This is one of most annoying things about Linux. It sometimes tries to copy Windows, but instead, does a half-assed job.
What you call half-assed, I call a reasonable standard. On Linux, Alt+F2 brings up a Run dialog in nearly every window manager and desktop environment. On top of that, the keyboard shortcuts on Linux tend to be relatively consistent across most common, actively-developed applications. On Windows, the only applications with similar keyboard shortcuts for similar tasks are those that Microsoft develops.
Why not just use the WIN+R command? Microsoft created the Run command, and the Windows Key makes the keystroke very easy. It is certainly easier than reaching for Alt+F2.
Because not every platform that Linux runs on even have Windows keys. However, all modern systems do have Ctrl and Alt (or historical equivalents).
Even Apple created their launch application using the command+spacebar keystroke.
But that's not Win+R either. Pick which one you're going to stand behind. And to be fair, OS X's Spotlight is not at all in the same league with "Run Program".
Why can't this be made standard? Instead of having to add some other unsupported key application just to get that mapping to use the Windows Key. Practically all keyboards have the Windows key standard.
Correction: practically all "Designed for Windows" keyboards have Windows keys. (Note the plural, that's three extra keys crammed in between what used to be the easy-to-hit Ctrl and Alt keys.) I would give anything to find a good-quality keyboard that didn't have these three useless keys. In 15 years, I've never used them. Most people can't remember 3 layers of meta key combinations for their desktop (Shift, Ctrl, Alt), let alone a fourth.
I think most people lobbying for the Windows keys are just those who have gotten used to Win+E for explorer, Win+R for program run, etc. Tell me, how would it have been such a trajedy to learn Alt+E or Alt+R instead? The Windows keys were and always will be 100% marketing, 0% necessity.
This is one of the reasons why I refuse to buy LCDs for gaming, both on my desktop and for consoles. Other factors include refresh rates, variable resolution, and numerous quality problems (dead or stuck pixels, color reproduction, viewing angle, brightness uniformity, etc).
I was like you once. I snobbily scorned LCDs for years laboring under the conception that they held every single disadvantage one could possibly want in a high-performance computer display. Because for a long time, they did. But a couple years ago, when my 19" Iiyama with a flat Trinitron tube finally died, I decided to throw caution to the wind and see what a mid-priced LCD monitor could do. Best decision I ever made.
Point is, LCDs are not new unproven technology anymore. They've been on the market for about a decade. Most of the problems have been solved. If you do your research and get a good screen, you'll find that there are plenty of models that are affordable and have quality exceeding that of a similarly-priced CRT.
Yes, there are still issues remaining--mainly contrast and color accuracy--but for average home and office use, LCDs hold the edge over CRTs now. Refresh rates are no longer a problem (I play Quake3 on mine), and they're far easier on both the eyes and energy bill. The only place that you really *must* use a CRT over a good-quality LCD is when dealing with graphics or photos.
Well, it's like the War on Drugs or the War on Terrorism. If you fought the war in a way you could actually win it, then you run the risk of having nothing left to grandstand about and throw money at.
I'm dismayed to hear that there's not a chapter on how to write your extensions securely.
I work for a web hosting company with tens of thousands of customers and whenever I investigate a server that's been successfully attacked (and thereafter vandalized or used for spamming), about 50% of the time I can trace back the intrusion to an exploit in an insecure Joomla or Mambo extension.
Seriously, if you're going to use Joomla, do your web host a favor and NEVER use any third-party extension with it unless you can personally vouch for the competency of the programmer who wrote it. Of course, this advice is applicable to about any code you would run that has privileged access to your site or data, but so many people just throw caution to the wind when it comes web applications add-ons.
The calls from the Linux community have been growing due to Linux's failure to show rapid market share growth."
There, fixed that for you.
Linux already has significant market share. Look at the web and the Internet infrastructure: the vast majority of it is powered by Linux, technologies that are based on Linux, or utilize Linux in some indirect way. Linux is gaining traction left and right in the embedded market. No competent system administrator hasn't at least fired up a LiveCD to see what all the fuss is about.
It's true that Linux isn't as strong on the desktop as many advocates would like, but that's mainly because there's not yet any big company throwing their weight behind it to leverage business deals and spend billions in marketing to the consumer. (Canonical is trying, but they're still pretty small fish at the moment.)
As I've written repeatedly, ever since the very beginning Linux has had steady but slow growth. This isn't a good thing, nor is it a bad thing, it's just how it is. I think what we're seeing now is that more and more people are looking at Linux and open source and saying, "now, how can I make a quick buck off of this?" and realize they really can't and then spend all day lamenting about it in their blog.
I was at the credit union today waiting literally hours for a banker-type person to do their job. On the table, a CU industry magazine. I picked it up and started flipping through it. (Interesting how every article followed the same exact business-like structure and format, no matter what the topic.) One of the ads was for some kind of "check transport" device. The thing that zips your check through a U-turn and puts a timestamp or something on it, I think. At the bottom of the ad in big bold letters was the statement:
Compatible with all versions of Windows and Linux with WINE.
I was floored. I got that same feeling as the first few times I started seeing World Wide Web URLs pop up on billboards and on TV commercials. Or when random people would find out I was a computer nerd and ask if I knew that Linux program (pronounced with a long 'I').
Put simply, these things teach me that just as there was not really a definitive "year of the Internet," there won't be a "year of Linux" either.Linux's growth has and always will be slow but steady. The nature of software and the I.T. marketplace will demand that more and more software be portable, available, and just generally flexible. That software which isn't will be replaced by that which is. These are a few of the cornerstones of open source after all, and the proprietary vendors would do themselves a favor to realize this for themselves.
I don't think I agree. The vast majority of hostnames out there are pretty uncreative based on what I've seen. For example, 99% of the sites I visit have a hostname of simply "www".
I'll take as an example Adobe Reader, which installs a plugin for in-browser viewing when you install the desktop app (I hate Adobe Reader too, but it's a high-profile example). Firefox is not an Adobe product at all! yet we aren't yelling at that.
Adobe Reader isn't an apt comparison. For starters, they've been installing their plugin for practically as long as web browsers have been around. People know that installing Reader gets you the browser plugin as well (and most actually want that). Second, I do believe the installer for Adobe Reader gives you the option of installing the plugin, or at least makes it obvious that it is installing a browser plugin. Or at any rate it used to. I haven't installed Reader in years, so correct me if I'm wrong about current releases.
So it's really nothing abnormal to install an extension in a third party browser.
It is if you're not giving the user a choice about it. Even worse if you're not even telling them about it. Much worse if it can't be uninstalled via the normal means. TFA and the comments posted so far imply that Microsoft has bulls-eyed all three.
quite a few programs update/install Firefox extensions as part of their normal update procedure - I raise Foxit Reader as an example, which as of v3.0 automatically installs a Firefox plugin. No one's yelling about that.
A significant question here: If it wasn't Microsoft, would anyone be nearly as angry?
Anything that is installed "stealthily" on a computer, without the user's expressed permission, and with no immediately obvious way of removing it is the very meaning of malware as defined by all the security experts in the world. Whether it's Microsoft doing it or not makes no difference.
Either they are rushing it, or it's really just a minor change to Vista.
Doesn't anybody remember the Mojave Experiment? The one where MS showed random (but cooperative and photogenic) people a new and exciting OS called Mojave but was really just Vista underneath? In what was supposed to be a marketing stunt, they only really managed to prove that Vista had such a bad reputation that the only way to convince consumers into using it was by tricking them.
And now it looks like Mojave is going to be sold as Windows 7.
Thirdly, Linux needs to get the goddamned semantics down already! Someone comes in, "I tried Linux and my printer didn't work" then the reply is, "Linux is a kernel!!! It doesn't do printers!" Well, ok, then CALL IT SOMETHING ELSE. (Actually, I half-think the current confusing naming is on purpose, so there's always an 'out' to people who complain about Linux GUI problems.)
Are you aware of the irony in that first sentence? In one breath you've managed to deride users of Linux for using confusing terminology and then proceeded to call them "Linux." I cannot even remotely fathom how this got modded up as insightful.
The Linux community has had its "goddamned" semantics down just fine for as long as I can remember. Linux is a kernel. Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, and so on are distributions based around that kernel. Just because that concept doesn't seem to make sense to the average user (or you, from what I can tell) doesn't mean it's wrong or needs to be changed. It means somebody did a horrible job of explaining to them what "Linux" means or the user was lazy and filled in the gaps of their knowledge with incorrect assumptions.
If you want to get all Semantics Nazi, you can start with the fact that 90% of all computer-illiterate users still refer to the black box on the floor with the Dell logo as a "CPU." Good luck.
I think it's time we contain the optimism and start looking a little more critically at our new president. I voted for him and I believe he's the most intelligent and charismatic leader we've had since I've been alive, but thus far his pattern of leadership has been (perhaps with the exception of Gitmo) to simply give everyone whatever they're asking for. Two private corporate bailouts, one FISA bill, and almost a trillion in new spending. This cannot be sustainable in the long term.
And let's not forget that Obama was the one who supported the FISA amendment which, in addition to granting the telecom industry immunity from lawsuits for breaking privacy laws, also allows the government to wiretap without a warrant or court approval for up to a full week. Of course, it's hard to say where he'll stand on it now that he's president, because he was against the bill when running against Clinton, yet supported it when running against McCain and I can't tell that the bill changed during that time.
No, really, why? Windows already runs poorly with its default windowing interface. Why would I want to use up even more memory for a second windowing interface? No application is worth this layer of added complexity.
Not to you, obviously. But believe it or not, you're not the center of the computer desktop-using world.
For people who want to run KDE apps on Windows for whatever reason, this is an exciting development. To them, it means no more mucking around with virtualization or Linux distros which run entirely as a Windows process just for a few KDE apps. Also, this kind of development is beneficial as it allows Windows users to try applications that only Linux users have had the privilege of using so far. Regardless of what you think of KDE (and trust me, I'm no fan of 4.x just yet), it's an incredible demonstration of the powerful technologies and applications that can be created when a bunch of open source geeks organize themselves. And if they want to port it to every platform they can, who are you to sit around and mock them from the back row?
An FPS is a much different project than an MMORPG like Wow. An FPS-style game can actually be considered finished at a given point while an MMORPG requires constant development (as long as you want to keep customers, that is). There's a long history of people making full-featured games for free and actually completing them. It's just that the list of incomplete ones dwarf the complete ones.
Oh please. The "digital black hole" argument has been fodder on Slashdot for at least a decade. And it probably goes back to at least the 80's when users noticed that their floppy formats kept changing every few years and there wasn't always an easy and obvious way to migrate applications from one to the other.
As others have already pointed out, the government and many others are keeping full archives of whitehouse.gov. Archive.org, while admittedly not perfect, is another good example of a site that keeps snapshots of web content in perpetuity. Google has a huge index of more information than we can possibly imagine and while it may not be complete (no web archive solution can be), it's there and it will provide more than enough context for historians in the future. And these are not by any stretch the only ones scraping the web.
The digital black hole is 100% science fiction. Sure, you can find examples of applications, data, or websites that appear to have vanished completely but chances are exceedingly good that either you're wrong and weren't looking hard enough, or the content wasn't deemed important enough by anyone to keep around. Survival of the fittest applies to information as well.
And finally, it should be noted that we have the opposite problem of a digital black hole. That is, data which we don't necessarily want to be available publicly forever. When I was a teenager, I was quite active on mailing lists and IRC channels and I was simultaneously excited and dismayed that quite a lot of my old communication has survived in various forms. It's neat to look back and see what I wrote 10-15 years later, not so neat to discover the some of the things I wish I could now take back. (Thank goodness for disposable pseudonyms, at least.)
I can't speak for everyone but what is the point of caring what Linux, RMS, ESR, Bill Gates, President Obama... personal preferences are.
It's certainly the case that people have different tastes and that those tastes will affect everything from what kind of car they drive to what computer desktop environment they use. It's illogical to base your decision solely on others' decisions, no matter who they might be.
However, it's not illogical to ask *why* they chose the way they did. The names you listed are leaders in their respective fields. You have to be pretty smart to get where they are, so if they can make an argument regarding a particular choice, it's quite possible that it would contain information useful to the rest of us in our own decision making.
If you're selling them off as defective, that implies that you're not going to use the newest update... which would mean that whoever bought them would be able to apply the update and access your customers' data, right?
Isn't that a bad idea?
Disks that go bad are destroyed. Those with the firmware bug would be swapped, erased, and then sold.
Tests are just fine as long as they test your general understanding of the material. You have to have tests or there's no way for the teacher to tell whether your actually learning or just sitting in the back of the class goofing off the whole period. Tests also create a primary motivation to study and learn the material. Not everyone is autodidatic. I would wager hardly anyone goes to class thinking, "boy, I better pay attention in class today if I want to use this knowledge when I start my career eight years from now!" Students need a motivation that's much more immediate than that.
I've seen some good tests in my life. But I've also seen some horrible ones. The horrible ones seem to fall into two general categories: 1) Tests that ask you to recall specific facts rather than overall understanding and 2) tests that deliberately try to trick you into giving the wrong answer. The former is much more common and is usually the result of extreme laziness on the part of the instructor and the latter is a common practice of douchebag instructors who think they can gain some kind of "teacher cred" by having a washout percentage in the double digits.
If you like playing with LEDs, follow the Hack A Day blog. At least once a week, there's a post involving home-brew LED projects, some of them quite massive and/or impressive. For instance,
Parent is scored +5, and rightly so since it's the only useful comment so far.
To add, I also wondered the same thing. I bought the Zenith DT-901 (reported to be the highest-quality low-end DTV converter) and it's pretty darn spartan inside. Basically the only chip on the device is a SoC that handles everything, from the digital tuner to the analog output. I think there might have been some unpopulated JTAG headers, but other than that, there was nothing on the board to indicate that it is hackable. Even if it was, I doubt the firmware is anything close to publicly-available.
In order to get the features you want, you'd probably have to splurge for a beefier tuner. One that can't be bought with the coupon and has features like shuffling off the digital stream over firewire.
Slashdot Mirror
What you call half-assed, I call a reasonable standard. On Linux, Alt+F2 brings up a Run dialog in nearly every window manager and desktop environment. On top of that, the keyboard shortcuts on Linux tend to be relatively consistent across most common, actively-developed applications. On Windows, the only applications with similar keyboard shortcuts for similar tasks are those that Microsoft develops.
Because not every platform that Linux runs on even have Windows keys. However, all modern systems do have Ctrl and Alt (or historical equivalents).
But that's not Win+R either. Pick which one you're going to stand behind. And to be fair, OS X's Spotlight is not at all in the same league with "Run Program".
Correction: practically all "Designed for Windows" keyboards have Windows keys. (Note the plural, that's three extra keys crammed in between what used to be the easy-to-hit Ctrl and Alt keys.) I would give anything to find a good-quality keyboard that didn't have these three useless keys. In 15 years, I've never used them. Most people can't remember 3 layers of meta key combinations for their desktop (Shift, Ctrl, Alt), let alone a fourth.
I think most people lobbying for the Windows keys are just those who have gotten used to Win+E for explorer, Win+R for program run, etc. Tell me, how would it have been such a trajedy to learn Alt+E or Alt+R instead? The Windows keys were and always will be 100% marketing, 0% necessity.
I was like you once. I snobbily scorned LCDs for years laboring under the conception that they held every single disadvantage one could possibly want in a high-performance computer display. Because for a long time, they did. But a couple years ago, when my 19" Iiyama with a flat Trinitron tube finally died, I decided to throw caution to the wind and see what a mid-priced LCD monitor could do. Best decision I ever made.
Point is, LCDs are not new unproven technology anymore. They've been on the market for about a decade. Most of the problems have been solved. If you do your research and get a good screen, you'll find that there are plenty of models that are affordable and have quality exceeding that of a similarly-priced CRT.
Yes, there are still issues remaining--mainly contrast and color accuracy--but for average home and office use, LCDs hold the edge over CRTs now. Refresh rates are no longer a problem (I play Quake3 on mine), and they're far easier on both the eyes and energy bill. The only place that you really *must* use a CRT over a good-quality LCD is when dealing with graphics or photos.
Well, it's like the War on Drugs or the War on Terrorism. If you fought the war in a way you could actually win it, then you run the risk of having nothing left to grandstand about and throw money at.
I see what you did there.
I'm dismayed to hear that there's not a chapter on how to write your extensions securely.
I work for a web hosting company with tens of thousands of customers and whenever I investigate a server that's been successfully attacked (and thereafter vandalized or used for spamming), about 50% of the time I can trace back the intrusion to an exploit in an insecure Joomla or Mambo extension.
Seriously, if you're going to use Joomla, do your web host a favor and NEVER use any third-party extension with it unless you can personally vouch for the competency of the programmer who wrote it. Of course, this advice is applicable to about any code you would run that has privileged access to your site or data, but so many people just throw caution to the wind when it comes web applications add-ons.
I knew that hams speak to astronauts occasionally, but I always wondered:
Doesn't NASA get nervous that anyone with the right equipment can talk to the astronauts?
What exactly do you talk to an astronaut about? Is it all small talk? ("Hi, how's the weather up there?")
There, fixed that for you.
Linux already has significant market share. Look at the web and the Internet infrastructure: the vast majority of it is powered by Linux, technologies that are based on Linux, or utilize Linux in some indirect way. Linux is gaining traction left and right in the embedded market. No competent system administrator hasn't at least fired up a LiveCD to see what all the fuss is about.
It's true that Linux isn't as strong on the desktop as many advocates would like, but that's mainly because there's not yet any big company throwing their weight behind it to leverage business deals and spend billions in marketing to the consumer. (Canonical is trying, but they're still pretty small fish at the moment.)
As I've written repeatedly, ever since the very beginning Linux has had steady but slow growth. This isn't a good thing, nor is it a bad thing, it's just how it is. I think what we're seeing now is that more and more people are looking at Linux and open source and saying, "now, how can I make a quick buck off of this?" and realize they really can't and then spend all day lamenting about it in their blog.
I was at the credit union today waiting literally hours for a banker-type person to do their job. On the table, a CU industry magazine. I picked it up and started flipping through it. (Interesting how every article followed the same exact business-like structure and format, no matter what the topic.) One of the ads was for some kind of "check transport" device. The thing that zips your check through a U-turn and puts a timestamp or something on it, I think. At the bottom of the ad in big bold letters was the statement:
I was floored. I got that same feeling as the first few times I started seeing World Wide Web URLs pop up on billboards and on TV commercials. Or when random people would find out I was a computer nerd and ask if I knew that Linux program (pronounced with a long 'I').
Put simply, these things teach me that just as there was not really a definitive "year of the Internet," there won't be a "year of Linux" either.Linux's growth has and always will be slow but steady. The nature of software and the I.T. marketplace will demand that more and more software be portable, available, and just generally flexible. That software which isn't will be replaced by that which is. These are a few of the cornerstones of open source after all, and the proprietary vendors would do themselves a favor to realize this for themselves.
I don't think I agree. The vast majority of hostnames out there are pretty uncreative based on what I've seen. For example, 99% of the sites I visit have a hostname of simply "www".
Adobe Reader isn't an apt comparison. For starters, they've been installing their plugin for practically as long as web browsers have been around. People know that installing Reader gets you the browser plugin as well (and most actually want that). Second, I do believe the installer for Adobe Reader gives you the option of installing the plugin, or at least makes it obvious that it is installing a browser plugin. Or at any rate it used to. I haven't installed Reader in years, so correct me if I'm wrong about current releases.
It is if you're not giving the user a choice about it. Even worse if you're not even telling them about it. Much worse if it can't be uninstalled via the normal means. TFA and the comments posted so far imply that Microsoft has bulls-eyed all three.
Anything that is installed "stealthily" on a computer, without the user's expressed permission, and with no immediately obvious way of removing it is the very meaning of malware as defined by all the security experts in the world. Whether it's Microsoft doing it or not makes no difference.
Doesn't anybody remember the Mojave Experiment? The one where MS showed random (but cooperative and photogenic) people a new and exciting OS called Mojave but was really just Vista underneath? In what was supposed to be a marketing stunt, they only really managed to prove that Vista had such a bad reputation that the only way to convince consumers into using it was by tricking them.
And now it looks like Mojave is going to be sold as Windows 7.
Are you aware of the irony in that first sentence? In one breath you've managed to deride users of Linux for using confusing terminology and then proceeded to call them "Linux." I cannot even remotely fathom how this got modded up as insightful.
The Linux community has had its "goddamned" semantics down just fine for as long as I can remember. Linux is a kernel. Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, and so on are distributions based around that kernel. Just because that concept doesn't seem to make sense to the average user (or you, from what I can tell) doesn't mean it's wrong or needs to be changed. It means somebody did a horrible job of explaining to them what "Linux" means or the user was lazy and filled in the gaps of their knowledge with incorrect assumptions.
If you want to get all Semantics Nazi, you can start with the fact that 90% of all computer-illiterate users still refer to the black box on the floor with the Dell logo as a "CPU." Good luck.
Given Google's "all your data are belong to us" attitude, I'd rather stick to my own self-engineered remote storage solution.
I think it's time we contain the optimism and start looking a little more critically at our new president. I voted for him and I believe he's the most intelligent and charismatic leader we've had since I've been alive, but thus far his pattern of leadership has been (perhaps with the exception of Gitmo) to simply give everyone whatever they're asking for. Two private corporate bailouts, one FISA bill, and almost a trillion in new spending. This cannot be sustainable in the long term.
And let's not forget that Obama was the one who supported the FISA amendment which, in addition to granting the telecom industry immunity from lawsuits for breaking privacy laws, also allows the government to wiretap without a warrant or court approval for up to a full week. Of course, it's hard to say where he'll stand on it now that he's president, because he was against the bill when running against Clinton, yet supported it when running against McCain and I can't tell that the bill changed during that time.
Not to you, obviously. But believe it or not, you're not the center of the computer desktop-using world.
For people who want to run KDE apps on Windows for whatever reason, this is an exciting development. To them, it means no more mucking around with virtualization or Linux distros which run entirely as a Windows process just for a few KDE apps. Also, this kind of development is beneficial as it allows Windows users to try applications that only Linux users have had the privilege of using so far. Regardless of what you think of KDE (and trust me, I'm no fan of 4.x just yet), it's an incredible demonstration of the powerful technologies and applications that can be created when a bunch of open source geeks organize themselves. And if they want to port it to every platform they can, who are you to sit around and mock them from the back row?
An FPS is a much different project than an MMORPG like Wow. An FPS-style game can actually be considered finished at a given point while an MMORPG requires constant development (as long as you want to keep customers, that is). There's a long history of people making full-featured games for free and actually completing them. It's just that the list of incomplete ones dwarf the complete ones.
Oh please. The "digital black hole" argument has been fodder on Slashdot for at least a decade. And it probably goes back to at least the 80's when users noticed that their floppy formats kept changing every few years and there wasn't always an easy and obvious way to migrate applications from one to the other.
As others have already pointed out, the government and many others are keeping full archives of whitehouse.gov. Archive.org, while admittedly not perfect, is another good example of a site that keeps snapshots of web content in perpetuity. Google has a huge index of more information than we can possibly imagine and while it may not be complete (no web archive solution can be), it's there and it will provide more than enough context for historians in the future. And these are not by any stretch the only ones scraping the web.
The digital black hole is 100% science fiction. Sure, you can find examples of applications, data, or websites that appear to have vanished completely but chances are exceedingly good that either you're wrong and weren't looking hard enough, or the content wasn't deemed important enough by anyone to keep around. Survival of the fittest applies to information as well.
And finally, it should be noted that we have the opposite problem of a digital black hole. That is, data which we don't necessarily want to be available publicly forever. When I was a teenager, I was quite active on mailing lists and IRC channels and I was simultaneously excited and dismayed that quite a lot of my old communication has survived in various forms. It's neat to look back and see what I wrote 10-15 years later, not so neat to discover the some of the things I wish I could now take back. (Thank goodness for disposable pseudonyms, at least.)
It's certainly the case that people have different tastes and that those tastes will affect everything from what kind of car they drive to what computer desktop environment they use. It's illogical to base your decision solely on others' decisions, no matter who they might be.
However, it's not illogical to ask *why* they chose the way they did. The names you listed are leaders in their respective fields. You have to be pretty smart to get where they are, so if they can make an argument regarding a particular choice, it's quite possible that it would contain information useful to the rest of us in our own decision making.
Disks that go bad are destroyed. Those with the firmware bug would be swapped, erased, and then sold.
Tests are just fine as long as they test your general understanding of the material. You have to have tests or there's no way for the teacher to tell whether your actually learning or just sitting in the back of the class goofing off the whole period. Tests also create a primary motivation to study and learn the material. Not everyone is autodidatic. I would wager hardly anyone goes to class thinking, "boy, I better pay attention in class today if I want to use this knowledge when I start my career eight years from now!" Students need a motivation that's much more immediate than that.
I've seen some good tests in my life. But I've also seen some horrible ones. The horrible ones seem to fall into two general categories: 1) Tests that ask you to recall specific facts rather than overall understanding and 2) tests that deliberately try to trick you into giving the wrong answer. The former is much more common and is usually the result of extreme laziness on the part of the instructor and the latter is a common practice of douchebag instructors who think they can gain some kind of "teacher cred" by having a washout percentage in the double digits.
Hey physics types: So I take it this can in no way lead to the future development of the transporter?
So that more mainstream distributions like Ubuntu can implement the technologies after they've been bug-tested.
</rimshot>
If you like playing with LEDs, follow the Hack A Day blog. At least once a week, there's a post involving home-brew LED projects, some of them quite massive and/or impressive. For instance,
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
Parent is scored +5, and rightly so since it's the only useful comment so far.
To add, I also wondered the same thing. I bought the Zenith DT-901 (reported to be the highest-quality low-end DTV converter) and it's pretty darn spartan inside. Basically the only chip on the device is a SoC that handles everything, from the digital tuner to the analog output. I think there might have been some unpopulated JTAG headers, but other than that, there was nothing on the board to indicate that it is hackable. Even if it was, I doubt the firmware is anything close to publicly-available.
In order to get the features you want, you'd probably have to splurge for a beefier tuner. One that can't be bought with the coupon and has features like shuffling off the digital stream over firewire.