Both satilite and High Definition radio have the unfortunate timing of attempting to build a subscriber base at the same time as podcasting hit the market.
Why on earth would you want to spend hundreds of dollars on hardware and hundreds a year on subscribion fees when you've already got an iPod or mp3 player and you can get high definition, high quality audio delivered daily for free?
Incidentally, my wife and I run a free music podcast and happily hammer this nail in the coffin of pay-to-listen radio and pay-for-play radio every week. You wouldn't belive the amazing artists that we find flounder unsigned by the corporate media behemoths!
You can check us out at http://alternativemusic.thepodcastnetwork.com/ . Listening to podcasts has changed my commute for the last year and a half, AND it works in the subway and is on my schedule, rather than the radio stations!
The Hauppauge WinTV-D series for around $40 on ebay works great. The WinTV PVR's will work even better because they offload encoding from the machine, but they're not neccessary if you've got a 1+ ghz cpu
A few rebuttals: MythTV is packaged just like many of our favorite complex programs. KDE is a bitch to set up, but it's pretty easy to do "apt-get install kde"
Similarly, atrpms and others package MythTV for easy installation.
Installing MythTV is a 5 step process from bare hardware.
0.) put together an old box (I'm using an Athlon 1.4ghz in my recording box and and a Via M10000 in my playback-only box) and a cheap tuner card. The Hauppauge WinTV-D series for around $40 on ebay works great. The WinTV PVR's will work even better because they offload encoding from the machine, but they're not neccessary.
Voila, you've got a working MythTV install. The setup program will walk you through initial tasks like choosing a provider for XML tv listings.
To address the problems you're having with your machine, a few possibilities are:
* You're encoding at too high a resolution. - NTSC tv really tops out at 480x480. Using more pixels provides diminishing returns.
* You're encoding with too intense a codec - RTJpeg is great for low-processor encoding. That said, I'm using MPEG 4 at 480x480, 2400 bitrate for both live and recorded TV. This is on a 1.4ghz, and I've never seen a dropped frame.
* You may not have the proper video driver installed for X. I honestly don't know how the default drivers are for NVidia cards, but I know you can get a kick ass driver from *gasp* the vendor for most distros. I had this problem with my VIA chipset until the opensource unichrome via drivers became part of the X.org package. The default VESA driver just couldn't keep up with playback.
* You may not have DMA enabled on your hard drive, making it choke on simultaneous playback and recording, especially if using a low-compression or high-resolution (read: big files) codec.
* 640mb ram is overkill. I've got one 256 meg chip in my machine. It can't hurt to have more, but don't throw more ram at it.
* The denoiser may be part of your problem - but the deinterlacer works just fine for me. The noisy signal *may* be what is causing your jumpy recording, as the encoder has to treat each new frame as a whole new scene, due to so many pixels changing, but I'd be suprised if that alone could cause a 2.4ghz to frame-skip.
Mark talks in his article about finding a good tool for taking templates and applying them to a bunch of pages.
Along with tt2site, blosxom is another good FOSS tool for generating a site. Many people (including myself) use blosxom as a CGI module and render the pages on the fly, but if you've got a high traffic site you can run a quick command and generate all the pages as static HTML as Rael does on Blosxom.com itself.
Blosxom errs on the side of simplicity, rendering each text file as an "article" or "blog entry" based on its timestamp and the subdirectory to determine order and category. Once you become accustomed to the idea of each piece of content being an article it's easy to see how many sites can be implemented in that way, with a list of links pointing to categories or the permalink of various articles. While blosxom is not a point-n-click tool, it is extremely efficient once you get your site initially set up. When I have a new idea for my site, I simply add a new text file in the appropriate subdirectory (or make a new one if there is no category that fits). The article immediately shows up on the front of my site, and then filters down into its category page as it is displaced by more current articles.
Conversely, I use Dreamweaver at work where we have an existing site designed and need more granular control of each page. I've also found it invaluable to be able to sit with our various project directors and visually create their page with them while they direct and give input. The lack of a WYSIWYG tool for editing template based HTML files is the only thing keeping my work computer an M$ pc.
Completely neglected in this discussion so far have been CMS's like postnuke and phpnuke, zope, and others (including slashcode). Distributing the ability (and responsibility) for updating pages and sections of a site while keeping everything template based is a key function of CMS's. In many cases, frequently updated sites would benefit from switching to a CMS rather than constantly updating their static pages.
Now that you're an accomplished writer, do you ever have the urge to pen new Star Trek material in the hopes of producing it, or have you let that part of your life go with the transition away from being an actor first?
If you were to produce something, would you want to make a more independent project, or work once again with Berman, et al?
I've just edited the wikipedia entry for Black Tuesday to include the recent usage of the phrase "Black Tuesday" as a reference to Microsoft's patch release schedule, and the subsequent rash of virusus which seem to be appearing each month soon after.
I also included a link to this thread, which includes a link to wikipedia. Hey, it's Slashdot! Everybody loves recursion, right?
I've got one of the Via EPIA Mini-ITX machines, and I can tell you from experience that although there's less moving parts, that doesn't mean it's quiet.
Noisy capacitors, often talked about as a source of insecurity (you can listen to them with a computer and "hear" the data going across), but they also emit an annoying, high-pitched squeak which varies up and down.
If you're looking for a dedicated recording system, the Via boards may not be for you! Mine is noisy enough that I'm considering hiding it (it's my mythTV box) in a cabinet! And it's got no fans!
First, the M100, which can be had on ebay for incredibly cheap. This is crappy little PDA that does just about everything you need. no this isn't a contradiciton.
It's slow, clunky, and has a low res screen. That screen is only good for showing text, and maybe a calendar.
This is where the catch comes in. That's all you need. The res is perfectly comfortable for reading books (I've read over 15 books on the M100) and the indiglo backlight is unoffensive to the eyes. You can also read the the LCD in bright sunlight, and two AAA batteries last about 3 months due to the low res LCD and lack of an "all-the-time" backlight
Second - the tungsten E. If you NEED new features like high-res (the icons do look prettier, but that's about it,) the ability to run ScummVM, and want to play MP3's, this little $200 workhorse is amazing. The USB interface and SD card make it great for carrying virually the whole gutenberg library with you. The tungsten E is hard to see in bright sunling, however, and the built in recharable battery runs out in a day or two of normal use.
If you're reading books, don't pay more that $200 for this, and get your hands on plucker.
I've just gotten MythTV working - and although I've had my share of troubles with it on the mini-ITX playback machine I bought - it's currently working great on my main PC.
Issue #1: Control Yes, MythTV can control your box using any script or app such as changechannel.bin, or others. I was able to quickly find such a script for my RCN Cable box, and hook it up via serial cable. MythTV triggers the channel change automatically after an EASY setup from the main menu to tell it to use changechannel.bin. This also could have worked with an IR blaster.
For those without TiVo experience, this is important because there are no digital decoder cards on the market for PC since the stream is encoded, unlike analog cable. Don't be fooled into buying an HD capture card - it will only capture the HD Broadcast signals which are being sent over the airwaves in very limited markets.
Issue #2: Quality While I hear you that this is certainly better with a hacked DirecTivo setup, this is a non-issue for 95% of users, just as mp3 bitrate arguments (above 128kbps) don't apply to the majority of the music listening audience. As long as the quality is decent, they don't give a hoot whether it's good, great, or crystal.
Quality with MythTV is decent, although this depends largely on your capture card, but is completely watchable. Both my fiance and I watch all our TV on our MythTV system, and she's never complained once about the lack of quality.
The other reason this is less of an issue for most people is that regardless of digital or analog, traditional NTSC cable signals are relatively low resolution. You're never going to get beyond "good" quality into "great" and "awesome" like HDTV. People are much more tolerant of "Decent" quality when they're only used to slightly better.
Issue #3: Quality (Audio) For TV watching, 5.1 Audio is another enthusiasts toy. The average user just doesn't need it. That said, recording the 5.1 signal depends much on your video capture card, sound card, and current linux support. If you use the SBLive 5.1 you can pass the audio signal digitally out through your receiver. If it's 5.1 on the cable line, it will be 5.1 out that output. See http://cmisip.home.insightbb.com/mythtv.htm
Not necessarily Near the end of the article, they talk about how to make complex machines from simple substrates. They've already got designs and concepts for printing electromechanical devices (motors, moving parts) as well as substrates that give off an electrical change when compressed, which can act as a button.
My thought is that the free software movement should act as proactively as possible to release plans for basic building blocks here, so the first company to design a printable motor can't get Intellectual Property to it. Imagine if we all had to pay ConEd royalty rights on motors and generators, etc...
Once these pieces were built, imagine pluggin GNU flexware pieces in modeling software to make Just In Time machines... It'd be like RAD toolbuiding!
"Besides acting as a digital watermark, the use of radio chips could speed up routine bank processes such as counting. With such tags, a stack of notes can be passed through a reader and the sum added in a split second, similar to how inventory is tracked in an RFID-based system."
Step one: locate RFID's in lot of 100's Step two: cut them out Step three: Paste them on counterfits Step four: circulate RFID-less bills at McDonalds and other storefronts too busy to check for RFID's Step five: Deposit cash! Your bills are the "real" bills now
Image of Terminator II are off base, IMO
on
The Drone War
·
· Score: 1
I don't forsee a future overrun by fighting military machines in the sense of terminator or the matrix. The miliary machines we are beginning to see are more like long distance RC cars that happen to be able to blow things up.
One wonders if the military would be wise to simply create a "Simulation Game", and start training Kids across america to drive these machines. Imagine playing "Battle Bots" across the internet, but really be blowing stuff up.
Wargames comes to mind.
Slashdot Mirror
Both satilite and High Definition radio have the unfortunate timing of attempting to build a subscriber base at the same time as podcasting hit the market.
Why on earth would you want to spend hundreds of dollars on hardware and hundreds a year on subscribion fees when you've already got an iPod or mp3 player and you can get high definition, high quality audio delivered daily for free?
Incidentally, my wife and I run a free music podcast and happily hammer this nail in the coffin of pay-to-listen radio and pay-for-play radio every week. You wouldn't belive the amazing artists that we find flounder unsigned by the corporate media behemoths!
You can check us out at http://alternativemusic.thepodcastnetwork.com/ . Listening to podcasts has changed my commute for the last year and a half, AND it works in the subway and is on my schedule, rather than the radio stations!
Some examples of a giant 'corporation' hiding the fact that it had a product ready ahead of schedule? Did you sleep through return of the Jedi?
"Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational battlestation!"
The Hauppauge WinTV-D series for around $40 on ebay works great. The WinTV PVR's will work even better because they offload encoding from the machine, but they're not neccessary if you've got a 1+ ghz cpu
A few rebuttals:
MythTV is packaged just like many of our favorite complex programs. KDE is a bitch to set up, but it's pretty easy to do "apt-get install kde"
Similarly, atrpms and others package MythTV for easy installation.
Installing MythTV is a 5 step process from bare hardware.
0.) put together an old box (I'm using an Athlon 1.4ghz in my recording box and and a Via M10000 in my playback-only box) and a cheap tuner card. The Hauppauge WinTV-D series for around $40 on ebay works great. The WinTV PVR's will work even better because they offload encoding from the machine, but they're not neccessary.
1.) Install Fedora Core (any version)
2.) Install the atrpms kickstart package
3.) apt-get update
4.) apt-get dist-upgrade
5.) apt-get install mythtv-suite
Voila, you've got a working MythTV install. The setup program will walk you through initial tasks like choosing a provider for XML tv listings.
To address the problems you're having with your machine, a few possibilities are:
* You're encoding at too high a resolution. - NTSC tv really tops out at 480x480. Using more pixels provides diminishing returns.
* You're encoding with too intense a codec - RTJpeg is great for low-processor encoding. That said, I'm using MPEG 4 at 480x480, 2400 bitrate for both live and recorded TV. This is on a 1.4ghz, and I've never seen a dropped frame.
* You may not have the proper video driver installed for X. I honestly don't know how the default drivers are for NVidia cards, but I know you can get a kick ass driver from *gasp* the vendor for most distros. I had this problem with my VIA chipset until the opensource unichrome via drivers became part of the X.org package. The default VESA driver just couldn't keep up with playback.
* You may not have DMA enabled on your hard drive, making it choke on simultaneous playback and recording, especially if using a low-compression or high-resolution (read: big files) codec.
* 640mb ram is overkill. I've got one 256 meg chip in my machine. It can't hurt to have more, but don't throw more ram at it.
* The denoiser may be part of your problem - but the deinterlacer works just fine for me. The noisy signal *may* be what is causing your jumpy recording, as the encoder has to treat each new frame as a whole new scene, due to so many pixels changing, but I'd be suprised if that alone could cause a 2.4ghz to frame-skip.
Hope some of that helps!
They did. It's Win"DOH!"s after all.
Mark talks in his article about finding a good tool for taking templates and applying them to a bunch of pages.
Along with tt2site, blosxom is another good FOSS tool for generating a site. Many people (including myself) use blosxom as a CGI module and render the pages on the fly, but if you've got a high traffic site you can run a quick command and generate all the pages as static HTML as Rael does on Blosxom.com itself.
Blosxom errs on the side of simplicity, rendering each text file as an "article" or "blog entry" based on its timestamp and the subdirectory to determine order and category. Once you become accustomed to the idea of each piece of content being an article it's easy to see how many sites can be implemented in that way, with a list of links pointing to categories or the permalink of various articles. While blosxom is not a point-n-click tool, it is extremely efficient once you get your site initially set up. When I have a new idea for my site, I simply add a new text file in the appropriate subdirectory (or make a new one if there is no category that fits). The article immediately shows up on the front of my site, and then filters down into its category page as it is displaced by more current articles.
Conversely, I use Dreamweaver at work where we have an existing site designed and need more granular control of each page. I've also found it invaluable to be able to sit with our various project directors and visually create their page with them while they direct and give input. The lack of a WYSIWYG tool for editing template based HTML files is the only thing keeping my work computer an M$ pc.
Completely neglected in this discussion so far have been CMS's like postnuke and phpnuke, zope, and others (including slashcode). Distributing the ability (and responsibility) for updating pages and sections of a site while keeping everything template based is a key function of CMS's. In many cases, frequently updated sites would benefit from switching to a CMS rather than constantly updating their static pages.
Now that you're an accomplished writer, do you ever have the urge to pen new Star Trek material in the hopes of producing it, or have you let that part of your life go with the transition away from being an actor first?
If you were to produce something, would you want to make a more independent project, or work once again with Berman, et al?
I've just edited the wikipedia entry for Black Tuesday to include the recent usage of the phrase "Black Tuesday" as a reference to Microsoft's patch release schedule, and the subsequent rash of virusus which seem to be appearing each month soon after.
I also included a link to this thread, which includes a link to wikipedia. Hey, it's Slashdot! Everybody loves recursion, right?
I've got one of the Via EPIA Mini-ITX machines, and I can tell you from experience that although there's less moving parts, that doesn't mean it's quiet.
Noisy capacitors, often talked about as a source of insecurity (you can listen to them with a computer and "hear" the data going across), but they also emit an annoying, high-pitched squeak which varies up and down.
If you're looking for a dedicated recording system, the Via boards may not be for you! Mine is noisy enough that I'm considering hiding it (it's my mythTV box) in a cabinet! And it's got no fans!
I have two wonderful recommendations for you
First, the M100, which can be had on ebay for incredibly cheap. This is crappy little PDA that does just about everything you need. no this isn't a contradiciton.
It's slow, clunky, and has a low res screen. That screen is only good for showing text, and maybe a calendar.
This is where the catch comes in. That's all you need. The res is perfectly comfortable for reading books (I've read over 15 books on the M100) and the indiglo backlight is unoffensive to the eyes. You can also read the the LCD in bright sunlight, and two AAA batteries last about 3 months due to the low res LCD and lack of an "all-the-time" backlight
Second - the tungsten E. If you NEED new features like high-res (the icons do look prettier, but that's about it,) the ability to run ScummVM, and want to play MP3's, this little $200 workhorse is amazing. The USB interface and SD card make it great for carrying virually the whole gutenberg library with you. The tungsten E is hard to see in bright sunling, however, and the built in recharable battery runs out in a day or two of normal use.
If you're reading books, don't pay more that $200 for this, and get your hands on plucker.
-Eric Skiff
http://www.glitchnyc.com
I've just gotten MythTV working - and although I've had my share of troubles with it on the mini-ITX playback machine I bought - it's currently working great on my main PC.
Issue #1: Control
Yes, MythTV can control your box using any script or app such as changechannel.bin, or others. I was able to quickly find such a script for my RCN Cable box, and hook it up via serial cable. MythTV triggers the channel change automatically after an EASY setup from the main menu to tell it to use changechannel.bin. This also could have worked with an IR blaster.
For those without TiVo experience, this is important because there are no digital decoder cards on the market for PC since the stream is encoded, unlike analog cable. Don't be fooled into buying an HD capture card - it will only capture the HD Broadcast signals which are being sent over the airwaves in very limited markets.
Issue #2: Quality
While I hear you that this is certainly better with a hacked DirecTivo setup, this is a non-issue for 95% of users, just as mp3 bitrate arguments (above 128kbps) don't apply to the majority of the music listening audience. As long as the quality is decent, they don't give a hoot whether it's good, great, or crystal.
Quality with MythTV is decent, although this depends largely on your capture card, but is completely watchable. Both my fiance and I watch all our TV on our MythTV system, and she's never complained once about the lack of quality.
The other reason this is less of an issue for most people is that regardless of digital or analog, traditional NTSC cable signals are relatively low resolution. You're never going to get beyond "good" quality into "great" and "awesome" like HDTV. People are much more tolerant of "Decent" quality when they're only used to slightly better.
Issue #3: Quality (Audio)
For TV watching, 5.1 Audio is another enthusiasts toy. The average user just doesn't need it.
That said, recording the 5.1 signal depends much on your video capture card, sound card, and current linux support. If you use the SBLive 5.1 you can pass the audio signal digitally out through your receiver. If it's 5.1 on the cable line, it will be 5.1 out that output. See http://cmisip.home.insightbb.com/mythtv.htm
Not necessarily
Near the end of the article, they talk about how to make complex machines from simple substrates. They've already got designs and concepts for printing electromechanical devices (motors, moving parts) as well as substrates that give off an electrical change when compressed, which can act as a button.
My thought is that the free software movement should act as proactively as possible to release plans for basic building blocks here, so the first company to design a printable motor can't get Intellectual Property to it. Imagine if we all had to pay ConEd royalty rights on motors and generators, etc...
Once these pieces were built, imagine pluggin GNU flexware pieces in modeling software to make Just In Time machines... It'd be like RAD toolbuiding!
umm, he meant the site was on cold fusion.
.cfm?
:)
You know,
Cold fusion is a red herring anyway, but that's another matter entirely
"Besides acting as a digital watermark, the use of radio chips could speed up routine bank processes such as counting. With such tags, a stack of notes can be passed through a reader and the sum added in a split second, similar to how inventory is tracked in an RFID-based system."
Step one: locate RFID's in lot of 100's
Step two: cut them out
Step three: Paste them on counterfits
Step four: circulate RFID-less bills at McDonalds and other storefronts too busy to check for RFID's
Step five: Deposit cash! Your bills are the "real" bills now
I don't forsee a future overrun by fighting military machines in the sense of terminator or the matrix. The miliary machines we are beginning to see are more like long distance RC cars that happen to be able to blow things up.
One wonders if the military would be wise to simply create a "Simulation Game", and start training Kids across america to drive these machines. Imagine playing "Battle Bots" across the internet, but really be blowing stuff up.
Wargames comes to mind.