Thanks for the reply, it's very handy and appreciated.
Certainly I expect that a DVB-T receiver would just write the raw bitstream to disk, thus not require much CPU for encoding as it's bypassed. I'd only need CPU for decoding, and an EPIA-800 can do DVDs (just) so it should do that.
I just read that there are multiple versions of the Nova-T and one isn't supported (yet). My EPIA-800 has a spare PCI slot so that's all good.
1) What hardware can and can't run MythTV? a) In particular, could a VIA EPIA-800 system run it (recording, playback, live tv, etc)?
2) Does it work with DVB-T (digital terrestrial) in the UK? What hardware for PCs can receive DVD-T, or can it use cheap USB receivers?
3) TV Guide - does it recognise DVB-T 7-day guide and now & next? Digital text?
This would go nicely in my planned shed PC, which wil have the above hardware (from an old system of mine) for internet and music. If I can add a cheap DVB-T card and add this functionality that would be even better.
Apple gets a reasonable amount of patents, so I suppose they are innovative, but it is hard to tell in a world of obvious patents.
How many patents do Dell, HP, Gateway, etc, get?
Apple tend to innovate more at the package level than the component level. They might make products that other people have done before, but they make the whole package palatable to the purchaser, and thus desirable. They make it look good, work simply and easily, and these are things that PC makers are going to have trouble with as they don't have their own software stack incorporating an OS up through high end applications.
And they do these things with rapid speed. Another respondent says it is just a nicely packaged nano-ITX system. Problem is, nano-ITX is barely available a year after the Mini was released. I think he meant mini-ITX, although the mini's motherboard is smaller than that. Again, the mini is more integrated and more powerful (I guess a 1.5GHz G4 is twice as powerful as a 1.2GHz C3, and that's before SIMD).
$400 million value homes -> $8 million tax income via a 2% property tax (I assume).
Unfortunately the house is only worth $121,000, so the actual owed taxes were $2420, and that's assuming that the 2% tax rate applies at all values. It might only be 0.5% at that low a value, for example.
Why not just add more to the national debt and ignore the $8m shortfall. It'd hardly dent the trillions of debt.:p (sod trying to be responsible with money, hehe)
My iBook has been doing the fancy 'ripple' effect stuff since I got it, some 6 months ago (the last update). Of course I disabled Dashboard because I don't need it or want it, and fancy effects are only good for a couple of weeks anyway.
The Mac Mini is the only one without the required hardware. It's near the end of its life though, and during its life it still did everything else on the GPU.
That was the only benefit of a custom architecture - Apple had to use discrete graphics chips which even if they weren't great, were better than integrated chipsets on the PC side. So they ran the interface well, and they could implement it earlier.
Probably because audio data needs to be compressed before sending it, which requires CPU time, even for basic audio compression algorithms. The DS may have two processors, but neither is that fast, and I bet that even basic compression would use up significant CPU time.
Sure, I bet they're recording in mono 8-bit at 22kHz, so the datarate is only 22kB/s, but with a couple of people that could saturate the uplink of many home broadband connections even without the gameplay traffic. Zap in some simple voice compression and you've got a ~4kB/s data stream, much more convenient.
Certainly the next GTA game, online or not, will be very clearly labelled 18. The install will make this very clear too, and disclaim all liabilities for underage players playing the game. Maybe Take Two could make a campaign for parental responsibility at the launch as well, to draw off the inevitable 14 year old who shot someone in real life claiming that GTA did it.
On a side note, how can an unrated post be modded 'overrated'?
Into an online massive world, where you strive to be a gang leader / mafia leader / etc against other real players. Think GTA:SA Gang Wars, but with real people, real gangs, real gang members.
Yeah, gang == MMORPG guild, deal with it.
You could be a hick gang leader in the boonies. You could run a business pimping, or selling drugs/etc.
Of course, the car is the central point. Getting cars will be harder, none of this 'run up and get car' business. You'll need to learn how to do it. You'll start off on a bike, try to join a gang... eventually get a car, you've got to look after it, or you'll lose it in an accident.
Oh, time to go home. Sod this post, time for pr0n and food.
But not for the majority, otherwise it would all fall down as any earnings from the game would end up being pumped back into the game. Just like real life. The scary thing is that some people are probably paying more for in-game clothes/furniture than they do for their real-life self.
But yeah, would be nice to be in on the receiving end of it at the moment. Until more people start getting creative, creating competition and driving prices down anyway.
Sorry, but with online gaming the updated team details, players, stats, etc, could easily be accessed by a game and used to update the relevant details.
People know this, and they aren't going to pay $50 for an update which is basically only that.
When they have a next generation console, they will buy the game however, because it will have better graphics. Again, they'll do this only once. That's if they bother with the next generation console.
Sports games are the worst offenders here, but it is hard to get excited about any sequel unless it brings something new to the scene. And this type of originality is what is lacking. It is hard to get excited by TheSameGame... 3!!! Think back to Tomb Raider. Each game was better than the previous one, adding features, until pretty much all the modern 3D platformer features were added. You can't get much further. There's only so many ways to jump/climb/etc. The current consoles don't have the power to get to the next level of immersiveness.
Again, Nintendo will bring out a whole ramp of '$Sequel Revolution' games, and they'll all have new controller features as well as new graphics, and they'll be bought by the boat load.
God, sometimes anything feels like it would be better than Finder!
No. I think* that Apple will develop a cut down Carbon UI toolkit and run it on top of Darwin for ARM (I bet it exists), creating a Mobile Mac OS X.
They'll get the Palm side to develop hardware based around Intel's XScale processor, and run this cut down Mac OS X on top. Sure, it won't be binary compatible, and source compatible only when the source only uses the APIs that are available on the cut down variant. But it won't take much work to port useful tools to it, or to create new ones. mCal, mTunes, mMail, mSafari. m is the new i, and should be used even where i wasn't.
(* Actually, I think the whole story is a pile of steaming bull turds, hence my post is ridiculous *)
And my tool was DPaint IV, not some fancy Photoshop.
Per-pixel 'texture' editing, bitch. Dozens an hour. Sure, they were smaller (16x16 pixels) but I imagine they take the same amount of time in the end given the tool superiority and colour range available today. Why? because I wanted to, and then I'd stick them in the game I'd be writing at the same time. I'd only have a few hours to do it in. Level design would be done in a primitive editor, or by hand entering data.
In the end it seems like a pretty standard course in terms of work that has to be done. THey're paying $24k a year to learn 'creativity' though, and that's something that best comes naturally from someone who wants to do it. Artistic skill, likewise, can only be further developed if there's some to start off with.
Melanie Brandman has been victim of two BlackBerry soakings -- but says hers has never fallen into the toilet. Once, in the bathroom of a hotel in Turkey, she put her handbag in one sink while running water in a second one. She accidentally tripped the first sink's automatic sensor and flooded the bag with water
How do these people get to be company presidents?
Do they think 'where's a good place for my bag... hmm, the floor - no, too low. ah, by the sink! No! INSIDE A SINK!'
All I can hope for is that these people will work themselves to death early on in life, and have no children.
TVs in the bathroom. Why? Do you hate your spouse and kids that much?
Seriously, if you find yourself watching that much television you need to reassess your priorities. Not that I care, the fewer people out there DOING/CREATING stuff the better. They can all sit like pigs watching TV, their brains gently decomposing in their heads (that isn't earwax coming out of their ears!) whilst I do stuff* and feel accomplished and happy.
*Well, I would, but there's a good comedy show on tonight that I can't miss, and might as well watch the news afterwards, and then there's a film with killer robots in it.
I think Apple's marketshare was around 5% the last time they said anything about it, last month. Seems the Mac Mini and iMac G5 did improve their rather piss poor marketshares since a couple of years beforehand!
Still, Apple has come a long way since 10 years ago.
I remember the Macs at school then. They really did suck. A lot. Looked nicer than the PCs though, but the OS and the keyboard and the mouse did suck.
Since then, the OS has overtaken Windows substantially, Windows gets reamed by viruses and spyware too easily, and Apple's hardware still looks nicer. 'Macs suck' is just a silly teenage opinion now, rather than being based upon any real fact. Still, the UK Macs still have the @ and " swapped from the usual Windows arrangement, and don't have a # on the keyboard! God knows why! They have that funny S thing, it has its own key!
However people use what they're used to, they're scared to change, they're sheep. It doesn't have the comforting blue E of vulnerability, I mean, Internet on it.
I got my PS2 and Gamecube used, they came with used games (including Ico with the postcards which according to eBay is worth quite a bit these days). I don't care about used games, or used music. Hell, play a game, finish it or get bored of it, sell it on amazon marketplace and fund your next game/music purchase.
For new games, I don't buy them straight away, I wait for the price to drop or for a strange pricing decision. Sometimes that nets me a bargain, such as Spellforce for a tenner on the release day.
TBH I very rarely pay more than a tenner for a game. Exceptions include GTA:SA (although I traded in some games from the aforementioned PS2 purchase that I never played to get it, so it only cost me £15 or so on release day) and GT4 (which I still suck at).
The only issue with my 'bargain hunt' gaming system is that I sometimes buy too many bargain games that I don't have time to play. Such as Metroid Prime.:( I just stopped myself from buying Thief III since I always wanted to get that, because I will have no time to play it!
The warmer in this case was keeping the coffee at 185F:
"Reports also indicate that McDonald's consistently keeps its coffee at 185 degrees, still approximately 20 degrees hotter than at other restaurants. Third degree burns occur at this temperature in just two to seven seconds, requiring skin grafting, debridement and whirlpool treatments that cost tens of thousands of dollars and result in permanent disfigurement, extreme pain and disability to the victims for many months, and in some cases, years."
I personally wouldn't blame the heat. I'd blame the retardo-containers they serve coffee in. A good solid mug of coffee is much less likely to tip over - but that'd add washing up to McDonald's staff skills list, cutting another 50% of people off the potential employee list. It isn't as if all tables in McDonalds are stable, and all the people around mean that accidental knocks are far more likely to happen.
It seems there was a serious problem if there were 700 cases prior to the well known one, and the effects are pretty major. It'd be idiotic to argue that nothing should have been done about it.
Re:Uh, Can We Say Together "Apple Portables"?
on
Always on Laptops
·
· Score: 1
I'll back this up. My iBook is never off, I can leave it for days in its case, and then get it out, flip up the lid and be doing stuff within a couple of seconds.
Far more useful than having this extra display ON the laptop (meaning you have to get out the laptop, orient it, etc) would be to have a subsystem that would work over bluetooth with a compatible phone/PDA/whatever to give you various status messages.
When taken to the extreme they unfairly restrict a person's trade.
E.g., Computer programmer writing games for Ubisoft, moves to EA. Cannot do so, as 'computer game programming' is competing.
Clearly if a programmer for an unreleased game in a certain genre with unique features left Ubisoft and joined EA to help write a game in the same genre, it'd be an issue. I don't see how it should stop them joining EA to program something in a different area.
If you want to retain your employees, then give them an incentive to remain with you, such as good working conditions, good wages, a fun job. Don't indenture them to you by restricting their freedoms if they choose to leave, i.e., work for us in this dark cellar, have no fun, no wage increase, oh and if you leave, we won't let you get another job except in MacDonalds.
(yes, that's taking it a bit too far, and EA aren't exactly renowned for their good working conditions and practices, but hey...)
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Thanks for the information, it's muchly appreciated. :)
Thanks for the reply, it's very handy and appreciated.
Certainly I expect that a DVB-T receiver would just write the raw bitstream to disk, thus not require much CPU for encoding as it's bypassed. I'd only need CPU for decoding, and an EPIA-800 can do DVDs (just) so it should do that.
I just read that there are multiple versions of the Nova-T and one isn't supported (yet). My EPIA-800 has a spare PCI slot so that's all good.
1) What hardware can and can't run MythTV?
a) In particular, could a VIA EPIA-800 system run it (recording, playback, live tv, etc)?
2) Does it work with DVB-T (digital terrestrial) in the UK? What hardware for PCs can receive DVD-T, or can it use cheap USB receivers?
3) TV Guide - does it recognise DVB-T 7-day guide and now & next? Digital text?
This would go nicely in my planned shed PC, which wil have the above hardware (from an old system of mine) for internet and music. If I can add a cheap DVB-T card and add this functionality that would be even better.
I too got a mini-itx motherboard and case in 2002.
:p
My only computer system that at retail hasn't lost any value, and it is over 3 years old!
Shame the performance sucks. I may turn it into a car pc or similar one day though, or a shed-pc
Apple gets a reasonable amount of patents, so I suppose they are innovative, but it is hard to tell in a world of obvious patents.
How many patents do Dell, HP, Gateway, etc, get?
Apple tend to innovate more at the package level than the component level. They might make products that other people have done before, but they make the whole package palatable to the purchaser, and thus desirable. They make it look good, work simply and easily, and these are things that PC makers are going to have trouble with as they don't have their own software stack incorporating an OS up through high end applications.
And they do these things with rapid speed. Another respondent says it is just a nicely packaged nano-ITX system. Problem is, nano-ITX is barely available a year after the Mini was released. I think he meant mini-ITX, although the mini's motherboard is smaller than that. Again, the mini is more integrated and more powerful (I guess a 1.5GHz G4 is twice as powerful as a 1.2GHz C3, and that's before SIMD).
$400 million value homes -> $8 million tax income via a 2% property tax (I assume).
Unfortunately the house is only worth $121,000, so the actual owed taxes were $2420, and that's assuming that the 2% tax rate applies at all values. It might only be 0.5% at that low a value, for example.
Why not just add more to the national debt and ignore the $8m shortfall. It'd hardly dent the trillions of debt.
My iBook has been doing the fancy 'ripple' effect stuff since I got it, some 6 months ago (the last update). Of course I disabled Dashboard because I don't need it or want it, and fancy effects are only good for a couple of weeks anyway.
The Mac Mini is the only one without the required hardware. It's near the end of its life though, and during its life it still did everything else on the GPU.
That was the only benefit of a custom architecture - Apple had to use discrete graphics chips which even if they weren't great, were better than integrated chipsets on the PC side. So they ran the interface well, and they could implement it earlier.
Probably because audio data needs to be compressed before sending it, which requires CPU time, even for basic audio compression algorithms. The DS may have two processors, but neither is that fast, and I bet that even basic compression would use up significant CPU time.
Sure, I bet they're recording in mono 8-bit at 22kHz, so the datarate is only 22kB/s, but with a couple of people that could saturate the uplink of many home broadband connections even without the gameplay traffic. Zap in some simple voice compression and you've got a ~4kB/s data stream, much more convenient.
I chose erlang after 8 years of Java programming which was followed by 8 years of Smalltalk.
So you started writing in Java in 1988, 7 years before its release?
Amazing.
Okay, it's a crap idea!
12 year olds shouldn't be playing the damn game.
Certainly the next GTA game, online or not, will be very clearly labelled 18. The install will make this very clear too, and disclaim all liabilities for underage players playing the game. Maybe Take Two could make a campaign for parental responsibility at the launch as well, to draw off the inevitable 14 year old who shot someone in real life claiming that GTA did it.
On a side note, how can an unrated post be modded 'overrated'?
Into an online massive world, where you strive to be a gang leader / mafia leader / etc against other real players. Think GTA:SA Gang Wars, but with real people, real gangs, real gang members.
... eventually get a car, you've got to look after it, or you'll lose it in an accident.
Yeah, gang == MMORPG guild, deal with it.
You could be a hick gang leader in the boonies. You could run a business pimping, or selling drugs/etc.
Of course, the car is the central point. Getting cars will be harder, none of this 'run up and get car' business. You'll need to learn how to do it. You'll start off on a bike, try to join a gang
Oh, time to go home. Sod this post, time for pr0n and food.
But not for the majority, otherwise it would all fall down as any earnings from the game would end up being pumped back into the game. Just like real life. The scary thing is that some people are probably paying more for in-game clothes/furniture than they do for their real-life self.
But yeah, would be nice to be in on the receiving end of it at the moment. Until more people start getting creative, creating competition and driving prices down anyway.
Sorry, but with online gaming the updated team details, players, stats, etc, could easily be accessed by a game and used to update the relevant details.
People know this, and they aren't going to pay $50 for an update which is basically only that.
When they have a next generation console, they will buy the game however, because it will have better graphics. Again, they'll do this only once. That's if they bother with the next generation console.
Sports games are the worst offenders here, but it is hard to get excited about any sequel unless it brings something new to the scene. And this type of originality is what is lacking. It is hard to get excited by TheSameGame... 3!!! Think back to Tomb Raider. Each game was better than the previous one, adding features, until pretty much all the modern 3D platformer features were added. You can't get much further. There's only so many ways to jump/climb/etc. The current consoles don't have the power to get to the next level of immersiveness.
Again, Nintendo will bring out a whole ramp of '$Sequel Revolution' games, and they'll all have new controller features as well as new graphics, and they'll be bought by the boat load.
God, sometimes anything feels like it would be better than Finder!
No. I think* that Apple will develop a cut down Carbon UI toolkit and run it on top of Darwin for ARM (I bet it exists), creating a Mobile Mac OS X.
They'll get the Palm side to develop hardware based around Intel's XScale processor, and run this cut down Mac OS X on top. Sure, it won't be binary compatible, and source compatible only when the source only uses the APIs that are available on the cut down variant. But it won't take much work to port useful tools to it, or to create new ones. mCal, mTunes, mMail, mSafari. m is the new i, and should be used even where i wasn't.
(* Actually, I think the whole story is a pile of steaming bull turds, hence my post is ridiculous *)
as a teenager.
And my tool was DPaint IV, not some fancy Photoshop.
Per-pixel 'texture' editing, bitch. Dozens an hour. Sure, they were smaller (16x16 pixels) but I imagine they take the same amount of time in the end given the tool superiority and colour range available today. Why? because I wanted to, and then I'd stick them in the game I'd be writing at the same time. I'd only have a few hours to do it in. Level design would be done in a primitive editor, or by hand entering data.
In the end it seems like a pretty standard course in terms of work that has to be done. THey're paying $24k a year to learn 'creativity' though, and that's something that best comes naturally from someone who wants to do it. Artistic skill, likewise, can only be further developed if there's some to start off with.
How do these people get to be company presidents?
Do they think 'where's a good place for my bag
All I can hope for is that these people will work themselves to death early on in life, and have no children.
I've run OpenBSD before. I even paid for it, and some OpenBSD posters. But not on a VAX.
TVs in the bathroom. Why? Do you hate your spouse and kids that much?
Seriously, if you find yourself watching that much television you need to reassess your priorities. Not that I care, the fewer people out there DOING/CREATING stuff the better. They can all sit like pigs watching TV, their brains gently decomposing in their heads (that isn't earwax coming out of their ears!) whilst I do stuff* and feel accomplished and happy.
*Well, I would, but there's a good comedy show on tonight that I can't miss, and might as well watch the news afterwards, and then there's a film with killer robots in it.
I think Apple's marketshare was around 5% the last time they said anything about it, last month. Seems the Mac Mini and iMac G5 did improve their rather piss poor marketshares since a couple of years beforehand!
Still, Apple has come a long way since 10 years ago.
I remember the Macs at school then. They really did suck. A lot. Looked nicer than the PCs though, but the OS and the keyboard and the mouse did suck.
Since then, the OS has overtaken Windows substantially, Windows gets reamed by viruses and spyware too easily, and Apple's hardware still looks nicer. 'Macs suck' is just a silly teenage opinion now, rather than being based upon any real fact. Still, the UK Macs still have the @ and " swapped from the usual Windows arrangement, and don't have a # on the keyboard! God knows why! They have that funny S thing, it has its own key!
However people use what they're used to, they're scared to change, they're sheep. It doesn't have the comforting blue E of vulnerability, I mean, Internet on it.
I got my PS2 and Gamecube used, they came with used games (including Ico with the postcards which according to eBay is worth quite a bit these days). I don't care about used games, or used music. Hell, play a game, finish it or get bored of it, sell it on amazon marketplace and fund your next game/music purchase.
:( I just stopped myself from buying Thief III since I always wanted to get that, because I will have no time to play it!
For new games, I don't buy them straight away, I wait for the price to drop or for a strange pricing decision. Sometimes that nets me a bargain, such as Spellforce for a tenner on the release day.
TBH I very rarely pay more than a tenner for a game. Exceptions include GTA:SA (although I traded in some games from the aforementioned PS2 purchase that I never played to get it, so it only cost me £15 or so on release day) and GT4 (which I still suck at).
The only issue with my 'bargain hunt' gaming system is that I sometimes buy too many bargain games that I don't have time to play. Such as Metroid Prime.
The warmer in this case was keeping the coffee at 185F:
"Reports also indicate that McDonald's consistently keeps its coffee at 185 degrees, still approximately 20 degrees hotter than at other restaurants. Third degree burns occur at this temperature in just two to seven seconds, requiring skin grafting, debridement and whirlpool treatments that cost tens of thousands of dollars and result in permanent disfigurement, extreme pain and disability to the victims for many months, and in some cases, years."
I personally wouldn't blame the heat. I'd blame the retardo-containers they serve coffee in. A good solid mug of coffee is much less likely to tip over - but that'd add washing up to McDonald's staff skills list, cutting another 50% of people off the potential employee list. It isn't as if all tables in McDonalds are stable, and all the people around mean that accidental knocks are far more likely to happen.
It seems there was a serious problem if there were 700 cases prior to the well known one, and the effects are pretty major. It'd be idiotic to argue that nothing should have been done about it.
I'll back this up. My iBook is never off, I can leave it for days in its case, and then get it out, flip up the lid and be doing stuff within a couple of seconds.
Far more useful than having this extra display ON the laptop (meaning you have to get out the laptop, orient it, etc) would be to have a subsystem that would work over bluetooth with a compatible phone/PDA/whatever to give you various status messages.
When taken to the extreme they unfairly restrict a person's trade.
E.g., Computer programmer writing games for Ubisoft, moves to EA. Cannot do so, as 'computer game programming' is competing.
Clearly if a programmer for an unreleased game in a certain genre with unique features left Ubisoft and joined EA to help write a game in the same genre, it'd be an issue. I don't see how it should stop them joining EA to program something in a different area.
If you want to retain your employees, then give them an incentive to remain with you, such as good working conditions, good wages, a fun job. Don't indenture them to you by restricting their freedoms if they choose to leave, i.e., work for us in this dark cellar, have no fun, no wage increase, oh and if you leave, we won't let you get another job except in MacDonalds.
(yes, that's taking it a bit too far, and EA aren't exactly renowned for their good working conditions and practices, but hey...)