Since you mentioned Miro: make a visit to http://tvrss.net/ to find a good show and copy the feed URL to paste as a "channel" into Miro.
As a bonus you can then stream that content to your 360 or similar device with another program, TVersity. That's what I'm doing and it works great. The drawback, since I apparently don't know how to get good speeds from torrents, shows take forever to finish downloading. If you don't mind that it works perfectly. You can get video podcasts with Miro as well (though iTunes is good enough for that).
For years I used ghost and loved it. Then DVD burners got cheap and they added support for them and now I'm committed for life. You can make a ghost to a DVD and make that same disc bootable itself. You don't know even need an OS or to install it. It just boots into some version of DOS and opens ghost for you. You can then make the image to a bootable DVD, or hard drive, clone a drive or whatever. And it even has compression to save space. If you can get networking working under DOS you can even batch it over the network. Or use Bart's PE via CD or USB thumb drive to make for easier network imaging. Point is Ghost (ignore versions 10 and later) is an ideal imaging solution for anything you could possibly want.
I was actually thinking of setting up a home NAS myself. So I have a suggestion that is also a question to slashdot on whether this approach is a good one.
I was trying to set up a FreeNAS box. I used VirtualPC (it's free so I don't complain) to set it initially then did used dd to raw-write the virtual hard drive to a pen/flash drive. I was pretty sure that should work. But I kept getting getting errors referring to a missing kernel or a bad file system. So I put the project on hold.
Then it occurred to me I could set up a simple Windows installation with VirtualPC and just use that to run the FreeNAS install. This approach would have several advantages: I can use as many or as few physical disks as I want. I can back up the virtual disks to other media. I don't have to worry about FreeNAS being able to recognize the NIC of the PC I'm using for the FreeNAS. If something happens to the install of FreeNAS for some reason I can simply re-install in the virtual machine. I can even run other virtual servers along side it (like OpenFiler if I want to do a side-by-side comparison). You could even easily transplant the whole thing to a new computer without worrying about differing hardware.
Then I started to think about making a giant raid of ~4.6Gig virtual disks that could be backed up to DVDs, but that's probably pushing it.
So I offer this as both a suggestion and a question of whether this would be a good approach. I only mentioned Windows and VirtualPC because both are readily available (VMWare still costs money, right? I guess you can make the machine and use the free VMWarePlayer?).
Buffy's fifth was the best? Interesting you say that. It's my least favorite. I watched the DVD special features. Even the executive producer (Marti Nox I think it was) couldn't fully explain the plot. What the hell man. Course, I'm guessing you're a lot younger than me. That's probably why. I probably like seasons 3 and 4 the most. Though six and seven had their moments (I loved the musical and the one where the vampire acts as psychologist for buffy as well as 4's last episode, Restless).
I realize there will be an inevitable flood of "already been canceled" comments (as there was on dig last night) but just remember one thing: Angel (produced by fox) kept going and going and going. I can't be the only one who watched all five seasons (right?). Jeeze man...That show went on way past it's prime. Every gimmick imaginable to keep it going a little longer. I mean sure Deleria was hot and all but...damn.
Don't be too hard them is my point. They don't actually have that bad of a record. Seven seasons and five seasons isn't really THAT bad (for Buffy and Angel respectively).
I subscribed about a year ago. They seem to update the game library and client constantly (if you don't login for a couple months the updates will take a while).
I have some things I'll add that I don't think anyone else has mentioned: - sure they have PC games but no multiplayer! Would it really be so hard to integrate GameSpy or something similar? Ok I guess they'd need some huge set of CD keys but seriously. Couldn't they at least mention this? They do have mutliplayer but only for arcade titles (not for consoles).
-I have an XBox 360 USB gamepad for Windows and all the buttons seemed to map automatically for me (start/select etc.). I thought that was pretty neat...I'm fairly certain it won't recognize all and map all gamepads like that.
-Some games don't seem to work correctly to or at least not very well. For instance I tried one of the hitman games and was getting terrible frame rates. My PC will play Oblivion at 30+ frames per second but I can't run hitman?! (it's a 3800+ with 2 gigs of memory and a decent video card).
It's a great service if you just want to try a game you know you'd never play (Psychonaughts is was a good example for me). For everything but some of the old PC games you will need a game pad though. I recommend the XBox 360 USB, the one directly from MS.
For the record the resident lives in Gizzly Flats, which is located in El Dorado County. It's the first part of the first sentence of the whole article. I only point this out because I live a few miles from Grizzly Flats (and in El Dorado County for life). Also, there's a town called El Dorado in El Dorado County. So it does matter. Sort of.
From article:
El Dorado resident and
As Grizzly Flats resident Dennis Sheehan... Also, who the hell buys Gateway?!
It just so happened I have been watching the DVDs of an apparently little-known sci-fi series, the new Outer Limits from showtime, and saw an episode almost indistinguishable from the hypothetical in the description. The episode was called "The Voyage Home" featuring Michael Dorn (a.k.a. Warf). Him and two others were traveling back to Earth from Mars when they discover a strange substance on their ship. Here's more info (with spoilers) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Voyage_Home_(The_ Outer_Limits)
I really recommend the series by the way. A lot of Trek alumni are featured in episodes (the one with Lenord Nimoy was pretty good).
I guess no body listens to the podcasts. The producer/writer, Ronald D. Moore, mentioned this a month ago on a podcast. The network made him sweat it out with that "12 episodes" thing but finally said ok to a twenty-something deal. He also said the show has TWO seasons left. He hasn't signed two seasons, he just thinks the story arc has two seasons left. I highly recommend the podcasts by the way...
I thought I would mention game tap. It still needs work but I like it. I can easily just choose a game from a larger number platforms and it and just downloads and is ready to play. No installing, copy protection. And when I don't want it any more I just delete it through the interface. I bought a XBox 360-like controller and it just works. Genesis games, arcade games, some ported PS1 games that were obviously intended for a gamepad, etc. (though no multi-player in PC games is disappointing).
I mention Game Tap because this seems to be the direction of gaming in general. With the 360 essentially bringing PC gaming to an easy to use package and things like Yahoo games coming in maybe this is just the writing on the wall: just make it work, don't make me think.
Also, look at all the console games that get ported to PC with little to no work on them. For instance I bought one of the new Metal Gear Solid games (the second one I think) for Windows but it was pretty much impossible to play with a keyboard and mouse and my game pad worked very poorly. If "Games for Windows" standardizes those sorts of ports so I can actually play a game like that I think it's a good idea.
I don't even know if it was released or if so if it was successful but there was supposed to be a "BASIC Programming Kit" for Sega Saturn. Even if it was released some how I doubt it was terribly successful.
They're a bit old but I thought games like Planescape: Torment and Deus Ex would be good examples of "high brow" games. And if you know Deus is not pronounced "doose" extra points to you.
I remember a story from several years ago, not sure when exactly when it was (might have even been late 90s), that talked about a Simpsons movie. In particular it mentioned the whole cast aging and Bart losing his virginity as major events in th movie. Perhaps that script has been thrown out in the intervening bad writing seasons. Any body else remember a story like that?
The only reason I like this idea is the potential of convincing family members to switch to FF. For instance my younger sister and her husband are still using the official Kazaa client which (last I heard) has loads of spyware. And also using IE, also experiencing loads of issues with spyware. If this plugin (I'm assuming it does not have spyware) is as easy and accessible as it looks maybe this will convince them to switch from both IE and Kazaa to FF. Right? (much less spyware isn't a convincing argument I guess. At least I got them switched from Me to Win2k. That took many months.)
I would point out though yahoo has a feature like this called already called breifcase. Upload data (docs/movies/photos/etc.), share it and send the link (no logins for a shared folder). If something lik this could be integrated (and more people knew about it) I think it would be a lot more useful. At least for photo and doc sharing anyway. I did a brief search for it on the FF extension database and nothing came up.
All you need is the login password? Couldn't a bad guy just boot off the install CD, reset the password and login (and reset the keychain, god I hate that keychain)? Doesn't sound very secure to me.
At the risk of nit-picking (and sounding like a a geek) it's not grokk. The term is grok. The term was made up in a sci-fi novel: Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. I know because I'm mid-way through reading this book. A fantastic book, well worth reading. Not that I'm a geek.
Actually there's sites out there that give you a pretty good price from the combo. I built mine for $190: the motherboard with a circuit board of a PSU and AC adapter all together as a package for $170. I then paid $20 for a case (a little cash box thing from an office supply store). Sure it's not very fast and kind of ugly but it's a rather small computer for ~$190 (just used some spare memory and HDD).
I was about to post exactly this but you managed express my thoughts exactly.
I would only add the following:
Internet access is a luxury expense like cable TV/dishwasher/dvd player/vcr/gym membership/cell phone/wow subscription et al. In california where I live our roads are falling apart, our schools don't teach the children, the population increases by millions why no provisions done to handle water supplies, electricity, etc. and yet now I get to subsidize free Internet. Internet that won't be used for much more than porn habits anyway.
You want to be educated or find information? Try what we did in 1994: use books, magazines and newspapers at the library (or rent Internet time at the library).
It really comes down to priorities: either you want Internet bad enough to pay the money for it, sacrificing something else, or you don't want it. That's the way it should be with luxury items.
Well it's not exactly silent, or done, but I also built an attempt at a HTPC/PVR computer. Current it's sitting in the living room hooked up to the big screen running SageTV on Windows 2000 Pro:
Super VCR Mod
A, who has three people on her buddy list, doesn't add much to your score. That's because she doesn't have as many people on her buddy list as does B, who has 16. Your friend A is clearly not as well-connected as your friend B. Not unlike life."
3 is less than 16? When did that happen? Good thing you spelled that out in a complicated formula. Thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
Since you mentioned Miro: make a visit to http://tvrss.net/ to find a good show and copy the feed URL to paste as a "channel" into Miro. As a bonus you can then stream that content to your 360 or similar device with another program, TVersity. That's what I'm doing and it works great. The drawback, since I apparently don't know how to get good speeds from torrents, shows take forever to finish downloading. If you don't mind that it works perfectly. You can get video podcasts with Miro as well (though iTunes is good enough for that).
All we need is an antenna to receive Internet access...to stream video/audio feeds...on TV. If only something like that already existed...
For years I used ghost and loved it. Then DVD burners got cheap and they added support for them and now I'm committed for life. You can make a ghost to a DVD and make that same disc bootable itself. You don't know even need an OS or to install it. It just boots into some version of DOS and opens ghost for you. You can then make the image to a bootable DVD, or hard drive, clone a drive or whatever. And it even has compression to save space. If you can get networking working under DOS you can even batch it over the network. Or use Bart's PE via CD or USB thumb drive to make for easier network imaging. Point is Ghost (ignore versions 10 and later) is an ideal imaging solution for anything you could possibly want.
I was actually thinking of setting up a home NAS myself. So I have a suggestion that is also a question to slashdot on whether this approach is a good one.
I was trying to set up a FreeNAS box. I used VirtualPC (it's free so I don't complain) to set it initially then did used dd to raw-write the virtual hard drive to a pen/flash drive. I was pretty sure that should work. But I kept getting getting errors referring to a missing kernel or a bad file system. So I put the project on hold.
Then it occurred to me I could set up a simple Windows installation with VirtualPC and just use that to run the FreeNAS install. This approach would have several advantages: I can use as many or as few physical disks as I want. I can back up the virtual disks to other media. I don't have to worry about FreeNAS being able to recognize the NIC of the PC I'm using for the FreeNAS. If something happens to the install of FreeNAS for some reason I can simply re-install in the virtual machine. I can even run other virtual servers along side it (like OpenFiler if I want to do a side-by-side comparison). You could even easily transplant the whole thing to a new computer without worrying about differing hardware.
Then I started to think about making a giant raid of ~4.6Gig virtual disks that could be backed up to DVDs, but that's probably pushing it.
So I offer this as both a suggestion and a question of whether this would be a good approach. I only mentioned Windows and VirtualPC because both are readily available (VMWare still costs money, right? I guess you can make the machine and use the free VMWarePlayer?).
Buffy's fifth was the best? Interesting you say that. It's my least favorite. I watched the DVD special features. Even the executive producer (Marti Nox I think it was) couldn't fully explain the plot. What the hell man. Course, I'm guessing you're a lot younger than me. That's probably why. I probably like seasons 3 and 4 the most. Though six and seven had their moments (I loved the musical and the one where the vampire acts as psychologist for buffy as well as 4's last episode, Restless).
I realize there will be an inevitable flood of "already been canceled" comments (as there was on dig last night) but just remember one thing: Angel (produced by fox) kept going and going and going. I can't be the only one who watched all five seasons (right?). Jeeze man...That show went on way past it's prime. Every gimmick imaginable to keep it going a little longer. I mean sure Deleria was hot and all but...damn.
Don't be too hard them is my point. They don't actually have that bad of a record. Seven seasons and five seasons isn't really THAT bad (for Buffy and Angel respectively).
I subscribed about a year ago. They seem to update the game library and client constantly (if you don't login for a couple months the updates will take a while).
I have some things I'll add that I don't think anyone else has mentioned:
- sure they have PC games but no multiplayer! Would it really be so hard to integrate GameSpy or something similar? Ok I guess they'd need some huge set of CD keys but seriously. Couldn't they at least mention this? They do have mutliplayer but only for arcade titles (not for consoles).
-I have an XBox 360 USB gamepad for Windows and all the buttons seemed to map automatically for me (start/select etc.). I thought that was pretty neat...I'm fairly certain it won't recognize all and map all gamepads like that.
-Some games don't seem to work correctly to or at least not very well. For instance I tried one of the hitman games and was getting terrible frame rates. My PC will play Oblivion at 30+ frames per second but I can't run hitman?! (it's a 3800+ with 2 gigs of memory and a decent video card).
It's a great service if you just want to try a game you know you'd never play (Psychonaughts is was a good example for me). For everything but some of the old PC games you will need a game pad though. I recommend the XBox 360 USB, the one directly from MS.
From article:
El Dorado resident and As Grizzly Flats resident Dennis Sheehan... Also, who the hell buys Gateway?!It just so happened I have been watching the DVDs of an apparently little-known sci-fi series, the new Outer Limits from showtime, and saw an episode almost indistinguishable from the hypothetical in the description. The episode was called "The Voyage Home" featuring Michael Dorn (a.k.a. Warf). Him and two others were traveling back to Earth from Mars when they discover a strange substance on their ship. Here's more info (with spoilers) -_ Outer_Limits)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Voyage_Home_(The
I really recommend the series by the way. A lot of Trek alumni are featured in episodes (the one with Lenord Nimoy was pretty good).
I guess no body listens to the podcasts. The producer/writer, Ronald D. Moore, mentioned this a month ago on a podcast. The network made him sweat it out with that "12 episodes" thing but finally said ok to a twenty-something deal. He also said the show has TWO seasons left. He hasn't signed two seasons, he just thinks the story arc has two seasons left. I highly recommend the podcasts by the way...
I mention Game Tap because this seems to be the direction of gaming in general. With the 360 essentially bringing PC gaming to an easy to use package and things like Yahoo games coming in maybe this is just the writing on the wall: just make it work, don't make me think.
Also, look at all the console games that get ported to PC with little to no work on them. For instance I bought one of the new Metal Gear Solid games (the second one I think) for Windows but it was pretty much impossible to play with a keyboard and mouse and my game pad worked very poorly. If "Games for Windows" standardizes those sorts of ports so I can actually play a game like that I think it's a good idea.
On a semi-related note, has anyone every heard of this? http://www.envizionsinc.com/
I don't even know if it was released or if so if it was successful but there was supposed to be a "BASIC Programming Kit" for Sega Saturn. Even if it was released some how I doubt it was terribly successful.
They're a bit old but I thought games like Planescape: Torment and Deus Ex would be good examples of "high brow" games. And if you know Deus is not pronounced "doose" extra points to you.
No, LiteStep
I said...litestep...ah forget it.
Actually you can drag-and-drop images from browsers in windows. If the browser you're using can't someone went out of their way to prevent it.
I remember a story from several years ago, not sure when exactly when it was (might have even been late 90s), that talked about a Simpsons movie. In particular it mentioned the whole cast aging and Bart losing his virginity as major events in th movie. Perhaps that script has been thrown out in the intervening bad writing seasons. Any body else remember a story like that?
The only reason I like this idea is the potential of convincing family members to switch to FF. For instance my younger sister and her husband are still using the official Kazaa client which (last I heard) has loads of spyware. And also using IE, also experiencing loads of issues with spyware. If this plugin (I'm assuming it does not have spyware) is as easy and accessible as it looks maybe this will convince them to switch from both IE and Kazaa to FF. Right? (much less spyware isn't a convincing argument I guess. At least I got them switched from Me to Win2k. That took many months.)
I would point out though yahoo has a feature like this called already called breifcase. Upload data (docs/movies/photos/etc.), share it and send the link (no logins for a shared folder). If something lik this could be integrated (and more people knew about it) I think it would be a lot more useful. At least for photo and doc sharing anyway. I did a brief search for it on the FF extension database and nothing came up.
All you need is the login password? Couldn't a bad guy just boot off the install CD, reset the password and login (and reset the keychain, god I hate that keychain)? Doesn't sound very secure to me.
At the risk of nit-picking (and sounding like a a geek) it's not grokk. The term is grok. The term was made up in a sci-fi novel: Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. I know because I'm mid-way through reading this book. A fantastic book, well worth reading. Not that I'm a geek.
Actually there's sites out there that give you a pretty good price from the combo. I built mine for $190: the motherboard with a circuit board of a PSU and AC adapter all together as a package for $170. I then paid $20 for a case (a little cash box thing from an office supply store). Sure it's not very fast and kind of ugly but it's a rather small computer for ~$190 (just used some spare memory and HDD).
I was about to post exactly this but you managed express my thoughts exactly.
I would only add the following:
Internet access is a luxury expense like cable TV/dishwasher/dvd player/vcr/gym membership/cell phone/wow subscription et al. In california where I live our roads are falling apart, our schools don't teach the children, the population increases by millions why no provisions done to handle water supplies, electricity, etc. and yet now I get to subsidize free Internet. Internet that won't be used for much more than porn habits anyway.
You want to be educated or find information? Try what we did in 1994: use books, magazines and newspapers at the library (or rent Internet time at the library).
It really comes down to priorities: either you want Internet bad enough to pay the money for it, sacrificing something else, or you don't want it. That's the way it should be with luxury items.
Well it's not exactly silent, or done, but I also built an attempt at a HTPC/PVR computer. Current it's sitting in the living room hooked up to the big screen running SageTV on Windows 2000 Pro: Super VCR Mod
3 is less than 16? When did that happen? Good thing you spelled that out in a complicated formula. Thanks.