Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Skype Let Down

Skype just got knocked down a bit in my estimation today. I have had a few dollars in a Skype account "just in case". And I just got an email saying it expired. With a bunch of fluff saying how they tried their best and all. Crap.

So I sent them an email back:

I just received an email saying my Skype credit has expired.

Within the email it tells me how you "tried to make our expiration policy as user friendly as possible", and how you must "comply with normal accounting rules".

If either of these things were true, then you would have sent the automated email *prior* to the credit expiring to provide the opportunity for people to maintain their account presense.

And regardless, to determine an account "dead" simply because the credit was unused rather that the account being unused is absurd. Which is reflected in the fact that you do not deem an account "dead", but just the credit. You know full well when an account is genuinely dead when the skype user no longer connects to the skype network.

So the reality is that this is simply a money grabbing opportunity and a blatant one at that.

This is very disappointing.

I hate it when a service seems to do it right and then punches you in the face.

Friday, May 26, 2006

Mythtv Adverts

Some stuff just works. The things that you would want to work more than any other just don't most of the time however.

MythTV can be grief to put together. Like all linux things, it is a journey, rather than a product. I have learnt more about linux through putting a MythTV deployment together over any other activity. You want to learn linux? Give it a try. Not for the fainthearted linux newbie.

So with a freebie, there comes a set of expectations. One of them being that you don't fully expect it to work all the time. You kind expect it to work most of the time, but realise there is going to have to be a bit of mucking around to keep it afloat. What else?

But it doesn't. I had a whole bunch of flakiness to contend with with the initial Ubuntu MythTV have-a-go, but after binning it and starting over with Gentoo, I discovered that it was all down to the hardware. For some reason if the processor goes at its rated speed, I am in for trouble. I didn't get the same problem when the same hardware was running Windows, but I guess that even when Windows is running full tilt it does it pretty inefficiently, and didn't stress all of the components enough at the same time to kick it over? Who knows, that is just idle anti-windows speculation.

So each night a script goes off and gets new listings for the guide. Whenever my shows come on, Mythtv just records them. No fuss. If the disk is getting full, it deletes old stuff. If you say you want to keep something, it keeps it.

It just gets on with it.

But best of all is the ad skipping. After recording, a script runs that does ad detection, and puts markers in the recording. Now clearly determining where ads start and end isn't science? I mean, sometimes it is a right giveaway, but often it isn't... sometime ads seem to flow seamlessly from the show. So you roll out your expectations once again, and accept that some of the time ad skipping will work, but mostly it is going to dump you right in the middle of next segment causing you to rewind to find the start.

But it works. And I am not even watching US tv, which it must be mostly optimised for.

You press the skip button, and it skips the ads.

Rock and roll.

Friday, May 12, 2006

Physics and Graphics

So.. AGEIA bring out a new idea - a year ago - where you have dedicated hardware for modelling physics. Similar reaction to when the first 3D accelerators were introduced. Who would buy specific purpose hardware where games were the only real place for them to be used. How frivolous!

Of course, the environment is different now, what with quad SLI and all, but still. Then ATI (I think) pointed out that a lot of physics calcs could be done with Shader 3.0 hardware. Graphics hardware.

Now I thought, "surely the Shader 3.0 hardware is going to be busy shading pixels?". My point being that you would have to sacrifice the dedication of the graphics hardware to do the physics. Robbing peter to pay paul as they say. I can see how putting the physics chip on a graphics card would be a winner - excepting of course the size of the bloody things already. And anyway Asus have gone ahead and made a card, and there is Physx support in games already. So it looks like it is going to happen. And why not really? Games are an entertainment medium unlike any other, and immersion is key to the enjoyment of any game after gameplay. And good graphics and physics help immensely.

But back to that ATI idea... Using Shader 3.0.

My mobo has an AGP slot, and a PCIe. I chose this because my current graphics card is AGP, and my next one will be PCIe. But ultimately, I am going to have a card that can support Shader 3.0 doing nothing once I employ a spanking new card. I mean, I cannot run them SLI for example, and I am not going to be playing games on two machines. Oh perhaps if Vista comes out and I want two windows machines and Vista is worth a damn, then it might get used I suppose. But that spare processing power can be used in the same machine.

So. My thinking is that you can open the world to hardware physics to a wealth of people by simply using their old Shader 3.0 cards to do the physics while their new card runs the graphics. It is subgenius I tell you.