The Senate Judiciary Committee is holding confirmation hearings right now on Dubya's choice of the next director of the FBI, Muller.
So, do something about it and send an email to Senator Leahy, the chairman of the committee.
If this question is brought up before Muller, it will definitely get more media attention.
Just like a "hospital worker" is not always a doctor, a "tech worker" is not always a degreed CS/EE/etc. major.
We hear about hospital workers being laid off; but how many doctors are in the homeless shelters?:-)
I just went to TiVo's webpage and there is no mention of this "Richard Bullwinkle". Who is this guy? Why does everyone believe that this response is the "official" response? If it is the official response, how come there is no mention of it on the TiVo webpages?
I just don't get it. You buy the Tivo from Philips, and then you hook it up to a phone line for a free time/update service that
Tivo provides.
Now all these people get pissed off that Tivo changed things!! WTF did you think the phone line was for?
Bitch all you want, Tivo may have made a mistake, but they are letting you have a free ride they don't have any obligation to
give you.
Never criticise someone until you have walked a mile in their shoes.
Here are some items to ponder:
TiVo requires you to connect to a phone line, at least for the initial setup
TiVo does not give you the option of turning off daily calls, or turning off upgrades.
When TiVo makes the call, it doesn't just set the clock; it uploads your daily viewing information to the master server. Even though this information is "anonymised", it is still immensely valuable to TiVo. They turn around and sell this information to advertisers. If you have ever worked in advertising, you would know how valuable this information is.
For those of us who pay by the call, these daily calls add up.
Now, in return for updating the clock, Joe Unsub is giving TiVo fine-grained viewing information at his own cost (of the call).
Who's the leach now?
Before you start bitching about things you don't know about, take the time to think a little. They are not letting you have a free ride.
No. Customers without service have not paid TiVo a dime. TiVo has PAID THEM, indirectly, through Philips or Sony.
Well, not exactly true. Even though the non-subscribers weren't paying TiVo directly, TiVo was downloading their daily viewing habits to the second. This information is very valuable; in fact TiVo's latest SEC filing indicates that this is a good source of revenue to them.
Your points do not apply here. For the nth time: this guy was not a subscriber! He chose not to subscribe. Once he had made that decision, why should TiVO now screw around with his set???
their primary
focus is the folks the get money from, i.e. subscribers Exactly! TiVO chose to "upgrade" his system even though he is not a subscriber. He did not!
As for why he had it plugged into the phone: well, its his system dammit, and he can do what he wants with it!
I mean in all honesty, why would you buy this system
without signing up for it?
I, for one, won a TiVo in one of their silly contests. I was specifically told that all I was obliged to do was subscribe to 1 month of service; not more. Well, after the month was up, I had used the service just a few times, and decided it wasn't worth the effort. Also, TiVo would call out every day, uploading logs of whatever I watched. I pay per call ($0.10), so this worked out to an additional $3.00 per month. For me, it just wasn't worth it.
So I cancelled the service. But before cancelling it, I unplugged it from the phone jack, having looked at their scripts.
I'm glad I haven't plugged it back in. If I need to adjust the date, I'll do it in the bash.
One thing to note is that Fred (the first poster) paid $400 for the box; you can buy it for $235 today. In other words, Fred helped out TiVo in their early stages (he bought it over a year ago) by being an early customer. And this is how he gets repaid!
One other noteworthy thing: it has been just over a year since he bought it; and the warranty from TiVo is for 1 year. Could it be that they waited for a year so that they wouldn't void their own warranty?
From what I read, the flash is only 4mb...and that's hardly enough for the full os...
Of course, you would have to use a 32MB flash card for the full distro. But freeing up the CD would make it more attractive to people (not to mention the 5sec bootup!).
But a floppy would make it really handy; face it, floppies are still the preferred medium of data transport and cheap as hell.
How easy is it to modify this "NIC" ? I'm thinking that as a transition machine, it would be nice to add a floppy drive, and more importantly, put the entire OS (including Netscape) on the flash card. I know this will add to the cost, but a terminal like this which will boot up in 5 seconds (with the OS on the CF card) would make it more like a true appliance. And the CD could be used as an audio CD player.
Is it a coincidence that just a week ago they were given a sweet deal to manage the coveted.com domain for many more years? Did they wait to get this deal before pulling this stunt? Shows their true colors!
Plan9 has been killed by the lawyers at Lucent. It was a good OS many years ago. Lucent should have gone the Open Source route, and today Plan9 would have been much more popular. But the lawyers got in the way and they started charging for distributions, and throwing all sorts of legalese at ya. The end result? Plan9 is now as popular as the movie it was named after.
PS: BTW, according to the license you have to agree to before you can download Plan9, you cannot export Plan9 out of the US without a license! So much for putting it on your FTP site....
How does this system work with images?
Also, I'm not so sure about using Neural Nets for this kind of application. NNs do not generalize very well.
Is there any place where you can try out this "filtering" technology?
PS: I wonder if RuleSpace will catch the "goat sex" image....:)
Many people feel that "ubiquitous computing" is the future. Well, this is another form of ubiquitous computing.
In today's world, information is power (and wealth). Devices like these will let the information flow into each and every nook and cranny of this world.
An anecdote is in order. It used to be that farmers from far-flung villages would sell their produce to some middleman at a price influenced by that middleman. But this is changing. Today in some areas farmers are able to search the internet for the latest commodity prices, and can get a better estimate of what their produce is worth. Thus, access to this information has taken out most of the wiggle room that the middlemen had.
I think Paul Graham is tooting his own horn a bit too much here. Lisp was 35 years old when he used it in ViaWeb. His claim that "It was in fact the first big end-user application to be written in Lisp,which up till then had been used mostly in universities and research labs." is patently wrong. Has he forgotten about Emacs? When I was a lowly grad student, we used to work on Lisp Machines (a TI Explorer and a Symbolics Lisp machine). IIRC, their whole OS was written in Lisp.
So, for Mr. Graham to claim a first here is definitely hype.
Buffalo NY would have to be the ideal location for this. Cold as hell, and right next to the Niagra Hydro plant for cheap power.
You're right about the cold, brother. Except, it is not cold as hell, but cold as a witch's behind..;-)
BTW: the cost of electricity here is higher than a lot of other places. Don't ask me why; I think the juice just flows out of here.
We have been using Insure++ from ParaSoft, and it works wonders. In my experience, it catches far more bugs than Purify, the other such product. The only catch is that the execution is a lot slower, since every memory access is monitored. But, what would you rather waste: CPU cycles or your own time?:-)
They are trying to get ID cards introduced across Europe,....... Add that to the mix and I'll be applying for my green card!
In case you didn't know, a green card is also an ID card. The only difference is that with a green card, you have less rights than a citizen. Which means, the INS can bust yo' ass and no one can do anything about it.
People have been jailed for several years in the US without trial. The INS claims that it has "secret evidence", but won't show it to anyone. In the meantime the poor SOB rots in jail.
Slashdot Mirror
The Senate Judiciary Committee is holding confirmation hearings right now on Dubya's choice of the next director of the FBI, Muller.
So, do something about it and send an email to Senator Leahy, the chairman of the committee.
If this question is brought up before Muller, it will definitely get more media attention.
The problem with this approach is that it is real-time; the conversion cannot be done in "batch mode".
Just like a "hospital worker" is not always a doctor, a "tech worker" is not always a degreed CS/EE/etc. major. :-)
We hear about hospital workers being laid off; but how many doctors are in the homeless shelters?
PII 350 (bargain price) 50$ (with mobo)
Where can you get a P-II 350 +mobo for $50?
what about a laden swallow?
African or European?
Where can I get TV listings in a machine-readable format (easy to parse) ?
I just went to TiVo's webpage and there is no mention of this "Richard Bullwinkle". Who is this guy? Why does everyone believe that this response is the "official" response? If it is the official response, how come there is no mention of it on the TiVo webpages?
Now all these people get pissed off that Tivo changed things!! WTF did you think the phone line was for?
Bitch all you want, Tivo may have made a mistake, but they are letting you have a free ride they don't have any obligation to give you.
Never criticise someone until you have walked a mile in their shoes.
Here are some items to ponder:
Now, in return for updating the clock, Joe Unsub is giving TiVo fine-grained viewing information at his own cost (of the call).
Who's the leach now?
Before you start bitching about things you don't know about, take the time to think a little. They are not letting you have a free ride.
No. Customers without service have not paid TiVo a dime. TiVo has PAID THEM, indirectly, through Philips or Sony.
Well, not exactly true. Even though the non-subscribers weren't paying TiVo directly, TiVo was downloading their daily viewing habits to the second. This information is very valuable; in fact TiVo's latest SEC filing indicates that this is a good source of revenue to them.
Mod this up! This guy needs to be heard!! Moderators!
Your points do not apply here. For the nth time: this guy was not a subscriber! He chose not to subscribe. Once he had made that decision, why should TiVO now screw around with his set???
their primary focus is the folks the get money from, i.e. subscribers
Exactly! TiVO chose to "upgrade" his system even though he is not a subscriber. He did not!
As for why he had it plugged into the phone: well, its his system dammit, and he can do what he wants with it!
I mean in all honesty, why would you buy this system without signing up for it?
I, for one, won a TiVo in one of their silly contests. I was specifically told that all I was obliged to do was subscribe to 1 month of service; not more. Well, after the month was up, I had used the service just a few times, and decided it wasn't worth the effort. Also, TiVo would call out every day, uploading logs of whatever I watched. I pay per call ($0.10), so this worked out to an additional $3.00 per month. For me, it just wasn't worth it.
So I cancelled the service. But before cancelling it, I unplugged it from the phone jack, having looked at their scripts.
I'm glad I haven't plugged it back in. If I need to adjust the date, I'll do it in the bash.
One thing to note is that Fred (the first poster) paid $400 for the box; you can buy it for $235 today. In other words, Fred helped out TiVo in their early stages (he bought it over a year ago) by being an early customer. And this is how he gets repaid!
One other noteworthy thing: it has been just over a year since he bought it; and the warranty from TiVo is for 1 year. Could it be that they waited for a year so that they wouldn't void their own warranty?
From what I read, the flash is only 4mb...and that's hardly enough for the full os...
Of course, you would have to use a 32MB flash card for the full distro. But freeing up the CD would make it more attractive to people (not to mention the 5sec bootup!).
But a floppy would make it really handy; face it, floppies are still the preferred medium of data transport and cheap as hell.
How easy is it to modify this "NIC" ? I'm thinking that as a transition machine, it would be nice to add a floppy drive, and more importantly, put the entire OS (including Netscape) on the flash card. I know this will add to the cost, but a terminal like this which will boot up in 5 seconds (with the OS on the CF card) would make it more like a true appliance. And the CD could be used as an audio CD player.
Is it a coincidence that just a week ago they were given a sweet deal to manage the coveted .com domain for many more years? Did they wait to get this deal before pulling this stunt? Shows their true colors!
Isn't India one of the countries that still practices female genital mutilation (aka circumcision)?
Nope! You are probably thinking of Sudan or Ethiopia. But who cares, right? Just another third world country...
Plan9 has been killed by the lawyers at Lucent. It was a good OS many years ago. Lucent should have gone the Open Source route, and today Plan9 would have been much more popular. But the lawyers got in the way and they started charging for distributions, and throwing all sorts of legalese at ya. The end result? Plan9 is now as popular as the movie it was named after.
PS: BTW, according to the license you have to agree to before you can download Plan9, you cannot export Plan9 out of the US without a license! So much for putting it on your FTP site....
How does this system work with images? .... :)
Also, I'm not so sure about using Neural Nets for this kind of application. NNs do not generalize very well.
Is there any place where you can try out this "filtering" technology?
PS: I wonder if RuleSpace will catch the "goat sex" image
Many people feel that "ubiquitous computing" is the future. Well, this is another form of ubiquitous computing.
In today's world, information is power (and wealth). Devices like these will let the information flow into each and every nook and cranny of this world.
An anecdote is in order. It used to be that farmers from far-flung villages would sell their produce to some middleman at a price influenced by that middleman. But this is changing. Today in some areas farmers are able to search the internet for the latest commodity prices, and can get a better estimate of what their produce is worth. Thus, access to this information has taken out most of the wiggle room that the middlemen had.
Checkout http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q 261/1/86.ASP ; Microsoft has computers playing classical music all by themselves!
I think Paul Graham is tooting his own horn a bit too much here. Lisp was 35 years old when he used it in ViaWeb. His claim that "It was in fact the first big end-user application to be written in Lisp,which up till then had been used mostly in universities and research labs." is patently wrong. Has he forgotten about Emacs? When I was a lowly grad student, we used to work on Lisp Machines (a TI Explorer and a Symbolics Lisp machine). IIRC, their whole OS was written in Lisp.
So, for Mr. Graham to claim a first here is definitely hype.
Buffalo NY would have to be the ideal location for this. Cold as hell, and right next to the Niagra Hydro plant for cheap power. ;-)
You're right about the cold, brother. Except, it is not cold as hell, but cold as a witch's behind..
BTW: the cost of electricity here is higher than a lot of other places. Don't ask me why; I think the juice just flows out of here.
We have been using Insure++ from ParaSoft, and it works wonders. In my experience, it catches far more bugs than Purify, the other such product. The only catch is that the execution is a lot slower, since every memory access is monitored. But, what would you rather waste: CPU cycles or your own time? :-)
They are trying to get ID cards introduced across Europe,
In case you didn't know, a green card is also an ID card. The only difference is that with a green card, you have less rights than a citizen. Which means, the INS can bust yo' ass and no one can do anything about it.
People have been jailed for several years in the US without trial. The INS claims that it has "secret evidence", but won't show it to anyone. In the meantime the poor SOB rots in jail.
Read for yourself
Ya know, for guys promising quicker, faster downloads of content, their "plugin" sure is fat at 17MB...