[rescue] Rescued O2

[Curious George]

Hi,

--- On Thu, 8/14/08, Joshua Boyd <jdboyd at jdboyd.net> wrote:

> > I am clueless about these.
> > But, hoping the hardware would be good for multimedia
> work. (?)
> 
> Meh.  It's certainly OK for video input and output,
> once you figure out some issues.  
> 
> The big problem was software.

(sigh)  Isn't this ALWAYS the issue?  :<

> I don't know that there was every
> anything that made great use of the hardware.  As I
> understand it, there were basically three choices for 
> editing software: the included Movie
> Editor; Premiere 4.2; and Jaleo O2.  The last program was
> extremely expensive and I believe it only did uncompressed video. 

I'd be happy if I could just *reliably* digitize video, etc.

> Premiere 4.2 was absolutely terrible.  The included software is
> what it is, which is to say very basic.

Yes, that seems to also be a "given".  :<  I note how crappy
the SunVideo software is, the video software that came with
my VWS320, etc.  It;s as if they wanted to say "See?!!  You
*could* do these kind of things!!!" but really didn't want
to spend much effort ($$$) proving that point!  (cripes, then
why even bother if you aren't going to exploit the unique
abilities of your hardware over that of "beige computers")

> Fow awhile I had dreams of writing my own software to
> maximize the O2,
> but of course writing good GUIs is always hard, which is
> what kept me
> from getting anywhere.  Now I can see some better starting
> points (on
> the surface, OpenME looks like it could be reasonably
> stripped down to
> just a GUI then built back up again), but I lack the time
> and energy.

Easier and quicker to just move to a platform that does what
you need *now*.

> > What do I need to know to determine if it is worth the
> trouble
> > to keep?  Appears to have 6.5 installed along with
> some sort of
> > specialized application software (i.e., I believe it
> was part
> > of a medical instrument).  Of course, no root password
> so I'll
> > have to start over (probably worth doing anyways since
> it
> > only has a 9G drive in it).
> 
> You could always clear the password by sticking the disk in another
> machine.  Linux can do the job, although I think you might have to
> custom compile a kernel to do so.

I don;t run Linux.  Solaris or NetBSD are the only choices I have
readily available...