I have Humax running right now in the Den. Love this box. The DVD burning feature is so nice. Just pop in a blank disk, select the shows to burn and done. Now you have a DVD to take with you on vacation, for the kids in the car, or to pass to a friend. Sadly they don't sell this unit or any other with DVD burner built in.
I currently have 2 Tivos - 1 of them HD - and a cable co dvr. The interface is the best and Tivo just works. The cable company's dvr can't touch it. One small example. Say you turn on the TV and see a show that has been on for 10 minutes - and you decide to record it. Well Tivo has been buffering the show since it began - so when you hit record you don't miss the first 10 minutes. On the cable co's dvr it just starts recording from when you hit record - you don't get the first 10 minutes. There are many other examples like this that when all added up make the Tivo worth *some* premium. And here's where tivo gets in trouble. Their pricing scheme, upgrade scheme is one big mess. Do you wonder why, if I love Tivo so much I still have a cable co dvr? Its because Tivo wanted too much money from me to convert from Series 2 to Tivo HD. So now I have both in my home - Tivo and Cable dvr. Cable dvr is not as user friendly. But my wife and I are slowing learning its quirks. Every month I see the Tivo bill I think about disconnecting to save money. Every month I learn to live with the Cable co dvr a bit more.....
Sorry, Zed I don't need statistics to do my job. Zed jumped the shark years ago - isn't he the Rails guy? That is so 2005. This story is like having deja-vu of a bad hangover.
I had moved some new work to postgres, after the sun+oracle announcement I migrated some older code to postgres.
I also weaned myself off of Netbeans.
I've been in this business too long to have any illusions that Oracle is going to fund competitors to its revenue earning products. Oracle doesn't want you on MySQL- at the minimum they want you on Oracle XE.
Hey Rupert, your a big shot CEO - so just make the phone call and have your robots.txt file edited to block Google and stop the whining!
As Google has stated - indexing news is not a big revenue source for them. Last time I checked there are no ads on google news. The truth is that News Corp's content *on the internet* isn't worth that much. There are hundreds if not thousands of other smaller operations that would gladly take their place in Google's indexes. The value in these legacy media operations was the control they had amassed over the *medium* (paper, broadcast signals) not their *content*, which as most of us know, on average *sucks*
As for Microsoft....All I can say is that with business strategies like this they better hope they can keep on selling office/windows for a long, long time. I would call this strategy a direct assault on themselves. Google should encourage Microsoft to pay for as much content as possible to put pressure on Microsoft's bottom line.
After 15+ years as a consultant/software engineer I have been in all kinds of interviews and job situations (in the US and Europe). Here is my opinion - hiring a programmer based on his/her performance on some test is like hiring an admin based on his/her performance on a typing test. I have interviewed and hired dozens of programmers and my success rate is pretty good. I have a pretty simple formula. Before the interview I list out what this job really entails in all brutal honesty (e.g. hot code fixes under pressure late at night, working with a hard to get along with person, coming up with innovation on the scale of the iphone (:-)) Then I just seek to have a conversation with the person asking them very open ended questions that address the items in my list. Then I listen, and listen trying not to talk to too much. This has worked much better , in my opinion, than asking them to get up and code a quicksort on the chalkboard or something.
1) I really like the privacy policy. Google worries me. Especially when I can fill my screen with detailed images of my home - not to mention the amount of information they have stored on me and my search history.
2) I don't like the columnar results. You can reduce it down to 2 columns - but why not 1 - maybe google has me trained but scanning results left-right, top-bottom seems like more work.
3) searches like "target san francisco, ca" bring up the store with phone number + map google. cuil's results are nothing special. I tend to use google quite frequently for these types of "yellow pages" type queries.
4) I think cuil needs to present one thing they do better than Google that would justify switching. The privacy angle is HUGE but I think they need at least one(or a few) in your face, obvious features that in some way, for some target audience, blows google away feature wise.
5) I am sure this will draw laughter - but honestly, I sort of miss ads - advertising does have value, and when you search for something sometimes you appreciate seeing links that people are willing to pay money to show you.
As for NBL - I think the NBL will provide support/semantics for development methodologies and components - Abstractions built in for defining components, instantiating them from repositories, support for testing.. I think all the current focus on things like dynamic vs static typing, closures, functional languages, dsl, are all things that are at too low a level - it is analogous to assembly language programmers arguing over instruction set design when out of left field comes compiled high level languages (ie. fortran ) So I think the guy saying he doesn't see any new paradigms showing up is correct if your "domain" is limited to what we know so far.. I mean take C vs Ruby - how much do their paradigms differ ? Compare the difference in paradigms between assembly and fortran - that is big difference. I think the NBL will be the NBL exactly because it will force us to think about programming in an entirely new way - in my opinion it will need to address the fundamental problem that alot of software engineering (despite 20 years of OO) involves re-inventing the wheel. Take the hottest web dev framework - Ruby on Rails...what is pathetic is how much functionality each web dev team is duplicating all over the world...user management, logging, session management, on and on, not to mention higher level domain stuff like shopping carts.. so there is lots of re-inventing the wheel going on. Software needs components - this is not a new idea.. I think Parnas in the 70s or something delivered a speech on this...so the NBL will enable components...Software development is hard (re Brooks - mythical man month - essential vs accidental complexity) that is true..but it doesn't follow that we are doomed to repeating the essential (hard parts) ad infinitum....okay sorry for rambling... good night.
I read TFA and the first thing that jumped out at me was they released to production on a Friday. Now in some cases that can be planned - e.g. it is a time of low system usage, people are coming in over the weekend - obviously this wasn't the case as everyone in this company was getting paged when things went wrong. Where I work we release on tuesdays - saves monday for putting out fires that developed over the weekend, gives us wed-friday to fix any fallout from the release. Okay back to sleep (I mean work) now.
I recently needed a "cheapest laptop possible" - for use on the subway, beach, coffee shops, places where risk of theft/damage is higher. Anyway I ended up with a $399 gateway with vista home basic, 1 GB Ram, celeron processor. Firstly, this is my first experience with Vista and well the first impression is that it is dog slow. I first go to some web sites explaining how to turn off vista features to improve performance - it helps a bit, but not enough. I should say my previous "beater" laptop was a toshiba 800ghz, sattelite with win 2000 that gave up the ghost after 5 years - and despite the gateway having like 2x the cpu and 3x the memory not to mention whatever you would expect moore's law to give you over 5 years this new laptop was a real dog with Vista. So I finally bit the bullet and installed centos 5 (rhel 5) and I must say that my little gateway was like a new machine - I was also pleasantly surprised that most of my hardware was recognized - i did need to do some hacking to get the built in wireless to work - but man what a difference.
I think MS has really screwed up big time with Vista - forget linux vs MS - MS has to deliver on windows. period. if they can't manage this after 6 Billion you have to wonder just wtf is going on in Redmond. I have to believe if Bill G. was hands on with MS even he would have stopped the POS that Vista seems to be from leaving the station.
The PC platform could have been dominated by any number of companies other than MS - IBM, Apple, Digital Research come to mind. Well, we all know it was MS that won, and they have reaped the rewards. An interesting book that explores the economics and history of platforms is "Invisible Engines: How Software Platforms Drive Innovation and Transform Industries."
But I think the comments from TFA indicate that MS (at the highest levels) does not fully grok that the web (as a platform) is replacing the PC as the platform of interest and profit.
I am old enough to remember when a new PC application or OS was the focus of attention. But honestly, what is more relevant today - the announcement of Vista or what new App/API Google, Facebook, Ebay, Amazon, Saleforce.com,... (insert favorite web entity) has unleashed on the world?
MS mastered and dominates the PC platform, so far they haven't executed well on the web platform and from the looks of things aren't headed in that direction.
I agree with parent 100%. I own 3 tivo boxes, one has a dvd burner on it and I think google + tivo would be a great combo. I could see them integrating youtube video - I put some keywords in and google pumps down youtube video matches to my box. They could also integrate it with other google properties.
I for one don't want to see tivo fade away - I already have my ISP choices restricted to a duopoly - ATT,Comcast - I would rather not have the cable companies controlling my dvr freedom.
I also think that with the right interface you will start seeing people purchasing stuff from the tivo platform...imagine a home shopping club and/or an auction site app on the tivo box..
That's me. 40+ years old. I have checked out sites like myspace and facebook - and while I understand what they do, they certainly don't appeal to me. I can see the popularity among the 20s/30s people who are interesting in hooking up with friends, finding a date, find a party etc. At my age w/wife/kids - the lazy boy + espn is MYspace.
So what? Well firstly, whatever content News Corp puts in the myspace pipe doesn't really matter to me. For me it doesn't exist. Secondly, watching stuff on my laptop or at my desk is way too much of a reminder of being at work and generally uncomfortable.
ergo, I think the big disruption to tv will happen when the IP TV is easily/cheaply integrated with my TV in my living room.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "serious traction"... but for the vast,vast majority Linux is just not an option.
Windows will die out when the web as a platform obsoletes it. I think in 3 - 5 years windows won't matter that much to most people - the main use will be to provide hardware driver support and launch rich client internet aware apps. The day will come when there is an alternative to Office that works anywhere you have an internet connection and it will cost much,much less and have more features.
btw, O'Reilly book "Restful Web Services" - a good read by the way. has quite a bit of coverage of S3.
I *was* interested in S3, and have been mulling over how it might fit in with some requirements I have..but honestly, finding out about this patent just killed my interest. If I want vendor lock in on my stack I would be developing with.net, oracle, whatever... Amazon, get a clue.. do you think the likely customers for your service want vendor lock in? Those folks already have datacenters with Oracle/SANS,whatever they aren't interested in having Amazon hosts their data. Startups that are using open source - that's whose likely to be interested in your service.. think about it!
The problem isn't coming up with systems to name things the problem is how to associate semantics (i.e. meaning) to the things that are named that allow programs to operate on them. I think some guy (Berners-Lee or something) has been working on this -:)
Let's face it, the WORLD IS FLAT and if India or China has a competitive advantage in physics then according the LAWS of ECONOMICS it is to our ADVANTAGE to OBEY the invisible hand of the market, doing otherwise will only distract us from enjoying the LOWER PRICES at WALMART.
This has been a message from the Corporate Security Agency. God Bless America.
"This poor guy now faces daunting reality of having to litigate this on appeal against Gateway...By winning, he's lost.'"
What is the cost to Gateway in bad PR?
Either he got a replacement PC or he didn't - I would assume that on delivery someone would have needed to sign for it...
Rule out any shipping mistake or some hare-brained fraud on the customer's part and move on. Sounds easy. Why send in the lawyers and turn it into a big deal?
TFA, looks like a serious article - listing quotes repeated in slashdot story. Curious about the accompanying video I click on that. Well surprise! That "video" is a PARODY (funny).
I also file via paper and handwritten - no pdf forms, etc. mainly because I have this idea it just,just might lower my chances for an audit.
Working in IT I have seen many times how the same "form" goes down different rabbit trails depending on whether it was submitted electronically verses paper. I figure that filing electronically means for sure your numbers are immediately available for input into whatever algorithm the IRS uses to flag you for an audit. With paper, and handwritten with a few erasures, cross outs, etc who knows? I figure that the older manual based systems are probably much less efficient, understaffed, etc.
Who knows, I guess it is mainly a pyschological crutch that helps me believe my chances for audit are less, and that helps me forget about it...
I have multiple boxes on 24x7 at home. Loads of wasted cycles...
How about a bot that throws searches at these guys - Can Google filter out the noise? Probably something like this already exists.. a firefox plug in or some such..
Perhaps this is what Google/MSN/Yahoo etc fears the most - people taking counter measures to screw up their valuable keyword database; these counter measures impacting other algorithms ; bots "clicking" on ads...
Slashdot Mirror
Here's 10 patents and I raise you 235 more...
What a god damn joke the whole system is.
I have Humax running right now in the Den. Love this box. The DVD burning feature is so nice. Just pop in a blank disk, select the shows to burn
and done. Now you have a DVD to take with you on vacation, for the kids in the car, or to pass to a friend. Sadly they don't sell this unit or any other
with DVD burner built in.
I currently have 2 Tivos - 1 of them HD - and a cable co dvr. The interface is the best and Tivo just works. The cable company's dvr can't touch it.
One small example. Say you turn on the TV and see a show that has been on for 10 minutes - and you decide to record it. Well Tivo has been buffering the
show since it began - so when you hit record you don't miss the first 10 minutes. On the cable co's dvr it just starts recording from when you hit record -
you don't get the first 10 minutes. There are many other examples like this that when all added up make the Tivo worth *some* premium. And here's where tivo
gets in trouble. Their pricing scheme, upgrade scheme is one big mess. Do you wonder why, if I love Tivo so much I still have a cable co dvr? Its because Tivo wanted
too much money from me to convert from Series 2 to Tivo HD. So now I have both in my home - Tivo and Cable dvr. Cable dvr is not as user friendly. But my wife and I
are slowing learning its quirks. Every month I see the Tivo bill I think about disconnecting to save money. Every month I learn to live with the Cable co dvr a bit more.....
Sorry, Zed I don't need statistics to do my job. Zed jumped the shark years ago - isn't he the Rails guy? That is so 2005. This story is like having deja-vu of a bad hangover.
Just go away.
I had moved some new work to postgres, after the sun+oracle announcement I migrated some older code to postgres.
I also weaned myself off of Netbeans.
I've been in this business too long to have any illusions that Oracle is going to fund competitors to its revenue earning products. Oracle
doesn't want you on MySQL- at the minimum they want you on Oracle XE.
Hey Rupert, your a big shot CEO - so just make the phone call and have your robots.txt file
edited to block Google and stop the whining!
As Google has stated - indexing news is not a big revenue source for them. Last time I checked
there are no ads on google news. The truth is that News Corp's content *on the internet* isn't worth
that much. There are hundreds if not thousands of other smaller operations that would gladly take
their place in Google's indexes. The value in these legacy media operations was the control they had
amassed over the *medium* (paper, broadcast signals) not their *content*, which as most of us know, on
average *sucks*
As for Microsoft....All I can say is that with business strategies like this they better hope they can keep
on selling office/windows for a long, long time. I would call this strategy a direct assault on themselves. Google
should encourage Microsoft to pay for as much content as possible to put pressure on Microsoft's bottom line.
After 15+ years as a consultant/software engineer I have been in all kinds of interviews and job situations (in the US and Europe). Here is my opinion - hiring a programmer based on his/her performance on some test is like hiring an admin based on his/her performance on a typing test. I have interviewed and hired dozens of programmers and my success rate is pretty good. I have a pretty simple formula. Before the interview I list out what this job really entails in all brutal honesty (e.g. hot code fixes under pressure late at night, working with a hard to get along with person, coming up with innovation on the scale of the iphone (:-)) Then I just seek to have a conversation with the person asking them very open ended questions that address the items in my list. Then I listen, and listen trying not to talk to too much. This has worked much better , in my opinion, than asking them to get up and code a quicksort on the chalkboard or something.
Arnold also is proposing a temporary 1% increase
in sales taxes:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/08/04/BA2212523E.DTL
I bet there won't be any programming problems stopping this.
Here's my quick review:
1) I really like the privacy policy. Google
worries me. Especially when I can fill my screen
with detailed images of my home - not to mention the
amount of information they have stored on me and my search history.
2) I don't like the columnar results. You can reduce it down to 2 columns - but why not 1 - maybe google has me trained but scanning results left-right, top-bottom seems like more work.
3) searches like "target san francisco, ca" bring up the store with phone number + map google. cuil's results are nothing special. I tend to use google quite frequently for these types of "yellow pages" type queries.
4) I think cuil needs to present one thing they do better than Google that would justify switching. The privacy angle is HUGE but I think they need at least one(or a few) in your face, obvious features that in some way, for some target audience, blows google away feature wise.
5) I am sure this will draw laughter - but honestly, I sort of miss ads - advertising does have value, and when you search for something sometimes you appreciate seeing links that people are willing to pay money to show you.
As for NBL - I think the NBL will provide support/semantics for development methodologies and components - Abstractions built in for defining components, instantiating them from repositories, support for testing .. I think all the current focus on things like dynamic vs static typing, closures, functional languages, dsl, are all things that are at too low a level - it is analogous to assembly language programmers arguing over instruction set design when out of left field comes compiled high level languages (ie. fortran ) So I think the guy saying he doesn't see any new paradigms showing up is correct if your "domain" is limited to what we know so far.. I mean take C vs Ruby - how much do their paradigms differ ? Compare the difference in paradigms between assembly and fortran - that is big difference. I think the NBL will be the NBL exactly because it will force us to think about programming in an entirely new way - in my opinion it will need to address the fundamental problem that alot of software engineering (despite 20 years of OO) involves re-inventing the wheel. .. I think Parnas in the 70s or something delivered a speech on this...so the NBL will enable components ...Software development is hard (re Brooks - mythical man month - essential vs accidental complexity) that is true..but it doesn't follow that we are doomed to repeating the essential (hard parts) ad infinitum....okay sorry for rambling... good night.
Take the hottest web dev framework - Ruby on Rails...what is pathetic is how much functionality each web dev team is duplicating all over the world...user management, logging, session management, on and on, not to mention higher level domain stuff like shopping carts.. so there is lots of re-inventing the wheel going on. Software needs components - this is not a new idea
I read TFA and the first thing that jumped out at me was they released to production on a Friday. Now in some cases that can be planned - e.g. it is a time of low system usage, people are coming in over the weekend - obviously this wasn't the case as everyone in this company was getting paged when things went wrong. Where I work we release on tuesdays - saves monday for putting out fires that developed over the weekend, gives us wed-friday to fix any fallout from the release. Okay back to sleep (I mean work) now.
I recently needed a "cheapest laptop possible" - for use on the subway, beach, coffee shops, places
where risk of theft/damage is higher. Anyway I ended up with a $399 gateway with vista home basic,
1 GB Ram, celeron processor. Firstly, this is my first experience with Vista and well the first impression
is that it is dog slow. I first go to some web sites explaining how to turn off vista features to improve
performance - it helps a bit, but not enough. I should say my previous "beater" laptop was a toshiba 800ghz,
sattelite with win 2000 that gave up the ghost after 5 years - and despite the gateway having like 2x the cpu
and 3x the memory not to mention whatever you would expect moore's law to give you over 5 years this new
laptop was a real dog with Vista. So I finally bit the bullet and installed centos 5 (rhel 5) and I must say
that my little gateway was like a new machine - I was also pleasantly surprised that most of my hardware was
recognized - i did need to do some hacking to get the built in wireless to work - but man what a difference.
I think MS has really screwed up big time with Vista - forget linux vs MS - MS has to deliver on windows. period.
if they can't manage this after 6 Billion you have to wonder just wtf is going on in Redmond. I have to believe
if Bill G. was hands on with MS even he would have stopped the POS that Vista seems to be from leaving the station.
The PC platform could have been dominated by any number of companies other than MS -
... (insert favorite web entity) has unleashed on the world?
IBM, Apple, Digital Research come to mind. Well, we all know it was MS that won, and
they have reaped the rewards. An interesting book that explores the economics and history
of platforms is "Invisible Engines: How Software Platforms Drive Innovation and Transform Industries."
But I think the comments from TFA indicate that MS (at the highest levels) does not fully
grok that the web (as a platform) is replacing the PC as the platform of interest and profit.
I am old enough to remember when a new PC application or OS was the focus of attention. But honestly,
what is more relevant today - the announcement of Vista or what new App/API Google, Facebook, Ebay, Amazon,
Saleforce.com,
MS mastered and dominates the PC platform, so far they haven't executed well on the web platform and from the
looks of things aren't headed in that direction.
cheers.
I agree with parent 100%. I own 3 tivo boxes, one has a dvd burner on it
and I think google + tivo would be a great combo. I could see them integrating
youtube video - I put some keywords in and google pumps down youtube video matches
to my box. They could also integrate it with other google properties.
I for one don't want to see tivo fade away - I already have my ISP choices restricted
to a duopoly - ATT,Comcast - I would rather not have the cable companies controlling
my dvr freedom.
I also think that with the right interface you will start seeing people purchasing stuff
from the tivo platform...imagine a home shopping club and/or an auction site app on the
tivo box..
That's me. 40+ years old. I have checked out sites like myspace and facebook - and while
I understand what they do, they certainly don't appeal to me. I can see the popularity
among the 20s/30s people who are interesting in hooking up with friends, finding a date,
find a party etc. At my age w/wife/kids - the lazy boy + espn is MYspace.
So what? Well firstly, whatever content News Corp puts in the myspace pipe doesn't really
matter to me. For me it doesn't exist. Secondly, watching stuff on my laptop or at my desk
is way too much of a reminder of being at work and generally uncomfortable.
ergo, I think the big disruption to tv will happen when the IP TV is easily/cheaply integrated
with my TV in my living room.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "serious traction"... but for the vast,vast
majority Linux is just not an option.
Windows will die out when the web as a platform obsoletes it. I think in 3 - 5 years
windows won't matter that much to most people - the main use will be to provide hardware
driver support and launch rich client internet aware apps. The day will come when there
is an alternative to Office that works anywhere you have an internet connection and it will
cost much,much less and have more features.
actually, parkplace is done with ruby + another framework (camping) not rails...
just so used to "rails" coming after "ruby" these days....-:)
There is already an open source clone of the api called parkplace done
.net, oracle, whatever... .. do you think the likely customers for your service want
in ruby/rails.
http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/parkplace
btw, O'Reilly book "Restful Web Services" - a good read by the way.
has quite a bit of coverage of S3.
I *was* interested in S3, and have
been mulling over how it might fit in with some requirements I have..but
honestly, finding out about this patent just killed my interest. If I want
vendor lock in on my stack I would be developing with
Amazon, get a clue
vendor lock in? Those folks already have datacenters with Oracle/SANS,whatever
they aren't interested in having Amazon hosts their data. Startups that are using
open source - that's whose likely to be interested in your service.. think about it!
Hasn't this guy heard of the URI? (see http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Axioms.html)
The problem isn't coming up with systems to name things the problem is how to
associate semantics (i.e. meaning) to the things that are named that allow programs to operate
on them. I think some guy (Berners-Lee or something) has been working on this -:)
Let's face it, the WORLD IS FLAT and if India or China
has a competitive advantage in physics then according the LAWS of ECONOMICS it is to our ADVANTAGE to OBEY the invisible hand of the market, doing otherwise will only distract us from enjoying the LOWER PRICES at WALMART.
This has been a message from the Corporate Security Agency. God Bless America.
"This poor guy now faces daunting reality of having to litigate this on appeal against Gateway...By winning, he's lost.'"
What is the cost to Gateway in bad PR?
Either he got a replacement PC or he didn't - I would assume that on delivery someone would have needed to sign for it...
Rule out any shipping mistake or some hare-brained fraud on the customer's part and move on. Sounds easy. Why
send in the lawyers and turn it into a big deal?
TFA, looks like a serious article - listing quotes repeated in slashdot story. Curious
about the accompanying video I click on that. Well surprise! That "video" is a PARODY (funny).
Am I missing something here?
I have a spare PC running centos and mysql that can handle those troublesome 12GBs like a chainsaw
cutting through butter.
Call me and I can drive over to the plex today and get it running over the weekend for a very reasonable fee...
This must be a joke? right? Google has problems with 12GB of data?
someone please tell me it's at least 12 TB w/thousands of concurrent users...
I also file via paper and handwritten - no pdf forms, etc. mainly because
I have this idea it just,just might lower my chances for an audit.
Working in IT I have seen many times how the same "form" goes down different rabbit trails
depending on whether it was submitted electronically verses paper. I figure that filing
electronically means for sure your numbers are immediately available for input into whatever
algorithm the IRS uses to flag you for an audit. With paper, and handwritten with a few erasures,
cross outs, etc who knows? I figure that the older manual based systems are probably much less efficient,
understaffed, etc.
Who knows, I guess it is mainly a pyschological crutch that helps me believe my chances for audit are
less, and that helps me forget about it...
I have multiple boxes on 24x7 at home. Loads of wasted cycles...
...
How about a bot that throws searches at these guys - Can Google
filter out the noise? Probably something like this already exists..
a firefox plug in or some such..
Perhaps this is what Google/MSN/Yahoo etc fears the most - people
taking counter measures to screw up their valuable keyword database; these
counter measures impacting other algorithms ; bots "clicking" on ads