Anything you can get cheap, I guess. Just get a cheap PC with a big hard drive, add the Ceton card and make sure you have video that will decode BluRay and HD with ease. The new sandy bridge can do BR decoding without a GPU, so that's really all you need. It doesn't even have to be a fast PC, it's really easy and simple to set up. I did it for the fun of it, and after I realized how great it was -- I ditched all my cable equipment.
You forget, that this is also a computer. I can use HBOGO to get my HBO fix, I don't ever watch PPV so that's not a biggie (though you can still get it, if you call the phone number and order it, then just tune the channel -- and record it to boot), and VOD I don't miss either since I have Netflix built into my WMC.
Build a Windows Media Center PC, add a CetonTV card, and rent a CableCard from your cable company for around ~$3 a month.
I can record four shows at one time, have a much better guide and interface, save a lot of power (because cable boxes don't give a damn about power usage, and you'd know that if you plugged in a Kill-A-Watt into it), and just in rental fees, I save over $400 a year for two cable boxes. I use my WMC PC in one room (and it's whisper quiet), and an Xbox to extend the DVR to another room.
If I want to extend it again, I just buy an XBox on ebay for ~$100 or so. Nicest thing is that regardless of what cable company I have, I will always have a good DVR.
The thing about Google is that 90%+ of its entire revenue comes from search. This isn't true of Microsoft, or even Apple, or Oracle. They have multiple lines that generate revenue.
If Google loses 5% on search (not a lot) the blow to them is a LOT bigger than if MS loses on search, or Apple loses on iTunes. So as far as their best days being behind them, I'd say yes; but the same is true for MS and Apple, but in different respects.
Google needs to innovate outside of search, but everything they do keeps coming back around to search; even Google+. It's a datamining operation and it doesn't produce a line of revenue that's not susceptible to challenge, whether it's Bing/Facebook or something else. They need more sources of revenue, not ways to bolster their only line of revenue. But that's just my opinion.
The thing with institutional investors though, is that they don't buy US Treasuries any more anyway. Since the Fed has reduced the interest rate, the treasuries are basically useless to hold any more, so that's why you found the institutional investors getting involved in the CDOs that Wall Street pumped out, and the S&P rated AAA.
It's kind of a vicious circle, but having worked in and around Wall St. for 10 years well... it's a bunch of games and stupidity. Your money is still as good if you just throw darts at the ticker.
Yea, I'm hawking Facebook even though my user number is lower than yours. Jeez, I should have just said "Microsoft sucks" and I'd get modded up like crazy.
It's a poorly thought out service that isn't exactly "friendly" and redundant in terms of what Facebook gives.
I don't put anything overly personal on Facebook, and Google+ really is no benefit. This is going to be another Google Wave, where it's got a lot of hype, people get excited, and then nothing happens.
If you're a HFT programmer, you usually don't have traders in your ear, you have a bunch of quants in your ear. They usually don't yell (much).
The programmers that get yelled at by traders do more line of business applications and datapulls (kind of a business analyst role), because traders rely on them to make trading decisions and want their information "right now, you fucking asshole". These programmers usually stick to.NET or Java, though with the invention of Silverlight I'm seeing a lot more of that in the arena lately.
Full disclosure, I have worked in finance for 10+ years and currently work at a hedge fund as a systems architect/engineer.
This cannot be modded up enough. I work in the financial services industry for the exact reason that all good engineers and math whizzes do -- that's where the money is. I have almost six figures in student loans (partly mistakes on my part, partly no choice) and the only way I'm going to be able to pay them back is to have a job that pays a lot of cash.
Sorry to say, but tech firms don't come close to offering what I get. I got a job offer from Microsoft and they offered me 30k less than I made currently, and took away any bonus opportunity.
When "engineers" know that Wall Street will pay them hand over fist, it doesn't matter how many you make, because the ONLY thing they are going to be building is complex financial instruments. I'm glad that I'm in a firm whose business is solely 80%+ an institutional client, and we are *very* conservative, so it makes me feel less bad about going into work every day, but well... I know plenty of guys at Goldman or Credit Suisse or elsewhere that are brilliant minds, and would have made so many cool things happen in a software firm, instead are relegated to writing trading algorithms and derivatives.:(
What is the future of Silverlight/WPF going to really hold for us? We use it in Line of Business apps because we can cross deploy to our Mac users and Windows users, get a level of performance we know we can trust, and not worry about browser issues as we would in native ASP or PHP.
Microsoft is committed to the platform, and I don't think there's any denying that; the problem is that with a presentation of this magnitude, there has to be room to clarify the positions, and quickly. I work in the financial sector and people jump on news that ultimately amounts to nothing. It takes but a moment for their PR person to get out there and say we are fully commited to.NET as a platform, and the HTML5/JS is only going to be used for the tiles, or whatever.
My gut instinct tells me that this is a result of in-fighting within the teams at MS; the IE9 team is heavily embedded into the HTML5 arena, and obviously the rest of MS has its own methods and thoughts on things. Simply put, Ballmer needs to go, and they need a unified voice back in charge to get the infighting out (I have had friends who quit MS for this specific reason) and get the engineers able to shine.
Because despite what people at Slashdot think, MS hires some *really* smart people. They just have a terrible management layer.
I have never had such an issue with getting to play a movie on my PC, ever. And only with BR titles, to boot. I've found it easier to rip the entire thing, then play it as an MKV rather than even bother with playing the disc.
I can't wait until everything is available streaming or through download.
Depends on your needs. MS seems to be adding features at a slow but steady pace (dynamic memory just came out too). If you're just making VMs out of dev/test boxes, Hyper-V works fine, and saves you a lot of cash. If you want to do live migration or "V-Motion" then yea, VMWare works really well, but you have to use the right tool for the job.
We are currently mixing Hyper-V and VMWare, and have managed to keep our budget in check as a result.
But YouTube's "buffering" and Flash problems are worse for me than Netflix has *ever* been in streaming content. I can watch a movie in HD and if my connection starts to suck, the movie starts streaming at a lower quality in order to keep playing. Flash can't do that, and YouTube can't do that.
So no, I think that until we are all on HTML5 (no time soon) or until Google decides to use Silverlight to do the streaming, Netflix has no competition in this space.
Windows. Office. Sharepoint. BizTalk. Exchange. System Center Suite. SQL Server. Dynamics. Forefront, and probably more.
They *all* make money. Microsoft is one of the most diverse companies out there, and despite you not liking their products doesn't make them any less profitable. The thing is, MS doesn't have to improve a lot in these arenas because its products are superior to most competitors. Sure, there's choice but MS integration is what companies strangely like, as it keeps the TCO low.
Granted, it's not to say that they couldn't do a better job on a lot of their products, and Windows Phone has a great OS (now, anyway) with a mediocre product launch and marketing, and long term strategy.
However if Apple loses out on the phone arena, and their tablets aren't doing so well either... the company is going to take a dump FAST. Similarly for Google, if Microsoft gains 5% in Bing traffic and Google loses 5%, Google loses a *huge* chunk of revenue because 90%+ of it is derived from search. The same is not true for Microsoft. They have the luxury to be able to make mistakes, but it doesn't mean that every little thing that other people do better in phones, in tablets, in search, or on the desktop (yet to be seen) will chip away at MS quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
Anything you can get cheap, I guess. Just get a cheap PC with a big hard drive, add the Ceton card and make sure you have video that will decode BluRay and HD with ease. The new sandy bridge can do BR decoding without a GPU, so that's really all you need. It doesn't even have to be a fast PC, it's really easy and simple to set up. I did it for the fun of it, and after I realized how great it was -- I ditched all my cable equipment.
You forget, that this is also a computer. I can use HBOGO to get my HBO fix, I don't ever watch PPV so that's not a biggie (though you can still get it, if you call the phone number and order it, then just tune the channel -- and record it to boot), and VOD I don't miss either since I have Netflix built into my WMC.
I really don't lose anything.
Build a Windows Media Center PC, add a CetonTV card, and rent a CableCard from your cable company for around ~$3 a month.
I can record four shows at one time, have a much better guide and interface, save a lot of power (because cable boxes don't give a damn about power usage, and you'd know that if you plugged in a Kill-A-Watt into it), and just in rental fees, I save over $400 a year for two cable boxes. I use my WMC PC in one room (and it's whisper quiet), and an Xbox to extend the DVR to another room.
If I want to extend it again, I just buy an XBox on ebay for ~$100 or so. Nicest thing is that regardless of what cable company I have, I will always have a good DVR.
The thing about Google is that 90%+ of its entire revenue comes from search. This isn't true of Microsoft, or even Apple, or Oracle. They have multiple lines that generate revenue.
If Google loses 5% on search (not a lot) the blow to them is a LOT bigger than if MS loses on search, or Apple loses on iTunes. So as far as their best days being behind them, I'd say yes; but the same is true for MS and Apple, but in different respects.
Google needs to innovate outside of search, but everything they do keeps coming back around to search; even Google+. It's a datamining operation and it doesn't produce a line of revenue that's not susceptible to challenge, whether it's Bing/Facebook or something else. They need more sources of revenue, not ways to bolster their only line of revenue. But that's just my opinion.
The thing with institutional investors though, is that they don't buy US Treasuries any more anyway. Since the Fed has reduced the interest rate, the treasuries are basically useless to hold any more, so that's why you found the institutional investors getting involved in the CDOs that Wall Street pumped out, and the S&P rated AAA.
It's kind of a vicious circle, but having worked in and around Wall St. for 10 years well... it's a bunch of games and stupidity. Your money is still as good if you just throw darts at the ticker.
Yea, I'm hawking Facebook even though my user number is lower than yours. Jeez, I should have just said "Microsoft sucks" and I'd get modded up like crazy.
I don't have any apps on my FB either...
And never used it since.
It's a poorly thought out service that isn't exactly "friendly" and redundant in terms of what Facebook gives.
I don't put anything overly personal on Facebook, and Google+ really is no benefit. This is going to be another Google Wave, where it's got a lot of hype, people get excited, and then nothing happens.
If you're a HFT programmer, you usually don't have traders in your ear, you have a bunch of quants in your ear. They usually don't yell (much).
The programmers that get yelled at by traders do more line of business applications and datapulls (kind of a business analyst role), because traders rely on them to make trading decisions and want their information "right now, you fucking asshole". These programmers usually stick to .NET or Java, though with the invention of Silverlight I'm seeing a lot more of that in the arena lately.
Full disclosure, I have worked in finance for 10+ years and currently work at a hedge fund as a systems architect/engineer.
I love how everything can tie into MS being evil on Slashdot :)
You can't say long and hard when talking about rape cases, it's a no-no.
Why aren't we prosecuting the criminals that stole from us in the US? You know, like all of wall street?
http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/obama-economy/presidents-failure/
https://twitter.com/#!/ID_AA_Carmack/status/81732190949486592
This cannot be modded up enough. I work in the financial services industry for the exact reason that all good engineers and math whizzes do -- that's where the money is. I have almost six figures in student loans (partly mistakes on my part, partly no choice) and the only way I'm going to be able to pay them back is to have a job that pays a lot of cash.
Sorry to say, but tech firms don't come close to offering what I get. I got a job offer from Microsoft and they offered me 30k less than I made currently, and took away any bonus opportunity.
When "engineers" know that Wall Street will pay them hand over fist, it doesn't matter how many you make, because the ONLY thing they are going to be building is complex financial instruments. I'm glad that I'm in a firm whose business is solely 80%+ an institutional client, and we are *very* conservative, so it makes me feel less bad about going into work every day, but well... I know plenty of guys at Goldman or Credit Suisse or elsewhere that are brilliant minds, and would have made so many cool things happen in a software firm, instead are relegated to writing trading algorithms and derivatives. :(
But that started when George W. Bush got re-elected.
What is the future of Silverlight/WPF going to really hold for us? We use it in Line of Business apps because we can cross deploy to our Mac users and Windows users, get a level of performance we know we can trust, and not worry about browser issues as we would in native ASP or PHP.
Microsoft is committed to the platform, and I don't think there's any denying that; the problem is that with a presentation of this magnitude, there has to be room to clarify the positions, and quickly. I work in the financial sector and people jump on news that ultimately amounts to nothing. It takes but a moment for their PR person to get out there and say we are fully commited to .NET as a platform, and the HTML5/JS is only going to be used for the tiles, or whatever.
My gut instinct tells me that this is a result of in-fighting within the teams at MS; the IE9 team is heavily embedded into the HTML5 arena, and obviously the rest of MS has its own methods and thoughts on things. Simply put, Ballmer needs to go, and they need a unified voice back in charge to get the infighting out (I have had friends who quit MS for this specific reason) and get the engineers able to shine.
Because despite what people at Slashdot think, MS hires some *really* smart people. They just have a terrible management layer.
Kinda surprising that they will be first to have a fully voice activated phone. Either way, it's coming to everybody.
This is the TABLET UI. There is a separate desktop UI that has yet to be announced or shown.
You guys are really funny though.
I have never had such an issue with getting to play a movie on my PC, ever. And only with BR titles, to boot. I've found it easier to rip the entire thing, then play it as an MKV rather than even bother with playing the disc.
I can't wait until everything is available streaming or through download.
They are going full solar and just accepting not to have power during the nighttime hours.
A company who makes billions in hardware devices and the supporting facilities now is worth more than just a software company.
News at 11.
Depends on your needs. MS seems to be adding features at a slow but steady pace (dynamic memory just came out too). If you're just making VMs out of dev/test boxes, Hyper-V works fine, and saves you a lot of cash. If you want to do live migration or "V-Motion" then yea, VMWare works really well, but you have to use the right tool for the job.
We are currently mixing Hyper-V and VMWare, and have managed to keep our budget in check as a result.
But YouTube's "buffering" and Flash problems are worse for me than Netflix has *ever* been in streaming content. I can watch a movie in HD and if my connection starts to suck, the movie starts streaming at a lower quality in order to keep playing. Flash can't do that, and YouTube can't do that.
So no, I think that until we are all on HTML5 (no time soon) or until Google decides to use Silverlight to do the streaming, Netflix has no competition in this space.
I know it's kind of laughable right now, but imagine if Windows Phone or Android make a big dent into Apple's iPhone marketshare.
That's 50% of their revenue they are cutting into, at high percentages. Just food for thought folks...
That's the stupidest thing I've ever read.
Windows. Office. Sharepoint. BizTalk. Exchange. System Center Suite. SQL Server. Dynamics. Forefront, and probably more.
They *all* make money. Microsoft is one of the most diverse companies out there, and despite you not liking their products doesn't make them any less profitable. The thing is, MS doesn't have to improve a lot in these arenas because its products are superior to most competitors. Sure, there's choice but MS integration is what companies strangely like, as it keeps the TCO low.
Granted, it's not to say that they couldn't do a better job on a lot of their products, and Windows Phone has a great OS (now, anyway) with a mediocre product launch and marketing, and long term strategy.
However if Apple loses out on the phone arena, and their tablets aren't doing so well either... the company is going to take a dump FAST. Similarly for Google, if Microsoft gains 5% in Bing traffic and Google loses 5%, Google loses a *huge* chunk of revenue because 90%+ of it is derived from search. The same is not true for Microsoft. They have the luxury to be able to make mistakes, but it doesn't mean that every little thing that other people do better in phones, in tablets, in search, or on the desktop (yet to be seen) will chip away at MS quickly.