It also doesn't stretch/zoom the image to fill a 16x9 screen.
The HD-Tivo *will* stretch, fill, or letterbox 4:3 SDTV content - depending on how you've configured it (you choose how to display it.. I prefer leaving it 4:3 with sidebar letterboxing, but others prefer to stretch it). Check on tivocommunity.com, there is a link to a PDF of the HD-Tivo manual, it describes the options for displaying 4:3 material.
The only issue is the other one you mentioned - when people want to use their TV's scaler, and output 480i from their HD STB. Personally, I consider this a non-issue. SDTV looks like crap no matter how you process it. As long as the HD material looks good, I'm happy.
Re:Well, you have to assume they're not stupid
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There are some HDTV tuner cards available, which rely on DxVA acceleration for MPEG2 decoding. With a Radeon card, the bare minimum CPU is an 800MHz P3. With an Nvidia GeForce4 MX or FX Series (the other Nvidia cards don't do MPEG2 accel) it takes a 1.6GHz P4. Assuming the VIA chip's capabilities are somewhere between the Radeon & Nvidia chips, let's say it takes a 1GHz P3. From my experience with the Via C3, the preformance is around 1/2 of the performance of a P3 at the same clock speed. So, the C3 is not gonna cut HD decoding.
I use one of the FusionHDTV cards, with a 1.4GHz Celeron(Tualatin). It mostly works.. it will decode the HD pretty well, but have little hiccups a couple times per minute. Much too annoying for my tastes. I switched to a "MyHD" card, which has a hardware MPEG decoder instead. It could run with a 200MHz Pentium, as almost all of the processing is done on card.
DirecTV - That's the whole point of the Tivo mentioned in the article. It's sold as a DirecTV receiver, which also supports OTA reception. Without a valid DirecTV subscription, the OTA will not work.
As for seperating the cards in different boxes. That's fine, it will work. But, the net effect will be even less like a real Tivo. You have a problem of distributed recording/scheduling, and problems playing live tv when the card is in another system, file locking issues, etc.. (Yes, I have tried this with HD cards.) There may be some capability to do this with the various SD cards out there, but the HDTV equipment is not as flexible. At this point, there is only one HDTV card that is even operational in MythTV (pchdtv.com). It has beta level drivers, and alpha level integration into MythTV. Using it today is not just a DIY project, it's a software development project.
Any way you cut it, you currently can't make an HDTV PVR that compares to the Tivo. I've been trying to for the last 2 years, and while I've got a decent system for recording Off The Air HDTV, it doesn't come close to a Tivo. I will gladly toss my homebrew PVR in the closet and replace it with the Tivo.
The VIA chipset supports MPEG2 acceleration (offload of iDCT and Motion Compensation) *not* full HD decoding. So, you still need a lot of CPU horsepower to display HD - more than the 1GHz VIA C3 has to offer.
Beyond that, there is no way to hook an HDTV tuner to that board, not to mention the 2 Off The Air tuners the Tivo supports.
Then, you've got the DirecTV input.. The Tivo has 2 DirecTV tuners, while it's impossible to use DirecTV with a PC board.
Then, you've got the software. There are some decent PC PVR packages available. But, nothing up to the Tivo's level.
I think he called it "Armorgel", and used it to protect the joints mostly - along with "Arachnofiber" a breathable kevlar-like material for the rest of the suit.
Beyond the great video resolution of HDTV, it also supports Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound. So, most people use their stereo receiver for the audio from HDTV broadcasts.
I have a macro set up on my remote, so when I turn the TV on, it automatically turns my receiver on & switches to the right input. I haven't used the speakers in my TV in 3 years, so I'm not sure if it has a lip sync problem or not (probably not, because it supports all the ATSC formats natively.. it doesn't need to do the extra processing which apparently causes the problem).
This is a cool concept. I would think that most Mac users have at least one fast/cheap PC laying around. I know I've got a few of them. You might as well use them for some extra horsepower.
What would be really cool is an x86 agent for iMovie, iDVD, and Final Cut - where it could offload all of the number frunching of MPEG2 compression or other video conversion to some cheap PC's in the basement. I would love to have my 450MHz G4 Cube as the front end, and my Athlon 64 doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes.
Google & Akamai are similar in that they both use clusters of computers to do extremely high performance tasks. While there could be some great possibilities by combining the two, this is definitely not a "no brainer". Their models are different enough to make it difficult.
Akamai's business is distributing servers around the Internet, to maximize the efficiency of the web connections to them. They distribute the workload, and minimize the network distance needed for each person to connect. So, they need a large number of sites, each with a small number of servers (small relative to Google).
Google has a small number of sites, with a huge number of servers. Those servers are heavily dependent on one another. As mentioned in the article, they use Google's file system technology to aggregate to huge database. If that same structure was divided up into smaller chunks that were highly distributed, the back-end cluster performance would suffer because of the WAN links interconnecting them.
I'm sure Google will continue to grow, and create more data centers. But, they will need a different structure than Akamai uses.
So, it's simply another type of denial of service. A TCP Reset packet can be faked, which will result in a legitimate open TCP connection being closed by a third party.
It also assumes a few of things.. You would need to be in the network route, or have some other means of establishing the sequence numbers for the connection. You would also need to be in a network that does not filter out improper source addresses (which some networks do.. but more should do) to allow your spoofed packet to get through.
So, the problem boils down to a low bandwidth method to DoS TCP connections. It does not give a method to hijack the connections, or otherwise gain access to data.
Anyway.. Clear IP connections are very open, and completely based on trust. Any sensitive communication should be tunneled inside a VPN, where it would not be vulnerable to this type of attack. (A real IPSec tunnel would not be vulnerable - as it does not use TCP. "SSL VPNs" use TCP as a transport, so they might be open to DoS.. Stick with the security of IPSec for best results.
My parents house is in a rural area, with bad phone lines. They are lucky to get 24Kbps connections, and the actual throughput on the line is below that. If they could really get 56K connections (40Kbps, or whatever realistic throughput would be) they would probably be happy with it.
As it is now, with their shitty dialup, they would definitely pay for DSL/Cable if it was available in their area.
Microsoft is going full throttle to settle all outstanding lawsuits. It wouldn't do to have a bunch of outstanding legal battles while you're throwing mud at Linux and questioning the legal security of the businesses that are using it.
Regardless of how the SCO thing works out, you can be sure that MSFT will be using this FUD when trying to close deals with big business customers.
Enterprise customers are generally very careful about making significant upgrades to their servers. Security patches and application fixes are expected, but a new kernel throws them into a huge process of integration, compatibility, and stability testing that they don't want to be forced into. The same thing applies to application vendors.
So, RedHat backports desired pieces from the 2.6 kernel, so they can give their customers a more manageable update process.
While fast paced updates are great from the hobbyist perspective, enterprise customers have a whole different set of prioritites. This is one of the big things they touted for the RH Enterprise Edition.. it is supposed to have a more manageable update process, sticking with the same core kernel for longer periods of time to ease support and management.
Because noone with an equity stake in Google is going to sell their shares before it goes IPO. They are all expecting it to go through the roof when it goes public, so the last thing they would want to do is sell it now.
Also, it's not as simple as just buying it back. The majority of those shareholders are probably employees who get stock options that vest monthly or quarterly.. so they are always getting more shares. This is part of their employment contract, so Google can't just revoke the shares.
You're right, almost all of the Unix things I want to do I can do under OS X. That was the reason I bought the PowerBook in the first place.
There are some Linux-specific things I want to poke around with, like the Linux kernel, and various extensions to that.
But, the main reason is that I want to avoid mucking up my MacOS X environment as much as possible. I hesitate before compiling/installing software that needs extensive libraries. Or, perl apps with a bunch of dependencies, etc. I want to have a good feel for the state of the system, and any security issues for misc software scattered around the disk.
After installing stuff on my Linux boxes for a decent amount of time, there is enough cruft built up around the filesystem that I just blow it away and re-install an updated distribution. I would like to do that less frequently with my PowerBook.
The virtual machine environments make it really easy to start from new, or roll back to a cleaner version.
Can someone explain to an Amiga outsider what this is?
I am familiar with the old Amiga, and all the cool things it could do long before anyone else. I had a couple friends that swore they were the greatest thing ever, but I never really used one (I was an Apple ][e user). There are frequent announcements about new Amiga stuff... but in today's computing world, I'm not sure what that means.
- Is this a standalone OS, or a modified Linux / BSD system? - Does it run on Amiga hardware, PowerPC, x86, or something else? - It is compatible with the old Amiga software, API's, etc?
- What is the compelling reason for this to exist? What does it do better than all the other options available?
Since buying my 15" PowerBook G4, I've been able to replicate most of the main functions I had on previous Linux or Windows boxes.
About the only think I haven't got is a good PPC vertual machine application. Yes, there is VirtualPC, but that emulates a completely different architecture (x86), so there will be a big performance hit. What I am looking for is the equivalent of VMWare for PowerPC. I could then have a farily light weight LinuxPPC image for all my Linux needs, rather than needing to repartition my drive and create a dual boot Linux/MacOS X system.
This whole process has smelled of something not quite right.
Through the whole process, SCO's claims were bordering on ridiculous. Their antics rarely ever resulted in a stronger chance of being able to win the case.. they merely generated more publicity.
It looks to me like their only goal in the whole process was to create as much FUD about Linux and Free Software as they could. To get as much media coverage as possible, creating that seed of doubt in as many IT managers minds as possible.
The grand finale is when they cannot fund the lawsuit anymore, and close up shop. With no conclusion to the case, that cloud of FUD still hangs over Linux.
Yeah.. that's quite a conspiracy theory. It's probably more likely that the SCO people are merely morons. But, whether by design or by their ineptitude, I think that the death of SCO before resolving the case would be a bad thing.
I've been addicted to Netflix for over 3 years now. That instantly cut my TV viewing to almost nothing. I always had a movie that I wanted to watch, rather than the junk that happened to be on TV.
After getting a widescreen TV to view DVD's in their native format, I tried out the HD capabilities of the TV with an HD tuner. I was very impressed with the quality, and my ability to get a perfect picture via antenna - even though using analog reception my picture always sucked. Now, I can get the big sporting events I want, as well as a couple TV shows (The West Wing & Fear Factor) with no monthly costs.
But, I didn't take the plunge and cancel DirecTV yet.. For most people, there will always be a small number of stations they must have. For me, it's ESPN-HD, HBO-HD, and HDNet Movies. For my grandfather, it's The Weather Channel and CNN. For my Dad, it's the Golf Channel.
So.. I think that the suggestions you gave make ala carte channel selection even more useful. If I can pay $15-$25 for the few channels I actually want, that's a big improvement over what I have today - paying for dozens of SDTV channels that I literally never watch.
That site with their bulletins also has a link to the XP Service Pack 2 release candidate.. That thing has been in the works for so long. Hopefully it makes some useful improvements in their security.
It looks like the firewall will basically be a built-in ZoneAlarm, with better inbound abilities, and outbound application controls.
They also have some buffer overflow protections. Are they good enough to make a difference?
I bought Quicksilver as soon as it was released.. And it's been sitting in my "To Read" pile ever since. That huge volume is just a bit too intimidating to begin. I've read about a dozen smaller books in the interrim.
When I got Cryptonomicon, I put off reading that until I had a 15 hour flight. I got through the bulk of it in the 30 hour round trip.
My need is smaller than yours.. just a couple personal domains for my various mail & hosting needs. But, the concept is the same.
I started out doing my own DNS. I wanted the flexibility and complete control of running it myself. After diligently updating bind versions for a long time, I missed one. A 1337 h4x0r quickly exploited my system. Luckily, he was dumb enough to reboot the box, and broadcasted a message saying "you are owned". Yup, time for an OS re-install.
I tried a cheap DNS hosting service.. too unreliable. Then I switched to NetSol. It's been very reliable. I'm sure they have their servers in some core network areas, with lots of bandwidth, and all kinds of redundancy. I don't think you'll do much better than what they offer.
They would be doing the encrypting (at least for mails originated in gmail), so they would make the decision about ads before the data is encrypted. The text ad would then be encrypted as part of the message, so it wouldn't divulge anything about the message content (e.g. if the targetted ad is for the "Suckmaster 5000", it might give a hint about the content of your e-mail).
For mail that is received encrypted from an outside source, you're right - they would not be able to scan the content for advertising decisions. In that case, they would just use your account info & previous activities to do a less relevant targetted ad.
Another option is to not encrypt the e-mail, but just digitally sign it. Then you have authentication of the sender, and validation of the integrity of the message. This could be very helpful for spam blocking.
Personally, I couldn't care less about their mail scanning to associate ads. It's a free service.. Ad's are the cost of usage. If they can get legitimate advertisers and successfully achieve directed advertising, that's even better. I am much more concerned about transit and authentication security.
Some of the privacy areas that would be more valuable to me are:
- Ability to access securely. I am much more concerned about sniffers on public networks grabbing my data than google's software seeing it. Can I use a fully SSL encrypted session for mail access (rather than Yahoo's SSL authentication, then clear viewing of mail content)?
- Encrypted e-mail support? Open standards based e-mail encryption would be a major plus. If it was compatible with Mozilla/Thunderbird it would be extremely useful. Running a huge mail service that supported this could get enough momentum for average people to actually secure their e-mail. (The mail is then secured not only in transit, but also on the disk.)
- IMAPS / POPS support? I don't know if it will allow POP/IMAP support at all. But, if it does, SSL encrypted sessions are a must to avoid password and data sniffing.
I'm surprised that they have gotten reputable financial institutions to underwrite their IPO. According to the Wired article, it's being underwritten by Deutsche Bank Securities, Piper Jaffray, SG Cowen Securities and Thomas Weisel Partners. Wasn't Deutsche Bank involved in some of SCO's funding??
Their IPO filing says they derived 31% of their 2003 revenue ( ~ $30M ) from "Overture Services". Interesting.. Overture seems to be straddling the line between legitimate business & spyware.
Also, the risks section of their IPO filing is pretty amusing. Anyone with half a clue will see what a detestable company they are after reading the risks. Some of the risks they list are:
- Popup blockers. impeding their ability to attract customers. - People buying new computers. Since their software won't be on the new system. - spyware detectors which uninstall their software (as offered by AOL, McAfee, Symantec, Earthlink, and others). - Changes in MS operating systems (i.e. SP2 with the popup blocker and other security enhancements could screw them) - New technologies that would "hamper the operation or our GAIN AdServer". - Changes in legislation could impair our ability to provide services
Basically, they are saying that they operate by tricking people into installing their software, and a lot of people are trying to stop shady operators like them.
Anyone who invests in them deserves to lose their money.
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It also doesn't stretch/zoom the image to fill a 16x9 screen.
The HD-Tivo *will* stretch, fill, or letterbox 4:3 SDTV content - depending on how you've configured it (you choose how to display it.. I prefer leaving it 4:3 with sidebar letterboxing, but others prefer to stretch it). Check on tivocommunity.com, there is a link to a PDF of the HD-Tivo manual, it describes the options for displaying 4:3 material.
The only issue is the other one you mentioned - when people want to use their TV's scaler, and output 480i from their HD STB. Personally, I consider this a non-issue. SDTV looks like crap no matter how you process it. As long as the HD material looks good, I'm happy.
There are some HDTV tuner cards available, which rely on DxVA acceleration for MPEG2 decoding. With a Radeon card, the bare minimum CPU is an 800MHz P3. With an Nvidia GeForce4 MX or FX Series (the other Nvidia cards don't do MPEG2 accel) it takes a 1.6GHz P4. Assuming the VIA chip's capabilities are somewhere between the Radeon & Nvidia chips, let's say it takes a 1GHz P3. From my experience with the Via C3, the preformance is around 1/2 of the performance of a P3 at the same clock speed. So, the C3 is not gonna cut HD decoding.
I use one of the FusionHDTV cards, with a 1.4GHz Celeron(Tualatin). It mostly works.. it will decode the HD pretty well, but have little hiccups a couple times per minute. Much too annoying for my tastes. I switched to a "MyHD" card, which has a hardware MPEG decoder instead. It could run with a 200MHz Pentium, as almost all of the processing is done on card.
DirecTV - That's the whole point of the Tivo mentioned in the article. It's sold as a DirecTV receiver, which also supports OTA reception. Without a valid DirecTV subscription, the OTA will not work.
As for seperating the cards in different boxes. That's fine, it will work. But, the net effect will be even less like a real Tivo. You have a problem of distributed recording/scheduling, and problems playing live tv when the card is in another system, file locking issues, etc.. (Yes, I have tried this with HD cards.) There may be some capability to do this with the various SD cards out there, but the HDTV equipment is not as flexible. At this point, there is only one HDTV card that is even operational in MythTV (pchdtv.com). It has beta level drivers, and alpha level integration into MythTV. Using it today is not just a DIY project, it's a software development project.
Any way you cut it, you currently can't make an HDTV PVR that compares to the Tivo. I've been trying to for the last 2 years, and while I've got a decent system for recording Off The Air HDTV, it doesn't come close to a Tivo. I will gladly toss my homebrew PVR in the closet and replace it with the Tivo.
Dude, that's not even close to a Tivo.
The VIA chipset supports MPEG2 acceleration (offload of iDCT and Motion Compensation) *not* full HD decoding. So, you still need a lot of CPU horsepower to display HD - more than the 1GHz VIA C3 has to offer.
Beyond that, there is no way to hook an HDTV tuner to that board, not to mention the 2 Off The Air tuners the Tivo supports.
Then, you've got the DirecTV input.. The Tivo has 2 DirecTV tuners, while it's impossible to use DirecTV with a PC board.
Then, you've got the software. There are some decent PC PVR packages available. But, nothing up to the Tivo's level.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking..
I think he called it "Armorgel", and used it to protect the joints mostly - along with "Arachnofiber" a breathable kevlar-like material for the rest of the suit.
Beyond the great video resolution of HDTV, it also supports Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound. So, most people use their stereo receiver for the audio from HDTV broadcasts.
I have a macro set up on my remote, so when I turn the TV on, it automatically turns my receiver on & switches to the right input. I haven't used the speakers in my TV in 3 years, so I'm not sure if it has a lip sync problem or not (probably not, because it supports all the ATSC formats natively.. it doesn't need to do the extra processing which apparently causes the problem).
This is a cool concept. I would think that most Mac users have at least one fast/cheap PC laying around. I know I've got a few of them. You might as well use them for some extra horsepower.
What would be really cool is an x86 agent for iMovie, iDVD, and Final Cut - where it could offload all of the number frunching of MPEG2 compression or other video conversion to some cheap PC's in the basement. I would love to have my 450MHz G4 Cube as the front end, and my Athlon 64 doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes.
Google & Akamai are similar in that they both use clusters of computers to do extremely high performance tasks. While there could be some great possibilities by combining the two, this is definitely not a "no brainer". Their models are different enough to make it difficult.
Akamai's business is distributing servers around the Internet, to maximize the efficiency of the web connections to them. They distribute the workload, and minimize the network distance needed for each person to connect. So, they need a large number of sites, each with a small number of servers (small relative to Google).
Google has a small number of sites, with a huge number of servers. Those servers are heavily dependent on one another. As mentioned in the article, they use Google's file system technology to aggregate to huge database. If that same structure was divided up into smaller chunks that were highly distributed, the back-end cluster performance would suffer because of the WAN links interconnecting them.
I'm sure Google will continue to grow, and create more data centers. But, they will need a different structure than Akamai uses.
I went to the site linked from the article.. The portal company is called "Walla", http://www.walla.co.il/.
Just remember, Hebrew is writted right to left.. Now go ahead and translate the page, register for an account, and you're all set..
So, it's simply another type of denial of service. A TCP Reset packet can be faked, which will result in a legitimate open TCP connection being closed by a third party.
It also assumes a few of things.. You would need to be in the network route, or have some other means of establishing the sequence numbers for the connection. You would also need to be in a network that does not filter out improper source addresses (which some networks do.. but more should do) to allow your spoofed packet to get through.
So, the problem boils down to a low bandwidth method to DoS TCP connections. It does not give a method to hijack the connections, or otherwise gain access to data.
Anyway.. Clear IP connections are very open, and completely based on trust. Any sensitive communication should be tunneled inside a VPN, where it would not be vulnerable to this type of attack. (A real IPSec tunnel would not be vulnerable - as it does not use TCP. "SSL VPNs" use TCP as a transport, so they might be open to DoS.. Stick with the security of IPSec for best results.
My parents house is in a rural area, with bad phone lines. They are lucky to get 24Kbps connections, and the actual throughput on the line is below that. If they could really get 56K connections (40Kbps, or whatever realistic throughput would be) they would probably be happy with it.
As it is now, with their shitty dialup, they would definitely pay for DSL/Cable if it was available in their area.
Microsoft is going full throttle to settle all outstanding lawsuits. It wouldn't do to have a bunch of outstanding legal battles while you're throwing mud at Linux and questioning the legal security of the businesses that are using it.
Regardless of how the SCO thing works out, you can be sure that MSFT will be using this FUD when trying to close deals with big business customers.
Enterprise customers are generally very careful about making significant upgrades to their servers. Security patches and application fixes are expected, but a new kernel throws them into a huge process of integration, compatibility, and stability testing that they don't want to be forced into. The same thing applies to application vendors.
So, RedHat backports desired pieces from the 2.6 kernel, so they can give their customers a more manageable update process.
While fast paced updates are great from the hobbyist perspective, enterprise customers have a whole different set of prioritites. This is one of the big things they touted for the RH Enterprise Edition.. it is supposed to have a more manageable update process, sticking with the same core kernel for longer periods of time to ease support and management.
Because noone with an equity stake in Google is going to sell their shares before it goes IPO. They are all expecting it to go through the roof when it goes public, so the last thing they would want to do is sell it now.
Also, it's not as simple as just buying it back. The majority of those shareholders are probably employees who get stock options that vest monthly or quarterly.. so they are always getting more shares. This is part of their employment contract, so Google can't just revoke the shares.
You're right, almost all of the Unix things I want to do I can do under OS X. That was the reason I bought the PowerBook in the first place.
There are some Linux-specific things I want to poke around with, like the Linux kernel, and various extensions to that.
But, the main reason is that I want to avoid mucking up my MacOS X environment as much as possible. I hesitate before compiling/installing software that needs extensive libraries. Or, perl apps with a bunch of dependencies, etc. I want to have a good feel for the state of the system, and any security issues for misc software scattered around the disk.
After installing stuff on my Linux boxes for a decent amount of time, there is enough cruft built up around the filesystem that I just blow it away and re-install an updated distribution. I would like to do that less frequently with my PowerBook.
The virtual machine environments make it really easy to start from new, or roll back to a cleaner version.
Can someone explain to an Amiga outsider what this is?
I am familiar with the old Amiga, and all the cool things it could do long before anyone else. I had a couple friends that swore they were the greatest thing ever, but I never really used one (I was an Apple ][e user). There are frequent announcements about new Amiga stuff... but in today's computing world, I'm not sure what that means.
- Is this a standalone OS, or a modified Linux / BSD system?
- Does it run on Amiga hardware, PowerPC, x86, or something else?
- It is compatible with the old Amiga software, API's, etc?
- What is the compelling reason for this to exist? What does it do better than all the other options available?
THIS LINE-->>> Arch separation (yes... mol will soon run under OS X)
Nice.. that looks like just what I need. I'll be watching for the OS X release.
Thanks.
Since buying my 15" PowerBook G4, I've been able to replicate most of the main functions I had on previous Linux or Windows boxes.
About the only think I haven't got is a good PPC vertual machine application. Yes, there is VirtualPC, but that emulates a completely different architecture (x86), so there will be a big performance hit. What I am looking for is the equivalent of VMWare for PowerPC. I could then have a farily light weight LinuxPPC image for all my Linux needs, rather than needing to repartition my drive and create a dual boot Linux/MacOS X system.
Does such a thing exist?
This whole process has smelled of something not quite right.
Through the whole process, SCO's claims were bordering on ridiculous. Their antics rarely ever resulted in a stronger chance of being able to win the case.. they merely generated more publicity.
It looks to me like their only goal in the whole process was to create as much FUD about Linux and Free Software as they could. To get as much media coverage as possible, creating that seed of doubt in as many IT managers minds as possible.
The grand finale is when they cannot fund the lawsuit anymore, and close up shop. With no conclusion to the case, that cloud of FUD still hangs over Linux.
Yeah.. that's quite a conspiracy theory. It's probably more likely that the SCO people are merely morons. But, whether by design or by their ineptitude, I think that the death of SCO before resolving the case would be a bad thing.
I have *almost* gotten to this level..
I've been addicted to Netflix for over 3 years now. That instantly cut my TV viewing to almost nothing. I always had a movie that I wanted to watch, rather than the junk that happened to be on TV.
After getting a widescreen TV to view DVD's in their native format, I tried out the HD capabilities of the TV with an HD tuner. I was very impressed with the quality, and my ability to get a perfect picture via antenna - even though using analog reception my picture always sucked. Now, I can get the big sporting events I want, as well as a couple TV shows (The West Wing & Fear Factor) with no monthly costs.
But, I didn't take the plunge and cancel DirecTV yet.. For most people, there will always be a small number of stations they must have. For me, it's ESPN-HD, HBO-HD, and HDNet Movies. For my grandfather, it's The Weather Channel and CNN. For my Dad, it's the Golf Channel.
So.. I think that the suggestions you gave make ala carte channel selection even more useful. If I can pay $15-$25 for the few channels I actually want, that's a big improvement over what I have today - paying for dozens of SDTV channels that I literally never watch.
That site with their bulletins also has a link to the XP Service Pack 2 release candidate.. That thing has been in the works for so long. Hopefully it makes some useful improvements in their security.
It looks like the firewall will basically be a built-in ZoneAlarm, with better inbound abilities, and outbound application controls.
They also have some buffer overflow protections. Are they good enough to make a difference?
I bought Quicksilver as soon as it was released.. And it's been sitting in my "To Read" pile ever since. That huge volume is just a bit too intimidating to begin. I've read about a dozen smaller books in the interrim.
When I got Cryptonomicon, I put off reading that until I had a 15 hour flight. I got through the bulk of it in the 30 hour round trip.
My need is smaller than yours.. just a couple personal domains for my various mail & hosting needs. But, the concept is the same.
I started out doing my own DNS. I wanted the flexibility and complete control of running it myself. After diligently updating bind versions for a long time, I missed one. A 1337 h4x0r quickly exploited my system. Luckily, he was dumb enough to reboot the box, and broadcasted a message saying "you are owned". Yup, time for an OS re-install.
I tried a cheap DNS hosting service.. too unreliable. Then I switched to NetSol. It's been very reliable. I'm sure they have their servers in some core network areas, with lots of bandwidth, and all kinds of redundancy. I don't think you'll do much better than what they offer.
They would be doing the encrypting (at least for mails originated in gmail), so they would make the decision about ads before the data is encrypted. The text ad would then be encrypted as part of the message, so it wouldn't divulge anything about the message content (e.g. if the targetted ad is for the "Suckmaster 5000", it might give a hint about the content of your e-mail).
For mail that is received encrypted from an outside source, you're right - they would not be able to scan the content for advertising decisions. In that case, they would just use your account info & previous activities to do a less relevant targetted ad.
Another option is to not encrypt the e-mail, but just digitally sign it. Then you have authentication of the sender, and validation of the integrity of the message. This could be very helpful for spam blocking.
Personally, I couldn't care less about their mail scanning to associate ads. It's a free service.. Ad's are the cost of usage. If they can get legitimate advertisers and successfully achieve directed advertising, that's even better. I am much more concerned about transit and authentication security.
Some of the privacy areas that would be more valuable to me are:
- Ability to access securely. I am much more concerned about sniffers on public networks grabbing my data than google's software seeing it. Can I use a fully SSL encrypted session for mail access (rather than Yahoo's SSL authentication, then clear viewing of mail content)?
- Encrypted e-mail support? Open standards based e-mail encryption would be a major plus. If it was compatible with Mozilla/Thunderbird it would be extremely useful. Running a huge mail service that supported this could get enough momentum for average people to actually secure their e-mail. (The mail is then secured not only in transit, but also on the disk.)
- IMAPS / POPS support? I don't know if it will allow POP/IMAP support at all. But, if it does, SSL encrypted sessions are a must to avoid password and data sniffing.
I'm surprised that they have gotten reputable financial institutions to underwrite their IPO. According to the Wired article, it's being underwritten by Deutsche Bank Securities, Piper Jaffray, SG Cowen Securities and Thomas Weisel Partners. Wasn't Deutsche Bank involved in some of SCO's funding??
Their IPO filing says they derived 31% of their 2003 revenue ( ~ $30M ) from "Overture Services". Interesting.. Overture seems to be straddling the line between legitimate business & spyware.
Also, the risks section of their IPO filing is pretty amusing. Anyone with half a clue will see what a detestable company they are after reading the risks. Some of the risks they list are:
- Popup blockers. impeding their ability to attract customers.
- People buying new computers. Since their software won't be on the new system.
- spyware detectors which uninstall their software (as offered by AOL, McAfee, Symantec, Earthlink, and others).
- Changes in MS operating systems (i.e. SP2 with the popup blocker and other security enhancements could screw them)
- New technologies that would "hamper the operation or our GAIN AdServer".
- Changes in legislation could impair our ability to provide services
Basically, they are saying that they operate by tricking people into installing their software, and a lot of people are trying to stop shady operators like them.
Anyone who invests in them deserves to lose their money.