What I want is the AppleTV to act as a MythTV frontend. Either by running mythfrontend itself (unlikely) or by my mythbackend speaking DAAP such that I can use the native ATV software to access my mythbackend.
Why? I want to velcro the ATV behind my LCD TV or on the ceiling with my projector (haven't decided which yet) and only have to deal with a single power cord. I don't want to put my 2TB mythbackend in the same room as my TV. I want it in my rack in the far corner of the basement where it can happily whine away.
Once we have consumer devices that can inconspicuously tuck in behind a TV and speak some standard protocol from the household media server, I'd say we're done. Apple's "household media server" is not quite there. ie: it doesn't have DVR functionality yet, and the iTunes TV model doesn't have the content I want at the prices I'm currently paying.
First: There's the 'bug' in the corner. The distracting annoying semi-fully opaque icon in the corner of your program. Sometimes those icons are animated to grab your attention while trying to watch the show. Those are there for the entire span of each show. Then there's the banner that shows up on the bottom of your TV, covering about 20% of the screen, to notify you of important events such as who's on Oprah tomorrow. Those appear just before commercials, and sometimes for a short time just after commercials. Then while the credits are airing on the show, they squish the last 10 seconds of the show over to the left and put an ad in the remaining 50% of screen real estate... Don't forget the high dB voice-overs...
These asshats are interfering with the content I paid for. Their banners at the bottom often interfere with, say, the relevant text placed on the bottom of the screen of shows like '24' to establish context for the current scene.
And I won't even get into 'soft advertising' like product placement. In shows like '24', the prominently placed Cisco 7960's, good guys using Macs, bad guys using Dells, all guys drinking Coke.... Product placement in movies will be the death of 'period pieces', mark my words.
How many of you people making fun of the poor windows weenies whose machines are on botnets, are currently running your own mailservers at home on your dynamic broadband connection and would subsequently cause your ISP all sorts of grief if they suddenly blocked outbound port 25 ?
Yeah, that's what I thought. Hell, half of my co-workers are linux fanboys who run mail servers on their broadband connections, say things like "I don't trust anyone to route my mail for me, not even my ISP" while complaining about spam and botnets.
Greylisting doesn't work anymore. You might block a few spammers but I do greylisting with the latest version of postgrey and I still wind up with about 50 spams a day that get through to my spamassassin... Spammers take non-fatal error returns and add them to the end of the list.
X-Greylist: delayed 58065 seconds by postgrey-1.27 at xxxxx; Mon, 15 Jan 2007 10:58:49 UTC
X-Greylist: delayed 48829 seconds by postgrey-1.27 at xxxxx; Mon, 15 Jan 2007 11:42:10 UTC
X-Greylist: delayed 8054 seconds by postgrey-1.27 at xxxxx; Mon, 15 Jan 2007 13:18:46 UTC
That's from my spamassassin folder.
The bits they change are subtle and don't affect the overall plot of the movie. So, for example, everyone who downloads a copy of the movie gets Lindsey Lohan replaced with another actor (say, Danny Devito) in every scene in which she appears. This change, while sublime, is preserved through re-encoding.
I can support this as well. I was born in Austria and lived there til I was 3. Then moved here where I promptly had to learn english. My parents continued speaking to me in austrian but I would respond in english. Years later, I can still understand german/austrian fine when it is spoken to me but I have trouble making my mouth speak it. In the late 80's, I went there with my wife who didn't speak any german at all so I had to translate. After about 2 days of full immersion, it was like a switch was turned on in my head and I could speak german fluently...
The strange thing that happened however, was that my brain switched to thinking in german as well so in a restaurant, while translating what the waiter was saying, to my wife, she looked at me like I was an alien. I had just spoken an english sentence but used german construction so it came out all wrong and practically incomprehensible.
Having not been there in about 10 years, I'm back to being unable to speak german.
Is that the market will split into a couple of factions... 1 is the content providers (itms, etc) providing music/video via DAAP or some equivalent mechanism, and the hardware providers (apple, sling, etc) providing set top boxes or TV's with built-in DAAP clients....
That means, I'm waiting for the $1000 42" LCD TV with built-in ethernet/wifi that connects to my household MythTV backend with a DAAP plugin.
The pieces are almost there. Probably less than a year.
....this will stop the relatively constant stream of unsolicited recruitment letters that I and many others in the OSS world are subject to. Each time I get one I forward it to abuse@google.com (which nets me a canned response) and respond to the sender telling me to remove me from their list. Apparently Google are like every other spammer in that these requests are ignored and the UCE continues unabated.
We have 3 track lights in our kitchen. Each track has 3 flood lights. Our kitchen is where life happens in our house and as such, those tracks are on a _lot_. So I replaced 1 bulb in each track with a compact flourescent flood fixture. My wife immediately noticed and hates them. It's not the temperature or color of the light. It's that it takes so long for the light to be at the accustomed brightness. I must admit, there is a very noticeable difference between the brighness of the room with when you first turn the lights on vs about a minute later. When you first turn the lights on, it just feels like something is wrong...
What you want is already mostly there, albeit illegally. Private torrent networks coupled with an RSS plugin for Azureus running on my mythbackend, automatically dropping files into my videos folder... Newest episodes of stuff just appear for me.
The technology is there, the networks just have to figure out that people will pay to have this and companies like Apple just have to figure out how to package it so you can plug and view. If someone writes a DAAP plugin for MythTV, then I'm all over that itv thing. I just spent 2 days building a replacement mythfrontend. I'd have rather just spent the money for something that worked.
I spend my commute times on a road that is fairly busy but usually the traffic flows well and it's all good. Of the observations I've made, an interesting one is what happens when one lane is blocked for construction or what have you. Often, in the case of construction, there are warning signs way in advance instructing drivers to get in the left/right lane. In the case of an accident, no signs and while you can't see what the problem is, you can easily tell which lane the problem is in because it's the lane that's moving quickly. It seems ironic but as you get closer and begin to see the problem, the lane in question flows faster and faster relative to the lane into which everyone has to eventually merge. From a politeness perspective, it seems like I should just merge at my earliest opportunity and wait my turn like everyone else but from a flow perspective, it seems like I should blast on ahead and find a space to merge as long as I can find some way to do it without creating a standing wave... Unfortunately, in the latter case, everyone is justified in not opening a space to let me in and indeed, when I see someone blast on ahead and then wait right in front of the problem area, I don't make them a space, but invariably, someone always puts on the brakes, comes to a full stop and waits while the idiot driver wakes up and begins to creep into traffic, thus exacerbating the whole problem. Of course, if everyone was able to make their vehicle accelerate quickly, stop on a dime, and were fully alert, as well as fully conscious of just where each corner of their vehicle was relative to the rest of the world, we wouldn't have traffic jams. It's humans that are the problem. Lets get the humans out from behind the wheel.
In the time that it's going to take for you to read all of these responses, you could have sat down and written some code that will impress them. They're not looking for your magnum opus... They want to see stuff that shows you can understand a problem and translate your understanding into compilable syntax. In fact, they probably don't even care about compilable syntax. Think of a cute hack and write it instead of reading slashdot. Take it in and say "I can't show you any of the code I've written professionally, so I wrote this last night. You can confirm with google that I didn't download it from anywhere if you like, or you can ask me any questions about it and I'll be happy to answer them." Don't pick something related to the companies' core business. They understand their problems _way_better_ than you do. Second, decide whether you want to work for a company that quantifies you based on your code output. I'm a coder and I only spend about 10% of my work time actually writing production code. The rest is hacking test cases, prototyping, designing, staring at graphs, and attending team meetings.
I write NPU code for a living. When I first heard about this card I thought "Hey great! A cheap pci card with an NPU on it that I can use for something useful". When I read the technical details on it and discovered it's not really an NPU at all it became suddenly less exciting. Yawn.
Google should convert their huge parking lots into solar 'car ports' providing multiple benefits: lots of square footage for solar power collection, somewhere shaded for employees to park their Ferrari's under, and encourage employees to buy plug-in hybrids that can charge while they're at work all day. Excess power for data centers, less A/C runtime when cars startup (and are least efficient), and fuel savings by employees who buy plug-in hybrids.
I have Macs and I have iPods. My wife an iPod Mini and me a 4th gen 40G. Both ipods are still fine. Primary use is in the car with an iTrip. Secondary use is as a data shuttle. I was going to buy my dad an iPod for christmas and that's when I realized that for our uses (we're both old car hobbyists so own multiple cars each), the ipod is really low value for the money. After you've spent $300 on it (either 8GB Nano or 30GB Video), you still have to spend about $100 to make it useful (car charger and FM modulator)... If you buy a 30GB ipod and travel, then you probably want the $120 A/V kit... I used to joke that all iPod accessories cost $40. Now I think inflation has kicked in and all iPod accessories cost $100.
When my 4th gen dies, I'm probably not going to buy an iPod.
I work in the embedded space. Currently linux/mips64 and linux/x86. In the past I've done NetBSD/evbarm and NetBSD/ppc405, Linux/arm. Also QNX/ppcbe. I'm largely platform agnostic but in the various environments I've worked in, I can tell you that you will encounter many engineering departments that do all of their CAD on Solaris/sparc and the software guys do their builds on Solaris/sparc machines while using Linux desktops... So I believe you'll find greater market acceptance if you at least offer a Solaris SDK as well. If you can confirm your toolchain works on a *BSD, then you will have all the bases covered. Nothing I hate more than to see some documentation that says "system requirements: RedHat vFOO". Embedded developers are typically smarter than your average bear and are happy to install using a tarball instead of some proprietary packaging mechanism.
Also, provide a sample build system that developers can "include" in their Makefiles and set one or two environment variables that are target dependant (FOO_ROOT and FOO_TARGET for example)...
Find out what Montavista is doing and avoid it all. How are these people still in business?
Yes, I too regret having chosen "+" as my recipient_delimiter in postfix. Now I have lots of legitimate mail coming in with "+" in it... Postfix doesn't support multiple recipient_delimiter's so you basically lose.
The ethical/moral thing to do is to do your job as is defined by your employer. You don't follow the pressure of religion or the pressure of society at large. You follow the pressure of the person signing your paycheck. If you don't like it, leave.
I have a kid. He was 4 the first time he flew on a plane. Didn't cry once. Didn't kick the seat in front of him, yell, or even talk loudly. He may have giggled once though. He colored or looked out the window the entire flight. So I'm having trouble with why you think my kid should not be allowed on the same plane with you. You feel the same way about Jews maybe? Or maybe you want an "all male" airline? I acknowledge that some kids cry on planes. That's largely unavoidable; kids cry in restaurants too. I suppose you never went to a restaurant until you were 10 years old either.
You need to grow up and recognize there are other people in the world and stop being so intolerant of people who aren't quite as perfect as you.
"Offtopic, but - who's up for a "no kids" airline? I'd definitely pay an extra $10 per flight to ensure there aren't any crying babies onboard."
What, you were never a kid? Hatched when you were 24? I'm up for a "no intolerant assholes" airline. In fact, why don't you just stay home so the rest of us don't have to deal with you.
It sounds to me like one of the appeals is that you can stay after work playing half-life with your new 'friends'. While a short-term cool idea, it gets old "real fast". Just because you work with a bunch of people, doesn't mean they are automatically your friends and that you will enjoy hanging out with them... It's nice to have cow-orkers you can get along with. In fact, it's very important. But do try to keep your personal life seperate from your work life (while participating in the obligatory team-building recreational outings).
Also, don't under-estimate the sheer pain of commuting that far/long twice a day. If you ever decide to create a family, you will loathe the time you waste sitting on the freeway instead of playing with your kid(s).
Having said that, don't just go for the money.
Slashdot Mirror
Why? I want to velcro the ATV behind my LCD TV or on the ceiling with my projector (haven't decided which yet) and only have to deal with a single power cord. I don't want to put my 2TB mythbackend in the same room as my TV. I want it in my rack in the far corner of the basement where it can happily whine away.
Once we have consumer devices that can inconspicuously tuck in behind a TV and speak some standard protocol from the household media server, I'd say we're done. Apple's "household media server" is not quite there. ie: it doesn't have DVR functionality yet, and the iTunes TV model doesn't have the content I want at the prices I'm currently paying.
You're forgetting some of the commercials....
First: There's the 'bug' in the corner. The distracting annoying semi-fully opaque icon in the corner of your program. Sometimes those icons are animated to grab your attention while trying to watch the show. Those are there for the entire span of each show. Then there's the banner that shows up on the bottom of your TV, covering about 20% of the screen, to notify you of important events such as who's on Oprah tomorrow. Those appear just before commercials, and sometimes for a short time just after commercials. Then while the credits are airing on the show, they squish the last 10 seconds of the show over to the left and put an ad in the remaining 50% of screen real estate... Don't forget the high dB voice-overs...
These asshats are interfering with the content I paid for. Their banners at the bottom often interfere with, say, the relevant text placed on the bottom of the screen of shows like '24' to establish context for the current scene.
And I won't even get into 'soft advertising' like product placement. In shows like '24', the prominently placed Cisco 7960's, good guys using Macs, bad guys using Dells, all guys drinking Coke.... Product placement in movies will be the death of 'period pieces', mark my words.
Yeah, that's what I thought. Hell, half of my co-workers are linux fanboys who run mail servers on their broadband connections, say things like "I don't trust anyone to route my mail for me, not even my ISP" while complaining about spam and botnets.
Greylisting doesn't work anymore. You might block a few spammers but I do greylisting with the latest version of postgrey and I still wind up with about 50 spams a day that get through to my spamassassin... Spammers take non-fatal error returns and add them to the end of the list. X-Greylist: delayed 58065 seconds by postgrey-1.27 at xxxxx; Mon, 15 Jan 2007 10:58:49 UTC X-Greylist: delayed 48829 seconds by postgrey-1.27 at xxxxx; Mon, 15 Jan 2007 11:42:10 UTC X-Greylist: delayed 8054 seconds by postgrey-1.27 at xxxxx; Mon, 15 Jan 2007 13:18:46 UTC That's from my spamassassin folder.
Quite clever, really.
The strange thing that happened however, was that my brain switched to thinking in german as well so in a restaurant, while translating what the waiter was saying, to my wife, she looked at me like I was an alien. I had just spoken an english sentence but used german construction so it came out all wrong and practically incomprehensible.
Having not been there in about 10 years, I'm back to being unable to speak german.
I RTFA and thought the commentary looked familiar: http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=216560&c id=17578608
That means, I'm waiting for the $1000 42" LCD TV with built-in ethernet/wifi that connects to my household MythTV backend with a DAAP plugin.
The pieces are almost there. Probably less than a year.
....this will stop the relatively constant stream of unsolicited recruitment letters that I and many others in the OSS world are subject to. Each time I get one I forward it to abuse@google.com (which nets me a canned response) and respond to the sender telling me to remove me from their list. Apparently Google are like every other spammer in that these requests are ignored and the UCE continues unabated.
Not going over well in my house.
The technology is there, the networks just have to figure out that people will pay to have this and companies like Apple just have to figure out how to package it so you can plug and view. If someone writes a DAAP plugin for MythTV, then I'm all over that itv thing. I just spent 2 days building a replacement mythfrontend. I'd have rather just spent the money for something that worked.
I spend my commute times on a road that is fairly busy but usually the traffic flows well and it's all good. Of the observations I've made, an interesting one is what happens when one lane is blocked for construction or what have you. Often, in the case of construction, there are warning signs way in advance instructing drivers to get in the left/right lane. In the case of an accident, no signs and while you can't see what the problem is, you can easily tell which lane the problem is in because it's the lane that's moving quickly. It seems ironic but as you get closer and begin to see the problem, the lane in question flows faster and faster relative to the lane into which everyone has to eventually merge. From a politeness perspective, it seems like I should just merge at my earliest opportunity and wait my turn like everyone else but from a flow perspective, it seems like I should blast on ahead and find a space to merge as long as I can find some way to do it without creating a standing wave... Unfortunately, in the latter case, everyone is justified in not opening a space to let me in and indeed, when I see someone blast on ahead and then wait right in front of the problem area, I don't make them a space, but invariably, someone always puts on the brakes, comes to a full stop and waits while the idiot driver wakes up and begins to creep into traffic, thus exacerbating the whole problem. Of course, if everyone was able to make their vehicle accelerate quickly, stop on a dime, and were fully alert, as well as fully conscious of just where each corner of their vehicle was relative to the rest of the world, we wouldn't have traffic jams. It's humans that are the problem. Lets get the humans out from behind the wheel.
whoa, dude. Tone it down a bit. That's a bit too geeky for this site ....
In the time that it's going to take for you to read all of these responses, you could have sat down and written some code that will impress them. They're not looking for your magnum opus... They want to see stuff that shows you can understand a problem and translate your understanding into compilable syntax. In fact, they probably don't even care about compilable syntax. Think of a cute hack and write it instead of reading slashdot. Take it in and say "I can't show you any of the code I've written professionally, so I wrote this last night. You can confirm with google that I didn't download it from anywhere if you like, or you can ask me any questions about it and I'll be happy to answer them." Don't pick something related to the companies' core business. They understand their problems _way_better_ than you do. Second, decide whether you want to work for a company that quantifies you based on your code output. I'm a coder and I only spend about 10% of my work time actually writing production code. The rest is hacking test cases, prototyping, designing, staring at graphs, and attending team meetings.
I write NPU code for a living. When I first heard about this card I thought "Hey great! A cheap pci card with an NPU on it that I can use for something useful". When I read the technical details on it and discovered it's not really an NPU at all it became suddenly less exciting. Yawn.
Google should convert their huge parking lots into solar 'car ports' providing multiple benefits: lots of square footage for solar power collection, somewhere shaded for employees to park their Ferrari's under, and encourage employees to buy plug-in hybrids that can charge while they're at work all day. Excess power for data centers, less A/C runtime when cars startup (and are least efficient), and fuel savings by employees who buy plug-in hybrids.
When my 4th gen dies, I'm probably not going to buy an iPod.
Go ahead Apple. Give me one more reason to subscribe to .mac which I will translate to one less reason to buy your software/hardware.
Also, provide a sample build system that developers can "include" in their Makefiles and set one or two environment variables that are target dependant (FOO_ROOT and FOO_TARGET for example)...
Find out what Montavista is doing and avoid it all. How are these people still in business?
Here's one way to work around the problem, with postfix http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/postfix/200 4-01/1944.html
The ethical/moral thing to do is to do your job as is defined by your employer. You don't follow the pressure of religion or the pressure of society at large. You follow the pressure of the person signing your paycheck. If you don't like it, leave.
You need to grow up and recognize there are other people in the world and stop being so intolerant of people who aren't quite as perfect as you.
What, you were never a kid? Hatched when you were 24? I'm up for a "no intolerant assholes" airline. In fact, why don't you just stay home so the rest of us don't have to deal with you.
It sounds to me like one of the appeals is that you can stay after work playing half-life with your new 'friends'. While a short-term cool idea, it gets old "real fast". Just because you work with a bunch of people, doesn't mean they are automatically your friends and that you will enjoy hanging out with them... It's nice to have cow-orkers you can get along with. In fact, it's very important. But do try to keep your personal life seperate from your work life (while participating in the obligatory team-building recreational outings). Also, don't under-estimate the sheer pain of commuting that far/long twice a day. If you ever decide to create a family, you will loathe the time you waste sitting on the freeway instead of playing with your kid(s). Having said that, don't just go for the money.
Porn at work == bad? Will the erosion of job satisfaction never end? What next? No more booze in the server room?