I was reading this article that mentioned MythTV and I began wondering if anyone had an experience with this...

What I want to be able to do (ultimately) is to capture an MPEG2-TS directly from OTA HDTV, and more importantly, digital cable or satellite (DirecTV/Dish/whatever). In Linux.

So far I think my only option is to somehow get an old Dish Model 5000 with that extra 8VSB modulator that plugs into the back, then somehow get a PCTV2000 or 3000.

And even then I think that the Dish model 5000 is incompatible with a lot of new HD channels (like DiscoveryHD) and they want you to upgrade to the 6000 which has no convienent outputs.

Of course, I could always suffer one analog conversion stage... but even that's tricky.

Best bet I think would be to secure one of those AJA Y-Cr-Cb to HD-SDI converter boxes, and then somehow get an AJA HD-SDI 601 card and convince Linux Media Arts to part with just the OEM card, not a whole fucking server.

It'd be tons better than a conversion to S-Video and back... but it'd probably cost me at least $1000, not counting the cost of receiver.

Any ideas?

Well, actually it was Sept. 1st, but I'm celebrating it today. ::dances::

PS - Still waiting for more detail on MUA-side mail classifiers.

Does anyone know where I can get a generic mail classifier for Mozilla or Thunderbird? The junk mail filter is nice, but I'd like to be able to classify things as "other than junk" as well. It's easier than having to write filters manually... plus, I mean, junk mail filters based on naive classifiers are just special cases of the N-group classifier.

Any ideas?

Help me buy cat5.net
Those domain-squatting bastards want something like $800 for it. If I get enough people to pool their money to buy it, I'll host a site in all the donators honor, with free shell accounts, webhosting, unlimited mail aliases, the works.

Cat5.. Category 5, like the cable, and the hurricane. Get it? It's catchy and short.

Any takers?

I want you to place a link to my nigritude ultramarine site on your website, slashdot, using the phrase "nigritude ultramarine" somewhere in the link text.

You can place it way at the bottom of your page, or in big H2.

It won't win me a prize from darkblue.net who's hosting this dumbass SEO competetion (because I haven't met all the requirements and added my little participation banner). So if you do this for me, you can only help make a statement.

If I won (or anybody else pulling the same stunt), it'd be a big fuck you to all those SEOs who don't understand why people hate them.

Let me just assert that Congress needs to pass a Consitutional Amendment to eliminate Daylight Savings Time before they can even consider one for or against gay marriage.

Let's focus on things that actually make an impact on our everyday lives, people.

Video game concept/proposal:

Imagine this... You have a wide screen TV. The left-hand side is a blistering directed-focus 3d shooter. Meanwhile you have a high-speed emergency vehicle careening around turns and through rush hour traffic on the right hand side.

It's the same game, from two different points of view. You've got the gunner, and the driver. Essentially you're a urban warfare vehicular unit, fending off terrorists/invading armies/aliens from an unsuspecting populace. Player one mans the guns, while player two tries to get you to the checkpoint in time. Each mission would have multiple objectives, which require certain performance from each player. You'd have to work together to do well and get past harder missions.

You can imagine scenarios: having the driver manuveur behind a bus on the gunner's command to be protected from incoming fire. To return fire, the driver hits the brakes/accelerates, clearing the bus and leaving an opening for the gunner.

If you can't find a friend to play, you could pick from a variety of driver/gunner AIs at the beginning of each mission from your crack team.

A 4-way (2 vs. 2) destruction derby and/or rally race is imperative.

The key here is that you have to have a widescreen TV to implement the side by side view. Maybe you could alter it to do a horizontal division on a 4:3 set, but then you probably need to rescript events to fit the camera track / road better.

And of course, this show must have a continuation. But I don't think ACROSS is welcome in F City, F Prefecture any longer. No, they need to strike somewhere they can rise to power virtually undetected, where police will give their antics and exploits nary a second glance.

Rio, St. Petersburg, and New York City. I'd say NYC, because if you run out of jokes, you can flip to Fox and steal them out of an old Seinfeld episode.

I don't know how many people "got" Excel Saga, but Across was supposed to be an abstraction of Western ideological movements, and how they attempt to eat away at the foundations of an otherwise rigid Japanese culture (which ultimately defeats them... they can never beat the "system" which sort of pays homage to it, even if Rikido didn't intend to). Excel is loud, rude and blonde. I kept thinking they were trying to peg her as some kind of loud-mouthed activist/valley girl. And as independant and self-willed as she believes she is, she is just a pawn in Ilpalazzo's scheme (policy toting, politically correct western bureaucrat, looking to extend his influence) And we have Pedro's struggle against "The Man". I'm sure that was a hard one to figure out... :-)

Why do a new season based in foreign city?
The tables become turned. Excel and her organization is now the Eastern influence trying to worm its way into a culture which doesn't try to keep it away, but could care less. While they are supposed to be outsiders, to American audiences ACROSS [the Japanese portrayal of (our) infringement on their culture] is just as foreign to us, as they were to them. Thus in this context, they are as Japanese to us as they were alien to Nippon in the original.
They don't have to become "more eastern" to set up the same culture clash in a new setting.

The challenge of ACROSS (and the writers of the show) becomes: can she worm her way into our hearts, and get us to "join Across"? Could we even work the culture clash/satire with enough tenacity to successfully syndicate back to the Japanese?

It's a challenge. I think it could work.

The Law and Order franchise has successfully branched into many subgenres of TV drama and can draw from other audiences.

LNO: CI (investigation heavy, Dragnet or NYPD Blue)
LNO: SVU (focus on family issues, ethnically diverse cast)
LNO: Third Watch (if you like ER...)

What about an animated Law and Order?
It could be about the port authority police (lots of drug busts, immigrants, fraud cases, terrorism).

LNO: NYTA (animated to capitalize on east meets west anime fetish, export drugework to korea, marketing gold mine)

Bear with me for a second.

There's nothing wrong with closed source systems, propietary technologies, etc, per se. The point is that it does the job well, and for the right price (whether cash, time, effort, flexibility, lockin, etc.) Lots of propietary technologies suck in this respect, while others are downright pleasant even for the hardcore technologist and tinkerer (IE. Solaris, which is why I used the Sun icon).

Here's my thinking.
An ideal situation is as follows:
The Company designed closes systems. These systems are particular powerful and useful, but standards oriented and malleable, so they have few drawbacks except for closed nature.
The OSS community develops software to interact with said system and gets help from the Company. The OSS brings value to the system, and Company helps make the OSS more useful.

At some point a particularly smart person involved in the OSS project "closes the loop" and figures out how to duplicate most of the functionality in the closed system by examining the interfaces, reading research papers, and just by being clever.

At this point, the Company now has competition: a free product that does the same thing as their product and interacts with the OSS that end-users might already also have. One of three things might happen:

1) Company changes the interfaces for all new releases to isolate the OSS system and client software.

2) Company litigates for IP violation

3) *** Company determines that it no longer has a competitve edge in designing the system as it has become widespread knowledge through other channels (the same ones they looked at during development), and decided to innovate or find a new angle ***

It is the choice for option 3 that helps move technology along at a pace that can keep up with our increasing demands. I think OSS helps to prevent the industry from stagnating by revealing the "common knowledge" in systems, and helps companies to discover where competetive niches truely lie.

Companies that choose options 1 or 2 should be viewed negatively. They are the ones that you don't tolerate. I don't think Sun has ever opted for choices 1 or 2, and I think they "get it", which is why they abide and even help the Linux community, etc.

that you suspected was the same as myself, I'd like to hear your theories. I'll give you a hint, I have at least one other profile.

Quick thing:

If you attempt to put the following string:

Score: #

Anywhere in the title, where # is a number, slashdot will eat it and if there aren't enough other markup in the title, you'll get the "cat got your tongue?" error.

If you've ever tried to comment on the score of someone's post, or question moderation, you may have accidentally run into this nice surprise.

Try Sc0re: #, it passes muster.

(This is just preliminary rambling)

Linux (and other Unicies) need a protocol to make remote devices available over networks, both character and block devices. There should be two versions of this protocol:

• One based on a layer-2 protocol (like a new program type for ethernet) that would allow remote I/O with minimal latency. Zerocopy network and a close relation with the disk buffer layer is key.
• A second based on a layer-3 protocl (like TCP) which can be used for more complex activity, perhaps in order to parameterize strange ioctls or deal with a spotty or remote network.

There has been some effort down this path with the network audio device and the enhanced networkk block drivers. It would be ideal if both efforts could be combined. It would also be nice to get rid of the user-space component and push the functionality directly into a kernel thread. It could be configured by a nice proc interface, or even iptables.
A scheme that might be tractable is either force the driver to bind to an existing interface like ethertap had done before, or to create a new virtual interface, say nd0 (or nd1, nd2) and then set up routing between external interfaces and that interface. Sending packets to that "interface" would send then to the disk driver to interpret (requests for data or writes).
Another key feature is to attempt to support (and detect remote support) for as many ioctls as possible. The four big ones are OSS/ALSA interfaces for sound, the TTY interface for remote serial lines, the SCSI command set (cdrom, cdda, mag. tape, disk geometry, etc.), and USB HID.
What's nice is that if you support a wide enough dialect of these ioctls on the local side, the remote side can casts these high level commands into different ioctls the actual device supports, like presenting /dev/cdrom as /dev/scd0 and doing SCSI->ATAPI translation on the fly. That, of course, would not be in the low-latency implementation.

Remote framebuffer would also be nice, but then you'd probably need to have compression and that starts to get towards X11... but it also has to be there eventually. Even if it's slow it might be tolerable over 100MB to control multiple slave video drivers or something... big wall displays... mmmmm

Sun's got something similar to this in their Sun Cluster software, but it's sort of a by-product of how it works, not an advertised feature. It would be cool to have just by itself.

In the April 2003 issue of Communications of the ACM (Vol. 46, no. 4) the News Track section mentions research that has recently determined that using a hands free phone does nothing to improve driver attentiveness. They used scanners that track eye movement and determined that there was no difference using a traditional or hands-free phone in the car, while those talking to a passenger or listening to music were unaffected. The concern is that a number of states are introducing legislation that will force drivers to use hands-free technology to improve safety, and that these laws could instill a false sense of security (in addition to being plain dumb).

The question remains: Why do drivers get tunnel vision when they are talking to someone who isn't there? They know that it's not that the driver literally gets tunnel vision, but that they start filtering out signs and other cars (inattention blindness). Still, what is it about the fact the person they are conversing with isn't there that causes that problem?

I have a theory. Imagine for a second you are in the car, talking to a friend. Then there's traffic up ahead, you say to the friend, "hold on," and you interrupt your train of thought to deal with the vehicles. Later, when the traffic eases up, you both figure out where you last left off.

But on a cellphone, the person at the other end doesn't have this context. You may tell them: wait, I'm in the car, I need to deal with this, but it's not the same. When you initiate a phone transaction, the assumption is that someone has been interrupted (the callee), and so both parties are very focused on the dialog; or maybe they are worried about the minutes left on their plan. The person on the other end of the cellphone won't know why you trail off because you can't be distracted; so you try not to and you struggle to keep engaging them. PRetty soon, you're realizing your about to miss your exit, so you swerve over to the right to make it, then BAM!

Not good. I might also postulate that using a phone is particularly more stressful on the brain because each party is visually imagining the person they are talking to (at least I'm aware that _I_ do it); these are visual cortex cycles that should be focused on one's environment. But this is in contrast with the fact music or books on tape don't were found to NOT have this effect.

Comments?

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