I remember our Hayes 300 baud modem that I could tweak to 450(!!!) on compatible BBSs. I wish I could remember my CompuServ number. Long passed into oblivion. . .
I had a Level I that was shortly upgraded to a Level II. I learned an awful lot on that machine: BASIC, self-modifying code, tokenized languages, simple graphics. I foolishly took it apart years later.
I had a ~900GB MythTV box for three or four years until I recently upgraded to FiOS TV. Unfortunately, my TV capture card (Hauppauge) doesn't recognize the channels I care about most (SciFi, BBC America). I don't know if this is fixable but in my limited free-time it didn't make the cut to figure out.
I really miss that machine. Aside from having hundreds and hundreds of hours of record-time, I found the interface and functionality far superior to my Verizon-provided DVR. Other posters are correct in that getting MythTV up and running can be a bit of a chore, though it has improved a lot, once you spend the time to get it going it's quite bullet-proof.
for all these encrypted machines? The OP doesn't indicate if the IT department is going to centrally manage them or if it's up to the individual workstation user. If the former, how are they going to distribute the keys and who's to say that the IT department secure enough to *not* be a single point of failure. If it's up to individuals how much do you want to bet that 50% of the passwords will be the name of your institution, your institution backwards or some other weak key. Unless the IT folks enforce a long and difficult-to-remember password strength model that's what you'll get. And if they do mandate long passwords then you'll get them sticky-noted to the monitor.
Encryption is a good thing but just installing it doesn't really solve anything. I'm sure others have pointed this out above. . .
Double de-clutching, or just double-clutching or rev-matching, is no longer necessary but is still a useful skill when driving at a track or autocross. The point of double-clutching is to make the transition from gear-to-gear smooth so as not to upset the suspension during a downshift. If the suspension is fully loaded then the abrupt weight transfer forward if double-clutching is not used can cause the car to slide or otherwise take a corner incorrectly. This is not something most people worry about, granted, but it is by no means obsolete. Some automated manual gearboxes (Ferrari, Mitsubishi Evo X, etc.) do this rev-matching so well and so quickly the driver almost doesn't notice.
I bought an OLPC for my 9-year-old because of it's ability to teach exactly what the parent is talking about. Exploratory skills, confidence with trying things out on the machine, programming from the ground-up rather than "taught" - all the things you don't get from the formal computer education we have in the US. I learned more about *COMPUTERS* from my first forays into TRS-80 BASIC and some well-placed PEEK and POKE commands then I ever did in school.
Exactly. MythTV provides you the ability to have unlimited storage for the cost of a simple hard disk (mine has >800GB), easily accessible recordings, multi-tuners, an MP3 player (one of the primary uses of my box), a game player, a IP phone, etc.
I loved that phone and would still use one if I didn't need a Smartphone to keep track of my contacts and schedule (I got tired of carrying two devices around everyplace). The 6100 has the best interface, it's small and reception/voice quality was good. I charged it every night out of force-of-habit so I don't know the battery life. It's a great phone.
Great idea. Do it now! We just redid the kitchen/family room/dining room area so while all the walls were open I did the same thing. I bought Cat 6 cables from www.cat5ecableguy.com and a bunch of trays from www.cableorganizer.com so the attic was a bit tidier. Though I purchased 3" conduit to run all the cables through and to future-proof the setup our walls weren't thick enough to hold it and there were numerous horizontal brace pieces - redoing all the walls to accomodate the conduit was out-of-the-question. Instead, the contractor drilled holes through the horizontal pieces and ran the cable to the attic. For some measure of future-proofing, I had the contractor put a single electrical-grade conduit from the attic to my main "media corner" in case I need to run another cable of some kind.
In addition to ethernet to the media-corner (four lines), kitchen area and dining room (hidden) all going to the home-office I pulled one line from kitchen media corner (for controlling purposes) and a line from office to the wall where the flat-screen TV is all prepared to go. Lastly, I ran conduit back from the media-corner through a closet on the other side and back up to the flat-screen TV location. I've got two coax-cables going through now but it is trivially easy to pull some HDMI, composite, whatever cables for the TV. Finally, I did the 6.1 surround sound thing as well (bluejeanscable.com).
All the cables are documented with from/to notes on the cable, I've got pictures with measurements for the covered cables/conduit and a Visio in case I forget. My setup is fairly simple since we didn't do the entire house. Since you're doing the entire house you will need more planning than I.
I've been reading SA since a college (~20 years) and have always enjoyed it for it's purely scientifically slanted articles however in the last year I have noted two articles by interested commercial parties. This Gates piece (which I have not read yet) was the second. The first was in mid-2006 by CEO of some start-up bio-fuel or something company extolling the virtues of his process and it's rosy future.
I hope this does not become a trend. I don't mind these points-of-view and think this type of discourse is very good it just doesn't belong in Scientific American.
My iPod is in my car connected to the radio via an ice>Link CD adapter. I just leave it on shuffle but *every* time the iPod resets (which it does each weekend because the battery doesn't hold a charge anymore) it plays the same first song. This song happens to be the first one in the first directory when Windows sorts my collection by name
(Unknown Chinese)\(Unknown Chinese)\(Unknown Chinese 1).01.mp3
The rest of the shuffle seems to be random enough, I haven't noticed any bias.
A really interesting book about all kinds of issues that must be addressed in construction. It's companion, Why Building Stand Up is just as informative if a bit less sensational. Both by Mario Salvadori and available on Amazon.
Brings up a saying I invented (or so I think), "If we built buildings the way we build software, we'd all be living in caves."
I remember some of the European Internet cafe's from 2001 followed this same model. Seemed like a good way to avoid all manner of nastyness. Took 2 minutes for the full wipe/image cycle. I wonder now if now you could use a bunch of flash chips in place of the magnetic media and avoid the hard-disk wear-and-tear. But of course flash devices have their own MTBF.
Funny. It's this the same quandry that those "old" computers faced. ..100,000 tubes with a MTBF of 1000 hours so one would fail every 5 minutes. Not having been there I can't say from first hand experience but I read it someplace. . .
Don't forget MythTV also does MP3 (and web/news)
on
Home Theatre PC Guide
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I didn't really need a PVR since Babylon 5 is done and Star Trek is ending. ..but I did *want* to build one. A main requirement was something to play my MP3 catalog (all 100% ripped from my own personal collection, FYI). We have two small children and keeping all the CDs in order and undamaged is a challenge.
Anyway, I put together my box in a Shuttle ST62K using Fedora Core in a couple weekends using the the excellent help from www.wilsonet.com. I would only have a few hours/day, if that, after the kids were in bed which broke up my train of thought certainly, but in any case I agree that MythTV is not a plug-and-play task. I knew that going in and, as has been expressed above, was looking forward to the technical challenges. FUN!
In the end I'm very happy. It's not 100% perfect nor as seamless as a real Tivo but I wouldn't have been happy with a Tivo anyway. I have all my CDs available through the stereo and can record TV when I want to with picture quality that's actually better than through my cable box!?!
If anyone's interested, my problems are (a) an annoying hum from the Shuttle case. This should be alleviated by suspending the hard-disk in the case instead of rigidly mounting it. Check out http://www.silentpcreview.com/article139-page6.htm l
for a writeup on this; (b) I need to attach a small/quiet fan in back of the (closed) shelf where the case is sitting due to heat. My wife won't let me leave the PC next to the TV and I don't want to leave the door open because of the 10 little 6 year old fingers and 10 smaller 2 year old fingers running around our house; and (c) the X GUI screen size (and thus MythTV config screens) are too large for the TV and run off the edges. I've fiddled with this a bit but haven't solved it.
Some years ago I had a bug in a Windows NT system caused by DST handling. The problem only surfaced in the period between when the US and Europe went on/off DST. There's a period of about a week when they are not in sync. The symptom of this was that system events displayed via the standard Windows GUI were different than when accessed through a character mode terminal. Same data source: the NT Event Log.
After some debugging to make sure it wasn't our code and some back and forth with Microsoft I discovered that the libc.dll code subtraced the hour for non-DST (or added for DST, I forget which. ..this was a while ago) at some point in the code and then further down in the code did it again (oops). The pure Win32 API did the computation correctly.
We got the DLL code and considered fixing it there but I didn't want to be in the DLL maintenance business so we pressed MS for a solution. In the end MS Support came up with a computation that used big decimals and turned the timestamps into pico-seconds since 1,000,000 BC (or something like that) and then back into MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS format. This worked reliably in both applications.
Every time I hear of time-zone questions I think of this story.
Anyone remember Quantum?
on
High Score
·
· Score: 1
This was the only standup I ever got really good at. I could play indefinitely. My roommate in college bought it (for $100) from the university game room when they had a sale. It was great. We had *lots* of friends that year! Afterwards it stayed at my parents house for some time until my (then ex-) roommate found a place to put it.
The object was simple: use a trackball to drive a dot across the screen and capture various particles. The dot left a trail that slowly evaporated. There were various challenges and the game started moving much faster as the levels increased. Really simple but really fun.
I saw it only once after that at Disneyland some years later but it was *broken*:-(
Now, I don't have time to play though I do appreciate the occasional head-to-head driving game!
T.
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I remember our Hayes 300 baud modem that I could tweak to 450(!!!) on compatible BBSs. I wish I could remember my CompuServ number. Long passed into oblivion. . .
I had a Level I that was shortly upgraded to a Level II. I learned an awful lot on that machine: BASIC, self-modifying code, tokenized languages, simple graphics. I foolishly took it apart years later.
I had a ~900GB MythTV box for three or four years until I recently upgraded to FiOS TV. Unfortunately, my TV capture card (Hauppauge) doesn't recognize the channels I care about most (SciFi, BBC America). I don't know if this is fixable but in my limited free-time it didn't make the cut to figure out.
I really miss that machine. Aside from having hundreds and hundreds of hours of record-time, I found the interface and functionality far superior to my Verizon-provided DVR. Other posters are correct in that getting MythTV up and running can be a bit of a chore, though it has improved a lot, once you spend the time to get it going it's quite bullet-proof.
for all these encrypted machines? The OP doesn't indicate if the IT department is going to centrally manage them or if it's up to the individual workstation user. If the former, how are they going to distribute the keys and who's to say that the IT department secure enough to *not* be a single point of failure. If it's up to individuals how much do you want to bet that 50% of the passwords will be the name of your institution, your institution backwards or some other weak key. Unless the IT folks enforce a long and difficult-to-remember password strength model that's what you'll get. And if they do mandate long passwords then you'll get them sticky-noted to the monitor. Encryption is a good thing but just installing it doesn't really solve anything. I'm sure others have pointed this out above. . .
Double de-clutching, or just double-clutching or rev-matching, is no longer necessary but is still a useful skill when driving at a track or autocross. The point of double-clutching is to make the transition from gear-to-gear smooth so as not to upset the suspension during a downshift. If the suspension is fully loaded then the abrupt weight transfer forward if double-clutching is not used can cause the car to slide or otherwise take a corner incorrectly. This is not something most people worry about, granted, but it is by no means obsolete. Some automated manual gearboxes (Ferrari, Mitsubishi Evo X, etc.) do this rev-matching so well and so quickly the driver almost doesn't notice.
I bought an OLPC for my 9-year-old because of it's ability to teach exactly what the parent is talking about. Exploratory skills, confidence with trying things out on the machine, programming from the ground-up rather than "taught" - all the things you don't get from the formal computer education we have in the US. I learned more about *COMPUTERS* from my first forays into TRS-80 BASIC and some well-placed PEEK and POKE commands then I ever did in school.
Exactly. MythTV provides you the ability to have unlimited storage for the cost of a simple hard disk (mine has >800GB), easily accessible recordings, multi-tuners, an MP3 player (one of the primary uses of my box), a game player, a IP phone, etc.
Probably the best phone I ever had. It's several years old now but I found this on eBay though price seems a bit high for such an old device.G SM-Mobile-Phone_W0QQitemZ160139013240QQihZ006QQcat egoryZ64355QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
http://cgi.ebay.com/Unlocked-Nokia-6100-Tri-Band-
I loved that phone and would still use one if I didn't need a Smartphone to keep track of my contacts and schedule (I got tired of carrying two devices around everyplace). The 6100 has the best interface, it's small and reception/voice quality was good. I charged it every night out of force-of-habit so I don't know the battery life. It's a great phone.
Great idea. Do it now! We just redid the kitchen/family room/dining room area so while all the walls were open I did the same thing. I bought Cat 6 cables from www.cat5ecableguy.com and a bunch of trays from www.cableorganizer.com so the attic was a bit tidier. Though I purchased 3" conduit to run all the cables through and to future-proof the setup our walls weren't thick enough to hold it and there were numerous horizontal brace pieces - redoing all the walls to accomodate the conduit was out-of-the-question. Instead, the contractor drilled holes through the horizontal pieces and ran the cable to the attic. For some measure of future-proofing, I had the contractor put a single electrical-grade conduit from the attic to my main "media corner" in case I need to run another cable of some kind.
In addition to ethernet to the media-corner (four lines), kitchen area and dining room (hidden) all going to the home-office I pulled one line from kitchen media corner (for controlling purposes) and a line from office to the wall where the flat-screen TV is all prepared to go. Lastly, I ran conduit back from the media-corner through a closet on the other side and back up to the flat-screen TV location. I've got two coax-cables going through now but it is trivially easy to pull some HDMI, composite, whatever cables for the TV. Finally, I did the 6.1 surround sound thing as well (bluejeanscable.com).
All the cables are documented with from/to notes on the cable, I've got pictures with measurements for the covered cables/conduit and a Visio in case I forget. My setup is fairly simple since we didn't do the entire house. Since you're doing the entire house you will need more planning than I.
I've been reading SA since a college (~20 years) and have always enjoyed it for it's purely scientifically slanted articles however in the last year I have noted two articles by interested commercial parties. This Gates piece (which I have not read yet) was the second. The first was in mid-2006 by CEO of some start-up bio-fuel or something company extolling the virtues of his process and it's rosy future.
/.?
I hope this does not become a trend. I don't mind these points-of-view and think this type of discourse is very good it just doesn't belong in Scientific American.
Maybe the SA editors read
(Unknown Chinese)\(Unknown Chinese)\(Unknown Chinese 1).01.mp3
The rest of the shuffle seems to be random enough, I haven't noticed any bias.
I've always wondered about that.
T.
A really interesting book about all kinds of issues that must be addressed in construction. It's companion, Why Building Stand Up is just as informative if a bit less sensational. Both by Mario Salvadori and available on Amazon. Brings up a saying I invented (or so I think), "If we built buildings the way we build software, we'd all be living in caves."
I remember some of the European Internet cafe's from 2001 followed this same model. Seemed like a good way to avoid all manner of nastyness. Took 2 minutes for the full wipe/image cycle. I wonder now if now you could use a bunch of flash chips in place of the magnetic media and avoid the hard-disk wear-and-tear. But of course flash devices have their own MTBF.
Funny. It's this the same quandry that those "old" computers faced. . .100,000 tubes with a MTBF of 1000 hours so one would fail every 5 minutes. Not having been there I can't say from first hand experience but I read it someplace. . .
I didn't really need a PVR since Babylon 5 is done and Star Trek is ending. . .but I did *want* to build one. A main requirement was something to play my MP3 catalog (all 100% ripped from my own personal collection, FYI). We have two small children and keeping all the CDs in order and undamaged is a challenge.
Anyway, I put together my box in a Shuttle ST62K using Fedora Core in a couple weekends using the the excellent help from www.wilsonet.com. I would only have a few hours/day, if that, after the kids were in bed which broke up my train of thought certainly, but in any case I agree that MythTV is not a plug-and-play task. I knew that going in and, as has been expressed above, was looking forward to the technical challenges. FUN!
In the end I'm very happy. It's not 100% perfect nor as seamless as a real Tivo but I wouldn't have been happy with a Tivo anyway. I have all my CDs available through the stereo and can record TV when I want to with picture quality that's actually better than through my cable box!?!
If anyone's interested, my problems are (a) an annoying hum from the Shuttle case. This should be alleviated by suspending the hard-disk in the case instead of rigidly mounting it. Check out http://www.silentpcreview.com/article139-page6.htm l
for a writeup on this; (b) I need to attach a small/quiet fan in back of the (closed) shelf where the case is sitting due to heat. My wife won't let me leave the PC next to the TV and I don't want to leave the door open because of the 10 little 6 year old fingers and 10 smaller 2 year old fingers running around our house; and (c) the X GUI screen size (and thus MythTV config screens) are too large for the TV and run off the edges. I've fiddled with this a bit but haven't solved it.
Some years ago I had a bug in a Windows NT system caused by DST handling. The problem only surfaced in the period between when the US and Europe went on/off DST. There's a period of about a week when they are not in sync. The symptom of this was that system events displayed via the standard Windows GUI were different than when accessed through a character mode terminal. Same data source: the NT Event Log. After some debugging to make sure it wasn't our code and some back and forth with Microsoft I discovered that the libc.dll code subtraced the hour for non-DST (or added for DST, I forget which. . .this was a while ago) at some point in the code and then further down in the code did it again (oops). The pure Win32 API did the computation correctly.
We got the DLL code and considered fixing it there but I didn't want to be in the DLL maintenance business so we pressed MS for a solution. In the end MS Support came up with a computation that used big decimals and turned the timestamps into pico-seconds since 1,000,000 BC (or something like that) and then back into MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS format. This worked reliably in both applications.
Every time I hear of time-zone questions I think of this story.
This was the only standup I ever got really good at. I could play indefinitely. My roommate in college bought it (for $100) from the university game room when they had a sale. It was great. We had *lots* of friends that year! Afterwards it stayed at my parents house for some time until my (then ex-) roommate found a place to put it. The object was simple: use a trackball to drive a dot across the screen and capture various particles. The dot left a trail that slowly evaporated. There were various challenges and the game started moving much faster as the levels increased. Really simple but really fun. I saw it only once after that at Disneyland some years later but it was *broken* :-(
Now, I don't have time to play though I do appreciate the occasional head-to-head driving game!
T.