Hehe, on this box you basically have to re-enter all your recordings every season anyway, or when things get screwed up, so it's not a big deal. I'm glad I have never used a Tivo... my opinion might be different in that case.
When switchover time comes, if there is something I haven't watched yet, I can always archive it over firewire to PC and watch it later (on the PC). My HTPC isn't fast enough to play HD, and it's only hooked up to the TV at 848x480p anyway. What would be cool is a way to hook up 2 DVR boxes with firewire and copy all the programs from the old box to the new box!
A review of high-definition television recording options in the Aug. 29 Business section incorrectly said that Dish Network's Dish Player-DVR 921 digital video recorder is available for rental. It is available for purchase, and the price is $999.
Yeah but consider the market for the current HDTivos: the early adopter/HD nut/AVS Forum/type person. These people are not content with old technology and are always looking to upgrade. What will they do with their obsolete boxes?
Another thing, the interface problems on the Motorola boxes are all because most cable companies are stuck using the TV Guide/Gemstar software, which is the horrible boxy ad-ridden mess you are used to. My cable company, Armstrong, is stuck contractually with TV Guide for the near future, but would love to move to something else.
However, the DCT cable boxes are generic platforms and can run any software. Some markets are now using the much nicer Pioneer Passport Echo software, which I think is much closer to Tivo-land, since you can record entire series with one click, it shows the buffer status, etc. Microsoft also has software for the box in some markets.
For some reason my cable company runs everything unencrypted. I can pull anything off firewire, including HBO-HD, etc. I wish my cable box supported playback of external TS files, but I know that will never happen.:)
I have a Motorola DCT-6208, the model I think they are referring to in this article that Comcast offers.
Even though the hard drive is only 80GB, and the interface sucks, the thing is virtually free and I don't have to worry about it breaking, hard drive failing, or the eventual obsolescence in less than a year. Anyone shelling out $1000 for the satellite models is a sucker IMO.
I used to be a DirecTV customer and bought a RCA DTC-100 HD tuner on Ebay for $400. I was able to turn around and resell it on Ebay for $350 2 years later, but only because I sold it before the crop of DVRs came out, and because it was a high-demand model. Now, if you are stuck with an obsolete HD Tivo in a year or two, you are pretty much screwed because the new models will be so much better no one will want an older model. Maybe you can sell it to your grandmother though for $100.:)
With cable though, I can keep getting a better box for virtually nothing. The new Motorola DCT-6412 with two tuners and 120GB hard drive is right around the corner, and I will just have to call and setup an appointment to have the tech come in and swap it out.
LOL yeah, there is only one way to watch 4x3 content: in pillarbox format. Any kind of stretch is a silly thing to do. We watch a lot of 4x3 on our HDTV with gray bars and it doesn't even bother the wife or kids anymore.
Um, the TV has a TV tuner, maybe an HDTV ATSC tuner (although probably not on a 20" model), a remote, etc. You can't really just buy a 19" computer monitor and watch TV on it. Some have S-Video jacks, but you still need additional hardware to watch TV on it.
I made the switch a few weeks ago to DSPAM for my family's email, and let me tell you, it's amazing. We were using bogofilter before and it never did a very good job learning about false negatives.
I could never get the web interface working so I don't have any stats, but I can tell you I get maybe 1 false negative PER WEEK! The rate of false positives is higher than that, maybe 1 per day, but this seems to be getting better the more it learns. My wife's email is also working amazingly well after an initial training period of a few days, because she subscribes to alot of lists that look like spam to me.:)
I have it setup through fetchmail+postfix+procmail into Courier IMAP, and use special IMAP folders called False-Negatives and False-Positives with a cron job to check them, so we just have to drag misclassified email into those folders. Much faster than using the email method DSPAM mentions in their docs.
The learning curve for setting it up is pretty steep though... it took me maybe 4+ hours to get it working right.
The numbers will probably be misleading with the release of 1.0PR, because every current Firefox user will download it, and the new users will be lost in the noise.
What they could do is have an optional survey or something where people can choose if they are upgrading or a new user.
My site gets about 16000 unique visitors a month (1.4 million hits), and so far in September the stats look like this: IE: 77.5% Firefox: 8.9% Opera: 3.5% Safari: 2.6% Mozilla: 2.2% Netscape: 1.2%
The trend is there though, I think IE used to be in the 90's. It's just a really slow trend. I'm glad to see old Netscape almost non-existant.:) These numbers are from awstats which uses total number of hits for this (660K), not visitors.
The point is to be able to offer many local HD channels, to compete with cable. I get my HD over cable for one reason: local channels for which I am too far away to receive with an OTA antenna. Our local ABC DT station in Pittsburgh (WTAE) broadcasts at a ridiculously low power, so it's the only option without a large antenna and unobstructed path to the city.
Oh yeah, cable also gives me a cheap HD DVR box. That'll trump the $1000 HD Tivo anyday.:)
An Xbox controller is basically the ideal controller for playing emulated games. When using it on SNES games it feels just like playing the real thing. Xbox controllers are simple USB devices so you just need to buy or build a cheap adapter and install a driver. It also works great for PC driving games that support analog controls such as Midnight Club II.
1080p is there but the bandwidth to broadcast this just isn't there. Some 1080p displays are starting to come out.
You can't really say 1080i = 540p. You are right that 1080i is 2 540 fields interlaced, but those are FIELDS, i.e. offset horizontal lines. Combined they do produce 1080 lines of resolution. Native 540p is basically just NTSC, and 1080i can easily said to be amazingly higher quality than NTSC. Most people can also spot the difference between 720p and 1080i too. I can tell when watching ABC/ESPN 720p football compared to CBS/HDNet 1080i football. I don't have a native 720p display though, to be fair, and 1080i does have more motion artifacts. It's generally agreed that 720p is best for fast-moving sports, and 1080i for slow shots, documentaries, 35mm film transfers, etc.
I just upgraded to 3Mbit/512k (in reality it's about 4/640) DSL for less than I was paying for 512k SDSL service. I pay around $45/mo. This is pretty good, and I can certainly understand the lack of 100mbit connections in a country as large as the US. I can download a couple Linux ISOs in a half an hour or so... I'm happy with it.:) Within 5 years or so we'll all look back on this and laugh... when everyone has gigabit ethernet or some other insanely fast fiber connection. Or maybe wireless!
It was a day like any other and my 240GB RAID5 ReiserFS mp3 partition was just minding its own business... a split second power outage later and my precious data was vomited into tens of thousands of nightmarish numeric lost+found files. What I did manage to recover through painstaking use of mp3info, grep, prayer, etc. seemed fine, except for the insidious corrupted block of data that would invariably be within each and every one of my mp3 files. I nearly cried. At least I had an excuse to re-rip all of my CDs in Ogg format now.
The moral of the story: ext3 with data journaling (mount option data=journal), and a UPS are wonderful things. I can power cycle my box all day long with no ill effects (to my files anyway).
You better believe I am staying far far away from Reiser4!
After the nightmare of trying to recover from a 250GB reiserfs corruption after a power loss, spewing tons of numbered files into lost+found... I now only run ext3 with data journaling. It's slightly slower, but can still write at 20-30MB/sec, more than enough for any video editing I need to do.
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Perl works fine on Windows, even in IIS. http://www.activestate.com/Products/ActivePerl/
It's time to upgrade to 11g. You should get up to 20mbit of real-world performance with 11g compared to the 3-5 from 11b.
It was (and still is) live on the Science Channel.
Not in HD, only Widescreen SD. :\
I think it's only in widescreen SD. :( I'm DVR'ing it anyway though, looks like it will be cool.
Hehe, on this box you basically have to re-enter all your recordings every season anyway, or when things get screwed up, so it's not a big deal. I'm glad I have never used a Tivo... my opinion might be different in that case.
When switchover time comes, if there is something I haven't watched yet, I can always archive it over firewire to PC and watch it later (on the PC). My HTPC isn't fast enough to play HD, and it's only hooked up to the TV at 848x480p anyway. What would be cool is a way to hook up 2 DVR boxes with firewire and copy all the programs from the old box to the new box!
No it's not, they corrected the article:
A review of high-definition television recording options in the Aug. 29 Business section incorrectly said that Dish Network's Dish Player-DVR 921 digital video recorder is available for rental. It is available for purchase, and the price is $999.
Yeah but consider the market for the current HDTivos: the early adopter/HD nut/AVS Forum/type person. These people are not content with old technology and are always looking to upgrade. What will they do with their obsolete boxes?
Right, and you can record normal TV in black and white, but why would you want to? :)
Another thing, the interface problems on the Motorola boxes are all because most cable companies are stuck using the TV Guide/Gemstar software, which is the horrible boxy ad-ridden mess you are used to. My cable company, Armstrong, is stuck contractually with TV Guide for the near future, but would love to move to something else.
However, the DCT cable boxes are generic platforms and can run any software. Some markets are now using the much nicer Pioneer Passport Echo software, which I think is much closer to Tivo-land, since you can record entire series with one click, it shows the buffer status, etc. Microsoft also has software for the box in some markets.
For some reason my cable company runs everything unencrypted. I can pull anything off firewire, including HBO-HD, etc. I wish my cable box supported playback of external TS files, but I know that will never happen. :)
I have a Motorola DCT-6208, the model I think they are referring to in this article that Comcast offers.
:)
Even though the hard drive is only 80GB, and the interface sucks, the thing is virtually free and I don't have to worry about it breaking, hard drive failing, or the eventual obsolescence in less than a year. Anyone shelling out $1000 for the satellite models is a sucker IMO.
I used to be a DirecTV customer and bought a RCA DTC-100 HD tuner on Ebay for $400. I was able to turn around and resell it on Ebay for $350 2 years later, but only because I sold it before the crop of DVRs came out, and because it was a high-demand model. Now, if you are stuck with an obsolete HD Tivo in a year or two, you are pretty much screwed because the new models will be so much better no one will want an older model. Maybe you can sell it to your grandmother though for $100.
With cable though, I can keep getting a better box for virtually nothing. The new Motorola DCT-6412 with two tuners and 120GB hard drive is right around the corner, and I will just have to call and setup an appointment to have the tech come in and swap it out.
LOL yeah, there is only one way to watch 4x3 content: in pillarbox format. Any kind of stretch is a silly thing to do. We watch a lot of 4x3 on our HDTV with gray bars and it doesn't even bother the wife or kids anymore.
Um, the TV has a TV tuner, maybe an HDTV ATSC tuner (although probably not on a 20" model), a remote, etc. You can't really just buy a 19" computer monitor and watch TV on it. Some have S-Video jacks, but you still need additional hardware to watch TV on it.
I made the switch a few weeks ago to DSPAM for my family's email, and let me tell you, it's amazing. We were using bogofilter before and it never did a very good job learning about false negatives.
:)
I could never get the web interface working so I don't have any stats, but I can tell you I get maybe 1 false negative PER WEEK! The rate of false positives is higher than that, maybe 1 per day, but this seems to be getting better the more it learns. My wife's email is also working amazingly well after an initial training period of a few days, because she subscribes to alot of lists that look like spam to me.
I have it setup through fetchmail+postfix+procmail into Courier IMAP, and use special IMAP folders called False-Negatives and False-Positives with a cron job to check them, so we just have to drag misclassified email into those folders. Much faster than using the email method DSPAM mentions in their docs.
The learning curve for setting it up is pretty steep though... it took me maybe 4+ hours to get it working right.
Nope, I've seen the problem a few times already on 1.0. :(
The numbers will probably be misleading with the release of 1.0PR, because every current Firefox user will download it, and the new users will be lost in the noise.
What they could do is have an optional survey or something where people can choose if they are upgrading or a new user.
My site gets about 16000 unique visitors a month (1.4 million hits), and so far in September the stats look like this:
:) These numbers are from awstats which uses total number of hits for this (660K), not visitors.
IE: 77.5%
Firefox: 8.9%
Opera: 3.5%
Safari: 2.6%
Mozilla: 2.2%
Netscape: 1.2%
The trend is there though, I think IE used to be in the 90's. It's just a really slow trend. I'm glad to see old Netscape almost non-existant.
They just added it. :) I did the same on my website, pretty cool stuff.
The point is to be able to offer many local HD channels, to compete with cable. I get my HD over cable for one reason: local channels for which I am too far away to receive with an OTA antenna. Our local ABC DT station in Pittsburgh (WTAE) broadcasts at a ridiculously low power, so it's the only option without a large antenna and unobstructed path to the city.
:)
Oh yeah, cable also gives me a cheap HD DVR box. That'll trump the $1000 HD Tivo anyday.
An Xbox controller is basically the ideal controller for playing emulated games. When using it on SNES games it feels just like playing the real thing. Xbox controllers are simple USB devices so you just need to buy or build a cheap adapter and install a driver. It also works great for PC driving games that support analog controls such as Midnight Club II.
1080p is there but the bandwidth to broadcast this just isn't there. Some 1080p displays are starting to come out.
You can't really say 1080i = 540p. You are right that 1080i is 2 540 fields interlaced, but those are FIELDS, i.e. offset horizontal lines. Combined they do produce 1080 lines of resolution. Native 540p is basically just NTSC, and 1080i can easily said to be amazingly higher quality than NTSC. Most people can also spot the difference between 720p and 1080i too. I can tell when watching ABC/ESPN 720p football compared to CBS/HDNet 1080i football. I don't have a native 720p display though, to be fair, and 1080i does have more motion artifacts. It's generally agreed that 720p is best for fast-moving sports, and 1080i for slow shots, documentaries, 35mm film transfers, etc.
I just upgraded to 3Mbit/512k (in reality it's about 4/640) DSL for less than I was paying for 512k SDSL service. I pay around $45/mo. This is pretty good, and I can certainly understand the lack of 100mbit connections in a country as large as the US. I can download a couple Linux ISOs in a half an hour or so... I'm happy with it. :) Within 5 years or so we'll all look back on this and laugh... when everyone has gigabit ethernet or some other insanely fast fiber connection. Or maybe wireless!
It was a day like any other and my 240GB RAID5 ReiserFS mp3 partition was just minding its own business... a split second power outage later and my precious data was vomited into tens of thousands of nightmarish numeric lost+found files. What I did manage to recover through painstaking use of mp3info, grep, prayer, etc. seemed fine, except for the insidious corrupted block of data that would invariably be within each and every one of my mp3 files. I nearly cried. At least I had an excuse to re-rip all of my CDs in Ogg format now.
The moral of the story: ext3 with data journaling (mount option data=journal), and a UPS are wonderful things. I can power cycle my box all day long with no ill effects (to my files anyway).
You better believe I am staying far far away from Reiser4!
After the nightmare of trying to recover from a 250GB reiserfs corruption after a power loss, spewing tons of numbered files into lost+found... I now only run ext3 with data journaling. It's slightly slower, but can still write at 20-30MB/sec, more than enough for any video editing I need to do.