I've been patiently waiting for an XBMC tie in. I've tried PLEX, but IMO it doesn't compare to the experience that I get with XBMC.
I think it will require the XBMC community to embrace it and push it in. I'm not sure if they could do this via a skin, if we'll have to wait for an XBMC release after Gotham, or if someone will figure a way to have Chromecast act as a second monitor.
Any of those and I feel that my home media center will be complete, but until then I'm stuck waiting.
I'd be interested to see what comes out, but the strength of the chromecast is the ability to browse and such and your phone, and just click a button to instruct the chromecast to play certain content. I'm not sure it makes sense to replicate the xbmc interface on your TV - it's not really inline with what the chromecast is trying to do.
That's a fun story told often around a most factories. I've also heard it told that instead of a mechanical arm the operator would have to stand up, walk over, remove the box, and go sit back down. Since the guy was a little lazy he just put a fan there. The moral of that story was "ask the laziest guy how to fix your problem and he'll give you a good answer".
It's a dangerous methodology to preach though. In this story they found out that they had a problem where they were producing boxes without product and instead of actually figuring out why they were producing empty boxes in the first place (i.e. determining the root cause of the problem) they over engineered a 100% quality control inspection on every piece at a huge expense.
In any manufacturing process you reach a point of diminishing returns where it becomes simply more cost-effective to reject an occasional defective product than to solve the root problem causing the defects.
Is there any way to install a switch to kill the tag when you don't plan on using it? If that's possible, how difficult would it be to control this on/off switch with a spare smart phone based on approved GPS location?
Yes, you can put it in a special bag that blocks its signals. If you buy a FastTrak device for the SF Bay Area, it actually comes in the bag. Still, you have a license plate. (Unless you are like Steve Jobs, and lease a new car every 6 months)
Seattle's equivalent has a few models, and one of them lets you turn it on and off by having the RFID part slide into the case. Though this has a practical use case---some lanes around here are tolled for single-occupant vehicles but not with two or more occupants, so that's how you indicate whether you need to pay or not.
I had a rental car in Boston a few weeks ago and the rental car came with an EZ-Pass that flipped into a little box. I was told by the rental company that if I didn't want to use it and pay cash tolls, just keep it inside the box. So I'm assuming the box stops the readers from reading the pass.
Do they all do this? I live in a state that has exactly two toll roads, so I'm not sure what SOP is for those kind of things.
Here in the bay area, they give you a mylar/antistatic bag with new FasTrak transponders for precisely this purpose. Put the transponder in the bag, nobody can read it.
(Also useful if you're using the new FasTrak-enabled carpool lanes in the east bay, when you actually have a carpool quorum and therefore are exempt from the toll.)
An on/off switch on the FasTrak transponder would be a lot more convenient than taking it out of or into a mylar bag... I have considered modifying mine with a switch.
"TL;DR? Why not just go watch another five second video of a kitten with it’s head in a toilet roll, or a 140 character description of a meal your friend just stuffed in their mouth. “num num”. This blog post is not for you."
Snarky enough? If you start out like that I've already made the decision that you're over opinionated and probably prone to dramatic exaggeration.
I also loved the TL;DR. My first impression wasn't "this guy is an asshole" it was "wow, it's refreshing to see someone openly reject idiots on their blog."
Maybe not idiots exactly, but I agree with the derision of short attention spans.
It's rather discombobulating at first, but then the point of the article indeed comes thru: if you're not going to read beyond a TL;DR then you're part of the problem.
Okay, by popular consent the TL:DR? remains as is. So do the punctuation errors. I'll leave the post alone. Either you like the content or hate the content. I admit the spelling and punctuation are not great, but then again I didn't expect anyone to actually read this.
After a little while I was able to move past the snark and start reading your post and I really like it, but the open automatically alienated every person that you are trying to reach. Everybody saying that they're glad you have it in there or that it's refreshing to see already gets your message.
By removing from the spectrum everybody that would actually benefit from reading this article it got changed into pointless a circle jerk for the tech community about how much "they" just don't get it.
It's a good article, but it's too bad that the people who need to read it will pass by it because of an opening.
No keep it. The whole tldr meme is nicely analogous to the point you are making.
The only things you are "snarky" about in the piece are entitled attitudes of people who want things that are mostly free to require no effort at all on their part. It's deserved and needs to be said, it's a disempowering attitude and it's important to discuss in a world that is more and more run by computers and software.
Love the post, and I'm with you 100% on this subject. Just thought I'd mention that the counteract the surprising, even for HN, amount of negativity in these comments.
> "TL;DR? Why not just go watch another five second video of a kitten with it’s head in a toilet roll, or a 140 character description of a meal your friend just stuffed in their mouth. “num num”. This blog post is not for you."
I was going to start reading the article, but the TL;DR dissuaded me. The article look to be a long one, and if I just committed to reading every long article on the internet I'd never get anything done.
The beginning of the article should serve to get me interested and willing to invest the time to read the article, not as a snark remark to people who have already showed interest in your article by navigating to it. In the case that this is a reply to people asking for TL;DR on things you write: A tl;dr means that someone was interested in what you had to say enough to leave a comment. However you failed to show the worth of reading the article given the apparent size of it. You had the potential to get those who would start reading your article to see if it had value and told all of them to go waste their time.
On the contrary, the TL;DR encouraged me to read the article to the bottom.
I don't get it why anyone (except the ones mentioned in this tl;dr) would be offended by this.
The irony is that the article was summarized in the conclusion.
"I want the people who will help shape our society in the future to understand the technology that will help shape out society in the future. If this is going to happen, then we need to reverse the trend that is seeing digital illiteracy exponentially increase. We need to act together, as parents, as teachers, as policy makers. Lets build a generation of hackers. Who’s with me?"
I pressed back immediately after reading this opening. Not because I fall into the category of person the author describes but because I'm not bothered reading an article written by somebody who starts their blog posts by insulting their readers.
Pure conjecture here, but if retailers are getting in on this jig is it safe to assume that local, state, or federal governments are doing this with public wifi ports? If I walk into a courthouse and my phone is searching for wifi am I tagged as being in the building? Would it be possible for government agencies at any level to subpoena this sort of information from retailers?
The newly-built, PV-covered stop&shop on the way home from my work has a flat, black board with the name "Motorola" on it hanging over the entrance. Presumably, it's full of antennas. Since Google acquired Motorola, I'm sure this data is being resold and who knows what kinds of restrictions there are.
It is unknown what signals it records. It would be nice if someone who knows cell phone signalling can chime in on how much is legible in this way.
As far as legal records, well, everyone on HN probably knows how easy it is to fake a WiFi MAC address and make it seem like someone was at the scene of a crime, or seem to be innocently hanging out somewhere else. So subpoena'ing this information might not lead to useful evidence, but probably to lots of confusion and prosecutorial mistakes and disasters. I would love to know how easy it is to fake a cell phone IMEI or other identifying info.
How accurate? Pretty sure the bit about "Combined with video surveillance, those stores also collect your gender and demographics" is total BS, and is probably based on someone's misinterpretation of something or someone saying it's theoretically possible that it could be done. Combining wi-fi tracking with video surveillance of any sort, even just computing the movements of simple shapes derived from background subtraction, is hard, and doubly so for general-purpose deployment. Now you want to do face-to-demographics? On a little tiny face from a MJPEG feed of a camera mounted to the ceiling? Of people who are wandering around the store, some of whom may be traveling in groups without a one-to-one face-to-phone mapping? Eh.
Give it another three to five years, maybe? At least? Until then, I strongly suspect shenanigans. If you did want to collect demographic data, you'd find a way to correlate a more high-quality source of demographic data with the phone MAC address (e.g. customer checkout data, possibly with attached loyalty program, which could be done on a purely statistical basis with just two or three visits for most cases). Or use a smartphone-based app connected through the in-store network (offer coupons as an incentive). Finally, even then, if you did want to do stuff based on faces, you'd put a camera at eye level in strategic locations to maximize your data quality.
Now, as for tracking in a courthouse: a high-quality wireless network NMS will in fact record general details about your connection times and dates, by MAC address. These NMSes, last I checked, generally do NOT record unconnected clients, though Euclid Analytics (mentioned in another post here) does. There may be legal issues if you do, doubly so since non-connected clients haven't accepted any guest-wifi terms of service pages - you'd have to ask Euclid what their theories are; this hasn't seen court yet.
Speaking of NMSes, here is one generally-available NMS that does detailed client-historical data, including general client location history: http://www.arubanetworks.com/products/management-security-so... -- see the VisualRF link: "Plays back a user’s location history over the past day to aid in troubleshooting and recovery of lost devices. Last known location of each tracked device is stored indefinitely to help find lost or stolen devices". In addition to that, detailed association history (MAC-to-AP without a computed geographic location) can be kept indefinitely. Again, this is mostly focused on connected clients for now. But the wireless network is capable of reporting non-connected clients, so this is subject to change.
More worrisome for government tracking, though: subpoena the cell phone company.
I'm blown away that you can load up and run with this. Isn't SABnzbd pretty RAM intensive? Are you doing this with local storage or networked storage? Does this handle 1080p, or are you running mostly 480 media?
I'm full of questions on this subject mainly because I've been holding out on purchasing a Pi for this exact application until they come with a bit more power.
"True Republicans" tend to have their base in a smaller government and more protection against governmental intrusion. This being the biggest Republican state fits perfectly, especially in a political atmosphere that is railing against the current administration's recent transgressions in the area of personal privacy (i.e. AP snooping).
No it's not. "True Republicans" was in quotes. Republicans are supposed to be for smaller government in theory. In practice they sometimes seem "small enough to fit in the bedroom".
Is this a joke? Have you ever heard of John Cornyn, US Senator for Texas? He'd wiretap your grandmother and collect DNA samples from your dog if he could.
None of your civil liberties matter much after you're dead -- John Cornyn, in support of reauthorization of the PATRIOT act
