I got a good old chuckle out of xkcd today and thought I would share:
Tag:
This is an email I sent out today to someone I am working with elsewhere but I also think it’s about time I shared my recent thoughts to a wider audience:
All current issues aside the work I have been doing over the past year has presented a few issues which are encouraging me to wonder if there is place for a corporately sponsored open STB project. I know there is Dreambox but these are expensive and have had various political issues. I also know there is MythTV and the others but they are heavily PC dependent. The concept would be an open platform based on a modern STB design optimised for simplicy and power (possibly a PVR). We could manufacture in modest volumes enough to supply the demand and possibly could sell them at wholesale pricing. It would be a hardware only sale with software to be determined on the project basis. We could support the project through administration and hardware, but further we can drive the project by offering ‘bounties’ on features that are requested by potential corporate customers. In effect we could offer two teirs of product software the "community edition" which is free, but offers only community support and the "commercial edition" which would offer features for the ‘bounty’ with a professional code compile service for validated code.
This is just something I am bouncing around in my head and I wanted to put it around before I built a proposal out of it. Please let me know your thoughts on this.
I think it could fly, I think it could be useful and I think it would address many peoples problems. I’ve had requests for close to 50,000 boxes on different projects, but because each one of them was so small there was no way we could put development resources behind them. Put together that much hardware is reasonable business and I think something that’s worth paying attention to. The ‘bounty’ would fund peoples time to work on the project, or perhaps reward them for their work.
I welcome your feedback…
So, we’ve launched ‘freesat’ today. It seems to be going well, people are are trying to find the product and the product is starting to appear in shops. I hope it does well, the Humax Foxsat-HD is such a nice product and I am proud of our work on it. I keep getting asked when the Humax freesat PVR will be here, well that will have to wait until it is ready.
I am just reading an article by Bill Thompson of the BBC:
"Unfortunately, however, like many other communities that seem to be happy and relaxed but are in turmoil just beneath the surface, eBay is more like the fictional murder-prone village of Midsomer than the perfect market."
I loved that line. Apparently sellers will no longer be able to leave negative feedback for buyers, I am not sure if this is a good idea.
Thanks to my brother for spotting that the comment section of my site didn’t work. Hope I’ve fixed it, darn SEF module was doing too good a job and the Comment module had a stray ./ a mixture for disaster.
I would like to publically thank (as much as I can here) the company "Learning with Linden ".
They have sorted me out with the brackets for a projection screen that was delivered in a poor state by the vendor. The vendor has been difficult to deal with on this problem, but looking over the delivered package I noticed a name on it that included a model number. By googling that name I found "Learning with Linden" and from there I was able to find the product.
I was able to call them, explain my situation and after they verified I had purchased the product they said they would send me the brackets tonight in the post! Wonderful, well, I will see and perhaps update you.
Edit:
To update you, it went up, it doesn’t look great, but then again you get what you pay for in life, and it didn’t cost much.
New broadband provider… a new year. Excellent:
| Uptime: | 0 days, 4:11:09 | ||
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| Modulation: | G.992.5 Annex A | ||
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| Bandwidth (Up/Down) [kbps/kbps]: | 1,291 / 7,264 | ||
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| Output Power (Up/Down) [dBm]: | 12.0 / 18.0 | ||
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| Line Attenuation (Up/Down) [dB]: | 21.5 / 39.5 | ||
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| SN Margin (Up/Down) [dB]: | 7.0 / 6.5 | ||
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Ah, heck, it might not be 24Mb but its enough for me.
Ok, I confess, I went to see the Spice Girls at the O2 Arena last night. It wasn't my fault, the man with the free VIP lounge with free hospitality (inc. bar!) made me do it! It was an impressive sight, but I certainly wasn't there for the music!
Forgive me?
P.S. I will try and get Angel to write more about the experience.