I'm not really sure what the point of this item is, but I'll be more than happy to blather on about console stuff I like:P
Midnight Commander: (mc) - Mostly I write scripts to make things easier for other people. But there isn't always a good GUI to allow the user to see what scrips are available. So I'll get all my scripts together in a directory and open the directory in midnight commander. Then they can see a sorted list of all the available commands. Gnome panel buttons work OK for this as well, but there's usually limited space for those, and they're kind of finicky in Nautilus views.
GNU Screen : is like VNC for terminal sessions. Lets multiple human operators see what's going on in one session (as well as let them fight over keyboard control:P ). You can also set it up to launch an entire multi-terminal environment, for complex scripts with lots of log monitors, controls, fields, etc. Unfortunately, it doesn't deal with mouse support so much, so you have to teach your users the keyboard commands.
gdialog / kdialog / xdialog are somewhat interesting ways to throw in a touch of GUI dialogs for common actions (radio buttons, file selectors, etc.) that get passed back to the script. But pretty boring.
That said, I've been pretty impressed with python tkinter for making simple GUIs a snap to toss together. It's another matter stringing together subProcess() arguments to get commands and scripts to exec, but whatever.
SSDs will probably see a slight boost in the next year or two due to rotating hard disks finally getting around to migrating to 4kb sector sizes (which still poses compatibility and performance challenges for Windows XP, and even many Linux utilities aren't quite prepared yet)
So the SSD manufacturers could do well to advertise that people still running older systems may run into a fair amount of trouble upgrading to newer hard disks with 4kb sectors. Even in compatibility mode, they've found 3x-4x slowdowns in write performance if the file systems aren't aligned with the sectors just right. Makes the decision to upgrade with SSDs sound that much better if they can really increase their performance and not have to plop down a few hundred $$ and time on OS upgrades.
(yes, of course there are similar write performance gotchas with aligning file systems to the 128k SSD erase blocks, but those shouldn't bite quite as much)
Wake me up when they come with their own mounted systems for bovine freedom.
I think they might want to take this technology to Southeast Asia... elephants are not only much more massive but also seem much more active, and the elephant conservatories in Thailand are always looking for things to do to make money to afford to keep their brood occupied and healthy./drove through Wisconsin last week, saw mounted cows.
Meh, "job security" clearances are just that... jobs for Americans that legally can't be outsourced. It keeps the middle-class Americans with degrees employed and content so they aren't off organizing revolutions for the lower classes or something. From what I've seen, the shroud of secrecy is more to hide all the advanced technology that we don't have rather than to protect details of the few things that actually work. Let the enemy assume we have bugs and eyes and ears everywhere like it's portrayed in the movies:-P
So yeah, the bumbling incompetence of project management these days is one of those things we want to hide. As long as the money flows to the military-industrial complex to keep our middle-management and nerds and engineers preoccupied so they don't actually go on and try to effect any real disruptive changes, technological or otherwise...
This kind of corporate welfare is kind of like supporting the poor to keep them from having to resort to thievery and becoming a nuisance. Except sort of in reverse.
I hate to say this, but I've pretty much come to expect a decent optical mouse to cost $5, and am a bit saddened that we probably should be paying more (assuming the money actually goes towards the "right" parties).
Marketing is very much an American invention that can hike the price of consumer goods way beyond what the market price should be. As an example, video games in Asia typically go by market prices based on their popularity and manufacturing costs like how many MB's of ROM are in the cartridge (yes, I'm dating myself here). Whereas here, a crappy game would still sell for retail price alongside a newer release.
But anyway, look up externalities sometime... those are the sacrifices made outside of your economic transaction, like environmental damage, or a wasted youth, or a war caused by ill will towards your belligerence.
I'm with you on #2. Heck, even the digital TV and radio signals we use now are already unrecognizable from just a few decades or two ago, and with encoding and encryption and DRM is likely becoming not only difficult to reverse engineer, but also indistinguishable from white noise. The only way we'd find them is if they set up a transmitter. And would you really set up a transmitter to a potentially technologically-advanced civilization saying: "hey, we're HERE!, the weather's great, the resources are plentiful, and we haven't figured out plasma weapons, shields, or warp drives yet"
I don't really buy the philosophical arguments in TFA, though. We thrive on diversity, which stabilizes into some sort of balanced ecosystem. Parts of a society may succumb to some kind of degenerative vice, but not all. I'm just saying it would take extraordinary effort to completely homogenize an entire species. I mean, it's happening to our world now, but there's already quite a backlash.
The best explanation I've heard for being one of the earlier galactic civilizations is that you pretty much need a second or even third generation solar system to have enough heavy elements produced and ejected from the star to form rocky, mineral-rich planets. So in a 14 billion year old universe, the fact that our sun and planet are about 4 billion years old already, plus another ~8 billion years for the "first life" of our sun where it was fusing the light gases available to it into more interesting heavy elements before ejecting them in a nova to form our current solar system, means we're probably not really all that late to the party. At worst on the order of millions of years and not quite billions.
This really really pisses off people who think they have no prejudice.
*** Spoiler Alert *** To do well on the test (and get a neutral rating), you really have to accept the racial bias you have and actively prompt yourself to counter it.
Piracy affects distribution sales somewhat, yes. But the other half of what recording companies do is promotion, which involves controlling how new artists appear on the scene and building up their audience by airing stuff on the radio, movies, and elsewhere. Cultural art like music and movies don't really follow the classic supply/demand rules... the more people are exposed to a song (that doesn't suck too much) the more it enters their consciousness and they want to hear it again. So really they can make or break an artist merely by planning their promotion schedule and exposure, a measure of control they probably don't want to give up.
A pretty good way to save on entertainment expenses is simply to not listen to the radio or watch TV. I've barely had any impulse to buy any album or movie for the past few years, and also no budget for entertainment.
Some time ago I did start listening to some internet radio, and ended up hunting down and purchasing stuff from some artists I found I liked. But without exposure to the promotion, either through piracy or through encountering the music on the radio or ads or wherever, the product had no demand from or apparent value to me. So I believe it's more the cultural control that the RIAA is intent on protecting, rather than the distribution revenue. Piracy erodes more at their control of cultural contributions through authorized channels than at their sales revenue (which mostly goes to people without the money budgeted to buy the retail version anyway, and which only serves to increase their interest in the product).
They're approaching this all wrong.... IP law needs to be rewritten to protect the future rather than the past; attitudes need to change so that people choose retail over piracy or counterfeit because they want to somehow support the artist's future work, and some approach should still allow the freeloaders to freeload, since not much is going to change them and the present-day battle for their mindshare is probably worth more than their walletshare.
The guy's work looks somewhat interesting. I don't see why he can't just make it a facebook app or something that just happens to crossover onto the rest of the internet as well, maybe that would have helped him fly under their radar if it was seen as something that enhanced facebook.
But seems like his problem all along was lack of publicity, which/. will surely help with.
That said, call me old-school, but I've had more fun with things like ircstats. So I'm mostly still waiting for this new social crap to catch up.
I'm not entirely opposed to this kind of thing, as long as it is turned off most of the time:P But there has already been plenty of movement to ban sending visible messages from space since 1993.
It would be neat to be able to send text messages in the sky, even if it was just a little icon indicating that you really ought to turn on a radio to check for a news flash.
The true demise of twitter will be / is when the PR firms that try to take advantage of this flood it with spam, or worse yet, pay people to hype their junk.
Onwards to the next social networking platform!!! I want something with pub/private encryption, non-repudiation, recall, key escrow, supports live pictures, movies, sound, and sound effects, multi-threaded conversations, geolocation, rankings, tagging, filtering, and stuff (yes, I know I contradicted myself a few times, laugh)
Heh, I'm in the same boat:P . Well, I could list a bunch of features I want (along with a platform that actually provides it)
Google Maps Mobile (Android, iPhone, Blackberry, Symbian, and even some crappy phones that support java but NOT eeebuntu/Linux/Android-x86:-( I really would like to be able to run this on a netbook!)
Google Earth (Android, maybe iPhone, eeebuntu/windows ) It runs well on my netbook after fixing some of the libraries. But no GPS support (and I was a paying customer for that back in the Keyhole NV / Earth-Plus days):P
A decent PIM (Blackberry, PalmOS, maybe iPhone, but not Android:P )
Google apps (Android, iPhone, Blackberry)
Yahoo apps (iPhone, Blackberry, but not Android >:-P ) It would be nice to be able to check my spam account every once in a while, and while away time on Flikr. And yahoo did / still does a good job with human-optimized content before google made machine-generated search work well.
Opera mini (OK, everything, which is probably why they'll ultimately win the browser wars after everyone replaces all their computers with smartphones)
media player w/ streaming media (eeebuntu/windows, the rest is difficult to say, since they tend to rely on PC-based converters or specific distributor app support like Pandora, etc.)
Flash support (eeebuntu/windows, N900, Android? but NOT iPhone)
PalmOS emulation (N900 - woo, an upgrade path for oldskool Palm addicts that the Palm Pre doesn't even have!)
usable thin clients like ssh, vnc, rdesktop, etc. (eeebuntu/windows , most other devices fail to provide enough virtual keyboard keys or mouse button support to be too useful)
So that's generally the kind of app support I'm looking for in a device... unfortunately, there doesn't really seem to be anything on the market that can run all that:P So I'm still running around with my old Palm TX tethered to a dumbphone while waiting for either the N900 or Android to mature and fill out some of their weak spots:-P
(BTW, I'm just guessing on the iPhone, since I've never actually played with one. But I've played with Apple stuff just enough to know it would drive me crazy with what things it would not let me do due to lame policy)
Word... I'd love to throw these little mouse-sized computers at everything for work, but can't really use their binary driver packages that can only really be shoehorned in to a particular ubuntu release.
Had to go with a mini-itx nVidia ION platform instead... which admittedly has much better performance and driver support, but is ~8 times the size and thus actually needs space and mounting hardware allocated for it. I wish some manufacturer would sell the nano-itx ION reference platform (hint hint easy money)... that was almost as small as a Fit-PC2 and had all the interfaces we wanted. But blargh.
Yes, in this day and age, you have to claim your namespace online, which includes Facebook for some silly reason.
But afterwards, I don't see any reason why people have any expectations of privacy on Facebook or any other "social networking" site. The whole "friend" thing is just a way to build subscriptions, not at all a way to lock out strangers and undesirables.
So don't treat it like a personal diary. Don't say anything that you wouldn't post on your public website.
At this point I'd actually be more worried about people tracking me my Slashdot profile, but those tend to be the cool sysadmins, so then again I'm not:P
FWIW, we've been using http://kayak.com/ a lot lately for that kind of thing... it has lots of relevant useful features (shows what prices other people have been getting to your destination displayed on a calendar, automatically opens your searches in competitors' engines, etc.), so I'd say that's the current benchmark for a good air travel search site.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, I instinctively avoid all things branded Microsoft.
If there's a flash movie I care about, I'll usually pause the browser player and run vlc/tmp/Flash*...to open it up fullscreen in VideoLAN with VPDAU hardware acceleration, post-processing, vertical-sync, etc. (stuff they can't even get working nicely on Flash for Windows)
But yeah, intensive flash games like Fantastic Contraption wouldn't be so hot. If it wasn't for that and the hope from the somewhat decent http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/ blog, I wouldn't bother with flash at all. (I already use FlashBlock for most sites... makes the web a much more serene place)
Oh, but nice to run into one of my contemporaries from CSLUG-L every once in a while... how you been? You need a new Homepage, looks like they shut down CUPeople last year:/
I've been testing these things for work, and I'm very impressed.
Dual core atom w/ hyperthreading actually makes the system very responsive, so it's easier to forget that it's not a "real" CPU, unlike my single-core eeePC that does stutter occasionally.
Also has a decent nVidia 9400 GPU with dedicated RAM, so it actually will give you decent 3D desktop effects (useful for monitoring multiple pieces of content simultaneously), decoding acceleration, etc. under both Windows and Linux.
The price point is pretty good too... many are under $300 if you can provide your own storage... e.g. if you find a usb pendrive linux-based media center that streams everything.
That takes care of pretty flexible hardware... I don't actually have a TV, though, so I haven't really bothered to find media software I liked. But going with a full nettop means it should be pretty straightforward to run all XBMC, Boxee, MythTV, Miro, etc. from one device. Though I guess you'd need to go with Windows to get crappy DRM'd content like Hulu and Netflix (which I've simply just been doing without).
Awesome! I can't wait for Bollywood to take this on and make a classical documentary dramedy "Much Ado About Nothing Atoll"
Or, quick, someone photoshop the place with a French vessel and title it: "Much Adieu", a boat, Nothing Atoll OK, I admit that was weak. I'll stop now./been spending too much time on Fark lately.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not really sure what the point of this item is, but I'll be more than happy to blather on about console stuff I like :P
Midnight Commander: (mc) - Mostly I write scripts to make things easier for other people. But there isn't always a good GUI to allow the user to see what scrips are available. So I'll get all my scripts together in a directory and open the directory in midnight commander. Then they can see a sorted list of all the available commands. Gnome panel buttons work OK for this as well, but there's usually limited space for those, and they're kind of finicky in Nautilus views.
GNU Screen : is like VNC for terminal sessions. Lets multiple human operators see what's going on in one session (as well as let them fight over keyboard control :P ). You can also set it up to launch an entire multi-terminal environment, for complex scripts with lots of log monitors, controls, fields, etc. Unfortunately, it doesn't deal with mouse support so much, so you have to teach your users the keyboard commands.
Judicious use of colors are always welcome in my scripts: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prompt-HOWTO/x329.html
As long as they're not overdone, they really help delineate different kinds of information.
For a bit more control, you can also use tput http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prompt-HOWTO/x405.html to let you overwrite fields so you're not just breaking out status strings of newlines.
gdialog / kdialog / xdialog are somewhat interesting ways to throw in a touch of GUI dialogs for common actions (radio buttons, file selectors, etc.) that get passed back to the script. But pretty boring.
That said, I've been pretty impressed with python tkinter for making simple GUIs a snap to toss together. It's another matter stringing together subProcess() arguments to get commands and scripts to exec, but whatever.
SSDs will probably see a slight boost in the next year or two due to rotating hard disks finally getting around to migrating to 4kb sector sizes (which still poses compatibility and performance challenges for Windows XP, and even many Linux utilities aren't quite prepared yet)
2TB drives have just started to come out, which is actually the limit to the 512b sector sizes hard coded into many OSs for the past couple of decades. Here's a good explanation:
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/03/why-new-hard-disks-might-not-be-much-fun-for-xp-users.ars/
So the SSD manufacturers could do well to advertise that people still running older systems may run into a fair amount of trouble upgrading to newer hard disks with 4kb sectors. Even in compatibility mode, they've found 3x-4x slowdowns in write performance if the file systems aren't aligned with the sectors just right. Makes the decision to upgrade with SSDs sound that much better if they can really increase their performance and not have to plop down a few hundred $$ and time on OS upgrades.
(yes, of course there are similar write performance gotchas with aligning file systems to the 128k SSD erase blocks, but those shouldn't bite quite as much)
Wake me up when they come with their own mounted systems for bovine freedom.
I think they might want to take this technology to Southeast Asia... elephants are not only much more massive but also seem much more active, and the elephant conservatories in Thailand are always looking for things to do to make money to afford to keep their brood occupied and healthy. /drove through Wisconsin last week, saw mounted cows.
Not much of an OpenGL programmer either, but I'm pretty sure that's sarcasm.
OTH, fading between images using compositing to allow that operation to be GPU-accelerated is a pretty legitimate use of OpenGL, though.
Meh, "job security" clearances are just that... jobs for Americans that legally can't be outsourced. It keeps the middle-class Americans with degrees employed and content so they aren't off organizing revolutions for the lower classes or something. From what I've seen, the shroud of secrecy is more to hide all the advanced technology that we don't have rather than to protect details of the few things that actually work. Let the enemy assume we have bugs and eyes and ears everywhere like it's portrayed in the movies :-P
So yeah, the bumbling incompetence of project management these days is one of those things we want to hide. As long as the money flows to the military-industrial complex to keep our middle-management and nerds and engineers preoccupied so they don't actually go on and try to effect any real disruptive changes, technological or otherwise...
This kind of corporate welfare is kind of like supporting the poor to keep them from having to resort to thievery and becoming a nuisance. Except sort of in reverse.
I hate to say this, but I've pretty much come to expect a decent optical mouse to cost $5, and am a bit saddened that we probably should be paying more (assuming the money actually goes towards the "right" parties).
Marketing is very much an American invention that can hike the price of consumer goods way beyond what the market price should be. As an example, video games in Asia typically go by market prices based on their popularity and manufacturing costs like how many MB's of ROM are in the cartridge (yes, I'm dating myself here). Whereas here, a crappy game would still sell for retail price alongside a newer release.
But anyway, look up externalities sometime... those are the sacrifices made outside of your economic transaction, like environmental damage, or a wasted youth, or a war caused by ill will towards your belligerence.
I'm with you on #2. Heck, even the digital TV and radio signals we use now are already unrecognizable from just a few decades or two ago, and with encoding and encryption and DRM is likely becoming not only difficult to reverse engineer, but also indistinguishable from white noise. The only way we'd find them is if they set up a transmitter. And would you really set up a transmitter to a potentially technologically-advanced civilization saying: "hey, we're HERE!, the weather's great, the resources are plentiful, and we haven't figured out plasma weapons, shields, or warp drives yet"
I don't really buy the philosophical arguments in TFA, though. We thrive on diversity, which stabilizes into some sort of balanced ecosystem. Parts of a society may succumb to some kind of degenerative vice, but not all. I'm just saying it would take extraordinary effort to completely homogenize an entire species. I mean, it's happening to our world now, but there's already quite a backlash.
Pretty interesting concept...
The best explanation I've heard for being one of the earlier galactic civilizations is that you pretty much need a second or even third generation solar system to have enough heavy elements produced and ejected from the star to form rocky, mineral-rich planets. So in a 14 billion year old universe, the fact that our sun and planet are about 4 billion years old already, plus another ~8 billion years for the "first life" of our sun where it was fusing the light gases available to it into more interesting heavy elements before ejecting them in a nova to form our current solar system, means we're probably not really all that late to the party. At worst on the order of millions of years and not quite billions.
This is a really cool on-line rather objective test for determining what racial color biases you have:
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/
This really really pisses off people who think they have no prejudice.
*** Spoiler Alert ***
To do well on the test (and get a neutral rating), you really have to accept the racial bias you have and actively prompt yourself to counter it.
Piracy affects distribution sales somewhat, yes. But the other half of what recording companies do is promotion, which involves controlling how new artists appear on the scene and building up their audience by airing stuff on the radio, movies, and elsewhere. Cultural art like music and movies don't really follow the classic supply/demand rules... the more people are exposed to a song (that doesn't suck too much) the more it enters their consciousness and they want to hear it again. So really they can make or break an artist merely by planning their promotion schedule and exposure, a measure of control they probably don't want to give up.
A pretty good way to save on entertainment expenses is simply to not listen to the radio or watch TV. I've barely had any impulse to buy any album or movie for the past few years, and also no budget for entertainment.
Some time ago I did start listening to some internet radio, and ended up hunting down and purchasing stuff from some artists I found I liked. But without exposure to the promotion, either through piracy or through encountering the music on the radio or ads or wherever, the product had no demand from or apparent value to me. So I believe it's more the cultural control that the RIAA is intent on protecting, rather than the distribution revenue. Piracy erodes more at their control of cultural contributions through authorized channels than at their sales revenue (which mostly goes to people without the money budgeted to buy the retail version anyway, and which only serves to increase their interest in the product).
They're approaching this all wrong.... IP law needs to be rewritten to protect the future rather than the past; attitudes need to change so that people choose retail over piracy or counterfeit because they want to somehow support the artist's future work, and some approach should still allow the freeloaders to freeload, since not much is going to change them and the present-day battle for their mindshare is probably worth more than their walletshare.
The guy's work looks somewhat interesting. I don't see why he can't just make it a facebook app or something that just happens to crossover onto the rest of the internet as well, maybe that would have helped him fly under their radar if it was seen as something that enhanced facebook.
But seems like his problem all along was lack of publicity, which /. will surely help with.
That said, call me old-school, but I've had more fun with things like ircstats. So I'm mostly still waiting for this new social crap to catch up.
Sounds like similar technology with similar issues raised:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_advertising
http://www.jhhuebert.com/articles/In%20Defense%20of%20Advertising%20in%20Space.pdf
I'm not entirely opposed to this kind of thing, as long as it is turned off most of the time :P But there has already been plenty of movement to ban sending visible messages from space since 1993.
It would be neat to be able to send text messages in the sky, even if it was just a little icon indicating that you really ought to turn on a radio to check for a news flash.
The true demise of twitter will be / is when the PR firms that try to take advantage of this flood it with spam, or worse yet, pay people to hype their junk.
Onwards to the next social networking platform!!! I want something with pub/private encryption, non-repudiation, recall, key escrow, supports live pictures, movies, sound, and sound effects, multi-threaded conversations, geolocation, rankings, tagging, filtering, and stuff (yes, I know I contradicted myself a few times, laugh)
Heh, I'm in the same boat :P . Well, I could list a bunch of features I want (along with a platform that actually provides it)
So that's generally the kind of app support I'm looking for in a device... unfortunately, there doesn't really seem to be anything on the market that can run all that :P So I'm still running around with my old Palm TX tethered to a dumbphone while waiting for either the N900 or Android to mature and fill out some of their weak spots :-P
(BTW, I'm just guessing on the iPhone, since I've never actually played with one. But I've played with Apple stuff just enough to know it would drive me crazy with what things it would not let me do due to lame policy)
Word... I'd love to throw these little mouse-sized computers at everything for work, but can't really use their binary driver packages that can only really be shoehorned in to a particular ubuntu release.
Had to go with a mini-itx nVidia ION platform instead... which admittedly has much better performance and driver support, but is ~8 times the size and thus actually needs space and mounting hardware allocated for it. I wish some manufacturer would sell the nano-itx ION reference platform (hint hint easy money)... that was almost as small as a Fit-PC2 and had all the interfaces we wanted. But blargh.
Yes, my friend, rest and heal; so that you are strong and able to face the perils before you.
Pleasant Dreams
Mwa ha ha ha ha
Bingo.
Yes, in this day and age, you have to claim your namespace online, which includes Facebook for some silly reason.
But afterwards, I don't see any reason why people have any expectations of privacy on Facebook or any other "social networking" site. The whole "friend" thing is just a way to build subscriptions, not at all a way to lock out strangers and undesirables.
So don't treat it like a personal diary. Don't say anything that you wouldn't post on your public website.
At this point I'd actually be more worried about people tracking me my Slashdot profile, but those tend to be the cool sysadmins, so then again I'm not :P
Heh, sounds funny.
FWIW, we've been using http://kayak.com/ a lot lately for that kind of thing... it has lots of relevant useful features (shows what prices other people have been getting to your destination displayed on a calendar, automatically opens your searches in competitors' engines, etc.), so I'd say that's the current benchmark for a good air travel search site.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, I instinctively avoid all things branded Microsoft.
I think you might like this (somewhat dated) article about subcutaneous ("hunter") fat vs. visceral ("gatherer") fat:
http://discovermagazine.com/2007/feb/visceral-fat
I think he was referring to this article from last week:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/03/24/2122231/High-Fructose-Corn-Syrup-Causes-Bigger-Weight-Gain-In-Rats?art_pos=1
If there's a flash movie I care about, I'll usually pause the browser player and run /tmp/Flash* ...to open it up fullscreen in VideoLAN with VPDAU hardware acceleration, post-processing, vertical-sync, etc. (stuff they can't even get working nicely on Flash for Windows)
vlc
But yeah, intensive flash games like Fantastic Contraption wouldn't be so hot. If it wasn't for that and the hope from the somewhat decent http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/ blog, I wouldn't bother with flash at all. (I already use FlashBlock for most sites... makes the web a much more serene place)
Oh, but nice to run into one of my contemporaries from CSLUG-L every once in a while... how you been? You need a new Homepage, looks like they shut down CUPeople last year :/
I've been testing these things for work, and I'm very impressed.
Dual core atom w/ hyperthreading actually makes the system very responsive, so it's easier to forget that it's not a "real" CPU, unlike my single-core eeePC that does stutter occasionally.
Also has a decent nVidia 9400 GPU with dedicated RAM, so it actually will give you decent 3D desktop effects (useful for monitoring multiple pieces of content simultaneously), decoding acceleration, etc. under both Windows and Linux.
The price point is pretty good too... many are under $300 if you can provide your own storage... e.g. if you find a usb pendrive linux-based media center that streams everything.
That takes care of pretty flexible hardware... I don't actually have a TV, though, so I haven't really bothered to find media software I liked. But going with a full nettop means it should be pretty straightforward to run all XBMC, Boxee, MythTV, Miro, etc. from one device. Though I guess you'd need to go with Windows to get crappy DRM'd content like Hulu and Netflix (which I've simply just been doing without).
Awesome! I can't wait for Bollywood to take this on and make a classical documentary dramedy "Much Ado About Nothing Atoll"
Or, quick, someone photoshop the place with a French vessel and title it: "Much Adieu", a boat, Nothing Atoll /been spending too much time on Fark lately.
OK, I admit that was weak. I'll stop now.
Ha ha, my wife still types her dissertation with one hand, which makes her a hunt 'n' pecker. I'm sure she'll be targeted by this new filter :P
-- Douglas Adams.
Hey, it's the UK.