If Apple was going to introduce a PVR/PC, it seems like they would have introduced it before Christmas. American Consumers spent billions of dollars on Televisions, DVDs and other multimedia devices this year. If Apple released a good PVR on say, the Mac Mini, I would have seriously considered one.
As is, I had trouble finding any Multimedia/PVR PCs for less then $1200, and most of them still seemed pretty buggy.
may be value in purchasing a 'HDTV' antenna specifically designed to capture the broadcast.
Is there really much difference between those 'HDTV' antennas and any other analog antenna? I've been asking around on some DTV forums about this, and most folks say that most of those 'HDTV' antennas are really just a UHF antenna with better packaging and a premium price.
That is what these funds are for. These funds will be used to purchase converter boxes to convert the digital signal received from the source to an analog signal.
There is no such thing as a "HD Antenna". UHF/VHF antennas can be used to watch Digital OTA broadcasts, in theory. There's a whole other question about the quality of the signal as received by the antenna- those rabbit ears probably won't work very wekk. A weak analog signal results in a snowy picture-- it's low quality but watchable. A weak digital signal can result in a "stuttering" picture on the screen, like when you try to watch a scratched DVD. It's unwatchable.
I'm curious. Would Tor and Privoxy help in this situation? Locating and downloading the software might be difficult, but installing the pre-configured package for Windows takes less then 5 minutes.
It's not stealing. Isn't this more like BUYING a used, surplus truck from the postal service? You give someone a laptop-- what's wrong with them selling the laptop?
What would be the disadvantage in selling these laptops to people in wealthy nations as a commodity? That is precisely what the Freeplay Foundation does with their "Lifeline Radio", which is a robust, windup/solar powered, AM/FM/SW radio designed for people who live in areas without power. You can buy one radio through CCrane and they'll donate a second one to someone in need.
My 'utopian' internet future doesn't see much need for DNS. Bit-torrent doesn't need it, Google lets me find information anywhere without needing to remember domain names, and portable bookmarks make my life simple.
DNS makes the Internet easy to use. How many external IP addresses can you recite from memory? When we moveto IPV6 addresses, will you remember an address like "2001:0db8:85a3:08d3:1319:8a2e:0370:7334/64"?
Google DOES make use of DNS names-- it's in the search result. If you rely too much on Google to browse the web, you are giving up some control to rely on a centralized power. I'd be willing to bet that all of your bookmarks use DNS names as well.
In the time before DNS, people STILL didn't want to remember all those long IP addresses, and usually stored a name/IP map as a host file on the local machine. And there was much confusion when the host files fell out of sync, and thus a centralized name service was created to deal with this confusion.
Bah. There are plenty of Sun boxes in the private sector. If I walk around our floor at the colocation facility I can see a dozen cages for large companies. There are more then 500 computers total. Half of them are Sun machines.
If THAT happened we'd see all sorts of routing problems, and would probably have to isolate the US's networks to keep things from becoming completely disrupted.
Hopefully they would also see that this would cause all sorts of routing problems on their side. And rather then replacing the existing IPV4 allocation, they could probably meet most of their needs AND remain compatable with the IPV4 address space by using IPV6.
Let's look at other Scientific ideas which cannot be fully explains. Gravity is one such example. Nobody really understands how gravity works, the theories explaining gravity are not inconsistant and leave huge gaps in understanding-- and heck, much of the math doesn't even add up. And don't even get me started about Quantum Mechanics and Gravity.
The Neo-Newtonian theory of gravity is a "theory in crisis". I bet you didn't know that, despite centuries of research, this topic has long been a focal point for vigorous debate within the scientific & intellectual community! There are countless numbers of scientists who dispute theories like Neo-Darwinian evolution and Neo-Newtonian Gravity!!!
This is why I say we should introduce the theory of Intelligent Falling in schools. When you fall, you are not actually being pulled down; but rather, you are being pushed by a Higher Intelligence-- it may be God, the Flying Spaghetti Monster or something else... but it's quite clear that science cannot adequately explain why we are pulled to the ground.
Isn't this why we have the 2-letter country code top-level domains? Germany runs the name services for.dk , the US runs the name services for.us, etc. Countries who aren't capable of running their own TLDs can hire somebody else to do it (The TLD for Thailand was run by igc.org until 1999 or so).
And with IPV6 there are plenty of IP addresses to go around, but the protocol lacks support.
But still, somewhere in there, you would need some central authority to setup new TLDs--- does East Timor get it's own 2-letter country code or not? Does China need to recognize a code for Taiwan? Are there root servers to handle all of the TLDs, or should this be deferred to each country?
The.com,.org,.gov was a second, different idea that took off in the US. And since US customers dominated the Internet in the early days, the.com/.org/.gov idea stuck.
The name "Podcasting" is often misused to simply mean "listen to our audio file". I know you are being fecisious, but the "Pod" in "Podcast" doesn't mean that you need to buy a $400 piece of equipment to listen to a Podcast.
The word "Podcast" implies automation -- You tell the computer what shows you want to watch. The broadcaster distributes the audio file on a regular schedule. Your computer monitors the feed, downloads the files and does the work for you.
Using this method, an audio producer effectively distributes the file far and wide on a regular schedule. They have a larger potential audience, because listeners are more likely to listen to a broadcast.
Really, this is the same thing as when I was 8 years old and taped Dr. Demento. But Podcasting is more automated, and is a good use of these broadband connections that sit idle at night.
Normally when Sun talks about StarOffice/OpenOffice, they mostly talk about their own StarOffice product. I wonder why they don't talk about it in regards to this partnership? Does OpenOffice simply have better mindshare? Are there funny licensing reasons preventing Google from distributing StarOffice? Does Google want to distribute a more pure OSS project? Has Sun given up on StarOffice outside the corporate environment?
Yes, EXACTLY! I've had this same silly argument with a ton of physics majors (At UCSC, which has a top rated Physics program) about this same thing.
I was never a Einsteinien physics expert, but too often it seemed like my physics friends kept trying to cram 'light' into a model that only supported "Wave" or "Particle". Since light exhibits traits of both a wave and a particle, perhaps a dual-model is flawed?
Not that light's wave/particle duality is a simple question or anything.
Does it have to be either? Hacking, like most things in life, is neither a fine art or a pure science, so I'm always confused why certain people try to pigeonhole some discipline into either "Art or Science".
I hear this question over and over from some people. This question seems a little too academic and removed from reality-- if a discipline doesn't fit your narrow view of "Art or Science", perhaps the view is wrong.
If anything, I'd say hacking could loosely be called a craft, in the same way that any trade could be considered a craft--woodcraft, glasswork, gardening, auto mechanic or, just for fun, witchcraft (Hackers do mysterious things by reciting long incantations!).
Eventually many craftspeople are able to think outside the instruction manual and discover new ways to work their craft in ways that it wasn't intended to do.
Microsoft's Virtual Desktop Manager is a bad app
on
Pepping Up Windows
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Microsoft's Virtual Desktop Manager is not a powerful application.
Most of us looking for multiple desktops probably come from the Linux desktop world, and want many of those features: Keyboard navigation, edge flipping, an easy way to move application windows between virtual desktops and sticky windows.
Microsoft's Virtual Desktop Manager does none of this. In addition, it's pretty buggy-- switching between virtual desktops can leave many artificts on the screen, the toolbar for each virtual desktop may actually list applications from another virtual desktop and the toolbar may lose the toolbar icon for items on your current desktop.
And Microsoft hasn't really updated any of the features of this application in 3 years.
VirtuaWin is a pretty good app, and has most of the features listed above. In addition, there are dozens modules to add various features.
It's like a knowledge index for websites that returns results for stuff you want to know about!
Although, frequently Google mostly returns results for stuff the Vendors want you to know about. The stuff YOU want to know about is burried deep within one of the 1,040,000 results, and you'd be better off asking your fellow geek. Who knows, maybe you'll spark a conversation or two.
Sometimes asking a question to a discussion forum/newssite isn't wrong.
The station measures temperature, rain, humidity, wind speed and even calculates the dew point. It also functions as an atomic clock receiver.
The sensors are outside, and connect to a base station inside the house through a wired or wireless (433 MHz) connection. The base station connects to a PC over a serial connection. The sensors are battery powered. Mine have been running for 6 months off of NiMH batteries.
The stations come with software for Windows, but you can also use connect via Linux using the Open2300 project.
2300 includes most everything you need: The C programs read from the device via a serial port and write the information to a flat file or to an optional MySQL database.
Using a set of PHP scripts, you can host the data on any Apache webserver. As an alternative, you can upload the data to Weather Underground, or even broadcast it over a HAM radio (Citizens Weather-- but I know nothing about this).
The weather stations also listens to the NIST Atomic Clock in Boulder, Colorado. I'm looking at ways of using my weather station to set the time for my NTP service.
It's all pretty straightforward, and requires very little technical knowledge if you use the vendor-supplied versions of MySQL, PHP (With GD) & Apache.
My station for Berkeley has been setup for a month, but I need to remount the temperature sensors to a location that doesn't collect as much heat. It's not really 85F in Berkeley right now-- it's 85F right outside the office door, and a cool 80F inside.
Well ok, Wallace & Gromit is something I can watch with the kids without worrying too much about screening it first. Corpse Bride is something I want to watch first, just in case.
I have no problems with Nighmare Before Christmas -- it's one of my favorite movies, and kids that I babysit often want to watch it -- "Can we watch the Halloween Movie?". It's macabre, but it's not violent. Ok, maybe Oogie Boogie is a little scary.
But Beetle Juice (I've seen it scare kids), Batman (Too violent), or even Park's Chicken Run ("Kids, today we're going to talk about Death Camps")-- I'd think a little harder about those, depending on what the kid is like.
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If Apple was going to introduce a PVR/PC, it seems like they would have introduced it before Christmas. American Consumers spent billions of dollars on Televisions, DVDs and other multimedia devices this year. If Apple released a good PVR on say, the Mac Mini, I would have seriously considered one.
As is, I had trouble finding any Multimedia/PVR PCs for less then $1200, and most of them still seemed pretty buggy.
may be value in purchasing a 'HDTV' antenna specifically designed to capture the broadcast.
Is there really much difference between those 'HDTV' antennas and any other analog antenna? I've been asking around on some DTV forums about this, and most folks say that most of those 'HDTV' antennas are really just a UHF antenna with better packaging and a premium price.
Everything in the universe is analog. "digital" is just a theoretical mathematical approximation ;)
That is what these funds are for. These funds will be used to purchase converter boxes to convert the digital signal received from the source to an analog signal.
There is no such thing as a "HD Antenna". UHF/VHF antennas can be used to watch Digital OTA broadcasts, in theory. There's a whole other question about the quality of the signal as received by the antenna- those rabbit ears probably won't work very wekk. A weak analog signal results in a snowy picture-- it's low quality but watchable. A weak digital signal can result in a "stuttering" picture on the screen, like when you try to watch a scratched DVD. It's unwatchable.
I'm curious. Would Tor and Privoxy help in this situation? Locating and downloading the software might be difficult, but installing the pre-configured package for Windows takes less then 5 minutes.
he is address the concern that people will steal them.
I didn't actually watch the video (No time!), but from what I gather he was also talking about "grey market" resale-- not stolen goods.
"like stealing a post office truck"
It's not stealing. Isn't this more like BUYING a used, surplus truck from the postal service? You give someone a laptop-- what's wrong with them selling the laptop?
What would be the disadvantage in selling these laptops to people in wealthy nations as a commodity? That is precisely what the Freeplay Foundation does with their "Lifeline Radio", which is a robust, windup/solar powered, AM/FM/SW radio designed for people who live in areas without power. You can buy one radio through CCrane and they'll donate a second one to someone in need.
This used to be the case with the 1.0 line. This was changed in Firefox 1.5 so that updates could be incremental and small.
Windows is not a fish. It's a feature.
My 'utopian' internet future doesn't see much need for DNS. Bit-torrent doesn't need it, Google lets me find information anywhere without needing to remember domain names, and portable bookmarks make my life simple.
DNS makes the Internet easy to use. How many external IP addresses can you recite from memory? When we moveto IPV6 addresses, will you remember an address like "2001:0db8:85a3:08d3:1319:8a2e:0370:7334/64"?
Google DOES make use of DNS names-- it's in the search result. If you rely too much on Google to browse the web, you are giving up some control to rely on a centralized power. I'd be willing to bet that all of your bookmarks use DNS names as well.
In the time before DNS, people STILL didn't want to remember all those long IP addresses, and usually stored a name/IP map as a host file on the local machine. And there was much confusion when the host files fell out of sync, and thus a centralized name service was created to deal with this confusion.
Bah. There are plenty of Sun boxes in the private sector. If I walk around our floor at the colocation facility I can see a dozen cages for large companies. There are more then 500 computers total. Half of them are Sun machines.
If THAT happened we'd see all sorts of routing problems, and would probably have to isolate the US's networks to keep things from becoming completely disrupted.
Hopefully they would also see that this would cause all sorts of routing problems on their side. And rather then replacing the existing IPV4 allocation, they could probably meet most of their needs AND remain compatable with the IPV4 address space by using IPV6.
But we shouldn't stop there.
Let's look at other Scientific ideas which cannot be fully explains. Gravity is one such example. Nobody really understands how gravity works, the theories explaining gravity are not inconsistant and leave huge gaps in understanding-- and heck, much of the math doesn't even add up. And don't even get me started about Quantum Mechanics and Gravity.
The Neo-Newtonian theory of gravity is a "theory in crisis". I bet you didn't know that, despite centuries of research, this topic has long been a focal point for vigorous debate within the scientific & intellectual community! There are countless numbers of scientists who dispute theories like Neo-Darwinian evolution and Neo-Newtonian Gravity!!!
This is why I say we should introduce the theory of Intelligent Falling in schools. When you fall, you are not actually being pulled down; but rather, you are being pushed by a Higher Intelligence-- it may be God, the Flying Spaghetti Monster or something else... but it's quite clear that science cannot adequately explain why we are pulled to the ground.
Isn't this why we have the 2-letter country code top-level domains? Germany runs the name services for .dk , the US runs the name services for .us, etc. Countries who aren't capable of running their own TLDs can hire somebody else to do it (The TLD for Thailand was run by igc.org until 1999 or so).
.com, .org, .gov was a second, different idea that took off in the US. And since US customers dominated the Internet in the early days, the .com/.org/.gov idea stuck.
And with IPV6 there are plenty of IP addresses to go around, but the protocol lacks support.
But still, somewhere in there, you would need some central authority to setup new TLDs--- does East Timor get it's own 2-letter country code or not? Does China need to recognize a code for Taiwan? Are there root servers to handle all of the TLDs, or should this be deferred to each country?
The
The name "Podcasting" is often misused to simply mean "listen to our audio file". I know you are being fecisious, but the "Pod" in "Podcast" doesn't mean that you need to buy a $400 piece of equipment to listen to a Podcast.
The word "Podcast" implies automation -- You tell the computer what shows you want to watch. The broadcaster distributes the audio file on a regular schedule. Your computer monitors the feed, downloads the files and does the work for you.
Using this method, an audio producer effectively distributes the file far and wide on a regular schedule. They have a larger potential audience, because listeners are more likely to listen to a broadcast.
Really, this is the same thing as when I was 8 years old and taped Dr. Demento. But Podcasting is more automated, and is a good use of these broadband connections that sit idle at night.
I find it very interesting that these two big companies only mention OpenOffice. They don't talk about StarOffice at all.
Read the press releases from Sun & Google: Sun's Press Release, sun.com Featured Article, Google's Press Release . None of these mention "StarOffice". They all discuss "OpenOffice".
Normally when Sun talks about StarOffice/OpenOffice, they mostly talk about their own StarOffice product. I wonder why they don't talk about it in regards to this partnership? Does OpenOffice simply have better mindshare? Are there funny licensing reasons preventing Google from distributing StarOffice? Does Google want to distribute a more pure OSS project? Has Sun given up on StarOffice outside the corporate environment?
You forgot to turn your monitor on.
For the uninitiated, Serenity is based on the short-lived Fox television show Firefly
If you're that uninitiated, you'll need to know this-- Slashdot is a "Web Site" where we talk about geeky things.
Surely, if anyone on Slashdot hasn't heard of Serenity, it would cause a quantum singularity and we would all get sucked into a blackhole.
Not to get all Treky or anything.
Yes, EXACTLY! I've had this same silly argument with a ton of physics majors (At UCSC, which has a top rated Physics program) about this same thing.
I was never a Einsteinien physics expert, but too often it seemed like my physics friends kept trying to cram 'light' into a model that only supported "Wave" or "Particle". Since light exhibits traits of both a wave and a particle, perhaps a dual-model is flawed?
Not that light's wave/particle duality is a simple question or anything.
Does it have to be either? Hacking, like most things in life, is neither a fine art or a pure science, so I'm always confused why certain people try to pigeonhole some discipline into either "Art or Science".
I hear this question over and over from some people. This question seems a little too academic and removed from reality-- if a discipline doesn't fit your narrow view of "Art or Science", perhaps the view is wrong.
If anything, I'd say hacking could loosely be called a craft, in the same way that any trade could be considered a craft--woodcraft, glasswork, gardening, auto mechanic or, just for fun, witchcraft (Hackers do mysterious things by reciting long incantations!).
Eventually many craftspeople are able to think outside the instruction manual and discover new ways to work their craft in ways that it wasn't intended to do.
Microsoft's Virtual Desktop Manager is not a powerful application.
Most of us looking for multiple desktops probably come from the Linux desktop world, and want many of those features: Keyboard navigation, edge flipping, an easy way to move application windows between virtual desktops and sticky windows.
Microsoft's Virtual Desktop Manager does none of this. In addition, it's pretty buggy-- switching between virtual desktops can leave many artificts on the screen, the toolbar for each virtual desktop may actually list applications from another virtual desktop and the toolbar may lose the toolbar icon for items on your current desktop.
And Microsoft hasn't really updated any of the features of this application in 3 years.
VirtuaWin is a pretty good app, and has most of the features listed above. In addition, there are dozens modules to add various features.
It's a little confusing to configure.
You'd get better results if you hung a wireless card instead of a rock.
It's like a knowledge index for websites that returns results for stuff you want to know about!
Although, frequently Google mostly returns results for stuff the Vendors want you to know about. The stuff YOU want to know about is burried deep within one of the 1,040,000 results, and you'd be better off asking your fellow geek. Who knows, maybe you'll spark a conversation or two.
Sometimes asking a question to a discussion forum/newssite isn't wrong.
How funny, I'm working on this today.
I use a weather station made by La Crosse.
The station measures temperature, rain, humidity, wind speed and even calculates the dew point. It also functions as an atomic clock receiver.
The sensors are outside, and connect to a base station inside the house through a wired or wireless (433 MHz) connection. The base station connects to a PC over a serial connection. The sensors are battery powered. Mine have been running for 6 months off of NiMH batteries.
The stations come with software for Windows, but you can also use connect via Linux using the Open2300 project.
2300 includes most everything you need: The C programs read from the device via a serial port and write the information to a flat file or to an optional MySQL database.
Using a set of PHP scripts, you can host the data on any Apache webserver. As an alternative, you can upload the data to Weather Underground, or even broadcast it over a HAM radio (Citizens Weather-- but I know nothing about this).
The weather stations also listens to the NIST Atomic Clock in Boulder, Colorado. I'm looking at ways of using my weather station to set the time for my NTP service.
It's all pretty straightforward, and requires very little technical knowledge if you use the vendor-supplied versions of MySQL, PHP (With GD) & Apache.
My station for Berkeley has been setup for a month, but I need to remount the temperature sensors to a location that doesn't collect as much heat. It's not really 85F in Berkeley right now-- it's 85F right outside the office door, and a cool 80F inside.
Well ok, Wallace & Gromit is something I can watch with the kids without worrying too much about screening it first. Corpse Bride is something I want to watch first, just in case.
I have no problems with Nighmare Before Christmas -- it's one of my favorite movies, and kids that I babysit often want to watch it -- "Can we watch the Halloween Movie?". It's macabre, but it's not violent. Ok, maybe Oogie Boogie is a little scary.
But Beetle Juice (I've seen it scare kids), Batman (Too violent), or even Park's Chicken Run ("Kids, today we're going to talk about Death Camps")-- I'd think a little harder about those, depending on what the kid is like.