...assuming you've successfully managed to turn off its ability to join a WiFi network, which assumes the set does what you tell it with the remote.
That assumes your TV has WIFI capabilities. Mine doesn't. And if it did, I'd be sure to ensure it couldn't.
Given the AV industry's insistence on making their crap intentionally as incompatible as they possibly can, I would not be surprised if, after everyone abandons the XBOX and PS4 for HTPCs, people start to go with displays oriented towards the IT market.
However, just for a good measure of paranoia:
The only issues with incompatibility that I have are HDCP, driven by the DRM content industry and without which a whole host of stupidity would be gone, and 3D glasses on TV sets, as there is no standard. For the rest, I have no issues. You'll have to explain what your problems are.
The open vector in that regard is called HDMI-CEC.
Don't have HDMI-CEC devices or use a cacble that has it disabled. It is a designated pin, so can most likely be eliminated. I'd have to dig deeper to actually accomplish that. I have two CEC enabled devices connected to each other, but neither is network connected and they're isolated so that's not going to do anyone any good.
You need to check out the Panasonic VT60/ZT60 and Samsung 8500. They are both plasmas, and are absolutely awesome in PQ. Being as how the OLED phones are only now becoming available on more than a couple of obscure models, I haven't seen one.:)
But then again, if you're not in the market for anything over 48", it doesn't really matter for most, as you won't notice anyways. Streaming video, for instance, is fine on <43" TVs that I've seen, you don't really get assaulted with the compression artifacts until you're at 50"+. In fact, I'd wager you'd probably be perfectly fine watching decent SD 16x9 video on something that small at normal viewing distances. It's the same issue with 4K TVs being sold now, they're too small to really appreciate the extra detail over well-done 1080P at normal viewing distances. The benefits won't really start showing until you get to 70"+, and 4K just isn't there yet. The real benefit for 4K will be computer monitors in the near term, defined as the next 3-5 years.
You apparently don't have the slightest clue how git works, nor how to use it properly. I certainly am no git guru, but have no issues with using multiple git repos in projects, building sub-systems out of it, nor branching and merging, which it truly excels at. I wouldn't wish SVN on anyone that wants to use branching. It's about as brain-dead as it can get and still "function", barely. The only thing SVN has going for it is that it is almost atomic, whereas CVS, MKS, etc, absolutely aren't. ClearCase is a separate system that can be used, but requires a full time expert admin for anything more than basic code repos. At least it handles branching almost sensibly. Mercurial was in the running, but at the time git had (and still has) a larger user base with active improvements in various tools associated with it for my needs, thus I chose git.
Learn a tool before you wrongly despise it publicly. You are wrong on every count:
You don't get a full copy of everything on every system if you don't want it. You can just check out a single branch.
Every copy is not a full backup. See previous line item.
Selective work is easier in git, you can clone the item(s) desired, branch locally, and merge when complete, pushing only if desired.
Lastly, you can essentially "checkin" every change for a full history of what you did on a local branch, revert, merge other branches, etc, with no effect on the main dev branch(es). And you can do all this without even being connected to a "main" server. Maintaining parallel branches with constant merges is cake compared to SVN and other central repo schemes. There really is no situation where I'd rather use SVN or anything like it that I can think of, when I have a choice.
Oh but they aren't perfectly fine. My phone actually has a better PQ than my 3 year old HDTV. The color depth is better, and this is true of many TVs, even today. LED sets pretty much suck across the board for PQ, although some higher priced sets are addressing some of the issues. Plasma is still the king in PQ, and if I hadn't missed the Kuro clearance by a few weeks, I would not now be looking to pick up a new plasma. Sadly, my old HD CRT rear projection monitor died after a decade, and left me in a bind, so after reviewing the new models and missing the Kuros, I picked what I considered the best set in what was available in price tier I was shopping in. Sadly, the set in question failed miserably to meet my expectations in a couple of categories only discovered later on when presented with certain picture feeds, but the rest had issues in other areas that made them non-starters. The sets I'm seeing today (namely the Panasonic VT60 and ZT60 Plasmas) address every issue I've had with previous models. The Samsung 8500 seems ok, but if I'm spending in that range anyways, why not get the undisputed champion (not to mention having a negative experience or two with Samsung TVs)
As for the 4K panels, they're OK, but in the given size ranges and prices, why not just get the better deal for the immediate future? You're not going to have 4K material anytime soon, and if the Blu-Ray acceptance rate was anything to judge by, 4K's adoption will be anemic and expensive for the next quite a few years. Not to mention Sony's desire for always connected and play by play authorization scheme for 4K media.
It's totally irrelevant if you don't hook your TV up to the internet in the first place.
Besides, any self-respecting slashdotter has their own HTPC hooked up to their essentially HD Monitor (TV) and has it whitelisted for certain outbound services only and no direct inbounds (upon request only). Solves a whole host of issues. Oh, and the HTPC doesn't have a camera nor mike attached, so until the TV can be hacked over HDMI in that scenario, It appears to be relatively safe for now.
Unless, of course, they cracked the private master key(s). If BB did something as stupidly asinine as RSA and use a single master key to auth all other keys, well, you're in a pickle as soon as the master gets out or cracked. It wouldn't surprise me if that's exactly what has happened.
Any law that the NSA violates puts them at risk in court
Doubly so when breaking the law requires the informed cooperation of private entities with incentives misaligned with the government's. This is not something the NSA can do in their datacenter using relaxed interpretation of the law, away from prying eyes.
They need to go to corporations and ask them to break the law. I'm sure the majority will require some kind of immunity then comply, but it's enough for a single firm to spill the beans and the whole chain of command that authorized the plan will go to jail.
I have yet to see anyone go to jail, even when we have video proof.
I'd like Holt to hold Clapper in contempt of congress for lying on the stand under oath, and throw him in jail. That would be a good start. Then hit the next lying bastard, all the way down the line until they find someone honest, and put them in the top spot.
Parallels is both slick and has significant functionality over anything else out there for a mac. That's why people use it in preference over most other packages by a pretty large margin, from what I can tell. In fact, all the VmWare Fusion installs I've ever met were to seamlessly function with windows and other counterparts, and most had Parallels installed also for their own uses.
To GP's point later on, I imagine Parallels is losing users precisely because windows is becoming less necessary by the day. Interestingly enough, only 1 of my VMs is windows at this point, and I hardly ever use it.
The big difference between humans and other animals is that we are moral agents and they are not.
You make a grand claim there. Who says we are moral agents? I'd like a citation with proof please, assertions are irrelevant. History shows that we are anything but that, using "morals" for nothing more than to gain power over others.
Geez - just Alta Vista? Lycos, Yahoo, and a host of others existed at the time as well.
You've got Jobs wrong, he didn't drive execution and find Woz. He and Woz were members of a club and they worked on some things together and Steve saw the value in it and drove it from there. You make it sound like Steve had a plan. He didn't. He fell into a situation where he saw the potential, and he was smart and lucky enough to be able to execute on it and pull in others as needed.
One time numbers from your credit card vendor are even safer than both. I use those regularly. Yes, a bit more aggravation than simply typing in Paypal, but a whole lot less worry in the end.
There have been global patent wars for decades. These FRAND terms and standards bodies arose out of those so that interoperability could exist between multiple companies' devices.
I believe this is the critical malfunction - the delusion that aggression and coercion can somehow be used for good.
You'd be wrong. Aggression and coercion against bad elements is Nature's way of removing the bad from the social pack. Wolves and lions both will attack and eject an offspring killing member or one that refuses to accept their place in the hierarchy. People do the same with psychopaths and other bad elements.
First point - Google, Android, and Samsung are essentially all different ways to refer to Google Maps on Android for purposes of this conversation. Google was tasked to create a maps app for iOS. None existed like it prior. When Google decided to embark on Android and create their competing market, they never updated the iOS maps, but it was obvious that they copied their iOS maps app to Android, and then improved it to improve their own offering. Yes Apple was peeved. Rightly so, considering that Schmidt was a board-member of Apple while CEO at Google who then entered into a competitive arrangement where only cooperation existed before. That situation alone I've wondered about - how did Schmidt escape a conflict of interest lawsuit for harm done Apple by using insider information? There's not much else you can say about it.
Nokia retains their maps and is now part of MS, or will be soon. There are 2 other major providers for US data I know of besides Google, and Apple bought neither. Knowing what I know of their offerings, you're probably better off just licensing their data or grabbing the public domain data and working from it. It wouldn't be much more work. The google camera cars - that's another thing. Apple could do the same, and probably should, although street view doesn't do much for me in general. Good valid driving directions would though.
The problem with the internet services is that the do compress it a fair bit more. I average 12-16 Mbps OTA, the best internet HD stream I've seen is 3Mbps. U-verse is around 6-7 Mbps. Significantly better than the internet services, but still not great.
I maybe shouldn't have used the word "friends" before, and I guess it may only take one sociopath/psychopath or otherwise mentally disturbed person to end the world.. but even sociopaths crave attention and acceptance from others.
All it takes is one brilliant disturbed homicidal amoral person. There's no shortage of them, honestly, and if one of them has just the right balance of characteristics with the proper base education, you could do a good bit of damage in the world today, far more than anyone's done to date.
it'd be 2Mbps, at best, high latency, etc, makes video almost unwatchable for me. Then again, I'm not there, and I have seen much better. "In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king" goes the saying, and when you have nothing, 2Mbps would be awesome - it's certainly better than the 300 baud modems everyone started with (or the even worse 100 baud...)
I don't disagree with you, but I don't think that's the whole story. I don't stream because it sucks so bad. IMHO, streaming needs at least an order of magnitude better quality service than currently exists, along with an entirely different approach to buffering / downloading. The current streaming approach is an attempt to prevent copies from existing on your hardware, which is entirely pointless anyways. In the worst case, less than $100 worth of hardware and you can capture anything out there today, so let's worry about the quality and make it usable before worrying about anyone stealing content. People that are happy with today's streaming quality don't care if they view video-taped movies. If streaming was easy and cheap enough, no one would bother.
Current issues with streaming:
Stuttering, even on 20Mbps download capacity - at peak times, it doesn't matter
Compression artifacts - at peak times this gets worse
General low quality video even at low use times - due to amount of compression used
In general, why have a 1080P screen if you're going to display a 1Mbps stream which at best has analog SD resolution?
BTW, there is a solution to this, but no one has signed up for it yet, and it's not even new nor patentable at this point.
Slashdot Mirror
...assuming you've successfully managed to turn off its ability to join a WiFi network, which assumes the set does what you tell it with the remote.
That assumes your TV has WIFI capabilities. Mine doesn't. And if it did, I'd be sure to ensure it couldn't.
Given the AV industry's insistence on making their crap intentionally as incompatible as they possibly can, I would not be surprised if, after everyone abandons the XBOX and PS4 for HTPCs, people start to go with displays oriented towards the IT market.
However, just for a good measure of paranoia:
The only issues with incompatibility that I have are HDCP, driven by the DRM content industry and without which a whole host of stupidity would be gone, and 3D glasses on TV sets, as there is no standard. For the rest, I have no issues. You'll have to explain what your problems are.
The open vector in that regard is called HDMI-CEC.
Don't have HDMI-CEC devices or use a cacble that has it disabled. It is a designated pin, so can most likely be eliminated. I'd have to dig deeper to actually accomplish that. I have two CEC enabled devices connected to each other, but neither is network connected and they're isolated so that's not going to do anyone any good.
It would have to be WiFi enabled in the first place. Mine isn't. Thanks for playing.
You need to check out the Panasonic VT60/ZT60 and Samsung 8500. They are both plasmas, and are absolutely awesome in PQ. Being as how the OLED phones are only now becoming available on more than a couple of obscure models, I haven't seen one. :)
But then again, if you're not in the market for anything over 48", it doesn't really matter for most, as you won't notice anyways. Streaming video, for instance, is fine on <43" TVs that I've seen, you don't really get assaulted with the compression artifacts until you're at 50"+. In fact, I'd wager you'd probably be perfectly fine watching decent SD 16x9 video on something that small at normal viewing distances. It's the same issue with 4K TVs being sold now, they're too small to really appreciate the extra detail over well-done 1080P at normal viewing distances. The benefits won't really start showing until you get to 70"+, and 4K just isn't there yet. The real benefit for 4K will be computer monitors in the near term, defined as the next 3-5 years.
You apparently don't have the slightest clue how git works, nor how to use it properly. I certainly am no git guru, but have no issues with using multiple git repos in projects, building sub-systems out of it, nor branching and merging, which it truly excels at. I wouldn't wish SVN on anyone that wants to use branching. It's about as brain-dead as it can get and still "function", barely. The only thing SVN has going for it is that it is almost atomic, whereas CVS, MKS, etc, absolutely aren't. ClearCase is a separate system that can be used, but requires a full time expert admin for anything more than basic code repos. At least it handles branching almost sensibly. Mercurial was in the running, but at the time git had (and still has) a larger user base with active improvements in various tools associated with it for my needs, thus I chose git.
Learn a tool before you wrongly despise it publicly. You are wrong on every count:
Lastly, you can essentially "checkin" every change for a full history of what you did on a local branch, revert, merge other branches, etc, with no effect on the main dev branch(es). And you can do all this without even being connected to a "main" server. Maintaining parallel branches with constant merges is cake compared to SVN and other central repo schemes. There really is no situation where I'd rather use SVN or anything like it that I can think of, when I have a choice.
Oh but they aren't perfectly fine. My phone actually has a better PQ than my 3 year old HDTV. The color depth is better, and this is true of many TVs, even today. LED sets pretty much suck across the board for PQ, although some higher priced sets are addressing some of the issues. Plasma is still the king in PQ, and if I hadn't missed the Kuro clearance by a few weeks, I would not now be looking to pick up a new plasma. Sadly, my old HD CRT rear projection monitor died after a decade, and left me in a bind, so after reviewing the new models and missing the Kuros, I picked what I considered the best set in what was available in price tier I was shopping in. Sadly, the set in question failed miserably to meet my expectations in a couple of categories only discovered later on when presented with certain picture feeds, but the rest had issues in other areas that made them non-starters. The sets I'm seeing today (namely the Panasonic VT60 and ZT60 Plasmas) address every issue I've had with previous models. The Samsung 8500 seems ok, but if I'm spending in that range anyways, why not get the undisputed champion (not to mention having a negative experience or two with Samsung TVs)
As for the 4K panels, they're OK, but in the given size ranges and prices, why not just get the better deal for the immediate future? You're not going to have 4K material anytime soon, and if the Blu-Ray acceptance rate was anything to judge by, 4K's adoption will be anemic and expensive for the next quite a few years. Not to mention Sony's desire for always connected and play by play authorization scheme for 4K media.
It's totally irrelevant if you don't hook your TV up to the internet in the first place.
Besides, any self-respecting slashdotter has their own HTPC hooked up to their essentially HD Monitor (TV) and has it whitelisted for certain outbound services only and no direct inbounds (upon request only). Solves a whole host of issues. Oh, and the HTPC doesn't have a camera nor mike attached, so until the TV can be hacked over HDMI in that scenario, It appears to be relatively safe for now.
master gets out
Can be NSA gets it - that's all they need after all.
Unless, of course, they cracked the private master key(s). If BB did something as stupidly asinine as RSA and use a single master key to auth all other keys, well, you're in a pickle as soon as the master gets out or cracked. It wouldn't surprise me if that's exactly what has happened.
This is precisely what the citizens of Germany thought in the early 1930s. That worked out well for them. It's also how citizens of North Korea used to think. Now, if you're kid or grand child does something, you go to jail, after watching them get executed for something as mild as having sex. I certainly hope you don't buy garden gnomes that appear to look like a caricature of the president of 2025....
People who downmod won't get 15, at least not too often.
Any law that the NSA violates puts them at risk in court
Doubly so when breaking the law requires the informed cooperation of private entities with incentives misaligned with the government's. This is not something the NSA can do in their datacenter using relaxed interpretation of the law, away from prying eyes.
They need to go to corporations and ask them to break the law. I'm sure the majority will require some kind of immunity then comply, but it's enough for a single firm to spill the beans and the whole chain of command that authorized the plan will go to jail.
I have yet to see anyone go to jail, even when we have video proof.
I'd like Holt to hold Clapper in contempt of congress for lying on the stand under oath, and throw him in jail. That would be a good start. Then hit the next lying bastard, all the way down the line until they find someone honest, and put them in the top spot.
Parallels is both slick and has significant functionality over anything else out there for a mac. That's why people use it in preference over most other packages by a pretty large margin, from what I can tell. In fact, all the VmWare Fusion installs I've ever met were to seamlessly function with windows and other counterparts, and most had Parallels installed also for their own uses.
To GP's point later on, I imagine Parallels is losing users precisely because windows is becoming less necessary by the day. Interestingly enough, only 1 of my VMs is windows at this point, and I hardly ever use it.
It used to be harder than we imagined. It might be surprisingly easy with even today's technology.
The big difference between humans and other animals is that we are moral agents and they are not.
You make a grand claim there. Who says we are moral agents? I'd like a citation with proof please, assertions are irrelevant. History shows that we are anything but that, using "morals" for nothing more than to gain power over others.
Geez - just Alta Vista? Lycos, Yahoo, and a host of others existed at the time as well.
You've got Jobs wrong, he didn't drive execution and find Woz. He and Woz were members of a club and they worked on some things together and Steve saw the value in it and drove it from there. You make it sound like Steve had a plan. He didn't. He fell into a situation where he saw the potential, and he was smart and lucky enough to be able to execute on it and pull in others as needed.
One time numbers from your credit card vendor are even safer than both. I use those regularly. Yes, a bit more aggravation than simply typing in Paypal, but a whole lot less worry in the end.
There have been global patent wars for decades. These FRAND terms and standards bodies arose out of those so that interoperability could exist between multiple companies' devices.
It just goes to show that "Do no evil" doesn't apply where patents are concerned with Google.
Google's "do no evil" ended when they decided to go public in 2004. I haven't trusted them since, and neither should anyone else.
I believe this is the critical malfunction - the delusion that aggression and coercion can somehow be used for good.
You'd be wrong. Aggression and coercion against bad elements is Nature's way of removing the bad from the social pack. Wolves and lions both will attack and eject an offspring killing member or one that refuses to accept their place in the hierarchy. People do the same with psychopaths and other bad elements.
First point - Google, Android, and Samsung are essentially all different ways to refer to Google Maps on Android for purposes of this conversation. Google was tasked to create a maps app for iOS. None existed like it prior. When Google decided to embark on Android and create their competing market, they never updated the iOS maps, but it was obvious that they copied their iOS maps app to Android, and then improved it to improve their own offering. Yes Apple was peeved. Rightly so, considering that Schmidt was a board-member of Apple while CEO at Google who then entered into a competitive arrangement where only cooperation existed before. That situation alone I've wondered about - how did Schmidt escape a conflict of interest lawsuit for harm done Apple by using insider information? There's not much else you can say about it.
Nokia retains their maps and is now part of MS, or will be soon. There are 2 other major providers for US data I know of besides Google, and Apple bought neither. Knowing what I know of their offerings, you're probably better off just licensing their data or grabbing the public domain data and working from it. It wouldn't be much more work. The google camera cars - that's another thing. Apple could do the same, and probably should, although street view doesn't do much for me in general. Good valid driving directions would though.
The problem with the internet services is that the do compress it a fair bit more. I average 12-16 Mbps OTA, the best internet HD stream I've seen is 3Mbps. U-verse is around 6-7 Mbps. Significantly better than the internet services, but still not great.
I maybe shouldn't have used the word "friends" before, and I guess it may only take one sociopath/psychopath or otherwise mentally disturbed person to end the world.. but even sociopaths crave attention and acceptance from others.
All it takes is one brilliant disturbed homicidal amoral person. There's no shortage of them, honestly, and if one of them has just the right balance of characteristics with the proper base education, you could do a good bit of damage in the world today, far more than anyone's done to date.
it'd be 2Mbps, at best, high latency, etc, makes video almost unwatchable for me. Then again, I'm not there, and I have seen much better. "In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king" goes the saying, and when you have nothing, 2Mbps would be awesome - it's certainly better than the 300 baud modems everyone started with (or the even worse 100 baud...)
I don't disagree with you, but I don't think that's the whole story. I don't stream because it sucks so bad. IMHO, streaming needs at least an order of magnitude better quality service than currently exists, along with an entirely different approach to buffering / downloading. The current streaming approach is an attempt to prevent copies from existing on your hardware, which is entirely pointless anyways. In the worst case, less than $100 worth of hardware and you can capture anything out there today, so let's worry about the quality and make it usable before worrying about anyone stealing content. People that are happy with today's streaming quality don't care if they view video-taped movies. If streaming was easy and cheap enough, no one would bother.
Current issues with streaming:
In general, why have a 1080P screen if you're going to display a 1Mbps stream which at best has analog SD resolution?
BTW, there is a solution to this, but no one has signed up for it yet, and it's not even new nor patentable at this point.