They did it for Verizon. Here's my reasoning:
Android 2.2 includes a free feature to turn the phone into a WAP. With Droid X, you can pay Verizon $20/month to do the same thing. Droid X starts out as Android 2.1 but will be updated to 2.2. I'm sure that its 2.2 will disable stock Android 2.2's free WAP feature, so as not to compete with the $20/month offering. If Motorola allowed modders to install a stock Android 2.2, Verizon might not make as much money off this new feature.
"How well does it work with Satellite or Cable HDTV content?"
Assuming the format is QAM, the tuner cards will tune any unencrypted QAM signals. You'd need to check with your cable or satellite provider to see how many channels are unencrypted.
One of the best teachers I ever had (back in 1990) banned note taking entirely for his Trigonometry and Calculus classes. His view was that if you were taking notes, you would be focusing on writing down what you saw, rather than thinking about it. I can respect that and get behind it, since I've been there and know it works.
However, the professor in question wants people to switch from laptops to paper, basically making them less efficient at note-taking, giving them even less time to pay attention to what she's saying. I don't think she understands that side-effect.
In any case, if she's worried that note-taking is a distraction, why doesn't she just prepare all her material ahead of time, provide it to the students, and then go over it in class in detail? That eliminates 99% of note-taking, causes them to pay attention to her, and makes sure each student gets the same printed information. It seems as if she is putting artificial restrictions on her students in an attempt to achieve a goal without doing anything different herself.
The founder of KnoppMyth had similar issues when he was first installing MythTV, which is why he made KnoppMyth http://mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html. On Dragon http://mythic.tv/product_info.php?products_id=44 reference hardware, time between inserting the KnoppMyth CD and actually running MythTV can be as little as 21 minutes, and most of that time is spent waiting for automatic processes to finish. There's very little interaction required on the part of the user.
(BTW, the MPAA says two companies released players, but there is no mention of players on either company's site. Either they were never there, or the MPAA hasn't updated their FAQ in a long while.)
It's more likely that the Linspire people know that all the legal might of the MPAA is moving to fight bigger issues like resurrecting the Broadcast Flag, implementing HDCP over HDMI, and protecting HD-DVD/Blu-Ray content. Does the MPAA really want to try to put the DVD cat back in the bag at this point, or work to keep the high-def cat in the bag?
compare and contrast to the $49 price of a Tivo and describe why either of the units is worth two to four times the price of the Tivo plus a lifetime subscription.
As of this writing, the HD Tivo is only offered through DirecTV, and their HD service requires special equipment and costs $10.99 month in addition to their standard service. On top of that, the HD Tivo costs $549 after rebate and has a monthly Program Guide fee of $5.99. $50 extra gets you a "local channel kit" which is an off-the-air antenna. The cost of all of this for the first year is $802.76 for a specialized, locked-down system that only stores up to 30 hours of HD content.
When you consider the fact that an HD Tivo is a specialized piece of equipment that you cannot modify, cannot use for general-purpose computing, and it brings with it a monthly expense, the value Dragon offers becomes clear by contrast.
Dragon has no ongoing fees, it stores a minimum(*) of 28 hours of HD content, and it is a powerful general-purpose computer built with off-the-shelf components. If you decide you no longer want to use MythTV on Dragon, you can turn Dragon into a workstation, a desktop PC, a file server, or put another PVR suite on it. It's your choice. If you decide that you no longer want to use your HD Tivo, you have no such options.
(*) based on partition sizes of auto-installed KnoppMyth and 1080i content, with no other data using up HDD space
It occurs to me that the flag is already in the hardware and the drivers are already updated (anyone know if this is so?).
This depends on what you mean by "the hardware" and "the drivers." The next generation Air2PC card doesn't care about the Flag, nor does the hd-3000 card. But that major-brand HDTV set top box or PVR that you just bought? Yep, it probably sees the Flag and obeys it. Let's hope you never get to test it out.
So, whether or not it is mandated by the FCC, they now have the ability to control what you can and cannot record, email, or otherwise share (in new hardware) and there's no law AGAINST using it. Right?
This is a good point. The Flag compliance was a law regarding reception of HDTV, not broadcast. Even though the technology that receives HDTV no longer _has to_ obey the Flag, this doesn't preclude the Flag being put in there to work on devices that were already made to be Flag compliant.
In fact, this begs the question of whether or not the MPAA is backing down because they've already gotten major players in the PVR market to implement the Flag anyway, regardless of the struck-down law...
Let me get this straight - they're asking their competitors (the OSS community) what could be done to enable better interoperation between MS and OSS? Does it occur to anyone that the negation of the answers provides MS with a roadmap of how to best avoid interoperation?
Why would any company ask its competition how they could get along better, if the real motivation wasn't to be more competitive? Am I missing something?
A little more to the right, some will want porn shut down.
I agree that many voters would want this, but I doubt the Republican politicans would ever actually do it. The politicians are in a beneficial cycle at the moment, where they are elected by people who desperately want them to do certain things, most of which would be bad strategy for them to actually do.
It's far more beneficial to give the appearance of strenuously fighting porn than to actually eradicate it, since that would be one fewer thing the politicians in question could get elected to do next term.
that censorship isn't as effective as overwhelming the news media with misinformation and "talking points." In this age, overloading news bandwidth with your own world view works a lot better than trying to remove dissenting views.
They really need a FOX News affiliate over there to convince them that up is really down...
The general technique of feeding translations into a machine translation system and letting it derive its own rules started many years ago at CMU's Language Technologies Institute. It was called Example-Based Machine Translation, or EBMT.
EBMT never really worked very well (it needed millions of translations before it'd start to yield anything useful, and even then it needed hand-holding), but perhaps these new researchers have taken it to the next step.
Silverstone - if getting an HTPC case, be careful to get one that doesn't have cooling problems with your CPU of choice. HTPC cases with higher numbers in their names are generally better at cooling.
After all, who would they press charges against? The CEO?
Yes. They are ultimately responsible for the business activities of their company.
Presumably, the CEOs of large companies get paid so very much because of the stresses and stakes of doing their job correctly. If it's appropriate for a CEO to get a nice bonus when their company does well, I think it's appropriate for a CEO to take responsibility for the failure of a large high-profile project.
There are surely elected officials who'd rather not publicly call into question the validity of the voting equipment that put them into office. Seems like the most obvious reason why there have been no criminal charges.
is to make use of historical traffic flow data to plan out a route based on start time. This is mostly only valuable for out-of-town travelers, but I'm sure everyone's had one of those experiences where they figured 3:00PM was early enough to be driving near, say, NYC, to avoid rush hour.
I want my navigation system to adjust to unforeseen (realtime) traffic data and re-route me when appropriate, but the most important thing is for it to calculate an effective top speed for each potential road along the path, based on their historical flow data on various days of the week, holidays, and at various times of day. That way, it may realize that a 35MPH side-road that parallels the highway is actually faster than the 65MPH highway at 4:00PM on days when there's some sporting event going on. Prevents me from having to know this stuff:)
Yes, I still want to actually drive the car, thank you very much:)
While Open Source solutions may be better for an organization in the long-run, there's an unfortunate lack of bribery (aka kickbacks) possible when Open Source solutions are chosen over Closed Source. Keep in mind, many decision-makers are used to being persuaded into making decisions by commercial vendors in the form of free product, expensive vacations, and plain old cash. Open Source proponents generally can't do that.
I believe we need to start the Open Source Bribery Fund (OSBF) to level the playing field. After all, you will always have some corrupt decision-makers to deal with, and evening out the bribery between solutions would perhaps encourage them to think of the actual merits of each solution.
Perhaps you overestimate the steepness of the learning curve. My parents were used to WindowsXP, and I upgraded them to Mandrake just a few months ago. After about 20 minutes of demonstration on how to run Mozilla and OpenOffice in Linux, I'd tackled 90% of their usage. Quicken was taken care of by Crossover Office, and Family Tree Maker was replaced by Gramps. The Gimp replaced whatever freebie image editor my dad used, and Kooka took care of scanning.
Every now and then, my dad says, "I don't understand how Linux works," and I reply, without malice, "You didn't understand how Windows worked, either." After a moment's pause, he says, "True."
Depending on the software your parents need, it'll be so very close to what they're used to that they may not even notice.
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They did it for Verizon. Here's my reasoning: Android 2.2 includes a free feature to turn the phone into a WAP. With Droid X, you can pay Verizon $20/month to do the same thing. Droid X starts out as Android 2.1 but will be updated to 2.2. I'm sure that its 2.2 will disable stock Android 2.2's free WAP feature, so as not to compete with the $20/month offering. If Motorola allowed modders to install a stock Android 2.2, Verizon might not make as much money off this new feature.
Media-capable PCs are only noisy if you build them as if they're servers. There are plenty of quiet parts: drives, fans, heatsinks, etc.
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Commercial_My thTV_System is a comprehensive list of pre-built boxes that work well with MythTV
"How well does it work with Satellite or Cable HDTV content?"
Assuming the format is QAM, the tuner cards will tune any unencrypted QAM signals. You'd need to check with your cable or satellite provider to see how many channels are unencrypted.
"20 minute install and 10 minutes to configure."
Or 17 minutes to install and (mostly auto-)configure on reference hardware: http://mythic.tv/product_info.php?products_id=44
Dragon gives you surround sound, over a single optical or coaxial cable. In fact, any PC that has a sound card with an S/PDIF connector will.
So the best defense against surveillance is to be boring?
However, the professor in question wants people to switch from laptops to paper, basically making them less efficient at note-taking, giving them even less time to pay attention to what she's saying. I don't think she understands that side-effect.
In any case, if she's worried that note-taking is a distraction, why doesn't she just prepare all her material ahead of time, provide it to the students, and then go over it in class in detail? That eliminates 99% of note-taking, causes them to pay attention to her, and makes sure each student gets the same printed information. It seems as if she is putting artificial restrictions on her students in an attempt to achieve a goal without doing anything different herself.
The founder of KnoppMyth had similar issues when he was first installing MythTV, which is why he made KnoppMyth http://mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html. On Dragon http://mythic.tv/product_info.php?products_id=44 reference hardware, time between inserting the KnoppMyth CD and actually running MythTV can be as little as 21 minutes, and most of that time is spent waiting for automatic processes to finish. There's very little interaction required on the part of the user.
Maybe this is because the input isn't grammatical and contains fake words. :)
(BTW, the MPAA says two companies released players, but there is no mention of players on either company's site. Either they were never there, or the MPAA hasn't updated their FAQ in a long while.)
It's more likely that the Linspire people know that all the legal might of the MPAA is moving to fight bigger issues like resurrecting the Broadcast Flag, implementing HDCP over HDMI, and protecting HD-DVD/Blu-Ray content. Does the MPAA really want to try to put the DVD cat back in the bag at this point, or work to keep the high-def cat in the bag?
Great job compiling that list! But I wonder why they're putting XCP on CDs that hardly anyone cares about. Testing the waters, perhaps?
Sure thing. From the Dragon product page:
This depends on what you mean by "the hardware" and "the drivers." The next generation Air2PC card doesn't care about the Flag, nor does the hd-3000 card. But that major-brand HDTV set top box or PVR that you just bought? Yep, it probably sees the Flag and obeys it. Let's hope you never get to test it out.
So, whether or not it is mandated by the FCC, they now have the ability to control what you can and cannot record, email, or otherwise share (in new hardware) and there's no law AGAINST using it. Right?
This is a good point. The Flag compliance was a law regarding reception of HDTV, not broadcast. Even though the technology that receives HDTV no longer _has to_ obey the Flag, this doesn't preclude the Flag being put in there to work on devices that were already made to be Flag compliant.
In fact, this begs the question of whether or not the MPAA is backing down because they've already gotten major players in the PVR market to implement the Flag anyway, regardless of the struck-down law...
Why would any company ask its competition how they could get along better, if the real motivation wasn't to be more competitive? Am I missing something?
I agree that many voters would want this, but I doubt the Republican politicans would ever actually do it. The politicians are in a beneficial cycle at the moment, where they are elected by people who desperately want them to do certain things, most of which would be bad strategy for them to actually do.
It's far more beneficial to give the appearance of strenuously fighting porn than to actually eradicate it, since that would be one fewer thing the politicians in question could get elected to do next term.
They really need a FOX News affiliate over there to convince them that up is really down...
EBMT never really worked very well (it needed millions of translations before it'd start to yield anything useful, and even then it needed hand-holding), but perhaps these new researchers have taken it to the next step.
- Antec
- Silverstone - if getting an HTPC case, be careful to get one that doesn't have cooling problems with your CPU of choice. HTPC cases with higher numbers in their names are generally better at cooling.
- Travla
- Ahanix
- XOxide carries their own brand of cases, plus a lot of the other ones on this list.
- Arisetec (formerly Kanam)
- CoolerMaster
- Logic Supply
sells the Hush cases you're familiar with, along with some house-brand models.Yes. They are ultimately responsible for the business activities of their company.
Presumably, the CEOs of large companies get paid so very much because of the stresses and stakes of doing their job correctly. If it's appropriate for a CEO to get a nice bonus when their company does well, I think it's appropriate for a CEO to take responsibility for the failure of a large high-profile project.
There are surely elected officials who'd rather not publicly call into question the validity of the voting equipment that put them into office. Seems like the most obvious reason why there have been no criminal charges.
I want my navigation system to adjust to unforeseen (realtime) traffic data and re-route me when appropriate, but the most important thing is for it to calculate an effective top speed for each potential road along the path, based on their historical flow data on various days of the week, holidays, and at various times of day. That way, it may realize that a 35MPH side-road that parallels the highway is actually faster than the 65MPH highway at 4:00PM on days when there's some sporting event going on. Prevents me from having to know this stuff :)
Yes, I still want to actually drive the car, thank you very much :)
Traffic.com also posts realtime traffic flow information, and they say they get their data from these sources.
I believe we need to start the Open Source Bribery Fund (OSBF) to level the playing field. After all, you will always have some corrupt decision-makers to deal with, and evening out the bribery between solutions would perhaps encourage them to think of the actual merits of each solution.
Perhaps you overestimate the steepness of the learning curve. My parents were used to WindowsXP, and I upgraded them to Mandrake just a few months ago. After about 20 minutes of demonstration on how to run Mozilla and OpenOffice in Linux, I'd tackled 90% of their usage. Quicken was taken care of by Crossover Office, and Family Tree Maker was replaced by Gramps. The Gimp replaced whatever freebie image editor my dad used, and Kooka took care of scanning.
Every now and then, my dad says, "I don't understand how Linux works," and I reply, without malice, "You didn't understand how Windows worked, either." After a moment's pause, he says, "True."
Depending on the software your parents need, it'll be so very close to what they're used to that they may not even notice.