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A PVR For Two Straight Weeks Of Video
Rob G. writes: "Story from Variety on Y! News this morning about a monster PVR that can store 320 hours of tv; price is $1999. You could tape full seasons of a dozen shows and watch 'em in the summer instead of BB2." There are some other cool features promised here, including free programming service for broadband users. Watch the hard-drive wars heat up on PVRs and smile at what that means for your time-shifting habits.
first fucking post mother fuckers!
ffp man!!! aka mcdougal
shoutouts to mick
I am not wearing a thong bikini.
OK, many of you have probably noticed a lot of ascii art flooding this board lately. You're no doubt wondering why CmdrTaco's much encountered "lameness filters" are ineffective against it. To answer that question, I'm going to take you on a Perl journey, deep into slashcode. Think of it as being a bit like "Heart of Darkness", or if you're a typical slashdot pleb, "Apocalypse Now!"
The first files we'll be looking at are the infamous "bitchslap" and "modslap". I think these are a pretty decent introduction to how Rob's mind works when he's coding angry: Here's bitchslap. Scroll down to the section labelled "main program logic". BTW. "main program logic" is a ridiculously grandiloquent phrase for what we are seeing here.
Note how draconian this is. I like to think of this code as a memorial to slashdot-terminal, it's first victim. You can see how Malda deliberately broke his "self-regulating" moderation system, to give the admins of slashdot dictatorial powers. This code allows any admin using it to drop a user's default threshold to -1 instantly, and drop his karma down to a level from which it is unlikely to recover. I've heard that this script has been used on slashdot in a modified form, with the -defaultpoints set to less than -1, completely eliminating a user's post from normal viewing, unless people edit their query string manually.
On to modslap. Scroll down to "main program logic" again.
OK, what you're seeing here is Taco's method of restricting the flow of crack to moderators, to keep them nice and jumpy. If you don't mod the way he likes, your moderating days are over, and your karma plummets to bitchslap levels. An ugly tool.
To recap, the man we are dealing with here is obviously an anti-democratic tyrant. Censorship is his weapon, and he is vigilantly watching his censors, to ensure that no freedom is allowed to enter his domain. I believe he also lives in a hut with a man driven crazy by his proximity. The hut is surrounded by skulls on poles, but the skulls face inward. Remember that.
We're nearing the locus of my investigation now. You've heard the legends, now gaze into the face of comments.pl's so-called "troll detection code!"
comments.pl: Scroll down to the section under "here begins the troll detection code".
You may be wondering why it's such an ungodly piece of crap. I feel that we are seeing evidence of an ingrained unwillingness to think before coding.
The first few tests are fairly simple, based on regexps and length. They're pretty laughable, from an information theory perspective. If you don't believe me, the flood of ascii art should supply adequate evidence of what I'm talking about. Language is a complex thing, and a few simple tests are insufficient to distinguish English from ascii art, especially when the ascii artists are willing to take extreme measures to see their work posted. Regular posters do not have the patience for such chicanery.
The final test is my favourite, though. It begins under the comment ending with this charming sentence: "These ratios are _very_ conservative a comment has to be absolute shit to trip this off". An interesting claim. Considering the number of posts I've tripped this filter on without doing anything out of the ordinary, I'd say "conservative" means the same thing to Taco as it means to George W. Bush, nb. "nazi". What we are talking about here, is the postercomment compression test. (The horror! The horror!) "postercomment" is just the name of the field your comments are sent in, by the way. It isn't cool top secret slashspeak. It's just a variable name.
What this does is, it actually compresses your comment using zlib, then checks the change in size to decide if you are a troll or not! Furthermore, the code comments indicate that if you trip this test, slashcode thinks you are a "luser". Code like this makes it pretty clear that it takes one to know one, Rob!
As someone who as actually seen Rob Malda use the phrase "it won't scale" to dismiss questions about why parts of the moderation system weren't done in a more equitable fshion, I'd like to take this opportunity to laugh until I give myself a hernia.
Anyone who has studied information theory knows that the redundancy of english is estimated at about 50%. This value is fairly key in what we are seeing here, it determines a fair estimate of how effective compression of english text can be before we start to lose information. Taco's estimates were based, in his words, on "...testing out several paragraphs of text...". Doesn't sound like a particularly large sample group. What's more, it's indicative of poor software engineering practice. As is the recent bout of outages.
A few final criticisms. Firstly, there are far better, less memory intensive, and above all, less stupid methods of performing textual analysis than checking it's compression ratio. If Taco had any idea about computer science, he might have investigated a few before making a fool of himself in public like this. It's pretty clear that he's getting more and more frustrated with the situation on slashdot, and doesn't realise that if he ruled with an even hand, rather than a bitchslapping script and an army of trained thought police, the problems would not be so grave.
Secondly, I thought of a much more effective method of eliminating asci art posts, and it will never cause problems for genuine posters. What's more, it's extremely compact and doesn't even require regexps. I won't reveal it here, as I am not willing to assist in a reign of terror that I find to be reprehensible.
As further evidence of the lengths Malda and Co. may be willing to go to, you can find a commented out section that enables the deletion of posts and their descendant threads. We have no reason to believe that this will not be employed on slashdot.
Editorial notes: I don't use Perl and this is really the first time I've examined it closely. It's pretty much convinced me that I'm not missing much. I use real languages such as C and C++ and occasionaly asm to do most of my work, and I, along with 95% of the enterprise world, find Java to be the best solution for web programming. For most scripting tasks, shell script suffices. For more complicated scripting tasks, Python provides a more sensibly designed scripting environment. Additionally, as if to provide further evidence of Malda's incompetence as a programmer, I've hit the junk character post every single time I've previewed this comment, and am now forced to resort to edit it. Regretfully, I have been forced to replace the Perl fragments I was using with hyperlinks. Very unsatisfactory.
.. also send all your TV viewing habits to a server ?
- sigs are for wimps.
Sure it is enough room to store entire seasons of multiple shows, but is it enough to store a full Kevin Costner film?
If it won't boot, Fsck it!
get a nokia media terminal when they come out,
then save your content to your personal video server for retrieval
Given a BIOS that lets you Boot A PIII System In .8 Seconds and the Hauppage WinTV PVR card ($249) you could roll your own! Probably for lots less than $1000.
Best Slashdot Co
The artilce mentions 'DVR', not 'PVR'.
I know what a DVR is, but what is a PVR?
(from http://smoke.rotten.com/bird/)
Dear rotten.com,
I am unsure if you are aware of the problems that your
"Incident with the bird" picture has caused on the
popular technology website slashdot
(http://slashdot.org). Many users of this site's
messageboards are posting links to
http://smoke.rotten.com/bird and making text based
representations of a bird on a man's penis. Frankly,
while I am pro-freedom, this type of photo sickens me.
Could you please move the location of the bird page
on your site to keep slashdot readers from seeing
things that are completeley unrelated to computers and
technology? I'm not asking you to remove the content,
just to relocate it.
The Oregon-based company may once again fuel controversy among advertisers with a function that automatically eliminates commercials during the recording of programs.
I've got a pretty good record pause/unpause trigger finger for the VCR, but I'm curious as to how a DVR/PVR can detect the end of show / beginning of a commercial / end of a commercial / beginning of show sequence. Is there some sort of signal that can be detected?
Coming up with a dozen shows good enough to be worth taping a whole season's worth!
Why is it that as TV viewing technology gets better, TV seems to be getting worse?
InstaPundit! Ahead of the Curve Since 30 Minutes Ago
ReplayTV is planning a post-Labor Day introduction of a souped-up DVR that could store as much as 320 hours of TV programming and send programs by email to other DVRs.
Oh, that's just super.
"I send you this episode in order to have your advice"
On a serious note, that feature is going to kick ass, and is much cooler than a couple (hundred) extra hours of storage. Imagine:
- Your favorite team makes an incredible play, but you miss the game. So you hop onto IRC and someone mails you a 60-second clip
- You're flipping channels and come across a show that you really like. So you download every previous episode.
- (I know these things are supposed to come in threes, but that's all i can think of, so use your imagination)
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Free Dmitry Sklyarov! If you don't, all the prison fags raping him are going to make his ass even wider than this one!
$2000 freakin dollars?! I'm sorry, but for that kind of money I can go to ebay and buy an HDTV projector that can put a 300" screen on my wall if I want it. I can also take the extra $500 I'll have after buying that and buy a few 60 GB harddrives and make my own 320 hour DVR using Linux tools that already exist and a simple $40 TV card.
IANAL, but I play one on
Post Comment
Lameness filter encountered.
Your comment violated the postercomment compression filter. Comment aborted
130 hours an incredible amount of TV. You can sit and watch TV for every waking hour (16 hours/day) for over 8 days with a 130 hour TiVo. Switch to the high quality setting and you can still store 10 full length movies permanently on your TiVo and still have enough room left over to watch TV every waking hour for three days. Even on the highest quality setting, a 130 hour TiVo records 40 hours of TV, enough even for the most dedicated of couch potatoes. How much more do you need?
If only I could download a whole series of say
X-files rather than Pv-r I'd glady keep the commercials in them.
;-)
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
Hmmm....
1. Record entire season
2. Remove HD -- place in PC
3. Burn MPEG-4 of entire season to DVD-RAMs/VCDs
4. Replace HD
5. Share with friends (*NOT* the TV show)
6. Repeat
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
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A grendal cluster of these things?
So, now, a unit that's over 6 and a half times the cost of my Sony SVR2000 (i.e. an expensive model of TiVo) is supposed to revolutionize TV viewing? My ass. Sure, I plan on putting another larger drive in my TiVo, but I'm not whining about lack of space - it'll just be a nice cushion for when I'm away for the weekend.
btw, 8 times my current capacity isn't a whole season. It's maybe two months. Three tops. And I'm not particularly psycho about my TiVoing.
Send your friends messages of love at fuck-you.org
Alyson Hannigan
Alyson Hannigan
Alyson HANNIGAN!
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With Tivos (which run Linux), you can add hard drives as large as you like (though nobody's tried to break the IDE 128GB limit yet). Current owners can put in two 100GB drives, for well over 200 hours of recording capability.
.@.
No more late-night fights over what programs to keep: public access yoga vs. Doctor Who. If I had a spine, it would always be sci-fi over metaphysical crap, but apparently in a "relationship" you have to make "comprimises". 320 hours means no more comprimises over my precious PVR space! Woohoo!
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
ReplayTV recently sent out email questionaires about a speculative product that matched this one. Typically these questionaires ask about a product that isn't even close to existing and may not ever exist, because the whole point of the questionaire is to find out what products the company should bother to spend money developing. Note that while the article mentioned $10/mo for dialup and free broadband, others were asked about $10/mo for dialup and $5/mo for broadband so the specs and prices aren't set in stone, even if the machine is anywhere near production. Someone decided to take their version of the questionaire and misrepresent it as a product announcement.
3 04 .html
. ht ml
http://www.avsforum.com/ubbtivo/Forum1/HTML/008
http://www.avsforum.com/ubb/Forum13/HTML/005596
Think about it. How many times have you seen on big newsgroups for sci-fi programs someone missing something and wanting someone to mail them a VCR tape. If you could email a copy of a show you missed, that feature alone is worth the cost for us die-hard Farscape & Trek fans.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
As al bundy said:
Friends, don't have em, don't want em, and danmn sure don't want to watch em.
=
The next big step for a PVR will be when it can record two weeks of everything on every channel. I find there is plenty of space on my Tivo for everything I think I might want to watch in advance. The problem comes when there are two or more things you want to watch that are airing at the same time. Also, every once in a great while I will realize that I don't have anything on the Tivo worth watching. At that point, I would like to have a two week archive of everything to browse.
Well, they're looking to fill the market that TiVo is refusing to touch... that is, the transfer of programs between TiVo units. And if it is able to transfer video, you can almost bet that it has an ethernet connector, and doesn't just do it over dialup. Good for them. Competition is going to make the PVR market better.
Regarding the 320 hours, that's going to be in low quality. I'm assuming that the ReplayTV has a two-drive limit. Either they are banking on future technology (2 x 128gb drives) or some additional compression, or both. (Additional compression is still possible, using existing methods. Anyone remember the TiVo bug where vertical resolution was lost, but was only noticable on SVideo units?)
In any case, I'm glad they're taking a stand on the sharing issue. That alone might be enough to make me switch.
I mean come on, Taco's reverse engineering our proprietary troll protocols so he can write a lameness filter to prevent them!!! In fact, the lameness filter is a circumcism device -- directly contravecepted by the DMCA!! I say call the FEDs on them!!!
[unimaginative trolls ate my balls.]
Has something like this been used to record security camera footage, for archival purposes? Sounds like it would be perfect for that.
So it's probably not supported. I don't know what chipset it's on, though some of the other Hauppage cards use the bttv set, which is supported, unofficially, under Linux and, IIRC, FreeBSD. The cool thing about it is the hardware mpeg2 encoder. All the others I've seen under $500 are software encoders, requiring a GHZ processor for realtime work. Now I can finally put all those episodes of Buffy on VCD ;^)
Best Slashdot Co
i like to see devices like these. ihave a tivo and love it, except for the $hitty modem they put in it.
i cant seem to come up with a sig.
I realize he's a troll. Nonetheless he makes good points that desperately need discussing. The current state of slashdot it pitiful--my karma dropped 30 points over a 2 day period. A 2 day period in which I posed possibly as many as 3 comments. Legitmate users are being blocked by the "lameness" filter while ascii pr0n is posted as a real comment.
I've said it many many times (as far back as 1998, IIRC) before but no one backed me up. Finally we have somebody with a factual analysis. Rob, gestapo-style bitchslaps and thought-police moderation have an effect opposite the one you want. Please, for the love of god, try something else for a while and see the difference.
324006
TiVo is a great product, the problem is that the public just doesn't understand them yet. I've pretty much given up explaining them to people, as they invariably respond with: "my VCR can do that."
I just hope TiVo can hold on long enough for the critical mass of TV viewers to catch on. And things like this with a big "gee whiz" factor can only help.
Sure, you can build a device to record shows. But the great thing about these PVRs (I own 2 TiVos) is the integration they provide. It's not like having a seperate box to do these things. It fits in very nicely with an existing AV setup and soon you forget it's even there. The interface is great. It will be a while before you can build something as seamless and nice.
Now I can record a whole season of bigbrother and watch it over and over.
if common sense was common, wouldn't everyone have it?
Or do I record those and watch 'em in the winter? :)
BTW, Mon-Thurs showings of Farscape on SciFi start tonight at 8pm Eastern/Pacific. Watch it from the beginning!
My brothers in arms, I call unto you, let us join in celebration... the end of slashdot is drawing near.
VA Linx is bankrupt and the carelessness to hire certain editors that continues to censor certain projects will soon be over.
Now is the time for festivities and celebration. A toast is necessary to say so long to cmdrtaco and his crew.
So to all my AC's languishing from 3rd world nations to the rotten depths of your parents basement in Idaho, let us celebrate this special occasion!
Fight the good fight !
The DirecTivo has two tuners so you can record two things at once.
How many years ago was it that an 80 gig hard drive would cost $2000? It is becoming likely that everyone will have these one day, since I don't see random storage devices cheaper/better than hard drives coming out any time soon. Unless of course you count the internet as a random storage device... That *might* win (if the phone company ever got its act together).
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
It's pretty much agreed among all PVR geeks that this is likely vaporware. The "source" for this info was a survey that Replay sent out asking "Would you pay this much for this feature in a future product?", and then whoever came up with the story took all those features, and decided it was a product announcement. Don't expect to buy one anytime soon.
See the following:
Tivo forums discussion
Replay forums discussion
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
About a month ago, I upgraded my ReplayTV to have 100 hours of record time. (I did the fast-n-easy swap out the old drive for a 100GB drive.) It's overkill, and there are some problems.
First of all, the interface wasn't designed to cope with that much TV. To get down to the Simpsons (alphabetized by "The") I have to page through like 12 pages of other junk. Yuck.
Second, that's a hell of a lot of TV; I don't want to let the thing fill up, because when will I possibly find the 100 hours to watch everything it records?
Third, it does encourage you to watch more TV. There are shows I used to watch only when the opportunity arose, but now, since I'm recording EVERYTHING I might ever possibly watch, I end up watching all of them.
The real problem I have now is not the amount of record time, but the fact that it only has one tuner.
P.S. Do you know how long it takes to low-level format a 5400 rpm 100GB drive? About 15 hours!
lets give this a try (12 shows worth watching)
1) Dark Angel
2) The West Wing
3) The Sopranos
4) Junkyard Wars
5) Battlebots
6) Sex and the City
7) The Family Guy
8) The Simpsons
9) Comedy Central's Daily Show
10) Who's line is it anyway (US)
11) Law and Order
12) The Practice
Add to the list anything on TLC, the History channel (plus the obscure stuff I love, like the various car shows on TNN, and anything on the food network Iron Chef, Naked Chef, Good Eats etc)
S.
Watch the hard-drive wars heat up on PVRs and smile at what that means for your time-shifting habits.
...also watch copyright content control features go into you hard drive and feel your stomach turn as the MPAA and RIAA reach into your computer.
How long is a TV season? Last I paid attention, they followed the calender seasons. What are you comparing? Some shows run every day for a half hour, some run once or twice a week for a half or full hour.
science is a religion
There should be a poll on slashdot "Who do you prefer getting blowjobs from: 1) Women 2) Men 3) CowboyNeal" I would vote 2, women don't suck hard enough, and cowboyneal is ugly.
Iron Chef
Invisable Man
FarScape
Sex in the City
Junkyard Wars
Good Eats
Robot Wars (all versions!)
Witchblade
Star Trek: Enterprise
Outer Limits
The Cronicle
7 Days
I cannot believe that you place WestWing as #2. God willing, if I ever met any of the actors on that show in a dark room, I'd be the only one walking out alive. Same with Sex and the City, Law and Order, Te Practice, and Ally McBeal. You know, I just realized what they all have in common: The entire show is about LAWYERS! eek!
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a souped-up DVR that could store as much as 320 hours of TV programming and send programs by email to other DVRs.
If you thought it was bad that people mail Power Point presentations around, just wait till they start clicking the send to so they can share their favorite sit com. ARGH! What kind of jerk would encourage this sort of thing?! No no no no!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
BTW... I let the domain name expire. Want it?
This ReplayTV device doesn't stand a chance at the $1999 price, and the TV executives are quoted in the Yahoo article as saying they'll fight the commercial skipping and the ability to share the recordings.
Why is it that as TV viewing technology gets better, TV seems to be getting worse?
You obviously don't own a TiVo. You would be amazed, there is actually good stuff on TV. TiVo makes it much easier to sift through the garbage and locate the gems. I know my TV watching has gone up drastically since getting my TiVo, and I'm actually watching stuff that I LIKE.
"The guide is definitive, reality is frequently inaccurate."
is the SnapStream PVR software. The demo version is free, and the only practical limitation is a 2GB storage limit. But, if you move stuff out of it's directory, it doesn't know to add it into the 2GB quota. I've been using it for a few weeks now with a Hauppauge TV card, and it works great. My TV gets recorded, and I watch it whenever I want. The only bummer is that it currently only records in ASF. They once had an AVI recording feature in Beta, but I don't know what happened to that.
What options are out there nowadays for digital VCRs similar to TiVos that don't require a subscription? (and no, I don't care about the guide).
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
still waiting for UPS to come and play santa, but i'm building a 320gb raid array for the purpose of PVR/emulators/MP3/Ogg/Video serving.. Any idea how much space I'd need for roughly 100 hours of space?
For two grand, it had better have:
2 tuners (capable of NTSC and ATSC)
40+ hours of HD / 100+ hrs high qual NTSC
A DVD-R tray for archiving
Commercial pruning for the DVD-R (even if manual)
Otherwise, I'm not interested.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Great, now people can spam my TV!
It's one thing to pass along a video. It's something else to let one person pass along a program to hundreds of people at once,'' a network insider said. ``That could be a violation of our copyright.''
and better yet
Many major media companies invested in Replay in 1999 and 2000, including News Corp., Time Warner, the Walt Disney Co., NBC, Showtime Networks and what was then Universal's parent, Seagram.
So will NBC be 'suing' its investment for copyright violations? Or just going after the hapless evil hackers that are *gasp* trading shows on the Internet?!?!?!
246 hours with 200GB on mine as of last Friday. Did it myself too - very easy given even less than a rudimentary level of Linux knowledge and the ability to read FAQs.
Given the ability to connect Tivo to ethernet (www.9thtee.com) and a bit more Linux knowledge someone could probably build a script to archive and restore shows at will, effectively making the storage infinite -
Damn! Whatta deal! I'll take two!
About 190 hours worth it seems :)
Hey, ho,
Isn't there a Linux project which does just that: recording scheduled TV and radio progs, maybe even remotely scheduled over the Net?
What about recognition of a starting signal of a given TV program?
Anyway, a Linux proj which would also offer writing TV hard disk recordings to CDR (e.g. in DiVX) sounds very sexy!
The nice thing about Windows is: it does not just crash; it displays a nice little dialog box and let's you press 'OK'
Does this thing do clips, or do you have to mail the whole freaking game? One day, the whole game might be the better choice. You know, you just had to be there...
Video over the net does not make me happy yet. This stuff is going to clog up the world. Imagine your email having to compete against a sea of this shit. It's bad enough that the warez crowd hoggs up the net swaping around comercial movies, songs, M$ software and other trash. Encouraging Everyone to do this is irresponsible. Keep broadcast junk where it belongs. Leave the net to original content until it can handle much more.
If you absolutly must share that golden clip with your friend, host it on a web site! Email the link and let your friends decide on their own if they want to look at it. Cramming this into email is just rude.
You've got spam!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
but hopefully much more reliable and portable drives. Think VCR tape: consumers are going to want VCR tape sized (or smaller, of course) hard drives which they can pop in and out of these devices. this will mean a lot of good eventually for those of us who dig hot-swap storage.
The REAL sam_at_caveman_dot_org is user ID 13833.
There's nothing wrong with watching everything. Just don't focus on it. When your watching the not-so-good Simpsone episodes for the 2nd (or 3rd, 4th, 9th) time burn some VCDs on your computer and flip through your bills and mail. When the good bit comes up, stare at the screen for a bit, then get back to the tedious busy work you'd have to do anyway.
Odds are, you would have had the tube on anyway while dealing with that crud, so this way you you see classic good (as it gets) tv instead of whatevers on. It's no worse than slashdot... Oooh! ten thousand knives for only $33 a month with stretch pay! gotta go...
If you don't want to see all the ASCII crap, just raise your threshold. It's that easy.
"There is no scheme to differentiate between programs and commercials that is not defeatable," one senior network exec said.
Correct -- but there doesn't need to be. So long as commercials are fixed at 30 or 60 seconds, bypassing them is as easy as one or two presses of an instant 30-second-skip button. Four minutes' worth of advertising crap? How long does it take to press a button eight times?
Take that, corporate bastards! [cue maniacal laughter]
We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from the machinations of the wicked.
I am glad that ReplaTV is staying in the game. It just goes to show that a great product does stand a chance in the market if you beleieve in it enough. Marketing and advertising dollars should not determine what makes it in the industry and what doesn't. I hope they are here to stay this time.
Basic quality is more certainly not equal to VHS. In my experience, High quality is roughly equal to, maybe a little better than VHS EP.
Basic quality isn't just jerky, it distorts the colors. Even low frame rate animation looks bad. Useless.
I do most of my recording at High Quality. Some animation is OK at medium quality.
A "30 hour" TIVO records about hours of 15 hours at High Quality on a 36GB disk. So a good rule of thumb is 2GB/hour of usable quality.
I don't bother to get a login because, frankly, I don't see the point. As an anonymous Coward, I get to see all the +1 stuff, and if the thread looks good, I'll read the "below threshhold" Score: 0 ones too.
:)
:) Some are Trolls, who know better, but are pushing for anarchy and mediocrity. (If you like that ast line, read Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead - good book, if thick.)
I'm sure I miss out on some insightfull stuff that never got modded up, but if it was good enough to get a reply at +1 or so, I get to see it anyway (unless I'm First Read!ing
Some of the trolls are just ignorant or naive (i.e. think differently than you or I, and are therefore wrong
Moderation is a reall easy thing to fix if you genuinely want to, unlike my poor typing ability/keyboard.
1) Eliminate negative moderation. Sure, trolls will still mod each other up, as will boosters of misinformation. But they do that anyway now.
2) Allow borda count moderation on comments while the articles on the front page. That's "Am I hot or not?" for the trolls reading. Those comments which get broad support go up a point, those which don't stay where they are. Default browse score for archived articles can be set to 2, since most of the valid / ontopic score 1's would be boosted to 2 anyway.
It's pretty simple really.
Bu then there's no reason not to allow the submissions list to be seen. Preface the link with an anti-porn/crackhead/idiot/minor disclaimer and show only the title, not the submitter. Legitimate whining about submissions goes away and no one else checks it anyway, so it doesn't matter what the trolls do to it. A week or so later, either ditch it all, or if the editors look at the list, grab the good stuff which you reject anyway, and put it on a rejected page.
But what do I know? I'm just a no cookie Anyonymous Coward.
Obscure reference: Call me Tramper, these are my siblings, Guest and Visitor.
for $2000 i want much more, 120960 hours minimum.
Boy, if you hate SPAM now, I can just see it: come home from work, plop down in the recliner, and fire up the ol' mega-PVR.
"You have mail! Downloading message 1 of 73 ..."
Two hours later (after everyone in the neighborhood complains about using all their cable bandwidth), you find that the helpful folks with the "FREE PAGERS" have sent you 12 identical infomercials, several fly-by-night lenders sent feature films showing how they can refinance your [mortgage|debt], you have 17 MLM videos that all begin with, "This is NOT an MLM", and a dozen pr0n companies have sent you samples of their latest films (OK, so it's not all bad news).
Meanwhile, Aunt Emma sent the latest home videos forwarded and re-forwarded from distant relatives you've never met ("Here's Johnny Applesmith's complete graduation ceremony. You can see him at about 2:50. Johnny is my neighbor's second cousin-in-law on his uncle's side, twice removed."), Uncle Joe sent a Norton infomercial (fowarded from a friend, etc.) that he wants you to see "RIGHT NOW" because of that "Good Times AV Virus" he heard about (acutally shreds your PVR drive into its component electrons, then melts everything in your freezer, or so he heard from his buddy Tom), and half-a-dozen old friends with way too much time on their hands forward all the latest compilations of stand-up routines snatched from Comedy Central (and each other, over and over again).
Two thoughts:
1. We're going to have to get a bigger Internet.
2. Time to dig out my library card.
(Come to think of it, the pr0n by itself would consume every Hz of available bandwidth. Death of the Intermet, film at 11!)
Technology can be a wonderful thing. Just keep it away from Marketing.
... when I'd actually praise a TV network executive for being clueful. Did anyone catch this quote at the end of the article? In the context of whether a humungous PVR would be the death of network TV:
``Everyone said the VCR would kill network TV,'' one exec said. ``I don't think people are shivering over this.''
Gee, someone who actually gets it. What are the odds? Now if only the MPAA / RIAA executives would wake up and realize the same thing.
From the article:
``It's one thing to pass along a video. It's something else to let one person pass along a program to hundreds of people at once,'' a network insider said. ``That could be a violation of our copyright.''
I see no difference. When passed to a friend, the media still has the potential to reach the same number of people. That friend could perhaps copy it for two other people (and they do the same, making the total number of recipients grow exponentially).
Submission voting, no negatives, hot-or-not style scores--that's exactly what K5 does.
/. a LONG time ago. Like, 1997. (I remember railing against threaded comments.) Finally I had enough and moved to K5 (except for a few brief visits to this cesspool) about 9 months ago. The relief is palpable.
I started reading
324006
The ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon has S-video output. I can't say how it looks, as I've never used that feature of the card.
I just get a new Tivo when one fills up.
DVD is too small to archive a full series.
I think that's the point. Or at least it's my point. With a TIVO, my own tendency to procrastinate works toward the goal of watching less TV. If I can watch the show anytime I want then I don't need to watch it right now. So, instead I'll do something else that is not so flexible. Repeat a few times, and maybe I'll never get arround to watching the show. That's probably a good thing. When I do get arround to watching anything, I cherry pick the good stuff and discard the rest.
The trouble comes if the storage is too small. Then I face the delima: If I don't watch it now, it will be gone later. Maybe I should watch it now. To prevent this from happenning, make the disk real big. :-)
TV dramas typically have 25 unique episodes per season and a 1-hour duration. That's 25 hours/season.
Or if it's a 1 hour show on every day except Sunday, that's about 313 days. Again, 313 hours/season. But I think only news programming is close to that.
And of course, if it's on every day of the year, that's up to 366 hours/season.
And if you sleep 8 hours a day and watch TV the rest of the time, that's 20 straight days of TV.
Content owners will finally have to recognize this. Just as what that exec said is correct, it is also true that all technology to restrict the copying of copyrighted material will be unsuccessful. The two problems are equivalent.
-David.
The critical market acceptance question: Will we be able to sell old episodes on eBay?
Milo
I'm interested in getting a PVR. I'd like it to be able to record two shows at the same time, or at lease let me watch something and record something else at the same time. I'd also like it to be able to use my existing cable modem/Ethernet connection. I know of products that use a modem and my phone line, but my phone line isn't near my TV, and I'd really like it to use my existing high speed internet connection. Other than the above product, are there any other PVRs that will do that?
Maybe I just have low standards, but low quality is plenty good enough for me. The only time I even notice anything is during rapid screen changes.
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
Hey, at least then we wouldn't have to worry about them advertising to us, limiting what we can/can't record, disable sharing features, etc...
I'd gladly help out with such a beast...
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
It is based on the Covenant chip, so you can do captures in Linux. Unfortunately, the MPEG encoder is not supported so if you just want a card to use under Linux a cheaper model of the WinTV would be better.
Yess! "Good Eats" rules. It's the show that inspired me to start cooking. Emeril's not bad... but Good Eats teaches the fundamentals.
Personally, I watch maybe 2 hours of TV a week. Until my stepdaughter came to live with us, we hadn't had cable TV in over 3 years. My wife insisted that we get cable so that the munchkin can watch kid's shows on PBS and Nickelodian.
Of course she let the salescritter talk her into getting the $65 deluxe digital cable package with umpteen channels of HBO -- which we have yet to watch -- instead of the $28 basic analog package that I though we had agreed on. [Grumble] Waste of damn money, if you ask me -- even with the munchkin we're still watching less than 10 hours of TV a week, at a cost of $6.50 an hour. Ahhh, the sacrifices we make to help ensure marital bliss...
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
OBEY.
I watch more than one show.
Send your friends messages of love at fuck-you.org
Hobbyists will begin posting web sites with their own picks for the coming week, plus edit lists of recent shows.
Some will edit shows to compress them - first knocking out commercials, then dropping bits or fast forwarding through bits that they decide are useful to see but not critical to hear.
With audio processing, they'll add processing to allow some segments to be watched up to 2x faster but with audio frequencies adjusted back down to normal.
Others will use editing and interleaving of programs to create their own satirical productions - the nightly news mixed with political commercials and sit-coms, etc.
Once this sort of capability takes hold for PCs, it'll be replicated into consumer equipment. Then things will probably cycle back and go commercial, as people find that local hobbyists can't be relied on for the long term, and decide to tolerate a few ads in their mix in return for not needing to keep searching for new hobbyists that match their tastes.
Once this gets going strong enough, commercials will be transmitted once or twice a day, your system will record only those likely to target your consumption patterns, and you'll sit through them once or twice because you will often find them entertaining or interesting.
A new stability will form. With a lot more bandwidth for transmitting commercials (by eliminating redundancy), there'll be many minor variations on commercials, professionally edited to appeal to specific groups. "Trekkie In-Joke variation #2", "Upscale edutainment ages 6-8"
It's time to grow up and join the rael world now slashbot.
Should read : "It's time to grow up and join the rael world now slashbot."
sorreyyyyyyy!
I must have a mental block. When I first scanned the story, I thought that $199 was a decent price for a box like that. Imagine my suprise when I finally realized it was $1999. For that price I could build a monster homebrew version with IDE RAID and Hauppage's card, spend a couple hundred on beer and pizza to fuel my development time to build a slick interface, and still have enough cash to order enough pay-per-view porn to find something worth recording.
We have a Dishplayer from Dish network that works well for us. You have to mount the satellite dish and run coax to the receiver, but then you can watch a previously recorded show while another show is recording. Rumor has it they're working on a two receiver version that will allow you to record two live shows simultaneously, or several variations on that theme. And, all the programming is stored in compressed digital format, meaning you don't have the analog to digital to analog issue you have with an over the air unit. The playback picture looks as perfect as if you were watching it live off the satellite feed. Slap in a 40 or 60 GB hard disk, and you have 30+ hours of recording time.
a ye r/index.shtml
As for the broadband access, it is available through dish, but we subscribe to broadband cable for data purposes, and only use the satellite for tv programming. Pretty sweet setup so far.
http://www.dishnetwork.com/content/products/dpl
By the way, when I was shopping for a receiver, I bought a full direct tv setup the first time. Turns out, if you have more than 1 direct tv receiver in your house, they *all* must have a phone line run to them (not dedicated, just a phone line). That equipment went back in a hurry. Dish network does not require a phone line to be hooked up - having one hooked up just allows you to order pay per view movies under Dish network.
I agree, the "news" on K5 has started to suck ever since Rusty "fixed" the submission queue. But the diaries are alive and well.
However, you are right--I come to Slashdot for the news in the morning...but then I spend the day at K5.
324006
I'm starting to see where you're coming from.
They say 320 hours is enough to store "full seasons of a dozen shows"
You say 320 hours isn't enough to store a whole season.
But you're talking about your TV viewing season, not a television show's season. They're talking about a television show's season.
You can store whole season of Star Trek:Enterprise, and a season of The X Files, and a season of Earth: Final Conflict, and a season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and a season of Roswell, and a season of Dark Angel-- that's only six, and it takes about 150 hours. 12 will take about 300 hours.
That's how you store full seasons of a dozen shows on the thing.
the Hauppage card comes with a remote and an IR receiver.
While the official Replay service doesn't support Canada, someone on the AVSForum has written some code to fetch guide info from web sites, reformat them, and then load on his replay so he can get Canadian listings.
He doesn't even dial the official service any more.
Robert
--- If it's worth doing, it's worth doing in Perl!
All you have to do is check over at EBay for "HDTV projector" and you'll see that you can pick one up for between $1000 for a bottom of the line to $15000 for top of the line. Sure, $1500 might not be the best HDTV projector out there, but it sure as hell beats spending twice as much for a similar TV that can only display 60" and is monolithic in size and weight.
IANAL, but I play one on