Or you could live in Chicago which has to be the largest metropolian area that doesn't have a regular showing of ST:TNG. It happens at odd times in the middle of the night in a non-recurring fashion. The Tivo is great for that since you can set it up to record ST:TNG whenever it is on. It hasn't missed on yet.:)
In your analysis, you listed all of the reasons that YOU wouldn't buy a Tivo. If a 30-second skip is just that damn important to you, I guess you won't buy one. I turned on the 30 second skip feature through the Tivo backdoor and it wasn't that useful, especially since network TV seems to go out of its way to make commercial breaks not end on 30 second marks so they can through in a quick network identification and promos for Must See Thursday. The fast-forward with the rollback on the Tivo is much more precise.
To be honest, I certainly didn't buy the Tivo for its fast forwarding features. It is a perk. Most people that I know that bought one bought it for the convenience factor of recording TV shows. They don't want wireless Ethernet. They don't need to upgrade the hard drive beyond the 30 hours it came with. It is an APPLIANCE. You want to treat it like a COMPUTER which it was never indended to be.
As for Tivo's business model, margins in services are much much higher than there are in selling hardware. It seems your complaint with their business model is that they make too much money. I think that was the plan. That's why they got Sony and Panasonic to make the boxes while they license the software and sell the service.
It'll be years until there is cheap commodity hardware that replicates Tivo's functionality. Until then, Tivo can make a pretty tidy sum of money. I'll bet you Tivo makes profitability before the commodity appliance appear.
The punchline is that I was guessing about where you live.:)
I've seen the coverage maps. Unless you live in the cities limits of the major cities in those area, you aren't getting coverage. What's the point then?
By the way, I'm not from the east coast. Thanks again for proving your ignorance about things east of Sacramento.:)
The 50 million peple is the footprint for the PLANNED coverage of the 128kbps service and that is in doubt due to Ricochet's money problems. Unless all of those 50 million people live at the airport.
I'll chalk up your post as another Bay Area resident who doesn't know what the world is like east of Sacramento.
Re:An Informed Congress
on
Congress@Work
·
· Score: 2
The House of Representatives is not exactly made of up of people from the right side of the bell curve. In some districts, all you have to do is have the largest car dealership in town to be considered Congressional material.
The reports that I have read said that NASA didn't want to completely ground him, they wanted to make sure he had the proper training on NASA's side of the station. Unfortunately, that training wasn't available until October.
This didn't fit with Tito's schedule. He wanted to go NOW and didn't want to wait since he wanted to get back to his business.
When he showed up at NASA last week for training, he brough 5 bodyguards a long with "in case there was trouble". How money do you have to have that warps your mind so much it makes you concerned that Barney working the gate at the Houston Space Center is going to rough you up for not being on the list.
I think he's being given way too much slack for being a "self-made-man". I think he's one of those people that get a little money and thinks that should grease all of the wheels to get what he wants.
I'd say drop a line to the RSS or RBL people and the regular spam buster houses and tell them what is going to happen. Or at least tell maybe tell us what the domains are or the subjects of the spams are going to be so we can add them to our own procmailrc files.:)
I had the same thing happen to me. I worked at General Magic for a year and left as soon as I could get out from under the "repayment of signing bonus/moving expenses" clause. This was August of 1997.
I stumbled on a stock trading board and posted my *opinions* about the future the company to counter some of the high flying "this could be another Microsoft" posters who really didn't understand what exactly was General Magic's product/service. They thought that General Magic had invented speech recognition, universal messaging, text-to-speech, etc. for crying out loud. I had to set them straight and bring a realistic analysis to the table. Of course some of this realistic analysis basically stated that some of the key people involved (and the company as a whole) had no experience developing any telephony applications and had no experience in dealing with cellular and wireline carriers (ie their target market). I thought that they were more interested in building a flashy network operations center to show off to investors and carriers than actually developing a usable service that carriers and users would pay for.
I also detailed some of the reactions by certain employees to my resignation. The VP of Engineering (Kevin Surace of perfect.com and ZDTV's Silicon Spin) listened to my concerns about the direction of the company and why I was leaving and basically told me that I would never work in Silicon Valley again and that I would never get rich (another reason I left... people were more interested in getting rich than actually developing a service/product that would sell). My "boss" Gary Lang told me I was "stupid" for walking away from all that money. I thought the reason for the reactions I got was that my leaving General Magic really brought out some insecurities about what they were doing.
I think this rubbed some people the wrong way. A few days later, I got a letter from General Magic's lawyers telling me that I violated my NDA. Or at least that was how the letter started out. They then proceeded to pull apart my post refuting everything I said. If what I said was false, how could it be a violation of my NDA?
They also stated that I could be liable for any "damages" sustained by the company due to my posting. I'd like to see them prove that one in court. The company still has not made a profit in the three and a half years since I left and their direction seems to change about every 9 months (selling to executives, selling to carriers, free service based on advertising, turn key solution for enterprise, GM OnStar).
I find it amusing that all of the people who were so gung ho about the product and how it was going to change everything and make everybody rich have since left the company.
I think Live365 already has an agreement with the RIAA to handle the royalities with the caveat that you can only play the same songs with in a certain time period and no more than two songs from the same artist in a certain time period yadda yadda yadda.
Who said it has to be some company that does the Open Source version? I think there would be some motivation for developers in their spare time to write an open source version of Groove that is either compatible with Groove or feature/functionality clone of Groove that works on more than just the Windows platform.
If anybody is interested in something like this, let me know.
This application sounds like it could have a lot of promise. For anybody working in a corporation with high centralized IT departments where every request to get something done (usually because the IT department is stuck in firefighting mode) takes days if not weeks, the ability to set up a collaborative environment without the need for IT to make server space, set up a database or install applications would be a godsend.
Include concepts from the Eternity Service and you could make a real good case for adopting this tool in an environment where The Powers That Be decided to adopt a monolith document repository system or a centralized email system that seem to be down way too much.
For all that work devoted to find a copy of the book, did the thought about trying your local library cross your mind? That's where I first read Hackers in its hardcover glory.:)
I'm currently involved in implementing software to allow cellular carriers to comply with CALEA.
What the FBI is doing with Carnivore is completely contrary to how surveillance has been done in the past, if the stories about Carnivore are true. From what I understood, the Carnivore system is locked up in some cage, hooked up to the ISP's network and left alone. Only the FBI personnel are allowed to touch it.
The way surveillance has been done in the past is the FBI or any law enforcement agency goes to a carrier with a paper warrant written by a judge that says they can conduct surveillance on a person in a particular geographical area for a certain length of time. The carrier then provisions the wiretap equipment (owned by the carrier) to allow the LEA's Law Enforcement Monitor (LEM) to login and receive surveillance data. The surveillance should stop when the warrant expires if it is not renewed by a judge. The judge does regular reviews of the surveillance to make sure it is all compliant with the law.
With Carnivore, all of the accountability above is missing. The FBI owns and maintains the equipment and can be doing whatever they want with it regardless of whether or not there is a warrant. Who knows if they have implemented the automatic expiration of warrants (we had to in order to be compliant with FCC regulations). At least with the current scheme of things, the carrier has to be presented with a warrant and knows what is being done on its network.
With what I have seen the FBI try to get out of the CALEA law, they are really trying to expand their wiretap capabilities. An example: The FCC's latest CALEA standard allows LEA to continue surveill conference calls that the subject under surveillance has already hung up on or may or may not be a particpant of (in dispatch systems).
I think Carnivore is just another example of the FBI trying to expand its capabilities. I think this is also a case of asking for forgiveness rather than permission. Permissions would have taken too long in their eyes.
Did anybody see the actual cease and decist letter?
"We further demand that the Sounds website and its employees and agents immediately remove from its website all materials copied from the Iron Chef program and place a notice on the Sounds website acknowledging and apologizing for infringing Fuji's intellectual property rights and providing a link to the Television Food Network site regarding "Iron Chef" at: www.foodtv.com/tvshows/ironchefindex."
Does this sound incredibly petty to anybody? Removing the infringing material is one thing but an apology and a required link? They have no right to demand that.
I have a Linux box running Icecast which serves streams directly and I also send a stream to Live365 to use Live365 as a relay. They have a lot more bandwidth than I so I direct most listeners there. The Linux box is a 75 MHz Pentium with 32 megs of memory. All it does is stream. I rarely get more than two or three listeners at a time on this box since Live365 does relay so it is able to handle the load.
I use a Windows box to create the source stream. I have Winamp loaded with the Shoutcast DSP module and the linerec:// plug in to be able to record from the Line In on the sound card.
Some people on here have stated than anything less than 56kb doesn't sound good. I would agree with them if the 56kb stream is in stereo. Remeber if you broadcast in stereo, that stream has two hold one stream for left, one stream for right. So if you decided to broadcast in 24Kbps stereo, you only have 12Kbps per channel (more or less).
We broadcast in mono at 24kbps and still sounds really good. There really is no need for stereo in our broadcast since more of our broadcast is talk and we would rather have good sound quality than stereo for those small bits we play music. Also 24kbps only requires a 33.3K modem to listen if that much. It sounds like really clear AM radio.
As for the rest of our setup, we have a mixing board into which we plug our microphones. We then plug the mixing board's line out into the sound card's line in. This required a stereo RCA to stereo 1/8" plug converter. You can get this at Radio Shack.
We also take the line out of the sound card and hook it up to a stereo where we can plug in headphones. I highly recommend this. First off, you need to be able to hear what you are broadcasting directly (not through speakers). Secondly, headphones will allow you to hear any kind of hum that might be created by your setup.
None of what we are doing requires any high end hardware. Since we aren't broadcasting anywhere near CD-quality sound, we don't need a big machine to encode the stream and since we don't server a high number of simulataneous streams, we don't need a big icecast server. Live365 can handle the load if need be.
Not true... actually, exactly the opposite. Most divisions are phasing out Macintosh support in favor of a common platform that is basically a Dell with all Microsoft software.
Slashdot Mirror
Or you could live in Chicago which has to be the largest metropolian area that doesn't have a regular showing of ST:TNG. It happens at odd times in the middle of the night in a non-recurring fashion. The Tivo is great for that since you can set it up to record ST:TNG whenever it is on. It hasn't missed on yet. :)
In your analysis, you listed all of the reasons that YOU wouldn't buy a Tivo. If a 30-second skip is just that damn important to you, I guess you won't buy one. I turned on the 30 second skip feature through the Tivo backdoor and it wasn't that useful, especially since network TV seems to go out of its way to make commercial breaks not end on 30 second marks so they can through in a quick network identification and promos for Must See Thursday. The fast-forward with the rollback on the Tivo is much more precise.
To be honest, I certainly didn't buy the Tivo for its fast forwarding features. It is a perk. Most people that I know that bought one bought it for the convenience factor of recording TV shows. They don't want wireless Ethernet. They don't need to upgrade the hard drive beyond the 30 hours it came with. It is an APPLIANCE. You want to treat it like a COMPUTER which it was never indended to be.
As for Tivo's business model, margins in services are much much higher than there are in selling hardware. It seems your complaint with their business model is that they make too much money. I think that was the plan. That's why they got Sony and Panasonic to make the boxes while they license the software and sell the service.
It'll be years until there is cheap commodity hardware that replicates Tivo's functionality. Until then, Tivo can make a pretty tidy sum of money. I'll bet you Tivo makes profitability before the commodity appliance appear.
Let's go after these idiots:
"Charging $39.95 for the booklet, Heckel made 30 to 50 sales per month."
Who is buying this crap?
The punchline is that I was guessing about where you live. :)
:)
I've seen the coverage maps. Unless you live in the cities limits of the major cities in those area, you aren't getting coverage. What's the point then?
By the way, I'm not from the east coast. Thanks again for proving your ignorance about things east of Sacramento.
The 50 million peple is the footprint for the PLANNED coverage of the 128kbps service and that is in doubt due to Ricochet's money problems. Unless all of those 50 million people live at the airport.
I'll chalk up your post as another Bay Area resident who doesn't know what the world is like east of Sacramento.
The House of Representatives is not exactly made of up of people from the right side of the bell curve. In some districts, all you have to do is have the largest car dealership in town to be considered Congressional material.
The only thing I can think is that they want infringing products destroyed and/or recalled and that would be part of any injunction or ruling.
CompUSA, Best Buy and Circuit City would have to comply with destroying their stock and also fulfilling the recall.
Chris
(user inserts game CD)
(Neo-Tokyo blows up)
Rendered Kaneda: Tatsuo!
Rendered Tatsuo: Kaneda!
(user inserts second game CD)
(Neo-Tokyo blows up)
(with apologies to whoever came up with the world's shortest Akira plot summary originally)
Chris
Time to add a new moderation category:
Non-sequitur
They'll train him in October. That doesn't meet with his schedule so he's whining in public.
The reports that I have read said that NASA didn't want to completely ground him, they wanted to make sure he had the proper training on NASA's side of the station. Unfortunately, that training wasn't available until October.
This didn't fit with Tito's schedule. He wanted to go NOW and didn't want to wait since he wanted to get back to his business.
When he showed up at NASA last week for training, he brough 5 bodyguards a long with "in case there was trouble". How money do you have to have that warps your mind so much it makes you concerned that Barney working the gate at the Houston Space Center is going to rough you up for not being on the list.
I think he's being given way too much slack for being a "self-made-man". I think he's one of those people that get a little money and thinks that should grease all of the wheels to get what he wants.
I'd say drop a line to the RSS or RBL people and the regular spam buster houses and tell them what is going to happen. Or at least tell maybe tell us what the domains are or the subjects of the spams are going to be so we can add them to our own procmailrc files. :)
Does that mean that Tenchi is JR Ewing?
I had the same thing happen to me. I worked at General Magic for a year and left as soon as I could get out from under the "repayment of signing bonus/moving expenses" clause. This was August of 1997.
I stumbled on a stock trading board and posted my *opinions* about the future the company to counter some of the high flying "this could be another Microsoft" posters who really didn't understand what exactly was General Magic's product/service. They thought that General Magic had invented speech recognition, universal messaging, text-to-speech, etc. for crying out loud. I had to set them straight and bring a realistic analysis to the table. Of course some of this realistic analysis basically stated that some of the key people involved (and the company as a whole) had no experience developing any telephony applications and had no experience in dealing with cellular and wireline carriers (ie their target market). I thought that they were more interested in building a flashy network operations center to show off to investors and carriers than actually developing a usable service that carriers and users would pay for.
I also detailed some of the reactions by certain employees to my resignation. The VP of Engineering (Kevin Surace of perfect.com and ZDTV's Silicon Spin) listened to my concerns about the direction of the company and why I was leaving and basically told me that I would never work in Silicon Valley again and that I would never get rich (another reason I left... people were more interested in getting rich than actually developing a service/product that would sell). My "boss" Gary Lang told me I was "stupid" for walking away from all that money. I thought the reason for the reactions I got was that my leaving General Magic really brought out some insecurities about what they were doing.
I think this rubbed some people the wrong way. A few days later, I got a letter from General Magic's lawyers telling me that I violated my NDA. Or at least that was how the letter started out. They then proceeded to pull apart my post refuting everything I said. If what I said was false, how could it be a violation of my NDA?
They also stated that I could be liable for any "damages" sustained by the company due to my posting. I'd like to see them prove that one in court. The company still has not made a profit in the three and a half years since I left and their direction seems to change about every 9 months (selling to executives, selling to carriers, free service based on advertising, turn key solution for enterprise, GM OnStar).
I find it amusing that all of the people who were so gung ho about the product and how it was going to change everything and make everybody rich have since left the company.
I hope it wasn't something I said.
I think Live365 already has an agreement with the RIAA to handle the royalities with the caveat that you can only play the same songs with in a certain time period and no more than two songs from the same artist in a certain time period yadda yadda yadda.
Who said it has to be some company that does the Open Source version? I think there would be some motivation for developers in their spare time to write an open source version of Groove that is either compatible with Groove or feature/functionality clone of Groove that works on more than just the Windows platform.
If anybody is interested in something like this, let me know.
Include concepts from the Eternity Service and you could make a real good case for adopting this tool in an environment where The Powers That Be decided to adopt a monolith document repository system or a centralized email system that seem to be down way too much.
How soon before we see an open source version?
Here is something in that $300-$1000 category.
For all that work devoted to find a copy of the book, did the thought about trying your local library cross your mind? That's where I first read Hackers in its hardcover glory. :)
Chris
I'm currently involved in implementing software to allow cellular carriers to comply with CALEA.
What the FBI is doing with Carnivore is completely contrary to how surveillance has been done in the past, if the stories about Carnivore are true. From what I understood, the Carnivore system is locked up in some cage, hooked up to the ISP's network and left alone. Only the FBI personnel are allowed to touch it.
The way surveillance has been done in the past is the FBI or any law enforcement agency goes to a carrier with a paper warrant written by a judge that says they can conduct surveillance on a person in a particular geographical area for a certain length of time. The carrier then provisions the wiretap equipment (owned by the carrier) to allow the LEA's Law Enforcement Monitor (LEM) to login and receive surveillance data. The surveillance should stop when the warrant expires if it is not renewed by a judge. The judge does regular reviews of the surveillance to make sure it is all compliant with the law.
With Carnivore, all of the accountability above is missing. The FBI owns and maintains the equipment and can be doing whatever they want with it regardless of whether or not there is a warrant. Who knows if they have implemented the automatic expiration of warrants (we had to in order to be compliant with FCC regulations). At least with the current scheme of things, the carrier has to be presented with a warrant and knows what is being done on its network.
With what I have seen the FBI try to get out of the CALEA law, they are really trying to expand their wiretap capabilities. An example: The FCC's latest CALEA standard allows LEA to continue surveill conference calls that the subject under surveillance has already hung up on or may or may not be a particpant of (in dispatch systems).
I think Carnivore is just another example of the FBI trying to expand its capabilities. I think this is also a case of asking for forgiveness rather than permission. Permissions would have taken too long in their eyes.
6,006,227 Document stream operating system
Just FYI
Did anybody see the actual cease and decist letter?
"We further demand that the Sounds website and its employees and agents immediately remove from its website all materials copied from the Iron Chef program and place a notice on the Sounds website acknowledging and apologizing for infringing Fuji's intellectual property rights and providing a link to the Television Food Network site regarding "Iron Chef" at: www.foodtv.com/tvshows/ironchefindex."
Does this sound incredibly petty to anybody? Removing the infringing material is one thing but an apology and a required link? They have no right to demand that.
I have a Linux box running Icecast which serves streams directly and I also send a stream to Live365 to use Live365 as a relay. They have a lot more bandwidth than I so I direct most listeners there. The Linux box is a 75 MHz Pentium with 32 megs of memory. All it does is stream. I rarely get more than two or three listeners at a time on this box since Live365 does relay so it is able to handle the load.
I use a Windows box to create the source stream. I have Winamp loaded with the Shoutcast DSP module and the linerec:// plug in to be able to record from the Line In on the sound card.
Some people on here have stated than anything less than 56kb doesn't sound good. I would agree with them if the 56kb stream is in stereo. Remeber if you broadcast in stereo, that stream has two hold one stream for left, one stream for right. So if you decided to broadcast in 24Kbps stereo, you only have 12Kbps per channel (more or less).
We broadcast in mono at 24kbps and still sounds really good. There really is no need for stereo in our broadcast since more of our broadcast is talk and we would rather have good sound quality than stereo for those small bits we play music. Also 24kbps only requires a 33.3K modem to listen if that much. It sounds like really clear AM radio.
As for the rest of our setup, we have a mixing board into which we plug our microphones. We then plug the mixing board's line out into the sound card's line in. This required a stereo RCA to stereo 1/8" plug converter. You can get this at Radio Shack.
We also take the line out of the sound card and hook it up to a stereo where we can plug in headphones. I highly recommend this. First off, you need to be able to hear what you are broadcasting directly (not through speakers). Secondly, headphones will allow you to hear any kind of hum that might be created by your setup.
None of what we are doing requires any high end hardware. Since we aren't broadcasting anywhere near CD-quality sound, we don't need a big machine to encode the stream and since we don't server a high number of simulataneous streams, we don't need a big icecast server. Live365 can handle the load if need be.
Chris
And know you know... the rest of the story.
I'm Paul Harvey.
Not true... actually, exactly the opposite. Most
divisions are phasing out Macintosh support in favor of a common platform that is basically a Dell with all Microsoft software.