I'm a huge Boxee fan, but it's biggest differentiator (from XBMC, Plex, and similar forks) is also it's biggest liability.
In order to be an effective "social" media player, where titles can be shared and recognized by others, it has restrictions on the media sources. If your content isn't in IMDB, Hulu, TV Guide, or one of the other supported providers, there's no way to get it into Boxee.
The biggest offenders are TV series on DVD. Boxee understands Battlestar Galactica Season 1, Episode 5, but can't parse the DVD rip of Battlestar Galactica Season 1, Disk 2. Or, likewise, the DVD rip of Pixar's Short Films Collection (but it can parse the individual short films).
To be fair, last time I checked, none of the XBMC forks could parse these media (someone really should write a Netflix scraper plugin), but at least you could manually enter them.
For those who don't wish to spend as much time assembling and tweaking, but still want to enjoy Boxee goodness; You can buy a refurbished Mac Mini, DVIHDMI dongle, and 1tb external disk for roughly the same price as the author spent on his Ubuntu rig. Boxee is available (and started) as a native OS-X application. Plus, with OS-X, you can get streaming HD Netflix.
It's got a fairly high WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) in that the UI is pretty easy to use (certainly much easier than Finder/Explorer).
It's a "social" media player. In that it has a "friends" system like most other social sites. You can see what your friends are watching (opt-in, of course) and use that as a tool to find new content.
Google notebook seems redundant with Google Docs imo.
I disagree. As a Google Notebook user, I found it very fast and easy to access. The cost (in clicks) of getting into a Google doc and organizing said doc after is much higher than with Notebook, plus there was an integrated FF plugin that made it very useful for clipping pages.
While Google's statement is "no new development", I think odds are that it will be shuttered completely within 24 months as other notebook services' (Evernote, Zoho) feature sets become compelling enough for existing GNotebook users to migrate, thus lessening the outcry when Google does pull the plug.
I'm sad that they're closing it down, but if you've got to end a service, this is a good course of action.
Re:Expresso S3 review (I've used one)
on
The Gym Arcade
·
· Score: 1
We have one of these at work, and we're expecting another. It's a blast. And I'm not a gamer.
First, the downsides:
1) The shifter is not very well designed. It's a single lever mounted on the stem, which is an inconvenient spot. With 30 "gears" and very sharp changes of gradient, it's not uncommon to have to shift by 10 gears or more in a matter of seconds to avoid stalling out. The shifting doesn't seem all that responsive either, so there's a tendency to overshift, which usually leaves you moving too slowly. I'd rather have two shifters mounted on the bars, with the left shifter giving you 3-5 gears in one shot (i. e. something like front and rear derailleurs on a "real" bike). This is by far the weakest part of the setup. If they would fix that, it would be a much stronger product.
The S3 model has shift buttons on the handlebars, are you sure you don't have an S2 model (the S3 has a widescreen 17" monitor where the S2 has a 4x3 14" monitor)? Also, on all the models, you can shift using the up and down arrows on the control panel, but the beeping can get annoying after a while.
3) The saddle simply isn't very good. It's adjustable in maybe 1/2" increments both vertically and front to back (which is OK for this purpose, but finer increments would be better). However, it's a wide, heavily cushioned saddle, which really isn't very comfortable for long rides. It would be nice if there were a couple of different saddles to pick from, and you could just plunk down the one you like at any given time. It's a much better saddle than the usual exercise bike saddle, but that's not saying much.
There are several models of saddle available and you can easily swap them out, maybe talk to your facilities person and see if they'll order a different seat?
Good points:
4) The bike can be connected to the internet, with some additional features (I don't know what they all are; ours isn't connected yet).
The back-end support is where the EF 'experience' really shines - If your bike is connected to the net and you choose to create an rider account (which is free), your ride data is uploaded to the web site expresso.net and you can have online access to your ride statistics and performance history, view leaderboards, participate in contests, choose saved rides (yours and other peoples') to ride against, and view achievements you've attained while riding. A basic bike account is free and gives you access to some of the features on the web site, upgrading to a paying member unlocks the extra tracks and expands the features available on the back end.
Neutral points:
1) While your avatar responds to the steering, it doesn't really affect the riding in any way, except on the game course. It won't let you go off the course (if you try to steer off, or don't try to steer on, it just keeps you at the side of the course). You can also ride right through other riders, and they can ride through you if you're slower. It doesn't really feel natural, but without actual movement, it would be very hard to make the steering feel natural. I don't care all that much.
The Chase courses (where you chase down dragons to earn points) are "free range". Since quite a bit of the Route experience is designed around the idea of a repeatable "lap", we need to be able to constrain the riders to a course.
The one thing I'd love to see with these articles are a few actual build/tweak sessions. Sure, it looks like a monster on paper - but maybe the 4870 drivers aren't mature under Vista 64 and you end up rebooting every half hour. Makes the whole list pretty useless.
Alas, it didnt look like these guys have actually even touched the hardware they're writing about on a store shelf, much less opened it up and done compatibility or performance tests.
There's an open source project, SCMBug that seeks to be a glue between SVN and Bugzilla - allowing well-formed checkin comments to comment/close out bugs (of course, getting well-formed checkin comments from developers is sort of like getting 99% uptime from twitter).
For instance, p2p programs can start using UDP spread spectrum... pass packets on random ports. The receiver then basically implements a quick and dirty tcp-like connection over this (ie much worse for an ISP than actual TCP). Add encryption and random length so it's harder to filter out. Or there can be a shared random number seed for the shared ports. Just for example...
Hopefully, when BT clients implement this, it'll be a checkbox in Options labeled "Comcastic".
That it is a great idea. Combined with only dropping RST packets for your torrent port you could have it match a specific TTL as well. Try this: iptables -I FORWARD 3 -p tcp --dport 36745 --tcp-flags RST RST -ttl-eq $EVILISPTTL -j DROP
For the neophyte firewall admins among us, how does one go about determining EVILISPTTL? And better yet, is there a way to specify a range for ttl-eq when the ISP starts injecting variable TTL RST packets?
It would be interesting to see a graph indicating the amount of profanity in internet traffic over the next few days as this news spreads.
Shame that someone with such a large body of great work is primarily remembered for his "7 words". It least here on/., there seems to be a bit more discourse on the rest of his comedy.
An old laptop like that isn't going to be good for much else than browsing/email anyhow, so why not replace the drive with a CF card and laptop IDE-CF adapter. Adapters can be had on ebay for ~$5. CF cards are pretty cheap - You can run XP on a 4GB card pretty well and Win2k or linux variants on 2GB easily. Write times aren't all that great (avoid super-low memory environments where there'll be a lot of swapping), but read times are great and battery life will be much improved (which is a big deal on slower older laptops), plus they're lighter and run cooler.
The write cycle failure time on most CF cards is so long, you should get at least a few more years of use out of it (and CF cards will be that much cheaper by then). Even then, from what I understand, write cycle failures are just that - a failure to write. You can get a new drive, copy the contents to the new drive and be good to go.
I'm a fan of Carl Sagan, but I do find it kind of amusing that he would easily reject one idea that there is no evidence for (God), but so willingly embrace another idea for which there is no evidence (intelligent extraterrestrial life).
I believe Sagan's embrace of the idea of IEL was based on sheer mathematical probability. I think he had a harder time coming up with a mathematical formula that could prove the existence of God (and lets face it, if there was a formula, it'd be on bumpers and t-shirts and slogans all over the place). Besides, the fundament of religion is faith, which is based on the absence of math and scientific truth, Sagan's domain. So it's no surprise that he rejected it.
First off, if you don't pay for content, then don't be outraged when that content disappears. The PC gaming industry gets worse and worse every year due to piracy. All of my favorite PC game houses went bankrupt.
Next, how much time does it take to rip that DVD, convert it to fit on a single layer disc, burn it, label it, etc?
Most of my DVDs I buy used from Hollywood Video or Blockbuster. They pretty much always have a 3 for $25 deal. I'm paying $8 for a movie to own it legally.
Okay, this argument doesn't really work. When you buy used like that, guess who gets 100% of that revenue? Blockbuster and Hollywood Video. Not the publishers. As far as they're concerned, you might as well be pirating the movies. If you search around, you'll find the publishing houses (movies, music, and games) blame their losses on the used market just as much as piracy (example here).
My time is worth far more than $8 an hour, so even if it only takes 1 hour to pirate a DVD, then it really is a huge waste.
If it's taking you more than 5 minutes of your time, you're doing it wrong. Insert DVD, launch ripper app, click "Rip", go do whatever it is that's more "worth your time".
I don't know many folks who actually re-burn DVD rips anymore, especially when the new consoles can play media from a USB drive or even network shares. Even if you did, if it's taking you more than 3 minutes to swap disks, fire up your burning software, start the burn, eject, and scribble a title, you're doing it wrong again. NOTE - If you're sitting there watching the ripping or burning parts, you probably actually aren't worth more than $8/hr.
Failure to achieve these things will not reflect well on the fitness of the rulers to rule.... Or the people who elected them.
You mean lobbyists and campaign contributors, such as the MPAA, RIAA, Sony, and such? Please. This will get swept under the rug and the relentless juggernaut of "copyright justice" will roll on like it has for the last 10 years.
You can also make a habit of getting an annual free credit report from annualcreditreport.com. [annualcreditreport.com] This can help you to detect if something goofy is going on.
I wholeheartedly second this with the caveat to read everything very carefully when signing up for a free credit report. These companies all make money off of up-selling you to paid ongoing credit monitoring services and they make every possible effort to sign you up for such services as part of the free report process (and likewise make every effort to defeat you from canceling the service afterward).
The clock widgets seem especially worthless -- if you have a lot of widgets in your rotation and just missed the clock, you're going to end up wondering what time it was when you started watching, waiting for the clock.
You dictate the order/duration of display of the widgets. There are some 30 different clock widgets and repeating is allowed - I had the same issue as you describe, my solution was to intersperse clock widgets throughout the lineup (IE - Stock Widget, Analog Clock Widget, Weather Widget, Digital Clock Widget, TechMeme Widget, Melting Digital Clock Widget, etc...), so a time display was never more than 30 seconds away.
Pogue hit it on the head: "The widgets are the biggest draw, though. So big, in fact, that the Chumby is filled with hardware features that pretty much do nothing at the moment."
It's got a reasonable CPU, accelerometer, 2(!) USB ports, wifi, touch screen, runs an acceptable linux environment, and hacking is encouraged. Here's to hoping Pogues +/.'s coverage turns a few more folks on to it.
Out of the box, it's still kinda.9 software - I'd hoped to use it as a smart clock-radio, but the software UI just isn't as easy as a dedicated alarm clock. The good news is, someone with decent skeelz could write an excellent replacement alarm clock.
It should be noted that you can create a "virtual chumby" on the company's site to preview all the widgets 'live'.
I'm confused - Comcast has admitted they can't handle the speeds they're already providing to customers, what's the point in providing a faster end-user connection if the back-end can't support it?
Unfortunately money can't be turned directly into servers. They need to be built and delivered, and have software loaded and configured. Give it a few weeks.
At a guess, they might even need so many new servers that they need to hire or buy a new location and have it rigged with power and internet. That could take months.
It's not like Christmas changes dates every year - They've had plenty of time to anticipate. Did Microsoft really have such low holiday sales expectations that they didn't ramp up enough servers to handle the load (conspiracy theory alert! Did they know about the Warner announcement and think it was coming pre-Dec25)? Even if it takes weeks, pre-sales figures should have been readily available with less than a few day's lag. And really, if your back-end is properly architected, you should be able to add capacity within days, not weeks. It's been 11 days and things still aren't working smoothly.
From what I've read from the XBox Live team, the current failures are in authentication, which is handled by a different group than XBL. That sounds like either folks in the XBox sales group and XBL network operations didn't bother to let folks in Microsoft Authentication (Passport?) know to expect a heavy load and/or the folks in the Authentication group aren't skilled at quickly scaling their system.
It's disappointing that studios are willing to choose the quick payola for format exclusivity over long term customer satisfaction. As broadband and storage tech gets cheaper and more pervasive, you can bet more and more customers alienated by choosing the "losing format" will turn to solutions that require less financial commitment and even provide a little spiteful satisfaction. Namely illegal downloading. Sure, Comcast can try to throttle downloads and Microsoft can try to DRM-lock their OS, but there will always be a way around these draconian restrictions and they seem to be getting more consumer friendly, rather than less. The record labels are slowly learning, but at least their follies aren't costing the general music consumer money (I'm talking about obsoleting an entire format, not DRM-crippled/rootkit costs). November 2007 numbers indicated 750,000 HD-DVD players, that's a whole lot of pissed off customers.
The widget in question (according to TFA) is "Secret Crush". The app asks you to complete several steps, including signing up 5 of your friends and installing a tray applet (containing the "infamous "Zango" adware/spyware") from Zango's site.
The RIAA would never agree to this as the industry is making the bulk of it's profits now off of back-catalog music that's >5 years old (where royalty contracts have been renegotiated lower or expired completely and the cost of creating the content has long since been paid off).
'Free' (on the assumption that if Amazon would charge the same for content regardless of connection method) CDMA seems to me more pervasive than free WiFi. Additionally, you're far more likely to be eavesdropped using WiFi in some random public place than CDMA. So I don't really count this as a negative - quite the contrary.
Slashdot Mirror
In order to be an effective "social" media player, where titles can be shared and recognized by others, it has restrictions on the media sources. If your content isn't in IMDB, Hulu, TV Guide, or one of the other supported providers, there's no way to get it into Boxee.
The biggest offenders are TV series on DVD. Boxee understands Battlestar Galactica Season 1, Episode 5, but can't parse the DVD rip of Battlestar Galactica Season 1, Disk 2. Or, likewise, the DVD rip of Pixar's Short Films Collection (but it can parse the individual short films).
To be fair, last time I checked, none of the XBMC forks could parse these media (someone really should write a Netflix scraper plugin), but at least you could manually enter them.
For those who don't wish to spend as much time assembling and tweaking, but still want to enjoy Boxee goodness; You can buy a refurbished Mac Mini, DVIHDMI dongle, and 1tb external disk for roughly the same price as the author spent on his Ubuntu rig. Boxee is available (and started) as a native OS-X application. Plus, with OS-X, you can get streaming HD Netflix.
I disagree. As a Google Notebook user, I found it very fast and easy to access. The cost (in clicks) of getting into a Google doc and organizing said doc after is much higher than with Notebook, plus there was an integrated FF plugin that made it very useful for clipping pages.
While Google's statement is "no new development", I think odds are that it will be shuttered completely within 24 months as other notebook services' (Evernote, Zoho) feature sets become compelling enough for existing GNotebook users to migrate, thus lessening the outcry when Google does pull the plug.
I'm sad that they're closing it down, but if you've got to end a service, this is a good course of action.
We have one of these at work, and we're expecting another. It's a blast. And I'm not a gamer.
First, the downsides:
1) The shifter is not very well designed. It's a single lever mounted on the stem, which is an inconvenient spot. With 30 "gears" and very sharp changes of gradient, it's not uncommon to have to shift by 10 gears or more in a matter of seconds to avoid stalling out. The shifting doesn't seem all that responsive either, so there's a tendency to overshift, which usually leaves you moving too slowly. I'd rather have two shifters mounted on the bars, with the left shifter giving you 3-5 gears in one shot (i. e. something like front and rear derailleurs on a "real" bike). This is by far the weakest part of the setup. If they would fix that, it would be a much stronger product.
The S3 model has shift buttons on the handlebars, are you sure you don't have an S2 model (the S3 has a widescreen 17" monitor where the S2 has a 4x3 14" monitor)? Also, on all the models, you can shift using the up and down arrows on the control panel, but the beeping can get annoying after a while.
3) The saddle simply isn't very good. It's adjustable in maybe 1/2" increments both vertically and front to back (which is OK for this purpose, but finer increments would be better). However, it's a wide, heavily cushioned saddle, which really isn't very comfortable for long rides. It would be nice if there were a couple of different saddles to pick from, and you could just plunk down the one you like at any given time. It's a much better saddle than the usual exercise bike saddle, but that's not saying much.
There are several models of saddle available and you can easily swap them out, maybe talk to your facilities person and see if they'll order a different seat?
Good points:
4) The bike can be connected to the internet, with some additional features (I don't know what they all are; ours isn't connected yet).
The back-end support is where the EF 'experience' really shines - If your bike is connected to the net and you choose to create an rider account (which is free), your ride data is uploaded to the web site expresso.net and you can have online access to your ride statistics and performance history, view leaderboards, participate in contests, choose saved rides (yours and other peoples') to ride against, and view achievements you've attained while riding. A basic bike account is free and gives you access to some of the features on the web site, upgrading to a paying member unlocks the extra tracks and expands the features available on the back end.
Neutral points:
1) While your avatar responds to the steering, it doesn't really affect the riding in any way, except on the game course. It won't let you go off the course (if you try to steer off, or don't try to steer on, it just keeps you at the side of the course). You can also ride right through other riders, and they can ride through you if you're slower. It doesn't really feel natural, but without actual movement, it would be very hard to make the steering feel natural. I don't care all that much.
The Chase courses (where you chase down dragons to earn points) are "free range". Since quite a bit of the Route experience is designed around the idea of a repeatable "lap", we need to be able to constrain the riders to a course.
Why is Apple releasing new laptops right after the start of the school year (for most folks)?
Alas, it didnt look like these guys have actually even touched the hardware they're writing about on a store shelf, much less opened it up and done compatibility or performance tests.
Does anyone have any experience with this tool?
Hopefully, when BT clients implement this, it'll be a checkbox in Options labeled "Comcastic".
For the neophyte firewall admins among us, how does one go about determining EVILISPTTL? And better yet, is there a way to specify a range for ttl-eq when the ISP starts injecting variable TTL RST packets?
Shame that someone with such a large body of great work is primarily remembered for his "7 words". It least here on /., there seems to be a bit more discourse on the rest of his comedy.
The write cycle failure time on most CF cards is so long, you should get at least a few more years of use out of it (and CF cards will be that much cheaper by then). Even then, from what I understand, write cycle failures are just that - a failure to write. You can get a new drive, copy the contents to the new drive and be good to go.
I believe Sagan's embrace of the idea of IEL was based on sheer mathematical probability. I think he had a harder time coming up with a mathematical formula that could prove the existence of God (and lets face it, if there was a formula, it'd be on bumpers and t-shirts and slogans all over the place). Besides, the fundament of religion is faith, which is based on the absence of math and scientific truth, Sagan's domain. So it's no surprise that he rejected it.
Next, how much time does it take to rip that DVD, convert it to fit on a single layer disc, burn it, label it, etc?
Most of my DVDs I buy used from Hollywood Video or Blockbuster. They pretty much always have a 3 for $25 deal. I'm paying $8 for a movie to own it legally.
Okay, this argument doesn't really work. When you buy used like that, guess who gets 100% of that revenue? Blockbuster and Hollywood Video. Not the publishers. As far as they're concerned, you might as well be pirating the movies. If you search around, you'll find the publishing houses (movies, music, and games) blame their losses on the used market just as much as piracy (example here).
My time is worth far more than $8 an hour, so even if it only takes 1 hour to pirate a DVD, then it really is a huge waste.
If it's taking you more than 5 minutes of your time, you're doing it wrong. Insert DVD, launch ripper app, click "Rip", go do whatever it is that's more "worth your time".
I don't know many folks who actually re-burn DVD rips anymore, especially when the new consoles can play media from a USB drive or even network shares. Even if you did, if it's taking you more than 3 minutes to swap disks, fire up your burning software, start the burn, eject, and scribble a title, you're doing it wrong again. NOTE - If you're sitting there watching the ripping or burning parts, you probably actually aren't worth more than $8/hr.
You mean lobbyists and campaign contributors, such as the MPAA, RIAA, Sony, and such? Please. This will get swept under the rug and the relentless juggernaut of "copyright justice" will roll on like it has for the last 10 years.
I wholeheartedly second this with the caveat to read everything very carefully when signing up for a free credit report. These companies all make money off of up-selling you to paid ongoing credit monitoring services and they make every possible effort to sign you up for such services as part of the free report process (and likewise make every effort to defeat you from canceling the service afterward).
You dictate the order/duration of display of the widgets. There are some 30 different clock widgets and repeating is allowed - I had the same issue as you describe, my solution was to intersperse clock widgets throughout the lineup (IE - Stock Widget, Analog Clock Widget, Weather Widget, Digital Clock Widget, TechMeme Widget, Melting Digital Clock Widget, etc...), so a time display was never more than 30 seconds away.
It's got a reasonable CPU, accelerometer, 2(!) USB ports, wifi, touch screen, runs an acceptable linux environment, and hacking is encouraged. Here's to hoping Pogues + /.'s coverage turns a few more folks on to it.
Out of the box, it's still kinda .9 software - I'd hoped to use it as a smart clock-radio, but the software UI just isn't as easy as a dedicated alarm clock. The good news is, someone with decent skeelz could write an excellent replacement alarm clock.
It should be noted that you can create a "virtual chumby" on the company's site to preview all the widgets 'live'.
I'm confused - Comcast has admitted they can't handle the speeds they're already providing to customers, what's the point in providing a faster end-user connection if the back-end can't support it?
At a guess, they might even need so many new servers that they need to hire or buy a new location and have it rigged with power and internet. That could take months.
It's not like Christmas changes dates every year - They've had plenty of time to anticipate. Did Microsoft really have such low holiday sales expectations that they didn't ramp up enough servers to handle the load (conspiracy theory alert! Did they know about the Warner announcement and think it was coming pre-Dec25)? Even if it takes weeks, pre-sales figures should have been readily available with less than a few day's lag. And really, if your back-end is properly architected, you should be able to add capacity within days, not weeks. It's been 11 days and things still aren't working smoothly.
From what I've read from the XBox Live team, the current failures are in authentication, which is handled by a different group than XBL. That sounds like either folks in the XBox sales group and XBL network operations didn't bother to let folks in Microsoft Authentication (Passport?) know to expect a heavy load and/or the folks in the Authentication group aren't skilled at quickly scaling their system.
It's disappointing that studios are willing to choose the quick payola for format exclusivity over long term customer satisfaction. As broadband and storage tech gets cheaper and more pervasive, you can bet more and more customers alienated by choosing the "losing format" will turn to solutions that require less financial commitment and even provide a little spiteful satisfaction. Namely illegal downloading. Sure, Comcast can try to throttle downloads and Microsoft can try to DRM-lock their OS, but there will always be a way around these draconian restrictions and they seem to be getting more consumer friendly, rather than less. The record labels are slowly learning, but at least their follies aren't costing the general music consumer money (I'm talking about obsoleting an entire format, not DRM-crippled/rootkit costs). November 2007 numbers indicated 750,000 HD-DVD players, that's a whole lot of pissed off customers.
The widget in question (according to TFA) is "Secret Crush". The app asks you to complete several steps, including signing up 5 of your friends and installing a tray applet (containing the "infamous "Zango" adware/spyware") from Zango's site.
The RIAA would never agree to this as the industry is making the bulk of it's profits now off of back-catalog music that's >5 years old (where royalty contracts have been renegotiated lower or expired completely and the cost of creating the content has long since been paid off).
Some of us prefer make.
Frankly, I've had far better luck long term with setup.exe.
'Free' (on the assumption that if Amazon would charge the same for content regardless of connection method) CDMA seems to me more pervasive than free WiFi. Additionally, you're far more likely to be eavesdropped using WiFi in some random public place than CDMA. So I don't really count this as a negative - quite the contrary.