MythTV is nearly (if not completely) useless for watching movies, listening to music, or looking at image media
I don't care much one way or the other about pictures or music, but you're flat-out wrong on movies. MythDVD works fairly nicely; it calls whatever DVD player app you want to use. mplayer is rather lacking (no menu support at all), but xine offers full-featured playback with menus and AC3/DTS passthrough. It even ignores PUOs (which others have said are frequently abused by Di$ney, though I have no firsthand experience), so you can start playing any commercial DVD with minimal delay.
But for me.. sorry.. Freevo is useless. If they're going to play off the "TiVo" name by calling it Freevo it should be able to handle timeshifting of live TV.
If I cant pause/rewind/fast-fwd live TV then I'm not touching it. If they ever figure out how to add that functionality then I'll take a look.
How often does the average TiVo or MythTV user watch live TV, though? It's one of those neat features that TiVo uses to sell its boxes, but in the more than four years I've had my TiVo, I've almost never watched live TV. It usually only happens when I start watching a show that's been recording for 15 minutes or so, and I end up catching up to live TV before it's over.
I've started using MythTV more recently, and the only time I fire up live TV on it is to verify that the capture cards are working after changing hardware, upgrading software, or whatever. If they made live TV some sort of service-menu option and removed it from the main menu system, I wouldn't miss it. (Swapping the "Watch TV" and "Watch Recordings" options around would be nice...maybe I should dig into the source some time and do that.)
Can you name a more widely used application of tubes now days [than guitar amps]?
How about the microwave in your kitchen? It uses a magnetron to produce the RF that heats up your leftover pizza. There's probably not a kitchen in the country that doesn't have one.
He explained that, no, the tubes were plenty reliable, but the solid-carbon resistors used in those days didn't handle the high voltages used in the tube circuits very well, and thus constantly failed.
Resistors aren't the only components that tended to crap out. Capacitors were usually not much more than a couple strips each of aluminum foil and paper, rolled up and sealed with more wax, with wires sticking out each end of the roll. Over time, the heating and cooling caused by switching a device on and off would lead to the outer coating becoming compromised, letting moisture in to do various nasty things. When getting an old radio working, the first thing you usually end up doing is yanking out all of the old "wax firecrackers" and replacing them with metal-film capacitors that you'll probably never need to replace again.
This is nothing new. Red Hook made Double Black Stout using Starbucks coffee years ago.
Most coffee-flavored beers don't have enough coffee in them to give you much (if any) of a caffeine buzz. I checked a couple of coffee stout recipes...one calls for 16 shots of espresso, while the other calls for 12 cups of coffee. Both of these recipes make 5 gallons, the typical homebrew batch size. Do the math.
Given the Pisswasser that Anheuser-Busch tries to pass off on an unsuspecting public as "beer," though, that they would come up with a caffeinated, ginseng-and-guarana-"enhanced" alco-pop isn't a total surprise.
What's ironic about it? Zuniga said (paraphrasing a bit) of the four contractors burned, dismembered, and hung from a bridge in Fallujah that they got what they deserved. (Go here and search the page for the phrase "screw them".) Next to that, the statements you attribute to LGF WRT known terrorist sympathizers like Rachel Corrie are peanuts.
Not to mention the telegraph is openly and proudly conservative. Just ask its owner Conrad Black.
I didn't say that it wasn't. Why do you think I compared its one article linked by Google News to the four articles in the Guardian (which is, as others have already noted, one of Britain's left-wing rags)? I lived there for a couple of years in the mid-'80s, and the Telegraph was as close to even-handed as the British press got.
It's a percieved conservative bias, not a liberal one. That's the "problem".
Running across this article today after reading this item yesterday on Google News' inclusion of the Daily Kos hatesite as a "news" source is amusing. The last article on the page (at this time) gives this explanation from Google:
While our news sources vary in perspective and editorial approach, their selection for inclusion is done without regard to political viewpoint or ideology. An article's placement on our main page is determined entirely by a mathematical algorithm, based on many factors including how often and where a story appears on the Web. We do make an effort to group sites that seem biased with contrasting sites, to give a well-rounded perspective on the topic.
We hope that you will find reports within Google News that strike you as unbiased as well as those espousing obvious viewpoints. The beauty of this service is that you get to determine which accounts you wish to read.
When the current page (as I write this) links to four articles from the Guardian and two from al-Jazeera vs. one from the Telegraph, it does lead to some questions of how their algorithm makes its decisions about what to present. The actual selections may have been done by a computer, but the computer is running software that somebody wrote to make those selections.
What platforms does it cross? Doesn't work on my x86 box running Linux.
I just fired up joe on one of my servers and tried it out...it works fine there. It's running a somewhat old version of Gentoo, and I haven't done anything weird with the setup that would be aimed at making this work.
Further- just because [MPlayer]'s legal in Hungary doesn't mean it is legal anywhere else- which is why mplayer isn't distributed with, for example, Debian. I don't believe it is, in fact, distributed with any major Linux distribution.
There is a Gentoo ebuild for it. The MPlayer files (source and DLL packs) aren't hosted by any of the Gentoo mirrors, but are retrieved from the MPlayer website. The same applies to most software for which ebuilds exist, though. Source for GNU programs gets pulled from GNU mirrors, source for SourceForge-hosted projects gets pulled from SourceForge mirrors, etc. Whether you could call this state of affairs "distribution" is open to debate, I suppose. While what Gentoo provides directly is in a sense little more than instructions and a patchfile, installing MPlayer is no more difficult than installing Emacs or KDE.
(It's worth mentioning that system-specific optimizations (-march=athlon-xp, or whatever) are disabled in the MPlayer ebuild, which goes against one of the main reasons people use Gentoo. With that said, it's behaved reasonably well IME.)
The democrats are currently way too controlled by people seriously running around claiming Bush is worse than Hitler.
What a joke! Who is saying this? Please show me an elected democrat, democrat running for office, or democratic party official who said anything like this. You can't take an internet message board and say that it represents the party leadership.
This is just the most recent example, which I ran across earlier today:
Republicans in Minnesota including Sen. Norm Coleman are calling on John Kerry to condemn an, "outrageous and offensive" bumper sticker they say was handed out by the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (search) the state's largest political party.
Copies of the sticker, which says, "Bush/Cheney: Most hated world leaders since Hitler," were mailed to the party's headquarters and briefly exhibited on a desk.
Republicans say a staffer they sent to the headquarters was given a sticker, but Democrats insist they had nothing to do with the sticker and never distributed it and accuse Republicans of a, "pathetic set-up."
(DFL is what Minnesota Democrats call themselves for some odd reason.)
Backup? Why? If it gets fried, it's not going to boot anyways. Good luck trying to flash it back..
An EPROM burner will fix that...but only if you have the original contents to dump back into the flash chip.
Some BIOS ROMs are also configured with a recovery area that doesn't get overwritten during an upgrade, so if the upgrade goes badly, you still have a way to get it running again without having to drag out the EPROM burner (which I'll admit is a gadget most people don't have). The code in this recovery area usually has just enough code to load a BIOS image from floppy, flash it, and beep the speaker as it goes about its work. (Some of them were able to use a VGA display on the ISA bus, but most computers nowadays don't even have an ISA bus.)
BIOS updates? Last time I did it, it was from an El Burrito CD.
If you're updating your BIOS, you'll probably want to make a backup of the original BIOS before you flash the new one. Without a floppy drive, where are you going to store the backup? Last time I checked, DOS-based BIOS flashers didn't include the ability to write the backup to CD.
Only up to 137GB due to long-LBA issues. Only the HiDef Tivo supports LBA48, allowing HDs larger than 137GB to be recognized correctly (it still recognizes larger HDs, but only sees the first 137GB).
Replace the kernel with one that includes LBA48 support. I did that, and my TiVo sees the full 200GB capacity of the hard drive that's currently installed in it.
(When I last looked into it, this wasn't yet an option for Series 2 for some odd reason, though there are some Series 2 models (not just the HD models) that already include an LBA48 kernel. If you have a Series 1 TiVo, though (whether it's one you've had for years or one you just picked up off of eBay), replacing the kernel isn't all that difficult.)
Every time I call my parents, they say a different number shows up on their caller ID. How is this new service any different from what's happening already?
Between that problem with POTS service at home and DSL at work that constantly needs resetting, I think it's fairly safe to say that Sprint sux.:-P
The there is the old trick of putting html in the middle of dodgey words.
Like: viag<!--xyz-->ra
Your typical Bayesian filter works on the message source, not the output of an HTML renderer. "viag<!--xyz-->ra" gets dumped into the spammy-word list along with "v1agr4" and other annoyances, so after the first one sneaks through and is manually classified, the rest are blocked.
No one is stopping stem cell research. Just no federal funds can be used for it.
Actually, there's plenty of federal funding for research that uses adult stem cells. There's even funding for research that uses several preexisting lines of embryonic stem cells; the law only prohibits federal funding of research involving new lines of embryonic stem cells.
Who was the president who signed the bill that provides this funding? George W. Bush.
If it's the fucking miracle you folks think it is, then there should be plenty of private research by those who seek to profit from it.
While adult stem cells hold promise for such things as generation of transplantable organs and tissues that won't be rejected (in a sense, you would become your own donor), the outlook for embryonic stem-cell research has been nowhere near as promising. Nasty cancers known as teratomas have often formed where embryonic stem cells are injected...in one experiment involving rats, they formed in one out of five test subjects.
That said, there's no law that prohibits use of private funding toward any sort of stem-cell research, whether using adult or embryonic stem cells from either preexisting or new cell lines. Some people, unfortunately, have found it easier to engage in demagoguery and impute malicious intent to those with whom they disagree than to follow a more rational course. Since it's easy for the nightly news to get soundbites from them, they're paid far more attention than they deserve, and before long, their distortions of the true state of affairs get accepted as truth.
I've always wanted to build a fish tank that is only a foot or so in diameter but goes from the floor to the ceiling.
The problem with that idea is that you'd end up with a mostly empty tank. The safe load limit for the number & size of fishes you can put in an aquarium is determined in part by the surface area of the top of the aquarium (oxygen & carbon dioxide are exchanged between air & water here). With only about 1.5 ft^2 of surface area, your hypothetical 1-foot cylinder would safely hold no more than the average 10-gallon aquarium...probably less.
Personally, I'm shocked more isn't done with the Railroads.
Nothing's done with the railroads because nobody rides them anymore, at least not in this country. Last time I took a train to get from point A to point B was over in Germany, years ago. For short trips (under 300-350 miles), driving is about as fast (probably faster, because you don't have to make a bunch of stops along the way), and is more convenient...you don't have to rent a car at your destination. For longer trips, flying is faster.
In the UK I'm paying about 350 pounds a month to insure a 3 year-old 2 litre mondeo [4 door sedan for our cousins across the pond]. Thats covers me for any damage I may cause, including third party and also insures the car against damage [with a small excess]. I'm curious about how much it costs in the states.
$635 (£350 at the current exchange rate) per month to insure a Ford Contour (Mondeo)? Either you're the world's worst driver (you said nothing about your driving record one way or the other) or you're getting rooked in a major way. I live in one of the more expensive states for car insurance (Nevada, if you're wondering), but I'm currently paying about $90 per month for insurance on two vehicles: an '02 Chevy S-10 (small pickup, 4.3L V6) and a '77 Olds Cutlass Supreme (an "intermediate" 2-door that's larger than most current full-size models, with a 350-ci (5.7L) V8). After rear-ending somebody about 5 years ago, my rates went up to over $200 per month for about 3 years. It helps that my insurance is with USAA (they're almost always the least expensive, but they only insure military personnel and their families), but insurance in nearly any other market in the United States would be considerably cheaper regardless of who sells it.
Looks like gasoline isn't the only thing for which you're getting ripped off when you get behind the wheel.
Second, get corporations back to footing half the taxes, like they did in the 1950's, instead of the 2% of today.
Businesses don't pay taxes. They take money that they receive from their customers (which, at some point, comes from you and me) and divert some of that to the government. If their taxes go up, they pass the increase along to their customers as higher prices for their goods and/or services. The end result is that you end up paying more for the stuff you buy.
If the salesman wants to say "you should buy Monster Cable because it's big and thick and might make you feel better if you are insecure about your undersized penis", then I'd have no complaints. If they said "if replacing this $40 DVD player would ruin you financially, then you should buy this $10 service plan", I'd be less inclined to be offended. But when you buy a $79 CD player and they act like Monster cable will make it sound like a piece of high-fidelity audio equipment, that's just wrong.
Back when I was working at Best Buy and they were starting their big Monster Cable push, I should've brought in a copy of the Radio-Electronics article I had read years ago that compared lamp cord to the fancy speaker cables and found bugger-all difference between them. IIRC, it was a proper double-blind test that was also backed up by measurements of the signals coming out the speaker end of the cable. Their conclusion was that as long as the cable is of sufficiently large gauge to keep losses to a minimum and as long as you don't do stupid stuff with the cable (like route it alongside a metal beam or make a tightly-wound coil out of the excess), the lamp cord worked just as well and was much cheaper.
Oh well...the managers' eyes probably would've just glazed over on the phrase "double-blind."
Slashdot Mirror
I don't care much one way or the other about pictures or music, but you're flat-out wrong on movies. MythDVD works fairly nicely; it calls whatever DVD player app you want to use. mplayer is rather lacking (no menu support at all), but xine offers full-featured playback with menus and AC3/DTS passthrough. It even ignores PUOs (which others have said are frequently abused by Di$ney, though I have no firsthand experience), so you can start playing any commercial DVD with minimal delay.
How often does the average TiVo or MythTV user watch live TV, though? It's one of those neat features that TiVo uses to sell its boxes, but in the more than four years I've had my TiVo, I've almost never watched live TV. It usually only happens when I start watching a show that's been recording for 15 minutes or so, and I end up catching up to live TV before it's over.
I've started using MythTV more recently, and the only time I fire up live TV on it is to verify that the capture cards are working after changing hardware, upgrading software, or whatever. If they made live TV some sort of service-menu option and removed it from the main menu system, I wouldn't miss it. (Swapping the "Watch TV" and "Watch Recordings" options around would be nice...maybe I should dig into the source some time and do that.)
How about the microwave in your kitchen? It uses a magnetron to produce the RF that heats up your leftover pizza. There's probably not a kitchen in the country that doesn't have one.
Resistors aren't the only components that tended to crap out. Capacitors were usually not much more than a couple strips each of aluminum foil and paper, rolled up and sealed with more wax, with wires sticking out each end of the roll. Over time, the heating and cooling caused by switching a device on and off would lead to the outer coating becoming compromised, letting moisture in to do various nasty things. When getting an old radio working, the first thing you usually end up doing is yanking out all of the old "wax firecrackers" and replacing them with metal-film capacitors that you'll probably never need to replace again.
Most coffee-flavored beers don't have enough coffee in them to give you much (if any) of a caffeine buzz. I checked a couple of coffee stout recipes...one calls for 16 shots of espresso, while the other calls for 12 cups of coffee. Both of these recipes make 5 gallons, the typical homebrew batch size. Do the math.
Given the Pisswasser that Anheuser-Busch tries to pass off on an unsuspecting public as "beer," though, that they would come up with a caffeinated, ginseng-and-guarana-"enhanced" alco-pop isn't a total surprise.
What's ironic about it? Zuniga said (paraphrasing a bit) of the four contractors burned, dismembered, and hung from a bridge in Fallujah that they got what they deserved. (Go here and search the page for the phrase "screw them".) Next to that, the statements you attribute to LGF WRT known terrorist sympathizers like Rachel Corrie are peanuts.
I didn't say that it wasn't. Why do you think I compared its one article linked by Google News to the four articles in the Guardian (which is, as others have already noted, one of Britain's left-wing rags)? I lived there for a couple of years in the mid-'80s, and the Telegraph was as close to even-handed as the British press got.
Running across this article today after reading this item yesterday on Google News' inclusion of the Daily Kos hatesite as a "news" source is amusing. The last article on the page (at this time) gives this explanation from Google:
When the current page (as I write this) links to four articles from the Guardian and two from al-Jazeera vs. one from the Telegraph, it does lead to some questions of how their algorithm makes its decisions about what to present. The actual selections may have been done by a computer, but the computer is running software that somebody wrote to make those selections.
I just fired up joe on one of my servers and tried it out...it works fine there. It's running a somewhat old version of Gentoo, and I haven't done anything weird with the setup that would be aimed at making this work.
Alt-0163 (press the digits on your keypad while holding down Alt) produces "£"...and it's cross-platform, too.
There is a Gentoo ebuild for it. The MPlayer files (source and DLL packs) aren't hosted by any of the Gentoo mirrors, but are retrieved from the MPlayer website. The same applies to most software for which ebuilds exist, though. Source for GNU programs gets pulled from GNU mirrors, source for SourceForge-hosted projects gets pulled from SourceForge mirrors, etc. Whether you could call this state of affairs "distribution" is open to debate, I suppose. While what Gentoo provides directly is in a sense little more than instructions and a patchfile, installing MPlayer is no more difficult than installing Emacs or KDE.
(It's worth mentioning that system-specific optimizations (-march=athlon-xp, or whatever) are disabled in the MPlayer ebuild, which goes against one of the main reasons people use Gentoo. With that said, it's behaved reasonably well IME.)
This is just the most recent example, which I ran across earlier today:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,131946,00.html
(DFL is what Minnesota Democrats call themselves for some odd reason.)
An EPROM burner will fix that...but only if you have the original contents to dump back into the flash chip.
Some BIOS ROMs are also configured with a recovery area that doesn't get overwritten during an upgrade, so if the upgrade goes badly, you still have a way to get it running again without having to drag out the EPROM burner (which I'll admit is a gadget most people don't have). The code in this recovery area usually has just enough code to load a BIOS image from floppy, flash it, and beep the speaker as it goes about its work. (Some of them were able to use a VGA display on the ISA bus, but most computers nowadays don't even have an ISA bus.)
If you're updating your BIOS, you'll probably want to make a backup of the original BIOS before you flash the new one. Without a floppy drive, where are you going to store the backup? Last time I checked, DOS-based BIOS flashers didn't include the ability to write the backup to CD.
Replace the kernel with one that includes LBA48 support. I did that, and my TiVo sees the full 200GB capacity of the hard drive that's currently installed in it.
(When I last looked into it, this wasn't yet an option for Series 2 for some odd reason, though there are some Series 2 models (not just the HD models) that already include an LBA48 kernel. If you have a Series 1 TiVo, though (whether it's one you've had for years or one you just picked up off of eBay), replacing the kernel isn't all that difficult.)
Between that problem with POTS service at home and DSL at work that constantly needs resetting, I think it's fairly safe to say that Sprint sux. :-P
From the photos in the article, it looked more like he was shooting for a Darwin Award.
You've never seen Austin Powers? You can hand your Geek ID over to the gate guard on the way out this evening, as you won't be needing it anymore. :-)
Your typical Bayesian filter works on the message source, not the output of an HTML renderer. "viag<!--xyz-->ra" gets dumped into the spammy-word list along with "v1agr4" and other annoyances, so after the first one sneaks through and is manually classified, the rest are blocked.
Actually, there's plenty of federal funding for research that uses adult stem cells. There's even funding for research that uses several preexisting lines of embryonic stem cells; the law only prohibits federal funding of research involving new lines of embryonic stem cells.
Who was the president who signed the bill that provides this funding? George W. Bush.
While adult stem cells hold promise for such things as generation of transplantable organs and tissues that won't be rejected (in a sense, you would become your own donor), the outlook for embryonic stem-cell research has been nowhere near as promising. Nasty cancers known as teratomas have often formed where embryonic stem cells are injected...in one experiment involving rats, they formed in one out of five test subjects.
That said, there's no law that prohibits use of private funding toward any sort of stem-cell research, whether using adult or embryonic stem cells from either preexisting or new cell lines. Some people, unfortunately, have found it easier to engage in demagoguery and impute malicious intent to those with whom they disagree than to follow a more rational course. Since it's easy for the nightly news to get soundbites from them, they're paid far more attention than they deserve, and before long, their distortions of the true state of affairs get accepted as truth.
The problem with that idea is that you'd end up with a mostly empty tank. The safe load limit for the number & size of fishes you can put in an aquarium is determined in part by the surface area of the top of the aquarium (oxygen & carbon dioxide are exchanged between air & water here). With only about 1.5 ft^2 of surface area, your hypothetical 1-foot cylinder would safely hold no more than the average 10-gallon aquarium...probably less.
Nothing's done with the railroads because nobody rides them anymore, at least not in this country. Last time I took a train to get from point A to point B was over in Germany, years ago. For short trips (under 300-350 miles), driving is about as fast (probably faster, because you don't have to make a bunch of stops along the way), and is more convenient...you don't have to rent a car at your destination. For longer trips, flying is faster.
$635 (£350 at the current exchange rate) per month to insure a Ford Contour (Mondeo)? Either you're the world's worst driver (you said nothing about your driving record one way or the other) or you're getting rooked in a major way. I live in one of the more expensive states for car insurance (Nevada, if you're wondering), but I'm currently paying about $90 per month for insurance on two vehicles: an '02 Chevy S-10 (small pickup, 4.3L V6) and a '77 Olds Cutlass Supreme (an "intermediate" 2-door that's larger than most current full-size models, with a 350-ci (5.7L) V8). After rear-ending somebody about 5 years ago, my rates went up to over $200 per month for about 3 years. It helps that my insurance is with USAA (they're almost always the least expensive, but they only insure military personnel and their families), but insurance in nearly any other market in the United States would be considerably cheaper regardless of who sells it.
Looks like gasoline isn't the only thing for which you're getting ripped off when you get behind the wheel.
Businesses don't pay taxes. They take money that they receive from their customers (which, at some point, comes from you and me) and divert some of that to the government. If their taxes go up, they pass the increase along to their customers as higher prices for their goods and/or services. The end result is that you end up paying more for the stuff you buy.
It doesn't. Been there, done that.
Back when I was working at Best Buy and they were starting their big Monster Cable push, I should've brought in a copy of the Radio-Electronics article I had read years ago that compared lamp cord to the fancy speaker cables and found bugger-all difference between them. IIRC, it was a proper double-blind test that was also backed up by measurements of the signals coming out the speaker end of the cable. Their conclusion was that as long as the cable is of sufficiently large gauge to keep losses to a minimum and as long as you don't do stupid stuff with the cable (like route it alongside a metal beam or make a tightly-wound coil out of the excess), the lamp cord worked just as well and was much cheaper.
Oh well...the managers' eyes probably would've just glazed over on the phrase "double-blind."