent abuse of it.
Why should we be using police officers to enforce traffic laws when technology can do it better? Would not a better use of their time and training be preventing violent crime? Traffic enforcement is so randomly enforced now that many feel they can get away with it. If this can reduce traffic fatalities and put more police back in the communities to prevent serious violent crime, then I am all for it.
As with most such schemes, the privacy "nuts" worry not about the intended use of the system, but of creeping introduction of other uses for the data collected.
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the rest is just used to heat up the engine and exhaust. ... and planet...
I have 4 computers located a few feet from my bed which are on 24/7, and though still noisy, it just doesnt botther me, I guest Ive just dont have that great hearing that others have :(.
:)
Sometimes my neighbour (I live in a terrace) plays music when I want to sleep. I'm not talking about music loud enough to be considered noise pollution -- I can just barely hear a murmur, but it stops me sleeping because I strain to try and work out what tune he's playing. I put a desk fan on at its lowest setting, and that drowns it out beautifully. The fan noise is quite soothing -- like the gentle lapping of sea water
OTOH there are other reasons to quieten PCs. I don't, for example, want fan noise in my front room when I want to listen to music or watch DVDs.
For Europe, I'm quite a big fan of Map24.
They have a Java applet interface that is nowhere near as clunky as it ought to be. It lets you scroll and zoom interactively, loading detail on the fly.
The same technology is licensed by the RAC, whos version covers more of Eastern Europe. For giggles, I asked it for a route from Birmingham (UK) to Minsk (Byelorussia) avoiding motorways, and it worked a treat, even finding appropriate ferry routes.
Yup. Especially in embedded scenarios. Cuz what use would my linux based DSL router be without ls? or my dad's linux based PVR without bash?
TiVo definitely has bash installed, and I'm willing to bet that at least some of its functionality relies on shell scripts. Once you're in the world of shell scripting, it's hard to avoid calling GNU textutils and fileutils.
Your DSL router, I don't know.
If Richard Stallman's insistence on using the term "GNU/Linux" is really one of principle and not an attempt at grabbing some limelight away from a wildly successful software project that he didn't mastermind, why doesn't he insist we call bash "GNU/bash" or ls "GNU/ls?"
/usr/bin/date and a /usr/bin/gnudate, because GNU date does more than AIX's date.
... but a kernel is useless on its own, and a typical Linux distribution will bundle the kernel with a whole raft of GNU products - and most of them won't boot without bash, sed, grep, and so on. So "GNU/Linux" does not mean "Linux: a GNU product", it means "Linux and GNU together".
... but I think there's a case for saying that the body of GNU software is more fundamental to the functionality of Linux as a platform than, say, Apache (just an application) or even X (which many uses of Linux can do without).
Well, it is called "GNU Bash" and "GNU ls". On some of my AIX systems I have a
But saying "GNU date" is different from saying "GNU/Linux", and here you're making a similar mistake to what the article does when it says "Stallman insists Torvalds' work should properly be called GNU/Linux".
This isn't true at all. "Torvalds' work" is the Linux kernel, and even RMS agrees that this piece of work is called "Linux".
A more valid anti-"GNU/Linux" argument is that if you follow things to their logical conclusion, the system ends up being called "GNU/MIT/Apache/XFree/Perl/.../Linux".
I think the proof of the pudding is that if you build all the GNU tools on a different OS (as, say, Cygwin has on Windows: hey -- GNU/Windows!) you get something that looks and feels for all the world like what most people think of as Linux (if you avoid stuff that's in the kernel's domain). If you deny yourself any GNU tools and try and build a Linux distribution from elsewhere, you'll find yourself with something unrecognisable, and not nearly as useful.
NB: I'd be interested to know whether anyone has built a GNU-free Linux distro, maybe using BSD's tools. I'd also be interested in examples of Linux-like distributions build on non-Linux kernels. The best example I can think of right now is Debian Hurd.
Ugh, should have done a preview. Let's try that again:
... both are the same data, but the switch in analogue data takes place at a slightly different time.
1001<pause>0010 10111000
10010010 1011<pause>1000
Lowenbrau? "Dark Beer"? Surely some mistake.
It's not exactly Guinness. It's probably lighter than a decent pale ale.
I know you were only joking, but seriously it bothers me that in this day and age we still need a defrag command.
There have been "grown up" filesystems on UNIX and Linux for years -- I believe even extfs managed defragmentation on the fly.
That NTFS on Windows still just leaves fragmented files lying around until you manually ask a program to fix them is frankly outrageous.
I mean, has it ever actually happened that somebody says "Gosh, my 2Ghz fileserver with fast ethernet and half-a-gig of RAM serves files too slowly?"
I mostly agree -- there are niche situations where things slow down, but even then, it's easy these days to throw more hardware at the problem.
What's more important to my mind, is ease of administration, so it's nice to see a link to an older story on that page "Samba simplifies admin".
Pong is/was an analogue game. As such there is no ROM image for pong. To emulate it you would need to simulate the analogue circuit.
I'm not aware that anyone as done that: it's probably easier to just implement a clone.
On the other side of the map, in a sick irony, there's my father (lost to Windows because of its apparent cheapness). I swear, it seems like he never uses his left mouse button. He just found the right-button one day and now he has no grasp of what the term "default action" means. I'm always like, "Open that!" And he's like, "Ok, Hmmm, let's see, Open, Edit, Play, Add to Archive, Scan for Viruses, Send to:, Delete, Cut, Paste, Properties..."
In Windows this is probably a good idea.
Certainly if you want to copy or move files between file windows, a right-drag is safer than a left-drag, because whether the default action is "cp" or "mv" depends on whether or not both windows are on the same filesystem. Yes, you can reason about what left-drag is going to do, but if you right drag, you can choose between "copy" and "move", and you get visual reinforcement of what's about to happen.
(Yes I am a TiVo bore)
OK, the sofa is dumb, but there is at least one situation where a home appliance would benefit from a way to identify the individual who's controlling it, with as little interaction as possible.
TiVo makes recommendations based on the shows you tell it you like and the shows you tell it you hate, but if there's more than one person feeding it preferences, it has imperfect data and gives poorer suggestions than it otherwise could. The idea of user profiles is so common that TiVo's own suggestions message board puts it in its "please don't suggest this again: we know" list.
I'm guessing that one of the reasons it's not implemented is that TiVo care about UI, and it pretty tricky to design an ID switch UI that's both simple, reliable and convenient enough that it will always get used.
I can promise you that if there was a "switch user" option in the top level menu, my SO would never bother using it. Even if there were four "I am user n buttons on the remote, she'd probably not bother.
If the remote knew who was holding it (hmm, by analysing the grip? the palmprint?) there would be NO login stage, and it could work. The sofa kind of approaches this way of doing things... but is impractical -- I wouldn't want my PVR saying "Error, please sit on sofa before setting preferences".
I read a print review of the MediaMaster T a few months back, so I might be able to fill in a few blanks. This is all from memory, so don't take it as gospel.
The T model receives Digital Terrestrial broadcasts, rather than Digital Satellite broadcasts, but the technology is not much different, so most of what applies to the T will apply to the S.
Unlike a TiVo, the MM does not compress video: it simply dumps the MPEG stream that's being broadcast onto disk.
Pro: no loss of quality
Con: you don't get to choose your own quality/capacity tradeoff
Pro: in the UK at least, there are digital "TV" channels that are audio-only. TiVo wastes space recording the screen the STB displays in lieu of video. The MM can store hundreds of hours worth of audio.
I think the MM has two recievers built in, so you can watch one digital channel while recording another. I'm not sure you can record two at once, or pause one channel while recording another.
There are no suggestions or automatic recordings you didn't explicitly ask for. Nor are there any subscriptions to pay: it gets the EPG from the DTV service (a problem in the UK, because since OnDigital went bust, the EPG doesn't go all that far into the future, nor is there a great deal of detail in the program summaries.
Not much else to say: the review was positive, no complaints about build quality or UI.
Milo Manara illustrating "Desire"?
Buy stocks in Kleenex!
An associate was saying this is basically a rebadged tivo...and if it's not tivo hardware, they are licensing TiVos technology.
AFAIK there is no such thing as TiVo hardware: their business model is to license the software. I don't own a TiVo: I own a "Thompson Scenium", although the TiVo brand is all over the UI, so everyone will always refer to it as TiVo.
Most "Series 1" standalone TiVos can be used manually without a subscription. ...
Hacking has nothing to do with this aspect of TiVo.
Not that by "used manually" stevel means you can program the tivo like a VCR: give it a start time, and end time and a channel number. Without the subscription, you cannot select a programme from the EPG, because it's the EPG you're paying for.
I daresay there are hacks to get EPGs from elsewhere, but the mainsteam TiVo hack sites don't discuss such matters, because TiVo have been very cooperative with the mod community, and people want to keep it that way.
Every mp3 player I've ever seen uses either a CD-ROM, hard drive, or ROM. With an O.
Are you trolling? ROM means "Read Only Memory". How then am I writing MP3s onto the CF my MP3 player uses? How does the Yepp manage to record radio onto read-only memory?
It's RAM. Non-volatile RAM, but RAM nonetheless.
Flash is random access memory. RAM is a contrast to sequential access memory, like a hard drive, which is something Flash obviously is not.
Erm, a hard drive is blatantly random access too. A tape is sequential access.
But I agree, the OP was ranting for no good reason.
It seems such a shame not to include a timer for recording from the radio. Surely that's a cheap thing to add.
I think you could be right, but I also suspect that whoever (in VIA) is making this an issue is confused.
With the ever-increasing clock speed of our CPUs, what is the point of having a hardware MPEG decoder?
Some of these VIA processors run cool enough that you can build fanless machines around them. That's a big deal because I for one don't want my video watching disturbed by fans. The cool ones are the slow ones.
Does anyone know if hardware MPEG encoders are supported on Linux?
Yes, Google is your friend.
If you have to reverse-engineer a driver, what the fuck good is it?
Hmm, and someone mods this "+1 Funny" because you said "fuck". Ouch my sides.
Anyhow, VIA released binary-only drivers which work, but which are problematic if you don't happen to be running the exact same kernel as they've targetted (which pretty much means you have to pick from the short list of distributions they support).
So the binary only drivers were of some use, but by reverse engineering them and creating an open-source driver, this guy's made something that's more generally useful.
I believe that VIA, or some people in VIA, are keen to be helpful to the Open Source crowd, but I'm guessing they have problems with corporate lawyers, managers who miss the point, etc. I'm also guessing that someone somewhere is confused between MPEG decoding ("it allows you to watch DVDs") and DeCSS ("it allows you to watch DVDs"), so things are being held up by that.
Why, except for a pathetic fetish for obsolete technology, would you want to use a text-based interface to your X-Server?
Perhaps for bandwidth preservation? Of course, then why use text-GUI if you've got CLI?
Here's a scenario: you've been asked to develop a new stock management system for a retail chain. They have TTYs in their warehouses left over from previous systems, they have Windows boxes on their execs desks and in stores, and they're interested in saving money by deploying Linux boxes in the stores instead.
Now you can develop *one* GTK app, and deploy it everywhere, cheap. I think that's pretty neat.
Once known as the country that taxes everything, the UK will now be known as the country that fines everything.
We already fine speeding and dangerous driving.
I have absolutely no problem with catching and fining speeding drivers, and drivers who break the law in other ways. Even if it's me.
I'm astounded at the number of people responding to this with horror, their logic basically being "how dare they catch me".
I do worry about what else the data collected by this system could be used for, and I wouldn't support such a scheme until I'd seen safeguards that would prevent abuse of it.
Why should we be using police officers to enforce traffic laws when technology can do it better? Would not a better use of their time and training be preventing violent crime? Traffic enforcement is so randomly enforced now that many feel they can get away with it. If this can reduce traffic fatalities and put more police back in the communities to prevent serious violent crime, then I am all for it.
As with most such schemes, the privacy "nuts" worry not about the intended use of the system, but of creeping introduction of other uses for the data collected.