I have terrestrial digital right now, and while the quality is good, there are a number of issues. 1) I live in a ground floor flat and when certain cars drive past or have the engine running, there is so much interference that I may as well be watching tv through Realplayer ! (buffering, buffering). Obviously its a suppressor problem on those particular cars, which is actually illegal here in the UK, but I am not prepared to call the authorities every time it happens (every 5 minutes) 2)I have to retune almost every day to two days because as they add more channels (or placeholders), the existing ones lose power and I can't get a signal. The most recent example of this was the day of the German Grand Prix. I spent 3 hours trying to tune the receiver, but at a power level below 30 % it wasn't gonna happen. I had to spend the next day at work with my fingers in my ears while I dloaded a rip using BT. 3)while a lot of the programming is done in wide screen, not all of it is, so you get wild screen switching when they go to the ads then wild switching again when the program comes back. Either that or put up with a significantly smaller picture surrounded by black bars.
So bear in mind this digital tv ain't as bright as its painted.
Re:That's just ridiculous
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P2P and TV
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· Score: 1
If you have made the idea/invention public but then choose not to profit from it, then withhold it from the rest of us for no readily apparent reason you would be a really tight-assed bastard. Take your fuckin' ball and go home then, see who cares. If you invent something but don't want to see it used then DON'T TELL ANYBODY !
Because after all, we all know that before the WWW ad boom of 2000, there was no content on the web.
Oh wait - I think I have that backwards - there was *better* content on the web *before* the major corperations and their ads came on.
Exactly right. It was the ads and the uptake of the net by big business that caused so much boom and bust in the industry. Personally, I would be glad if all the ads disappeared tomorrow. As for the cost of bandwidth etc, bollox ! Hosting pre-requisites are cheaper than they have ever been. If people need so many ads to support their crappy little sites then they don't really belong on the net in the first place. This is a place for the enthusiast to create, and everybody to enjoy, not a private corporate cash-cow, or a place where every git with a copy of FP can make their fortune. Bah ! I used to rent out webspace for fun and profit, but as the prices kept falling, it became more of a pain in the neck to keep things sweet and still make any money. So now I host a few sites on colo servers for friends and mirror for worthycauses, and charge nobody anything. Bandwidth is pretty cheap these days and I average just under 1000 GB per month, which is less than 50% of my allotment. No ads are needed to pay for any of this. I'm tired of going to some blog site and getting adverts thrust at me, and I'll even include Google ads in that. The only people really benefitting from Google ads are Google, through the impression counts.
sure it's easy for computer people... for home users, it'll take a LOT longer to explain "directories" than just a file/folder comparison and a file cabinet. Easy simple stuff you take for granted will often confuse the begeezis out of regular people.
Yeah right, like, pick up the phone book for your town, and look in it for a number. then pick up the book for a different town and look for a different number. Thats got to be really hard to grasp. I hate the term 'folder'. It has nothing to do with what is really going on. Directory is correct because thats what it is : a listing of entries with something in common (to the owner of the entries) to be found in one place. Plus the items don't have to be moved if you move their entries to a different directory. Much like a dbase system in fact. and so the wheel turns, and the new boys give it a name and pretend they invented a revolutionary new way of doing things. Not to mention that the 'folder' is only useful as a description in a GUI environment.
Exactly. I don't mind admitting to using BT for "illegal" purposes, but as I don't buy dvds, go to the cinema, or listen to the latest pap on the radio anyway, I don't see any problem. I have trouble reconciling working hard for a living myself, while some twat fronted by a Media Empire gets more money than they will _ever_ need, for singing something that is composed (wrong term really) of the same riffs, words and instruments that I was listening to 20 years ago. F*** You ! Meanwhile, things that are still quality items from the "old" days are either unavailable, or just as expensive as the new shite. I hoard now, because one day they will try to destroy it all rather than hand it over to us, the true owners. There will be no archaeological sites for future civilisations to explore, because all our popular art "stuff" is electronic, so maybe a few ripped dvds will survive to show the future what crap we had to put up with. Call me a thief if you like, but if you find something on the street, say like a plastic disposable cigarette lighter, is it responsible to track the owner down, or do you just keep/bin it ? Modern "art" is disposable by nature, so sue me if I want to keep it for my own enjoyment.
It was probably because the stock levels were reflecting interest in the product, so the same item might take longer for a later "browser". I've frequently been in the process of ordering some pc parts when at the final stage of checkout, 1 or 2 items have suddenly become out of stock. Generally, if I leave it an hour, they will come back into stock, because someone else has deleted items from their cart. Basically one of your browsers was at the front of a queue, and after deleting the cookies (hence the cart/interest in the product) you joined the back like everyone else.
You just bought a CRT as an HDTV ? How big is that then ? I debated for months over a 19" LCD or bigger ( I use the monitor for tv / dvd ) and eventually bought a 19" CRT for computer _work_ (runs at 1600x1200) and payed out for an X2 projector for the tv stuff. Much better. Instead of 19" flat screen, I have 84" flat screen. Ok, its only good for 1028x768 max res, but for tv purposes, its the dogs. Price wise, at the time I bought, a decent 19" LCD was around £350 ($650 - $700) and the CRT was £120 ($200 - $240). The X2 cost around £550, but as regards inches per £/$ it's unbeatable. (Plus it has a max diagonal of over 21' !)
I prefer to think of it as a subscription that gets you four TV channels, seven or eight top quality national radio stations, local radio stations, a stupendously good news media organization, and high-quality production values and no advertising.
Fine, if it was a voluntary subscription, which is isn't. Every program the BBC makes ends up on satellite, for which you pay a subscription. Don't pretend that the BBC don't charge the satellite providers for the content either.
I think the BBC should be provided for like all the rest, i.e. they get their money from people who choose to subscribe. Using the government to force people to support a commercial service is too much.
... because, although the rational basis for science is correct, there is ultimately (or currently at least) no absolute proof of where all _this_ came from.
I could ramble on about a tv programme I saw once, which started off in space flying faster and faster through galaxies and solar systems, before eventually picking a planet and diving down into the atmosphere, then down down until we "flew"into a persons hand then plunged through the skin and into the blood and then into the cells..... The visual similarity between galactic space and atoms and molecules was striking to me even then (around age 8 or 9 ) Anyway, I won't ramble too much on that. But here's a thought. When, some time in the future, we create a self aware "being", AI, or whatever you call it, will that be a result of evolution, or of creation ?
And if it's the latter, why can't it have happened before ?
The whole thing about quantum data transmission is that if the signal is intercepted, then the sender knows _instantly_. How would your "man in the middle" get around that ?
Slightly OT but anyway, It always amuses me to see you guys bitching about gas being expensive in the US. You should come to the UK where we are paying minimum of £3.70 / gallon thats currently just over $7 a gallon. When you catch up with us (and you will) you won't be able to afford netflix/blockbuster or pretty much anything else.
Also, there are a lot of runways that have lakes or the sea at the end of them. So if your plane fails to stop on the runway, it is most likely to end up wet. BTW crash pics have been available here for years (seems to be pop up infested these days though)
I get to see lots of bad/stupid driving everyday, all day. People take their driving test, then just do what they want when they've passed. The instructors don't even seem to correct bad behaviour when they are training people. It seems that automatic "cars" as portrayed in Minority Report or I Robot will be the only way to go if the number of vehicles is allowed to grow unchecked. I am all in favour of an inbuilt electronic system much like the Tachographs we have in large goods vehicles in Europe. It would have to be electronic for car use, because you wouldn't be able to trust the average car driver to change the paper disks every day. For those who don't know, tachographs record speed against time and also rest periods. So if the vehicle has moved, that fact is recorded. In an electronic version, the device would record speed in much the same way, but would be impervious to user intervention. That way, if there were an accident, the device could be read via a scanner and report the actual conditions at the time of the crash. Also, it would require the driver to assume responsibility for the way they drive, which is something that seems to have been forgotten. Any time law enforcement had occasion to stop a vehicle, they would be able to see the recent driving history of that vehicle and prosecute infringments as neccessary. This is not big brother, this is common sense. No location details need to be recorded. Combined with sensors on the steering wheel to determine blood alcohol levels (which would disable the car if you were over the limit) a system like this would require people to pay attention to what they were doing while driving. The car these days is no longer simply a transportation device, it has become a fashion item / portable entertainment system, and the skill of the drivers has decreased as a result. Most people I see have difficulty reversing, staying in a designated lane or even steering ! I can always tell when some people have accelerated, because the car veers to the right ?! There was a funny experiment shown on tv recently, where, on a perfectly straight piece of road, they painted a "wiggle" in the white centre lane markings. Then they filmed the results. Most of the cars driving past actually swerved to follow the line of the "wiggle" ! In brief, if people are going to reject public transport (where the driver is more highly qualified) then they must be forced into compliance. The car is not a toy, it is a machine, and a large, heavy, deadly one at that. Links: Representative image of a used tacho disk Digital tachograph system
This idea is obvious in retrospect, as all really useful ideas are. Its basically a modification of the normal behaviour to take into account recent changes in WiFi usage. Instead of intensively hunting for a new AP when the signal has nearly died, the system checks more regularly, but much less intensively, so that it is ready to switch at a moments notice. I hope they get paid for this. Of course, this will only work for APs that you have legitimate access to, so if you come within reach of a restricted AP (on a different net maybe) then it can't handover to that, so "roaming" is perhaps too strong a word.
I am a smoker.... My Pioneer 107D burner died last week after only around 9 months of use. The dvd disks would get loaded, and then the drive would light up and thrash for about 5 minutes. Eventually it would give up and the disk wouldn't get read. I have a hard time believing this is due to any smoking induced effect because: a) I don't purposely blow smoke into the drive when its open, and its not in line of me when I'm working. Tar doesn't get "everywhere", as looking behind shelf units or pictures will show. b) The drive would still read cds ! Unless the tar is magically atracted just to one lense/laser then it can't be responsible for the drives failure. As I rarely use cds anymore, I had to get a new drive (NEC ND-3520A 16x DVD R/RW Dual Layer - £36.00) I think the drives aren't intended to last that long, hence the low(ish) prices. The Pioneer only cost around £40.00 9 months ago.
Aah, but thats the problem. They are getting education. It's just bad education. Here's a quote from a site I stumbled across:
Sexual reproduction could not have developed over millions of years because the male and female must develop simultaneously in the same location in less than fifty years for humans and in a week for fruit flies.
This impossible coincidence must be repeated in every species. Millions of them.
Can you believe that this is designed to "educate" ? Another quote:
The epiglottis is a flap of cartilage that covers the trachea when we swallow and stops food from entering the lungs. If evolution occurred, then our ancestors would have choked on their food for several thousand years until they realized that they should evolve a flap to protect the wind pipe. It sounds ridiculous. A baby would have choked to death.
Study any system in the body and you will realize that it would not function if it had to wait millions of years for the necessary part to evolve.
I hate to mix my metphors here, but JESUZZZZ CHRIST !! Does any real "creationist" agree or approve of this bullsh1t ? For more fun and creative science, check out this site.
I think I did try videoredo, and the MPEG2vcr by womble was the software I mentioned in my post. The audio synch problem was such that, if I removed the first set of ads from a 2 hour program, then the sound would be around 1 second out of synch. If I then removed the second set of ads (at around 30 minutes into the program) the sound would go around 1.5 seconds out from that point. And so on through the whole program. What was interesting was that this problem wasn't consistent. Some programs I could edit fine, and others were absolute pigs. I really would prefer straight to avi recording rather than on the fly compression, and get back the control I used to have. Ok, it takes up more space, but I have a 200GB SATA drive sat here so thats no problem.
I have a Hauppauge Nova USB -T which does digital terrestrial (in the UK at least). It has PVR functions and pause of live tv etc. The only problem I have found is it sucks ! Getting it to work under linux is almost impossible, as it uses a different chipset to the standard analogue devices. As such, it is relegated to use on a Windows machine only. the supplied software *requires* both IE5 and WinDVD 4 to be installed for the tv to work at all. Removing ads is an exercise in futility, because, as the card records straight to mpeg2, if you take out the ads, then you have to resynch all the following recording. This is a problem that gets worse as the recording length increases. Also, as I am running this on an old win98se box, I am limited to 4GB filesize. I can live with that as it has automatic file splitting, except, that when I try to use the separate pieces of the recording in software such as TMPGEnc DVD Author, I can't ! Only the first section of the file is recognised, and the rest is refused as being out of spec. Strangely, if I use another piece of software ( Womble mpeg editor IIRC ) to open and then save the same "out of spec" files (that's all, just open then save), TMPGEnc suddenly recognises the files ok.
Add to this the occasional IE "page not found" error in the TV interface (no, I'm not kidding), and you get an idea of the shite this program represents. I did buy a PVR 350 originally, but it didn't work, so I RMA'd it and got this instead....foool. I will be getting another PVR 350 as soon as funds allow, then I'll have to get a set top box for the digital broadcasts and feed that into the 350. A large part of the decision to get the Nova-t was the fact that the uk authorities are going to start turning off analogue tv broadcasts as early as 2006, ie, next year, but if I can get a set top box feeding into the 350 then thats what I'll do.
The original Hitchhikers was the radio series on BBC Radio 4. I still have the tapes taken from those series. Then came the books, which, when I read them, I found disapointing as they bore little resemblance to the original. Then came the BBC TV series, which was mind-numbingly bad. To expect a movie made all this time later to bear any resemblance to the the original series, or in fact any of the future adapatations is unrealistic, to say the least. I won't be watching it unless it gets rave reviews, which is unlikely. I put off watching LOTR for 5 years as I didn't want to ruin a perfectly good mental image, but that was actually pretty well done. It doesn't sound as if the same can be said for this.
I signed up for the mailing list of my local area LUG (Linux Users Group), basically because I like sharing problems and solutions amongst like minded people. Mailing lists have always been educational and useful to me, especially when dealing with specific hardware issues etc. The best one I can remember was the old Cobalt RAQ list, which was nearly essential as the hardware became obsolete, and the OS was customised for the hardware. Anyway, back to the LUG.... It soon became clear that this particular group was entirely focussed on a) Debian and b) the list maintainer. If it wasn't debian and he didn't like/understand/care about the problem/subject , then it wasn't worth a sensible response. It was however worth the odd flame. For example, one poster asked how to remove old kernels from a redhat install, as he had about 6 still living on the hard drive. No response from anyone. Except me of course, having been familiar with rpm since the beginning of my linuxship. Another example of the bad attitude came from someone who kept using FUD but had no idea what the term meant. When I pointed out her error, she claimed it was "her opinion" and so was valid, even though she obviously never even followed the explanatory links I posted on the subject. There was also a tendency to try and "promote" linux use to the wider population even to the extent of making it seem more geeky than it actually is. I'm all for linux being publically visible, but ramming it down peoples throats is counter productive. The best users of any system are those who come to the subject of their own accord, and have to work through their own issues but know what they want. Most of the general Windows owning public just want to get things done, and they don't care how the underlying OS works. The 2 things that finally caused me to cancel the mailing list subscription, were a) they had a "discussion" about renaming the group to GLUG because of the fact that most of the software is GNU and linux is just the kernel. While this may be true, the only people who care are really nit-picking , and it would be irrelevant to newbies. Plus even though the debate ended about 50-50 the list still got its name changed (guess which side the list maintainer was on !) b) I wrote a post concerning recent new adsl offerings by BT (UK) and compared these to other offerings available in our area. This was basically flamed and its title was renamed to [Offtopic] $title. Fair enough, but when the day before, some geek post links to pictures of his deconstructed computer, bits hanging off walls and in drawers while it was still running, the title remained unchanged, even though one of the pictures showed it was running Outlook ! All in all, their elite, university educated snobbery and "superiority" got right up my nose. So I quietly left the scene and carried on with my own life. God help any newbies who want help on anything other than debian, or who might have their own opinion. I am quite happily still running RHE on my servers and have FC3 purring along on a box that, by using a combination of Apache, MySQL and VLC I provide a visual movie menu, in which, by clicking a movie entry (covershot), that movie is streamed (xvid) to the rest of the lan and out though a projector. I also run Win98se, XP on a laptop, RH9 on a workstation, and have about 15 live cds of various distros sat on my desk. I even have a FreeBSD server on my LAN, so I am not biased in any particular direction, but I do appreciate different tools.
All in all, sometimes the message is more important than the messenger, so if you don't like one persons style of advocacy, it doesn't indicate anything negative about the thing they are advocating. This assumes you are capable of independent thought of course;-)
Slashdot Mirror
I have terrestrial digital right now, and while the quality is good, there are a number of issues.
1) I live in a ground floor flat and when certain cars drive past or have the engine running, there is so much interference that I may as well be watching tv through Realplayer ! (buffering, buffering). Obviously its a suppressor problem on those particular cars, which is actually illegal here in the UK, but I am not prepared to call the authorities every time it happens (every 5 minutes)
2)I have to retune almost every day to two days because as they add more channels (or placeholders), the existing ones lose power and I can't get a signal. The most recent example of this was the day of the German Grand Prix. I spent 3 hours trying to tune the receiver, but at a power level below 30 % it wasn't gonna happen. I had to spend the next day at work with my fingers in my ears while I dloaded a rip using BT.
3)while a lot of the programming is done in wide screen, not all of it is, so you get wild screen switching when they go to the ads then wild switching again when the program comes back. Either that or put up with a significantly smaller picture surrounded by black bars.
So bear in mind this digital tv ain't as bright as its painted.
If you have made the idea/invention public but then choose not to profit from it, then withhold it from the rest of us for no readily apparent reason you would be a really tight-assed bastard.
Take your fuckin' ball and go home then, see who cares.
If you invent something but don't want to see it used then DON'T TELL ANYBODY !
Long version (.mov) Long version (divx)
Short version (.mov) Short version (divx)
As for the cost of bandwidth etc, bollox !
Hosting pre-requisites are cheaper than they have ever been. If people need so many ads to support their crappy little sites then they don't really belong on the net in the first place. This is a place for the enthusiast to create, and everybody to enjoy, not a private corporate cash-cow, or a place where every git with a copy of FP can make their fortune.
Bah !
I used to rent out webspace for fun and profit, but as the prices kept falling, it became more of a pain in the neck to keep things sweet and still make any money. So now I host a few sites on colo servers for friends and mirror for worthy causes, and charge nobody anything. Bandwidth is pretty cheap these days and I average just under 1000 GB per month, which is less than 50% of my allotment. No ads are needed to pay for any of this. I'm tired of going to some blog site and getting adverts thrust at me, and I'll even include Google ads in that. The only people really benefitting from Google ads are Google, through the impression counts.
The four most expensive words in the English Language: "This Time It's Different"
Or in Michael Jacksons case : "fancy a sleepover, kids ?"
Thats got to be really hard to grasp.
I hate the term 'folder'. It has nothing to do with what is really going on. Directory is correct because thats what it is : a listing of entries with something in common (to the owner of the entries) to be found in one place. Plus the items don't have to be moved if you move their entries to a different directory. Much like a dbase system in fact.
and so the wheel turns, and the new boys give it a name and pretend they invented a revolutionary new way of doing things.
Not to mention that the 'folder' is only useful as a description in a GUI environment.
I don't mind admitting to using BT for "illegal" purposes, but as I don't buy dvds, go to the cinema, or listen to the latest pap on the radio anyway, I don't see any problem.
I have trouble reconciling working hard for a living myself, while some twat fronted by a Media Empire gets more money than they will _ever_ need, for singing something that is composed (wrong term really) of the same riffs, words and instruments that I was listening to 20 years ago.
F*** You !
Meanwhile, things that are still quality items from the "old" days are either unavailable, or just as expensive as the new shite. I hoard now, because one day they will try to destroy it all rather than hand it over to us, the true owners.
There will be no archaeological sites for future civilisations to explore, because all our popular art "stuff" is electronic, so maybe a few ripped dvds will survive to show the future what crap we had to put up with.
Call me a thief if you like, but if you find something on the street, say like a plastic disposable cigarette lighter, is it responsible to track the owner down, or do you just keep/bin it ?
Modern "art" is disposable by nature, so sue me if I want to keep it for my own enjoyment.And, no, I don't sell anything I dload.
It was probably because the stock levels were reflecting interest in the product, so the same item might take longer for a later "browser".
I've frequently been in the process of ordering some pc parts when at the final stage of checkout, 1 or 2 items have suddenly become out of stock. Generally, if I leave it an hour, they will come back into stock, because someone else has deleted items from their cart.
Basically one of your browsers was at the front of a queue, and after deleting the cookies (hence the cart/interest in the product) you joined the back like everyone else.
You just bought a CRT as an HDTV ? How big is that then ?
I debated for months over a 19" LCD or bigger ( I use the monitor for tv / dvd ) and eventually bought a 19" CRT for computer _work_ (runs at 1600x1200) and payed out for an X2 projector for the tv stuff. Much better.
Instead of 19" flat screen, I have 84" flat screen. Ok, its only good for 1028x768 max res, but for tv purposes, its the dogs. Price wise, at the time I bought, a decent 19" LCD was around £350 ($650 - $700) and the CRT was £120 ($200 - $240). The X2 cost around £550, but as regards inches per £/$ it's unbeatable.
(Plus it has a max diagonal of over 21' !)
Fine, if it was a voluntary subscription, which is isn't. Every program the BBC makes ends up on satellite, for which you pay a subscription.
Don't pretend that the BBC don't charge the satellite providers for the content either.
I think the BBC should be provided for like all the rest, i.e. they get their money from people who choose to subscribe. Using the government to force people to support a commercial service is too much.
Ask Hu ?
... because, although the rational basis for science is correct, there is ultimately (or currently at least) no absolute proof of where all _this_ came from.
I could ramble on about a tv programme I saw once, which started off in space flying faster and faster through galaxies and solar systems, before eventually picking a planet and diving down into the atmosphere, then down down until we "flew"into a persons hand then plunged through the skin and into the blood and then into the cells.....
The visual similarity between galactic space and atoms and molecules was striking to me even then (around age 8 or 9 )
Anyway, I won't ramble too much on that. But here's a thought.
When, some time in the future, we create a self aware "being", AI, or whatever you call it, will that be a result of evolution, or of creation ?
And if it's the latter, why can't it have happened before ?
The whole thing about quantum data transmission is that if the signal is intercepted, then the sender knows _instantly_.
How would your "man in the middle" get around that ?
Slightly OT but anyway,
It always amuses me to see you guys bitching about gas being expensive in the US. You should come to the UK where we are paying minimum of £3.70 / gallon thats currently just over $7 a gallon.
When you catch up with us (and you will) you won't be able to afford netflix/blockbuster or pretty much anything else.
Also, there are a lot of runways that have lakes or the sea at the end of them. So if your plane fails to stop on the runway, it is most likely to end up wet.
BTW crash pics have been available here for years (seems to be pop up infested these days though)
I get to see lots of bad/stupid driving everyday, all day. People take their driving test, then just do what they want when they've passed. The instructors don't even seem to correct bad behaviour when they are training people. It seems that automatic "cars" as portrayed in Minority Report or I Robot will be the only way to go if the number of vehicles is allowed to grow unchecked.
I am all in favour of an inbuilt electronic system much like the Tachographs we have in large goods vehicles in Europe. It would have to be electronic for car use, because you wouldn't be able to trust the average car driver to change the paper disks every day.
For those who don't know, tachographs record speed against time and also rest periods. So if the vehicle has moved, that fact is recorded. In an electronic version, the device would record speed in much the same way, but would be impervious to user intervention. That way, if there were an accident, the device could be read via a scanner and report the actual conditions at the time of the crash. Also, it would require the driver to assume responsibility for the way they drive, which is something that seems to have been forgotten. Any time law enforcement had occasion to stop a vehicle, they would be able to see the recent driving history of that vehicle and prosecute infringments as neccessary. This is not big brother, this is common sense. No location details need to be recorded. Combined with sensors on the steering wheel to determine blood alcohol levels (which would disable the car if you were over the limit) a system like this would require people to pay attention to what they were doing while driving.
The car these days is no longer simply a transportation device, it has become a fashion item / portable entertainment system, and the skill of the drivers has decreased as a result. Most people I see have difficulty reversing, staying in a designated lane or even steering ! I can always tell when some people have accelerated, because the car veers to the right ?!
There was a funny experiment shown on tv recently, where, on a perfectly straight piece of road, they painted a "wiggle" in the white centre lane markings. Then they filmed the results. Most of the cars driving past actually swerved to follow the line of the "wiggle" !
In brief, if people are going to reject public transport (where the driver is more highly qualified) then they must be forced into compliance. The car is not a toy, it is a machine, and a large, heavy, deadly one at that.
Links:
Representative image of a used tacho disk
Digital tachograph system
This idea is obvious in retrospect, as all really useful ideas are. Its basically a modification of the normal behaviour to take into account recent changes in WiFi usage. Instead of intensively hunting for a new AP when the signal has nearly died, the system checks more regularly, but much less intensively, so that it is ready to switch at a moments notice.
I hope they get paid for this.
Of course, this will only work for APs that you have legitimate access to, so if you come within reach of a restricted AP (on a different net maybe) then it can't handover to that, so "roaming" is perhaps too strong a word.
I am a smoker ....
My Pioneer 107D burner died last week after only around 9 months of use. The dvd disks would get loaded, and then the drive would light up and thrash for about 5 minutes. Eventually it would give up and the disk wouldn't get read.
I have a hard time believing this is due to any smoking induced effect because:
a) I don't purposely blow smoke into the drive when its open, and its not in line of me when I'm working. Tar doesn't get "everywhere", as looking behind shelf units or pictures will show.
b) The drive would still read cds ! Unless the tar is magically atracted just to one lense/laser then it can't be responsible for the drives failure.
As I rarely use cds anymore, I had to get a new drive (NEC ND-3520A 16x DVD R/RW Dual Layer - £36.00)
I think the drives aren't intended to last that long, hence the low(ish) prices. The Pioneer only cost around £40.00 9 months ago.
Here's a quote from a site I stumbled across
Can you believe that this is designed to "educate" ?
Another quote
I hate to mix my metphors here, but JESUZZZZ CHRIST !!
Does any real "creationist" agree or approve of this bullsh1t ?
For more fun and creative science, check out this site.
I think I did try videoredo, and the MPEG2vcr by womble was the software I mentioned in my post.
The audio synch problem was such that, if I removed the first set of ads from a 2 hour program, then the sound would be around 1 second out of synch. If I then removed the second set of ads (at around 30 minutes into the program) the sound would go around 1.5 seconds out from that point. And so on through the whole program. What was interesting was that this problem wasn't consistent. Some programs I could edit fine, and others were absolute pigs.
I really would prefer straight to avi recording rather than on the fly compression, and get back the control I used to have. Ok, it takes up more space, but I have a 200GB SATA drive sat here so thats no problem.
I have a Hauppauge Nova USB -T which does digital terrestrial (in the UK at least).
It has PVR functions and pause of live tv etc. The only problem I have found is it sucks !
Getting it to work under linux is almost impossible, as it uses a different chipset to the standard analogue devices. As such, it is relegated to use on a Windows machine only. the supplied software *requires* both IE5 and WinDVD 4 to be installed for the tv to work at all. Removing ads is an exercise in futility, because, as the card records straight to mpeg2, if you take out the ads, then you have to resynch all the following recording. This is a problem that gets worse as the recording length increases.
Also, as I am running this on an old win98se box, I am limited to 4GB filesize. I can live with that as it has automatic file splitting, except, that when I try to use the separate pieces of the recording in software such as TMPGEnc DVD Author, I can't ! Only the first section of the file is recognised, and the rest is refused as being out of spec. Strangely, if I use another piece of software ( Womble mpeg editor IIRC ) to open and then save the same "out of spec" files (that's all, just open then save), TMPGEnc suddenly recognises the files ok.
Add to this the occasional IE "page not found" error in the TV interface (no, I'm not kidding), and you get an idea of the shite this program represents.
I did buy a PVR 350 originally, but it didn't work, so I RMA'd it and got this instead....foool.
I will be getting another PVR 350 as soon as funds allow, then I'll have to get a set top box for the digital broadcasts and feed that into the 350.
A large part of the decision to get the Nova-t was the fact that the uk authorities are going to start turning off analogue tv broadcasts as early as 2006, ie, next year, but if I can get a set top box feeding into the 350 then thats what I'll do.
The original Hitchhikers was the radio series on BBC Radio 4. I still have the tapes taken from those series. Then came the books, which, when I read them, I found disapointing as they bore little resemblance to the original. Then came the BBC TV series, which was mind-numbingly bad.
To expect a movie made all this time later to bear any resemblance to the the original series, or in fact any of the future adapatations is unrealistic, to say the least.
I won't be watching it unless it gets rave reviews, which is unlikely.
I put off watching LOTR for 5 years as I didn't want to ruin a perfectly good mental image, but that was actually pretty well done. It doesn't sound as if the same can be said for this.
Here's a mirror of the flash file. Works best by downloading the file, then playing.
I signed up for the mailing list of my local area LUG (Linux Users Group), basically because I like sharing problems and solutions amongst like minded people. Mailing lists have always been educational and useful to me, especially when dealing with specific hardware issues etc. The best one I can remember was the old Cobalt RAQ list, which was nearly essential as the hardware became obsolete, and the OS was customised for the hardware.
;-)
Anyway, back to the LUG.... It soon became clear that this particular group was entirely focussed on a) Debian and b) the list maintainer. If it wasn't debian and he didn't like/understand/care about the problem/subject , then it wasn't worth a sensible response. It was however worth the odd flame.
For example, one poster asked how to remove old kernels from a redhat install, as he had about 6 still living on the hard drive. No response from anyone. Except me of course, having been familiar with rpm since the beginning of my linuxship.
Another example of the bad attitude came from someone who kept using FUD but had no idea what the term meant. When I pointed out her error, she claimed it was "her opinion" and so was valid, even though she obviously never even followed the explanatory links I posted on the subject.
There was also a tendency to try and "promote" linux use to the wider population even to the extent of making it seem more geeky than it actually is. I'm all for linux being publically visible, but ramming it down peoples throats is counter productive. The best users of any system are those who come to the subject of their own accord, and have to work through their own issues but know what they want. Most of the general Windows owning public just want to get things done, and they don't care how the underlying OS works.
The 2 things that finally caused me to cancel the mailing list subscription, were
a) they had a "discussion" about renaming the group to GLUG because of the fact that most of the software is GNU and linux is just the kernel. While this may be true, the only people who care are really nit-picking , and it would be irrelevant to newbies. Plus even though the debate ended about 50-50 the list still got its name changed (guess which side the list maintainer was on !)
b) I wrote a post concerning recent new adsl offerings by BT (UK) and compared these to other offerings available in our area. This was basically flamed and its title was renamed to [Offtopic] $title. Fair enough, but when the day before, some geek post links to pictures of his deconstructed computer, bits hanging off walls and in drawers while it was still running, the title remained unchanged, even though one of the pictures showed it was running Outlook !
All in all, their elite, university educated snobbery and "superiority" got right up my nose. So I quietly left the scene and carried on with my own life. God help any newbies who want help on anything other than debian, or who might have their own opinion.
I am quite happily still running RHE on my servers and have FC3 purring along on a box that, by using a combination of Apache, MySQL and VLC I provide a visual movie menu, in which, by clicking a movie entry (covershot), that movie is streamed (xvid) to the rest of the lan and out though a projector. I also run Win98se, XP on a laptop, RH9 on a workstation, and have about 15 live cds of various distros sat on my desk. I even have a FreeBSD server on my LAN, so I am not biased in any particular direction, but I do appreciate different tools.
All in all, sometimes the message is more important than the messenger, so if you don't like one persons style of advocacy, it doesn't indicate anything negative about the thing they are advocating. This assumes you are capable of independent thought of course
a disturbance in the force !