Re:er, interesting conclusions in context of the r
on
Build Your Own PVR
·
· Score: 1
My experience with SageTV has been uniformly good. Using PVR-250's as my capture compression device I have had no problems with audio/video desynchronization. One factor which may operate in my favor is that I installed WinDVD to provide DVD play, and configured Sage TV to employ the Intervideo CODEC in conjuntion w/ hardware acceleration (Nvidia 5200). In this configuration SageTV has rock solid image quality and a/v sync. In addition, unlike my Leadtek 2000XP capture card, the resulting MPEG files generate perfectly synced DVDs.
'tho I use SageTV on a self built box, my comments are even more salient with regard to MythTV. I can configure to my specific needs and desires, don't get another bill in the mail and am free to do whatever I want to the content. Just the network acessibility of my box is worth it, viewing shows with VLC and controlling SageTV with VNC is flat out sublime.
Alas, SageTV is excellent
on
Build Your Own PVR
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Despite being a penguinista, my experiences with getting the ivtv driver to work with The Hauppage PVR 250 PCI cards were rather hopeless regardless of the distro I employed. I finally broke down and installed SageTV on a Win2K box and have been very happy ever since. I'm using two PVR 250 capture/compression cards, an NVIDIA GeForce 5200 and a Fortissimo 7.1 (just for the TOSlink output) on an Athalon 2000+ system using an IRman universal IR recivever which makes the system think It's a tivo to allow for my universal remote to support it. One tuner is connected to the output of my cable box to allow access to the digital tier and HBO using an Actisys IR-200L. The overall result is spectacular, I never have recording conflicts, flawless sound and picture quality, and I can back off shows to DVD with the Ulead MovieFactory package which comes with the PVR-250. I can also view the Mpeg files from my other computers as well. The SageTV package also serves as an MP3 and DVD Player. When the remote is not enough VNC works flawlessly. Quite indispensable given my schedule, and its addicted me to Inuyasha as well! Excellent software, 'tho I intend to revisit mythtv when a mini-distro is available.
I too learned a great deal of programming from "100 BASIC Computer Games", and it took many years to unlearn the bad practices. While the code was facinating 20 years ago, at that point BASIC was a viable language and we worked with 1 MHz 16KB machines. Frankly, the majority of the games were hideous even back then. When he sees the structure and gets the logical flow of that completely unstructured spagetti code he will renounce programming for life! I strongly belive that teaching children BASIC as a first language should be classified as "contributing to the delinquency of a minor", please use a modern language such as python or java
The PyGame (pygame.org) module for Python provides a reasonably complete binding of the Simple Direct Layer (SDL). It is sufficently high level to allow for the coding of reasonably good games win several pages of code. Using this in combination with the Python binding of VTK allows for the coding of real time interactive 3D apps in 3-4 pages of code. For folks who cant wrap their heads around VTK there is always pyGL As a result it is possible to easily write games in python while promoting good coding pratice.
Quite a bit of problematic physics 'tho: -Contrails do not form in hard vaccum. -A shortwave wireless would be of no use in space,in that the point of shortwave is that it bounces off of the ionosphere back down to the ground. -The kinematics of the fighters are still problematic, space craft don't make banking turns. -No networking? Given that even 1970's fighters use heavy networking (F-117's can't fly without networked computers) this is rather dubious. -The government doesn't use secure compartmentalized sercurity on their mainframes? -The cylon fighters sould be capable of much greater acceleration than those of humans, due to the lack of the need to protect a biological body from high G's. -The choppy handheld effects were annoying and anachronistic.
That being said the miniseries was a vast improvement over the original. Any change replacing testosterone poisoned fighter jocks and Cylons (and combinations thereof) with hot babes is a distinct improvement. The plot wasn't spectacular but wasn't bad either. The sex was rather heavy (I'd wondered how much they wanted to sex up Crusade, I wonder no more).
What I wonder is if the series is going to turn into "Voyager: The Next Generation" or "Andormeda:The Next Generation" (the good first and second season Andromeda, that is). If it is the latter it might be worth a series, given the lack of any good scifi series out there these days.
Of course, it can't hold a candle to Babylon 5, Crusade, or Firefly and the money would be better spent on JMS or Joss but what can you do?
Just imagine a Joss Whedon Battlestar Galactica!
I say give it a series and give Quentin Tarantino full creative control. In the first episode Boomer meets her twin sister Go Go!
Thr standard universal IR (UIR) commercially available as the IRman by evation.com is supported, which allows you to train it to any selsected remote. As a result you can train it to be operated under a universal remote.
Pohl predicted this in Man Plus(1976), in which a man is modified to survive on the surface of mars. I don't have a copy at hand but there was an excellent passage about how humans can't really live in unmodified form outside of the savanna, the modifications (parkas, fire, etc.) necessary to live elsewere are just reversible so far. Of course Cordwainer Smith was there in 1950 with "Scanners Live in Vain" with the Habermen and Scanners.
In my experience embedding processors in very tiny MEMS sensor packages (smaller than a postage stamp) the Microchip Inc. PIC processors are an excellent embedded processor with many low cost programming tools. The PIC16f876 is particularly neat with a flash reprogrammable ROM and in circuit programability. But the 8 pin designs pack quite a wallop as well.
The Javelin is java version of the basic stamp for the more hardware adverse, For low performance work the Basic stamp is excellent.
Finally the uClinux folks have a series of SIMM (Memory) form factor single board computers with the same power of a small Palm Pilot which run uClinux.
Mithridatism, the practice of ingesting small quantities of poison to develop a resistance has been practiced since ancient times. The name comes from Mithridates, king of ancient Pontus, who fearful of being poisoned, ingested small quanties at regular intervals develop a resistance. Dashiell Hammett descibes the use of Mithridatism to develop a resistance to arsenic in the Continental Op story "Fly Paper" (1929) which in turn references the practice as per Dumas in "The Count of Monte Cristo". Thus it is relatively well known that trace doses of some poisons can result in relative imunity to the specific toxin. This does not imply that the paractice is particularly healthy or desirable.
I want cheap nearly disposable legacy free computers commonly available. I mean cheap $20, impulse buy, in the checkout lane at the supermarket, i-POD sized nano-ATX linux boxes. I want $10 10" flat panel displays, next to the keyboards and mice.
Oh, I forgot my computer, I'll just go to the 7-11 and get one, plug in my 10 GB thumb drive with all my work on it and I'm set! When I get back it goes into my Beowulf cluster automatically.
What we have here is a failure to recognize a chain of causality. The pre-deregulation utility business had no incentive to withhold power or engage in complicated fiscal tricks. The rise of Enron was directly dependent upon market deregulation. The specific structure of the California deregulation, particularly the existence of a spot market, no long term contracts, and a small number of players, led to a strong incentive towards a scarce market. By withholding power Enron and others could realize huge profits, other utilities had no incentive to provide power at a cheaper price resulting in blackouts. Throughout the California Blackout story, the cause of the blackouts was always presented as an inherent lack of capacity caused by NIMBYs, but once Enron and several other utilities collapsed there has been plenty of power available here, despite any major group of powerplants comming online. If we belived the stories, we should be in an appreciably more dire situation now whith increased demand. From personal experience, after the State bought the powerlines here we have had a distinct drop in the number of power failures from poor maintainence. The market provides what it has incentives to provide. Regulation provides the ground rules and the nature of the incentives. Regulation also minimizes fraud. If a company is forced to compete in terms of reliability and consistency of service the market will deliver.
Puppy linux fits in 48MB w/ a X windows interface and office software http://www.goosee.com/puppy/ Mesh-AP fits in 32MB and incorporates an ad-hoc WiFi mesh and an Opera browser http://www.locustworld.com/ Trinux fits in a floppy with heavy duty security functions http://www.trinux.org/
You might check out Nobel Laureate (Physics 1970) Hannes Alfvén's speculations on the matter (or antimatter). Particularly "Worlds-Antiworlds: Antimatter in Cosmology" where he supposed that matter and antimatter stars coexisted with boundary layers of plasma between them. In fact he had a running bet that Alpha Centari was made of antimatter (I once had lunch with him and heard this first person). To quote http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/alfven.htm: "Some of Hannes Alfvén's ideas are still controversial. One example is his idea that the universe consists of equal amounts of matter and antimatter separated by thin boundary layers"
Of course Davros from Dr. Who (http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/doctorwho/alien/davros. shtml) developed a variant of his mind control wheelchair to host what the kaleds race would mutate into after their protracted exposure to nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) warfare agents, creating the Daleks.
This is particularly disturing in that he as more than a passing resemblance to Rumsfield.
But in Sendai you have to put up with northern long blade cherry blossom spirit attacks. And giant steam robots jumpting out of giant dirigibles to disrupt weddings! See http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Shadowlands/3932/s akura1.html
My mom and my relatively technophobic sister both use Mozilla and Opera Exclusively. I simply explained how you can disable pop-ups, banner ads, block M$ Outbreak viruses, and eliminate spyware. When I also poined out how you can access Google from the sidebar, they were sold. The same goes for the friends who ask me to set up their computers for them. My coworkers, that's another story, serious stupidity!
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My experience with SageTV has been uniformly good. Using PVR-250's as my capture compression device I have had no problems with audio/video desynchronization. One factor which may operate in my favor is that I installed WinDVD to provide DVD play, and configured Sage TV to employ the Intervideo CODEC in conjuntion w/ hardware acceleration (Nvidia 5200). In this configuration SageTV has rock solid image quality and a/v sync. In addition, unlike my Leadtek 2000XP capture card, the resulting MPEG files generate perfectly synced DVDs.
'tho I use SageTV on a self built box, my comments are even more salient with regard to MythTV. I can configure to my specific needs and desires, don't get another bill in the mail and am free to do whatever I want to the content. Just the network acessibility of my box is worth it, viewing shows with VLC and controlling SageTV with VNC is flat out sublime.
Despite being a penguinista, my experiences with getting the ivtv driver to work with The Hauppage PVR 250 PCI cards were rather hopeless regardless of the distro I employed.
I finally broke down and installed SageTV on a Win2K box and have been very happy ever since. I'm using two PVR 250 capture/compression cards, an NVIDIA GeForce 5200 and a Fortissimo 7.1 (just for the TOSlink output) on an Athalon 2000+ system using an IRman universal IR recivever which makes the system think It's a tivo to allow for my universal remote to support it. One tuner is connected to the output of my cable box to allow access to the digital tier and HBO using an Actisys IR-200L.
The overall result is spectacular, I never have recording conflicts, flawless sound and picture quality, and I can back off shows to DVD with the Ulead MovieFactory package which comes with the PVR-250. I can also view the Mpeg files from my other computers as well. The SageTV package also serves as an MP3 and DVD Player. When the remote is not enough VNC works flawlessly. Quite indispensable given my schedule, and its addicted me to Inuyasha as well!
Excellent software, 'tho I intend to revisit mythtv when a mini-distro is available.
I too learned a great deal of programming from "100 BASIC Computer Games", and it took many years to unlearn the bad practices. While the code was facinating 20 years ago, at that point BASIC was a viable language and we worked with 1 MHz 16KB machines. Frankly, the majority of the games were hideous even back then. When he sees the structure and gets the logical flow of that completely unstructured spagetti code he will renounce programming for life!
I strongly belive that teaching children BASIC as a first language should be classified as "contributing to the delinquency of a minor", please use a modern language such as python or java
The PyGame (pygame.org) module for Python provides a reasonably complete binding of the Simple Direct Layer (SDL). It is sufficently high level to allow for the coding of reasonably good games win several pages of code. Using this in combination with the Python binding of VTK allows for the coding of real time interactive 3D apps in 3-4 pages of code. For folks who cant wrap their heads around VTK there is always pyGL
As a result it is possible to easily write games in python while promoting good coding pratice.
Very similar to Hush Puppies last about a year. Very very confortable even if you have to spend 10 hours on a concrete floor.
As an added plus, very dressy uppers are available with these soles.
You post on /. and you still have non-geek friends!
Quite a bit of problematic physics 'tho:
.
-Contrails do not form in hard vaccum.
-A shortwave wireless would be of no use in space,in that the point of shortwave is that it bounces off of the ionosphere back down to the ground.
-The kinematics of the fighters are still problematic, space craft don't make banking turns.
-No networking? Given that even 1970's fighters use heavy networking (F-117's can't fly without networked computers) this is rather dubious.
-The government doesn't use secure compartmentalized sercurity on their mainframes?
-The cylon fighters sould be capable of much greater acceleration than those of humans, due to the lack of the need to protect a biological body from high G's.
-The choppy handheld effects were annoying and anachronistic.
That being said the miniseries was a vast improvement over the original. Any change replacing testosterone poisoned fighter jocks and Cylons (and combinations thereof) with hot babes is a distinct improvement. The plot wasn't spectacular but wasn't bad either. The sex was rather heavy (I'd wondered how much they wanted to sex up Crusade, I wonder no more).
What I wonder is if the series is going to turn into "Voyager: The Next Generation" or "Andormeda:The Next Generation" (the good first and second season Andromeda, that is). If it is the latter it might be worth a series, given the lack of any good scifi series out there these days
Of course, it can't hold a candle to Babylon 5, Crusade, or Firefly and the money would be better spent on JMS or Joss but what can you do?
Just imagine a Joss Whedon Battlestar Galactica!
I say give it a series and give Quentin Tarantino full creative control. In the first episode Boomer meets her twin sister Go Go!
Thr standard universal IR (UIR) commercially available as the IRman by evation.com is supported, which allows you to train it to any selsected remote. As a result you can train it to be operated under a universal remote.
>Lagrange points are cool - but planets are cooler.
No, Lagrange Points hover around absolute zero while most of the planets are considerably warmer...
...the Martian Successor Nadesico probe?
Pohl predicted this in Man Plus(1976), in which a man is modified to survive on the surface of mars. I don't have a copy at hand but there was an excellent passage about how humans can't really live in unmodified form outside of the savanna, the modifications (parkas, fire, etc.) necessary to live elsewere are just reversible so far.
Of course Cordwainer Smith was there in 1950 with "Scanners Live in Vain" with the Habermen and Scanners.
... Since if it's on the Internet it has to be true!
'The First' like in the first evil in Buffy. Has anybody seen Bill touch anything lately?
In my experience embedding processors in very tiny MEMS sensor packages (smaller than a postage stamp) the Microchip Inc. PIC processors are an excellent embedded processor with many low cost programming tools. The PIC16f876 is particularly neat with a flash reprogrammable ROM and in circuit programability. But the 8 pin designs pack quite a wallop as well.
The Javelin is java version of the basic stamp for the more hardware adverse, For low performance work the Basic stamp is excellent.
Finally the uClinux folks have a series of SIMM (Memory) form factor single board computers with the same power of a small Palm Pilot which run uClinux.
If the Iranian Goverment funded Anonymizer for US dissidents.
Mithridatism, the practice of ingesting small quantities of poison to develop a resistance has been practiced since ancient times. The name comes from Mithridates, king of ancient Pontus, who fearful of being poisoned, ingested small quanties at regular intervals develop a resistance. Dashiell Hammett descibes the use of Mithridatism to develop a resistance to arsenic in the Continental Op story "Fly Paper" (1929) which in turn references the practice as per Dumas in "The Count of Monte Cristo". Thus it is relatively well known that trace doses of some poisons can result in relative imunity to the specific toxin. This does not imply that the paractice is particularly healthy or desirable.
I want cheap nearly disposable legacy free computers commonly available. I mean cheap $20, impulse buy, in the checkout lane at the supermarket, i-POD sized nano-ATX linux boxes. I want $10 10" flat panel displays, next to the keyboards and mice.
Oh, I forgot my computer, I'll just go to the 7-11 and get one, plug in my 10 GB thumb drive with all my work on it and I'm set! When I get back it goes into my Beowulf cluster automatically.
What we have here is a failure to recognize a chain of causality. The pre-deregulation utility business had no incentive to withhold power or engage in complicated fiscal tricks. The rise of Enron was directly dependent upon market deregulation. The specific structure of the California deregulation, particularly the existence of a spot market, no long term contracts, and a small number of players, led to a strong incentive towards a scarce market. By withholding power Enron and others could realize huge profits, other utilities had no incentive to provide power at a cheaper price resulting in blackouts.
Throughout the California Blackout story, the cause of the blackouts was always presented as an inherent lack of capacity caused by NIMBYs, but once Enron and several other utilities collapsed there has been plenty of power available here, despite any major group of powerplants comming online. If we belived the stories, we should be in an appreciably more dire situation now whith increased demand.
From personal experience, after the State bought the powerlines here we have had a distinct drop in the number of power failures from poor maintainence.
The market provides what it has incentives to provide. Regulation provides the ground rules and the nature of the incentives. Regulation also minimizes fraud. If a company is forced to compete in terms of reliability and consistency of service the market will deliver.
Puppy linux fits in 48MB w/ a X windows interface and office software
http://www.goosee.com/puppy/
Mesh-AP fits in 32MB and incorporates an ad-hoc WiFi mesh and an Opera browser
http://www.locustworld.com/
Trinux fits in a floppy with heavy duty security functions
http://www.trinux.org/
SCO Sues you!
No wait, we did that already
You might check out Nobel Laureate (Physics 1970) Hannes Alfvén's speculations on the matter (or antimatter). Particularly "Worlds-Antiworlds: Antimatter in Cosmology" where he supposed that matter and antimatter stars coexisted with boundary layers of plasma between them. In fact he had a running bet that Alpha Centari was made of antimatter (I once had lunch with him and heard this first person). :
To quote http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/alfven.htm
"Some of Hannes Alfvén's ideas are still controversial. One example is his idea that the universe consists of equal amounts of matter and antimatter separated by thin boundary layers"
Of course Davros from Dr. Who (http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/doctorwho/alien/davros. shtml)
developed a variant of his mind control wheelchair to host what the kaleds race would mutate into after their protracted exposure to nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) warfare agents, creating the Daleks.
This is particularly disturing in that he as more than a passing resemblance to Rumsfield.
But in Sendai you have to put up with northern long blade cherry blossom spirit attacks. And giant steam robots jumpting out of giant dirigibles to disrupt weddings!s akura1.html
See http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Shadowlands/3932/
My mom and my relatively technophobic sister both use Mozilla and Opera Exclusively. I simply explained how you can disable pop-ups, banner ads, block M$ Outbreak viruses, and eliminate spyware. When I also poined out how you can access Google from the sidebar, they were sold.
The same goes for the friends who ask me to set up their computers for them.
My coworkers, that's another story, serious stupidity!