Why isn't everyone screaming this? I'm facing a similar question at the moment. My site is going to be pretty much a hobbyist thing so I probably don't need to worry about performance and scalability too much at the moment. Security is my biggest concern. I can't believe it doesn't even feature on the list of concerns.
Exactly, its very hard to understand why they are not using the anti-grav technology recovered from the alien spaceships to protect the shuttle. An anti-grav forcefield would surely offer the required protection without arousing suspicion of an alternative means of propulsion.
Also watching the painstaking analysis of the heat shielding is galling when we know there is a fleet of US Spaceships crewed by non-terrestrial officers that could just do a visual inspection in a fly by rather than mucking about with that cumbersome boom.
What I'd like to see is NASA, the ESA, China, Japan, India, Pakistan and any other country who wants to join in working together to get things into orbit.
Like putting man on the moon, the shuttle design was heavily influenced by the need for a propaganda tool. My hope is that we are reaching a climate where there will be more political captial in achieving world peace and unity - maybe these powerful political forces can be channeled more productively.
I like the idea of a space elevator. Unfortunatley the viablity of the shuttle is not just an engineering decision. There's too much political capital in a vision of X-wing fighters buzzing about the place. America might be able to lead the way on this one while its still ahead. Pretty soon though I'll have to be making the same appeal to the Chineese. Which is OK by me, but I want to see us working together productively on this sooner rather than later.
That interview was a good listen. Thanks for the link.
I am concerned that the alleged crime did not take place on American soil. So far as I know this bloke hasn't even been to the States. Certainly the "hacking" seems to have been done from a London flat.
If it happened on British soil the Americans should have the decency to respect the British courts to deal with it under British law. However decency is not something that we've come to expect from America in it its dealings with the rest of the world.
I suppose this does raise a serious question about where it actually did happen. Personally I'd say that while the effects were in the states, the direction and motivation happened in the UK and so this is where the crime took place. This seems to be by far the simplest and most pragmatic legal interpretation.
The ammount of damage he is being charged with doing seems to be ludicrous. Ok I can see how the compromised systems needed to be rebuilt....but their state of security was patently so shocking that this was required in any case - he saved them money by pointing this out sooner rather than later.
It also seems clear that this guys motivations were not malicious to the United States. I think the British courts should tell the US to stop whinging and concentrate on securing their systems. Even if their systems were unlawfully penetrated they lacked dillegence in insuring that data, particularly confidential data was not in the plain on any machine ever connected to a network.
The revelation that there exists a fleet of American spaceships is rather worrying. Is the American military under alien control? I don't believe these people could've sorted out a space fleet by themeselves - not without a blue room. Was the bombing of Iraq carried out under alien orders? If Bush and his supporters think they can get away with planting a load of goof on some computers and saying "I didn't do it", they've got another thing coming. I don't believe a word of it.
Seriously though this guy is obviously harmless. If he did any harm then its not his fault. If someone nipped into an army base and made off with some missiles and tanks then blew a few small towns up then it would be right to be more concerned with military security than the actions of the passing nutter. In fact I'd hold the military wholly responsible. I demand my right to be a passing nutter! Whether u grant it or not there will always be passing nutters.
I'd agree that Linux isn't ready to be installed by average users. Neither is Windows. I think MacOS is the only OS I'd be happy to see installed by anyone - partly down to Apple's good work but also because of hardware compatibility.
I'd disagree about the need to install alongside windows and shift settings etc. Mostly only nerds upgrade their OS. People buy a computer they switch it on and expect it to work. Many companies are already selling PCs with linux preinstalled. It is up to them to choose good default software.
I think Linux is perfectly ready as a configured desktop for any user. Many of my friends come round my house and have no problem operating my computers - they're often unaware they're using Linux. A browser is a browser. No one has had a problem using Juk.
What I think is more important is that Linux is ready to be connected to a network. Windows obviously isn't. As network services are essential to so many desktop applications this has to be an important consideration.
Maybe MacOS X is ready for the generic desktop and networks. But after being shafted 3 times by Apple hardware I'll wait until I can install it on the quality components of my choice.
For most desktop applications I think all 3 major OS's are 'ready'. The network security is really where the pinch comes. Businesses need secure data and robust systems - a lot of people should be fired for choosing windows.
Remember that recently it appears dotnet is going to be decoupled from the Longhorn OS. I would speculate that IE7 will still use DotNet 2.0 API for its security features. Although the DotNet framework will not be part of the kernel itself - the security features will not be so comprehensively applied but apps like IE will use them.
I am wondering whether DotNet 2.0 is going to be available on W2K. Maybe it will but some features will not work - features that IE7 will need.
I'm also in IT and very much non-zealot about platform choices. One think I do wonder about in your anecdote....Does the ibook get used by your kids. I'm not certain but I think kids might be hazardous in a lot of computing environments.
A good friend has just finished a philosophy thesis - at the start she bought a compaq laptop and steadfastly refused to connect it to any network until her thesis was finished! A good decision I think but its sad that this is so. When everything was handed in she connected it to the internet - everything started going wrong and I got called! I had never seen such an infected PC. It was an unpatched XP1. Now that their kids are not running with admin rights, there's virus, spyware and firewall protection hopefully things should be better for them..... but just watching the kids browsing behaviour is pretty terrifying. Would you type "paris hilton" into the google search on the ibook, follow a whole bunch of random links and download random stuff from there? I'll be interested to see how their new fortified laptop stands up to this kind of behaviour.
BTW. Not having kids I haven't really considered them greatly in terms of computing. Maybe I haven't looked hard enough but there seems to be a shortage of services and especially standards that should be in place to provide a safe online experience.
Thanks for your suggestions. It's good to hear other people are having success with it. I hope I manage to get the performance I want without buying another tuner card.
I was hoping my high spec cpu and ram would allow me to comfortably do the encoding in software. The box came unwanted from a friend at very low cost (only had 128Mb ram) - I already chucked an extra 512Mb ram at it. The tuner card was also real cheap from DSE.
Probably wouldn't meet the expectations of a real ricer but...
My hard drive hdparm -tT output looks ok, it is:/dev/hda:
Timing cached reads: 852 MB in 2.01 seconds = 424.79 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 114 MB in 3.02 seconds = 37.70 MB/sec
I think my video is ok as well - I'm using the nvidia drivers:
12070 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2414.000 FPS
It's true it doesn't seem that I can gain with more RAM. top shows only a bit of swap space being used and plenty of disk buffering happening. The processor is hitting 90% which is concerning. I'm using a 2.6 kernel with -O2 CFLAGs. Perhaps I should add -fomit-framepointer. NPTL are available and glibc uses them exclusively.
I'm already using the RTJpeg codec. I'll experiment with its settings. During setup I increased the capture resolution from 480x480 to 720x576 (recommended in my cards manual for PAL). This did seem to give me better results - but I'll try a lower capture resolution too.
It's great for mythtv to have this potential revenue source. I hope it works out. It is a shame the service isn't available more widely around the world, but there are many methods to fill your myth database. Hopefully though this new system will do well and extend to other parts of the world. It needn't be expensive to run or to subscribe to, yet the volume of subscribers has potential to pay for a lot of development effort.
I've just got my first mythtv system working 2 days ago and I'm happy as larry. The advert detection is working very well. Being able to pause a live show is great. The program guide and recording scheduling functionalitys make choosing what you want to watch easy. I find its best to record stuff you want to watch because the advert detection is so good. It is possible to do advert detection during recording. There are performance constraints of course. Another nice function is slowing down or speeding up playback without altering the pitch of the audio. When you watch Attack of the Clones you can speed up through some of the crappy stilted dialogue and slow down in some of the excellent action scenes!
It's a bit of a bitch to setup the whole system and it does take quite a lot of hardware resource but the results are so good that I really think this thing is going to attract a wider and wider audience. It's not just the TV....various plugins provide gaming, music, weather information, news, dvd playing, movie playing, photo viewing and importing. Altogether it makes an excellent entertainment centre in any living room.
I have an Athlon-XP 2.4 with 640Mb RAM, a generic SAA7134 (LifeView 3000) tuner which does no hardware mpeg encoding. Its got an Nvidia GeForce FX5500 graphics card with a Tv-out connected to my...TV! I'm using an old style terrestrial broadcast system and I have to deal with some signal noise - so I have a deinterlacer and a denoiser in my playback filter chain - this adds to the processor load. It's too much for the system to be able to simmultaneously record a showing and playback (current or previously recorded) showing without dropping frames on the playback. I think I might need a tuner card with hardware encoding. First I'll look at throwing in more RAM or faster hard drive setup if appropriate. You can have multiple backends and multiple frontends. Also more than one tuner card in the same backend. I'd really like to keep it all in the box under the tellie though, with the laptop as an occasional frontend.
...until people realised that a raw bluetooth connection wasn't a good indicator for romantic success. Even so, clutching your cellphone and willing it to transform into the partner of your dreams is a good way to avoid eye contact with all those people you are so close to and yet so far away from in the tube.
Maybe some software on your phone that stored some key personal questions and personality profiles and automatically scanned for matches would have worked better. Version 2 will automatically arrange legal documents and allow access to well signed and verified medical reports. Carriage number 3 will be like a bar, 2 a bedroom (ewww, sex on the tube!) and 1 a mobile registry office. People will be flirting with their partners by waiting at the appropriate point on the platform.
Personally, I'd recommend forgetting the whole bluetooth / people thing and just going for shrews. They are much simpler. But unfortunately still too complicated to make a proper computer model.
I don't mean the developer documentation. I meant documentation for using the shell. On a unix system you can find what shell you're running by typing 'ps' and then do eg. 'man bash' . There I can find out exactly how to redirect input / output, pipe commands, write a script. If there's anything I'm having a problem with I can type eg. 'man -k priority', easy access to the knowledge needed to deal with the priority of commands. The man pages often solve any administration / setup problem and serve as a jumping off point to get to more extensive documentation.
I do agree that the msdn documentation is often excellent. Though it is overly influenced by their product marketing. I think it tries to steer you too much to particular technology choices. The API stuff is very good. Access to it is not so great....the library application is very buggy and has primitive searching capabilities. Online searching is crap too....it was interesting to note at a developer's conference that the MS people were all using google with 'site:msdn.com' added.
I've spent most of my computing life (20 years since I was 12) working on CP/M, macos, and linux. 2 years ago I became a Window developer.
I've found that I need administrative access to do a lot of the things that I need to as a developer. I do these things many times a day. On linux I would just sudo when I needed it. I think you can run commands as a different user on windows too, I did try it once but kept hitting problems. There's no 'man' command! DOS documentation sucks. I haven't found the equivalent of a sticky bit that I can use for my build scripts that need admin access. A lot of Windows apps are built from visual studio which doesn't have a GUI to switch to admin access for parts of the build. The philosophy is just not there - yes we should push for it.
When I was developing for macos in a much bigger company the windows team used to be more sorted in this respect - but then there was a big IT department to support them - developers can't afford to spend too much of their time on system admin. Some developer's are into it and some aren't. The lead programmer on my current team is so not into it (but he is a brilliant programmer) - to make things easy for him he has domain admin - everyone knows his password! No I won't say where I work! We don't have an IT department. I think big companies that can afford IT staff do tend to be better over stuff like this.
I don't think many people would start an X session as root in linux. A lot of people will only switch to root as needed. Some are better than others about being fussy about what they do as root. (I bet a lot of people compile their kernels as root) On Windows on the other hand it is very common to login to the graphical environment as admin. A lot of the admin tools have GUI. I think both Windows and linux could be made better by making it very awkward (impossible out of the box) to start an X session / login to Windows as an admin user. I have seen new linux users start X sessions as root....normally to get things set up (often being used to Windows)....but then sometimes things don't work for them as normal users and they just give up and always login as root!
I suppose I might be guilty of the same laziness when it comes to being a new Windows user - but I'm not being paid to admin my machine....In fact I use a linux box to mail and surf so as to lower risks a bit - we were asked to find ways of avoiding Outlook - so I found an old PII and blatted gentoo on it. There is a big difference between Windows and Linux though...a lot of install stuff is done on the command line on linux. Most big distro's make it clear you're being an idiot for running X as root. I haven't seen a linux distro that doesn't make you, or strongly advise you to create a normal user account as well as a root account. Having groups as well as users makes things a lot more flexible. Unix has always been a multi-user environment. Windows just hasn't been designed that way. You've got to laugh.
Britain is not a socialist country. However.... a license fee is already required for a tuner on a graphics card. You only need one license per household regardless of how many tuner units you have.
I think the issue here has parallels to the tv license tax in terms of its application. The proposed tax (not that I necessarily agree with it) is however on computer ownership not on the ability to receive a signal of some kind. I suppose if your computer is connected to a network which can receive broadcast media and you use a software based decoder rather than a set top box - there is a blurring line.
The TV tax goes to fund the BBC (there seems to be a large consensus that the BBC is a good thing). I haven't seen it proposed but what if the computer tax funded a BCC (British Computer Consortium) which could develop software and hardware. Suppose the BCC jumped on the linux bandwagon....that would give MS something to whine about. There was a news item recently about the British government providing a virus alert system....BCC could fund stuff like this. It's scope could be wider and it could generally protect the data security of British business.
Would you pay £100 quid a year to make MS look (to the masses) inferior and featureless next to BCC Linux? Just like the BBC currently makes Fox / CNN look like crap?
You can already use your games console without a license. Just remove the tuner from your tv. A tv without a tuner doesn't need a license.
The other way would take more space - remove the existing power supply and convert it to run on batteries. I guess you'd need a few big car batteries to run a big modern tv. You'd better check up on current regs, but when I was at uni 12 years ago a license was not required for a battery operated unit.
I think that charging more for dual core licenses / multi cpu is very fair, it benefits the small guy / business and its supportable by the market. Here's why in a nutshell....
Development of multi-threaded applications is more expensive. The scope of possible flows of execution is vastly increased. Design, programming and testing time has to be put into achieving a proper interaction between threads. This can add up to a big overhead. However the performance benefits ban be large / necessary.
So if you have a small business / area hobbyist and are therefore not needing massive performance; not making the money from that performance; cannot justify a large expense to get that performance - but still want the functionality. It seems fair - because you're not really fully using the work behind that threadedness; and marketable - you cannot afford a huge license fee, yet you become a customer.
A large business on the other hand is fully taking advantage of the work and benefitting from it financially. Therefore they will pay more, they can afford too and it is right that they should do so.
It's a good kind of metering. There are other kinds of metering in software - like needing a server version of windows to handle more than 10? concurrent connections. Microsoft's counting of CPU counting has simply been a pragmatic one - in the future if the market makes sense they will count the cores.
Where I am it is illegal unless you make an announcement that the call is being recorded prior to starting the recording. The upshot of this is that my system announces it is recording while the company I'm talking to may make a similar announcement. There seems to be a widespread assumption that no confirmation from the other party is required. Its quite an interesting issue.
Making the raw data available is necessary for good science. The agencies should be applauded.
The fact that someone manages to have some fun / do some science with the raw images is a testament to the value they are getting from their tax dollar.
As far as science goes....the fact that there is so much data to analyze, coupled with the positive attitude of the agencies towards release, means that it is common place for people who did not gather the data to make discoveries about it. In such cases both parties deserve credit. Doing it any other way would set us back. The situation has some analogies with open source vs. closed software.
Ok some adverts can provide a moments amusement, but on the whole they are a pain. While the google ads are (at the moment) quite unobtrusive (especially with an adblocker!) they are still part of an industry which is crying out for a bloody good kicking.
Ads accross wireless medium: The airwaves belong to everyone. This is a limited resource so there has to be some regulation but we sure as hell don't want to piss it away on people trying to get their bullshit imagery into your head for their sordid profit.
Ads accross wires: I don't know about the States but in the places I have lived the telecommunications networks were set up with public funding. It seems that most places have now privatised their telecommunications networks, state assets, belonging to all, being sold for a fraction of their true value for the benefit of the rich. With the advent of VOIP and large scale public adhoc wireless networking the business model of the telecommunications companies is no longer viable and this basic resource should be brought back into the public domain.
Bill boards / train adverts: These things are nauseating. Why as human beings should we suffer this indignity? I'd prefer the raw sewage people used to throw onto the streets in Victorian times to the demeaning bullshit the advertiser assaults us with.
To sum it up......adverts STEAL our SUNSHINE.
Those of you who disagree with me will be pleased to know that I had to move to a small island in the Pacific to escape from all this...the universe is beautiful and the sun bestows its wealth on all!
Unfortunatley it looks like the political forces of the West have decided to lay waste to the world. One way or another all this advertising must stop.
Lifes a big trip....he's just doing something different. He hasn't stopped living.
One of the best things I ever did was take almost a year hiatus. I just quit my job, rented the house... what's the big deal. Never rely on a particular job still being there... even when you're in it... what happens if you get made redunant. Unless you're able to walk out of there you're a prisoner. So if the market in your area is looking that bad, I'd retrain or move. That's why I wasn't worried when I quit my job as a software engineer... it turned out to be easy to get another good job but if it hadn't, I'd probably be fitting gas boilers or going to law school.
Spending 8 months hiking in the mountains made be happier than anything ever has. Enjoy the world...its bloody cool. Personally I don't think the insurance policies are the best bit.
Many Presidents have been voted in to office since Hiroshima....given the state of war at the time no one would seriously suggest that the public should be appraised of new weapon development.
That said, I wouldn't regard the US as being a democracy. Even if it were you wouldn't expect your vote to count on every issue...but for something like this I think there would be a good case for referenda.
Slashdot Mirror
can u post your source?
Why isn't everyone screaming this? I'm facing a similar question at the moment. My site is going to be pretty much a hobbyist thing so I probably don't need to worry about performance and scalability too much at the moment. Security is my biggest concern. I can't believe it doesn't even feature on the list of concerns.
The article is very unclear and poorly written. I suspect an illegal paid for download service may have been involved?
I wouldn't put a cent into the pocket of this man. I wouldn't trust any software he had a hand in producing.
Thanks for the heads up.
Exactly, its very hard to understand why they are not using the anti-grav technology recovered from the alien spaceships to protect the shuttle. An anti-grav forcefield would surely offer the required protection without arousing suspicion of an alternative means of propulsion.
Also watching the painstaking analysis of the heat shielding is galling when we know there is a fleet of US Spaceships crewed by non-terrestrial officers that could just do a visual inspection in a fly by rather than mucking about with that cumbersome boom.
What I'd like to see is NASA, the ESA, China, Japan, India, Pakistan and any other country who wants to join in working together to get things into orbit.
Like putting man on the moon, the shuttle design was heavily influenced by the need for a propaganda tool. My hope is that we are reaching a climate where there will be more political captial in achieving world peace and unity - maybe these powerful political forces can be channeled more productively.
I like the idea of a space elevator. Unfortunatley the viablity of the shuttle is not just an engineering decision. There's too much political capital in a vision of X-wing fighters buzzing about the place. America might be able to lead the way on this one while its still ahead. Pretty soon though I'll have to be making the same appeal to the Chineese. Which is OK by me, but I want to see us working together productively on this sooner rather than later.
That interview was a good listen. Thanks for the link.
I am concerned that the alleged crime did not take place on American soil. So far as I know this bloke hasn't even been to the States. Certainly the "hacking" seems to have been done from a London flat.
If it happened on British soil the Americans should have the decency to respect the British courts to deal with it under British law. However decency is not something that we've come to expect from America in it its dealings with the rest of the world.
I suppose this does raise a serious question about where it actually did happen. Personally I'd say that while the effects were in the states, the direction and motivation happened in the UK and so this is where the crime took place. This seems to be by far the simplest and most pragmatic legal interpretation.
The ammount of damage he is being charged with doing seems to be ludicrous. Ok I can see how the compromised systems needed to be rebuilt....but their state of security was patently so shocking that this was required in any case - he saved them money by pointing this out sooner rather than later.
It also seems clear that this guys motivations were not malicious to the United States. I think the British courts should tell the US to stop whinging and concentrate on securing their systems. Even if their systems were unlawfully penetrated they lacked dillegence in insuring that data, particularly confidential data was not in the plain on any machine ever connected to a network.
The revelation that there exists a fleet of American spaceships is rather worrying. Is the American military under alien control? I don't believe these people could've sorted out a space fleet by themeselves - not without a blue room. Was the bombing of Iraq carried out under alien orders? If Bush and his supporters think they can get away with planting a load of goof on some computers and saying "I didn't do it", they've got another thing coming. I don't believe a word of it.
Seriously though this guy is obviously harmless. If he did any harm then its not his fault. If someone nipped into an army base and made off with some missiles and tanks then blew a few small towns up then it would be right to be more concerned with military security than the actions of the passing nutter. In fact I'd hold the military wholly responsible. I demand my right to be a passing nutter! Whether u grant it or not there will always be passing nutters.
I'd agree that Linux isn't ready to be installed by average users. Neither is Windows. I think MacOS is the only OS I'd be happy to see installed by anyone - partly down to Apple's good work but also because of hardware compatibility.
I'd disagree about the need to install alongside windows and shift settings etc. Mostly only nerds upgrade their OS. People buy a computer they switch it on and expect it to work. Many companies are already selling PCs with linux preinstalled. It is up to them to choose good default software.
I think Linux is perfectly ready as a configured desktop for any user. Many of my friends come round my house and have no problem operating my computers - they're often unaware they're using Linux. A browser is a browser. No one has had a problem using Juk.
What I think is more important is that Linux is ready to be connected to a network. Windows obviously isn't. As network services are essential to so many desktop applications this has to be an important consideration.
Maybe MacOS X is ready for the generic desktop and networks. But after being shafted 3 times by Apple hardware I'll wait until I can install it on the quality components of my choice.
For most desktop applications I think all 3 major OS's are 'ready'. The network security is really where the pinch comes. Businesses need secure data and robust systems - a lot of people should be fired for choosing windows.
Remember that recently it appears dotnet is going to be decoupled from the Longhorn OS. I would speculate that IE7 will still use DotNet 2.0 API for its security features. Although the DotNet framework will not be part of the kernel itself - the security features will not be so comprehensively applied but apps like IE will use them.
I am wondering whether DotNet 2.0 is going to be available on W2K. Maybe it will but some features will not work - features that IE7 will need.
I'm also in IT and very much non-zealot about platform choices. One think I do wonder about in your anecdote....Does the ibook get used by your kids. I'm not certain but I think kids might be hazardous in a lot of computing environments.
A good friend has just finished a philosophy thesis - at the start she bought a compaq laptop and steadfastly refused to connect it to any network until her thesis was finished! A good decision I think but its sad that this is so. When everything was handed in she connected it to the internet - everything started going wrong and I got called! I had never seen such an infected PC. It was an unpatched XP1. Now that their kids are not running with admin rights, there's virus, spyware and firewall protection hopefully things should be better for them..... but just watching the kids browsing behaviour is pretty terrifying. Would you type "paris hilton" into the google search on the ibook, follow a whole bunch of random links and download random stuff from there? I'll be interested to see how their new fortified laptop stands up to this kind of behaviour.
BTW. Not having kids I haven't really considered them greatly in terms of computing. Maybe I haven't looked hard enough but there seems to be a shortage of services and especially standards that should be in place to provide a safe online experience.
I can't visualise the physics of the electricity generation from the information in the article. Can anyone provide a clearer picture?
Thanks
Thanks for your suggestions. It's good to hear other people are having success with it. I hope I manage to get the performance I want without buying another tuner card.
/dev/hda:
I was hoping my high spec cpu and ram would allow me to comfortably do the encoding in software. The box came unwanted from a friend at very low cost (only had 128Mb ram) - I already chucked an extra 512Mb ram at it. The tuner card was also real cheap from DSE.
Probably wouldn't meet the expectations of a real ricer but...
My hard drive hdparm -tT output looks ok, it is:
Timing cached reads: 852 MB in 2.01 seconds = 424.79 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 114 MB in 3.02 seconds = 37.70 MB/sec
I think my video is ok as well - I'm using the nvidia drivers:
12070 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2414.000 FPS
It's true it doesn't seem that I can gain with more RAM. top shows only a bit of swap space being used and plenty of disk buffering happening. The processor is hitting 90% which is concerning. I'm using a 2.6 kernel with -O2 CFLAGs. Perhaps I should add -fomit-framepointer. NPTL are available and glibc uses them exclusively.
I'm already using the RTJpeg codec. I'll experiment with its settings. During setup I increased the capture resolution from 480x480 to 720x576 (recommended in my cards manual for PAL). This did seem to give me better results - but I'll try a lower capture resolution too.
It's great for mythtv to have this potential revenue source. I hope it works out. It is a shame the service isn't available more widely around the world, but there are many methods to fill your myth database. Hopefully though this new system will do well and extend to other parts of the world. It needn't be expensive to run or to subscribe to, yet the volume of subscribers has potential to pay for a lot of development effort.
...TV! I'm using an old style terrestrial broadcast system and I have to deal with some signal noise - so I have a deinterlacer and a denoiser in my playback filter chain - this adds to the processor load. It's too much for the system to be able to simmultaneously record a showing and playback (current or previously recorded) showing without dropping frames on the playback. I think I might need a tuner card with hardware encoding. First I'll look at throwing in more RAM or faster hard drive setup if appropriate. You can have multiple backends and multiple frontends. Also more than one tuner card in the same backend. I'd really like to keep it all in the box under the tellie though, with the laptop as an occasional frontend.
I've just got my first mythtv system working 2 days ago and I'm happy as larry. The advert detection is working very well. Being able to pause a live show is great. The program guide and recording scheduling functionalitys make choosing what you want to watch easy. I find its best to record stuff you want to watch because the advert detection is so good. It is possible to do advert detection during recording. There are performance constraints of course. Another nice function is slowing down or speeding up playback without altering the pitch of the audio. When you watch Attack of the Clones you can speed up through some of the crappy stilted dialogue and slow down in some of the excellent action scenes!
It's a bit of a bitch to setup the whole system and it does take quite a lot of hardware resource but the results are so good that I really think this thing is going to attract a wider and wider audience. It's not just the TV....various plugins provide gaming, music, weather information, news, dvd playing, movie playing, photo viewing and importing. Altogether it makes an excellent entertainment centre in any living room.
I have an Athlon-XP 2.4 with 640Mb RAM, a generic SAA7134 (LifeView 3000) tuner which does no hardware mpeg encoding. Its got an Nvidia GeForce FX5500 graphics card with a Tv-out connected to my
Yep, apparently some people like to use a tube and a small rodent.....and well, yes its illegal in a lot of countries!
Not me! If I had any shrews then I'd keep em in a cage or put them down....they'd play havoc with the native fauna in NZ
...until people realised that a raw bluetooth connection wasn't a good indicator for romantic success. Even so, clutching your cellphone and willing it to transform into the partner of your dreams is a good way to avoid eye contact with all those people you are so close to and yet so far away from in the tube.
Maybe some software on your phone that stored some key personal questions and personality profiles and automatically scanned for matches would have worked better. Version 2 will automatically arrange legal documents and allow access to well signed and verified medical reports. Carriage number 3 will be like a bar, 2 a bedroom (ewww, sex on the tube!) and 1 a mobile registry office. People will be flirting with their partners by waiting at the appropriate point on the platform.
Personally, I'd recommend forgetting the whole bluetooth / people thing and just going for shrews. They are much simpler. But unfortunately still too complicated to make a proper computer model.
I don't mean the developer documentation. I meant documentation for using the shell. On a unix system you can find what shell you're running by typing 'ps' and then do eg. 'man bash' . There I can find out exactly how to redirect input / output, pipe commands, write a script. If there's anything I'm having a problem with I can type eg. 'man -k priority', easy access to the knowledge needed to deal with the priority of commands. The man pages often solve any administration / setup problem and serve as a jumping off point to get to more extensive documentation.
I do agree that the msdn documentation is often excellent. Though it is overly influenced by their product marketing. I think it tries to steer you too much to particular technology choices. The API stuff is very good. Access to it is not so great....the library application is very buggy and has primitive searching capabilities. Online searching is crap too....it was interesting to note at a developer's conference that the MS people were all using google with 'site:msdn.com' added.
I've spent most of my computing life (20 years since I was 12) working on CP/M, macos, and linux. 2 years ago I became a Window developer.
I've found that I need administrative access to do a lot of the things that I need to as a developer. I do these things many times a day. On linux I would just sudo when I needed it. I think you can run commands as a different user on windows too, I did try it once but kept hitting problems. There's no 'man' command! DOS documentation sucks. I haven't found the equivalent of a sticky bit that I can use for my build scripts that need admin access. A lot of Windows apps are built from visual studio which doesn't have a GUI to switch to admin access for parts of the build. The philosophy is just not there - yes we should push for it. When I was developing for macos in a much bigger company the windows team used to be more sorted in this respect - but then there was a big IT department to support them - developers can't afford to spend too much of their time on system admin. Some developer's are into it and some aren't. The lead programmer on my current team is so not into it (but he is a brilliant programmer) - to make things easy for him he has domain admin - everyone knows his password! No I won't say where I work! We don't have an IT department. I think big companies that can afford IT staff do tend to be better over stuff like this.
I don't think many people would start an X session as root in linux. A lot of people will only switch to root as needed. Some are better than others about being fussy about what they do as root. (I bet a lot of people compile their kernels as root) On Windows on the other hand it is very common to login to the graphical environment as admin. A lot of the admin tools have GUI. I think both Windows and linux could be made better by making it very awkward (impossible out of the box) to start an X session / login to Windows as an admin user. I have seen new linux users start X sessions as root....normally to get things set up (often being used to Windows)....but then sometimes things don't work for them as normal users and they just give up and always login as root!
I suppose I might be guilty of the same laziness when it comes to being a new Windows user - but I'm not being paid to admin my machine....In fact I use a linux box to mail and surf so as to lower risks a bit - we were asked to find ways of avoiding Outlook - so I found an old PII and blatted gentoo on it. There is a big difference between Windows and Linux though...a lot of install stuff is done on the command line on linux. Most big distro's make it clear you're being an idiot for running X as root. I haven't seen a linux distro that doesn't make you, or strongly advise you to create a normal user account as well as a root account. Having groups as well as users makes things a lot more flexible. Unix has always been a multi-user environment. Windows just hasn't been designed that way. You've got to laugh.
Britain is not a socialist country. However.... a license fee is already required for a tuner on a graphics card. You only need one license per household regardless of how many tuner units you have.
I think the issue here has parallels to the tv license tax in terms of its application. The proposed tax (not that I necessarily agree with it) is however on computer ownership not on the ability to receive a signal of some kind. I suppose if your computer is connected to a network which can receive broadcast media and you use a software based decoder rather than a set top box - there is a blurring line.
The TV tax goes to fund the BBC (there seems to be a large consensus that the BBC is a good thing). I haven't seen it proposed but what if the computer tax funded a BCC (British Computer Consortium) which could develop software and hardware. Suppose the BCC jumped on the linux bandwagon....that would give MS something to whine about. There was a news item recently about the British government providing a virus alert system....BCC could fund stuff like this. It's scope could be wider and it could generally protect the data security of British business.
Would you pay £100 quid a year to make MS look (to the masses) inferior and featureless next to BCC Linux? Just like the BBC currently makes Fox / CNN look like crap?
You can already use your games console without a license. Just remove the tuner from your tv. A tv without a tuner doesn't need a license. The other way would take more space - remove the existing power supply and convert it to run on batteries. I guess you'd need a few big car batteries to run a big modern tv. You'd better check up on current regs, but when I was at uni 12 years ago a license was not required for a battery operated unit.
I think that charging more for dual core licenses / multi cpu is very fair, it benefits the small guy / business and its supportable by the market. Here's why in a nutshell....
Development of multi-threaded applications is more expensive. The scope of possible flows of execution is vastly increased. Design, programming and testing time has to be put into achieving a proper interaction between threads. This can add up to a big overhead. However the performance benefits ban be large / necessary.
So if you have a small business / area hobbyist and are therefore not needing massive performance; not making the money from that performance; cannot justify a large expense to get that performance - but still want the functionality. It seems fair - because you're not really fully using the work behind that threadedness; and marketable - you cannot afford a huge license fee, yet you become a customer.
A large business on the other hand is fully taking advantage of the work and benefitting from it financially. Therefore they will pay more, they can afford too and it is right that they should do so.
It's a good kind of metering. There are other kinds of metering in software - like needing a server version of windows to handle more than 10? concurrent connections. Microsoft's counting of CPU counting has simply been a pragmatic one - in the future if the market makes sense they will count the cores.
Where I am it is illegal unless you make an announcement that the call is being recorded prior to starting the recording. The upshot of this is that my system announces it is recording while the company I'm talking to may make a similar announcement. There seems to be a widespread assumption that no confirmation from the other party is required.
Its quite an interesting issue.
Absoloutley.
Making the raw data available is necessary for good science. The agencies should be applauded.
The fact that someone manages to have some fun / do some science with the raw images is a testament to the value they are getting from their tax dollar.
As far as science goes....the fact that there is so much data to analyze, coupled with the positive attitude of the agencies towards release, means that it is common place for people who did not gather the data to make discoveries about it. In such cases both parties deserve credit. Doing it any other way would set us back. The situation has some analogies with open source vs. closed software.
Ok some adverts can provide a moments amusement, but on the whole they are a pain. While the google ads are (at the moment) quite unobtrusive (especially with an adblocker!) they are still part of an industry which is crying out for a bloody good kicking.
Ads accross wireless medium:
The airwaves belong to everyone. This is a limited resource so there has to be some regulation but we sure as hell don't want to piss it away on people trying to get their bullshit imagery into your head for their sordid profit.
Ads accross wires:
I don't know about the States but in the places I have lived the telecommunications networks were set up with public funding. It seems that most places have now privatised their telecommunications networks, state assets, belonging to all, being sold for a fraction of their true value for the benefit of the rich. With the advent of VOIP and large scale public adhoc wireless networking the business model of the telecommunications companies is no longer viable and this basic resource should be brought back into the public domain.
Bill boards / train adverts:
These things are nauseating. Why as human beings should we suffer this indignity? I'd prefer the raw sewage people used to throw onto the streets in Victorian times to the demeaning bullshit the advertiser assaults us with.
To sum it up......adverts STEAL our SUNSHINE.
Those of you who disagree with me will be pleased to know that I had to move to a small island in the Pacific to escape from all this...the universe is beautiful and the sun bestows its wealth on all!
Unfortunatley it looks like the political forces of the West have decided to lay waste to the world. One way or another all this advertising must stop.
Lifes a big trip....he's just doing something different. He hasn't stopped living.
... what's the big deal. Never rely on a particular job still being there ... even when you're in it ... what happens if you get made redunant. Unless you're able to walk out of there you're a prisoner. So if the market in your area is looking that bad, I'd retrain or move. That's why I wasn't worried when I quit my job as a software engineer ... it turned out to be easy to get another good job but if it hadn't, I'd probably be fitting gas boilers or going to law school.
One of the best things I ever did was take almost a year hiatus. I just quit my job, rented the house
Spending 8 months hiking in the mountains made be happier than anything ever has. Enjoy the world...its bloody cool. Personally I don't think the insurance policies are the best bit.
Have fun.
Democracy doesn't need to be unaminous.
Many Presidents have been voted in to office since Hiroshima....given the state of war at the time no one would seriously suggest that the public should be appraised of new weapon development.
That said, I wouldn't regard the US as being a democracy. Even if it were you wouldn't expect your vote to count on every issue...but for something like this I think there would be a good case for referenda.