Oh yay. I can't wait for the day when my PVR channel guide is kept up to date by the same sort of company that prints documentation on a photocopier and deliberately omits their company name, contact info, and even product model number so you can't actually go to them for support. Excellent.
I've worked at a PVR company on channel guide functionality, and it's not easy. The amount of data for every single show broadcast on every head end in the US is actually fairly large, and obviously it gets updated a lot. I don't think that an open source approach to maintaining a feed of channel guide data will work until / unless PVRs get a LOT more market penetration. (The data becomes obsolete very quickly, and has to be constantly refreshed, unlike software that you just keep building on.) That's why, for the next few years, somebody is going to have to get paid to provide the channel guide info. That might be your cable or satellite provider, though. A good way to get free channel guide info might be to hack your cable or satellite box, or maybe to just create a gadget that reads it right off the cable TV signal.
Re:Yes, but measuring webserver market share is ha
on
2003: Year of Apache
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Wow, Apache lets you add functionality through plug-ins that use a standard API? That's amazing! Just about every other web server has that too, but they don't make you run a bunch of command line config crap and recompile like Apache does, so it's not as k3wl. Recompiling is fun and definitely better than using some stupid installer that gets the configuration right the first time.
What other features can we gush about? Oh my god, it serves HTTP too? That's awesome! Can it talk to the filesystem and actually keep a log of the HTTP accesses, though? That would be really amazing.
>you mean you can't encode files in Apple's AAC format or whatever it is that the iPod plays? You can only get files in that format from the iTunes store?
No, and you could have found this out very easily...
Google search for: itunes encode aac The first hit is http://www.apple.com/itunes/encode.html which says: "Unlike some applications that limit the number of songs you can import in the MP3 format, iTunes lets you import as many songs as you want in either AAC or MP3 formats."
Here is yet another example of Microsoft NOT being an invincible force in any market they damn well please. Kinda like UltimateTV, MSN Messenger (heck, MSN itself), Xbox, etc. Unless they're giving it away for free with a Windows purchase, don't assume Microsoft offering will just magically take over a market.
>The only reason people use oracle anymore is that they don't have the balls to use the open source solutions where they are using oracle.
Or, because the current crop of open source DBs, pretty code notwithstanding, are demonstrably inferior in high-end scenarios to expensive closed-source products such as Oracle, DB2, and SQL Server.
Oh wait, I forgot, open source magically confers technical superiority over mature closed-source products that incorporate tens/hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of engineering investment and refinement. Never mind that bit about real world results.
>"Why should I care what an actor says about anything other than acting? "
Why should anyone care what a computer geek has to say about movies? Obviously you're not an Officially Certified Movie Critic with a PhD in literary criticism so you can't possibly have a valid opinion or have anything interesting to say.
>Explain to me again why I should bother working with a language that doesn't even have pointers?
Because it will take less time to write correct programs without them.
I suppose you'd NEVER EVER think about using Perl or JavaScript or Lisp any number of other high level languages that let you live in reference land because you absolutely positively can't write a single program for any purpose under any circumstances without needing pointers.
Right?
Also, bear in mind that if your program is correct but slow, you can optimize it. If it doesn't work, who cares how fast it is?
Different languages are good for solving different problems. Ruling out the possibility of a problem set that you're not familiar with just shows your arrogance.
>Apple's response was that it doesn't happen in Panther, so just upgrade.
Those BASTARDS! How can you get any work done in Jaguar without this critical feature. I just can't believe that somebody inside Apple decided not to backport this.
*cough*
Jesus Christ.
Please also keep us posted on the progress of the bug whereby a 20" iMac cooled to nearly absolute zero incorrectly reports a temperature value of MAXINT. That one's really slowing me down at work and if they don't fix it soon I'm gonna have no choice but to switch back to Windows.
>The movie studios should NOT make the same mistakes that the music industry did. >They should start offering legitimate good quality legal downloads NOW, before too >many people start thinking about movies the way they do mp3s.
http://www.movielink.com/
Of course, it's DRMified so that you can't do nearly as much as you could with, say, a DVD.
BTW, re: "instant gratification", actually I think that may be more important for movies than for audio. How would you like it if it took 45 minutes to change the channel on your TV set? OTOH, as a PVR owner and NetFlix subscriber, I'm used to the idea of deciding what I'll want to watch well ahead of time, and then choosing from whatever happens to be available when I'm in the mood to watch something.
At some point in the near future when consoles or PVRs with broadband connectivity are actually linked to a movie download service, maybe this stuff will take off. But I have my doubts... after all, DirecTiVo already records high quality movies from satellite, so why would it be that much better to replace the dish with a cable modem? At least with a PVR you can record it to VHS or copy it to a PC on a home LAN for long term storage. With a DRM-heavy setup like MovieLink, after 30 days you can't watch it anymore without paying again.
Whatever. The important part is that movie studios are trying SOMETHING, and if it fails, they'll have usage data and customer feedback to analyze instead of just hot air. It wouldn't be too hard for them to change their prices, extend the viewing window, etc. if that's all it takes to get people to subscribe.
Some popular musicians are already doing this. I can't remember who for sure but I know that there were some early CD-ROM multimedia projects that were basically remixable versions of successful pop songs. They flopped, but maybe they were before their time. Quicktime Player allows you to enable/disable tracks; Flash could be used for something similar. I can't think of a 100% free way to do this right now, though. (Media + interactivity + hackability?)
>Doesn't help much when I'm forced to use a university workstation
Yeah but in that case it's not your problem if the machine gets 0wn3d while you're using it. If they want to run IE and have it get hosed repeatedly, that's their problem.
This assumes, of course, that you're treating the lab machine as an untrusted computer, since any number of the following could be true: - it hasn't been patched ever - some smartass installed a keylogger - some dumbass already got 0wn3d and the exploit is watching what you're doing - there's a proxy run by the university that's recording what you're doing - there's a power-hungry admin with not enough to do who's watching what you're doing - there's someone else in the lab looking over your shoulder watching what you're doing - the next user is going to look at the local cookies and cache right after you're done to see what they can grab
OS X is not the most secure OS out there, but it is arguably the most secure OS that is also a reasonable alternative for an average user.
Yes, if someone breaks into my house and puts a rogue DHCP server on my home network they could 0wn my PowerBook, but that's much less scary than any given IE sploit-du-jour.
If you want to try and get people onto OpenBSD or whatever you believe to the THE most secure OS out there, more power to you, seriously. But when they can't load a funny Flash movie URL or whatever, have fun supporting them.
>I'll be perfectly honest that I support "pirating" music (though I've never done it) >because *anything* that makes big record studios lose money is GOOD.
Really? Tyler Durden has some ideas for you.
>EVERY SINGLE THING a record studio does can be done more efficiently with >commodity hardware, software, and communications.
Anybody who has ever recorded music on a PC knows differently. Consumer / hobbyist grade != professional grade. The junk that comes bundled with a PC is suitable for demos and teenage garage bands only. Even for a home studio built around a PC, it's normal to buy all sorts of equipment to replace or augment the commodity crap that's built into the PC. Nobody would just take the little bitty condenser mic and plug it into their sound card and expect that to sound good. That's why stuff like the AudioBuddy exists.
There's a reason that musicians record through really expensive microphones in sound isolation booths into expensive consoles manned by highly trained recording engineers. It ain't tradition.
CDs sell in vastly higher quantity than DVDs. See this article - in the second table it shows that in 2001, 906 million CDs shipped, compared with 7.9 million DVDs.
As for per-work shipments (how many copies of a given CD vs. how many copies of a given DVD), that's harder to find. Anybody got a good source of data on this?
Did you know that you can type URLs directly into the location bar of your web browser? Also, friends can email you URLs, and you can click on them to go to pages directly. It's not like TV, where you can only tune to channels that your cable provider offers, or a newspaper, where you have to buy a whole new viewing device every time you want someone else's content. Google isn't a channel guide.
Unless you're using some kind of kiosk-mode browser or "decency" filter, you can read whatever you want. Google can't make a hyperlink from page A to page B suddenly go to page C.
AutoCAD is another good example, as is (arguably) emacs/vi. There's a difference between good usability for a novice, and good usability for experts. Remember that usability is usually measured in terms of how long it takes a user to accomplish a task - if that user has been trained in an application's UI and understands the underlying domain model that the UI is representing to them, that can still be a good UI even when grandma can't figure the dangblasted thing out. If you spend all day every day at work in the same application, losing 60% of your screen real estate to GUI widgets that let you modify a tiny postage stamp-sized pane of actual content is not acceptable. Clearly there are also UIs that just plain suck, or are different just because the developer felt like being a unique and special individual, but don't lump those together with the UIs that deliberately make experts happy at the expense of newbie usability.
I've worked in an open environment like that at several companies and it worked pretty well. But, a couple of things were required to make it tolerable: 1) Salespeople or other "yell into the phone all day" types have to be located far away from developers. Same with people who leave their desks all day and yet have a phone that rings off the hook... or who leave their cell phones set on Kill volume but always leave them at their desks... or people who like to listen to their voice mail at full blast. Put those people in a smelly little mildewy office in the basement until they can play nice with others. 2) There need to be places (we had teeny 1-2 person meeting rooms called "phone booths) where you can have a private phone call or conversation without leaving the office. 3) There need to be normal meeting rooms that people can go into to do presentations, demos, have arguments, draw on whiteboards, etc.
The usual objection to such an environment is "I need an office so I can think - I can't do work with all that talking going on." Actually this is usually incorrect. As long as you're working on the same project as the people around you, the "knowledge accidents" that happen when you can't help but eavesdrop on your co-workers' discussions are very important. You can put on headphones to tune people out when you need mega focus, but you'll inevitably hear that one comment about something that you REALLY want to object to or have input into, and that's precious[ssss].
Slashdot Mirror
Oh yay. I can't wait for the day when my PVR channel guide is kept up to date by the same sort of company that prints documentation on a photocopier and deliberately omits their company name, contact info, and even product model number so you can't actually go to them for support. Excellent.
I've worked at a PVR company on channel guide functionality, and it's not easy. The amount of data for every single show broadcast on every head end in the US is actually fairly large, and obviously it gets updated a lot. I don't think that an open source approach to maintaining a feed of channel guide data will work until / unless PVRs get a LOT more market penetration. (The data becomes obsolete very quickly, and has to be constantly refreshed, unlike software that you just keep building on.) That's why, for the next few years, somebody is going to have to get paid to provide the channel guide info. That might be your cable or satellite provider, though. A good way to get free channel guide info might be to hack your cable or satellite box, or maybe to just create a gadget that reads it right off the cable TV signal.
Wow, Apache lets you add functionality through plug-ins that use a standard API? That's amazing! Just about every other web server has that too, but they don't make you run a bunch of command line config crap and recompile like Apache does, so it's not as k3wl. Recompiling is fun and definitely better than using some stupid installer that gets the configuration right the first time.
What other features can we gush about? Oh my god, it serves HTTP too? That's awesome! Can it talk to the filesystem and actually keep a log of the HTTP accesses, though? That would be really amazing.
>you mean you can't encode files in Apple's AAC format or whatever it is that the iPod plays? You can only get files in that format from the iTunes store?
No, and you could have found this out very easily...
Google search for: itunes encode aac
The first hit is http://www.apple.com/itunes/encode.html which says:
"Unlike some applications that limit the number of songs you can import in the MP3 format, iTunes lets you import as many songs as you want in either AAC or MP3 formats."
Here is yet another example of Microsoft NOT being an invincible force in any market they damn well please. Kinda like UltimateTV, MSN Messenger (heck, MSN itself), Xbox, etc. Unless they're giving it away for free with a Windows purchase, don't assume Microsoft offering will just magically take over a market.
Don't forget about used machines on eBay. You can pick up a reasonably well configured G4 desktop for a few hundred bucks.
Mac IE is also still the "must browse with" selection for a number of sites including MS LiveMeeting (used to be Placeware).
>The only reason people use oracle anymore is that they don't have the balls to use the open source solutions where they are using oracle.
Or, because the current crop of open source DBs, pretty code notwithstanding, are demonstrably inferior in high-end scenarios to expensive closed-source products such as Oracle, DB2, and SQL Server.
Oh wait, I forgot, open source magically confers technical superiority over mature closed-source products that incorporate tens/hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of engineering investment and refinement. Never mind that bit about real world results.
>"Why should I care what an actor says about anything other than acting? "
Why should anyone care what a computer geek has to say about movies? Obviously you're not an Officially Certified Movie Critic with a PhD in literary criticism so you can't possibly have a valid opinion or have anything interesting to say.
I know several attractive and available ladies that regard Office Space as one of their favorite movies.
Maybe you're just dating the wrong people.
You can download hundreds of Java programs? Oh my god! Java has finally conquered the desktop!!
>Explain to me again why I should bother working with a language that doesn't even have pointers?
Because it will take less time to write correct programs without them.
I suppose you'd NEVER EVER think about using Perl or JavaScript or Lisp any number of other high level languages that let you live in reference land because you absolutely positively can't write a single program for any purpose under any circumstances without needing pointers.
Right?
Also, bear in mind that if your program is correct but slow, you can optimize it. If it doesn't work, who cares how fast it is?
Different languages are good for solving different problems. Ruling out the possibility of a problem set that you're not familiar with just shows your arrogance.
>Apple's response was that it doesn't happen in Panther, so just upgrade.
Those BASTARDS! How can you get any work done in Jaguar without this critical feature. I just can't believe that somebody inside Apple decided not to backport this.
*cough*
Jesus Christ.
Please also keep us posted on the progress of the bug whereby a 20" iMac cooled to nearly absolute zero incorrectly reports a temperature value of MAXINT. That one's really slowing me down at work and if they don't fix it soon I'm gonna have no choice but to switch back to Windows.
Now instead of crappy WEP I'll have to buy devices that have better security and are made in China so they'll be cheaper! DAMN IT!
>The movie studios should NOT make the same mistakes that the music industry did.
>They should start offering legitimate good quality legal downloads NOW, before too
>many people start thinking about movies the way they do mp3s.
http://www.movielink.com/
Of course, it's DRMified so that you can't do nearly as much as you could with, say, a DVD.
BTW, re: "instant gratification", actually I think that may be more important for movies than for audio. How would you like it if it took 45 minutes to change the channel on your TV set? OTOH, as a PVR owner and NetFlix subscriber, I'm used to the idea of deciding what I'll want to watch well ahead of time, and then choosing from whatever happens to be available when I'm in the mood to watch something.
At some point in the near future when consoles or PVRs with broadband connectivity are actually linked to a movie download service, maybe this stuff will take off. But I have my doubts... after all, DirecTiVo already records high quality movies from satellite, so why would it be that much better to replace the dish with a cable modem? At least with a PVR you can record it to VHS or copy it to a PC on a home LAN for long term storage. With a DRM-heavy setup like MovieLink, after 30 days you can't watch it anymore without paying again.
Whatever. The important part is that movie studios are trying SOMETHING, and if it fails, they'll have usage data and customer feedback to analyze instead of just hot air. It wouldn't be too hard for them to change their prices, extend the viewing window, etc. if that's all it takes to get people to subscribe.
Some popular musicians are already doing this. I can't remember who for sure but I know that there were some early CD-ROM multimedia projects that were basically remixable versions of successful pop songs. They flopped, but maybe they were before their time. Quicktime Player allows you to enable/disable tracks; Flash could be used for something similar. I can't think of a 100% free way to do this right now, though. (Media + interactivity + hackability?)
>Doesn't help much when I'm forced to use a university workstation
Yeah but in that case it's not your problem if the machine gets 0wn3d while you're using it. If they want to run IE and have it get hosed repeatedly, that's their problem.
This assumes, of course, that you're treating the lab machine as an untrusted computer, since any number of the following could be true:
- it hasn't been patched ever
- some smartass installed a keylogger
- some dumbass already got 0wn3d and the exploit is watching what you're doing
- there's a proxy run by the university that's recording what you're doing
- there's a power-hungry admin with not enough to do who's watching what you're doing
- there's someone else in the lab looking over your shoulder watching what you're doing
- the next user is going to look at the local cookies and cache right after you're done to see what they can grab
OS X is not the most secure OS out there, but it is arguably the most secure OS that is also a reasonable alternative for an average user.
Yes, if someone breaks into my house and puts a rogue DHCP server on my home network they could 0wn my PowerBook, but that's much less scary than any given IE sploit-du-jour.
If you want to try and get people onto OpenBSD or whatever you believe to the THE most secure OS out there, more power to you, seriously. But when they can't load a funny Flash movie URL or whatever, have fun supporting them.
>DVD don't have processors as such
3 0521.htm:
Exactly. Instead, the logic for the DVD menus and the MPEG decoding are handled by cheerful little hedgehogs that live inside the DVD player.
From http://www.sigmadesigns.com/news/press_releases/0
"The EM8500 is designed around the system-on-chip concept with an internal 150 Mhz RISC CPU"
In this context, of course, RISC stands for "Rodents in Spiny Coats."
>I'll be perfectly honest that I support "pirating" music (though I've never done it)
>because *anything* that makes big record studios lose money is GOOD.
Really? Tyler Durden has some ideas for you.
>EVERY SINGLE THING a record studio does can be done more efficiently with
>commodity hardware, software, and communications.
Anybody who has ever recorded music on a PC knows differently. Consumer / hobbyist grade != professional grade. The junk that comes bundled with a PC is suitable for demos and teenage garage bands only. Even for a home studio built around a PC, it's normal to buy all sorts of equipment to replace or augment the commodity crap that's built into the PC. Nobody would just take the little bitty condenser mic and plug it into their sound card and expect that to sound good. That's why stuff like the AudioBuddy exists.
There's a reason that musicians record through really expensive microphones in sound isolation booths into expensive consoles manned by highly trained recording engineers. It ain't tradition.
CDs sell in vastly higher quantity than DVDs. See this article - in the second table it shows that in 2001, 906 million CDs shipped, compared with 7.9 million DVDs.
As for per-work shipments (how many copies of a given CD vs. how many copies of a given DVD), that's harder to find. Anybody got a good source of data on this?
Welcome to the internet.
Did you know that you can type URLs directly into the location bar of your web browser? Also, friends can email you URLs, and you can click on them to go to pages directly. It's not like TV, where you can only tune to channels that your cable provider offers, or a newspaper, where you have to buy a whole new viewing device every time you want someone else's content. Google isn't a channel guide.
Unless you're using some kind of kiosk-mode browser or "decency" filter, you can read whatever you want. Google can't make a hyperlink from page A to page B suddenly go to page C.
Those aren't at the top of my list for unaccented speech, enunciation, good grammar...
"Awl raht suhr, kin yew, lahk, cleeick awun yer Cuhstumahs buhttin, an' wheyun thuh wiyunda uhpeyurs, teyul me whut it sayus."
AutoCAD is another good example, as is (arguably) emacs/vi. There's a difference between good usability for a novice, and good usability for experts. Remember that usability is usually measured in terms of how long it takes a user to accomplish a task - if that user has been trained in an application's UI and understands the underlying domain model that the UI is representing to them, that can still be a good UI even when grandma can't figure the dangblasted thing out. If you spend all day every day at work in the same application, losing 60% of your screen real estate to GUI widgets that let you modify a tiny postage stamp-sized pane of actual content is not acceptable. Clearly there are also UIs that just plain suck, or are different just because the developer felt like being a unique and special individual, but don't lump those together with the UIs that deliberately make experts happy at the expense of newbie usability.
I've worked in an open environment like that at several companies and it worked pretty well. But, a couple of things were required to make it tolerable:
1) Salespeople or other "yell into the phone all day" types have to be located far away from developers. Same with people who leave their desks all day and yet have a phone that rings off the hook... or who leave their cell phones set on Kill volume but always leave them at their desks... or people who like to listen to their voice mail at full blast. Put those people in a smelly little mildewy office in the basement until they can play nice with others.
2) There need to be places (we had teeny 1-2 person meeting rooms called "phone booths) where you can have a private phone call or conversation without leaving the office.
3) There need to be normal meeting rooms that people can go into to do presentations, demos, have arguments, draw on whiteboards, etc.
The usual objection to such an environment is "I need an office so I can think - I can't do work with all that talking going on." Actually this is usually incorrect. As long as you're working on the same project as the people around you, the "knowledge accidents" that happen when you can't help but eavesdrop on your co-workers' discussions are very important. You can put on headphones to tune people out when you need mega focus, but you'll inevitably hear that one comment about something that you REALLY want to object to or have input into, and that's precious[ssss].
Exactly. Journalists never show bias, especially not on Slashdot. No opinions are welcome here. Back to Usenet with ye, you vile holders of opinion!