Stossel Comments on the Boston Terror Scare

This isn't really germane to the main focus of this blog; nevertheless, I found John Stossel's take on Boston being brought to its knees by the Mooninites to be rather insightful, particularly with respect to the potential pitfalls of centralization:

Boston's crazy reaction reinforces the theme I've been sounding in recent columns: Decentralization of authority is always better than centralized power. Imagine if the federal Department of Homeland Security imposed procedures on all cities for when suspicious devices are spotted. The whole country might have come to a standstill.

Also worth checking out is this article about how the Boston incident did not significantly boost the ratings for Aqua Teen Hunger Force. The article failed to mention that the show is currently in reruns (and almost all the previous episodes are available on DVD), which may have something to do with the stagnant ratings.

Installation of MythTV (part three)

After the re-installation of FC6 and compiling/installing MythTV v. 0.20, I found there were three outstanding issues:

(1) MythTV had a tendency to crash while recording (and sometimes when watching live TV;

(2) I could not get video to display at a higher resolution than 320 X 240; and

(3) I could not get MythArchive to work.

I noted that Linux reported "Unsupported SiS chipset" on boot, and decided that #2 was probably the result of Linux not supported the on-board graphics chipset. I therefore took a chance on buying a new graphics card. Since my MythTV system has a PCI Express (X16) slot, I could have gone all-out and ordered a state-of-the-art video card like Nvidia's GeForce 8800. As it happened, I went with a more budget-priced option: Connect3D's ATI Radeon X300. I probably should have procured an Nvidia graphics card, but as it turns out, the Radeon X300 proved adequate. Here's the specs for this card:

ATI Radeon X300 graphics processor
128 MB DDR
VGA/DVI/TV Out output
Maximum 2D display mode: 2048 X 1536
Maximum 3D display mode: 2048 X 1536
64-bit memory interface
Four extreme parallel 3D rendering pixel pipelines
Two programmable vertex shader pipelines
Full DX9 support

Again, the X300 is essentially a budget-priced card, yet it's a good indication of recent technological advances. I paid about $50 (USD) for this card. I paid the same amount for a graphics card for a system I was putting together about 6 or 7 years ago whose motherboard didn't have an onboard graphics chip. I was able to get a PCI graphics card with 16 MB of memory. A few years before that, the same amount of money would have bought a card with maybe 4 MB of memory (just enough for a resolution of 1280 X 1024 in 24-bit true color mode).

Anyhow, once I installed the new graphics card, I was able to run MythTV at any resolution it supports (anywhere from 720 X 480 to 320 X 240, and anywhere in between). Problem #2 seemed to be solved. #1 and #3 will be discussed in a future posting.