Actually, I think you are mistaken. IMHO, most excellent pieces of software begin their lives as "yeah, I know there's other solutions out there that do this, but they don't really solve my problem, or solve it the way I like, so here's my attempt at it..." I know most of my software projects have started off that way. You begin with a need (a cheap/free Unix-like OS, a decent raster graphics editor, a scripting language to solve another problem), and things evolve from there.
'course, this is also why a lot of OSS software is difficult to use, or is missing certain features, etc... the developers don't need it, or aren't interested in solving the problem, so it doesn't get done. But that's the reality of volunteer labour.
But the whole point is to solve problems you're interested in. If other people find your work useful, great, but becoming "big" shouldn't be the goal, otherwise you'll never get anywhere.
because you're just sitting there bitching instead of putting out useful solutions.
Don't be an asshole. Calling out people for inhumane behaviour (such as condoning prison rape) is extremely important. Nothing will change if everyone keeps their mouth shut, as you advocate, or worse, cheers this kind of shit on.
Wrong again. I can't use those songs I wrote without modifying them significantly. If I don't, and release them as-is, I will be sued by Sony/Universal/Warner/EMI.
No, that's precisely why it's a legal/political issue. It's fucked up, yes. And I'm not sure what gave you the impression I think it's okay.
But the fact the laws are fucked up doesn't mean that the frontiers of music are, somehow, smaller, other than in a legal sense.
So if your argument is that artist's productivity is *artificially* limited by simple-minded laws, then fine, I can buy that. But the idea that there is less music to discover today than there was 50 years ago? That's pure BS, plain and simple.
I don't care about copyright. I'm reacting to the (IMHO, silly) idea that The Beatles, for example, were more prolific because there was just more music to discover. That's BS. The Beatles were simply exceptional. And they aren't even that exceptional (there are plenty of highly prolific musicians out there). As for large != infinite, while that's true, for all practical purposes, it really doesn't matter.
The "uniqueness" test for copyright is BS, IMHO, but that's a legal/political issue, nothing more.
Sorry, but that story is just naive. Your average song isn't just about melody. It's about rhythm, lyrics, arrangements, vocals, instruments... to think that, somehow, today there's just less music to find, is flat out ridiculous in the face of all the variables one can alter. Sure, if music was comprised solely of a single sequence of notes, one following the other, the author may have a point. But it's so much more than that.
Your designer file should **just** have UI code in it. Theres regions for the machine based stuff and regions for the person-generated stuff. Keep the person-generated stuff to a minumum. Again, I haven't come across that problem...
Did I say I added human-generated code? No. That would be stupid. VS just decides, on a machine-by-machine basis (ie, it's largely deterministic on one box, but another box can produce a different ordering... god knows why), the order in which code will be laid out in some of it's generated files. This includes designer files, where a small change can completely reorder the code for no apparent reason, and XSDs (this one is particularly irritating). Why they didn't just use alphanumeric sorting, I'll never know...
Again, I can't complain. I use C++ and C#... never had any serious problems with them.
Then you've never worked on a reasonably large dataset in VS.
Even the freebie versions beat the crap out of any IDE I've seen for linux.
Tell me that again after VS has crashed for the second time in a day, or mysteriously added new connection strings to your project resources for no apparent reason, or decided, once again, to reorder the code in your designer file, generating massive conflicts when you update your local source tree, or strangely repositioned the scrollbars when you opened up a dataset and started navigating, or...
Honestly, VS is good, for what it is. But at the same time, it's an unstable, unpredictable piece of crap. Which pretty well describes most MS software, so I suppose that's not terribly surprising.
Yeah, my understanding is that it's fundamentally about reducing traffic congestion, which was absolutely horrible in downtown Boston. Wikipedia seems to have a decent article on the topic.
Because private companies have done sooooo well with the security for voting machines, credit cards (and credit information in general), etc.
Well, to be fair, in the case of voting machines, there's no motivation for the companies to produce a device that's *truly* secure. It need only *appear* to be secure in order to satisfy the people. And conspiracy theorists may argue that there is, in fact, motivation to create an *in*secure system.
In the case of airline security, though, the airlines have very real reasons to be as rigorous as possible: 1) the costs incurred due to the loss of an aircraft, 2) the cost of insurance and lawsuits following an accident, 3) the desire to project an image of safety (ie, marketing interests). That's not to say I agree with leaving security to the airlines (though, at this point, I fail to see how they can be any worse than the ridiculous security theatre we have to put up with today), but IMO it's not a fundamentally crazy idea.
It happens frequently to low-status people who are given more authority than they know how to handle.
I take it you've never worked with a dick middle manager. Give *anyone* more power than they know how to handle, and there's a good chance they'll turn into an asshole. The only thing in common between a dick police officer, sysadmin, or PHB, is the fact they're all human.
On the other hand, I made a conscience decision nearly 2 decades ago never to use emoticons to insure that they never become a crutch.
Yes, but the problem you seem to be forgetting is that of the receiver. As clear as you think your writing is, there are *many* reasons why your text may be misinterpreted, aside from poor compositional skills on your part: it's entirely possible the receiver has poor language skills, has difficulty recognizing written tone, interprets your text with a specific bias due to cultural differences, or, heck, they may simply be a dimwit. In these cases, emoticons are a useful way of enhance clarity in casual written conversation (which, as it happens, also tends to be less rigorously composed in the first place, increasing the likelihood of miscommunication).
Why? Wine doesn't require a recompile of the executable in question. It simply does a manual load of the PE/COFF file. Creating a similar loader for the Mach-O format is probably no more difficult.
I thought New Zealand was closer to Australian and U.S. in freedoms, not Zimbabwe and Canada.
And that's when it became obvious you are a troll... but, you did get modded up for it, so, credit where credit is due.
Meanwhile, I'm gonna go back to watching Royal Canadian Air Farce, This Hour Has 22 Minutes, and Rick Mercer, shows where our very own politicians participate in the satire, rather than being sequestored in some ivory tower (err... make that, white house).
I watch a fair bit of television here and I can say have lived in both the states and here that New Zealand television news is many times better than American TV.
Even if there was a hack, there is no open source solution for TV listings anymore. zap2it is discontinuing their free service, so XMLTV doesn't have a read source of listings any longer.
Ugh, I'm so sick of hearing about this.
1) XMLTV was scraping listings long before Zap2It Labs opened up. They can always go back to doing that.
2) There is an effort under way, spearheaded by members of various projects affected by this change, to find a solution to the problem (I believe they're actually working with Zap2It).
3) The cutoff is still a month and a half away, more than enough time to find a solution.
Honestly, what is with all this "the sky is falling!" BS?
Re:$10/month from the cable company and you're don
on
The Trouble With TiVo
·
· Score: 1
it has two recorders which my mythTV box doesn't support
Why doesn't it? I have two inputs, and I might add a third some day (though, two has, so far, been enough). Works great.
DVR's contain parts that can *fail* so the rental model isn't that bad for the consumer given the life of a disk. Also consider that a DVR's disk gets a lot of use.
And then you have to rely on the cable co fixing it, because you *can't*. And, given the quality of cable co support, well... I'll pass (odds are, their "fix" will be to send you a new one, meaning you lose all your recordings, preferences, etc).
The software works well enough for recording shows
Yeah, this comes down to taste. I regularly have weird schedules along the lines of "record this show on all channels except for these two". eg, CSI - Spike, which plays ancient CSI re-runs over and over and over and... that kind of flexibility isn't available in your standard DVR.
I already pay for the TV listings with my comcast cable bill
I don't pay for TV listings at all.
Wiring my living room for internet access to pull channel listings is non trivial
I'll give you this one. Though, I've used 802.11g (watching TV on my laptop) with reasonable success, and that's with two floors between me and the WAP.
My Wife can understand the integrated remote
This I just don't understand... I have a single, el-cheapo programmable remote that controls my myth box and TV, and works perfectly. You're saying this wasn't possible for you?
No, IMHO, the biggest knock on Myth is HD, and the biggest knock for TiVo is the subscription, and the fact the box is, technically speaking, closed (yeah, you can hack it, but I suspect that voids your warrantee).
But cable co DVRs? Good god, no thanks. Limited storage (I have 750GB in my myth setup. Good luck getting that in a rented DVR), crappy, closed software, limited recording capabilities... And given the number of times I hear about rented DVRs crashing, locking up, *erasing all recordings*, and who knows what else, I'll gladly take my Myth setup, which has been running solidly for the last 8 months, 24/7. And if it *does* break, at least I can fix it.
ROFL, by that metric, lisp and Smalltalk are poor languages (though, in the latter case, that's changing with Seaside). Different languages have different strengths and weaknesses. Would I use JS for server-side content delivery? I don't know. But I do know that's not the yardstick by which I judge the merits of a language.
Now do you call or fold? You have the better hand here. If you knew what your opponent had you would definitely call. But since you are playing the odds, you decide to fold because you calculated you have a 30% of winning, which also means you have a 70% of losing. This is why playing the odds will cause you to lose.
Right, because there's a significant element of luck, and so it's impossible, in the absence of other information, to determine whether or not your opponent is holding a good hand or not. So you guess. Thank you for demonstrating my point.
*Now*, in such a situation, a skilled player would observe the betting habits of their opponent, combine that with their own instincts and approach to the game, and use that as a yardstick to determine whether or not they have a good hand. IOW, while it's a guess, it's a somewhat educated guess. No question, there is skill involved in this. However, a) that's not psychology, any more than studying chess games to identify an opponent's weaknesses is psychology, and b) it doesn't change the fact that a top-notch player with a bad run of cards will still lose out to a complete amateur. After all, home many top-seed players get knocked out in the first round of a tournament, purely by chance?
Poker has an eliment of chance, however chance doesn't explain why you consistently see the top pros at final tables.
Who are also quite frequently tossed out in the first round.
No, it's not entirely luck. Pure number crunching skill is also quite important, both in calculating the odds, as well as in determine risk-reward for a given situation, deciphering player's betting strategies, etc. Such skills take time to master, so it's hardly surprising that the more experienced, practiced players typically perform well.
However, IMHO, the whole "reading people/hiding tells" business is bullshit. Any even mediocre player will learn quickly to hide their reactions, not to mention the use of baseball caps, sunglasses, and other such devices. Show me top, online poker tournaments who's results are, on average, significantly divergent from face-to-face games, and I will be very shocked.
It's not a strategy game, but a psychological exercise.
You tell yourself that. But it's BS. Poker, when it comes down to it, is all about a) statistics, and b) luck. Is there a psychological component to it? Sure. But I'll bet dollars to donuts those aspects are greatly outweighed by luck and a given player's ability to evaluate the statistics on a given hand.
Meh, I have a pair of 160GB SATA Seagate Barracudas in a mirror as part of an LVM on my Myth box and they've been running smooth since last November, having been beaten up extensively (easily handling two simultaneous recordings while playing back a third). I've also got a pair of Seagate 160GB PATA drives in my desktop machine, also mirrored, one of which has been running for years now, while the Maxtor which was originally paired in the mirror (I prefer to mix drives/batches when I can) died long ago, to be replaced by the second Seagate.
So, as with all things related to hard-drives... YMMV. *shrug* IMHO, drives are far more likely to fail due to thermal issues, problems in specific batches, etc, than because a specific manufacturer is bad.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I think you are mistaken. IMHO, most excellent pieces of software begin their lives as "yeah, I know there's other solutions out there that do this, but they don't really solve my problem, or solve it the way I like, so here's my attempt at it..." I know most of my software projects have started off that way. You begin with a need (a cheap/free Unix-like OS, a decent raster graphics editor, a scripting language to solve another problem), and things evolve from there.
'course, this is also why a lot of OSS software is difficult to use, or is missing certain features, etc... the developers don't need it, or aren't interested in solving the problem, so it doesn't get done. But that's the reality of volunteer labour.
But the whole point is to solve problems you're interested in. If other people find your work useful, great, but becoming "big" shouldn't be the goal, otherwise you'll never get anywhere.
because you're just sitting there bitching instead of putting out useful solutions.
Don't be an asshole. Calling out people for inhumane behaviour (such as condoning prison rape) is extremely important. Nothing will change if everyone keeps their mouth shut, as you advocate, or worse, cheers this kind of shit on.
Wrong again. I can't use those songs I wrote without modifying them significantly. If I don't, and release them as-is, I will be sued by Sony/Universal/Warner/EMI.
No, that's precisely why it's a legal/political issue. It's fucked up, yes. And I'm not sure what gave you the impression I think it's okay.
But the fact the laws are fucked up doesn't mean that the frontiers of music are, somehow, smaller, other than in a legal sense.
So if your argument is that artist's productivity is *artificially* limited by simple-minded laws, then fine, I can buy that. But the idea that there is less music to discover today than there was 50 years ago? That's pure BS, plain and simple.
but, as far as copyright goes
I don't care about copyright. I'm reacting to the (IMHO, silly) idea that The Beatles, for example, were more prolific because there was just more music to discover. That's BS. The Beatles were simply exceptional. And they aren't even that exceptional (there are plenty of highly prolific musicians out there). As for large != infinite, while that's true, for all practical purposes, it really doesn't matter.
The "uniqueness" test for copyright is BS, IMHO, but that's a legal/political issue, nothing more.
DMCA
Sorry, but that story is just naive. Your average song isn't just about melody. It's about rhythm, lyrics, arrangements, vocals, instruments... to think that, somehow, today there's just less music to find, is flat out ridiculous in the face of all the variables one can alter. Sure, if music was comprised solely of a single sequence of notes, one following the other, the author may have a point. But it's so much more than that.
Because of all the resources, energy, and labour consumed in producing it.
Sorry, but that's just flat out wrong. Solar cells pay back their energy investment in as little as 6-7 years.
Can't say I've ever had any of those problems...
Apparently you're lucky.
Your designer file should **just** have UI code in it. Theres regions for the machine based stuff and regions for the person-generated stuff. Keep the person-generated stuff to a minumum. Again, I haven't come across that problem...
Did I say I added human-generated code? No. That would be stupid. VS just decides, on a machine-by-machine basis (ie, it's largely deterministic on one box, but another box can produce a different ordering... god knows why), the order in which code will be laid out in some of it's generated files. This includes designer files, where a small change can completely reorder the code for no apparent reason, and XSDs (this one is particularly irritating). Why they didn't just use alphanumeric sorting, I'll never know...
Again, I can't complain. I use C++ and C#
Then you've never worked on a reasonably large dataset in VS.
Even the freebie versions beat the crap out of any IDE I've seen for linux.
Tell me that again after VS has crashed for the second time in a day, or mysteriously added new connection strings to your project resources for no apparent reason, or decided, once again, to reorder the code in your designer file, generating massive conflicts when you update your local source tree, or strangely repositioned the scrollbars when you opened up a dataset and started navigating, or...
Honestly, VS is good, for what it is. But at the same time, it's an unstable, unpredictable piece of crap. Which pretty well describes most MS software, so I suppose that's not terribly surprising.
Yeah, my understanding is that it's fundamentally about reducing traffic congestion, which was absolutely horrible in downtown Boston. Wikipedia seems to have a decent article on the topic.
Because private companies have done sooooo well with the security for voting machines, credit cards (and credit information in general), etc.
Well, to be fair, in the case of voting machines, there's no motivation for the companies to produce a device that's *truly* secure. It need only *appear* to be secure in order to satisfy the people. And conspiracy theorists may argue that there is, in fact, motivation to create an *in*secure system.
In the case of airline security, though, the airlines have very real reasons to be as rigorous as possible: 1) the costs incurred due to the loss of an aircraft, 2) the cost of insurance and lawsuits following an accident, 3) the desire to project an image of safety (ie, marketing interests). That's not to say I agree with leaving security to the airlines (though, at this point, I fail to see how they can be any worse than the ridiculous security theatre we have to put up with today), but IMO it's not a fundamentally crazy idea.
It happens frequently to low-status people who are given more authority than they know how to handle.
I take it you've never worked with a dick middle manager. Give *anyone* more power than they know how to handle, and there's a good chance they'll turn into an asshole. The only thing in common between a dick police officer, sysadmin, or PHB, is the fact they're all human.
On the other hand, I made a conscience decision nearly 2 decades ago never to use emoticons to insure that they never become a crutch.
Yes, but the problem you seem to be forgetting is that of the receiver. As clear as you think your writing is, there are *many* reasons why your text may be misinterpreted, aside from poor compositional skills on your part: it's entirely possible the receiver has poor language skills, has difficulty recognizing written tone, interprets your text with a specific bias due to cultural differences, or, heck, they may simply be a dimwit. In these cases, emoticons are a useful way of enhance clarity in casual written conversation (which, as it happens, also tends to be less rigorously composed in the first place, increasing the likelihood of miscommunication).
Why? Wine doesn't require a recompile of the executable in question. It simply does a manual load of the PE/COFF file. Creating a similar loader for the Mach-O format is probably no more difficult.
I thought New Zealand was closer to Australian and U.S. in freedoms, not Zimbabwe and Canada.
And that's when it became obvious you are a troll... but, you did get modded up for it, so, credit where credit is due.
Meanwhile, I'm gonna go back to watching Royal Canadian Air Farce, This Hour Has 22 Minutes, and Rick Mercer, shows where our very own politicians participate in the satire, rather than being sequestored in some ivory tower (err... make that, white house).
I watch a fair bit of television here and I can say have lived in both the states and here that New Zealand television news is many times better than American TV.
Talk about damning with faint praise...
Yeah... it's just a shame the RIAA has nothing to do with patents.
Even if there was a hack, there is no open source solution for TV listings anymore. zap2it is discontinuing their free service, so XMLTV doesn't have a read source of listings any longer.
Ugh, I'm so sick of hearing about this.
1) XMLTV was scraping listings long before Zap2It Labs opened up. They can always go back to doing that.
2) There is an effort under way, spearheaded by members of various projects affected by this change, to find a solution to the problem (I believe they're actually working with Zap2It).
3) The cutoff is still a month and a half away, more than enough time to find a solution.
Honestly, what is with all this "the sky is falling!" BS?
it has two recorders which my mythTV box doesn't support
Why doesn't it? I have two inputs, and I might add a third some day (though, two has, so far, been enough). Works great.
DVR's contain parts that can *fail* so the rental model isn't that bad for the consumer given the life of a disk. Also consider that a DVR's disk gets a lot of use.
And then you have to rely on the cable co fixing it, because you *can't*. And, given the quality of cable co support, well... I'll pass (odds are, their "fix" will be to send you a new one, meaning you lose all your recordings, preferences, etc).
The software works well enough for recording shows
Yeah, this comes down to taste. I regularly have weird schedules along the lines of "record this show on all channels except for these two". eg, CSI - Spike, which plays ancient CSI re-runs over and over and over and... that kind of flexibility isn't available in your standard DVR.
I already pay for the TV listings with my comcast cable bill
I don't pay for TV listings at all.
Wiring my living room for internet access to pull channel listings is non trivial
I'll give you this one. Though, I've used 802.11g (watching TV on my laptop) with reasonable success, and that's with two floors between me and the WAP.
My Wife can understand the integrated remote
This I just don't understand... I have a single, el-cheapo programmable remote that controls my myth box and TV, and works perfectly. You're saying this wasn't possible for you?
No, IMHO, the biggest knock on Myth is HD, and the biggest knock for TiVo is the subscription, and the fact the box is, technically speaking, closed (yeah, you can hack it, but I suspect that voids your warrantee).
But cable co DVRs? Good god, no thanks. Limited storage (I have 750GB in my myth setup. Good luck getting that in a rented DVR), crappy, closed software, limited recording capabilities... And given the number of times I hear about rented DVRs crashing, locking up, *erasing all recordings*, and who knows what else, I'll gladly take my Myth setup, which has been running solidly for the last 8 months, 24/7. And if it *does* break, at least I can fix it.
ROFL, by that metric, lisp and Smalltalk are poor languages (though, in the latter case, that's changing with Seaside). Different languages have different strengths and weaknesses. Would I use JS for server-side content delivery? I don't know. But I do know that's not the yardstick by which I judge the merits of a language.
Now do you call or fold? You have the better hand here. If you knew what your opponent had you would definitely call. But since you are playing the odds, you decide to fold because you calculated you have a 30% of winning, which also means you have a 70% of losing. This is why playing the odds will cause you to lose.
Right, because there's a significant element of luck, and so it's impossible, in the absence of other information, to determine whether or not your opponent is holding a good hand or not. So you guess. Thank you for demonstrating my point.
*Now*, in such a situation, a skilled player would observe the betting habits of their opponent, combine that with their own instincts and approach to the game, and use that as a yardstick to determine whether or not they have a good hand. IOW, while it's a guess, it's a somewhat educated guess. No question, there is skill involved in this. However, a) that's not psychology, any more than studying chess games to identify an opponent's weaknesses is psychology, and b) it doesn't change the fact that a top-notch player with a bad run of cards will still lose out to a complete amateur. After all, home many top-seed players get knocked out in the first round of a tournament, purely by chance?
Poker has an eliment of chance, however chance doesn't explain why you consistently see the top pros at final tables.
Who are also quite frequently tossed out in the first round.
No, it's not entirely luck. Pure number crunching skill is also quite important, both in calculating the odds, as well as in determine risk-reward for a given situation, deciphering player's betting strategies, etc. Such skills take time to master, so it's hardly surprising that the more experienced, practiced players typically perform well.
However, IMHO, the whole "reading people/hiding tells" business is bullshit. Any even mediocre player will learn quickly to hide their reactions, not to mention the use of baseball caps, sunglasses, and other such devices. Show me top, online poker tournaments who's results are, on average, significantly divergent from face-to-face games, and I will be very shocked.
It's not a strategy game, but a psychological exercise.
You tell yourself that. But it's BS. Poker, when it comes down to it, is all about a) statistics, and b) luck. Is there a psychological component to it? Sure. But I'll bet dollars to donuts those aspects are greatly outweighed by luck and a given player's ability to evaluate the statistics on a given hand.
Meh, I have a pair of 160GB SATA Seagate Barracudas in a mirror as part of an LVM on my Myth box and they've been running smooth since last November, having been beaten up extensively (easily handling two simultaneous recordings while playing back a third). I've also got a pair of Seagate 160GB PATA drives in my desktop machine, also mirrored, one of which has been running for years now, while the Maxtor which was originally paired in the mirror (I prefer to mix drives/batches when I can) died long ago, to be replaced by the second Seagate.
So, as with all things related to hard-drives... YMMV. *shrug* IMHO, drives are far more likely to fail due to thermal issues, problems in specific batches, etc, than because a specific manufacturer is bad.