I've wanted that for a while. The first time I saw one of those commercials for one of those stupid things on mute, I wanted a Billy Bass to look straight at a guest and start cussing at them.
Now, I can. Thank you slashdot submitters for brining new meaning to my borring and miserable life!
It actually makes some sense.. For non-timing-sensitive cargo -- i.e. not people -- a train is damn efficent. And if you run it through Russia for a small cost, they'll make money on the market going between the US and Asia.
Well, I've managed to keep my notes electronically using current devices.
It works for everything but a math class.
I have been purchasing low-cost laptops -- my first one was an Epson 486/66 for $1150 about 5 years ago, followed by a closeout Sony VAIO F250 when the Epson died last semester for about the same price.
What I've done is created a nice MS Word style sheet and toolbar. This does everything but doodles. I haven't found a good solution for that.
I think that a good first step would be an application that would run on any standard PC laptop for the purpose of taking notes. Letting somebody with a laptop take notes is a much less intensive project than trying to get the software and hardware both right.
I did some work with this, but I haven't exactly gotten anywhere with it, mostly because of a lack of time. I mostly had the interface and some implementation code.
In any case, the Alpha, MIPS, and SPARC are much better designed for high-end engineering work than your garden variety AMD/Intel CPU.
And there is always the option of rewriting your code in portable C++ that can be run on a MIPS, Alpha, or SPARC system if the Gimp needs to be whipped.;)
The only problem with SGI is the questionable company future.:/
The problem is, if my understanding of "Video and graphical data" that they are referring to, this is more than just dual monitor systems. This also means that the whole raft of high-end video editing systems are going to have problems. And perhaps DVD decoder cards, too.
I suspect that the major issue here is that Intel doesn't want to do a recall on the boards that have already been made, like the i820. So they are figuring that this isn't a major enough problem, so they are going to just let it ship.
It doesn't bother me because I'm not going to buy a P4 of this vintage. If I upgrade, it'll either be to a fast P3, the next version of the P4 and chipset, or an Athlon.
We can't have companies interfering with our fundamental right to gripe! I mean, sure, if somebody's posting stupid rumors about Satan Worshiper P&G People or trying to pull of scams, that's illegal because of Libel and Fraud, but bad reviews are a part of life.
I mean, think about what would happen if every piece of review hardware for the computer mags and sites came with a TOS agreement that dictated that you couldn't write a unfavorable review of the piece of hardware. A good review wouldn't mean anything.
Now, I suspect that a good lawyer could get you out of the TOS's review clause. But your average pissed off customer makes a lot less legitimately than he does illegally, where the problem then lies.
Let's just hope that nobody else gets such bright ideas..:/
I have a few tools (heh heh.. he said tool) that I use. You'll eventually find that the Multi-tools are great to keep on your belt, in your pocket, or in your satchel, but they are not good at all for complex work.
I have a leatherman-clone tool that I got at SigGraph 2000. But that's when I need a knife or something like that.
The rest of the time, I just use a small leather-bound set of tools that I picked up in Staples. The main thing you need is two small screwdrivers and two tiny screwdrivers and a tweezer to grab any screws that you drop in the case. The part tube (to hold a unfolded paperclip for prodding things and resetting my palmtop or any annoying older iMacs) is helpful. Plus, there's a Toryx and some other little nicities.
Trust me, a real screwdriver is MUCH MUCH easier to deal with than a screwdriver one.
Oh, and BTW -- Good tip for taking stuff apart. Cary a roll of scotch tape and some white paper. You put the white paper under the item being dissassembled and you stick the screws and other loose parts to the paper with the scotch tape. You can arange the screws in groups so that the right part goes in the right place. Works every time.
CS Majors are better because...
on
CS vs CIS
·
· Score: 1
I would say that you don't get the same kind of job as a CS major.
From what I can tell, the skills that you learn in CS are more abstract, more mathematically based. You pick up a lot of problem solving skills that are really helpful in all kinds of stuff, not just in writing a program to help with payroll.
I will say that CIS/MIS majors get more of a business education. In my school, you can barely know how to code and get a MIS degree.
So what I've been seeing is that CIS/MIS grads go into consulting firms and IS departments, where you will be doing front-line coding to support the business process. Which is fine for some people.
But people with CS degrees get to do much much cooler stuff. Sure you can do front-line coding to support the business process, but you also end up doing more inovative stuff. There are a lot of different and interesting career options available for you.
For example, my personal love is graphics. You can't really do graphics with an MIS/CIS degree. Plus, you need a solid mathematical background.
And sad to say it, but I have found that ALL of my high-level math courses have been useful in some way. Anything from Combinatorics, Discrete Math, Probability, Real Analysis, Graph Theory, (and most especially) Linear Algebra. It's a pain in the brain, but it will be really helpful later on.
And not just for the actual basis, but the thinking and problem solving that it requires you to have.
So it depends on your ambitions. You'd probably get a much better education and have more capability to grow if you get a CS degree and maybe take some business classes.
I tried NS 6.0 and I'm more in line with the Mozilla people in that when they say it's 1.0, I'll be happy and finally replace NS 4.7x.
It's funny, actually. Little things made it impossible to use. All it took was the bookmark functionality to not quite work right, and I couldn't use it. Bookmarks ended up in the wrong folders or would dissapear. I couldn't drag to the sidebar. I was in the middle of browsing job sites and bookmarking promising ones and I got fed up with it. That was all it took for me to hate it and go back to NS4.7.
You might just want to see a doctor and get your eyes checked. Your insurance should cover it, and it might spot problems before they get really bad.
I have had generally good results with my 15" Sony monitor from years ago at ~75Hz. But then, I get 8 hours of sleep a night, so my experience can't be too indicitave of a good monitor.
But I have found that a quality monitor -- a Sony or the like -- will be much better for you than a cheapo one.
And the other trick, of course, is to take regular breaks every 1/2 or 1/4 of an hour, to focus on something other than the monitor. This gives your eyes a chance to relax a little bit.
You will most likely loose some quality in the LD->DVD translation, but not enough to be seriously worried about.
You need to be careful with the DVD-RAM disks. Many DVD players won't read them. This will hopefully change in the future.
You might have some problems creating a correctly formatted DVD disk, but I think that some people have been working on that problem.
I mean, worst case, you'll have an MPEG-2 video stream that you have to view on your computer until the digital video market stabilizes. Still beats having nothing if your Laserdisk deck dies.
They are basicly working off of the perhaps flawed assertion that biofeedback helps ADD. There is no scientific evidence of this, and nobody's doing double-blind testing of biofeedback.
I've heard about this company in the past and they turned me off by insisting that anecdotal evidence -- stories of people who used biofeedback and found that it helped -- as scientific proof. The company doesn't quite double blind studies, which are much closer to proof.
OTOH, it's/just/ $899, is most likely harmless.
I'm very skeptic about most of the claims of curing ADD with... treatment. There are getting to be as many ADD cures that are full of it as there are cures for cancer that are full of it.
I'm leaning towards getting a compaq h3650 when my current one dies. Yes, it's not a Palm, which is what everybody else, and probably for very good reason uses. I just like having a little more PC-like capabilities in my pocket. I have a Philips Nino right now. It's old, monchrome, discontinued, and the paint is slowly flaking off, but I actually use the nice audio hardware for grabbing interesting sounds without the trouble of carying a tape recorder.
But back to why the Compaq would be nice. Why? It has an optional clip-on PCMCIA card slot. Therefore, Wireless Ethernet is possible. Therefore, there's not a lot of difference between your PDA and the PADDs on Star Trek.;)
Of the two that you mentioned, get the Palm. But consider other options.
What you don't necessarily need is to know their exact technical skills at the moment. Most effective people in the computer field are able to injest massive quantities of information and regurgitate the useful parts to solve a problem.
What you need to do is to know how much they can learn. Which means that you pick something off of their resume that you know very well and give them some hard questions on that, even if it's not a required job skill. They have to have learned that skill somewhere, and how well they learned that will determine how well they will learn everything else. If they evade questions on something that they claim to know well, they aren't very bright.
Theroetcial questions and logic problems are all fine and good, but if your interviewee is out of college, they generally will have seen any problems that you could think up.
You want to make sure that they have the skills elsewhere, so that they can at least land with their feet on the ground, but..
Ask them about their greatest hack. It'll be an interesting story and it will give you an idea of their personality.
If you look at the specs, it's not a mouse in the canonical sense. You can't drag it around or anything.
It's more like a very very industrialized TrackPoint.
Very useful for computing in dangerous environments or out on the field. Or in the middle of the desert where the sand will grind the fsck out of the ball and probably scratch those funky new optical mice to hell, too.
One of the reasons why I am a software person is because there was always plenty of cool stuff to do with the computer and I had adequate guidance.
Those little Radio Shack electronics kits -- I'm not sure if they exist anymore -- never cut it, because they didn't give me any sort of grasp for how to fit things together. It was 200 circuts that you could wire up, without any information about how to synthesyse something new.
So the best way, IMHO, to introduce a kid to electronics is to make sure that they have adequate suplies and guidance, as well as something to do with it.
I'd say a breadboard, a few microcontrollers, and various other parts. Have the kid make something simple at first, like a little radio or something, and then direct them towards something substantial, once the understanding and interest is there.
Has it occured to anybody but me that ever since Win95, the next version of Windows has been said to have these new, advanced capabilities with impressive beta releases, and then when it all gets down to it, they ship the same old, same old?
I mean, really. Those screen shots, with a tweak here and a tweak there, look like the really early Win98 show-off-ware. And they've been having ideas about design ever since MS Bob! All that MS has come up with is a few tweaks here and there to the interface, a little gloss, and a lot of hype.
I think that the GUI needs to get OUT of my way, not in my way. If I want news, I'll look it up. If I want my buddies, I'll pull up my buddy list.
If we are going to not have windows that overlap, I want there to be $100 tablet computers that I can spread out over my desk, not a single $2000 computer with a single monitor.
Having said that, OS X has some good new tweaks to the interface. It's no revolution, but I think that Aqua is doing a better job at evolving the GUI.
Getting your keyboard tapped sucks, but it's better than the alternative.
Now, granted, tapping a keyboard should be equivelent to wiretapping and require the usual warant.
But I'd much rather have the FBI tapping my keyboard with a warant than needing to use whimpy encryption with a backdoor.
Besides, a smart political will sweap their gear for bugs on a regular basis. I'm sure that most people don't crack their keyboards open to look for bugs, but it might be the 3l33t habit of the new millenium, when it starts in less than a month...;)
Like it costs them anything substantial to pay for him. Some $60-100k/year, which is nothing compared to $x billion in revenues. If a thousand Linux-heads picked up a HP printer on the "good feelings" from this instead of an Epson (who's printers I prefer anyways) they'll pay for it.
They can ignore him at will, too. They'll be able to get advice from him on a few ways to make money without any possibility of affecting their intelectual property or bottom line.
I'm going to have to say that I really don't care about my.mp3.com. The good part of mp3.com is the unsigned artist community.
I mean, really. The amount of cases where it is useful is decreasing. You need broadband access in order to play your MP3s at a decent clip. The only time I saw it make sense was if you wanted to listen to some tunes in a computer lab on campus.
If I want to transport music around, I just burn it to CD-R disks that I can cary around. Plus, that frees up hard disk space for other things.
I learned a dialect of APL that works with SML in a compilers class.
I haven't heard of it otherwise. For hardcore mathematical coding, it seems like people are using one of the CAS systems like Maple, Matlab, or Mathematica. It seems that a lot of those systems have a lot of the same sort of operators that I learned when I learned APL.
Kernel fork, maybe... Incompatabilities, no...
on
Linux to Fragment?
·
· Score: 1
I personally am not too scared of a kernel fork, if it is done right.
There are a whole set of features that a industrial-strength server needs that a workstation doesn't. There is also a large set of tweaks that work great on multiprocessor, large memory machines that will not work too well on the 486 that you scavenged to use as a firewall.
So a kernel fork may very well happen, with a more industrial-strength kernel being created to be shipped with higher-end servers.
But, at the same time, any kernel form will probably be GPLed. And unless the people doing the fork have the brains of a box of rocks, they will probably end up keeping compatability.
And the BSD folk have nothing to be proud of. BSD forks like rabbits fcsk.
From what I understand, the TiVo code that handles the GUI is probably part of the custom application layer. I doubt they are running X, instead, they probably are just writing code to write directly to the frame buffer and using their own custom code to do this.
I suspect that TiVo, despite their use of the open-source Linux OS in the boxes, considers the interface one of their key intellectual properties. Therefore, I doubt that they are going to release that part of their code as open source anytime soon.
It has already been posted that it's probably a very bad idea to take the set-top box interface and try to make it work on the computer. There is a completely different set of requirements that you need in order to make a interface work from a remote than the requirements that make an interface work from a computer console.
Get an older laptop with a sound card. A sound card with 16 bit accuracy will give you 44100 16 bit samples per second, which is more than enough.
Then pick up a wireless ethernet card for the laptop.
And, of course, if the laptops are cheap enough, you could make a beowulf cluster of these..;)
If you want to spend more money and get something smaller, see about one of the HP Jornada handheld PCs. You'd have to get an external digitizer hooked to the serial port and write WinCE software to take advantage of it, but they are pretty small and they have a PCMCIA slot for wireless ethernet. Alternitively, you could rip it open and hotwire your sensor to the microphone jack.
Slashdot Mirror
I've wanted that for a while. The first time I saw one of those commercials for one of those stupid things on mute, I wanted a Billy Bass to look straight at a guest and start cussing at them.
Now, I can. Thank you slashdot submitters for brining new meaning to my borring and miserable life!
It actually makes some sense.. For non-timing-sensitive cargo -- i.e. not people -- a train is damn efficent. And if you run it through Russia for a small cost, they'll make money on the market going between the US and Asia.
Well, I've managed to keep my notes electronically using current devices.
It works for everything but a math class.
I have been purchasing low-cost laptops -- my first one was an Epson 486/66 for $1150 about 5 years ago, followed by a closeout Sony VAIO F250 when the Epson died last semester for about the same price.
What I've done is created a nice MS Word style sheet and toolbar. This does everything but doodles. I haven't found a good solution for that.
I think that a good first step would be an application that would run on any standard PC laptop for the purpose of taking notes. Letting somebody with a laptop take notes is a much less intensive project than trying to get the software and hardware both right.
I did some work with this, but I haven't exactly gotten anywhere with it, mostly because of a lack of time. I mostly had the interface and some implementation code.
In any case, the Alpha, MIPS, and SPARC are much better designed for high-end engineering work than your garden variety AMD/Intel CPU.
;)
:/
And there is always the option of rewriting your code in portable C++ that can be run on a MIPS, Alpha, or SPARC system if the Gimp needs to be whipped.
The only problem with SGI is the questionable company future.
The problem is, if my understanding of "Video and graphical data" that they are referring to, this is more than just dual monitor systems. This also means that the whole raft of high-end video editing systems are going to have problems. And perhaps DVD decoder cards, too.
I suspect that the major issue here is that Intel doesn't want to do a recall on the boards that have already been made, like the i820. So they are figuring that this isn't a major enough problem, so they are going to just let it ship.
It doesn't bother me because I'm not going to buy a P4 of this vintage. If I upgrade, it'll either be to a fast P3, the next version of the P4 and chipset, or an Athlon.
That's just dangerous.. :/
:/
We can't have companies interfering with our fundamental right to gripe! I mean, sure, if somebody's posting stupid rumors about Satan Worshiper P&G People or trying to pull of scams, that's illegal because of Libel and Fraud, but bad reviews are a part of life.
I mean, think about what would happen if every piece of review hardware for the computer mags and sites came with a TOS agreement that dictated that you couldn't write a unfavorable review of the piece of hardware. A good review wouldn't mean anything.
Now, I suspect that a good lawyer could get you out of the TOS's review clause. But your average pissed off customer makes a lot less legitimately than he does illegally, where the problem then lies.
Let's just hope that nobody else gets such bright ideas..
I have a few tools (heh heh.. he said tool) that I use. You'll eventually find that the Multi-tools are great to keep on your belt, in your pocket, or in your satchel, but they are not good at all for complex work.
I have a leatherman-clone tool that I got at SigGraph 2000. But that's when I need a knife or something like that.
The rest of the time, I just use a small leather-bound set of tools that I picked up in Staples. The main thing you need is two small screwdrivers and two tiny screwdrivers and a tweezer to grab any screws that you drop in the case. The part tube (to hold a unfolded paperclip for prodding things and resetting my palmtop or any annoying older iMacs) is helpful. Plus, there's a Toryx and some other little nicities.
Trust me, a real screwdriver is MUCH MUCH easier to deal with than a screwdriver one.
Oh, and BTW -- Good tip for taking stuff apart. Cary a roll of scotch tape and some white paper. You put the white paper under the item being dissassembled and you stick the screws and other loose parts to the paper with the scotch tape. You can arange the screws in groups so that the right part goes in the right place. Works every time.
I would say that you don't get the same kind of job as a CS major.
From what I can tell, the skills that you learn in CS are more abstract, more mathematically based. You pick up a lot of problem solving skills that are really helpful in all kinds of stuff, not just in writing a program to help with payroll.
I will say that CIS/MIS majors get more of a business education. In my school, you can barely know how to code and get a MIS degree.
So what I've been seeing is that CIS/MIS grads go into consulting firms and IS departments, where you will be doing front-line coding to support the business process. Which is fine for some people.
But people with CS degrees get to do much much cooler stuff. Sure you can do front-line coding to support the business process, but you also end up doing more inovative stuff. There are a lot of different and interesting career options available for you.
For example, my personal love is graphics. You can't really do graphics with an MIS/CIS degree. Plus, you need a solid mathematical background.
And sad to say it, but I have found that ALL of my high-level math courses have been useful in some way. Anything from Combinatorics, Discrete Math, Probability, Real Analysis, Graph Theory, (and most especially) Linear Algebra. It's a pain in the brain, but it will be really helpful later on.
And not just for the actual basis, but the thinking and problem solving that it requires you to have.
So it depends on your ambitions. You'd probably get a much better education and have more capability to grow if you get a CS degree and maybe take some business classes.
I tried NS 6.0 and I'm more in line with the Mozilla people in that when they say it's 1.0, I'll be happy and finally replace NS 4.7x.
It's funny, actually. Little things made it impossible to use. All it took was the bookmark functionality to not quite work right, and I couldn't use it. Bookmarks ended up in the wrong folders or would dissapear. I couldn't drag to the sidebar. I was in the middle of browsing job sites and bookmarking promising ones and I got fed up with it. That was all it took for me to hate it and go back to NS4.7.
You might just want to see a doctor and get your eyes checked. Your insurance should cover it, and it might spot problems before they get really bad.
I have had generally good results with my 15" Sony monitor from years ago at ~75Hz. But then, I get 8 hours of sleep a night, so my experience can't be too indicitave of a good monitor.
But I have found that a quality monitor -- a Sony or the like -- will be much better for you than a cheapo one.
And the other trick, of course, is to take regular breaks every 1/2 or 1/4 of an hour, to focus on something other than the monitor. This gives your eyes a chance to relax a little bit.
Note that all he needs is the DVD Formatting app and maybe the AC-3 formatting app. He's got the rest already.
You will most likely loose some quality in the LD->DVD translation, but not enough to be seriously worried about.
You need to be careful with the DVD-RAM disks. Many DVD players won't read them. This will hopefully change in the future.
You might have some problems creating a correctly formatted DVD disk, but I think that some people have been working on that problem.
I mean, worst case, you'll have an MPEG-2 video stream that you have to view on your computer until the digital video market stabilizes. Still beats having nothing if your Laserdisk deck dies.
They are basicly working off of the perhaps flawed assertion that biofeedback helps ADD. There is no scientific evidence of this, and nobody's doing double-blind testing of biofeedback.
/just/ $899, is most likely harmless.
... treatment. There are getting to be as many ADD cures that are full of it as there are cures for cancer that are full of it.
I've heard about this company in the past and they turned me off by insisting that anecdotal evidence -- stories of people who used biofeedback and found that it helped -- as scientific proof. The company doesn't quite double blind studies, which are much closer to proof.
OTOH, it's
I'm very skeptic about most of the claims of curing ADD with
I'm leaning towards getting a compaq h3650 when my current one dies. Yes, it's not a Palm, which is what everybody else, and probably for very good reason uses. I just like having a little more PC-like capabilities in my pocket. I have a Philips Nino right now. It's old, monchrome, discontinued, and the paint is slowly flaking off, but I actually use the nice audio hardware for grabbing interesting sounds without the trouble of carying a tape recorder.
;)
But back to why the Compaq would be nice. Why? It has an optional clip-on PCMCIA card slot. Therefore, Wireless Ethernet is possible. Therefore, there's not a lot of difference between your PDA and the PADDs on Star Trek.
Of the two that you mentioned, get the Palm. But consider other options.
I've dealt with this one, and it's not that hard.
What you don't necessarily need is to know their exact technical skills at the moment. Most effective people in the computer field are able to injest massive quantities of information and regurgitate the useful parts to solve a problem.
What you need to do is to know how much they can learn. Which means that you pick something off of their resume that you know very well and give them some hard questions on that, even if it's not a required job skill. They have to have learned that skill somewhere, and how well they learned that will determine how well they will learn everything else. If they evade questions on something that they claim to know well, they aren't very bright.
Theroetcial questions and logic problems are all fine and good, but if your interviewee is out of college, they generally will have seen any problems that you could think up.
You want to make sure that they have the skills elsewhere, so that they can at least land with their feet on the ground, but..
Ask them about their greatest hack. It'll be an interesting story and it will give you an idea of their personality.
If you look at the specs, it's not a mouse in the canonical sense. You can't drag it around or anything.
It's more like a very very industrialized TrackPoint.
Very useful for computing in dangerous environments or out on the field. Or in the middle of the desert where the sand will grind the fsck out of the ball and probably scratch those funky new optical mice to hell, too.
One of the reasons why I am a software person is because there was always plenty of cool stuff to do with the computer and I had adequate guidance.
Those little Radio Shack electronics kits -- I'm not sure if they exist anymore -- never cut it, because they didn't give me any sort of grasp for how to fit things together. It was 200 circuts that you could wire up, without any information about how to synthesyse something new.
So the best way, IMHO, to introduce a kid to electronics is to make sure that they have adequate suplies and guidance, as well as something to do with it.
I'd say a breadboard, a few microcontrollers, and various other parts. Have the kid make something simple at first, like a little radio or something, and then direct them towards something substantial, once the understanding and interest is there.
Has it occured to anybody but me that ever since Win95, the next version of Windows has been said to have these new, advanced capabilities with impressive beta releases, and then when it all gets down to it, they ship the same old, same old?
I mean, really. Those screen shots, with a tweak here and a tweak there, look like the really early Win98 show-off-ware. And they've been having ideas about design ever since MS Bob! All that MS has come up with is a few tweaks here and there to the interface, a little gloss, and a lot of hype.
I think that the GUI needs to get OUT of my way, not in my way. If I want news, I'll look it up. If I want my buddies, I'll pull up my buddy list.
If we are going to not have windows that overlap, I want there to be $100 tablet computers that I can spread out over my desk, not a single $2000 computer with a single monitor.
Having said that, OS X has some good new tweaks to the interface. It's no revolution, but I think that Aqua is doing a better job at evolving the GUI.
Getting your keyboard tapped sucks, but it's better than the alternative.
;)
Now, granted, tapping a keyboard should be equivelent to wiretapping and require the usual warant.
But I'd much rather have the FBI tapping my keyboard with a warant than needing to use whimpy encryption with a backdoor.
Besides, a smart political will sweap their gear for bugs on a regular basis. I'm sure that most people don't crack their keyboards open to look for bugs, but it might be the 3l33t habit of the new millenium, when it starts in less than a month...
Like it costs them anything substantial to pay for him. Some $60-100k/year, which is nothing compared to $x billion in revenues. If a thousand Linux-heads picked up a HP printer on the "good feelings" from this instead of an Epson (who's printers I prefer anyways) they'll pay for it.
They can ignore him at will, too. They'll be able to get advice from him on a few ways to make money without any possibility of affecting their intelectual property or bottom line.
I'm going to have to say that I really don't care about my.mp3.com. The good part of mp3.com is the unsigned artist community.
I mean, really. The amount of cases where it is useful is decreasing. You need broadband access in order to play your MP3s at a decent clip. The only time I saw it make sense was if you wanted to listen to some tunes in a computer lab on campus.
If I want to transport music around, I just burn it to CD-R disks that I can cary around. Plus, that frees up hard disk space for other things.
I learned a dialect of APL that works with SML in a compilers class.
I haven't heard of it otherwise. For hardcore mathematical coding, it seems like people are using one of the CAS systems like Maple, Matlab, or Mathematica. It seems that a lot of those systems have a lot of the same sort of operators that I learned when I learned APL.
I personally am not too scared of a kernel fork, if it is done right.
There are a whole set of features that a industrial-strength server needs that a workstation doesn't. There is also a large set of tweaks that work great on multiprocessor, large memory machines that will not work too well on the 486 that you scavenged to use as a firewall.
So a kernel fork may very well happen, with a more industrial-strength kernel being created to be shipped with higher-end servers.
But, at the same time, any kernel form will probably be GPLed. And unless the people doing the fork have the brains of a box of rocks, they will probably end up keeping compatability.
And the BSD folk have nothing to be proud of. BSD forks like rabbits fcsk.
From what I understand, the TiVo code that handles the GUI is probably part of the custom application layer. I doubt they are running X, instead, they probably are just writing code to write directly to the frame buffer and using their own custom code to do this.
I suspect that TiVo, despite their use of the open-source Linux OS in the boxes, considers the interface one of their key intellectual properties. Therefore, I doubt that they are going to release that part of their code as open source anytime soon.
It has already been posted that it's probably a very bad idea to take the set-top box interface and try to make it work on the computer. There is a completely different set of requirements that you need in order to make a interface work from a remote than the requirements that make an interface work from a computer console.
Get an older laptop with a sound card. A sound card with 16 bit accuracy will give you 44100 16 bit samples per second, which is more than enough.
;)
Then pick up a wireless ethernet card for the laptop.
And, of course, if the laptops are cheap enough, you could make a beowulf cluster of these..
If you want to spend more money and get something smaller, see about one of the HP Jornada handheld PCs. You'd have to get an external digitizer hooked to the serial port and write WinCE software to take advantage of it, but they are pretty small and they have a PCMCIA slot for wireless ethernet. Alternitively, you could rip it open and hotwire your sensor to the microphone jack.