Think you hit the nail on the head with the word "why".
What is the point of MS providing a search facility via their websites and eventually tied directly into their OS. So they can make more money. Yeah a secondary concern might be to help their customers have a better experience, but believe me, it's to make money.
Has MS been particularly honest about their search results in the past. I've done the "Linux" search on MSN before and quite frankly it was appalling to me that a company could be so blatent in their disregard for truthfullness.
Thus, "Why" should I provide any opportunity for MS to make any additional money. I certainly don't feel the need to line Bill Gates pockets anymore.
And, I certainly don't feel the need to give sustenance to someone who has made it their life's calling to squash anything that is non-MS.
Call me vindictive and I'll wear it like a crown if you like.
To me, collaborating with MS in any manner is sorta like having the person who shot and killed your mother over for dinner. Ain't gonna happen under my command.
By disallowing the msnbot I effectively, in a small way, reduce MS' ability to rule the world completely.
And as I noted in my first post, before I disallowed msnbot from my site I only got a few redirects off of MS sites daily anyway.
If somebody wants to find my site they can readily find me on any of the other search engines. My site's consistently in the top five returns for the pertinent subject matter on any search engine. Except MSN, of course, hee! hee! hee!
> On the subject of GPL, I'm not sure I understand why Sun would Open Source this
My guess is that it all ties together with the open-sourcing of the Java 3D libraries in the last couple of weeks.
From what I've heard the Looking Glass 3D code is based upon the Java 3D libraries.
Thus, it's sort of a cool project to release along-side the J3D code.
> The only thing I can see is that they don't have the resources to develop this fast enough and want to leverage the Open Source community
Probably true to some extent. The Java 3D development effort always seemed to drag on forever. I gave up on it personally.
But, on the other hand, depending on how it is implemented it really may not require much development at all.
The J3D libraries are pretty mature, but nothing incredibly bleeding edge is my guess. They are fairly well thought out in that they conform to what a lot of other folks do in the 3D graphics world.
They are plenty fast with the right sort of programming. You gotta know what you're doing to really extract good performance out of any 3d library.
From viewing the snapshots provided it appears they are simply capturing the rendered output from windows (images if you like) and then binding those images and their associated listeners (button listeners, keystroke listeners, etc.) to the appropriate hotspots on a 3D window. Possibly similar to a mapping of hotspots on an image imbedded in an html document.
That's certainly all speculation on my part, but if I had to guess how they did it that's what I would guess.
They certainly don't have time to recreate an entire windowing system (ala SWING, AWT, etc.) in J3D.
The 3D window itself is just floating around in the scenegraph. Nothing huge there.
Just some observations.
From the snapshots, to me it's all just eye-candy.
Sorta looks like something you might see on CSI while they are using that miraculous finger-print matching software that seems to need to render every fingerprint in the database to make a match. SO LAME, but hey my mom thinks it's real.
Some may get all hot and bothered over Looking Glass but I'm just fine with the plain vanilla windowing systems we have today.
Can it open OpenOffice spreadsheets? And how fast can it do it?
As a person who writes software which can read/write OO files I see a couple reasons why OO sheets may tend to read/write more slowly.
- The OO files are compressed zip files. Gotta spend a few precious seconds uncompressing them.
- The files contain very verbose XML which has to be parsed. My guess is that Excel sheets in a lot of cases have far fewer bytes to accomplish the same thing.
> Maybe some sort of "reconnection fee" from the ISP in the $35-50 range would be a good enough speedbump
Huh?
I recently had the opportunity to clean-up one of those "infected PCs".
My job would have been made a whole lot easier if the stupid ISP who sold my elderly friend the cable modem service had thrown in a free cheap router and a firewall to go on the operating system.
Instead, they came into her house, connected a very vulnerable windows xp install directly to the cable modem, got her signature on the contract, and walked out the door.
In my opinion that's like handing a loaded 45 calibar handgun to a nine year old. You just know something bad is gonna happen.
And they knew it also.
So who really is at fault? My friend, who admittedly buys things under the pretense that they are safe or the people who knowingly provided the spammers with EASY pickings?
If anything, the ISP should be made to pay me for the hours I spent putting her system back together. And then putting firewalls, anti-virus, anti-spyware, etc..., etc....
If she had not already had this computer for a year (i.e., lots of grandkid pictures on it, programs she had no idea where the original disks were, etc., but never connected to the internet until about two weeks before I saw it) I would have simply reformatted the hard drive and started from scratch, it was that bad.
The "Check engine light" coming on for a loose gas cap can probably happen to each and every one of us.
It happened to my wife a couple of times. Both times she was charged nothing. But, those two times she neglected to ask what the problem was. Now I admit I should have got off my lazy behind and investigated more but I didn't.
The third time she took her Toyota in for the "problem" they checked her prior service history and said it was probably a loose gas cap and that they would charge her $100 to turn off the check engine light.
She called me asking what I thought about this and I just about went ballistic. I called the dealer and told them to cancel any and all work on the car.
Once again, in this instance my family was at more fault than the dealer, but it would have been nice if the first couple of times they had told her what the problem was.
To me it seems that the dealership was probably within it's right to try to get rid of a nuisance customer.
Anyway, so got the car back and went down to chit-chat with a couple of my mechanic buddies.
They work on Porsches and the procedure for a Porsche is this if you suspect the gas cap check engine light problem:
- Tighten the gas cap, of course. - Let the car cool off overnight. - Drive the car a distance far enough to fully warm the engine. Five miles should do it. - Let the car cool off overnight. - Drive the car a distance far enough to fully warm the engine, again. - Let the car cool off overnight.
After driving the car upon finishing the above you should no longer get the dreaded "Check engine light". The car's computer actually resets itself.
So we tried this procedure and it worked great.
The key is cycling the heat-up and cool-down procedure twice fully.
The world needs is a DMCA compliant method to copyright something that lawyers/politicians need real bad. Or maybe a patent...
Access to prescriptions or something similar would work.
Then they would see the craziness that IP law is evolving into and want to do something about it.
Hopefully they would do something that would prove to be discriminatory against the general populace and the whole blooming IP mess could be stricken down by the Supreme Court.
When I bought my TIVO I had a MS salesperson (they actually had one stationed at The Good Guys trying to sell the piece of junk) tell me that I was making a big mistake in buying the TIVO because they would be outta business in no time flat and that MS was the smart purchase.
Is truly the definition of a mob mentality. The person is basically saying "We are going to take your property and there is nothing you can do about it."
I don't know where "ln -sf head ass" is geographically located, but in the USA we have courts and trials and juries for deciding these sorts of issues. And for good reason. It used to be that the King of England could come into your home and force you to give up your food and shelter for one of his soldiers.
The attitude displayed is no better than the King of England's.
What if Microsoft suddenly decided to come in and take the GNU compiler as it's own? distributing it as a freebie in it's operating system and putting this or that limit on it. SCO is apparently doing that right now with Linux.
The outcry would be tremendous from the Slashdot community.
What this person is espousing is exactly the same sort of thing. Taking, or enabling the taking of, property and changing the rights to it and distributing it as their own.
Anyone who believes in this sort of mayhem should be ashamed of themselves and look very closely at what type of world they really want to live in.
One of chaos or one that at least has some sort of respect for another's space.
Should keep his big mouth shut. Sun has put a ton of effort into making Java what it is today and it's a great product.
Of course Java has issues but what doesn't.
Java came along in the mid nineties and it was obvious that this language was what C++ should have been all along.
What does ESR want Java to become? Another language driven by the whims of a few programmers (probably picking their nose and doing some sort of thesis on the side) who have no idea what corporate computing really demands.
When ESR can contribute something as good as Java to the programming community at large then I'll listen to anything he has to say.
Given Trolltech doesn't even have a website on archive.org prior to the year 2000 I find it a tad bit hard to believe that Sun was later in it's definition of write-once-run-anywhere.
Plus, if we're gonna play those games then I was using Motif on variety of platforms in the early/mid nineties with C without a need for re-write.
So I hardly think QT is a defining standard for write-one-run-anywhere GUI development.
But, my buddy John worked at the sewage treatment plant. Of course since he was a high schooler and everybody else was part of the gobn (good-ole-boy-network) he got to do the dirty work.
And from my understanding it was dirty.
Apparently every once in a while a valve would clog. So it would be his job to strip down to the bare essentials, jump into the muck, reach his hand down into the pipe, and yank out whatever was clogging the valve.
He detailed an interesting variety of items which made their way into the system. I will not go into that subject matter. Your imagination will suffice entirely.
A few months ago I believe it was Bruce Perens who proposed some methodology of using checksums, etc. to make a comparison between source code sets, binaries, or something I cannot remember exactly.
The question is: What happened to this analysis?
I'm assuming it didn't go far since I don't remember anyone shouting "Eureka", we've got the hard evidence.
She has an extreme case of porphyria and she can only tolerate light in the 585+ NM wavelengths.
BTW, 585 is exactly the wavelength of those ugly yellow street lamps you occasionally see. I think those lamps are some type of sodium vapor lamp and they are ultra efficient also.
Since incandescants, etc. were literally cooking her from the inside out I built her an LED lamp.
Her lamp has 50 LEDS connnected in 10 parallel circuits. I also slapped on ten switches with one master on/off switch.
Thus, she could turn on as little as 5 or as many as 50 bulbs simultaneously.
It works great for her. She's still very sick, but at least she has some light she can tolerate.
LED's emit a very narrow wavelength of light. You can get them in small bulk packages at the following address:
www.TheLEDLight.com
That store also has a whole bunch of Super Cool LED flashlights etc.
Also, my friend's porphyria is a really rare and strange disease which means she is akin to a vampire. She has the EP variety. Only approximately 300 more like her in the US.
She has been stuck in her mom's basement now for two years, at the age of 34. Such a tragedy!
----- Barrett complained about federal agriculture subsidies he said were worth tens of billions of dollars while government investment in physical sciences was a relatively low $5 billion. "I can't understand why we continue to pour resources into the industries of the 19th century," Barrett said. -----
I suppose Mr. Barrett would have us eating all those food surpluses that India and China are producing now-a-days.
He might get a rude awakening though if the US were suddenly dependent on India, etc. for food and they said, we're not shipping you any more food because we don't like your stand on XYZ issue.
If there is one thing that I'll certainly support is help for farmers. Hey, they put food on my table.
The last thing I'll be supporting in the future is govt. investment in high tech. Why should the US support high-tech when high-tech eggheads like Craig Barrett will just take those advances and give them to the Chinese.
I can do without a computer for a long time. I'd probably starve to death in about a month.
Talking about losing points with me, it's not even close....
> Monsanto have been doing that with corn and soya
Yeah, and Monsanto is sueing a guy in the NE US or Eastern Canada (I cannot remember the exact location) because he is promoting his farm products as "Non-Genetically Modified".
BTW, my father was a loyal Monsanto employee for 35 years, and I have to admit that Monsanto essentially paid for my upbringing, college, etc. through their trading of money for my dad's time/work.
Never-the-less, Monsanto's argument is that the politicians have given them the green light to sell the seeds (and the resulting crops) as being totally safe for human consumption. Thus, the farmer's claims are "portreying Monsanto's products in a negative light".
I think Monsanto's arguments are ridiculous, that farmer has not said one word about Monsanto's seeds (etc. etc.). He has only stated how his crop is produced.
But that's what a lot of money and lawyers can get you. A court case being heard only because big money is behind it. Otherwise any logical person would have thrown the case out immediately.
Before you nkow it we will have the same situations with Charlie the Tuna sueing the pants off Maine fishermen because the Maine fisherman caught his tuna the natural way instead of GMing it.
Thus, I don't trust this Australian method of ridding itself of carp since it only legitimizes GMed products.
I do have a TIVO and it does not have an overheating problem.
I took the cover off once to upgrade the hard-drives and it's basically a PC inside.
It has a cooling fan which pulls air from the bottom and pushes air over the hard-drive(s). The fan is just a run-of-the-mill PC cooling fan. Easily disconnected (see adventure below) and replaced if necessary.
If you block either the holes at the bottom or the holes on the side/top then you will probably get a heating issue.
Two hard drives in a small box do tend to run fairly hot.
And if you're a bozo like me and forget to hook back up your cooling fan the TIVO has internal circuitry that shuts it down if it gets too hot.
That's what happened to mine. I got up the day after upgrading my drives to find my TIVO shutdown. Immediate thoughts went through my head of "Oh no! I've killed it!"
Only to discover a screen on my display from the TIVO that said I had an overheating issue.
Lastly, the TIVO has an on-screen diagnostic screen which will tell you your TIVO current temp.
I had the opportunity to be at a demo of the new HDTivo given at TIVO HQ about a month ago. I wrote the following review note to an interested friend who couldn't make it to the demo.
You may find it interesting:
->
Derek,
A few observations which I hope Dan will correct if they are incorrectly stated.
- First, one of the features I think I've heard you saying you have been wanting for a long time. Folders for your "Now Playing List".
From my understanding, the standalone TIVO units currently have the 4.0 software release that has this feature. Our current TIVOs should be getting the 4.0 software upgrade at some point in time, and thus this feature.
As to how it works, I didn't quite catch that, Dan, did you get it?
- In general, the TIVO folks appear to simply have added HD capability to the box. Other than the HD there doesn't seem to be any huge "WOWs" coming down the pike.
The presenter made the statement that they had designed the series 2 tivo with extensibility built-in so that they could upgrade it to HD. And to me that's what they have done. That's my OPINION.
- Someone brought up if a space/recording time remaining indicator was included on the machine. The presenter kind of blew that one off. See the next bullet.
- If the HD signal is 720 then only 720 is saved. If it is 1024 then 1024 is saved. Thus, the amount of space required to save will be variable. TIVO as a company quotes storage capacity as a conservative type number.
- 250GB hard drive. ~30 hours HD, 200 normal def.
- 4 tuners, 2 HD, 2 Regular OTA. Can record from 2 tuners at same time. Any combination.
- Up to two network zones. I think you will like this feature. Basically it's an off-the-air feature where you can tell the TIVO that you can recieve both the bay area stations and the sacramento stations and it can figure it all out.
- Season passes/wishlists can be designated as HD only. You can define a season pass for CSI in HD and then have a duplicate season pass in reg def. Then you simply order them in the season pass manager. The TIVO will then record both the HD and reg def versions simultaneously.
- The DirecTV channel menu was TOO SLOW, almost unuseable, the TIVO channel menu was fairly quick. It didn't take long for the presenter to switch to the TIVO channel menu.
- The DirectTv channel menu did indicate which shows were in HD.
- The DirectTv channel menu did indicate which channels were in HD. Thus, for channel five there was three(? correct number) channels. The reg def 5, then 5.1, and 5.2.
- The DirectTv channel menu was now opaque if I remember correctly. I don't remember seeing a program playing behind the menus. Dan, do you remember?
- A TIVO engineer stated that the chipset was basically the same, but that some speed had been added, but they wouldn't state how much.
- An engineer stated that the Now Playing list had been worked on so that it would scroll/page up/page down, etc. faster. Once again, no indication of how much better it was, just that it was now "more optimized".
- No HD out for recording purposes. Machine will down convert to 480/analog for VCR/DVD recording purposes.
- I never did catch whether the HD box will have Home Media Option (i.e. sharing between TIVOs). Dan, did you catch what was going on with this?
- Form factor is about the same. Same basic box, same basic remote. Only IR remote. Sorry about that one.
Dan, if I left out something then feel free to speak up.
Slashdot Mirror
I,
Think you hit the nail on the head with the word "why".
What is the point of MS providing a search facility via their websites and eventually tied directly into their OS. So they can make more money. Yeah a secondary concern might be to help their customers have a better experience, but believe me, it's to make money.
Has MS been particularly honest about their search results in the past. I've done the "Linux" search on MSN before and quite frankly it was appalling to me that a company could be so blatent in their disregard for truthfullness.
Thus, "Why" should I provide any opportunity for MS to make any additional money. I certainly don't feel the need to line Bill Gates pockets anymore.
And, I certainly don't feel the need to give sustenance to someone who has made it their life's calling to squash anything that is non-MS.
Call me vindictive and I'll wear it like a crown if you like.
To me, collaborating with MS in any manner is sorta like having the person who shot and killed your mother over for dinner. Ain't gonna happen under my command.
By disallowing the msnbot I effectively, in a small way, reduce MS' ability to rule the world completely.
And as I noted in my first post, before I disallowed msnbot from my site I only got a few redirects off of MS sites daily anyway.
If somebody wants to find my site they can readily find me on any of the other search engines. My site's consistently in the top five returns for the pertinent subject matter on any search engine. Except MSN, of course, hee! hee! hee!
Anybody know what the search engine spider calls itself.
I make sure that msnbot is not allowed to traverse my web site via the robots.txt file. I'd like to do the same with this robot.
BTW, I've noticed no appreciable decline in web hits at all.
> On the subject of GPL, I'm not sure I understand why Sun would Open Source this
My guess is that it all ties together with the open-sourcing of the Java 3D libraries in the last couple of weeks.
From what I've heard the Looking Glass 3D code is based upon the Java 3D libraries.
Thus, it's sort of a cool project to release along-side the J3D code.
> The only thing I can see is that they don't have the resources to develop this fast enough and want to leverage the Open Source community
Probably true to some extent. The Java 3D development effort always seemed to drag on forever. I gave up on it personally.
But, on the other hand, depending on how it is implemented it really may not require much development at all.
The J3D libraries are pretty mature, but nothing incredibly bleeding edge is my guess. They are fairly well thought out in that they conform to what a lot of other folks do in the 3D graphics world.
They are plenty fast with the right sort of programming. You gotta know what you're doing to really extract good performance out of any 3d library.
From viewing the snapshots provided it appears they are simply capturing the rendered output from windows (images if you like) and then binding those images and their associated listeners (button listeners, keystroke listeners, etc.) to the appropriate hotspots on a 3D window. Possibly similar to a mapping of hotspots on an image imbedded in an html document.
That's certainly all speculation on my part, but if I had to guess how they did it that's what I would guess.
They certainly don't have time to recreate an entire windowing system (ala SWING, AWT, etc.) in J3D.
The 3D window itself is just floating around in the scenegraph. Nothing huge there.
Just some observations.
From the snapshots, to me it's all just eye-candy.
Sorta looks like something you might see on CSI while they are using that miraculous finger-print matching software that seems to need to render every fingerprint in the database to make a match. SO LAME, but hey my mom thinks it's real.
Some may get all hot and bothered over Looking Glass but I'm just fine with the plain vanilla windowing systems we have today.
Anybody have a list of which sites were affected by this IE/IIS problem. Seems as though it's been kept under wraps pretty well so far.
San Jose Mercury news indicates Yahoo!, Earthlink, and EBay. True, not true?
Now KBB?
Thanks.
Can it open OpenOffice spreadsheets? And how fast can it do it?
As a person who writes software which can read/write OO files I see a couple reasons why OO sheets may tend to read/write more slowly.
- The OO files are compressed zip files. Gotta spend a few precious seconds uncompressing them.
- The files contain very verbose XML which has to be parsed. My guess is that Excel sheets in a lot of cases have far fewer bytes to accomplish the same thing.
> Maybe some sort of "reconnection fee" from the ISP in the $35-50 range would be a good enough speedbump
Huh?
I recently had the opportunity to clean-up one of those "infected PCs".
My job would have been made a whole lot easier if the stupid ISP who sold my elderly friend the cable modem service had thrown in a free cheap router and a firewall to go on the operating system.
Instead, they came into her house, connected a very vulnerable windows xp install directly to the cable modem, got her signature on the contract, and walked out the door.
In my opinion that's like handing a loaded 45 calibar handgun to a nine year old. You just know something bad is gonna happen.
And they knew it also.
So who really is at fault? My friend, who admittedly buys things under the pretense that they are safe or the people who knowingly provided the spammers with EASY pickings?
If anything, the ISP should be made to pay me for the hours I spent putting her system back together. And then putting firewalls, anti-virus, anti-spyware, etc..., etc....
If she had not already had this computer for a year (i.e., lots of grandkid pictures on it, programs she had no idea where the original disks were, etc., but never connected to the internet until about two weeks before I saw it) I would have simply reformatted the hard drive and started from scratch, it was that bad.
Yes,
The "Check engine light" coming on for a loose gas cap can probably happen to each and every one of us.
It happened to my wife a couple of times. Both times she was charged nothing. But, those two times she neglected to ask what the problem was. Now I admit I should have got off my lazy behind and investigated more but I didn't.
The third time she took her Toyota in for the "problem" they checked her prior service history and said it was probably a loose gas cap and that they would charge her $100 to turn off the check engine light.
She called me asking what I thought about this and I just about went ballistic. I called the dealer and told them to cancel any and all work on the car.
Once again, in this instance my family was at more fault than the dealer, but it would have been nice if the first couple of times they had told her what the problem was.
To me it seems that the dealership was probably within it's right to try to get rid of a nuisance customer.
Anyway, so got the car back and went down to chit-chat with a couple of my mechanic buddies.
They work on Porsches and the procedure for a Porsche is this if you suspect the gas cap check engine light problem:
- Tighten the gas cap, of course.
- Let the car cool off overnight.
- Drive the car a distance far enough to fully warm the engine. Five miles should do it.
- Let the car cool off overnight.
- Drive the car a distance far enough to fully warm the engine, again.
- Let the car cool off overnight.
After driving the car upon finishing the above you should no longer get the dreaded "Check engine light". The car's computer actually resets itself.
So we tried this procedure and it worked great.
The key is cycling the heat-up and cool-down procedure twice fully.
Hope this helps anyone as dumb as I was.
What,
The world needs is a DMCA compliant method to copyright something that lawyers/politicians need real bad. Or maybe a patent...
Access to prescriptions or something similar would work.
Then they would see the craziness that IP law is evolving into and want to do something about it.
Hopefully they would do something that would prove to be discriminatory against the general populace and the whole blooming IP mess could be stricken down by the Supreme Court.
Any ideas?
Add ultimate tv to that list.
When I bought my TIVO I had a MS salesperson (they actually had one stationed at The Good Guys trying to sell the piece of junk) tell me that I was making a big mistake in buying the TIVO because they would be outta business in no time flat and that MS was the smart purchase.
Needless to say, we know what happened....
This,
Is truly the definition of a mob mentality. The person is basically saying "We are going to take your property and there is nothing you can do about it."
I don't know where "ln -sf head ass" is geographically located, but in the USA we have courts and trials and juries for deciding these sorts of issues. And for good reason. It used to be that the King of England could come into your home and force you to give up your food and shelter for one of his soldiers.
The attitude displayed is no better than the King of England's.
What if Microsoft suddenly decided to come in and take the GNU compiler as it's own? distributing it as a freebie in it's operating system and putting this or that limit on it. SCO is apparently doing that right now with Linux.
The outcry would be tremendous from the Slashdot community.
What this person is espousing is exactly the same sort of thing. Taking, or enabling the taking of, property and changing the rights to it and distributing it as their own.
Anyone who believes in this sort of mayhem should be ashamed of themselves and look very closely at what type of world they really want to live in.
One of chaos or one that at least has some sort of respect for another's space.
Format,
That I will not be buying into. I suppose if you're into that sort of thing then all of these niche markets are great.
But, a vast majority of people are perfectly happy listening to music on low bitrate mp3s.
I've,
/
Gotton rid of MSN altogether in my life by going as far as putting the following entry in my robots.txt file:
User-agent: msnbot
Disallow:
They only ever accounted for a few legit hits a month on my website anyway.
Using this technique may make MS less able to dominate the Internet. Or it might not. You never know...
I,
Totally agree. I'm doing almost exactly the same thing and Firebird is the easiest package of them all to configure.
Plus, I've used Interbase for over 10 years now and I've NEVER had a data corruption.
Ever,
Heard of OpenOffice/StarOffice? If you haven't I suggest you look it up. You might change you opinion of Sun's contributions to open-source software.
ESR,
Should keep his big mouth shut. Sun has put a ton of effort into making Java what it is today and it's a great product.
Of course Java has issues but what doesn't.
Java came along in the mid nineties and it was obvious that this language was what C++ should have been all along.
What does ESR want Java to become? Another language driven by the whims of a few programmers (probably picking their nose and doing some sort of thesis on the side) who have no idea what corporate computing really demands.
When ESR can contribute something as good as Java to the programming community at large then I'll listen to anything he has to say.
What better way to show to the judge a perfectly acceptable legitmate usage of P2P than posting the oral arguments on a P2P system.
Given Trolltech doesn't even have a website on archive.org prior to the year 2000 I find it a tad bit hard to believe that Sun was later in it's definition of write-once-run-anywhere.
Plus, if we're gonna play those games then I was using Motif on variety of platforms in the early/mid nineties with C without a need for re-write.
So I hardly think QT is a defining standard for write-one-run-anywhere GUI development.
John,
Forgive me if I get parts of this wrong.
But, my buddy John worked at the sewage treatment plant. Of course since he was a high schooler and everybody else was part of the gobn (good-ole-boy-network) he got to do the dirty work.
And from my understanding it was dirty.
Apparently every once in a while a valve would clog. So it would be his job to strip down to the bare essentials, jump into the muck, reach his hand down into the pipe, and yank out whatever was clogging the valve.
He detailed an interesting variety of items which made their way into the system. I will not go into that subject matter. Your imagination will suffice entirely.
That's my friend's contribution...
Back,
A few months ago I believe it was Bruce Perens who proposed some methodology of using checksums, etc. to make a comparison between source code sets, binaries, or something I cannot remember exactly.
The question is: What happened to this analysis?
I'm assuming it didn't go far since I don't remember anyone shouting "Eureka", we've got the hard evidence.
Anybody remember what I'm talking about, results?
I
Know someone who has an LED basement.
She has an extreme case of porphyria and she can only tolerate light in the 585+ NM wavelengths.
BTW, 585 is exactly the wavelength of those ugly yellow street lamps you occasionally see. I think those lamps are some type of sodium vapor lamp and they are ultra efficient also.
Since incandescants, etc. were literally cooking her from the inside out I built her an LED lamp.
Her lamp has 50 LEDS connnected in 10 parallel circuits. I also slapped on ten switches with one master on/off switch.
Thus, she could turn on as little as 5 or as many as 50 bulbs simultaneously.
It works great for her. She's still very sick, but at least she has some light she can tolerate.
LED's emit a very narrow wavelength of light. You can get them in small bulk packages at the following address:
www.TheLEDLight.com
That store also has a whole bunch of Super Cool LED flashlights etc.
Also, my friend's porphyria is a really rare and strange disease which means she is akin to a vampire. She has the EP variety. Only approximately 300 more like her in the US.
She has been stuck in her mom's basement now for two years, at the age of 34. Such a tragedy!
I,
Love this one:
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Barrett complained about federal agriculture subsidies he said were worth tens of billions of dollars while government investment in physical sciences was a relatively low $5 billion. "I can't understand why we continue to pour resources into the industries of the 19th century," Barrett said.
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I suppose Mr. Barrett would have us eating all those food surpluses that India and China are producing now-a-days.
He might get a rude awakening though if the US were suddenly dependent on India, etc. for food and they said, we're not shipping you any more food because we don't like your stand on XYZ issue.
If there is one thing that I'll certainly support is help for farmers. Hey, they put food on my table.
The last thing I'll be supporting in the future is govt. investment in high tech. Why should the US support high-tech when high-tech eggheads like Craig Barrett will just take those advances and give them to the Chinese.
I can do without a computer for a long time. I'd probably starve to death in about a month.
Talking about losing points with me, it's not even close....
Now,
That's what I call sticking it in the entertainments industry's face.
Obviously DVD Jon has just been waiting to stick it to whom-ever he can.
"I've just been acquited, I think I'll yank their chains again".
> Monsanto have been doing that with corn and soya
Yeah, and Monsanto is sueing a guy in the NE US or Eastern Canada (I cannot remember the exact location) because he is promoting his farm products as "Non-Genetically Modified".
BTW, my father was a loyal Monsanto employee for 35 years, and I have to admit that Monsanto essentially paid for my upbringing, college, etc. through their trading of money for my dad's time/work.
Never-the-less, Monsanto's argument is that the politicians have given them the green light to sell the seeds (and the resulting crops) as being totally safe for human consumption. Thus, the farmer's claims are "portreying Monsanto's products in a negative light".
I think Monsanto's arguments are ridiculous, that farmer has not said one word about Monsanto's seeds (etc. etc.). He has only stated how his crop is produced.
But that's what a lot of money and lawyers can get you. A court case being heard only because big money is behind it. Otherwise any logical person would have thrown the case out immediately.
Before you nkow it we will have the same situations with Charlie the Tuna sueing the pants off Maine fishermen because the Maine fisherman caught his tuna the natural way instead of GMing it.
Thus, I don't trust this Australian method of ridding itself of carp since it only legitimizes GMed products.
I do have a TIVO and it does not have an overheating problem.
I took the cover off once to upgrade the hard-drives and it's basically a PC inside.
It has a cooling fan which pulls air from the bottom and pushes air over the hard-drive(s). The fan is just a run-of-the-mill PC cooling fan. Easily disconnected (see adventure below) and replaced if necessary.
If you block either the holes at the bottom or the holes on the side/top then you will probably get a heating issue.
Two hard drives in a small box do tend to run fairly hot.
And if you're a bozo like me and forget to hook back up your cooling fan the TIVO has internal circuitry that shuts it down if it gets too hot.
That's what happened to mine. I got up the day after upgrading my drives to find my TIVO shutdown. Immediate thoughts went through my head of "Oh no! I've killed it!"
Only to discover a screen on my display from the TIVO that said I had an overheating issue.
Lastly, the TIVO has an on-screen diagnostic screen which will tell you your TIVO current temp.
You can easily monitor it that way.
Hi,
I had the opportunity to be at a demo of the new HDTivo given at TIVO HQ about a month ago. I wrote the following review note to an interested friend who couldn't make it to the demo.
You may find it interesting:
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Derek,
A few observations which I hope Dan will correct if they are incorrectly stated.
- First, one of the features I think I've heard you saying you have been wanting for a long time. Folders for your "Now Playing List".
From my understanding, the standalone TIVO units currently have the 4.0 software release that has this feature. Our current TIVOs should be getting the 4.0 software upgrade at some point in time, and thus this feature.
As to how it works, I didn't quite catch that, Dan, did you get it?
- In general, the TIVO folks appear to simply have added HD capability to the box. Other than the HD there doesn't seem to be any huge "WOWs" coming down the pike.
The presenter made the statement that they had designed the series 2 tivo with extensibility built-in so that they could upgrade it to HD. And to me that's what they have done. That's my OPINION.
- Someone brought up if a space/recording time remaining indicator was included on the machine. The presenter kind of blew that one off. See the next bullet.
- If the HD signal is 720 then only 720 is saved. If it is 1024 then 1024 is saved. Thus, the amount of space required to save will be variable. TIVO as a company quotes storage capacity as a conservative type number.
- 250GB hard drive. ~30 hours HD, 200 normal def.
- 4 tuners, 2 HD, 2 Regular OTA. Can record from 2 tuners at same time. Any combination.
- Up to two network zones. I think you will like this feature. Basically it's an off-the-air feature where you can tell the TIVO that you can recieve both the bay area stations and the sacramento stations and it can figure it all out.
- Season passes/wishlists can be designated as HD only. You can define a season pass for CSI in HD and then have a duplicate season pass in reg def. Then you simply order them in the season pass manager. The TIVO will then record both the HD and reg def versions simultaneously.
- The DirecTV channel menu was TOO SLOW, almost unuseable, the TIVO channel menu was fairly quick. It didn't take long for the presenter to switch to the TIVO channel menu.
- The DirectTv channel menu did indicate which shows were in HD.
- The DirectTv channel menu did indicate which channels were in HD. Thus, for channel five there was three(? correct number) channels. The reg def 5, then 5.1, and 5.2.
- The DirectTv channel menu was now opaque if I remember correctly. I don't remember seeing a program playing behind the menus. Dan, do you remember?
- A TIVO engineer stated that the chipset was basically the same, but that some speed had been added, but they wouldn't state how much.
- An engineer stated that the Now Playing list had been worked on so that it would scroll/page up/page down, etc. faster. Once again, no indication of how much better it was, just that it was now "more optimized".
- No HD out for recording purposes. Machine will down convert to 480/analog for VCR/DVD recording purposes.
- I never did catch whether the HD box will have Home Media Option (i.e. sharing between TIVOs). Dan, did you catch what was going on with this?
- Form factor is about the same. Same basic box, same basic remote. Only IR remote. Sorry about that one.
Dan, if I left out something then feel free to speak up.