I don't understand why everyone (including MS I guess) thinks tablets will eventually replace PCs. Is it just that I and everyone I know are way more verbose than the average person? Are people really going to tap out blog posts and forum posts and emails (not texts/tweets) on glass horrible excuses for virtual keyboards? really?
They have an input problem, and I don't see ANY solution that will make them a serious computing option within the next 10 years, barring a docking station that just basically makes them a PC anyway (at which point what is the point?). Voice control may not ever work, much less "soon," glass keyboards seem fine in the store, but if I had to type even this rant on one, I might shoot my tablet instead.
I have a tablet with a full usb keyboard, and that works, but I mean it isn't even more portable than a laptop at that point.
Ah microsoft... when you have an 85% (or 70 or 95 depending on whose clicks you believe) market share, you don't compete with the 12% runner up by releasing some cute toy. You do it by releasing more of what you are already doing to win. If windows 7 works for someone, nothing else will. If windows 8 works for them, ANYTHING else will (from an interface perspective, it is the worst, despite buggy workarounds to make it act like a pc)... do you see the problem?
If people wanted something cute and narrow purpose they would buy a mac/pod/pad.
I don't really understand the drive to make computing more *fun* or whatever the fuck that irritating waste of time Metro is supposed to be. All that boring expensive stuff, yeah that is what pays the Bill/bills... Keep doing that.
I agree. I am lucky enough that (unlike my parents) I have the financial and personal means to pull my kids from public school if i need to. It would be hard, but we could manage. I spent 9th grade in an alternative school just like the one you are talking about, and I don't want my kids doing the same.
I don't take it lightly, and I am not ready to throw my hands up at the first sign of trouble, but I am also not willing to go in without an exit plan.
You joke, but I was expelled in 9th grade for something vaguely similar (admitting I had done something off campus that was neither illegal, nor against student code of conduct). My kids (age 7 and 5) have explicit instructions from me. If the principal, teacher, or a policeman want you to say something that you do not want to say or do something you do not want to do (other than normal school work) then you need to say:
"I don't want to do that unless you call my parents"
will it result in false positives? Maybe. Will I honor that phone call? ABSOLUTELY.
Kids don't actually have many rights, especially during school hours. They are not protected by our laws because they can't vote. The only ones that can protect them from abuse of power is their parents, so whereas you are entitled to trial, counsel, not incriminating yourself, children are only really entitled to not being denied access to their parents. It is my job to extend my civil rights to my children in this situation, because they have none. So the earlier I am involved in an incident, the better.
I work for a megacorporation. I can go to any nearby office and get a desk for the day (or a conference room for my team), but I can mostly work from home. I tend to go in and meet my team about once a month for collaboration and socialization. My company was able to close 10 pretty large office buildings in my region, at pretty substantial savings. I am pretty sure they get tax breaks for "green" business practices.
It's a pretty big company and we have a 20% telecommute goal, but it is mostly IT who are eligible, so nearly all of us in software telecommute now.
Everyone I know complains that "you never really leave work" when telecommuting, and most of the people I work with don't even stop for lunch any more. I try to have boundaries, but honestly as a developer you never really leave work anyway... but I can take a shower and eat dinner at home, which is great.
Mostly what they got from me though is loyalty. I have worked there for 8 years, only 2 of them telecommute, and no bonus, raise, or corporate title bought them the loyalty that telecommuting bought them. With this sweet setup, I will never quit... It would have to get pretty bad for me to want to... I am hoping that by the time I have to move on Telecommute will be the norm.
I have an HP Elitebook for work, I travel a fair bit, so I bought a netbook that has the SAME power adaptor, which saves most of the annoyingness of having 2 laptops. The netbook even fits in my company issued laptop bag along with the company laptop. I don't even browse for work related stuff on my work laptop. The browser is so locked down (and stuck in an older patch of IE) that it is annoying to find answers to API problems on forums and whatnot.
not to mention gift cards. If gift cards had verifiable values (i.e. you could tell how much they were worth without going into a store) then they could be freely traded between individuals. A smart chip embeded in the card that is readable by your phone could serve authentication purposes.
after that, how is a transferrable 50 dollar walmart gift card, which can be traded for anything walmart sells (read: anything) any different from walmart issued cash?
I spend about 3 dollars a person to make healthy and delicious food for my family. It IS super cheap, but you know, I interact with $500,000 (probably a low estimate) worth of stuff that lots of people don't have, in order to make it.
I have a comfortable house, functioning appliances, a full kitchen, a car, access to a grocery store, time to drive there weekly so I can keep fresh produce, internet access to find new and interesting things to cook, the correct pots, pans, knives, cutting boards, implements, etc to cook. I enjoyed a middle class upbringing, wherein my mother cooked, and demystified cooking. I have only one job, which has only occasional overtime needs, and that one job is enough for my household, freeing up more time. I don't work manual labor, so I don't need a heavy caloric load (try loading a truck on rice and lean chicken... you'll need to eat 9 meals a day)
Well I don't have 1000, but it really helps if you break them up by genre or some other category. with 100 clips in one single category, the coverflow is still pretty fast, but don't package any of your thumbnails in your channel, load them from a URL instead, trust me it is way faster. It appears that there is something with channel size that makes the roku way slower, I can't explain it, but even my menu headers and stuff I keep on my webserver and load them dynamically, since it seems the smaller the brightscript package the faster the channel. Also, make the pictures JPEG and not PNG, for whatever reason the roku seems faster at JPEG. Also, make them lower resolution than you think they need to be. I try to keep my thumbnails between 10 and 30KB, and that keeps them loading quickly and really how great do they need to look?
As for sharing the code, really there is nothing my code can do for you that the examples in the SDK won't do. Mine is full of lazy hard-coding and not commented at all, which won't really help anyone make progress. I should spend the time to clean it up so I can post it, but I haven't.
yes, he specifically was looking to watch huiu on the tv without paying for it, connecting a PC to your TV is the least geeky way to do that. I know set top boxes aren't for normal consumers, cheapskates on slashdot are not normal consumers.
The PS3 makes a lousy appliance. It overheats if it is always on, the controllers run down the battery while they idle, it has very frequent software patches. Idle to movie is about 3 seconds on a Roku, from "off" to movie is about 5 minutes-30 minutes on a PS3, (boot, login, - possibly patch - netflix, play). I have both and the PS3 really can't compare to a "cable box" like a roku ca, even though it's video capabilities are similar or better.
I have a PS3 and a Roku, I can tell you they both do netflix and hulu plus, and the PS3 even has a much better interface for netflix... we still use the roku more. The PS3 has to install an OS upgrade every week or so, the "controllers" or remote control system will use up the batteries completely in about 10 hours of idling, the device itself gets really hot even idling, etc.
So for the roku, it is always on, the remote always works. For the PS3 we have to turn it on, wait for a firmware/OS upgrade, then remember to turn the controllers off while we watch TV. It does way too much to be an appliance. The PS3 is a game console with streaming, the Roku is an appliance, and there still is a big difference.
One thing the reviews leave out is scriptability/hackability.
Roku actually has a pretty easy and open-ish api.
Roku channels can be written in a scripting language called Brightscript (feels mostly like VBScript). The SDK also comes with C header files if you'd rather write something low level. I wrote a basic channel that takes reads an XML manifest file from my webserver and lets you pick from any of my home videos (or backups of my DVDs or infringed video) and streams it on the TV. I did this in about 15 minutes of coding on the roku side, including a "cover flow" style menu. (Of course, you aren't going to escape the need to transcode your video files, unless you are doing it hot on the webserver)
later when they upgraded the OS (without breaking any compatibility) I was able to write a page to run on my webserver that allows me to go to a browser from any of the computers on my network and select any movie (accessible by http) and directly launch it on the roku from the browser (which is very helpful for when I want to watch a horror/pr0n movie with the wife after the kids go to bed, but I don't want the kids to have access to it during the day)
I wrote an HTML/AJAX remote control app to run on our tablets/iphone/laptops to control the roku if we misplace the remote, which was also really simple, due to the easy/open API
I have tried many set top solutions, and THIS is the one my 3 year-old and my grandmother can use, but that I can still force it to do what I want.
Not only that but with After Effects they have figured out how to profit from the youtube generation... something I am not even sure youtube has done. I know it's the most expensive piece of software my 6 year-old has ever begged for.
a "problem" reported with a car is usually a very inconsequential one. Reliability is a crappy measure, because it measures buyer's willingness to come in to the mechanic for a minor problem like a scratch in the mirror or a slow window motor with a NEW car. Resale is king. If you go to a used car lot and see all the 4 year old Odysseys for 20 grand, and all the 4 year old Dodge Caravans for 8 grand, that tells you a lot more than "reliability ratings" ever could.
Reliability ratings attempt to measure the problems the cars ship with, resale value measures the problems they eventually develop.
I meant less "technically illiterate" managers, admittedly that does not make them better. Game managers want to know why not supporting LAN play will be a problem for users, whereas Banking managers want to know why your new 10 man team of first year contractors isn't as efficient as the 5 seasoned developers they laid off last quarter.
actually I only buy the very cheapest, because unlike samsung's incorrect assumption, 1080 is about 660 too many for me. I am a PC gamer so I am accustomed to "HD" gaming, so I do enjoy that on the TV, but everything else, "Standard" definition is fine by me.
In fact, it was explained to me (not in as many words) that the reason I hate HD movies is because the first HD tv I bought was actually too expensive. It has MotionPlus or some similar feature (that I have since turned off) that causes movies to look annoyingly like soap operas or news casts. My much cheaper and lower-end second HD TV does not have that feature or that problem. Sure I could have researched and turned that feature off before, but I didn't even know to look, didn't even know it was a feature and not just an "HD Thing".
So really if I had started out buying the absolute cheapest bottom of the line, I would have been happer from the get go.
I agree that more research is better, but samsung and AV geeks don't tend to understand that most people care less about "picture quality" In order to find my preferred TV, I would probably need to cruise the one star reviews on a site like that.
actually there was some big sporting event a week or so ago, and for some reason Target had cheapie 46 inch 60 Hz 1080p TVs on sale for $279 I bought one for the office, and it's awesome, perfect for me.
Oh, nice, I will check for something like that, thank you, I had never even heard of that . I am such a luddite when it comes to "HD" I really only got it because it was bigger, lighter, and wall mountable. Otherwise I would still be using a glass tube boat anchor, though I have to admit, PS3 looks fantastic in HD (though most of my games only do 720p)
That's the problem I have. 1080p looks like crap to me because sprung for the 120Hz model thinking I would be annoyed by 60Hz, turns out the opposite was true. My next TV was 60Hz, because it doesn't make every movie look like a soap opera.
I actually started watching some movies with the Composite connectors so that I wouldn't be distracted by the higher refresh rate.
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I don't understand why everyone (including MS I guess) thinks tablets will eventually replace PCs. Is it just that I and everyone I know are way more verbose than the average person? Are people really going to tap out blog posts and forum posts and emails (not texts/tweets) on glass horrible excuses for virtual keyboards? really?
They have an input problem, and I don't see ANY solution that will make them a serious computing option within the next 10 years, barring a docking station that just basically makes them a PC anyway (at which point what is the point?). Voice control may not ever work, much less "soon," glass keyboards seem fine in the store, but if I had to type even this rant on one, I might shoot my tablet instead.
I have a tablet with a full usb keyboard, and that works, but I mean it isn't even more portable than a laptop at that point.
Ah microsoft... when you have an 85% (or 70 or 95 depending on whose clicks you believe) market share, you don't compete with the 12% runner up by releasing some cute toy. You do it by releasing more of what you are already doing to win. If windows 7 works for someone, nothing else will. If windows 8 works for them, ANYTHING else will (from an interface perspective, it is the worst, despite buggy workarounds to make it act like a pc)... do you see the problem? If people wanted something cute and narrow purpose they would buy a mac/pod/pad.
I don't really understand the drive to make computing more *fun* or whatever the fuck that irritating waste of time Metro is supposed to be. All that boring expensive stuff, yeah that is what pays the Bill/bills... Keep doing that.
I agree. I am lucky enough that (unlike my parents) I have the financial and personal means to pull my kids from public school if i need to. It would be hard, but we could manage. I spent 9th grade in an alternative school just like the one you are talking about, and I don't want my kids doing the same.
I don't take it lightly, and I am not ready to throw my hands up at the first sign of trouble, but I am also not willing to go in without an exit plan.
because they have none
Interestingly enough, the constitution never actually says that children don't have rights such as free speech...
But then again, a school isn't exactly a court.
Think of it this way... the only people in the world that it is legal to hit because you think they need a beating are children. They have no rights.
You joke, but I was expelled in 9th grade for something vaguely similar (admitting I had done something off campus that was neither illegal, nor against student code of conduct). My kids (age 7 and 5) have explicit instructions from me. If the principal, teacher, or a policeman want you to say something that you do not want to say or do something you do not want to do (other than normal school work) then you need to say:
"I don't want to do that unless you call my parents"
will it result in false positives? Maybe. Will I honor that phone call? ABSOLUTELY.
Kids don't actually have many rights, especially during school hours. They are not protected by our laws because they can't vote. The only ones that can protect them from abuse of power is their parents, so whereas you are entitled to trial, counsel, not incriminating yourself, children are only really entitled to not being denied access to their parents. It is my job to extend my civil rights to my children in this situation, because they have none. So the earlier I am involved in an incident, the better.
actually when you shift to work from home, my company buys you a proper chair and desk, they even send people over to install it for you.
I work for a megacorporation. I can go to any nearby office and get a desk for the day (or a conference room for my team), but I can mostly work from home. I tend to go in and meet my team about once a month for collaboration and socialization. My company was able to close 10 pretty large office buildings in my region, at pretty substantial savings. I am pretty sure they get tax breaks for "green" business practices.
It's a pretty big company and we have a 20% telecommute goal, but it is mostly IT who are eligible, so nearly all of us in software telecommute now.
Everyone I know complains that "you never really leave work" when telecommuting, and most of the people I work with don't even stop for lunch any more. I try to have boundaries, but honestly as a developer you never really leave work anyway... but I can take a shower and eat dinner at home, which is great.
Mostly what they got from me though is loyalty. I have worked there for 8 years, only 2 of them telecommute, and no bonus, raise, or corporate title bought them the loyalty that telecommuting bought them. With this sweet setup, I will never quit... It would have to get pretty bad for me to want to... I am hoping that by the time I have to move on Telecommute will be the norm.
I have an HP Elitebook for work, I travel a fair bit, so I bought a netbook that has the SAME power adaptor, which saves most of the annoyingness of having 2 laptops. The netbook even fits in my company issued laptop bag along with the company laptop. I don't even browse for work related stuff on my work laptop. The browser is so locked down (and stuck in an older patch of IE) that it is annoying to find answers to API problems on forums and whatnot.
not to mention gift cards. If gift cards had verifiable values (i.e. you could tell how much they were worth without going into a store) then they could be freely traded between individuals. A smart chip embeded in the card that is readable by your phone could serve authentication purposes.
after that, how is a transferrable 50 dollar walmart gift card, which can be traded for anything walmart sells (read: anything) any different from walmart issued cash?
I spend about 3 dollars a person to make healthy and delicious food for my family. It IS super cheap, but you know, I interact with $500,000 (probably a low estimate) worth of stuff that lots of people don't have, in order to make it.
I have a comfortable house, functioning appliances, a full kitchen, a car, access to a grocery store, time to drive there weekly so I can keep fresh produce, internet access to find new and interesting things to cook, the correct pots, pans, knives, cutting boards, implements, etc to cook. I enjoyed a middle class upbringing, wherein my mother cooked, and demystified cooking. I have only one job, which has only occasional overtime needs, and that one job is enough for my household, freeing up more time. I don't work manual labor, so I don't need a heavy caloric load (try loading a truck on rice and lean chicken... you'll need to eat 9 meals a day)
Well I don't have 1000, but it really helps if you break them up by genre or some other category. with 100 clips in one single category, the coverflow is still pretty fast, but don't package any of your thumbnails in your channel, load them from a URL instead, trust me it is way faster. It appears that there is something with channel size that makes the roku way slower, I can't explain it, but even my menu headers and stuff I keep on my webserver and load them dynamically, since it seems the smaller the brightscript package the faster the channel. Also, make the pictures JPEG and not PNG, for whatever reason the roku seems faster at JPEG. Also, make them lower resolution than you think they need to be. I try to keep my thumbnails between 10 and 30KB, and that keeps them loading quickly and really how great do they need to look?
As for sharing the code, really there is nothing my code can do for you that the examples in the SDK won't do. Mine is full of lazy hard-coding and not commented at all, which won't really help anyone make progress. I should spend the time to clean it up so I can post it, but I haven't.
yes, he specifically was looking to watch huiu on the tv without paying for it, connecting a PC to your TV is the least geeky way to do that. I know set top boxes aren't for normal consumers, cheapskates on slashdot are not normal consumers.
nope :( There are no known reliable DNLA clients yet for Roku.
low overall cost: connect it to your computer with an HDMI cable. Otherwise you are looking at subscriber services.
The PS3 makes a lousy appliance. It overheats if it is always on, the controllers run down the battery while they idle, it has very frequent software patches. Idle to movie is about 3 seconds on a Roku, from "off" to movie is about 5 minutes-30 minutes on a PS3, (boot, login, - possibly patch - netflix, play). I have both and the PS3 really can't compare to a "cable box" like a roku ca, even though it's video capabilities are similar or better.
I have a PS3 and a Roku, I can tell you they both do netflix and hulu plus, and the PS3 even has a much better interface for netflix... we still use the roku more. The PS3 has to install an OS upgrade every week or so, the "controllers" or remote control system will use up the batteries completely in about 10 hours of idling, the device itself gets really hot even idling, etc. So for the roku, it is always on, the remote always works. For the PS3 we have to turn it on, wait for a firmware/OS upgrade, then remember to turn the controllers off while we watch TV. It does way too much to be an appliance. The PS3 is a game console with streaming, the Roku is an appliance, and there still is a big difference.
One thing the reviews leave out is scriptability/hackability.
Roku actually has a pretty easy and open-ish api.
Roku channels can be written in a scripting language called Brightscript (feels mostly like VBScript). The SDK also comes with C header files if you'd rather write something low level. I wrote a basic channel that takes reads an XML manifest file from my webserver and lets you pick from any of my home videos (or backups of my DVDs or infringed video) and streams it on the TV. I did this in about 15 minutes of coding on the roku side, including a "cover flow" style menu. (Of course, you aren't going to escape the need to transcode your video files, unless you are doing it hot on the webserver)
later when they upgraded the OS (without breaking any compatibility) I was able to write a page to run on my webserver that allows me to go to a browser from any of the computers on my network and select any movie (accessible by http) and directly launch it on the roku from the browser (which is very helpful for when I want to watch a horror/pr0n movie with the wife after the kids go to bed, but I don't want the kids to have access to it during the day)
I wrote an HTML/AJAX remote control app to run on our tablets/iphone/laptops to control the roku if we misplace the remote, which was also really simple, due to the easy/open API
I have tried many set top solutions, and THIS is the one my 3 year-old and my grandmother can use, but that I can still force it to do what I want.
Not only that but with After Effects they have figured out how to profit from the youtube generation... something I am not even sure youtube has done. I know it's the most expensive piece of software my 6 year-old has ever begged for.
a "problem" reported with a car is usually a very inconsequential one. Reliability is a crappy measure, because it measures buyer's willingness to come in to the mechanic for a minor problem like a scratch in the mirror or a slow window motor with a NEW car. Resale is king. If you go to a used car lot and see all the 4 year old Odysseys for 20 grand, and all the 4 year old Dodge Caravans for 8 grand, that tells you a lot more than "reliability ratings" ever could.
Reliability ratings attempt to measure the problems the cars ship with, resale value measures the problems they eventually develop.
I meant less "technically illiterate" managers, admittedly that does not make them better. Game managers want to know why not supporting LAN play will be a problem for users, whereas Banking managers want to know why your new 10 man team of first year contractors isn't as efficient as the 5 seasoned developers they laid off last quarter.
Game development has better managers, worse hours, much worse pay, much worse burnout ratio.
actually I only buy the very cheapest, because unlike samsung's incorrect assumption, 1080 is about 660 too many for me. I am a PC gamer so I am accustomed to "HD" gaming, so I do enjoy that on the TV, but everything else, "Standard" definition is fine by me.
In fact, it was explained to me (not in as many words) that the reason I hate HD movies is because the first HD tv I bought was actually too expensive. It has MotionPlus or some similar feature (that I have since turned off) that causes movies to look annoyingly like soap operas or news casts. My much cheaper and lower-end second HD TV does not have that feature or that problem. Sure I could have researched and turned that feature off before, but I didn't even know to look, didn't even know it was a feature and not just an "HD Thing".
So really if I had started out buying the absolute cheapest bottom of the line, I would have been happer from the get go.
I agree that more research is better, but samsung and AV geeks don't tend to understand that most people care less about "picture quality" In order to find my preferred TV, I would probably need to cruise the one star reviews on a site like that.
actually there was some big sporting event a week or so ago, and for some reason Target had cheapie 46 inch 60 Hz 1080p TVs on sale for $279 I bought one for the office, and it's awesome, perfect for me.
Oh, nice, I will check for something like that, thank you, I had never even heard of that . I am such a luddite when it comes to "HD" I really only got it because it was bigger, lighter, and wall mountable. Otherwise I would still be using a glass tube boat anchor, though I have to admit, PS3 looks fantastic in HD (though most of my games only do 720p)
That's the problem I have. 1080p looks like crap to me because sprung for the 120Hz model thinking I would be annoyed by 60Hz, turns out the opposite was true. My next TV was 60Hz, because it doesn't make every movie look like a soap opera.
I actually started watching some movies with the Composite connectors so that I wouldn't be distracted by the higher refresh rate.