Who gets to decide what "legitimate" means in this scenario? If it's left up to the judge and jury, surely it's already been admitted as evidence and is therefore legitimate by definition?
Wasn't aware I could do that...! Oh well, it only cost me a fiver for Deus Ex, I bought HL as part of a bundle that included Blue Shift, Opposing Force and Team Fortress as well.
I'm not trying to say Valve are saints and Steam is the rapture, but it's so much better than GFWL (God-Awful?)
Like the OP, I also got saddled with it on my last system with DoW2. It worked maybe 60% for connecting games, and connections would frequently drop out. It would frequently lock up the admittedly crappy BT router I was forced to use at the time when negotiating UPnP. There's a god-damned banner ad at the bottom. A bunch of publishers have chosen to go the "you must be logged in to play!" option whereas, IIRC, steam insists that offline mode remains functional for single player.
When I was forced to install Steam under a throwaway account cos I wanted to play Portal (via the freebie update) I expected myself to be uninstalling it as soon as I'd gone through the game a couple of times, but it's clearly been engineered to put the user experience first on the list (well, first behind DRM anyway) and it shows. Once your account is created, playing offline is never a hassle - I was offline for two months (longer periods I can't vouch for) whilst I moved house and all my steam games worked seamlessly - although there's a delay when you start it due to it trying to contact the login servers first. There's none of that fucktarded bullshit where you can't save your game unless you're logged in (indeed, not all games support backing your savegames up to the steam "cloud" in any case). I've since bought the orange box (physical, as steam prices in the UK are often higher than the physical media) plus steam copies of old faves like Deus Ex and the original Half-Life; I still have the original discs but the low price on steam was worth it for me, especially to avoid having to hook up optical drives and hunting down patches for the machines I wanted to play on. I've even started playing the superbly tongue-in-cheek Team Fortress 2 and found it rather surprisingly free of rabid 13 year olds comparing me to meat dumpling.
Lastly is adverising; there is some on steam, but it's not in your face. But I most love the searching for games thing - there's a pretty awesome repository of little indie games on steam which I found out about through one of their regular bundle offers, which got me into Darwinia, Defcon, Defence Grid and a whole load more interesting games that - most importantly - were easily playable on my dinky laptop with intel graphics. The GF also loves some of the interesting puzzlers. I also like the way I can give the little man my hard earned, rather than relentless advertising for the next AAAAAAAAAAAAAA FPS title that indistinguishable from the last one.
Lastly - the old "but what happens when Valve goes bust/gets bought/gets a headcrab?!?!?!?!1111" problem. No, I don't believe Valve will be able to "open" the servers, as anyone with the slightest bit of nouse about takeovers or bankruptcy will be able to tell you, the rights I have to my game will be auctioned off to the highest bidder. But this is also the case for GFWL, and indeed any other system that relies on remote authentication servers. Steam is currently displaying the best track record for this by a long chalk.
So just to add my voice to the choir - I hate DRM, but it's a fact of life if you want to play games without downloading a pirate copy; I just chose not to buy games with onerous DRM (here's looking at you Bioshock 2). Steam is DRM underneath with a highly polished exterior that's almost entirely transparent to the user and gives me added value, at least. GFWL, IMNSHO, is a thinly veiled and malfunctioning surveillance platform masquerading as a games portal that provides nothing of merit to me that the games couldn't do better themselves.
If word of the hype machine and some of my friends who saw Avatar is to be believed, 3D makes everything that was once crap entirely utterly awesome. You're just being cynical and refusing to embrace The Future.
Personally, I'm looking forward to a re-release of Superman 64 on my 3D TV. It'll be like the entire games room is enveloped in purple fog!
Erm... isn't the present day BP a merging of the British BP and the American Amoco? Are people seriously disliking the brits just because BP used to have a "British" in the name? Post-merger, BP have been officially called BP, not British Petroleum (and I've only been keeping an eye on the geology/engineering behind it, not any apparent sentiment).
In any case, ultimately they're a multinational megacorp and even if it was possible to bankrupt them and keep the oil flowing, after six months with some creative accountants and rebranding themselves as FluffyKitten Inc. they'd be back doing the same thing.
Disclaimer: I am a brit, and an ex-geologist. Anyone with minimal knowledge could have told you that deep water drilling in the gulf of mexico is dodgy as hell (the area is full of methane clathrates), and anyone can agree that BP have rogered everyone possible in the arse, but especially the south coast of the US.
Follow the money. It's amazing how fast you can get things done when your campaign contributions depend on it. Where's the money in shutting down fraud, spam and everything else?
Whoops. Forgot to take my anti-cynicism pills today. I'm sure our politicians and lawmakers are doing the very best they can, and after all piracy costs the economy eleventy trillion bajongas a year.
The conservatives in the UK have been going on about bringing back tax breaks for married couples (and civil partnerships, but those aren't available to heterosexual couples here yet - I'm also one of those people that doesn't agree with marriage but support the idea of civil unions) - I really don't see what the hell marriage is supposed to achieve, and add to that the UK having the highest divorce rate in europe I don't see any form of tax break as going to make "families" more "stable".
Stupid political posturing. Why can't the state just treat people as individuals?
...why are google covering a "tax for gays"? Why are gay people being taxed more in the first place?
FTA: "Google is going to begin covering a cost that gay and lesbian employees must pay when their partners receive domestic partner health benefits, largely to compensate them for an extra tax that heterosexual married couples do not pay."
To me this sounds like gay people are charged money when their (civil?) partners receive some form of benefit, but when heterosexual couples do the same thing they're not charged money? Can someone put this in terms a commnie socialist brit can understand?
I read slashdot every working weekday (and have done since 2001) and I don't remember seeing anything called "Bilski" in recent memory.
And sentences like "X could have major repercussions for Y" where X is an unknown quantity and Y is an article about which one can be reasonably sure someone would know don't tend to work very well when pointed at the scientific market - doubly so when you can't tell when X is a proper noun or not. Observe the following examples:
"Moojops to be a major player in the fashion wars this summer!" "Cocktuffington takes Hollywood starlets by storm!" "Franzibald levels in the Large Hadron Collider CERN team reaching critical levels!"
I daresay the first two might make sense to someone who gives a shit, but I for one think the first sentence of the summary would be better written as "The US Supreme Court has finally decided the Bilski case (PDF), more commonly known as the busines's model patent." Eight extra words and also the extra chance for adding a superfluous apostrophe, a whole lot less kerfuffle. It's common courtesy, not to mention fucking basic journalism, to explain or not obfuscate your terms.
"Interested in a popular search company's competing motive image compression algorithm? Well, in the preceding diurnal cycles the collective of sentient carbon-based non-abhumanoid lifeforms who promulgate behind the hypertext-based site registered at D5908ABA progressed with envisaging a manifestation of the extrapolated logic required to implement a playback-oriented interpreter of aforementioned format which when committed to an unspecified base2 arithmetic engine format required more than pi to the power 6 (but less than the distance from Shrewsbury to Telford when measured in the length of a certain heroic greeks sub-ankle extremity) typewriter dings within the confines of the specified format."
It's *alpha* emitters you definitely don't want to swallow; alpha is stopped by skin or a few metres of open air, beta goes straight through you but can be blocked by some sheets of thick metal or concrete.
The reason radon gas is so hazardous is that is decays into an alpha emitter; if it's in your lungs when it does that you can expect some heavy chop.
Comes from a sketch show called A Bit of Fry and Laurie starring, you might have guessed, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. The clip shows that Murdoch has been slinging mud at the BBC since the dawn of ti... well, since the early 90's when Sky TV was getting a foothold. It's a tad exaggerated, but the thought of a UK without a BBC and full of Murdochian bile fills me with dread.
You can make amarok 2 look superficially like 1.4, but the behaviour is different. I still keep trying it every six months or so, and even though I can now get rid of that gargantuan trainwreck of a waste of space in the middle of the screen, I still can't sort the playlist by column. You still can't hook your player into a centralised database (apparently embedded MySQL was much better than generic SQL classes). I still can't figure out how to get myself a nice little album cover+related artists tab on the left hand side, out of the way of the playlist.
Amarok 1.4 was the best music player I'd ever used, I've now reverted back to Winamp/BMP because I just can't stand amarok's "in your face"/iTunes wannabe attitude anymore. Too many music players seem to have the mentality that, since they've put so much work into writing the library code, the library must become the key functionality. No. The key functionality is playing music, and when a library makes that overly complicated the app has lost sight of it's goals IMHO.
Erm, OK, dunno what happened to my other comment but it missed out a whole bunch of text, so here it is again:
Despite its size, Hawaii is actually one of the "safest" volcanoes in the world; it's magma is very poor in silica (<~50%), making the lava very runny. This prevents any large pressure build up, and it's fairly easy to predict where the lava will run. Magma with a very high silica content (>~70%) is much thicker, and tends to clog up the tubes, resulting in large pressure build up and things going BOOOOM - much like Mt. St. Helens and most of the other volcanoes in the Cascades.
All of the really nasty stratovolcanoes that explode and produce pyroclastic flows, nuclear-winter style ash clouds and the like are of the silica-rich variety, whereas shield volcanoes like the Hawaiian hospots are much safer to live by.
So yes, the US is vulnerable to volcanism, but Hawaii's probably the nicest place to live to stay away from it:) Until Yellowstone of course...!
Despite its size, Hawaii is actually one of the "safest" volcanoes in the world; it's magma is very poor in silica (~70%) is much thicker, and tends to clog up the tubes, resulting in large pressure build up and things going BOOOOM - much like Mt. St. Helens and most of the other volcanoes in the Cascades.
All of the really nasty stratovolcanoes that explode and produce pyroclastic flows, nuclear-winter style ash clouds and the like are of the silica-rich variety, whereas shield volcanoes like the Hawaiian hospots are much safer to live by.
So yes, the US is vulnerable to volcanism, but Hawaii's probably the nicest place to live to stay away from it:) Until Yellowstone of course...!
The problem with ubuntu (indeed, most Linux distros I've used) is that they also sue the swap file as the hibernation file - last time I set up a laptop, I wasn't able to hibernate due to my habit of capping swap partitions/files at 256MB*, and last I looked it was impossible to set it up to use a swapfile due to the way suspend was implemented, it had to be a partition. More confusingly, linux (judging by the amount that's written to disc when hibernating) writes the entire contents of memory, rather than dumping buffers+cache as windows seems to do, but that's another story. I've not had too much time to play with various suspend solutions but that's how it seems anyway.
I know loads of people will chime in with "disc space is cheap! Why not have an XGB Yfile?!", but when you're using SSD's, it's not cheap or plentiful.
What I'd love is the ability to have a minimal swap partition and a dynamically resizeable hibernate file that I can delete and have automatically recreated if need be - heck, the default 5% root reservation used by ext filesystems should ensure there's space available on the drive if need be.
* To everyone that thinks you should have 2*$yourmem in swap, IME you're almost certainly wrong on anything with 2GB or more of RAM (my bloaty-as-hell KDE4 workstation with 8GB uses about 1.5GB as a working load and my debian backup box only uses about 75MB of RAM for actual programs, the rest is all used as cache). The only time I ever have apps that run out of memory is when one develops a leak or somesuch (hey! Thanks for eating up all my 16GB of memory and 32GB of swap, BackupExec!), in which case I want the OOM Killer to terminate it ASAP, rather than have the discs grind away for an hour first, making the computer more or less unusable. If anyone can find me a situation where having gobs of swap is handy I'd love to hear it...!
I'm pretty sure such a list would count as collecting information that could have been used to prepare or commit acts of terrorism. With a law as vague as this you can go as meta as you like and still get a conviction!
The problem with the symlinking of stuff is that, after a few generations of hardware, it gets very messy and complicated. I settled on stuff in/storage/tvstore but I think just symlinking stuff all over the place is inelegant; when I was importing recording and metadata from two other systems, it was either "create random symlinks everywhere depending on where system owner put his recordings" or manually edit the database exports.
And yeah, last time I setup a frontend I had to do it from scratch. It picked up the backend settings from the database, but all other settings had to be changed manually. This would be alot more bearable if I could just go into, say, mythweb and copy the host settings for host X to host Y, but last time I looked it wasn't there.
Horses for courses on the editing front I guess - I'm pretty familiar with lirc and can thrash out a config file and have irw spitting out the right buttons in a few minutes... but as to why I have to manually create an lircrc for Myth? No idea. At least xine allows you to dump out a default lircrc keymap which you can just populate with your own values.
Completely agree about the settings being categorised - in fact I'd be happier if they were nicely categorised in the database, but as it is they're all just glommed into a single table listed in alphabetical order, without any sort of hierarchical structure in the key names (such as you do with objects in firefox's about:config for example) - wouldn't it be nice to have a frontend.display.widgets.renderer = opengl for instance?
Agree that it's entirely possible I'm doing very complicated things, but this is why I get so annoyed at the bulk of Myth power users; I say something's needlessly complicated, and I'm told it's because Myth is so powerful. If something powerful doesn't work as I'd like it to, I'm told I'm making things needlessly complicated.
Academic perhaps, as with the advent of iplayer, the general shittiness of broadcast TV and more disposable income meaning towers of DVD box sets to watch we're spending less and less time watching the tube, but I'd still like to see Myth living up to its potential. But like you say the devs have practically zero focus on the end user so I don't hold out much hope.
Essentially yes - but I think you're giving it a lot more credit than it's due:) It's the relative simplicity of some of it's biggest pitfalls that make its "85% complete on the features it has" so hard to stomach.
Don't know the last time you tried, but since at least 0.22, it has exactly this using an included python script.
Last I looked the backup script didn't offer the option to change, e.g. the location of recorded TV shows, so you always need to keep the same paths all the time... so I can't just build myself a new system and import my config into it without editing it first, as paths may well have changed.
In terms of storing global configurations in the database, I'm all for that and it makes plenty of sense. But when there doesn't seem to be an option of "copy all my settings for host X to host Y except for machine/hardware-specific ones" I don't see the point, and using mythweb/phpmyadmin for editing a config file is even clunkier than using the UI - there's no reason why things like screen resolution, sound setup, OGL settings, etc should be stored globally - but in any case if you do want everything in the database it's perfectly simple to have the myth programs parse a text file on startup and insert the data into the DB. This would have saved me no end of problems when I had a system that would freeze and crash X (due to buggy intel drivers) with the OGL painter enabled. Sure, it's simpler for devs but much, much harder for users.
Pretty much impossible to keep the box in a consistent state - this is a Myth system with two combo backends, three dedicated frontends, and it's used by between seven and nine people. It's got recordings going all the way back, so I've had to keep upgrading from the year dot. Should I note have upgraded it, hardware or software-wise, in all that time?
The primary backend of myth is also a caretaker for the house - none of the other software on the box ever has problems when I switch to another distro or upgrade the hardware - you just drop the config files in the right place, or blow your DB back into the new tin, and you're good to go - because once something's set up I don't tinker with it - I use Linux, and especially Debian, because it's essentially a fire'n'forget option that I don't have to think about. The fact that Myth has problems with this isn't explained away by it's "appliance" nature (if I thought of Myth like an appliance I'd be alot more scathing about it - none of the other PVR programs I've used have the same issues either) since it clearly doesn't behave like one; I'm not interested in keeping a separate box for Myth (waste of money and power), it's advertised as something that can coexist with XYZ and yet has a multitude of problems that every other program neatly avoids that I'm told are created by using my computer like a computer.
Plain and simple truth IMHO is that the project is badly thought out and managed, an opinion that I came to after a) looking at the code and b) trying to deal with some of the developers. As it is I'm just using it in the absence of anything better.
Granted XMLTV is an external dependency, but since Myth is pretty useless without it I would have thought more work might have gone into streamlining its use - heck, even running the setup app in a window rather than fullscreen would have been a massive help in that regard.
The near term plans of which you speak are, IMHO, stuff that should have been considered years ago back when these problems first started arising en masse. And I don't see why I shouldn't be able to import mythtv recordings into the mythtv recordings (especially if they ever do come up with a metadata format), rather than have to use mythvideo.
I've also been using it since late 2003 and whilst the setup has improved, it's still an utter pain in the arse to setup and configure. Whenever the channel setup changes, I have to manually edit my xmltv entries for the various new channels (using the EPG only provides a week of entries, as opposed to 2 weeks for RT, plus keeps mythbackend running at 30% CPU and occasionally crashing). Keeping the database and filesystem in one piece whenever you rebuild a machine or switch to another distro is needlessly manual - why can't myth have a "save my database" and "look in this directory for recordings" import , rather than me having to edit my 450MB MySQL database?
MySQL was also a bad choice - I've lost count of the time it's become corrupted, and alot of users will have also run into the problems with Myth's retarded character encoding especially during the 0.22 upgrade http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Fixing_Corrupt_Database_Encoding Why can it not use.conf files for local/client-side configuration? Why not an SQLite DB a la XBMC which, on my machines, is far, far faster than MySQL for getting crap on the screen? Postgres or DB-agnostic SQL classes would have been better in every way (and would have saved me untold hours fixing MySQL tables), but they're another topic that generates "MySQL is the best!" and endless "wontfix" flames.
Sure, Myth is pretty powerful and I've done some really cool things with it. But the overhead of setting it up and keeping it running is high, much higher than I think it warrants, and its fragility hurts the WAF. Alot of it has improved, but it's still very much a project with the mentality of an experiment rather than a serious stab at the PVR market. Lots of easily automated/GUIfied tasks left as terminal-only solutions, and not very scalable in places (try loading a collection of ~1600 movies with metadata and thumbnails and scrolling through them - XBMC can keep up with the keyboard, Myth can't). Speaking of metadata, when 0.22 came out I still couldn't find a way to get Myth to do auto-lookups of TV shows... other than using one of various metadata lookup scripts, which was when I made the switch to XBMC.
Very little spit and polish in very many key areas is one of the main reason geeks like myself get pissed off with Myth. No-one's arguing that it can do some really, really funky things, but I don't agree with your point that with great power comes great respo... complexity. Myth just has alot of needless complexity because no-one's dedicated the time to make things go smoothly.
Slashdot Mirror
Reduntantly recursive recidivism? Now there's an app for that!
Who gets to decide what "legitimate" means in this scenario? If it's left up to the judge and jury, surely it's already been admitted as evidence and is therefore legitimate by definition?
Wasn't aware I could do that...! Oh well, it only cost me a fiver for Deus Ex, I bought HL as part of a bundle that included Blue Shift, Opposing Force and Team Fortress as well.
I'm not trying to say Valve are saints and Steam is the rapture, but it's so much better than GFWL (God-Awful?)
Like the OP, I also got saddled with it on my last system with DoW2. It worked maybe 60% for connecting games, and connections would frequently drop out. It would frequently lock up the admittedly crappy BT router I was forced to use at the time when negotiating UPnP. There's a god-damned banner ad at the bottom. A bunch of publishers have chosen to go the "you must be logged in to play!" option whereas, IIRC, steam insists that offline mode remains functional for single player.
When I was forced to install Steam under a throwaway account cos I wanted to play Portal (via the freebie update) I expected myself to be uninstalling it as soon as I'd gone through the game a couple of times, but it's clearly been engineered to put the user experience first on the list (well, first behind DRM anyway) and it shows. Once your account is created, playing offline is never a hassle - I was offline for two months (longer periods I can't vouch for) whilst I moved house and all my steam games worked seamlessly - although there's a delay when you start it due to it trying to contact the login servers first. There's none of that fucktarded bullshit where you can't save your game unless you're logged in (indeed, not all games support backing your savegames up to the steam "cloud" in any case). I've since bought the orange box (physical, as steam prices in the UK are often higher than the physical media) plus steam copies of old faves like Deus Ex and the original Half-Life; I still have the original discs but the low price on steam was worth it for me, especially to avoid having to hook up optical drives and hunting down patches for the machines I wanted to play on. I've even started playing the superbly tongue-in-cheek Team Fortress 2 and found it rather surprisingly free of rabid 13 year olds comparing me to meat dumpling.
Lastly is adverising; there is some on steam, but it's not in your face. But I most love the searching for games thing - there's a pretty awesome repository of little indie games on steam which I found out about through one of their regular bundle offers, which got me into Darwinia, Defcon, Defence Grid and a whole load more interesting games that - most importantly - were easily playable on my dinky laptop with intel graphics. The GF also loves some of the interesting puzzlers. I also like the way I can give the little man my hard earned, rather than relentless advertising for the next AAAAAAAAAAAAAA FPS title that indistinguishable from the last one.
Lastly - the old "but what happens when Valve goes bust/gets bought/gets a headcrab?!?!?!?!1111" problem. No, I don't believe Valve will be able to "open" the servers, as anyone with the slightest bit of nouse about takeovers or bankruptcy will be able to tell you, the rights I have to my game will be auctioned off to the highest bidder. But this is also the case for GFWL, and indeed any other system that relies on remote authentication servers. Steam is currently displaying the best track record for this by a long chalk.
So just to add my voice to the choir - I hate DRM, but it's a fact of life if you want to play games without downloading a pirate copy; I just chose not to buy games with onerous DRM (here's looking at you Bioshock 2). Steam is DRM underneath with a highly polished exterior that's almost entirely transparent to the user and gives me added value, at least. GFWL, IMNSHO, is a thinly veiled and malfunctioning surveillance platform masquerading as a games portal that provides nothing of merit to me that the games couldn't do better themselves.
Sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from incompetence.
If word of the hype machine and some of my friends who saw Avatar is to be believed, 3D makes everything that was once crap entirely utterly awesome. You're just being cynical and refusing to embrace The Future.
Personally, I'm looking forward to a re-release of Superman 64 on my 3D TV. It'll be like the entire games room is enveloped in purple fog!
Erm... isn't the present day BP a merging of the British BP and the American Amoco? Are people seriously disliking the brits just because BP used to have a "British" in the name? Post-merger, BP have been officially called BP, not British Petroleum (and I've only been keeping an eye on the geology/engineering behind it, not any apparent sentiment).
In any case, ultimately they're a multinational megacorp and even if it was possible to bankrupt them and keep the oil flowing, after six months with some creative accountants and rebranding themselves as FluffyKitten Inc. they'd be back doing the same thing.
Disclaimer: I am a brit, and an ex-geologist. Anyone with minimal knowledge could have told you that deep water drilling in the gulf of mexico is dodgy as hell (the area is full of methane clathrates), and anyone can agree that BP have rogered everyone possible in the arse, but especially the south coast of the US.
Follow the money. It's amazing how fast you can get things done when your campaign contributions depend on it. Where's the money in shutting down fraud, spam and everything else?
Whoops. Forgot to take my anti-cynicism pills today. I'm sure our politicians and lawmakers are doing the very best they can, and after all piracy costs the economy eleventy trillion bajongas a year.
Unmarried people in the US are taxed extra? Why?!
The conservatives in the UK have been going on about bringing back tax breaks for married couples (and civil partnerships, but those aren't available to heterosexual couples here yet - I'm also one of those people that doesn't agree with marriage but support the idea of civil unions) - I really don't see what the hell marriage is supposed to achieve, and add to that the UK having the highest divorce rate in europe I don't see any form of tax break as going to make "families" more "stable".
Stupid political posturing. Why can't the state just treat people as individuals?
...why are google covering a "tax for gays"? Why are gay people being taxed more in the first place?
FTA: "Google is going to begin covering a cost that gay and lesbian employees must pay when their partners receive domestic partner health benefits, largely to compensate them for an extra tax that heterosexual married couples do not pay."
To me this sounds like gay people are charged money when their (civil?) partners receive some form of benefit, but when heterosexual couples do the same thing they're not charged money? Can someone put this in terms a commnie socialist brit can understand?
I read slashdot every working weekday (and have done since 2001) and I don't remember seeing anything called "Bilski" in recent memory.
And sentences like "X could have major repercussions for Y" where X is an unknown quantity and Y is an article about which one can be reasonably sure someone would know don't tend to work very well when pointed at the scientific market - doubly so when you can't tell when X is a proper noun or not. Observe the following examples:
"Moojops to be a major player in the fashion wars this summer!"
"Cocktuffington takes Hollywood starlets by storm!"
"Franzibald levels in the Large Hadron Collider CERN team reaching critical levels!"
I daresay the first two might make sense to someone who gives a shit, but I for one think the first sentence of the summary would be better written as "The US Supreme Court has finally decided the Bilski case (PDF), more commonly known as the busines's model patent." Eight extra words and also the extra chance for adding a superfluous apostrophe, a whole lot less kerfuffle. It's common courtesy, not to mention fucking basic journalism, to explain or not obfuscate your terms.
"Interested in a popular search company's competing motive image compression algorithm? Well, in the preceding diurnal cycles the collective of sentient carbon-based non-abhumanoid lifeforms who promulgate behind the hypertext-based site registered at D5908ABA progressed with envisaging a manifestation of the extrapolated logic required to implement a playback-oriented interpreter of aforementioned format which when committed to an unspecified base2 arithmetic engine format required more than pi to the power 6 (but less than the distance from Shrewsbury to Telford when measured in the length of a certain heroic greeks sub-ankle extremity) typewriter dings within the confines of the specified format."
Damn. I should write for Gartner. Or Idle.
The problem is, if UPS are a few days late delivering your parcel, they get all the profit and not you.
I reckon any union workers would have grounds for a strike due to unsafe working conditions, however.
It's *alpha* emitters you definitely don't want to swallow; alpha is stopped by skin or a few metres of open air, beta goes straight through you but can be blocked by some sheets of thick metal or concrete.
The reason radon gas is so hazardous is that is decays into an alpha emitter; if it's in your lungs when it does that you can expect some heavy chop.
I've been wanting to post this for a while:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1aZcsY-O8Q
Comes from a sketch show called A Bit of Fry and Laurie starring, you might have guessed, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. The clip shows that Murdoch has been slinging mud at the BBC since the dawn of ti... well, since the early 90's when Sky TV was getting a foothold. It's a tad exaggerated, but the thought of a UK without a BBC and full of Murdochian bile fills me with dread.
You can make amarok 2 look superficially like 1.4, but the behaviour is different. I still keep trying it every six months or so, and even though I can now get rid of that gargantuan trainwreck of a waste of space in the middle of the screen, I still can't sort the playlist by column. You still can't hook your player into a centralised database (apparently embedded MySQL was much better than generic SQL classes). I still can't figure out how to get myself a nice little album cover+related artists tab on the left hand side, out of the way of the playlist.
Amarok 1.4 was the best music player I'd ever used, I've now reverted back to Winamp/BMP because I just can't stand amarok's "in your face"/iTunes wannabe attitude anymore. Too many music players seem to have the mentality that, since they've put so much work into writing the library code, the library must become the key functionality. No. The key functionality is playing music, and when a library makes that overly complicated the app has lost sight of it's goals IMHO.
http://briancarper.net/blog/amarok-22-disber-grogth-grocks
Erm, OK, dunno what happened to my other comment but it missed out a whole bunch of text, so here it is again:
:) Until Yellowstone of course...!
Despite its size, Hawaii is actually one of the "safest" volcanoes in the world; it's magma is very poor in silica (<~50%), making the lava very runny. This prevents any large pressure build up, and it's fairly easy to predict where the lava will run. Magma with a very high silica content (>~70%) is much thicker, and tends to clog up the tubes, resulting in large pressure build up and things going BOOOOM - much like Mt. St. Helens and most of the other volcanoes in the Cascades.
All of the really nasty stratovolcanoes that explode and produce pyroclastic flows, nuclear-winter style ash clouds and the like are of the silica-rich variety, whereas shield volcanoes like the Hawaiian hospots are much safer to live by.
So yes, the US is vulnerable to volcanism, but Hawaii's probably the nicest place to live to stay away from it
Despite its size, Hawaii is actually one of the "safest" volcanoes in the world; it's magma is very poor in silica (~70%) is much thicker, and tends to clog up the tubes, resulting in large pressure build up and things going BOOOOM - much like Mt. St. Helens and most of the other volcanoes in the Cascades.
All of the really nasty stratovolcanoes that explode and produce pyroclastic flows, nuclear-winter style ash clouds and the like are of the silica-rich variety, whereas shield volcanoes like the Hawaiian hospots are much safer to live by.
So yes, the US is vulnerable to volcanism, but Hawaii's probably the nicest place to live to stay away from it :) Until Yellowstone of course...!
The problem with ubuntu (indeed, most Linux distros I've used) is that they also sue the swap file as the hibernation file - last time I set up a laptop, I wasn't able to hibernate due to my habit of capping swap partitions/files at 256MB*, and last I looked it was impossible to set it up to use a swapfile due to the way suspend was implemented, it had to be a partition. More confusingly, linux (judging by the amount that's written to disc when hibernating) writes the entire contents of memory, rather than dumping buffers+cache as windows seems to do, but that's another story. I've not had too much time to play with various suspend solutions but that's how it seems anyway.
I know loads of people will chime in with "disc space is cheap! Why not have an XGB Yfile?!", but when you're using SSD's, it's not cheap or plentiful.
What I'd love is the ability to have a minimal swap partition and a dynamically resizeable hibernate file that I can delete and have automatically recreated if need be - heck, the default 5% root reservation used by ext filesystems should ensure there's space available on the drive if need be.
* To everyone that thinks you should have 2*$yourmem in swap, IME you're almost certainly wrong on anything with 2GB or more of RAM (my bloaty-as-hell KDE4 workstation with 8GB uses about 1.5GB as a working load and my debian backup box only uses about 75MB of RAM for actual programs, the rest is all used as cache). The only time I ever have apps that run out of memory is when one develops a leak or somesuch (hey! Thanks for eating up all my 16GB of memory and 32GB of swap, BackupExec!), in which case I want the OOM Killer to terminate it ASAP, rather than have the discs grind away for an hour first, making the computer more or less unusable. If anyone can find me a situation where having gobs of swap is handy I'd love to hear it...!
I'm pretty sure such a list would count as collecting information that could have been used to prepare or commit acts of terrorism. With a law as vague as this you can go as meta as you like and still get a conviction!
The problem with the symlinking of stuff is that, after a few generations of hardware, it gets very messy and complicated. I settled on stuff in /storage/tvstore but I think just symlinking stuff all over the place is inelegant; when I was importing recording and metadata from two other systems, it was either "create random symlinks everywhere depending on where system owner put his recordings" or manually edit the database exports.
And yeah, last time I setup a frontend I had to do it from scratch. It picked up the backend settings from the database, but all other settings had to be changed manually. This would be alot more bearable if I could just go into, say, mythweb and copy the host settings for host X to host Y, but last time I looked it wasn't there.
Horses for courses on the editing front I guess - I'm pretty familiar with lirc and can thrash out a config file and have irw spitting out the right buttons in a few minutes... but as to why I have to manually create an lircrc for Myth? No idea. At least xine allows you to dump out a default lircrc keymap which you can just populate with your own values.
Completely agree about the settings being categorised - in fact I'd be happier if they were nicely categorised in the database, but as it is they're all just glommed into a single table listed in alphabetical order, without any sort of hierarchical structure in the key names (such as you do with objects in firefox's about:config for example) - wouldn't it be nice to have a frontend.display.widgets.renderer = opengl for instance?
Agree that it's entirely possible I'm doing very complicated things, but this is why I get so annoyed at the bulk of Myth power users; I say something's needlessly complicated, and I'm told it's because Myth is so powerful. If something powerful doesn't work as I'd like it to, I'm told I'm making things needlessly complicated.
Academic perhaps, as with the advent of iplayer, the general shittiness of broadcast TV and more disposable income meaning towers of DVD box sets to watch we're spending less and less time watching the tube, but I'd still like to see Myth living up to its potential. But like you say the devs have practically zero focus on the end user so I don't hold out much hope.
Essentially yes - but I think you're giving it a lot more credit than it's due :) It's the relative simplicity of some of it's biggest pitfalls that make its "85% complete on the features it has" so hard to stomach.
Last I looked the backup script didn't offer the option to change, e.g. the location of recorded TV shows, so you always need to keep the same paths all the time... so I can't just build myself a new system and import my config into it without editing it first, as paths may well have changed.
In terms of storing global configurations in the database, I'm all for that and it makes plenty of sense. But when there doesn't seem to be an option of "copy all my settings for host X to host Y except for machine/hardware-specific ones" I don't see the point, and using mythweb/phpmyadmin for editing a config file is even clunkier than using the UI - there's no reason why things like screen resolution, sound setup, OGL settings, etc should be stored globally - but in any case if you do want everything in the database it's perfectly simple to have the myth programs parse a text file on startup and insert the data into the DB. This would have saved me no end of problems when I had a system that would freeze and crash X (due to buggy intel drivers) with the OGL painter enabled. Sure, it's simpler for devs but much, much harder for users.
Pretty much impossible to keep the box in a consistent state - this is a Myth system with two combo backends, three dedicated frontends, and it's used by between seven and nine people. It's got recordings going all the way back, so I've had to keep upgrading from the year dot. Should I note have upgraded it, hardware or software-wise, in all that time?
The primary backend of myth is also a caretaker for the house - none of the other software on the box ever has problems when I switch to another distro or upgrade the hardware - you just drop the config files in the right place, or blow your DB back into the new tin, and you're good to go - because once something's set up I don't tinker with it - I use Linux, and especially Debian, because it's essentially a fire'n'forget option that I don't have to think about. The fact that Myth has problems with this isn't explained away by it's "appliance" nature (if I thought of Myth like an appliance I'd be alot more scathing about it - none of the other PVR programs I've used have the same issues either) since it clearly doesn't behave like one; I'm not interested in keeping a separate box for Myth (waste of money and power), it's advertised as something that can coexist with XYZ and yet has a multitude of problems that every other program neatly avoids that I'm told are created by using my computer like a computer.
Plain and simple truth IMHO is that the project is badly thought out and managed, an opinion that I came to after a) looking at the code and b) trying to deal with some of the developers. As it is I'm just using it in the absence of anything better.
Granted XMLTV is an external dependency, but since Myth is pretty useless without it I would have thought more work might have gone into streamlining its use - heck, even running the setup app in a window rather than fullscreen would have been a massive help in that regard.
The near term plans of which you speak are, IMHO, stuff that should have been considered years ago back when these problems first started arising en masse. And I don't see why I shouldn't be able to import mythtv recordings into the mythtv recordings (especially if they ever do come up with a metadata format), rather than have to use mythvideo.
More balance :)
I've also been using it since late 2003 and whilst the setup has improved, it's still an utter pain in the arse to setup and configure. Whenever the channel setup changes, I have to manually edit my xmltv entries for the various new channels (using the EPG only provides a week of entries, as opposed to 2 weeks for RT, plus keeps mythbackend running at 30% CPU and occasionally crashing). Keeping the database and filesystem in one piece whenever you rebuild a machine or switch to another distro is needlessly manual - why can't myth have a "save my database" and "look in this directory for recordings" import , rather than me having to edit my 450MB MySQL database?
MySQL was also a bad choice - I've lost count of the time it's become corrupted, and alot of users will have also run into the problems with Myth's retarded character encoding especially during the 0.22 upgrade http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Fixing_Corrupt_Database_Encoding Why can it not use .conf files for local/client-side configuration? Why not an SQLite DB a la XBMC which, on my machines, is far, far faster than MySQL for getting crap on the screen? Postgres or DB-agnostic SQL classes would have been better in every way (and would have saved me untold hours fixing MySQL tables), but they're another topic that generates "MySQL is the best!" and endless "wontfix" flames.
Sure, Myth is pretty powerful and I've done some really cool things with it. But the overhead of setting it up and keeping it running is high, much higher than I think it warrants, and its fragility hurts the WAF. Alot of it has improved, but it's still very much a project with the mentality of an experiment rather than a serious stab at the PVR market. Lots of easily automated/GUIfied tasks left as terminal-only solutions, and not very scalable in places (try loading a collection of ~1600 movies with metadata and thumbnails and scrolling through them - XBMC can keep up with the keyboard, Myth can't). Speaking of metadata, when 0.22 came out I still couldn't find a way to get Myth to do auto-lookups of TV shows... other than using one of various metadata lookup scripts, which was when I made the switch to XBMC.
Very little spit and polish in very many key areas is one of the main reason geeks like myself get pissed off with Myth. No-one's arguing that it can do some really, really funky things, but I don't agree with your point that with great power comes great respo... complexity. Myth just has alot of needless complexity because no-one's dedicated the time to make things go smoothly.