SBC offered their Internet customers the option of switching from their own Prodigy provider to Yahoo email. I declined for obvious reasons (privacy primarily), but switching ISP's is trivial for me because most of my email is sent to Spamex.com email addresses of my choosing such as Whatever_I_Want@spamex.com and all I have to do to switch ISP's is just change the redirection of my Spamex email forwarding account.
I also even purchased some cheap webhosting space so that I could run my own mail server and have as many email accounts that were independent of my ISP as I want. By the way, in my opinion StartLogic.com sucks really badly, but BlueHost.com has everything I want and more and works great. BlueHost is the only cheap webhost I know of that offers free SSH shell access.
While I'm off the topic;-), all I really want is a webhost with shell access, lots of cheap webspace, enough bandwidth for my needs (a few TB's per month plus decent download speeds), and none of the GUI interface nonsense and all the fancy web applications that most web hosts provide these days. All I want is the type of account a university student or professor might have at their institution for example. Anyone know of any *Nix/BSD based webhosts offering this type of bare-bones service? Thanks.
I hear a colonoscopy inspection with the photographs retained by the police department along with fingerprints, etc., is going to be required for most IT jobs starting next year. The last time I had one done, the doctor let me keep the picture taken by the camera as it was peering outwards towards the opening of my anus from the inside (the doctor was checking for hemorrhoids). He suggested using the picture on my drivers license or as a passport photo.:-|
The only thing that really matters with coffee is how recently the beans were roasted. Two other things that are also very important are the type of roast; ie, were the beans lightly roasted so you can actually taste the coffee bean (instead of being burned to a crisp until they're as bitter as Zeus hops in beer, or Full City and Espresso coffee roasts are), and lastly where are the beans from and what was that particular harvest like? Freshly and properly ground coffee beans are assumed of course. Green coffee beans will last several months on the shelf, but once you roast them in your home coffee roaster (of course;-) the flavor starts deteriorating after only a few days (some difference is noticeable after only hours!), and after a month you may as well be buying supermarket coffee.
Great news! I just received a patent from uspto.gov on the number "42". Henceforth, anyone using this number in full, or as part of an embedded string of numbers, is now required by law to pay whatever I want to charge for the use of that number. Note that any and all program output data containing this number is subject to the same royalty payments and severe FBI penalties including imprisonment and fines as high as $42 for using this number without permission!
It's not that CDs have exact replication but vinyl sounds better, but rather that many CDs have poorly done recording and mastering. It has nothing to do with the medium.
I was always very skeptical about tube audio amplifiers sounding better than solid state amps until I purchased one. As soon as I hooked it up and turned it on my wife exclaimed at how much better the sound was. She is no audiophile and neither am I although I do have a sound system that's at least as good as my ears - on the other hand, that's easy to do because I'm 61!;-)
So I'm pretty sure that it wasn't just my imagination when I noticed a distinctively more "realistic" sound. I doubt that the sound is actually more realistic, but it does seem to sound better with a tube amplifier. I would think that whatever waveform shaping a tube amp does could be replicated by some sort of R/C passive network, or certainly by an active filter.
Some of the music I play is rather unusual and sometimes emits strange and unexpected sounds (so called "New Age" stuff for us old folks). Since I've been using the tube amp, sometimes I'm startled by a sound from the next room where the stereo is, because it's so realistic it sounds as though someone is in the next room!
If by "your 'own' home" you mean the bank's home, then I would agree; however, even after the mortgage is paid off it still isn't your own home. It belongs to the county and you must pay a yearly rental fee to the county for the rest of your life or they will repossess it. The county calls the rental fee "property taxes" and they can be quite high in some areas. I wonder if they have that in India?
If you can't attract viewers with quality, attract them with something that they'll remember: boobs, blood, and bombs. If network TV continues to fail, it certainly won't be due to censorship - it will be due to the networks' inability to address their piss-poor programming.
What disturbs me even more is the possibility that the TV networks are actually producing what the average American wants to watch. After all, the networks are in the business of making money, and so are likely to be at least *trying* to produce what average Joe Six-pack wants. THAT is the scary part because it makes me wonder about the type of society I'm living in that enjoys the kind of crap that's on TV.
It has no "impact force" per se, so we're talking about destroying through heat -- but how far (as in depth) does that actually get you?
Have no fear, at this very moment I am developing a specially designed tinfoil hat with built-in drop down tinfoil sheeting that will encase the entire body in tinfoil protective sheeting so that you can drift like a silver ghost through the powerful energy beam weapons of the forces of evil. ;-)
.. their sales model is based on the fact that with old-style TV, you have to watch the crap they want you to watch
Actually I think pay-per-view in general and Joost in particular is just an extension of the movie theatre model. You pay each time you want to watch a movie, which is effectively "renting" a viewing and is in line with the overall movement to rent software in general by means of crap like so called "Product Activation" (as well as remote product DE-ACTIVATION), DRM, etc., rather than selling it, and should be resisted with every fiber of our being.
Does anybody more versed in this know, with current technology and a little more time, will we really be able to track all potential, immediate threats?
I'm no astronomer, but I did write the telescope control system software for a medium sized (24" diameter mirror) telescope used primarily for asteroid acquisition and tracking, and I think I can safely say that:
Yes, given enough asteroid tracking telescopes to cover the entire sky every three months, any asteroid coming from any direction could be identified well before it struck earth. The reason is that as the earth revolves in its orbit, areas of the sky that were previously in the direction of the Sun will be visible without interference from the Sun in three months - which is the length of time it takes the earth to revolve 90 degrees in it's 360 degree orbit around the Sun.
Wow, I thought my Karma would get mutilated, but right now my original message is at +4!
Please watch the video before you comment. It addresses each and every point you have all brought up. Most of all though, actually read the Constitution sometime. It's written for the common man and is easily understandable by anyone who will take the time to read it with care. Pay particular attention to the two different types of taxes that are authorized by the Constitution (hint: the 16th Amendment has nothing to do with it according to the Supreme Court).
My roof IS loaded up with solar cells and they generate about half the electricity my wife and I use. It's a "net metered" system, so I effectively use the power grid as a giant "storage battery", so to speak. I had the system installed about three years ago, and in another seven years the system will have paid for itself. Actually it will only have paid my own costs, which were less than 50% of the actual $40,000 cost of the system due to government rebates and tax credits. Even after I'm dead, that system will still be putting out essentially "free" power however.
Ironically enough, even though the City of Glendale paid for half the cost of the system, the Glendale planning commission almost rejected my plan to put the solar cells on my roof for "aesthetic" reasons, arrrrggggghhhhh. Thanks to a persuasive and persistent solar system installer however, I was finally able to get the City of Glendale to approve the solar system another branch of the city government was helping to pay for.
Plus Citibank has a feature that I now find essential - the ability to generate "virtual" credit card numbers as needed, and to be able to set the expiration date and limit on the amount of purchase that can be charged to each virtual credit card number. It makes online shopping perfectly safe. MBNA offered a similar feature until they were bought up by BofA, which is when I changed to Citibank, and so far I'm very happy with Citibank.
There's a rather humorous corollary to this, and since I feel loquacious today I shall tell the story:
When I was employed and had a six digit salary, credit card offers with credit limits upward of $50,000 routinely came in the mail. Now that I'm retired and have no visible income anymore (just my retirement savings and Social Security), what happened when I switched from my MBNA credit card with it's open ended limit (once or twice MBNA raised my credit limit so high that I called them and asked them to reduce it for fear that if my credit card were stolen, someone might use it to purchase their own island or something, har!) was that my new Citi card only came with a $4,000 credit limit. As it turns out, even though I pay each month's credit card bill in full, my wife and I maxed out the $4,000 credit limit in almost the first month - not because we spend more than that each month, but because the delay between the time the charge is incurred by the bank and the time I receive the bill for that charge can be as much as five or six weeks in certain cases. The effect of this delay is that the actual "real time" charges on my credit card account can be the total of six weeks worth of spending rather than one month's spending. Because of this and Citibank's understandable refusal to raise our credit limit until we'd had the account for at least six months, I've ended up having to send Citibank an OVERPAYMENT each month to avoid maxing out our ostensible $4,000 monthly limit (ie; if I receive a bill for $1,500, I send a check for $3,500 so that I always have a positive balance on file). I'm effectively using my Citibank "credit" card as a "debit" card. I'm sure the bank loves it, but as long as they raise my credit limit to something more reasonable in six months I don't mind waiting.
Is PCIe the kind of animal where, if you had a machine with multiple slots, you could use one slot for input, sampling and ADC chores, and direct blast the bits to the other board (to handle encoding & muxing) straight across the PCIe bus without having to hit the other mobo bottlenecks?
No, I don't think so. As I recall, in the PCI bus I'm familiar with (ie; I don't know what the "e" in PCIe means), a device can operate in either bus master or slave mode but in both cases data transfer occurs between the device and the main CPU RAM rather than from one device to another on the PCI bus. There is nothing to stop you from connecting a ribbon cable directly from one board to another and bypassing the PCI bus altogether however.
Now that I think about it, it might be possible to do the whole thing by just adding a three input ADC PCI card to a reasonably fast desktop computer. As you say, I first need to get a copy of the specs on the YPbPr video to find out how fast it needs to be sampled and what the waveform looks like so I know where to sample it, etc. If the numbers look promising, I would like to get back to you for guidance on what the typical "customer base" would accept, but I just realized that SlashDot apparently has no mechanism for sending private messages from one member to another, so if you (RareButSeriousSideEffect) would please send an email to me at gmail (my username is rsdotson) I will keep you informed of my progress (if any). Thanks for the suggestion, even though surely the "big guys" will be coming out with a device like you describe very soon. ARCHOS already makes video playback/recorders just like you describe that record as well as plays back, but only for NTSC.
Fortunately the Xvid codec is open source, so I've already downloaded it to see how complicated it is. I'm hoping it will be small enough to run on an embedded CPU core in an FPGA. By the way, don't ever think of yourself as a "lowly" programmer. I was primarily a C programmer before my retirement and only taught myself Verilog afterwards. If you can learn C# then you can certainly learn Verilog if you wish to. It's a myth that Verilog and VHDL are difficult to learn. They are both programming languages like any other, except that the rules are different than on standard sequential CPU's. Verilog essentially allows the programmer to implement NON-deterministic finite state machines, as well as the standard classical deterministic finite state machine model that most CPU's implement. If you like low level programming, you'll LOVE Verilog!:-)
1. Are you telling me that there are people who would pay as much as $2,000 for a board that digitizes the three YPbPr component video signals and two analog stereo outputs of an HDTV device and sends the data to a PC for recording (or plugs into the PCI bus and is accessed via device drivers), or would that price also require downscaling of the image and MP4/XviD compression? I believe that fast enough FPGA boards with high speed ADC's and builtin PCI interface plus DMA can be had for around two or three hundred dollars.
2. How much would the MP4 and/or XviD compression portion of the operation be worth (perhaps as an optional extra-cost feature)? At the moment I have no idea how feasible MP4 compression would be for an FPGA. If it's very complicated it may require a very expensive FPGA or even a custom VLSI chip in order to have enough logic circuitry available.
3. Is http://forum.videohelp.com/ representative of the type of "Videohelp & AVS's forums" you referred to, or do you have some better suggestions as to where I could go to sell my YPbPr/MP4 converters after I've built a couple of them?:-)
P.S. This kind of thing is made considerably easier thanks to the Open Source sharing of Verilog and VHDL designs at places like http://www.opencores.org/ where you can find pre-existing tested and free (as in freedom) designs for things like USB and Ethernet interfaces (not sure about MP4 compression though), so I wouldn't be doing the whole thing from scratch and that's why I gave such an optimistic schedule estimate.
If you can actually capture DVI in realtime, then you're probably inside the industry already, where no form of copy protection can prevent leaks.
Not true. This is SlashDot, remember?;-) I have a brand new Actel ProAsic3E-A3PE600 FPGA development board and a couple of older FPGA development boards sitting around gathering dust just begging for a new project, and this sounds like it might be just the ticket. The boards have a prototyping area, high speed ADC and DAC converters, lots of high speed I/O ports of various sorts, and I have a few gigabytes of some old RAM lying around that I could use as a buffer. I also use to write software for embedded systems and operating system device drivers to communicate with those embedded systems (which in this case would be an FPGA development board), so it shouldn't take me more than a couple of weeks to put together a system that can capture such a bitstream as you describe, and another couple of weeks to be able to DMA it to a computer's hard disk (or even a hard drive attached locally to the FPGA development board for that matter!), but it wouldn't do me much good unless I were able to decode the data stream.
Whenever I'm unable to purchase something from a web store because their website requires Javascript, I always make it a point to send the sales department or webmaster for that company an email explaining that I was unable to purchase from their website because of the Javascript requirement and/or because their web site is incompatible with my FireFox web browser. I hope everyone else also does this, because although news websites probably don't really care much whether you visit their site or not, merchants probably care a great deal when they start loosing sales because of web browser incompatibility.
Slashdot Mirror
SBC offered their Internet customers the option of switching from their own Prodigy provider to Yahoo email. I declined for obvious reasons (privacy primarily), but switching ISP's is trivial for me because most of my email is sent to Spamex.com email addresses of my choosing such as Whatever_I_Want@spamex.com and all I have to do to switch ISP's is just change the redirection of my Spamex email forwarding account.
;-), all I really want is a webhost with shell access, lots of cheap webspace, enough bandwidth for my needs (a few TB's per month plus decent download speeds), and none of the GUI interface nonsense and all the fancy web applications that most web hosts provide these days. All I want is the type of account a university student or professor might have at their institution for example. Anyone know of any *Nix/BSD based webhosts offering this type of bare-bones service? Thanks.
I also even purchased some cheap webhosting space so that I could run my own mail server and have as many email accounts that were independent of my ISP as I want. By the way, in my opinion StartLogic.com sucks really badly, but BlueHost.com has everything I want and more and works great. BlueHost is the only cheap webhost I know of that offers free SSH shell access.
While I'm off the topic
I hear a colonoscopy inspection with the photographs retained by the police department along with fingerprints, etc., is going to be required for most IT jobs starting next year. The last time I had one done, the doctor let me keep the picture taken by the camera as it was peering outwards towards the opening of my anus from the inside (the doctor was checking for hemorrhoids). He suggested using the picture on my drivers license or as a passport photo. :-|
The only thing that really matters with coffee is how recently the beans were roasted. Two other things that are also very important are the type of roast; ie, were the beans lightly roasted so you can actually taste the coffee bean (instead of being burned to a crisp until they're as bitter as Zeus hops in beer, or Full City and Espresso coffee roasts are), and lastly where are the beans from and what was that particular harvest like? Freshly and properly ground coffee beans are assumed of course. Green coffee beans will last several months on the shelf, but once you roast them in your home coffee roaster (of course ;-) the flavor starts deteriorating after only a few days (some difference is noticeable after only hours!), and after a month you may as well be buying supermarket coffee.
Great news! I just received a patent from uspto.gov on the number "42". Henceforth, anyone using this number in full, or as part of an embedded string of numbers, is now required by law to pay whatever I want to charge for the use of that number. Note that any and all program output data containing this number is subject to the same royalty payments and severe FBI penalties including imprisonment and fines as high as $42 for using this number without permission!
10011111100100010001000000101001110101110100111000 1101011011110\1 00011000000
1100001000001010101101100010101100011010101101000
So I'm pretty sure that it wasn't just my imagination when I noticed a distinctively more "realistic" sound. I doubt that the sound is actually more realistic, but it does seem to sound better with a tube amplifier. I would think that whatever waveform shaping a tube amp does could be replicated by some sort of R/C passive network, or certainly by an active filter.
Some of the music I play is rather unusual and sometimes emits strange and unexpected sounds (so called "New Age" stuff for us old folks). Since I've been using the tube amp, sometimes I'm startled by a sound from the next room where the stereo is, because it's so realistic it sounds as though someone is in the next room!
I wonder what my anonymous proxy provider does with letters like these?
Direct download of the i386 DVD version is available at:- DVD/
i n-DVD/
http://cryptomania.info/crypt/CentOS-5.0-i386-bin
By tomorrow the x86_64 DVD version will be available at:
http://cryptomania.info/crypt/CentOS-5.0-x86_64-b
I'm trying out a new webhosting provider and am curious how they perform. Comments welcome.
If by "your 'own' home" you mean the bank's home, then I would agree; however, even after the mortgage is paid off it still isn't your own home. It belongs to the county and you must pay a yearly rental fee to the county for the rest of your life or they will repossess it. The county calls the rental fee "property taxes" and they can be quite high in some areas. I wonder if they have that in India?
Depressing polls like this make me think that the evolutionary scenario portrayed in the movie "Idiocracy" is already happening. :-(
Yes, given enough asteroid tracking telescopes to cover the entire sky every three months, any asteroid coming from any direction could be identified well before it struck earth. The reason is that as the earth revolves in its orbit, areas of the sky that were previously in the direction of the Sun will be visible without interference from the Sun in three months - which is the length of time it takes the earth to revolve 90 degrees in it's 360 degree orbit around the Sun.
Wow, I thought my Karma would get mutilated, but right now my original message is at +4!
Please watch the video before you comment. It addresses each and every point you have all brought up. Most of all though, actually read the Constitution sometime. It's written for the common man and is easily understandable by anyone who will take the time to read it with care. Pay particular attention to the two different types of taxes that are authorized by the Constitution (hint: the 16th Amendment has nothing to do with it according to the Supreme Court).
Anyone who thinks there is a law requiring US citizens to pay taxes should watch Freedom to Fascism by Aaron Russo.
I would have said "... borders on insanity", but in any case I wish I had some mod points to give you, my fellow omnivore.
My roof IS loaded up with solar cells and they generate about half the electricity my wife and I use. It's a "net metered" system, so I effectively use the power grid as a giant "storage battery", so to speak. I had the system installed about three years ago, and in another seven years the system will have paid for itself. Actually it will only have paid my own costs, which were less than 50% of the actual $40,000 cost of the system due to government rebates and tax credits. Even after I'm dead, that system will still be putting out essentially "free" power however.
Ironically enough, even though the City of Glendale paid for half the cost of the system, the Glendale planning commission almost rejected my plan to put the solar cells on my roof for "aesthetic" reasons, arrrrggggghhhhh. Thanks to a persuasive and persistent solar system installer however, I was finally able to get the City of Glendale to approve the solar system another branch of the city government was helping to pay for.
Plus Citibank has a feature that I now find essential - the ability to generate "virtual" credit card numbers as needed, and to be able to set the expiration date and limit on the amount of purchase that can be charged to each virtual credit card number. It makes online shopping perfectly safe. MBNA offered a similar feature until they were bought up by BofA, which is when I changed to Citibank, and so far I'm very happy with Citibank.
There's a rather humorous corollary to this, and since I feel loquacious today I shall tell the story:
When I was employed and had a six digit salary, credit card offers with credit limits upward of $50,000 routinely came in the mail. Now that I'm retired and have no visible income anymore (just my retirement savings and Social Security), what happened when I switched from my MBNA credit card with it's open ended limit (once or twice MBNA raised my credit limit so high that I called them and asked them to reduce it for fear that if my credit card were stolen, someone might use it to purchase their own island or something, har!) was that my new Citi card only came with a $4,000 credit limit. As it turns out, even though I pay each month's credit card bill in full, my wife and I maxed out the $4,000 credit limit in almost the first month - not because we spend more than that each month, but because the delay between the time the charge is incurred by the bank and the time I receive the bill for that charge can be as much as five or six weeks in certain cases. The effect of this delay is that the actual "real time" charges on my credit card account can be the total of six weeks worth of spending rather than one month's spending. Because of this and Citibank's understandable refusal to raise our credit limit until we'd had the account for at least six months, I've ended up having to send Citibank an OVERPAYMENT each month to avoid maxing out our ostensible $4,000 monthly limit (ie; if I receive a bill for $1,500, I send a check for $3,500 so that I always have a positive balance on file). I'm effectively using my Citibank "credit" card as a "debit" card. I'm sure the bank loves it, but as long as they raise my credit limit to something more reasonable in six months I don't mind waiting.
Now that I think about it, it might be possible to do the whole thing by just adding a three input ADC PCI card to a reasonably fast desktop computer. As you say, I first need to get a copy of the specs on the YPbPr video to find out how fast it needs to be sampled and what the waveform looks like so I know where to sample it, etc. If the numbers look promising, I would like to get back to you for guidance on what the typical "customer base" would accept, but I just realized that SlashDot apparently has no mechanism for sending private messages from one member to another, so if you (RareButSeriousSideEffect) would please send an email to me at gmail (my username is rsdotson) I will keep you informed of my progress (if any). Thanks for the suggestion, even though surely the "big guys" will be coming out with a device like you describe very soon. ARCHOS already makes video playback/recorders just like you describe that record as well as plays back, but only for NTSC.
:-)
Fortunately the Xvid codec is open source, so I've already downloaded it to see how complicated it is. I'm hoping it will be small enough to run on an embedded CPU core in an FPGA. By the way, don't ever think of yourself as a "lowly" programmer. I was primarily a C programmer before my retirement and only taught myself Verilog afterwards. If you can learn C# then you can certainly learn Verilog if you wish to. It's a myth that Verilog and VHDL are difficult to learn. They are both programming languages like any other, except that the rules are different than on standard sequential CPU's. Verilog essentially allows the programmer to implement NON-deterministic finite state machines, as well as the standard classical deterministic finite state machine model that most CPU's implement. If you like low level programming, you'll LOVE Verilog!
Three questions if I may:
:-)
1. Are you telling me that there are people who would pay as much as $2,000 for a board that digitizes the three YPbPr component video signals and two analog stereo outputs of an HDTV device and sends the data to a PC for recording (or plugs into the PCI bus and is accessed via device drivers), or would that price also require downscaling of the image and MP4/XviD compression? I believe that fast enough FPGA boards with high speed ADC's and builtin PCI interface plus DMA can be had for around two or three hundred dollars.
2. How much would the MP4 and/or XviD compression portion of the operation be worth (perhaps as an optional extra-cost feature)? At the moment I have no idea how feasible MP4 compression would be for an FPGA. If it's very complicated it may require a very expensive FPGA or even a custom VLSI chip in order to have enough logic circuitry available.
3. Is http://forum.videohelp.com/ representative of the type of "Videohelp & AVS's forums" you referred to, or do you have some better suggestions as to where I could go to sell my YPbPr/MP4 converters after I've built a couple of them?
P.S.
This kind of thing is made considerably easier thanks to the Open Source sharing of Verilog and VHDL designs at places like http://www.opencores.org/ where you can find pre-existing tested and free (as in freedom) designs for things like USB and Ethernet interfaces (not sure about MP4 compression though), so I wouldn't be doing the whole thing from scratch and that's why I gave such an optimistic schedule estimate.
Whenever I'm unable to purchase something from a web store because their website requires Javascript, I always make it a point to send the sales department or webmaster for that company an email explaining that I was unable to purchase from their website because of the Javascript requirement and/or because their web site is incompatible with my FireFox web browser. I hope everyone else also does this, because although news websites probably don't really care much whether you visit their site or not, merchants probably care a great deal when they start loosing sales because of web browser incompatibility.