The sad part is that giant retailers such as Bad Buy an Walmart are pushing manufacturers to "cheapen" their products - demanding lower prices. Quality is the number 1 thing cut first.
I wanted to buy an art easel for my 3 year old. LittleTikes or FisherPrice - can't remember which. Every Single One was broken in the store (there were like 10 of them.) Looked at the shipping box. Made in China. It seems that Everything is made in China. Local manufacturing is G-O-N-E. Outsourced to cheap labor and substandard materials with zero quality control.
I ended up building an easel out of solid oak and cabinet grade plywood. It will last for generations.
I Never Ever buy open box products. I insist that they be factory sealed. I've been burned one too many times.
The thing that annoys me about Bad Buy is that they will have 8 open boxes, none factory sealed. They will not restock untill all the open box products have been sold. Hence, I go elsewhere.
I don't bother with rebates. I'll buy from someone else that has a good deal, or another brand, or just ignore the rebate all together. Most of the time, my personal time is worth more than the rebate.
That's an insane argument that has no basis in law. Anything you write is by default, copyrighted. It's a stronger copyright if you explicitly state that it is copyrighted. Even stronger if you register it. Code you write is only "public domain" if you explicitly say so.
As others have stated correctly many times, if the GPL is invalid then normal copyright applies. It wouild be unthinkable for the court to deny copyright protection to Linux, which is explicitly copyrighted. GPL and copyright are not mutually exclusive - they are very distinct and separate. The code is copyrighted. The copyrighted code is licenesed to you under the specific terms listed in the GPL. Even if the terms don't apply, the copyright still does.
Why oh why do people think about coffee makers when someone mentions home automation? HA is not about coffee makers and toasters.
HA is about automatically closing or opening the blinds depending on the angle of the sun (or maybe when you start a DVD...) It's about being able to control your heating system a lot better than a set-back thermostat. How about calling home (or WAP interface) to heat up the hot tub? Or monitor the security cameras at your house from your office - maybe unlock the door for the UPS man... HA can remember to close the garage door at night, or turn off the lights in the basement. There are many good applications for HA.
As far as pwoer backup, external UPS's work fine. You can get a generator that autmatically starts and takes over when the power goes out. Why would you want an internal battery?
Quite simple really... Just take one of these boxes, add something like This, and you have a neat inexpensive tool to control stuff around the house...
A full blown PC is overkill from a size, heat, power, and noise perspective. Please think outside the box (no pun intended:-)
It's an interesting product. I have used some of these very expensive SSD's in the past for specialized applications. This one seems to work off Flash. Others work off RAM (with a battery) that dumps to a dedicated hard disk.
The typical problem with flash is speed, cost, and re-writability (limited cell life.) A 1G SD falsh card for my camera is down to about $200 now, but the thing is quite slow.
Seems to me that some combination of real ram (cheap and fast) and flash (non-volitile but slow for long-term, power fail storage) would be an ideal combination. An onboard rechargable cell would power the ram to flash dump.
OCR is actually pretty darn reliable for printed characters
That has not been my experience. I have found the accuracy to be horrible - even on high-end systems. What we ended up doing for a domument management system is use the OCR for searching, and the raw image gets retrieved. 100% accuracy isn't very important then.
contract them out to some poor schmuck in India to type them in for $5 a day.
I worked at a company that did this years ago. We started with OCR, but due to the error rate on even perfectly printed material, we dumped it and sent the material to india. It was pretty inexpensive - much less than our time correcting the OCR mistakes. We had triple entry which was still very cheap.
I could take something and print it in courier 16 point at 600dpi, scan it, and the OCR would still screw up about 1% of the time. Normal pages was somewhere about 5% errors, which is HUGE. It takes so long to correct that you could just type the thing in. Note that many of these OCR packages would claim 99.9% accuracy but they never got close. I tried everything from $99 programs to high-end $10K programs and they were all about the same, really.
Oh, boy. I get FREQUENT very slow operations of all sorts. Go into the todo list and delete some individual shows. Painful. Just hitting record can be a very slow operation taking over 30 seconds before it's all set.
On my S1 DTivo, I installed a cachecard with 512M and that has helped a lot for season pass / recording management, but some operations are still very pokey. Many of the hacks that improve the usability of the tivo (tivoweb, etc.) take even more of that precious ram.
Real ram would be a lot more useful than the cachecard ram. One dimm slot would have been awesome, but would have increased cost. I would have happily swapped out the 32M for 512M. The biggest performance hit is not having enough ram, but a better processor would help make the tivo much more responsive. I navigate very quickly, and the tivo always lags - sometimes a LOT.
I just bought a new S2 unit yesterday. Even with zero hacks at all, it's pretty pokey with simple navigation being even slower than my old s1!
Or blockbuster, which just announced a cheaper version of netflix.
WHat I wouldn't mind seeing is a service from DirecTV that is like netflix. They have lots of spare sat capacity now, and they could offer a service where you could pick a movie and it would schedule it to be broadcast sometime in the next week. DirecTivo would record it. How cool would that be? Kind of a better version of pay per view.
It's a small problem at this point, but it IS a growing one. I wouldn't write the trust issue off too quickly. We are talking about future, not yesterday and today.
I've known several die-hard windows fans that have converted over the past couple years for multiple reasons - security, cost, flexability, and reliability. It's not that they are converting specifically to Linux or Mac - it's that they are converting AWAY from windows and Linux and mac just happen to be the most viable options.
The DVR market is still small, and HDTV is an even smaller piece of that.
True, but I would bet that the DVR market IN the HDTV market is quite large. I think it's more the expense than anything. The DirectHDTivo is kind of spendy but not too bad really ($299). It's heavily subsidized by DirectTV since you pay extra for the HDTV programming. They are betting that if you buy and HDTV PVR that you will subscribe to a significant portion of HDTV services. That would be a good bet.
A SA HDTV unit would be a LOT harder to recoup costs on. They pretty much have to sell it at full cost.
Get yourself another DirecTivo box. They are only $79. Hack that. Once it's working great, THEN let your wife at it. That's what I did with my tivos, and (linux based) asterisk phone system. If you let them at the "beta" version, it's just gonna piss them off, and turn them off from any other technology thing you want to do.
FYI, A DirecTivo unit goes for $79. A plain sat receiver is $49, so the tivo part is only $30 more and has dual inputs. DirecTV only charges $4.99 for tivo service which is the same as the mirroring fee if you have 2 normal sat receiver boxes. Now hack your tivo so you can UL/DL video, MP3's, add in GAIM, etc. and it becomes QUITE a nice system. Base Tivo is nice, but as you say, it could do a lot more. I just wish the processor was faster and that it had more ram (this is a problem with MOST DVR's)
It would be very cool to get the digital steam directly into mythtv without re-encoding. Best of both worlds.
You do know about SRV and NAPTR records don't you? Dynamic DNS updates? ENUM RFC 2916, RFC 3761? e164.arpa? e164.org? You don't always need a service provider to use SIP in routing calls.
My question would be: why wouldn't there be a firewall between the "primary server" and "leased line"? The windows RPC ports would not be needed unless the system is horribly broken. The second point, "firewalled internet access for a VPN to GE" should ALSO be blocking RPC.
There is no reason specialized medical equipment shouldn't be put on an isolated / firewalled network segment, away from general purpose office PC's.
When you go to HGTV, you are going to see Home Depot and Lowes commercials. Soap networks is going to be food, cleaning products, and makeup. Yes, these are targeted in a general sense, but guys watching soaps (and some do for some bizzare reason) are not going to be buying nail polish. They are getting the advertizing targeted towards housewives - so the advertising time is wasted. That's what I'm getting at.
Let's pretend that Tivo gets it's act together and starts working with networks and advertisers better. Tivo goes a little further and lets family members tag their own shows instead of being generic. Now when Bob watches his favorite soaps, he starts getting directly targeted advertising inserted in the commercial spots of the type that he is less likely to fast forward though - maybe a ford truck ad instead of a tampon ad. This would put tivo-based TV viewing in the same league as the internet. Advertising targeted directly at specific groups of people that are interested in the products offered rather than getting blasted with the generic broadcast ads.
You miss the point completely. I know all about the arbitron ratings etc. The difference is that if you are watching CNN, you are going to get generic ads. If you are registered on CNN's web site, chances are that they are not going to show you a viagra ad if you are registered as a 25 year old woman. Instead, you will probably get tampax ads.
Doubleclick and cohorts try to judge your interests by where you go. They can target ads specifically to you based on what they suspect you are interested in. That's not possible on broadcast media.
But the reason they want the info is for targeted ads which you are filtering. So there is no point in collecting the info in the first place.
Remember: advertisers don't get that kind of targeted ability with any other medium (TV, radio, newspaper, magazine) yet they do on the internet (if people buy into it) yet pay the lowest rate per impression. This doesn't make sense.
If you want the NY Times content without having to give up any information, then hustle down to the newsstand and actually buy a copy.
This has nothing to do with content and all to do with advertising.
FYI, the NYT doesn't really make any money off the newsstand price - that's eaten up in printing and distribution. They make all their money on ads.
For some bizzare reason, advertisers are willing to advertise without all the detailed market info on radio, television, magazines, newspaper, billboards, etc. but feel it's required on the internet. Just because something is possible doesn't make it required. I know full well why they do this - trying to get the best impact from ad dollars. It doesn't mean that I buy into it (no pun intended.:-) I heard a talk from the DoubleClick CEO a while back where he went into this and the dollars spent by companies like Ford, Pepsi, etc. The dollars those companies are willing to pay per impression on the internet are a tiny fraction as those in other media (TV being the largest.)
However, if the same obviously false story were printed in a newspaper or a "real" media outlet, someone would lose his job and it probably would end his career.
Nah, they would just print a retraction.
If you actually read the editorials in the papers, the lies, misdirection, etc. are usually much more subtle than your example. Frequently in "statistics", or deliberate omissions of facts. They happen every day in well known papers such as the NYT and LA Times, as well as the small-town papers which are actually WORSE than the majors from what I have seen (credability isn't an issue.) The bias and lies also show up in hard news articles. Unless you know the details of the topic in the articles you would never know.
Commercial media is only accountable if people hold them accountable. Trouble is, not enough people do to matter.
Anyway, back to the original topic. Registration drives me nuts. All get totally and obviously fake info - even if it's just age, sex, and zip code. Some registrations just are not worth it. If they want me to fill out a full page of info including phone numbers, email addresses, full address, birthdate, etc. I don't waste my time. The content isn't worth it, and is usually available somewhere else. In the wired article, they mention that these content providers don't see the negative feedback. This is simply because we don't care to waste our time complaining as it's not that important.
While it's fairly trivial to get stuff to run on OSX, getting it to run as a native OSX app is a whole different ballgame. OpenOffice is a great example of this.
Easy porting misses the point. One of the HUGE advantages of Linux is that it runs just about everywhere from watches, PDA's, desktop, servers, mainframes, to massive clusters. IBM realizes this, just as they realized the same concept with Java (which is why they do more with java than Sun does.) Getting somthing written on Intel linux to run on PowerPC Linux is trivial compared to porting from Linux to OSX.
FWIW, that survey was done before any major adoption of linux by businesses (especially in a desktop role.) I would bet that if that survey were run again today and targeted the real customer base (business) instead of consumers / techies, the results would be different (although maybe not considering the lack of advancement of the product. Adobe seems to have killed it on all platforms.)
Pointing at a several year old survey as "proof" of viability for commercial apps on linux is silly. My company spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on commercial linux software every year. The linux market is alive and well for innovative products. Products that don't offer any real benefit over their free alternatives will not make it.
Frankly, the commercial word-processing / spreadsheet space is just about dead due to good free alternatives such as OpenOffice, Abiword / Gnumeric, Lyx, etc. Microsoft is going to find this out over the next couple years (I think office suites is their number 2 money maker IIRC...)
BTW, Commodore's horrible marketing killed Amiga and its market. Not piracy. I was an avid Amiga user / programmer from '85 to '95 when I switched to Linux.
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The sad part is that giant retailers such as Bad Buy an Walmart are pushing manufacturers to "cheapen" their products - demanding lower prices. Quality is the number 1 thing cut first.
I wanted to buy an art easel for my 3 year old. LittleTikes or FisherPrice - can't remember which. Every Single One was broken in the store (there were like 10 of them.) Looked at the shipping box. Made in China. It seems that Everything is made in China. Local manufacturing is G-O-N-E. Outsourced to cheap labor and substandard materials with zero quality control.
I ended up building an easel out of solid oak and cabinet grade plywood. It will last for generations.
I Never Ever buy open box products. I insist that they be factory sealed. I've been burned one too many times.
The thing that annoys me about Bad Buy is that they will have 8 open boxes, none factory sealed. They will not restock untill all the open box products have been sold. Hence, I go elsewhere.
I don't bother with rebates. I'll buy from someone else that has a good deal, or another brand, or just ignore the rebate all together. Most of the time, my personal time is worth more than the rebate.
That's an insane argument that has no basis in law. Anything you write is by default, copyrighted. It's a stronger copyright if you explicitly state that it is copyrighted. Even stronger if you register it. Code you write is only "public domain" if you explicitly say so.
As others have stated correctly many times, if the GPL is invalid then normal copyright applies. It wouild be unthinkable for the court to deny copyright protection to Linux, which is explicitly copyrighted. GPL and copyright are not mutually exclusive - they are very distinct and separate. The code is copyrighted. The copyrighted code is licenesed to you under the specific terms listed in the GPL. Even if the terms don't apply, the copyright still does.
Why oh why do people think about coffee makers when someone mentions home automation? HA is not about coffee makers and toasters.
HA is about automatically closing or opening the blinds depending on the angle of the sun (or maybe when you start a DVD...) It's about being able to control your heating system a lot better than a set-back thermostat. How about calling home (or WAP interface) to heat up the hot tub? Or monitor the security cameras at your house from your office - maybe unlock the door for the UPS man... HA can remember to close the garage door at night, or turn off the lights in the basement. There are many good applications for HA.
As far as pwoer backup, external UPS's work fine. You can get a generator that autmatically starts and takes over when the power goes out. Why would you want an internal battery?
Quite simple really... Just take one of these boxes, add something like This, and you have a neat inexpensive tool to control stuff around the house...
:-)
A full blown PC is overkill from a size, heat, power, and noise perspective. Please think outside the box (no pun intended
It's an interesting product. I have used some of these very expensive SSD's in the past for specialized applications. This one seems to work off Flash. Others work off RAM (with a battery) that dumps to a dedicated hard disk.
The typical problem with flash is speed, cost, and re-writability (limited cell life.) A 1G SD falsh card for my camera is down to about $200 now, but the thing is quite slow.
Seems to me that some combination of real ram (cheap and fast) and flash (non-volitile but slow for long-term, power fail storage) would be an ideal combination. An onboard rechargable cell would power the ram to flash dump.
OCR is actually pretty darn reliable for printed characters
That has not been my experience. I have found the accuracy to be horrible - even on high-end systems. What we ended up doing for a domument management system is use the OCR for searching, and the raw image gets retrieved. 100% accuracy isn't very important then.
contract them out to some poor schmuck in India to type them in for $5 a day.
I worked at a company that did this years ago. We started with OCR, but due to the error rate on even perfectly printed material, we dumped it and sent the material to india. It was pretty inexpensive - much less than our time correcting the OCR mistakes. We had triple entry which was still very cheap.
I could take something and print it in courier 16 point at 600dpi, scan it, and the OCR would still screw up about 1% of the time. Normal pages was somewhere about 5% errors, which is HUGE. It takes so long to correct that you could just type the thing in. Note that many of these OCR packages would claim 99.9% accuracy but they never got close. I tried everything from $99 programs to high-end $10K programs and they were all about the same, really.
Oh, boy. I get FREQUENT very slow operations of all sorts. Go into the todo list and delete some individual shows. Painful. Just hitting record can be a very slow operation taking over 30 seconds before it's all set.
On my S1 DTivo, I installed a cachecard with 512M and that has helped a lot for season pass / recording management, but some operations are still very pokey. Many of the hacks that improve the usability of the tivo (tivoweb, etc.) take even more of that precious ram.
Real ram would be a lot more useful than the cachecard ram. One dimm slot would have been awesome, but would have increased cost. I would have happily swapped out the 32M for 512M. The biggest performance hit is not having enough ram, but a better processor would help make the tivo much more responsive. I navigate very quickly, and the tivo always lags - sometimes a LOT.
I just bought a new S2 unit yesterday. Even with zero hacks at all, it's pretty pokey with simple navigation being even slower than my old s1!
Or blockbuster, which just announced a cheaper version of netflix.
WHat I wouldn't mind seeing is a service from DirecTV that is like netflix. They have lots of spare sat capacity now, and they could offer a service where you could pick a movie and it would schedule it to be broadcast sometime in the next week. DirecTivo would record it. How cool would that be? Kind of a better version of pay per view.
It's a small problem at this point, but it IS a growing one. I wouldn't write the trust issue off too quickly. We are talking about future, not yesterday and today.
I've known several die-hard windows fans that have converted over the past couple years for multiple reasons - security, cost, flexability, and reliability. It's not that they are converting specifically to Linux or Mac - it's that they are converting AWAY from windows and Linux and mac just happen to be the most viable options.
The DVR market is still small, and HDTV is an even smaller piece of that.
True, but I would bet that the DVR market IN the HDTV market is quite large. I think it's more the expense than anything. The DirectHDTivo is kind of spendy but not too bad really ($299). It's heavily subsidized by DirectTV since you pay extra for the HDTV programming. They are betting that if you buy and HDTV PVR that you will subscribe to a significant portion of HDTV services. That would be a good bet.
A SA HDTV unit would be a LOT harder to recoup costs on. They pretty much have to sell it at full cost.
Get yourself another DirecTivo box. They are only $79. Hack that. Once it's working great, THEN let your wife at it. That's what I did with my tivos, and (linux based) asterisk phone system. If you let them at the "beta" version, it's just gonna piss them off, and turn them off from any other technology thing you want to do.
FYI, A DirecTivo unit goes for $79. A plain sat receiver is $49, so the tivo part is only $30 more and has dual inputs. DirecTV only charges $4.99 for tivo service which is the same as the mirroring fee if you have 2 normal sat receiver boxes. Now hack your tivo so you can UL/DL video, MP3's, add in GAIM, etc. and it becomes QUITE a nice system. Base Tivo is nice, but as you say, it could do a lot more. I just wish the processor was faster and that it had more ram (this is a problem with MOST DVR's)
It would be very cool to get the digital steam directly into mythtv without re-encoding. Best of both worlds.
You do know about SRV and NAPTR records don't you? Dynamic DNS updates? ENUM RFC 2916, RFC 3761? e164.arpa? e164.org? You don't always need a service provider to use SIP in routing calls.
My question would be: why wouldn't there be a firewall between the "primary server" and "leased line"? The windows RPC ports would not be needed unless the system is horribly broken. The second point, "firewalled internet access for a VPN to GE" should ALSO be blocking RPC.
There is no reason specialized medical equipment shouldn't be put on an isolated / firewalled network segment, away from general purpose office PC's.
When you go to HGTV, you are going to see Home Depot and Lowes commercials. Soap networks is going to be food, cleaning products, and makeup. Yes, these are targeted in a general sense, but guys watching soaps (and some do for some bizzare reason) are not going to be buying nail polish. They are getting the advertizing targeted towards housewives - so the advertising time is wasted. That's what I'm getting at.
Let's pretend that Tivo gets it's act together and starts working with networks and advertisers better. Tivo goes a little further and lets family members tag their own shows instead of being generic. Now when Bob watches his favorite soaps, he starts getting directly targeted advertising inserted in the commercial spots of the type that he is less likely to fast forward though - maybe a ford truck ad instead of a tampon ad. This would put tivo-based TV viewing in the same league as the internet. Advertising targeted directly at specific groups of people that are interested in the products offered rather than getting blasted with the generic broadcast ads.
You miss the point completely. I know all about the arbitron ratings etc. The difference is that if you are watching CNN, you are going to get generic ads. If you are registered on CNN's web site, chances are that they are not going to show you a viagra ad if you are registered as a 25 year old woman. Instead, you will probably get tampax ads.
Doubleclick and cohorts try to judge your interests by where you go. They can target ads specifically to you based on what they suspect you are interested in. That's not possible on broadcast media.
But the reason they want the info is for targeted ads which you are filtering. So there is no point in collecting the info in the first place.
Remember: advertisers don't get that kind of targeted ability with any other medium (TV, radio, newspaper, magazine) yet they do on the internet (if people buy into it) yet pay the lowest rate per impression. This doesn't make sense.
If you want the NY Times content without having to give up any information, then hustle down to the newsstand and actually buy a copy.
:-) I heard a talk from the DoubleClick CEO a while back where he went into this and the dollars spent by companies like Ford, Pepsi, etc. The dollars those companies are willing to pay per impression on the internet are a tiny fraction as those in other media (TV being the largest.)
This has nothing to do with content and all to do with advertising.
FYI, the NYT doesn't really make any money off the newsstand price - that's eaten up in printing and distribution. They make all their money on ads.
For some bizzare reason, advertisers are willing to advertise without all the detailed market info on radio, television, magazines, newspaper, billboards, etc. but feel it's required on the internet. Just because something is possible doesn't make it required. I know full well why they do this - trying to get the best impact from ad dollars. It doesn't mean that I buy into it (no pun intended.
However, if the same obviously false story were printed in a newspaper or a "real" media outlet, someone would lose his job and it probably would end his career.
Nah, they would just print a retraction.
If you actually read the editorials in the papers, the lies, misdirection, etc. are usually much more subtle than your example. Frequently in "statistics", or deliberate omissions of facts. They happen every day in well known papers such as the NYT and LA Times, as well as the small-town papers which are actually WORSE than the majors from what I have seen (credability isn't an issue.) The bias and lies also show up in hard news articles. Unless you know the details of the topic in the articles you would never know.
Commercial media is only accountable if people hold them accountable. Trouble is, not enough people do to matter.
Anyway, back to the original topic. Registration drives me nuts. All get totally and obviously fake info - even if it's just age, sex, and zip code. Some registrations just are not worth it. If they want me to fill out a full page of info including phone numbers, email addresses, full address, birthdate, etc. I don't waste my time. The content isn't worth it, and is usually available somewhere else. In the wired article, they mention that these content providers don't see the negative feedback. This is simply because we don't care to waste our time complaining as it's not that important.
While it's fairly trivial to get stuff to run on OSX, getting it to run as a native OSX app is a whole different ballgame. OpenOffice is a great example of this.
Easy porting misses the point. One of the HUGE advantages of Linux is that it runs just about everywhere from watches, PDA's, desktop, servers, mainframes, to massive clusters. IBM realizes this, just as they realized the same concept with Java (which is why they do more with java than Sun does.) Getting somthing written on Intel linux to run on PowerPC Linux is trivial compared to porting from Linux to OSX.
FWIW, that survey was done before any major adoption of linux by businesses (especially in a desktop role.) I would bet that if that survey were run again today and targeted the real customer base (business) instead of consumers / techies, the results would be different (although maybe not considering the lack of advancement of the product. Adobe seems to have killed it on all platforms.)
Pointing at a several year old survey as "proof" of viability for commercial apps on linux is silly. My company spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on commercial linux software every year. The linux market is alive and well for innovative products. Products that don't offer any real benefit over their free alternatives will not make it.
Frankly, the commercial word-processing / spreadsheet space is just about dead due to good free alternatives such as OpenOffice, Abiword / Gnumeric, Lyx, etc. Microsoft is going to find this out over the next couple years (I think office suites is their number 2 money maker IIRC...)
BTW, Commodore's horrible marketing killed Amiga and its market. Not piracy. I was an avid Amiga user / programmer from '85 to '95 when I switched to Linux.