It's really not at all uncommon for the employees of a company to not also be the target market of that company, and not just in software.
The only excuse I can think of for not knowing the business field and at least something about the competitors would be DoD TS clearance compartmentalized stuff. Like if you were writing ICBM navigation software but were so compartmentalized you don't even know what missile it was for.
vertical market software for large financial institutions
20 years ago I worked in that field and marketing went to great extremes to educate us as to how our competitors products sucked (we had much better graphs and our network was much more stable).
might not be a passion for the people actually developing it
Nothing kills a hobby faster than doing it at work, but even someone who knows nothing about the subject can at least technically evaluate the app.. do all the features advertised show up in there, somewhere? Does it look nice? Fast and low latency? Does it run at all or just crash? Are the user instructions written in English or India-glish? Is the user manual written and screencap'd for the same version as is distributed? Typos and missspellllings in the app?
Why do you work for a company who's products you don't use? Is the app too expensive, or just not something that is suited to your life? Frankly if neither you nor your colleagues use a product your company created, why does the company think anyone will use it?
Many jobs ago over the summer I worked IT for a place that provided emergency 24x7 repair service for industrial cranes (like those things you see moving shipping containers at seaports and building skyscrapers, nothing under, say, 10 tons capacity) Obviously I had no use for their service, but I could easily intelligently evaluate what it would be like to be their customer, and compare them to similar emergency service providers and I knew a little bit about the competition and their strengths and weaknesses.
So the original posters argument is he admits in writing to knowing nothing about the product, and possibly knows nothing about the entire business sector they operate in, yet he's apparently got an opinion about how they run things anyway... gotta be working in government or finance, definitely at management level, that's what I'm thinking.
The problem is the original poster, not the policy, at least so far. The original poster is an epic fail because:
The thing is, most of the employees have not used the app
You have to do that before you can decide what to do with:
we are being asked to say that we like it.
Note that you don't have to like the genre to say the product is best in class, or at least somewhat "like-able". Many years ago I was asked my opinion of an ethnic food product my former employer sold; I can't stand that kind of stuff, but I could honestly say my employers individual product was an excellent example of the genre. If I had to eat this junk in general, this is the one I'd eat. This is your out if the app is something like a female ovulation calendar app or kids educational app or whatever.
I deleted my facebook account years ago, but the social norm at the time was some dude you sat next to in 8th grade once is a "friend" and anything vaguely novel is "like", so its not as if they're asking you to get a tattoo on your forehead or become a booth babe. The standard for "like" an app is probably "it didn't make my phone catch fire, so thats good enough".
If its just too rancidly repulsive to appeal to you, or in your opinion, anyone, you need to run like hell and start emailing resumes because: 1) They're obviously grasping at straws if its so awful they have to pay people $75K/yr (or whatever) to grudgingly admit they like it. 2) After grasping at straws comes the layoffs, downsizing, bankruptcies, etc, next week. So get a jump to it.
As with TLS, I'd like to see any future revisions of these secure protocols trim more fat.
Dude, SSH is half a meg. Calm down.
The problem with "Arcane ciphers, modes, etc" is not executable size at all, but security.
For example, MD2 finally go the axe from openssl back in '09, not because md2 took up too much executable space, but because it was obsolete small / psuedo-broken. I call it psuedo-broken because they crypto guys would call it broken, cracked wide open, but its not totally broken like DRM or copy-protection schemes. Its still has got about 50 bits or so of security, and for many apps that's more than enough, as long as you go in eyes wide open that its a "50 bit hash" not a "128 bit hash". Anyway in '97 md2 was looking shaky, and in '04 it was psuedo-broken, so it should have gotten the axe around 97 to 04, not wait until '09....
You don't want the "ssh of a new decade" to support all kinds of cruft that can be used to exploit it later on. Using md2 in mosh, for example, would be a bug not a feature, or merely a waste of executable code size.
It would be an interesting battle. I read the Rogaway original paper years ago and he was granting free use to anything GPL licensed. For a more modern view you can also see"
I've looked into MOSH recently, and it is GPL. The battle would be, does mosh live under Rogaway's OCB patents which makes it free, or IBMs patents, which makes it unclear... From a "money is justice" perspective, I donno if ucdavis would win against IBM, but they'd have better odds than "just a bunch of random hackers" vs IBM.
To burn an informative couple hours on the topic, simply google for "rogaway OCB" and start reading.
and the cost of D would have to fall close to zero.
Interestingly, D production is much like Aluminum production, it primarily is electrically driven. And if you have a working fusion reactor, you conveniently have... free electricity, therefore free D.
As an ex-chemist there are neutron efficiency reasons not to do it, but from a chemical standpoint there is no reason not to use a nice boring non-reactive lithium compound. Most/.ers would probably benefit from some lithium orotate in their diet... As an example of what I'm talking about, probably two decades ago in school we did some weird physics experiment WRT to sodium isotopes, probably because sodium has only one stable isotope, or something like that. We could have used sodium metal, but being undergrads we'd inevitably set ourselves on fire or blow the lab up, just like the o-chem guys did. So we used some sodium salt, I wanna say sodium chloride (table salt) but maybe it was something else. IIRC it was some labeled compound experiment...
Fusion does not generate any weird radioactive isotopes like Fission does.
Here is the standard/. car analogy in very non-technical terms:
Fission is like making money by running cars thru a shredder and selling the shredded bits for recycling. You have no control over the input stream and sometimes toxic paint residue shows up in the output of the shredder. Tough shite you're going to have to decontaminate it or bury it or otherwise figure out something to do with toxic paint residue. In the big picture its not a big deal, but that reside does accumulate... Seems an unavoidable problem...
Fusion is like making money by building big cars out of tiny little parts (like the assembly line...). If you don't want to deal with toxic paint residue, then simply do not make your cars using toxic paint, crazy as it sounds, it really is that simple. Its not like the act of screwing a 12 mm bolt onto a 12 mm screw automagically makes toxic waste. Is the whole thing going to be perfectly clean, like all green and hemp and organic and natural and homeopathic and chakra aligned, well, no, even the cleanest factory does have a trash can, but its not an inherently filthy industry, like say, shredding cars and recycling the bits.
Sounds like parts were run thru a PR filter and thus very suspect. For example, the real answer to:
Is the ITER project good science? Or is it a politically-motivated, pork-laden boondoggle?
is not a bunch of blah blah like in the answer, but simple observation and a hair of inductive and deductive reasoning... if it were politically motivated pork then we'd have politicians chomping at the bit to fund it and take personal credit for it. Since they're shunning it instead, its obviously not politically motivated pork, this is almost a "duh" moment. Not being pork doesn't mean its automatically good science, the question itself is a false dichotomy. For example my hamburger last night wasn't pork, yet simultaneously it was somehow also not good science. Although it did taste good. None the less, good science seems to be the goal for ITER, the people doing it seem to have a great track record for doing good science, and there seems to be no obvious reason to suspect they'll suddenly fail to successfully execute "good science". Whatever the hell "good science" is defined to be. That is the true answer to that specific question, not a bunch of "blah blah rah rah team".
You can also see in the tone how the liberal arts PR people shied away from altering the "science" answers and we got the straight stuff there, while they rammed all the "policy/political" questions thru a bullshit processor.
I mean, come on, that was embarrassing for an answer. My answer was much better. Let me paraphrase their answer. "1) Its good because I say its good, I'm from MIT therefore by authoritarianism doctrine you must agree with me. 2) Governments like it and government is always a force for good therefore it must be good. 3) We need more money (which seems to have nothing to do with goodness or badness, but it was a nice place to start begging) 4) The world will end unless we get more money (well, assuming the world ending is bad, I guess this is a decent argument) 5) You should be more politically active (nice sentiment, but WTF?)."
I will give them credit, that the policy Q's absolutely sucked, so demanding fantastic policy A's is both unrealistic and a silk purse out of a sows ear situation...
Overall, if you skip the icky policy Q+A and stick to the science Q+A it was an excellent factual article, my hats off to both the interview-ers and interview-ees.
You'll have to excuse me because I went to public schools, so I forgot about that whole "earth is round" thing. Dammit.
About 100 degrees of longitude separates them.... Seriously though I was thinking of southern circumpolar observations... anything below their lattitude never locally sets. That is kind of a problem with both observation sites in the extreme south... they're not going to be making observations of Polaris anytime soon, which is too bad. Now "Indonesia / Kenya" would be pretty good locations, at least WRT latitude.
The automagical commercial skipper already reads the whole file and thinks about it. If a "film" had that aspect ratio for 2 hours... that would be annoying enough not to watch.
Hmm OK I guess I was hoping for that to show up in the channel guide. Where an end user could see it rather than a more esoteric location. I'm not asking for the blink tag, but a little something in the corner. Maybe it does that, I'll find out in a couple months.
Oh and I was just about to state that I LOVE schedules direct. I don't love paying for it, but talk about a service provider that just freaking works. You give them money and they do what they say they will all silent like, perfectly, every time, never fails. Its like Hurricane Electric QoS or a toyota car or something. Then I realized I wanted to add another simple myth complaint: I wipe certain channels from my cable system. Certain shopping and sports channels and foreign language channels have been expunged from existence in my mythtv. I can't see them, can't scroll thru them, they're just... gone. The Schedules Direct link is that you have to obviously delete the channel from the backend tuner, no big deal, but also have to delete the channel from Schedules Direct or else mythtv re-adds the channel next time it downloads from SD. This should not be an issue. There should be a simple channel editor flag for "annihilate all record of this channel". No matter if SD sends it to you, or the channel editor picks it up... I know about the personal channel lists, but I'm talking a level above that system, simple removal from all records. This is also to keep my kids out of channels I want to keep them out of...
For real? I'm not talking about bringing up the OSD menu, then selecting video then selecting... zoom or whatever (from memory) then selecting full instead of none, but I'm requesting a magic auto-zoomer where if it sees a black donut with a pic in the middle then it eats the donut and autozooms.
I'm not too worked up, this is only an issue if my atsc tuners are all busy and I'm stuck watching a widescreen show on a SD analog tuner (standard analog cable input). So it doesn't happen often, but it does happen... PBS seems to be the worst WRT this, they've abandoned narrowscreen completely in my market but still push a widescreen image on their analog cable channel.
It looks pretty bad zoomed, but at least there's no black donut.
LOL the only BR I play come from Us**et and torrents as video files not old fashioned optical disks, but a glance at the readme for 0.25 shows that adding native blueray support was a major focus of 0.25.
If they're into adding legacy physical media, I'd like an 8-track interface for mythmusic while they're at it. Maybe sony mini-disc player support?
so much content is streaming over the Internet
One of the pains of being an early adopter is you get your attitudes set in stone from ye olden days. For me, streaming will always be shitty breaking up and stuttering realaudio from 1997. Has it improved any? I tried watching a couple youtube videos on my phone recently and they're all stutter and buffer but maybe real devices work better now? Or does streaming still suck?
I wish they would integrate mythnettv into the mainline. Its an addon that shoves video podcasts into your "recorded tv shows" list as if they came over the air (or cable or satellite or whatever). Most of what I watch on "TV" is from revision3 or twit.tv or ted talks rss feed now rather than the old fashioned "tv" networks and it all comes from mythnettv run by a cron job every night pulling a bunch of RSS feeds.
Another thing thats bugged me for years with my myth setup at home is they've got all this psuedo-intelligent magic AI post-processing after recording that makes commercials disappear... literally hands free you're watching TV, a break comes up, it skips the commercials. Very nice, very impressive, something no other DVR has, a killer feature that makes it impossible to even consider trying another. However, for years and years they still can't figure out a way to auto-zoom widescreen content on a narrow channel shown on a wide display (in other words, a tiny pic in the center of a giant black border). You'd think tech smart enough to detect and autoskip commercials could figure out when a TV show gets "framed" and adjust the zoom appropriately. Maybe this is something they added back in 0.23 and I just haven't noticed yet, donno.
Another thing that bugs me is digital dropouts make a star trek like sound in addition to ugly picture and I wish the backend could be convinced if the mpeg stream turns to crap that it should cleanly eat the bad checksum frames and mute the sound stream. Doesn't happen often. But the concept of a squelch function when the input drops doesn't seem like rocket science to implement. Even a cheap TV can bluescreen on lack of input signal, why not my myth backend?
If you sign up for schedule data from schedules direct, how come myth can't tell you when it expires other than your listings disappearing?
Back around 0.20 there was a really nice streaming audio player and I found it amusing to listen to various world wide stations on my TV. That disappeared in recent versions, a rare feature regression. I miss that.
Honestly 0.24 is/was about 99% perfect, its just these weird corner cases that still bug me after years and years, and it sounds like 0.25 has fixed none of my real issues while adding support for stuff I simply don't care about.
I am pleased that its 1998 in mythtv land so they finally support ipv6... I'm thinking of setting up a frontend at my mother in law's place and this saves me the effort of putting a vpn client to make her house part of my network. Then she'd have my full library of media and a decent DVR. From multi-room DVR to multi-house DVR, here I come!
If you owe money they'll whomp you with penalties you cannot imagine (like 200% the difference) Been there done that. My specific problem was related to DCRA with both parents employed interacting both with each other's limit and some other child credit.
There is no theoretical way they could have the data for how much you donated to church or paid in medical bills unless you send the receipts and donation letters to them, so I'm mystified about this "give you deductions".
Televisions - what has the best display for you and your needs, try figuring that out on-line on your $100 monitor.
All 42 inch screens come off the same Chinese assembly line. You're wasting your time thinking there is any difference.
What is different, is retail stores have a backstock of older stuff, so the 42 inch that has been sitting in the back room for 2 years has cruddy specs compared to the more expensive one that just arrived from the container ship last week. Online is the same but there is not as much backstock, which is why online specs seem to be better than brick n mortar specs, generally.
The other part that I hate is trying to figure out tech specs at a store. Online its so simple, you click on the specs tab at Amazon. In person a pushy salesperson is breathing down your neck trying to sell you monster cables while you're trying to climb up on the display to look at the back panel to count how many HDMI inputs the damn thing has.
Online I can download the complete manual, sit down, and read it, as long as I want, and amazon will patiently wait for me to click the "buy" button. Or not. Or maybe I buy something else. It much less rushed, so I seem to spend more money online.
Trying to find things out in person is an unpleasant experience compared to online. In person is for "convenience store" items like the cable or inkjet cartridge you desperately need right now.
Slashdot Mirror
It's really not at all uncommon for the employees of a company to not also be the target market of that company, and not just in software.
The only excuse I can think of for not knowing the business field and at least something about the competitors would be DoD TS clearance compartmentalized stuff. Like if you were writing ICBM navigation software but were so compartmentalized you don't even know what missile it was for.
vertical market software for large financial institutions
20 years ago I worked in that field and marketing went to great extremes to educate us as to how our competitors products sucked (we had much better graphs and our network was much more stable).
might not be a passion for the people actually developing it
Nothing kills a hobby faster than doing it at work, but even someone who knows nothing about the subject can at least technically evaluate the app.. do all the features advertised show up in there, somewhere? Does it look nice? Fast and low latency? Does it run at all or just crash? Are the user instructions written in English or India-glish? Is the user manual written and screencap'd for the same version as is distributed? Typos and missspellllings in the app?
Why do you work for a company who's products you don't use? Is the app too expensive, or just not something that is suited to your life? Frankly if neither you nor your colleagues use a product your company created, why does the company think anyone will use it?
Many jobs ago over the summer I worked IT for a place that provided emergency 24x7 repair service for industrial cranes (like those things you see moving shipping containers at seaports and building skyscrapers, nothing under, say, 10 tons capacity) Obviously I had no use for their service, but I could easily intelligently evaluate what it would be like to be their customer, and compare them to similar emergency service providers and I knew a little bit about the competition and their strengths and weaknesses.
So the original posters argument is he admits in writing to knowing nothing about the product, and possibly knows nothing about the entire business sector they operate in, yet he's apparently got an opinion about how they run things anyway... gotta be working in government or finance, definitely at management level, that's what I'm thinking.
Can't say that I would do it.
The problem is the original poster, not the policy, at least so far. The original poster is an epic fail because:
The thing is, most of the employees have not used the app
You have to do that before you can decide what to do with:
we are being asked to say that we like it.
Note that you don't have to like the genre to say the product is best in class, or at least somewhat "like-able". Many years ago I was asked my opinion of an ethnic food product my former employer sold; I can't stand that kind of stuff, but I could honestly say my employers individual product was an excellent example of the genre. If I had to eat this junk in general, this is the one I'd eat. This is your out if the app is something like a female ovulation calendar app or kids educational app or whatever.
I deleted my facebook account years ago, but the social norm at the time was some dude you sat next to in 8th grade once is a "friend" and anything vaguely novel is "like", so its not as if they're asking you to get a tattoo on your forehead or become a booth babe. The standard for "like" an app is probably "it didn't make my phone catch fire, so thats good enough".
If its just too rancidly repulsive to appeal to you, or in your opinion, anyone, you need to run like hell and start emailing resumes because:
1) They're obviously grasping at straws if its so awful they have to pay people $75K/yr (or whatever) to grudgingly admit they like it.
2) After grasping at straws comes the layoffs, downsizing, bankruptcies, etc, next week. So get a jump to it.
My related links shows: "Google Earns $2 Per Handset; Apple, $575" and apparently, "Nokia, $-0.01"
As with TLS, I'd like to see any future revisions of these secure protocols trim more fat.
Dude, SSH is half a meg. Calm down.
The problem with "Arcane ciphers, modes, etc" is not executable size at all, but security.
For example, MD2 finally go the axe from openssl back in '09, not because md2 took up too much executable space, but because it was obsolete small / psuedo-broken. I call it psuedo-broken because they crypto guys would call it broken, cracked wide open, but its not totally broken like DRM or copy-protection schemes. Its still has got about 50 bits or so of security, and for many apps that's more than enough, as long as you go in eyes wide open that its a "50 bit hash" not a "128 bit hash". Anyway in '97 md2 was looking shaky, and in '04 it was psuedo-broken, so it should have gotten the axe around 97 to 04, not wait until '09....
You don't want the "ssh of a new decade" to support all kinds of cruft that can be used to exploit it later on. Using md2 in mosh, for example, would be a bug not a feature, or merely a waste of executable code size.
i can't see any idle traffic ... being specified
I looked into MOSH in detail a little while ago and the keepalive packet is every 3 seconds or 3 packets per second can't remember which.
It was often enough to make me pause... that's a lot of traffic if you're metered and paying by the K and/or powered by battery...
It would be an interesting battle. I read the Rogaway original paper years ago and he was granting free use to anything GPL licensed. For a more modern view you can also see"
http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/ocb/license.htm
I've looked into MOSH recently, and it is GPL. The battle would be, does mosh live under Rogaway's OCB patents which makes it free, or IBMs patents, which makes it unclear... From a "money is justice" perspective, I donno if ucdavis would win against IBM, but they'd have better odds than "just a bunch of random hackers" vs IBM.
To burn an informative couple hours on the topic, simply google for "rogaway OCB" and start reading.
Is there a mosh iOS app?
They're promising a droid app soon, for the Daft Punk fans...
and the cost of D would have to fall close to zero.
Interestingly, D production is much like Aluminum production, it primarily is electrically driven. And if you have a working fusion reactor, you conveniently have ... free electricity, therefore free D.
As an ex-chemist there are neutron efficiency reasons not to do it, but from a chemical standpoint there is no reason not to use a nice boring non-reactive lithium compound. Most /.ers would probably benefit from some lithium orotate in their diet... As an example of what I'm talking about, probably two decades ago in school we did some weird physics experiment WRT to sodium isotopes, probably because sodium has only one stable isotope, or something like that. We could have used sodium metal, but being undergrads we'd inevitably set ourselves on fire or blow the lab up, just like the o-chem guys did. So we used some sodium salt, I wanna say sodium chloride (table salt) but maybe it was something else. IIRC it was some labeled compound experiment...
Fusion does not generate any weird radioactive isotopes like Fission does.
Here is the standard /. car analogy in very non-technical terms:
Fission is like making money by running cars thru a shredder and selling the shredded bits for recycling. You have no control over the input stream and sometimes toxic paint residue shows up in the output of the shredder. Tough shite you're going to have to decontaminate it or bury it or otherwise figure out something to do with toxic paint residue. In the big picture its not a big deal, but that reside does accumulate... Seems an unavoidable problem...
Fusion is like making money by building big cars out of tiny little parts (like the assembly line...). If you don't want to deal with toxic paint residue, then simply do not make your cars using toxic paint, crazy as it sounds, it really is that simple. Its not like the act of screwing a 12 mm bolt onto a 12 mm screw automagically makes toxic waste. Is the whole thing going to be perfectly clean, like all green and hemp and organic and natural and homeopathic and chakra aligned, well, no, even the cleanest factory does have a trash can, but its not an inherently filthy industry, like say, shredding cars and recycling the bits.
When did a 6 digit UID become "awesome"? I think I missed that day...
Probably an order of magnitude after 5 digit UIDs became "really super awesome".
Sounds like parts were run thru a PR filter and thus very suspect. For example, the real answer to :
Is the ITER project good science? Or is it a politically-motivated, pork-laden boondoggle?
is not a bunch of blah blah like in the answer, but simple observation and a hair of inductive and deductive reasoning... if it were politically motivated pork then we'd have politicians chomping at the bit to fund it and take personal credit for it. Since they're shunning it instead, its obviously not politically motivated pork, this is almost a "duh" moment. Not being pork doesn't mean its automatically good science, the question itself is a false dichotomy. For example my hamburger last night wasn't pork, yet simultaneously it was somehow also not good science. Although it did taste good. None the less, good science seems to be the goal for ITER, the people doing it seem to have a great track record for doing good science, and there seems to be no obvious reason to suspect they'll suddenly fail to successfully execute "good science". Whatever the hell "good science" is defined to be. That is the true answer to that specific question, not a bunch of "blah blah rah rah team".
You can also see in the tone how the liberal arts PR people shied away from altering the "science" answers and we got the straight stuff there, while they rammed all the "policy/political" questions thru a bullshit processor.
I mean, come on, that was embarrassing for an answer. My answer was much better. Let me paraphrase their answer. "1) Its good because I say its good, I'm from MIT therefore by authoritarianism doctrine you must agree with me. 2) Governments like it and government is always a force for good therefore it must be good. 3) We need more money (which seems to have nothing to do with goodness or badness, but it was a nice place to start begging) 4) The world will end unless we get more money (well, assuming the world ending is bad, I guess this is a decent argument) 5) You should be more politically active (nice sentiment, but WTF?)."
I will give them credit, that the policy Q's absolutely sucked, so demanding fantastic policy A's is both unrealistic and a silk purse out of a sows ear situation...
Overall, if you skip the icky policy Q+A and stick to the science Q+A it was an excellent factual article, my hats off to both the interview-ers and interview-ees.
You'll have to excuse me because I went to public schools, so I forgot about that whole "earth is round" thing. Dammit.
About 100 degrees of longitude separates them.... Seriously though I was thinking of southern circumpolar observations... anything below their lattitude never locally sets. That is kind of a problem with both observation sites in the extreme south... they're not going to be making observations of Polaris anytime soon, which is too bad. Now "Indonesia / Kenya" would be pretty good locations, at least WRT latitude.
There's little scientific advantage
Make it a interferometer? Seems obvious, so there must be something wrong with that idea.
The automagical commercial skipper already reads the whole file and thinks about it. If a "film" had that aspect ratio for 2 hours... that would be annoying enough not to watch.
Ah that is exactly my situation.
Or an ex-employer. "turn in your phone to the security guard on the way out the door". Well...
You can top off a stolen prepay phone using a prepay cash card.
The only certain way to kill a prepay phone is to port the number to a new phone / new provider. That'll zap it for sure on the old phone.
Hmm OK I guess I was hoping for that to show up in the channel guide. Where an end user could see it rather than a more esoteric location. I'm not asking for the blink tag, but a little something in the corner. Maybe it does that, I'll find out in a couple months.
Oh and I was just about to state that I LOVE schedules direct. I don't love paying for it, but talk about a service provider that just freaking works. You give them money and they do what they say they will all silent like, perfectly, every time, never fails. Its like Hurricane Electric QoS or a toyota car or something. Then I realized I wanted to add another simple myth complaint: I wipe certain channels from my cable system. Certain shopping and sports channels and foreign language channels have been expunged from existence in my mythtv. I can't see them, can't scroll thru them, they're just ... gone. The Schedules Direct link is that you have to obviously delete the channel from the backend tuner, no big deal, but also have to delete the channel from Schedules Direct or else mythtv re-adds the channel next time it downloads from SD. This should not be an issue. There should be a simple channel editor flag for "annihilate all record of this channel". No matter if SD sends it to you, or the channel editor picks it up... I know about the personal channel lists, but I'm talking a level above that system, simple removal from all records. This is also to keep my kids out of channels I want to keep them out of...
For real? I'm not talking about bringing up the OSD menu, then selecting video then selecting ... zoom or whatever (from memory) then selecting full instead of none, but I'm requesting a magic auto-zoomer where if it sees a black donut with a pic in the middle then it eats the donut and autozooms.
I'm not too worked up, this is only an issue if my atsc tuners are all busy and I'm stuck watching a widescreen show on a SD analog tuner (standard analog cable input). So it doesn't happen often, but it does happen... PBS seems to be the worst WRT this, they've abandoned narrowscreen completely in my market but still push a widescreen image on their analog cable channel.
It looks pretty bad zoomed, but at least there's no black donut.
The phrase you didn't know to google for is "hdhomerun prime"
I have no personal experience with that device, but its the "talk of the town" in mythtv circles.
and it doesn't play BluRays.
LOL the only BR I play come from Us**et and torrents as video files not old fashioned optical disks, but a glance at the readme for 0.25 shows that adding native blueray support was a major focus of 0.25.
If they're into adding legacy physical media, I'd like an 8-track interface for mythmusic while they're at it. Maybe sony mini-disc player support?
so much content is streaming over the Internet
One of the pains of being an early adopter is you get your attitudes set in stone from ye olden days. For me, streaming will always be shitty breaking up and stuttering realaudio from 1997. Has it improved any? I tried watching a couple youtube videos on my phone recently and they're all stutter and buffer but maybe real devices work better now? Or does streaming still suck?
I wish they would integrate mythnettv into the mainline. Its an addon that shoves video podcasts into your "recorded tv shows" list as if they came over the air (or cable or satellite or whatever). Most of what I watch on "TV" is from revision3 or twit.tv or ted talks rss feed now rather than the old fashioned "tv" networks and it all comes from mythnettv run by a cron job every night pulling a bunch of RSS feeds.
Another thing thats bugged me for years with my myth setup at home is they've got all this psuedo-intelligent magic AI post-processing after recording that makes commercials disappear... literally hands free you're watching TV, a break comes up, it skips the commercials. Very nice, very impressive, something no other DVR has, a killer feature that makes it impossible to even consider trying another. However, for years and years they still can't figure out a way to auto-zoom widescreen content on a narrow channel shown on a wide display (in other words, a tiny pic in the center of a giant black border). You'd think tech smart enough to detect and autoskip commercials could figure out when a TV show gets "framed" and adjust the zoom appropriately. Maybe this is something they added back in 0.23 and I just haven't noticed yet, donno.
Another thing that bugs me is digital dropouts make a star trek like sound in addition to ugly picture and I wish the backend could be convinced if the mpeg stream turns to crap that it should cleanly eat the bad checksum frames and mute the sound stream. Doesn't happen often. But the concept of a squelch function when the input drops doesn't seem like rocket science to implement. Even a cheap TV can bluescreen on lack of input signal, why not my myth backend?
If you sign up for schedule data from schedules direct, how come myth can't tell you when it expires other than your listings disappearing?
Back around 0.20 there was a really nice streaming audio player and I found it amusing to listen to various world wide stations on my TV. That disappeared in recent versions, a rare feature regression. I miss that.
Honestly 0.24 is/was about 99% perfect, its just these weird corner cases that still bug me after years and years, and it sounds like 0.25 has fixed none of my real issues while adding support for stuff I simply don't care about.
I am pleased that its 1998 in mythtv land so they finally support ipv6... I'm thinking of setting up a frontend at my mother in law's place and this saves me the effort of putting a vpn client to make her house part of my network. Then she'd have my full library of media and a decent DVR. From multi-room DVR to multi-house DVR, here I come!
If you owe money they'll whomp you with penalties you cannot imagine (like 200% the difference) Been there done that. My specific problem was related to DCRA with both parents employed interacting both with each other's limit and some other child credit.
There is no theoretical way they could have the data for how much you donated to church or paid in medical bills unless you send the receipts and donation letters to them, so I'm mystified about this "give you deductions".
Televisions - what has the best display for you and your needs, try figuring that out on-line on your $100 monitor.
All 42 inch screens come off the same Chinese assembly line. You're wasting your time thinking there is any difference.
What is different, is retail stores have a backstock of older stuff, so the 42 inch that has been sitting in the back room for 2 years has cruddy specs compared to the more expensive one that just arrived from the container ship last week. Online is the same but there is not as much backstock, which is why online specs seem to be better than brick n mortar specs, generally.
The other part that I hate is trying to figure out tech specs at a store. Online its so simple, you click on the specs tab at Amazon. In person a pushy salesperson is breathing down your neck trying to sell you monster cables while you're trying to climb up on the display to look at the back panel to count how many HDMI inputs the damn thing has.
Online I can download the complete manual, sit down, and read it, as long as I want, and amazon will patiently wait for me to click the "buy" button. Or not. Or maybe I buy something else. It much less rushed, so I seem to spend more money online.
Trying to find things out in person is an unpleasant experience compared to online. In person is for "convenience store" items like the cable or inkjet cartridge you desperately need right now.