Google Lists the following tested+working distributions:
Ubuntu 5.10 Suse 10.1 Fedora Core 5 Linspire 5.1 Gentoo 2006.0 Debian 3.1 Red Hat 9
I just tested it and it works but sporadically crashes under RHEL3 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3). The crash said that it would be sending details to google regarding the crash, but I didn't see any notice about it when I next started googleearth.
I love how we all see censorship as bad, and because Google is taking part in censorship we blame Google. We make no effort to blame the CHINESE GOVERNMENT for requiring that kind of censorship. Google does not exist to fight political battles over freedoms of people in China (although they do have a history of expanding into surprising new markets, I somehow feel that political picketing is not the next one).
Summary: HELLO, Google is not the one censoring the chinese people, CHINA is the one censoring them, Google is just doing what they are told by the government in the country they are operating in. Google may be all-powerful, but I don't think they are in a position to start a war against china by breaking their laws and standing by that treason.
At my school, there was no direct punishment for what you did outside of school, even if it was against the law.
HOWEVER, to get around that loophole, the school required that you sign a form if you join any clubs, sports teams, or participate in any extra-cirricular activities, possibly including things like trips and prom. The form stated that you agree to be kicked off the team if you are caught drinking or doing drugs, even if you are not at or anywhere near school. If you refuse to sign the form, you are not allowed to be in the club / on the team / etc.
A pretty ingenius system, if you ask me. It doesn't technically punish you for using drugs/alcohol, you just aren't allowed to do certain things if you do. Kind of a pre-emptive punishment.
So basically when Microsoft says "beta" they mean:
it sorta works. ok, there might be a few bugs. ok, so maybe it can't even install itself or use hardware.
When google says "beta" they mean:
it's more done than most web services that have been around since the early 90s will ever be, but the moniker "Beta" has a nice ring to it. Plus we like how elitist it is to have to be invited to a webmail service.
The father and mothers friends, family, and neighbors will stop returning their calls after the second time they hear "come see the video of everything junior did today!"
Junior's first girlfriend will die of starvation after 36 straight hours of family videos.
Junior will spend the second 5 years of his live watching what he did for the first 5 years of his life. That 5 year event will be recorded and used to determine how people learn by watching videos of themselves learning.
For $1.99 x Large Number of Episodes, wouldn't you rather buy the DVD?
I'm imagining that the people who want to pay money for tiny-resolution video are doing it because they either lack the technology to just record it themselves (since ABC is free over-the-air and available on US cable/satellite) or missed an episode accidentally. Why pay $1.99 for a poor-quality video when you can pay $Free? I find it hard to believe that there are very many people who use iTMS exclusively instead of their television or cable.
Plus, who doesn't have a laptop or desktop with TV-Out? I'm sure more people can come up with that than can come up with a video ipod, and playing a flash video on the TV shouldn't be all that difficult.
Now if iTMS were selling full-resolution recordings that you could burn to DVD, that would be a different story. They aren't, though. They are selling teeny-tiny poor-quality videos for a price comparable to that of the DVD season. It doesn't take much to undercut that.
Could it be that paragraphs usually are numbered in this kind of text? I dunno, and I don't want to ruin you good ideas here.. Just another viewpoint.
I'm sure that the paragraphs are normally numbered, I just mean that the judge would probably use that feature of the document as part of the code, since it's there.
I saw that all the paragraphs are numbered and figured that there had to be some relevance to that. I don't think skipped paragraphs can just be spaces, though:
smithycodeJae ie xt t os t ps a cgrea mqwf ka dp m qz
The words just aren't believable lengths. Too many 2-letter and 1-letter words. Here's the breakdown:
Did I mention I've had six or seven managers in five years? I've only changed jobs twice -- the others were "churn" caused by reorganizations or managers otherwise being reassigned. In fact, in the month between when I was hired and when I started, the person who was going to be my manager (we'd already had several phone/email conversations) changed! It's seven if you count that, six if you don't.
With no way for the customer to burn the movies to disc, how is that a permanent ownership? I imagine they are expecting people to start using this as the way to buy movies, but what happens when somebody buys 10 movies? 20? 50? Are they supposed to just keep buying more HD space to store them indefinitely?
Plenty of people have already mentioned the "but I can't watch it on my TV, what's the point?" reasoning.
I think an ideal system would be a service where you can download a reduced-quality version (like iTunes) a few days before the DVD release for a higher price. Included in that cost, however, is a copy of the DVD that they will mail you once it releases. If I get a physical copy of the dvd, I don't care what DRM is on the digital file copy, since I'll just delete it once the DVD arrives.
If I could go back and delete my original comment I would... I just checked my speeds again, and they've gone up considerably from the first time I checked them back in December, and now they seem correct.
At the moment I'm getting ~180KB/s download, 16KB/s upload. 180KB/s is about the 1.5meg/s that is advertised, and 16KB/s upload is about 128k upload. Those numbers could very well be the advertised speed.
That being said, it's a whole lot slower than the 3 meg cable (I think they had upped it to either 4 or 6 by the time I moved) in both upload and download.
it was a typo, it's actually around 40kB/s, which is still very slow for broadband (as the other poster pointed out 40kbps would be slow even for dialup). Running a DSL speed report online basically just involves the graph laughing at me and ranking me at the bottom.
Unfortunately I am sharing a roommates connection, and it is his account, so I can't exactly call up the provider to complain without an account in my name. It's basically a put-up or shut-up case, where if I really want to fix it, I can get my own comcast cable connection and bask in the high speeds. Or if I want to continue with the low cost shared connection route, I can deal with it.
But in any case Comcast Cable vs Verizon DSL is No Contest. Comcast advertises 3, 4, 6, 8, 10 MB downloads and delivers. Verizon promises little and delivers even less.
I may only be a single consumer, and thus I am statistically insignificant, but I had the 4.0mb comcast cable until about November of 2005. I was getting download speeds of 3700Kbps or so to match, I was very pleased with the speed. Upload speeds left a lot to be desired, the most I saw was around 90kbps.
Now I am on Verizon DSL. I get 40kbps....DOWNLOAD. Sometimes as high as 100. Forget uploads, I can't serve anything.
As for discernable difference, I just discerned it. DSL 1.5MB is A). not 1.5MB and B). the limiting factor. Don't blame it on the backbone, you're slow!
Right, so it will work - but if you switch to a software decoder, that defeats the purpose of using the PVR-350. (and plus, the PVR-350 is generally too jumpy and slow to play anything but MPEG2, even with XV. Read the mythtv user lists for details)
Basically, the workaround for most things bad about the PVR-350 are to not use the MPEG2 decoder and instead use framebuffer X. The downside is that it's slow and that you don't get any benefit over using a normal nvidia card.
I have a PVR-350 as well. If I were going back and doing it again, I'd just get a normal nvidia card with TV-Out. Looking at the specs, it seems nice to have video in/out in hardware, but they don't tell you how many hoops you have to jump through. (I do have it up and working beautifully, but there are some things that will never work, due to lack of driver/myth support)
The PVR-350 has two output modes - Framebuffer X and MPEG2. MPEG2 output works great. Framebuffer X is slow and unaccelerated (XV is half-working, but OpenGL will never work, and it will always be slow).
From a high-level view, the output should be handled by the drivers, yes. But since the PVR-350 has both types of output, the application needs to be aware of that and handle it accordingly. Things like fast forwarding, rewinding, overlaying the guide data, going through menus, etc. You have to be talking to ivtv X driver AND the ivtv mpg driver. Myth is always adding new features that are really cool (I'm a big fan of the speed up / slow down without pitch change. You can watch a show at down to 0.5x or up to 2x without the voices sounding like darth vader or the chipmunks. The PVT-350 won't do it, because it's a feature of the software MPEG decoding). Fast forward / rewind are also features of the mpeg decoder, and they don't work on the PVR-350 anymore (you can ff at 3x only. Anything faster or any rewinding and your playback gets borked, you have to stop and start again).
The PVR-350 also has audio output. Great, unless you want to listen to the audio of something that isn't an MPEG2 file. You then have to get a 5" loopback cable and plug the output of the 350 into the input of a sound card, and plug the output of the sound card to the input of the TV. Lame, huh? It's the only option.
Transcoding - you can't do it! If you tell myth to auto-transcode your files, it will make them unplayable on the PVR-350 output. That's because the PVR-350 can only play MPEG2 (not rtjpeg or mpeg4, etc)
Basically, because it's so different from normal X playback, it's hard to support.
So the major selling points of the PVR-350 are hardware MPEG2 decompression, video out. Take a look at the newer NVidia cards. You'll find that they also have hardware decompression (even MPEG4) and video out. They are better supported (nvidia binary drivers are very mature in linux), very common (everyone has an nvidia card). You'll notice just as little cpu usage when decompressing MPEG2, and everything will just work better.
Another reason I wanted the PVR-350 was so that I could have TVOut playing WHILE using my normal X-session for other things. It does work with the PVR-350, mpeg output works concurrently with X. Framebuffer X, however, doesn't, so the menu system doesn't work with X. The good news is, X.org 6.9 and 7.0 allow multiple concurrent displays on separate X-sessions, so that ability is now a moot point, as any card will be able to do just that (and you could always xinerama two screens together)
So yeah, I'm a little bitter about having bought a PVR-350.
Not to worry, it'll take much longer here in the US. We don't have things like "standards" for digital TV. We have digital cable and satellite providers that would cry if we made them standardize their set top boxes (I hear in the UK you don't need cable boxes at all?).
Even with digital cable and satellite, you can still use an analog tuner to record TV. I personally use a serial cable to change channels on the STB and an SVideo cable to feed the video signal to the input on my PVR. I've heard of many people using an IR Blaster to be an automatic remote control for the same purpose. It may not be digital, but it's the best there is at the moment, and it's free from all Digital Rights Management (at the moment), since I'm recording it in analog, not digital, they have no right to prevent me. Also, if it can be watched on a TV, it can be recorded by an analog tuner - the same cannot be said for digital.
Get a PVR-150 or 500, then, they are MUCH cheaper than the 350. You'll pull your hair out trying to get the PVR-350 to work perfectly, and even when you get it working, you'll find that the MythTV developers are no longer supporting it (and won't be fixing bugs with the TV-Out functionality)
The major difference between the PVR-350 and the PVR-250/150 is that the 350 has video output (MPEG2 decompression). Seeing as the board he selected has video out built in (and a processor that is plenty-capable enough), the PVR-350 was an unnecessary added expense. Also, the PVR-350 is slow at outputting X-menus, cannot do OpenGL or any acceleration except for MPEG2, DVD decoding is slow, games won't work, etc. Basically, the PVR-350 is useful ONLY for MPEG2 TV output.
ALSO - the current stable version of MythTV (0.19) has a bug where fast forwarding and rewinding greater than 3X don't work properly. There is no timeframe for fixing the bug, as not all that many people are using the 350.
A better choice would have been to get a PVR-500 to get dual-tuners, or at least a MCE version of the 150 (take up less space in the teeny case) and use the onboard SVideo out (or VGA out converted).
Good Advice
on
Sudo vs. Root
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
This article is good advice for anyone running a unix-like operating system (OSX, Linux, etc). It's not knocking on OSX, just knocking on the default configuration.
Sudo is really just a way to allow root access without allowing root logins. The best way to configure it:
Root Account with a unique password (not the same as your user account)
Sudo requires password to activate (caching is ok, but no automatic access, no keys)
Sudo logs all commands
Sudo only enabled for specific user accounts
Root account has login disabled, ftp/ssh disabled. (using the/usr/bin/false trick mentioned in the article, I use true myself)
Slashdot Mirror
Google Lists the following tested+working distributions:
Ubuntu 5.10
Suse 10.1
Fedora Core 5
Linspire 5.1
Gentoo 2006.0
Debian 3.1
Red Hat 9
I just tested it and it works but sporadically crashes under RHEL3 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3). The crash said that it would be sending details to google regarding the crash, but I didn't see any notice about it when I next started googleearth.
What is Podcasting?
It's like a factory that produces apple pies for whales, that's the simplest way I can describe it.
Ask a Ninja
I love how we all see censorship as bad, and because Google is taking part in censorship we blame Google. We make no effort to blame the CHINESE GOVERNMENT for requiring that kind of censorship. Google does not exist to fight political battles over freedoms of people in China (although they do have a history of expanding into surprising new markets, I somehow feel that political picketing is not the next one).
Summary: HELLO, Google is not the one censoring the chinese people, CHINA is the one censoring them, Google is just doing what they are told by the government in the country they are operating in. Google may be all-powerful, but I don't think they are in a position to start a war against china by breaking their laws and standing by that treason.
At my school, there was no direct punishment for what you did outside of school, even if it was against the law.
HOWEVER, to get around that loophole, the school required that you sign a form if you join any clubs, sports teams, or participate in any extra-cirricular activities, possibly including things like trips and prom. The form stated that you agree to be kicked off the team if you are caught drinking or doing drugs, even if you are not at or anywhere near school. If you refuse to sign the form, you are not allowed to be in the club / on the team / etc.
A pretty ingenius system, if you ask me. It doesn't technically punish you for using drugs/alcohol, you just aren't allowed to do certain things if you do. Kind of a pre-emptive punishment.
So basically when Microsoft says "beta" they mean:
it sorta works. ok, there might be a few bugs. ok, so maybe it can't even install itself or use hardware.
When google says "beta" they mean:
it's more done than most web services that have been around since the early 90s will ever be, but the moniker "Beta" has a nice ring to it. Plus we like how elitist it is to have to be invited to a webmail service.
The father and mothers friends, family, and neighbors will stop returning their calls after the second time they hear "come see the video of everything junior did today!"
Junior's first girlfriend will die of starvation after 36 straight hours of family videos.
Junior will spend the second 5 years of his live watching what he did for the first 5 years of his life. That 5 year event will be recorded and used to determine how people learn by watching videos of themselves learning.
You should post a photo of your license so we can see what you mean...
MythTV is also participating in the Summer of Code
For $1.99 x Large Number of Episodes, wouldn't you rather buy the DVD?
I'm imagining that the people who want to pay money for tiny-resolution video are doing it because they either lack the technology to just record it themselves (since ABC is free over-the-air and available on US cable/satellite) or missed an episode accidentally. Why pay $1.99 for a poor-quality video when you can pay $Free? I find it hard to believe that there are very many people who use iTMS exclusively instead of their television or cable.
Plus, who doesn't have a laptop or desktop with TV-Out? I'm sure more people can come up with that than can come up with a video ipod, and playing a flash video on the TV shouldn't be all that difficult.
Now if iTMS were selling full-resolution recordings that you could burn to DVD, that would be a different story. They aren't, though. They are selling teeny-tiny poor-quality videos for a price comparable to that of the DVD season. It doesn't take much to undercut that.
Didn't Apple make a big deal about offering episodes of Lost on their iTunes Video/Music store?
I can't imagine they will be very happy with ABC direct-releasing similarly-poor-quality videos for free. I smell another frivolous lawsuit...
Could it be that paragraphs usually are numbered in this kind of text? I dunno, and I don't want to ruin you good ideas here.. Just another viewpoint.
I'm sure that the paragraphs are normally numbered, I just mean that the judge would probably use that feature of the document as part of the code, since it's there.
I saw that all the paragraphs are numbered and figured that there had to be some relevance to that. I don't think skipped paragraphs can just be spaces, though:
smithycodeJae ie xt t os t ps a cgrea mqwf ka dp m qz
The words just aren't believable lengths. Too many 2-letter and 1-letter words. Here's the breakdown:
(01. s) (02. m) (03. ithy) (04. c) (05. o) (06. d) (07. e) (08. Ja) (09. e) (10. -) (11. ie) (12. -) (13. x) (14. t) (15. -) (16. os) (17. -) (18. t) (19. -) (20. p) (21. s) (22. -) (23. a) (24. -) (25. cgr) (26. e) (27. a) (28. -) (29. mq) (30. w) (31. f) (32. -) (33. -) (34. k) (35. a) (36. -) (37. d) (38. p) (39. -) (40. m) (41. -) (42. q) (43. z)
(stupid slashdot won't let me post them each on a single line, so deal with the bad formatting)
You just used the word LEGO to make me read this! LEGOs have about as much to do with this molecule binding as a bowl of petunias does!
Did I mention I've had six or seven managers in five years? I've only changed jobs twice -- the others were "churn" caused by reorganizations or managers otherwise being reassigned. In fact, in the month between when I was hired and when I started, the person who was going to be my manager (we'd already had several phone/email conversations) changed! It's seven if you count that, six if you don't.
I have 8 bosses, Bob...
With no way for the customer to burn the movies to disc, how is that a permanent ownership? I imagine they are expecting people to start using this as the way to buy movies, but what happens when somebody buys 10 movies? 20? 50? Are they supposed to just keep buying more HD space to store them indefinitely?
Plenty of people have already mentioned the "but I can't watch it on my TV, what's the point?" reasoning.
I think an ideal system would be a service where you can download a reduced-quality version (like iTunes) a few days before the DVD release for a higher price. Included in that cost, however, is a copy of the DVD that they will mail you once it releases. If I get a physical copy of the dvd, I don't care what DRM is on the digital file copy, since I'll just delete it once the DVD arrives.
If I could go back and delete my original comment I would... I just checked my speeds again, and they've gone up considerably from the first time I checked them back in December, and now they seem correct.
At the moment I'm getting ~180KB/s download, 16KB/s upload. 180KB/s is about the 1.5meg/s that is advertised, and 16KB/s upload is about 128k upload. Those numbers could very well be the advertised speed.
That being said, it's a whole lot slower than the 3 meg cable (I think they had upped it to either 4 or 6 by the time I moved) in both upload and download.
it was a typo, it's actually around 40kB/s, which is still very slow for broadband (as the other poster pointed out 40kbps would be slow even for dialup). Running a DSL speed report online basically just involves the graph laughing at me and ranking me at the bottom.
Unfortunately I am sharing a roommates connection, and it is his account, so I can't exactly call up the provider to complain without an account in my name. It's basically a put-up or shut-up case, where if I really want to fix it, I can get my own comcast cable connection and bask in the high speeds. Or if I want to continue with the low cost shared connection route, I can deal with it.
But in any case Comcast Cable vs Verizon DSL is No Contest. Comcast advertises 3, 4, 6, 8, 10 MB downloads and delivers. Verizon promises little and delivers even less.
oops, typo. You know what I meant. 40kB/s is still slow.
I may only be a single consumer, and thus I am statistically insignificant, but I had the 4.0mb comcast cable until about November of 2005. I was getting download speeds of 3700Kbps or so to match, I was very pleased with the speed. Upload speeds left a lot to be desired, the most I saw was around 90kbps.
Now I am on Verizon DSL. I get 40kbps....DOWNLOAD. Sometimes as high as 100. Forget uploads, I can't serve anything.
As for discernable difference, I just discerned it. DSL 1.5MB is A). not 1.5MB and B). the limiting factor. Don't blame it on the backbone, you're slow!
Right, so it will work - but if you switch to a software decoder, that defeats the purpose of using the PVR-350. (and plus, the PVR-350 is generally too jumpy and slow to play anything but MPEG2, even with XV. Read the mythtv user lists for details)
Basically, the workaround for most things bad about the PVR-350 are to not use the MPEG2 decoder and instead use framebuffer X. The downside is that it's slow and that you don't get any benefit over using a normal nvidia card.
I have a PVR-350 as well. If I were going back and doing it again, I'd just get a normal nvidia card with TV-Out. Looking at the specs, it seems nice to have video in/out in hardware, but they don't tell you how many hoops you have to jump through. (I do have it up and working beautifully, but there are some things that will never work, due to lack of driver/myth support)
The PVR-350 has two output modes - Framebuffer X and MPEG2. MPEG2 output works great. Framebuffer X is slow and unaccelerated (XV is half-working, but OpenGL will never work, and it will always be slow).
From a high-level view, the output should be handled by the drivers, yes. But since the PVR-350 has both types of output, the application needs to be aware of that and handle it accordingly. Things like fast forwarding, rewinding, overlaying the guide data, going through menus, etc. You have to be talking to ivtv X driver AND the ivtv mpg driver. Myth is always adding new features that are really cool (I'm a big fan of the speed up / slow down without pitch change. You can watch a show at down to 0.5x or up to 2x without the voices sounding like darth vader or the chipmunks. The PVT-350 won't do it, because it's a feature of the software MPEG decoding). Fast forward / rewind are also features of the mpeg decoder, and they don't work on the PVR-350 anymore (you can ff at 3x only. Anything faster or any rewinding and your playback gets borked, you have to stop and start again).
The PVR-350 also has audio output. Great, unless you want to listen to the audio of something that isn't an MPEG2 file. You then have to get a 5" loopback cable and plug the output of the 350 into the input of a sound card, and plug the output of the sound card to the input of the TV. Lame, huh? It's the only option.
Transcoding - you can't do it! If you tell myth to auto-transcode your files, it will make them unplayable on the PVR-350 output. That's because the PVR-350 can only play MPEG2 (not rtjpeg or mpeg4, etc)
Basically, because it's so different from normal X playback, it's hard to support.
So the major selling points of the PVR-350 are hardware MPEG2 decompression, video out. Take a look at the newer NVidia cards. You'll find that they also have hardware decompression (even MPEG4) and video out. They are better supported (nvidia binary drivers are very mature in linux), very common (everyone has an nvidia card). You'll notice just as little cpu usage when decompressing MPEG2, and everything will just work better.
Another reason I wanted the PVR-350 was so that I could have TVOut playing WHILE using my normal X-session for other things. It does work with the PVR-350, mpeg output works concurrently with X. Framebuffer X, however, doesn't, so the menu system doesn't work with X. The good news is, X.org 6.9 and 7.0 allow multiple concurrent displays on separate X-sessions, so that ability is now a moot point, as any card will be able to do just that (and you could always xinerama two screens together)
So yeah, I'm a little bitter about having bought a PVR-350.
Not to worry, it'll take much longer here in the US. We don't have things like "standards" for digital TV. We have digital cable and satellite providers that would cry if we made them standardize their set top boxes (I hear in the UK you don't need cable boxes at all?).
Even with digital cable and satellite, you can still use an analog tuner to record TV. I personally use a serial cable to change channels on the STB and an SVideo cable to feed the video signal to the input on my PVR. I've heard of many people using an IR Blaster to be an automatic remote control for the same purpose. It may not be digital, but it's the best there is at the moment, and it's free from all Digital Rights Management (at the moment), since I'm recording it in analog, not digital, they have no right to prevent me. Also, if it can be watched on a TV, it can be recorded by an analog tuner - the same cannot be said for digital.
Get a PVR-150 or 500, then, they are MUCH cheaper than the 350. You'll pull your hair out trying to get the PVR-350 to work perfectly, and even when you get it working, you'll find that the MythTV developers are no longer supporting it (and won't be fixing bugs with the TV-Out functionality)
The major difference between the PVR-350 and the PVR-250/150 is that the 350 has video output (MPEG2 decompression). Seeing as the board he selected has video out built in (and a processor that is plenty-capable enough), the PVR-350 was an unnecessary added expense. Also, the PVR-350 is slow at outputting X-menus, cannot do OpenGL or any acceleration except for MPEG2, DVD decoding is slow, games won't work, etc. Basically, the PVR-350 is useful ONLY for MPEG2 TV output.
ALSO - the current stable version of MythTV (0.19) has a bug where fast forwarding and rewinding greater than 3X don't work properly. There is no timeframe for fixing the bug, as not all that many people are using the 350.
A better choice would have been to get a PVR-500 to get dual-tuners, or at least a MCE version of the 150 (take up less space in the teeny case) and use the onboard SVideo out (or VGA out converted).
This article is good advice for anyone running a unix-like operating system (OSX, Linux, etc). It's not knocking on OSX, just knocking on the default configuration. Sudo is really just a way to allow root access without allowing root logins. The best way to configure it: Root Account with a unique password (not the same as your user account) Sudo requires password to activate (caching is ok, but no automatic access, no keys) Sudo logs all commands Sudo only enabled for specific user accounts Root account has login disabled, ftp/ssh disabled. (using the /usr/bin/false trick mentioned in the article, I use true myself)