I'm the same way. I don't have an uncontrollable urge to click and buy things from every ad I see -- do all these adblock users have that? I understand for the annoying ads (punch the monkey, etc), but really, I'll just stop going to the site. Likewise with NoScript. What is people's obsession with not running scripts? Many apps and sites make huge use of scripts, and that's what's enabling us to get to the point where so many apps are online, running in a browser. Nothing to install, update, etc, and the apps are getting very powerful and functional. Do you want to go back to the old days of platform-specific native apps? It's like people have gotten to that age where new technology is scary.. no doubt this same conversation happened when going from 3270 terminals to PC, and from text-mode to graphical UI, etc.
I was in the same boat, just found smooth gestures - it works quite well, though I also had to install smooth gestures new tab because otherwise it doesn't work on the "new" tab that shows thumbnails etc.
I've started using Chrome on my laptop now, mostly because Firefox inexplicably started taking up many hundreds of megs of RAM and becoming very slow after a day or two, to the point I had to restart. I have some extensions installed (firebug, firecookie, web developer, gestures) but nothing that I don't have installed on other systems.
Anyways, it's noticeably faster than FF, and so far I like it. No real complaints for my laptop surfing so far (which is reading news, email, and random research/documentation/surfing).
Find a site that exploits IE6 to install something highly irritating but otherwise mostly harmless (eg.. randomly flips the monitor upside down, or keeps showing a message "Rebooting in 30 seconds, click here to cancel.." or randomly open websites every few minutes). Preferably you have nothing to do with the creation, hosting, or anything else of this site -- you just found it somewhere.
Find a large-ish company, mandated to use IE6.. preferably one where the IT department says it's because it's "more secure" than other browsers (and yes, I know places like that - it's mind boggling).
Put an ad up on a billboard nearby (that many of their offices/breakroom overlook, or employees drive by, etc) that says "Hey (company name), do NOT go to www.badsite.com!"
Technically, you were doing a public service, warning them not to go there. All I'm saying.. it would be interesting to watch the fallout (knowing an insider in the company would make this more interesting).
By long drill bit, what you want is a flexible, self-feeding "installer bit" (eg: http://www.bamanufacturing.com/fg_series.html). I wired my house with a 54" x 3/8" (or maybe 1/2"? I can't remember now) bit: http://gregmaclellan.com/blog/running-network-cables/ (has some pictures). In my case I added at least 2x Cat5e and 1x RG-6 to every room (though really, I don't use the coax at all, I run Mythtv and everything is networked).
Basically, you can put a hole in the wall where you want the jack, stick this bit in, and drill into the floor above/below. You need to of course be careful and check for wires/plumbing/etc (turn off power if you're at all unsure). If it's not next to an unfinished space, it will require more creative pathways and probably some extra holes in drywall that will have to get patched up later.
I ran into this problem before with Kingston RAM, where different chips were used, but it was otherwise the same part number.
I had a bunch of identical systems, all using "identical" ram. However, a couple were having issues, and totally failed memtest. So I sent them back, and got new ones - and these too failed. I took them back again, and they checked them in the store, where they worked fine. Upon further inspection, all the ones that failed had one brand of chip, while the working ones had a different chip. It was just this specific chip in combination with the motherboard. It's obvious in retrospect, but before looking at the manufacturer on the chips (or even thinking of that), it was a very difficult problem to solve. The whole thing did remind me again why I hate hardware and generally stick to software. Needless to say, we used a different brand entirely, and problem solved.
I was avoiding Kingston RAM for a while, but I may have used it accidentally since (this was 2-3 years ago) because I forgot about this story.
I bet we'll get an issue that all the jQuery is too slow in IE6. And I fear the fix is not going to be to use a faster browser instead.
That's like getting an issue saying ANY app is too slow, reported by a user running a Pentium III 900mHz with 128MB of RAM. They'll probably argue that their computer was fast when they bought it back in 2001, and they still had the equivalent of your app, and it was fast. Why is it slow now?
Ah yes. Because software always works perfectly, you can rest well at night knowing that your mission-critical servers will always survive a hard reboot. Testing is for wussies
This is also in a game where you can get hit by a rocket and live if you have enough health. And take a few hundred bullets from a simple 'machine gun'. And jumping from a ledge 6 times your height? No problem.
In fact, I wonder what the OP is trying to do, that involves 4+ different virtual desktops in various 4 combinations (AC, AD, BC, BD).
I used multiple workspaces quite a bit when I had one monitor.. then when I had two monitors, I gradually used it less and less, until the only reason I didn't turn it off was to play with the Cube display in compiz. Before I got to that point though, I would tend to use a feature in KDE that let you pin a window to all workspaces, so I would use that for my chat client / media player, depending on what I was doing.
So back to my original point, if you wanted to switch between two workspaces, but always have email on one window, you could easily do that by pinning email to all workspaces.. as you switch, it'll just stay there.
It's unnecessary. I ran KDE for a long time with multiple monitors, and it just works. You can add as many panels as you want (equivalent to windows task bar), plus there's no stupid limitations on what goes where.. so you can have an application menu on both, a clock only on second monitor, an 'favourites' launcher on the second... heck you can add another panel at the top of the screen that just shows notification icons.
In that context, Ultramon looks like a poor hack, and the fact Windows STILL can't natively even have more than one taskbar is just sad.
On that topic, I'm now using DisplayFusion on my multi-monitor Windows desktops, and I really recommend it.
If you need an advance, you go to a real bank and get an advancement.
There was an Ongoing History Of New Music episode that discussed this to length, and it was quite interesting (unfortunately, they don't put their shows online due to licensing restrictions because they contain music that is owned by record companies....)
For starters, banks are not likely to give a loan to a band. Simply put, there is a low probability of success, and banks do not have the expertise to judge the likelihood of a band succeeding. Secondly, if you fail* as a band, the record label will say "oh, well, that sucks. Well, have a nice life, thanks for wasting our money". A bank is not quite going to have the same attitude.
* Failing means not making money at a faster rate than you are required to pay your loan back. If you don't start making money for two years, it doesn't matter.. you still owe that money during the two years.
Record labels are basically analogous to angel investors for startups. The only difference is they are also the distributors, and effectively have a monopoly on distribution. It would be like if the only way to get out software was to put it on a CD, and the only ones who could make CDs were the angel investors/VCs. They're not going to make a CD if you funded your startup on your own, and they have no ownership in it.
You can also just have gmail do your mail hosting, which is free. Better spam filtering than most ISPs (if they provide any at all), decent web UI, and you don't have to think about it anymore. I hosted my own for about 10 years, and finally gave up and switched to gmail about a year ago. Much simpler.
Actually the biggest factor for me was I got a new laptop, and got sick of copying my thunderbird filters - yet again - to a new machine. I decided to use gmail, and though I missed Thunderbird at first, I'm now totally content with it (plus I installed the gmail app on my work blackberry, and now get my personal email there, with a similar UI). It's actually possible to have Thunderbird connect to gmail, but why bother.
I created a subdomain* about 10 years ago, that has a catch-all (so * @sub.mydomain.com goes to me) that I use for signing up for things. I've been using this for forums, with my email address based on the site itself, eg, slashdot@ (and I have hundreds of these accounts). At the same time, I've had a personal address which I've never used for signing up for anything on the web, only as a personal address I've given to people. I've been careful about not making it visible on the web, although it's very possible that it is.
Interestingly, I've received maybe two or three spam messages (and they were to one specific address -- thus from one site -- which I forget now because it was years ago) to my subdomain (Most mail is at least semi-legitimate mailing lists/updates etc from the site I've signed up for, and password resets, etc).
My personal address gets a ton of spam. My theory is this is coming from two primary sources: the biggest, is people sending e-cards and other crap. The second is being included on forwards, and having all the addresses eventually get harvested.
So effectively, in my opinion/experience, forums and generally signing up for websites are not a source of spam.
Now, this isn't fully scientific because for the last 5 or 6 years I've had some level of spam protection, Spam Assassin and the filtering in thunderbird, mostly. I still had a fair amount coming to my personal address, and none to my subdomain, but it's possible the stuff to my subdomain was just more blatant and getting filtered. It's also possible that sub-domain addresses simply don't get as much spam (maybe the spammer's regexes don't work properly?).
For the last year or so I've been hosting all my mail at gmail, and almost no spam gets through anymore (I think 2 in the last year), so I'm not sure if the situation has changed on my subdomain.
* An important point on this, is it has to be a sub-domain. The first time I got my first personal domain (in 1997 or 98 I'd guess?), I had a catch-all at the top level. That lasted for less than a day, because so much garbage came to it, including dictionary-type attacks to every imaginable name -- and this was a domain that had never been registered before.
go where their interest lies. If they really want to know about electron migration through a solid state material, Hell, go for it. But if they are interested in how to generate a web page, that's where you start.
This is exactly correct. "Programming" is farther from a one-size-fits-all skill than it's ever been. There are so many different areas and specialties. It's nice to have a sense of certain areas, but there's no way to be an expert in everything ("jack of all trades, master of none"). Some people are just more suited to certain areas or types of programming, or just enjoy it more. No sense forcing someone who loves to design games to write print drivers. Think of some of the extremes: writing kernel code/drivers; writing music software; home/industrial automation; "business applications".
I know people who can write great APIs, but make the suckiest user interfaces ever.. and likewise, people who can create beautiful intuitive interfaces, but have to rewrite their API every version.
It's probably early for a 12-year old, but one of the most important things is knowing there is much more to programming than writing code. If you're writing photo editing software, knowing about color theory, how cameras work, etc will take you MUCH farther than knowing (insert language here) really well.
This can go the other way, too. This might be good for a kid, actually. Maybe s/he loves shooting off model rockets. To get them interested, try writing software to help design them or figure out how high/where one will go (eg it can read weather forcecast off the net to get wind speeds/direction). This alone would work because it's a program that actually applies to them to solve a real problem, but it also starts teaching the value of integrating knowledge of programming with knowledge the problem domain.
I have to agree here, MythTV is the ultimate flexibility.
I just went through the same thing the OP went through. I've been using Myth for about 4 years, and was on 0.21 on a 4-year old install of Debian, and was getting annoyed because I was missing some codecs, had some stability issues (which was something in H/W, but I have no idea what). On top of that, I wanted some small frontends for around the house. So since I had to rebuild the box, I was willing to try some other systems out.
I first tried SageTV, because of it's apparent extendability, and mostly because of the $200 HD-capable, silent, small frontends. I tried both the standard and the SageMC UI. After using Mythtv for so long, I *really* tried to get used to it, but I just hated the way the UI worked, and the general workflow of how recordings, playback, etc worked, as well as how you browse music (it was really not any better than MythMusic, which is just plain sad), and videos. A *major* negative, it has no streaming radio support. WTF?
GB-PVR is quite promising, but again, the UI is not quite there. I was actually really tempted to hack on this, and get it to where I wanted it.. but in the meantime, I'd have no TV. I found in particular the recording support lacking. In myth, I can say "record this at any time, keep 2, delete the oldest". In GB-PVR, this concept doesn't really exist, you can only "favourite" the series, and then it just records all of them I guess? I found no options for how many to keep, etc. Particularly with The Simpsons, which is on about 14 times a week, I'd like to keep a handful so when I actually feel like watching it, I can find one I have only seen 20 times instead of 50.
I had a HECK of a time getting either a Windows MCE remote and a Hauppage remote (pvr-150) working totally properly in Sage and GB-PVR.. I never did quite get it fully functioning (some buttons did nothing. In GB-PVR, when I pressed the "windows" button on the MCE remote, Windows media center opened). Setting up GB-PVR as a client is a bit hackish feeling, since you have to use network shares and set a bunch of things manually.. it's not like myth, where you can just point it at the IP and it works.
I also gave Windows Media Center a very quick shot. It has a very nice looking UI, but it's architecture is severely crap. I think it's two tuners max (I could be wrong), only works with very select hardware, and its extenders, from what I can tell, are basically RDP clients, which means the server has to be beefy. And I believe you are limited to two. You can link multiple WMCs with some hacks (involving network shares mostly), but it's just ugly.
I was trying to use XBMC as a frontend for a while (thinking of it as an alternative frontend to myth), and I did have it working really great on an asrock ION 330.. but it's mythtv support is not that great. There's a project on google code that looks very promising, and I tried it later on my laptop, but it was just crashing. I didn't investigate further. Maybe in a few months or a year it will be there.. but not yet.
So after all that, I went back to Mythtv (0.22) on a brand new Asrock board with integrated HDMI and digital audio. I also have a frontend running on my old mythtv box (albeit really scaled down) and an asrock ION 330. I'm using Mythbuntu now, which is great. All my remotes worked flawlessly out of the box. The tuner worked right away. My only real complaints right now: DVD playback is broken (audio/video sync issue), and mythstream (streaming audio support) is not working on 0.22 yet (though there is a alpha quality build for it). Oh, and one of the frontends is on a standard 4:3 TV, and there is currently only one theme that looks reasonable on it. Other than that, it's impossible to tell if you're on the main backend or a frontend, it's the same experience.
I have to say, if the top 1000 sites were stupid enough to go along with this, then I'd be pretty damn happy if I was site #1001.
Even if the top 2 or 3 book selling sites are all in the top 1000 sites (and go along with this), then what is the more likely scenario:
* Everyone says "Oh crap, I can't find the book I'm looking for on [insert favourite site here], I don't know what this [insert #4 bookseller here] site is, so I'm going to go another search engine"
* People buy from the first link, and #4 bookseller very quickly jumps to #1
Repeat across every industry. Even if the first scenario happens in some, it won't in all of them.
Another take on this: how often, when you search for a business/whatever and can't find it, even after trying a couple variations, do you go to another search engine? For me, it's never. I just assume they don't have a website. I imagine I'm not the only one.
I'm going through the same. I've been using Myth for maybe 3 or 4 years (starting with 0.20-beta something). It was relatively stable, but did crash once in a while. Mostly what was driving me insane is for the past few months, it would stop responding to the remote for a few minutes, then suddenly play back everything that just happened. So you'd hit fast-forward, and nothing would happen.. hit a couple more times... then suddenly a few minutes later, it would skip forward several times. Lirc was seeing the commands in realtime, so I have no idea what the problem was. It was intermittent, and I never found a common thing that was happening at the same time.
I've built a new Windows box now, and I'm currently trying GBPVR, and SageTV. Myth's UI is better than SageTV's.. GBPVR is a lot like myth. Myth has better recording options than both. Sage has sub-$200 fanless network client hardware, which has the same UI as the main box - this is a HUGE plus. You can't build a PC for that price, let alone a silent PC, and any other options have a different UI which is just annoying. Myth is the only one I know of that supports multiple backends (not needed for me now, but it's a sign of a good design and allows expandability).
Taking away constraints of OS/software, there is just no solution that leads to a great networked PVR system out there yet, in my opinion. To clarify, I'm not looking for a HTPC - I want a UI, consistent on every TV in my house, that lets me watch live TV (not that I ever do that), watch and/or schedule recordings (and have any available on any TV), watch DVDs, watch downloaded movies/shows, listen to music (both stored and streaming), and things like pictures and weather reports are kinda handy too.
I tried using XBMC on an Asrock ION 330 as a frontend for a while. Basically, it looks amazing (especially compared to Myth 0.21), and has some nice things like animations. It was dirt simple to get working with the hardware, including an MCE remote (as in, I basically had to do nothing).
The bad: it's not a DVR at all. It has half-baked myth backend support - in that it is supposed to understand the streams and be able to play content. However, you have to go into a menu item called "Scripts" and then start "Mythtv" from a list there, before navigating to recordings. It has no support for scheduling or doing anything besides playing back recordings. I ended up just making it look directly at the Recordings directory on my myth box and playing back files from there (note, I use a script there to symlink the mythtv recording files to their actual names).
The ugly: Due to the high potential, I started digging in more to see if there was anything I could do to help out, such as work on the myth backend support. What I found is that entire project has been mothballed, and they are working on a grandios rewrite of a generic PVR layer, and then later on top of that will have Mythtv support. Not a TERRIBLE plan, but 1) it's a huge plan, that will take a long time before it is even remotely usable, 2) it means the PVR has to be lowest common denominator support, combined based on what all the PVR backends they support have. It also means the devs are rejecting patches to the existing myth support, because it is not relevant in the wake of the new PVR backend.
On top of that, the architecture is sadly lacking. With apologize to XBMC devs, as I'm about to call your baby ugly, but It very much shows its organic and basic roots. The actual menu items are hardcoded into the theme, and intertwined with the code in the back. To do something that should be simple, like add another menu item to the main menu, from what I can tell you have to: 1) modify the core code to understand the command, 2) modify the theme to add in the button - which includes changing the x,y coordinates of all buttons below that one that now need to be shifted, and adjusting the animation code so it knows the positions of all the buttons. It's possible it is simpler than that (I didn't actually try), but from looking at the code, that's what it looked like to me, and so I lost interest due to the amount of effort and non-reusability (eg, my Mythtv button wouldn't be accepted as a patch, and I'd have to redo this anytime I installed an update).
I absolutely agree with everything here. I've been using MythTV for the past 3 years, and it's completely changed the way I watch TV. I simply didn't watch some shows before, because I wasn't willing to bend my life around TV ("Gotta be home at 8PM tonight, my show is on!"). So I would just simply never even watch shows with a continuing story (Lost, 24, etc), because if you don't watch from the start, you have no clue what's happening.. and if you miss one or two, it's not as interesting. It's like leaving in the middle of a movie for 20 minutes, then coming back to watch the end - you get the story, but it's not as fulfilling.
Now, I literally never watch live tv. Any show I have interest in, I record. In fact, if I accidentally start watching a show while it's still recording, I'll usually turn it off if I figure out that I'm going to catch up to livetv and have to watch commercials. If I watch it afterwards, myth has already flagged it and I never see them.
On topic to the OP, I actually don't mind watching SOME commercials. Some are even pretty humorous and entertaining. However, many are not. Even more irritating, is many are repeated during the show - and some are even repeated during the same commercial break. It is that kind of thing that drives me to not watch commercials.
The parallel is to ads on the web: I don't block them, because generally I don't mind them, I've even clicked and bought stuff from relevant ads before. What makes me want to block ads, is when they flash on the screen, pop up/under, or make a monkey fly back and forth. Since there's no way for me to filter reasonable vs unreasonable ads, the only way to solve that problem is to block them all. I haven't yet been driven to this (I just don't use any sites that do that, or I stop using them when they do), but I could see it happening.
I think TV has the same problem. By having crappy ads, and repeating them, and turning up the volume during ads, and generally just being irritating, people don't want to watch ANY, because it's not worth the effort to sort the tolerable from the bad.
Simply put, Google has provided an absolutely awesome, sky is the limit, technology. If multiple killer applications are not in place which leverage Wave within a year or two, I'd declare this a failure of developers and imagination rather than a failure of Google and/or Wave.
Okay.. so what am I missing? Admittedly I haven't really spent much time looking into it - the initial PR was way too fluffy and said nothing specific.. and this is apparently too focused on one thing and not really using the full potential of wave.. so what is the full potential?
We use skype (mostly for chat) at work, and although I don't think it's the greatest choice (I would rather use Jabber), everything described in this review is what I do today with skype. You click on someone, can have an IM conversation, and move on.. or you can drag other people in, and instantly have a multi-user skype conversation. I often have several going on at once (not always active).. and when you do, it marks the messages sent while the window wasn't focused differently so it's easy to catch up. You can even click 'call group' and instantly start a group teleconference. Very often, people will add me to a conversation and continue chatting (kind of like cc'ing with emails), and I don't necessarily add anything.
The only difference I see so far is that in skype, the button is labelled "conversations", in Wave, it's called "Inbox".
Heck, I'm pretty sure you can do everything I just described in google talk (which I actually really like as an IM platform), and plus any conversation you have gets saved in your gmail account along with emails.
So what am I missing? What is revolutionary here?
I kind of like having the separation between IM and email - there is a different urgency to both, and a different level of conversation you can have. It's the same sort of thing as
The article specifically states they sampled water in shower heads in cities in the US (New York and Denver pointed out as examples), and found 30% of them contained the bacteria.
Frankly, I'm surprised as well that they can survive the chlorine mandated to be in drinking water, but apparently they do.
The owner instructions are just as bad.. I just recently got a Bell Canada phone (through work), and even though I switched it to "fast" prompts, it's still very terrible. Literally it says this:
* You have 1 unheard new messages. To listen to new messages, press one one. (I *really* don't get why I have to press 1 twice. My voicemail system at work does the same, it's stupid. There's no other option if you press 1 once, it just says to press 1 again).
Press 1..
* You have one unheard message. First unheard message..
It just says the phrase "unheard messages" WAAAY too much.
At home I have an asterisk-based PBX (I used to be a FreePBX developer).. even though its voicemail IVR isn't the best, it beats the pants of both Bell Canada's, and our Panasonic key system at work. However, at home, I almost never listen to voicemail that way. All my messages get emailed to me as a.wav file, much simpler. I actually set up a cron job to delete the actual messages from the PBX after a day so the 'new message' light goes out automatically.
I really wish I could have the email thing for my cell and work phones..
I just got a Pioneer AVIC-F700BT (http://www.pioneerelectronics.com/PUSA/Products/Navigation/In-Dash/AVIC-F700BT). It doesn't quite do everything you asked, but there are other models that add traffic updates, etc.
It runs Windows CE (bear with me here..), and has ways to boot into it. There are people that have hacked the firmware, and added various features to it - check out avic411.com. I haven't tried this myself, but it doesn't look overly difficult. I get the impression that community is not really full of "programmers" per-se, more just enthusiasts, so it's likely that someone who actually knows how to program would get quite far. (Note, I am a programmer, I just haven't had time to mess with my car stereo which works satisfactorily).
Pros: relatively cheap (note: the MSRP is $900-something, but it can be found for $500), has pretty decent maps, decent directions, plays MP3s from USB/CD/SD (and DVD, in some models), ipod interface, has XM/Sirius capability via add-ons, bluetooth with voice recognition (which works extremely well)
Cons: slow-ish bootup time (~7 seconds to playing music, another 7-10 before UI is fully available), music-related voice control features only work with ipod (eg, "play songs by ____" doesn't work on cd.. but you can say "next track" or "change source to FM" - which frankly, is kinda useless), playback from SD/USB won't resume right where it left off, it always starts the song over, fast-forward/rewind is frustratingly slow (both of these are probably fixable via firmware, or even hacking.. unfortunately, they contribute to mean I can't really listen to podcasts, which is one thing I was hoping for with the ability to use SD cards). Ships with a stupid "feature" where you can't change Nav destination/settings while driving (luckily, this is easily bypass-able by connecting an extra wire while installing).
I'm quite happy with it, honestly, and I'd definitely recommend the unit. Like I said, I haven't really gotten in to hack it yet (I likely will), but then again, I haven't really needed to.
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I'm the same way. I don't have an uncontrollable urge to click and buy things from every ad I see -- do all these adblock users have that? I understand for the annoying ads (punch the monkey, etc), but really, I'll just stop going to the site. Likewise with NoScript. What is people's obsession with not running scripts? Many apps and sites make huge use of scripts, and that's what's enabling us to get to the point where so many apps are online, running in a browser. Nothing to install, update, etc, and the apps are getting very powerful and functional. Do you want to go back to the old days of platform-specific native apps? It's like people have gotten to that age where new technology is scary.. no doubt this same conversation happened when going from 3270 terminals to PC, and from text-mode to graphical UI, etc.
I was in the same boat, just found smooth gestures - it works quite well, though I also had to install smooth gestures new tab because otherwise it doesn't work on the "new" tab that shows thumbnails etc.
I've started using Chrome on my laptop now, mostly because Firefox inexplicably started taking up many hundreds of megs of RAM and becoming very slow after a day or two, to the point I had to restart. I have some extensions installed (firebug, firecookie, web developer, gestures) but nothing that I don't have installed on other systems.
Anyways, it's noticeably faster than FF, and so far I like it. No real complaints for my laptop surfing so far (which is reading news, email, and random research/documentation/surfing).
Interesting experiment:
Find a site that exploits IE6 to install something highly irritating but otherwise mostly harmless (eg.. randomly flips the monitor upside down, or keeps showing a message "Rebooting in 30 seconds, click here to cancel.." or randomly open websites every few minutes). Preferably you have nothing to do with the creation, hosting, or anything else of this site -- you just found it somewhere.
Find a large-ish company, mandated to use IE6.. preferably one where the IT department says it's because it's "more secure" than other browsers (and yes, I know places like that - it's mind boggling).
Put an ad up on a billboard nearby (that many of their offices/breakroom overlook, or employees drive by, etc) that says "Hey (company name), do NOT go to www.badsite.com!"
Technically, you were doing a public service, warning them not to go there. All I'm saying.. it would be interesting to watch the fallout (knowing an insider in the company would make this more interesting).
By long drill bit, what you want is a flexible, self-feeding "installer bit" (eg: http://www.bamanufacturing.com/fg_series.html). I wired my house with a 54" x 3/8" (or maybe 1/2"? I can't remember now) bit: http://gregmaclellan.com/blog/running-network-cables/ (has some pictures). In my case I added at least 2x Cat5e and 1x RG-6 to every room (though really, I don't use the coax at all, I run Mythtv and everything is networked).
Basically, you can put a hole in the wall where you want the jack, stick this bit in, and drill into the floor above/below. You need to of course be careful and check for wires/plumbing/etc (turn off power if you're at all unsure). If it's not next to an unfinished space, it will require more creative pathways and probably some extra holes in drywall that will have to get patched up later.
I ran into this problem before with Kingston RAM, where different chips were used, but it was otherwise the same part number.
I had a bunch of identical systems, all using "identical" ram. However, a couple were having issues, and totally failed memtest. So I sent them back, and got new ones - and these too failed. I took them back again, and they checked them in the store, where they worked fine. Upon further inspection, all the ones that failed had one brand of chip, while the working ones had a different chip. It was just this specific chip in combination with the motherboard. It's obvious in retrospect, but before looking at the manufacturer on the chips (or even thinking of that), it was a very difficult problem to solve. The whole thing did remind me again why I hate hardware and generally stick to software. Needless to say, we used a different brand entirely, and problem solved.
I was avoiding Kingston RAM for a while, but I may have used it accidentally since (this was 2-3 years ago) because I forgot about this story.
Careful - it sounds like you're suggesting a user is considered disabled because they are running IE6..
That's like getting an issue saying ANY app is too slow, reported by a user running a Pentium III 900mHz with 128MB of RAM. They'll probably argue that their computer was fast when they bought it back in 2001, and they still had the equivalent of your app, and it was fast. Why is it slow now?
Ah yes. Because software always works perfectly, you can rest well at night knowing that your mission-critical servers will always survive a hard reboot. Testing is for wussies
This is also in a game where you can get hit by a rocket and live if you have enough health. And take a few hundred bullets from a simple 'machine gun'. And jumping from a ledge 6 times your height? No problem.
If it was realistic, you'd be dead from the first
I'd agree with this.
In fact, I wonder what the OP is trying to do, that involves 4+ different virtual desktops in various 4 combinations (AC, AD, BC, BD).
I used multiple workspaces quite a bit when I had one monitor.. then when I had two monitors, I gradually used it less and less, until the only reason I didn't turn it off was to play with the Cube display in compiz. Before I got to that point though, I would tend to use a feature in KDE that let you pin a window to all workspaces, so I would use that for my chat client / media player, depending on what I was doing.
So back to my original point, if you wanted to switch between two workspaces, but always have email on one window, you could easily do that by pinning email to all workspaces .. as you switch, it'll just stay there.
It's unnecessary. I ran KDE for a long time with multiple monitors, and it just works. You can add as many panels as you want (equivalent to windows task bar), plus there's no stupid limitations on what goes where.. so you can have an application menu on both, a clock only on second monitor, an 'favourites' launcher on the second... heck you can add another panel at the top of the screen that just shows notification icons.
In that context, Ultramon looks like a poor hack, and the fact Windows STILL can't natively even have more than one taskbar is just sad.
On that topic, I'm now using DisplayFusion on my multi-monitor Windows desktops, and I really recommend it.
There was an Ongoing History Of New Music episode that discussed this to length, and it was quite interesting (unfortunately, they don't put their shows online due to licensing restrictions because they contain music that is owned by record companies....)
For starters, banks are not likely to give a loan to a band. Simply put, there is a low probability of success, and banks do not have the expertise to judge the likelihood of a band succeeding. Secondly, if you fail* as a band, the record label will say "oh, well, that sucks. Well, have a nice life, thanks for wasting our money". A bank is not quite going to have the same attitude.
* Failing means not making money at a faster rate than you are required to pay your loan back. If you don't start making money for two years, it doesn't matter.. you still owe that money during the two years.
Record labels are basically analogous to angel investors for startups. The only difference is they are also the distributors, and effectively have a monopoly on distribution. It would be like if the only way to get out software was to put it on a CD, and the only ones who could make CDs were the angel investors/VCs. They're not going to make a CD if you funded your startup on your own, and they have no ownership in it.
You can also just have gmail do your mail hosting, which is free. Better spam filtering than most ISPs (if they provide any at all), decent web UI, and you don't have to think about it anymore. I hosted my own for about 10 years, and finally gave up and switched to gmail about a year ago. Much simpler.
Actually the biggest factor for me was I got a new laptop, and got sick of copying my thunderbird filters - yet again - to a new machine. I decided to use gmail, and though I missed Thunderbird at first, I'm now totally content with it (plus I installed the gmail app on my work blackberry, and now get my personal email there, with a similar UI). It's actually possible to have Thunderbird connect to gmail, but why bother.
I created a subdomain* about 10 years ago, that has a catch-all (so * @sub.mydomain.com goes to me) that I use for signing up for things. I've been using this for forums, with my email address based on the site itself, eg, slashdot@ (and I have hundreds of these accounts). At the same time, I've had a personal address which I've never used for signing up for anything on the web, only as a personal address I've given to people. I've been careful about not making it visible on the web, although it's very possible that it is.
Interestingly, I've received maybe two or three spam messages (and they were to one specific address -- thus from one site -- which I forget now because it was years ago) to my subdomain (Most mail is at least semi-legitimate mailing lists/updates etc from the site I've signed up for, and password resets, etc).
My personal address gets a ton of spam. My theory is this is coming from two primary sources: the biggest, is people sending e-cards and other crap. The second is being included on forwards, and having all the addresses eventually get harvested.
So effectively, in my opinion/experience, forums and generally signing up for websites are not a source of spam.
Now, this isn't fully scientific because for the last 5 or 6 years I've had some level of spam protection, Spam Assassin and the filtering in thunderbird, mostly. I still had a fair amount coming to my personal address, and none to my subdomain, but it's possible the stuff to my subdomain was just more blatant and getting filtered. It's also possible that sub-domain addresses simply don't get as much spam (maybe the spammer's regexes don't work properly?).
For the last year or so I've been hosting all my mail at gmail, and almost no spam gets through anymore (I think 2 in the last year), so I'm not sure if the situation has changed on my subdomain.
* An important point on this, is it has to be a sub-domain. The first time I got my first personal domain (in 1997 or 98 I'd guess?), I had a catch-all at the top level. That lasted for less than a day, because so much garbage came to it, including dictionary-type attacks to every imaginable name -- and this was a domain that had never been registered before.
This is exactly correct. "Programming" is farther from a one-size-fits-all skill than it's ever been. There are so many different areas and specialties. It's nice to have a sense of certain areas, but there's no way to be an expert in everything ("jack of all trades, master of none"). Some people are just more suited to certain areas or types of programming, or just enjoy it more. No sense forcing someone who loves to design games to write print drivers. Think of some of the extremes: writing kernel code/drivers; writing music software; home/industrial automation; "business applications".
I know people who can write great APIs, but make the suckiest user interfaces ever.. and likewise, people who can create beautiful intuitive interfaces, but have to rewrite their API every version.
It's probably early for a 12-year old, but one of the most important things is knowing there is much more to programming than writing code. If you're writing photo editing software, knowing about color theory, how cameras work, etc will take you MUCH farther than knowing (insert language here) really well.
This can go the other way, too. This might be good for a kid, actually. Maybe s/he loves shooting off model rockets. To get them interested, try writing software to help design them or figure out how high/where one will go (eg it can read weather forcecast off the net to get wind speeds/direction). This alone would work because it's a program that actually applies to them to solve a real problem, but it also starts teaching the value of integrating knowledge of programming with knowledge the problem domain.
I have to agree here, MythTV is the ultimate flexibility.
I just went through the same thing the OP went through. I've been using Myth for about 4 years, and was on 0.21 on a 4-year old install of Debian, and was getting annoyed because I was missing some codecs, had some stability issues (which was something in H/W, but I have no idea what). On top of that, I wanted some small frontends for around the house. So since I had to rebuild the box, I was willing to try some other systems out.
I first tried SageTV, because of it's apparent extendability, and mostly because of the $200 HD-capable, silent, small frontends. I tried both the standard and the SageMC UI. After using Mythtv for so long, I *really* tried to get used to it, but I just hated the way the UI worked, and the general workflow of how recordings, playback, etc worked, as well as how you browse music (it was really not any better than MythMusic, which is just plain sad), and videos. A *major* negative, it has no streaming radio support. WTF?
GB-PVR is quite promising, but again, the UI is not quite there. I was actually really tempted to hack on this, and get it to where I wanted it.. but in the meantime, I'd have no TV. I found in particular the recording support lacking. In myth, I can say "record this at any time, keep 2, delete the oldest". In GB-PVR, this concept doesn't really exist, you can only "favourite" the series, and then it just records all of them I guess? I found no options for how many to keep, etc. Particularly with The Simpsons, which is on about 14 times a week, I'd like to keep a handful so when I actually feel like watching it, I can find one I have only seen 20 times instead of 50.
I had a HECK of a time getting either a Windows MCE remote and a Hauppage remote (pvr-150) working totally properly in Sage and GB-PVR.. I never did quite get it fully functioning (some buttons did nothing. In GB-PVR, when I pressed the "windows" button on the MCE remote, Windows media center opened). Setting up GB-PVR as a client is a bit hackish feeling, since you have to use network shares and set a bunch of things manually.. it's not like myth, where you can just point it at the IP and it works.
I also gave Windows Media Center a very quick shot. It has a very nice looking UI, but it's architecture is severely crap. I think it's two tuners max (I could be wrong), only works with very select hardware, and its extenders, from what I can tell, are basically RDP clients, which means the server has to be beefy. And I believe you are limited to two. You can link multiple WMCs with some hacks (involving network shares mostly), but it's just ugly.
I was trying to use XBMC as a frontend for a while (thinking of it as an alternative frontend to myth), and I did have it working really great on an asrock ION 330.. but it's mythtv support is not that great. There's a project on google code that looks very promising, and I tried it later on my laptop, but it was just crashing. I didn't investigate further. Maybe in a few months or a year it will be there.. but not yet.
So after all that, I went back to Mythtv (0.22) on a brand new Asrock board with integrated HDMI and digital audio. I also have a frontend running on my old mythtv box (albeit really scaled down) and an asrock ION 330. I'm using Mythbuntu now, which is great. All my remotes worked flawlessly out of the box. The tuner worked right away. My only real complaints right now: DVD playback is broken (audio/video sync issue), and mythstream (streaming audio support) is not working on 0.22 yet (though there is a alpha quality build for it). Oh, and one of the frontends is on a standard 4:3 TV, and there is currently only one theme that looks reasonable on it. Other than that, it's impossible to tell if you're on the main backend or a frontend, it's the same experience.
I have to say, if the top 1000 sites were stupid enough to go along with this, then I'd be pretty damn happy if I was site #1001.
Even if the top 2 or 3 book selling sites are all in the top 1000 sites (and go along with this), then what is the more likely scenario:
* Everyone says "Oh crap, I can't find the book I'm looking for on [insert favourite site here], I don't know what this [insert #4 bookseller here] site is, so I'm going to go another search engine"
* People buy from the first link, and #4 bookseller very quickly jumps to #1
Repeat across every industry. Even if the first scenario happens in some, it won't in all of them.
Another take on this: how often, when you search for a business/whatever and can't find it, even after trying a couple variations, do you go to another search engine? For me, it's never. I just assume they don't have a website. I imagine I'm not the only one.
maybe... s/even though/because it is/ ?
I'm going through the same. I've been using Myth for maybe 3 or 4 years (starting with 0.20-beta something). It was relatively stable, but did crash once in a while. Mostly what was driving me insane is for the past few months, it would stop responding to the remote for a few minutes, then suddenly play back everything that just happened. So you'd hit fast-forward, and nothing would happen.. hit a couple more times... then suddenly a few minutes later, it would skip forward several times. Lirc was seeing the commands in realtime, so I have no idea what the problem was. It was intermittent, and I never found a common thing that was happening at the same time.
I've built a new Windows box now, and I'm currently trying GBPVR, and SageTV. Myth's UI is better than SageTV's.. GBPVR is a lot like myth. Myth has better recording options than both. Sage has sub-$200 fanless network client hardware, which has the same UI as the main box - this is a HUGE plus. You can't build a PC for that price, let alone a silent PC, and any other options have a different UI which is just annoying. Myth is the only one I know of that supports multiple backends (not needed for me now, but it's a sign of a good design and allows expandability).
Taking away constraints of OS/software, there is just no solution that leads to a great networked PVR system out there yet, in my opinion. To clarify, I'm not looking for a HTPC - I want a UI, consistent on every TV in my house, that lets me watch live TV (not that I ever do that), watch and/or schedule recordings (and have any available on any TV), watch DVDs, watch downloaded movies/shows, listen to music (both stored and streaming), and things like pictures and weather reports are kinda handy too.
I tried using XBMC on an Asrock ION 330 as a frontend for a while. Basically, it looks amazing (especially compared to Myth 0.21), and has some nice things like animations. It was dirt simple to get working with the hardware, including an MCE remote (as in, I basically had to do nothing).
The bad: it's not a DVR at all. It has half-baked myth backend support - in that it is supposed to understand the streams and be able to play content. However, you have to go into a menu item called "Scripts" and then start "Mythtv" from a list there, before navigating to recordings. It has no support for scheduling or doing anything besides playing back recordings. I ended up just making it look directly at the Recordings directory on my myth box and playing back files from there (note, I use a script there to symlink the mythtv recording files to their actual names).
The ugly: Due to the high potential, I started digging in more to see if there was anything I could do to help out, such as work on the myth backend support. What I found is that entire project has been mothballed, and they are working on a grandios rewrite of a generic PVR layer, and then later on top of that will have Mythtv support. Not a TERRIBLE plan, but 1) it's a huge plan, that will take a long time before it is even remotely usable, 2) it means the PVR has to be lowest common denominator support, combined based on what all the PVR backends they support have. It also means the devs are rejecting patches to the existing myth support, because it is not relevant in the wake of the new PVR backend.
On top of that, the architecture is sadly lacking. With apologize to XBMC devs, as I'm about to call your baby ugly, but It very much shows its organic and basic roots. The actual menu items are hardcoded into the theme, and intertwined with the code in the back. To do something that should be simple, like add another menu item to the main menu, from what I can tell you have to: 1) modify the core code to understand the command, 2) modify the theme to add in the button - which includes changing the x,y coordinates of all buttons below that one that now need to be shifted, and adjusting the animation code so it knows the positions of all the buttons. It's possible it is simpler than that (I didn't actually try), but from looking at the code, that's what it looked like to me, and so I lost interest due to the amount of effort and non-reusability (eg, my Mythtv button wouldn't be accepted as a patch, and I'd have to redo this anytime I installed an update).
I absolutely agree with everything here. I've been using MythTV for the past 3 years, and it's completely changed the way I watch TV. I simply didn't watch some shows before, because I wasn't willing to bend my life around TV ("Gotta be home at 8PM tonight, my show is on!"). So I would just simply never even watch shows with a continuing story (Lost, 24, etc), because if you don't watch from the start, you have no clue what's happening.. and if you miss one or two, it's not as interesting. It's like leaving in the middle of a movie for 20 minutes, then coming back to watch the end - you get the story, but it's not as fulfilling.
Now, I literally never watch live tv. Any show I have interest in, I record. In fact, if I accidentally start watching a show while it's still recording, I'll usually turn it off if I figure out that I'm going to catch up to livetv and have to watch commercials. If I watch it afterwards, myth has already flagged it and I never see them.
On topic to the OP, I actually don't mind watching SOME commercials. Some are even pretty humorous and entertaining. However, many are not. Even more irritating, is many are repeated during the show - and some are even repeated during the same commercial break. It is that kind of thing that drives me to not watch commercials.
The parallel is to ads on the web: I don't block them, because generally I don't mind them, I've even clicked and bought stuff from relevant ads before. What makes me want to block ads, is when they flash on the screen, pop up/under, or make a monkey fly back and forth. Since there's no way for me to filter reasonable vs unreasonable ads, the only way to solve that problem is to block them all. I haven't yet been driven to this (I just don't use any sites that do that, or I stop using them when they do), but I could see it happening.
I think TV has the same problem. By having crappy ads, and repeating them, and turning up the volume during ads, and generally just being irritating, people don't want to watch ANY, because it's not worth the effort to sort the tolerable from the bad.
Okay.. so what am I missing? Admittedly I haven't really spent much time looking into it - the initial PR was way too fluffy and said nothing specific.. and this is apparently too focused on one thing and not really using the full potential of wave.. so what is the full potential?
We use skype (mostly for chat) at work, and although I don't think it's the greatest choice (I would rather use Jabber), everything described in this review is what I do today with skype. You click on someone, can have an IM conversation, and move on.. or you can drag other people in, and instantly have a multi-user skype conversation. I often have several going on at once (not always active).. and when you do, it marks the messages sent while the window wasn't focused differently so it's easy to catch up. You can even click 'call group' and instantly start a group teleconference. Very often, people will add me to a conversation and continue chatting (kind of like cc'ing with emails), and I don't necessarily add anything.
The only difference I see so far is that in skype, the button is labelled "conversations", in Wave, it's called "Inbox".
Heck, I'm pretty sure you can do everything I just described in google talk (which I actually really like as an IM platform), and plus any conversation you have gets saved in your gmail account along with emails.
So what am I missing? What is revolutionary here?
I kind of like having the separation between IM and email - there is a different urgency to both, and a different level of conversation you can have. It's the same sort of thing as
The article specifically states they sampled water in shower heads in cities in the US (New York and Denver pointed out as examples), and found 30% of them contained the bacteria.
Frankly, I'm surprised as well that they can survive the chlorine mandated to be in drinking water, but apparently they do.
The owner instructions are just as bad.. I just recently got a Bell Canada phone (through work), and even though I switched it to "fast" prompts, it's still very terrible. Literally it says this:
* You have 1 unheard new messages. To listen to new messages, press one one.
(I *really* don't get why I have to press 1 twice. My voicemail system at work does the same, it's stupid. There's no other option if you press 1 once, it just says to press 1 again).
Press 1..
* You have one unheard message. First unheard message..
It just says the phrase "unheard messages" WAAAY too much.
At home I have an asterisk-based PBX (I used to be a FreePBX developer).. even though its voicemail IVR isn't the best, it beats the pants of both Bell Canada's, and our Panasonic key system at work. However, at home, I almost never listen to voicemail that way. All my messages get emailed to me as a .wav file, much simpler. I actually set up a cron job to delete the actual messages from the PBX after a day so the 'new message' light goes out automatically.
I really wish I could have the email thing for my cell and work phones..
I just got a Pioneer AVIC-F700BT (http://www.pioneerelectronics.com/PUSA/Products/Navigation/In-Dash/AVIC-F700BT). It doesn't quite do everything you asked, but there are other models that add traffic updates, etc.
It runs Windows CE (bear with me here..), and has ways to boot into it. There are people that have hacked the firmware, and added various features to it - check out avic411.com. I haven't tried this myself, but it doesn't look overly difficult. I get the impression that community is not really full of "programmers" per-se, more just enthusiasts, so it's likely that someone who actually knows how to program would get quite far. (Note, I am a programmer, I just haven't had time to mess with my car stereo which works satisfactorily).
Pros: relatively cheap (note: the MSRP is $900-something, but it can be found for $500), has pretty decent maps, decent directions, plays MP3s from USB/CD/SD (and DVD, in some models), ipod interface, has XM/Sirius capability via add-ons, bluetooth with voice recognition (which works extremely well)
Cons: slow-ish bootup time (~7 seconds to playing music, another 7-10 before UI is fully available), music-related voice control features only work with ipod (eg, "play songs by ____" doesn't work on cd.. but you can say "next track" or "change source to FM" - which frankly, is kinda useless), playback from SD/USB won't resume right where it left off, it always starts the song over, fast-forward/rewind is frustratingly slow (both of these are probably fixable via firmware, or even hacking.. unfortunately, they contribute to mean I can't really listen to podcasts, which is one thing I was hoping for with the ability to use SD cards). Ships with a stupid "feature" where you can't change Nav destination/settings while driving (luckily, this is easily bypass-able by connecting an extra wire while installing).
I'm quite happy with it, honestly, and I'd definitely recommend the unit. Like I said, I haven't really gotten in to hack it yet (I likely will), but then again, I haven't really needed to.