It is based on the Covenant chip, so you can do captures in Linux. Unfortunately, the MPEG encoder is not supported so if you just want a card to use under Linux a cheaper model of the WinTV would be better.
I have a WinTV PVR and I would tend to agree. It does have hardware MPEG encoding but your choices are limited between MPEG1 VCD and MPEG 2 at between 2 and 12 megabytes PER SECOND. Real time compression to MPEG1 does not produce the best quality image. It is adequate to compress with Virtual Dub and watch on your PC but not good enough to watch on a large screen TV. I have tried creating VCDs with their included software and the results have been very disappointing. If you install the latest upgrades you can also create Super VCDs compressed in real time, but while these look better than VCDs the picture gets "blocky" when there is a lot of action in a scene, like explosions. The best way to make VCDs and SVCDs is to record them at a much lower compression rate and then compress them afterwards, a process that takes eight or so hours.
After much experimenting I have decided that the optimum use of the WinTV PVR is to record my old Beta tapes at MPEG1 VCD and then compress them using Open DivX so I can burn one movie per CD. These can only be viewed on a PC, but the quality is adequate for that. Picture size is 320 x 240.
I wish the Hauppage web site had more information on how to use this gadget too. I had to do a LOT of trial and error with this thing to get useable results.
I tend to upgrade my Linux box once a year. I could do it more often, but while the process is relatively painless it is still a lot to go through. (Every application on the system is upgraded at the same time.)
I compile my most important apps from source, so they are more likely to be up to date.
One of my SuSE distros had a problem with Zip drive support. When you mounted a new Zip disk the system still thought the previous one was mounted. After MANY emails to SuSE they were able to recreate the problem, provided me with a patch to the kernel module and gave me detailed instructions on recompiling the kernel. I don't know if this level of support is typical, but I never got that kind of support for Windows.
In any case, I do buy boxed distros at full retail price every time. I know I don't *have* to, but to me they are the best software bargain going.
My wife could use one of these
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Bionic Nurses
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My wife is a CCRN (Critical Care Nurse) that regularly has to move three hundred plus pound patients. In the ICU there are no nurse's aides to help her. Sometimes she gets some security guards to help. The thing is, she is really tiny. Last year she had a hernia operation and the place where the hernia is still acts up. She really should be avoiding heavy lifting but the job won't let her.
I'm sure she'd dearly love to have one of these suits!
I will grant you that Java on the desktop is not as popular as it could be, but it isn't a "flop". Have a look at http://jedit.sourceforge.net to see a truly awesome Java application for the desktop. Choose the "Windows" look and feel (instead of the default "Metal") and you'd never know you weren't running a native Windows app written in C++. Java on the desktop is an excellent alternative to such things as Visual Basic, Power Builder, Centura SQL Windows, etc.
As for applets, I agree we could do without them. Java Web Start looks like a better idea for the kinds of things we do with applets.
Re:Microsoft making computing more affordable?
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Microsoft and the GPL
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Back in the 1980's I bought a friend a used 286 computer for about $300 (including color monitor). I added in a spreadsheet for $10 and a really nice word processor from "Better Working" that supported five different font families and even had a WYSIWYG mode. The word processor was $15. The same company made a program called "Eight In One" that had a spreadsheet, word processor, flat file database, communications program, and some other stuff I don't remember. That was $25 and you could buy it a WalMart. And don't forget shareware, which was often quite good, always cheap, and could be tried before buying. All this was happening when MS software was costing in the hundreds of dollars.
And let's not forget MS Access, a pretty decent database that MS sold for $99 until it drove all the other databases out of business. Then the price went up. A lot.
Sure, Internet Explorer is free but they make money on a lot of tools for the Internet that only work with IE, like ActiveX controls.
In any case, don't give MS too much credit for lowering the cost of software. Maybe YOU bought a spreadsheet for $1,000 back in the day, but I got a pretty good one for $10 and of course now I use Gunmeric which is free.
By the way, my mother and my nieces have used my Linux workstations with no problems when they come to visit.
Linux does not have to succeed on the desktop to threaten MS. Think about who mostly runs Linux now: Computer Programmers. Good ones, usually. What does MS need to keep releasing upgrades to its OS and applications? Whose hearts and minds do they need to win to make.NET work, or to keep Visual Basic going?
When the Macintosh first came out it was impressive as hell but I didn't buy one because a). more expensive than PC and b). Apple seemed to have no use for me as a developer. If you used their development tools you paid a fortune and still owed them royalties on each product you sold. I'm not even sure that you could legally give away software you wrote with those tools. With the PC, with all its limitations, I could get cheap but good development tools and do as I liked with the programs I wrote. I think this had a lot to do with making the PC more successful than the Mac.
Of course, Linux is more attractive to a developer than MS-DOS ever was. Any computer programmer worth spit will want to run it at home and develop apps for it.
In any case, if enough good programmers use Linux or BSD at home and think of Windows as being the OS their Mother uses it WILL hurt Microsoft.
Back in the day when I was studying Computers in college we learned only two languages: BAL (360 Basic Assemby Language, commonly called Assembler) and COBOL. I learned Fortran in one afternoon to do an assignment where we were allowed to choose the language to write it in. (It was easier to learn Fortran than to type in all that COBOL!) I also remember implementing sorting and linked lists using COBOL.
Say what you like about Java, it beats COBOL. It also beats Visual Basic, which I know many high schools are teaching. Count your blessings.
Java can do everything Visual Basic can do, lets you easily create your own components, has free libraries to do everything you'd ever want to do, and is cross platform. Performance should be decent unless your app is very unusual. Java programs take a long time to start up, but once they're up they perform well.
Visual Age for Java is my favorite IDE, and you can get a free version for Windows OR Linux. The Professional version is less expensive than the other tools you mentioned. Forte and NetBeans are free and worth a look.
If you'd like to learn how to write your own components visit my website.
I gave up on Visual Basic and switched to Java back in 95. The language has improved a lot since then, and I haven't looked back.
The article needs work. Many questions went unaddressed.
Several people pointed out that Java is slow. Well, it is slow to load into memory, but once loaded it is tolerably fast. Servlets stay loaded in memory once they are run once, so the second user that hits a given web page gets MUCH improved performance. How does this compare with Perl, which has to be started each time the page is accessed? Also, Java servlets can generally pool database connections, which is another big performance boost. Can you do these things in Perl or PHP?
Perl and PHP users please forgive my ignorance. I am only trying to point out questions this article should have addressed. I don't mean to knock your choice of language.
I'm a little surprised to see this article on an IBM website, since IBM sells some really good tools for creating Java servlets and doesn't make a dime off Perl or PHP. You would think they'd recommend servlets more than this article does.
Our company built some systems based on products that used to be supported by Arthur Andersen. Later they stopped supporting these products, but they had the source code put in escrow and all of their customers got the source. We ended up having to do some conversion work because the code we got was for a later version than what we were using, but it could have been worse.
Many years later we bought a product called Excelerator from Index Technology. This was a terrible piece of crap that only did one thing well: keep you from using it without paying for it. When they went from the MS-DOS version to the Windows version they got rid of the "dongles" and replaced it with something even worse, which was copy control that expired if the product was not upgraded. By the time the software had expired we had lost enough productivity trying to use it that we were willing to just give up on it. My bad experiences with this product helped me to see the value of Free Software.
I agree. Linux has needed a decent answer to MS Access for a long time (so has the Mac for that matter), and this looks like it will have the good points of MS Access without the bad (ActiveX controls, dealing with the Windows registry, bloat, etc.) The ability to plug in various back end databases (which Access could also do, using ODBC)is a big plus. I'm really looking forward to using this, although I don't count myself a big fan of KDE.
When my nieces come for a visit they use the Java version of AOL IM on my Linux box. I wonder if that will be affected by this change? It does display ads and is AOL's own product, so I'd be surprised if it doesn't work.
I have no interest in AOL IM myself, but my nieces can't live without it. All their friends are on it.
The anecdote was from a book I read as a kid. Title was "One, Two, Three, Infinity" and George Gamow was the author. Details are from my memory, which is obviously faulty. Still after 64 iterations the total is a hell of a large number.
One gig of disk space for an OS with no applications is ridiculous. At this rate if we ever do build a computer as powerful as HAL 9000 we'll need it just to run the latest version of office.
I remember reading a story about the man who invented Chess asking for a reward from the caliph. He wanted one grain of wheat to be put on the first square of the board, 2 on the second, 4 on the third, 8 on the fourth, 16 on the fifth, etc. doubling each time. By the time you reach the 64th square you need more grains of wheat than there are atoms in the Universe.
And for those enlightened souls who point out that disk space is cheap, you still have to do backups on a regular basis. Backup media like Zip disks are still expensive.
I'm happy to keep my Pentium with 64 mb of RAM (upgraded from 32) and 8 gigs of disk space (upgraded from 2). Heck, I still have my 486 running Linux with under a gig of disk, 20 mb of RAM, and it is a useable desktop.
If you love the look and feel of the NEXTSTEP user interface widgets, you may want to check out the NiceSTEP project on SourceForge. This project is a set of lightweight Java components that can be used with or without Swing to create applications with that look and feel. It is NOT a part of GNUstep, but it has some of the same virtues; with a modern IDE you can create a significant portion of a useable application without writing code. Plus you can share these apps with Windows users. See http://nicestep.sourceforge.net.
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It is based on the Covenant chip, so you can do captures in Linux. Unfortunately, the MPEG encoder is not supported so if you just want a card to use under Linux a cheaper model of the WinTV would be better.
After much experimenting I have decided that the optimum use of the WinTV PVR is to record my old Beta tapes at MPEG1 VCD and then compress them using Open DivX so I can burn one movie per CD. These can only be viewed on a PC, but the quality is adequate for that. Picture size is 320 x 240.
I wish the Hauppage web site had more information on how to use this gadget too. I had to do a LOT of trial and error with this thing to get useable results.
I compile my most important apps from source, so they are more likely to be up to date.
One of my SuSE distros had a problem with Zip drive support. When you mounted a new Zip disk the system still thought the previous one was mounted. After MANY emails to SuSE they were able to recreate the problem, provided me with a patch to the kernel module and gave me detailed instructions on recompiling the kernel. I don't know if this level of support is typical, but I never got that kind of support for Windows.
In any case, I do buy boxed distros at full retail price every time. I know I don't *have* to, but to me they are the best software bargain going.
I'm sure she'd dearly love to have one of these suits!
As for applets, I agree we could do without them. Java Web Start looks like a better idea for the kinds of things we do with applets.
And let's not forget MS Access, a pretty decent database that MS sold for $99 until it drove all the other databases out of business. Then the price went up. A lot.
Sure, Internet Explorer is free but they make money on a lot of tools for the Internet that only work with IE, like ActiveX controls.
In any case, don't give MS too much credit for lowering the cost of software. Maybe YOU bought a spreadsheet for $1,000 back in the day, but I got a pretty good one for $10 and of course now I use Gunmeric which is free.
By the way, my mother and my nieces have used my Linux workstations with no problems when they come to visit.
When the Macintosh first came out it was impressive as hell but I didn't buy one because a). more expensive than PC and b). Apple seemed to have no use for me as a developer. If you used their development tools you paid a fortune and still owed them royalties on each product you sold. I'm not even sure that you could legally give away software you wrote with those tools. With the PC, with all its limitations, I could get cheap but good development tools and do as I liked with the programs I wrote. I think this had a lot to do with making the PC more successful than the Mac.
Of course, Linux is more attractive to a developer than MS-DOS ever was. Any computer programmer worth spit will want to run it at home and develop apps for it.
In any case, if enough good programmers use Linux or BSD at home and think of Windows as being the OS their Mother uses it WILL hurt Microsoft.
Say what you like about Java, it beats COBOL. It also beats Visual Basic, which I know many high schools are teaching. Count your blessings.
Visual Age for Java is my favorite IDE, and you can get a free version for Windows OR Linux. The Professional version is less expensive than the other tools you mentioned. Forte and NetBeans are free and worth a look.
If you'd like to learn how to write your own components visit my website.
I gave up on Visual Basic and switched to Java back in 95. The language has improved a lot since then, and I haven't looked back.
Several people pointed out that Java is slow. Well, it is slow to load into memory, but once loaded it is tolerably fast. Servlets stay loaded in memory once they are run once, so the second user that hits a given web page gets MUCH improved performance. How does this compare with Perl, which has to be started each time the page is accessed? Also, Java servlets can generally pool database connections, which is another big performance boost. Can you do these things in Perl or PHP?
Perl and PHP users please forgive my ignorance. I am only trying to point out questions this article should have addressed. I don't mean to knock your choice of language.
I'm a little surprised to see this article on an IBM website, since IBM sells some really good tools for creating Java servlets and doesn't make a dime off Perl or PHP. You would think they'd recommend servlets more than this article does.
Many years later we bought a product called Excelerator from Index Technology. This was a terrible piece of crap that only did one thing well: keep you from using it without paying for it. When they went from the MS-DOS version to the Windows version they got rid of the "dongles" and replaced it with something even worse, which was copy control that expired if the product was not upgraded. By the time the software had expired we had lost enough productivity trying to use it that we were willing to just give up on it. My bad experiences with this product helped me to see the value of Free Software.
I agree. Linux has needed a decent answer to MS Access for a long time (so has the Mac for that matter), and this looks like it will have the good points of MS Access without the bad (ActiveX controls, dealing with the Windows registry, bloat, etc.) The ability to plug in various back end databases (which Access could also do, using ODBC)is a big plus. I'm really looking forward to using this, although I don't count myself a big fan of KDE.
It's a standalone application. I have installed it on Linux myself, for when my oldest niece comes to visit.
I have no interest in AOL IM myself, but my nieces can't live without it. All their friends are on it.
One gig of disk space for an OS with no applications is ridiculous. At this rate if we ever do build a computer as powerful as HAL 9000 we'll need it just to run the latest version of office.
And for those enlightened souls who point out that disk space is cheap, you still have to do backups on a regular basis. Backup media like Zip disks are still expensive.
I'm happy to keep my Pentium with 64 mb of RAM (upgraded from 32) and 8 gigs of disk space (upgraded from 2). Heck, I still have my 486 running Linux with under a gig of disk, 20 mb of RAM, and it is a useable desktop.