slashdot ate my greater than and less than

cars under 20%
cyclists over 80%

If they used them to ticket cyclists they'd be rich. Stand at any intersection in San Francisco, count the percentage of cars that violate traffic laws vs cyclists that violate traffic laws.

I'm just guessing here but

cars 80%

Subtract taxis and cars is probably under 5%

I gave a talk in China last summer in Shanghai. All the projectors required VGA and no one running the conference had a DVI adaptor. They basically claimed DVI is not used in China !?!??!

Yay! the typical answer for an open source product.

1) Open Source Guy: Our product is teh awesome!
2) User: It's not 1/10th as good a ABC
3) Open Source Guy: So volunteer to fix it!

#3 kind of negates #1

Sure I might consider contributing to XBMC but I'm responding to the idea that it's supposedly a good replacement for boxee. That doesn't appear to be the case.

Tried the new beta. Other than re-arranging the top menu I don't see much of a difference. It still doesn't have most of the features of boxee. It still crashed trying to watch a video in the ted app. And now it does silly things like show me a thumbnail of the movie I'M CURRENTLY WATCHING when I bring up the playback controls.

Don't you mean making tablets that look like Crunchpads?
http://techcrunch.com/2009/07/04/crunchpad-prototype-coming-this-month-be-available-asap/

note the date

I used to use XBMC on Xbox. Switched to Boxee on a Mac Mini a couple of years ago.

If Boxee's dead what next? I actually liked Boxee (thought not the bugs)

Every time I try XBMC it dies or is missing features. I just downloaded it right now (v 10.1 for OSX). I like several of the Boxee Apps (ted, vimeo, escapist, ...) so I download the Ted app for XBMC. I run it. First thing I notice. It's not nearly has nice as the Boxee app. Simple list, no descriptions, no style. I click the first link, XBMC is now locked. It's been locked for 10 minutes now.

So, I'm sad to hear that boxee is going away. It's pretty clearly better than XBMC for my use cases at least.

Features I'm hoping for in whatever replaces Boxee no particular order

1) Shows Facebook new stream youtube videos (boxee does this on home screen)

Does XBMC have this built in or as an add on as slick as Boxee? Note: Picking some model script it NOT the solution

2) Has nice skinned apps to major sites (on boxee I use Ted, The Big Picture, Vimeo, The Escapist, Pandora and a few other apps)

are there good skinned apps in XBMC?

3) Has FULL Samba client support built in

Full = works with passwords XBMC has this. Not sure any of the other solutions do.

4) Has instant FF and REV

XBMC has this. Popcorn hour does not. Not sure about others but if I can't skip around in my media fast it's not a solution for me.

5) Has "post" to social media features throughout

I like being able to watch a video on youtube or vimeo in Boxee and click "Loved" and have that posted to Facebook.

6) Supports all the same formats or more

Both XBMC and Boxee support a lot of formats. Lots of other solutions I've tried support less. Of course supporting more would be good. I have to switch out of XBMC for certain types of files.

7) Can be controlled smoothly with an Apple 6 button remote

Boxee did this well. XBMC not so sure. Others? My Popcorn hour sucks here. Their remote has ton of buttons and its not responsive

8) Handles non English

Neither old XBMC nor Boxee were all that good here. Basically you had to configure them, copy in new fonts and other BS. Maybe current XBMC handles this?

9) Auto downloads subtitles

Boxee does this. I didn't see it in my 5 minute test of current XBMC (after I force closed it from the lock above)

I'm sure there's a lot more. Calls above that Boxee sucks, XBMC rules don't seem to fit with my experience though. XBMC is fine at playing already downloaded movies but I haven't had much luck with XBMC providing all the other features I loved in Boxee.

Is there something else that comes closer?

Sorry but I'm not understanding why you guys separate programmers from everyone else. If you write a GPLed word processor, why don't you require everyone to GPL every document they create with it? If you write a photo editing program, why don't you require every photo edited with it to be GPLed?

Person A uses your work to create thing B and you're fine with them not GPLing it.
Person C uses your work to creating thing D and you're not fine with it.

Why do you single out programmers but not anyone else?

BSD doesn't have a problem.

It's fine if you want to use the GPL to force PROGRAMMERS to pay you back with their changes. Of course it's unclear to me why you don't also expect USERS to pay you back was well and only single out PROGRAMMERS.

BSD is for people to like to give things away. I like to give my friends and family presents at Christmas. I don't require that they pay me back. I like to give donations to my favorite charities and organizations whether it's the EFF, PBS, NPR, ACLU, Red Cross, etc. I don't expect them to pay me back. I like to throw parties and invite my friends. I buy all the food and spend all day cooking. I don't require my anyone to pay me back.

It's perfectly reasonable of me to BSD my code in the same spirit of giving. Giving breeds giving. Sure a few people night not give back. So what. I don't care. Even if no one gave back I'd still do it.

Fortunately people do give back without being forced. Apache, Python, PHP, Lua, zlib,libjpeg, libpng, and thousands of other projects are doing just fine BSDed.

My iPhone 3GS crashed all the time. It crashed while browsing the net. It crashed while trying to answer a phone call. It locked while trying to dial a phone number while driving down the freeway requiring holding the power button for 5 seconds to force a shutdown and reboot. So much for not being distracted while driving. It would randomly disable all downloaded apps until I downloaded 1 new one again. Since that time I've had a Nexus One and a Nexus-S. They are every bit as crappy as my iPhone 3GS was. I haven't owned a smart phone that's stable.

I too wish the bar was set higher.