I've since learned about the Hauppauge HD-PVR. So I guess it is possible now. I couldn't find such a thing a while ago, and since Lucas release "proper" DVDs finally, I stopped caring and never came across this thing.

During an earlier iteration of this kind of discussion, I had been pondering how to get my Laserdisc copies of the "true" Star Wars triogy (without all that messed up Special Edition crap) onto DVD. I found a Laserdisc player with Component outputs, but that might have even only been for the DVD half of a combo DVD/Laserdisc player. But I was not able to find a component "tuner" input card to capture onto. At least not anything that a mortal like me can afford. So, without being a millionaire, without engineering and building my own copying machine, and without giving an all-out howto, is there a cost-effective way for any of us, or our grandparents, to copy and play back stuff from these analog component outputs? I hesitate to ask for links to purchase the equipment, I'm mostly curious if the MPAA's claimed fears are realistic or even possible at all. If people here know it's not possible, why aren't we lobbying that fact to the congresscritters that need to know?

As for the big moneymaking pirates in Hong Kong, if they can afford to have a special analog copying machine engineered and made for their own use, they can surely also afford to have an HDMI+HDCP copying machine made up too. No law here will be able to stop the likes of them. But I really don't believe that being able to turn off HDTVs made before HDMI or HDCP and preventing legitimate customers from seeing anything is worth-while side-effect of this phantom people copying everything at home "problem".

Uhm, the Amiga Hand is not a bug or crash screen. That's the ROM telling you the floppy drive is empty and it wants some bootable media. It would pretty much never be seen with a hard drive system.

The Amiga crash screen is called the Guru Meditiation. It's either a red or yelow blinking box with some cryptic text inside, which only a developer would try to understand. Red is crash, yellow is "recoverable alert", which may leave the computer running but a crash is frequently soon to happen after a yellow guru. Earlier AmigaOS versions only had red, yellow was added sometime in 2.x or 3.x versions.

I think for the much more recent 4.x versions of AmigaOS, it's been changed to the Grim Reaper, and it's more of a window than a black screen with a blinking thing in it. Chances of recovering and continuing use are much better now.

I'd love to understand their algorithm for determining that 373,375 American jobs are affected by this.

So, assuming batteries so these people aren't dragging around a long extension cord, how are you going to get someone that doesn't know where they are etc. to remember and charge the batteries every night?

That's a good point, but many students will have already been exposed to schematics in earlier prerequisite courses before being tossed into an FPGA class. In the real word today, people are using vhdl and/or verilog and or other languages isntead of schematics for FPGA work. Look at those FPGAs today, holding millions of gates to use, it'd be unreasonable to design for that using schematics. Look at available resources like opencores.org which have open-source projects/cores in vhdl and in verilog. In the real world, the simulators most in use today are verilog and/or vhdl and/or other languages.

I think it'd be nice to have some exposure for your students in what is done in real life as well as whatever benefit there is to starting with schematic. Perhaps this FPGA course could be a follow up to a more basic digital logic design course showing schematics etc. as a prerequisite?

Who's teaching the course, you? Have a look at them and see if you have a strong preference. Most people do one way or the other. I like Verilog and hate VHDL. I think the instructor should teach what he's more comfortable himself, so you're all more confident that he's teaching it correctly and not tossing out things that are confusing and may be somehow inaccurate in that language he's not as good with. I could help someone understand Verilog, but I would be a horrible teacher/mentor/tutor in VHDL trying to read and understand my answers to questions from the same (and/or other) books the students have. Other people are likely the reverse. Which way does this intructor for your course go? It'd be nice to find that out before you choose the wrong language for him.

Of course a superb instructor would be fluent in both, and more, but it'd be nice to avoid focusing on a good but fluent in only one teacher's weaker language.

I meant comparing = to <= up there. Sorry, html ate my less than char

I work at a chip company doing ASIC and custom SOC microprocessor stuff. We mostly use verilog here for our stuff. Most of the VHDL I see comes from customers, which often gets blended into our verilog platforms. All our RTL IP cores are verilog that I know of, at least that I've used/seen, and our integration work to make platforms out of all the IP pieces is verilog. What we synthesize to gates is also a verilog gates netlist result that goes to place/route into silicon.

In college the class I took that involved this sort of thing was in VHDL, and I hated that. had me really nto wanting to do this kind of work, I was really happy when I was exposed to verilog and I didn't hate it, and I've been a chip guy for over 10 years now.

But as I understand, VHDL is far more popular in some locations, and verilog in others, so jobs in other locales may be completely opposite to my work environment. It would probably be nice to show some of each to be a little familiar with both such as comparing/contrasting = to = and == to ===, but focus on one or the other for people to really get experience fitting pieces together and learning the general stuff about RTL design, etc. that are not as dependent on what language you use.

I have a multimedia computer in my living room, which is not right next to where I sit. Bluetooth seems to be better for across-the-room distance than RF. The RF keyboards/mice I tried could go a few feet, but were unreliable beyond that, and while fresh batteries made it seem OK, it wasn't long before they were no longer quite new enough to do it anymore. Bluetooth parts seem much better for that.

Lightwave 3d. It's PC/Windows now, maybe Linux, dunno. But it started on AmigaOS with the Video Toaster.

AmigaOS 4.1 was released in September 2008. Sure, there may be a miniscule number of people still using/buying it in your terms, but it's still here.

I've in the past used Soft Scrub cleaner to clean up my old Amiga stuff. This way may be better than what I've done, possibly easier than the gentle scrubbing I did, and I did have to individually scrub each keyboard keycap, which was not particularly fun. I may try this as I get some old stuff ready for ebay.

My laptop didn't offer a downgrade to XP at all, but I wanted this particular one specifically because of the feature set and graphics chip model which was hard to find other sources for, for peculiar but important to me reasons. I had to pay full retail to buy XP for this thing, which was a lot, but worth it since some of my software still doesn't run on Vista today. (which includes the VPN software supported/provided by my employer, they do not currently support Vista)

I jsut got a 1TB predecessor to this drive. They were waiting for me to buy before they announced the double size of it weren't they! I got it for my Tivo HD, I understand it's supposed to be nice and quiet and relatively low power compared to other drives. Others will likely enjoy it in DVR boxes when that kind of capacity is supported. (I understand Tivo's kernel currently won't do mroe than 1TB anyway)