"In a democracy (‘rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history will be the majority and will dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance."
Jerry Pournelle can be relied upon to condense a complex thought into a pithy statement:
Globalization made what industry we kept very efficient. The rest of the economy consisted of opening containers of goods and consuming them, then paying for them by borrowing money and flipping real estate. Water runs downhill but it was never supposed to hit bottom.
Well, has the water hit bottom yet?
While I’ve not got an antenna attached for FM radio, after playing around with media center apps in both Ubuntu and Win7, I have to give the edge in media center/home theater pc stuff to Windows. TV only “sorta” worked in Ubuntu. The much ballyhooed MythTV and other options–including MythBuntu, LinucMCE, etc.–for integrating TV/Radio/Video/Music into PC use are just too much like work to get ’em functional and too rough-edged to boot, even when they do work. Kudoes for great effort on the Linux side, marks down for actual accomplishment.
On the Windows side… *sigh* I could wish everything Just Worked out of the box, but “it ain’t necessarily so” as the song goes. Windows Media Center… what can I say? I don’t like its look and feel, but that’s just my idiosyncratic response. What killed it for me was that while everything BUT one thing worked pretty well, that one thing was… setting up TV. Yep. Every Single Time I got to the channel download the thing choked. Bah.
Hauppauge’s own WinTV apps almost got TV working. Got further than Windows Media Center, at least. But still, no joy.
GBPVR looked promising but stumbled getting out the gate with Win7–“wrong OS” or some such error.
Tried several other non-solutions and then hit on MediaPortal, an outgrowth of the XBMC project. Now, XBMC isn’t suited to tuning TV or FM radio, although it does all the other media center things one might want and will (when I get another Round Toit) serve well as a media director in the old XBox I have half-modded to use it, but I wanted to tune TV (and later FM radio) on this box, so I tried MediaPortal.
MediaPortal Just Works. Oh, there’re more than a few rough edges. Scanning for channels found all the channels I wanted, and they previewed just fine in the scan, but when I tried tuning them initially, some would not tune in. (“Search the forums for solutions” time… ) The manual? Just fine. IF everything goes without a hitch. No real problem solving–or acknowledgement of issues–in the manual. Managing the settings isn’t intuitive, so a better manual would be a help.
Still, I marked “TV working on PC” off my list before my “work day” started this a.m. I’ll get into the whole “time shifting” thing later.
MediaPortal: not ready for Aunt Tilly but definitely a workable solution.