As one such person, I have never been recruited by them. In fact, I have tried to get a job with them a couple times, and both times have been when they had a hiring freeze.
It's not that the people who hack (finally, proper usage of the word) their Tivo to get more space...
I am going to have to disagree with you on the proper use thing. That is like saying script kiddies are cracking system security. They are not, they have tools to do it for them. The people who made the tools are the ones hacking (Or cracking).
I happen to be one that makes the tools. I have written one of the most commonly used TiVo upgrade tools (Not the most common though, at least not yet). I figured out what I needed to do to backup just the needed data from TiVo's special filesystem/database. I figured out what I needed to do to add more directly. And I wrote code to do it.
What most everybody else does (Including TiVo engineers w/ their own TiVos, so I hear) is just follow a set of instructions, run code by people like me, and stick their drives in their TiVo. They often (But not always) have no or little understanding of what is going on. Therefore I would argue that describing someone upgrading their drives in modern times is not hacking. Hell, you can even buy pre-configured drives that you just pop in your TiVo. It is no more hacking than adding a new drive to your computer, in that case.
The thing is, they themselves are geeks. I wrote one of the main utilities used to upgrade TiVos, and released a new version of it at this BBQ. I asked one of the TiVo employees what they thought about it, and the response I got was that many of the TiVo engineers use it themselves, since they don't have any tools like it. Another one stated that it is giving them sales. Of course, they can't officially condone it since TiVo is not a consumer upgradable device, but they do it themselves.
The thing is, in the case of the DirecTV one and the UTV as well as DishPlayer and DishPVR, it isn't just an en/de-coder. They don't have an encoder, using the DBS encoded signal directly, which gets a much higher quality image. However, don't expect either company to release hardware any time soon to let you capture THAT to your computer.
The UTV upgrade is, unsurprisingly, not unlike the DishPlayer upgrade. In fact, it is pretty much the same. Surprised this was not found earlier, unless it is drive specific, and early attempts tried the wrong drive type.
The upgrade itself is pretty painless. I do not have a UTV myself, nor have I upgraded one, but I do follow the forums. It is pretty much just putting it in and letting it download software. Only catch, from what I see, is the drive cannot have anything on it. At all. Not even an unused partition. While (In theory) slower than the TiVo upgrade, it is easier, and harder to end up with useless hardware. But I believe there is only space for one drive in UTV, so you can only get half the space of a TiVo.
As it is, the TiVo upgrade these days is pretty painless, and is only likely to get less so. If you can swap drives in the unit, it is only a little harder to do the necessary PC work. Of course, it does require a PC. And with the drives that come prepared for TiVo upgrade, it is actually just as easy to upgrade TiVo, and much quicker to boot, involving only a few seconds to add the new drive, instead of hours to download software to install.
Okay, so I just found and read the news.com article, which says they are actually suing.
But that aside, just commercial advance is not the whole of the lawsuit. I think the big stinger for them is the sharing of content. While I'm sure the commercial advance could survive legal scrutiny, sending digital copies may be a bit more difficult to deal with. However, by piggy-backing the commercial advance on, if they even have a slight victory, it is taken along for the ride, making others think twice before integrating such features.
Viacom's CBS, Disney's ABC, General Electric's NBC and other media companies are planning to sue personal video recorder maker Replay TV for copyright infringement. (Emphasis added)
Note that they are not actually filing a lawsuit, they are just announcing that they are planning to. They feel threatened all right. They are threatened because they fear that this could be perfectly legal and they could not do a thing about it. So they are announcing a potential lawsuit to try and scare other companies away from video sharing and automatic commercial skip, otherwise the big scarey lawyers might come after them.
(This is from TVInsite. For some reason, I can't seem to get login to NYTimes working, so don't know what their article says)
That part of the lawsuit has nothing to do with the 30 second skip button. The new ReplayTV 4000 box actually has an option to completely skip commercials, automatically. Similar to those VCRs with commercial auto-skip, except you just don't see the commercial. One minute, it is a break, and the next moment, the break is over. If you are not paying attention, you may not even realize the commercial was there. You don't even get the fleeting glimpse of the product like you do with fast-forward or a skip button. THAT is what they are worried about.
But that is also not the strongest part of this, IMO. I suspect the bigger part will be the ability to share recorded shows.
I agree with you, these are lacking. They are lacking the same thing every other construction toy lacks. Simplicity. Sure there are only two pieces, but way too many ways to connect them.
The advantage of Lego is that it is SIMPLE. There may be a lot of different pieces, but conceptually they are all the same. You always connect them the exact same way. That is their appeal, you can sit down and put them together right away, starting to explore the construction and creativity involved immediately, instead of having to first explore the ways to put them together and how they interact. Lego is a classic. It is simple. Anybody can pick it up and make stuff.
So while this looks like it has possibilities, I don't see it replacing Lego, just like other things have yet to replace lego.
Now if just Lego would go back to the basics instead of doing all these specialized kits.
If debian testing is 2 weeks behind unstable than how come I have yet to even get KDE 2.2? The latest I have is 2.1.1 and my package database is not stale (I updated it once already this week)
Is there a way to get KDE 2.2.anything for Debian without going to unstable release? That is the most annoying thing I find about *all* the distributions. You either use their packages and are stuck with what they got, or you use source and don't ever use any packages that have dependancies on the stuff you compiled in source. As a result I usually end up just getting source. But I am *trying* to give Debian and the much touted apt a chance. However, I don't feel like going to unstable, and bugs in KDE2 and other packages frozen in stable/testing have been annoying me.
Just because all the pixels have their own cathodes, doesn't mean they will all be used at once. The electronics for that would be very complex. Even LCDs don't do that really. On the other hand, doing a simulated raster scan would be easy. In fact, LCD hardware already does that. So you could probably take an LCD controller circuit and slap it onto one of these babies and have that problem solved. You still have a faster refresh, because you are only simulating the raster scan in electronics and you can do a whole line at a time. As to power consumption, remember, a traditional CRT has consuming power both a cathode which must produce a beam to cross from the back of the tube to the screen, and illuminate the phospher brightly through the shadow mask, as well as a huge magnetic coil to direct the beam. And traditional CRTs also must run hot to work right. On the other hand, most thin CRT technologies use cold running cathodes, and the beam must only cross a short distance, usually only a few mm, and no magnetic coils.
Don't confuse the technology behind a CRT (The cathode generating an electron beam striking a phosphor) with the implementation (A single beam, steered across the screen by magnetic coils) of a standard CRT.
This sounds remarkably similar to FED, ThinCRT, and other similar technologies. While the technology is the same (Cathode generating an electron beam striking a phospher) the implementation will likely be fastly different. In this case, it will be virtually identical to LCD - you have an address decoder that just walks through the horizontal and vertical rows, illuminating one pixel/row of pixels at a time, where each pixel is a defined area on the screen (Like LCDs) not where the beam happens to strike (Like traditional CRTs) In fact, the addressing hardware will probably be virtually identical. The biggest difference is instead of a transistor at each pixel, it just has an anode for the rows, and a cathode for the columns, and where the signals meet is illuminated. (Or vice versa)
As to heat.. Most similar technologies use something called cold cathodes.. Due to their much reduced power requirements, they can use slightly different technologies, and do not require being warmed up like traditional CRTs before they operate.
Of course, due to IBMs lack of information, this could all be wrong, but it is what it looks like to me.
This should beat traditional CRTs for weight, power consumption, and clarity (No focus or convergence problems and simplified geometry management - push button alignment like on LCDs) but still use more power than LCDs and be heavier.
I'm still keeping my eye on OLEDs though.
No, the CPU does not. It has a decoder chip that handles mpeg video and layer 2 audio (Sorry, no mp3 players possible with it) The CPU on the TiVo actually doesn't do terribly much. Most of it is IO bound.
Trust me.. I have a very very good source of information here. (BTW, I was the AC there - forgot to login)
Maybe not for the web, but what about for radio? For TV? I certainly love my TiVo, and being able to listen to internet audio without dealing with a full on computer, especially with the power prices in CA, is a nice benefeit.
This isn't the end of internet appliances.. It is just 3com deciding they can't afford R&D at the moment.
The price would most likely have been an early adopter price, to have gone down later.
As to running an ethernet cable, at the latest CES there was a wireless model running on batteries.
Boycotting may be the kneejerk/. reaction, but.. Doesn't it seem kind of pointless to boycott something that isn't really there to be boycotted?
On one hand, I can see that this is a little quick to do a boycott, and there is no reason.. But I also don't see much point in turning around and decrying people that want to boycott. Lets try and analyze the two sides of this logically:
Situation A: We assume openssh.org is evil Reaction: openssh.org should be boycotted End result: openssh.org ignores you too. Seeing as how it isn't getting anything out of you visiting and you aren't getting anything out of visiting, theres nothing lost.
Situation B: We assume openssh.org is just another domain that happened to be there first Reaction: No reason to boycott End result: Since there is really no reason to go there, I still don't visit. Seeing as how it isn't getting anything out of you visiting and you aren't getting anything out of visiting, there is nothing lost.
Is it just me, or do these two situations look rather... Err.. identical in the outcome? For Amazon or Sony I can see a boycott/don't boycott argument... But for a 2 link webpage that has no useful content on it's own? Besides, boycotting will not help the cause much. If someone stumbles across it, they probably wouldn't be boycotting it because then they would know it was useless to go there anyway and would know better.
Slashdot Mirror
As one such person, I have never been recruited by them. In fact, I have tried to get a job with them a couple times, and both times have been when they had a hiring freeze.
I never said most. I brought 25 CDs (too few in hindsight) and TiVo employees ended up with 5-10 of them.
It's not that the people who hack (finally, proper usage of the word) their Tivo to get more space...
I am going to have to disagree with you on the proper use thing. That is like saying script kiddies are cracking system security. They are not, they have tools to do it for them. The people who made the tools are the ones hacking (Or cracking).
I happen to be one that makes the tools. I have written one of the most commonly used TiVo upgrade tools (Not the most common though, at least not yet). I figured out what I needed to do to backup just the needed data from TiVo's special filesystem/database. I figured out what I needed to do to add more directly. And I wrote code to do it.
What most everybody else does (Including TiVo engineers w/ their own TiVos, so I hear) is just follow a set of instructions, run code by people like me, and stick their drives in their TiVo. They often (But not always) have no or little understanding of what is going on. Therefore I would argue that describing someone upgrading their drives in modern times is not hacking. Hell, you can even buy pre-configured drives that you just pop in your TiVo. It is no more hacking than adding a new drive to your computer, in that case.
The thing is, they themselves are geeks. I wrote one of the main utilities used to upgrade TiVos, and released a new version of it at this BBQ. I asked one of the TiVo employees what they thought about it, and the response I got was that many of the TiVo engineers use it themselves, since they don't have any tools like it. Another one stated that it is giving them sales. Of course, they can't officially condone it since TiVo is not a consumer upgradable device, but they do it themselves.
I count 3 common utilities in his name actually.. There may be more that are somewhat obscure.
Well good old trusty TiVo already had it on the to-do list by the time I found out. Can't beat that.
The thing is, in the case of the DirecTV one and the UTV as well as DishPlayer and DishPVR, it isn't just an en/de-coder. They don't have an encoder, using the DBS encoded signal directly, which gets a much higher quality image. However, don't expect either company to release hardware any time soon to let you capture THAT to your computer.
Works fine here. Although this link is a little shorter and has what appears to be a session ID removed.
The UTV upgrade is, unsurprisingly, not unlike the DishPlayer upgrade. In fact, it is pretty much the same. Surprised this was not found earlier, unless it is drive specific, and early attempts tried the wrong drive type.
The upgrade itself is pretty painless. I do not have a UTV myself, nor have I upgraded one, but I do follow the forums. It is pretty much just putting it in and letting it download software. Only catch, from what I see, is the drive cannot have anything on it. At all. Not even an unused partition. While (In theory) slower than the TiVo upgrade, it is easier, and harder to end up with useless hardware. But I believe there is only space for one drive in UTV, so you can only get half the space of a TiVo.
As it is, the TiVo upgrade these days is pretty painless, and is only likely to get less so. If you can swap drives in the unit, it is only a little harder to do the necessary PC work. Of course, it does require a PC. And with the drives that come prepared for TiVo upgrade, it is actually just as easy to upgrade TiVo, and much quicker to boot, involving only a few seconds to add the new drive, instead of hours to download software to install.
Okay, so I just found and read the news.com article, which says they are actually suing.
But that aside, just commercial advance is not the whole of the lawsuit. I think the big stinger for them is the sharing of content. While I'm sure the commercial advance could survive legal scrutiny, sending digital copies may be a bit more difficult to deal with. However, by piggy-backing the commercial advance on, if they even have a slight victory, it is taken along for the ride, making others think twice before integrating such features.
Viacom's CBS, Disney's ABC, General Electric's NBC and other media companies are planning to sue personal video recorder maker Replay TV for copyright infringement. (Emphasis added)
Note that they are not actually filing a lawsuit, they are just announcing that they are planning to. They feel threatened all right. They are threatened because they fear that this could be perfectly legal and they could not do a thing about it. So they are announcing a potential lawsuit to try and scare other companies away from video sharing and automatic commercial skip, otherwise the big scarey lawyers might come after them.
(This is from TVInsite. For some reason, I can't seem to get login to NYTimes working, so don't know what their article says)
That part of the lawsuit has nothing to do with the 30 second skip button. The new ReplayTV 4000 box actually has an option to completely skip commercials, automatically. Similar to those VCRs with commercial auto-skip, except you just don't see the commercial. One minute, it is a break, and the next moment, the break is over. If you are not paying attention, you may not even realize the commercial was there. You don't even get the fleeting glimpse of the product like you do with fast-forward or a skip button. THAT is what they are worried about.
But that is also not the strongest part of this, IMO. I suspect the bigger part will be the ability to share recorded shows.
You know, patch does have a -E option to erase empty files.
I agree with you, these are lacking. They are lacking the same thing every other construction toy lacks. Simplicity. Sure there are only two pieces, but way too many ways to connect them.
The advantage of Lego is that it is SIMPLE. There may be a lot of different pieces, but conceptually they are all the same. You always connect them the exact same way. That is their appeal, you can sit down and put them together right away, starting to explore the construction and creativity involved immediately, instead of having to first explore the ways to put them together and how they interact. Lego is a classic. It is simple. Anybody can pick it up and make stuff.
So while this looks like it has possibilities, I don't see it replacing Lego, just like other things have yet to replace lego.
Now if just Lego would go back to the basics instead of doing all these specialized kits.
So it's not just me with that problem?
The weird thing is I didn't start seeing it until I upgraded from kernel 2.2 to 2.4... Things that make you go hmmmmm....
If debian testing is 2 weeks behind unstable than how come I have yet to even get KDE 2.2? The latest I have is 2.1.1 and my package database is not stale (I updated it once already this week)
Is there a way to get KDE 2.2.anything for Debian without going to unstable release? That is the most annoying thing I find about *all* the distributions. You either use their packages and are stuck with what they got, or you use source and don't ever use any packages that have dependancies on the stuff you compiled in source. As a result I usually end up just getting source. But I am *trying* to give Debian and the much touted apt a chance. However, I don't feel like going to unstable, and bugs in KDE2 and other packages frozen in stable/testing have been annoying me.
Just because all the pixels have their own cathodes, doesn't mean they will all be used at once. The electronics for that would be very complex. Even LCDs don't do that really. On the other hand, doing a simulated raster scan would be easy. In fact, LCD hardware already does that. So you could probably take an LCD controller circuit and slap it onto one of these babies and have that problem solved. You still have a faster refresh, because you are only simulating the raster scan in electronics and you can do a whole line at a time. As to power consumption, remember, a traditional CRT has consuming power both a cathode which must produce a beam to cross from the back of the tube to the screen, and illuminate the phospher brightly through the shadow mask, as well as a huge magnetic coil to direct the beam. And traditional CRTs also must run hot to work right. On the other hand, most thin CRT technologies use cold running cathodes, and the beam must only cross a short distance, usually only a few mm, and no magnetic coils.
Don't confuse the technology behind a CRT (The cathode generating an electron beam striking a phosphor) with the implementation (A single beam, steered across the screen by magnetic coils) of a standard CRT. This sounds remarkably similar to FED, ThinCRT, and other similar technologies. While the technology is the same (Cathode generating an electron beam striking a phospher) the implementation will likely be fastly different. In this case, it will be virtually identical to LCD - you have an address decoder that just walks through the horizontal and vertical rows, illuminating one pixel/row of pixels at a time, where each pixel is a defined area on the screen (Like LCDs) not where the beam happens to strike (Like traditional CRTs) In fact, the addressing hardware will probably be virtually identical. The biggest difference is instead of a transistor at each pixel, it just has an anode for the rows, and a cathode for the columns, and where the signals meet is illuminated. (Or vice versa) As to heat.. Most similar technologies use something called cold cathodes.. Due to their much reduced power requirements, they can use slightly different technologies, and do not require being warmed up like traditional CRTs before they operate. Of course, due to IBMs lack of information, this could all be wrong, but it is what it looks like to me. This should beat traditional CRTs for weight, power consumption, and clarity (No focus or convergence problems and simplified geometry management - push button alignment like on LCDs) but still use more power than LCDs and be heavier. I'm still keeping my eye on OLEDs though.
But Audrey doesn't run Linux. It runs QNX IIRC. (Don't recall, I'm not in that group) And part of R&D is development. And there is plenty of research.
No, the CPU does not. It has a decoder chip that handles mpeg video and layer 2 audio (Sorry, no mp3 players possible with it) The CPU on the TiVo actually doesn't do terribly much. Most of it is IO bound. Trust me.. I have a very very good source of information here. (BTW, I was the AC there - forgot to login)
Maybe not for the web, but what about for radio? For TV? I certainly love my TiVo, and being able to listen to internet audio without dealing with a full on computer, especially with the power prices in CA, is a nice benefeit. This isn't the end of internet appliances.. It is just 3com deciding they can't afford R&D at the moment.
The price would most likely have been an early adopter price, to have gone down later. As to running an ethernet cable, at the latest CES there was a wireless model running on batteries.
Boycotting may be the kneejerk /. reaction, but.. Doesn't it seem kind of pointless to boycott something that isn't really there to be boycotted?
On one hand, I can see that this is a little quick to do a boycott, and there is no reason.. But I also don't see much point in turning around and decrying people that want to boycott. Lets try and analyze the two sides of this logically:
Situation A: We assume openssh.org is evil
Reaction: openssh.org should be boycotted
End result: openssh.org ignores you too. Seeing as how it isn't getting anything out of you visiting and you aren't getting anything out of visiting, theres nothing lost.
Situation B: We assume openssh.org is just another domain that happened to be there first
Reaction: No reason to boycott
End result: Since there is really no reason to go there, I still don't visit. Seeing as how it isn't getting anything out of you visiting and you aren't getting anything out of visiting, there is nothing lost.
Is it just me, or do these two situations look rather... Err.. identical in the outcome? For Amazon or Sony I can see a boycott/don't boycott argument... But for a 2 link webpage that has no useful content on it's own? Besides, boycotting will not help the cause much. If someone stumbles across it, they probably wouldn't be boycotting it because then they would know it was useless to go there anyway and would know better.
I forgot to account for virtual domains.. This is likely just the default page from their ISP for if it can't figure out the domain you want.