Hmm, well you have a few choices here on how this device will interface with cable: 1) Classic Analog 2) Unencrypted QAM 3) Encrypted QAM* 4) Cablecard device 5) IPTV
As far as I know, HD content is not offered over classic Analog, and cannot be relied upon to be supplied over unencrypted QAM. So now you are into connection options that require an authentication scheme and some sort of trusted / authenticated relationship between the device and the cable company.
So far the closest analog (ignoring TVs with cablecard slots) is the HD-TIVO. One only has to scan the threads on avsforum to see the good and bad experiences people have had trying to activate what cable companies essentially consider a third party device on their network.
For your average slashdot reader the integration issues are likely something we would spend time working through and could in fact navigate to a successful conclusion. But for the average consumer this could prove a frustrating and potentially hopeless experience unless Microsoft's 360/MCE is an "officially" supported device. And I don't see that happening without an investment from MS of some kind.
* I intentionally separated encrypted QAM from cablecard as cablecard's replacement is ostensible on the horizon.
LOL, you think you are kidding. But when my wife and I go skiing we do exactly this. One carry on for toiletries. One checked bag for enough warm clothes to last a day or two. Everything else goes UPS to the hotel ahead of time. Airlines will offload luggage in tight fuel situations or if they have paying freight. So it makes sense to send some packets on a different route, as it were, rather than risk a ruined vacation. Worst case -- you have enough warm clothes to ski in and can rent gear.
hax-- try jetblue, then. they have had some ontime problems, but they have very generous seat dimensions, both in terms of seat width and "seat pitch" which is the distance between seats front-to-back.
Great, maybe they can fix HFCS so that Coke no longer tastes like I'm licking a corn on the cob covered in malted battery acid. I would prefer the traditional sugary sweet malted battery acid.
Being self sufficient and well educated are not mutually exclusive.
Your average white-collar geek is just a knowledge / variety seeker who understands that working in A/C from 9a-5p (ok 7a-8p where I am) is far better than the alternative.
Were the brown stuff to hit the air stirring device, your typical geek or geekette would probably do just fine. They might take a more analytical approach to hunting and skinning them there rabbits, but I'd put even money they would do it.
On the other hand, since edible fauna are inversely related to population density* it seems pointless to argue these things.
Particularly in non-IT industries you will see a LOT of journeymen. The last time I worked at an oil & gas company, less than 10% of the IT department had degrees in computer science or an equivalent course of study that emphasized computer science. Everyone else had degrees in hard sciences or math. So they were well educated and competent, but rarely did they pass on to guru status: IT wasn't exciting, it was just a job. You can tell those guys easily, they usually say something like "Oh I don't use a computer once I get home, I've have enough of that after a day in the office."
Prima donna gurus are the second worst people in IT. The worst people in IT are those "in it for the money" and journeyman types who think they are gurus. They usually view any criticism of their proposed architectures / solutions / whatever as ad hominem attacks. Those are the people you fire when it is "who are our bottom 10%?" time of the year.
More to the point, when companies lose contracts they lose to them to a small circle of competitors and those competitors rehire most of the people who were on the contract. In fact that is so common you usually take your tenure / seniority with you to the next company. When a contract changes hands, it really means the management layer and the interface between management and the government is being changed. Workers by and large keep their jobs.
A VAX sysadmin leaves for a new job in the same facility but on a different government contract. A few days into his new job, he realizes he could really use a script he wrote for the old job. Rather than asking his replacement to e-mail / print / backup to tape / whatever the script, he checks and finds he still has access to the old gear. One FTP later, Mr. Sysadmin is doing 3-5 in Federal prison. These guys don't fark around.
Its sort of like taking out a credit card. If you are an unwashed rebel who can't be bothered to pay his bills on time, taking out a credit card is a stupid idea. You are just rebelling against a situation you put yourself into. Idiot. Same with a security clearance. If you bother to get one, and manage to make it past the screening process you know the rules. You may not agree with 'em, you may not like 'em. But you put yourself into that situation. If you don't want to play, don't get a clearance.
The UNISYS guys may have been looking at some breakins as "we will lose the contract", "we will be fired", etc. Who knows. Personally I think coming clean up front on the breakins would have been much better. They knew the rules. The should have kept their boxes secured.
If you have an old monitor lying around,Sun's first generation Sunrays are also and option.
Supported by Solaris and Linux. Similarly live-linux distributions (Ubuntu comes to mind) on any old laptop also work well. Although frustratingly Ubuntu's live-linux DVD doesn't come with Acrobat, Flash or codecs installed (because of licensing no doubt), so a warm linux install definately offers more.
It would be really, really, really nice if Microsoft rolled up their patches into a bundle.*
That way if you had to re-install XP from scratch you could (for example) be much more caught up after installing XP SP3 or SP4; instead of installing hundreds of patches, many of which require reboots, and some of which patch vulnerabilities that can be exploited until they are patched.
*Wags will point out they have done so, and it's called Vista.
Well on the bitter, negative, grumpy left hand Linux is Yet Another UNIX (TM), on the right hand Linux is hugely popular and has caused widespread adoption of UNIX where another OS from Redmond would probably have been. And on the gripping hand Stallman has but to offer a compellingly better alternative for people to follow him.
So far market penetration or even hobbyist adoption of "a better idea" has been remarkably low. See Plan 9 for an example of something with very different approaches to UNIX on some things, a very UNIX feel on others and yet can gain no traction. The reasons are obvious: Linux although not the "blank sheet" complete redesign that Mr. Stallman allegedly* desires is good enough, and its low "barrier to entry" means people who know classic UNICES (from 4.2 BSD to Solaris 10) can use it at once.
Remember the procrastinator's credo: It will be perfect someday, versus the pragmatist's credo: Good enough works right now.
Linux is good enough. I can get real work done with it today.
I say allegedly because if Richard really wanted a clean-sheet I'm not sure he'd start by writing open source clones of UNIX utils. But it's been 20 years since I read his Dr. Dobbs interview, so maybe I'm wrong.
When I walk home every day (I can't afford a car, or public transportation) the public shower me with rose petals, accolades and proclamations of my uber froobiness. Why? Because by God, Microsoft, Church and Apple Pie I built my PC with Windows Ultimate Edition!
Sure it cost a little more and there was that dark spell where I just ate Ramen noodles Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and sucked on the salt packets Tuesdays and Thursdays but dang it I needed the best, the very best OS in the land for my daily diet of Fox News, posting vociferous rants on right-leaning blogs and stalking the Olsen twins.
Maybe you should fire your head of IT, and maybe NESTA should as well. IT is at it's heart a service field
It can be hard to separate that your systems and the services are indispensable, from the fact that people who run them are not. Sadly we IT geeks can be replaced. I've literally had business users who refused to do anything manually when their systems were down, even when they had moved from the previous system or a manual process months before. It didn't matter; they would rather wait.
The magic for us geeks is in creating systems so useful that we appear to be equally invaluable. Bad examples of this are people who "own" one system and refuse to ever document or share. Good examples are people who build systems so incredibly, intuitively, awesomely awesome the users demand encore after encore. I prefer to be in the second camp.
Obstructionist IT department just spawn mini-IT departments sooner or later. That's been happening since Ken Olsen labeled his computers "lab equipment" to get around obstreperous mainframe priests. We are very proud of the fact that the internet will route around damage. It can be humbling but should never be forgotten your users will route around YOU sooner or later if you cause them too much grief.
In my humble opinion the difference is in having rules for a reason, and having rules for rules sake.
You are correct more CPU cycles are not needed for simplification of business models.
Making things more complex can be a competitive advantage, however. Consider two companies with physical energy assets such as a gas pipeline.
Company A uses pen registers to measure gas flow from wells to the pipe. The paper discs from the register are collected once a month, keypunched into some IT system to derive an average flow for the month and accounts are settled. Account settlement includes billing companies who fail to meet their contracted flow rates, because the company has to maintain certain amount of pressure in the pipe and they've created an issue by going below.
Company B updates to the latest radio-based reporting systems. No keypunch errors, no monthly delays on reporting. Instant or near-realtime reporting of gas flows and pressures on both supplier (well-head) and consumer (city-gate) sides.
Who do you think has the more complex infrastructure? Who can react instantly when they have a problem? Who knows they have a problem when they have a problem, even? Now considering a gas company can be fined megabucks for failing to meet their contractual obligations who is the better gas company?
Now take that same model and apply it to the IT portions of modern day trading companies. People who have integrated near-realtime front/mid/back office trading systems are at a huge competitive trading advantage to those who rely on classic batch-based systems. Why? Because any trading company's fuel is their liquid assets. If they have a up-to-date picture of their exposure to the market, to asset classes (how much in energy? finance? heavy industry?), and up to date data on market movements they are in a MUCH better position than those who are relying day or two old data to assess who much they can or should be buying or selling in given market scenarios.
I could draw similar analogies for other industries I've worked in like aerospace and medical but I think you see my point. Infrastructure investment can result in competitive advantages, risk reduction or both. They aren't just edge cases. Exponential grown in hardware though? Yeah, right.
My system uses Windows XP MCE and a Silicon Dust HDHomeRun to tune digital cable. The utterly AWESOME thing about the HDHomeRun is it is just a network device, and VLC is very happy to talk to it. So yes you can use it with Linux! Yay! (I happen to use MCE because it passes the wife acceptance factor test)
Playback at my Viewsonic's native resolution of 1366x768 is accomplished via an Nvidia 7600 video card with DVI out. Configuration was trivial and XP is happy to drive a device at that resolution with no complaint. Physically the DVI to HMDI cable is connected to an Octava 5x1 HDMI switch, but before purchasing that my PC was connected directly to the 32" Viewsonic with no problems. The Viewsonic supports "sideband" audio (i.e. audio from another source than the HDMI input) so no problems there.
Even so when a decent NVIDIA card with HDMI and native audio mixing support comes out (the current ones seem to be fairly noisy and hot) I'll jump to that, and maybe to a native 1024p flat panel at the same time. The Viewsonic is nice, but the one thing they can't do is automatic colorspace switching. You have to manually flip the device when going between devices with different colorspace schemes.
Anyway, your question was is it possible to get Cable's QAM HDTV content from cable and output that to a display device? Yes, absolutely in Windows XP natively and in Media Center Edition if that floats your boat. No doubt native resolution device support in Linux is just as easily done by running your X Server's configurator.
There are things that get me just a pissed off as you clearly are over the whole toilet seat thing. Strictly in terms of efficiency it's much faster to unzip, do your business, flush, wash and leave than to invest the time and energy to drop your pants and sit down. This goes way up when you are in public and have to put something on the toilet seat.
Having said that I'm perfectly happy dropping the toilet seat for my wife so she doesn't get an accidental dunking.
What was annoying as all get our was her 2 am habit of dropping the toilet lid from its maximum height. The resulting gunshot crack woke me instantly from a dead sleep every time she did it. Sometimes 3 or 4 times a night. You want annoying? Try waking up thinking you've been shot, shot at, your wife's been shot or some combination of the above and digging for your gun because you are about to shoot back.
Similarly as someone who grew up entertaining themselves and alone in their head most of the time, it came as quite a shock that my wife (who came from a family of 8) was perfectly happy to leave the damn bathroom door open while doing whatever she did, and to hover while I was trying to do my business. I'll shut the damn lid, just give me some privacy!
Slashdot Mirror
Woops, make that "ostensibly". Suck it, spelling trolls.
And check out http://www.opencable.com/primer/cablecard_primer.html if you want
to know more about cablecards.
Hmm, well you have a few choices here on how this device will interface with cable:
1) Classic Analog
2) Unencrypted QAM
3) Encrypted QAM*
4) Cablecard device
5) IPTV
As far as I know, HD content is not offered over classic Analog, and cannot be relied upon to be supplied
over unencrypted QAM. So now you are into connection options that require an authentication scheme
and some sort of trusted / authenticated relationship between the device and the cable company.
So far the closest analog (ignoring TVs with cablecard slots) is the HD-TIVO. One only has to scan the
threads on avsforum to see the good and bad experiences people have had trying to activate what cable
companies essentially consider a third party device on their network.
For your average slashdot reader the integration issues are likely something we would spend time working
through and could in fact navigate to a successful conclusion. But for the average consumer this could
prove a frustrating and potentially hopeless experience unless Microsoft's 360/MCE is an "officially"
supported device. And I don't see that happening without an investment from MS of some kind.
* I intentionally separated encrypted QAM from cablecard as cablecard's replacement is ostensible
on the horizon.
LOL, you think you are kidding. But when my wife and I go skiing we do exactly this.
One carry on for toiletries. One checked bag for enough warm clothes to last a day or two.
Everything else goes UPS to the hotel ahead of time. Airlines will offload luggage
in tight fuel situations or if they have paying freight. So it makes sense to send
some packets on a different route, as it were, rather than risk a ruined vacation.
Worst case -- you have enough warm clothes to ski in and can rent gear.
hax-- try jetblue, then. they have had some ontime problems, but they have
very generous seat dimensions, both in terms of seat width and "seat pitch"
which is the distance between seats front-to-back.
Great, maybe they can fix HFCS so that Coke no longer tastes like I'm licking a corn on the cob
covered in malted battery acid.
I would prefer the traditional sugary sweet malted battery acid.
Because I'm a first responder volunteer looking for the best price on one-use medical items?
Being self sufficient and well educated are not mutually exclusive.
Your average white-collar geek is just a knowledge / variety seeker who understands
that working in A/C from 9a-5p (ok 7a-8p where I am) is far better than the alternative.
Were the brown stuff to hit the air stirring device, your typical geek or geekette would
probably do just fine. They might take a more analytical approach to hunting and skinning
them there rabbits, but I'd put even money they would do it.
On the other hand, since edible fauna are inversely related to population density* it seems
pointless to argue these things.
*Excluding pets and zoo animals.
Dead on.
Particularly in non-IT industries you will see a LOT of journeymen. The last time I worked
at an oil & gas company, less than 10% of the IT department had degrees in computer science
or an equivalent course of study that emphasized computer science. Everyone else had degrees
in hard sciences or math. So they were well educated and competent, but rarely did they
pass on to guru status: IT wasn't exciting, it was just a job. You can tell those guys
easily, they usually say something like "Oh I don't use a computer once I get home,
I've have enough of that after a day in the office."
Prima donna gurus are the second worst people in IT. The worst people in IT are those
"in it for the money" and journeyman types who think they are gurus. They usually view
any criticism of their proposed architectures / solutions / whatever as ad hominem attacks.
Those are the people you fire when it is "who are our bottom 10%?" time of the year.
More to the point, when companies lose contracts they lose to them to a small
circle of competitors and those competitors rehire most of the people who were on the contract.
In fact that is so common you usually take your tenure / seniority with you to the
next company. When a contract changes hands, it really means the management layer
and the interface between management and the government is being changed. Workers
by and large keep their jobs.
I still remember the security training video.
A VAX sysadmin leaves for a new job in the same facility but on a different government contract.
A few days into his new job, he realizes he could really use a script he wrote for the old job.
Rather than asking his replacement to e-mail / print / backup to tape / whatever the script,
he checks and finds he still has access to the old gear. One FTP later, Mr. Sysadmin is
doing 3-5 in Federal prison. These guys don't fark around.
Its sort of like taking out a credit card. If you are an unwashed rebel who can't be bothered
to pay his bills on time, taking out a credit card is a stupid idea. You are just rebelling
against a situation you put yourself into. Idiot. Same with a security clearance. If you
bother to get one, and manage to make it past the screening process you know the rules.
You may not agree with 'em, you may not like 'em. But you put yourself into that situation.
If you don't want to play, don't get a clearance.
The UNISYS guys may have been looking at some breakins as "we will lose the contract",
"we will be fired", etc. Who knows. Personally I think coming clean up front on the breakins
would have been much better. They knew the rules. The should have kept their boxes
secured.
I know the US Dollar has fallen greatly in the last few months,
but do I really have to give you an entire child for one laptop?
If you have an old monitor lying around,Sun's first generation Sunrays are also and option.
Supported by Solaris and Linux. Similarly live-linux distributions (Ubuntu comes to mind)
on any old laptop also work well. Although frustratingly Ubuntu's live-linux DVD doesn't
come with Acrobat, Flash or codecs installed (because of licensing no doubt), so a warm
linux install definately offers more.
It would be really, really, really nice if Microsoft rolled up their patches into a bundle.*
That way if you had to re-install XP from scratch you could (for example) be much more caught up
after installing XP SP3 or SP4; instead of installing hundreds of patches, many of which require reboots,
and some of which patch vulnerabilities that can be exploited until they are patched.
*Wags will point out they have done so, and it's called Vista.
Well on the bitter, negative, grumpy left hand Linux is Yet Another UNIX (TM), on the
right hand Linux is hugely popular and has caused widespread adoption of UNIX where another
OS from Redmond would probably have been.
And on the gripping hand Stallman has but to offer a compellingly better alternative for people to follow him.
So far market penetration or even hobbyist adoption of "a better idea" has been remarkably low.
See Plan 9 for an example of something with very different approaches to UNIX on some things,
a very UNIX feel on others and yet can gain no traction.
The reasons are obvious: Linux although not the "blank sheet" complete redesign that Mr. Stallman
allegedly* desires is good enough, and its low "barrier to entry" means people who know classic UNICES
(from 4.2 BSD to Solaris 10) can use it at once.
Remember the procrastinator's credo: It will be perfect someday, versus the pragmatist's
credo: Good enough works right now.
Linux is good enough. I can get real work done with it today.
I say allegedly because if Richard really wanted a clean-sheet I'm not sure he'd start
by writing open source clones of UNIX utils. But it's been 20 years since I read his
Dr. Dobbs interview, so maybe I'm wrong.
I couldn't agree more.
When I walk home every day (I can't afford a car, or public transportation) the public shower
me with rose petals, accolades and proclamations of my uber froobiness. Why?
Because by God, Microsoft, Church and Apple Pie I built my PC with Windows Ultimate Edition!
Sure it cost a little more and there was that dark spell where I just ate Ramen noodles
Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and sucked on the salt packets Tuesdays and Thursdays
but dang it I needed the best, the very best OS in the land for my daily diet of Fox News,
posting vociferous rants on right-leaning blogs and stalking the Olsen twins.
Woo! Yay me!
Maybe you should fire your head of IT, and maybe NESTA should as well. IT is at it's heart a service field
It can be hard to separate that your systems and the services are indispensable,
from the fact that people who run them are not. Sadly we IT geeks can be replaced. I've literally had business
users who refused to do anything manually when their systems were down, even when they had moved from the
previous system or a manual process months before. It didn't matter; they would rather wait.
The magic for us geeks is in creating systems so useful that we appear to be equally invaluable. Bad examples
of this are people who "own" one system and refuse to ever document or share. Good examples are people
who build systems so incredibly, intuitively, awesomely awesome the users demand encore after encore.
I prefer to be in the second camp.
Obstructionist IT department just spawn mini-IT departments sooner or later. That's been happening since
Ken Olsen labeled his computers "lab equipment" to get around obstreperous mainframe priests.
We are very proud of the fact that the internet will route around damage. It can be humbling
but should never be forgotten your users will route around YOU sooner or later if you cause
them too much grief.
In my humble opinion the difference is in having rules for a reason, and having rules for rules sake.
I don't roll out of bed to take a leak for less than a 256 node cluster of blade servers.
15 servers is what we keep on hand for spares.
Meh.
You are correct more CPU cycles are not needed for simplification of business models.
Making things more complex can be a competitive advantage, however. Consider two
companies with physical energy assets such as a gas pipeline.
Company A uses pen registers to measure gas flow from wells to the pipe. The paper
discs from the register are collected once a month, keypunched into some IT system
to derive an average flow for the month and accounts are settled. Account settlement
includes billing companies who fail to meet their contracted flow rates, because
the company has to maintain certain amount of pressure in the pipe and they've created
an issue by going below.
Company B updates to the latest radio-based reporting systems. No keypunch errors,
no monthly delays on reporting. Instant or near-realtime reporting of gas flows and pressures
on both supplier (well-head) and consumer (city-gate) sides.
Who do you think has the more complex infrastructure? Who can react instantly when they
have a problem? Who knows they have a problem when they have a problem, even?
Now considering a gas company can be fined megabucks for failing to meet their contractual
obligations who is the better gas company?
Now take that same model and apply it to the IT portions of modern day trading companies.
People who have integrated near-realtime front/mid/back office trading systems are at a huge
competitive trading advantage to those who rely on classic batch-based systems. Why?
Because any trading company's fuel is their liquid assets. If they have a up-to-date
picture of their exposure to the market, to asset classes (how much in energy? finance? heavy industry?),
and up to date data on market movements they are in a MUCH better position than those
who are relying day or two old data to assess who much they can or should be buying or selling
in given market scenarios.
I could draw similar analogies for other industries I've worked in like aerospace and medical
but I think you see my point. Infrastructure investment can result in competitive advantages,
risk reduction or both. They aren't just edge cases. Exponential grown in hardware though?
Yeah, right.
Correction: Viewsonics are capable of automatic colorspace switching.
They just always get it wrong on my model the N3250W.
My system uses Windows XP MCE and a Silicon Dust HDHomeRun to tune digital
cable. The utterly AWESOME thing about the HDHomeRun is it is just a
network device, and VLC is very happy to talk to it. So yes you can use it
with Linux! Yay! (I happen to use MCE because it passes the wife
acceptance factor test)
Playback at my Viewsonic's native resolution of 1366x768 is accomplished
via an Nvidia 7600 video card with DVI out. Configuration was trivial and
XP is happy to drive a device at that resolution with no complaint.
Physically the DVI to HMDI cable is connected to an Octava 5x1 HDMI switch,
but before purchasing that my PC was connected directly to the 32"
Viewsonic with no problems. The Viewsonic supports "sideband" audio (i.e.
audio from another source than the HDMI input) so no problems there.
Even so when a decent NVIDIA card with HDMI and native audio mixing support
comes out (the current ones seem to be fairly noisy and hot) I'll jump to
that, and maybe to a native 1024p flat panel at the same time. The
Viewsonic is nice, but the one thing they can't do is automatic colorspace
switching. You have to manually flip the device when going between devices
with different colorspace schemes.
Anyway, your question was is it possible to get Cable's QAM HDTV content
from cable and output that to a display device? Yes, absolutely in Windows
XP natively and in Media Center Edition if that floats your boat. No doubt
native resolution device support in Linux is just as easily done by running
your X Server's configurator.
Er, I vaugely remember the runoff command creating .doc files? Or at least .doc files on pdp-10 and pdp-11 systems in the early 1980's.
seeing other
I don't think ".doc" is excluse to MS in any case.
I was stung several times by a jellyfish yesterday... so I can
attest that as of yesterday around noon cst anyway, jellyfish were not in fact extinct.
Just a useless and painfully collected datapoint. OK everyone back to squabbling.
There are things that get me just a pissed off as you clearly are over the whole toilet seat thing.
Strictly in terms of efficiency it's much faster to unzip, do your business, flush, wash and leave than
to invest the time and energy to drop your pants and sit down. This goes way up when you are in public
and have to put something on the toilet seat.
Having said that I'm perfectly happy dropping the toilet seat for my wife so she doesn't get an accidental dunking.
What was annoying as all get our was her 2 am habit of dropping the toilet lid from its maximum height.
The resulting gunshot crack woke me instantly from a dead sleep every time she did it. Sometimes 3 or 4 times a night.
You want annoying? Try waking up thinking you've been shot, shot at, your wife's been shot or some combination
of the above and digging for your gun because you are about to shoot back.
Similarly as someone who grew up entertaining themselves and alone in their head most of the time, it came
as quite a shock that my wife (who came from a family of 8) was perfectly happy to leave the damn bathroom door open
while doing whatever she did, and to hover while I was trying to do my business. I'll shut the damn lid, just give me some privacy!
But then the toilet snakes might bite me!
Yes, but they are high in cholesterol.