This has bothered me for several years. One of the beauties of an electric car is the lack of noise. Humans have a strange relationship to sound. I see many articles where people want cars to sound like cars, yet I have friends who are surprised that my robotic vacuum (Roomba) is "so noisy". I stand on street corners and feel assaulted by the noise from dozens of idling engines providing no useful work and wonder how nice it would be to drop the sound level on our streets. It's noisy now with lots of idling internal combustion engines, but imagine if we have dozens of different noises, all customized from regular engine noise, futuristic space noise, to Nyan Cat. Is this the sort of environment we want? Cacophony.
I am sympathetic to the plight of sight impaired people, they currently rely upon sound, but quiet vehicles already produce problems for them, and as drivers we MUST be careful of ALL pedestrians. I'm not sure the solution is to replicate old technology by imitating old noises. There must be a better solution than hacking something on to a relatively clean and simple system.
NASA is under orders to retain all data from planetary missions, including lunar missions. Once the data as been recovered, what are NASA's plans to archive and prevent the data from being lost over the next 40, or 400 years? How will they plan on making the data available to general public?
Revealing source code is good, but that doesn't gaurantee that the code you review is the same code actually running in the deployed machines.
Some people would like to see paper trails and code review as a backup security measure, but I have another option I could feel comfortable with. How about a neutral third party, mutually selected by the state/city/etc and machine supplier? This third party can act as the review agent for the code, even bringing in outside experts. Public review of the code could even be done if all parties agree that this is the best thing to do.
Finally (and here is where I think things get better), the escrow company actually builds the reviewed code, performs quality and acceptance tests. This code built by the third party is then released to the state for installation in their machines. The machine supplier never releases code directly to state/county/city/etc.
Many large corporations use similar schemes to manage mission critical code. The IP still belongs to the machine supplier, of course, but there is now a very public and verifiable step in the process to ensure trust in the system.
This is just a text book case of how technology is not the same as marketing collateral.
... of course if someone has reasonably deep pockets they could encumber SCO linux pretty quickly. I doubt that would make them take #5 down from their site, but it would be one more lie.
This isn't a review of NKS (you can do that yourself), but having access to the book in two forms is very nice.
The paper version works well on the table, couch, or water closet library. The electronic version works well for searching and quick references when away from the dead tree version.
To me, this is the really important point about building one of these boxes. I've spent about 2 hours putting together the hardware (at a very relaxed pace). Much more time has been spent putting the software together.
Because I am using the VIA Nehemiah board, I tried "freepia" (freepia.org) which is made for this board. It didn't detect my Win-TV card properly, and the player application crashed. While the Freevo app itself was fine, the other problems cause me to believe that I can not really use it in that form.
The best part about the freepia distro is that is boots in under 1 minute, mostly runs out of a RAM disk. This is good because I can program the machine to wake up 1 or 2 minutes before the next scheduled recording and it won't sound like a bucket of bolts. Red Hat loads so much stuff (mostly not needed) that the disk sounds like it going to go into orbit compared to the lite weight freepia. I certainly don't want that noisy thing starting up at 3 AM!
Perhaps it's time to make my own.
For a serious time shifter (or at least me) the VCR has become a liability. I capture many shows on a regular basis (my wife does too) and the VCR tapes pile up next to the TV until we have time to watch them. Becauswe of work, family, etc. it may be quite some time before we get around to "clearing tape".
To make matters worse, sometimes our shows get intermingled (her shows on the same tape as my shows) and we don't clear them at the same time. Now we have lots of tapes (~12) with some shows watched and some unwatched. Performing garbage collection on a linear access medium isn't something I enjoy.
I do enjoy tinkering though, it's been fun putting this together. Having my pvr on my house-net will be really nice.
I too am building a system using the VIA Nehemiah board. The low power consumption was one of main attractions to using this board. Additionally the BIOS contains a "wake up @ time" function than I suspect can be used to cause a start up of the system so a scheduled recording can be done.
All the previous analysis of the amount of power used in a 24x7 configuration hit on an important point. The total on time is almost more important than the power used while the system really "on". Consider how much power a "small" 4 watt wall-wart uses. It's much more than you think. I really found this out when doing a power survey in my house for a planned (but not yet purchased) photovoltaic system.
Perhaps I need a solar powered "freevo" box...
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This has bothered me for several years. One of the beauties of an electric car is the lack of noise. Humans have a strange relationship to sound. I see many articles where people want cars to sound like cars, yet I have friends who are surprised that my robotic vacuum (Roomba) is "so noisy". I stand on street corners and feel assaulted by the noise from dozens of idling engines providing no useful work and wonder how nice it would be to drop the sound level on our streets. It's noisy now with lots of idling internal combustion engines, but imagine if we have dozens of different noises, all customized from regular engine noise, futuristic space noise, to Nyan Cat. Is this the sort of environment we want? Cacophony. I am sympathetic to the plight of sight impaired people, they currently rely upon sound, but quiet vehicles already produce problems for them, and as drivers we MUST be careful of ALL pedestrians. I'm not sure the solution is to replicate old technology by imitating old noises. There must be a better solution than hacking something on to a relatively clean and simple system.
NASA is under orders to retain all data from planetary missions, including lunar missions. Once the data as been recovered, what are NASA's plans to archive and prevent the data from being lost over the next 40, or 400 years? How will they plan on making the data available to general public?
The ARRL just celebrated it's 90th anniversary. Ham radio was around before that.
Revealing source code is good, but that doesn't gaurantee that the code you review is the same code actually running in the deployed machines.
Some people would like to see paper trails and code review as a backup security measure, but I have another option I could feel comfortable with. How about a neutral third party, mutually selected by the state/city/etc and machine supplier? This third party can act as the review agent for the code, even bringing in outside experts. Public review of the code could even be done if all parties agree that this is the best thing to do.
Finally (and here is where I think things get better), the escrow company actually builds the reviewed code, performs quality and acceptance tests. This code built by the third party is then released to the state for installation in their machines. The machine supplier never releases code directly to state/county/city/etc.
Many large corporations use similar schemes to manage mission critical code. The IP still belongs to the machine supplier, of course, but there is now a very public and verifiable step in the process to ensure trust in the system.
This is just a text book case of how technology is not the same as marketing collateral.
... of course if someone has reasonably deep pockets they could encumber SCO linux pretty quickly. I doubt that would make them take #5 down from their site, but it would be one more lie.
This isn't a review of NKS (you can do that yourself), but having access to the book in two forms is very nice.
The paper version works well on the table, couch, or water closet library. The electronic version works well for searching and quick references when away from the dead tree version.
To me, this is the really important point about building one of these boxes. I've spent about 2 hours putting together the hardware (at a very relaxed pace). Much more time has been spent putting the software together.
Because I am using the VIA Nehemiah board, I tried "freepia" (freepia.org) which is made for this board. It didn't detect my Win-TV card properly, and the player application crashed. While the Freevo app itself was fine, the other problems cause me to believe that I can not really use it in that form.
The best part about the freepia distro is that is boots in under 1 minute, mostly runs out of a RAM disk. This is good because I can program the machine to wake up 1 or 2 minutes before the next scheduled recording and it won't sound like a bucket of bolts. Red Hat loads so much stuff (mostly not needed) that the disk sounds like it going to go into orbit compared to the lite weight freepia. I certainly don't want that noisy thing starting up at 3 AM!
Perhaps it's time to make my own.
For a serious time shifter (or at least me) the VCR has become a liability. I capture many shows on a regular basis (my wife does too) and the VCR tapes pile up next to the TV until we have time to watch them. Becauswe of work, family, etc. it may be quite some time before we get around to "clearing tape".
To make matters worse, sometimes our shows get intermingled (her shows on the same tape as my shows) and we don't clear them at the same time. Now we have lots of tapes (~12) with some shows watched and some unwatched. Performing garbage collection on a linear access medium isn't something I enjoy.
I do enjoy tinkering though, it's been fun putting this together. Having my pvr on my house-net will be really nice.
I too am building a system using the VIA Nehemiah board. The low power consumption was one of main attractions to using this board. Additionally the BIOS contains a "wake up @ time" function than I suspect can be used to cause a start up of the system so a scheduled recording can be done. All the previous analysis of the amount of power used in a 24x7 configuration hit on an important point. The total on time is almost more important than the power used while the system really "on". Consider how much power a "small" 4 watt wall-wart uses. It's much more than you think. I really found this out when doing a power survey in my house for a planned (but not yet purchased) photovoltaic system. Perhaps I need a solar powered "freevo" box...