Contrary to popular belief, the American people own the airwaves. The original deal with the FCC was that the broadcasters wouldn't charge people to watch shows, and the broadcasters could have a chunk of the airwaves. No mention was ever made regarding obligations of the public to the broadcasters.
If the broadcasters don't like it, they are free to sell their stations and get a real job.
The questioner wonders about the support costs of a commercial app that doesn't do all of what they want it to do. The vendor is going to customize it for free? I'm sorry, not for free, the support cost was less than $2600/year. Not including adding new features that the vendor wasn't planning to install, or thinks they can get the client to pay for. Played that game before doing government consulting.
The real comparison is between using an OSS project, and paying someone to customize it, and using a commercial product and paying someone to embrace and extend it.
I bet the OSS costs will still be less than the "peek at the source code" fee for a proprietary solution.
Well two working, and one for parts, and I have to agree that Tivo (the company) is the walking dead.
I declined to buy lifetime subscriptions to their service since I didn't expect them to be around that long, and it was the lifetime of the individual TiVo box. There is a reason I have a TiVo that is just for parts.
Both of the working ones have web access, network cards, and two huge drives. I plan to add the 4 drive adapter in the near future.
It was a cool idea. But with several open source projects to build a PVR out of commodity parts, and the potential to tie several homebuilt ones together in a PVR cluster, I really don't see what TiVo has to offer to the people that are most likely to buy a TiVo. Especially since you can get TV guide information with any of the ATI TV tuner cards.
It is a shame that TiVo (the company) got to spend all of that money showing people what could be done, only to be trampled by all of the cable box and satellite decoder manufacturers running out to implement the "TiVo" idea.
I had been wearing soft contacts for about 18 years, and had noticed that within a week of getting new lenses, my vision had started to drop off.
About 8 months ago one of the local eye doctors started offering
orthokeratology.
I wanted to do this instead of lasik because I don't trust anything that has to do with cutting my eyes, the "oops, you know there is always a chance of something bad happening" factor bothers me. With orthokeratology, if you stop wearing the lenses, your eyes go back to how they were. This lets me have good vision with a minor inconvinience (less than wearing soft contacts) and give me the option of getting lasik when it is $50 an eye and there is no chance of anything bad happening.
My eyes started out at -6.5 / -5.5, which is at the far end for successful treatment. Important lesson, don't go from eyesight this bad to 20/20 in one step, use two different sets of lenses.
After about 6 weeks I had 20/20 20/25 without the lenses 20/15 with. Now I wear the lenses all day and night one day, leave them out the next. If I only wear them at night, after the second night I have 20/40.
I have no trouble working on computers all day, and I don't have to worry about losing a lens while rafting or diving. Getting dirt in my eye while biking though is a very interesting experience, one of the drawbacks of hard contact lenses.
I have two TiVos because networks like to pit their top shows against each other. I never watch commercials on either TiVo. I do watch commercials in those shows that are simulcast in HDTV, because TiVo doesn't make an HDTV recorder yet.
If the networks want to keep their advertising revenue, finish switching all the shows over to HDTV.
In a prior life, I helped setup the web farm and database server for a dot com that is still around. At that point they were just starting out. We had quickly outstripped the processing capability of a sun ulta 10, and had gotten an E6000.
Couple minor problems. We had already burned up one ultra because we didn't have a dedicated AC, and the building didn't provide AC at night or over the weekend. At the time, we were using $15 fans strapped in the doorways to the "server room" to keep it below 100F.
During the big argument with the CFO's girlfriend (the office manager) about why we needed to have AC put in before we turned on the big box (it needs a 440 power hookup) one of the junior sys admins had unpacked all of the Kingston memory, and left it laying out on a table near where the painters were finishing up.
Oddly enough, we found the boxes for the memory in the phone closet, but the memory was never seen again.
By the time the AC was ready, we had run out the "trial" period from Sun, and when they wanted to get paid, we ended up sending the box back telling them that it didn't mean our current needs.
Anyone care to guess what 4 gig of RAM cost back in 1997?
When you can check email from your car (you know Microsoft will get a piece of this), can you also send email to the slow f*ck in front of you with a virus to disable their brakes, or make them steer to the side of the road and then crash (non-lethal) their car?
The problem with his entire premise is that they, the studios are losing money. Lets see, a bunch of college students with no jobs, would rather download FREE (as in no cost to them) movies and spend their money on beer and getting laid instead of spending their money on renting or buying movies.
If the students weren't able to download movies, they would still spend their money on beer and getting laid, and just not watch movies, or make VHS copies.
I don't see where the studios are losing money.
Only people with jobs can afford to buy a movie on VHS and then again on DVD.
Sounds like Dr. Velikovsky was correct. He studies the myths and legends of ancient cultures looking for patterns and postulated in the 1950s that the Earth underwent a near miss by a comet, which later became the planet Venus.
He was quite promptly dissed by all of the leading scientists of the time, since everyone knows that the Earth isn't subject to astronomical events.
One of his theories was that the comet dropped lots of hydrocarbons as it went by, this might explain why we get helium from oil wells.
That or dinosaurs were really big balloon animals.
If it was developed in the US, the fact that the original project was developed with government money is in your favor. Projects that were developed with government help, are automatically placed in the public domain. The reasoning is that since the government is funding the development, the results belongs to all of the citizens.
You might be familier with another government funded research project that spun off Illustra (now an Informix project), Ingres (CA product), and the Postgres family of open source databases.
Programming is all about attention to detail, and knowing the results of your changes. Based on my experience, that isn't taught in school. Probably because the schools can't or won't assign large, team based projects to give students some real experience.
Started work in a shop that is in the medical industry. Since they won't pay well, they get the people that are willing to work below scale. We started with a COTS database package, and it is utter crap. It works more by 'magic' than by design.
The original programmers would do things like open a record set, count the number of rows until they found a match for the other key, and use that counter as meaningful data elsewhere. God forbid that the orignial record set would change.
Or the programmer that said 'oh, I thought that might happen' after I spent all day digging through his code to find out why it didn't work after his last change.
Nevermind that half the bugs fixed have side affects because nobody really understands how the system works, or why global variables are a bad thing.
Nobody here knows how to test to see if the code works, no one knows how to get real requirements, no one knows how to write code that does error trapping. I've spent 5 months trying to get management to buy into a peer review or at least a design review so that we can get out of a continual maintenance mode. Of course that would eliminate interfaces with 30 parameters, most of them named product1, product2, product3
No one else can understand why I spend 3 days writing code, then a week writing the test script, then another week writing all of the documentation. Oddly enough, they can't understand why I don't have to keep going back to fix my code. Hmm, wonder if the testing and the lack of bugs are related.
Sure glad I bothered to finish my degree in CS. Then I'd be as clueless as all the degreed people (some with Ph.D's) I've had to babysit during my career.
The CCS encryption doesn't prevent someone from making a bit-wise copy of a DVD. It just prevents someone from storing it to their hard disk in a usable form, OR, using/building a non-approved player to view a DVD. CCS has always been about limiting the DVD player market. Of course, the crack would let you translate a DVD so that it will work anywhere in the world, instead of just the original region.
All the UDP does is keep spam from leaving the @home network. I'm on @home, I and you, will be able to read all of the spam. Everyone outside of the @home network won't. Net affect to you: No one outside of @home will be able to see your replies to a usenet article.
isn't to force cars to slow down, but to allow cars to manage themselves. I have much better things to do with my time on a long trip than drive. If I could get onto a 'smart' road, tell my car where I wanted to go, and then read, or work, or sleep until I got there, I would. With the car being managed for me, as a convience, its acceptable. With the car being managed for me because my judgement isn't good enough, its insulting.
Its a nice theory, but as a former developer/dba/sa that went from being the only clue-full person in the development shop to managing the databases when the last DBA manager realized he couldn't lie to me about his ability, I call b*llshit. Process compensates for lack of talent and ability. Our shop is full of people doing their own thing, the problem is they ain't any good.
You can run a free-for-all when you have those programmers that are good, but there is the same distribution of talent in programming as there is in professional sports. Everyone can play basketball, very few make a living at it. Generally, the lame programmers don't work on open source projects.
If I sound bitter, its because I am about to spend the next four months re-configuring a huge production server in three hour chunks to correct the incompetence and stupidity of the past, AND do the job I get paid for, AND try to teach our developers how to write code that will actually work AND get them to actually test beyond the fact that it can compile.
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Contrary to popular belief, the American people own the airwaves. The original deal with the FCC was that the broadcasters wouldn't charge people to watch shows, and the broadcasters could have a chunk of the airwaves. No mention was ever made regarding obligations of the public to the broadcasters.
If the broadcasters don't like it, they are free to sell their stations and get a real job.
The questioner wonders about the support costs of a commercial app that doesn't do all of what they want it to do. The vendor is going to customize it for free? I'm sorry, not for free, the support cost was less than $2600/year. Not including adding new features that the vendor wasn't planning to install, or thinks they can get the client to pay for. Played that game before doing government consulting.
The real comparison is between using an OSS project, and paying someone to customize it, and using a commercial product and paying someone to embrace and extend it.
I bet the OSS costs will still be less than the "peek at the source code" fee for a proprietary solution.
Well two working, and one for parts, and I have to agree that Tivo (the company) is the walking dead.
I declined to buy lifetime subscriptions to their service since I didn't expect them to be around that long, and it was the lifetime of the individual TiVo box. There is a reason I have a TiVo that is just for parts.
Both of the working ones have web access, network cards, and two huge drives. I plan to add the 4 drive adapter in the near future.
It was a cool idea. But with several open source projects to build a PVR out of commodity parts, and the potential to tie several homebuilt ones together in a PVR cluster, I really don't see what TiVo has to offer to the people that are most likely to buy a TiVo. Especially since you can get TV guide information with any of the ATI TV tuner cards.
It is a shame that TiVo (the company) got to spend all of that money showing people what could be done, only to be trampled by all of the cable box and satellite decoder manufacturers running out to implement the "TiVo" idea.
Such is life.
About 8 months ago one of the local eye doctors started offering orthokeratology. I wanted to do this instead of lasik because I don't trust anything that has to do with cutting my eyes, the "oops, you know there is always a chance of something bad happening" factor bothers me. With orthokeratology, if you stop wearing the lenses, your eyes go back to how they were. This lets me have good vision with a minor inconvinience (less than wearing soft contacts) and give me the option of getting lasik when it is $50 an eye and there is no chance of anything bad happening.
My eyes started out at -6.5 / -5.5, which is at the far end for successful treatment. Important lesson, don't go from eyesight this bad to 20/20 in one step, use two different sets of lenses.
After about 6 weeks I had 20/20 20/25 without the lenses 20/15 with. Now I wear the lenses all day and night one day, leave them out the next. If I only wear them at night, after the second night I have 20/40.
I have no trouble working on computers all day, and I don't have to worry about losing a lens while rafting or diving. Getting dirt in my eye while biking though is a very interesting experience, one of the drawbacks of hard contact lenses.
I have two TiVos because networks like to pit their top shows against each other. I never watch commercials on either TiVo. I do watch commercials in those shows that are simulcast in HDTV, because TiVo doesn't make an HDTV recorder yet.
If the networks want to keep their advertising revenue, finish switching all the shows over to HDTV.
In a prior life, I helped setup the web farm and database server for a dot com that is still around. At that point they were just starting out. We had quickly outstripped the processing capability of a sun ulta 10, and had gotten an E6000.
Couple minor problems. We had already burned up one ultra because we didn't have a dedicated AC, and the building didn't provide AC at night or over the weekend. At the time, we were using $15 fans strapped in the doorways to the "server room" to keep it below 100F.
During the big argument with the CFO's girlfriend (the office manager) about why we needed to have AC put in before we turned on the big box (it needs a 440 power hookup) one of the junior sys admins had unpacked all of the Kingston memory, and left it laying out on a table near where the painters were finishing up.
Oddly enough, we found the boxes for the memory in the phone closet, but the memory was never seen again.
By the time the AC was ready, we had run out the "trial" period from Sun, and when they wanted to get paid, we ended up sending the box back telling them that it didn't mean our current needs.
Anyone care to guess what 4 gig of RAM cost back in 1997?
Maybe California should pass a special tax just for Oracle, 50M/month until they cancel the contract.
When you can check email from your car (you know Microsoft will get a piece of this), can you also send email to the slow f*ck in front of you with a virus to disable their brakes, or make them steer to the side of the road and then crash (non-lethal) their car?
If the students weren't able to download movies, they would still spend their money on beer and getting laid, and just not watch movies, or make VHS copies.
I don't see where the studios are losing money.
Only people with jobs can afford to buy a movie on VHS and then again on DVD.
Sounds like Dr. Velikovsky was correct. He studies the myths and legends of ancient cultures looking for patterns and postulated in the 1950s that the Earth underwent a near miss by a comet, which later became the planet Venus.
He was quite promptly dissed by all of the leading scientists of the time, since everyone knows that the Earth isn't subject to astronomical events.
One of his theories was that the comet dropped lots of hydrocarbons as it went by, this might explain why we get helium from oil wells.
That or dinosaurs were really big balloon animals.
If it was developed in the US, the fact that the original project was developed with government money is in your favor. Projects that were developed with government help, are automatically placed in the public domain. The reasoning is that since the government is funding the development, the results belongs to all of the citizens.
You might be familier with another government funded research project that spun off Illustra (now an Informix project), Ingres (CA product), and the Postgres family of open source databases.
Programming is all about attention to detail, and knowing the results of your changes. Based on my experience, that isn't taught in school. Probably because the schools can't or won't assign large, team based projects to give students some real experience.
Started work in a shop that is in the medical industry. Since they won't pay well, they get the people that are willing to work below scale. We started with a COTS database package, and it is utter crap. It works more by 'magic' than by design.
The original programmers would do things like open a record set, count the number of rows until they found a match for the other key, and use that counter as meaningful data elsewhere. God forbid that the orignial record set would change.
Or the programmer that said 'oh, I thought that might happen' after I spent all day digging through his code to find out why it didn't work after his last change.
Nevermind that half the bugs fixed have side affects because nobody really understands how the system works, or why global variables are a bad thing.
Nobody here knows how to test to see if the code works, no one knows how to get real requirements, no one knows how to write code that does error trapping. I've spent 5 months trying to get management to buy into a peer review or at least a design review so that we can get out of a continual maintenance mode. Of course that would eliminate interfaces with 30 parameters, most of them named product1, product2, product3
No one else can understand why I spend 3 days writing code, then a week writing the test script, then another week writing all of the documentation. Oddly enough, they can't understand why I don't have to keep going back to fix my code. Hmm, wonder if the testing and the lack of bugs are related.
Sure glad I bothered to finish my degree in CS. Then I'd be as clueless as all the degreed people (some with Ph.D's) I've had to babysit during my career.
The CCS encryption doesn't prevent someone from making a bit-wise copy of a DVD. It just prevents someone from storing it to their hard disk in a usable form, OR, using/building a non-approved player to view a DVD. CCS has always been about limiting the DVD player market. Of course, the crack would let you translate a DVD so that it will work anywhere in the world, instead of just the original region.
All the UDP does is keep spam from leaving the @home network. I'm on @home, I and you, will be able to read all of the spam. Everyone outside of the @home network won't. Net affect to you: No one outside of @home will be able to see your replies to a usenet article.
isn't to force cars to slow down, but to allow cars to manage themselves. I have much better things to do with my time on a long trip than drive. If I could get onto a 'smart' road, tell my car where I wanted to go, and then read, or work, or sleep until I got there, I would. With the car being managed for me, as a convience, its acceptable. With the car being managed for me because my judgement isn't good enough, its insulting.
You can run a free-for-all when you have those programmers that are good, but there is the same distribution of talent in programming as there is in professional sports. Everyone can play basketball, very few make a living at it. Generally, the lame programmers don't work on open source projects.
If I sound bitter, its because I am about to spend the next four months re-configuring a huge production server in three hour chunks to correct the incompetence and stupidity of the past, AND do the job I get paid for, AND try to teach our developers how to write code that will actually work AND get them to actually test beyond the fact that it can compile.