Run Windows Media center (Win7) on a Fit2PC (it has an HDMI output and a bay for a 2.5 inch drive) pair it with a Silicon Dust HDHomeRun network cable tuner.

Or

Run a EyeTV on a Mac Mini with a Silicon Dust HDHomeRun network cable tuner and pair that combo with an AppleTV

The first option using WMC is much easier and costs less, EyeTV requires a Channel listing subscription.

Personally I'm still experimenting, but WMC makes a lot of sense and its well established, plus the channel listing subscription is free.

Rumor has it Microsoft will be coming out with a split personality XBox offering, with a high end Xbox for media and gaming, and a low end Xbox offering called xTV to compete with AppleTV - but that's strictly rumor.

.. that's no moon.

I'd recommend a return to the Pre-Apollo Era Space SciFi when Chesley Bonstel was popular - http://www.amazon.com/Battle-Mercury-Winston-Science-Fiction/dp/B000OP9M4Q/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1340228543&sr=8-1&keywords=battle+on+mercury

At a pre-teen I really enjoyed the stories that seemed to resonate with the movies like the Day the Earth Stood Still - but went much much further.

"Battle on Mercury" has space travel, robots, alien life forms and just a ton of stuff in a nice sized book.

"The Windows of Forever" was a nice story in which the main character discovers wormholes all around them just outside the corner of your eye to the past or the future. A boy learns how to detect them and ends up helping future colonists battling alien invaders on a distant future earth.

"They Might be Gods or Demons" is another light scifi story in which the travelers track down ancient astronauts bent on conquering the earth but who run afoul of a group of students who discover time travel and foil their plans tens of thousands of years ago, unable to time travel the ancient astronauts threaten to find them whenever they go. A "grown up" Back to the Future story.

"Son of the Stars" a trilogy in which a young man discovers a crashed spaceship and helps a humonoid alien learn about earth, launch a rescue beacon and then is invited to visit the federation of worlds - only to find out Earth was under observation the whole time, and it was all a test to find out if Earth was worthy to take its seat in the governing body of this area of the galaxy.

"Marooned on Mars" an escape mission to return to Earth from Mars, but the dead do not reast easy on Mars, and these dead wiped out all life on multiple planets long ago and Earth is next. (maybe a bit too intense for a young child).

I wouldn't worry too much about the language barrier, if he's interested in SciFi he'll learn to sustitute what he knows for what he doesn't and reconcile later. It's what kids do to keep from going bonkers over anxiety worrying about details.

1950 and 1960's scifi for the most part should be relatively safe and mostly gloss over the ideas and concepts people find too difficult.

It does have the odor of a Leo moment for Microsoft.

Difference being this Leo owns a lot of Microsoft stock.

I wonder how institutional investors will react.

Stephen Baxter is a great writer and his TimeShips spanned what seemed like one dimension of the Universe, from now to the End of time.

In a similar way I thought Sliders was on the cusp of charting space and time but in the sideways sense of possibilties.

It would have been cool to explore the limits of habitable Earths and maybe even have gone extraterrestrial. It always seemed artificial for them to arrive only on Earths with a population, and never explain that. There were rules like they would not time travel on the show and that felt artificial too.. in a lot of ways.. all the limiting rules storylines seemed its undoing. It became believe it or not more comedy and then theatrical tragedy. It was an exterme, focusing too much on individuals and then a single individual, until that individual left.. and then they jumped the shark for sure.. it could have easily opened up and passed the batton or went oribus and explained how a single individual got so lucky.. and felt very satisfying.. even leaving open the franchise to others.. remember the Quinn that tossed him a fully functional timer? One that actually worked?

As it is Sliders will have to be re-imagined one day.

I just hope like Stephen Baxter they think larger and less limiting.. they hinted at coordinates and ways of navigating the ethereal plains of existence.. and that others out there might be doing the same.. "Slide like an Egyptian" hinted at that tongue in cheek.

What I had against the Kromags was the overt beating over the head with the idea that Neaderthals or some evolved Nazi's could go maurading and conquering alternate worlds.. as if mere resources or emotion were good enough to justify why they were pursuing it. I rather liked the individual idea of exploration and curiousity (like the original HG Wells time traveler) was more likely and interesting.. coming across say one or two civilizations who thought pandimensional travel was interesting.. was okay.. but making it a focal point of storyline was hard to relate to.. (it would be like making star travel common place).

Rather it would have been nicer if they got themselves into serious trouble and the mysterious Quinn with the working timer reappeared with some answers but not all.. and they discovered they were being sponsored by a different civilization.. or one totally outside our experience..like the ones from Contact.. for their own reasons that probably would have nothing to do with us.. somethings we simply will never know.

In a lot of ways it was the American Doctor Who saga rather junior style.. as if it were Doctor Who "the early years".. keeping it grounded in hard science would have been a challenge bit fun.. and if they lifted the ban on time travel, even if only the rate of time on different worlds allowed limited travel they could have explored things that left the planet, or warming of the earth, or space and star travel.

Handing off the technology to different travelers would have been rather like the Doctor changing faces every few seasons, with only the mysterious sponsors or Quinn with the Cheshire cat grin left to maintain continuity.

'scare the heck' out of every creature in the area

Is that your medical opinion Bones?

Oh yeah.. just ask the Ganymedens about their project Icarus.. that ended well [ http://www.amazon.com/The-Gentle-Giants-Ganymede-2/dp/0345323270 ]

A spaceship, a blackhole and alien refugees fleeing a dying sun.

Just another day a the the beach 25 millions years long.

Children tend to play with toys in their crib first.. then with the ones in the neighbors backyard.

Just say'in..

But we're a habitually meddlesome species.. we can't see to leave well enough alone.

While we're workin on the stellar engineering degree there's bound to be a few.. "whoopsies"

There was once a "can't loose, this time its different, the world has changed" event called the Holland Bulb bubble.

It ended poorly for them, patents and copyrights will end poorly for the world.

In the final analysis to criminalize thinking destablizes or distorts perceptions of reality.

Only two outcomes from attempting to distort reality:

A. Rude awakening, you find yourself in a world in which the fiction is someday ignored, or
B. .. well historically there have been no alternatives.

Probability is the majority of the world already ignores patents, and the internet and the documentation will distribute and drive a subculture of innovation. They have become a "right to sue" federal grant and have nothing to do with their original intended purpose in a small out of the way country isolated from the rest of the world at the end of the 18th Century. They are a kind of proxy for a world government when they cross license and attempt to set up similar federal grants in foreign countries.. they become the Universal Euro. They are the ultimate credit swap derivative. And I think we have a lot of recent experience with those.

I think it is unlikely anyone will unwind this credit default swap, the odds are stacked against it. Civilization will get on with the business of business and life. Investors in companies that inflate their values with patent and copyright portfolios will experience rapid deflation or uncertainty then lose a lot of real money.

Probably sooner than later.

I subscribed and watched like two shows. Boring as cardboard. Cancelled the service, to user unfriendly.

Truth is my life is busy enough as it is, commercials and debacles that confuse me?

Dragging me to their scheduled events? At work we use to call them 'meetings'.

Come to think of it some productions look a lot like Powerpoint.

I buy the shows I want now, if I'm interested. Six seasons of Lost? I do not have the time.

A thirteen episode season of a good story, maybe.

Content providers are going to loose customers because they are not catering to their customer base.

The old days of multigenerational television shows like Happy Days are over.

Multigenerational Cable service is going the same way.

Even Tivo is a bit out dated. Institutionalizing the 'commercial' dodge was amusing at best.. stand back and its pure insanity to put up with it.

Make it easy.. or I've better things to do with my time.

Make it less expensive.. or I just can't afford to pay.

The human race has lived without TV for a long time, I doubt they'll notice its passing.

XP (like many operating systems) is (a) an installer (b) a boot loader (c) a device detection and driver loading system (d) a gui file management systems (c) a socket based network system, and a collection of well know precompiled libraries

It fits nicely in a virtual machine and can boot off a cdrom iso image direct into memory

Its evolved over the years into a tool or a widget, its odd that over years there has been more and better documentation written and indexed about it on the web than by its parent vendor.

If you trim off the legacy subsystems or let them plug into a virtual machine, like KVM it becomes less dependent on hardware and more stable.

Consider Windows 7 and Windows 8 merely the latest "Hypervisor" from Microsoft and be done with it.

If you need XP for the GUI to support legacy staff, then use the Windows 8 metro tiles to launch an XP desktop (ditto for Win 7).

XP is becoming more like Unix "X" in that its becoming a "window manager" with a complement of features, its more the job of the hypervisor to secure its communciations. That's the best explaination I can come up with for Snofsky's Microsoft abandoning selling "eXPerience" for function.

Gosh.. I almost got excited by this new feature.

Then I realized it was an Eyeball typo..

If only

Actually that's a stellar idea.

I recently bought a POV cam from Contour cameras.

Standard is 720p with omnidirectional sound, about 3-4 hour recording time on a single charge, the memory cards can hold up to 8 hours.

But it can shoot 1080p and it is not advertised as Low Light, but works very good in low light.

The camera settings can be configured by manipulating a text file on the memory card that it reads on start up.

The native recording format is H.264 MOV files, so all the compression is done up front.

The ContourROAM camera I have has a standard 1/4 inch-20 UNC screw mount point on the bottom so send a little table top tripod along with it.

It's basically fool proof even though it doesn't have a view finder, just aim and shoot. It has a single slider switch for On and Off.

So if you recorded the interview with one of these and conducted Q&A over the web with a web client, you'd get the best of both world, extremely high quality, hi-res interviews with low noise and a wide angle lens. But still be able to conduct the interview in a conversational manner.

The fact that sound is recorded along with the video could be plus and minus, it could be a primary source, or a backup source, or a sync source to couple with the web audio and video.

more episodes of "Lost"

Like Time Travel, playing "What If?" is fun to a point.

Of course we live in the only alternative time line we know is possible.

But I'll play.

In the 70s all the rage was speculation on power generation plants to solve the oil crisis.

In the 00s all the rage has been sun-brellas to deflect sunlight from the poles to reduce global warning.

Combine the two and in a history where the shuttle program didn't get going and we might have satellite power generation stations in the 80s and the conversion of those into satellite solar shields in the 90s. Instead the money went to boosters that bootstrapped the solar power generation industry. Then NASA was spun off as a quasi commercial business and ran a space shuttle program in the 00s. Later generations might be looking at passive solar sails to explore the near earth objects for building materials, and using sails in some kind of paper scissors rock game of wrapping dangerous near earth objects and deflecting them further out into space, or bringing them into approved manufacturing plant corridors in earth orbit.