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I've been doing research on this for the last month or three, and the news isn't entirely good. First, you need to figure out exactly what you want your TiVo-esque set-top box to do. "Personal TV" features like live pause and live rewind? Digital, full-frame recording? MPEG1, MJPEG or MPEG2 compression? Channel guides and automatic VCR programming? CD playing? DVD playing? Lastly, what will you put it all in?

Let's start with personal TV features. You can currently record live, full-resolution video and audio onto your HD without dropping frames -- assuming you've got at least a 500mHz processor and a fast HD. That's just a live dump to a raw AVI, and you'll fill up your HD pretty fast that way, at roughly 1-2 meg a second. But if you can blow 4gb for an hour of programming to be able to do a live pause/rewind for a while, then that's not too big a deal. But what if you want to include digital VCR features, not just live pause/rewind?

Now, things get a little more expensive. The crux of the problem is to do live, full-frame MPEG2 video and audio encoding in software, you need at least ANOTHER 500mhz of horsepower, and a single 1gHz processor won't cut it. MPEG1 quality blows if you're recording off satellite or even decent cable TV (if you want the low-end, though, the Broadway MPEG1 encoder is cheap, around $800), leaving you with just MJPEG or MPEG2 video. MJPEG is much larger than MPEG2, because it doesn't have temporal compression, but you can get consumer-grade hardware MJPEG encoders on Matrox hardware, so for a build-your-own box, if you 2-3x your HD size, you should be okay. But to do it right, you want full-frame D1 MPEG2 encoding (half-D1 MPEG2 is MPEG1 resolution, but MPEG2 quality), like you have on DVDs. And to do that in hardware will cost you over a thousand dollars, and may not include an MPEG DEcoding solution!. Yuck. Darim's MPEGator2 can do full D1 encoding for (only) US$1800, VisionTech's MVcast is US$1995, DV Studio's Apollo Expert is US$1995 and includes both encoding and decoding, making it possibly the best buy. I have no idea if Linux drivers are available for any of them, but the price alone puts that sort of tech out of the realm of most people's hands.

With that sobering realization in mind, let's forge forward to channel guides and VCR programming. Channel guides are easy. Just have a Perl script rip and reformat any of the listings from the online providers, including Excite TV, Ultimate TV, GIST TV (which also provides the Yahoo TV listings), Ask TV (in the UK), Click TV (what TiVo uses), TV Quest, TV Grid or TV Guide Online. And once you have this set up, it's not much farther to program an IR transmitter to sit in front of your VCR's IR port to have it automatically record shows for you.

CD playing in a set-top box is a nice feature. Pop the CD in, and have it hit CDDB for the disc info, and give track options. Shouldn't be too hard.

DVD playing in a homebuild Linux-based set-top box is nearly possible now, too. As of this weekend, I believe that you can now put a DVD in the drive, and play it, entirely software decoded, no ripping VOBs or copying to a HD, full-screen, full-frame, with real-time AC3/48kHz audio downsampling to 44kHz, and audio/video sync is probably only a few hours of coding away. Now all we need is hardware MPEG acceleration in the ATI Rage chipsets, and maybe that attractive Apollo encoder/decoder.

Lastly, what are you going to put this monstrosity of open-source software engineering in? What we've just explained above is that for around $3000, you can build a combination cable box (we'll ignore the open source software cable descramblers for the moment), real-time MPEG2 digital VCR, timeshifting personal TV player, channel guide, CD player and region-code-less, restriction-less DVD player, that utterly blows the quality of anything else on the market out of the water. This is what TiVo WANTS to be. But what are you going to do? Stick a fat, ugly, beige desktop case on top of your TV? Bah. T-A-C-K-Y. Even the recently rediscovered BookPC (aka NLX) cases still look like PCs. But most people can't afford to mint custom cases, yet you want something that doesn't look like a PC. How about a 1U or 2U black rackmount case, sans locking front panel and rails? 19" wide makes it a bit wide for small TVs, but that's okay. You've got a bay for a floppy drive or small LCD panel, a DVD drive, and enough room inside for at least one HD, and in some 1U cases, both the TV card and the MPEG card! Otherwise, just go 2U, which isn't TOO much larger. Whee.

I think that's it. I don't know what the state of TV input on Linux is, but I assume it's pretty good, or you wouldn't even be able to consider this project, so that's not a big deal. And even through you can record in real-time, without compression, straight to AVI (bleagh!), I left out the possibility to post-process the AVI to MPEG, because really, that's so tacky. That's like having to play DVDs by copying them to a HD first. Do it realtime, and Do It Right(tm). Lists of MPEG hardware encoders I got from a Canadian distributor called BernClare Multimedia, Inc. Seems like a nice place. Other URLs I used for reference (no, my personal project doesn't have a site; I just posted most of my knowledge here!) include the still-conceptual LinuxVCR project, the LinuxToday article on How to Build Your Own 1U Rackmount, the Calibri 300R 1U rackmount Linux-based router, and LCDproc for that LCD display you know you'll need on the front to perpetually blink 12:00.

Shouldn't you be working? Business must be slow at VA if you've got the time to sit around and troll on Slashdot. I hope for your sake its your coffee break.

Considering VA Linux's whopping 5% marketshare among Linux hardware vendors, according to IDC, I can't say im really surprised. Way to go, by the way. You guys edged past tough big-name Linux vendors like "Fujitsu Siemens" with 3%, and uhh...oh wait, you guys arent doing better than any of the others.. Oh well.

Truth hurts, doesn't it.


Bowie J. Poag

Shouldn't you be working? Business must be slow at VA if you've got the time to sit around and troll on Slashdot. I hope for your sake its your coffee break.

Considering VA Linux's whopping 5% marketshare among Linux hardware vendors, according to IDC, I can't say im really surprised. Way to go, by the way. You guys edged past tough big-name Linux vendors like "Fujitsu Siemens" with 3%, and uhh...oh wait, you guys arent doing better than any of the others.. Oh well.

Truth hurts, doesn't it.


Bowie J. Poag

As for the stock being low, it is low in terms of P/E (it's a great value to buy right now), but bear in mind that it went up 400% over the last year! AMD has been competely kicking Intel's ass both in terms of clock speeds, performance and stock price. Athlon is just as fast as PIII (not to mention that AMD are actually shipping them in volume at 1GHz vs Intel's vapourware announcement), but Spitfire, Thunderbord, Mustang and Sledgehammer will all CRUSH the corresponding Intel processors!

AMD's time has come!

AMD stock chart

Please read this ZDNet story:
http://news.excite.com/news/zd /000414/15/doubt-cast-on

As you'll see this is nothing more than a bug in an older version of Microsoft's software. The artilce states, While reports focused on a phrase -- "!seineew era sreenigne epacsteN" or the backwards spelling of "Netscape engineers are weenies!" -- which was present in the DLL, that's a red herring, said Cooper, adding that the phrase is not a password, but a cypher key used to scramble the address of Web pages requested by users..

Well, the company i work for (Excite@Home) has more than 1.25 million cable modem subscribers. I have DSL at home, as do another half million people or so (roughly, current numbers aren't in front of me). I'd wager that most people who share the use of a T1 or higher at work or school are happier than they would be at 28.8. And I can assure you that they aren't all using the speed just for porn, music, and warez.

Since my company's motto is "The Leader in Broadband", i can think of some darned useful and/or enjoyable uss for broadband:

1. Almost all pages load much faster.
2. Online radio/video becomes reasonable/listenable.
3. Downloading demo/free software becomes much more reasonable.
4. Online gaming quality improves dramatically.
5. Friends who send you large email attachments remain your friends.
6. Working from home becomes much more enjoyable, since you don't spend eons waiting for the source code to move between machines.
7. And so on...

I'm glad that you surf happily at 28.8, but you're incorrect to suggest that faster is not useful. Indeed, it changes ones entire relationship to the web. At slower speeds, you're not sure whether you really want to click that link, cause who knows what kind of wait you're in for. Faster means you're threshold of pain is dramatically lower.

The uptake of mobile phones with limited bandwidth is proof of the value of mobile connectivity, not the superior desirability of low bandwidth.

[PLUG] See home.excite.com for more ideas about what broadband is good for [/PLUG]

mahlen

Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies
solely in my tenacity.
--Louis Pasteur (1822-1895)

Here's what another article had to say about that same quote. It looks to me as though George himself wasn't the one who talked about the privacy rules. Looks more to me like he was advocating Big Brother. He says "information needs to be collected... if justified," never mind that the FBI would like to justify any "information gathering" it can get away with, as evidenced by many of its recent technology-related actiona and proposals. Recently, to give one example, it tried to persuade Congress to give it the ability to wiretap anyone, at will, without a warrant to do so.

And yeah, the CIA can't legally spy on US citizens. So what? The US government and the various pieces thereof do illegal things every day. I very much doubt the CIA is any different; they're just better at hiding it.

You're a good reason why Windows has a monopoly.

You can't run Word and Solitaire in web pages.

Click on Solitaire, and pick your style. I didn't find the editor in under 10 seconds, but I'm sure one is out there.

That "high application barrier to entry" is one formed from both business strategy and marketing, from the looks of your comment, it's the marketing that is more powerful.

--

LONDON (Reuters) - A teenager arrested in Wales for allegedly hacking into e-commerce Web sites had obtained the credit card details of Bill Gates, head of Microsoft and the world's richest man, newspapers said on Sunday.

I'm sure you wouldn't have any trouble convincing anyone who was smart enough to buy AAPL at 13 bucks a share...

Of course, don't search just slashdot for articles like this. Also search the archives of papers that have been presented at various USENIX/SAGE conferences (in particular, LISA), and other USENIX publications, starting at http://www.usenix.org/publicat ions/publications.html.

You will also want to use index sites such as Yahoo! and Excite, as well as search engines like Google, Altavista, and Hotbot, not to mention community directory projects such as dmoz Open Directory.

That's just a sampling of the sorts of research that you should START with. Of course, to do this right, you'll need to do much, much more.
--
Brad Knowles

Since the link is broken at the moment, here's a link to the story: Agilent Optical Switch

check this link about a woman that want to patent herself, i submitted it as a story two days ago.
--
BeDevId 15453
Download BeOS R5 Lite free!

Amen to that my brother.
I have to wonder about the claims of saving up to 80 - 90 percent of the space on the server.... uh...that can't be possible can it? They don't talk about the size of the database that contains the *file signatures* OR they don't talk about what happens when your box crashes and that databse becomes corrupt... sheesh...

The real killer for me is how near the bottom of the article they *hint* thay they are the ones who developed IpV6... AND...GOOD NEWS FOLKS... you can download it for free from our website.. yeah...like the *nix community hasn't had IpV6 support for some time now.

The MS marketing machine rolls on...

Just for fun check out Bill Gates and Paul Allen dumping MS stock like there is no tommorrow

This one's a little wierd, but in the current atmosphere it makes some sense: Woman patents herself.

I guess in a community that hates AOL, none of you are aware that AOL has lead the battle to open access on cable networks to other ISPs. This is not an attempt to "keep the anti-trust demons off their back" this is an attempt to put their money where there mouth is.

If you don't believe me, read it and weep.

Now, don't get me wrong -- I'm a pretty loyal /.'er. CmdrTaco and gang generally do a pretty darn good job running the show. But can someone please tell me why we are wasting bandwidth on this piece of self-congradulatory back-patting?

I fail to see how fluff like this gets top billing while my submission on a hacker bust gets declined? Which one meets the definition of "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters."? Which topic is more likely to provoke intelligent debate rather than endless spoutings about hot naked petrified grits?

It's almost enough to make me want to shut down my browser and actually do some work :-)

"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'

Someone posted the wire version here

Also, there are several related links on the Personal Security page of the Center for the Study of Technology and Society.

Finally, if you want the wire version of the story, click here.

Yours,
A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technoloy and Society

surelyy am easy mistak.

http://search.excite . com/search.gw?search=cockolate+nip+nookie

And I'm offering $100 to anyone who can find me a good biscuit recipe with the keywords "hot horny humping she-male sex slaves"

I wonder how many sites with the title "Cookie Recipies" actually contain nasty hardcore porn.

In my experience, deceiving site titles are actually less problematic than they used to be.

A year or two ago it seemed like no matter what query I entered into Alta Vista, one or more pages with innocent titles would pop up which, when selected, would display a message to the effect of "Site moved, redirecting..." or "Site moved, click here", the 'moved' site being porn. Blecchh. Typically a server would have simply hundreds of these bogus-forward pages.

I haven't seen one like that in a while. I suppose upstream providers started putting the smack down on deceptive sites, or perhaps Alta Vista started filtering those sorts of pages out. If the latter, that's a sort of filtering that, while I don't support, I also don't mind, since there are oodles and oodles and oodles and oodles of other search engines out there and you aren't limited to using one search engine like you're limited to using the connection you've got.

My sentiments exactly. Incredible that the Associated Press got it wrong! (sigh...)

Mich. Eyes DoubleClick Privacy Suit -- "NEW YORK (AP) - Michigan law enforcers threatened Thursday to sue the online advertising firm DoubleClick Inc. for violating consumers' privacy, adding to a growing list of protests against the company and sending its stock into a tailspin." Full Story

Don't know where the Header came from as it directly contradicts what a recent report Constellati on 3D, Inc. -CFMD- Sets Goals 2000 - 2001 said that their "Goals" were going to be. The article, from business wire, indicated that their first product would not be seen until 2001: "The target date for commencement of production is the second quarter of 2001." So sue me if the html doesn't work...

Whoever is doing this (obviously a large group coordinated somehow) has got a LOT of power behind what they're doing. eBay goes down like a cheap whore, but Yahoo, Amazon, and Cnn are not known for their vulnerability.

Whoever is doing this (obviously a large group coordinated somehow) has got a LOT of power behind what they're doing. eBay goes down like a cheap whore, but Yahoo, Amazon, and Cnn are not known for their vulnerability.

http://news.excite.com/news/ap/00020 8/20/yahoo

Just heard on CNN that today's DoS victim is Buy.com. The site is back online now, but here's an article on Excite about it.

Cyberattack Cripples Yahoo (APBNews)
Who's Behing Yahoo Attack? (ZDNet)
FBI talks with Yahoo! about attack (ZDNet)
How a basic attack crippled Yahoo (CNet) (with stupid protocol animations too!)

And in other news: A different type of DoS attack is being carried out against Yahoo. At least 40 web articles have been written so far, showing evidence of how many reporters must be calling Yahoo right now. Once the second round of DoS attacks are stopped, the techies can finally get some work done beefing up the site.

But then I ran across this from a Routers clip:

• Jeffrey Kessler, lead attorney for the DVD Copy Control Association trade group, said the decision "establishes that the rules of intellectual property apply on the Internet, just like in all areas of commerce."
  
  Kessler was not worried the program would continue to circulate in defiance of the court order. "Most people are law-abiding," he said.

Actually, it's probably the money that made eToys change their mind. Their stock chart shows a pretty good slide down, from the 60's and 70's to the 20's, in the last couple of months. Ouch.

Is this a cheap way to expand your RAM, upload via smell to your own brain?

Better leave the room when you empty your recycle bin. And you don't want to leave those core dumps lying around, they can really stink.

Now I'm really going to avoid cDc. BO get's hardcore nasty.

Smelling search-voyeur is a bit like walking through a dorm... "What on earth was that smell?"

It might save some time when you're trying to pick up on IRC... "You don't smell like a blonde 18/F/Paris"

The banner ads? Hmmm, smells like KFC. Now I'm hungry.

Personally, I love the fresh-leather aroma of a "Your Apache install worked!" page.

But I'll really be looking forward to the olfactory upgrade to Fractint - THAT would be beauty.

Excite News reports in this story that: "MADRID (Reuters) - At least 10 melon-sized ice balls that have slammed into Spain in the last week are probably debris from comets, not human excrement as first suspected, a Spanish scientist said Monday."

Excite News reports in this story that: "MADRID (Reuters) - At least 10 melon-sized ice balls that have slammed into Spain in the last week are probably debris from comets, not human excrement as first suspected, a Spanish scientist said Monday."

What are you talking about?!? Be(BEOS) IPOed this summer at $6 or so a share. It hadn't moved a much, started drifting downwards, and then skyrocketed.... Now it's drifting back down towards earth.

Go look

ODBC Socket Server does exactly what you want. ODBC Socket Server is an open source database access toolkit that exposes Windows NT ODBC data sources with an XML-based TCP/IP interface.

It includes clients for Perl, PHP, C++. The server is GPL, clients public domain.

I am the author, e-mail me with any questions at fxml@excite.com. Check us out at: http://odbc.linuxbox.com.

Exactly. Sony's stock price has gone from ~65 to 270 in the last year (check the chart. Analysts started speculating about a split months ago.

AltaVista, Yahoo, MSN, Netscape, Excite, and of course AOL all have links to this. All of these guys have money, and it's very probable that at least one of them won't obey this court order through sheer carelessness. Let's get ready to Sue!

There are tons of Hotmail alternatives. (go to yahoo, type in "free email" and you'll be amazed!) I use two that I like: excite, and mailandnews. I think now just about every portal (yahoo, altavista, netscape, etc.) gives free e-mail. excite has a nice interface, and it's easy to set up to check multiple external pop mail boxes, which is very useful when travelling. mailandnews.com is great because you get a free pop mail box, which you can check using any regular mail client. It seems fairly reliable, although about once a week or so it's inaccessible for about an hour. Not enough to make a big difference, and it is, after all, a free pop mail box!

Concerning that 10 million players figure you gave us, check this outtake from a variety article :

QUOTE That point may be coming sooner than the studios want to acknowledge as prices for the machines drop. Indeed, by the end of 2000, DVD penetration will likely reach 10% of U.S. households: the point at which VHS rentals took off. /QUOTE

I'm not math whiz, put that would be around 25 millions players in the us alone (assuming they know what they're talking about). BTW i got that link from the dvd resource page

Did anyone actually take the time to look up the
patent before first running off at the mouth???

The only one I could find listed at IBM's Patent Server is this:

US5897620: Method and apparatus for the sale of airline-specified flight tickets.

IT IS NOT A PATENT ON REVERSE AUCTIONS

It is in fact a technology related patent for
processing certain kinds of airline ticket
purchases. As far as I know, this idea was actually an original invention by Priceline, and they deserve to get a patent on it.

Claim 1 reads:

1. A method comprising the steps of:

viewing, using a computer, special fare listing information for air travel to a specified destination location from a specified departure location within a specified time range, said special fare listing information excluding a specified departure time; transmitting, using a computer, a request to purchase a commitment for carriage corresponding to said special fare listing information; receiving a commitment for carriage, including an obligation by an airline to provide a seat on a flight, that satisfies said request but does not specify a departure time;
accepting said commitment for carriage; and receiving at a time subsequent to said accepting an identification of said departure time.

This patent is so narrow that anyone that is not just out there COPYING what other people are doing (like Microsoft often does) should be able to avoid it.

There have been other stories in the media about Microsoft attending venture capital meetings with Priceline and failing to reach a business agreement. (That I submitted and /. failed to post) At these meetings Microsoft demanded shares of Priceline at below IPO prices. All of this is so reminiscent of other previous Microsoft activities it should raise the hackles of anyone in the high tech industry. Microsoft is just repeating what they did to Stac here, and deserves to get sued by Priceline.

All of this is so similar to the previous rapacious behaviour of Microsoft there is no way I can find fault with either the patent system of what Priceline is doing.

For those of you who don't know, Excite lets you add tide tables as part of their customization. This is what mine currently looks like:

Old Saybrook Point, Connecticut Tides
December 21
Low3:25PM -0.50
High9:27PM3.08
December 22
Low3:23AM -0.31
High9:49AM4.11
Low4:23PM -0.58
High10:28PM3.11


These don't appear to be all THAT unusual to me at all....





This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.

"Not bad for a company with about $14 million in revenues (they did not profit) last year...."

EBIZ which runs TheLinuxStore had $15M in sales last year, yet they're trading at $4.5/share.

Clearly VA Linux is over valued. There is only so much money you can make assembling off the shelf components. They basically can only compete in three areas: price, quality, or service. Though my impression is VA Linux quality is higher than EBIZ, EBIZ has better prices. Quality I think is moot as they would have have to hire and train 100's (if not 1000's) of new techs to install and service new equipment if their sales were to get anywhere near where they should be to justify the stock price. Such a fast staffing-up will inevitably lead to some quality problems.

Another company that shows how overvalued VA Linux is, is SGI. SGI has something like 1.2M shares of VA Linux thanks to early capital investments. That stock now represents about 1/6 of the total value of SGI.

As did the Argentinian Tango legend Enrique Cadicamo, at the age of 99. And as did about 410,000 other people I don't know.

I don't want to disrespect this death: I try to keep a constant post in my heart reserved for thoughts of the suffering, mourning and dying outside my life, my world, and my knowledge. I really think that does more than slapping up a headline here everytime a semi-celebrity dies.


-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.

An Excite story explains this whole situation a lot better. Slashdot should really demand better citations.

It turns out Wonder has not made any public statements regarding the procedure. A tabloid reported that he told a congregation that he was planning on getting his site back, but the doctor that is running the clinic has said he has not made an apoitment. Besides, an examination would have to be done first to see if he is even a candidate. Still pretty cool even if Wonder is not planning the procedure.

The 'c' doesn't make much of a difference, because exite.com just refers you to excite.com. They are registered by different corporations, however, and this behavior might change sometime in the future.

Here's an article on a new competitor to the Venus (set-top VCD/internet device) that MS developing for the Mainland Chinese market.

Unfortunately, the author of the new article doesn't seem to know the difference between VCD and DVD.

(Disclaimer: I work for Ericsson, but my views are my own and this post does not represent Ericsson in any way.)
---

RHAT's fundamentals amaze me. They only made 10 million dollars last quarter, and lost 1 million. That is freaking peanuts. If ALL their revenue was profit, their P/E ratio would still be an extremely high 150 (6 Billion/40 million). That is insane. Also, if you look at Excite's excellent financial page on RedHat, you'll see that only .3% of its shares are held by institutional investors. They obviously don't believe that this stock is a good long-term buy. I firmly believe that this company can never live up to the insane valuations that it has achieved. Their services are not unique and will not become a dominant player unless...

Their only solution to this dilemma is if they are able to buy up enough Linux players so that they can offer a portfolio of products that they can be the one stop shopping site for all things Linux. Sort of the MS of the Linux world (I know they won't own the code, but for businesses, it won't matter [they'll be happy buying a total solution]). Anyway, I ramble, but it is an interesting phenomenon: A company with an insane valuation can justify the valuation by buying enough companies so that their valuation is justified.

Symantec posted this advisory of the VBS.BubbleBoy here
http://www.symantec.c om/avcenter/venc/data/vbs.bubbleboy.html.
It contains details of what the virus does, where it goes into the registry and how to protect yourself.

If you already do not have that security patch from Windows Update, you can download the patch from
http://www.microsoft.com/s ecurity/Bulletins/ms99-032.asp.

This is kinda scary... as we have always taught people that you cannot get a virus by reading mail, only opening attachments. I hope this doesn't become a growing trend.