Oh don't be surprised if they're not. I'm a 28-year-old male also, with a wife and kid. In addition to my own shows, my TiVo gets Zooboomafoo and Sesame Street and Bear in the Big Blue House for my son, plus Forensic Files and Trading Spaces for my wife. That and the 47 other wishlists/season passes.
Well, it's a good thing when both the seller and the buyer end up happy. That DVD has been sitting in my cart for over a month waiting for me to want enough stuff to qualify for free shipping.
I want Amazon to continue doing stuff like this, and the DVD I got is not likely to make it to my local Sam's Club (where I get most DVDs I buy), so we're both happy.
It's also worth noting the Microsoft Operating Systems rate #5, #8, #9, and #17.
If you're interested, here's the breakdown:
5. Microsoft Office XP Standard for Students and Teachers 8. Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition Upgrade 9. Microsoft Windows XP Professional Upgrade 17. Microsoft Office XP Professional Upgrade
It's too bad they don't release actual numbers. I wonder if Jaguar beats all of those combined?
I worked for CNN.com for two years (1998 - 2000). We used SSH there to transfer news feeds between servers as part of our automated processing. A template would generate the data (XML, html, JavaScript, whatever), and then a Perl or shell script would scp (secure copy, a part of ssh) the file to the remote server using an ssh-agent.
When I left CNN, I went to a startup called ZapMedia. It was a much smaller company, but we used SSH for all communications to our production boxes (which were colocated at Exodus outside of our company LAN). We even did remote CVS checkouts over SSH as part of our code release process. The use of SSH was completely secure and worked very well.
You haven't actually USED OSX have you? Turning on SSH and Apache is as simple as clicking a checkbox. They're not even called that in the interface. Apache is called "Web Sharing" and SSH is called "Remote Login". People very well might turn these on without knowing the implication.
On the other side of the coin, I've been doing UNIX software development for a decade, and I waited for the Apple updates rather that compiling my own. I turned off SSH until that one was fixed, but left Apache to fend for itself (the box is firewalled and NAT'd so I wasn't too worried).
I hate to even post this, since it may some day be brought up in a court case (an actual quote from a PVR user!). I use a TiVo at home. I go through commercials at 30x (60x has too much over-correction). If they were great or terrible, I'll never know. Sometimes I see the logo of the product being advertised, but that's it. The commercial may be funny or interesting, but I'll never know.
ReplayTV users are even further away. They never even see the commercials, not even at 60x. They'll never know if commercial quality improves.
To me, your rant sounds very much like you have an axe to grind..
Well, I DID say it was a rant. I do have a problem with SB as a company, but I wouldn't call it a vendetta. I just won't support a company that I think is so careless with the lives of other people.
([Richard Bullwinkle]'s talking about hackers extracting the video from the Tivo)
we have to write code that makes it as difficult as we can. We are very aware that there is no hacker-proof system, but we try to make it very difficult... Conceivably TiVo will provide technology that will allow users to share video within their home, but not allow it to be sent outside the home... we must protect the content providers
If you follow the threads with Richard (a.k.a. Tivolutionary) on the AVS TiVo forum, you know that he is the TiVo hacker's biggest advocate in the company. The fact that they added TiVoNet (ethernet) support in the 3.0 software for hackers tells you how TiVo feels about hacking their boxes.
When I worked at the company I mentioned in my last post, we encountered this as well. We managed to get a license for the Microsoft WMA and WMV codec source, which we compiled and had running on Linux. Our contract with MS basically said we had to make every effort to prevent their codecs from getting out. That is the main reason our box was locked down so tight. If we had not gone to such lengths, we could have been liable if/when our box was hacked. If not for things like that, we could have had the box more open for hackers to play with.
The quote from Tivolutionary above is talking about the legal issues that got SB sued -- which TiVo does not want to have happen to them. Sending recorded shows over the internet may really be a copyright violation, and very possibly falls outside of fair use (IANAL). Even if it doesn't, it's not a clear line one way or the other, so TiVo is being careful. That is what I'd do if it were my company.
What it comes down to (at least for me) is this: Replay has better technology, and doesn't cowtow to "content providers" at the expense of their customers.
Well, I certainly would disagree about Reply/SB having better technology. I have used both boxes, and I like the TiVo better. Yes, Replay has two specific features (sharing and commercial skip), but if those features do prove to be illegal, you can hardly blame TiVo for not having them. TiVo has some unique features as well.
If you read the AVS forums, you will see that TiVo's customers understand TiVo's choices about these legal issues very clearly.
I'm turning off my +1 bonus since this is a bit of a rant. However, its a rant with some insider knowledge, so it may be worth reading. I used to work for a company that has been mentioned here on Slashdot twice. They make/made a multimedia convergence box that ran Linux and did DVD, MP3 ripping, MP3 jukebox, streaming audio and video, etc.
Our company effectively ran out of money last July/Aug./Sept. We still had partners with a major newspaper for $2M in advertising, and with a major audo components manufacturer (if you look at the box you would know whose products it looks like).
Anyway, we were looking for buyers, and SonicBlue made an offer. We accepted it, and the lawyers went into legal stuff. For months we all waited, until SonicBlue eventually pissed off our other partners so much that they walked from the deal. Needless to say, without the advertising money we were not as desirable and SonicBlue dumped us.
I guess my point is, SonicBlue is a bad company. They have a bunch of cash in the form of stock from the video card days, and they are spending it screwing up small companies (like us and the Rio Car).
I met Ken Potashner (sp?), CEO of SonicBlue. He was a whiny, slick marketer guy, may he roast in hell.
TiVo is a good company that customers can believe in. They make a good product (I have one), and they don't screw over their customers or business partners. I hope TiVo captures the whole market and SonicBlue goes bankrupt. Now that UltimateTV has been cancelled by Microsoft, it's a two horse race.
Zope has a steep learning curve
on
Zope Bible
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Zope has to be one of the coolest open-source projects I have ever used. You can literally build a site from scratch to completion in a matter of hours or days (depending on complexity) if you know what you're doing.
I used to work for a company that built a very large ZCatalog-driven site (with over 300,000 items in the ZCatalog, interfacing to an Oracle backend with over 3 million items). Zope was an excellent development platform, and I still use it on personal projects.
The biggest thing keeping Zope for blowing other products like WebLogic and StoryServer out of the water is the steep learning curve. It took me a good month to get up to real speed on Zope, and I had a background in python. Zope relies on some very powerful base-class "magic" to make everything work, and some of that behavior is hard to grok (acquisition, ZClass/Python-class dichotomy, the ZCatalog, the BTree implementation, and the various ZODB Storage options come to mind).
At the 2001 Python conference, the Zope-Corp (nee Digital Creations) folks said the learning curve was a high priority for future releases. I hope so, because Zope and python are great technologies for those who make the time investment necessary to learn them.
Unlike most Linux distros, OSX ships with everything off. No telnet, no FTP, no apache, no SSH, no file sharing, nothing. It's pretty secure until people start turning things on, so I suspect it won't be 0wn3d on any large scale by script kiddies. Microsoft can keep that role in the computer community.
The good thing about OSX is that when you turn on "Allow Remote Login" you get OpenSSH, not telnet.
Linux has VMWare as well, and as there is no opcode translation it's faster too. Look, any computer can emulate any other, what matters is how well.
True. VirtualPC emulates a PC close to perfectly, albeit too slow for my taste. I have found the same with VMWare. It runs very compatibly, but not fast enough to really replace a PC if you need to use one all the time. Wine is faster, but it's a huge pain to set up and it doesn't always work, whereas VPC is a simple installer, and VMWare is a (less simple) installer.
Yes, often you have to compile stuff for Linux, that's not what I meant. Porting would have been a better word. Very little linux software will work out of the box on OS X, it can be ported easily yes, but that's still something that can only be done by a programmer.
Yes, but that's the same thing Linux users face if the app isn't compiled for their particular Linux glib, gtk, etc. Even if it's as simple as "./configure; make; sudo make install", non-programmer Linux users would have a problem. In the Linux world, non-programming users either learn to program enough to get by or leave the platform.
I looked at fink, it doesn't download and recompile Linux apps at all. It gives you access to (currently) 841 apps that have been ported. Compare that to the tens of thousands of Linux apps available, and I'm not impressed.
It actually includes two components. One downloads precompiled binaries, the other downloads the source and compiles it. You are correct that the selection is somewhat limited, but it's all the command-line stuff that most people need that is not already included with OSX.
Again not true, that program gives you an Aqua-like window manager. So it skins the titlebar and that's about it.. GTK apps will still look like GTK apps, ditto for Qt. The design of X means that unless you completely rewrite the front end for a Linux app it will never really have the Aqua look.
You could make the same argument for GTK versus KDE on Linux. GTK apps never look quite right in a KDE environment and vice versa. Linux has a serious problem with interface inconsistency, whereas on the Mac inconsistency is limited to "ported" apps from the X11 world, which most Mac users will never need anyway.
Good for you, but those are entirely subjective opinions. There are also several web browsers, email clients, office suites, fast java runtimes, and tons of fun games for Linux. So what? I have yet to find something that I want to do for which there is no Linux application.
What is not subjective about "tell Apple what you think"? The fact is that there are thousands of notable commercial companies developing for MacOS X, compared to maybe a couple hundred on Linux. Plus, on OSX there are products from vendors that desktop users care about like Adobe, Macromedia, Microsoft, Quark, Alias|Wavefront, and others that will likely never make it to the Linux desktop.
There's no need to run every Linux app out there on OSX for the same reason that there's no reason to run every Windows app. Why run Everybuddy or Gaim when I can run Fire? Why use kOffice or StarOffice when I can use AppleWorks, MS Office, etc.? In almost every case, if there is a good application for Linux, a similar (and sometimes better) app for OSX already exists. You're making the same argument that Windows users make, but it's not really valid and hasn't been for quite a few years.
The "real question" comes down to this: "What are you missing in your current OS that OSX might offer for you?". In your case, the answer may be that for you, Linux is perfect. For many of us though, MacOSX offers the power of Linux with a better user interface, innovative high-quality hardware, support from a large company interested in helping its customers, lots of commercial applications, lots of free applications, more games, and an equally vibrant user community.
Er, sorry? By that logic the number of Linux apps beats any OS out there by miles because any Windows app can be run under Wine (not true of course).
Wine is a pain to get working too. By this path you could say that OSX is more compatible since VirtualPC runs a lot more Windows apps than Wine does (albeit probably slower).
To run a Linux app under OS X you must be a guru at recompiling (unless it's been prepackaged: not very frequent), which very few OS X users are, basically only those that migrated from Linux.
First off, I often find I have to compile things I download for Linux as well. Second, with Fink, downloading and installing is as easy as fink install [package]. I did this on my iBook yesterday with GnuPG and it works flawlessly.
You must invariably be running an X Server. I have tried XDarwin at my Mac-lover friends house, and it'd scare the living daylights out of most Mac users. Sure, it has an installer program, but when you run it what pops up? TWM with three xterms. Most Mac users won't want to place XDarwin (which is huge) onto their systems, and keep it running in the background just to run a Linux app. ... Linux apps don't have the Aqua look, and there are large numbers of OS X users out there who were 'inspired' shall we say by its looks. You give them a GTK+ or Qt app and they'll puke.
With OroborOSX, you can run X11 apps that look like native aqua apps. It's a very nice package that is easy to use and can be launched with a simple double-click. I agree that the bloat of X11 is never desirable, but Linux has it as well.
Now don't get me wrong, I like OS X. But saying it has more apps than Linux or Windows is ridiculous. Actually you often can't even count Classic apps either, I know that the fact that you had to run Photoshop in classic has held back widespread OS X adoption by old-skool mac users for a long time, and my friend hates running Classic apps, would often rather wait until it's been ported in fact
Well, you can count or not count whatever you want. The fact is that OSX has most of the apps on Linux, plus many of the apps on Windows, plus thousands of native MacOS X apps. For people who need Classic, it is fast and quite stable. The important thing is that OSX has all the apps that 95% of the world would ever need if they bothered to look. Everything from MS Office to a dozen email apps, best-of-class web browsers, great development environments and tools, a fast Java runtime, and tons of fun games are on the Mac (lots of stuff businesses need that they can't get for Linux). One of these days I am going to put Windows back on my Linux box, because with OSX on my G4 and my iBook I don't ever use Linux anymore for UNIX stuff.
The only problem with this otherwise cool idea is that the iPod doesn't have a speaker. You'd find yourself holding the headphone up to the telephone to try and get it to dial. The Newton used to do that, but I found that I rarely used that feature.
It would be a cool idea if the iPod had a speaker though.
The fee for FireWire is only $1 per port. That's it. I don't think that would seriously affect the price of a $700 box (Series 2).
Firewire is the standard now. The ports on Series2 TiVos are USB, but not USB2. So they're limited to 11MBps, which is too slow for data storage. It's mainly useful for easily adding a network adapter, but you can do that to old TiVos already using TivoNet.
I have learned some interesting lessons selling Mac software as a hobby for the last 3 years. The first thing I realized was that without some sort of registration system people will not register.
I wrote an app called MacBattleChat. It was a very popular app amongst Mac gamers, since it was the only one of its kind at the time. My "registration system" was an "I paid" checkbox. I got less than 10 registrations, but I could go on battle.net in the mac channel and see a dozen clients running at any given time.
I learned my lesson. I added a serial number and "nag screen" system to DropImage and PortSniffer. To this date I've had over 400 registrations of DropImage, and over 50 PortSniffer registrations.
I will say that there are pirate serial numbers in Cracks & Numbers, but I get enough registrations that I don't care. The shareware payments cover my IDE and development costs and then some. I'm not going to get rich with my shareware business, but it's not as bad as the Ambrosia guys make it out to be. Maybe it's because my shareware is actually affordable.
It's worth noting that TiVo makes it VERY easy to copy a show off the TiVo to a VCR if you feel that making a "hard copy" is an important feature. I have a Sony TiVo and a Sony VCR, and the TiVo can actually queue up the movie, start the VCR recording, and even pop up a 5 second title to put on the tape saying what the tape will have on it. It's very seamless and very neat.
You can get a tivonet card and use the Tivo over ethernet instead of a modem.
As to the program guide, the TiVo has guide data for 2 weeks into the future. It doesn't just tell you what is on now, it tells you what will be on. It breaks it down by two levels of genre, actor, director, type, new or repeat, and more. You can tell TiVo "record all Tom Hanks comedies" or "Record any sitcom pilots". Very cool stuff.
> Just so I'm following...
> You left *TIME WARNER* because you didn't
> like *AOL's* philosophy?
I had no problem working for CNN (which was owned but not managed by Time Warner). CNN was committed to providing unbiased news, and I felt they delivered on that promise.
I was there from 1998 to 4/2000. CNN employees felt like Turner employees, not Time Warner. You would have had to have been there to understand that. CNN was like a family.
Well before AOL even began to talk "merger" (which is what they told us it was), we were in talks to provide them with news feeds (CBS's contract was expiring). I got a glimpse into their idea of technology working as a developer on that project, and it was truly frightening how bass-ackwards they did things. The project eventually got canned and I gained some insight into their management during that debacle.
When the deal was announced I was wary of working for AOL, but I took a wait-and-see attitude. When I started seeing the changes they were making before the merger even went through, I saw all I needed, and I left in April 2000.
If I look at the CNN web site today, I feel it's worse today than it was 2 years ago when I worked there. I blame the acquisition by AOL for those problems, and I am glad I don't work there anymore.
As to your implication, the DMCA did not exist back then. The RIAA was not making headlines. From my perspective, Time Warner was mainly a company that made movies, DVDs, CDs, and books. I did not associate a political philosophy with them. I'm not sure if I would feel the same about them now (but maybe I would). AOL on the other hand is just as bad as Microsoft when it comes to dirty business practices. They're just not quite as good at it.
It's crazy to think Alan is "cocky" for saying he would not work for AOL. I worked at CNN.com when AOL bought Time Warner, and I left before the deal could go through because I didn't want to work for AOL.
Lest you think I'm just another lunatic, about 15 of the 20 developers I worked with also left around that time. Of the developers that remained, only one of them was a developer of any quality, and he was big into MS tools.
My point is, working for a faceless conglomerate is one thing. Working for one with significant philosophical differences from your own is another thing entirely.
The drive controller in a TiVo is an ATA/33 controller. That means it can only handle up to 132GB per drive. If you put in a 160 GB drive, a lot of space will be wasted.
Most people on the AVS Forum agree that you're better off with quiet, cool drives than fast ones. The consensus is that the "best" upgrade for most people would be two 5400 RPM 120GB drives.
Most people don't do this though. They take the existing 20 or 30GB drive and make that their "A" drive, then add a big "B" drive (80, 100, or 120 GB). 5400 RPM drives are preferrable since they tend to be quieter and run cooler.
There are two worthwhile articles over at Macintouch about 802.11b (AirPort in the mac world). I thought they might be interesting to people looking to improve their wireless LAN performance or range.
Adding WaveLAN Extender - This article discusses adding various antennae to base stations to improve their range.
Extending TheAirPort's Range - This article discusses some more radical procedures, including some neat stuff with Directional Antennae which allow 802.11b to work as far away as a 57 Kilometers. They also discuss various antennae to add to laptops in order to improve their range.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh don't be surprised if they're not. I'm a 28-year-old male also, with a wife and kid. In addition to my own shows, my TiVo gets Zooboomafoo and Sesame Street and Bear in the Big Blue House for my son, plus Forensic Files and Trading Spaces for my wife. That and the 47 other wishlists/season passes.
Well, it's a good thing when both the seller and the buyer end up happy. That DVD has been sitting in my cart for over a month waiting for me to want enough stuff to qualify for free shipping.
I want Amazon to continue doing stuff like this, and the DVD I got is not likely to make it to my local Sam's Club (where I get most DVDs I buy), so we're both happy.
Doh, how dumb am I?
I realize that 5 and 17 are not MS Operating Systems, although they are so bulky that sometimes it seems like they are.
Interesting.
It's also worth noting the Microsoft Operating Systems rate #5, #8, #9, and #17.
If you're interested, here's the breakdown:
5. Microsoft Office XP Standard for Students and Teachers
8. Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition Upgrade
9. Microsoft Windows XP Professional Upgrade
17. Microsoft Office XP Professional Upgrade
It's too bad they don't release actual numbers. I wonder if Jaguar beats all of those combined?
Thanks! I cancelled my order and re-ordered it with this coupon code.
Amazon should be happy, I added a DVD to my order for my wife (the Schoolhouse Rock collection, shipping the same week as Jaguar).
I worked for CNN.com for two years (1998 - 2000). We used SSH there to transfer news feeds between servers as part of our automated processing. A template would generate the data (XML, html, JavaScript, whatever), and then a Perl or shell script would scp (secure copy, a part of ssh) the file to the remote server using an ssh-agent.
When I left CNN, I went to a startup called ZapMedia. It was a much smaller company, but we used SSH for all communications to our production boxes (which were colocated at Exodus outside of our company LAN). We even did remote CVS checkouts over SSH as part of our code release process. The use of SSH was completely secure and worked very well.
You haven't actually USED OSX have you? Turning on SSH and Apache is as simple as clicking a checkbox. They're not even called that in the interface. Apache is called "Web Sharing" and SSH is called "Remote Login". People very well might turn these on without knowing the implication.
On the other side of the coin, I've been doing UNIX software development for a decade, and I waited for the Apple updates rather that compiling my own. I turned off SSH until that one was fixed, but left Apache to fend for itself (the box is firewalled and NAT'd so I wasn't too worried).
I hate to even post this, since it may some day be brought up in a court case (an actual quote from a PVR user!). I use a TiVo at home. I go through commercials at 30x (60x has too much over-correction). If they were great or terrible, I'll never know. Sometimes I see the logo of the product being advertised, but that's it. The commercial may be funny or interesting, but I'll never know.
ReplayTV users are even further away. They never even see the commercials, not even at 60x. They'll never know if commercial quality improves.
Teletubbies is on PBS. There's no advertising on PBS (well not really, just "this show was sponsored by X. have a nice day.").
Well, I DID say it was a rant. I do have a problem with SB as a company, but I wouldn't call it a vendetta. I just won't support a company that I think is so careless with the lives of other people.
([Richard Bullwinkle]'s talking about hackers extracting the video from the Tivo)
If you follow the threads with Richard (a.k.a. Tivolutionary) on the AVS TiVo forum, you know that he is the TiVo hacker's biggest advocate in the company. The fact that they added TiVoNet (ethernet) support in the 3.0 software for hackers tells you how TiVo feels about hacking their boxes.
When I worked at the company I mentioned in my last post, we encountered this as well. We managed to get a license for the Microsoft WMA and WMV codec source, which we compiled and had running on Linux. Our contract with MS basically said we had to make every effort to prevent their codecs from getting out. That is the main reason our box was locked down so tight. If we had not gone to such lengths, we could have been liable if/when our box was hacked. If not for things like that, we could have had the box more open for hackers to play with.
The quote from Tivolutionary above is talking about the legal issues that got SB sued -- which TiVo does not want to have happen to them. Sending recorded shows over the internet may really be a copyright violation, and very possibly falls outside of fair use (IANAL). Even if it doesn't, it's not a clear line one way or the other, so TiVo is being careful. That is what I'd do if it were my company.
What it comes down to (at least for me) is this: Replay has better technology, and doesn't cowtow to "content providers" at the expense of their customers.
Well, I certainly would disagree about Reply/SB having better technology. I have used both boxes, and I like the TiVo better. Yes, Replay has two specific features (sharing and commercial skip), but if those features do prove to be illegal, you can hardly blame TiVo for not having them. TiVo has some unique features as well.
If you read the AVS forums, you will see that TiVo's customers understand TiVo's choices about these legal issues very clearly.
I'm turning off my +1 bonus since this is a bit of a rant. However, its a rant with some insider knowledge, so it may be worth reading. I used to work for a company that has been mentioned here on Slashdot twice. They make/made a multimedia convergence box that ran Linux and did DVD, MP3 ripping, MP3 jukebox, streaming audio and video, etc.
Our company effectively ran out of money last July/Aug./Sept. We still had partners with a major newspaper for $2M in advertising, and with a major audo components manufacturer (if you look at the box you would know whose products it looks like).
Anyway, we were looking for buyers, and SonicBlue made an offer. We accepted it, and the lawyers went into legal stuff. For months we all waited, until SonicBlue eventually pissed off our other partners so much that they walked from the deal. Needless to say, without the advertising money we were not as desirable and SonicBlue dumped us.
I guess my point is, SonicBlue is a bad company. They have a bunch of cash in the form of stock from the video card days, and they are spending it screwing up small companies (like us and the Rio Car).
I met Ken Potashner (sp?), CEO of SonicBlue. He was a whiny, slick marketer guy, may he roast in hell.
TiVo is a good company that customers can believe in. They make a good product (I have one), and they don't screw over their customers or business partners. I hope TiVo captures the whole market and SonicBlue goes bankrupt. Now that UltimateTV has been cancelled by Microsoft, it's a two horse race.
Zope has to be one of the coolest open-source projects I have ever used. You can literally build a site from scratch to completion in a matter of hours or days (depending on complexity) if you know what you're doing.
I used to work for a company that built a very large ZCatalog-driven site (with over 300,000 items in the ZCatalog, interfacing to an Oracle backend with over 3 million items). Zope was an excellent development platform, and I still use it on personal projects.
The biggest thing keeping Zope for blowing other products like WebLogic and StoryServer out of the water is the steep learning curve. It took me a good month to get up to real speed on Zope, and I had a background in python. Zope relies on some very powerful base-class "magic" to make everything work, and some of that behavior is hard to grok (acquisition, ZClass/Python-class dichotomy, the ZCatalog, the BTree implementation, and the various ZODB Storage options come to mind).
At the 2001 Python conference, the Zope-Corp (nee Digital Creations) folks said the learning curve was a high priority for future releases. I hope so, because Zope and python are great technologies for those who make the time investment necessary to learn them.
Unlike most Linux distros, OSX ships with everything off. No telnet, no FTP, no apache, no SSH, no file sharing, nothing. It's pretty secure until people start turning things on, so I suspect it won't be 0wn3d on any large scale by script kiddies. Microsoft can keep that role in the computer community.
The good thing about OSX is that when you turn on "Allow Remote Login" you get OpenSSH, not telnet.
Linux has VMWare as well, and as there is no opcode translation it's faster too. Look, any computer can emulate any other, what matters is how well.
True. VirtualPC emulates a PC close to perfectly, albeit too slow for my taste. I have found the same with VMWare. It runs very compatibly, but not fast enough to really replace a PC if you need to use one all the time. Wine is faster, but it's a huge pain to set up and it doesn't always work, whereas VPC is a simple installer, and VMWare is a (less simple) installer.
Yes, often you have to compile stuff for Linux, that's not what I meant. Porting would have been a better word. Very little linux software will work out of the box on OS X, it can be ported easily yes, but that's still something that can only be done by a programmer.
Yes, but that's the same thing Linux users face if the app isn't compiled for their particular Linux glib, gtk, etc. Even if it's as simple as "./configure; make; sudo make install", non-programmer Linux users would have a problem. In the Linux world, non-programming users either learn to program enough to get by or leave the platform.
I looked at fink, it doesn't download and recompile Linux apps at all. It gives you access to (currently) 841 apps that have been ported. Compare that to the tens of thousands of Linux apps available, and I'm not impressed.
It actually includes two components. One downloads precompiled binaries, the other downloads the source and compiles it. You are correct that the selection is somewhat limited, but it's all the command-line stuff that most people need that is not already included with OSX.
Again not true, that program gives you an Aqua-like window manager. So it skins the titlebar and that's about it.. GTK apps will still look like GTK apps, ditto for Qt. The design of X means that unless you completely rewrite the front end for a Linux app it will never really have the Aqua look.
You could make the same argument for GTK versus KDE on Linux. GTK apps never look quite right in a KDE environment and vice versa. Linux has a serious problem with interface inconsistency, whereas on the Mac inconsistency is limited to "ported" apps from the X11 world, which most Mac users will never need anyway.
Good for you, but those are entirely subjective opinions. There are also several web browsers, email clients, office suites, fast java runtimes, and tons of fun games for Linux. So what? I have yet to find something that I want to do for which there is no Linux application.
What is not subjective about "tell Apple what you think"? The fact is that there are thousands of notable commercial companies developing for MacOS X, compared to maybe a couple hundred on Linux. Plus, on OSX there are products from vendors that desktop users care about like Adobe, Macromedia, Microsoft, Quark, Alias|Wavefront, and others that will likely never make it to the Linux desktop.
There's no need to run every Linux app out there on OSX for the same reason that there's no reason to run every Windows app. Why run Everybuddy or Gaim when I can run Fire? Why use kOffice or StarOffice when I can use AppleWorks, MS Office, etc.? In almost every case, if there is a good application for Linux, a similar (and sometimes better) app for OSX already exists. You're making the same argument that Windows users make, but it's not really valid and hasn't been for quite a few years.
The "real question" comes down to this: "What are you missing in your current OS that OSX might offer for you?". In your case, the answer may be that for you, Linux is perfect. For many of us though, MacOSX offers the power of Linux with a better user interface, innovative high-quality hardware, support from a large company interested in helping its customers, lots of commercial applications, lots of free applications, more games, and an equally vibrant user community.
Er, sorry? By that logic the number of Linux apps beats any OS out there by miles because any Windows app can be run under Wine (not true of course).
Wine is a pain to get working too. By this path you could say that OSX is more compatible since VirtualPC runs a lot more Windows apps than Wine does (albeit probably slower).
To run a Linux app under OS X you must be a guru at recompiling (unless it's been prepackaged: not very frequent), which very few OS X users are, basically only those that migrated from Linux.
First off, I often find I have to compile things I download for Linux as well. Second, with Fink, downloading and installing is as easy as fink install [package]. I did this on my iBook yesterday with GnuPG and it works flawlessly.
You must invariably be running an X Server. I have tried XDarwin at my Mac-lover friends house, and it'd scare the living daylights out of most Mac users. Sure, it has an installer program, but when you run it what pops up? TWM with three xterms. Most Mac users won't want to place XDarwin (which is huge) onto their systems, and keep it running in the background just to run a Linux app.
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Linux apps don't have the Aqua look, and there are large numbers of OS X users out there who were 'inspired' shall we say by its looks. You give them a GTK+ or Qt app and they'll puke.
With OroborOSX, you can run X11 apps that look like native aqua apps. It's a very nice package that is easy to use and can be launched with a simple double-click. I agree that the bloat of X11 is never desirable, but Linux has it as well.
Now don't get me wrong, I like OS X. But saying it has more apps than Linux or Windows is ridiculous. Actually you often can't even count Classic apps either, I know that the fact that you had to run Photoshop in classic has held back widespread OS X adoption by old-skool mac users for a long time, and my friend hates running Classic apps, would often rather wait until it's been ported in fact
Well, you can count or not count whatever you want. The fact is that OSX has most of the apps on Linux, plus many of the apps on Windows, plus thousands of native MacOS X apps. For people who need Classic, it is fast and quite stable. The important thing is that OSX has all the apps that 95% of the world would ever need if they bothered to look. Everything from MS Office to a dozen email apps, best-of-class web browsers, great development environments and tools, a fast Java runtime, and tons of fun games are on the Mac (lots of stuff businesses need that they can't get for Linux). One of these days I am going to put Windows back on my Linux box, because with OSX on my G4 and my iBook I don't ever use Linux anymore for UNIX stuff.
The only problem with this otherwise cool idea is that the iPod doesn't have a speaker. You'd find yourself holding the headphone up to the telephone to try and get it to dial. The Newton used to do that, but I found that I rarely used that feature.
It would be a cool idea if the iPod had a speaker though.
The fee for FireWire is only $1 per port. That's it. I don't think that would seriously affect the price of a $700 box (Series 2).
Firewire is the standard now. The ports on Series2 TiVos are USB, but not USB2. So they're limited to 11MBps, which is too slow for data storage. It's mainly useful for easily adding a network adapter, but you can do that to old TiVos already using TivoNet.
I have learned some interesting lessons selling Mac software as a hobby for the last 3 years. The first thing I realized was that without some sort of registration system people will not register.
I wrote an app called MacBattleChat. It was a very popular app amongst Mac gamers, since it was the only one of its kind at the time. My "registration system" was an "I paid" checkbox. I got less than 10 registrations, but I could go on battle.net in the mac channel and see a dozen clients running at any given time.
I learned my lesson. I added a serial number and "nag screen" system to DropImage and PortSniffer. To this date I've had over 400 registrations of DropImage, and over 50 PortSniffer registrations.
I will say that there are pirate serial numbers in Cracks & Numbers, but I get enough registrations that I don't care. The shareware payments cover my IDE and development costs and then some. I'm not going to get rich with my shareware business, but it's not as bad as the Ambrosia guys make it out to be. Maybe it's because my shareware is actually affordable.
It's worth noting that TiVo makes it VERY easy to copy a show off the TiVo to a VCR if you feel that making a "hard copy" is an important feature. I have a Sony TiVo and a Sony VCR, and the TiVo can actually queue up the movie, start the VCR recording, and even pop up a 5 second title to put on the tape saying what the tape will have on it. It's very seamless and very neat.
You can get a tivonet card and use the Tivo over ethernet instead of a modem.
As to the program guide, the TiVo has guide data for 2 weeks into the future. It doesn't just tell you what is on now, it tells you what will be on. It breaks it down by two levels of genre, actor, director, type, new or repeat, and more. You can tell TiVo "record all Tom Hanks comedies" or "Record any sitcom pilots". Very cool stuff.
> Just so I'm following...
> You left *TIME WARNER* because you didn't
> like *AOL's* philosophy?
I had no problem working for CNN (which was owned but not managed by Time Warner). CNN was committed to providing unbiased news, and I felt they delivered on that promise.
I was there from 1998 to 4/2000. CNN employees felt like Turner employees, not Time Warner. You would have had to have been there to understand that. CNN was like a family.
Well before AOL even began to talk "merger" (which is what they told us it was), we were in talks to provide them with news feeds (CBS's contract was expiring). I got a glimpse into their idea of technology working as a developer on that project, and it was truly frightening how bass-ackwards they did things. The project eventually got canned and I gained some insight into their management during that debacle.
When the deal was announced I was wary of working for AOL, but I took a wait-and-see attitude. When I started seeing the changes they were making before the merger even went through, I saw all I needed, and I left in April 2000.
If I look at the CNN web site today, I feel it's worse today than it was 2 years ago when I worked there. I blame the acquisition by AOL for those problems, and I am glad I don't work there anymore.
As to your implication, the DMCA did not exist back then. The RIAA was not making headlines. From my perspective, Time Warner was mainly a company that made movies, DVDs, CDs, and books. I did not associate a political philosophy with them. I'm not sure if I would feel the same about them now (but maybe I would). AOL on the other hand is just as bad as Microsoft when it comes to dirty business practices. They're just not quite as good at it.
It's crazy to think Alan is "cocky" for saying he would not work for AOL. I worked at CNN.com when AOL bought Time Warner, and I left before the deal could go through because I didn't want to work for AOL.
Lest you think I'm just another lunatic, about 15 of the 20 developers I worked with also left around that time. Of the developers that remained, only one of them was a developer of any quality, and he was big into MS tools.
My point is, working for a faceless conglomerate is one thing. Working for one with significant philosophical differences from your own is another thing entirely.
It does a really nice job generating (HTML, text, etc.) documentation from python code __doc__ strings and source code.
The drive controller in a TiVo is an ATA/33 controller. That means it can only handle up to 132GB per drive. If you put in a 160 GB drive, a lot of space will be wasted.
Most people on the AVS Forum agree that you're better off with quiet, cool drives than fast ones. The consensus is that the "best" upgrade for most people would be two 5400 RPM 120GB drives.
Most people don't do this though. They take the existing 20 or 30GB drive and make that their "A" drive, then add a big "B" drive (80, 100, or 120 GB). 5400 RPM drives are preferrable since they tend to be quieter and run cooler.
Adding WaveLAN Extender - This article discusses adding various antennae to base stations to improve their range.
Extending TheAirPort's Range - This article discusses some more radical procedures, including some neat stuff with Directional Antennae which allow 802.11b to work as far away as a 57 Kilometers. They also discuss various antennae to add to laptops in order to improve their range.