I strongly advice everyone using mythtv to move to vdr instead.
I did a year ago, after 3 years of mythtv, it's another league as far as usability.
It you need al the non-tv addons you're better off with xbmc+vdr.
do yourself a favour and drop mythtv now.
in europe, thanks to publishing lobbies the companies gets paid to compensate allegedly lost sales.
in italy at least this is paid directly by the government, so that end users haven't noticed, still I think it's a shame that libraries, which for thousands of years have been the place that could freely spread culture are now considered 'lost sales'
after 3-4 years of mythtv I found VDR, and it's everything myth is supposed to be.
if you're using dvb-s/t/c it's perfect, notice that it springs from the linuxtv project itself.
it's also super fast, channel switching is faster than my set-top box.
and if you need grey-area tools to use your legit subscription services there are plenty of tools available, and most of all you can talk about it freely in the forums, as opposed to the mythtv mailing lists.
for the media player part, I use xbmc
I live in a 200k people town in italy. we have a power plant close to the town center. we have built pipes under most of the central part of town hot water coming out of the plant as a byproduct get piped to the individual homes and is used for heating during the winter. the bill for the people is cheaper and it seem to work quite well.
the only problem is what gets burned in the plant, but that is a typical italian political problem that would probably not exist in other parts of the world
after four years of mythtv a few months ago I upgraded to VDR (http://www.linuxtv.org/vdrwiki/index.php/Main_Page)
I always avoided it since I wanted the 'noisy backend in basement' and 'silent frontend in living room' separation, and I thought it was exclusive to mythtv. In reality, vdr handles it much better and on lower hardware specs.
and for all of the non-tv features, xbmc takes care of them very nicely.
all it takes to make everybody happy is require video uploaders who use copyrighted music to clearly state the song they are using, so that youtube can automagically link the video to a 'buy this song now' place
it's so obvious that I think that the only reason this has not been implemented yet (and the real reason for artists' rants) it's that they have not agreed yet on which webstore should sell the music.
I once had a user that had a strange (to her) dialog box. She could take a screenshot of the box only (alt+print screen, so not that clueless after all), print it, and faxed it to me with a handwritten note asking 'what should I do?'. I should add that the dialog box only had a 'OK' button, and that was the only option...
Some years ago I took a course in history of religions at the university of verona (italy). that teacher had an amazingly deep knowledge of the subject. one day he took us to the library of the cathedral of verona, an they had a bible from the 4th century which was written with an ink made of silver, while all of the names of jesus, god, and such where written in gold. he would read us some parts to show us that the original greek test was the same as the one used today. the funny thing was that he would hold this book as it was just another paperback, flipping pages and pointing the finger to show the relevant parts... i was shocked as i couldn't even begin to imagine the value of that book.
in Italy the government is trying to pass a law that forbids most (warranted) wiretapping, with the exception of a few mafia related crimes.
In the last few years many white collar crimes made the news after wiretaps transcriptions were leaked the the newspapers.
Since people in the government (or friends and families thereof) were involved they're trying to bypass this 'problem' by prohibiting wiretapping altogether.
Needless to say there was no street protest about this, only a few articles on blogs or newspapers.
Seems like it's most of the world that's asleep and will wake to a harsh reality.
Weight has very little to do with the efficiency of a modern car. weight has a lot to do with the efficiency of any car. the point is, to carry around a 150lb person you need an engine that can move 150lb+3000lb for the car. it's the concept of car as a mean of transportation itself that needs to be rethought
The copy protection part was a series of descriptions of the Grail according to various authors - which were referenced by Indy as he investigated various items. I think you have this wrong. or, at least, the pc version had a lookup table with greek symbols. I know because I didn't have the original, but among my friends we had fotocopies of this codes which were hand-copied by some crazy guy.
zak mccraken had such a copy protection. it was the first time I realized there was some thing as 'original' (had never seen one) and copied games. if you failed to give the correct codes at the airports a guard would put you in jail and give you a lecture about how hard programmers had worked for that game, and that he hoped that you just made a mistake while typing the code.
i met someone who had the original box. the codes were printed in black on dark red. I found a place that made color copies (in 1990!) which probably cost me more than the game itself.
years later I found out that turning contrast very high on a copier would make a farly readable copy anyway.
if you have the money to buy a suv, you have the money to pay for its gas. in italy gas is 1.5 euros/litre and the number of suvs is increasing like crazy.
I remember seeing an interview with Metallica's drummer back in the napster days "this people are, like, turning our music into a PRODUCT, maaan" their super packaged box set 'live shit' had just come out...
in europe it's not free anymore, thanks to publishing lobbies the companies gets paid to compensate allegedly lost sales. in italy at least this is paid directly by the government, so that end users haven't noticed, still I think it's a shame that libraries, which for thousands of years have been the place that could freely spread culture are now considered 'lost sales'
Slashdot Mirror
Why does my refrigerator take heat out of the inside, and dump it into my house - requiring my A/C to then take it and again put it outside?
passive cooled refrigerators do exist. see here for some prototipes, but I remember I read they were easer to find in northern europe.
I strongly advice everyone using mythtv to move to vdr instead. I did a year ago, after 3 years of mythtv, it's another league as far as usability. It you need al the non-tv addons you're better off with xbmc+vdr. do yourself a favour and drop mythtv now.
in europe, thanks to publishing lobbies the companies gets paid to compensate allegedly lost sales.
in italy at least this is paid directly by the government, so that end users haven't noticed, still I think it's a shame that libraries, which for thousands of years have been the place that could freely spread culture are now considered 'lost sales'
it's directive 92/100 from 1992 (in several languages).
here is an explanation.
press release from 2002 that says that many countries have not adopted the directive yet (italy did in 1996).
wikipedia says this amount is in reality not very high, however the principle itself is chilling.
after 3-4 years of mythtv I found VDR, and it's everything myth is supposed to be.
if you're using dvb-s/t/c it's perfect, notice that it springs from the linuxtv project itself. it's also super fast, channel switching is faster than my set-top box.
and if you need grey-area tools to use your legit subscription services there are plenty of tools available, and most of all you can talk about it freely in the forums, as opposed to the mythtv mailing lists.
for the media player part, I use xbmc
if the heating bill is the problem, why not centralize it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating
I live in a 200k people town in italy.
we have a power plant close to the town center.
we have built pipes under most of the central part of town
hot water coming out of the plant as a byproduct get
piped to the individual homes and is used for heating during the winter.
the bill for the people is cheaper and it seem to work quite well.
the only problem is what gets burned in the plant, but that is a typical italian political problem that would probably not exist in other parts of the world
after four years of mythtv a few months ago I upgraded to VDR (http://www.linuxtv.org/vdrwiki/index.php/Main_Page)
I always avoided it since I wanted the 'noisy backend in basement' and 'silent frontend in living room' separation, and I thought it was exclusive to mythtv. In reality, vdr handles it much better and on lower hardware specs.
and for all of the non-tv features, xbmc takes care of them very nicely.
In Italy copyright is death+70 years, so this rule (performance+50/70) will actually shorten the copyright in most cases.
all it takes to make everybody happy is require video uploaders who use copyrighted music to clearly state the song they are using, so that youtube can automagically link the video to a 'buy this song now' place
it's so obvious that I think that the only reason this has not been implemented yet (and the real reason for artists' rants) it's that they have not agreed yet on which webstore should sell the music.
mp3-crossing!
fill them up and then leave them on some bench at a park!
I have never heard anyone in Europe utter such crap.
not even the pope, who has expressed several times his support to darwin's work!
i think it was Robin Williams who said 'americans: so puritan even the english kicked them out'
thank god (notice the pun) it seems to apply to a small, although noisy, minority of americans
I once had a user that had a strange (to her) dialog box.
She could take a screenshot of the box only (alt+print screen, so not that clueless after all), print it, and faxed it to me with a handwritten note asking 'what should I do?'.
I should add that the dialog box only had a 'OK' button, and that was the only option...
is it american football or european football (=soccer?)
Some years ago I took a course in history of religions at the university of verona (italy).
that teacher had an amazingly deep knowledge of the subject.
one day he took us to the library of the cathedral of verona, an they had a bible from the 4th century which was written with an ink made of silver, while all of the names of jesus, god, and such where written in gold.
he would read us some parts to show us that the original greek test was the same as the one used today.
the funny thing was that he would hold this book as it was just another paperback, flipping pages and pointing the finger to show the relevant parts... i was shocked as i couldn't even begin to imagine the value of that book.
on a non-tech radio news this morning I heard something about non-latin characters being allowed, any word on this?
what happens to punycode??
in Italy the government is trying to pass a law that forbids most (warranted) wiretapping, with the exception of a few mafia related crimes.
In the last few years many white collar crimes made the news after wiretaps transcriptions were leaked the the newspapers.
Since people in the government (or friends and families thereof) were involved they're trying to bypass this 'problem' by prohibiting wiretapping altogether.
Needless to say there was no street protest about this, only a few articles on blogs or newspapers.
Seems like it's most of the world that's asleep and will wake to a harsh reality.
the point is, to carry around a 150lb person you need an engine that can move 150lb+3000lb for the car.
it's the concept of car as a mean of transportation itself that needs to be rethought
I know because I didn't have the original, but among my friends we had fotocopies of this codes which were hand-copied by some crazy guy.
this screenshots gallery seems to support my memory.
zak mccraken had such a copy protection.
it was the first time I realized there was some thing as 'original' (had never seen one) and copied games. if you failed to give the correct codes at the airports a guard would put you in jail and give you a lecture about how hard programmers had worked for that game, and that he hoped that you just made a mistake while typing the code.
i met someone who had the original box. the codes were printed in black on dark red.
I found a place that made color copies (in 1990!) which probably cost me more than the game itself.
years later I found out that turning contrast very high on a copier would make a farly readable copy anyway.
if you have the money to buy a suv, you have the money to pay for its gas.
in italy gas is 1.5 euros/litre and the number of suvs is increasing like crazy.
there still are parallel port dongles, although they are being phased out by usb dongles.And then one we used at work: Parallel port dongles.
aladdin / hasp sells such protection mechanisms.
yes, it's directive 92/100 from 1992 (in several languages).
here is an explanation.
press release from 2002 that says that many countries have not adopted the directive yet (italy did in 1996).
wikipedia says this amount is in reality not very high, however the principle itself is chilling.
I remember seeing an interview with Metallica's drummer back in the napster days
"this people are, like, turning our music into a PRODUCT, maaan"
their super packaged box set 'live shit' had just come out...
in europe it's not free anymore, thanks to publishing lobbies the companies gets paid to compensate allegedly lost sales.
in italy at least this is paid directly by the government, so that end users haven't noticed, still I think it's a shame that libraries, which for thousands of years have been the place that could freely spread culture are now considered 'lost sales'
Greenpeace did almost 70mpg in 1996 with simple mods to an existing car
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SmILE
At the time, it was still pretty unusual that two people would both have access to email
well, no wonder there wasn't much traffic going on.