For 60% of the cost you get 33% the result!
on
Build Your Own Linux PVR
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
From my figuring, the author spent $300 building this super-widget. So, he saved $250 over a new TiVo with a lifetime suibscription.
For that, he sacrificed a whole lot!
* 15fps * poor video quality (vertical lines) on top of the 15fps * No 'live pause' * No watching one program while saving another * No guide, etc.
For me, the tradeoff isn't worth it. Even if TiVo fails as a company, I suspect that the community will come up with a network-hack for getting scheduling information.
And even if you lose that, you still have a better-quality recorder with an easy interface, more features, that's running linux.
It only compares if you wanted to play around building a PVR for personal humor. It doesn't make sense as a solution, though:)
If you can say "I can always go with a competing database" then you can say "I can always go with a competing desktop/server infrastructure."
At an enterprise level, moving from one database platform to another, while possible, is far from trivial.
This type of licensing is across all platforms I've negotiated on, from DB servers to App servers to web servers. Companies are offered significant discounts (in some cases I worked with, on the order of 50% on a $500,000.00 order) if they don't purchase the right to resell to another party.
If KMart didn't purchase assignability, they shouldn't be allowed the right just because they are in bankruptcy.
I had LASIK done about 4 months ago (from 8 diopters worth of glasses) and for the last four months I've been kicking myself that I didn't do it long ago.
Of course, long ago the procedures weren't nearly as good. I evaluated it, and felt that I was going to a competent surgeon with a proven track record, and that I was willing to chance the risk.
Now that I live without glasses, I realize that, in my risk/reward analysis, I only gave the reward side about half the credit I should have.
btw, my vision was corrected to 20/20 and 20/25 instantly, and as everything healed is down to 20/15 and 20/20 (better than with glasses).
Sadly, while this may have been picked up on a slow news day, it's true nonetheless. I noted personally that this might be an issue when the original tests were conducted and it was discovered that UWB devices were generating interference at outputs far, far lower than anticipated.
The intent of the tests were actually to demonstrate that UWB devices would not be an issue; I believe everyone was shocked at the results.
Antiquated technology or not, the ILS is still the standard in many, many locations. Replacing it would certainly cause those nice, low, $99 cross-country airfares to go away.
The malicious implications are certainly disheartening, but are really a second order concern.
I Agree! I was one of the loyal Netscape users who couldn't deal with the incredibly, tongue-tyingly horrid Netscape 4, and went with IE4 instead.
However, for the exact reasons above, I find myself using Mozilla 1.0 as much as possible now, mainly because 1) it works as well as IE including plugins, et al (except ActiveX, of course) 2) I prefer the Mozilla IMAP client, and 3) IT STOPS THE DAMN POPUPS!
Are we all really so stupid as to think that the cost of the CD alone is the only factor in its pricing?
That's as moronic as saying Intel should sell CPUs for 20 bucks because that's way more than it costs to make a CPU.
In both cases, it totally ignores development, infrastructure, salaries, and so forth.
These type of statments only make the 'average Joe' on the street go 'these guys are a bunch of idiots looking to find lame excuses to rip off music companies.'
Arguements like this aren't proving anything other than total stupidity.
I think that perhaps what Microsoft was trying to do was limit people from running:
Web servers Database servers Application servers
and the like
And because they don't often think out of their box, they only considered their own RDP solution and not anything else.
From the MS perspective, as they continue to develop and refine the desktop/workstation product, it becomes more and more capable of acting as a server. But in the MS design, one of their revenue designs is around selling workstation licenses for far less than server licenses. (Hey, Sun does it as well...note that Solaris is only 'free' for eight processors or less).
Now, also from the MS point of view, the server platforms do contain more software -- it's NOT just a 'naming convention' but XP has certainly matured to the point where people would consider running server farms of XP machines rather than Win2k servers -- and that's what they want to avoid.
Remember that the people who write these things are lawyers, and not always (ever?) technicians.
There are a few things I'd like to point out. I hold this particular subject near and dear, as both an aviation enthusiast (for example, http://xb70.interceptor.com/), a computer geek, and a commercially rated pilot who has owned several aircraft.
IANAL, but:
1) it concerns me that all the EAA article mentions is the availablilty of the documents. There's no protection should a copyright holder appear post-fact to sue you for building his STC'd widget without license.
2) A difference between most abandonware and this is that certainly the intent here is to only deal with entities that no longer exist. That's entirely different from entities that don't care. most "abandonware" it seems, is indeed owned by someone and is copyrighted; it's just that they don't care to support, sell, or do anything but sit on it. This example won't change that a bit.
3) The reason that type certificates (TC) and Supplemental Type Certificates (STC) are zealously protected is because a lot of expense goes into them. Due to the nature of aircraft, even fairly small changes (such as replacing an engine with an almost identical model that 'bolts in' without physical changes) have to be documented and tested extensively. The only way for people to recoup those costs is to charge users of the STC a fee for a 'license.'
4) as others have pointed out, virtually everything the EAA is talking about is very old and has been abandoned for decades.
Finally, even as a corporate manager, I was able to go to a UNIX on my laptop without dual-booting, etc. It's what I needed -- a UNIX with MS Office! While there's still some corner cases where not having a windows machine is annoying, they aren't every day occurances.
What OS X on Mac hardware offers is not only the ability to run existing OS 9 apps via the Classic layer, but it offers the Carbon API as a fairly simple interface that allows you to port your existing Mac apps to OS X much easier than otherwise (and allows the same binary to run on most of the Modern Mac's running OS 9, as well).
OS X on Intel, without that ability, really doesn't give us anything other than a cleaner UI -- but without applications, it doesn't really matter. Desktop users care about applications first, OS a distant second (maybe even third?)
I agree! Why should my heirs EVER have to lose the exclusive right to my works?
Here's a comparison: If I work hard and leave 40 million to my relatives, and they shepherd it and don't spend the capital, would we take it away 50 years after my death? Of course not!
It's great that so many people in the world Open Source their stuff, or release it to the public domain, but that's a choice you got to make, how about MY right to chose?
Oh yeah, this is/. You have a right to chose what you are told to chose -- Free as in you can agree with the Open Surce collective, not Free as in speech.
If life solely revolved around the core OS, then Linux would already own the world.
The fact is, it's all about having applications, such as Microsoft Office, Photoshop, etc. (even if some of them have to be run in Classic mode, which is less than ideal, at least they largely run)
OS X for intel would have none of that, nor the simple 'Carbon' layer allowing existing applications to run without total rework.
Virtual any ISP of size uses web proxies. It improves the performance to it's users by return data more quickly. In fact, it's simple enoough to argue that any major ISP that's NOT caching is a bad Netizen, for pointlessly wasting bandwidth!
And I am sure they are tracking usage, to some extent, because they are looking for patterns to more efficiently tune the proxies. A common tuning, for example, is to only cache certain sites (for example, your personal homepage on xyz.com doesn't ever get cached) for greater performance (cache doesn't waste time putting it into the cache to have it pressured out again).
If you find that they are looking at the returned data itself for no reason, then yes, that's wrong. But just plain old caching? Come on, let's be serious.
This is a wonderful example of "You're not cool enough to use my resources" baloney that strikes fear into the hearts of managers. it makes them skeptical of the entire Open/Free Software idea.
"Sure, it's free, but I'm concerned that it won't play well with my installed software base."
"Sure, it's free, but man, you just never know what project might 'offend the sensibilities' of these Open/Free developers and then they'll walk out, making me look bad."
And the most damning truth in the big bad world:
"not a team player."
We can all sit and yank our own cranks thinking "they're full of it" but the fact is, there are a lot more of "them" than "us," and things like this won't change that.
Re:For what it's worth, I bought a Loki game today
on
Last Word on Loki
·
· Score: 1
That's the best and most concise analogy I've ever heard.
From what I read, Comcast prohibits you from supplying bandwidth outside your household. That's reasonable.
It also appears that it's not that that they want to prohibit NAT, but, rather, that they don't understand how it could be used. The FAQ clearly implies that they believe that each computer will need an IP from them. So they are limiting it to three per household, and charging for it.
And for many people, who don't understand / care about firewalls, they may just go with that solution.
I think Comcast's only concern is conservation of their IP pool, not the computers themselves.
I bet if someone offered to work with them, they'd modify their FAQ's.
While the network won't depend on wires,
it requires a lot of infrastucture to make it work. You need even greater density thann you do with cell phones (about three times as much, IIRC). Even in the Bay Area there are tons of places you can get cell phone service where Ricochet service was flaky.
That makes it highly impractical for rural solutions -- heck, you'd have to have a tower located at each farmhouse, just about.
The value of the network will only be realized if 2.5/3G fails miserably, in which case, as a mobile substitue in dense metro areas, you might have a market.
But personally, I feel it's a branch of technology that eventually goes nowhere.
You can get a major office suite, browsers, and build just about everything -- and this is in the first release. By December, there will no need for everything else. After all, I use a computer to be productive -- and OS X gives me that freedom. It's worth the extra money not to waste my time.
This has been the thought running through my mind -- that the Open Source / Free Software community not only relies on, but is extremely vigourous about protecting THEIR rights via the GPL, etc.
We jump all over Microsoft and others for omitting pieces of source, yet, while we're willing to say 'MP3 is here to stay, deal with it,' we don't seem prepared to say 'hey, FTP has been here even longer!'
To demand people honor the GPL while arguing that music companies "don't get it" and we should support copyright violation shows the entire movement at it's worst: Just a group of folks that want stuff for nothing.
If we were as rabid about flaming those who violate other's copyrights, and avidly pushed to end online piracy, THAT would be a good thing.
Large Cluster management isn't that bad as long as you standardize things. If you run DHCP for example, all you need is a single disk image, 'dd' it to a new drive, slap that into your 1U box, and put it back in the cluster. If you are using 1U, for example, you probably share a switch between a rack or 2 (since you can get about 50 1U systems in a rack), and then gigabit connect that switch to a 'core' switch. Of course, if you are trult bandwidth intensive, that could be an issue, but I don't think Google is as much bandwidth as CPU-bound.
As far as power density, most 1U systems pull 150 watts for dual 600-800Mhz CPUs. That gives you a total of 100 CPU's per rack, IMHO more power than an E10K, since we're dealing with an application whose individual threads probably don't utilize more than one or two CPUs at a time.
I'm hopeful that Corel (which has good name recognition amongst the non-techie) with the company-formerly-known-as-Borland can provide the first true, end-to-end competition with the Windows giant.
If they drive great development tools (especially Delphi) into th market, with th ability to market with a distribution, well, I think that's a winning combination.
I'll agree that people, broadly speaking, will build up a collection of pirated MP3's that they wouldn't have bought -- for example, prhaps a theme song for a film, where they wouldn't have bought the soundtrack for it.
However, to say that NONE of the music people are pirating wouldn't have been purchased is incorrect IMHO. One could assume that 10 million people would have purchased 2 CD's a year more (and let's face it, those who truly can't find $25 a year are typically the folks who aren't online with computers good enough to have lots of MP3's), and talking about $150 million/year -- not much, but I also think the figure's highly conservative.
In fact, I'd be willing to bet that the real cost of mp3's is at least $1 *Billion* every year.
Don't get me wrong, I think SDMI is seriously flawed (and that's being kind to the extreme).
I want mp3 to be the standard.
But piracy is wrong, and should never be condoned. In addition, it gives all the idiots firepower for 'XYZ technology only matters to pirates anyways-- see, here's their own words!'
I've not worked in the music business, but I did spend almost 5 years in the movie distribution business (selling 'B' movie (for example, 'Cannibal Campout') videos to rental stores).
Sure, it cost us about $2.00 for a 90 minute VHS tape. Sure, we sold that tape to the store for $47-50 dollars. But was anyone making big money? Of course not! There are lots of costs to get people to buy something. All the promotion - going to conventions, shows, etc. - that's big money down the drain. Posters? More money again. Packaging? Shipping? Accounting, salespeople (after all, you've got to convince stores to carry off-titles)
No one got rich, and we all busted our behinds to make it happen.
And this argument over 'artists don't get MUCH money' - coming from people who claim to be so broke they can't afford to buy a CD, you think they would appreciate that while $15,000 or $20,000 isn't a LOT of money, it's nothing to blow off.
And for 'artists support/condone this', why don't we just ask artists to simply state that they music/performance is public domain? If they don't make the statement, then everything else is bogus - you're a criminal, in many cases (when you add it up) stealing hundreds, if not thousands of dollars.
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From my figuring, the author spent $300 building this super-widget. So, he saved $250 over a new TiVo with a lifetime suibscription.
:)
For that, he sacrificed a whole lot!
* 15fps
* poor video quality (vertical lines) on top of the 15fps
* No 'live pause'
* No watching one program while saving another
* No guide, etc.
For me, the tradeoff isn't worth it. Even if TiVo fails as a company, I suspect that the community will come up with a network-hack for getting scheduling information.
And even if you lose that, you still have a better-quality recorder with an easy interface, more features, that's running linux.
It only compares if you wanted to play around building a PVR for personal humor. It doesn't make sense as a solution, though
Steve
If you can say "I can always go with a competing database" then you can say "I can always go with a competing desktop/server infrastructure."
At an enterprise level, moving from one database platform to another, while possible, is far from trivial.
This type of licensing is across all platforms I've negotiated on, from DB servers to App servers to web servers. Companies are offered significant discounts (in some cases I worked with, on the order of 50% on a $500,000.00 order) if they don't purchase the right to resell to another party.
If KMart didn't purchase assignability, they shouldn't be allowed the right just because they are in bankruptcy.
Steve
...and you have to weight those out.
I had LASIK done about 4 months ago (from 8 diopters worth of glasses) and for the last four months I've been kicking myself that I didn't do it long ago.
Of course, long ago the procedures weren't nearly as good. I evaluated it, and felt that I was going to a competent surgeon with a proven track record, and that I was willing to chance the risk.
Now that I live without glasses, I realize that, in my risk/reward analysis, I only gave the reward side about half the credit I should have.
btw, my vision was corrected to 20/20 and 20/25 instantly, and as everything healed is down to 20/15 and 20/20 (better than with glasses).
Steve
Sadly, while this may have been picked up on a slow news day, it's true nonetheless. I noted personally that this might be an issue when the original tests were conducted and it was discovered that UWB devices were generating interference at outputs far, far lower than anticipated.
The intent of the tests were actually to demonstrate that UWB devices would not be an issue; I believe everyone was shocked at the results.
Antiquated technology or not, the ILS is still the standard in many, many locations. Replacing it would certainly cause those nice, low, $99 cross-country airfares to go away.
The malicious implications are certainly disheartening, but are really a second order concern.
Steve
I Agree! I was one of the loyal Netscape users who couldn't deal with the incredibly, tongue-tyingly horrid Netscape 4, and went with IE4 instead.
However, for the exact reasons above, I find myself using Mozilla 1.0 as much as possible now, mainly because 1) it works as well as IE including plugins, et al (except ActiveX, of course) 2) I prefer the Mozilla IMAP client, and 3) IT STOPS THE DAMN POPUPS!
Are we all really so stupid as to think that the cost of the CD alone is the only factor in its pricing?
That's as moronic as saying Intel should sell CPUs for 20 bucks because that's way more than it costs to make a CPU.
In both cases, it totally ignores development, infrastructure, salaries, and so forth.
These type of statments only make the 'average Joe' on the street go 'these guys are a bunch of idiots looking to find lame excuses to rip off music companies.'
Arguements like this aren't proving anything other than total stupidity.
I think that perhaps what Microsoft was trying to do was limit people from running:
Web servers
Database servers
Application servers
and the like
And because they don't often think out of their box, they only considered their own RDP solution and not anything else.
From the MS perspective, as they continue to develop and refine the desktop/workstation product, it becomes more and more capable of acting as a server. But in the MS design, one of their revenue designs is around selling workstation licenses for far less than server licenses. (Hey, Sun does it as well...note that Solaris is only 'free' for eight processors or less).
Now, also from the MS point of view, the server platforms do contain more software -- it's NOT just a 'naming convention' but XP has certainly matured to the point where people would consider running server farms of XP machines rather than Win2k servers -- and that's what they want to avoid.
Remember that the people who write these things are lawyers, and not always (ever?) technicians.
There are a few things I'd like to point out. I hold this particular subject near and dear, as both an aviation enthusiast (for example, http://xb70.interceptor.com/), a computer geek, and a commercially rated pilot who has owned several aircraft.
IANAL, but:
1) it concerns me that all the EAA article mentions is the availablilty of the documents. There's no protection should a copyright holder appear post-fact to sue you for building his STC'd widget without license.
2) A difference between most abandonware and this is that certainly the intent here is to only deal with entities that no longer exist. That's entirely different from entities that don't care. most "abandonware" it seems, is indeed owned by someone and is copyrighted; it's just that they don't care to support, sell, or do anything but sit on it. This example won't change that a bit.
3) The reason that type certificates (TC) and Supplemental Type Certificates (STC) are zealously protected is because a lot of expense goes into them. Due to the nature of aircraft, even fairly small changes (such as replacing an engine with an almost identical model that 'bolts in' without physical changes) have to be documented and tested extensively. The only way for people to recoup those costs is to charge users of the STC a fee for a 'license.'
4) as others have pointed out, virtually everything the EAA is talking about is very old and has been abandoned for decades.
Steve
Finally, even as a corporate manager, I was able to go to a UNIX on my laptop without dual-booting, etc. It's what I needed -- a UNIX with MS Office! While there's still some corner cases where not having a windows machine is annoying, they aren't every day occurances.
It *is* all about the applications.
What OS X on Mac hardware offers is not only the ability to run existing OS 9 apps via the Classic layer, but it offers the Carbon API as a fairly simple interface that allows you to port your existing Mac apps to OS X much easier than otherwise (and allows the same binary to run on most of the Modern Mac's running OS 9, as well).
OS X on Intel, without that ability, really doesn't give us anything other than a cleaner UI -- but without applications, it doesn't really matter. Desktop users care about applications first, OS a distant second (maybe even third?)
Steve
I agree! Why should my heirs EVER have to lose the exclusive right to my works?
/. You have a right to chose what you are told to chose -- Free as in you can agree with the Open Surce collective, not Free as in speech.
Here's a comparison: If I work hard and leave 40 million to my relatives, and they shepherd it and don't spend the capital, would we take it away 50 years after my death? Of course not!
It's great that so many people in the world Open Source their stuff, or release it to the public domain, but that's a choice you got to make, how about MY right to chose?
Oh yeah, this is
If life solely revolved around the core OS, then Linux would already own the world.
The fact is, it's all about having applications, such as Microsoft Office, Photoshop, etc. (even if some of them have to be run in Classic mode, which is less than ideal, at least they largely run)
OS X for intel would have none of that, nor the simple 'Carbon' layer allowing existing applications to run without total rework.
Virtual any ISP of size uses web proxies. It improves the performance to it's users by return data more quickly. In fact, it's simple enoough to argue that any major ISP that's NOT caching is a bad Netizen, for pointlessly wasting bandwidth!
And I am sure they are tracking usage, to some extent, because they are looking for patterns to more efficiently tune the proxies. A common tuning, for example, is to only cache certain sites (for example, your personal homepage on xyz.com doesn't ever get cached) for greater performance (cache doesn't waste time putting it into the cache to have it pressured out again).
If you find that they are looking at the returned data itself for no reason, then yes, that's wrong. But just plain old caching? Come on, let's be serious.
This is a wonderful example of "You're not cool enough to use my resources" baloney that strikes fear into the hearts of managers. it makes them skeptical of the entire Open/Free Software idea.
"Sure, it's free, but I'm concerned that it won't play well with my installed software base."
"Sure, it's free, but man, you just never know what project might 'offend the sensibilities' of these Open/Free developers and then they'll walk out, making me look bad."
And the most damning truth in the big bad world:
"not a team player."
We can all sit and yank our own cranks thinking "they're full of it" but the fact is, there are a lot more of "them" than "us," and things like this won't change that.
That's the best and most concise analogy I've ever heard.
Bravo!
From what I read, Comcast prohibits you from supplying bandwidth outside your household. That's reasonable.
It also appears that it's not that that they want to prohibit NAT, but, rather, that they don't understand how it could be used. The FAQ clearly implies that they believe that each computer will need an IP from them. So they are limiting it to three per household, and charging for it.
And for many people, who don't understand / care about firewalls, they may just go with that solution.
I think Comcast's only concern is conservation of their IP pool, not the computers themselves.
I bet if someone offered to work with them, they'd modify their FAQ's.
I went from a Dell 7500 with the 15.1" 100x1050 to a G4 TiBook. While I love the TiBook, the screen sucks in comparison.
The size is good, but it'd be better with about 20% greater resolution.
Sprint recently abandoned both it's ION offering as well as it's MMDS (wireless) product.
Given the strong ties between Earthlink and Sprint, I suspect this is the same product, only (perhaps) with a better marketing and support campaign.
Especially for rural 'last miles' MMDS remains the only truly practical alternative to, well, anything else.
While the network won't depend on wires,
it requires a lot of infrastucture to make it work. You need even greater density thann you do with cell phones (about three times as much, IIRC). Even in the Bay Area there are tons of places you can get cell phone service where Ricochet service was flaky.
That makes it highly impractical for rural solutions -- heck, you'd have to have a tower located at each farmhouse, just about.
The value of the network will only be realized if 2.5/3G fails miserably, in which case, as a mobile substitue in dense metro areas, you might have a market.
But personally, I feel it's a branch of technology that eventually goes nowhere.
And it's called OS X.
You can get a major office suite, browsers, and build just about everything -- and this is in the first release. By December, there will no need for everything else. After all, I use a computer to be productive -- and OS X gives me that freedom. It's worth the extra money not to waste my time.
This has been the thought running through my mind -- that the Open Source / Free Software community not only relies on, but is extremely vigourous about protecting THEIR rights via the GPL, etc.
We jump all over Microsoft and others for omitting pieces of source, yet, while we're willing to say 'MP3 is here to stay, deal with it,' we don't seem prepared to say 'hey, FTP has been here even longer!'
To demand people honor the GPL while arguing that music companies "don't get it" and we should support copyright violation shows the entire movement at it's worst: Just a group of folks that want stuff for nothing.
If we were as rabid about flaming those who violate other's copyrights, and avidly pushed to end online piracy, THAT would be a good thing.
As far as power density, most 1U systems pull 150 watts for dual 600-800Mhz CPUs. That gives you a total of 100 CPU's per rack, IMHO more power than an E10K, since we're dealing with an application whose individual threads probably don't utilize more than one or two CPUs at a time.
Steve
I'm hopeful that Corel (which has good name recognition amongst the non-techie) with the
company-formerly-known-as-Borland can provide the
first true, end-to-end competition with the
Windows giant.
If they drive great development tools (especially
Delphi) into th market, with th ability to market with a distribution, well, I think that's a winning combination.
I'm going to disagree here, to a large part.
I'll agree that people, broadly speaking, will build up a collection of pirated MP3's that they wouldn't have bought -- for example, prhaps a theme song for a film, where they wouldn't have bought the soundtrack for it.
However, to say that NONE of the music people are pirating wouldn't have been purchased is incorrect IMHO. One could assume that 10 million people would have purchased 2 CD's a year more (and let's face it, those who truly can't find $25 a year are typically the folks who aren't online with computers good enough to have lots of MP3's), and talking about $150 million/year -- not much, but I also think the figure's highly conservative.
In fact, I'd be willing to bet that the real cost of mp3's is at least $1 *Billion* every year.
Don't get me wrong, I think SDMI is seriously flawed (and that's being kind to the extreme).
I want mp3 to be the standard.
But piracy is wrong, and should never be condoned. In addition, it gives all the idiots firepower for 'XYZ technology only matters to pirates anyways-- see, here's their own words!'
Steve
Sure, it cost us about $2.00 for a 90 minute VHS tape. Sure, we sold that tape to the store for $47-50 dollars. But was anyone making big money? Of course not! There are lots of costs to get people to buy something. All the promotion - going to conventions, shows, etc. - that's big money down the drain. Posters? More money again. Packaging? Shipping? Accounting, salespeople (after all, you've got to convince stores to carry off-titles)
No one got rich, and we all busted our behinds to make it happen.
And this argument over 'artists don't get MUCH money' - coming from people who claim to be so broke they can't afford to buy a CD, you think they would appreciate that while $15,000 or $20,000 isn't a LOT of money, it's nothing to blow off.
And for 'artists support/condone this', why don't we just ask artists to simply state that they music/performance is public domain? If they don't make the statement, then everything else is bogus - you're a criminal, in many cases (when you add it up) stealing hundreds, if not thousands of dollars.