It is interesting to note that while they were updating the cutting-edge Rawhide release every day, there hasn't been any updates there since April 15th.
I don't have any historical data on how they handled Rawhide prior to new releases, so I can't say exactly what this indicates.
The 4000-series boxes have modems and ethernet, but the modems are not turned on by the software. They could turn around tomorrow and start charging for subscriptions for current 4000 owners who want to use the modems (well, not tomorrow, but as soon as they update the software to support it).
As to MP3 support, you can find some text from mpg123 if you dig through the hard drive on the current 4000 models, or so it has been reported. My guess is that that was a feature planned for the 4000, but it wasn't ready in time for shipping, so it was cut so that they could start making money. At this point, it's probably only a marketing decision as to whether to offer that feature on existing boxes; they are certainly capable of it.
Computer-based solutions will always be a niche market. People don't want to leave their computers on all the time. People don't want to connect their computers to their home theaters. Sure, most people here think it is cool, but we're not most people.
but the vendor lockin with someone who's being sued by *everyone* does throw some cold water on desire for the machine.
The lawsuits indicate a long-standing philosophical difference between TiVo and ReplayTV. When both companies released their first products (within a month of each other, I believe), ReplayTV had a 30-second skip button for instantly jumping over commercials, and TiVo said they would not include such a feature to avoid annoying the networks.
Now ReplayTV 4000 units include more consumer-friendly features that are even more annoying to the networks. They include automatic commercial skipping (the same technology found in some VCRs for detecting commercials). And once you record something, you can send it to a friend's ReplayTV unit using the Internet.
If anything, the lawsuits are a reason to get a ReplayTV instead of a TiVo. You'll be supporting a company that is pushing the best technology they can; if it forces the networks to rethink their revenue model, that's a problem for the networks to deal with.
And even if for some reason the networks win their lawsuit, all it is likely to mean is that there will be a software update to disable whatever feature the court rules is illegal.
They've said nothing about the details of the pricing model. With any luck, they'll enable both modem and ethernet ports so you can get updates either way. With such a setup, they should charge a lower price for the ethernet-based updates, as they don't have to pay Earthlink (I think that's the ISP they contract with) for the dialups.
And everyone wants them to offer a lifetime subscription for those of us who hate monthly fees.
They didn't cut off my service when they replaced the 2020 with the 3030 and 3060. They didn't cut me off when they switched to the 4xxx series. I would be shocked if they decided to cut us off later, especially considering that the price of the units was essentially including a lifetime subscription fee.
Retailers expect a given profit margin as a percentage of the sales price. If lifetime service is bundled into the sales price, then you have to inflate the service price to cover the retailer's profit. By selling it direct to the consumer, you don't have to mark it up.
That's all the more reason for getting a PVR. You can save 25% of the time by skipping commercials. With my ReplayTV, I just use the 30-second skip button and I'm past the commercials almost instantly (I use the 8-second instant replay button if I go too far).
And that doesn't begin to touch how nice it is not having to manage your life around being there to watch your favorite show. Or how you always have something interesting to watch instead of channel surfing. Or how skipping the commercials avoids breaking the tension in a show like 24. Or how watching several episodes of a continuing story back to back can make a TV show feel like a movie. Or how totally pissed off you get when someone spoils the X-Files for you when you're three weeks behind.
The situation you described sounds like a bad power supply. As others have mentioned, it's the controller, not the hard drive, that requests IRQs--that's something that is usually part of the motherboard chip set. So if the failure you described is accurate, you're seeing failures in multiple parts of the system, which is a strong indicator of a bad power supply. That could also explain why you had more than one drive fail in the system, though often with drives you do find reliability comes and goes in bunches.
One of the reasons his ad campaign faltered is that his so-called poetry sucked. Now I really liked the idea of what he was doing, but he should have come up with better silly ads. Perhaps some haiku related to the word he was buying would work well.
By "awful lot," the numbers may still look large, but when you compare them to what is used for automotive fuel, home heating fuel, and aircraft fuel, you'll find that "miniscule" would probably be a better description.
While there may be advantages to using alternatives (as referenced by other responses), from and economic or environmental standpoint, it's just a drop in the ocean compared to fuel usage.
Sure, oil is used for plastics, lubricants, and many other purposes, but who cares? Why would we want to eliminate all use of oil? If we eliminate the use of oil for automobiles, OPEC could shut down and we wouldn't notice. If we also eliminate the use of oil for home heating, our oil use would no longer be a statisticly-significant source of pollution.
I don't see anyone else commenting on the 1979 miniseries of the Martian Chronicles. I remember watching it at the time, and I wasn't terribly impressed. I haven't read the books, though. Does anyone else remember the miniseries?
While it might be nice for Slashdot to cache pages, there are copyright issues with doing that. Many sites would prefer people visit the real site (so as to preserve advertising revenue, preserve brand identity, and such).
Also, Slashdot has enough trouble keeping up with its own bandwidth requirements.
She had plenty of opportunity to make a backup before the Police seized her computer. If her hard drive had crashed, she would be in the same position now. While it is horrible when the authorities abuse their power, and nothing excuses that, she has no right to complain about not having a backup when she needs one.
I'm not sure about failure rates, but heat and noise can be problem with the faster drives. That's the general consensus among people upgrading ReplayTV and TiVo units. Granted, that's a special case where the extra speed is of no value, whereas acoustics are very important. Anyway, the point is that you don't get the extra speed for free.
A coworker of mine who is very sensitive to screen flicker had a similar problem--every monitor he tried would cause headaches. They gave him a flat screen and that solved the problem. That was at about the time when we figured out that on the other side of the wall from his cube was a wiring closet, so it was the electrical fields from the wiring closet messing up his monitor.
If you can find the source of the problem, you might be able to shield it.
I remember when a friend was recording a radio theatre show, the studio had chicken wire on all the walls (behind accoustic foam in most places) to minimize inteferrence from outside signals. You don't want your microphone cable picking up radio signals when recording a performance. This material could be ideal for construction in applications like that where you want to block out outside signals.
It seems the editorial position here is that cable companies should be forced to allow other ISPs access. I'm not sure that's the right way of doing it.
The real question is whether you define operating the cable network (the physical network) as a separate business from providing data over that network. With current cable systems, the business of providing content and the business of providing connections are one and the same. At some point, it might become practical to change that, much like some states have done with electricity. You would get a separate bill for having a live cable connected to your house from the bill for whatever television content you received, quite possibly from separate companies.
The problem with technology and law is that we're dealing with new things. The government doesn't have specific rules for how to handle things, so it makes analogies to existing technologies. Those analogies are never perfect.
In this case, is letting another company offer ISP services over your cable lines analogous to letting another company offer TV channels over your cable lines, or is it analogous to letting another long distance carrier complete calls to your phone customers.
From my perspective, I don't see as this is a bad ruling from a legal perspective.
It also depends on the job market. If everyone else is laying people off, and I believe in what the company is doing, then why not show up and do what you enjoy instead of sitting around at home bored?
With a SPECint_base value of 306 Apple's 1 GHz machine under Mac OS X ran almost head to head with the equally clocked Pentium III, combined with Linux and GCC, with a SPECint_base value of 309. Under Windows, the bad quality of Microsoft's run-of-the-mill compiler, which pushed the system down to a SPECint_base value of 236
That means Linux is over 30% faster than Windows!
Too bad they didn't give similar floating point numbers (or at least I didn't find them in the article), especially seeing as how the Mac is faring so poorly against the Linux PIII in that area.
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It is interesting to note that while they were updating the cutting-edge Rawhide release every day, there hasn't been any updates there since April 15th.
I don't have any historical data on how they handled Rawhide prior to new releases, so I can't say exactly what this indicates.
The 4000-series boxes have modems and ethernet, but the modems are not turned on by the software. They could turn around tomorrow and start charging for subscriptions for current 4000 owners who want to use the modems (well, not tomorrow, but as soon as they update the software to support it).
As to MP3 support, you can find some text from mpg123 if you dig through the hard drive on the current 4000 models, or so it has been reported. My guess is that that was a feature planned for the 4000, but it wasn't ready in time for shipping, so it was cut so that they could start making money. At this point, it's probably only a marketing decision as to whether to offer that feature on existing boxes; they are certainly capable of it.
Computer-based solutions will always be a niche market. People don't want to leave their computers on all the time. People don't want to connect their computers to their home theaters. Sure, most people here think it is cool, but we're not most people.
but the vendor lockin with someone who's being sued by *everyone* does throw some cold water on desire for the machine.
The lawsuits indicate a long-standing philosophical difference between TiVo and ReplayTV. When both companies released their first products (within a month of each other, I believe), ReplayTV had a 30-second skip button for instantly jumping over commercials, and TiVo said they would not include such a feature to avoid annoying the networks.
Now ReplayTV 4000 units include more consumer-friendly features that are even more annoying to the networks. They include automatic commercial skipping (the same technology found in some VCRs for detecting commercials). And once you record something, you can send it to a friend's ReplayTV unit using the Internet.
If anything, the lawsuits are a reason to get a ReplayTV instead of a TiVo. You'll be supporting a company that is pushing the best technology they can; if it forces the networks to rethink their revenue model, that's a problem for the networks to deal with.
And even if for some reason the networks win their lawsuit, all it is likely to mean is that there will be a software update to disable whatever feature the court rules is illegal.
They've said nothing about the details of the pricing model. With any luck, they'll enable both modem and ethernet ports so you can get updates either way. With such a setup, they should charge a lower price for the ethernet-based updates, as they don't have to pay Earthlink (I think that's the ISP they contract with) for the dialups.
And everyone wants them to offer a lifetime subscription for those of us who hate monthly fees.
They didn't cut off my service when they replaced the 2020 with the 3030 and 3060. They didn't cut me off when they switched to the 4xxx series. I would be shocked if they decided to cut us off later, especially considering that the price of the units was essentially including a lifetime subscription fee.
Retailers expect a given profit margin as a percentage of the sales price. If lifetime service is bundled into the sales price, then you have to inflate the service price to cover the retailer's profit. By selling it direct to the consumer, you don't have to mark it up.
That's all the more reason for getting a PVR. You can save 25% of the time by skipping commercials. With my ReplayTV, I just use the 30-second skip button and I'm past the commercials almost instantly (I use the 8-second instant replay button if I go too far).
And that doesn't begin to touch how nice it is not having to manage your life around being there to watch your favorite show. Or how you always have something interesting to watch instead of channel surfing. Or how skipping the commercials avoids breaking the tension in a show like 24. Or how watching several episodes of a continuing story back to back can make a TV show feel like a movie. Or how totally pissed off you get when someone spoils the X-Files for you when you're three weeks behind.
I'm still getting at least one hit per day on my cable modem from Nimda. Code Red is less frequent, but still around, too.
It's an annoyance, not a problem; my web server is running on a 90MHz Pentium laptop. Of course, I'm running Linux.
The situation you described sounds like a bad power supply. As others have mentioned, it's the controller, not the hard drive, that requests IRQs--that's something that is usually part of the motherboard chip set. So if the failure you described is accurate, you're seeing failures in multiple parts of the system, which is a strong indicator of a bad power supply. That could also explain why you had more than one drive fail in the system, though often with drives you do find reliability comes and goes in bunches.
One of the reasons his ad campaign faltered is that his so-called poetry sucked. Now I really liked the idea of what he was doing, but he should have come up with better silly ads. Perhaps some haiku related to the word he was buying would work well.
By "awful lot," the numbers may still look large, but when you compare them to what is used for automotive fuel, home heating fuel, and aircraft fuel, you'll find that "miniscule" would probably be a better description.
While there may be advantages to using alternatives (as referenced by other responses), from and economic or environmental standpoint, it's just a drop in the ocean compared to fuel usage.
Sure, oil is used for plastics, lubricants, and many other purposes, but who cares? Why would we want to eliminate all use of oil? If we eliminate the use of oil for automobiles, OPEC could shut down and we wouldn't notice. If we also eliminate the use of oil for home heating, our oil use would no longer be a statisticly-significant source of pollution.
I don't see anyone else commenting on the 1979 miniseries of the Martian Chronicles. I remember watching it at the time, and I wasn't terribly impressed. I haven't read the books, though. Does anyone else remember the miniseries?
Some of the ads only have to be paid for when someone clicks on them. I don't know if I can bring myself to go to a Scientology web page, though.
While it might be nice for Slashdot to cache pages, there are copyright issues with doing that. Many sites would prefer people visit the real site (so as to preserve advertising revenue, preserve brand identity, and such).
Also, Slashdot has enough trouble keeping up with its own bandwidth requirements.
She had plenty of opportunity to make a backup before the Police seized her computer. If her hard drive had crashed, she would be in the same position now. While it is horrible when the authorities abuse their power, and nothing excuses that, she has no right to complain about not having a backup when she needs one.
I'm not sure about failure rates, but heat and noise can be problem with the faster drives. That's the general consensus among people upgrading ReplayTV and TiVo units. Granted, that's a special case where the extra speed is of no value, whereas acoustics are very important. Anyway, the point is that you don't get the extra speed for free.
A coworker of mine who is very sensitive to screen flicker had a similar problem--every monitor he tried would cause headaches. They gave him a flat screen and that solved the problem. That was at about the time when we figured out that on the other side of the wall from his cube was a wiring closet, so it was the electrical fields from the wiring closet messing up his monitor.
If you can find the source of the problem, you might be able to shield it.
It looks like we may have found the perfect material for building theaters!
I remember when a friend was recording a radio theatre show, the studio had chicken wire on all the walls (behind accoustic foam in most places) to minimize inteferrence from outside signals. You don't want your microphone cable picking up radio signals when recording a performance. This material could be ideal for construction in applications like that where you want to block out outside signals.
It seems the editorial position here is that cable companies should be forced to allow other ISPs access. I'm not sure that's the right way of doing it.
The real question is whether you define operating the cable network (the physical network) as a separate business from providing data over that network. With current cable systems, the business of providing content and the business of providing connections are one and the same. At some point, it might become practical to change that, much like some states have done with electricity. You would get a separate bill for having a live cable connected to your house from the bill for whatever television content you received, quite possibly from separate companies.
The problem with technology and law is that we're dealing with new things. The government doesn't have specific rules for how to handle things, so it makes analogies to existing technologies. Those analogies are never perfect.
In this case, is letting another company offer ISP services over your cable lines analogous to letting another company offer TV channels over your cable lines, or is it analogous to letting another long distance carrier complete calls to your phone customers.
From my perspective, I don't see as this is a bad ruling from a legal perspective.
It also depends on the job market. If everyone else is laying people off, and I believe in what the company is doing, then why not show up and do what you enjoy instead of sitting around at home bored?
I found this from the article to be interesting:
With a SPECint_base value of 306 Apple's 1 GHz machine under Mac OS X ran almost head to head with the equally clocked Pentium III, combined with Linux and GCC, with a SPECint_base value of 309. Under Windows, the bad quality of Microsoft's run-of-the-mill compiler, which pushed the system down to a SPECint_base value of 236
That means Linux is over 30% faster than Windows!
Too bad they didn't give similar floating point numbers (or at least I didn't find them in the article), especially seeing as how the Mac is faring so poorly against the Linux PIII in that area.