* Support for multiple recording directories. * Support for recording multiple streams over DVB. * New deinterlacers (and an OpenGL-based video renderer, but that's still disabled by default, as I understand it).
That's it. There are hundreds of other changes and fixes, great and small, but for most people these are the changes that'll mean the most. Despite the 18 months since 0.20's release (a way too-long interval, I'd argue), this is a testament to just how good 0.20 was feature- and stabilitywise.
Even bigger news than 0.21 is the forthcoming $299 Hauppauge HD-PVR, the first consumer-grade high-definition video encoder (and with promised Linux support, no less). Within a couple of months, anyone—not just those lucky enough to have unencrypted FireWire ports—will be able to record in real time full 720p or 1080i video and Dolby 5.1 audio from their high-definition cable boxes into h.264 format and play it back on their MythTV boxes. Be aware, however, that the h.264 recordings will for many likely require faster hardware than what they're using for their MythTV frontends.
During the past few months, I have spent entire days locked up in my office, writing my first manuscript to be submitted to a peer reviewed scientific journal. While doing so, I have come to realize the following: details can change everything . . . Often, the information I require simply isn't available (the studies haven't been done, or the studies that exist are based on assumptions of their own).
I have a Treo 700p and a little windows only app, PDAnet, that lets me connect to the net through my Sprint data connection. Works great.
I have a Treo 700p and a little Palm OS app, USB Modem, that lets me connect to the net through my Sprint EV-DO data connection. Works great with my MacBook and its built-in Network control panel.
This phenomenon is well known to devotees of Woot!. iPod knockoffs comprise seemingly half the seven new products offered each week—various Roomba models comprise the other half—and a good chunk of the selection during each Woot-off.
I agree that the so-called "dark side" the summary mentions is pretty lame. That said, anyone who uses an ISP (or a company) email address as his primary means of contact is, unless he owns the ISP or company, making a big mistake. Everyone should be using permanent, lifetime email addresses that can be changed as necessary to forward mail to whatever actual accounts (including ISP or company) they are using at the moment.
Three ways to get a lifetime address:
A free email service. GMail offers free mail forwarding and I presume some other services do so as well.
A university alumni address. There's a good chance your alma mater offers one. Universities benefit because they get to stay in contact with potential alumni donors. Institutions of higher education are more stable than almost any other entity in society, so the odds joe@alumni.example.edu will still work 50 years from now are as high as you can hope for.
A for-pay forwarding service. Pobox has been around since 1995 and I've been a customer since 1996. The current price is $20 a year for three pobox.com addresses and some other features like spam filtering. As for whether customers can rely on any one company to stick around, Pobox's current FAQs have long since been "corporatized" but a rough paraphrase of a question in an earlier version went something like this:
Q: How do I know you'll be around in the future?
A: Will you? (Ha! Didn't think of that, did you?)
I prefer my pobox.com address over my university's alumni address because the latter assigns a letter-and-number userid I've never liked. I could always start using my gmail.com address instead, under the presumably-safe assumption Google and GMail will be around for a long time, but as a firm believer in TANSTAAFL I can't believe that GMail and/or forwarding mail to another address will remain free forever. Meanwhile, Pobox has a more than ten-year history and counting with better than 99.44% uptime. Even were I to switch to GMail for my day-to-day email access as opposed to the Emacs-based mailer I've been using for more than a decade, I suspect I'd still give out my pobox.com address instead of the gmail.com one.
If you prefer gaining a permanent address by supporting a worthy nonprofit, two possibilities are IEEE and the Free Software Foundation. Each costs annually considerably more than $20, of course; if FSF would offer some sort of lifetime membership for a reasonable sum I'd probably do it, though.
Despite all the jokes about pr0n and large amounts of storage, my MythTV system is testament that that's not necessarily so. High-definition recordings take about 7.5GB per hour and I can record four at once (two from cable over FireWire and two from ATSC over-the-air).
One of the two RAID arrays I devote to MythTV recordings is built around a 16 drive-bay 4U server case with a quad-core processor and RocketRAID 2240 controller card (just for JBOD; I use software RAID 6) inside. The bays are all full in terms of physical disks and almost so in terms of data, and I'm thinking about building another array. I neither need nor want another full-fledged server, though; the 16-bay server already has plenty of leftover horsepower and internal-bus bandwidth. I really just need a box with empty drive bays, ideally at least eight.
Am I correct in believing that I could get an eight-bay enclosure, put another RocketRAID 2240 (or something cheaper if possible; I don't need the hardware-RAID functionality) in the 16-bay server, connect the server and enclosure with two multiband SATA/"Infiniband" cables, and be up and running with capacity left over on the card for another such enclosure add-on down the road?
I've seen an advance galley proof of the book, and let me tell you, it's filled with fascinating material. Here's some nuggets:
Q: George, there are rumors going around that Luke and Leia are related in some way. GL: (Laughs) Charlie, I can assure the fans that they are not related. Look at the chemistry between Carrie [Fisher] and Mark [Hamill] on screen! Everyone would feel ill if they turned out to be brother and sister or something like that.
Q: Fans seem to be fascinatated by Darth Vader. What do you think about him has captured everyone's imagination? GL: People love mysteries. They always have. I learned that a long time before USC. Vader is full of them. Perhaps some of peoples' questions will be answered over time, but I think anyone who expects to get all the answers on things like who he (Is "he" even the right word?) is, what's his name, does he have a family, is or was he ever married, those sorts of things may be disappointed.
Q: What about the Force? Is it magic? Telekinesis? A God-given gift? Illusions? GL: All of them. None of them. What I can say is that the Force is certainly not something that can be pinned down to anything physical or tangible. If we were to find out that magicians need an extra gland or anything else unusual in their bodies to do their stage tricks we'd all be disappointed, because that means they wouldn't be human any more. We couldn't relate to them. If there's anything the Jedi are, it's that they are as 100% human as you or me.
Q: The Negro community— GL: Isn't the word "black" nowadays? Q: —sorry, the black community—some have complained that there aren't any black people in the Star Wars world. What's your response? GL: Charlie, I want to say that I have the utmost respect for black culture and Negr--blacks' contributions to American society. While, of course, there are no black Americans per se "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away," I can assure fans that anyone who looks black, or sounds black, will be portrayed in a completely-dignified fashion. I won't stoop to using demeaning cultural stereotypes of any kind in my work.
Q: Here's another question from a fan: "Do people in Star Wars use money?" GL: Charlie, with all due respect to the fan, I want to emphasize how I am trying my best to depict on screen a completely new society. A completely new world. One of the many things different about this world is that it's moved beyond things like "money." Why, one might as well ask whether people will still be talking about "free trade" and "trade cartels"! I mean, come on! Talk about losing the audience! (Laughs)
Q: Speaking of money, what's your take on tie-in products? Toys, games, that sort of thing. GL: I don't like them. As much as I love and admire Steve[n Spielberg], one thing I found distasteful about Jaws was all the commercialism around [the movie]. I mean, come on! A Jaws lunchbox? A book? Does a shark movie really need a novelization? Mark my words, you're not going to see anything like that for Star Wars. Well, maybe a toy or two for the little kids. But that's it.
Agreed here. As one who grew up in Nu Yawk, I'm hard pressed to think of a single feature in that game's Liberty City that was reminiscent of the city in any way. It was very much a generic Hill Street Blues-like "generic big Eastern/Northeastern US city."
Seriously, Rockstar hasn't really done a good job capturing the feel of the cities they parallel. Vice City didn't feel like Miami either.
Disagree here. Vice City, according to my friend who went to college at the University of Miami, was filled with things reminiscent of Miami. The cities within the San Andreas is even more connected to its real-life counterparts. I lived in Las Vegas for two years and have lived in the San Francisco Bay area for seven, and I can testify that San Fierro (San Francisco) and Las Venturas (Las Vegas) are dead-on knockoffs of both cities. I've only briefly visited Los Santos (Los Angeles) but by all accounts the two cities are just as much twins as the others. I know firsthand that Santa Maria Beach is a *perfect* recreation of Santa Monica's Muscle Beach.
Based on the trailer, GTA IV's Liberty City will, as others have noted, be just as close a twin of a real-life city as Vice City and San Andreas are. I, for one, can't wait.
I've edited Wikipedia articles for going on three years now, and have always found it an impressive accomplishment. I've done more than my share (for one who isn't a basement-dwelling 21-year old who has way, way, way too much free time; Wikipedia, like many open-source projects, relies on an army of such fanatics to do much of the day-to-day work) of editing and copyediting articles and sometimes reverting vandalism when I catch it. The bottom line is that I like Wikipedia quite a bit.
Two things bother me about Essjay's case, though:
* As others have noted here, Wales is confusing--unintentionally or intentionally--a pseudonym with a falsified CV (I remember it impressing me when I read that The New Yorker article last year). If Essjay was concerned about Internet stalkers he simply didn't have to say anything at all on his User page, or simply say that he lived in British Columbia or Japan or Oregon instead of Kentucky. Instead, he came up with an entire, completely-plausible but completely-fake academic background in theology. It'd be one thing if he had stuck to edits on astronomy or Germany or Legos but, in fact, he specialized (go way, way, way back in the history) in articles on theology. Of course people would take edits by someone with those kinds of credentials more seriously. * Beyond the pseudonym/fake-background issue. Essjay and some other admins don't like talking about this issue in public, and almost instantly threaten to ban those who do. I don't know if Purples is a sockpuppet for some otherwise-banned Wikipedia user, but he doesn't come across that way to me, and look what he gets in response to what I thought were pretty-legitimate questions.
Bill Gates gets a call while he and his wife are having dinner out. Gates' response after hanging up:
"Honey? I'll be right back. Steve needs $1.5B so I'm going to go to the ATM across the street. He's waiting outs--I think that's him honking. Can you order the chocolate cake for me for dessert?"
North Hempstead is on Long Island, and is thus not in upstate New York. (And, no, the word "upstate" is found nowhere in the original article; Times writers and editors know what upstate encompasses, even if Zonk doesn't). This is as incorrect as saying that Pasadena is in the San Francisco Bay area or that Palo Alto is in the Southland.
I'm with the responder to the original article that wanted a http://www3.flickr.com/photos/saldana/234320198Leg ion Flight Ring instead. Yes, a Green Lantern ring is a superset of a Flight Ring functionalitywise, but I'd rather be a Legionnaire. DC sold one about 15 years ago but it was pretty crummy, alas.
Slashdot Mirror
Your arch-nemesis has escaped Arkham Asylum! No, not Joker or Two-Face. It's the Ten-Eyed Man! Someone forgot to lock up his hands!
I've had a MythTV setup at home for more than two years now, and have posted several times about it. Here's my quick take on the major changes for 0.21:
* Support for multiple recording directories.
* Support for recording multiple streams over DVB.
* New deinterlacers (and an OpenGL-based video renderer, but that's still disabled by default, as I understand it).
That's it. There are hundreds of other changes and fixes, great and small, but for most people these are the changes that'll mean the most. Despite the 18 months since 0.20's release (a way too-long interval, I'd argue), this is a testament to just how good 0.20 was feature- and stabilitywise.
Even bigger news than 0.21 is the forthcoming $299 Hauppauge HD-PVR, the first consumer-grade high-definition video encoder (and with promised Linux support, no less). Within a couple of months, anyone—not just those lucky enough to have unencrypted FireWire ports—will be able to record in real time full 720p or 1080i video and Dolby 5.1 audio from their high-definition cable boxes into h.264 format and play it back on their MythTV boxes. Be aware, however, that the h.264 recordings will for many likely require faster hardware than what they're using for their MythTV frontends.
I totally sympathize with Lost_my_regs' dilemma because I've had the same thing happen to me. I'm still fighting!
Sincerely,
Mr. Apple X. Ibm
Follow the examples set by Michael Bellesiles and Woo Suk Hwang. Simply make up data to fit your conclusions!
That's crazy! Those MIT scientists must be insane! Totally off their rockers, they are!
Glad to hear it. That 200-miles-long extension cord was becoming a real hassle!
I have a Treo 700p and a little Palm OS app, USB Modem, that lets me connect to the net through my Sprint EV-DO data connection. Works great with my MacBook and its built-in Network control panel.
This phenomenon is well known to devotees of Woot!. iPod knockoffs comprise seemingly half the seven new products offered each week—various Roomba models comprise the other half—and a good chunk of the selection during each Woot-off.
Three ways to get a lifetime address:
I prefer my pobox.com address over my university's alumni address because the latter assigns a letter-and-number userid I've never liked. I could always start using my gmail.com address instead, under the presumably-safe assumption Google and GMail will be around for a long time, but as a firm believer in TANSTAAFL I can't believe that GMail and/or forwarding mail to another address will remain free forever. Meanwhile, Pobox has a more than ten-year history and counting with better than 99.44% uptime. Even were I to switch to GMail for my day-to-day email access as opposed to the Emacs-based mailer I've been using for more than a decade, I suspect I'd still give out my pobox.com address instead of the gmail.com one.
If you prefer gaining a permanent address by supporting a worthy nonprofit, two possibilities are IEEE and the Free Software Foundation. Each costs annually considerably more than $20, of course; if FSF would offer some sort of lifetime membership for a reasonable sum I'd probably do it, though.
Despite all the jokes about pr0n and large amounts of storage, my MythTV system is testament that that's not necessarily so. High-definition recordings take about 7.5GB per hour and I can record four at once (two from cable over FireWire and two from ATSC over-the-air).
One of the two RAID arrays I devote to MythTV recordings is built around a 16 drive-bay 4U server case with a quad-core processor and RocketRAID 2240 controller card (just for JBOD; I use software RAID 6) inside. The bays are all full in terms of physical disks and almost so in terms of data, and I'm thinking about building another array. I neither need nor want another full-fledged server, though; the 16-bay server already has plenty of leftover horsepower and internal-bus bandwidth. I really just need a box with empty drive bays, ideally at least eight.
Am I correct in believing that I could get an eight-bay enclosure, put another RocketRAID 2240 (or something cheaper if possible; I don't need the hardware-RAID functionality) in the 16-bay server, connect the server and enclosure with two multiband SATA/"Infiniband" cables, and be up and running with capacity left over on the card for another such enclosure add-on down the road?
Lame.
Jerk.
"Electronic Privacy Information Center"
Your search - "Electronic Privacy Information Center" - did not match any documents.
Suggestions:
"Center for Digital Democracy"
Your search - "Center for Digital Democracy" - did not match any documents.
"US Public Interest Research Group"
Your search - "US Public Interest Research Group" - did not match any documents.
Since Google says these so-called 'activist groups' don't exist, this must be a hoax! All hail the all-seeing, all-knowing Google!
I've seen an advance galley proof of the book, and let me tell you, it's filled with fascinating material. Here's some nuggets:
Q: George, there are rumors going around that Luke and Leia are related in some way.
GL: (Laughs) Charlie, I can assure the fans that they are not related. Look at the chemistry between Carrie [Fisher] and Mark [Hamill] on screen! Everyone would feel ill if they turned out to be brother and sister or something like that.
Q: Fans seem to be fascinatated by Darth Vader. What do you think about him has captured everyone's imagination?
GL: People love mysteries. They always have. I learned that a long time before USC. Vader is full of them. Perhaps some of peoples' questions will be answered over time, but I think anyone who expects to get all the answers on things like who he (Is "he" even the right word?) is, what's his name, does he have a family, is or was he ever married, those sorts of things may be disappointed.
Q: What about the Force? Is it magic? Telekinesis? A God-given gift? Illusions?
GL: All of them. None of them. What I can say is that the Force is certainly not something that can be pinned down to anything physical or tangible. If we were to find out that magicians need an extra gland or anything else unusual in their bodies to do their stage tricks we'd all be disappointed, because that means they wouldn't be human any more. We couldn't relate to them. If there's anything the Jedi are, it's that they are as 100% human as you or me.
Q: The Negro community—
GL: Isn't the word "black" nowadays?
Q: —sorry, the black community—some have complained that there aren't any black people in the Star Wars world. What's your response?
GL: Charlie, I want to say that I have the utmost respect for black culture and Negr--blacks' contributions to American society. While, of course, there are no black Americans per se "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away," I can assure fans that anyone who looks black, or sounds black, will be portrayed in a completely-dignified fashion. I won't stoop to using demeaning cultural stereotypes of any kind in my work.
Q: Here's another question from a fan: "Do people in Star Wars use money?"
GL: Charlie, with all due respect to the fan, I want to emphasize how I am trying my best to depict on screen a completely new society. A completely new world. One of the many things different about this world is that it's moved beyond things like "money." Why, one might as well ask whether people will still be talking about "free trade" and "trade cartels"! I mean, come on! Talk about losing the audience! (Laughs)
Q: Speaking of money, what's your take on tie-in products? Toys, games, that sort of thing.
GL: I don't like them. As much as I love and admire Steve[n Spielberg], one thing I found distasteful about Jaws was all the commercialism around [the movie]. I mean, come on! A Jaws lunchbox? A book? Does a shark movie really need a novelization? Mark my words, you're not going to see anything like that for Star Wars. Well, maybe a toy or two for the little kids. But that's it.
Don't VMware's admins know to turn Automatic Updates off in the copy of Windows ME that the Blackberry backend runs on?
This sounds like paranoia. Everyone knows Linux is U BEN PWN3D BY THE SUPR HAX0R BOW B4 MY L33T SKILZ the most secure OS around!
Bah! Simpletons! Infidels! Heretics! Everyone knows that the one true religion, computingwise at least, is the Church of Emacs. Repent!!!
Agreed here. As one who grew up in Nu Yawk, I'm hard pressed to think of a single feature in that game's Liberty City that was reminiscent of the city in any way. It was very much a generic Hill Street Blues -like "generic big Eastern/Northeastern US city."
Disagree here. Vice City, according to my friend who went to college at the University of Miami, was filled with things reminiscent of Miami.
The cities within the San Andreas is even more connected to its real-life counterparts. I lived in Las Vegas for two years and have lived in the San Francisco Bay area for seven, and I can testify that San Fierro (San Francisco) and Las Venturas (Las Vegas) are dead-on knockoffs of both cities. I've only briefly visited Los Santos (Los Angeles) but by all accounts the two cities are just as much twins as the others. I know firsthand that Santa Maria Beach is a *perfect* recreation of Santa Monica's Muscle Beach.
Based on the trailer, GTA IV's Liberty City will, as others have noted, be just as close a twin of a real-life city as Vice City and San Andreas are. I, for one, can't wait.
I've edited Wikipedia articles for going on three years now, and have always found it an impressive accomplishment. I've done more than my share (for one who isn't a basement-dwelling 21-year old who has way, way, way too much free time; Wikipedia, like many open-source projects, relies on an army of such fanatics to do much of the day-to-day work) of editing and copyediting articles and sometimes reverting vandalism when I catch it. The bottom line is that I like Wikipedia quite a bit.
Two things bother me about Essjay's case, though:
* As others have noted here, Wales is confusing--unintentionally or intentionally--a pseudonym with a falsified CV (I remember it impressing me when I read that The New Yorker article last year). If Essjay was concerned about Internet stalkers he simply didn't have to say anything at all on his User page, or simply say that he lived in British Columbia or Japan or Oregon instead of Kentucky. Instead, he came up with an entire, completely-plausible but completely-fake academic background in theology. It'd be one thing if he had stuck to edits on astronomy or Germany or Legos but, in fact, he specialized (go way, way, way back in the history) in articles on theology. Of course people would take edits by someone with those kinds of credentials more seriously.
* Beyond the pseudonym/fake-background issue. Essjay and some other admins don't like talking about this issue in public, and almost instantly threaten to ban those who do. I don't know if Purples is a sockpuppet for some otherwise-banned Wikipedia user, but he doesn't come across that way to me, and look what he gets in response to what I thought were pretty-legitimate questions.
Bill Gates gets a call while he and his wife are having dinner out. Gates' response after hanging up:
"Honey? I'll be right back. Steve needs $1.5B so I'm going to go to the ATM across the street. He's waiting outs--I think that's him honking. Can you order the chocolate cake for me for dessert?"
I'd send special forces to permanently take out all spammers worldwide. Voilà! Global bandwidth usage goes down by 50% or more.
(Of course, I favor doing this today, regardless of any crisis.)
Yet more evidence of the truth and beauty of the Church of Emacs.
Or, if one is into truly antediluvian forms of worship, Ed, man! !man ed.
I can't wait to use the Optimus keyboard with a Phantom console to play Duke Nukem Forever!
HIX NIX VHS PIX
North Hempstead is on Long Island, and is thus not in upstate New York. (And, no, the word "upstate" is found nowhere in the original article; Times writers and editors know what upstate encompasses, even if Zonk doesn't). This is as incorrect as saying that Pasadena is in the San Francisco Bay area or that Palo Alto is in the Southland.
I'm with the responder to the original article that wanted a http://www3.flickr.com/photos/saldana/234320198Leg ion Flight Ring instead. Yes, a Green Lantern ring is a superset of a Flight Ring functionalitywise, but I'd rather be a Legionnaire. DC sold one about 15 years ago but it was pretty crummy, alas.