While I hate RealNetworks and all it stands for, and will never forgive them for taking over online media with their crappy bloated players and codecs....I think I hate the movie industry just a little more. Especially Sony Pictures. I think the net effect (as usual) is that this sucks for consumers.
...there's a simple solution. It's called a waiver. Each attendee signs a piece of paper on the way in waiving their right to sue the organizer. This includes damages from theft, disaster, or stupidity.
We got those, and also promised each of our players that we'd keep an eye on things, but that they needed to secure all of their valuables. Computers and monitors aren't easily walked away with, and they're also easily secured with a security cable, so we recommended that as well.
Just make sure that you're not responsible, and make sure your attendees know it, and things will take care of themselves. We ran 600+ attendee LANs with this in place and never had any trouble.
I ran a Myth box for a couple of years on Linux, and even ran a couple of linux-specific PC-HDTV 5500 cards with that rig, with a Silver Sensor antenna. My HDTV reception was mediocre at best, but the worst part was MythTV itself.
Aside from the fact that the program guide is now a pay service, Myth itself is rather annoying. It's very well developed in some areas, and not so much in other areas. And asking for help from the dev team on getting the god damned thing working right is an exercise in elitist intolerance, because their first response is "fix it yourself". Way to gain marketshare, you jackasses.
About six months ago I said screw this, formatted the machine, put Windows XP sp2 on it, and installed BeyondTV. The program guide is pay once ($60 for the license which will last as long as BeyondTV does) and the software is *extremely* stable in WindowsXP. The machine never needs to be restarted, makes for a fine browser/gaming rig for my projector as well, and has generally behaved like a champ. The PCHDTV cards even have Windows drivers for them.
If you're looking for decent reception of OTA HDTV - I strongly suggest the Philips Silver Sensor antenna. I've even stuck them outside on top of a window AC unit and gotten halfway decent reception of at least a few channels, and I live in a valley.
In 2001, I got the Microsoft Backoffice logo tattooed around my right bicep. I had taken the logo from a copy of Backoffice I had, lengthened and duplicated it, and finally had it etched into my skin.
At the time, I was working heavily with MS Site Server (what they called portals before portals were called portals). It jumpstarted my career as a systems administrator and I don't ever want to forget that time, when I was energized, full of life, and right about nearly everything.
That said, all of my Windows skills went out the window(s) when I became a Java middleware admin.
Because driving drunk is so much worse than killing people with guns, running them over with stolen cars, and becoming a crime lord.
Rockstar should make a fucking "Drunk Driving Expansion" which involves consuming mass amounts of liquor, and scoring points by running down innocents. Extra points for single Christian moms.
Instead of doing the bittorrent dance, I started having the disc shipped to me. You can order whatever you need from https://shipit.ubuntu.com/ - they do a great job of getting the discs shipped, free of charge, in a lot less time than what they indicate on the site.
I ask for 25 discs at a time, put a pile of them on my desk at work, and they're gone in a week. Here, have a Linux, it's free.
848x480 is standard, unscaled, DVD resolution. Imagine a pixel-perfect DVD screen. That's what this is. If you want 1024x768, wait for the (inevitable) business version.
....to file for an extension. Or, better yet, file in February as soon as all the necessary paperwork comes in.
Perhaps this is the gods' way of paying back Intuit for some of their indiscretions with our personal data (and software activation) a couple of years back.
Adobe has been doing this for years. And it works. I don't know how many of my peers pirated Photoshop 3.0 only to go on to buy a license for 7 and CS and CS2 later in life.
What I don't get is the validity of TFA's statement in parallel with Microsoft's scarily effective product activation.
Most of the games reviewed in TFA are console games. What about PC games like Tribes, which was successfully augered into the earth by Vivendi/Universal with the stinky "Tribes:Vengeance"? Sure, let's release a game that has broken bits (like tournament mode) and then refuse to patch it. Ever.
First they started with a great game: Tribes 1. Then the obvious thing to do was to make a sequel, which came out horrifically different from the original in terms of gameplay and feel - not to mention it was broken in the box. Endless patches ensued, until eventually the player community wrote maps and patches to make it feel and play more like the original game. After that debacle, development began on T:V, which as mentioned above was also broken.
Thanks, guys. You took a franchise which could have flourished and just buried it.
Having started with Knoppmyth, and then moved briefly to Mythdora, I settled in on a manual compile of Myth 0.19 on Suse 10.1. It was this configuration that worked best for me - because I had invested in 2 PCHDTV HD-5500 tuners. I could not get them working in Myth 0.20 at all, and finally made them work in 0.19. The feature set between the two is minimal, with 0.20 being a lot of fixes and optimizations, so there's not a lot of love lost.
Myth is not an easy thing for even the experienced admin to make work. Because of the dependencies and the hardware involvement, this is more than just installing an application and having it work. For people new to the Myth infrastructure, it's actually rather nice to have a live CD install everything that's necessary. For 90% of the folks wanting to try it, they're going to have a dedicated PC for it anyway. Of course, if you want to just throw in a tuner card and try it that way, you can compile it too.
If you're a Suse person, you can check out a HOWTO I put together for 10.1 and PCHDTV cards here. It covers all the stuff one has to do to make a Myth box work with HD under Suse 10.1. While there are RPMs available for Myth 0.20 on Suse 10.1, the package doesn't support HD, which is what my project was specifically designed to be.
If you do plan on doing HD - be vigilant in your hardware selection! HD playback takes a considerable amount of computing horsepower. I really recommend getting an nVidia 5200 card for playback - not only are they super cheap, and sometimes fanless (read: noiseless), but they also support the nVidia XvMC playback driver, which accelerates MPEG2 streams, offloading decoding from your processor. It also does a fine job at Bob2X deinterlacing, required for watchable HD.
I used to work at Comair. Remember, that airline that stranded about 10,000 people in the airport a couple of Christmases ago?
Same deal. Program was capable of handling only a certain number of changes.
Hopefully your president won't have to resign.
The fact is, I will only be into the idea of traveling to space in a craft that reaches orbit. The idea of basically riding in a ship, basically going straight up, and then falling back down again, just does not interest me at all. They will have trouble filling seats 52 times a year, I think.
For those of you dreading a long, drawn-out upgrade process, Ubuntu can upgrade using update-manager from many previous Debian builds. It's a seamless transition that can run in the background while you continue to work. One (count 'em) reboot is required, and you're done.
For readers of Slashdot, using Linux probably seems a trivial task. But for the millions of PC users out there who have been using Windows for years, switching to Linux is a serious investment in time and learning. Put simply, in Windows, everything works out of the box in 99.999% of the cases. In the case of Linux, there is *always* some modicum of configuration needed. There's no distro of Linux I know of that plays DVDs and MP3s out of the box, simply due to the licensing issues that Windows has covered. And *everyone* listens to music on their PC, right? (I know, I know, Windows doesn't play DVDs either. But it's a lot easier to set that up in Windows.)
Once a company steps up and licenses some software, and puts together a commercial distro of Linux that works out of the box in the same ballpark as Windows, then it will have a fighting chance at winning people over. Then the only problems will be the cost - because it won't be Free Software - and convincing people that they need to learn a completely new GUI.
Devs are always looking for ways to reduce the amount of time it takes to code something. Admins are always looking for ways to automate their jobs. RoR is nice for devs but makes the admin tasks pretty hard - unless the admin knows his way around the product about as well as the dev does.
Now add the additional idea of a custom-designed project that the dev put together - and didn't document (because devs never document, right?). Chaos ensues.
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While I hate RealNetworks and all it stands for, and will never forgive them for taking over online media with their crappy bloated players and codecs....I think I hate the movie industry just a little more. Especially Sony Pictures. I think the net effect (as usual) is that this sucks for consumers.
Here's an idea I don't know if anyone's thought of yet:
Put the foam on the INSIDE of the ET.
...there's a simple solution. It's called a waiver. Each attendee signs a piece of paper on the way in waiving their right to sue the organizer. This includes damages from theft, disaster, or stupidity.
We got those, and also promised each of our players that we'd keep an eye on things, but that they needed to secure all of their valuables. Computers and monitors aren't easily walked away with, and they're also easily secured with a security cable, so we recommended that as well.
Just make sure that you're not responsible, and make sure your attendees know it, and things will take care of themselves. We ran 600+ attendee LANs with this in place and never had any trouble.
I ran a Myth box for a couple of years on Linux, and even ran a couple of linux-specific PC-HDTV 5500 cards with that rig, with a Silver Sensor antenna. My HDTV reception was mediocre at best, but the worst part was MythTV itself.
Aside from the fact that the program guide is now a pay service, Myth itself is rather annoying. It's very well developed in some areas, and not so much in other areas. And asking for help from the dev team on getting the god damned thing working right is an exercise in elitist intolerance, because their first response is "fix it yourself". Way to gain marketshare, you jackasses.
About six months ago I said screw this, formatted the machine, put Windows XP sp2 on it, and installed BeyondTV. The program guide is pay once ($60 for the license which will last as long as BeyondTV does) and the software is *extremely* stable in WindowsXP. The machine never needs to be restarted, makes for a fine browser/gaming rig for my projector as well, and has generally behaved like a champ. The PCHDTV cards even have Windows drivers for them.
If you're looking for decent reception of OTA HDTV - I strongly suggest the Philips Silver Sensor antenna. I've even stuck them outside on top of a window AC unit and gotten halfway decent reception of at least a few channels, and I live in a valley.
In 2001, I got the Microsoft Backoffice logo tattooed around my right bicep. I had taken the logo from a copy of Backoffice I had, lengthened and duplicated it, and finally had it etched into my skin.
At the time, I was working heavily with MS Site Server (what they called portals before portals were called portals). It jumpstarted my career as a systems administrator and I don't ever want to forget that time, when I was energized, full of life, and right about nearly everything.
That said, all of my Windows skills went out the window(s) when I became a Java middleware admin.
Because driving drunk is so much worse than killing people with guns, running them over with stolen cars, and becoming a crime lord.
Rockstar should make a fucking "Drunk Driving Expansion" which involves consuming mass amounts of liquor, and scoring points by running down innocents. Extra points for single Christian moms.
Instead of doing the bittorrent dance, I started having the disc shipped to me. You can order whatever you need from https://shipit.ubuntu.com/ - they do a great job of getting the discs shipped, free of charge, in a lot less time than what they indicate on the site.
I ask for 25 discs at a time, put a pile of them on my desk at work, and they're gone in a week. Here, have a Linux, it's free.
848x480 is standard, unscaled, DVD resolution. Imagine a pixel-perfect DVD screen. That's what this is. If you want 1024x768, wait for the (inevitable) business version.
I for one welcome our new SuSE overlords.
Next thing you know he'll be tossing words like "hella" and "truthiness" around.
Sony? Spit in the face of their customers? Nooooooooo! Never!
...Nerds. Only a nerd would recognize a chemical formula on the side of a box in a movie.
....to file for an extension. Or, better yet, file in February as soon as all the necessary paperwork comes in. Perhaps this is the gods' way of paying back Intuit for some of their indiscretions with our personal data (and software activation) a couple of years back.
Adobe has been doing this for years. And it works. I don't know how many of my peers pirated Photoshop 3.0 only to go on to buy a license for 7 and CS and CS2 later in life.
What I don't get is the validity of TFA's statement in parallel with Microsoft's scarily effective product activation.
Most of the games reviewed in TFA are console games. What about PC games like Tribes, which was successfully augered into the earth by Vivendi/Universal with the stinky "Tribes:Vengeance"? Sure, let's release a game that has broken bits (like tournament mode) and then refuse to patch it. Ever.
First they started with a great game: Tribes 1. Then the obvious thing to do was to make a sequel, which came out horrifically different from the original in terms of gameplay and feel - not to mention it was broken in the box. Endless patches ensued, until eventually the player community wrote maps and patches to make it feel and play more like the original game. After that debacle, development began on T:V, which as mentioned above was also broken.
Thanks, guys. You took a franchise which could have flourished and just buried it.
Having started with Knoppmyth, and then moved briefly to Mythdora, I settled in on a manual compile of Myth 0.19 on Suse 10.1. It was this configuration that worked best for me - because I had invested in 2 PCHDTV HD-5500 tuners. I could not get them working in Myth 0.20 at all, and finally made them work in 0.19. The feature set between the two is minimal, with 0.20 being a lot of fixes and optimizations, so there's not a lot of love lost.
Myth is not an easy thing for even the experienced admin to make work. Because of the dependencies and the hardware involvement, this is more than just installing an application and having it work. For people new to the Myth infrastructure, it's actually rather nice to have a live CD install everything that's necessary. For 90% of the folks wanting to try it, they're going to have a dedicated PC for it anyway. Of course, if you want to just throw in a tuner card and try it that way, you can compile it too.
If you're a Suse person, you can check out a HOWTO I put together for 10.1 and PCHDTV cards here. It covers all the stuff one has to do to make a Myth box work with HD under Suse 10.1. While there are RPMs available for Myth 0.20 on Suse 10.1, the package doesn't support HD, which is what my project was specifically designed to be.
If you do plan on doing HD - be vigilant in your hardware selection! HD playback takes a considerable amount of computing horsepower. I really recommend getting an nVidia 5200 card for playback - not only are they super cheap, and sometimes fanless (read: noiseless), but they also support the nVidia XvMC playback driver, which accelerates MPEG2 streams, offloading decoding from your processor. It also does a fine job at Bob2X deinterlacing, required for watchable HD.
Comparing Google to Microsoft for something like this is like comparing Luke Skywalker to Darth Vader.
Oh, wait a second.....
I used to work at Comair. Remember, that airline that stranded about 10,000 people in the airport a couple of Christmases ago? Same deal. Program was capable of handling only a certain number of changes. Hopefully your president won't have to resign.
The fact is, I will only be into the idea of traveling to space in a craft that reaches orbit. The idea of basically riding in a ship, basically going straight up, and then falling back down again, just does not interest me at all. They will have trouble filling seats 52 times a year, I think.
But build me an orbiting hotel - and I'm there.
For those of you dreading a long, drawn-out upgrade process, Ubuntu can upgrade using update-manager from many previous Debian builds. It's a seamless transition that can run in the background while you continue to work. One (count 'em) reboot is required, and you're done.
Congrats to the Dapper team.
For readers of Slashdot, using Linux probably seems a trivial task. But for the millions of PC users out there who have been using Windows for years, switching to Linux is a serious investment in time and learning. Put simply, in Windows, everything works out of the box in 99.999% of the cases. In the case of Linux, there is *always* some modicum of configuration needed. There's no distro of Linux I know of that plays DVDs and MP3s out of the box, simply due to the licensing issues that Windows has covered. And *everyone* listens to music on their PC, right? (I know, I know, Windows doesn't play DVDs either. But it's a lot easier to set that up in Windows.)
Once a company steps up and licenses some software, and puts together a commercial distro of Linux that works out of the box in the same ballpark as Windows, then it will have a fighting chance at winning people over. Then the only problems will be the cost - because it won't be Free Software - and convincing people that they need to learn a completely new GUI.
Best of luck.
Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.
I thought this was social networking for jailbirds.
"Comprehensible"? I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Devs are always looking for ways to reduce the amount of time it takes to code something. Admins are always looking for ways to automate their jobs. RoR is nice for devs but makes the admin tasks pretty hard - unless the admin knows his way around the product about as well as the dev does.
Now add the additional idea of a custom-designed project that the dev put together - and didn't document (because devs never document, right?). Chaos ensues.