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That's precisely what I ask in the OpEd piece that I had been writing for a while and just finished this morning before this news broke. I've included a lot of details that aren't generally clear without a lot of digging or without being really active in the Mandrake community as I myself am.

You can read the piece here:
http://ben.reser.org/rants/invisible.cgi?month=01& day=15&year=2003&t=00

Before this news broke I published an OpEd piece on my site this morning about this. This breaking only confirms my belief we should make a break for it.

The piece is available for viewing here:
http://ben.reser.org/rants/invisible.cgi?month=01& day=15&year=2003&t=00

The UTV upgrade is, unsurprisingly, not unlike the DishPlayer upgrade. In fact, it is pretty much the same.

I could not find a description of that on the forum. But I did here.

Basically the piece says 'take your Dish PVR apart, put in a bigger hard drive, reassemble'.

What I would really like to do is to modify the PVR so that I can use a removable drive. That might mean buying a new case.

Only thing they don't mention is putting two drives in - as has been done with Tiva (plural of Tivo). I would ideally like two 160Gb Hard Drives, or bigger.

I have had Echostar/DishNetwork service for many years and have been quite happy with it. This weekend I bought a new receiver/dish setup (with two LNBs) so I could get the Denver broadcast stations. I bought the JVC/Echost ar Dishplayer 7200. Aside from being a WebTV unit as well (whoopee) it's darn cool, and has great program guide, unattended scheduled recording, pause, rewind, fastforward and record live television and lots of other cool gizmos.

Specs:

• 56k software phone modem
  
• 17 GB hard drive(Model 7200, about 12 hrs)
  
• 16Mb RAM
  
• 67 Mhz QED 5230 processor (aka MIPS R5000) with 4Mb ROM
  

According to this page you can easily upgrade the HD in the Dishplayer yourself, and Echostar at least tacitly permits this (though they disclaim it completely, and you take your warrantee into your own hands).

BTW: User interface and video quality is excellent, given that it is all digital MPEG from the head end to your hard drive. The system price is about $400 with the dual-head dish and the 17Gb HD (about 12 hours of recording time).

I use a Ricochet modem on my server at home in Alexandria, Fairfax County, VA. It's my only connection to the Internet. Sometimes I get nearly 28.8K out of it. Other times it's much slower. Overall, I'm happy with the service although I wish that its interactive performance was better. It's unusable for telnet. In spite of the sometimes slow connections, I'm running a couple of services over the radio link. Visit Madison to play with my NetBSD port of Alan Cox's Linux Portaloo and also Ben Reser's Echelon Armor thingie which I swiped from here. I'm running an OpenVerse server on madison.dynip.com:7000 and a dopewars server on the default dopewars port. Feel free to try any of them. I don't advertise, so I don't get lot of traffic. Don't be surprised if the connection is slow!

I've also used the modem on my NetBSD-running Sony PCG-505 laptop. I've used it to listen to WPFW in DC and WWOZ in New Orleans using RealAudio. In fact, Frank Ahrens of the Washington Post wrote about my experience in an article on the future of radio. It appeared on January 21, 1999. Depending on network congestion, it acutally sounds OK. In the article, I think I said the sound was "like a cheap transistor radio". Mr. Ahren's editor cut out the qualification that that was a weakness of the small Sony speakers I used rather than the streaming audio technology or the wireless modem.

A recent announcement from Metricom promised 128K service in 12 markets by summer 2000.

I must have been crazy but I did it. I put it up, there's a copy of the code that runs it and a CGI that lets you play with it with small things.

You can enjoy at http://ben.reser.org/echelon/.

Have fun, but please don't kill my server. If the CGI is too big of a problem I'll have to take it down.