A List Of People Who Should Stop Writing Software. Example:
Printer Manufacturers: A Printer driver is a folder with one “.ini” file, and a couple of “.dll”s and that’s it. It is not a 50 MB download. It is not an IE Toolbar, and Side Pane. It is not half-baked photo software. It is not a splash screen when your computer starts. It is not a tray icon.
AT least ‘lectronic stuff, anyhow.
Heathen Central’s 3rd stereo receiver — after 1988’s entry-level Pioneer (RIP) and 1992’s $1,000 Onkyo battleship (still in limited service in Heathen HQ’s office) — has gone the way of all circuits. This is somewhat irritating, since it wasn’t cheap and has been in for repairs once already despite its relative youth (b. in late 2000 or early 2001; we forget, but it was soon after our acquisition of the Steel Treehouse Lodge (tm pending)). The 2000-era box — an Arcam AVR100 — was nice enough, and did the New Fanciness of both Dolby Digital and DTS, so we were very happy with it. Except for a few things.
Problem the First was that, unlike some of the fancier models of its era, renaming inputs wasn’t possible. No receiver anywhere, I’m convinced, actually has the correct equipment plugged into every port, and for lots of good reasons, but having customizable text on the screen means at least some positive feedback is possible for the operator (i.e., when you’ve got the TV plugged into VCR for input-scarcity reasons, it’s nice if the screen says “TV” anyway).
Problem the Second was an unfortunately made bet w/r/t digital audio bus inputs. Back in the day, everything was on a pair of RCA cables, one left channel and one right, but with multichannel came the need for, well, more than that (Dolby Digital has 6 distinct channels). Digital cabling solved the problem, but there were two main contenders for plug type: Coaxial and optical. The Arcam has two coax but only one optical input, but the market has since settled on optical. Oops. Double oops since Heathen HQ has optical inputs coming from the Tivo, the XBox, and the streaming music from the Airport Express (heretofore routed through an outboard D/A; we only did cable swap between the Tivo and XBox).
Problem the Third was video switching, meaning the “stereo” controls both what you hear and what you see on the TV. Receivers as old as the Onkyo would try to do this, but they could only handle composite video — i.e., single-RCA plug video feeds that, quite frankly, look like ass even with plain-jane cable TV. In a world of 1080i, that’s just not enough. Even in 2000, the solution wasn’t good enough — the Aardvark will switch S-Video (good enough for standard-resolution DirecTV), but nothing better, so using the DVD player or the XBox meant switching inputs on both the receiver and the TV, which got direct feeds from the higher-resolution sources.
Combine all three of these issues, and you get a situation wherein I once typed up a three-page guide for a long-term houseguest just so she could watch TV when Mrs. Heathen and I were out.
Well, now that the Arcam’s dead, we have a new sheriff in town in a little Yamaha amp, and it gleefully solves all these problems.
First, inputs are re-nameable onscreen, so when you scroll the Input knob, you see a word that means something for the local setup. Even better, the Yamaha line comes with four big round buttons square in the front of the box called “Scenes;” these amount to input-and-surround-setting macros you can configure for easy access. At the Steel Treehouse Lounge, #1 is the new Tivo; #2 is the old Tivo (shut up); #3 is the DVD player on stereo-only with all DSP and processing bypassed; and #4 is for DVD movies; each of these also gets its own, human-created name, so it’s clear when you hit one of the buttons what the gig is. No muss, no fuss, and certainly no 3-page instruction manuals for visiting playwrights.
Second, the digital bus problem is solved in spades, again with a bit of a one-two punch. It’s got enough of the right plugs for us, which is great, but you can also reassign the higher-resolution plugs on the back (i.e., the inputs for digital audio (coax & optical), HDMI, and component video) to the input slots arbitrarily to better suit your configuration. It’s part of the same interface you use for changing input names.
Finally, the video switching problem is dead, dead, dead. Only two remotes live on the coffeetable now: Tivo and receiver. There’s no need to switch TV inputs now, since everything goes through the receiver — and will continue to do so well into the future. (The receiver is actually smarter than the TV now, since the 2001-era TV doesn’t know from HDMI.)
As a bonus? The Yamaha had a lower number on its price tag than either the Onkyo or the Arcam, which means it’s actually MUCH MUCH cheaper if you adjust for inflation — about half the price of the Onkyo in 2007 dollars, and 2/3 that of the Arcam.
Anti-civil-rights senator Jesse Helms has finally gone to his eternal reward. Good riddance.
Betty Bowers has a fine list of quotes from the late Senator.
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
This isn’t just what we believe. It’s what is TRUE. People have rights, period. Governments do not grant them; governments are created to secure them.
Somewhere along the way, this administration forgot — or abandoned — these ideals.
Annoyed at a perceived slight by some NYT reporters, Fox News ran photos of the men that had been edited to make them ugly — receding hairlines, yellow teeth, exaggerated features, etc. Click the link for Media Matters’ coverage, which includes side-by-side comparisons of the original photos and the Fox versions.
In the afternoon of deck-clearing, we find this MeFi post which refers to this NYT story about a New York apartment remodeling job that included, unbidden, a sequence of puzzles the owners eventually figured out. There’s a slideshow as well. File under “what you can get for $8 million,” we reckon, but it’s still cool as hell. I mean, hello: secret compartments! Codes! What’s not to like?
You get TV with no context at all, which must be part of the point of this bit of web goodness. (Via JWZ.)
Bruce Schneier explains why killswitches are a bad idea. Basically, it comes down to a question of whether or not items you buy are owned by you, or by others.
People seem to continually forget to ask “what will happen with this new regulation or feature is misused?” when they ask for schemes like this. It’s not a question of whether it’ll be hacked; it’s a question of when.
Someone has figured out the rough size, shape, and density of Azeroth, i.e. the world in which World of Warcraft takes place, based on observable in-game experiments.
From Scalzi:
With some derision for the Bush administration’s arguments, a three-judge panel said the government contended that its accusations against the detainee should be accepted as true because they had been repeated in at least three secret documents.
The court compared that to the absurd declaration of a character in the Lewis Carroll poem “The Hunting of the Snark”: “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”
“This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true,” said the panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
There’s some gold in the comments, btw.
Check out this post over at the Agitator, especially if you still think of the GOP as the party of fiscal responsibility and limited government.