This is gonna be a half-rant / half-tutorial post.
Look behind your modern tv and you will see a plethora of connections, some familiar and others that will make you say "wtf???!!!111oneoneone!!". I'm going to try simplify this for you, by ranking them in order of display quality, lobbing a picture for reference and an explanation of when they would be commonly used.
So, bingo, let's start
Worst to best ranking, with some ties.
1) RF - you should be familiar with this one already, RF=Radio Frequency,, and it is what you plug your aerial into. In the states this would be an f-connector with a screw thread, most of the rest of the world uses a push fit connector , with the socket having a female receptacle. As it says, this is for radio frequency, and will not give the best picture quality, at all. Ever. Stay Away From This if you have others options.
It looks like this
2) Composite - (NOTE: DONT CONFUSE WITH COMPONENT) composte is normally coloured yellow, the jack and the socket is yellow, it is a two wire system, one being signal and the other is a ground/shield wire. This is so common on most equipment that if you havent seen one yet you probably own a guide dog. It is better than RF, but not by much. All info has to get modulated into a single wire, and this causes loss of clarity and colour. As above, avoid if you have better options. Here is the guilty party
3) Svideo - (I am gonna say this once only, if you EVER, DARE, IN MY PRESENCE, to call this super-vhs and super-video I will use this on you. Repeatedly. Sure, some vhs machines did have svideo connectors, and they were super-vhs machines, BUT THE CONNECTOR IS CALLED SVIDEO. kappish? Svideo is a 4 wire system, 2 ground, a luminance and a chrominance wire. This is better than composite, at least everything isnt squashed into one wire anymore, and for the most part people can get along with svideo on normal sd crt tv's quite fine. The connector is keyed and can only be inserted one way correctly, but this hasnt stopped people from squashing it in wrong and mashing the pins. This wont help your picture quality, by the way.
A stunning example is here, dressed in black
4) RGB (red, green, blue...like magic) - Ok, we are onto the better stuff now. RGB has seperate wires for the three colours, and then normally a h-sync wire (horizontal sync) and a v-sync (vertical sync) (or sometimes only a c-sync, composite sync). Guess what, this is what your average old computer monitor uses in the vga connections. On a tv, the frequency is much lower, so they cant be swopped willy-nilly, and rgb shouldnt be interchanged with vga, but the concept can be likened to brothers. Most of the time rgb is implemented on a scart connector. Yes, I said scart connector. It is a connector, not a signal type. SCART can carry composite, or rgb, or svideo +audio and syncing/switcing/voltages, or combinations thereof. Picture here
5) Component (sometimes called YPrPb) - this is some good stuff here. Can carry hi-def signals, 3 seperate rca style jacks, colour coded so you cant really mess things up. One red, one green, one blue. No, they dont carry red green and blue data. Use these if you got 'em and nothing better spare..
6) vga - an analog connector - like your computer monitor uses, this is a 15 pin d-sub port, carrying rgb and sync signals. plug your computer into this jack if it is your lowest common connector
7) dvi/hdmi - very similar jacks...all digital and used for modern equipment, hi-def cable/satellite boxes, computers, xbox 360/ps3 etcetera. the hdmi port differs from dvi in that it carries the same data as a dvi port and in addition can carry audio. You can buy dvi-->hdmi cables pretty cheaply. Dont bother about super duper high quality cables, the picture will look the same...the only diff is the more expense cables may have better connectors, better strain relief and perhaps more robust shielding.
Ok, hope that helps clarify the waters a bit, and heed the super-vhs warning. I rarely kid aroudn when I got fresh batteries :-)
Thursday 31 May 2007
Tuesday 29 May 2007
Dealing with the csup.txt whql mda requirement
Microsoft slipped a very quiet reference to a file, csup.txt, into the mda2007 requirements. In fact, I only found reference to this file in ONE powerpoint slide.
Either way, the actual requirements are simple enough, the file should contain the "born on" date for the machine, so microsoft can use this for reference to check which windows critical updates should be installed. And if you jump through the hoop nicely, you may receive you mda money.
The file needs to contain the current date. Something like echo %date% > c:\windows\csup.txt should be ok, isnt it? Nope, date must be in american format.
So, if you DONT live in the states, and your machines regional settings arent in U.S. format, you will have to conjure up some magic. I searche donline and found some routines for batch files, and modified them a bit, and this works for me
----begin batch-----
rem get the day, date and month in a format we can work with
@For /F "tokens=1,2,3 delims=/ " %%A in ('Date /t') do @(
Set Day=%%A
Set Month=%%B
Set Year=%%C
)
@echo DAY = %Day%
@echo Month = %Month%
@echo Year = %Year%
rem this line reformats it to american date format, as required by ms
rem and then creates c:\windows\csup.txt using this information for whql
echo %month%-%day%-%year% > c:\windows\csup.txt
-----end batch------
first sections uses the date command to put the date into variables, %day%, %month% and %year%, we can then echo these variables in any format into csup.txt, as shown by the last line. This works great for me for grabbing UK date and reformatting as U.S, please experiment for your area to get the variables correct.
Either way, the actual requirements are simple enough, the file should contain the "born on" date for the machine, so microsoft can use this for reference to check which windows critical updates should be installed. And if you jump through the hoop nicely, you may receive you mda money.
The file needs to contain the current date. Something like echo %date% > c:\windows\csup.txt should be ok, isnt it? Nope, date must be in american format.
So, if you DONT live in the states, and your machines regional settings arent in U.S. format, you will have to conjure up some magic. I searche donline and found some routines for batch files, and modified them a bit, and this works for me
----begin batch-----
rem get the day, date and month in a format we can work with
@For /F "tokens=1,2,3 delims=/ " %%A in ('Date /t') do @(
Set Day=%%A
Set Month=%%B
Set Year=%%C
)
@echo DAY = %Day%
@echo Month = %Month%
@echo Year = %Year%
rem this line reformats it to american date format, as required by ms
rem and then creates c:\windows\csup.txt using this information for whql
echo %month%-%day%-%year% > c:\windows\csup.txt
-----end batch------
first sections uses the date command to put the date into variables, %day%, %month% and %year%, we can then echo these variables in any format into csup.txt, as shown by the last line. This works great for me for grabbing UK date and reformatting as U.S, please experiment for your area to get the variables correct.
The Confusing Popularity of MySpace
OK, lets get it out of the way. MySpace is huge, MySpace is popular, and MySpace is a word in common usage (hereafter referred to as myspace because typing those two capital letters is winding me up)
I bumped into someone recently, and I guess she knew how much I loved mobile phones, because she didnt ask for my phone number, she wanted my "myspace". Much as I wouldve loved to oblige, she obviously was not aware of how much I dont "get" myspace.
Long-winded explanation follows.
Many Many moons ago, yea, Al Gore he made the net, and it was good, the pipes were flowing, and then they made geocities.com. And it was good. And the people they flocked and opened up pages using the geocities page wizard, and suddenly everybody had a presence. I would wager that this almost kick-started the "homepage" phenomenon.
Goecities was where everybody (initially) planted their first internet seed, you didnt NEED to know html as they had a site-designer. you could have geocities.com/mynutsandI for no fee whatsoever. If fate hadnt conspired otherwise, the lady in question shouldve asked me for my geocities address.
So, I have now drawn a parallel between myspace and geocities, and I belive they are (were?) very much the same thing.
But some difference in implementation exist.
#1) myspace is made out to be cool, glamorous and beautiful people go there to write about themselves (actually, they pay others to write for them, and probably wouldnt recognise their own page layout if they had to pick from 10 samples)
#2) with myspace you can message each other (status: horribly broken I have been told)
So, where did geocities go wrong? My opinion is probably it was too early. The critical mass of users who would find this service handy hadnt bought computers yet, and once they had myspace was there to give them something they needed.
And the html (or whatever myspace uses) which they provide to users is so ugly that it is almost a comptetition to see who can get a page that doesnt flash black and white @ 10hz with links that shoot left by 10pixels when you hover over them.
They have taken geocities, and made it into web2.0. Launched an almost broken product and harnessed the users to make it work, deftly side-stepping the "large corporate" attitude many sites have, branding myspace as "cutesy and cuddly" at the same time, and sticking good looking woman there. And if you want to see their profiles, you have to sign up too.
All in all, a job well done. Take something that exists already (geocities) and relaunch it. Yeah, you can tell how impressed I am.
Needless to say, I'm not on myspace. And you are not getting my geocities address:-)
I bumped into someone recently, and I guess she knew how much I loved mobile phones, because she didnt ask for my phone number, she wanted my "myspace". Much as I wouldve loved to oblige, she obviously was not aware of how much I dont "get" myspace.
Long-winded explanation follows.
Many Many moons ago, yea, Al Gore he made the net, and it was good, the pipes were flowing, and then they made geocities.com. And it was good. And the people they flocked and opened up pages using the geocities page wizard, and suddenly everybody had a presence. I would wager that this almost kick-started the "homepage" phenomenon.
Goecities was where everybody (initially) planted their first internet seed, you didnt NEED to know html as they had a site-designer. you could have geocities.com/mynutsandI for no fee whatsoever. If fate hadnt conspired otherwise, the lady in question shouldve asked me for my geocities address.
So, I have now drawn a parallel between myspace and geocities, and I belive they are (were?) very much the same thing.
But some difference in implementation exist.
#1) myspace is made out to be cool, glamorous and beautiful people go there to write about themselves (actually, they pay others to write for them, and probably wouldnt recognise their own page layout if they had to pick from 10 samples)
#2) with myspace you can message each other (status: horribly broken I have been told)
So, where did geocities go wrong? My opinion is probably it was too early. The critical mass of users who would find this service handy hadnt bought computers yet, and once they had myspace was there to give them something they needed.
And the html (or whatever myspace uses) which they provide to users is so ugly that it is almost a comptetition to see who can get a page that doesnt flash black and white @ 10hz with links that shoot left by 10pixels when you hover over them.
They have taken geocities, and made it into web2.0. Launched an almost broken product and harnessed the users to make it work, deftly side-stepping the "large corporate" attitude many sites have, branding myspace as "cutesy and cuddly" at the same time, and sticking good looking woman there. And if you want to see their profiles, you have to sign up too.
All in all, a job well done. Take something that exists already (geocities) and relaunch it. Yeah, you can tell how impressed I am.
Needless to say, I'm not on myspace. And you are not getting my geocities address:-)
Saturday 26 May 2007
Dealing with the hoodie phenomenon, effectively
A long time ago in a far away place there once lived a man called Jack The Ripper. Mr Jack wasn't such a nice bloke, he had these urges to kill and maim prostitutes. And he was never found. I'm not sure if he was the first, but he was definitely one of the first modern day serial killers.
For a few months olde London was thrown into panic as night time came about. People would be petrified that they would be Jack's next victim, and the most petrified of them all were the prostitutes. Nobody wanted to be near the prostitutes, and the prostitutes themselves kinda had a going out of business sale on.
So, last night I was at the pub and saw many hoodies running around, proving to themselves that Darwin's theory isnt working correctly. And it struck me...we dont need regulation, or Brussels, or Tony Blair to sort this out, heck, we dont even need any police.
Let's get Jack back.
But tweak him for the modern society, reprogram him to hoodie mode. Let him loose on modern London, with some modern weapons, and have him target hoodies for a couple of months.
I would be willing to wager sales of hoodies would plummet like Tony Blair's popularity. I would also wager that the next time I see a hoodie in my life it would be worn by the Grim Reaper, and not some Romford snot-nose.
They would all be cowering in fear, hiding in mommy's basement lest others point to them and cry "HIM!! He used to wear a HOODIE!!! RUN"
Now, who's going to vote for me? :-)
For a few months olde London was thrown into panic as night time came about. People would be petrified that they would be Jack's next victim, and the most petrified of them all were the prostitutes. Nobody wanted to be near the prostitutes, and the prostitutes themselves kinda had a going out of business sale on.
So, last night I was at the pub and saw many hoodies running around, proving to themselves that Darwin's theory isnt working correctly. And it struck me...we dont need regulation, or Brussels, or Tony Blair to sort this out, heck, we dont even need any police.
Let's get Jack back.
But tweak him for the modern society, reprogram him to hoodie mode. Let him loose on modern London, with some modern weapons, and have him target hoodies for a couple of months.
I would be willing to wager sales of hoodies would plummet like Tony Blair's popularity. I would also wager that the next time I see a hoodie in my life it would be worn by the Grim Reaper, and not some Romford snot-nose.
They would all be cowering in fear, hiding in mommy's basement lest others point to them and cry "HIM!! He used to wear a HOODIE!!! RUN"
Now, who's going to vote for me? :-)
Friday 25 May 2007
Everything is broken
Pondering the universe today, as per my usual lunch break, when I realised there would be a use on this planet for a website similar to digg, but for logging failures on modern electronic equipement, for the purpose of collecting enough info to launch a class action.
The reasoning behind this is pretty simple, so wont take much explaining. Everything is broken. Always. If you see something that you think isnt broken, it is because you havent looked hard enough. As the world turns and software creeps its way into everyday devices, like fridges, toasters, your pvr under the tv, your tv itself etc, the prevalence of bugs increases.
And there will always be a bug. But perhaps you dont realise it, or arent using the itme in a specific configuration so the bug doesnt raise its head. BUt it does exist.
What is needed is for everyone who believes they have a problem to be able to log it effectively somehow, and for others to chime in their 2c worth if they can replicate it. Once a critical mass of similar faults are recorded a class action can be launched.
Heck, the site would be a breeding ground for lawyers.
Just a thought...it is bound to get worse before it gets better...
The reasoning behind this is pretty simple, so wont take much explaining. Everything is broken. Always. If you see something that you think isnt broken, it is because you havent looked hard enough. As the world turns and software creeps its way into everyday devices, like fridges, toasters, your pvr under the tv, your tv itself etc, the prevalence of bugs increases.
And there will always be a bug. But perhaps you dont realise it, or arent using the itme in a specific configuration so the bug doesnt raise its head. BUt it does exist.
What is needed is for everyone who believes they have a problem to be able to log it effectively somehow, and for others to chime in their 2c worth if they can replicate it. Once a critical mass of similar faults are recorded a class action can be launched.
Heck, the site would be a breeding ground for lawyers.
Just a thought...it is bound to get worse before it gets better...
Thursday 24 May 2007
Hand Washing Rituals of the Modern Man
Before I let you in on my secret I have to say that I am a clean, well-washed young man who loves having his bath in the morning. And a cup of coffee, and a smoke.
And off to work we go. Open car door, close car door, get to work, open office door, walk around building, close doors etc. Lots of opening and closing.
And touching. Touching lots of foreign things. Foreign, dirty things, which werent washed that morning, probably full of germs farms.
And so it comes to that ritual I do after coffee, the morning piss at work. Have a nice long leak and a shake, then go wash my hands.
This is all expected human behaviour. But now, I am having a bit of a wonder here. My very dirty hands were used in the bathroom to support my male organ. Yes, the clean male organ that had a good wash that same morning, then got cottoned up in clean underwear and whisked off to work with me. But I washed my hands????? This defies logic.
There seems to be only two solutions that actually make sense, as the current one is giving me grey hairs trying to decipher.
We should
1) Wash hands before going to the toilet (and if you have bad aim, after toilet too)
2) Forget the hands, but invent some male organ washing machine that can clean your dangly bits AFTER you have touched it with your filthy hands.
But once again I ask, why do we wash our HANDS after toilet?
And off to work we go. Open car door, close car door, get to work, open office door, walk around building, close doors etc. Lots of opening and closing.
And touching. Touching lots of foreign things. Foreign, dirty things, which werent washed that morning, probably full of germs farms.
And so it comes to that ritual I do after coffee, the morning piss at work. Have a nice long leak and a shake, then go wash my hands.
This is all expected human behaviour. But now, I am having a bit of a wonder here. My very dirty hands were used in the bathroom to support my male organ. Yes, the clean male organ that had a good wash that same morning, then got cottoned up in clean underwear and whisked off to work with me. But I washed my hands????? This defies logic.
There seems to be only two solutions that actually make sense, as the current one is giving me grey hairs trying to decipher.
We should
1) Wash hands before going to the toilet (and if you have bad aim, after toilet too)
2) Forget the hands, but invent some male organ washing machine that can clean your dangly bits AFTER you have touched it with your filthy hands.
But once again I ask, why do we wash our HANDS after toilet?
Wednesday 23 May 2007
My girlfriend used to be this dirty
Sometimes, you just have to wonder how the hell some people managed to escape Darwin. The evolution of our species should mean that the rubbish cant procreate and eventually, they die, unable to pass their tarnished genes on to the next generation.
Occasionally, it must be said, one escapes the net. I blame alcohol. Alcohol has the ability to make stupid unattractive guys appealing to the fairer sex.
Which means, of course, the following photos cannot have come from Iran or a similar country. No sir, this excuse for a human hails from the land of the big great cloud. And what follows is a short photo story of the inside of his pc.
He came to me complaining that windows would occasionally not boot up completely, random reboots etc. My first instinct was heat. I wasnt wrong. I just didnt know how right I was.
This humble lump of plastic and metal left china about a year ago, nice 'n shiny. Now, it is just being abused.
If you can stomach it, read on.
Here is a lovely view with the front panel removed. You can see the dust has actually started to grow. I would hate to see what this person's house looks like.
It gets worse...viewed from the side the fur is about 2 inches long
one more pic, so you know this is for real
un-fucking-believable...
This pc was one year old, not some 10 year old gunk dug out of a cupboard. The techies refused to work on it, and we sent it back to the customer to clean (sterilise?) before we touched it further. The thing smelled bad too.
Occasionally, it must be said, one escapes the net. I blame alcohol. Alcohol has the ability to make stupid unattractive guys appealing to the fairer sex.
Which means, of course, the following photos cannot have come from Iran or a similar country. No sir, this excuse for a human hails from the land of the big great cloud. And what follows is a short photo story of the inside of his pc.
He came to me complaining that windows would occasionally not boot up completely, random reboots etc. My first instinct was heat. I wasnt wrong. I just didnt know how right I was.
This humble lump of plastic and metal left china about a year ago, nice 'n shiny. Now, it is just being abused.
If you can stomach it, read on.
Here is a lovely view with the front panel removed. You can see the dust has actually started to grow. I would hate to see what this person's house looks like.
It gets worse...viewed from the side the fur is about 2 inches long
one more pic, so you know this is for real
un-fucking-believable...
This pc was one year old, not some 10 year old gunk dug out of a cupboard. The techies refused to work on it, and we sent it back to the customer to clean (sterilise?) before we touched it further. The thing smelled bad too.
Tuesday 22 May 2007
The various levels of suckage - Windows MCE
time for another moan, bet you couldnt wait. I've been using windows mce 2004/2005/vista mce since they came out. So I have a valid opinion on it.
I also worked for a company which designed dedicated media center machines. Slick looking boxes for under the tv action. drool. Around 20000 sold, and counting. So that means I have a very valid opinion.
My son has a mce machine in his room, I have one in the lounge, and my car is running mce. I also got my brother and sister set up with mce.
So now I have a very very very valid opinion.
That means you have to sit and listen while I moan, because I am not moaning due to having a bad day. I am moaning due to this piece of crap microsoft is trying to tout to all and sundry. Yes, I have given it a good innings, more than most would attempt, and I still use it for lack of anything else wife friendly. That doesnt make it good.
So, lets begin the suckage tour, in random order.
1) Vista MCE UI elements. Guys, you stuck a new menu on the front of all the pages, the slick looking sliding up and down and left and right semi-transparent sections look great, especially with live tv playing in the background when browsing the menus. Then you go one layer deeper, and wtf is this? mce2005 menus, no transparent overlay type background...all back to the way it was. What happened? did you run out of money to pay the people to sort out the rest of the pages? You sold me the same product, with a different frontend, but the frontend is only partially new. The rest is still the same. Here is some advice. There are only two ways to do anything: YOU CAN DO IT RIGHT, OR YOU CAN DO IT AGAIN. As far as Vista MCE is concerned, you are going to have to do it again.
2) Live tv quality. Not all of us live in the land of OTA HD via ATSC and cablecard tuners. Some of us gotta take our set top boxes and feed them into an analogue tv tuner card. I own around 11 analog tuners. I made it a mission to find and select the best one over a period of time. Currently, it is a theatre 550 implemented on a pci-e x1 interface. It still sucks. Sure, I have a 40" Sony Bravia lcd (massively lovely colours) but it really sucks. You lose the upper 5% of colour range, and the picture is less defined. Why? because the stupid tuners need to get fed via svideo or composite. Where is my rgb enabled tv capture??? up the creek, that is where. In this day and age it is not imaginable to feed a 40" or bigger tv with an svideo signal. Sorry, that doesnt cut it. set top box--->svideo--->theatre 550--->hdmi--->lcd tv. lowest signal is the svideo, and it degrades everything else with it. Of course, we had cards such as the sweetspot with proper rgb capture, but noooo.....lets not help the guys with developing a software wrapper for this card, lets have everybody use svideo or composite for feeding their $2000 pc's. There, I said it. You couldve done better. Now, go back and do it again
3) What the hell is up with the music - Media Center PC. the center of my media. This includes music. Why is this so hard to understand. Why did winamp in circa 2000 have this down pitty pat and here I have a dual core machine which is sluggish when searching my music databse? Did I did up the graves of 1000 dead indian chief, piss in them and then chuck the bodies back? No, I just bought a microsoft product. I will let you decide which is a worse sin.
4) Pictures - what? did you have some space left on the menu and thought "lets tack something in there, like a picture module, but do it quickly before launch". The picture module is basic. Very basic. In fact, I do not get a semi-hardon when thinking about the picture module. Much less in fact. I would prefer you to leave it out. That way, I wont have to maon about it being a lump of junk, plus maybe my menus would be faster without having to skip over this module.
5) media database. Now guys, let me tell you a secret. Music goes into c:\mp3 and videos goes into c:\videos. That isnt rocket science. Just good housekeeping...you remember good housekeeping right? So, why change things....why for the love of $diety did you go mess about with this in vista mce? why do you expect c:\media with subfolder mp3 and videos? What gives you the right to dictate my filesystem preference? To those that dont know what I am talking about, you now have a media pool. This shits on so many levels I cant begin to explain all of it, but suffice to say that album coverart stored in c:\mp3's now gets added to the picture library. please, someone, shoot someone else before they think they have another clever idea.
6) where is softsled? oh wait, I know, it competed with the mce part of the xbxo 360, so you pulled it well and good. So now, instead of having one good beefy mce machine centralised (windows home server???) with little xp machines littered around the house pulling data off it, younow want me to plonk an mce machine under each telly, and have them operate in little glass houses by themselves. each with it's own tuner, not being able to share recorded tv without creative registry hacks. That smell, that is my dick in your mouth. Bastards. Client - server, I have heard of it. Have you?
7) your mce keyboard, the little nipple mouse thingy. My wife has nipples, two of them. They both work. Why cant you even get your ONE to work? I get a cramp thinking about it, yet ibm thinpads had perfectly functioning nipple mouses long before half of your hardware designers were but a distant thought in their dad's ball-bag.
8) Your mce remote is nice, I like the programmable tv power button. It can make my tv switch off. Of course, it cant make it switch on, I mean who the heck wants their tv on? They may just see the horrid picture quality of vista mce in action. Quite a few tv's I have seen want one button push to bring them out of standby, then another to select the channel the pc is on (hdmi or vga). Some can automatically go back to the last channel they were on. If that is the case, then only some of your customers will be happy. The rest of us will look at that programmable tv button and say "what a fscking half-job". I have an idea for you, implement functionality like hip to use a second ir wand to send macro type ir blasts to accomodate the other 80% of people.
9) My wife just told me "neighbours" didnt record today, as per the scheduled series setting. Do you wanna go explain that to her? I cant. It . Just. Makes. No. Sense.
10) My son just called, his mce2005 box has resumed from standby but is now sitting on the mce menu and wont respond to the remote control. I have been here before with his machine, it needs a reboot. windows is like that. I told him it is probably because it is "made in china". That is our code word for "does not work". Mostly his box is maintenance free. But, as I said at the beginning if this post, a mostly working mce machine, multiplied by the number of machines I oversee means that every night something goes wrong, and I have to drop what I am doing to go sort it out. Like a tv tech support person, living the microsoft dream.
need a bfg, that is what I need...a bfg..
I also worked for a company which designed dedicated media center machines. Slick looking boxes for under the tv action. drool. Around 20000 sold, and counting. So that means I have a very valid opinion.
My son has a mce machine in his room, I have one in the lounge, and my car is running mce. I also got my brother and sister set up with mce.
So now I have a very very very valid opinion.
That means you have to sit and listen while I moan, because I am not moaning due to having a bad day. I am moaning due to this piece of crap microsoft is trying to tout to all and sundry. Yes, I have given it a good innings, more than most would attempt, and I still use it for lack of anything else wife friendly. That doesnt make it good.
So, lets begin the suckage tour, in random order.
1) Vista MCE UI elements. Guys, you stuck a new menu on the front of all the pages, the slick looking sliding up and down and left and right semi-transparent sections look great, especially with live tv playing in the background when browsing the menus. Then you go one layer deeper, and wtf is this? mce2005 menus, no transparent overlay type background...all back to the way it was. What happened? did you run out of money to pay the people to sort out the rest of the pages? You sold me the same product, with a different frontend, but the frontend is only partially new. The rest is still the same. Here is some advice. There are only two ways to do anything: YOU CAN DO IT RIGHT, OR YOU CAN DO IT AGAIN. As far as Vista MCE is concerned, you are going to have to do it again.
2) Live tv quality. Not all of us live in the land of OTA HD via ATSC and cablecard tuners. Some of us gotta take our set top boxes and feed them into an analogue tv tuner card. I own around 11 analog tuners. I made it a mission to find and select the best one over a period of time. Currently, it is a theatre 550 implemented on a pci-e x1 interface. It still sucks. Sure, I have a 40" Sony Bravia lcd (massively lovely colours) but it really sucks. You lose the upper 5% of colour range, and the picture is less defined. Why? because the stupid tuners need to get fed via svideo or composite. Where is my rgb enabled tv capture??? up the creek, that is where. In this day and age it is not imaginable to feed a 40" or bigger tv with an svideo signal. Sorry, that doesnt cut it. set top box--->svideo--->theatre 550--->hdmi--->lcd tv. lowest signal is the svideo, and it degrades everything else with it. Of course, we had cards such as the sweetspot with proper rgb capture, but noooo.....lets not help the guys with developing a software wrapper for this card, lets have everybody use svideo or composite for feeding their $2000 pc's. There, I said it. You couldve done better. Now, go back and do it again
3) What the hell is up with the music - Media Center PC. the center of my media. This includes music. Why is this so hard to understand. Why did winamp in circa 2000 have this down pitty pat and here I have a dual core machine which is sluggish when searching my music databse? Did I did up the graves of 1000 dead indian chief, piss in them and then chuck the bodies back? No, I just bought a microsoft product. I will let you decide which is a worse sin.
4) Pictures - what? did you have some space left on the menu and thought "lets tack something in there, like a picture module, but do it quickly before launch". The picture module is basic. Very basic. In fact, I do not get a semi-hardon when thinking about the picture module. Much less in fact. I would prefer you to leave it out. That way, I wont have to maon about it being a lump of junk, plus maybe my menus would be faster without having to skip over this module.
5) media database. Now guys, let me tell you a secret. Music goes into c:\mp3 and videos goes into c:\videos. That isnt rocket science. Just good housekeeping...you remember good housekeeping right? So, why change things....why for the love of $diety did you go mess about with this in vista mce? why do you expect c:\media with subfolder mp3 and videos? What gives you the right to dictate my filesystem preference? To those that dont know what I am talking about, you now have a media pool. This shits on so many levels I cant begin to explain all of it, but suffice to say that album coverart stored in c:\mp3's now gets added to the picture library. please, someone, shoot someone else before they think they have another clever idea.
6) where is softsled? oh wait, I know, it competed with the mce part of the xbxo 360, so you pulled it well and good. So now, instead of having one good beefy mce machine centralised (windows home server???) with little xp machines littered around the house pulling data off it, younow want me to plonk an mce machine under each telly, and have them operate in little glass houses by themselves. each with it's own tuner, not being able to share recorded tv without creative registry hacks. That smell, that is my dick in your mouth. Bastards. Client - server, I have heard of it. Have you?
7) your mce keyboard, the little nipple mouse thingy. My wife has nipples, two of them. They both work. Why cant you even get your ONE to work? I get a cramp thinking about it, yet ibm thinpads had perfectly functioning nipple mouses long before half of your hardware designers were but a distant thought in their dad's ball-bag.
8) Your mce remote is nice, I like the programmable tv power button. It can make my tv switch off. Of course, it cant make it switch on, I mean who the heck wants their tv on? They may just see the horrid picture quality of vista mce in action. Quite a few tv's I have seen want one button push to bring them out of standby, then another to select the channel the pc is on (hdmi or vga). Some can automatically go back to the last channel they were on. If that is the case, then only some of your customers will be happy. The rest of us will look at that programmable tv button and say "what a fscking half-job". I have an idea for you, implement functionality like hip to use a second ir wand to send macro type ir blasts to accomodate the other 80% of people.
9) My wife just told me "neighbours" didnt record today, as per the scheduled series setting. Do you wanna go explain that to her? I cant. It . Just. Makes. No. Sense.
10) My son just called, his mce2005 box has resumed from standby but is now sitting on the mce menu and wont respond to the remote control. I have been here before with his machine, it needs a reboot. windows is like that. I told him it is probably because it is "made in china". That is our code word for "does not work". Mostly his box is maintenance free. But, as I said at the beginning if this post, a mostly working mce machine, multiplied by the number of machines I oversee means that every night something goes wrong, and I have to drop what I am doing to go sort it out. Like a tv tech support person, living the microsoft dream.
need a bfg, that is what I need...a bfg..
The Grumpy Middle-aged Perfectionist
so, the time has come for me to get a spot on the web and moan like a crack-whore on a saturday night outside a kebab shop. I have decided to park myself "here" for the time being. I will do a lot of moaning, hopefully most of it will be legitimate. I want to moan, call it therapy if you will. Fuck it, nobody else listens nowdays as the modern world is all about "me me me me me, handout handout handout handout" whereas I grew up in a "us us us, build build build, community community community" style-household.
There, first post and alienated around half the population below 30. And just getting warmed up.
and on to the purpose of this post (and to slide in my first moan). I want to introduce myself, so the returning readers get an idea of the pleb behind the keyboard. My name is Warren. I didnt pick it, neither did my parents. Just some dumb shitheads cant pronounce a perfectly normal name, albeit not 100% english, so I have decided to use this mis-pronounciation instead. It makes life easier on those not blessed with two brain cells to rub together.
Mr Warren just cant stand bad design, or bad logic (I determine "bad" in this sense of the word to mean anything I dont agree with. You may stop reading now if you so choose.) Mr Warren will also wax lyrically about the good old days occasionally. As long as you understand good old days to mean 1980 and 1990. Before we all got this craving for "instant" fucking everything. Instant messaging, instant pvr tv loving. Mobile phone ring me whenever it is convenient for you lifestyles.
Which, quite naturally, brings me to my first point I am going to make. Mobile/cellular phones.
Those that know me also know I dont own one. Ok, sorry, that is a half-truth. I do own one, I just dont know where it is. I think it fell down the crack between the sofa cushions sometime in the last century and I havent bothered to go look for it. Some of you may think "my god, how can he survive", yet, here I am , perfectly functioning and breathing human being. And may I add, happier because of it. See, the damn things, you guys take them with you everywhere, you pull them out at the slightest opportunity to show your friends the blinky lights and download ringtones for 99c of a shit song that loops for 30sec when the actual full single song is that price on itunes. Basically, "they" have got you hooked on them. You are now part of a balance sheet. And you think you are cool because of it.
(tinfoil hats will be on sale at the end of this post)
secondly (thirdly?), people can now phone you when it is convenient. the problem is, convenient for who? the initiator of the phone call decides to ring you, because THEY have the time. However, there is no mobile phone on this planet that can tell you whether the person you are phoning is NOT busy fucking your mom at that moment. It may not be convenient for them to answer. Yet, the damn thing will ring. Like this "hammer time...duh du du duh, du duh, cant touch this" and now you expect the owner of the phone to drop everything, and push the button. Like a well trained chimpanzee. ringing sound=push button.
Whichever deity you listen to, let me tell you, he/she didnt design you as some entity well trained at responding to a noise by pushing a button. You are HUMAN, capable of thought. Capable of making a decision. You do not *have* to do anything. You ALWAYS have a choice.
Do the right thing, show your creator you are free-spirited and next time the phone rings, just ignore it. You will get a warm fuzzy feeling inside knowing you have just regained control of your life.
And if you are panicking that maybe someone really really needs to get hold of you, dont worry, if it is urgent they will ring again. And perhaps it may be convenient for you to pick it up this time. Or perhaps you will be doing something more important, like watching paint dry.
There, first post and alienated around half the population below 30. And just getting warmed up.
and on to the purpose of this post (and to slide in my first moan). I want to introduce myself, so the returning readers get an idea of the pleb behind the keyboard. My name is Warren. I didnt pick it, neither did my parents. Just some dumb shitheads cant pronounce a perfectly normal name, albeit not 100% english, so I have decided to use this mis-pronounciation instead. It makes life easier on those not blessed with two brain cells to rub together.
Mr Warren just cant stand bad design, or bad logic (I determine "bad" in this sense of the word to mean anything I dont agree with. You may stop reading now if you so choose.) Mr Warren will also wax lyrically about the good old days occasionally. As long as you understand good old days to mean 1980 and 1990. Before we all got this craving for "instant" fucking everything. Instant messaging, instant pvr tv loving. Mobile phone ring me whenever it is convenient for you lifestyles.
Which, quite naturally, brings me to my first point I am going to make. Mobile/cellular phones.
Those that know me also know I dont own one. Ok, sorry, that is a half-truth. I do own one, I just dont know where it is. I think it fell down the crack between the sofa cushions sometime in the last century and I havent bothered to go look for it. Some of you may think "my god, how can he survive", yet, here I am , perfectly functioning and breathing human being. And may I add, happier because of it. See, the damn things, you guys take them with you everywhere, you pull them out at the slightest opportunity to show your friends the blinky lights and download ringtones for 99c of a shit song that loops for 30sec when the actual full single song is that price on itunes. Basically, "they" have got you hooked on them. You are now part of a balance sheet. And you think you are cool because of it.
(tinfoil hats will be on sale at the end of this post)
secondly (thirdly?), people can now phone you when it is convenient. the problem is, convenient for who? the initiator of the phone call decides to ring you, because THEY have the time. However, there is no mobile phone on this planet that can tell you whether the person you are phoning is NOT busy fucking your mom at that moment. It may not be convenient for them to answer. Yet, the damn thing will ring. Like this "hammer time...duh du du duh, du duh, cant touch this" and now you expect the owner of the phone to drop everything, and push the button. Like a well trained chimpanzee. ringing sound=push button.
Whichever deity you listen to, let me tell you, he/she didnt design you as some entity well trained at responding to a noise by pushing a button. You are HUMAN, capable of thought. Capable of making a decision. You do not *have* to do anything. You ALWAYS have a choice.
Do the right thing, show your creator you are free-spirited and next time the phone rings, just ignore it. You will get a warm fuzzy feeling inside knowing you have just regained control of your life.
And if you are panicking that maybe someone really really needs to get hold of you, dont worry, if it is urgent they will ring again. And perhaps it may be convenient for you to pick it up this time. Or perhaps you will be doing something more important, like watching paint dry.
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