The parent is absolutely right in terms of the Behringer as a good, cheap solution.
Beware of Behringer gear. Yes, it is cheap. Yes, it is decent when it works. But the build quality is quite shoddy. It will do the job, but something will break or burn out fairly quickly. I was warned about this before I bought a mixer from them, but I figured that it would be in a fairly decently controlled location and not moved around. Barely two years later and it's already blown one channel strip and the headphone-out.
I highly doubt there's much difference between the line-in jack on your sound card and the stereo microphone jack.
Microphones need power, and the mic-in provides it. Line-level audio is powered by the device producing the signal. If you run a regular mic into a line input, you'll get a much lower signal. Likewise, if you run a line into a mic-in you'll get more signal than the circuit is designed to handle, and it will distort much more easily.
I haven't seen any evidence of any great conspiracy to eliminate line-in from computer audio -- every sound card I've ever bought has it and I've never paid more than around US$25 (except the M-Audio Delta 1010LT -- 10 line-in, 10-line out, ~$200), but there are plenty of really simple audio USB adapters for $10-$20 retail. I've got a couple that came included with music hardware but I've never used them.
As for cost, audio gear is a bit like wine -- there's a huge difference between a $2 bottle and a $10 bottle, a bit of difference between a $10 and $25 bottle, and only subtle differences between a $25 and $100 bottle.
And if you're the audio equivalent of a wine snob that thinks he/she can taste the difference between a $100 and $1,000 bottle, than I'm sure someone is willing to sell you an automagnetic bit-harmonizing inductive-conditioning audio conduit interface for the price of a small car.
Now, I appreciate that it's a non-profit organisation and all, but it's hard to turn something that's free into a failure.
Ask Jeeves? AltaVista? MSN? Geocities? The clock's ticking on MySpace. It's awfully easy to fail when you're free, and you don't even need a company to do so. Just have a look at all the abandoned projects at Sourceforge.
A better example of success would be to look at something where the users have to pay for the service they get. In that case, almost every internet project is a failure: Wiki [sic], Facebook, Google, Twitter.
You've got it backwards. The customers are the advertisers, and they're paying Google handsomely. Whether or not Facebook and Twitter can accomplish long-term profitability is another question. I suspect not, but I've been very wrong before. Wikipedia has achieved sustainability, and for a non-profit that equals success.
None of these have succeeded at directly extracting cash from their users. They all rely on either having an independently wealthy sponsor who doesn't mind losing a few $Bn or they push advertising in our faces and make their money from that.
By this measure, every non-premium television station is a failure, as is every terrestrial radio station. Yet there are more TV and radio stations now than there have ever been. Red Hat has somehow grown both its profits and its margins this year even though I've never paid them a dime for Fedora.
(1.) A moving target. Ubuntu has two large releases with complete ly different packages a year.
Ubuntu has a major release (LTS) every two years. Interim releases are every six months. Yes, it is a challenge to migrate from, say Feisty to Intrepid, since you're going from one interim release to another while skipping several, including an LTS release. But the move from Dapper to Hardy (LTS-to-LTS) was really quite smooth.
(2.) A deeply fractured target. Sure, let's say Linux actually does have 5% desktop marketshare. What is that, 60% Ubuntu, 30% Fedora, 10% everyone else?
Source is source is source, and as such can be made to compile on the platform of your choice. If it's a production environment, you would have it set up with the standard kit of tools, meaning every major app you'd want would compile, or more likely, would be available as a package via apt, rpm, yum, etc.
Share of specific distro doesn't really matter. Ethereal, for example, is available precompiled as an rpm for Red Hat and derivatives. This doesn't stop you from giving the rpm a go on a non-RH system, or just compiling.
It sure didn't stop me from compiling on Ubuntu.
The point is that beyond the toolset and underlying architecture (which already is standard), a 'standard' Linux distro is not just unnecessary but completely contrary to what the whole thing is about.
For specific reasons, I run Ubuntu on my netbook, CentOS on my Myth system, and Debian on my server at work. Yet the same applications work on all three.
Yet at work I still have to fire up DOSBox from time to time to access a legacy database system that simply does not work under XP's cmd.exe.
So keep thinking what you're thinking. The buggy-whip industry is sure to bounce back by early next year once the market figures out that slower, clunkier, more expensive, and inherently incompatible is really the better option.
Back in the real world, I work a a pretty small company that currently runs about a dozen MS Servers. I expect that within two years we'll be down to one or two, or none at all. I do not think we're alone.
What's interesting is that they don't note the origin of the word "robot," itself, which is most likely the Karel Chapek play "R.U.R" [wikipedia.org]. Robota means drudgery in Czech.
The term was most certainly coined by Karel Capek. The R.U.R is for Rossum's Universal Robots; the play is from 1921.
The word robota has a bit more complex meaning than just drudgery. It can generally mean any unpleasant physical task, but particularly where there's an obligation.
The term is medieval in origins, and describes the obligation of labor that peasants owed the landlord. Every household owed X days of robota every year, in addition to taxes, crop quotas, etc.
It is not robota, for example, to clean your kitchen or wax your car. It may be robota to mow your lawn, depending on how you feel about it.
It's definitely robota when you have to complete some substantial task for someone else, particularly when you know there are better ways of doing it but can't, for whatever reason, use any of them.
The play is really interesting, and the English translation is very good. The robots are machines, but they're basically humans without emotion.
Capek also wrote an excellent proto-dystopian novel called War With the Newts.
Newts has a lot of the same themes and ideals of RUR, but is a lot darker and a lot less positive about humanity in general. Not a surprising attitude for central Europe in 1936.
But I highly recommend reading him. He's an overlooked genius of the Modern period
there is no way in hell they are going to get much better quality than the Yugo. (Wrap your mind around that!)
Remember though that the Yugo was essentially Warsaw Pact manufacturing quality with Fiat parts. The Tata was engineered from the ground up.
Remember also that the Yugo was designed for Western markets, the Tata is not.
I'm not sure about all the concern around this thing selling in the US or EU. It's a car designed for Asian cities, and that in itself means a much larger potential market than the US.
The founders and heirs of Wal-Mart have made donations, just not as vocal about them. The bible teaches to give in secret. Can you verify to me your source for the.01% or did you just pull that out of the air.
Parent is not a troll, and GP did pull the 0.01% figure out of the air. The Walton family, are in fact major-league philanthropists. Who do you think is behind the Walton Arts Center? And that's just a drop in the bucket.
The Walton Family Foundation gives away around $250 million per year, much of it to support K-12 education programs, while the Wal-Mart Foundation gives away another $200 million or so.
I'm no fan of Wal-Mart, just as I'm no fan of Mr. Gates. But credit where it's due. At least the Waltons don't seek publicity and adulation for giving away money they could never hope to spend.
Here's the market numbers that wikipedia knows about, which appear to be market share by Q308 sales:
Symbian OS from Symbian Ltd. (46.6% Market Share Sales Q3 2008
iPhone OS from Apple Inc. (17.3% Market Share Sales Q3 2008)
RIM BlackBerry operating system (15.2% Market Share Sales Q3 2008)
Windows Mobile from Microsoft (13.6% Market Share Sales Q3 2008)
Linux operating system (5.1% Market Share Sales Q3 2008)
[...]
Market Share data from Canalys report "Worldwide smart mobile device market, Canalys Q3 2008"[22]
Considering that WinCE, or Mobile (or whatever it's called this week) has been around the longest yet is under 14% of the market, and is strongest in Asia, it's not surprising that I don't generally see anyone using such a device.
Palm failed for a number of reasons, but Windows was not the only cause, and has not been the beneficiary.
People ask for BBs and iPhones. Nobody goes looking for a WinCE device.
This happened before with Windows CE and Palm. Palm had a solid lock on the handheld market, but MS kept dogging them, and Palm kept screwing up, till MS overtook them in the market.
How's that been working out for MS? All I ever see are devices running RIM or Symbian. I don't think I've even seen an WinCe device in the wild for years.
The idea of the original posting that since MS "only" sold $100M of the devices last year they'll leave the market?
According to TFA, Zune revenue wasn't $100M, the drop in Zune revenue was $100M, which is a 54% fall.
By extrapolation, this suggests that last year's revenue was around $185M and this year's around $85M.
MS has many lines of business that are under $100M in annual revenue, yet they continue on in those markets, despite not being #1 - I'm thinking keyboards, mice, MS Home Server, etc.
That may be, but it's not a question of revenue but of margin. Keyboards and Mice (which MS makes quite well) are quite likely moderately profitable lines. But doubling profit on them (or elimintating them altogether) would have no effect on MS' botom line.
There is no way the Zune is even close to profitable based on these sales numbers, and based on various figures that have come out concerning Zune development.
It doesn't cost that much (relatively) to spec out, manufacture, and rebrand Logitech hardware. It does cost a lot to design, develop, distribute, promote, and maintain a device and platform like the Zune. $85M, or even $100M a year is not going to cut it, particularly when the market has spoken and given MS a much smaller piece of a rapidly growing pie.
The Zune is a fine piece of hardware, despite the recent bru-ha-ha over the particular model that couldn't handle leap year [...]
The Ford Pinto was also a fine piece of automotive design, despite the bru-ha-ha over the particular model that couldn't handle a rear-end collision without exploding.
It's isn't that the Zune is a bad product or poor design. It's that it isn't cheaper, better, easier, faster, or more convenient than the alternatives. You can argue all you want, but the market has spoken quite clearly on this point.
A $100M revenue company selling MP3 devices that are tailored to the Windows platform should be a no-brainer, and I believe MS will turn it around.
This is a concept I've never been able to understand. Why on earth would someone want to make (or buy) a device that only works on one platform, when similar devices work with any?
Particularly when there is little the manufacturer needs to do to ensure cross-platform compatibility. How much did Apple contribute to the development (or suppression) of Gtkpod?
The fact is that MS' Entertainment (or whatever they're calling it today) division has been a money-sink from day one -- full of confusion, odd rebranding decisions, failed initiatives, conflicting projects, lack of focus, and several hardware fiascos -- most notably the XB360's red-ring-of-death and the Zune's leap-second crash.
If I was a MS shareholder (and hadn't sold out long ago when they stopped performing), I would be apoplectic about a lot of these initiatives.
There is a time to cut your losses, consolidate your position, and focus on what you do well. MS has never been able to do this and I doubt they will start now, although in the case of Zune (and probably MSN) it would be the wise thing.
This just highlights one of the negative aspects of using services out there on the net - if it's not running on your physical hardware it can be closed when the company decides it's not profitable to carry on with it.
Sort of. It looks like these are all getting canned because they're not really used. This is a good thing. You don't want to be spending a lot of time and resources on products that are unused, half-baked, and for which there's no realistic plan. There is a lesson here for Redmond.
It seems to me that while the specific products may be shutting down, the engineering and code is getting folded back into Google's more core products, like Apps. This is also a good thing.
In the case of these services I doubt there's anyone relying on them to do business, but that definitely isn't the case for things that run in the various compute clouds, or small companies migrating to things like Google Docs, GMail or Google Calendar.
Unless I'm mistaken, you can run Google Apps (Mail, Docs, Calendar, etc) on your own hardware with your own storage if you want. But the point is that at a certain complexity, it's easier and cheaper to have Google manage your mail infrastructure than to do it yourself. You can still keep a local archive, or even a local mirror.
Yes, there are risks and drawbacks to any hosted service. But our Exchange system now is creaking under its own weight, fails to backup shockingly often, and is down more than 99.9% monthly SLA that Google Apps offers. Scaling up the Exchange server would require a significant cash outlay, and I'm not convinced it would be any cheaper over the lifetime of the system.
I'm in operations, not IT, so it's not my decision to make. But I have got our IT manager looking into it, mainly by asking her this: When the mail goes down who do you want working on it -- a crew of geniuses in Mountain View or you and your intern?
* Productivity Software (Office) that is (for better or worse) almost universally used.
* Workstating Operating System Software that is (for better or worse) almost universally used.
This is where the bulk of revenue and nearly all of profits comes from. This market is not going to go away anytime soon, although MS' share of it can only go down.
* Video game consoles.
The only reason MS is able to make the XBox line is because of Windows and Office. Granted, the XBox stuff is good hardware (other than the overheating issue), but MS has always made good hardware, at least keyboards and mice.
But the Xbox line has been a money sink. It won't go away, mainly because that's how MS wants to build their own content pipe and media management system into your house. But even if it did, there's no shortage of other ways to play games.
* Server operating systems
* Database software
Yes, people still buy and run MS Server. And for a lot of good reasons in many cases. But those reasons are becoming fewer, and costs harder to justify. The same goes for SQL Server. Both the Server OS and SQL Server are top-notch packages. They're competitive on almost every technical level with competitors both proprietary and open-source.
But as good as Server and SQL Server are, they don't make up all that big a share of MS' overall numbers. If you took them completely out of the picture, the overall financial look of Microsoft wouldn't change that much.
Either way, the XBox stuff, Server, and SQL Server are all pretty good products (which, coincidentally enough, all compete fairly in competitive markets). But that doesn't address some of the belipsticked pigs Microsoft waddles out and claims as innovative. Like SharePoint, or...
* Exchange
This will be a Microsoft gold-mine for quite a while. Not because it's good but because it's too hard to move away from. It's not good. Many of its capabilities are surpassed in speed and ease of use by free online mail, including search, by a ridiculous margin. But it's what the company's got, what the admin is trained in, what everybody's used to, and what all the mail is archived in.
But it'll take more than an occasional spit-shine and a spiffy new interface to keep it going for too much longer.
There seems to be the beginning of some real competition with Exchange, particularly from hosted applications. Redmond should be very worried about the integration going on between Google Apps and Salesforce.com. This means sharing calendars, documents, spreadsheets, emails, presentations, and customer/vendor information across all those applications.
* MSNBC
Microsoft sold it's stake in MSNBC back to NBC in 2005. They still have a partnership on the MSNBC web site, but MS is not involved in the TV station.
Either way, MSNBC was part of MS' original (or second? third?) strategy to assume control of content delivery. Nothing, from their original AOL-style walled garden concept for MSN to their current batch of DRM, has helped.
MSNBC is not an example of anticipating new and emerging market opportunities. It's a tattered flag staking a claim in a market that never materialized.
Microsoft isn't going anywhere for the foreseeable future. They've diversified quite well [...]
They're not going anywhere in the next couple years, that's for sure. But they have not diversified well. If not for Windows and Office, they have precious little to show. This, I think is why so many of their recent forays have looked so desperate. Yes, I do mean the Zune.
And this is precisely why Microsoft is vulnerable. It doesn't have to be OpenOffice.org. It doesn't have to be Google Apps or Sun-supported Star Office. It doesn't have to be something from IBM. All that has to happen is
I'm thinking something a little different. I would abandon the whole concept of trying to parody (or parrot) the Mac concept, and instead try to show what Linux is and what it's really good at.
Here's what I was thinking:
Open with a spectacular image from space, which pulls back to reveal an obervatory. Go through the telescope to the computers recording the readings:
System Name Location Base Distro, version (e.g. Debian 3.1) Kernel version
Path continues through series of routers and hops, each flashes the above system stats. Continues through university network to research lab. Students in lab coats studying data, manipulating images from the observatory. Same stats:
System Name; Location; Base Distro, version (e.g. Debian 3.1); Kernel version
Path continues through routers/hops same as before, through a television news studio (stats as appropriate) and out to an LCD set in your average living room -- could be pretty well anywhere in the western world. It's showing the news we flew through before, which has the same backing image of space that keeps recurring. The anchor talks of 'astronomical discovery'. Show stats of TV:
System Name: Sony XXX LCD TV Location: All over Base system: custom kernel Kernel version: 2.4.1, e.g.
Camera swings around living room to reveal a girl at a table (4th-6th grade). She's got various books and papers around her -- she's working on a project about space. She's also got an eee (or similar), which is open to the same image of the cosmos.
System Name: Asus eee PC 701 Location: The world Base system: Ubuntu eee Kernel version 2.6.24-generic
She's chatting with someone about the image -- 'wow, that's amazing' or some such. Camera goes back through the tubes, appropriately showing router stats, to a modern classroom in an unexpected place -- e.g. Africa or Central Asia, where a child is also looking at the image and chatting.
Continue through the tubes to other places around the world where the image pops up on a Linux system. Same system stats as appropriate.
Finish in Peru. It's night and there's a child looking at the same image on an OLPC, chat window open. He's sitting on a stunning cliffside with the ocean below.
System Name: OLPC XO-1 Location: SomeVillage, Peru Base system: Red-Hat, Sugar Kernel version: 2.6.?
He looks slowly from the screen up into the night sky. The camera zooms out and follows his gaze back out into space.
why was it impossible? the sending of images, phone, push to talk and data has been around for years - it's called cell technology and i hear it's already in use....
It's not that any one thing they wanted was impossible. It's that doing all of it more or less at once, in the same place, with the same device fitting their size and power requirements, supporting as many simultaneous users per tower, and covering as large an area per tower as they wanted was impossible.
That's speaking purely about the end-user devices and towers. Add to that the necessary complexity of allowing fast and seamless access to government data repositories, but only the right repositories for the right people at the right time, over a network that is available wirelessly everywhere in the US.
Just because someone is an agent at one federal agency doesn't mean they get access to all federal data. You really don't want a passport-stamper at the US border to take your fingerprint on this thing and instantly have access to all your (or someone who shares your name) tax records, for example. Let alone driving record, library record, bank details (if you file online), school transcripts (if you attended public schools), employment history, Social Security contributions, medical history (if you use Medicaid or Medicare), and so on. Unless your name happens to be John Ashcroft.
And what happens when an agent forgets his device at a hotel bar or leaves it in a cab?
And none of that even begins to address the person-to-person and person-to-group push-to-talk capability they wanted on a national network with tens of thousands of simultaneous users.
It's not the specific tasks that are impossible, it's the package that is impossible.
Wow. I worked on IWN in a very limited capacity for one of the bidders back in early 2005. It was pretty clear then that the whole thing was going to be a huge cluster-fuck, but it was exciting to be a part of it for a while.
If the process continued the way it was going when I left, it is almost surely the Feds' fault. They were demanding certain requirements that were nearly impossible to engineer and didn't make much sense anyway. And the whole RFP described technology in ways that made it clear that the government folks running it were completely out of touch with the technology.
Essentially, the Feds wanted a device or devices that were a combination of tricorders, mobile phones, and walkie-talkies, as well as a national network to run them on.
They envisioned devices and a network that would allow primarily federal agents but also emergency first-responders to call anyone a-la a phone, push-to-talk to anyone a-la a walkie-talkie, take mug shots/scan fingerprints and get an instant identification, and pull whatever data from whatever government sources. Nationally, instantly, wirelessly, seamlessly.
I was just a lowly proposal writer and I suspected the whole thing was impossible. The engineers I worked with knew it was impossible, but it was really impressive to watch them try to build it anyway.
For the $10 billion the government was offering, you could understand why.
The bidder I was contracted to, via a small consultancy, wanted to call their team the National Wireless Alliance, or NWA. We thought that was a pretty ironic name for something to be used by cops. I suggested the Intra-Continental Emergency Telenetwork, or ICE-T. My buddy proposed the Wireless Universal Telephone And Network Group.
Among the many things I learned was that the government, and the extremely big companies that go for $10B deals with them, are utterly humorless.
But my hat was and is definitely off to the engineers, who were putting together some really great ideas.
Have you used Office 2007 very much? It seems like you have some biases from the 95-2003 days. Outlook is beautiful and utilitarian, and search is fast.
I haven't used 2007 at all. We're all XP at work (with no plans to migrate) and I'm Linux at home.
But does Outlook 2007 do real threading? Many people I correspond with know enough to bottom-post and trim messages. This can make it very frustrating when only incoming mail is arranged in 'conversations' but I need to search sent mail to get to what I said.
I do think Office is a very good product, but it's becoming harder and harder to justify the price.
If $0 gets me 85% of what I want and $500 gets me 90%, I'll take free. If $500 gets me 99+% of what I want, I can much more easily rationalize the expense.
The point of android is to provide a new platform to compete with winmo,[...]
Windows mobile is not the target. That platform got an early start and is still at the back of the pack in terms of capability and adoption.
The competition is Symbian, RIM, and Apple.
And hopefully what Google is doing with Android will make the platform less and less relevant, and make the content and capabilities really shine.
All the same, I'm hanging on to my Nokia candy-bar at least until the second generation of Android, or until my venerable machine dies. Judging from its battle scars, that may be a while.
Yeah, I really don't understand why people complain about MS Office when Open Office runs like a turd MS Office does not.
Microsoft certainly has one good product; Office is great as long as you ignore Access.
Not sure where to start with this. There are many cases where MS Office runs like a turd and OO.org does not.
On the whole, MS Office is a superior product, but that doesn't mean there aren't areas in which OO.org does better, or that there aren't areas in which MS Office is a pure dung heap.
Word vs Writer: For me, this is a draw. Both packages do most of the same things equally well. Word has more (and more easily accessible) 'power' features, but it's something of a fool's errand to try and produce a complicated document in either.
At least with OO.org you have xml source to look at when the formatting goes awry. With MS Office, things seem to change on whim from system to system or depending on the phase of the moon, and there's no way to figure out what is happening or why (this is a common theme with all the MS Office apps).
As far as trouble-shooting odd formatting, MS Word still lags behind WordPerfect 5.0, where you can see from the embedded codes exactly what will happen with your formatting. With Word, you're essentially praying that WYS is really WYG.
Excel vs Calc: For now Excel is the clear winner, although with a few caveats. It's much better at doing things like inserting rows and columns -- inserts preserve formatting of surrounding cells, while in Calc inserts tend to get default formatting. Charting in Excel is also better, at least currently, in Excel.
My big issue with Excel is its utter failure to handle properly comma-quote csv. For cells containing numbers, Excel will ignore its own formatting of those cells as text, and still export them as numbers -- meaning lots of havoc when dealing with things like IDs and Zip codes that have leading zeros. Also, try changing the format of something that looks like a date to text. Now try changing it back to a date.
Powerpoint vs Impress: Not so much a question of which is better as which is less bad. On the whole Impress seems to mangle things a lot less, and seems to make far fewer (wildly incorrect) assumptions about what you're trying to do.
It's easier to throw a presentation together in Powerpoint, but nearly impossible to make it look really good. (If you've got a Powerpoint presentation you think looks really good, you've never seen a really good-looking presentation.)
Access vs Base: This is a tough one, mainly because while these products look similar they are actually very different.
Access actually does pretty well for what it is and within its own limitations. Yes, it is a toy database but it does let you do database-type operations on small data sets quickly and easily.
On the other hand, its ~2 GB filesize limit, its nasty habit of corrupting data, and it's baffling default query window behavior all mean that it's not something you can use for serious work.
If your data set has tens of thousands of rows, Access can handle it just fine. If you've got a million rows, forget about it. If you want your database to scale, forget about it.
Base is not a toy database, or even a database at all. It's a simple frontend for a proper RDBMS system, like MySQL or PostgreSQL. As such, it looks more spare but is far more powerful and scalable.
Outlook vs Anything Else: Winner: Anything else. I simply cannot take anything MS says about search or accessibility or convenience seriously until they fix this steaming pile of garbage. As long as it takes minutes to search my ~250 MB Exchange mailbox, and until Outlook can properly handle message threading I simply have nothing positive to say about this turd.
So where do Google Apps fit in? What they lack in polish and functionality, they make up for in speed, accessibility, and collaboration. They're not there yet, but the thread
[...] There are no minor imperfections (bit of snow, slightly fuzzy or ghosting), you either get a perfect reproduction if the error rate is within the error correction's limits or nothing at all. (on/off).
In theory, that's absolutely right. In practice, it's not so clear cut. I'm in Chicago and have been feeding HD signals into Mythtv for a bit over a year with the HDHomerun. I've been feeding SD signals from either cable or satellite into it for over three years.
For about the first eight months of recording HD I was on Comcast, and got eight or nine local OTA channels in QAM off the HDHR. The FCC requires cable operators to carry local digital (icluding HD) chanels unencrypted where they are available locally.
The signal came through very cleanly and the picture was great, but it was clear there had been some compression. At times there were some glitches -- intermittent black screens, pixelization and blockiness, momentary freezes and jumps, etc. I saw all the same glitches at various times with the STB hooked straight up to the TV, so I'm quite sure that Myth didn't create the distortions.
So with cable, it is pretty much a binary proposition -- you get (more or less) exactly what's coming over the line or you get nothing at all.
But for the last five months or so, I've been feeding it OTA signals (ATSC) with rabbit ears. I live in a coach house about seven miles north and four miles west of the center -- where all the TV transmitters are atop the Sears Tower or the Hancock building.
My antenna faces west, and the house has walls built over 100 years ago by people afraid of big fires. As a result, I get at times considerable interference in the signal. When it's good, it's fantastic -- a mile better than the QAM signal from Comcast. But at times I get random characters, freezes, audio pops, etc.
The distortions are noticeably more frequent when it's raining. I've seen the same behavior on other sets around the city.
Most likely, it's because those channels are splitting their wattage between analog and digital transmissions until the switch. The digital transmissions are at hugely lower output levels than their analog equivalents.
There is definitely interference, but unlike poor analog signal, poor digital signal is impossible to watch.
I'm seeing the same thing. FF 3.0.1, Flashblock 1.5.6, Ubuntu 8.04.
It doesn't work consistently, or even according to any pattern that I can see. Just following the link seems to be enough -- there doesn't appear to be any effect whether or not one even looks at the tab.
The flash itself remains blocked but evil.com pops up in the clipboard around 10-20 percent of the time.
But, you still can't (AFAIK) run two instances of the browser running under different profiles at the same time.
Sure you can. Just fire up your favorite terminal, use su user2 to switch to another user account, and launch Firefox from there.
If you're using Ubuntu, you may have to run the command xhost +LOCAL: from your primary user account to let other non network users access the display.
Two separate browsers, two separate users, two profiles, two caches, two home directories, etc.
You can cut and paste URLs, and even drag tabs from one to the other.
but I have yet to find a way to have two profiles of Firefox running under Windows at the same time in the same Windows session.
Ah. I see. Well, the first step is to get an operating system that properly deals with multiple and non-admin users.
Basically, with no capability to use a cablecard (much less switched digital video),[...]
From what I've seen, not even Cableco-sanctioned Cablecard devices work properly, and I've never seen a PC-based PVR that actually works with cablecard, not matter what operating system it's running.
Cablecard depends on the providers -- Comcast, TW, etc -- letting it work, and they haven't shown any signs of that (though if you want to lease a PVR for $15/month, that can be arranged).
So what can MythTV do that Cablecard devices and/or CATV provider boxes can't?.
For one, they can capture just about anything you can throw at it. Input 1 of my machine is an analog capture from the stock Directv box, controlled via serial cable.
Inputs 2 and 3 are digital HD OTA channels captured with rabbit ears and an HD Homerun. Rabbit ears may seem a bit quaint, but try testing the quality of HD broadcasts OTA vs cable and you'll see pretty quickly that cable HD is not quite what it's cracked up to be.
Pretty soon input 4 will be HD channels in HD (as well as SD channels) from Directv via the Hauppage HD-PVR component capture device.
Plus I have Mythfrontends in my office and my bedroom.
I forget. Who else will give me 1TB+ of storage, three output locations, three HD inputs plus one SD input, not to mention CD archiving and playback, DVD archiving and playback, photo archiving and playback, emulator frontend, and (why the heck not) RSS reader? Let's just throw realtime weather forecasts and radar into the mix.
Did I mention you get all this for the cost of hardware? And (if you're in the US) the listings data runs $20/year?
And if you want 10TB of storage and 20 output locations, it still is only the cost of hardware?
I agree. I sure wish MythTV were practical and weren't so irrelevant. Maybe then I could stop watching my TV and start fiddling with it again.
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Beware of Behringer gear. Yes, it is cheap. Yes, it is decent when it works. But the build quality is quite shoddy. It will do the job, but something will break or burn out fairly quickly. I was warned about this before I bought a mixer from them, but I figured that it would be in a fairly decently controlled location and not moved around. Barely two years later and it's already blown one channel strip and the headphone-out.
Microphones need power, and the mic-in provides it. Line-level audio is powered by the device producing the signal. If you run a regular mic into a line input, you'll get a much lower signal. Likewise, if you run a line into a mic-in you'll get more signal than the circuit is designed to handle, and it will distort much more easily.
I haven't seen any evidence of any great conspiracy to eliminate line-in from computer audio -- every sound card I've ever bought has it and I've never paid more than around US$25 (except the M-Audio Delta 1010LT -- 10 line-in, 10-line out, ~$200), but there are plenty of really simple audio USB adapters for $10-$20 retail. I've got a couple that came included with music hardware but I've never used them.
As for cost, audio gear is a bit like wine -- there's a huge difference between a $2 bottle and a $10 bottle, a bit of difference between a $10 and $25 bottle, and only subtle differences between a $25 and $100 bottle.
And if you're the audio equivalent of a wine snob that thinks he/she can taste the difference between a $100 and $1,000 bottle, than I'm sure someone is willing to sell you an automagnetic bit-harmonizing inductive-conditioning audio conduit interface for the price of a small car.
Ask Jeeves? AltaVista? MSN? Geocities? The clock's ticking on MySpace. It's awfully easy to fail when you're free, and you don't even need a company to do so. Just have a look at all the abandoned projects at Sourceforge.
You've got it backwards. The customers are the advertisers, and they're paying Google handsomely. Whether or not Facebook and Twitter can accomplish long-term profitability is another question. I suspect not, but I've been very wrong before. Wikipedia has achieved sustainability, and for a non-profit that equals success.
By this measure, every non-premium television station is a failure, as is every terrestrial radio station. Yet there are more TV and radio stations now than there have ever been. Red Hat has somehow grown both its profits and its margins this year even though I've never paid them a dime for Fedora.
Methinks there is a flaw in your logic.
The ad seems to suggest that they're doing the 2010 Census. That would be big news.
Ubuntu has a major release (LTS) every two years. Interim releases are every six months. Yes, it is a challenge to migrate from, say Feisty to Intrepid, since you're going from one interim release to another while skipping several, including an LTS release. But the move from Dapper to Hardy (LTS-to-LTS) was really quite smooth.
Source is source is source, and as such can be made to compile on the platform of your choice. If it's a production environment, you would have it set up with the standard kit of tools, meaning every major app you'd want would compile, or more likely, would be available as a package via apt, rpm, yum, etc.
Share of specific distro doesn't really matter. Ethereal, for example, is available precompiled as an rpm for Red Hat and derivatives. This doesn't stop you from giving the rpm a go on a non-RH system, or just compiling.
It sure didn't stop me from compiling on Ubuntu.
The point is that beyond the toolset and underlying architecture (which already is standard), a 'standard' Linux distro is not just unnecessary but completely contrary to what the whole thing is about.
For specific reasons, I run Ubuntu on my netbook, CentOS on my Myth system, and Debian on my server at work. Yet the same applications work on all three.
Yet at work I still have to fire up DOSBox from time to time to access a legacy database system that simply does not work under XP's cmd.exe.
So keep thinking what you're thinking. The buggy-whip industry is sure to bounce back by early next year once the market figures out that slower, clunkier, more expensive, and inherently incompatible is really the better option.
Back in the real world, I work a a pretty small company that currently runs about a dozen MS Servers. I expect that within two years we'll be down to one or two, or none at all. I do not think we're alone.
Bydlil jsem rok v Praze, ale aj sest a pol rokov na Solensko. Hovorim ovela lepsie ako mluvim.
And I think you might be right about Josef.
The term was most certainly coined by Karel Capek. The R.U.R is for Rossum's Universal Robots; the play is from 1921.
The word robota has a bit more complex meaning than just drudgery. It can generally mean any unpleasant physical task, but particularly where there's an obligation.
The term is medieval in origins, and describes the obligation of labor that peasants owed the landlord. Every household owed X days of robota every year, in addition to taxes, crop quotas, etc.
It is not robota, for example, to clean your kitchen or wax your car. It may be robota to mow your lawn, depending on how you feel about it.
It's definitely robota when you have to complete some substantial task for someone else, particularly when you know there are better ways of doing it but can't, for whatever reason, use any of them.
The play is really interesting, and the English translation is very good. The robots are machines, but they're basically humans without emotion.
Capek also wrote an excellent proto-dystopian novel called War With the Newts.
Newts has a lot of the same themes and ideals of RUR, but is a lot darker and a lot less positive about humanity in general. Not a surprising attitude for central Europe in 1936.
But I highly recommend reading him. He's an overlooked genius of the Modern period
Remember though that the Yugo was essentially Warsaw Pact manufacturing quality with Fiat parts. The Tata was engineered from the ground up.
Remember also that the Yugo was designed for Western markets, the Tata is not.
I'm not sure about all the concern around this thing selling in the US or EU. It's a car designed for Asian cities, and that in itself means a much larger potential market than the US.
Parent is not a troll, and GP did pull the 0.01% figure out of the air. The Walton family, are in fact major-league philanthropists. Who do you think is behind the Walton Arts Center? And that's just a drop in the bucket.
The Walton Family Foundation gives away around $250 million per year, much of it to support K-12 education programs, while the Wal-Mart Foundation gives away another $200 million or so.
I'm no fan of Wal-Mart, just as I'm no fan of Mr. Gates. But credit where it's due. At least the Waltons don't seek publicity and adulation for giving away money they could never hope to spend.
Most major ones do. Except for Outlook.
Not sure why this is getting flagged as Troll.
Here's the market numbers that wikipedia knows about, which appear to be market share by Q308 sales:
Symbian OS from Symbian Ltd. (46.6% Market Share Sales Q3 2008
iPhone OS from Apple Inc. (17.3% Market Share Sales Q3 2008)
RIM BlackBerry operating system (15.2% Market Share Sales Q3 2008)
Windows Mobile from Microsoft (13.6% Market Share Sales Q3 2008)
Linux operating system (5.1% Market Share Sales Q3 2008)
[...]
Market Share data from Canalys report "Worldwide smart mobile device market, Canalys Q3 2008"[22]
Considering that WinCE, or Mobile (or whatever it's called this week) has been around the longest yet is under 14% of the market, and is strongest in Asia, it's not surprising that I don't generally see anyone using such a device.
Palm failed for a number of reasons, but Windows was not the only cause, and has not been the beneficiary.
People ask for BBs and iPhones. Nobody goes looking for a WinCE device.
How's that been working out for MS? All I ever see are devices running RIM or Symbian. I don't think I've even seen an WinCe device in the wild for years.
According to TFA, Zune revenue wasn't $100M, the drop in Zune revenue was $100M, which is a 54% fall.
By extrapolation, this suggests that last year's revenue was around $185M and this year's around $85M.
That may be, but it's not a question of revenue but of margin. Keyboards and Mice (which MS makes quite well) are quite likely moderately profitable lines. But doubling profit on them (or elimintating them altogether) would have no effect on MS' botom line.
There is no way the Zune is even close to profitable based on these sales numbers, and based on various figures that have come out concerning Zune development.
It doesn't cost that much (relatively) to spec out, manufacture, and rebrand Logitech hardware. It does cost a lot to design, develop, distribute, promote, and maintain a device and platform like the Zune. $85M, or even $100M a year is not going to cut it, particularly when the market has spoken and given MS a much smaller piece of a rapidly growing pie.
The Ford Pinto was also a fine piece of automotive design, despite the bru-ha-ha over the particular model that couldn't handle a rear-end collision without exploding.
It's isn't that the Zune is a bad product or poor design. It's that it isn't cheaper, better, easier, faster, or more convenient than the alternatives. You can argue all you want, but the market has spoken quite clearly on this point.
This is a concept I've never been able to understand. Why on earth would someone want to make (or buy) a device that only works on one platform, when similar devices work with any?
Particularly when there is little the manufacturer needs to do to ensure cross-platform compatibility. How much did Apple contribute to the development (or suppression) of Gtkpod?
The fact is that MS' Entertainment (or whatever they're calling it today) division has been a money-sink from day one -- full of confusion, odd rebranding decisions, failed initiatives, conflicting projects, lack of focus, and several hardware fiascos -- most notably the XB360's red-ring-of-death and the Zune's leap-second crash.
If I was a MS shareholder (and hadn't sold out long ago when they stopped performing), I would be apoplectic about a lot of these initiatives.
There is a time to cut your losses, consolidate your position, and focus on what you do well. MS has never been able to do this and I doubt they will start now, although in the case of Zune (and probably MSN) it would be the wise thing.
Sort of. It looks like these are all getting canned because they're not really used. This is a good thing. You don't want to be spending a lot of time and resources on products that are unused, half-baked, and for which there's no realistic plan. There is a lesson here for Redmond.
It seems to me that while the specific products may be shutting down, the engineering and code is getting folded back into Google's more core products, like Apps. This is also a good thing.
Unless I'm mistaken, you can run Google Apps (Mail, Docs, Calendar, etc) on your own hardware with your own storage if you want. But the point is that at a certain complexity, it's easier and cheaper to have Google manage your mail infrastructure than to do it yourself. You can still keep a local archive, or even a local mirror.
Yes, there are risks and drawbacks to any hosted service. But our Exchange system now is creaking under its own weight, fails to backup shockingly often, and is down more than 99.9% monthly SLA that Google Apps offers. Scaling up the Exchange server would require a significant cash outlay, and I'm not convinced it would be any cheaper over the lifetime of the system.
I'm in operations, not IT, so it's not my decision to make. But I have got our IT manager looking into it, mainly by asking her this: When the mail goes down who do you want working on it -- a crew of geniuses in Mountain View or you and your intern?
This is where the bulk of revenue and nearly all of profits comes from. This market is not going to go away anytime soon, although MS' share of it can only go down.
The only reason MS is able to make the XBox line is because of Windows and Office. Granted, the XBox stuff is good hardware (other than the overheating issue), but MS has always made good hardware, at least keyboards and mice.
But the Xbox line has been a money sink. It won't go away, mainly because that's how MS wants to build their own content pipe and media management system into your house. But even if it did, there's no shortage of other ways to play games.
Yes, people still buy and run MS Server. And for a lot of good reasons in many cases. But those reasons are becoming fewer, and costs harder to justify. The same goes for SQL Server. Both the Server OS and SQL Server are top-notch packages. They're competitive on almost every technical level with competitors both proprietary and open-source.
But as good as Server and SQL Server are, they don't make up all that big a share of MS' overall numbers. If you took them completely out of the picture, the overall financial look of Microsoft wouldn't change that much.
Either way, the XBox stuff, Server, and SQL Server are all pretty good products (which, coincidentally enough, all compete fairly in competitive markets). But that doesn't address some of the belipsticked pigs Microsoft waddles out and claims as innovative. Like SharePoint, or ...
This will be a Microsoft gold-mine for quite a while. Not because it's good but because it's too hard to move away from. It's not good. Many of its capabilities are surpassed in speed and ease of use by free online mail, including search, by a ridiculous margin. But it's what the company's got, what the admin is trained in, what everybody's used to, and what all the mail is archived in.
But it'll take more than an occasional spit-shine and a spiffy new interface to keep it going for too much longer.
There seems to be the beginning of some real competition with Exchange, particularly from hosted applications. Redmond should be very worried about the integration going on between Google Apps and Salesforce.com. This means sharing calendars, documents, spreadsheets, emails, presentations, and customer/vendor information across all those applications.
Microsoft sold it's stake in MSNBC back to NBC in 2005. They still have a partnership on the MSNBC web site, but MS is not involved in the TV station.
Either way, MSNBC was part of MS' original (or second? third?) strategy to assume control of content delivery. Nothing, from their original AOL-style walled garden concept for MSN to their current batch of DRM, has helped.
MSNBC is not an example of anticipating new and emerging market opportunities. It's a tattered flag staking a claim in a market that never materialized.
They're not going anywhere in the next couple years, that's for sure. But they have not diversified well. If not for Windows and Office, they have precious little to show. This, I think is why so many of their recent forays have looked so desperate. Yes, I do mean the Zune.
And this is precisely why Microsoft is vulnerable. It doesn't have to be OpenOffice.org. It doesn't have to be Google Apps or Sun-supported Star Office. It doesn't have to be something from IBM. All that has to happen is
I'm thinking something a little different. I would abandon the whole concept of trying to parody (or parrot) the Mac concept, and instead try to show what Linux is and what it's really good at.
Here's what I was thinking:
Open with a spectacular image from space, which pulls back to reveal an obervatory. Go through the telescope to the computers recording the readings:
System Name
Location
Base Distro, version (e.g. Debian 3.1)
Kernel version
Path continues through series of routers and hops, each flashes the above system stats. Continues through university network to research lab. Students in lab coats studying data, manipulating images from the observatory. Same stats:
System Name; Location; Base Distro, version (e.g. Debian 3.1); Kernel version
Path continues through routers/hops same as before, through a television news studio (stats as appropriate) and out to an LCD set in your average living room -- could be pretty well anywhere in the western world. It's showing the news we flew through before, which has the same backing image of space that keeps recurring. The anchor talks of 'astronomical discovery'. Show stats of TV:
System Name: Sony XXX LCD TV
Location: All over
Base system: custom kernel
Kernel version: 2.4.1, e.g.
Camera swings around living room to reveal a girl at a table (4th-6th grade). She's got various books and papers around her -- she's working on a project about space. She's also got an eee (or similar), which is open to the same image of the cosmos.
System Name: Asus eee PC 701
Location: The world
Base system: Ubuntu eee
Kernel version 2.6.24-generic
She's chatting with someone about the image -- 'wow, that's amazing' or some such. Camera goes back through the tubes, appropriately showing router stats, to a modern classroom in an unexpected place -- e.g. Africa or Central Asia, where a child is also looking at the image and chatting.
Continue through the tubes to other places around the world where the image pops up on a Linux system. Same system stats as appropriate.
Finish in Peru. It's night and there's a child looking at the same image on an OLPC, chat window open. He's sitting on a stunning cliffside with the ocean below.
System Name: OLPC XO-1
Location: SomeVillage, Peru
Base system: Red-Hat, Sugar
Kernel version: 2.6.?
He looks slowly from the screen up into the night sky. The camera zooms out and follows his gaze back out into space.
Fade to black.
Linux. There are no limits.
It's not that any one thing they wanted was impossible. It's that doing all of it more or less at once, in the same place, with the same device fitting their size and power requirements, supporting as many simultaneous users per tower, and covering as large an area per tower as they wanted was impossible.
That's speaking purely about the end-user devices and towers. Add to that the necessary complexity of allowing fast and seamless access to government data repositories, but only the right repositories for the right people at the right time, over a network that is available wirelessly everywhere in the US.
Just because someone is an agent at one federal agency doesn't mean they get access to all federal data. You really don't want a passport-stamper at the US border to take your fingerprint on this thing and instantly have access to all your (or someone who shares your name) tax records, for example. Let alone driving record, library record, bank details (if you file online), school transcripts (if you attended public schools), employment history, Social Security contributions, medical history (if you use Medicaid or Medicare), and so on. Unless your name happens to be John Ashcroft.
And what happens when an agent forgets his device at a hotel bar or leaves it in a cab?
And none of that even begins to address the person-to-person and person-to-group push-to-talk capability they wanted on a national network with tens of thousands of simultaneous users.
It's not the specific tasks that are impossible, it's the package that is impossible.
Wow. I worked on IWN in a very limited capacity for one of the bidders back in early 2005. It was pretty clear then that the whole thing was going to be a huge cluster-fuck, but it was exciting to be a part of it for a while.
If the process continued the way it was going when I left, it is almost surely the Feds' fault. They were demanding certain requirements that were nearly impossible to engineer and didn't make much sense anyway. And the whole RFP described technology in ways that made it clear that the government folks running it were completely out of touch with the technology.
Essentially, the Feds wanted a device or devices that were a combination of tricorders, mobile phones, and walkie-talkies, as well as a national network to run them on.
They envisioned devices and a network that would allow primarily federal agents but also emergency first-responders to call anyone a-la a phone, push-to-talk to anyone a-la a walkie-talkie, take mug shots/scan fingerprints and get an instant identification, and pull whatever data from whatever government sources. Nationally, instantly, wirelessly, seamlessly.
I was just a lowly proposal writer and I suspected the whole thing was impossible. The engineers I worked with knew it was impossible, but it was really impressive to watch them try to build it anyway.
For the $10 billion the government was offering, you could understand why.
The bidder I was contracted to, via a small consultancy, wanted to call their team the National Wireless Alliance, or NWA. We thought that was a pretty ironic name for something to be used by cops. I suggested the Intra-Continental Emergency Telenetwork, or ICE-T. My buddy proposed the Wireless Universal Telephone And Network Group.
Among the many things I learned was that the government, and the extremely big companies that go for $10B deals with them, are utterly humorless.
But my hat was and is definitely off to the engineers, who were putting together some really great ideas.
I haven't used 2007 at all. We're all XP at work (with no plans to migrate) and I'm Linux at home.
But does Outlook 2007 do real threading? Many people I correspond with know enough to bottom-post and trim messages. This can make it very frustrating when only incoming mail is arranged in 'conversations' but I need to search sent mail to get to what I said.
I do think Office is a very good product, but it's becoming harder and harder to justify the price.
If $0 gets me 85% of what I want and $500 gets me 90%, I'll take free. If $500 gets me 99+% of what I want, I can much more easily rationalize the expense.
Windows mobile is not the target. That platform got an early start and is still at the back of the pack in terms of capability and adoption.
The competition is Symbian, RIM, and Apple.
And hopefully what Google is doing with Android will make the platform less and less relevant, and make the content and capabilities really shine.
All the same, I'm hanging on to my Nokia candy-bar at least until the second generation of Android, or until my venerable machine dies. Judging from its battle scars, that may be a while.
Not sure where to start with this. There are many cases where MS Office runs like a turd and OO.org does not.
On the whole, MS Office is a superior product, but that doesn't mean there aren't areas in which OO.org does better, or that there aren't areas in which MS Office is a pure dung heap.
Word vs Writer: For me, this is a draw. Both packages do most of the same things equally well. Word has more (and more easily accessible) 'power' features, but it's something of a fool's errand to try and produce a complicated document in either.
At least with OO.org you have xml source to look at when the formatting goes awry. With MS Office, things seem to change on whim from system to system or depending on the phase of the moon, and there's no way to figure out what is happening or why (this is a common theme with all the MS Office apps).
As far as trouble-shooting odd formatting, MS Word still lags behind WordPerfect 5.0, where you can see from the embedded codes exactly what will happen with your formatting. With Word, you're essentially praying that WYS is really WYG.
Excel vs Calc: For now Excel is the clear winner, although with a few caveats. It's much better at doing things like inserting rows and columns -- inserts preserve formatting of surrounding cells, while in Calc inserts tend to get default formatting. Charting in Excel is also better, at least currently, in Excel.
My big issue with Excel is its utter failure to handle properly comma-quote csv. For cells containing numbers, Excel will ignore its own formatting of those cells as text, and still export them as numbers -- meaning lots of havoc when dealing with things like IDs and Zip codes that have leading zeros. Also, try changing the format of something that looks like a date to text. Now try changing it back to a date.
Powerpoint vs Impress: Not so much a question of which is better as which is less bad. On the whole Impress seems to mangle things a lot less, and seems to make far fewer (wildly incorrect) assumptions about what you're trying to do.
It's easier to throw a presentation together in Powerpoint, but nearly impossible to make it look really good. (If you've got a Powerpoint presentation you think looks really good, you've never seen a really good-looking presentation.)
Access vs Base: This is a tough one, mainly because while these products look similar they are actually very different.
Access actually does pretty well for what it is and within its own limitations. Yes, it is a toy database but it does let you do database-type operations on small data sets quickly and easily.
On the other hand, its ~2 GB filesize limit, its nasty habit of corrupting data, and it's baffling default query window behavior all mean that it's not something you can use for serious work.
If your data set has tens of thousands of rows, Access can handle it just fine. If you've got a million rows, forget about it. If you want your database to scale, forget about it.
Base is not a toy database, or even a database at all. It's a simple frontend for a proper RDBMS system, like MySQL or PostgreSQL. As such, it looks more spare but is far more powerful and scalable.
Outlook vs Anything Else: Winner: Anything else. I simply cannot take anything MS says about search or accessibility or convenience seriously until they fix this steaming pile of garbage. As long as it takes minutes to search my ~250 MB Exchange mailbox, and until Outlook can properly handle message threading I simply have nothing positive to say about this turd.
So where do Google Apps fit in? What they lack in polish and functionality, they make up for in speed, accessibility, and collaboration. They're not there yet, but the thread
In theory, that's absolutely right. In practice, it's not so clear cut. I'm in Chicago and have been feeding HD signals into Mythtv for a bit over a year with the HDHomerun. I've been feeding SD signals from either cable or satellite into it for over three years.
For about the first eight months of recording HD I was on Comcast, and got eight or nine local OTA channels in QAM off the HDHR. The FCC requires cable operators to carry local digital (icluding HD) chanels unencrypted where they are available locally.
The signal came through very cleanly and the picture was great, but it was clear there had been some compression. At times there were some glitches -- intermittent black screens, pixelization and blockiness, momentary freezes and jumps, etc. I saw all the same glitches at various times with the STB hooked straight up to the TV, so I'm quite sure that Myth didn't create the distortions.
So with cable, it is pretty much a binary proposition -- you get (more or less) exactly what's coming over the line or you get nothing at all.
But for the last five months or so, I've been feeding it OTA signals (ATSC) with rabbit ears. I live in a coach house about seven miles north and four miles west of the center -- where all the TV transmitters are atop the Sears Tower or the Hancock building.
My antenna faces west, and the house has walls built over 100 years ago by people afraid of big fires. As a result, I get at times considerable interference in the signal. When it's good, it's fantastic -- a mile better than the QAM signal from Comcast. But at times I get random characters, freezes, audio pops, etc.
The distortions are noticeably more frequent when it's raining. I've seen the same behavior on other sets around the city.
Most likely, it's because those channels are splitting their wattage between analog and digital transmissions until the switch. The digital transmissions are at hugely lower output levels than their analog equivalents.
There is definitely interference, but unlike poor analog signal, poor digital signal is impossible to watch.
I'm seeing the same thing. FF 3.0.1, Flashblock 1.5.6, Ubuntu 8.04.
It doesn't work consistently, or even according to any pattern that I can see. Just following the link seems to be enough -- there doesn't appear to be any effect whether or not one even looks at the tab.
The flash itself remains blocked but evil.com pops up in the clipboard around 10-20 percent of the time.
Sure you can. Just fire up your favorite terminal, use su user2 to switch to another user account, and launch Firefox from there.
If you're using Ubuntu, you may have to run the command xhost +LOCAL: from your primary user account to let other non network users access the display.
Two separate browsers, two separate users, two profiles, two caches, two home directories, etc.
You can cut and paste URLs, and even drag tabs from one to the other.
Ah. I see. Well, the first step is to get an operating system that properly deals with multiple and non-admin users.
From what I've seen, not even Cableco-sanctioned Cablecard devices work properly, and I've never seen a PC-based PVR that actually works with cablecard, not matter what operating system it's running.
Cablecard depends on the providers -- Comcast, TW, etc -- letting it work, and they haven't shown any signs of that (though if you want to lease a PVR for $15/month, that can be arranged).
So what can MythTV do that Cablecard devices and/or CATV provider boxes can't?.
For one, they can capture just about anything you can throw at it. Input 1 of my machine is an analog capture from the stock Directv box, controlled via serial cable.
Inputs 2 and 3 are digital HD OTA channels captured with rabbit ears and an HD Homerun. Rabbit ears may seem a bit quaint, but try testing the quality of HD broadcasts OTA vs cable and you'll see pretty quickly that cable HD is not quite what it's cracked up to be.
Pretty soon input 4 will be HD channels in HD (as well as SD channels) from Directv via the Hauppage HD-PVR component capture device.
Plus I have Mythfrontends in my office and my bedroom.
I forget. Who else will give me 1TB+ of storage, three output locations, three HD inputs plus one SD input, not to mention CD archiving and playback, DVD archiving and playback, photo archiving and playback, emulator frontend, and (why the heck not) RSS reader? Let's just throw realtime weather forecasts and radar into the mix.
Did I mention you get all this for the cost of hardware? And (if you're in the US) the listings data runs $20/year?
And if you want 10TB of storage and 20 output locations, it still is only the cost of hardware?
I agree. I sure wish MythTV were practical and weren't so irrelevant. Maybe then I could stop watching my TV and start fiddling with it again.