This is the reason I can't justify buying one yet.
If that's the only reason, get a Replay 4K. You
can easily extract the MPEG streams using free
software, such as
swapdv,
which is written in Java and works fine on Linux,
Windows, and Macs. The source is on
SourceForge.
It's a shame that IC vendors will no longer give out data on their chips. If they did, people would write good drivers for them. It's really difficult to see how that could be viewed as a bad thing.
The standard excuse is that they don't want the support burden. But that's bogus; they obviously have no obligation to provide support to any party other than the company they sell the chips to. In particular, the IC vendor does NOT generally have any obligation to support the end purchaser of a product containing their chip, or to someone trying to write their own drivers.
The other excuse I've sometimes heard is that they don't want other companies to clone their product. But that's a red herring. There are literally millions of transistors in these chips; just having the information on the programming interface to the chip (registers and commands) doesn't magically make it easy to design a compatible chip. If that were true, everyone and his brother would be making Pentium IVs, since the programming interface for that is well documented. As it is, there is only ONE company successfully competing with Intel on high-end x86 processors.
IMNSHO, these companies are just stupid to have such policies. If a company selling even a halfway-decent MPEG-2 encoder chip would make the programming specs available, there would be Linux support in no time, and it would sell more chips.
I've actually spoken to sales reps at three different manufacturers of MPEG-2 chips, and none of them are willing to provide docs except under NDA after you buy a very expensive SDK. And that might not be so bad, except that they won't sell the SDK to just anyone who is willing to pay. They'll only sell them to companies that they are convinced will buy tens of thousands of their chips.
One of the MPEG-2 encoder vendors does have a Linux driver as part of their SDK. Their chip is
used on the Hauppauge board, and so Hauppauge has the right to distribute the Linux driver (in binary form only), but refuses to do so.
If the MPEG-2 encoder vendors wanted to support Linux, they could offer to sell the SDK (or just the documentation) to anyone who will sign a contract acknowledging that the vendor would not provide any support and that the SDK is provided on an AS-IS basis.
It almost seems like these companies believe that it's a good idea to support the Microsoft monopoly.
If your DirecTV (DSS) receiver has a serial port
or a wide-band data port, you can hook it up
to a serial port on your PC and send it commands at 9600 8N1
to change the channel. A nine-pin serial cable such as a serial mouse extension cable should work fine.
Transmit data (from PC to receiver) - pin 3 on DB9, pin 6 on wideband data port
Receive data (from receiver to PC) - pin 2 on DB9, pin 14 on wideband dat port
Signal ground - pin 5 on DB9, pin 7 on wideband data port
The command to change channels is 0xFA 0x46 followed by two bytes of the binary channel number, MSB first.
A response of 0xF4 indicates that the command
was successful, and 0xF5 indicates a failure.
i see the phrase "the people" to be collective, as in "the people of america", not individualy.
Sure. And no doubt you also believe that "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures..." (Fourth Amendment) doesn't apply to
individuals either, nor the right to peaceably assemble, nor the other rights reserved to the people?
If you were right, that would certainly be very convenient for the government. Want to search someone's house? Fine, he's an individual, not "the people", so no warrant is needed.
Fortunately, the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the phrase "the people" as written in
the various Amendments DOES refer to individuals.
a new combination bill that would do two things: (a) outlaw filming someone via hidden camera without their permission except in public places,
So exactly which of the Powers of Congress enumerated in
the Constitution gives them the authority to do
something like this?
It doesn't seem to fall under "regulate interstate commerce", which is the usual catch-all.
The scenarios you suggest may violate copyright. Selling a used book does not, even if you sell it on a high-profile web site that also sells new books, such as amazon.com.
The issue here isn't a legal one, since sales of used books clearly is legal.
However, it may become a legal battle in the future.
It won't be too surprising if publishers try to get some laws passed to put restrictions on resale of content (including books). They really don't like the doctrine of first sale. They don't want you to own the book. They'd love to have a pay-per-read system; the technology isn't there yet, but it's being worked on.
Does it? Or does it simply lead to higher sales of used books?
It seems unlikely that you could increase the sales of used books by a non-trivial amount without having the side effect of increasing the sales of new books.
But when a book published in April 2002 already has a used book link offer up *right beside* the new book.. that strikes me as hurting the author and the publisher.
Yeah, and when the public library has a book published in April 2002 already on the shelf for people to check out or read, that strikes me as hurting the author and the publisher. NOT!
Next you'll tell us that people shouldn't be
allowed to lend lawnmowers to their neighbors,
because that deprives the lawnmower manufacturer
of revenue.
Get real. Robertson complains about being attacked, and says we should instead praise him because he sponsors this, contributes to that, and benefits the community. The GPL requirement to make source available is not a great hardship; if he isn't willing to comply with such a minor thing, I'm not going to be impressed with the supposed benefits to the community that he's making, since violating the GPL harms the community in a very direct way.
What possible reason could there be for claiming that he'll distribute the source for the final release, but not the beta? Is there something in the beta that shouldn't be there? Is he ashamed of his modifications?
If the GPL allowed distribution in object form only of prerelease software, that would completely undermine the whole concept, since almost no free software is ever "final" (nor is most proprietary
software, for that matter). Companies that wanted to keep their changes private, as Robertson apparently does, would simply release a never-ending stream of prereleases and betas.
Apparently Unisys does actually have an emulator for the B6700's successor "A-series" machines, but it's proprietary (and maybe for internal use only).
It's not for internal use only. If you buy a new
A-series machine, what you get is a box that
runs the simulator.
Re:Linux needs drivers for Creative's MPEG-2 PVR
on
PVR For Linux
·
· Score: 2
Tivo and Replay use standard MPEG 2 MP/ML (Main Profile/Main Level), so they have 720x480 resolution.
I'm not aware of any digital video standard that supports a 480x480 resolution.
If normal corporations ran this way, they'd issue
a press release after a board meeting:
The board of directors today approved a resolution that will improve the ability to reach broad consensus support of shareholders, and guarantee
all shareholders the opportunity to meaningfully participate in policymaking.
In the resolution, the board stated that it
"wishes to move forward with
energy and enthusiasm to build a meaningful structure for informed
participation by the full range of shareholders, and seeks avenues to
achieve these objectives that are bottom-up, self-organized, and self-sustaining."
The board is not persuaded that elections are the only or the best means of achieving meaningful participation by the shareholders.
The actual resolution would eliminate the voting rights of the common shareholders, and their representation on the board.
Slashdot just links to content in newspapers so i don't know what you're going on about...
I don't know what newspapers YOU read, but Slashdot has a lot of content not to be found in my local newspaper (San Jose Mercury News). And often they run stories before they can be found in the SJMN. Other times the SJMN breaks an interesting story and Slashdot links to it, and I get the story sooner than if I just waited to get the SJMN. So even when it isn't original content, Slashdot is serving a useful purpose.
Slashdot isn't perfect, but IMNSHO it is providing a valuable service, which is why I'm perfectly happy to provide a small amount of financial support. I fully expect to get my money's worth out of it.
You're a perfect example of the sort of whiner I was referring to. If you really don't think Slashdot has worthwhile content, why are you bothering to read it? Go read your newspaper instead.
Except unlike a newspaper slashdot gives you the option to buy your own comments back!
Demonstrably incorrect. I've bought my comments back from the local newspaper several times, and was not the least bit unhappy about doing so.
It was completely predictable that a lot of people would complain about this. I suspect it's largely the same group who complain about everything. When all is said and done, the majority of them will continue to read Slashdot.
I, for one, was happy to have the chance to help support Slashdot, and I bought a lot of page views. No, Slashdot isn't perfect, and I'll be the first to admit that some of the content is marginal, but some of it is really great. People have compared the subscription rates to those of newspapers, but Slashdot is worth much more to me than any newspaper.
Now where's the subscription option for Segfault?:-)
I agree. It would be nice to have an option that permits ads that are "on-topic" and not too intrusive. But I suspect that the "off-topic" advertisers wouldn't be willing to buy any ads if such an option existed.
Maybe a way to allow ads from specific advertisers as chosen by the subscriber?
I just bought a subscription for a large number of page views, but I'll actually miss some of the banners.
Sounds like a troll, but I'll offer a serious answer.
There already is OpenOffice, which is dual-licensed under the GPL and Sun SISSL licenses. So it is Free Software, which I think meets your request for "open sourced under the GPL". This is the code base that StarOffice 6 is based on, so Sun deciding to charge money for their release is no big deal.
There are other Free Software office applications and suites available.
> but "Hammer" isn't exactly a a good name either:
Isn't it just a code name? Anyhow, the full names are sledgehammer and clawhammer. Sledgehammer seems very descriptive. Clawhammer makes sense as a smaller, less expensive version. I think they're much better names than most products get these days.
In particular, they seem much better than "Pentium" and "Celeron". Years ago people really berated Intel's marketing for using those names, but I guess everyone's so used to hearing them now that they've forgotten how awful they are.
That third article about the supposed "HCF"
instruction on the 4004 is completely and utter BS.
None of the instructions on the 4004 will cause
it to burn up, even on the earliest production
parts.
Several processors had self-test instructions
known as "HCF". The 6800 family and the 6502
had such instructions. They caused the processor
to start fetching consecutive locations, thus
continuously incrementing the address bus. Didn't
damage the processor, even if you left it running
that way. The "Catch Fire" was a figurative
description of what was happening on the address
bus, nothing more.
On the original NMOS 6502, about 13 of the undefined opcodes had this effect. This was the
most common cause of computer lockups if the code
went into the weeds.
On some of the later 6800 family members, the test instructions were actually documented, but Motorola's published description did not include
any mnemonmic for them.
Spartan-2 eval board (XC2S200, the biggest Spartan-2, with over 5000 logic elements) for about US $150 from
BurchED.
I've been using it for months, and it's great.
They also offer a lot of plug-on modules with switches, LEDs, SRAM, keyboard and display interfaces, etc.
You can use Xilinx Webpack tools, available free from Xilinx.
Supports both VHDL and Verilog.
(I wish they had a native Linux version.)
With the XC2S200, you can fit a 32-bit RISC CPU, a bunch of peripherals, and a little memory all into the FPGA.
They do not consider themselves anything other than a software company.
Oh, yeah, and a video game console company. I
almost forgot about that one.
Umm. Wait a minute, don't they sell mice, keyboards, and joysticks too?
Err... I vaguely seem to recall a little joint venture called MSNBC.
And something about an online service?
Focus? Focus???! Yeah, they're focused on taking over anything that rakes in money.
Not that there's anything wrong with that,
if they would only use ethical business
practices.
Actually, I've got to admit that they're very ethical, in exactly the same sense that Clinton and Gore said that they would have the most ethical administration in
US history. And they did. But ethics is like luck -- there's good luck and there's bad luck.
I was just thinking about that BYTE article. I'm not sure which issue it was in. I think it was in a news blurb sort of column. IIRC, they claimed their compression algorithm was "not affected by the laws of information theory".
The reporter wrote glowing things about how when
he decompressed his files, they had the right
size and timestamp. There was a small matter of
the contents being wrong, but the company had
assured him that this was just a small glitch
in the beta version that would be fixed in the
final release.
I can imagine that some junior reporter might
fall for this, but where the heck was the
editor?
I imagine that the whole stunt was probably part
of a scam to defraud some investors. Get it published in a magzine, and it must be legit, right? I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if this new
"lossless compression algorithm" proved to be such a scheme.
BYTE went seriously downhill around 1985 or so. A friend seems to think that it was a result of Steve Ciarcia moving on, but I don't think that fully explains it. Before that, there were plenty of technical articles by other authors, but BYTE turned into a rag full of mostly non-technical reviews.
Stamped ID codes on the CD's are nothing new. Book, magazine, and newspaper publishers always identify themselves in their publications.
Yes, but book and newspaper publishers are not
REQUIRED BY LAW to do this. They do it because
it benefits them.
It is still legal in the U.S. to publish
anonymously. But for how long?
Slashdot Mirror
The standard excuse is that they don't want the support burden. But that's bogus; they obviously have no obligation to provide support to any party other than the company they sell the chips to. In particular, the IC vendor does NOT generally have any obligation to support the end purchaser of a product containing their chip, or to someone trying to write their own drivers.
The other excuse I've sometimes heard is that they don't want other companies to clone their product. But that's a red herring. There are literally millions of transistors in these chips; just having the information on the programming interface to the chip (registers and commands) doesn't magically make it easy to design a compatible chip. If that were true, everyone and his brother would be making Pentium IVs, since the programming interface for that is well documented. As it is, there is only ONE company successfully competing with Intel on high-end x86 processors.
IMNSHO, these companies are just stupid to have such policies. If a company selling even a halfway-decent MPEG-2 encoder chip would make the programming specs available, there would be Linux support in no time, and it would sell more chips.
I've actually spoken to sales reps at three different manufacturers of MPEG-2 chips, and none of them are willing to provide docs except under NDA after you buy a very expensive SDK. And that might not be so bad, except that they won't sell the SDK to just anyone who is willing to pay. They'll only sell them to companies that they are convinced will buy tens of thousands of their chips.
One of the MPEG-2 encoder vendors does have a Linux driver as part of their SDK. Their chip is used on the Hauppauge board, and so Hauppauge has the right to distribute the Linux driver (in binary form only), but refuses to do so.
If the MPEG-2 encoder vendors wanted to support Linux, they could offer to sell the SDK (or just the documentation) to anyone who will sign a contract acknowledging that the vendor would not provide any support and that the SDK is provided on an AS-IS basis.
It almost seems like these companies believe that it's a good idea to support the Microsoft monopoly.
</rant>
The command to change channels is 0xFA 0x46 followed by two bytes of the binary channel number, MSB first.
A response of 0xF4 indicates that the command was successful, and 0xF5 indicates a failure.
If you were right, that would certainly be very convenient for the government. Want to search someone's house? Fine, he's an individual, not "the people", so no warrant is needed.
Fortunately, the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the phrase "the people" as written in the various Amendments DOES refer to individuals.
The issue here isn't a legal one, since sales of used books clearly is legal.
However, it may become a legal battle in the future. It won't be too surprising if publishers try to get some laws passed to put restrictions on resale of content (including books). They really don't like the doctrine of first sale. They don't want you to own the book. They'd love to have a pay-per-read system; the technology isn't there yet, but it's being worked on.
Next you'll tell us that people shouldn't be allowed to lend lawnmowers to their neighbors, because that deprives the lawnmower manufacturer of revenue.
What possible reason could there be for claiming that he'll distribute the source for the final release, but not the beta? Is there something in the beta that shouldn't be there? Is he ashamed of his modifications?
If the GPL allowed distribution in object form only of prerelease software, that would completely undermine the whole concept, since almost no free software is ever "final" (nor is most proprietary software, for that matter). Companies that wanted to keep their changes private, as Robertson apparently does, would simply release a never-ending stream of prereleases and betas.
I'm not aware of any digital video standard that supports a 480x480 resolution.
And "Apple II Forever!"
Slashdot isn't perfect, but IMNSHO it is providing a valuable service, which is why I'm perfectly happy to provide a small amount of financial support. I fully expect to get my money's worth out of it.
You're a perfect example of the sort of whiner I was referring to. If you really don't think Slashdot has worthwhile content, why are you bothering to read it? Go read your newspaper instead.
Demonstrably incorrect. I've bought my comments back from the local newspaper several times, and was not the least bit unhappy about doing so.I, for one, was happy to have the chance to help support Slashdot, and I bought a lot of page views. No, Slashdot isn't perfect, and I'll be the first to admit that some of the content is marginal, but some of it is really great. People have compared the subscription rates to those of newspapers, but Slashdot is worth much more to me than any newspaper.
Now where's the subscription option for Segfault? :-)
Maybe a way to allow ads from specific advertisers as chosen by the subscriber?
I just bought a subscription for a large number of page views, but I'll actually miss some of the banners.
There already is OpenOffice, which is dual-licensed under the GPL and Sun SISSL licenses. So it is Free Software, which I think meets your request for "open sourced under the GPL". This is the code base that StarOffice 6 is based on, so Sun deciding to charge money for their release is no big deal.
There are other Free Software office applications and suites available.
In particular, they seem much better than "Pentium" and "Celeron". Years ago people really berated Intel's marketing for using those names, but I guess everyone's so used to hearing them now that they've forgotten how awful they are.
Several processors had self-test instructions known as "HCF". The 6800 family and the 6502 had such instructions. They caused the processor to start fetching consecutive locations, thus continuously incrementing the address bus. Didn't damage the processor, even if you left it running that way. The "Catch Fire" was a figurative description of what was happening on the address bus, nothing more.
On the original NMOS 6502, about 13 of the undefined opcodes had this effect. This was the most common cause of computer lockups if the code went into the weeds.
On some of the later 6800 family members, the test instructions were actually documented, but Motorola's published description did not include any mnemonmic for them.
You can use Xilinx Webpack tools, available free from Xilinx. Supports both VHDL and Verilog. (I wish they had a native Linux version.)
With the XC2S200, you can fit a 32-bit RISC CPU, a bunch of peripherals, and a little memory all into the FPGA.
Umm. Wait a minute, don't they sell mice, keyboards, and joysticks too?
Err... I vaguely seem to recall a little joint venture called MSNBC.
And something about an online service?
Focus? Focus???! Yeah, they're focused on taking over anything that rakes in money. Not that there's anything wrong with that, if they would only use ethical business practices.
Actually, I've got to admit that they're very ethical, in exactly the same sense that Clinton and Gore said that they would have the most ethical administration in US history. And they did. But ethics is like luck -- there's good luck and there's bad luck.
(with Apologies to Elwood Blues)
Seriously, though, IMNSHO they should get charged under the truth in advertising laws.
The reporter wrote glowing things about how when he decompressed his files, they had the right size and timestamp. There was a small matter of the contents being wrong, but the company had assured him that this was just a small glitch in the beta version that would be fixed in the final release.
I can imagine that some junior reporter might fall for this, but where the heck was the editor?
I imagine that the whole stunt was probably part of a scam to defraud some investors. Get it published in a magzine, and it must be legit, right? I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if this new "lossless compression algorithm" proved to be such a scheme.
BYTE went seriously downhill around 1985 or so. A friend seems to think that it was a result of Steve Ciarcia moving on, but I don't think that fully explains it. Before that, there were plenty of technical articles by other authors, but BYTE turned into a rag full of mostly non-technical reviews.