Don't worry, folks. Bruce and Sheila are going to miss being able to readily buy Vegemite at their local Woolworths and Coles. However, since allAustralians--including the greatest one of them all--live right next to the outback and the reef they'll simply go out and make their own rooburgers and shrim on the barbie.
If I understand this correctly, you're effectively saying that the LDS interpretation of god might have done the equivalent of
% cat > evolution.c; cc evolution.c;./a.out
and is now watching the results scroll out billions of years later?
Yes, in the sense that as the previous poster noted Latter-day Saints don't believe in an ex nihilo creation. Oh, and that Heavenly Father uses bash. (And emacs, but that's of course a given.)
I moved from NYC to the Palo Alto area in May 2000. That's right, just one month after the start of the long stock-market collapse and two months after the NASDAQ's peak, although of course no one knew these things at the time. I thus got to experience both the highs (insane traffic on 101, Sand Hill Road absolutely packed for two hours each afternoon) and the lows (significantly-better traffic on 101--admittedly a good thing in and of itself--and hordes of people losing jobs and moving back home each month).
It's important to distinguish between San Francisco and Silicon Valley. The Valley has recovered--traffic on 101 has long since become awful again, as today reminded me--but San Francisco still hasn't regained the equivalent of all those bubble-related jobs that vanished into the wind in the 2001-2002 time period, and probably never will. (I've been living in San Francisco for going on two years now and have yet to meet anyone who is working in a "Web" or "e-commerce" job up here. It's like a neutron bomb; the people went away but the buildings stayed.) By contrast, yes, the Valley lost tons of jobs, too, but at least the Valley had, and has, a longtime core of companies that made real products that do real thing dating back to the Fairchild/HP/Intel days. And on the Web side, of course, Google and Yahoo! are leading the charge. They're down there, though, and not up here. Unless and until another bubble develops, I expect San Francisco will remain a remarkably tech jobs-free (but with plenty of finance, retail, and other non tech-related companies) city on the edge of the world's greatest concentration of tech jobs.
After putting a Beowulf cluster to work, I've deciphered the remaining two unsolved Enigma messages. It turns out that one is a reply to the other. Of course, one can never be sure whether a decryption is correct, but the perfect German in the messages convinces me that I've got them right, as you can see:
"Sieg Heil! Zis is U-571. Ze Amerikan destroyer is pwning us! After zat last depth charge, all our blinkenlights are flashing crazily! What do we do?"
"Achtung! Achtung! Brest here. Unfortunately, ze RAF Bomber Command pwn3d us last night and ze submarine pens are kaput, so you cannot return from your tour early. Remember, Kapitan, what happens to schweinhunds zat are cowards; zhey get sent to the Russian Front! Follow the example of your Luftwaffe friend Colonel Klink and watch out, or you will be given ze boot from Das Boot!"
I only have five computers (one Athlon 1400GHz, one dual Xeon 2.8GHz, and one Pentium 4 3.0GHz, all running Fedora Core 3 or 4, plus one iBook G4 800MHz and one Infrant ReadyNAS 600) plus a gigabit Ethernet switch. Two things, however, cause my setup to stand out from the crowd:
* Between the dual Xeon and ReadyNAS, I have 4.8TB of RAID storage. That Pentium 4 is a MythTV box with three HDTV feeds, and given the massive sizes of HD recordings, I need all the space I can get. * Kerberos 5 single-signon authentication. One username and password gets me on to any machine on the network.
SetupWeasel asks that I prove that I heard something in person, which is of course difficult to impossible.
However, regarding Activision's alleged bankruptcy--the central point regarding his skepticism--would a SEC 10K filing with the following paragraph:
For purposes of this presentation, the Company prior to the January 9, 1992 effective date of its Plan of Reorganization (the "Plan of Reorganization") under Chapter 11 of Title 11 of the United States Code (the "Bankruptcy Code") is referred to as the "Predecessor Company," and the Company, after the effective date of the Plan of Reorganization, is referred to as "Reorganized Activision."
qualify as some type of evidence?
He's right in one thing, though; you *don't* tug on Superman's cape.
* The all-new Pontiac Gryphon. * Put up hot new cars at auction on late Friday afternoons, so that those who want to buy a new car to show off to their friends later that night and over the weekend will want to snap them up immediately. * The totally-redesigned Chevy Mechanostrider. (A subcompact.) * Lobby governments to raise the driving age to 40. * Replace warning lights on dashboard with the phrases "u left key in ign kthx," "0ut 0f wip3r fluid!!!", "buff m3 w/ 0il plz," and "LFG >91 Oct." * All cars will ship with Goblin(TM) Jumper Cables XL. (No guarantees on them actually doing any good.) * 40-main raids on the super high-level Japan instance. Watch out for the Toyota and Honda boss encounters!
And, the number-one lesson GM can learn from WoW: * To paraphrase Henry Ford: "You can paint it any color, so long as it's rouge."
Activision never went bankrupt. They did use a tax law that allowed them to reclaim paid taxes after the videogame crash which probably helped.
According to their own website "BHK Corporation, a company controlled by Activision's current executive management team" in 1990, but as it is a publicly traded company that stuff happens. It hasn't been merged into another company or ceased to exist at any point in time.
Not quite. BHK Corporation (standing for Bobby Kotick, Activision's CEO ever since) did indeed buy Activision/Mediagenic in 1990, but as I heard Kotick say in person (for about a year my job led to several in-person meetings with the gentleman), BHK bought it as a tax writeoff investment as he and his partners believed there was nothing left assetwise. They were surprised to learn that the Activision brand name (which he soon revived) and some intellectual property (such as the Infocom brand) still carried some value on the games market. Along the way there was, indeed, a prepackaged Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing (prearranged in order to streamline the company's finances). In any case, the post-Kotick Activision really does share nothing but some IP with the company that produced Pitfall! and River Raid.
Namco, Konami, Activision, and Capcom are all companies that have survived the last 2 decades.
I can't speak for the others (although I suspect you're correct), but the current Activision only shares the name and some intellectual property (such as the Infocom brand name) with the company of the 1980s; that one went bankrupt.
Indeed, it's much easier to list the names of the other prominent videogame publishers extant when EA debuted in 1983 that aren't around any more, versus those that still are. Off the top of my head I can name:
Surely I am forgetting a half dozen more, at least.
Accolade, Maxis, and Dynamix came later in the 1980s, and none is around today in its original form.
The turnover in the industry is quite remarkable. Who would have believed in 1983 that the mighty Epyx, the innovative MicroProse, or the wondrous Sierra would no longer exist a mere decade or two so later!
I think Rare could be considered to be autonomous enough for this list.
Disagree; I think being bought out by another (Microsoft, in this case) disqualifies it as having "survived intact."
* Hard Hat Mack for the Atari 800 and Apple II * Archon for the Atari 800 * Pinball Construction Set for the Atari 800 and Apple II * Worms? for the Atari 800 * M.U.L.E. for the Atari 800
I like EA and its games. It's a tremendously-successful company, is (I think) the *only* videogame maker other than Nintendo and Sega to survive intact over the past two decades, and over the past 23 years has put out many other fine titles. But let's not forget that there was a time when it didn't depend quite so heavily on annual releases of Madden and NBA Live.
For me, flame wars start for one reason and one reason only. As Dr. Evil put it so well:
"Why must I be surrounded by frickin' idiots?"
Claiming any other reason as a cause is naturally, ipso facto, evidence for the above. So there.
My MythTV experience: Great, but . . .
on
MythTV 0.19 Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I've been running MythTV for about two months, and have previously posted on my experience. I've been 100% Unix at home for ten years last month and my MythTV box is one of three Linux boxes plus one OS X box at home.
My experience with MythTV is can be summed up in the statement "It's great, but . .."
Great: * Support for recording and playing back HDTV broadcast feeds from FireWire (cable box) and MPEG-2 capture card (over-the-air) sources.
But . . . * FireWire input is generally reliable, but nodes sometimes mysteriously and unpredictably move around based on when and how the cable box, mythbackend daemon, and the MythTV box get started and restarted. (I don't think this is a MythTV problem, but more to do with the current state of the Linux FireWire libraries plus some unreliability on the part of the very common Motorola DCT-6200.) * MythTV's current state of over-the-air channel detection and setup is so, so horribly bad as to be nearly unusable. It's still not completely clear to me how the combination of Zap2It's program data and mythtv-setup's transport scanning are to work together. Anyone setting up over-the-air reception is going to run into the utterly baffling "missing PIDs" issue. Despite this I previously had, after enormous amounts of grief and multiple tries, three over-the-air HDTV channels working and working well; then all of a sudden one stopped working despite signal locks and an unchanged antenna orientation. Right now, with a rebuilt box, I only have one channel working right.
Great: * Very, very nice user interface (I really like the Retro theme and Isthmus OSD) with tons of great features.
But . . . * Holes in the most obvious places. For example, I have two HDTV cable boxes and the aforementioned over-the-air capture card. Let's say cable box #1 can't be used at the moment because fo the aforementioned wandering-node issue or because the preset channel is not broadcasting due to an outage. There's no way to, in Live TV mode, skip that tuner and go on to the others; instead, mythfrontend bounces me right back to the menu (if it doesn't crash completely). If the over-the-air card can't lock into the channel it's preset to, mythfrontend again bounces me right back to the menu or crashes instead of letting me instead try a channel that is working.
So on and so forth. (By the way, I really dislike the way its fans tend to push KnoppMyth as some kind of all-in-one, turnkey MythTV box-on-a-CD for dummies. It's not, unless you want to call lack of support for SATA drives in the install script and USB keyboards and mice a "feature" (unless things have improved since 5A26), and portraying it this way simply hurts the MythTV cause.)
Don't get me wrong; I still *really* like MythTV, am very happy with what I can do with it and how I've set up my little quasi-home theater setup, and it's quite possible 0.19 has taken care of some of the more glaring issues. But it's labeled 0.19 *for a reason*. Everything I wrote in my previous posting still holds, for better or for worse.
Except I'd rather eventually watch King Kong on HD-DVD on a 30" than a 19" monitor. Before you tell me to get an HDTV, I'll point out that most of the lower-end models don't actually do true 1080i, let alone 1080p. Furthermore, I don't have the budget to buy a 1080p HDTV and two 19" LCDs. So the sweet spot in the middle could be the Dell 30".
As Interiot writes elsewhere, the display you should snap up is the Westinghouse 37" 1080p LCD. It's a monitor (so no ATSC tuner; use a cable or over-the-air set-top box instead, or a computer), but otherwise it's absolutely ideal as an HDTV and, for those inclined, a monitor (I'm doing both, in a sense, by hooking it up to my new MythTV box). Of course, be sure to first read the lengthy AVSForum thread. When ready, go to J&R to buy it for $1570 including shipping anywhere in the 48 states outside New York state.
While on the subject of 1080p, an issue I'm facing now that I have a true 1080p display is that my video card--an eVGA Nvidia 6200 TC--is just a little too slow to deliver a perfect 1080p image without a portion of the screen refreshing behind the rest in certain cases. When I asked about this on AVSForum I was told that the 6600GT is is fast enough to do this right; thoughts?
The E-SATA kind. External sata is a simple pin thru for the data cable.
I should've been more clear, since you're not the only one who misunderstood me. By "external storage" I meant NFS or Samba through the Ethernet jack, not through the SATA jack (of which I agree any external drive should work).
I'd be very happy if Tivo Series 3 supports NFS or Samba as storage (again, I have no problem with Tivo using whatever encryption methods they'd like on said files), but I'd also be very surprised.
My biggest reluctance to moving away from TiVo is it's got the most usefully laid out remote I've ever used for watching video.
Amen and amen; it's yet another example of something TiVo got right six years ago.
If I wanted to I could use a $10 IR sensor (I can't find the address right now, but some guy sells them in USB and serial varieties for about that price) and the TiVo remote with lirc, the usual standard daemon for IR stuff in Linux. That said, I read many complaints about lirc issues and the TiVo remote just doesn't quite have all the buttons I want to have to use within MythTV. So I got myself an IR wireless keyboard + mouse ($20-40) and a universal remote (I got the super-sophisticated MX-500 for $80 but many people are happy with a $30 model) I taught the keyboard's keystrokes to. No worries with lirc with this approach; the MythTV box simply sees a keyboard.
I'm crossing my fingers here -- a little while after the S2 boxes were first released TiVo did this. You could transfer your subscription (monthly or lifetime; obviously it only made sense for lifetime) to a S2 box at no cost.
I'm glad to read your message; I have vague memories of TiVo doing so through an email offer to Series 1 owners like me, but am not sure. Yes, we're all crossing our fingers here.
Believe me, as I wrote in my original post, I *want* to go back to TiVo if it can offer what I currently have all nicely wrapped up in that glorious TiVo user interface! (MythTV has many elegant user-interface features, like the immensely-clever way it simultaneously lists available recordings in both reverse-chronological *and* title- or category-sorted fashion without making it obtrusive, but the UI still has some issues that TiVo solved six years [and a lot of venture capital money] ago.)
While Galleon is a very useful utility, there's a world of difference between any backup procedure--even a relatively-sophisticated one with rules--and having transparent, read-and-write, real-time access to a real NFS or Samba-mounted directory tree.
Given these two and the fact that you can attach a fat external SATA hard disk should be enough to get you out of your mythbox now.
I invite you to read my message again. I have a *2.8TB array*. It is comprised of *many* big fat hard disks (specifically, eight 400GBs in a RAID 5 configuration), not just one. I do not wish to compromise.
And speaking of compromise, why should I also want to give up the HDTV recording I can do and am doing right now for a standard-definition TiVo Series 2 box, when I never felt motivated enough to upgrade from my Series 1 to it in the first place? (I can't get DirecTV so can't use the HDTV DirecTiVo box, and DirecTV stopped improving the software on their DirecTiVo boxes years ago.)
I don't like subscriptions, but even more than that I don't like being locked into a single service provider. What if, in two years, the scheduling on the Tivo service is always wrong, or the prices raise outrageously. Having the choice to switch providers is a big plus for me. Right now I use a free, web based service with my PVR.
"You get what you pay for" (which is probably what I should've titled my post, because that's what it really boils down to). In four and 1/2 years of daily, heavy TiVo use I never had an issue with the reliability of the scheduling data that Tribune (through TiVo) provided. The DataDirect service that MythTV now has access to in the US is great--seriously, much thanks to Zap2It--and is, theoretically, the exact same data as TiVo's since it also comes from Tribune, but in the six weeks I've used it I've already seen at least one day (today) with almost no programs scheduled. (I'm probably going to have to start running mythfilldatabase from cron twice a day instead of once.) People on mythtv-users complain about other such instances, too. Yes, LxMSuite is available, but I don't know if it would actually solve this issue or not, or if it's just a polite way of helping to subsidize the (very worthy) MythTV development effort.
This thread proves once again that Slashdot needs a (-1, Cheapskate that won't ever buy anything their mommies don't give them the money for, but will whine endlessly for it to be free anyway) rating.
Ahem. I bought a Series 1 TiVo box in June 2000, later upgraded it myself to 200GB (the absolute most space available at the time), and happily bought a lifetime subscription. (The sort of idiots here who whine and complain about the horrible, awful TiVo subscription fee has always been around and always will; please ignore them.) However, five years later my box sits in the closet. In part it's because a drive died, but it's mostly because, yes, I built a MythTV box.
I *didn't* built a MythTV box because of:
* The subscription fee. See above. I always felt I got way more than my money's worth from TiVo; heck, were I to sell my box on eBay it'd still be worth a few hundred dollars due to the lifetime subscription. * A desire to export TiVo recordings to elsewhere. I never quite understood the fascination people had and have with decrypting TiVo's file system and exporting programs to elsewhere. If anything I wanted my TiVo to act as the portal through which I could view my video library.
I built a MythTV box because I wanted to:
* Bring programs *into* the box, not out of it. MythTV lets me view all my videos and DVD images in a nice, neat, format that resembles the directory hierarchy they are stored in. * Record HDTV programs. Thanks to two cable boxes and two FireWire cables, I can today record two HD programs simultaneously. * Have plenty of storage space. MPEG-2 HD programs take 7GB/hour. about 10 times more than TiVo's about 700MB/GB on the lowest-quality standard. With MythTV I can use NFS (or, in my case due to mysterious performance issues, Samba) to put all the recordings I want on my 2.8TB RAID 5 array. From the description it sounds like the Series 3 TiVo will have an Ethernet jack, but a) it's likely to be 100Mbps--likely to be problematic in real-life conditions when recording two HD programs and watching a third at the same time--and b) who knows what type of external storage the box will ever support in practice.
That's it. No, I really don't care about MythTV's themability (Why, oh why, do people focus on themes in free software so much? Don't they realize that 99% of them look eye-meltingly awful--Kids, raytracing is, like, *so* 1995--and don't do a thing to fix any underlying usability issues with the application?), MythWeather, MythGame, MythPhone, etc., etc. Hey, they're nice, but I'd give them up in a flash to fix the last niggling bugs in mythfrontend (Geez, folks, what *is* up with the "displaying OSD in some recordings consistently crashes mythfrontend" bug in 0.18.1? Linus used to call such issues "brown bag" bugs, as in bugs in Linux kernel releases so showstoppingly bad he wanted to wear a brown bag for letting it loose into the world.) and the annoyances (some pretty colossal) in MythVideo's Video Manager module. If TiVo Series 3 manages to robustly support external filesystems (I have *no* problems with some sort of encryption scheme here) *and* let me view my preexisting videos through the elegant TiVo interface, I'm there. (Especially if TiVo kindly offers us longtime lifetime-subscription owners free upgrades.) I am, however, not waiting for these things to occur; there's TV to watch, and record, today.
Another article from NASA emphasizes the dust's toxicity: 'In some ways, lunar dust resembles the silica dust on Earth that causes silicosis, a serious disease.'
From the article: "Particularly notable are the downloadable playable demos for launch titles including FIFA Soccer 06 Road to the 2006 FIFA World Cup (Electronic Arts), Kameo: Elements of Power (Microsoft Game Studios), Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie (Ubisoft), NBA LIVE 06 (Electronic Arts), Need for Speed Most Wanted (Electronic Arts)."
Great! I've been looking forward to these games. Let me just fire up my Xbox 360 so I can download them and try them out . . . Uh, wait.
My wife and I are looking into purchasing a game based learning console for our 4 year old boy this Christmas . . . We also have a 2 year old boy so something that lasts would be nice.
Sure, if you want the two year-old's first spoken words to be not "mommy" and "daddy" but "pwn," "teh," "l33t," "B11F," and "hax0r." His spelling skills will be forever ruined, but hey, at least he'll gain the linguistic skills necessary to speak fluent Bosnian!
Slashdot Mirror
Don't worry, folks. Bruce and Sheila are going to miss being able to readily buy Vegemite at their local Woolworths and Coles. However, since all Australians--including the greatest one of them all--live right next to the outback and the reef they'll simply go out and make their own rooburgers and shrim on the barbie.
. . . is what I wear on my wrist: The Casio MRG-2100. Consider:
* All-titanium construction
* Solar-powered
* Receives radio time signals from both US and Japanese sources
* Waterproof to 200m
* Digital/analog face
It's a Japan-only model; I had to import it. It's worth it, though; looks great with a button-down shirt.
Yes, in the sense that as the previous poster noted Latter-day Saints don't believe in an ex nihilo creation. Oh, and that Heavenly Father uses bash. (And emacs, but that's of course a given.)
No, because Latter-day Saints believe not only that God lives but that he interacts with humanity, his children, on a daily basis, as opposed to pushing the "Enter" key and letting the binary run indefinitely in the background without intervention (to further extend this lame simile).
Yeechang, who is late to this thread
I moved from NYC to the Palo Alto area in May 2000. That's right, just one month after the start of the long stock-market collapse and two months after the NASDAQ's peak, although of course no one knew these things at the time. I thus got to experience both the highs (insane traffic on 101, Sand Hill Road absolutely packed for two hours each afternoon) and the lows (significantly-better traffic on 101--admittedly a good thing in and of itself--and hordes of people losing jobs and moving back home each month).
It's important to distinguish between San Francisco and Silicon Valley. The Valley has recovered--traffic on 101 has long since become awful again, as today reminded me--but San Francisco still hasn't regained the equivalent of all those bubble-related jobs that vanished into the wind in the 2001-2002 time period, and probably never will. (I've been living in San Francisco for going on two years now and have yet to meet anyone who is working in a "Web" or "e-commerce" job up here. It's like a neutron bomb; the people went away but the buildings stayed.) By contrast, yes, the Valley lost tons of jobs, too, but at least the Valley had, and has, a longtime core of companies that made real products that do real thing dating back to the Fairchild/HP/Intel days. And on the Web side, of course, Google and Yahoo! are leading the charge. They're down there, though, and not up here. Unless and until another bubble develops, I expect San Francisco will remain a remarkably tech jobs-free (but with plenty of finance, retail, and other non tech-related companies) city on the edge of the world's greatest concentration of tech jobs.
I only have five computers (one Athlon 1400GHz, one dual Xeon 2.8GHz, and one Pentium 4 3.0GHz, all running Fedora Core 3 or 4, plus one iBook G4 800MHz and one Infrant ReadyNAS 600) plus a gigabit Ethernet switch. Two things, however, cause my setup to stand out from the crowd:
* Between the dual Xeon and ReadyNAS, I have 4.8TB of RAID storage. That Pentium 4 is a MythTV box with three HDTV feeds, and given the massive sizes of HD recordings, I need all the space I can get.
* Kerberos 5 single-signon authentication. One username and password gets me on to any machine on the network.
However, regarding Activision's alleged bankruptcy--the central point regarding his skepticism--would a SEC 10K filing with the following paragraph:
qualify as some type of evidence?
He's right in one thing, though; you *don't* tug on Superman's cape.
* The all-new Pontiac Gryphon.
* Put up hot new cars at auction on late Friday afternoons, so that those who want to buy a new car to show off to their friends later that night and over the weekend will want to snap them up immediately.
* The totally-redesigned Chevy Mechanostrider. (A subcompact.)
* Lobby governments to raise the driving age to 40.
* Replace warning lights on dashboard with the phrases "u left key in ign kthx," "0ut 0f wip3r fluid!!!", "buff m3 w/ 0il plz," and "LFG >91 Oct."
* All cars will ship with Goblin(TM) Jumper Cables XL. (No guarantees on them actually doing any good.)
* 40-main raids on the super high-level Japan instance. Watch out for the Toyota and Honda boss encounters!
And, the number-one lesson GM can learn from WoW:
* To paraphrase Henry Ford: "You can paint it any color, so long as it's rouge."
Not quite. BHK Corporation (standing for Bobby Kotick, Activision's CEO ever since) did indeed buy Activision/Mediagenic in 1990, but as I heard Kotick say in person (for about a year my job led to several in-person meetings with the gentleman), BHK bought it as a tax writeoff investment as he and his partners believed there was nothing left assetwise. They were surprised to learn that the Activision brand name (which he soon revived) and some intellectual property (such as the Infocom brand) still carried some value on the games market. Along the way there was, indeed, a prepackaged Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing (prearranged in order to streamline the company's finances). In any case, the post-Kotick Activision really does share nothing but some IP with the company that produced Pitfall! and River Raid.
You're right; I completely forgot about Sammy having bought it. Well, I guess the list thins further.
I can't speak for the others (although I suspect you're correct), but the current Activision only shares the name and some intellectual property (such as the Infocom brand name) with the company of the 1980s; that one went bankrupt.
Indeed, it's much easier to list the names of the other prominent videogame publishers extant when EA debuted in 1983 that aren't around any more, versus those that still are. Off the top of my head I can name:
* Activision (see below)
* Atari (acquired)
* Avalon Hill (acquired)
* Broderbund (acquired)
* Coleco (defunct)
* Epyx (defunct)
* Infocom (acquired)
* Mattel (exited)
* MicroProse (acquired)
* Mindscape (acquired)
* Origin (acquired)
* SSI (acquired)
* Sierra (acquired)
* Sir-Tech (defunct)
Surely I am forgetting a half dozen more, at least.
Accolade, Maxis, and Dynamix came later in the 1980s, and none is around today in its original form.
The turnover in the industry is quite remarkable. Who would have believed in 1983 that the mighty Epyx, the innovative MicroProse, or the wondrous Sierra would no longer exist a mere decade or two so later!
Disagree; I think being bought out by another (Microsoft, in this case) disqualifies it as having "survived intact."
Yes, it's hard to believe that *that* company was once the unquestioned leader of innovative gaming.
Consider the company's first five titles:
* Hard Hat Mack for the Atari 800 and Apple II
* Archon for the Atari 800
* Pinball Construction Set for the Atari 800 and Apple II
* Worms? for the Atari 800
* M.U.L.E. for the Atari 800
One is absolutely, bar none, one of the greatest games of all time. Two more are notable milestones in gaming history. Four, perhaps all five, are considered classics.
I like EA and its games. It's a tremendously-successful company, is (I think) the *only* videogame maker other than Nintendo and Sega to survive intact over the past two decades, and over the past 23 years has put out many other fine titles. But let's not forget that there was a time when it didn't depend quite so heavily on annual releases of Madden and NBA Live.
For me, flame wars start for one reason and one reason only. As Dr. Evil put it so well:
"Why must I be surrounded by frickin' idiots?"
Claiming any other reason as a cause is naturally, ipso facto, evidence for the above. So there.
I've been running MythTV for about two months, and have previously posted on my experience. I've been 100% Unix at home for ten years last month and my MythTV box is one of three Linux boxes plus one OS X box at home.
."
My experience with MythTV is can be summed up in the statement "It's great, but . .
Great:
* Support for recording and playing back HDTV broadcast feeds from FireWire (cable box) and MPEG-2 capture card (over-the-air) sources.
But . . .
* FireWire input is generally reliable, but nodes sometimes mysteriously and unpredictably move around based on when and how the cable box, mythbackend daemon, and the MythTV box get started and restarted. (I don't think this is a MythTV problem, but more to do with the current state of the Linux FireWire libraries plus some unreliability on the part of the very common Motorola DCT-6200.)
* MythTV's current state of over-the-air channel detection and setup is so, so horribly bad as to be nearly unusable. It's still not completely clear to me how the combination of Zap2It's program data and mythtv-setup's transport scanning are to work together. Anyone setting up over-the-air reception is going to run into the utterly baffling "missing PIDs" issue. Despite this I previously had, after enormous amounts of grief and multiple tries, three over-the-air HDTV channels working and working well; then all of a sudden one stopped working despite signal locks and an unchanged antenna orientation. Right now, with a rebuilt box, I only have one channel working right.
Great:
* Very, very nice user interface (I really like the Retro theme and Isthmus OSD) with tons of great features.
But . . .
* Holes in the most obvious places. For example, I have two HDTV cable boxes and the aforementioned over-the-air capture card. Let's say cable box #1 can't be used at the moment because fo the aforementioned wandering-node issue or because the preset channel is not broadcasting due to an outage. There's no way to, in Live TV mode, skip that tuner and go on to the others; instead, mythfrontend bounces me right back to the menu (if it doesn't crash completely). If the over-the-air card can't lock into the channel it's preset to, mythfrontend again bounces me right back to the menu or crashes instead of letting me instead try a channel that is working.
So on and so forth. (By the way, I really dislike the way its fans tend to push KnoppMyth as some kind of all-in-one, turnkey MythTV box-on-a-CD for dummies. It's not, unless you want to call lack of support for SATA drives in the install script and USB keyboards and mice a "feature" (unless things have improved since 5A26), and portraying it this way simply hurts the MythTV cause.)
Don't get me wrong; I still *really* like MythTV, am very happy with what I can do with it and how I've set up my little quasi-home theater setup, and it's quite possible 0.19 has taken care of some of the more glaring issues. But it's labeled 0.19 *for a reason*. Everything I wrote in my previous posting still holds, for better or for worse.
. . . that any Windows PC used to read this Slashdot story is now infected with a worm that exploits these WMF security holes.
Darn banner ads!
As Interiot writes elsewhere, the display you should snap up is the Westinghouse 37" 1080p LCD. It's a monitor (so no ATSC tuner; use a cable or over-the-air set-top box instead, or a computer), but otherwise it's absolutely ideal as an HDTV and, for those inclined, a monitor (I'm doing both, in a sense, by hooking it up to my new MythTV box). Of course, be sure to first read the lengthy AVSForum thread. When ready, go to J&R to buy it for $1570 including shipping anywhere in the 48 states outside New York state.
While on the subject of 1080p, an issue I'm facing now that I have a true 1080p display is that my video card--an eVGA Nvidia 6200 TC--is just a little too slow to deliver a perfect 1080p image without a portion of the screen refreshing behind the rest in certain cases. When I asked about this on AVSForum I was told that the 6600GT is is fast enough to do this right; thoughts?
I should've been more clear, since you're not the only one who misunderstood me. By "external storage" I meant NFS or Samba through the Ethernet jack, not through the SATA jack (of which I agree any external drive should work).
I'd be very happy if Tivo Series 3 supports NFS or Samba as storage (again, I have no problem with Tivo using whatever encryption methods they'd like on said files), but I'd also be very surprised.
Amen and amen; it's yet another example of something TiVo got right six years ago.
If I wanted to I could use a $10 IR sensor (I can't find the address right now, but some guy sells them in USB and serial varieties for about that price) and the TiVo remote with lirc, the usual standard daemon for IR stuff in Linux. That said, I read many complaints about lirc issues and the TiVo remote just doesn't quite have all the buttons I want to have to use within MythTV. So I got myself an IR wireless keyboard + mouse ($20-40) and a universal remote (I got the super-sophisticated MX-500 for $80 but many people are happy with a $30 model) I taught the keyboard's keystrokes to. No worries with lirc with this approach; the MythTV box simply sees a keyboard.
I'm glad to read your message; I have vague memories of TiVo doing so through an email offer to Series 1 owners like me, but am not sure. Yes, we're all crossing our fingers here.
Believe me, as I wrote in my original post, I *want* to go back to TiVo if it can offer what I currently have all nicely wrapped up in that glorious TiVo user interface! (MythTV has many elegant user-interface features, like the immensely-clever way it simultaneously lists available recordings in both reverse-chronological *and* title- or category-sorted fashion without making it obtrusive, but the UI still has some issues that TiVo solved six years [and a lot of venture capital money] ago.)
Yes, if they're in certain formats and resolutions. I have, alas, too many files whose names end in that obscure and unknown
While Galleon is a very useful utility, there's a world of difference between any backup procedure--even a relatively-sophisticated one with rules--and having transparent, read-and-write, real-time access to a real NFS or Samba-mounted directory tree.
I invite you to read my message again. I have a *2.8TB array*. It is comprised of *many* big fat hard disks (specifically, eight 400GBs in a RAID 5 configuration), not just one. I do not wish to compromise.
And speaking of compromise, why should I also want to give up the HDTV recording I can do and am doing right now for a standard-definition TiVo Series 2 box, when I never felt motivated enough to upgrade from my Series 1 to it in the first place? (I can't get DirecTV so can't use the HDTV DirecTiVo box, and DirecTV stopped improving the software on their DirecTiVo boxes years ago.)
"You get what you pay for" (which is probably what I should've titled my post, because that's what it really boils down to). In four and 1/2 years of daily, heavy TiVo use I never had an issue with the reliability of the scheduling data that Tribune (through TiVo) provided. The DataDirect service that MythTV now has access to in the US is great--seriously, much thanks to Zap2It--and is, theoretically, the exact same data as TiVo's since it also comes from Tribune, but in the six weeks I've used it I've already seen at least one day (today) with almost no programs scheduled. (I'm probably going to have to start running mythfilldatabase from cron twice a day instead of once.) People on mythtv-users complain about other such instances, too. Yes, LxMSuite is available, but I don't know if it would actually solve this issue or not, or if it's just a polite way of helping to subsidize the (very worthy) MythTV development effort.
This thread proves once again that Slashdot needs a (-1, Cheapskate that won't ever buy anything their mommies don't give them the money for, but will whine endlessly for it to be free anyway) rating.
Ahem. I bought a Series 1 TiVo box in June 2000, later upgraded it myself to 200GB (the absolute most space available at the time), and happily bought a lifetime subscription. (The sort of idiots here who whine and complain about the horrible, awful TiVo subscription fee has always been around and always will; please ignore them.) However, five years later my box sits in the closet. In part it's because a drive died, but it's mostly because, yes, I built a MythTV box.
I *didn't* built a MythTV box because of:
* The subscription fee. See above. I always felt I got way more than my money's worth from TiVo; heck, were I to sell my box on eBay it'd still be worth a few hundred dollars due to the lifetime subscription.
* A desire to export TiVo recordings to elsewhere. I never quite understood the fascination people had and have with decrypting TiVo's file system and exporting programs to elsewhere. If anything I wanted my TiVo to act as the portal through which I could view my video library.
I built a MythTV box because I wanted to:
* Bring programs *into* the box, not out of it. MythTV lets me view all my videos and DVD images in a nice, neat, format that resembles the directory hierarchy they are stored in.
* Record HDTV programs. Thanks to two cable boxes and two FireWire cables, I can today record two HD programs simultaneously.
* Have plenty of storage space. MPEG-2 HD programs take 7GB/hour. about 10 times more than TiVo's about 700MB/GB on the lowest-quality standard. With MythTV I can use NFS (or, in my case due to mysterious performance issues, Samba) to put all the recordings I want on my 2.8TB RAID 5 array. From the description it sounds like the Series 3 TiVo will have an Ethernet jack, but a) it's likely to be 100Mbps--likely to be problematic in real-life conditions when recording two HD programs and watching a third at the same time--and b) who knows what type of external storage the box will ever support in practice.
That's it. No, I really don't care about MythTV's themability (Why, oh why, do people focus on themes in free software so much? Don't they realize that 99% of them look eye-meltingly awful--Kids, raytracing is, like, *so* 1995--and don't do a thing to fix any underlying usability issues with the application?), MythWeather, MythGame, MythPhone, etc., etc. Hey, they're nice, but I'd give them up in a flash to fix the last niggling bugs in mythfrontend (Geez, folks, what *is* up with the "displaying OSD in some recordings consistently crashes mythfrontend" bug in 0.18.1? Linus used to call such issues "brown bag" bugs, as in bugs in Linux kernel releases so showstoppingly bad he wanted to wear a brown bag for letting it loose into the world.) and the annoyances (some pretty colossal) in MythVideo's Video Manager module. If TiVo Series 3 manages to robustly support external filesystems (I have *no* problems with some sort of encryption scheme here) *and* let me view my preexisting videos through the elegant TiVo interface, I'm there. (Especially if TiVo kindly offers us longtime lifetime-subscription owners free upgrades.) I am, however, not waiting for these things to occur; there's TV to watch, and record, today.
Great! I've been looking forward to these games. Let me just fire up my Xbox 360 so I can download them and try them out . . . Uh, wait.
Sure, if you want the two year-old's first spoken words to be not "mommy" and "daddy" but "pwn," "teh," "l33t," "B11F," and "hax0r." His spelling skills will be forever ruined, but hey, at least he'll gain the linguistic skills necessary to speak fluent Bosnian!