I'm in the same position.. I tried XBMC / Plex / Boxee as "the one true frontend". But, had no end of problems getting MythTV working with it. I got tantalizing glimpses of it working well, but it never stayed working.
I also have been using a Mac Mini as an HTPC that can do most everything I need between Front Row / iTunes, Plex/Boxee, and MythTV Frontend. It works passably well. But, I ran into too many oddities with the Mac OS X version of MythFrontend (others claim it's rock solid for them, so YMMV).
I ended up using an HDMI switching tuner and a Harmony remote, to easily switch back and forth between my Mac HTPC which does a lot of things, and a small Linux box as my MythTV frontend. I used an Acer AspireRevo running MythBuntu for the myth frontend. It has an nvidia GPU which supports VDPAU video acceleration. Video playback is rock solid, but I don't do anything else on that box (I made a couple attempts to get XBMC running on it, but it didn't go well).
A friend of mine installed Linux on his parents computer, and put an end to the corruption/rebuild cycle. Of course, I think a large part of why this helped was that his parents only understood how to do the basics - read e-mail, browse the web, play music. They couldn't install new apps.
For my parents, I didn't think they would put up with "lock down" mode. So, I set them up with an iMac, and it has been great so far. I can ssh in to the system and look around, like Linux. That helps some support issues. For others, remote desktop works well. But, I have not had to deal with any malware, system corruption, or complete re-installs since moving to Mac. (Why that is, I don't really care.. maybe someday we'll have virus issues. For now, all I care is that it is not a problem)
> Wow, you MS apologists just don't quit, do you? > >Here's the thing: If it was exclusive then what caused the exclusivity to change?
It's typically specified in the contract. MS probably demanded a period of exclusivity in exchange for the development/integration/distribution of making Netflix streaming available to their huge installed base of users. Netflix wanted to retain the flexibility to partner with anyone they wanted. So, they negotiated a mutually agreeable term of exclusivity.
This looks like a great device to replace my old WRV54G router (which has hardware IPSec support). When I bought the WRV54G, there were a couple projects to create an linux firmware, but none ever panned out.
Do any of the OSS firmware options support IPSec? I know it won't be fast on an embedded processor like are in these routers. But, it should be okay for a home router.
They declared bankruptcy.. the company failed and went into bankruptcy protection in an attempt to salvage something.
Their shareholders (owners) lost billions of dollars, and the GM of old is no more.
Yes, it's important to recognize the responsibilities of old-GM that are not being addressed now that they are gone. But, this should not be surprising, and it's not that unusual either.
The functional equivalent of the smartphone remote control has existed for a decade or so. The Phiips Pronto remote control is a touch screen, fully programmable, completely optimize for its job, remote control. It had a GUI editor for configuring the screens, built-in IR emitter, etc.
And yet, other universal remotes have been created and flourished. The touch screen sucks for remote controls. You don't want to look at the device to figure out the context and button layout every time you use it. You just want to feel the button layout and hit what you need.
I replaced me Pronto with a cheap Radio Shack remote control (and some hack-ish software to reprogram it). You can get nearly the same effect for a bit more $$ with the Harmony remote. Although, I think the Radio Shack "JP1" remotes are even better when programmed well - minimal buttons completely optimized for the user's environment.
Virtualization gives an easier way to accomplish this (with the caveat of needing a platform able to host the virtualized platform).
You can easily snapshot systems, and have an OS image for each x years rather than a complete new platform each time. Doing this today, you could easily produce snapshots from DOS days up until current systems.
VMware would be easier to create all this with. But, open source Xen would probably be the better choice to ensure future availability.
Does it have a mini adapter to an external video output?
A tiny device like this would be great to use as an HD Media Player, and also be usable as a portable device if needed.
If it supported Intel's VAAPI, it could probably decode HD content.. certainly MPEG2 HD content. Other similar devices with NVidia GPUs could also be excellent options. Their new video decoding API seems great - MythTV has support for it in the dev builds.
I made the mistake of buying Quicken when I moved from Linux to mac a few years ago. It sucked. I won't buy from intuit again until there is feature parity.
The free options don't meet my needs, I want more investment tracking. So I'll stick with my spreadsheet for now.
There are several options for the combo box the post asks about.. Maybe not the ultimate box that will play everything, but there are several that will do multiple sources. What I use is a Mac Mini (Core Duo), to play several types of content:
- DVD's (the new full screen DVD and Front Row in Leopard are nice DVD viewing options). - Movies, TV, and Music via iTunes. - Broadcast HDTV via MythTV (running backend and frontend on my Mini running OSX) - Netflix streaming movies via their Silverlight plugin - Various video file formats via Front Row. - There are various other video streaming services available, I don't use any of them at this point. - Occasional special webcasts - like the NCAA basketball tournament early round games.
It's hard to beat the flexibility of an HTPC. I think the Mac Front Row interface + all the other options is hard to beat. Especially considering the small size of the device, quiet operation, built-in remote control functionality, etc..
Areas for improvement: - Blue Ray DVD drive would be nice. - Better Netflix streaming. Silverlight is okay, but could be better. - Blockbuster, or other video streaming support.
It's nice to have the option for more content on my Mac Mini HTPC. I primarily use it for Broadcast HDTV via MythTV and DVDs from Netflix. So, this give a whole new source of content.
I have been using it for a few days, with mixed results.
- The quality is not great, and can vary widely. It seems to adapt to your internet connection speed. So, I think my Comcast "Burst then throttle" service screws it up. I often get the message saying needs to re-buffer.
- It's completely browser based. So, no integration with MythTV or FrontRow. No remote control, etc. I hope even the browser based version can be improved (e.g. flexible bookmarking).
I watched a documentary on it, Street Fight, and while the quality was not great (viewing on a 720p projector) for a documentary this was not a big problem. I also watched Tin Cup, and found it to be acceptable. But, I tried a couple movies with more action, and found the compression breaks down under a lot of movement.
Nothing I have seen from VMware (including walking through their booth at VMworld last week and getting a demo of it) was anything like what you are describing.
What they announced and were showing at VMworld was the next generation of their VMware Infrastructure. It added new features, like VM Fault Tolerance and distributed vSwitch, but did not change what runs in a VM.
ESX / ESXi is the compute node, vCenter (formerly VirtualCenter) is the management layer.
I'm not sure if you're talking about the hypervisor OS, or what.. Yes, ESXi is a very thin OS, but the servers / applications run in a VM which needs a standard OS. This is VMware's "Virtual Appliance" concept. The OS should be a really minimal stripped down build, usually Linux based, but it is a real OS.
The VDC-OS is just the underlying ESXi thin hypervisor, with VirtualCenter managing the resources. This is what VMware has been doing for quite a while now, the new name is partly some new features, and partly just a re-branding/positioning of their existing technology against some growing threats.
They are not replacing Linux. You still run your what you want on Linux, but do you run everything on ONE Linux box? If yes, you're not a good candidate for a Datacenter OS. If you run many servers, then there is almost definitely room for efficiency in that structure.
Rather than dedicating the full bare hardware to your App, you deploy as a VM in your Virtual Datacenter ( mini cloud ). The DCOS takes care of managing the resources, things like:
- Moving your server VM from compute node to compute node to automatically balance load and optimize performance, - Move VMs to work around failures, allow hardware upgrades, etc. without downtime. - Expand capacity by dropping another compute node into the cloud (the big difference between the old mainframe world and the new DCOS. This scales easily with cheap powerful nodes) - Move the machine images around your storage infrastructure, to allow for management, maintenance, upgrade, expansion, etc. - Provide recovery and even fault tolerance of hardware. Servers can automatically move and re-start on hardware failure; or they can even run in lockstep to maintain full operation through a node failure.
This is VMware's big lead (and big need to leverage, as the revenue from the hypervisor layer dries up). They provide the management layer that enables all the above, and they keep improving it. From a central GUI, I can manage all my VMs, manage the compute resources as a cluster.
> Xen is a paravirtualization technology, whereas VMWare is a straight-up virtualization technology.
That may have been true at some point. But, Xen has long ago supported full hardware virtualization (allowing it to run an unmodified OS, such as Windows). And, VMware now supports paravirtualization via "VMI" which they got included in the standard Linux kernel.
In any case, the more important issue is their management capabilities. Xen has struggled in the past because its management was weak compared to VMware. If Sun can put their resources into improving the management side of things, they could make an impact.
XvMC - Linux equivalent of DxVA, MPEG2 offload to GPU. Works for some, but is troublesome for many. Setup, smooth output, and reliability are questions. Supported by NVidia. Intel has always had minimal support (MC offload) but recently has been working on a full XvMC implementation (which I haven't used yet, so can't comment on the quality).
VAAPI - Intel led project to produce a better video acceleration API. Addresses MPEG4/H.264 as well as MPEG2, and allows for more flexibility in offloading more to the GPU. Has been in progress for 1 year+. No apps that I know of have implemented VAAPI support (the Myth developers seemed fairly hostile to the concept). Intel integrated GPUs can/do support this.
GLSL / GPU computing offload - There is a lot of talk about using GLSL or similar model for offloading the video decoding compute load to the GPU. But, as far as I know, there are no open source implementations. This could allow very broad/flexible implementations, requiring only OpenGL 2.0. Older GPUs, and many embedded GPUs, would not be able to support this.
Other options? - MyHD ATSC/QAM receiver with hardware decoder. A project to write a driver was started, but never reached a usable level. - MPEG2/4/H.264 offload cards. Some exist and have Linux drivers, but either the driver or the actual card is hard to get as an end user.
There is always software decoding. Recent CPUs can easily handle MPEG2 HD decoding. But, it still takes a large percentage of system resources, and can be subject to poor playback from other things running on the system.
I'm a long time Unix/Linux user. I used to run Linux on my desktop, till I switched to Mac OS X, and in general have been pretty critical of MS.
But, I must admit that I really like the MS "Sync" system in my new car. Basically it provides a voice controlled interface to my music on my iPod and bluetooth phone integration for hands free calling.
The voice recognition does a good job of interpreting my music selections, such as "Play Track Exhuming McCarthy" or "Play Artist Michael Hedges". Cell integration is quite nice too. It syncs with my phone's address book, and I can tell it "Call Sonya Porter on Cell".
I also use a microsoft mouse.. so, let's just throw Sync in the hardware category to not break the standard rule to avoid MS software.
In the '06 elections, the Democrats won overwhelmingly, taking back control of both houses of Congress. Many of us had high expectations after that.. I mean the public sentiment was about as obvious as it could ever be.
But, what the hell have they brought us? Certainly no meaningful change on the war effort. And no backbone when it comes to any of the tough issues. When the issues get difficult, they fold like lawnchairs.
The summary, claiming linux drivers on par with Windows seems to be overstating it a bit. From what I can see, there is still no sign of being able to use all the video acceleration capabilities of their cards.
So, what else are they offering? I guess it must be full 3D acceleration capabilities. That's great for all those linux 3D games, but what I want is a card that will offload decoding of high definition MPEG2 and H.264 decoding.
Their hardware supports it, but still no signs of Linux support.
I guess if VAAPI ever matures, along with improved Linux driver support, the Intel integrated video will be better than anything ATI or even Nvidia can offer for Linux.
I guess I was part of the problem. I watched a good portion of it, at least the first nine holes until it switched to NBC coverage where my MythTV DVR could record it (the first half was on ESPN, and I don't get cable).
I was surprised at how good the video looked. I have tried several other events in the past, and have always been disappointed, or completely unable to view it. Although, for the NCAA Final Four this year, I was finally able to actually watch a game after failing the last few years. I had to use Win2K within a VMware VM, but it did work.
The U.S. Open video worked directly from my Mac, had decent sized video, and was completely watchable on my laptop. Nice job USGA, NBC, etc.
That was the argument for why Bush was an acceptable President. "It doesn't matter that he has no foreign policy knowledge, is not intelligent, and cannot string two sentences together. As long as he has good advisors, everything will be fine."
We see how that turned out.
Having excellent advisors is an absolute requirement. It is necessary, but not sufficient, for a good presidency. You definitely need someone at the top who is able to digest all the inputs and provide the guidance and accountability.
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I'm in the same position.. I tried XBMC / Plex / Boxee as "the one true frontend". But, had no end of problems getting MythTV working with it. I got tantalizing glimpses of it working well, but it never stayed working.
I also have been using a Mac Mini as an HTPC that can do most everything I need between Front Row / iTunes, Plex/Boxee, and MythTV Frontend. It works passably well. But, I ran into too many oddities with the Mac OS X version of MythFrontend (others claim it's rock solid for them, so YMMV).
I ended up using an HDMI switching tuner and a Harmony remote, to easily switch back and forth between my Mac HTPC which does a lot of things, and a small Linux box as my MythTV frontend. I used an Acer AspireRevo running MythBuntu for the myth frontend. It has an nvidia GPU which supports VDPAU video acceleration. Video playback is rock solid, but I don't do anything else on that box (I made a couple attempts to get XBMC running on it, but it didn't go well).
A friend of mine installed Linux on his parents computer, and put an end to the corruption/rebuild cycle. Of course, I think a large part of why this helped was that his parents only understood how to do the basics - read e-mail, browse the web, play music. They couldn't install new apps.
For my parents, I didn't think they would put up with "lock down" mode. So, I set them up with an iMac, and it has been great so far. I can ssh in to the system and look around, like Linux. That helps some support issues. For others, remote desktop works well. But, I have not had to deal with any malware, system corruption, or complete re-installs since moving to Mac. (Why that is, I don't really care.. maybe someday we'll have virus issues. For now, all I care is that it is not a problem)
> Wow, you MS apologists just don't quit, do you?
>
>Here's the thing: If it was exclusive then what caused the exclusivity to change?
It's typically specified in the contract. MS probably demanded a period of exclusivity in exchange for the development/integration/distribution of making Netflix streaming available to their huge installed base of users. Netflix wanted to retain the flexibility to partner with anyone they wanted. So, they negotiated a mutually agreeable term of exclusivity.
This is very common in the software industry.
For those of us that use Windows in a VM on our primary Linux or Mac OS X desktop, what is the best OS?
For a long time, I stuck with my good old Win2K VM. But, too many apps were not supported on Win2K, so I moved to XP.
There was clearly no reason to go to Vista from XP. But, how about now with Win7? Any advantages to Win7 for basic VM use, office apps & IT tools?
This looks like a great device to replace my old WRV54G router (which has hardware IPSec support). When I bought the WRV54G, there were a couple projects to create an linux firmware, but none ever panned out.
Do any of the OSS firmware options support IPSec? I know it won't be fast on an embedded processor like are in these routers. But, it should be okay for a home router.
They declared bankruptcy.. the company failed and went into bankruptcy protection in an attempt to salvage something.
Their shareholders (owners) lost billions of dollars, and the GM of old is no more.
Yes, it's important to recognize the responsibilities of old-GM that are not being addressed now that they are gone. But, this should not be surprising, and it's not that unusual either.
The functional equivalent of the smartphone remote control has existed for a decade or so. The Phiips Pronto remote control is a touch screen, fully programmable, completely optimize for its job, remote control. It had a GUI editor for configuring the screens, built-in IR emitter, etc.
And yet, other universal remotes have been created and flourished. The touch screen sucks for remote controls. You don't want to look at the device to figure out the context and button layout every time you use it. You just want to feel the button layout and hit what you need.
I replaced me Pronto with a cheap Radio Shack remote control (and some hack-ish software to reprogram it). You can get nearly the same effect for a bit more $$ with the Harmony remote. Although, I think the Radio Shack "JP1" remotes are even better when programmed well - minimal buttons completely optimized for the user's environment.
Virtualization gives an easier way to accomplish this (with the caveat of needing a platform able to host the virtualized platform).
You can easily snapshot systems, and have an OS image for each x years rather than a complete new platform each time. Doing this today, you could easily produce snapshots from DOS days up until current systems.
VMware would be easier to create all this with. But, open source Xen would probably be the better choice to ensure future availability.
Does it have a mini adapter to an external video output?
A tiny device like this would be great to use as an HD Media Player, and also be usable as a portable device if needed.
If it supported Intel's VAAPI, it could probably decode HD content.. certainly MPEG2 HD content. Other similar devices with NVidia GPUs could also be excellent options. Their new video decoding API seems great - MythTV has support for it in the dev builds.
I made the mistake of buying Quicken when I moved from Linux to mac a few years ago. It sucked. I won't buy from intuit again until there is feature parity.
The free options don't meet my needs, I want more investment tracking. So I'll stick with my spreadsheet for now.
There are several options for the combo box the post asks about.. Maybe not the ultimate box that will play everything, but there are several that will do multiple sources. What I use is a Mac Mini (Core Duo), to play several types of content:
- DVD's (the new full screen DVD and Front Row in Leopard are nice DVD viewing options).
- Movies, TV, and Music via iTunes.
- Broadcast HDTV via MythTV (running backend and frontend on my Mini running OSX)
- Netflix streaming movies via their Silverlight plugin
- Various video file formats via Front Row.
- There are various other video streaming services available, I don't use any of them at this point.
- Occasional special webcasts - like the NCAA basketball tournament early round games.
It's hard to beat the flexibility of an HTPC. I think the Mac Front Row interface + all the other options is hard to beat. Especially considering the small size of the device, quiet operation, built-in remote control functionality, etc..
Areas for improvement:
- Blue Ray DVD drive would be nice.
- Better Netflix streaming. Silverlight is okay, but could be better.
- Blockbuster, or other video streaming support.
I have been trying the Mac/Silverlight version, and found the quality to be a bit lacking.
I had been considering buying one of the LG Blueray DVD players, in large part because it supports Netflix streaming.
Has anyone compared both viewing methods? Can I expect better quality via the hardware decoder (LG player or Netflix's Roku box)?
It's nice to have the option for more content on my Mac Mini HTPC. I primarily use it for Broadcast HDTV via MythTV and DVDs from Netflix. So, this give a whole new source of content.
I have been using it for a few days, with mixed results.
- The quality is not great, and can vary widely. It seems to adapt to your internet connection speed. So, I think my Comcast "Burst then throttle" service screws it up. I often get the message saying needs to re-buffer.
- It's completely browser based. So, no integration with MythTV or FrontRow. No remote control, etc. I hope even the browser based version can be improved (e.g. flexible bookmarking).
I watched a documentary on it, Street Fight, and while the quality was not great (viewing on a 720p projector) for a documentary this was not a big problem. I also watched Tin Cup, and found it to be acceptable. But, I tried a couple movies with more action, and found the compression breaks down under a lot of movement.
Nothing I have seen from VMware (including walking through their booth at VMworld last week and getting a demo of it) was anything like what you are describing.
What they announced and were showing at VMworld was the next generation of their VMware Infrastructure. It added new features, like VM Fault Tolerance and distributed vSwitch, but did not change what runs in a VM.
ESX / ESXi is the compute node, vCenter (formerly VirtualCenter) is the management layer.
I'm not sure if you're talking about the hypervisor OS, or what.. Yes, ESXi is a very thin OS, but the servers / applications run in a VM which needs a standard OS. This is VMware's "Virtual Appliance" concept. The OS should be a really minimal stripped down build, usually Linux based, but it is a real OS.
The VDC-OS is just the underlying ESXi thin hypervisor, with VirtualCenter managing the resources. This is what VMware has been doing for quite a while now, the new name is partly some new features, and partly just a re-branding/positioning of their existing technology against some growing threats.
They are not replacing Linux. You still run your what you want on Linux, but do you run everything on ONE Linux box? If yes, you're not a good candidate for a Datacenter OS. If you run many servers, then there is almost definitely room for efficiency in that structure.
Rather than dedicating the full bare hardware to your App, you deploy as a VM in your Virtual Datacenter ( mini cloud ). The DCOS takes care of managing the resources, things like:
- Moving your server VM from compute node to compute node to automatically balance load and optimize performance,
- Move VMs to work around failures, allow hardware upgrades, etc. without downtime.
- Expand capacity by dropping another compute node into the cloud (the big difference between the old mainframe world and the new DCOS. This scales easily with cheap powerful nodes)
- Move the machine images around your storage infrastructure, to allow for management, maintenance, upgrade, expansion, etc.
- Provide recovery and even fault tolerance of hardware. Servers can automatically move and re-start on hardware failure; or they can even run in lockstep to maintain full operation through a node failure.
This is VMware's big lead (and big need to leverage, as the revenue from the hypervisor layer dries up). They provide the management layer that enables all the above, and they keep improving it. From a central GUI, I can manage all my VMs, manage the compute resources as a cluster.
> Xen is a paravirtualization technology, whereas VMWare is a straight-up virtualization technology.
That may have been true at some point. But, Xen has long ago supported full hardware virtualization (allowing it to run an unmodified OS, such as Windows). And, VMware now supports paravirtualization via "VMI" which they got included in the standard Linux kernel.
In any case, the more important issue is their management capabilities. Xen has struggled in the past because its management was weak compared to VMware. If Sun can put their resources into improving the management side of things, they could make an impact.
Linux Hardware Accell:
XvMC - Linux equivalent of DxVA, MPEG2 offload to GPU. Works for some, but is troublesome for many. Setup, smooth output, and reliability are questions. Supported by NVidia. Intel has always had minimal support (MC offload) but recently has been working on a full XvMC implementation (which I haven't used yet, so can't comment on the quality).
VAAPI - Intel led project to produce a better video acceleration API. Addresses MPEG4/H.264 as well as MPEG2, and allows for more flexibility in offloading more to the GPU. Has been in progress for 1 year+. No apps that I know of have implemented VAAPI support (the Myth developers seemed fairly hostile to the concept). Intel integrated GPUs can/do support this.
GLSL / GPU computing offload - There is a lot of talk about using GLSL or similar model for offloading the video decoding compute load to the GPU. But, as far as I know, there are no open source implementations. This could allow very broad/flexible implementations, requiring only OpenGL 2.0. Older GPUs, and many embedded GPUs, would not be able to support this.
Other options?
- MyHD ATSC/QAM receiver with hardware decoder. A project to write a driver was started, but never reached a usable level.
- MPEG2/4/H.264 offload cards. Some exist and have Linux drivers, but either the driver or the actual card is hard to get as an end user.
There is always software decoding. Recent CPUs can easily handle MPEG2 HD decoding. But, it still takes a large percentage of system resources, and can be subject to poor playback from other things running on the system.
I'm a long time Unix/Linux user. I used to run Linux on my desktop, till I switched to Mac OS X, and in general have been pretty critical of MS.
But, I must admit that I really like the MS "Sync" system in my new car. Basically it provides a voice controlled interface to my music on my iPod and bluetooth phone integration for hands free calling.
The voice recognition does a good job of interpreting my music selections, such as "Play Track Exhuming McCarthy" or "Play Artist Michael Hedges". Cell integration is quite nice too. It syncs with my phone's address book, and I can tell it "Call Sonya Porter on Cell".
I also use a microsoft mouse.. so, let's just throw Sync in the hardware category to not break the standard rule to avoid MS software.
In the '06 elections, the Democrats won overwhelmingly, taking back control of both houses of Congress. Many of us had high expectations after that.. I mean the public sentiment was about as obvious as it could ever be.
But, what the hell have they brought us? Certainly no meaningful change on the war effort. And no backbone when it comes to any of the tough issues. When the issues get difficult, they fold like lawnchairs.
What a broken system we have.
The summary, claiming linux drivers on par with Windows seems to be overstating it a bit. From what I can see, there is still no sign of being able to use all the video acceleration capabilities of their cards.
So, what else are they offering? I guess it must be full 3D acceleration capabilities. That's great for all those linux 3D games, but what I want is a card that will offload decoding of high definition MPEG2 and H.264 decoding.
Their hardware supports it, but still no signs of Linux support.
I guess if VAAPI ever matures, along with improved Linux driver support, the Intel integrated video will be better than anything ATI or even Nvidia can offer for Linux.
I guess I was part of the problem. I watched a good portion of it, at least the first nine holes until it switched to NBC coverage where my MythTV DVR could record it (the first half was on ESPN, and I don't get cable).
I was surprised at how good the video looked. I have tried several other events in the past, and have always been disappointed, or completely unable to view it. Although, for the NCAA Final Four this year, I was finally able to actually watch a game after failing the last few years. I had to use Win2K within a VMware VM, but it did work.
The U.S. Open video worked directly from my Mac, had decent sized video, and was completely watchable on my laptop. Nice job USGA, NBC, etc.
Download Mac OS X Version
IPSec is built into Mac OS X. It's a bit clunky to use it manually (though possible).
But, there are a few other options.
One Free VPN GUI: http://www.lobotomo.com/products/IPSecuritas/
And one that costs a bit:
http://www.equinux.com/us/products/vpntracker/index.html
another one that I haven't tried:
http://www.nexumoja.org/projects/Shimo/
That was the argument for why Bush was an acceptable President. "It doesn't matter that he has no foreign policy knowledge, is not intelligent, and cannot string two sentences together. As long as he has good advisors, everything will be fine."
We see how that turned out.
Having excellent advisors is an absolute requirement. It is necessary, but not sufficient, for a good presidency. You definitely need someone at the top who is able to digest all the inputs and provide the guidance and accountability.