1. Nice straw man. It's not about networking. It's about plug-and-play networking. About zero-setup. Contrast that with your DIY DVR.
2. I can backup and watch all my Tivo content on my PC and my Laptop. So no, I can't browse Tivo like any other Samba share, but I don't need to. Yes, Tivo has DRM. No, the Tivo DRM does not restrict me from doing what I want to do.
3. CableCARD doesn't work with a Dish. So you use an IR Blaster for that. With a DIY DVR, you use an IR Blaster whether you have a Dish OR Cable. So no, Tivo isn't perfect, but this is a far more elegant solution for Cable customers (vastly outnumbering dish customers) than using an IR Blaster.
4. Due to CableCARD, I can access my VOD services right thru my DVR, Including the HBO On Demand, Cinnemax On Demand, etc. Try THAT with an IR Blaster.
5. If you have issues with finding HD content on YOUR provider, you should take that up with your provider. I have 30 channels offering 1080i and another 10 offering 720p. And despite your claim, these stations are showing true HD content. Sure, a movie from the 40's, 50's, or even 60's won't look any better at 1080p than it will at 480p. But masters exist for movies and televison made in the last, oh, THIRTY YEARS that do contain enough source detail to produce flawless 1080p encodings. Seriously, do you think that the theaters way back in the stone ages of the 1970's were showing movies at 480i? Of COURSE they weren't.
6. I DARE YOU to spec-out a DIY DVR (PC Based) that gives you 2 HDTV tuners allowing the simultaneous recording of 2 1080i streams (1080i since no cable operator I've seen is offering 1080p yet), that has HDMI outputs as well as digital audio output, and a functional remote control. If you can build it all -- case, main board, disk, RAM, sound card w/ Optical-out, video card w/ HDMI-out, DUAL HD tuners, remote control, IR reciever, and IR Blaster for set-top-box control -- and you can do it for $900 (the cost of Tivo plus a lifetime subscription), then I'll concede the argument.
But i think you know as well as I do, just by looking at that shopping list, that doing so would be an awfully tall order.
Nice straw man.
The networking is not the feature. The plug-and-play networking is the feature. The zero-setup-required networking is the feature. And it's a feature you DON'T get with a DIY DVR. This also holds true with Tivo2Go, which is just as trivial to setup and allows me to backup and watch my Tivo content on my PC and Laptop. Evangalize your 'simple file' all you want, but there's nothing I can't do with a Tivo, and I can do it all without an ounce of headache or a single hoop.
And this notion that there's not a lot of HD content makes me assume that you just have a woefully bad cable company. I have 40 channels of HD programming available to me, and 30 of them are 1080i, the others are 720p. The failure of YOUR local provider says nothing of Tivo.
And you're right, CableCARD doesn't help you if you have a dish. But you can still use the IR blaster. IR blasters are clunky and an inelegant solution. With Tivo, you need an IR blaster if you have a dish. With a DIY, you need an IR if you have a dish OR cable. So what's your point here? That Tivo, while better than DIY in this regard, is not perfect? Of course not, but it's closer to perfect than the best DIY DVR out there.
And you said this: "Most content was never made in SD. "
I'm assuming you meant to say "HD" there, not "SD."
But even THAT doesn't make sense. You're right, there's a good chance that movies made before 1970 and TV made before 1980 will show no better at 1080p than it does at 480i. But that's an awful lot of content there. And I don't know what your definition of "MOST" is, but I'd say that MOST the content that MOST people actually want to watch does indeed have masters available that can produce full 1080p encodings.
What you don't have are dual tuners capable of decoding the HD 1080i most cable companies are offering today, unless you're willing to shell out about $500 for it.
What you don't get is a cableCARD slot that, while not perfect, is certainly a much better solution than an IR Blaster taped to your cable box.
What you don't get is one-click integration with Amazon Unboxed and Rhapsody. Simple Device-to-Device networking, brainless remote scheduling, a low profile settop box, a superior remote control, and a polished User Interface that's Jobs-ian in it's attention to detail.
I'm not saying Sage and the ilk are not fine solutions.
But to suggest that Sage is entirely at par w/ Tivo because of these specific feature sets is disingenuous.
You're probably right, it'll happen. But it won't be days or weeks after it launches.
There is enough desire to block these ads that the talent out there will develop solutions. But blocking these ads will be an order of magnitude more difficult than blocking EVERY OTHER KIND of ad.
In every case of existing ad-blocking, you're either blocking a piece of discrete content that matches a number of defined characteristics, or you're blocking a discrete event (like the creation of a pop-up) that matches a number of defined characteristics.
With this system, the ad-blocker is going to actually have to process a video stream.
And the blocker would mean a real trade-off for the user. Because these ads couldn't be blocked in real-time streaming. First because the JavaScript engine that powers FF extensions simply does not have the horsepower to do realtime video processing, but mostly because what would you do for those 15-30 seconds after it identifies an ad and blocks it.
The way to overcome that first hurdle, in my quick analysis, would be to reverse-engineer the Flash plugin itself, which would be complied C and it would at least give you the tools needed to do the job.
And the only way I see to overcome the second would be to:
1. Download the entire video 2. If it's long enough, buffer 2-3 minutes of video, but that risks not having content should there be more than a couple minutes of commercials 3. Simultaneously download multiple streams, each stream staggered by 30 seconds, and when an ad is encountered, swap which stream is displayed. When, say, stream A is swapped for stream B (which is A + 30 seconds), you can terminate A or FF it to be B + 30 seconds, which would be slightly more efficient.
In all cases, the user is going to be affected. The first would be highly intrusive to the desired user experience. The second would be a leaky abstraction -- it would fail often and it would leave users watching ads they're unable to skip.
The third option, the one with the most promise of sustaining the user experience, only does so if the user is on a FAST connection. If the user is on a slow connection (Slow being defined as broadband slower than 5 Mbp/s), you would completely degrade the user experience. Users often find themselves waiting to buffer a single stream, let alone 2 or 3.
Not to mention, the 3rd option would hurt the content providers the most. You'd be doubling and tripling the data transfer needed to watch any given clip. One could see the formation of an arms-race if that should happen: Content providers who have no choice but to up the ads in an attempt to keep it's head above water amidst rising bandwidth bills.
Bottom line is that this is not a trivial problem like identifying an iFrame loading from doubleClick and eliminating it, or detecting a window.open event that wasn't triggered by the user.
You're the one who doesn't grasp economics. You obviously aren't going to be working every (spare) waking hour, so there is no opportunity cost here. If putting together a DVR required you work on nothing else 24/7 for weeks, THAT would be an opportunity cost. But that's not how it works. ie. No opportunity cost.
And I stopped reading.
You just have no clue what you're talking about. EVERYTHING has opportunity cost. EVERYTHING. It makes no difference if you were going to be working-for-pay during that time or not. None. At all.
Look, kid, this is covered in Micro 101. (And 201, 301, 401, Macro 101, 201, 301 and 401 for that matter). Go back, learn a thing or two, and then we can talk.
I got this far: You're the one who doesn't grasp economics. You obviously aren't going to be working every (spare) waking hour, so there is no opportunity cost here. If putting together a DVR required you work on nothing else 24/7 for weeks, THAT would be an opportunity cost. But that's not how it works. ie. No opportunity cost. <br><br> And I stopped reading. <br><br> You just have no clue what you're talking about. EVERYTHING has opportunity cost. EVERYTHING. It makes no difference if you were going to be working-for-pay during that time or not. None. At all. <br><br> Look, kid, this is covered in Micro 101. (And 201, 301, 401, Macro 101, 201, 301 and 401 for that matter). Go back, learn a thing or two, and then we can talk. <br><br> k? thx.
This is the benefit of the Tivo CableCARD slot. Not only can I record 2 HD streams simultaneously, I can record every channel I recieve, including HBO, etc, that are encrypted. And I don't have to use some crappy setup where I have an IR Blaster taped to the fricken cable box.
Not to mention, Tivo is the only setup I've seen that's been THX certified, that has an Optical Out port for audio, that has both HDMI and Component video outputs.
It's just a great, great appliance.
And it comes with the ability to get Amazon UnBox movies and Rhapsody music subscription at the click of a button, not to mention the ability to play your own music (and photos) from your PC. It also lets you watch things you've recorded on your PC, and on other Tivos on your network--and networking them is trivial--and it includes remote-scheduling that is a no-brainer for anybody.
It's downright Jobsian in its quality. Apple should scrap iTV and just purchase Tivo. Make the box white, run a trendy ad campaign, give it an iPod dock, drop Amazon UnBox and add iTunes. You do that, and nobody would ever know that it wasn't designed by Apple from the ground up. It's that good.
First, this is a false premise. That $200 PC with Myth is NOT the equivilent of a Tivo Series3.
You can get an HD Series2 Tivo for $100 that supports up to 1080i.
By going to a Series3 you get CableCARD technology. You're not getting that with a $200 PC running Myth. You get OUTSTANDING HCI, both in terms of the software and the exceptional remote control. You get dual tuners, you get a nice LCD output telling you what's being recorded. You get a LOAD of Media Center features including stream Rhapsody and Amazon UnBoxed at a single click of a button.
Second, You are wrong, too.
This is simple economics. Opportunity cost.
I work 50 hours a week, and, as a software developer, I make more than the US Median income.
The simple question of opportunity cost is: What COULD I be doing with these resources had I not done this.
Time is a valuable resource for most of us. Once you move out of moms basement, hang that B.S. on your wall, being your career and even perhaps begin a family, time is very, very precious. No offense, but you come across as somebody who cannot yet relate to that. When you're in your late teens/early 20s college years you have more constraints on your money than you do on your time. That resource balance shifts rapidly in the following years. You find yourself with all your own interests, the demands of a spouse and (perhaps) children, the demands of a career that--when you're making a decent living--demands far more than 9-5, 40 hours a week.
Finally, you said something thst made me laugh:"What's more, it's amazing how people focus on initial time, and ignore the rest." I started with ReplayTV. I've used Tivo for years. I also have some slim experience with the DVR from my cable company. And my brother ran Myth for years, and now runs Beyond.
TiVo has, bar none, the best HCI. It's far easier to do common tasks in Tivo. It's a polished user experience that's downright Jobsian. Its use of audible and visual feedback, the organization of its menus and options, its simple PNP tivo-to-tivo networking, its small form factor and quiet fan, all of it. It's all superior to every other DVR I'd seen.
I bought a 40" LCD on Sunday but I won't be touching a Blue Ray player for at least a year. $150 is actually my sweet spot. That's what I picked-up my first DVD player for in late 2000.
I get 720p from my cable provider and while I'd love to have 1080p content, I'm perfectly content waiting.
I find your logic flawed. It's about cost/benefit. I get a dramatic benefit going from my 30" 4:3 tube to going to a 40" 16:9 LCD. I get a large number of cable channels at 720p compared to the 480i I was used to. I get up-converted picture from all my DVDs. I get the benefit of a native wide-screen format. I get the ability to plug my computer into the TV and have it be not only usable but a pleasure to use. I save a load of space in the living room, and an all-around pleasing aesthetic.
With Blue Ray, the ONLY thing I get is the ability to use full 1080p. That's nice, and something i will definitely purchase eventually, in fact, Blue Ray is the sole reason I went for 1080p instead of saving $3-400 and going 720p.
But that's the only benefit. And I get so much benefit out of the move from 480 to 720 that going the extra mile to 1080 is not at all a necessity in my mind.
ESPECIALLY because in due time these things will be $75 just like todays average upconverting players are.
I know, Excel is made by Microsoft, and is teh suxors or whatever.
But, in all seriousness, Excel probably has the most well-optimized, concisely written formula engine I've ever heard of. I had to write a similar engine myself recently, taking into account complex dependency hierarchies and such. It's not a terribly difficult problem to solve, but it's not trivial, and doing it FAST is a lot more difficult. And honestly, I had things an order of magnitude easier than did the Excel team because I just embedded a Python interpreter, using that as my formula language.
On another note, a friend of mine is a Quant at an investment bank. He once said to me "dude, if you knew how many billions of dollars were processed every day by Excel macros, you'd cash out your 401k and put it all under your mattress"
1. What would be the point of having a global, static variable? 2. Of course, the original post also threw-in "Constant" which, of course, makes the other designations moot anyway.
I agree completely, but it doesn't make a difference to my original point.
Ok, so Be wasn't valuable BECAUSE OF MICROSOFT, fine, whatever, my only point is that Be wasn't valuable simply because Software companies cannot create value. They can. The failure of Be wasn't endemic to the software industry, it was endemic to that specific company and, by at least one court's judgment, it's competition.
Honestly, this supports my point.
Because Microsoft knew that the software wasn't valuable until it's code-base was mated with a user-base. It prevented the latter and held the market.
I'm not saying I agree with the guys entire premise.
But I do agree that software companies generate wealth.
I mean, you used BeOS as an example. That's a bad example because BeOS was never a terribly _valuable_ product. Sure, there was a large investment made, but very little value produced. This is not endemic to the software industry, it's endemic to Be. Supporting this theory that a large investment produced little value is the fact that THE COMPANY WENT UNDER!
With software, the user-base is equally as valuable as the code. Perhaps even more-so.
As an asset, BeOS was just half done: The code was there, the user-base was not.
This is a bit analogous to a contractor building half a house and going bankrupt. Sure, the half-built dwelling is worth SOMETHING, but not much.
1. If both are equally effective, wouldn't Talk Therapy be better than a pharmacological cure? All things being equal, wouldn't you prefer to keep your body as unadulterated as possible? 2. Anybody that does a job 2000+ hours a year develops tunnel vision. A surgeon sees problems as surgical problems. An analyst sees problems as analysis problems, that sorta thing. Hard to blame them.
You're not laying down the law "because I'm the parent and you're the child"
What's wrong with that?
You act like that's a bad thing.
What this country needs is MORE parenting, not less.
What most children need are parents with MORE time to set positive examples, and MORE concern about the negative ones.
I've seen threads like this before on Slashdot.
Inevitably some 16-24 year old who hasn't raised a child starts babbling about applying libertarian political philosophies to parenting.
It's insane and there's simply no way to win with people like you because you're certain that YOU KNOW BEST.
It's impossible for you to see it, but your attitude is the reason parenting of that style is necessary. Because when somebody is so damn certain that they're right they can cause themselves and others a lot of pain and trouble when it turns out they weren't.
Load up a few games. Show them how to use a Paint-like program and a word processor.
Teach them the value of money by giving allowance that they can chose to spend on a new game (and which one to pick!) or something else they may like.
Teach them the value of caring for things by waiting a bit to fix whatever they (potentially) break.
With the amount of educational software, and the fact that innate computer skills are already a requirement in the workforce (let alone 15 years from now when this girl will begin her career), a computer can be a valuable tool for a child.
I had "root" access to each of my computers as a child. The first was handed down to me from my dad when I was 9 or so and it was exclusively my toy, kept in my bedroom.
Of course, this was 1992, and it was an IBM XT (and later a PS2, err.. an *IBM* PS2). Aside from word processing and the few games that worked on a monochrome monitor there wasn't much you could do with it.
Now-a-days?
No way.
I cautioned my parents not to let my THIRTEEN y/o sister have a PC in her bedroom, let alone a seven year old!
Can anybody here think of ONE good reason for a 2nd grader to have privacy like this?
In truth, the constitution gave the President the unilateral authority of war and peace.
This was only changed after Vietnam. The War Powers Act only allows the President to engage in armed conflict for 60 days without the consent of Congress.
Of course, indirectly, the Congress has always had a lot of authority over war since they're the only ones that can sign the checks.
In practice, though, "you must support the troops" has been a meme that's worked like a charm going all the way back to the War of 1812, when some 'real men of genius' decided that Napoleon was kicking so much dirt in the faces of the British that we could just, oh, CONQUEROR CANADA and the wouldn't hardly notice. You'd think the way we got our asses handed to us (the White House was torched by the Red Coats) would've made us rethink unilateral war powers back then, but it wasn't in the cards.
On a complete side-note, whenever people say that "We've never lost a war" or "We've never lost a war until Vietnam," they always seem to forget about that time that, ya know, OUR CAPITOL WAS CONQUERED BY A FOREIGN ARMY:)
1. You picked out one of the easiest straw men to knock down. Compare that to genuinely useful prefixes like, say, "us" to indicated an unsafe string.
2. The code snippet is certainly redundant, but what's better?
Row current = getCurrentRow();
???
It's fine, until you use the 'current' variable 100 lines later in the procedure. One day the debugger throws an error on the line and you have to locate the declaration and figure out wth "current" is.
I believe in writing self-documenting code. And "current" just does not do it.
Now...
I'm sure you'll give me some nice CS201 line like "if you have a 100 line procedure you've got bigger problems" (akin to the CS201 platitude you threw-out there a few posts upthread).
In theory it's nice to have a procedure no longer than a single screen. In practice, some algorithms just don't allow for expression in 100 lines in any way that approaches being readable and self-documenting.
However, this shows it's head more clearly when dealing with properties.
If rowCurrent is a property, it's a lot more acceptable to even the pedantic-CS201 types that the declaration will not be in the same vicinity as the calling code.
When you're working with a file with dozens or hundreds of includes, finding the class definition and then the property declaration within it is certainly possible but it's nowhere near convienant.
Again, modern IDE's alleviate this for you, NOT modern languages.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Nice straw man. It's not about networking. It's about plug-and-play networking. About zero-setup. Contrast that with your DIY DVR.
2. I can backup and watch all my Tivo content on my PC and my Laptop. So no, I can't browse Tivo like any other Samba share, but I don't need to. Yes, Tivo has DRM. No, the Tivo DRM does not restrict me from doing what I want to do.
3. CableCARD doesn't work with a Dish. So you use an IR Blaster for that. With a DIY DVR, you use an IR Blaster whether you have a Dish OR Cable. So no, Tivo isn't perfect, but this is a far more elegant solution for Cable customers (vastly outnumbering dish customers) than using an IR Blaster.
4. Due to CableCARD, I can access my VOD services right thru my DVR, Including the HBO On Demand, Cinnemax On Demand, etc. Try THAT with an IR Blaster.
5. If you have issues with finding HD content on YOUR provider, you should take that up with your provider. I have 30 channels offering 1080i and another 10 offering 720p. And despite your claim, these stations are showing true HD content. Sure, a movie from the 40's, 50's, or even 60's won't look any better at 1080p than it will at 480p. But masters exist for movies and televison made in the last, oh, THIRTY YEARS that do contain enough source detail to produce flawless 1080p encodings. Seriously, do you think that the theaters way back in the stone ages of the 1970's were showing movies at 480i? Of COURSE they weren't.
6. I DARE YOU to spec-out a DIY DVR (PC Based) that gives you 2 HDTV tuners allowing the simultaneous recording of 2 1080i streams (1080i since no cable operator I've seen is offering 1080p yet), that has HDMI outputs as well as digital audio output, and a functional remote control. If you can build it all -- case, main board, disk, RAM, sound card w/ Optical-out, video card w/ HDMI-out, DUAL HD tuners, remote control, IR reciever, and IR Blaster for set-top-box control -- and you can do it for $900 (the cost of Tivo plus a lifetime subscription), then I'll concede the argument.
But i think you know as well as I do, just by looking at that shopping list, that doing so would be an awfully tall order.
Nice straw man.
The networking is not the feature. The plug-and-play networking is the feature. The zero-setup-required networking is the feature. And it's a feature you DON'T get with a DIY DVR. This also holds true with Tivo2Go, which is just as trivial to setup and allows me to backup and watch my Tivo content on my PC and Laptop. Evangalize your 'simple file' all you want, but there's nothing I can't do with a Tivo, and I can do it all without an ounce of headache or a single hoop.
And this notion that there's not a lot of HD content makes me assume that you just have a woefully bad cable company. I have 40 channels of HD programming available to me, and 30 of them are 1080i, the others are 720p. The failure of YOUR local provider says nothing of Tivo.
And you're right, CableCARD doesn't help you if you have a dish. But you can still use the IR blaster. IR blasters are clunky and an inelegant solution. With Tivo, you need an IR blaster if you have a dish. With a DIY, you need an IR if you have a dish OR cable. So what's your point here? That Tivo, while better than DIY in this regard, is not perfect? Of course not, but it's closer to perfect than the best DIY DVR out there.
And you said this: "Most content was never made in SD. "
I'm assuming you meant to say "HD" there, not "SD."
But even THAT doesn't make sense. You're right, there's a good chance that movies made before 1970 and TV made before 1980 will show no better at 1080p than it does at 480i. But that's an awful lot of content there. And I don't know what your definition of "MOST" is, but I'd say that MOST the content that MOST people actually want to watch does indeed have masters available that can produce full 1080p encodings.
What you don't have are dual tuners capable of decoding the HD 1080i most cable companies are offering today, unless you're willing to shell out about $500 for it.
What you don't get is a cableCARD slot that, while not perfect, is certainly a much better solution than an IR Blaster taped to your cable box.
What you don't get is one-click integration with Amazon Unboxed and Rhapsody. Simple Device-to-Device networking, brainless remote scheduling, a low profile settop box, a superior remote control, and a polished User Interface that's Jobs-ian in it's attention to detail.
I'm not saying Sage and the ilk are not fine solutions.
But to suggest that Sage is entirely at par w/ Tivo because of these specific feature sets is disingenuous.
You're probably right, it'll happen. But it won't be days or weeks after it launches.
There is enough desire to block these ads that the talent out there will develop solutions. But blocking these ads will be an order of magnitude more difficult than blocking EVERY OTHER KIND of ad.
In every case of existing ad-blocking, you're either blocking a piece of discrete content that matches a number of defined characteristics, or you're blocking a discrete event (like the creation of a pop-up) that matches a number of defined characteristics.
With this system, the ad-blocker is going to actually have to process a video stream.
And the blocker would mean a real trade-off for the user. Because these ads couldn't be blocked in real-time streaming. First because the JavaScript engine that powers FF extensions simply does not have the horsepower to do realtime video processing, but mostly because what would you do for those 15-30 seconds after it identifies an ad and blocks it.
The way to overcome that first hurdle, in my quick analysis, would be to reverse-engineer the Flash plugin itself, which would be complied C and it would at least give you the tools needed to do the job.
And the only way I see to overcome the second would be to:
1. Download the entire video
2. If it's long enough, buffer 2-3 minutes of video, but that risks not having content should there be more than a couple minutes of commercials
3. Simultaneously download multiple streams, each stream staggered by 30 seconds, and when an ad is encountered, swap which stream is displayed. When, say, stream A is swapped for stream B (which is A + 30 seconds), you can terminate A or FF it to be B + 30 seconds, which would be slightly more efficient.
In all cases, the user is going to be affected. The first would be highly intrusive to the desired user experience. The second would be a leaky abstraction -- it would fail often and it would leave users watching ads they're unable to skip.
The third option, the one with the most promise of sustaining the user experience, only does so if the user is on a FAST connection. If the user is on a slow connection (Slow being defined as broadband slower than 5 Mbp/s), you would completely degrade the user experience. Users often find themselves waiting to buffer a single stream, let alone 2 or 3.
Not to mention, the 3rd option would hurt the content providers the most. You'd be doubling and tripling the data transfer needed to watch any given clip. One could see the formation of an arms-race if that should happen: Content providers who have no choice but to up the ads in an attempt to keep it's head above water amidst rising bandwidth bills.
Bottom line is that this is not a trivial problem like identifying an iFrame loading from doubleClick and eliminating it, or detecting a window.open event that wasn't triggered by the user.
(Captcha: Remove. How apt)
I got this far:
You're the one who doesn't grasp economics. You obviously aren't going to be working every (spare) waking hour, so there is no opportunity cost here. If putting together a DVR required you work on nothing else 24/7 for weeks, THAT would be an opportunity cost. But that's not how it works. ie. No opportunity cost.
And I stopped reading.
You just have no clue what you're talking about. EVERYTHING has opportunity cost. EVERYTHING. It makes no difference if you were going to be working-for-pay during that time or not. None. At all.
Look, kid, this is covered in Micro 101. (And 201, 301, 401, Macro 101, 201, 301 and 401 for that matter). Go back, learn a thing or two, and then we can talk.
k? thx.
I got this far: You're the one who doesn't grasp economics. You obviously aren't going to be working every (spare) waking hour, so there is no opportunity cost here. If putting together a DVR required you work on nothing else 24/7 for weeks, THAT would be an opportunity cost. But that's not how it works. ie. No opportunity cost.
<br><br>
And I stopped reading.
<br><br>
You just have no clue what you're talking about. EVERYTHING has opportunity cost. EVERYTHING. It makes no difference if you were going to be working-for-pay during that time or not. None. At all.
<br><br>
Look, kid, this is covered in Micro 101. (And 201, 301, 401, Macro 101, 201, 301 and 401 for that matter). Go back, learn a thing or two, and then we can talk.
<br><br>
k? thx.
I dunno about #4.
I have a Roomba. Every day when I come home my carpets in my flat are clean.
My ONLY interaction with Roomba is emptying the bin twice a week and cleaning the brushes twice a month. Probably 1 hour a month, total.
Sure, it's not exactly Rosie, but it's certainly a robot.
This is the benefit of the Tivo CableCARD slot. Not only can I record 2 HD streams simultaneously, I can record every channel I recieve, including HBO, etc, that are encrypted. And I don't have to use some crappy setup where I have an IR Blaster taped to the fricken cable box.
Not to mention, Tivo is the only setup I've seen that's been THX certified, that has an Optical Out port for audio, that has both HDMI and Component video outputs.
It's just a great, great appliance.
And it comes with the ability to get Amazon UnBox movies and Rhapsody music subscription at the click of a button, not to mention the ability to play your own music (and photos) from your PC. It also lets you watch things you've recorded on your PC, and on other Tivos on your network--and networking them is trivial--and it includes remote-scheduling that is a no-brainer for anybody.
It's downright Jobsian in its quality. Apple should scrap iTV and just purchase Tivo. Make the box white, run a trendy ad campaign, give it an iPod dock, drop Amazon UnBox and add iTunes. You do that, and nobody would ever know that it wasn't designed by Apple from the ground up. It's that good.
First, this is a false premise. That $200 PC with Myth is NOT the equivilent of a Tivo Series3.
You can get an HD Series2 Tivo for $100 that supports up to 1080i.
By going to a Series3 you get CableCARD technology. You're not getting that with a $200 PC running Myth. You get OUTSTANDING HCI, both in terms of the software and the exceptional remote control. You get dual tuners, you get a nice LCD output telling you what's being recorded. You get a LOAD of Media Center features including stream Rhapsody and Amazon UnBoxed at a single click of a button.
Second, You are wrong, too.
This is simple economics. Opportunity cost.
I work 50 hours a week, and, as a software developer, I make more than the US Median income.
The simple question of opportunity cost is: What COULD I be doing with these resources had I not done this.
Time is a valuable resource for most of us. Once you move out of moms basement, hang that B.S. on your wall, being your career and even perhaps begin a family, time is very, very precious. No offense, but you come across as somebody who cannot yet relate to that. When you're in your late teens/early 20s college years you have more constraints on your money than you do on your time. That resource balance shifts rapidly in the following years. You find yourself with all your own interests, the demands of a spouse and (perhaps) children, the demands of a career that--when you're making a decent living--demands far more than 9-5, 40 hours a week.
Finally, you said something thst made me laugh: "What's more, it's amazing how people focus on initial time, and ignore the rest." I started with ReplayTV. I've used Tivo for years. I also have some slim experience with the DVR from my cable company. And my brother ran Myth for years, and now runs Beyond.
TiVo has, bar none, the best HCI. It's far easier to do common tasks in Tivo. It's a polished user experience that's downright Jobsian. Its use of audible and visual feedback, the organization of its menus and options, its simple PNP tivo-to-tivo networking, its small form factor and quiet fan, all of it. It's all superior to every other DVR I'd seen.
Your argument holds no water here, my friend.
Yes.
I bought a 40" LCD on Sunday but I won't be touching a Blue Ray player for at least a year. $150 is actually my sweet spot. That's what I picked-up my first DVD player for in late 2000.
I get 720p from my cable provider and while I'd love to have 1080p content, I'm perfectly content waiting.
I find your logic flawed. It's about cost/benefit. I get a dramatic benefit going from my 30" 4:3 tube to going to a 40" 16:9 LCD. I get a large number of cable channels at 720p compared to the 480i I was used to. I get up-converted picture from all my DVDs. I get the benefit of a native wide-screen format. I get the ability to plug my computer into the TV and have it be not only usable but a pleasure to use. I save a load of space in the living room, and an all-around pleasing aesthetic.
With Blue Ray, the ONLY thing I get is the ability to use full 1080p. That's nice, and something i will definitely purchase eventually, in fact, Blue Ray is the sole reason I went for 1080p instead of saving $3-400 and going 720p.
But that's the only benefit. And I get so much benefit out of the move from 480 to 720 that going the extra mile to 1080 is not at all a necessity in my mind.
ESPECIALLY because in due time these things will be $75 just like todays average upconverting players are.
I know, Excel is made by Microsoft, and is teh suxors or whatever.
But, in all seriousness, Excel probably has the most well-optimized, concisely written formula engine I've ever heard of. I had to write a similar engine myself recently, taking into account complex dependency hierarchies and such. It's not a terribly difficult problem to solve, but it's not trivial, and doing it FAST is a lot more difficult. And honestly, I had things an order of magnitude easier than did the Excel team because I just embedded a Python interpreter, using that as my formula language.
On another note, a friend of mine is a Quant at an investment bank. He once said to me "dude, if you knew how many billions of dollars were processed every day by Excel macros, you'd cash out your 401k and put it all under your mattress"
Yeah, and nobody would use an email provider where the last line of every email is an advertisement, either....
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1. What would be the point of having a global, static variable?
2. Of course, the original post also threw-in "Constant" which, of course, makes the other designations moot anyway.
They could include inline text ads with the IM content for non-AOL clients....
no.
I agree completely, but it doesn't make a difference to my original point.
Ok, so Be wasn't valuable BECAUSE OF MICROSOFT, fine, whatever, my only point is that Be wasn't valuable simply because Software companies cannot create value. They can. The failure of Be wasn't endemic to the software industry, it was endemic to that specific company and, by at least one court's judgment, it's competition.
Honestly, this supports my point.
Because Microsoft knew that the software wasn't valuable until it's code-base was mated with a user-base. It prevented the latter and held the market.
I'm not saying I agree with the guys entire premise.
But I do agree that software companies generate wealth.
I mean, you used BeOS as an example. That's a bad example because BeOS was never a terribly _valuable_ product. Sure, there was a large investment made, but very little value produced. This is not endemic to the software industry, it's endemic to Be. Supporting this theory that a large investment produced little value is the fact that THE COMPANY WENT UNDER!
With software, the user-base is equally as valuable as the code. Perhaps even more-so.
As an asset, BeOS was just half done: The code was there, the user-base was not.
This is a bit analogous to a contractor building half a house and going bankrupt. Sure, the half-built dwelling is worth SOMETHING, but not much.
1. If both are equally effective, wouldn't Talk Therapy be better than a pharmacological cure? All things being equal, wouldn't you prefer to keep your body as unadulterated as possible?
2. Anybody that does a job 2000+ hours a year develops tunnel vision. A surgeon sees problems as surgical problems. An analyst sees problems as analysis problems, that sorta thing. Hard to blame them.
I agree with you, but you didn't say anything to disagree with me.
The illusion of privacy is not the same thing as privacy.
Just like the illusion of freedom....
You're not laying down the law "because I'm the parent and you're the child"
What's wrong with that?
You act like that's a bad thing.
What this country needs is MORE parenting, not less.
What most children need are parents with MORE time to set positive examples, and MORE concern about the negative ones.
I've seen threads like this before on Slashdot.
Inevitably some 16-24 year old who hasn't raised a child starts babbling about applying libertarian political philosophies to parenting.
It's insane and there's simply no way to win with people like you because you're certain that YOU KNOW BEST.
It's impossible for you to see it, but your attitude is the reason parenting of that style is necessary. Because when somebody is so damn certain that they're right they can cause themselves and others a lot of pain and trouble when it turns out they weren't.
"My parents never snooped or prodded into what I was doing"
Or they were just very careful about it.
To borrow some phrasing... anybody can snoop. To snoop without anybody knowing they were snooped on, THAT'S the goal.
Absolutely.
An unplugged box is fine.
Load up a few games. Show them how to use a Paint-like program and a word processor.
Teach them the value of money by giving allowance that they can chose to spend on a new game (and which one to pick!) or something else they may like.
Teach them the value of caring for things by waiting a bit to fix whatever they (potentially) break.
With the amount of educational software, and the fact that innate computer skills are already a requirement in the workforce (let alone 15 years from now when this girl will begin her career), a computer can be a valuable tool for a child.
Exactly.
I had "root" access to each of my computers as a child. The first was handed down to me from my dad when I was 9 or so and it was exclusively my toy, kept in my bedroom.
Of course, this was 1992, and it was an IBM XT (and later a PS2, err.. an *IBM* PS2). Aside from word processing and the few games that worked on a monochrome monitor there wasn't much you could do with it.
Now-a-days?
No way.
I cautioned my parents not to let my THIRTEEN y/o sister have a PC in her bedroom, let alone a seven year old!
Can anybody here think of ONE good reason for a 2nd grader to have privacy like this?
That's just silly.
Investors implement the ISheep interface, but they clearly extend the doucheBag class.
In truth, the constitution gave the President the unilateral authority of war and peace.
:)
This was only changed after Vietnam. The War Powers Act only allows the President to engage in armed conflict for 60 days without the consent of Congress.
Of course, indirectly, the Congress has always had a lot of authority over war since they're the only ones that can sign the checks.
In practice, though, "you must support the troops" has been a meme that's worked like a charm going all the way back to the War of 1812, when some 'real men of genius' decided that Napoleon was kicking so much dirt in the faces of the British that we could just, oh, CONQUEROR CANADA and the wouldn't hardly notice. You'd think the way we got our asses handed to us (the White House was torched by the Red Coats) would've made us rethink unilateral war powers back then, but it wasn't in the cards.
On a complete side-note, whenever people say that "We've never lost a war" or "We've never lost a war until Vietnam," they always seem to forget about that time that, ya know, OUR CAPITOL WAS CONQUERED BY A FOREIGN ARMY
Yes, your example shows some redundancy:
Row rowCurrent = getCurrentRow();
But I have 2 thoughts on this.
1. You picked out one of the easiest straw men to knock down. Compare that to genuinely useful prefixes like, say, "us" to indicated an unsafe string.
2. The code snippet is certainly redundant, but what's better?
Row current = getCurrentRow();
???
It's fine, until you use the 'current' variable 100 lines later in the procedure. One day the debugger throws an error on the line and you have to locate the declaration and figure out wth "current" is.
I believe in writing self-documenting code. And "current" just does not do it.
Now...
I'm sure you'll give me some nice CS201 line like "if you have a 100 line procedure you've got bigger problems" (akin to the CS201 platitude you threw-out there a few posts upthread).
In theory it's nice to have a procedure no longer than a single screen. In practice, some algorithms just don't allow for expression in 100 lines in any way that approaches being readable and self-documenting.
However, this shows it's head more clearly when dealing with properties.
If rowCurrent is a property, it's a lot more acceptable to even the pedantic-CS201 types that the declaration will not be in the same vicinity as the calling code.
When you're working with a file with dozens or hundreds of includes, finding the class definition and then the property declaration within it is certainly possible but it's nowhere near convienant.
Again, modern IDE's alleviate this for you, NOT modern languages.
In summary, I stand by my original point.