One thing to note is that Apple is having some.Mac outages today. One has to wonder if those outages are responsible for the slow speeds people are complaining about.
Actually, now that I think about it, I wonder if it's actually the other way around - maybe Apple's.Mac outages are due to increased demand for this?
First, if you never watch any of the spanish channels, go into the settings menu into the "channels I recieve" box and turn them all off. Tivo won't ever record anything off those channels again. While you're at it, disable Home Shopping Network and anything of the like.
Secondly, be *very* liberal with your thumbs up and down, especially with the latter. For most shows that you're neutral about, leave it at no thumbs. Unless you really, really, really like a show, leave it at one thumb up. Don't give a show thumbs down unless you don't like it. Keep in mind that generally speaking, you aren't rating the show, you're rating the category, the actors and director, etc. So if you generally like sci-fi, but hate Enterprise, don't give it a thumbs-down - leave it at no thumbs. Too many thumbs down across too many shows will "poison" the system and make the suggestions worthless. Following this advice, I've found it very much worth my while to browse the TiVo suggestions list every week or so - while not everything on there is stuff I would watch, there's quite a bit on there that I wind up recording.
Many burners have a safety feature that only lets you burn as fast as the burner thinks the media can handle. Try different media; it may up the speed to 40x. There's also sometimes a software command to turn it off, although I don't know where that would be, and you run the risk of having iffy burnt CDs. This is under NERO on Windows; I don't know how it works under Linux/*BSD/. (I'm mainly a Mac OS X person myself, and I have a DVD-R in my machine; I just do a bit of work on the side on Windows.)
Also, I don't believe most burners actually burn at anywhere near 40x for most of the CD... for the inside of the disc, they burn at a slower speed, then keep upping it until they hit 40x near the end. Basically the same thing most cheapo 52x readers do.
Of course, then you run into the problem that you can't compare Macs to Mocs, since then you would be comparing Apples to Oranges, and we all know that's a no-no.
A brand-new "Super Wal-Mart" opened down the street. They currently have self-checkout lines, where you scan all the stuff yourself and pay using your card/cash (using one of those obnoxious things you find in vending machines). Currently they have a few security measures in place, such as making sure the item goes on a belt through a little tunnel to the bagging area before you can scan, and there's a "security" drone (read: A really bored cashier) a few feet away watching the whole thing to make sure you don't scam them. I could easily see them retrofitting these things to use RFIDs, so all you do is put them on the belt, it runs them through and scans them automatically. One thing I forsee possibly being a problem is produce. Unless they have a place where you can create your own ID (similar to the stands where you can weigh your produce, punch in a 4-digit ID and get a barcode that you can stick on), you're still going to have to identify it manually.
This is (sort of) possible. What you say can't be done literally on a Series2. TiVo has started checking hashes on everything in the Series2 units, so it's very difficult to hack the code on the TiVo. The kernel is signed with TiVo's private key, which the TiVo firmware checks on each bootup. Inside of the kernel is an initrd ramdisk, which contains to hashes to all the files on the TiVo's ext2 filesystem. (There's another filesystem called MFS that contains all of the TiVo video files and other critical data which isn't checked, but there's no executable code in there unfortunately.) Since the ramdisk is inside of the kernel, if you attempt to modify the ramdisk you ruin the signing, which means the firmware won't boot it. So until somebody hacks either the firmware, the private keys that the kernel is signed with, or manages to find a collision with the SHA-1 hashes, hacking the executable is out of the question. This also means all other fun forms of TiVo hacking are right out, such as TiVoWeb, yac/elseed (caller ID programs), e-mail notification systems and whatnot. (This is why I traded a friend a brand-new Series2 for a Series1 which he wasn't going to hack.)
Now, what you can do is modify the backdoor code hash itself, which is stored on the MFS file system. However, there's one big problem with that: You have to crack the case and pull out the hard drive, which has one of those lovely "Warranty Void if Removed/Damaged" stickers. True, many people are going to crack them open anyway to add a second drive, but there's also lots of people who won't. The backdoor codes can be entered without voiding the warranty; it's just a charachter code you enter on a certain screen. Voiding your warranty just to get into a few extra features via the backdoors code isn't something many people are willing to do.
And as for Freevo: Yeah, it might get somewhere sometime, but then again, it might not. Until it's as reliable, stable, and easy-to-use as my TiVo, I'm not planning on using it. I realize other people might have different tastes and prefer something majorly hackable, but I'm not one of them.:)
According to this guy, his setup is quite a bit different from yours. Might be time to become a "driven student" so you can get in on the cushy seats.;)
I've heard absolutely horrible things to date about the TW DVR. As it is in testing, I don't know how much will be fixed by the time it's widely availiable, but the main thing that worries me is that it's supposed to have a tendancy to not stop recording until it runs out of disk space, corrupts itself and requires a reset of some sort. Not to mention its' tendency to just not record stuff for no reason. You can read the article on Google Groups if you like.
Considering that every single game that Blizzard has released for PC has also come to the Mac, if by some chance it does come to a computer, Mac gamers won't be left out in the cold. Indeed, Blizzard's last two releases have been simultaneous for the Mac and PC, and even shipped in the same box using the same CD. Blizzard has their own in-house porting team, and in interviews often raves about how simultaneous cross-platform developement finds bugs on both platforms a lot faster then does working on one platform. (Not claiming this is true, just regurgitating what's been said.)
To be quite honest, I'm rather clueless as to what the point of this article is. There's still themes (maybe we can't do all the amazing whiz-bang things that Kaleidoscope was capable of, but they'll make it over eventually), there's still hacks to add more features to the UI, there's still great utilities and such. Apple's policy under OS X is the same that it always has been, which is to keep their mouth shut about deep-down OS areas. OK, so stuff breaks when going from 10.1 to Jaguar - stuff also breaks when going from 2.2 to 2.4 of the Linux kernel, or when going from Windows 2000 to XP. It even happened when going from Mac OS 8.6 to Mac OS 9. Just because Mac OS X is a radically different OS doesn't mean that you can't hack it. It's just new, the hackers will take a while to get into the real guts of the OS, and Apple will take a while to implement features that may make things easier or harder for customizers.
Yes, I know the article states most of this, but I just don't see the point in writing it. They could've just stated "It's the same as in OS 9" and been done with it.
Lastly, does anyone else find those featured themes to be rather unsightly? Come on, if you're going to showcase what Kaleidoscope was capable of, show off something a bit more visual then that.
I just checked CNN, MSNBC, Yahoo! News, ABC News and Fox News' websites, and all of them came up in a snap. There's something wrong with your connection.
I went to it; it was a pretty good time. No offense meant to any of the people there, but it was slightly weird being around people who, for the first time, are greater than or equal to my geekiness (most of my friends don't get too close to me...). I got involved in an interesting conversation or three with a couple people, swapped e-mail addresses with one person and promptly lost somebody else's (Pete, you out there?). I did show up an hour late due to some other stuff I had going on, as I only found out it was happening today at around 6:55, right when I was heading out to take care of some prior commitments. Luckily for me that particular Starbucks was 10 minutes from where I live and right on the way from where I was headed to/from. I'll probally attend the next one, assuming I don't have anything else going on. As I said, overall I had a good time. Anyone else from Rochester around?
(Rufo from Rochester, who is relaxing his grammar/spelling after writing long into the night last night...)
No, I doubt it's pudge; a lot of Mac users are like that. Very defensive of their platform, and if you insult them or their choice of platform, they'll blow up on you. We call them Mac zealots 'round these parts. There used to be an entire mailing list devoted to Mac zealot advocacy called the Evangelist run by ex-Apple (or is he still around?) employee Guy Kawasaki, but luckily they closed the list. I say luckily because I recall there being newspaper articles trashing the Mac, then one week later they'd refer to being bombarded with tons of angry e-mail. One columnist even went so far as to call them "Kawasaki's brown-shirted army", or something along those lines.
It should be noted that I'm a hard-core Mac user too, just pointing out an observation I've noticed. Hell, I even used to be a Mac zealot back in the day (although not an Evangalista). I've since aged, and mellowed out a bit.:)
You don't need to have cable TV to get cable internet access. I know of many people who don't get cable TV but have broadband through their cable provider (and no, they're not all in my area).
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Yes. ATI still exists after leaking the existance of the G4 Cube the day before the expo.
One thing to note is that Apple is having some .Mac outages today. One has to wonder if those outages are responsible for the slow speeds people are complaining about.
.Mac outages are due to increased demand for this?
Actually, now that I think about it, I wonder if it's actually the other way around - maybe Apple's
Re-rip those CDs instead.
What CDs?
Yeah, 'cause Steve Jobs thinks it's too confusing to have a three-fingered salute. (Read: People are too stupid.)
(For the record, every Mac I own has at least a three button + wheel mouse. I wouldn't have it any other way.)
Link, please? The only thing I've heard from Apple regarding Ogg is silent indifference.
Re: TiVo recording Telemundo 24/7... two things:
First, if you never watch any of the spanish channels, go into the settings menu into the "channels I recieve" box and turn them all off. Tivo won't ever record anything off those channels again. While you're at it, disable Home Shopping Network and anything of the like.
Secondly, be *very* liberal with your thumbs up and down, especially with the latter. For most shows that you're neutral about, leave it at no thumbs. Unless you really, really, really like a show, leave it at one thumb up. Don't give a show thumbs down unless you don't like it. Keep in mind that generally speaking, you aren't rating the show, you're rating the category, the actors and director, etc. So if you generally like sci-fi, but hate Enterprise, don't give it a thumbs-down - leave it at no thumbs. Too many thumbs down across too many shows will "poison" the system and make the suggestions worthless. Following this advice, I've found it very much worth my while to browse the TiVo suggestions list every week or so - while not everything on there is stuff I would watch, there's quite a bit on there that I wind up recording.
Many burners have a safety feature that only lets you burn as fast as the burner thinks the media can handle. Try different media; it may up the speed to 40x. There's also sometimes a software command to turn it off, although I don't know where that would be, and you run the risk of having iffy burnt CDs. This is under NERO on Windows; I don't know how it works under Linux/*BSD/. (I'm mainly a Mac OS X person myself, and I have a DVD-R in my machine; I just do a bit of work on the side on Windows.)
:)
Also, I don't believe most burners actually burn at anywhere near 40x for most of the CD... for the inside of the disc, they burn at a slower speed, then keep upping it until they hit 40x near the end. Basically the same thing most cheapo 52x readers do.
Just a few thoughts.
Of course, then you run into the problem that you can't compare Macs to Mocs, since then you would be comparing Apples to Oranges, and we all know that's a no-no.
A quick search on Google turned up this article with the regional director of X-Box Australia. He seems to address exactly what you're asking about.
A brand-new "Super Wal-Mart" opened down the street. They currently have self-checkout lines, where you scan all the stuff yourself and pay using your card/cash (using one of those obnoxious things you find in vending machines). Currently they have a few security measures in place, such as making sure the item goes on a belt through a little tunnel to the bagging area before you can scan, and there's a "security" drone (read: A really bored cashier) a few feet away watching the whole thing to make sure you don't scam them. I could easily see them retrofitting these things to use RFIDs, so all you do is put them on the belt, it runs them through and scans them automatically. One thing I forsee possibly being a problem is produce. Unless they have a place where you can create your own ID (similar to the stands where you can weigh your produce, punch in a 4-digit ID and get a barcode that you can stick on), you're still going to have to identify it manually.
I still want to find out what the underwear gnomes do for step two.
What, you don't have a moon? He did say a mirror, after all...
You're new here, aren't you? ;)
...we can embed links and advertising about Linux (oops, GNU/Linux) in Richard Stallmans' Free Software song?
/. Geek Club membership schedule says today I don't care about free software and love the MPAA, RIAA and Microsoft. Nevermind.
Wait a minute, my
This is (sort of) possible. What you say can't be done literally on a Series2. TiVo has started checking hashes on everything in the Series2 units, so it's very difficult to hack the code on the TiVo. The kernel is signed with TiVo's private key, which the TiVo firmware checks on each bootup. Inside of the kernel is an initrd ramdisk, which contains to hashes to all the files on the TiVo's ext2 filesystem. (There's another filesystem called MFS that contains all of the TiVo video files and other critical data which isn't checked, but there's no executable code in there unfortunately.) Since the ramdisk is inside of the kernel, if you attempt to modify the ramdisk you ruin the signing, which means the firmware won't boot it. So until somebody hacks either the firmware, the private keys that the kernel is signed with, or manages to find a collision with the SHA-1 hashes, hacking the executable is out of the question. This also means all other fun forms of TiVo hacking are right out, such as TiVoWeb, yac/elseed (caller ID programs), e-mail notification systems and whatnot. (This is why I traded a friend a brand-new Series2 for a Series1 which he wasn't going to hack.)
:)
Now, what you can do is modify the backdoor code hash itself, which is stored on the MFS file system. However, there's one big problem with that: You have to crack the case and pull out the hard drive, which has one of those lovely "Warranty Void if Removed/Damaged" stickers. True, many people are going to crack them open anyway to add a second drive, but there's also lots of people who won't. The backdoor codes can be entered without voiding the warranty; it's just a charachter code you enter on a certain screen. Voiding your warranty just to get into a few extra features via the backdoors code isn't something many people are willing to do.
And as for Freevo: Yeah, it might get somewhere sometime, but then again, it might not. Until it's as reliable, stable, and easy-to-use as my TiVo, I'm not planning on using it. I realize other people might have different tastes and prefer something majorly hackable, but I'm not one of them.
According to this guy, his setup is quite a bit different from yours. Might be time to become a "driven student" so you can get in on the cushy seats. ;)
I've heard absolutely horrible things to date about the TW DVR. As it is in testing, I don't know how much will be fixed by the time it's widely availiable, but the main thing that worries me is that it's supposed to have a tendancy to not stop recording until it runs out of disk space, corrupts itself and requires a reset of some sort. Not to mention its' tendency to just not record stuff for no reason. You can read the article on Google Groups if you like.
Considering that every single game that Blizzard has released for PC has also come to the Mac, if by some chance it does come to a computer, Mac gamers won't be left out in the cold. Indeed, Blizzard's last two releases have been simultaneous for the Mac and PC, and even shipped in the same box using the same CD. Blizzard has their own in-house porting team, and in interviews often raves about how simultaneous cross-platform developement finds bugs on both platforms a lot faster then does working on one platform. (Not claiming this is true, just regurgitating what's been said.)
To be quite honest, I'm rather clueless as to what the point of this article is. There's still themes (maybe we can't do all the amazing whiz-bang things that Kaleidoscope was capable of, but they'll make it over eventually), there's still hacks to add more features to the UI, there's still great utilities and such. Apple's policy under OS X is the same that it always has been, which is to keep their mouth shut about deep-down OS areas. OK, so stuff breaks when going from 10.1 to Jaguar - stuff also breaks when going from 2.2 to 2.4 of the Linux kernel, or when going from Windows 2000 to XP. It even happened when going from Mac OS 8.6 to Mac OS 9. Just because Mac OS X is a radically different OS doesn't mean that you can't hack it. It's just new, the hackers will take a while to get into the real guts of the OS, and Apple will take a while to implement features that may make things easier or harder for customizers.
Yes, I know the article states most of this, but I just don't see the point in writing it. They could've just stated "It's the same as in OS 9" and been done with it.
Lastly, does anyone else find those featured themes to be rather unsightly? Come on, if you're going to showcase what Kaleidoscope was capable of, show off something a bit more visual then that.
That's fucking brilliant. I love all the responses from the previous version. A true classic.
I just checked CNN, MSNBC, Yahoo! News, ABC News and Fox News' websites, and all of them came up in a snap. There's something wrong with your connection.
I went to it; it was a pretty good time. No offense meant to any of the people there, but it was slightly weird being around people who, for the first time, are greater than or equal to my geekiness (most of my friends don't get too close to me...). I got involved in an interesting conversation or three with a couple people, swapped e-mail addresses with one person and promptly lost somebody else's (Pete, you out there?). I did show up an hour late due to some other stuff I had going on, as I only found out it was happening today at around 6:55, right when I was heading out to take care of some prior commitments. Luckily for me that particular Starbucks was 10 minutes from where I live and right on the way from where I was headed to/from. I'll probally attend the next one, assuming I don't have anything else going on. As I said, overall I had a good time. Anyone else from Rochester around?
(Rufo from Rochester, who is relaxing his grammar/spelling after writing long into the night last night...)
No, I doubt it's pudge; a lot of Mac users are like that. Very defensive of their platform, and if you insult them or their choice of platform, they'll blow up on you. We call them Mac zealots 'round these parts. There used to be an entire mailing list devoted to Mac zealot advocacy called the Evangelist run by ex-Apple (or is he still around?) employee Guy Kawasaki, but luckily they closed the list. I say luckily because I recall there being newspaper articles trashing the Mac, then one week later they'd refer to being bombarded with tons of angry e-mail. One columnist even went so far as to call them "Kawasaki's brown-shirted army", or something along those lines.
:)
It should be noted that I'm a hard-core Mac user too, just pointing out an observation I've noticed. Hell, I even used to be a Mac zealot back in the day (although not an Evangalista). I've since aged, and mellowed out a bit.
You don't need to have cable TV to get cable internet access. I know of many people who don't get cable TV but have broadband through their cable provider (and no, they're not all in my area).