I don't think there's any big licensing issue here. Nobody sells just the images. They sell hard drives with image clones on them. Which makes them eligible for C&D letters too. And they probably get them. But rather than just go out of business, they forward the letter to their lawyers, who make it nontrivial for Tivo to shut them down. They probably could -- it's a question of how hard they want to try.
I have a T60 which is stuck on the welcome powering up message and just keeps rebooting every 30s. I'm going to see what I can do to salvage it, but I have a hunch a reimage will be needed. I'm crossing my fingers that there is no permanent damage...
I gather the reimage did work. You know, this points out the biggest, most fundamental flaw in Tivo -- it's a complicated kludge, designed without regard to Murphy's law. When nothing goes wrong, it works great. But it doesn't take a very big glitch to cause major problems. I mean, a simple power failure, jeez.
If I ever get mine working again, I think I'll want a UPS for it. Except a UPS isn't much use unless you can do a safe shutdown -- something you can't do with an out-of-the-box Tivo. Probably not that hard to write a script that gets run when when the UPS sends a command via the serial port.
I've always resisted becoming a Tivo hacker, but now I guess I have no choice. Either that or get rid of the thing.
So what were the symptoms? I ask because I have a Tivo gather dust, 'cause I can't afford to fix it. It worked well for about six months, then start freezing up intermittently. (Most irritating to come home and find ones favorite show not recorded.) These freezes became more and more frequent, until the system was unusable. Reinitializing the system helped, as did turning of the "record stuff I might like" feature, but in the end the system couldn't go for more than a few minutes without freezing up.
A lot of discussions with Tivo enthusiasts and video wonks made me think it had to be a hardware problem. (I forget my chain of reasoning -- it's been over a year.) But then again it did start misbehaving right after one of those upgrades.
There's a lot to love about a Tivo -- when it's working, it's every bit as good as its most rabid fans claim. But there's also stuff about it's that's totally ridiculous. Like:
The whole UI is obviously designed by not very creative people implement a checklist derived from a focus group. So it's basically pretty user-friendly, but doesn't include features any bright geek would automatically implement, like a simple procedure for dealing with overlaps, or a better feedback when it doesn't record something you told it to record.
The Tivo people are smart and nice, basically, but they won't ever admit that they've screwed up -- and they do screw up.
Every mass market product has rabid, short-tempered fans who will dump on you if you even imply that the product has flaws. But I never seen a product with so many. I mean, you even post a friendly suggestion in the Tivo suggesion forum, and a dozen angry bozos call you an idiot. Never mind trying to hold an intelligent conversation about technical problems.
That's reminiscent of something Alan Turing did during WW II. He wanted to learn to shoot a rifle, so he joined one of those voluntary rearguard units. Once he'd learned to shoot, he quit. Not usually allowed, but when they came to arrest him, he just pointed to the form he'd signed. Where it said, "Do you agree to server for the duration of the war?" he'd written, "No." Of course you were supposed to write "yes," but nobody ever checked.
Saw a resume once with a lot of bogus stuff on it. Not only had the guy listed degrees from schools he never attended, he misspelled the names of the schools. Didn't stop him from getting hired at the height of the dotcom bubble.
Do we have to trade powerful features for usability?
So experience would seem to indicate!
Seriously, here's the big problem with Notes. It wasn't designed -- it just grew. It appeared back in 1973 as a simple public message system. It's gone through umteen transitions and been split into two related programs (the Notes client and the Domino server). It has thirty years of legacy features to support, and a huge bureaucratic company maintaining it. They've been struggling to make it usable ever since they decided to make it a shrink-wrap product (used to be you could only buy Notes as part of big hyper-expensive support bundle), but it's a big task. If usability were the top priority, they would probably junk the client and start from scratch. But features are what sell a product, so that's where they put the effort.
Anyway, you're right, and you're wrong. You're right that Notes is a nightmare. You wrong to think this shows any special ineptitude on the part of IBM. Do you see any mail or messaging client that isn't feature-bloated and painful to use? Outlook, Pegasus, Eudora, Mulberry -- they all ignore usability in favor of Cool Features. The only difference with Notes is that it's had a lot more time to bloat up.
The notable exception is Netscape/Mozilla/Firebird. Which has issues, but is at least reasonably simple to use. I credit it to the fact that it's a commercial failure, so there's no pressure to keep shoving in features.
Seriously, where I work the programmers get along just fine. We can work out our differences on new features, and always know that showstopper bugs are called that for a reason. We give everyone a chance to comment on architectural or important decisions. Our Manager is an ex-programmer, but hes so burdened with administrative duties he doesnt get much time to develop. (poor bastard)
Well, whatever works. Sounds like you have the project management tasks divided between your boss and yourselves. Which is fine, except (a) your boss is wasting all his programming skills and experience, (b) your ability to get along and cooperatively split up the work is nice, but not usual, (c) this kind of setup simply doesn't scale.
That last point is particularly nasty. How many people in your group? No more than a dozen I'd guess. Imagine a programming effort with 50 or more people in it. Sure, you can subdivide the group, but then you've got even more layers of bureaucracy. And who makes sure all the groups work together? Maybe the uberboss, though he'll probably delegate it to somebody. If he has your attitude, that somebody will be a poorly trained secretary or intern, who will be unpopular and ineffective. If he's smart...
In orgs I've worked in with really good PMs, the managers get to do actual real work, instead of just shuffling papers. Instead of snearing at the bureaucratic scutwork, you should consider hiring somebody who makes it a speciality.
Maybe they dont need an inflated-ego type with MS Project telling them when to jump.
That would be a pain. But I'm talking about good PMs. The ones I know have as much ego a koala bear. And not all of them use Project -- one really impressive guy was very good at programming workflow databases in FileMaker.
So you think Java Desktop is going to challenge Windows? It's just another Linux desktop. Why should it do any better than any of the other Linux desktops that have appeared in the last few years? Not to mention all the desktop environments (at least 4) that Sun has come up, all of which failed miserably. Sun is beating a horse that is so dead, it's, well, pathetic.
Yes, I know who invented Javascript. But Netscape couldn't have made the change without Sun's permission. So somebody at Sun had to decide that using "Java" to describe a language that had only incidental connection to the Java platform was a good idea.
They're not selling the Java platform, they're selling the Java brand. Which is pathetic, I agree. Except you can make a lot of money exploiting an accepted brand, without being very creative or original, as the Batman movies attest. It's just that somebody at Sun thinks that Java is a lot more valuable as a brand then it really is. And they're overlooking the confusion they cause by separating the technology brand from the actual technology.
Microsoft did the same thing with.NET, though they soon realized they were overdoing it and pulled back. Sun has done it from the beginning (hence Javascript) and has never had a clue that they're doing anything wrong.
I'll say it again: Java's worst enemy is not Microsoft, it's Sun!
So only programmers can understand what programmers do? I've worked in place dominated by that attitude. What a disaster! No prioritization ("I want this feature, and fuck your schedule"), bad documentation ("Just put this in the docs, and don't try to understand it"), bad marketing ("those stupid marketeers are incapable of understanding the product") and permanent warfare with upper management ("who cares what those overpaid idiots think"). In really extreme cases, even the programming staff gets all Balkanized, because nobody believes in any concept of the product except their own. Bugs run rampant and the pieces don't work together. Everybody works too hard and gets too little done.
Good project management doesn't pretend to know everything (who can?) or try to tell everybody what to do (they'd just get ignored). It earns the respect and cooperation of the rest of the team, and makes sure people understand the consequences of breaking the rules (like fiddling with new features when you're supposed to be stomping showstopper bugs). If you don't understand that kind of coordination, either you've never had the good luck to work with a good PM (very likely) or you're just to full of yourself to be capable of real teamwork.
Oh good lord, yet another post quibbling with my engineer/PM quantification. Doesn't anybody around here know what a figure of speech is? Do you think that the difference between Dr. Seuss and Leo Tolstoy is summarized by "a picture is worth a thousand words"? If I had said, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure," would everybody be posting price quotes on tanin?
I think you're confusing Project Managers with "real" managers. The title is kind of misleading. A true PM isn't the boss of the people on their team. The PM just coordinates and communicates. The "real" manager is always in charge, but is more effective because the PM takes away a lot of the bureaucratic crap.
I guess it's pretty common to combine these two roles, but every place I've worked they were separate. And it works quite well, provided the PMs are given due respect and are good at what they do.
On the other hand, there's a place where I worked where they promoted a field engineer who lived two time zones away to PM, and allowed him to telecommute. The guy was reasonably smart and competent, but he had no hope of doing a decent job on that basis. It's hard enough to have a productive planning meeting when several key people are calling in. But when the guy who's supposed to be running the meeting isn't physically present? Forget it.
But the absolute worst PM I ever met was, well, me. I can say this without embaressment because I never set out to be one. I just took a contracting job where everybody in a huge pubs team delegated all the bureaucratic scutwork to me. (To be fair, I grabbed some work that I saw wasn't getting done. Should have let it remain so until the manager was forced to recognize the huge chunks falling through her departmental cracks.) So I was de-facto project manager, a role I am unsuited for by training, talent, and temperament. Ironically, this company had absolutely the best professional PMs I have ever had the pleasure to work with. But they had no authority in the little corporate fiefdom my manager had carved out.
Now I know coders aren't rocket scientists, but less advanced than project managers? Ouch
I guess you work for one of those pathetic little companies where the PMs are just glorified clerks. In a well-run shop, a good PM is worth a dozen engineers, never mind coders. That's because the PM does all the resource-managment, schedule juggling, workflow info distribution, and other organizational scutwork that would otherwise drastically impact the engineering man-month, if it got done at all.
Slashdot Editors: Is it so fucking hard to get a Google partner link? What do you guys do all day?
Gawd, we've been through this a hundred times. DMCA, changing link conventions, yada yada yada. If you're too lazy or paranoid to get a free NYTimes account, fine. But stop beating a dead horse already.
Jeez, you can't manage your cell phone, therefore cell phones are evil. Yeah right. I guess obnoxious drivers prove that cars are evil. (Actually cars are evil, but that's another subject.)
If you don't like answering every little phone call, don't. Get a phone that has caller ID and a button that lets you turn off the ringer if you don't want to answer. Let the voice mail pick up if you're busy, oror in a place where it would be rude or dangerous to talk on the phone. Or if you just don't feel like answering the phone. (In this era of telemarketers and other meme spammers, you cannot treat answering the phone as a fundamental obligation.) If you let a device like a cell phone enslave you, it's not the device that needs retooling.
And distinctive ring tones aren't meant to be cute or pretty. They're a way to distinguish your phone so you don't reach for your pocket every time somebody else's phone ring.
Speaking of which, does anybody know WTF "Kyung Bokung" is? It's one of the ring tones hard-wired into my Samsung 3500. Since the alternatives are various electronic chirps, and a couple of Western Classical pieces I like too much to listen to them every time my phone rings, it's what I use. I'm guessing Korean folk or patriotic tune. Google, for once, is not helpful.
The first iteration of my paper-less setup was a Newton MP2100, keyboard, 8 MB flash card, and 3com ethernet card. I owned 3 other PDAs before this...
Gah. The MP2100 came out after I gave up on the Newton platform. If it had come out sooner, I'd probably be one of those people who won't accept that the Newton will never come back. Then again, if the MP2100 had come out sooner, the Newton might not have gone away.
I wanted to run Squeak Smalltalk, my programming weapon of choice.
Double Gah. I'm constantly tempted to get into Squeak because I'm already into Wikis, and Swiki is the Wiki that most intrigues me. But I simply don't have time to learn another programming language. Except I used to know Smalltalk 80, and Squeak couldn't be that much different, so... No! NO! Retro me, Satanas!
I find it interesting that you seem to prefer PDAs with proper keyboards, but still give a system extra points if it runs -- and has a screen big enough to use -- Calligrapher. Have you considered a tablet PC?
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!
If reimaging works at all, it shouldn't matter how long you wait. It's like re-installing the OS on regular computer.
I don't think there's any big licensing issue here. Nobody sells just the images. They sell hard drives with image clones on them. Which makes them eligible for C&D letters too. And they probably get them. But rather than just go out of business, they forward the letter to their lawyers, who make it nontrivial for Tivo to shut them down. They probably could -- it's a question of how hard they want to try.
If I ever get mine working again, I think I'll want a UPS for it. Except a UPS isn't much use unless you can do a safe shutdown -- something you can't do with an out-of-the-box Tivo. Probably not that hard to write a script that gets run when when the UPS sends a command via the serial port.
I've always resisted becoming a Tivo hacker, but now I guess I have no choice. Either that or get rid of the thing.
Jeez, what idiot wasted their points modding down the parent? Besides which, "Redundant" makes no sense at all. "Offtopic," maybe.
A lot of discussions with Tivo enthusiasts and video wonks made me think it had to be a hardware problem. (I forget my chain of reasoning -- it's been over a year.) But then again it did start misbehaving right after one of those upgrades.
There's a lot to love about a Tivo -- when it's working, it's every bit as good as its most rabid fans claim. But there's also stuff about it's that's totally ridiculous. Like:
I think there might be a few folks who think I'm evil, and come hunting for me whenever they get a few mod points. Not that big a deal.
How is that world domination thing going?
Saw a resume once with a lot of bogus stuff on it. Not only had the guy listed degrees from schools he never attended, he misspelled the names of the schools. Didn't stop him from getting hired at the height of the dotcom bubble.
Seriously, here's the big problem with Notes. It wasn't designed -- it just grew. It appeared back in 1973 as a simple public message system. It's gone through umteen transitions and been split into two related programs (the Notes client and the Domino server). It has thirty years of legacy features to support, and a huge bureaucratic company maintaining it. They've been struggling to make it usable ever since they decided to make it a shrink-wrap product (used to be you could only buy Notes as part of big hyper-expensive support bundle), but it's a big task. If usability were the top priority, they would probably junk the client and start from scratch. But features are what sell a product, so that's where they put the effort.
Anyway, you're right, and you're wrong. You're right that Notes is a nightmare. You wrong to think this shows any special ineptitude on the part of IBM. Do you see any mail or messaging client that isn't feature-bloated and painful to use? Outlook, Pegasus, Eudora, Mulberry -- they all ignore usability in favor of Cool Features. The only difference with Notes is that it's had a lot more time to bloat up.
The notable exception is Netscape/Mozilla/Firebird. Which has issues, but is at least reasonably simple to use. I credit it to the fact that it's a commercial failure, so there's no pressure to keep shoving in features.
That last point is particularly nasty. How many people in your group? No more than a dozen I'd guess. Imagine a programming effort with 50 or more people in it. Sure, you can subdivide the group, but then you've got even more layers of bureaucracy. And who makes sure all the groups work together? Maybe the uberboss, though he'll probably delegate it to somebody. If he has your attitude, that somebody will be a poorly trained secretary or intern, who will be unpopular and ineffective. If he's smart...
In orgs I've worked in with really good PMs, the managers get to do actual real work, instead of just shuffling papers. Instead of snearing at the bureaucratic scutwork, you should consider hiring somebody who makes it a speciality.
That would be a pain. But I'm talking about good PMs. The ones I know have as much ego a koala bear. And not all of them use Project -- one really impressive guy was very good at programming workflow databases in FileMaker.So you think Java Desktop is going to challenge Windows? It's just another Linux desktop. Why should it do any better than any of the other Linux desktops that have appeared in the last few years? Not to mention all the desktop environments (at least 4) that Sun has come up, all of which failed miserably. Sun is beating a horse that is so dead, it's, well, pathetic.
Yes, I know who invented Javascript. But Netscape couldn't have made the change without Sun's permission. So somebody at Sun had to decide that using "Java" to describe a language that had only incidental connection to the Java platform was a good idea.
Microsoft did the same thing with .NET, though they soon realized they were overdoing it and pulled back. Sun has done it from the beginning (hence Javascript) and has never had a clue that they're doing anything wrong.
I'll say it again: Java's worst enemy is not Microsoft, it's Sun!
Good project management doesn't pretend to know everything (who can?) or try to tell everybody what to do (they'd just get ignored). It earns the respect and cooperation of the rest of the team, and makes sure people understand the consequences of breaking the rules (like fiddling with new features when you're supposed to be stomping showstopper bugs). If you don't understand that kind of coordination, either you've never had the good luck to work with a good PM (very likely) or you're just to full of yourself to be capable of real teamwork.
Boy, I'll bet you're a joy to manage.
Oh good lord, yet another post quibbling with my engineer/PM quantification. Doesn't anybody around here know what a figure of speech is? Do you think that the difference between Dr. Seuss and Leo Tolstoy is summarized by "a picture is worth a thousand words"? If I had said, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure," would everybody be posting price quotes on tanin?
I guess it's pretty common to combine these two roles, but every place I've worked they were separate. And it works quite well, provided the PMs are given due respect and are good at what they do.
On the other hand, there's a place where I worked where they promoted a field engineer who lived two time zones away to PM, and allowed him to telecommute. The guy was reasonably smart and competent, but he had no hope of doing a decent job on that basis. It's hard enough to have a productive planning meeting when several key people are calling in. But when the guy who's supposed to be running the meeting isn't physically present? Forget it.
But the absolute worst PM I ever met was, well, me. I can say this without embaressment because I never set out to be one. I just took a contracting job where everybody in a huge pubs team delegated all the bureaucratic scutwork to me. (To be fair, I grabbed some work that I saw wasn't getting done. Should have let it remain so until the manager was forced to recognize the huge chunks falling through her departmental cracks.) So I was de-facto project manager, a role I am unsuited for by training, talent, and temperament. Ironically, this company had absolutely the best professional PMs I have ever had the pleasure to work with. But they had no authority in the little corporate fiefdom my manager had carved out.
Yeah, very bigoted of me to equate "pathetic" with "little". My bad.
If you don't like answering every little phone call, don't. Get a phone that has caller ID and a button that lets you turn off the ringer if you don't want to answer. Let the voice mail pick up if you're busy, oror in a place where it would be rude or dangerous to talk on the phone. Or if you just don't feel like answering the phone. (In this era of telemarketers and other meme spammers, you cannot treat answering the phone as a fundamental obligation.) If you let a device like a cell phone enslave you, it's not the device that needs retooling.
And distinctive ring tones aren't meant to be cute or pretty. They're a way to distinguish your phone so you don't reach for your pocket every time somebody else's phone ring.
Speaking of which, does anybody know WTF "Kyung Bokung" is? It's one of the ring tones hard-wired into my Samsung 3500. Since the alternatives are various electronic chirps, and a couple of Western Classical pieces I like too much to listen to them every time my phone rings, it's what I use. I'm guessing Korean folk or patriotic tune. Google, for once, is not helpful.
Here.
Grammar Nazis are bad enough, but a vocabulary Nazi? Talk about stupid obsessions.
I find it interesting that you seem to prefer PDAs with proper keyboards, but still give a system extra points if it runs -- and has a screen big enough to use -- Calligrapher. Have you considered a tablet PC?