But this is Slashdot, and I want an answer to the following question:
Why would I want an HDHomeRun, when I can throw together a MythTV box out of scrap PC bits that I already have and use cheap Chinese USB dongles as tuners? Sure, I'll have some time invested in it, but, geez, really... If I'm saving ~$150, I can afford (based on my day-job hourly rate) to spend a fair bit of time goofing around with it, and it'll also be its own DVR when its done, AND it'll work with my PS3, and...
Are they even free? Last I saw a pallet of them at Wal-Mart, the boxes had a price tag of $59, which is $19 out of pocket, plus tax.
Meanwhile, Newegg shows me a 1080i-capable USB dongle which works without ugly hacks for $29, and Ebay shows some for as little as $16 (shipped).
I'm not an expert in math, but the following seems to be true: If time is money, then $29 is a good deal. And even if time is free, then $16 is certainly less than $19.
Pardon me for noticing, but: We're talking about Hulu as an alternative to domestic broadcasts within the Unites States. Unless you live someplace like Windsor, Ontario (in which case you'll easily receive television broadcasts from Detroit, Michigan), you're so far out of context with your mockery that it's not even funny.
Besides, I don't give a fuck what happens on your side of the pond. Thanks!
Please note that at no time have I mentioned unbricking the router. It was a brick, and once I learned more (and before it was fixed) it ceased to be a brick.
By your definition of brick, I've bricked whole PCs before by diddling with settings in CMOS, causing the system to fail to boot sufficiently that BIOS setup could be rerun. This required (variously) the physical acts of opening the box and throwing a jumper or removing the battery to clear CMOS. I can't imagine that such a thing as a bad CMOS setting could be considered bricking a computer.
Shoot, for that matter, I even successfully flashed the wrong BIOS to a motherboard once, causing it to cease functioning altogether. Was it a brick? Absolutely not. I already knew how to fix it (hotswap the chip with a working computer after enabling shadow ROM, and then run the correct flash procedure), and did so within a few minutes.
Likewise, I can't imagine bricking another WRT54G: I know enough about the thing, now, that I can rebuild the flash from scratch with only a few minutes with Google to refresh my mental notes.
I've bricked other things, too. I bricked a television once by plugging a video output into a video input, which caused the screen to get very very, white before I heard a soft popping sound. The set never did anything again. I bricked an old Sherwood amplifier by accidentally running it without a load. So on, so forth. If I were a skilled repairman, I would probably have had little trouble isolating and resolving these faults. On the other hand, in reality, I simply don't know how to fix these things, and it is that ignorance, all by itself, that makes them (as useful as) bricks.
The definition of "bricked" depends on the ability of the speaker.
I once bricked a Linksys WRT54G. I say this because I was sure that there was nothing that I, given my knowledge at the time, could ever do to rescue it.
As time went on, I learned more about the problem. Eventually, I soldered a header to the 54G's board and built a JTAG cable, and was able to reflash its firmware more or less directly using my Gentoo desktop's parallel port. Afterward it clearly wasn't a brick anymore, since it was now routing packets just fine. I believe that the precise point at which the device stopped being a brick was between the moment when I finally understood how to repair it, and the final completion of the repair.
So, here's what I think: Given average knowledge and ability, there's lots of things that one might be able to brick. However, with sufficient knowledge and ability, nothing can be bricked.
Covering the hairier parts of a post-Katrina New Orleans after a big storm with days of warning, and "the upper midwest" with zero warning are rather two totally different tasks.
Re-reading won't help; I just genuinely misunderstood your point.
I guess all I was attempting to convey is that either things are legal, or they're not. We seem to agree that it's not illegal to sell free software.
I'd like to expound upon my point, though, by saying the following: It is (and ought to be) legal to sell instructions. That someone falls into a trap where they've led themselves to believe that they're buying real products instead of just instructions just indicates to me that the person was not a very savvy purchaser.
C-Span's copyright policy for their own material is easily the most liberal I've ever seen associated with a television network. It boils down to this: As long as it's non-commercial use, and you keep the C-Span bug in the corner of the screen, go for it.
They even freely proclaim that almost everything on the network is, in fact, public domain and free of copyright, due to the Federally-funded nature of (most of) it.
Would you want the government telling you that you must add a $1,200 safety device to your $15,000, $20,000, or $50,000 car? I mean, honestly: At that point is it REALLY that much more?
Around 1992 when I was in school in Ohio, there was a big effort to put televisions in every classroom. Nothing terribly fancy; just wall-mounted 21" Zenith TVs with a factory modification so that they could be turned on centrally. Larger classrooms got more than one. There was a fairly elaborate head-end system with automated tape recorders which would record educational programs (apparently broadcast during middle-of-the-night off-peak hours for free). The regularly-scheduled use of this system was for a specially-produced program of current events and a bit of science, which the entire school would watch in unison. Regular cable TV was also available on the system (which the school would also get for free), but was normally turned off to prevent abuse.
Prior to that, there were big carts which lived in a few places on each floor of the school, each with a color TV and a VCR. They'd get wheeled around between classrooms as needed. But even then, we had cable. We watched the Challenger explode on the set in the school library (which was then quickly turned off, and we were ushered back to our classrooms in solid wonderment about what the silence was all about until we got home).
I'm also old enough to remember film projectors being used in school. There typically was a large projection screen which lived on the stage, which could be used for assemblies.
I can't imagine that schools these days can't come up with a bloody TV, or a projector and a blank wall, or something that allows large groups of kids to watch a broadcast. If they really, really can't, they're doing something very wrong.
I find the manner in which you attack the person instead of the idea to be very telling. It is a very moronic and nonsensical behavioral pattern, like using brass knuckles to finish off a chess match.
Unfortunately, I don't know of any schools (aside from church, or perhaps prison) which can rectify such basic and imbecilic logical fallacies as these.
I don't have any particular advice for you on this matter. These are just my observations.
But I digress. VLC might be part of the answer, but Google brought me to this post which states that VLC and C-Span do not cohabitate well.
With this in mind, perhaps the question would be better stated as follows:
"We have chosen to use a labor-intensive network video distribution system in a production environment, with little time for testing and even less time to develop failsafes, and huge opportunities for human error at all points. We selected this route because television is too easy, the picture is too good, the sound is always in sync. We feel that by using Teh Intarwebs, we'll be inspiring our schoolchildren to always look for the most difficult, elaborate, and expensive attack angle whenever there is a problem to solve, as per the gospel of Rube Goldberg.
Besides, TV is just uncool, with its lack of buffering and all. Where might we find a VLC-compatible feed of the inauguration proceedings?"
Eh? This is completely legal. There's nothing grey about it. Folks have been selling free software since, well, forever: One of the main, most useful, and most complete online repositories of free software used to be ftp.cdrom.com. One could go there, and download the latest kernel, or Slackware, or FreeBSD, or whatever, for free. It was supported entirely by (gasp!) SELLING FREE SOFTWARE.
I suspect that you think that charging money to download something which can easily and legitimately be had for free is probably an immoral thing to be doing, and I tend to agree with you on that point. But don't go confusing morality with legality -- just because something is immoral doesn't mean it should be outlawed.
Radio was an improvement over not witnessing it at all.
Remember, kid: The United States hasn't always had a thorough network of interstate highways and a monsoon of motor vehicles with which to utilize them. If a Californian wanted to see an inauguration in the early 1800s, it'd have taken months, and few would have had the wherewithal to do so. Instead, they just read about it in the left-coast newspapers, once the news eventually showed up over there.
Radio is definitely a step forward, in comparison.
But in practice, your argument just doesn't stand up.
First: TV is best. It's a broadcast medium, made to transmit a single moving image to thousands (or, in this case, millions) of recipients. It does this job very well. If you want to avoid outlandish commentary and commercialization, obvious channel choices are either C-Span or PBS (in order of preference).
Second: There isn't enough bandwidth in a T1 to send 20 video streams of any rational (for 2008) quality. Multicast IP would solve this problem, of course, but the M-Bone is all but dead. (Wikipedia those terms yourself if you don't understand.)
Third: Why do you assume that the coverage on a television channel like C-Span is worse than the coverage which might be available online? No matter what the medium, someone has to produce the feed, and in doing so, they'll almost certainly be adding commentary of some sort.
Fourth: Internet video for the sake of internet video. Who gives a shit? I know it's 2009, and we're supposed to be in Teh Future and stuff, but for fuck's sake: If, in 2009, this were a solved problem, the question would never have been raised. Think about it.
Wait. So. You mean: Nobody has ever done direct disk-to-disk SCSI transfers in a commodity OS[1]? I can't say I'm surprised, but I am a little offended[2].
[1]: I'm sure that, somewhere, there has been at least one embedded or special-built system which accomplished this. This, obviously, doesn't count.
[2]: I bought the big, fast SCSI disks because I needed big, and fast. But it would've been tres cool if copying would've been more efficient. Not that it ever much mattered, as you imply, but the concept is awesome awesome in the same way that "cat/dev/audio >/dev/st0" was the first time around.
Disk-to-disk operations would then bypass the kernel and asynchronous I/O would consume no primary resources. This was fashionable on some systems (most notably drives that used the IEEE 488 bus) in the 70s and was done to some degree with SCSI, but there's really no excuse for not providing such a capability on any modern drive.
I bought that line, hook line and sinker, in the late 90's with a bunch of IBM 9ES ultra-wide SCSI disks and a good controller.
It never was clear to me that, at any time, Linux was actually telling the drives to copy data directly from one disk to any other without the kernel in the middle.
And now that we live in a world of point-to-point serial buses (SATA, SAS) linking disks to seemingly independent controllers: Is it even theoretically possible anymore?
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I do like your definition. With it, things are fairly well defined as in being either bricks or not bricks.
I think I'll be using it that way from now on. Thank for for elaborating.
It's an American conversation about an American problem. Begone, you limey, or frog, or whatever you are.
Thanks!
But this is Slashdot, and I want an answer to the following question:
Why would I want an HDHomeRun, when I can throw together a MythTV box out of scrap PC bits that I already have and use cheap Chinese USB dongles as tuners? Sure, I'll have some time invested in it, but, geez, really... If I'm saving ~$150, I can afford (based on my day-job hourly rate) to spend a fair bit of time goofing around with it, and it'll also be its own DVR when its done, AND it'll work with my PS3, and...
Again: Why?
Are they even free? Last I saw a pallet of them at Wal-Mart, the boxes had a price tag of $59, which is $19 out of pocket, plus tax.
Meanwhile, Newegg shows me a 1080i-capable USB dongle which works without ugly hacks for $29, and Ebay shows some for as little as $16 (shipped).
I'm not an expert in math, but the following seems to be true: If time is money, then $29 is a good deal. And even if time is free, then $16 is certainly less than $19.
Pardon me for noticing, but: We're talking about Hulu as an alternative to domestic broadcasts within the Unites States. Unless you live someplace like Windsor, Ontario (in which case you'll easily receive television broadcasts from Detroit, Michigan), you're so far out of context with your mockery that it's not even funny.
Besides, I don't give a fuck what happens on your side of the pond. Thanks!
I disagree.
Please note that at no time have I mentioned unbricking the router. It was a brick, and once I learned more (and before it was fixed) it ceased to be a brick.
By your definition of brick, I've bricked whole PCs before by diddling with settings in CMOS, causing the system to fail to boot sufficiently that BIOS setup could be rerun. This required (variously) the physical acts of opening the box and throwing a jumper or removing the battery to clear CMOS. I can't imagine that such a thing as a bad CMOS setting could be considered bricking a computer.
Shoot, for that matter, I even successfully flashed the wrong BIOS to a motherboard once, causing it to cease functioning altogether. Was it a brick? Absolutely not. I already knew how to fix it (hotswap the chip with a working computer after enabling shadow ROM, and then run the correct flash procedure), and did so within a few minutes.
Likewise, I can't imagine bricking another WRT54G: I know enough about the thing, now, that I can rebuild the flash from scratch with only a few minutes with Google to refresh my mental notes.
I've bricked other things, too. I bricked a television once by plugging a video output into a video input, which caused the screen to get very very, white before I heard a soft popping sound. The set never did anything again. I bricked an old Sherwood amplifier by accidentally running it without a load. So on, so forth. If I were a skilled repairman, I would probably have had little trouble isolating and resolving these faults. On the other hand, in reality, I simply don't know how to fix these things, and it is that ignorance, all by itself, that makes them (as useful as) bricks.
That, sir, is one of the niftiest things I've ever seen.
Thank you.
The definition of "bricked" depends on the ability of the speaker.
I once bricked a Linksys WRT54G. I say this because I was sure that there was nothing that I, given my knowledge at the time, could ever do to rescue it.
As time went on, I learned more about the problem. Eventually, I soldered a header to the 54G's board and built a JTAG cable, and was able to reflash its firmware more or less directly using my Gentoo desktop's parallel port. Afterward it clearly wasn't a brick anymore, since it was now routing packets just fine. I believe that the precise point at which the device stopped being a brick was between the moment when I finally understood how to repair it, and the final completion of the repair.
So, here's what I think: Given average knowledge and ability, there's lots of things that one might be able to brick. However, with sufficient knowledge and ability, nothing can be bricked.
Covering the hairier parts of a post-Katrina New Orleans after a big storm with days of warning, and "the upper midwest" with zero warning are rather two totally different tasks.
Where?
Re-reading won't help; I just genuinely misunderstood your point.
I guess all I was attempting to convey is that either things are legal, or they're not. We seem to agree that it's not illegal to sell free software.
I'd like to expound upon my point, though, by saying the following: It is (and ought to be) legal to sell instructions. That someone falls into a trap where they've led themselves to believe that they're buying real products instead of just instructions just indicates to me that the person was not a very savvy purchaser.
Caveat emptor, et cetera.
You mean to tell me that in the past 70 years, nobody has ever installed an antenna on those buildings?
I am, frankly, shocked.
Best wishes.
Right. But:
http://www.c-span.org/about/copyright.asp
C-Span's copyright policy for their own material is easily the most liberal I've ever seen associated with a television network. It boils down to this: As long as it's non-commercial use, and you keep the C-Span bug in the corner of the screen, go for it.
They even freely proclaim that almost everything on the network is, in fact, public domain and free of copyright, due to the Federally-funded nature of (most of) it.
Sounds good enough to me.
Stop ruining my happy place with facts.
Thanks!
-mgt
Would you want the government telling you that you must add a $1,200 safety device to your $15,000, $20,000, or $50,000 car? I mean, honestly: At that point is it REALLY that much more?
Uhm. So what, precisely, is your point?
Either it is legal, or it isn't legal.
First you say it's legal, with a few restrictions. And then, you say I (me??) need a lawyer.
I'd write you off as just another troll, but trolls aren't don't generally present such well-researched facts. So what, exactly, are you trolling for?
Around 1992 when I was in school in Ohio, there was a big effort to put televisions in every classroom. Nothing terribly fancy; just wall-mounted 21" Zenith TVs with a factory modification so that they could be turned on centrally. Larger classrooms got more than one. There was a fairly elaborate head-end system with automated tape recorders which would record educational programs (apparently broadcast during middle-of-the-night off-peak hours for free). The regularly-scheduled use of this system was for a specially-produced program of current events and a bit of science, which the entire school would watch in unison. Regular cable TV was also available on the system (which the school would also get for free), but was normally turned off to prevent abuse.
Prior to that, there were big carts which lived in a few places on each floor of the school, each with a color TV and a VCR. They'd get wheeled around between classrooms as needed. But even then, we had cable. We watched the Challenger explode on the set in the school library (which was then quickly turned off, and we were ushered back to our classrooms in solid wonderment about what the silence was all about until we got home).
I'm also old enough to remember film projectors being used in school. There typically was a large projection screen which lived on the stage, which could be used for assemblies.
I can't imagine that schools these days can't come up with a bloody TV, or a projector and a blank wall, or something that allows large groups of kids to watch a broadcast. If they really, really can't, they're doing something very wrong.
I find the manner in which you attack the person instead of the idea to be very telling. It is a very moronic and nonsensical behavioral pattern, like using brass knuckles to finish off a chess match.
Unfortunately, I don't know of any schools (aside from church, or perhaps prison) which can rectify such basic and imbecilic logical fallacies as these.
I don't have any particular advice for you on this matter. These are just my observations.
But I digress. VLC might be part of the answer, but Google brought me to this post which states that VLC and C-Span do not cohabitate well.
With this in mind, perhaps the question would be better stated as follows:
"We have chosen to use a labor-intensive network video distribution system in a production environment, with little time for testing and even less time to develop failsafes, and huge opportunities for human error at all points. We selected this route because television is too easy, the picture is too good, the sound is always in sync. We feel that by using Teh Intarwebs, we'll be inspiring our schoolchildren to always look for the most difficult, elaborate, and expensive attack angle whenever there is a problem to solve, as per the gospel of Rube Goldberg.
Besides, TV is just uncool, with its lack of buffering and all. Where might we find a VLC-compatible feed of the inauguration proceedings?"
This is apparently legal
Eh? This is completely legal. There's nothing grey about it. Folks have been selling free software since, well, forever: One of the main, most useful, and most complete online repositories of free software used to be ftp.cdrom.com. One could go there, and download the latest kernel, or Slackware, or FreeBSD, or whatever, for free. It was supported entirely by (gasp!) SELLING FREE SOFTWARE.
I suspect that you think that charging money to download something which can easily and legitimately be had for free is probably an immoral thing to be doing, and I tend to agree with you on that point. But don't go confusing morality with legality -- just because something is immoral doesn't mean it should be outlawed.
Radio was an improvement over not witnessing it at all.
Remember, kid: The United States hasn't always had a thorough network of interstate highways and a monsoon of motor vehicles with which to utilize them. If a Californian wanted to see an inauguration in the early 1800s, it'd have taken months, and few would have had the wherewithal to do so. Instead, they just read about it in the left-coast newspapers, once the news eventually showed up over there.
Radio is definitely a step forward, in comparison.
I agree, in theory.
But in practice, your argument just doesn't stand up.
First: TV is best. It's a broadcast medium, made to transmit a single moving image to thousands (or, in this case, millions) of recipients. It does this job very well. If you want to avoid outlandish commentary and commercialization, obvious channel choices are either C-Span or PBS (in order of preference).
Second: There isn't enough bandwidth in a T1 to send 20 video streams of any rational (for 2008) quality. Multicast IP would solve this problem, of course, but the M-Bone is all but dead. (Wikipedia those terms yourself if you don't understand.)
Third: Why do you assume that the coverage on a television channel like C-Span is worse than the coverage which might be available online? No matter what the medium, someone has to produce the feed, and in doing so, they'll almost certainly be adding commentary of some sort.
Fourth: Internet video for the sake of internet video. Who gives a shit? I know it's 2009, and we're supposed to be in Teh Future and stuff, but for fuck's sake: If, in 2009, this were a solved problem, the question would never have been raised. Think about it.
Wait. So. You mean: Nobody has ever done direct disk-to-disk SCSI transfers in a commodity OS[1]? I can't say I'm surprised, but I am a little offended[2].
[1]: I'm sure that, somewhere, there has been at least one embedded or special-built system which accomplished this. This, obviously, doesn't count.
[2]: I bought the big, fast SCSI disks because I needed big, and fast. But it would've been tres cool if copying would've been more efficient. Not that it ever much mattered, as you imply, but the concept is awesome awesome in the same way that "cat /dev/audio > /dev/st0" was the first time around.
Disk-to-disk operations would then bypass the kernel and asynchronous I/O would consume no primary resources. This was fashionable on some systems (most notably drives that used the IEEE 488 bus) in the 70s and was done to some degree with SCSI, but there's really no excuse for not providing such a capability on any modern drive.
I bought that line, hook line and sinker, in the late 90's with a bunch of IBM 9ES ultra-wide SCSI disks and a good controller.
It never was clear to me that, at any time, Linux was actually telling the drives to copy data directly from one disk to any other without the kernel in the middle.
And now that we live in a world of point-to-point serial buses (SATA, SAS) linking disks to seemingly independent controllers: Is it even theoretically possible anymore?
I'd like to take this opportunity to put my 1995 hat back on, for old time's sake, and say the following:
Fuck the CDA.
That is all.
Oh. I see. It's not a protection mechanism, it's just a way to make people enlightened about the fact that their name is attached to their music.
So why in the fuck would these people, having been so enlightened, continue to buy music from vendors which behave this way?