There's a Wii connected, using the 480p cables, to my HDTV.:)
But there's a downfall to consoles... you can't play certain types of online games, where the goal is chatting, rather than competition. Try playing WoW, GuildWars, or SecondLife on a console. I dare ya.
I'd be using Minix on my laptop right now, if it supported the wireless card. *shrugs* dual boot, Minix for work, and XP for gaming.
What I really want is an OS that boots, from cold, almost instantly, and from which I can run my games. As the only game I really play all that often on the computer already has a Linux-native port, I'd be running Linux if it supported my sound card.... Will be trying the next release of Ubuntu to see if it does. And if it does, it'll be reformat/reinstall time. For now, I'm running XP MCE 2005, and sleeping it when I'm not using it.
It works well enough. But all things considered... I designed the laptop when I ordered it with Linux in mind. Hoping/planning on using it. Picked my hardware knowing that it would work in Linux... NVidia GeForce 8600GT 256MB video card, Intel 8945J wireless card, etc... never occurred to me that the sound card would end up being unsupported, especially since it's an Intel-based sound card....
Easy for you, maybe. Easy for the average user? Hell no.
Changing the DNS numbers in your TCP/IP stack is really easy to do. Just open the settings, and poof, it's there. Setting up a VPN to a corporate network requires: a job which allows you to VPN into the network, that your corporate network has a DNS server on a different ISP, a fair degree of knowhow to set up the VPN on your system, and an ISP that doesn't deprioritize encrypted traffic. It's something that's a lot more technical to do, and has a lot more ifs involved.
Setting it up to transparently proxy the DNS is something that's ridiculously easy to do. More than that, it'd probably cut out more than 90% of the pirate traffic. Sure, it's not 100%. Blocking out 100% is nearly impossible with the way the 'net is designed. But 90% is better than zero.
Unfortunately, they probably did. I know several well paid network engineers and sysadmins who really have no understanding of how the internet works, and would think a local ISP DNS block would work. The typical training for these positions is heavy on the "how", and light on the "why".
More realistically, they know exactly why it isn't working and aren't trying very hard to implement it. It's called "paying lip-service". A DNS block does work fine, as long as your users don't want to, or don't try to circumvent it. Case in point, I'm using DNS block on my home/small business network to block out adservers, using the list from http://pgl.yoyo.org/as/. Works great, because nobody on the network has any interest at all in circumventing it. If I were blocking something like Google, the users would riot. And they'd switch to a different DNS server.
Most people in the kind of position where they'd be able to implement a DNS block know that the only way to enforce it would be to block DNS traffic at the routers... or to silently redirect DNS traffic to the ISP's DNS server, something that's ridiculously easy to do with most routers/gateways/firewalls.
Seriously... whichever license you want. It's not that they're all the same, it's that they all serve different purposes. As long as you take the appropriate steps to make sure no morons are going to try to sue you if it blows up in their faces (literally or figuratively), then the rest of the license doesn't really matter now, does it? Claim whatever rights you want, give away whatever rights you please.
Just because it's "open source" doesn't mean that you don't get to retain any rights. Pick which rights you want to keep, pick a license that suits your needs/desire, and if you don't find one, roll your own.
I wonder if they're counting the positive impact that the plants they make fuels like Ethanol out of are having, too.... most of the carbon dioxide that gets released by burning something like corn-based Ethanol was carbon dioxide in the first place, and was scrubbed from the atmosphere by the plant you ultimately turn into alcohol. Yes, the fermentation process releases CO2. Yes, burning the resulting alcohol releases CO2. But unlike fossil fuels, this is CO2 that was removed from our atmosphere in living memory. The plants we're distilling and burning are ones that get cultivated for months, not millenia.
Even granting the benefit of the doubt and admitting that burning fossil fuels may release less CO2 in the long run, the important point that TFA is ignoring is that it's CO2 that hasn't been part of our atmosphere for millions of years. It's not about eliminating greenhouse gases entirely. That's never going to happen without a fundamental shift in how we get energy in the first place. Switching to alternative fuels is about carbon neutrality, and that's something that has to be measured within the human lifespan. Actually, it's something that needs to be measured over as short a period of time as possible.
Though with the 8 hours it took to copy all the MP3's from my two 320GB external USB hard drives to my 1TB external Firewire hard drive, that 9% would certainly be noticable. It's all about scale. You won't notice a 9% improvement in performance when you aren't doing much. But you most certainly will notice it when you're doing a lot.
This is Slashdot, and that article can loosely be translated as "Upgrading to Vista SP1 is a colossal waste of time." Anything that bashes MS or makes them look bad makes front page here.
I could really do without broadcast news. It's such a waste of time. They give you a little blurb about some interesting-looking story, and say it's "coming next", but then they don't actually go into that story for another hour. It's much better to just get your local news from a local newspaper website
It was an example of something that I do watch that you'll never see on BT. Whether you like it or not is irrelevant. If you'd prefer, you can substitute gameshows like Jeopardy! for the broadcast news. And I do need a PVR rather than a TV because I don't like to schedule the time I'm going to be sitting in front of a TV. I don't like having to cut my evening short, or plan around the schedules of the TV shows I watch. Having a PVR allows me to have a social life and remain physically active while still watching the shows I like. It suits my lifestyle better. Period. And there is absolutely nothing you can say that will convince me to switch that appliance to a Linux-based solution, when I've already established that Linux doesn't meet my needs. What's more, the only thing you're actually succeeding in doing right now is annoying me with your blind zealotry, and I think that runs counter to what you're actually trying to accomplish.
Don't get me wrong. I'm all for Linux. I use it on my laptop, and on my server. And before the desktop got retooled as a HTPC (before I bought a new laptop with better specs), I used Linux on the desktop too and played the majority of my games through WineX/Cedega, dualbooting into XP for games like Oblivion. *but* there is a time and a place for everything, and this is most emphatically *not* the place to be telling me that I should toss Windows out in favour of Linux. I've tried Linux in this setting. It simply doesn't meet my needs.
Listen to yourself: you're honestly telling me that I should adjust my needs so that I can use Linux. Sound familiar?
Contrary to what some zealots will have you believe, Free/Open-Source Software is not a panacea. It's a good thing, but there's still areas where it just doesn't measure up to commercial software, and since I'm not a particularly accomplished software engineer, I'm going to have to use commercial software until somebody else fixes the free stuff. When that happens? I don't know. I may reexamine my situation, but seeing as I have a completely legal, and free, implementation of Vista Ultimate x64 running my HTPC right now, it's doubtful.
That's easy: why bother with a TV tuner when everything worth watching is available on BitTorrent? An HTPC only needs to serve as a giant DVD player of sorts, allowing you to watch anything out of your collection of BitTorrent-downloaded content.
Hardware MPEG decoder? 2% CPU usage while watching x.264 1080p videos? The CPU is an Athlon64 X2 3800+.
This is a passively cooled system. One of the sacrifices I had to make for it to be passively cooled was a relatively low-end CPU. There's no way this CPU is powerful enough to watch a video like that with software decoding, and there's no way a CPU that is powerful enough to decode a video like that in real time is going to be cool enough for a passive heatsink. It's just not going to happen. So I need the TV tuner, because it includes a hardware MPEG decoder.
Quite aside from that, there are times when you just want to watch TV. Don't want to wait a few hours to download something through BT (if you're lucky), just want to turn it on and watch something. Like broadcast news, for example. Never shows up in BT, because by the time it could, it'd be outdated and not worth watching.
Oh, and there's one last thing you haven't considered: where do the BT people get the content? Somebody, somewhere, needs a TV tuner card in their computer, and to record the broadcast and edit/encode it.
I use BT for shows I can't get in broadcast TV, like Hotel Babylon. For shows like Little Mosque on the Prairie, or jPod, I will use my computer as a PVR.
What do you mean, "as a media center"? Can you not use Debian/Ubuntu or something?
No. I can't.
I'm talking about as an HTPC, and there's hardware in my system that simply doesn't work with Linux. There are absolutely no drivers for NEC-based TV tuner cards, such as my AverMedia M780. It's a gorgeous card... generates *much* less heat than a similar Hauppauge card does *especially when viewing 1080i HDTV*, better picture, and better ATSC reception than anything else I've tried. Absolutely the best TV tuner card I've found. But it's simply not supported by Linux. And switching to Hauppauge or something else isn't an option, because this is a passively cooled silent PC, and having a tuner card with a block temperature 30'C hotter than the M780 is out of the question.
There *are* Linux-based HTPC options. MythTV, for example. But the lack of support for some of the hardware I have in my system is a deal-breaker. What's the point of having a PVR/HTPC that doesn't have a working TV tuner?
So my HTPC/Media Center runs on Vista. Because in that respect, Vista is better than XP: the interface is better laid out and more intuitive. But in my experience, that's the only way in which it's better.
The Vista kernel, is probibly the ONLY thing going good for it. ONLY. Nothing else seems to be some kind of 'improvement' The UI blows, Mabye a smidgen of DX10, interesting, but coming to XP, sureptitiously. BUT not on any production machine, or one that I cannot run multiple OSs on.
Media Center. As an HTPC operating system, Vista is, bar none, the best option right now. There's really no argument that Linux's driver support doesn't come close to Vista's driver support when it comes to support of products like TV tuners. And due to a lack of DRM, Linux doesn't support the current implementation of HDMI, either, which limits its use with modern HDTVs. (let's not get into the argument about whether DRM is a good or a bad thing, the fact is that it's here). So on a driver support level alone, Vista is better than Linux *as a media center HTPC*. That's a question of market penetration, though... Linux doesn't have enough of a market share to justify developping drivers for it by fringe developpers. The TV Tuner market really is a fringe market compared to, say, the video card market. This is why Hauppauge, or AverMedia don't make Linux drivers for their hardware, while ATI and NVidia do.
Comparing user interface, Vista's MCE interface is *way* better than XP's. It's night and day. Vista's menu options are better laid out by category, the font they've used is crisper, cleaner, and easier to read, and the ability to overlay the menu on top of current video playback (rather than shrinking the display to a bottom corner, though it does that sometimes too) is a subtle but very useful difference, allowing you to pick what you want to watch/do without actually having to stop watching what you're doing now. Having used MythTV, I can tell you that the Vista Media Center interface is a lot more useful for me. Coupled with the driver support, it really is the best option for a Media Center/HTPC out there. Unless, of course, you compare it to Apple's offerings... in that respect, they're about equal. But Apple's stuff costs a lot more.
Oh, Vista's function is completely predictable: shitty.
Of course, as a media center (and only as a media center) it's actually the best option right now, and what I'm stuck using on my media PC. Brain... exploding....
I think you're suffering from a cranial-rectal inversion. You may want to get that checked.
DRM doesn't prevent me from watching anything I have. You missed that part, right? I can download all I want, and Vista isn't going to stop me from doing it. I know this, because I use it for exactly that purpose (it being the only computer other than my server that I leave on all the time).
And as any technically-minded person can tell you, there is *nothing* at the software level that can prevent me from copying something. Any new copy protection scheme they come up with *will* be broken, and in fact already has been broken. So what do I get from the DRM embedded in Vista that I simply cannot get from Linux? The ability to play full HD content on my TV. Without the DRM, playback gets downgraded for both the audio and the video signal. And that downgrading is done *at the hardware level*, by the TV itself. It's part of the specification. And I'm not a skilled enough hacker to bypass that in the TV. I *could* hook it up to a computer monitor, but have you compared the difference in cost between, say, a 30" computer monitor and a 46" 1080p TV? Simple economics.
And for the record, Vista hasn't prevented me from ripping any DVDs or CDs. It's not capable of it.
So does Vista. Even Vista Media Center plays them. Assuming you've been smart and, you know, installed the codecs. Just need one, actually: ffdshow. If you want to go for broke, you can also install the Combined Community Codec Pack (CCCP). Throw those at it, and Vista will play every file I have, including the MKVs and the OGG/Vorbis files.
And unlike your box, my Vista-based media center will actually play BluRay discs, as well as rips. And it'll play them at full 1080p through the HDMI or, if I prefer, the DVI output on my computer. Both of which support full HDCP. (I'm using the DVI, with the coaxial Dolby Digital output going directly to my decoder at the moment. I'll go HDMI when I replace my 24" WUXGA+ LCD display with a 46" HDTV in the near future)
The FUD about the DRM in Vista is completely overblown. It's in there, but it's not going to prevent you from viewing pirated content if that's your thing. Vista doesn't complain at all about playing videos or songs in my collection. The DRM is in there so that I can play my legitimately purchased content at full resolution, which is something you can't do with your box.
This is highly consistent with my own observation that females are able to distinguish 'attractiveness' in other females innately while straight males can only look to the reactions of females. How do you innately know what is attractive without some level of attraction?
I prefer to think that we're all bisexual to some degree... it's a question of societal programming and our own prejudices that tells us to like one explicitly to the exclusion of the other. There is a degree of nature in there, too, mind you... I have a very definite preference for the female of the species, and have never had any desire to hop in the sack with a guy, nor do I suspect I ever will. But that does mean I'm comfortable enough in my own sexual identity and my own sexuality (two different things) to be able to admit whether or not a guy is attractive. It's only because of idiotic programming on behalf of society that such an admission somehow threatens your masculinity.
You do have to admit that in North America, at least, there's a double standard out there... if a female is gay, it's sexy. if a male is gay, it's a crime against humanity. *shrugs* may explain why more females are willing to admit things like that than males....
i personally think sexual preference is NOT hardwired though it does stem from prepubescent experiences.
And what do you base this on? Any scientific body of evidence behind that? Any actual gay friends you've talked to about it? And what about the people who were abused as children but grew up to be straight? What made it different for them?
There've been studies done which showed that sexual attraction has to do with the size of a particular gland in the brain, attached to the thalmus. Specifically, the larger it is, the more likely you are to be attracted to females. They have found that in normal females, it's smaller than it is in normal males. And more importantly, that in homosexual males, it's more typically female, and in homosexual females, it's more typically male.
Quite aside from that, most homosexuals know long before they reach puberty that they're different from their peers. It's hard-wired. But it probably has more to do with horomones that get released in utero affecting the brain chemistry of the infant than it does with genetics (just as with cases of transgenderism), because there are cases of identical twins where one's gay and the other is straight.
What if a child with a limp walks by the tiger enclosure? Or someone with a bandaged wound? Or a stray dog gets into the zoo and barks at the tiger?
y'know... the last time I visited the Metropolitan Toronto Zoo, I was 13 years old and walking on crutches. My leg was in a cast. And I visited the tiger enclosure. The animals largely ignored me, just as they would anybody who's not throwing rocks at them. If you're trying to tick off the animal, it's your own darned fault if the animal attacks you.
They have a good life there... food presented to them, shelter, safety, no predators. And the cats are smart enough to understand just how good a deal that is. You have to really piss it off to get it to attack you.
The reason a shotgun is effective in an urban setting is because it's a spray&pray weapon. You point it in the general direction of your target, and because it's close quarters, the large number of small slugs that it discharges have effective killing power. You'd need to score a very lucky hit to kill with just one shotgun pellet, but the shock from being hit by 30 at the same time can be fatal in and of itself, even if no single hit is fatal. But for it to be effective, you need to be close. They just aren't effective at a distance, because of the scatter pattern. You're unlikely to be able to safely get close enough to a raging tiger to be able to disable it with this type of weapon.
A supersonic round from a rifle has a few major advantages over a shotgun from an accuracy perspective... first, it's coming from a rifled barrel. It'll maintain its accuracy over a much greater distance. Second, killing power. The bulk of its killing power comes from the tremendous kinetic energy that the round carries, and from the fact that supersonic rounds tend to disintegrate on impact, dispersing all of the kinetic energy into its target. Ricochets do happen, but in my experience (Canadian military, primarily with 5.56 and 7.62 FMJ ball) they aren't a serious worry. Those types of rounds will usually shatter on impact no matter what they hit, and each individual fragment simply doesn't have enough kinetic energy to cause serious harm unless it hits a vital area. Truth be told, where ricochets are concerned in these types of weapons, your biggest worry is the chunk of burning phosphorous that flies off tracers when they hit something. Even then, the bullet itself still disintigrates on impact.
To sum up... a rifle is the way to kill a tiger. To have any real guarantee of stopping the animal with a shotgun, you'd have to be far too close for comfort. I wouldn't want to get within 30 feet of a raging tiger if my intent was to kill the animal. I'd rather be 300 feet away with a rifle in my hands. And police *do* use rifles. The RCMP training in Canada, for example, includes proficiency with the 9mm pistol, the shotgun, and the.22cal rifle. (and before you say that a.22 isn't enough, know that the standard military rifle, an M16 in the US and a C7A2 in Canada, shoots 5.56mm rounds, which is about.223 calibre) They're trained to know when a rifle is appropriate, and when a shotgun is appropriate. And in a situation like this one, a rifle is the appropriate weapon.
See... you can study that without retaining the data once it's downloaded... what you really need to study are the long-term effects on consumer electronics from the frequent downloading/listening to of music, and the economics of long-term storage of said data.
And I suppose the most important question to ask: can your needs be settled by the publicly and freely available technical writeups out there? Why reverse-engineer something that's open?
Botnet. Every connected system has a unique IP address. (or enough of the connected systems do, at least). Enough IP variation to skirt around the detection.
Mario Galaxy does have the Red Mushroom powerup that gives you 6 hitpoints instead of 3 though. While he's not growing like he did in earlier games, it's arguable that this does make him "Super" Mario again.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a Wii connected, using the 480p cables, to my HDTV. :)
But there's a downfall to consoles... you can't play certain types of online games, where the goal is chatting, rather than competition. Try playing WoW, GuildWars, or SecondLife on a console. I dare ya.
I'd be using Minix on my laptop right now, if it supported the wireless card. *shrugs* dual boot, Minix for work, and XP for gaming.
What I really want is an OS that boots, from cold, almost instantly, and from which I can run my games. As the only game I really play all that often on the computer already has a Linux-native port, I'd be running Linux if it supported my sound card.... Will be trying the next release of Ubuntu to see if it does. And if it does, it'll be reformat/reinstall time. For now, I'm running XP MCE 2005, and sleeping it when I'm not using it.
It works well enough. But all things considered... I designed the laptop when I ordered it with Linux in mind. Hoping/planning on using it. Picked my hardware knowing that it would work in Linux... NVidia GeForce 8600GT 256MB video card, Intel 8945J wireless card, etc... never occurred to me that the sound card would end up being unsupported, especially since it's an Intel-based sound card....
Easy for you, maybe. Easy for the average user? Hell no.
Changing the DNS numbers in your TCP/IP stack is really easy to do. Just open the settings, and poof, it's there. Setting up a VPN to a corporate network requires: a job which allows you to VPN into the network, that your corporate network has a DNS server on a different ISP, a fair degree of knowhow to set up the VPN on your system, and an ISP that doesn't deprioritize encrypted traffic. It's something that's a lot more technical to do, and has a lot more ifs involved.
Setting it up to transparently proxy the DNS is something that's ridiculously easy to do. More than that, it'd probably cut out more than 90% of the pirate traffic. Sure, it's not 100%. Blocking out 100% is nearly impossible with the way the 'net is designed. But 90% is better than zero.
More realistically, they know exactly why it isn't working and aren't trying very hard to implement it. It's called "paying lip-service". A DNS block does work fine, as long as your users don't want to, or don't try to circumvent it. Case in point, I'm using DNS block on my home/small business network to block out adservers, using the list from http://pgl.yoyo.org/as/. Works great, because nobody on the network has any interest at all in circumventing it. If I were blocking something like Google, the users would riot. And they'd switch to a different DNS server.
Most people in the kind of position where they'd be able to implement a DNS block know that the only way to enforce it would be to block DNS traffic at the routers... or to silently redirect DNS traffic to the ISP's DNS server, something that's ridiculously easy to do with most routers/gateways/firewalls.
Seriously... whichever license you want. It's not that they're all the same, it's that they all serve different purposes. As long as you take the appropriate steps to make sure no morons are going to try to sue you if it blows up in their faces (literally or figuratively), then the rest of the license doesn't really matter now, does it? Claim whatever rights you want, give away whatever rights you please.
Just because it's "open source" doesn't mean that you don't get to retain any rights. Pick which rights you want to keep, pick a license that suits your needs/desire, and if you don't find one, roll your own.
I wonder if they're counting the positive impact that the plants they make fuels like Ethanol out of are having, too.... most of the carbon dioxide that gets released by burning something like corn-based Ethanol was carbon dioxide in the first place, and was scrubbed from the atmosphere by the plant you ultimately turn into alcohol. Yes, the fermentation process releases CO2. Yes, burning the resulting alcohol releases CO2. But unlike fossil fuels, this is CO2 that was removed from our atmosphere in living memory. The plants we're distilling and burning are ones that get cultivated for months, not millenia.
Even granting the benefit of the doubt and admitting that burning fossil fuels may release less CO2 in the long run, the important point that TFA is ignoring is that it's CO2 that hasn't been part of our atmosphere for millions of years. It's not about eliminating greenhouse gases entirely. That's never going to happen without a fundamental shift in how we get energy in the first place. Switching to alternative fuels is about carbon neutrality, and that's something that has to be measured within the human lifespan. Actually, it's something that needs to be measured over as short a period of time as possible.
Though with the 8 hours it took to copy all the MP3's from my two 320GB external USB hard drives to my 1TB external Firewire hard drive, that 9% would certainly be noticable. It's all about scale. You won't notice a 9% improvement in performance when you aren't doing much. But you most certainly will notice it when you're doing a lot.
You must be new here....
This is Slashdot, and that article can loosely be translated as "Upgrading to Vista SP1 is a colossal waste of time." Anything that bashes MS or makes them look bad makes front page here.
It was an example of something that I do watch that you'll never see on BT. Whether you like it or not is irrelevant. If you'd prefer, you can substitute gameshows like Jeopardy! for the broadcast news. And I do need a PVR rather than a TV because I don't like to schedule the time I'm going to be sitting in front of a TV. I don't like having to cut my evening short, or plan around the schedules of the TV shows I watch. Having a PVR allows me to have a social life and remain physically active while still watching the shows I like. It suits my lifestyle better. Period. And there is absolutely nothing you can say that will convince me to switch that appliance to a Linux-based solution, when I've already established that Linux doesn't meet my needs. What's more, the only thing you're actually succeeding in doing right now is annoying me with your blind zealotry, and I think that runs counter to what you're actually trying to accomplish.
Don't get me wrong. I'm all for Linux. I use it on my laptop, and on my server. And before the desktop got retooled as a HTPC (before I bought a new laptop with better specs), I used Linux on the desktop too and played the majority of my games through WineX/Cedega, dualbooting into XP for games like Oblivion. *but* there is a time and a place for everything, and this is most emphatically *not* the place to be telling me that I should toss Windows out in favour of Linux. I've tried Linux in this setting. It simply doesn't meet my needs.
Listen to yourself: you're honestly telling me that I should adjust my needs so that I can use Linux. Sound familiar?
Contrary to what some zealots will have you believe, Free/Open-Source Software is not a panacea. It's a good thing, but there's still areas where it just doesn't measure up to commercial software, and since I'm not a particularly accomplished software engineer, I'm going to have to use commercial software until somebody else fixes the free stuff. When that happens? I don't know. I may reexamine my situation, but seeing as I have a completely legal, and free, implementation of Vista Ultimate x64 running my HTPC right now, it's doubtful.
Hardware MPEG decoder? 2% CPU usage while watching x.264 1080p videos? The CPU is an Athlon64 X2 3800+.
This is a passively cooled system. One of the sacrifices I had to make for it to be passively cooled was a relatively low-end CPU. There's no way this CPU is powerful enough to watch a video like that with software decoding, and there's no way a CPU that is powerful enough to decode a video like that in real time is going to be cool enough for a passive heatsink. It's just not going to happen. So I need the TV tuner, because it includes a hardware MPEG decoder.
Quite aside from that, there are times when you just want to watch TV. Don't want to wait a few hours to download something through BT (if you're lucky), just want to turn it on and watch something. Like broadcast news, for example. Never shows up in BT, because by the time it could, it'd be outdated and not worth watching.
Oh, and there's one last thing you haven't considered: where do the BT people get the content? Somebody, somewhere, needs a TV tuner card in their computer, and to record the broadcast and edit/encode it.
I use BT for shows I can't get in broadcast TV, like Hotel Babylon. For shows like Little Mosque on the Prairie, or jPod, I will use my computer as a PVR.
No. I can't.
I'm talking about as an HTPC, and there's hardware in my system that simply doesn't work with Linux. There are absolutely no drivers for NEC-based TV tuner cards, such as my AverMedia M780. It's a gorgeous card... generates *much* less heat than a similar Hauppauge card does *especially when viewing 1080i HDTV*, better picture, and better ATSC reception than anything else I've tried. Absolutely the best TV tuner card I've found. But it's simply not supported by Linux. And switching to Hauppauge or something else isn't an option, because this is a passively cooled silent PC, and having a tuner card with a block temperature 30'C hotter than the M780 is out of the question.
There *are* Linux-based HTPC options. MythTV, for example. But the lack of support for some of the hardware I have in my system is a deal-breaker. What's the point of having a PVR/HTPC that doesn't have a working TV tuner?
So my HTPC/Media Center runs on Vista. Because in that respect, Vista is better than XP: the interface is better laid out and more intuitive. But in my experience, that's the only way in which it's better.
Media Center. As an HTPC operating system, Vista is, bar none, the best option right now. There's really no argument that Linux's driver support doesn't come close to Vista's driver support when it comes to support of products like TV tuners. And due to a lack of DRM, Linux doesn't support the current implementation of HDMI, either, which limits its use with modern HDTVs. (let's not get into the argument about whether DRM is a good or a bad thing, the fact is that it's here). So on a driver support level alone, Vista is better than Linux *as a media center HTPC*. That's a question of market penetration, though... Linux doesn't have enough of a market share to justify developping drivers for it by fringe developpers. The TV Tuner market really is a fringe market compared to, say, the video card market. This is why Hauppauge, or AverMedia don't make Linux drivers for their hardware, while ATI and NVidia do.
Comparing user interface, Vista's MCE interface is *way* better than XP's. It's night and day. Vista's menu options are better laid out by category, the font they've used is crisper, cleaner, and easier to read, and the ability to overlay the menu on top of current video playback (rather than shrinking the display to a bottom corner, though it does that sometimes too) is a subtle but very useful difference, allowing you to pick what you want to watch/do without actually having to stop watching what you're doing now. Having used MythTV, I can tell you that the Vista Media Center interface is a lot more useful for me. Coupled with the driver support, it really is the best option for a Media Center/HTPC out there. Unless, of course, you compare it to Apple's offerings... in that respect, they're about equal. But Apple's stuff costs a lot more.
Oh, Vista's function is completely predictable: shitty.
Of course, as a media center (and only as a media center) it's actually the best option right now, and what I'm stuck using on my media PC. Brain... exploding....
I think you're suffering from a cranial-rectal inversion. You may want to get that checked.
DRM doesn't prevent me from watching anything I have. You missed that part, right? I can download all I want, and Vista isn't going to stop me from doing it. I know this, because I use it for exactly that purpose (it being the only computer other than my server that I leave on all the time).
And as any technically-minded person can tell you, there is *nothing* at the software level that can prevent me from copying something. Any new copy protection scheme they come up with *will* be broken, and in fact already has been broken. So what do I get from the DRM embedded in Vista that I simply cannot get from Linux? The ability to play full HD content on my TV. Without the DRM, playback gets downgraded for both the audio and the video signal. And that downgrading is done *at the hardware level*, by the TV itself. It's part of the specification. And I'm not a skilled enough hacker to bypass that in the TV. I *could* hook it up to a computer monitor, but have you compared the difference in cost between, say, a 30" computer monitor and a 46" 1080p TV? Simple economics.
And for the record, Vista hasn't prevented me from ripping any DVDs or CDs. It's not capable of it.
So does Vista. Even Vista Media Center plays them. Assuming you've been smart and, you know, installed the codecs. Just need one, actually: ffdshow. If you want to go for broke, you can also install the Combined Community Codec Pack (CCCP). Throw those at it, and Vista will play every file I have, including the MKVs and the OGG/Vorbis files.
And unlike your box, my Vista-based media center will actually play BluRay discs, as well as rips. And it'll play them at full 1080p through the HDMI or, if I prefer, the DVI output on my computer. Both of which support full HDCP. (I'm using the DVI, with the coaxial Dolby Digital output going directly to my decoder at the moment. I'll go HDMI when I replace my 24" WUXGA+ LCD display with a 46" HDTV in the near future)
The FUD about the DRM in Vista is completely overblown. It's in there, but it's not going to prevent you from viewing pirated content if that's your thing. Vista doesn't complain at all about playing videos or songs in my collection. The DRM is in there so that I can play my legitimately purchased content at full resolution, which is something you can't do with your box.
... Having been asked "what state's that in?" when I said I'm from Canada, I can honestly say that they probably aren't capable of geography....
I prefer to think that we're all bisexual to some degree... it's a question of societal programming and our own prejudices that tells us to like one explicitly to the exclusion of the other. There is a degree of nature in there, too, mind you... I have a very definite preference for the female of the species, and have never had any desire to hop in the sack with a guy, nor do I suspect I ever will. But that does mean I'm comfortable enough in my own sexual identity and my own sexuality (two different things) to be able to admit whether or not a guy is attractive. It's only because of idiotic programming on behalf of society that such an admission somehow threatens your masculinity.
You do have to admit that in North America, at least, there's a double standard out there... if a female is gay, it's sexy. if a male is gay, it's a crime against humanity. *shrugs* may explain why more females are willing to admit things like that than males....
And what do you base this on? Any scientific body of evidence behind that? Any actual gay friends you've talked to about it? And what about the people who were abused as children but grew up to be straight? What made it different for them?
There've been studies done which showed that sexual attraction has to do with the size of a particular gland in the brain, attached to the thalmus. Specifically, the larger it is, the more likely you are to be attracted to females. They have found that in normal females, it's smaller than it is in normal males. And more importantly, that in homosexual males, it's more typically female, and in homosexual females, it's more typically male.
Quite aside from that, most homosexuals know long before they reach puberty that they're different from their peers. It's hard-wired. But it probably has more to do with horomones that get released in utero affecting the brain chemistry of the infant than it does with genetics (just as with cases of transgenderism), because there are cases of identical twins where one's gay and the other is straight.
y'know... the last time I visited the Metropolitan Toronto Zoo, I was 13 years old and walking on crutches. My leg was in a cast. And I visited the tiger enclosure. The animals largely ignored me, just as they would anybody who's not throwing rocks at them. If you're trying to tick off the animal, it's your own darned fault if the animal attacks you.
They have a good life there... food presented to them, shelter, safety, no predators. And the cats are smart enough to understand just how good a deal that is. You have to really piss it off to get it to attack you.
Accuracy.
.22cal rifle. (and before you say that a .22 isn't enough, know that the standard military rifle, an M16 in the US and a C7A2 in Canada, shoots 5.56mm rounds, which is about .223 calibre) They're trained to know when a rifle is appropriate, and when a shotgun is appropriate. And in a situation like this one, a rifle is the appropriate weapon.
The reason a shotgun is effective in an urban setting is because it's a spray&pray weapon. You point it in the general direction of your target, and because it's close quarters, the large number of small slugs that it discharges have effective killing power. You'd need to score a very lucky hit to kill with just one shotgun pellet, but the shock from being hit by 30 at the same time can be fatal in and of itself, even if no single hit is fatal. But for it to be effective, you need to be close. They just aren't effective at a distance, because of the scatter pattern. You're unlikely to be able to safely get close enough to a raging tiger to be able to disable it with this type of weapon.
A supersonic round from a rifle has a few major advantages over a shotgun from an accuracy perspective... first, it's coming from a rifled barrel. It'll maintain its accuracy over a much greater distance. Second, killing power. The bulk of its killing power comes from the tremendous kinetic energy that the round carries, and from the fact that supersonic rounds tend to disintegrate on impact, dispersing all of the kinetic energy into its target. Ricochets do happen, but in my experience (Canadian military, primarily with 5.56 and 7.62 FMJ ball) they aren't a serious worry. Those types of rounds will usually shatter on impact no matter what they hit, and each individual fragment simply doesn't have enough kinetic energy to cause serious harm unless it hits a vital area. Truth be told, where ricochets are concerned in these types of weapons, your biggest worry is the chunk of burning phosphorous that flies off tracers when they hit something. Even then, the bullet itself still disintigrates on impact.
To sum up... a rifle is the way to kill a tiger. To have any real guarantee of stopping the animal with a shotgun, you'd have to be far too close for comfort. I wouldn't want to get within 30 feet of a raging tiger if my intent was to kill the animal. I'd rather be 300 feet away with a rifle in my hands. And police *do* use rifles. The RCMP training in Canada, for example, includes proficiency with the 9mm pistol, the shotgun, and the
See... you can study that without retaining the data once it's downloaded... what you really need to study are the long-term effects on consumer electronics from the frequent downloading/listening to of music, and the economics of long-term storage of said data.
And I suppose the most important question to ask: can your needs be settled by the publicly and freely available technical writeups out there? Why reverse-engineer something that's open?
Botnet. Every connected system has a unique IP address. (or enough of the connected systems do, at least). Enough IP variation to skirt around the detection.
There was a hotkey, I think "CTRL-D", which skipped the questions....
Um, don't ask how I know that. >.>
Mario Galaxy does have the Red Mushroom powerup that gives you 6 hitpoints instead of 3 though. While he's not growing like he did in earlier games, it's arguable that this does make him "Super" Mario again.