I would be very interested to hear your subjective opinion of ivtv stability. (I've been thinking about getting a PVR350 for quite a while, but I don't want to jump in if it's going to be a constant headache. At the same time I'm not satisfied with the picture or sound quality from my current tuner card.)
Also can the PVR 350's hardware decoder handle input from a DVD drive, and does IVTV support that? It may seem like a small detail, but for me it drives the cpu requirement for the whole box.
There is already TiVo and ReplayTV, I don't don't think we need another shrinkwrapped "don't look inside" consumer product.
What I want is a cheap, quiet, hackable box that records and replays high-quality audio and video, with all the normal expansion slots (because I'd also like it to replace my "home server" which does a bunch of other stuff).
It's a challenge to do, because the only suitable encoder/decoder is the Hauppauge PVR 350 pci card, which is almost $200 by itself.
No, no, no. The "make sure the user doesn't screw their computer over" features are the most annoying of all. A simple thing like changing your current directory becomes an interrogation - "are you sure you want to go into that directory? I doubt you need to go in there!" And crap like automatically copying (and restoring!) system files, and for that matter the artificial distinction of a "system file" in the first place. Please keep that rubbish away from Linux!
I would be interested to hear why you think the H2 doesn't have good off-road capability. It seems a common assumption, but I haven't found any actual reviews (by people who've driven them offroad) to be so critical. Edmunds says it has very good offroad ability. Yes, we all know the H2 is totally different than the H1, but the H2's competition isn't the H1 at all, but rather other SUVs. So how does it stack up against other SUVs, and even against specialized offroad vehicles like the Jeep Rubicon?
Seriously, have you ever seen a Wiki that didn't contain off-topic, duplicate, or contradictory information?
Does Wikipedia.org count? I'm very impressed with it.
But no, I don't have unrealistic expectations for the Wikki approach to documenting Linux. I only hold out some hope that the ease of editing a Wiki will make invite more participation than linuxdoc.org has. But I think the odds of "success" are significantly less than 50%.
Do you remember how hot McDonald's served their coffee? Regular coffee drinkers at McDonald's knew to respect, no, fear that coffee. I would fully expect to to get minor burns if I simply took a big swallow of McDonald's coffee during that era. It was wicked hot.
Oh, good grief. We're talking about water here. It can only get to the boiling point. Anybody with a kettle that whistles when the water boils has exposed themselves to this same "danger."
Fair enough.. the best weight lifters can't run the fastest, jump the highest, or do the splits, and they also won't live the longest. Does that decrease their accomplishment though?
A single cable doesn't have enough bandwidth to manage 1600x1200 at more than 60Hz refresh. (go check the DVI spec)
I did mention it's an LCD panel, and 60Hz is perfect for an LCD panel. And let me tell you my 1600x1200 21" LCD2180UX looks awesome hooked up to the T40 through DVI using the open source driver. People accpting IBM's phony limitation at face value are missing out, and witholding useful information from customers because it just might lead to a bit of hassle is a perfect example of "corporate BS."
I think the issue is that she didn't just say "the company sucks," she registered "thecompany.com" for herself and put up her web page there. So if PETA had beaten mcdonalds.com in registering that domain name, it would still take you to a protest site today.
Anyways just wanted to clarify, this was about domain names rather than any old use of the company name in protests.
So what if the drivers are closed source? ATI cant and wont expose the low level details of their hardware's functionality to competitors. Whats the difference anyway?
In my case it makes the drivers unusable.
I wanted to plug my laptop into a 1600x1200 LCD using DVI. If you select "linux laptop driver download" at the ATI site, it says "go ask the manufacturer." Oh, goody, corporate marketing BS fingerpointing.
But IBM doesn't support 1600x1200 over DVI on my laptop. Why? Who knows. Supposedly under Windows you can get it by hacking the registry. But IBM doesn't feel like supporting it. More corporate BS.
So you go back to the ATI site and download the Mobile FireGL driver, if you're persistent enough to think of trying it on the M9 Radeon chip. Turns out it does work, but they won't tell you that due to even more corporate marketing BS.
You find that it almost works, but makes a sparkling or shimmering effect from random bit errors at 1600x1200. From the open source radeon driver mailing list, it appears that the fix is very simple. But ATI got it wrong and of course a closed source driver can't be fixed. Of course you could try to contact the ATI engineers, tell them the solution, and maybe they'll send you a fix. In your dreams.
Meanwhile the open source radeon driver runs 1600x1200 over DVI just fine. Some versions did create the shimmering effect, so somebody posted to a mailing list and helped the developer figure out what was wrong and it got fixed.
Oh, Europe, isn't that the place where everybody decided it was uncouth to make babies?
You can't pay strangers to actually care about you. If you don't have family, you are likely to be lonely. If you do have family, they won't stop visiting just because you can bathe yourself (with robotic assistance).
The other big problem is that information goes rapidly out of date.
Say you need to make a file over 2GB (very common in video processing) and you stumble across this page. You come away thinking linux doesn't support large files, when really it does. In this case you can scroll all the way to the bottom and the author is nice enough to have timestamped the page - 1998. But still, how do you know whether the old information is outdated? Even if you choose some arbitrary cutoff date ("information after Jan 1, 2003 is likely to be fresh") how do you tell google to only find information after that date? You can't.
Unfortunately there's no easy solution to the problem of outdated information. Useful documentation takes attention and manpower. But perhaps an easily modifiable Wikki-format will encourage more updates and more participation than comparable efforts such as The Linux Documentation Project, which is really just a smattering of FAQs, HOWTO-s, guides, and man pages with no real coherence - full of duplication and stale information.
Interestingly, cnn recently ran an article stating that Chinese is not ahead and losing ground fast, but rather that the share of native English speakers is actually declining and Mandarin is numero uno. But the professor the story is about doesn't see any one language taking over.
It's hard to know what to make of this stuff though. 15 years ago a lot of people thought we'd all soon be learning Japanese to converse with our bosses.
If memory serves, a 19th century sociologist by the name of "Darde" posited that out of 100 people, 1 is truly creative and the remaining 99 are echoic.
Hence the rest of us peons are reduced to recycling the wisdom of long-dead academics. (get it?)
Actually I mostly agree. Except I think everybody is at least slightly original, just to different degrees. Even Einstein's work wasn't a total discontinuity out of the blue.
I like to rank originality, at least in science, by the number of years I guess it would have taken for the thing to be invented anyways, if the original inventor had not. The TV, for instance, was a virtual tie among several people.
Back in the dark ages there weren't too many scientists and it was relatively easy to move a discovery up by 100 years IMHO. Nowadays so many people are working every problem that it's harder to jump ahead even by 1-2 years.
I was about to mention Microsoft's CLR (common language runtime), but it turns out it's only for compiled languages, by design.
The JVM might work better, but I'm not sure. You can get other languages compiled for Java, but Java lacks support to invoke scripts (AFAIK). Seems like a shame. Java's 2 step process of compiling PLUS interpreting is annoying.
This is why I've always used a pseudonym on slashdot and usenet. Hey, I might want to run for office one day, who knows? And who knows where the tide of public opinion will go in 25 years.
Apple has the 17" screen powerbook, but it has a 16:9 aspect ratio. This means it has less surface area than a 4:3 17" screen, so the Acer screen might be a bit bigger.
I wonder if it's really 17 lbs though? If so it had better have genuine desktop performance. In that case it would be good for lan parties (ahem, I mean "graphics-intensive business presentations).
We have one of these at work. It's totally inappropriate for gaming, the control isn't that immediate and precise. What it is for is presentations, sort of like a laser pointer that controls the mouse cursor. (The one I've used might no longer be the latest model, so ymmv).
If there is truly a conflict, I hope the hams can be given some other chunk of spectrum to operate with, because the number of people interested in accessing the Internet truly dwarfs the number interested in ham radio. I do have some sympathy for "we were here first" but at some point it would simply be a tyranny of the minority.
Slashdot Mirror
Also can the PVR 350's hardware decoder handle input from a DVD drive, and does IVTV support that? It may seem like a small detail, but for me it drives the cpu requirement for the whole box.
What I want is a cheap, quiet, hackable box that records and replays high-quality audio and video, with all the normal expansion slots (because I'd also like it to replace my "home server" which does a bunch of other stuff).
It's a challenge to do, because the only suitable encoder/decoder is the Hauppauge PVR 350 pci card, which is almost $200 by itself.
No, no, no. The "make sure the user doesn't screw their computer over" features are the most annoying of all. A simple thing like changing your current directory becomes an interrogation - "are you sure you want to go into that directory? I doubt you need to go in there!" And crap like automatically copying (and restoring!) system files, and for that matter the artificial distinction of a "system file" in the first place. Please keep that rubbish away from Linux!
And no, I don't own or want an H2.
What do you think they do with undergrad tuition at those top schools? It's not going to the TA's who do the teaching.
More importantly, did you get any 1990 Dell stock options?
But no, I don't have unrealistic expectations for the Wikki approach to documenting Linux. I only hold out some hope that the ease of editing a Wiki will make invite more participation than linuxdoc.org has. But I think the odds of "success" are significantly less than 50%.
Fair enough.. the best weight lifters can't run the fastest, jump the highest, or do the splits, and they also won't live the longest. Does that decrease their accomplishment though?
Anyways just wanted to clarify, this was about domain names rather than any old use of the company name in protests.
The upshot: the OSS drivers support my setup, the closed source drivers do not.
I wanted to plug my laptop into a 1600x1200 LCD using DVI. If you select "linux laptop driver download" at the ATI site, it says "go ask the manufacturer." Oh, goody, corporate marketing BS fingerpointing.
But IBM doesn't support 1600x1200 over DVI on my laptop. Why? Who knows. Supposedly under Windows you can get it by hacking the registry. But IBM doesn't feel like supporting it. More corporate BS.
So you go back to the ATI site and download the Mobile FireGL driver, if you're persistent enough to think of trying it on the M9 Radeon chip. Turns out it does work, but they won't tell you that due to even more corporate marketing BS.
You find that it almost works, but makes a sparkling or shimmering effect from random bit errors at 1600x1200. From the open source radeon driver mailing list, it appears that the fix is very simple. But ATI got it wrong and of course a closed source driver can't be fixed. Of course you could try to contact the ATI engineers, tell them the solution, and maybe they'll send you a fix. In your dreams.
Meanwhile the open source radeon driver runs 1600x1200 over DVI just fine. Some versions did create the shimmering effect, so somebody posted to a mailing list and helped the developer figure out what was wrong and it got fixed.
So yeah, closed source is different.
You can't pay strangers to actually care about you. If you don't have family, you are likely to be lonely. If you do have family, they won't stop visiting just because you can bathe yourself (with robotic assistance).
Sorry I botched the link to The Linux Documentation Project in my previous post.
Say you need to make a file over 2GB (very common in video processing) and you stumble across this page. You come away thinking linux doesn't support large files, when really it does. In this case you can scroll all the way to the bottom and the author is nice enough to have timestamped the page - 1998. But still, how do you know whether the old information is outdated? Even if you choose some arbitrary cutoff date ("information after Jan 1, 2003 is likely to be fresh") how do you tell google to only find information after that date? You can't.
Unfortunately there's no easy solution to the problem of outdated information. Useful documentation takes attention and manpower. But perhaps an easily modifiable Wikki-format will encourage more updates and more participation than comparable efforts such as The Linux Documentation Project, which is really just a smattering of FAQs, HOWTO-s, guides, and man pages with no real coherence - full of duplication and stale information.
It's hard to know what to make of this stuff though. 15 years ago a lot of people thought we'd all soon be learning Japanese to converse with our bosses.
Actually I mostly agree. Except I think everybody is at least slightly original, just to different degrees. Even Einstein's work wasn't a total discontinuity out of the blue.
I like to rank originality, at least in science, by the number of years I guess it would have taken for the thing to be invented anyways, if the original inventor had not. The TV, for instance, was a virtual tie among several people.
Back in the dark ages there weren't too many scientists and it was relatively easy to move a discovery up by 100 years IMHO. Nowadays so many people are working every problem that it's harder to jump ahead even by 1-2 years.
The JVM might work better, but I'm not sure. You can get other languages compiled for Java, but Java lacks support to invoke scripts (AFAIK). Seems like a shame. Java's 2 step process of compiling PLUS interpreting is annoying.
This is why I've always used a pseudonym on slashdot and usenet. Hey, I might want to run for office one day, who knows? And who knows where the tide of public opinion will go in 25 years.
I wonder if it's really 17 lbs though? If so it had better have genuine desktop performance. In that case it would be good for lan parties (ahem, I mean "graphics-intensive business presentations).
We have one of these at work. It's totally inappropriate for gaming, the control isn't that immediate and precise. What it is for is presentations, sort of like a laser pointer that controls the mouse cursor. (The one I've used might no longer be the latest model, so ymmv).
If there is truly a conflict, I hope the hams can be given some other chunk of spectrum to operate with, because the number of people interested in accessing the Internet truly dwarfs the number interested in ham radio. I do have some sympathy for "we were here first" but at some point it would simply be a tyranny of the minority.
They already knew Mars has ice caps. So now it appears there was once liquid water also.