Steve Ballmer is notorious for saying ridiculously stupid, arrogant things. For example, during the DOJ investigation of Microsoft, he said "Janet Reno can go to hell."
Apparently, this sort of personality makes for good CEOs, but i'm not sure why. He could use some pointier hair.
Goto is doing extremely well; they're one of the few companies around which are making a profit off of web searches. It turns out to be a very good search engine for goods and services--you get good results because people are paying to be listed.
Most of their traffic is through affiliates large and small, not directly through their site. Some of their affiliates are AOL, Altavista, and MSN.
For sites which make more than $.05 per targeted visitor (meaning, the visitor actually *wants* to view your site, not some random viewer), Goto is the most effective source of traffic you can buy. As far as i know, Goto has significantly more advertisers than any other net company, and has a very interesting mix of fortune-500 advertisers and mom-and-pop-shop advertisers.
You might instead try connecting the TiVo to a networked computer using a serial cable and null modem. You run pppd and some routing on the computer, and the TiVo can be set to connect via ppp on that serial port instead of the modem.
DirecTiVo also has two tuners; it just needs the next software upgrade to get the second one working. DirectTiVo is the competitor to ultimateTV.
The Standalone TiVo box only has one tuner, but it works with regular cable or antenna TV. DirecTiVo and ultimatetv are only for satellite; they don't have mpeg encoders.
Hot-swappable USB and Firewire drives which are cheaper and more portable (both in 2.5" and 3.5" sizes) than this iomega drive have been out for several years. I'm still not quite sure what makes this news relevant or interesting.
Solar panels are still relatively inefficient. IIRC they only convert about 5-10% of the light hitting them to
electricity.
That conversion rate is actually quite impressive. The sun sends lots of energy our way (peak about 1.1 kW/m^2), and converting 10% of that into electricity is quite impressive.
The real efficiency problem is one of cost--look at the $/W numbers of solar photovoltaic panels and solar/battery (batteries are extremely expensive) systems, and see how they compare to conventional sources or wind. The places where photovoltaics are efficient are remote places where electricity is unavailable. They're much cheaper than stringing new electric lines to the middle of nowhere.
A solar-powered turbine can be cheaper, but requires much more maintenance and is not something that scales down to individual household use cheaply.
If you're after reliable power, get a generator and UPS. If you want to help the environment, stick to cheaper energy sources (wind, water?) and donate the money you would have spent on solar on organizations which fund research on environmental issues and alternative power.
The short truth is that it will take years, even at a frantic war-time pace, to develop the oil that's under the
Alaska's wildlife refuges. There's the surveying, getting equipment there, infrastructure, finding laborers,
moving the prodcut -- it all takes time.
Furthermore, there are no plans for the new drilling in Alaska to supply natural gas--the cost of a pipeline for it would be prohibitively expensive for the amount it might supply. California does not use oil to make electricity; it's primarily a natural gas state. Therefore, new oil drilling in Alaska does nothing to help with California's electricity woes--oil is much more valuable to be refined and sold as oil than converted to electricity.
One of the nice things about the ibook and titanium powerbook is that they have ethernet and 802.11 antennas built in (802.11 is a $99 internal card addition). It annoys me on other laptops to have the 802.11 cards or ethernet dongles sticking out of the computer; I'm not sure why the PC companies can't copy this nice feature of the apple laptops.
Apple introduced software control of its monitors with their AppleVision monitors, several years beefore the iMac. It's a somewhat nice feature, because dragging a window around is a bit better than pressing a button to do screen placement or other adjustments. Color calibrations can also be handled more easily this way.
There's no pollution on the buildings because the photographer chose to photograph nice areas. In the industrial areas of this time (and since the beginnings of the industrial era), soot and other easily detectable pollutants were horrible, far worse than anything you'd find in the U.S. today.
For what it's worth, i've found the tivo fast forward and correction backtracking to be more effective for skipping commercials than a 30s skip. It's something you need to try for yourself, but I'm sure that most people will get better results from the FF w/correction.
John Dvorak is a troll. Trolls exist not only in usenet, but also in the commercial press. He writes controversially to get attention. I don't think he's truly that stupid. He was pretty funny when he wrote the back-page column for MacUser, a long long time ago.
He can be a slave to the networks, but the rest of us don't have to be.
The equivalant product today would be 10GB and fast enough to run Windows 2000 off of for $200. Hell, if that was on the market, I'd be there in a second.
That product exists today (well, for $200, you can get a 40 GB one) in the form of external USB and firewire drives. External drives were always very prevalent in the mac world, but never caught on much in the PC world because there was no good standardized external interface for them (parallel drive? ugh.)
Finally, I should point out that it is non-trivial to get those cards working under windows, especialy if you
want to use ad-hoc mode and turn on encryption.
I'm not sure about ad-hoc mode, but installing an 802.11 lucent card in windows is cake. You run the software, enter in the encryption key, and it just works. It's cake. I have no idea how to get it to switch to a regular pcmcia ethernet card without rebooting though...i really despise windows.
Linux 2.4.3 actually makes using the lucent and similar 802.11 cards quite easy to install. You just need to compile in the drivers (using the kernel's pcmcia support rather than pcmcia-cs) for the "hermes" cards, plug the appropriate network name and encryption key into the wireless.opts, and download the hermes.conf file. It could all be easily stuffed into some nice gui setup utility.
At The Ohio State University, the computers in our computer labs are like this. Well they, from what I can
figure out, are some kind of HP Xwindow terminals. So I am sure they are a breeze to admin! And from them
we can either log into our accounts on the solaris server or log into NT4. All this is done over the network. I
had never heard of using NT4 over an X terminal but it works great! They dont have to buy hundreds of full
computers this way.
It's nice until you look up how much hardware you need to run the NT terminal server, and find out how much you have to pay per concurrent NT user. Microsoft's monopoly allows them to charge monopoly-level pricing for such a product. You don't end up saving much on hardware and software costs in a cluster where most of the machines are running NT (but it's nice if you are in a cluster where only the occasional user wants NT), and gain most of your savings in decreased maintenance costs.
You can edit some environmental variables set at bootup which will change the auto-correct to whatever you want. Check the tivo underground for the specifics.
Automatic software updates are about trust. Some companies and organizations i trust. I strongly trust Debian. I trust Apple to do auto-updates on their own software. I trust TiVo, unless they run out of money and sell themselves and don't retain the same employees.
Good luck installing debian on a laptop...I've found Debian to be an incredible platform for servers. On the other hand, it sucks for workstation use.
Why do you say this? I switched my laptop from redhat to Debian (testing) last year, and i don't miss a single thing from redhat. A few months ago, i installed debian on a bunch of old laptops at work which were unused (some ancient NEC, an old thinkpad, a couple old dells, a toshiba), and the installation for all of them was flawless. X worked fine right away for all of them. Sound took some effort (mainly looking at the linux-laptop-howtos, and copying the appropriate lines for conf.modules), but it worked for all of them except for the toshiba which wasn't supported by the kernel modules (it got alsa instead). Overall, the process was simple, and just as easy or easier than redhat installs.
Upgrading in debian is simple and actually works; i have much greater trust in debian packages than rpms.
To convert a system from redhat to Debian, you'll probably want to wipe your system and start anew. Tar up your home directories and any other directories you use to store files. Make a list of software you've installed so you remember to select them when you do the debian install. Backup/etc and any other directories which you think you might want files from.
Wipe the disks, install Debian, put your home directory into place. That's about it...
I finally brought my Tivo killer online last week. It cost me about 800 bucks to build (based on an Athlon and
ATI Radeon All In Wonder) but it does everything Tivo does. Plus, it plays DVD's, VCD's, DivX AVI's and every
other computer video format I throw at it, MP3's, PC games, and most importantly, MAME
Is it fast enough to be always encoding and decoding MPEG2 video to and from disk?
You can actually avoid using UUnet and use your regular net connection instead. The easy way to do it is to set up a PPP server on a unix box and connect it with a null modem to the TiVo's modem. Or, you can hack ethernet into the TiVo.
You either get
real-time or you can tape the whole show and watch it when its done. Or are you going to wait until the game
has been on for 30 minutes before starting to watch it? And then what if you catch up? Stare at a paused
screen while it buffers just so you can skip some ads you won't pay attention to anyway?
You definitely can just wait 30 minutes (actually, depending on the sport, usually more), then watch. It's the advantage of a recorder that can record and play from different points simultaneously.
If you're caught up, and you need something to do besides stare at a paused screen, you can go through your list of other shows that have been recorded and watch one of those while the tivo maintains your position in and keeps recording the show you were watching almost-live.
Slashdot Mirror
Most companies do not allow employees to trade in derivatives (options, shorts) on the company's stock.
Apparently, this sort of personality makes for good CEOs, but i'm not sure why. He could use some pointier hair.
Most of their traffic is through affiliates large and small, not directly through their site. Some of their affiliates are AOL, Altavista, and MSN.
For sites which make more than $.05 per targeted visitor (meaning, the visitor actually *wants* to view your site, not some random viewer), Goto is the most effective source of traffic you can buy. As far as i know, Goto has significantly more advertisers than any other net company, and has a very interesting mix of fortune-500 advertisers and mom-and-pop-shop advertisers.
Bill and Ted do the time travelling bit *so* much better.
There's a HOW-TO on this.
The Standalone TiVo box only has one tuner, but it works with regular cable or antenna TV. DirecTiVo and ultimatetv are only for satellite; they don't have mpeg encoders.
Hot-swappable USB and Firewire drives which are cheaper and more portable (both in 2.5" and 3.5" sizes) than this iomega drive have been out for several years. I'm still not quite sure what makes this news relevant or interesting.
Also, take a look at the font de-uglifiation HOW-TO.
That conversion rate is actually quite impressive. The sun sends lots of energy our way (peak about 1.1 kW/m^2), and converting 10% of that into electricity is quite impressive.
The real efficiency problem is one of cost--look at the $/W numbers of solar photovoltaic panels and solar/battery (batteries are extremely expensive) systems, and see how they compare to conventional sources or wind. The places where photovoltaics are efficient are remote places where electricity is unavailable. They're much cheaper than stringing new electric lines to the middle of nowhere.
A solar-powered turbine can be cheaper, but requires much more maintenance and is not something that scales down to individual household use cheaply.
If you're after reliable power, get a generator and UPS. If you want to help the environment, stick to cheaper energy sources (wind, water?) and donate the money you would have spent on solar on organizations which fund research on environmental issues and alternative power.
Furthermore, there are no plans for the new drilling in Alaska to supply natural gas--the cost of a pipeline for it would be prohibitively expensive for the amount it might supply. California does not use oil to make electricity; it's primarily a natural gas state. Therefore, new oil drilling in Alaska does nothing to help with California's electricity woes--oil is much more valuable to be refined and sold as oil than converted to electricity.
Well, you can definitely buy a linux box at best buy. They sell TiVos.
The iBook has built-in ethernet and an internal slot for 802.11, so for most users, the lack of PC Card slots is not relevant.
One of the nice things about the ibook and titanium powerbook is that they have ethernet and 802.11 antennas built in (802.11 is a $99 internal card addition). It annoys me on other laptops to have the 802.11 cards or ethernet dongles sticking out of the computer; I'm not sure why the PC companies can't copy this nice feature of the apple laptops.
Apple introduced software control of its monitors with their AppleVision monitors, several years beefore the iMac. It's a somewhat nice feature, because dragging a window around is a bit better than pressing a button to do screen placement or other adjustments. Color calibrations can also be handled more easily this way.
There's no pollution on the buildings because the photographer chose to photograph nice areas. In the industrial areas of this time (and since the beginnings of the industrial era), soot and other easily detectable pollutants were horrible, far worse than anything you'd find in the U.S. today.
For what it's worth, i've found the tivo fast forward and correction backtracking to be more effective for skipping commercials than a 30s skip. It's something you need to try for yourself, but I'm sure that most people will get better results from the FF w/correction.
He can be a slave to the networks, but the rest of us don't have to be.
That product exists today (well, for $200, you can get a 40 GB one) in the form of external USB and firewire drives. External drives were always very prevalent in the mac world, but never caught on much in the PC world because there was no good standardized external interface for them (parallel drive? ugh.)
I'm not sure about ad-hoc mode, but installing an 802.11 lucent card in windows is cake. You run the software, enter in the encryption key, and it just works. It's cake. I have no idea how to get it to switch to a regular pcmcia ethernet card without rebooting though...i really despise windows.
Linux 2.4.3 actually makes using the lucent and similar 802.11 cards quite easy to install. You just need to compile in the drivers (using the kernel's pcmcia support rather than pcmcia-cs) for the "hermes" cards, plug the appropriate network name and encryption key into the wireless.opts, and download the hermes.conf file. It could all be easily stuffed into some nice gui setup utility.
It's nice until you look up how much hardware you need to run the NT terminal server, and find out how much you have to pay per concurrent NT user. Microsoft's monopoly allows them to charge monopoly-level pricing for such a product. You don't end up saving much on hardware and software costs in a cluster where most of the machines are running NT (but it's nice if you are in a cluster where only the occasional user wants NT), and gain most of your savings in decreased maintenance costs.
Automatic software updates are about trust. Some companies and organizations i trust. I strongly trust Debian. I trust Apple to do auto-updates on their own software. I trust TiVo, unless they run out of money and sell themselves and don't retain the same employees.
Why do you say this? I switched my laptop from redhat to Debian (testing) last year, and i don't miss a single thing from redhat. A few months ago, i installed debian on a bunch of old laptops at work which were unused (some ancient NEC, an old thinkpad, a couple old dells, a toshiba), and the installation for all of them was flawless. X worked fine right away for all of them. Sound took some effort (mainly looking at the linux-laptop-howtos, and copying the appropriate lines for conf.modules), but it worked for all of them except for the toshiba which wasn't supported by the kernel modules (it got alsa instead). Overall, the process was simple, and just as easy or easier than redhat installs.
Upgrading in debian is simple and actually works; i have much greater trust in debian packages than rpms.
To convert a system from redhat to Debian, you'll probably want to wipe your system and start anew. Tar up your home directories and any other directories you use to store files. Make a list of software you've installed so you remember to select them when you do the debian install. Backup /etc and any other directories which you think you might want files from.
Wipe the disks, install Debian, put your home directory into place. That's about it...
Is it fast enough to be always encoding and decoding MPEG2 video to and from disk?
There's a HOWTO on this.
You definitely can just wait 30 minutes (actually, depending on the sport, usually more), then watch. It's the advantage of a recorder that can record and play from different points simultaneously.
If you're caught up, and you need something to do besides stare at a paused screen, you can go through your list of other shows that have been recorded and watch one of those while the tivo maintains your position in and keeps recording the show you were watching almost-live.