What do you mean none of their other activities are successful? The XBox 360 has become the best gaming platform for hardcore gamers, beating out the over-hyped (and -priced) Playstation 3. I'd say MS's game console division is quite successful.
MS has invested in the neighborhood of 10 figures into the XBox line. Revenues from the XBox to date are only 7 or 8 figures. This is a deficit of tens of millions of dollars -- which turns into hundreds of millions when you consider that the XBox hardware is sold at or below cost. MS may be getting mindshare and establishing a place in the market, but not many companies would lose hundreds of millions to gain a number-two spot and call it a success.
Aside from that, their Live Local maps are much better than Google's maps with their bird's eye view and the more recent images (Google's are several years old in most places).
Google Maps makes Google money through advertising. That is their business. MS Maps (or whatever they've renamed it to lately) is a loss-leader that does more losing than leading. Business Lesson #1: Money coming in is better than money going out.
There are still a lot of Hotmail users and the new Hotmail interface is quite nice if you ask me.
Gmail makes Google money through advertising. See Business Lesson #1.
As for MS Office, the new interface is far more intuitive and takes a regular user only a week or 2 to get used to it.
Many 'regular users' are much older than you and don't like having to relearn to walk. I don't think that redesigning the interface was a bad idea, but it is a bad idea to force it on people who were quite happy with what they had. In other words, the new interface is useful but that's no reason to prevent people from working in a way they already know and are comfortable with.
Google Docs doesn't even come close to being able to do what MS Office can do. Anyone who can suggest that isn't a power user of MS Office.
I didn't suggest that Google docs is a replacement. It's not, and won't be for quite some time. But I do see in the future that there will be a very valuable place for small, lightweight, and truly portable apps for those times when a full-blown office suite is just overkill. Yes, I do need MS Office, and I do appreciate the power that it has, particularly Excel. But at the same time, I've quit trying to make Office apps do things they're not really designed to do. For example, Yes MS Word can do document layout. But I got sick of trying to wrestle with it and am unimpressed by the primitiveness of MS Publisher. So I've found it easier and better looking to use a text editor and Scribus. I do still need MS Office, but there's one less thing I need it for.
MS also had announced this year that they were going to introduce document sharing.
Considering all the wild promises MS has made over the years of Really Cool Stuff (TM) in development that will be ready any day now, I treat anything from them that isn't in production and available as pure vapor. This is no exception.
And if you really think online software is the way of the future, wait until you have to edit a presentation in flight to a client. Good luck with that.
It's inevitable that a huge chunk of what now resides on the desktop will move to the server. Everyone, including MS, is aware of this and is moving in this direction. That doesn't mean that you won't be able to work without a connection -- everyone is also aware that networks go down or are unavailable at times. We'll both still be able to edit our presentations on the plane without a net connection. But when we are connected the work will be synced, so when we leave our laptop in the cab on the way back home, the presentation will have already been saved remotely. If this is not the way of the future, then why is MS developing Office Live?
MS is still the clear winner when it comes to drivers. If I install even the latest Linux I still have issues with hunting down drivers, especially for wireless cards.
I'm getting very tired of seeing this same myth trotted out again and again. The fact is that drivers in Linux are not hard to find or install because you don't have to find or install them. They're already there. And this goes for standard and and quite a wide range of exotic hardware.
Need some examples? I've used all the following hardware with Fedora and/or Ubuntu (in most cases both), and some with Debian.
Hauppage PVR-x50/500: recognized by Linux at installation, ivtv driver automatically installed and activated. On Windows requires driver installation and reboot.
Nvidia fx5x00/fx6x00: recognized by Linux at installation, nv driver automatically installed and activated. For binary nvidia driver, need to install (one click on Ubuntu, yum install nvidia-graphics on Fedora) and restart X. On Windows, need to install driver, reboot, update driver, reboot.
Turtle Beach Riviera soundcard: recognized at installation, cmipci driver loaded and activated. On Windows, need to install driver, reboot.
Nikon D-50 digital camera: plug into Linux and go. On Windows, need to install driver, reboot.
HDHomerun HDTV over IP tuner: Plug into your network, point Linux at the IP address and go. On Windows, need to install driver, reboot. (Notice a theme?)
Lexicon Omega audio/MIDI interface: Plug into Linux (Ubuntu Studio) and go. On Windows, need to install driver, reboot.
HP psc2400 all-in-one printer (this one is my favorite for pure absurdity): Plug into Linux, add to CUPS using Install Printer dialog. On windows need to install or download either basic driver (150 MB!) or full package with crapware (350MB), reboot, update driver (if from CD), reboot.
Network printing is even more fun: on Linux, check a box to enable network printing and Install Printer (doesn't need to be attached) on remote machine. On Windows: Try to add remote printer on MS machine, watch it fail and demand a driver. Try to install driver, watch it fail because the printer is not attached. Move the printer to the remote system so you can install the printer and driver locally. Manually edit the printer config to point to the remote location, move the printer back to the remote system, and hope that Windows doesn't decide the printer is no longer attached and remove the driver.
Network printer hosted on Linux: From Linux, Install network printer at remote location using CUPS. From Windows, once drivers are installed configure remote printer IP address.
Network printer hosted on Windows: From Linux, Install network printer at remote location using Samba (printer sharing enabled). From Windows: Go through a whole series of confusing dialogs about file/printer sharing on host and client, watch it fail, tweak more settings, adjust firewall, watch it fail, tweak more settings, watch your remote system remove driver, move your printer again so you can reinstall the driver, reboot a few times, and eventually it might work.
The only part of your argument that makes any sense is with wireless cards, and that is only if you haven't done your homework and bought a Broadcom or other unsupported card. On my laptop (Ubuntu Feisty) the Atheros-based SMC PCMCIA card worked out of the box. No driver installation because the atheros driver was already there.
So tell me again, how does Windows have an advantage with hardware installation and drivers?
Microsoft is a software company who have, admittedly, recently taken an interest in Search tools [...]
MS is an OS and applications company that has recently taken an interest in search tools, and advertising, and game consoles, and live services, and mapping, and portable music hardware, and low-end laptops, and enterprise servers, and smartphones, and content delivery, and standards, and anything else involving binary code that they can get their hands into.
The problem with MS is that they've lost focus on the business that built and sustains them -- Windows and Office. As it stands, Office is still the must-have application, which drives every business in which MS is successful. Replace Office, and you no longer need Windows, Exchange, MS Server, MS SQL, etc. None of their other activities are successful -- they're either gaping sinkholes of cash or so marginally profitable that they're unsustainable for anyone not sitting on $50 billion in cash.
What Google gets right is that their entire business is focused on the core of search, advertising, and the organization of information. Everything they do points straight back to and reinforces the core business.
Google's business is possible thanks to OSS tools, and Google deserves respect for going well beyond what is required under OSS licenses and actively contributing code and developer time to projects that are only marginally related, or completely unrelated to their core business. This doesn't cause them to lose focus, but it does keep their developers sharp and happy, and able to approach problems in completely new ways.
Take the office suite, for example. MS' big innovation for the new Office: a redesigned interface that many users, at least initially, find confusing and frustrating. It's interesting but not really necessary, and it's inexcusable that there's no mechanism to display menus in a way that users are already used to. With the Google office tools (which admittedly are nowhere near ready to replace MS Office) you get something that really is groundbreaking: the ability for multiple people to edit the same document at the same time.
There's also the difference in how these companies view business and threats. In MS' case, they see a threat in every business sector they don't control outright, and in many they do but where there are still upstarts who can't be bought, bullied, or sued. For companies like Google and others who rely on and develop OSS, competition means better software and improved opportunities for all.
MS isn't going away any time soon and there will always be a place for proprietary software. But increasingly proprietary solutions will be limited to niche professional markets (AutoCAD, ProTools, Premier etc), common applications will move from desktop to server and become platform-agnostic (office suites, email/calendaring, collaboration and versioning), and OSS apps will become increasingly robust and capable for armchair enthusiasts and pros alike (Ardour, GIMP, Cinelerra, My/PostgreSQL, etc).
MS can look for threats wherever it wants and they will find a lot. But the real threat doesn't come from any particular company, sector, or application. It's environmental -- the platform will simply become less and less relevant as time moves on. The real threat is that MS won't see this and won't react in time. It will be the beginning of the end as soon as there is a platform-neutral, drop-in replacement for Office + Outlook + Exchange + Sharepoint. We're not there yet, but the day is fast approaching.
So yes. I DO deserve a job here over some kid in a third world country that can barely count his fingers.
So how many languages do you speak? I've met lots of people in Africa and Asia whom you would probably judge can't 'count their fingers' but they can speak English as a fourth or fifth language.
'Working your ass off' varies hugely. I might have a busy 12 hour day where I sit at my ergonomic desk in my ergonomic chair, with blinds to keep the glare of the sun up on the 51st floor on my office high-rise in financial NYC out of my eyes sending emails, making decisions, creating documentation and participating in meetings. I'd say i worked pretty hard that day.
Sitting on your ass all day doing easy things is not 'working your ass off'. That's the benefit of a university education -- one can complain about a 'hard day' because one had to write some emails, make some decisions, and talk on the phone for a while. Try working a real 'hard day' and you'll see the difference. You probably interact with folks every day who work their asses off for next to nothing, but but you just don't care about that, do you. Probably too busy talking on the phone and writing emails.
As one of the benefits that my parents (and ancestors) have passed on to me, i get to have a much nicer 'hard day'.
Undoubtedly a though that Czar Nicholas would agree with. Things ended badly for him. You deserve nothing because of your ancestors. Prove yourself in an open marketplace. If I buy your services, I decide what you are worth.
Maybe some of these third world countries should try doing something other than breeding more poor, diseased, hungry children. The US managed to avoid that route after all. So have plenty of other countries.
Maybe you should realize that the 'third world' hasn't existed for quite some time, and that the inhabitants of many of these countries don't think of themselves as underprivileged. In many countries there are, in fact, fewer poor, diseased, or hungry children than in your US of A. And, if surveys are to be believed, many of them are happier than you are.
The biggest real difference is and has been the price of and access to capital. In the US, capital has always been relatively cheap, and the penalty for default relatively benign. Education has always been encouraged, if not officially than at least through communities. Elsewhere in the world, capital has been expensive and difficult to come by, failure has meant penury, and education has been throttled by those who would prefer today's slaves to tomorrow's consumers. This is changing rather quickly.
The America of your father is dead. The US, while still a generator of knowledge, is no longer an exporter but an importer of intellectual capital. And the country is making it harder and harder to import the knowledge it needs, and doing everything it can to encourage the growth of innovative centers elsewhere in the world.
If you care about the future of the US then this should concern you greatly. America cannot compete on the world market in manufacturing as it had in the past because of abundant resources and cheap labor -- resources are no longer abundant and labor is no longer cheap. Therefore it must compete on quality of service and depth of knowledge. The gap between the US and the rest of the world in this respect narrows by the day.
The UN still is under the impression that sanctions...
Fixed your typo. Unless you're under the impression that the US has complete and total control of the security council suddenly.
Nope. The embargo on Cuba is purely a US matter. There was a time when the US could bully plenty of Central and South American countries into honoring it, but the US is pretty much alone these days. Neither the UN nor the UN Security Council has ever had an embargo on Cuba.
I've had a mythtv system for a couple of years as well and for it "just works". Plays DVD's, games, and mp3's and of course all the good PVR functionality. Looking at the uptime, I see its up to 80 days now... my record is 140 days. I bet I could correlate my system outages with wind storms (think power outage).
Current uptime on my Myth backend: 129 days. Restarted when I upgraded from 0.18 to 0.20. Previous uptime around ~200 days. Restarted because I moved. I had forgotten that I never scripted lircd to start from boot, so was surprisd when my remote didn't work. When you boot a machine less than twice a year it's easy to forget that something isn't set to automatically start at boot. But easy to fix. How do you modprobe something on MS Windows again?
It's also been interesting reading yet another rehash of this whole MS Windows vs Linux driver support debate, and realizing how vocal people are who do't know jack shit about it.
It comes down to this: If a nifty new piece of hardware is supported by a Microsoft OS, it will have
a honking big sticker on the box saying so. It will not, unfortunately, advertise Linux compatibility or non-compatibility.
Users of MS windows will have to install the drivers from the hardware from included CD-ROMs, or fetch the drivers from the internet. In Linux it's a bit different.
For the vast majority of devices that are Linux-compatible, there are no drivers to install or download; they are included. Like my POS All-in-One HP PSC printer. To get the thing to work in MS Windows, I need to install/download a 150 MB driver (that's the minimum required) just to get it to work. HP and Microsoft recommend I install the full package at 350 MB.
On Linux, I don't need anything because it already works. Scanner, check; printer, check; copier, independent of PC but check; fax, well who uses those anymore (I assume it works but haven't had a landline in two years thanks to Asterisk).
If I want remote printing/scanning capabilities it's really easy to do on Linux -- I just point the local machine to whatever machine hosts the printer. No drivers. No messines.
On MS Windows, it's a bit more difficult. Since this is a POS USP printer, Widows doesn't like that it's not attached locally. Even though My Computer can see the remote printer attached via SMB, the local system still insists on installing its own driver (rather than using the generic driver), and then fails to install the driver when it can't locate the printer locally. So I have to phsically move the printer from one room to another; install the driver; move the printer back where I wanted it; and hope that my target MS Windows system hasn't noticed that its default local printer is actually on a remote SMB share.
I don't know what's involved in installing MS Windows drivers for Turtle Beach soundcards or Hauppage capture cards, because I've never had to do it. Both of these pieces of hardware are recognized in Linux automatically. I've heard that MS Windows users sometimes have problem with SATA drives. I've never had a problem with Linux.
And my point is not that I've never had a problem finding a driver on the internet but that I've never had to look for a driver.
You can complain all you want that your shitty-ass ATI card doesn't give you Beryl automatically, or that your on-board Broadcom Wi-Fi chip isn't recognized in Ubuntu, but nobody ever promised you it would. In fact, many people have already warned you against trying to get 3D acceleration with ATI, or 802.11g speed (or any function at all) with Broadcom.
You might as well complain that your Honda carburator won't fit your Ford.
What hardware would be recommended to get started to get started? I assume a Tuner card in a working PC is what is needed but would additional hardware/software be needed?
Most obviously, you want a working computer. Motherboards are pretty flexible but some VIA chipsets have been known to be problematic. Nforce boards are the gold standard.
For capture, it really depends on your signal source and your plans.
Analog hardware capture cards are probably the best e.g, the Hauppage PVR 150/250/500 series. These will let you capture analog OTA transmissions and coax/S-video output from a cable or satellite STB. These cards are SD only, but can capture all stations in SD.
To use this card with a cable or satellite STB, you'll need an IR blaster and a working serial port. There are a number of IR blasters that can do this that work through a serial port or through USB.
For HD broadcasts you'll need a card capable of ATSC (over the air) or QAM (cable) decoding. But even QAM cards will only give you those channels that your cable provider sends without encryption. By law (in the US), they are required by the FCC to send OTA stations in the clear -- meaning NBC, FOX, ABC, PBS, CBS. But you're not likely to get access to channels like DiscoveryHD or ESPNHD even if you're paying for them. Either way, HD cards will generally only give you HD stations.
You'll want an nvidia gfx card for playback. Don't ask, don't posit, don't opine, and most of all, don't try to get an ATI card working under Linux. ATI doesn't care, their drivers are for shit, and you're asking for a headache. Any nvidia card gf4 or better will work. The gold standard is still the fx5200 series, although you'll have no problems with the 6x00 series either.
Your AC97 on-board audio will work, though I've always found it a bit noisy and lacking in definition. Turtle Beach cards offer excellent quality for the price -- particularly the Riviera, which you can get retail for around $30 or OEM for around $25.
Why would someone want to use this instead of say TVO?
Aside from the joy and satisfaction that comes from building a superior machine, it is because of the things that makes MythTV superior to devices like Tivo. I can't speak for all users, but I'll say why it's better for me.
Mythtv allows time-shifting of television in much the same way that Tivo does. It allows for recording of TV programs automatically according to user-defined rules in a much more discreet way than Tivo does. It allows remote administration of recordings and recording schedules in a way that Tivo doesn't. It allows format shifting of recorded material in a way that Tivo doesn't. And it is capable of storing and playing back just about any media in a way that Tivo most decidedly isn't.
Myth plays externally acquired videos, like your home movies or legitimately backed-up DVDs, Myth plays your music, Myth shows your photos, and Myth will do all this on as many machines as you attach to your network without asking for silly things like license keys or monthly fees.
I've run MythTV since 0.14 on Knoppmyth and Fedora -- starting with FC3.
When I started, Knoppmyth was way over my head -- particularly the finishing touches to get everything running properly. It was my first real hands-dirty experience with Linux and I appreciated for all I learned. I did did manage to get an ancient K6-3D system running Knoppmyth -- not well enough to put in my livingroom, but well enough to prove the concept and that it was worth the time and effort to build a new system on more capable hardware.
My second system was a P3 700 built on FC3 following Jarod Wilson's definitive guide, mainly because I felt that following the guide to transform a generic install into a MythTV appliance would teach me a lot about what the Myth components were, how they all fit together, how to make them all fit together in Linux, and what to do when something went wrong. I was right.
I built a third machine (my current master beckend/frontend) on FC4 also following Jarod's guide but this time on a P4 2.5 machine.
By this time I was ready to start adding FE capabilities, but I already knew the process of installation, knew about the components and dependencies, and no longer felt the need for yumming or smarting in kernel modules and so on. I used Knoppmyth to turn my old P3 700 former-backend into a frontend.
This setup worked well through several upgrades -- FC on the backend, Knoppmyth on the frontend with the only caveat being that both machines have to be running the same version of Myth. Upgrade one, you have to upgrade the other.
Even though this was about two years ago, the Knoppmyth install was easy and painless, and I was prepared to deal with irregularities like tweaking xorg.conf. I also really appreciated that the Knoppmyth CD would let you run a frontend off the CD -- allowing you to instantly test hardware without touching the drive.
Last weekend, I finally retired the P3. It's currently on holiday, but will soon return to service as a file server. Instead I built a new frontend on an Athlon 64 4000.
I decided to give Mythdora a whirl since I know it's been under heavy development including the involvement of Jarod. I was really impressed with how smoothly and quickly the installation went, including post-install scripts to handle things like IR hardware and binary nvidia drivers (I know, I know, but the binary driver really works better for Myth than the Free one). I went from having a pile of boxes at 4 pm to a working Mythtv system at 9:30. It might have been quicker but I had to run to the shop when I ran out of beer.
I didn't try a Knoppmyth install on this hardware, but have no doubt that it would have gone just as smoothly. Cecil deserves a lot of respect and credit for the fantastic job he has done with Knoppmyth over the years.
Of course I did have quite a bit of Myth-specific experience behind me and knew from the start to buy hardware that was rock-solid compatible -- like an nforce board, nvidia gfx card, turtle beach sound card, on-board 10/100 LAN, etc.
The point is that by last weekend I was a lot more familiar with Fedora than with Debian, so I was really happy to be able to so painlessly migrate my FE to Fedora. I have no doubt that those more familiar with Debian will be just as happy with what Cecil has done in Knoppix.
And more than anything, lot of credit is owed to the folks behind MythTV -- from Isaac Richards, the original creator, and all the key developers, to folks like Jarod, Cecil, and Dennis for enormous contributions in making Myth more accessible, to all the numerous active and helpful folks on the mailing list. They've made MythTV into a product that truly is a world-beater -- by far the most powerful, most flexible, most extensible, and downright most pleasurable media engine on the planet.
Why is it that when a product achieves......10% of the MP3 player market, it is less than an also-ran.
Because it is highly dubious that the Zune has sold anywhere near the figures being claimed. Because the portable media player market is still a rapidly growing one, and the sales rate of ipods is still growing significantly. The Zune hasn't done a thing to reduce the ipod's market performance, but has only appeared to cannabalize sales of Microsoft-partner devices.
The Zune has nowhere near 10 percent of the market, and other players are selling more rapidly and growing sales rates more rapidly, meaning that the Zune's market share is shrinking, not growing, despite the growing size of the market. The ipod's market share is still growing.
...10% of the browser market, it is a signal that the world is changing....10% of the OS market, it is news that would rival the second coming of Christ.
Because the browser market is mature, and the growth of a superior upstart browser has led directly to a weakening of the incumbent. This might not seem like much when it's a matter of one free program vs another, but it's much more significant than that.
Microsoft wanted to "own" the internet since it belatedly learned of its existence. Internet Explorer was to be the means of this ownership as the protocols and standards involved were subverted to work properly only on Microsoft's software. The plan almost worked.
Same thing in the OS market. Microsoft insists on coplete dominance, and has managed to maintain it for over 20 years. The inertia that comes from this dominance is the only thing that keeps them going. It certainly isn't innovation, nor is it that they make the best products (Excel notwithstanding).
But if you remove the ubiquity of MS Windows, and people began to look at software and/or services based on their needs and the ability of the software/service to meet those needs without considering what they're used to, then purchasing and deployment decisions become much more nuanced and better informed than today's 'Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft'. Remeber when the same thing happened to IBM?
Because Microsoft insists on complete dominance, anything less than complete dominance would be a failure. Their software would have to be cross-platform, they would have to compete on features and price, they would have to open their formats and ensure compatibility to avoid losing a significant and growing market segment. They would have to play by the rules and compete according to those rules.
In short "Zune sells a million" isn't news or notable because it probably isn't true -- and even if it is, it's a small and shrinking slice of the pie, and hasn't touched the incumbent in the slightest. Ten percent of the browser and/or OS market is news because it represents direct damage to the incumbent, and the cracks that non-MS software is opening in the Microsoft fortress may prove unfixable.
I've found that Ogg Vorbis offers noticeably better fidelity than mp3 at comparable comression. It's not something that you can easily hear with a portable player and cheap headphones, but on quality gear the difference is obvious.
Ogg is much, much better at preserving the character of high-frequency sounds and overtones (think cymbals and strings), and much more faithfully preserves dynamic range. Again, this won't make much difference on the train with your ipod ear buds, but run it through a decent sound system and the mp3s just sound muddy. And when it comes to Classical music, mp3 is nearly useless. Ogg does a decent enough job of it, but I still keep Classical and many Jazz recordings in FLAC.
From what I understand, the lack of Ogg support on many players stems less from commercial or legal concerns (patent issues vis a vis Fraunhofer notwithstanding) than from technical issues. Ogg needs more juice to decode, which means needing stronger processors, better means of heat dissipation, and a necessary hit on battery performance. Not that it can't be done, but it requires more expensive components and shorter battery lives.
But the lack of Ogg support on the ipod is not a huge deal. I wish it were there, but that doesn't stop me from transcoding from Ogg (or FLAC) to mp3 for the ipod and keeping the Oggs and FLACs on my Myth system.
I do favor open source whenever possible but am no fanatic. I am, however, a musician, and sound quality is as imortant as, or more important to me than portability. Especially when portability is so easy after the fact.
And I think it's pretty stupid of you to not realize that other people may do things diferently than you, and they're not wrong because of it.
As far as the Zune claims go, I don't buy it for a minute, any more than I buy the claim of 40m Vista licenses sold.
I take the el to work in Chicago, and every day I see dozens of people with ipods. I've yet to see a single Zune in the wild, and at retail outlets like Microcenter or Target there always seems to be a crowd of people looking at the ipods on display while the Zune is simply ignored. I don't think I've ever even seen a working Zune on display -- they're always off or broken.
Microsoft's numbers don't mean a thing. The numbers to look at are from retailers: How many Zunes have been sold at Amazon, Best Buy, Circuit City, etc.? It's certainly not as high as Microsoft would have you believe. No matter what color they make it.
In 2005 you can do all of those things except rip commercial DVDs for obvious reasons.
What's so obvious about not being able to shift the format of content you've bought?
You can fast forward through commercials although you can install some plug-ins that will attempt to skip them automatically. A plug-in is obviously acceptable given the nature of it's competition which is 100% modular.
Ah so. This ability isn't built-in? The source code isn't available and tweakable? There aren't multiple methods to achieve the same thing, eg. blank-frame detection, logo detection, scene change detection, etc?
MCE is not restricted in any way, it can play h.264 or whatever you like including Ogg support.
So MCE allows me to take one program group and through a user job automatically strip commercials and transcode to Xvid for storage, and for another group to strip commercials and transcode for ipod while leaving the originals? With softare included in the original distribution? MCE allows me to record in HD those channels that my provider has applied 5c encryption to? Surely by "not restricted in any way" you mean "somewhat restricted in several ways".
The web interface may be new to the Vista versions although it's easy enough to integrate the Media Connect service with a web service that you customize yourself.
So is this another license? Is this another bit-and-piece you have to tack on after the fact? The web interface in MythTV is not valuble so you can change your recording schedule while you're on holiday in the Seychelles (althlough it is capable of that) but so you can set up and change recordings in your home office while your wife is watching the Food Channel in the other room. Can MCE do that?
I haven't seen too much demand for this since most people don't feel the need to modify their play-lists remotely which you can do without a web interface.
Most people don't see a need for a PVR until they see one and what it can do, particularly when it means you can watch a whole football game in 90 minutes without ever seeing a commercial or ever touching the remote. Can MCE do that?
[I]f you have a way to decode 4 heterogeneous video feeds then you sure can record them all.
I'm not greedy. My Myth box only has one analog and one HD input. But I know people who have up to four analog inputs and two HD inputs working simultaneously. With MythTV I can record (though not play back) HD content on a P3 700MHz system -- I can play it back on my P4 2.8 frontend. Can I record HD contend using MCE on my P3 700 system? Will it allow me to set up multiple playback units on generic hardware without requiring the purchase of a new license?
Transcoding is as simple as a change of recording preference or a simple save as if you're talking after the fact.
So transcoding in MCE is simply a function of 'Save As...'? That would be interesting -- I find that transcoding from DVD-format MPEG-2 (my default recording format) to Xvid takes a bit longer than it takes to watch it for two-pass encoding. A bit quicker for one-pass encoding to ipod format. Or are you saying that MCE records all three formats (and more) simultaneously so there's no extra time involved in transcoding? The transcoding package is built-in, right? Or is that another license one has to buy?
I'm not sure what kind of video editing you do using a remote,if you're talking about cutting out commercials you can certainly do that. Anything more complex should be done through Media Connect to another machine where you have real tools for editing. It's easy as pie to setup because of the Media Connect service.
I think you forgot the "(TM)" at the end of Media Connect (TM). Does it allow me to cut breaks in recordings des
...followed by a picture of Richard Stallman, looking like an Al Qaeda member, captioned "The patent hater".
Just for reference, could you post a link to a picture of RMS where he doesn't look like wild-eyed old-testament prophet?
I agree with much (though certainly not all) of what Stallman says, and I'm awfully happy he's doing what he's doing. But you must realize that on some questions he is quite off the deep end -- and ruthlessly idealistic as only an acedemic can be.
Business doen't go much for ideology and will be little moved by Stallman's invectives, however entertaining they may be and however much most of us here grasp their essential truth.
But Business will be put at ease, and Microsoft put against the ropes, once herds of IBM patent lawyers start taking apart these claims. Assuming it comes to that, and hopefully it will.
Zero nine eff nine
One one zero two nine dee
Seven four eee three
Five bee dee eight four
One five six see five six three
Five six eight eight si
Zero in the end
All bad dee are emm shall pass
Bits fall like raindrops
Now Jimmy the "Moose" Morgan, him I'll believe. He don't guess the probabilities, he makes them. A lead pipe trumps your modern math any day of the week.
But setting the odds on sports matches isn't really about the probablility of one team winning or losing. It's about balancing the way that people will bet. The odds are structured to minimize the risk and maximize the return of the bookmaker, based on bettor behavior.
"Moose" Morgan doesn't need to know or care whether the Yankees are likely to beat Orioles tomorrow, only what the balance will be between bets on the Yankees and Orioles. As an experienced bookmaker, Moose will naturally give favor to the Yankees from the outset. But if he's getting twice the number of bets on the Orioles to win than the Yanks, then he will shift his odds accordingly.
Because of this, the science (and math) in sports gambling comes down to finding the inefficiencies -- i.e. figuring out where the bettors have moved the gambling odds far enough beyond the real odds that it makes a bet attractive. Meaning that if you can come up with an algorithm that is reasonably accurate and says that the Yankees:Orioles ought to be 6:5 but the betting odds are 7:2, you stand to make a killing.
This is much easier to do with something like horse racing than with baseball. With horses, you have a relatively small number of people spread across 6 to 15 or so potential winners in every race. Inefficiencies abound, in the sense that favorites often win but pay at 2:1 when realistically they should be 4:1, eg. The secret to a happy day at the track is finding the horse that should be 4:1 or 5:1 but is running at 16:1.
Jimmy knows his business, and deserves credit for that. After all why would you try to gamble and risk losing when you're smart emough to take a piece of every bet and always win?
Consumers don't have to rationalize buying Vista. If they're buying a new computer, they don't have a choice. A telling quote from the article:
"Microsoft declined to break out the number of Vista copies sold at retail, though it has said in the past that 80 percent of Windows revenue comes from sales to PC makers."
What's more is that the figures suggest that 20 million copies of Vista are currenty being used, rather than having been shipped to OEMs and sitting on shelves. I would suspect that the actual number of Vista licenses in the wild are substantially lower, to the point of embarassment for Microsoft.
Personally, I've bought my last Microsoft license. At the same time I realize that Business runs on Microsoft, Business accounts for the lion's share of Microsoft licenses, and I've yet to see Business in general, or any single business in particular, leaping towards Vista. Most, including the one I work for, are waiting until it is absolutely necessary (certainly not before SP1) before even contemplating a widespread rollout.
The numbers are nonsense and reflective only of PCs in the pipeline (or whatever other figures can be found in Redmond-area proctological exams), not in deployment. In 12 months, Vista will be unavoidable but for now it is a non factor. As far as Business goes, it's still more important to make sure your widget works with MS Windows 2000 than with Vista.
She has to run a windows application for her work and it doesn't work under wine so I got the free vmware player but got stuck because you need the commercial version to create a virtual disk.
You may need the commercial VMware to create a virtual disk, but there's other free utilities that can create a virtual disk readable by VMplayer.
For example I used qemu to create a virtual disk holding and running XP under VMplayer (free) running on FC4. Works great, and completely free.
Brilliant.
You only forgot to mention that the Linux babe never gets sick, never drags you off to visit her mother (never even calls her mother), has built-in birth control, and really enjoys it when you get two or three other hot Linux babes to all play together on your system.
Apples and oranges. Many of the same factors that make a national election possible in a country like Estonia make it impossible in the US.
For one thing: The United States does not have a national election. The US has 50 concurrent state elections for federal offices. At the same time, there are 50 separate elections for state-level offices, and thousands of elections for county, city, schoolboard district, ward, etc offices, not to mention ballot initiatives, referenda, multiple-selection judicial contests, and so on.
A national election in a country like Estonia involves only one choice -- for party. Parliamentary seats are divided among parties based on the percent of returns for each party, and the party decides which of its candidates sits in Parliament. The party with the most seats nominates a Prime Minister who then appoints a government, which assumes power provided it has the approval of the Parliament.
If the party with the largest number of votes is unable to persuade the whole assembley to approve its nomination, the chance goes to the party with the next largest share of votes, and so on. Thus you can get some quite strange bedfellows in European coalition governments (like the Red-Green coalition in Germany until recently). But this is all separate and distinct from the voter, who has no say beyond party preference as to how the government is comprised or who the Prime Minister is.
Thus a national election in Estonia is one question on one ballot that is the same for the whole country.
In Maricopa County, AZ, last November there were 19 different initiative and referendum measures in addition to the usual slate of federal, state, county, city (Phoenix, Mesa, Tempe, etc), judicial, school board, etc. races that varied according to ward, precinct, township, jurisdiction, school board district, etc. While their ballot was one of the longest in the country in November, the same complexity and range of contests is true in any big city.
When you have one question on one ballot for the whole voting population, then internet voting is feasible. When your ballot is much more complex, much longer, and requires strictly validating voters according to location and eligibility, it becomes much more problematic.
We're not so bloody stupid to believe that our competitors are standing in the aisle of Circuit City and scratching their head over whether to buy a Seagate or WD drive.
We know that our competitors all have their own metrics and their own relationships with manufacturers and frankly, we don't care. We know our competitors also measure these things, and we're not telling them anything they don't already know.
We aren't particularly worried about saying that some drives fail, because everyone who cares already knows that some drives fail. Everyone whose job it is to know which drives fail first already knows that as well.
But we're not going to tell you which brand fails at a higher rate than normal because we don't need a lawsuit that would cost us a lot of money but in the end would only confirm what the people who need to know these things already know.
We will, on the other hand, describe the tests we ran, our methodology, our results, and our analyses. We do this just for kicks and we hope you can learn something from the results.
You really didn't read the article, did you? On page 3 (Section 2.2 Deployment Details), the authors state: "More than one hundred thousand disk drives were used for all the results presented here. The disks are a combination of serial and parallel ATA consumer-grade hard disk drives, ranging in speed from 5400 to 7200 rpm, and in size from 80 to 400 GB. All units were put into production in or after 2001. [...] The data used for this study were collected between December 2005 and August 2006."
What are you waiting for Google to tell you? Are you really accusing them of being evil because they did a study, described their methodology, detailed their results, presented their analyses, and published it all for anyone who is interested?
You describe their conclusions as:
Uselsess
But there is no contradiction at all if you are smart enough to understand. They are telling you that if SMART identifies a problem with a drive then it is very likely that drive will fail within 60 days. But in a sample of 100,000 drives, many drives will also fail that have not returned errors on SMART scans. Thus SMART is a reliable indicator of impending failure but is not a silver bullet that can recognize and predict all failures before they happen.
Next time you have access to 100,000 hard drives, can analyze patterns of failure among them, can use those failures as a benchmark against which to measure analysis tools, and can come up with better recommendations for predicting failure than this study, then by all means let us know. But if you're looking for Microsoft or Western Digital or Seagate or Yahoo to perform and publish this kind of study for free, I think you may be waiting a good long while.
Question: Why is it reasonable for OOo 1.x to not be able to read OOo 2.x formatted documents, but not reasonable that Word97 can't read Word2003 formatted documents?
Because upgrading from OpenOffice 1.x to OpenOffice 2.x costs nothing, takes 10 minutes or less, preserves all the functionality you had before, and increases compatibility exponentially.
Moving to an incrementally higher version of MS Office(TM) costs hundreds of dollars per seat, breaks older funtionality, renders documents you produced unreadable to users who haven't "upgraded" their MS Office(TM) istallations, and as of 2007 requires users to relearn how to do things they already know how to do for no good reason and with no way to roll the interface back.
I own a licence for MS Office 1997(TM), another license for MS Office 2000(TM), an upgrade license for MS Office XP(TM), and an upgrade license for MS Office 2003(TM). Now MS tells me that I can't "upgrade" to MS Office 2007(TM) with my current licenses, bought and paid for each time. If I want MS Office 2007(TM) I will need to buy the full version. Well, as it turns out I don't want MS Office 2007(TM). The only feature that interests me is the expanded Pivot Tables in Excel. That may have been worth a $100 upgrade but it isn't worth the full retail price of MS Office(TM).
Besides, I don't belive that MS Office 2007(TM) will run nearly as well as MS Office 2003(TM) on the XP(TM) system that I run in VMware under Fedora Core.
I don't claim that I'll be able to avoid using them, but I've bought my last MS Office(TM) and my last MS Windows(TM) licenses. If I need to produce a document readable by MS Office 2007(TM), I'll use my older version. If I need to read a document produced in MS Office 2007(TM), I'll use OpenOffice.
Thanks for the memories, Microsoft(TM), but I've moved on.
In all seriousness, I think this this is a definite trend and will continue.
I work in analytics for a middling consultancy. Our business runs on information and is almost entirely an MS shop (MS Server, MS SQL, MS Exchange, etc; thank goodness we don't use Sharepoint) but we have no intention of moving to Vista any time in the foreseeable future. Unfortunately, we have no intention of moving to Linux for the exact same reason -- that we have a lot of custom and shared applications that run on XP, and there's no business case to be made for conversion.
But while Vista is not even on the map, it is likely that at least some of us will be moving to Office 2007 before too long, partly because of the expanded capacity of Excel but even more because of the highly augmented capability of PivotTables.
I wish it could be otherwise, but we can easily generate the types of graphics we need to with Excel and PivotTables, while doing this in OSS apps is much more problematic.
When processing data on the other hand we work mostly in csv or other text-based formats, and I've introduced Vim and OpenOffice.org to the analytics department for this very purpose. Microsoft simply doesn't produce anything that that can easily, reliably, and predictably work with text formats. No matter how many times you specify cell format in Excel you can never be sure if 25000 will export as...,25000,...,...,"25,000",..., or...,"25000",. Don't even get me started on what MS Office does to New England ZIP codes.
We can perform certain operations in Calc now that used to take more than twice as long in MS Office and required using both Excel and Access (as well as Notepad for tracking down strange text formatting errors).
I've been doing some testing recently with Pentaho (open source BI suite) and am very excited at the developments I see. But I'm not sure that it will do what we need without substantial coding to make it compatible with the other systems we use.
I imagine that a year from now Vista will still be a novelty in the business world, though I fear MS Office 2007 will be unavoidable.
Actually, wireless settings are systemwide settings, and would probably require a prompt even in Linux.
Setting up any network settings on Linux requires sudo. It is an administrative task and so requires administrative priviledges. On most Linux systems you need to authenticate before you make any changes, and often before you can even view settings. This is right and proper behavior.
Where MS Windows Vista fails is in completely mucking up the whole concept of permissions. As an administrator, I don't want my users (or myself as a non-admin user) to even be aware of network settings, and certainly not be allowed to change them. If the network is failing, they need an adminitrator to sort it out. If the user has sudo priviledges and can fix it, that's great but they'll have to authenticate first. There is rarely a need to confirm changes because it is assumed that an administrator knows what they're changing.
MS Windows Vista lets you do whatever you want, then asks you if you're sure you want to do it, then asks if you're really sure you want to do it, then tells you that you can't do it.
The point is removing barriers between a user and his or her goal. Linux does this very elegantly. Apple does it elegantly and prettily. MS does it in a way that is as elegant as an elephant trying to turn around in an elevator, and as pretty as what the elephant leaves behind.
MS hasn't failed because they tried to implement some semblance of user permissions and security, they failed because they did it in such a way that defeats the security through wolf-crying, defeats the permissions by letting anyone elevate permissions easily, and annoys the user by making tasks more difficult, complicated and time consuming than they need to be.
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MS has invested in the neighborhood of 10 figures into the XBox line. Revenues from the XBox to date are only 7 or 8 figures. This is a deficit of tens of millions of dollars -- which turns into hundreds of millions when you consider that the XBox hardware is sold at or below cost. MS may be getting mindshare and establishing a place in the market, but not many companies would lose hundreds of millions to gain a number-two spot and call it a success.
Google Maps makes Google money through advertising. That is their business. MS Maps (or whatever they've renamed it to lately) is a loss-leader that does more losing than leading. Business Lesson #1: Money coming in is better than money going out.
Gmail makes Google money through advertising. See Business Lesson #1.
Many 'regular users' are much older than you and don't like having to relearn to walk. I don't think that redesigning the interface was a bad idea, but it is a bad idea to force it on people who were quite happy with what they had. In other words, the new interface is useful but that's no reason to prevent people from working in a way they already know and are comfortable with.
I didn't suggest that Google docs is a replacement. It's not, and won't be for quite some time. But I do see in the future that there will be a very valuable place for small, lightweight, and truly portable apps for those times when a full-blown office suite is just overkill. Yes, I do need MS Office, and I do appreciate the power that it has, particularly Excel. But at the same time, I've quit trying to make Office apps do things they're not really designed to do. For example, Yes MS Word can do document layout. But I got sick of trying to wrestle with it and am unimpressed by the primitiveness of MS Publisher. So I've found it easier and better looking to use a text editor and Scribus. I do still need MS Office, but there's one less thing I need it for.
Considering all the wild promises MS has made over the years of Really Cool Stuff (TM) in development that will be ready any day now, I treat anything from them that isn't in production and available as pure vapor. This is no exception.
It's inevitable that a huge chunk of what now resides on the desktop will move to the server. Everyone, including MS, is aware of this and is moving in this direction. That doesn't mean that you won't be able to work without a connection -- everyone is also aware that networks go down or are unavailable at times. We'll both still be able to edit our presentations on the plane without a net connection. But when we are connected the work will be synced, so when we leave our laptop in the cab on the way back home, the presentation will have already been saved remotely. If this is not the way of the future, then why is MS developing Office Live?
I'm getting very tired of seeing this same myth trotted out again and again. The fact is that drivers in Linux are not hard to find or install because you don't have to find or install them. They're already there. And this goes for standard and and quite a wide range of exotic hardware.
Need some examples? I've used all the following hardware with Fedora and/or Ubuntu (in most cases both), and some with Debian.
Hauppage PVR-x50/500: recognized by Linux at installation, ivtv driver automatically installed and activated. On Windows requires driver installation and reboot.
Nvidia fx5x00/fx6x00: recognized by Linux at installation, nv driver automatically installed and activated. For binary nvidia driver, need to install (one click on Ubuntu, yum install nvidia-graphics on Fedora) and restart X. On Windows, need to install driver, reboot, update driver, reboot.
Turtle Beach Riviera soundcard: recognized at installation, cmipci driver loaded and activated. On Windows, need to install driver, reboot.
Nikon D-50 digital camera: plug into Linux and go. On Windows, need to install driver, reboot.
HDHomerun HDTV over IP tuner: Plug into your network, point Linux at the IP address and go. On Windows, need to install driver, reboot. (Notice a theme?)
Lexicon Omega audio/MIDI interface: Plug into Linux (Ubuntu Studio) and go. On Windows, need to install driver, reboot.
HP psc2400 all-in-one printer (this one is my favorite for pure absurdity): Plug into Linux, add to CUPS using Install Printer dialog. On windows need to install or download either basic driver (150 MB!) or full package with crapware (350MB), reboot, update driver (if from CD), reboot.
Network printing is even more fun: on Linux, check a box to enable network printing and Install Printer (doesn't need to be attached) on remote machine. On Windows: Try to add remote printer on MS machine, watch it fail and demand a driver. Try to install driver, watch it fail because the printer is not attached. Move the printer to the remote system so you can install the printer and driver locally. Manually edit the printer config to point to the remote location, move the printer back to the remote system, and hope that Windows doesn't decide the printer is no longer attached and remove the driver.
Network printer hosted on Linux: From Linux, Install network printer at remote location using CUPS. From Windows, once drivers are installed configure remote printer IP address.
Network printer hosted on Windows: From Linux, Install network printer at remote location using Samba (printer sharing enabled). From Windows: Go through a whole series of confusing dialogs about file/printer sharing on host and client, watch it fail, tweak more settings, adjust firewall, watch it fail, tweak more settings, watch your remote system remove driver, move your printer again so you can reinstall the driver, reboot a few times, and eventually it might work.
The only part of your argument that makes any sense is with wireless cards, and that is only if you haven't done your homework and bought a Broadcom or other unsupported card. On my laptop (Ubuntu Feisty) the Atheros-based SMC PCMCIA card worked out of the box. No driver installation because the atheros driver was already there.
So tell me again, how does Windows have an advantage with hardware installation and drivers?
MS is an OS and applications company that has recently taken an interest in search tools, and advertising, and game consoles, and live services, and mapping, and portable music hardware, and low-end laptops, and enterprise servers, and smartphones, and content delivery, and standards, and anything else involving binary code that they can get their hands into.
The problem with MS is that they've lost focus on the business that built and sustains them -- Windows and Office. As it stands, Office is still the must-have application, which drives every business in which MS is successful. Replace Office, and you no longer need Windows, Exchange, MS Server, MS SQL, etc. None of their other activities are successful -- they're either gaping sinkholes of cash or so marginally profitable that they're unsustainable for anyone not sitting on $50 billion in cash.
What Google gets right is that their entire business is focused on the core of search, advertising, and the organization of information. Everything they do points straight back to and reinforces the core business.
Google's business is possible thanks to OSS tools, and Google deserves respect for going well beyond what is required under OSS licenses and actively contributing code and developer time to projects that are only marginally related, or completely unrelated to their core business. This doesn't cause them to lose focus, but it does keep their developers sharp and happy, and able to approach problems in completely new ways.
Take the office suite, for example. MS' big innovation for the new Office: a redesigned interface that many users, at least initially, find confusing and frustrating. It's interesting but not really necessary, and it's inexcusable that there's no mechanism to display menus in a way that users are already used to. With the Google office tools (which admittedly are nowhere near ready to replace MS Office) you get something that really is groundbreaking: the ability for multiple people to edit the same document at the same time.
There's also the difference in how these companies view business and threats. In MS' case, they see a threat in every business sector they don't control outright, and in many they do but where there are still upstarts who can't be bought, bullied, or sued. For companies like Google and others who rely on and develop OSS, competition means better software and improved opportunities for all.
MS isn't going away any time soon and there will always be a place for proprietary software. But increasingly proprietary solutions will be limited to niche professional markets (AutoCAD, ProTools, Premier etc), common applications will move from desktop to server and become platform-agnostic (office suites, email/calendaring, collaboration and versioning), and OSS apps will become increasingly robust and capable for armchair enthusiasts and pros alike (Ardour, GIMP, Cinelerra, My/PostgreSQL, etc).
MS can look for threats wherever it wants and they will find a lot. But the real threat doesn't come from any particular company, sector, or application. It's environmental -- the platform will simply become less and less relevant as time moves on. The real threat is that MS won't see this and won't react in time. It will be the beginning of the end as soon as there is a platform-neutral, drop-in replacement for Office + Outlook + Exchange + Sharepoint. We're not there yet, but the day is fast approaching.
So how many languages do you speak? I've met lots of people in Africa and Asia whom you would probably judge can't 'count their fingers' but they can speak English as a fourth or fifth language.
Sitting on your ass all day doing easy things is not 'working your ass off'. That's the benefit of a university education -- one can complain about a 'hard day' because one had to write some emails, make some decisions, and talk on the phone for a while. Try working a real 'hard day' and you'll see the difference. You probably interact with folks every day who work their asses off for next to nothing, but but you just don't care about that, do you. Probably too busy talking on the phone and writing emails.
Undoubtedly a though that Czar Nicholas would agree with. Things ended badly for him. You deserve nothing because of your ancestors. Prove yourself in an open marketplace. If I buy your services, I decide what you are worth.
Maybe you should realize that the 'third world' hasn't existed for quite some time, and that the inhabitants of many of these countries don't think of themselves as underprivileged. In many countries there are, in fact, fewer poor, diseased, or hungry children than in your US of A. And, if surveys are to be believed, many of them are happier than you are.
The biggest real difference is and has been the price of and access to capital. In the US, capital has always been relatively cheap, and the penalty for default relatively benign. Education has always been encouraged, if not officially than at least through communities. Elsewhere in the world, capital has been expensive and difficult to come by, failure has meant penury, and education has been throttled by those who would prefer today's slaves to tomorrow's consumers. This is changing rather quickly.
The America of your father is dead. The US, while still a generator of knowledge, is no longer an exporter but an importer of intellectual capital. And the country is making it harder and harder to import the knowledge it needs, and doing everything it can to encourage the growth of innovative centers elsewhere in the world.
If you care about the future of the US then this should concern you greatly. America cannot compete on the world market in manufacturing as it had in the past because of abundant resources and cheap labor -- resources are no longer abundant and labor is no longer cheap. Therefore it must compete on quality of service and depth of knowledge. The gap between the US and the rest of the world in this respect narrows by the day.
Nope. The embargo on Cuba is purely a US matter. There was a time when the US could bully plenty of Central and South American countries into honoring it, but the US is pretty much alone these days. Neither the UN nor the UN Security Council has ever had an embargo on Cuba.
Current uptime on my Myth backend: 129 days. Restarted when I upgraded from 0.18 to 0.20. Previous uptime around ~200 days. Restarted because I moved. I had forgotten that I never scripted lircd to start from boot, so was surprisd when my remote didn't work. When you boot a machine less than twice a year it's easy to forget that something isn't set to automatically start at boot. But easy to fix. How do you modprobe something on MS Windows again?
It's also been interesting reading yet another rehash of this whole MS Windows vs Linux driver support debate, and realizing how vocal people are who do't know jack shit about it.
It comes down to this: If a nifty new piece of hardware is supported by a Microsoft OS, it will have a honking big sticker on the box saying so. It will not, unfortunately, advertise Linux compatibility or non-compatibility.
Users of MS windows will have to install the drivers from the hardware from included CD-ROMs, or fetch the drivers from the internet. In Linux it's a bit different.
For the vast majority of devices that are Linux-compatible, there are no drivers to install or download; they are included. Like my POS All-in-One HP PSC printer. To get the thing to work in MS Windows, I need to install/download a 150 MB driver (that's the minimum required) just to get it to work. HP and Microsoft recommend I install the full package at 350 MB.
On Linux, I don't need anything because it already works. Scanner, check; printer, check; copier, independent of PC but check; fax, well who uses those anymore (I assume it works but haven't had a landline in two years thanks to Asterisk).
If I want remote printing/scanning capabilities it's really easy to do on Linux -- I just point the local machine to whatever machine hosts the printer. No drivers. No messines.
On MS Windows, it's a bit more difficult. Since this is a POS USP printer, Widows doesn't like that it's not attached locally. Even though My Computer can see the remote printer attached via SMB, the local system still insists on installing its own driver (rather than using the generic driver), and then fails to install the driver when it can't locate the printer locally. So I have to phsically move the printer from one room to another; install the driver; move the printer back where I wanted it; and hope that my target MS Windows system hasn't noticed that its default local printer is actually on a remote SMB share.
I don't know what's involved in installing MS Windows drivers for Turtle Beach soundcards or Hauppage capture cards, because I've never had to do it. Both of these pieces of hardware are recognized in Linux automatically. I've heard that MS Windows users sometimes have problem with SATA drives. I've never had a problem with Linux.
And my point is not that I've never had a problem finding a driver on the internet but that I've never had to look for a driver.
You can complain all you want that your shitty-ass ATI card doesn't give you Beryl automatically, or that your on-board Broadcom Wi-Fi chip isn't recognized in Ubuntu, but nobody ever promised you it would. In fact, many people have already warned you against trying to get 3D acceleration with ATI, or 802.11g speed (or any function at all) with Broadcom.
You might as well complain that your Honda carburator won't fit your Ford.
Most obviously, you want a working computer. Motherboards are pretty flexible but some VIA chipsets have been known to be problematic. Nforce boards are the gold standard.
For capture, it really depends on your signal source and your plans.
Analog hardware capture cards are probably the best e.g, the Hauppage PVR 150/250/500 series. These will let you capture analog OTA transmissions and coax/S-video output from a cable or satellite STB. These cards are SD only, but can capture all stations in SD.
To use this card with a cable or satellite STB, you'll need an IR blaster and a working serial port. There are a number of IR blasters that can do this that work through a serial port or through USB.
For HD broadcasts you'll need a card capable of ATSC (over the air) or QAM (cable) decoding. But even QAM cards will only give you those channels that your cable provider sends without encryption. By law (in the US), they are required by the FCC to send OTA stations in the clear -- meaning NBC, FOX, ABC, PBS, CBS. But you're not likely to get access to channels like DiscoveryHD or ESPNHD even if you're paying for them. Either way, HD cards will generally only give you HD stations.
You'll want an nvidia gfx card for playback. Don't ask, don't posit, don't opine, and most of all, don't try to get an ATI card working under Linux. ATI doesn't care, their drivers are for shit, and you're asking for a headache. Any nvidia card gf4 or better will work. The gold standard is still the fx5200 series, although you'll have no problems with the 6x00 series either.
Your AC97 on-board audio will work, though I've always found it a bit noisy and lacking in definition. Turtle Beach cards offer excellent quality for the price -- particularly the Riviera, which you can get retail for around $30 or OEM for around $25.
Aside from the joy and satisfaction that comes from building a superior machine, it is because of the things that makes MythTV superior to devices like Tivo. I can't speak for all users, but I'll say why it's better for me.
Mythtv allows time-shifting of television in much the same way that Tivo does. It allows for recording of TV programs automatically according to user-defined rules in a much more discreet way than Tivo does. It allows remote administration of recordings and recording schedules in a way that Tivo doesn't. It allows format shifting of recorded material in a way that Tivo doesn't. And it is capable of storing and playing back just about any media in a way that Tivo most decidedly isn't.
Myth plays externally acquired videos, like your home movies or legitimately backed-up DVDs, Myth plays your music, Myth shows your photos, and Myth will do all this on as many machines as you attach to your network without asking for silly things like license keys or monthly fees.
Like this.
I've run MythTV since 0.14 on Knoppmyth and Fedora -- starting with FC3.
When I started, Knoppmyth was way over my head -- particularly the finishing touches to get everything running properly. It was my first real hands-dirty experience with Linux and I appreciated for all I learned. I did did manage to get an ancient K6-3D system running Knoppmyth -- not well enough to put in my livingroom, but well enough to prove the concept and that it was worth the time and effort to build a new system on more capable hardware.
My second system was a P3 700 built on FC3 following Jarod Wilson's definitive guide, mainly because I felt that following the guide to transform a generic install into a MythTV appliance would teach me a lot about what the Myth components were, how they all fit together, how to make them all fit together in Linux, and what to do when something went wrong. I was right.
I built a third machine (my current master beckend/frontend) on FC4 also following Jarod's guide but this time on a P4 2.5 machine.
By this time I was ready to start adding FE capabilities, but I already knew the process of installation, knew about the components and dependencies, and no longer felt the need for yumming or smarting in kernel modules and so on. I used Knoppmyth to turn my old P3 700 former-backend into a frontend.
This setup worked well through several upgrades -- FC on the backend, Knoppmyth on the frontend with the only caveat being that both machines have to be running the same version of Myth. Upgrade one, you have to upgrade the other.
Even though this was about two years ago, the Knoppmyth install was easy and painless, and I was prepared to deal with irregularities like tweaking xorg.conf. I also really appreciated that the Knoppmyth CD would let you run a frontend off the CD -- allowing you to instantly test hardware without touching the drive.
Last weekend, I finally retired the P3. It's currently on holiday, but will soon return to service as a file server. Instead I built a new frontend on an Athlon 64 4000.
I decided to give Mythdora a whirl since I know it's been under heavy development including the involvement of Jarod. I was really impressed with how smoothly and quickly the installation went, including post-install scripts to handle things like IR hardware and binary nvidia drivers (I know, I know, but the binary driver really works better for Myth than the Free one). I went from having a pile of boxes at 4 pm to a working Mythtv system at 9:30. It might have been quicker but I had to run to the shop when I ran out of beer.
I didn't try a Knoppmyth install on this hardware, but have no doubt that it would have gone just as smoothly. Cecil deserves a lot of respect and credit for the fantastic job he has done with Knoppmyth over the years.
Of course I did have quite a bit of Myth-specific experience behind me and knew from the start to buy hardware that was rock-solid compatible -- like an nforce board, nvidia gfx card, turtle beach sound card, on-board 10/100 LAN, etc.
The point is that by last weekend I was a lot more familiar with Fedora than with Debian, so I was really happy to be able to so painlessly migrate my FE to Fedora. I have no doubt that those more familiar with Debian will be just as happy with what Cecil has done in Knoppix.
And more than anything, lot of credit is owed to the folks behind MythTV -- from Isaac Richards, the original creator, and all the key developers, to folks like Jarod, Cecil, and Dennis for enormous contributions in making Myth more accessible, to all the numerous active and helpful folks on the mailing list. They've made MythTV into a product that truly is a world-beater -- by far the most powerful, most flexible, most extensible, and downright most pleasurable media engine on the planet.
Here's looking to 0.21.
Because it is highly dubious that the Zune has sold anywhere near the figures being claimed. Because the portable media player market is still a rapidly growing one, and the sales rate of ipods is still growing significantly. The Zune hasn't done a thing to reduce the ipod's market performance, but has only appeared to cannabalize sales of Microsoft-partner devices.
The Zune has nowhere near 10 percent of the market, and other players are selling more rapidly and growing sales rates more rapidly, meaning that the Zune's market share is shrinking, not growing, despite the growing size of the market. The ipod's market share is still growing.
Because the browser market is mature, and the growth of a superior upstart browser has led directly to a weakening of the incumbent. This might not seem like much when it's a matter of one free program vs another, but it's much more significant than that.
Microsoft wanted to "own" the internet since it belatedly learned of its existence. Internet Explorer was to be the means of this ownership as the protocols and standards involved were subverted to work properly only on Microsoft's software. The plan almost worked.
Same thing in the OS market. Microsoft insists on coplete dominance, and has managed to maintain it for over 20 years. The inertia that comes from this dominance is the only thing that keeps them going. It certainly isn't innovation, nor is it that they make the best products (Excel notwithstanding).
But if you remove the ubiquity of MS Windows, and people began to look at software and/or services based on their needs and the ability of the software/service to meet those needs without considering what they're used to, then purchasing and deployment decisions become much more nuanced and better informed than today's 'Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft'. Remeber when the same thing happened to IBM?
Because Microsoft insists on complete dominance, anything less than complete dominance would be a failure. Their software would have to be cross-platform, they would have to compete on features and price, they would have to open their formats and ensure compatibility to avoid losing a significant and growing market segment. They would have to play by the rules and compete according to those rules.
In short "Zune sells a million" isn't news or notable because it probably isn't true -- and even if it is, it's a small and shrinking slice of the pie, and hasn't touched the incumbent in the slightest. Ten percent of the browser and/or OS market is news because it represents direct damage to the incumbent, and the cracks that non-MS software is opening in the Microsoft fortress may prove unfixable.
I've found that Ogg Vorbis offers noticeably better fidelity than mp3 at comparable comression. It's not something that you can easily hear with a portable player and cheap headphones, but on quality gear the difference is obvious.
Ogg is much, much better at preserving the character of high-frequency sounds and overtones (think cymbals and strings), and much more faithfully preserves dynamic range. Again, this won't make much difference on the train with your ipod ear buds, but run it through a decent sound system and the mp3s just sound muddy. And when it comes to Classical music, mp3 is nearly useless. Ogg does a decent enough job of it, but I still keep Classical and many Jazz recordings in FLAC.
From what I understand, the lack of Ogg support on many players stems less from commercial or legal concerns (patent issues vis a vis Fraunhofer notwithstanding) than from technical issues. Ogg needs more juice to decode, which means needing stronger processors, better means of heat dissipation, and a necessary hit on battery performance. Not that it can't be done, but it requires more expensive components and shorter battery lives.
But the lack of Ogg support on the ipod is not a huge deal. I wish it were there, but that doesn't stop me from transcoding from Ogg (or FLAC) to mp3 for the ipod and keeping the Oggs and FLACs on my Myth system.
I do favor open source whenever possible but am no fanatic. I am, however, a musician, and sound quality is as imortant as, or more important to me than portability. Especially when portability is so easy after the fact.
And I think it's pretty stupid of you to not realize that other people may do things diferently than you, and they're not wrong because of it.
As far as the Zune claims go, I don't buy it for a minute, any more than I buy the claim of 40m Vista licenses sold.
I take the el to work in Chicago, and every day I see dozens of people with ipods. I've yet to see a single Zune in the wild, and at retail outlets like Microcenter or Target there always seems to be a crowd of people looking at the ipods on display while the Zune is simply ignored. I don't think I've ever even seen a working Zune on display -- they're always off or broken.
Microsoft's numbers don't mean a thing. The numbers to look at are from retailers: How many Zunes have been sold at Amazon, Best Buy, Circuit City, etc.? It's certainly not as high as Microsoft would have you believe. No matter what color they make it.
But they did include the latest. Ubuntu is at number 16.
What's so obvious about not being able to shift the format of content you've bought?
Ah so. This ability isn't built-in? The source code isn't available and tweakable? There aren't multiple methods to achieve the same thing, eg. blank-frame detection, logo detection, scene change detection, etc?
So MCE allows me to take one program group and through a user job automatically strip commercials and transcode to Xvid for storage, and for another group to strip commercials and transcode for ipod while leaving the originals? With softare included in the original distribution? MCE allows me to record in HD those channels that my provider has applied 5c encryption to? Surely by "not restricted in any way" you mean "somewhat restricted in several ways".
So is this another license? Is this another bit-and-piece you have to tack on after the fact? The web interface in MythTV is not valuble so you can change your recording schedule while you're on holiday in the Seychelles (althlough it is capable of that) but so you can set up and change recordings in your home office while your wife is watching the Food Channel in the other room. Can MCE do that?
Most people don't see a need for a PVR until they see one and what it can do, particularly when it means you can watch a whole football game in 90 minutes without ever seeing a commercial or ever touching the remote. Can MCE do that?
I'm not greedy. My Myth box only has one analog and one HD input. But I know people who have up to four analog inputs and two HD inputs working simultaneously. With MythTV I can record (though not play back) HD content on a P3 700MHz system -- I can play it back on my P4 2.8 frontend. Can I record HD contend using MCE on my P3 700 system? Will it allow me to set up multiple playback units on generic hardware without requiring the purchase of a new license?
So transcoding in MCE is simply a function of 'Save As...'? That would be interesting -- I find that transcoding from DVD-format MPEG-2 (my default recording format) to Xvid takes a bit longer than it takes to watch it for two-pass encoding. A bit quicker for one-pass encoding to ipod format. Or are you saying that MCE records all three formats (and more) simultaneously so there's no extra time involved in transcoding? The transcoding package is built-in, right? Or is that another license one has to buy?
I think you forgot the "(TM)" at the end of Media Connect (TM). Does it allow me to cut breaks in recordings des
Just for reference, could you post a link to a picture of RMS where he doesn't look like wild-eyed old-testament prophet?
I agree with much (though certainly not all) of what Stallman says, and I'm awfully happy he's doing what he's doing. But you must realize that on some questions he is quite off the deep end -- and ruthlessly idealistic as only an acedemic can be.
Business doen't go much for ideology and will be little moved by Stallman's invectives, however entertaining they may be and however much most of us here grasp their essential truth.
But Business will be put at ease, and Microsoft put against the ropes, once herds of IBM patent lawyers start taking apart these claims. Assuming it comes to that, and hopefully it will.
(Reminder to self: always check submission settins and remember to preview)
Zero nine eff nine
One one zero two nine dee
Seven four eee three
Five bee dee eight four
One five six see five six three
Five six eight eight si
Zero in the end
All bad dee are emm shall pass
Bits fall like raindrops
Zero nine eff nine One one zero two nine dee Seven four eee three Five bee dee eight four One five six see five six three Five six eight eight si Zero in the end All bad dee are emm shall pass Bits fall like raindrops
But setting the odds on sports matches isn't really about the probablility of one team winning or losing. It's about balancing the way that people will bet. The odds are structured to minimize the risk and maximize the return of the bookmaker, based on bettor behavior.
"Moose" Morgan doesn't need to know or care whether the Yankees are likely to beat Orioles tomorrow, only what the balance will be between bets on the Yankees and Orioles. As an experienced bookmaker, Moose will naturally give favor to the Yankees from the outset. But if he's getting twice the number of bets on the Orioles to win than the Yanks, then he will shift his odds accordingly.
Because of this, the science (and math) in sports gambling comes down to finding the inefficiencies -- i.e. figuring out where the bettors have moved the gambling odds far enough beyond the real odds that it makes a bet attractive. Meaning that if you can come up with an algorithm that is reasonably accurate and says that the Yankees:Orioles ought to be 6:5 but the betting odds are 7:2, you stand to make a killing.
This is much easier to do with something like horse racing than with baseball. With horses, you have a relatively small number of people spread across 6 to 15 or so potential winners in every race. Inefficiencies abound, in the sense that favorites often win but pay at 2:1 when realistically they should be 4:1, eg. The secret to a happy day at the track is finding the horse that should be 4:1 or 5:1 but is running at 16:1.
Jimmy knows his business, and deserves credit for that. After all why would you try to gamble and risk losing when you're smart emough to take a piece of every bet and always win?
What's more is that the figures suggest that 20 million copies of Vista are currenty being used, rather than having been shipped to OEMs and sitting on shelves. I would suspect that the actual number of Vista licenses in the wild are substantially lower, to the point of embarassment for Microsoft.
Personally, I've bought my last Microsoft license. At the same time I realize that Business runs on Microsoft, Business accounts for the lion's share of Microsoft licenses, and I've yet to see Business in general, or any single business in particular, leaping towards Vista. Most, including the one I work for, are waiting until it is absolutely necessary (certainly not before SP1) before even contemplating a widespread rollout.
The numbers are nonsense and reflective only of PCs in the pipeline (or whatever other figures can be found in Redmond-area proctological exams), not in deployment. In 12 months, Vista will be unavoidable but for now it is a non factor. As far as Business goes, it's still more important to make sure your widget works with MS Windows 2000 than with Vista.
You may need the commercial VMware to create a virtual disk, but there's other free utilities that can create a virtual disk readable by VMplayer.
For example I used qemu to create a virtual disk holding and running XP under VMplayer (free) running on FC4. Works great, and completely free.
Brilliant. You only forgot to mention that the Linux babe never gets sick, never drags you off to visit her mother (never even calls her mother), has built-in birth control, and really enjoys it when you get two or three other hot Linux babes to all play together on your system.
Apples and oranges. Many of the same factors that make a national election possible in a country like Estonia make it impossible in the US.
For one thing: The United States does not have a national election. The US has 50 concurrent state elections for federal offices. At the same time, there are 50 separate elections for state-level offices, and thousands of elections for county, city, schoolboard district, ward, etc offices, not to mention ballot initiatives, referenda, multiple-selection judicial contests, and so on.
A national election in a country like Estonia involves only one choice -- for party. Parliamentary seats are divided among parties based on the percent of returns for each party, and the party decides which of its candidates sits in Parliament. The party with the most seats nominates a Prime Minister who then appoints a government, which assumes power provided it has the approval of the Parliament.
If the party with the largest number of votes is unable to persuade the whole assembley to approve its nomination, the chance goes to the party with the next largest share of votes, and so on. Thus you can get some quite strange bedfellows in European coalition governments (like the Red-Green coalition in Germany until recently). But this is all separate and distinct from the voter, who has no say beyond party preference as to how the government is comprised or who the Prime Minister is.
Thus a national election in Estonia is one question on one ballot that is the same for the whole country.
In Maricopa County, AZ, last November there were 19 different initiative and referendum measures in addition to the usual slate of federal, state, county, city (Phoenix, Mesa, Tempe, etc), judicial, school board, etc. races that varied according to ward, precinct, township, jurisdiction, school board district, etc. While their ballot was one of the longest in the country in November, the same complexity and range of contests is true in any big city.
When you have one question on one ballot for the whole voting population, then internet voting is feasible. When your ballot is much more complex, much longer, and requires strictly validating voters according to location and eligibility, it becomes much more problematic.
Apples and oranges.
Another translation:
We're not so bloody stupid to believe that our competitors are standing in the aisle of Circuit City and scratching their head over whether to buy a Seagate or WD drive.
We know that our competitors all have their own metrics and their own relationships with manufacturers and frankly, we don't care. We know our competitors also measure these things, and we're not telling them anything they don't already know.
We aren't particularly worried about saying that some drives fail, because everyone who cares already knows that some drives fail. Everyone whose job it is to know which drives fail first already knows that as well.
But we're not going to tell you which brand fails at a higher rate than normal because we don't need a lawsuit that would cost us a lot of money but in the end would only confirm what the people who need to know these things already know.
We will, on the other hand, describe the tests we ran, our methodology, our results, and our analyses. We do this just for kicks and we hope you can learn something from the results.
And we hope you have a nice day.
You really didn't read the article, did you? On page 3 (Section 2.2 Deployment Details), the authors state: "More than one hundred thousand disk drives were used for all the results presented here. The disks are a combination of serial and parallel ATA consumer-grade hard disk drives, ranging in speed from 5400 to 7200 rpm, and in size from 80 to 400 GB. All units were put into production in or after 2001. [...] The data used for this study were collected between December 2005 and August 2006."
What are you waiting for Google to tell you? Are you really accusing them of being evil because they did a study, described their methodology, detailed their results, presented their analyses, and published it all for anyone who is interested?
You describe their conclusions as:
But there is no contradiction at all if you are smart enough to understand. They are telling you that if SMART identifies a problem with a drive then it is very likely that drive will fail within 60 days. But in a sample of 100,000 drives, many drives will also fail that have not returned errors on SMART scans. Thus SMART is a reliable indicator of impending failure but is not a silver bullet that can recognize and predict all failures before they happen.
Next time you have access to 100,000 hard drives, can analyze patterns of failure among them, can use those failures as a benchmark against which to measure analysis tools, and can come up with better recommendations for predicting failure than this study, then by all means let us know. But if you're looking for Microsoft or Western Digital or Seagate or Yahoo to perform and publish this kind of study for free, I think you may be waiting a good long while.
Because upgrading from OpenOffice 1.x to OpenOffice 2.x costs nothing, takes 10 minutes or less, preserves all the functionality you had before, and increases compatibility exponentially.
Moving to an incrementally higher version of MS Office(TM) costs hundreds of dollars per seat, breaks older funtionality, renders documents you produced unreadable to users who haven't "upgraded" their MS Office(TM) istallations, and as of 2007 requires users to relearn how to do things they already know how to do for no good reason and with no way to roll the interface back.
I own a licence for MS Office 1997(TM), another license for MS Office 2000(TM), an upgrade license for MS Office XP(TM), and an upgrade license for MS Office 2003(TM). Now MS tells me that I can't "upgrade" to MS Office 2007(TM) with my current licenses, bought and paid for each time. If I want MS Office 2007(TM) I will need to buy the full version. Well, as it turns out I don't want MS Office 2007(TM). The only feature that interests me is the expanded Pivot Tables in Excel. That may have been worth a $100 upgrade but it isn't worth the full retail price of MS Office(TM).
Besides, I don't belive that MS Office 2007(TM) will run nearly as well as MS Office 2003(TM) on the XP(TM) system that I run in VMware under Fedora Core.
I don't claim that I'll be able to avoid using them, but I've bought my last MS Office(TM) and my last MS Windows(TM) licenses. If I need to produce a document readable by MS Office 2007(TM), I'll use my older version. If I need to read a document produced in MS Office 2007(TM), I'll use OpenOffice.
Thanks for the memories, Microsoft(TM), but I've moved on.
In all seriousness, I think this this is a definite trend and will continue.
...,25000,..., ...,"25,000",..., or ...,"25000",. Don't even get me started on what MS Office does to New England ZIP codes.
I work in analytics for a middling consultancy. Our business runs on information and is almost entirely an MS shop (MS Server, MS SQL, MS Exchange, etc; thank goodness we don't use Sharepoint) but we have no intention of moving to Vista any time in the foreseeable future. Unfortunately, we have no intention of moving to Linux for the exact same reason -- that we have a lot of custom and shared applications that run on XP, and there's no business case to be made for conversion.
But while Vista is not even on the map, it is likely that at least some of us will be moving to Office 2007 before too long, partly because of the expanded capacity of Excel but even more because of the highly augmented capability of PivotTables.
I wish it could be otherwise, but we can easily generate the types of graphics we need to with Excel and PivotTables, while doing this in OSS apps is much more problematic.
When processing data on the other hand we work mostly in csv or other text-based formats, and I've introduced Vim and OpenOffice.org to the analytics department for this very purpose. Microsoft simply doesn't produce anything that that can easily, reliably, and predictably work with text formats. No matter how many times you specify cell format in Excel you can never be sure if 25000 will export as
We can perform certain operations in Calc now that used to take more than twice as long in MS Office and required using both Excel and Access (as well as Notepad for tracking down strange text formatting errors).
I've been doing some testing recently with Pentaho (open source BI suite) and am very excited at the developments I see. But I'm not sure that it will do what we need without substantial coding to make it compatible with the other systems we use.
I imagine that a year from now Vista will still be a novelty in the business world, though I fear MS Office 2007 will be unavoidable.
Setting up any network settings on Linux requires sudo. It is an administrative task and so requires administrative priviledges. On most Linux systems you need to authenticate before you make any changes, and often before you can even view settings. This is right and proper behavior.
Where MS Windows Vista fails is in completely mucking up the whole concept of permissions. As an administrator, I don't want my users (or myself as a non-admin user) to even be aware of network settings, and certainly not be allowed to change them. If the network is failing, they need an adminitrator to sort it out. If the user has sudo priviledges and can fix it, that's great but they'll have to authenticate first. There is rarely a need to confirm changes because it is assumed that an administrator knows what they're changing.
MS Windows Vista lets you do whatever you want, then asks you if you're sure you want to do it, then asks if you're really sure you want to do it, then tells you that you can't do it.
The point is removing barriers between a user and his or her goal. Linux does this very elegantly. Apple does it elegantly and prettily. MS does it in a way that is as elegant as an elephant trying to turn around in an elevator, and as pretty as what the elephant leaves behind.
MS hasn't failed because they tried to implement some semblance of user permissions and security, they failed because they did it in such a way that defeats the security through wolf-crying, defeats the permissions by letting anyone elevate permissions easily, and annoys the user by making tasks more difficult, complicated and time consuming than they need to be.