Alex Hopmann’s Blog

In scoping out a future media center box, I’m curious if USB 2.0 based video tuners give as good results as PCI cards? In theory the bandwidth should be there but do they really work as well? It could certainly help keep the size of the box down and system flexibility up to have something like that be outside the main enclosure. Also- are there any good USB tuners that can do 2 simultaneous inputs?

Overall this seems like a step backwards. I’ve got 4 “unknown” devices on my MacBook at the moment and its really hard to tell what they are supposed to be (which makes it hard to go searching for the right drivers).

Also on Thursday at Ignite I tried to put in a USB key. It couldn’t find the drivers. For a USB key!!! I had to manually point the search path to c:\windows and then it worked fine, but a novice would have been totally lost. I also have a standard Microsoft optical mouse at home that for some reason always pops up driver install messages and can’t find its drivers on the Internet or otherwise.

You would think this stuff would be the bread and butter basics of an OS, but it does show some of how we got off track with Vista. I think what most people really want out of their OS is to just work rock solid with the latest hardware and somehow we (and I’ll include myself in the blame) got too focused on changing the world. Changing the world can be a great thing, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be intertwined with the OS release itself.

Bloc Party has a new single out and I went to look for it on EMusic. All their mainstream albums are no longer available on there. Not cool!