Now, I don't live anywhere near Seattle but every day the traffic looks the same to me. A bunch of heavy traffic in the same places every day.
Now, I don't live anywhere near Seattle either, but please allow me to tell you a small story
I recently lived in southern California, and daily traffic was pretty much as you describe it. In fact, it's so regular that if you know where you're going to work, you can pick where to live in order to minimize total daily traffic.
Even more recently, I moved to northeastern Illinois. I don't know how much you know about the midwest, but there are two season here: winter, and road construction. In addition, right around now, we seem to have a lot of storms, which seem to knock out power with disturbing regularity.
Now, I live fifteen miles away from where I work, and there are no fewer than five distinct routes from my house to my work. One route traditionally has less traffic, and gets me there fastest, so I take that by default.
However, just yesterday, one traffic light was unpowered and replaced by a stop sign. It took me an extra hour to get to work, due to the five miles of backed up traffic behind that intersection. Had I known about that beforehand, I could have taken a different route. As it was, I was already committed, and short of going all the way back home and taking a different route, I just had to sit through it.
My point being: in some areas of the country, there are MANY factors involved in traffic patterns. Is the 41 closed to one lane for inane construction? I'll take the 21, thanks. The 21 and the 60 both backed up because of construction at their intersection? I'll head over to the 45 and come in from the other side. This information would be priceless.
I'd spend $500 on a device like this one that showed the local roads in my area, in a heartbeat. Maybe more. And I'd be the most popular guy in my office near the end of every day.
I second his remark about the super-solid Linux server, and add that it also has a super-solid and mature Linux CLIENT. I played NWN natively on my Linux box, using TeamSound, with both the TS and NWN servers running on a Linux server, and my friends connecting to both with their Windoze clients. Not a single problem.
I've since used the Windows TS client to connect with friends while playing PlanetSide, again with the Linux TS server. Super solid. It also lets you choose from several audio codecs, which all generally sound good but let you choose how much bandwidth you use, as well.
The truth of it is actually less exciting: the volume of traffic - and I quote - "hosed" the routing table, making the small but important packets very, very confused.
Newsbreak! You don't have the right to download free music!
True, although interestingly enough, that is the implication. Note that they're only going after the people who share the music, not those who download it. Thus, the 'leeches' who download but do not share should be safe and sound.
Who's doing the copying? He who shares, or he who downloads?
He who shares. When you fire up KaZaa, you are explicitly handing over everything in your 'shared folder' to the Internet. If somebody grabs it, you essentially made the copy that the other guy took.
In your scenario, it would be trivial for you NOT to share your copyrighted material; just put it elsewhere. Keep your shared directory clean with only the GPL'ed parody songs, and you've got nothing to fear.
...if you don't have anything better to do than spend a week configuring the damn thing to even run at all. <gripe about library hell>
Or, install Gentoo. No library hell, keeps you up to date with the latest version of video and audio drivers and whatnot. I've installed NWN and UT2003 with no issues, and Winex was also a one-line install. I played EQ on Linux for a good while.
I agree that the quantity of games isn't there yet, but many of the problems you mention with Linux gaming have been solved, in at least one distribution, and that means the solutions will spread to the others.
If somebody came to me as asked "I want a gaming computer, what should I install?" I wouldn't tell them Linux, either. But to say that it's near-impossible to play games on Linux is also untrue.
Besides, we all know how some movies get a sex scene "tacked on" just to titillate the dating audience.
Case in point: the overly-long rave/orgy/sex scene in the recent Matrix. What was that, ten minutes? No point whatsoever. Okay, Zion's filled with 'spirit', Neo has problems keeping it up because of these funky images of his honey falling to her death... that last is the only part that matters, and we already knew it.
How about the french guy's whole speech about the woman in the restaurant, making her eat the cake and zooming in between her legs? That meant nothing at all to the rest of the movie, or the rest of the guy's speech, for that matter. <snip>
You can bet your ass that if Macs were as ubiqutous as x86 machines, they'd be getting slammed with worms too...
While your point seems logical, there are some glaring examples that disprove similar arguments. For example, Netcraft shows Apache running more than twice as many web servers as IIS, but when the exploits come around, which platform gets nailed?
All the recent worms I can remember use some sort of Windows hole to get in and then Outlook to spread themselves. You claim that's because Windows is far more common, but doesn't most email get routed by Unix boxen over the 'net? Why attack the endpoints when all the middle nodes are right there in front of you? Hack a Unix box, take over sendmail, and you have access to every piece of mail that passes through the machine. Why don't people do that?
The answer is that the endpoints, the Windows clients, are much easier to get into. MacOS X is built on top of BSD, which has a security track record that is way, way better than Windows. I believe you are incorrect, and if tomorrow everybody turned off their Windows boxen and turned on a Mac, you'd pretty much see the end of this kind of thing, at least for a long while.
Having spent all my schooling years in California, I still have a surreal moment when I hear people talking about "snow days" in the context of something that actually happens sometimes.
I still don't get this. Aren't the schools heated? Are they trying to keep kids from freezing or cars from crashing on the way to the schools? Aren't there plows and salters and whatnot that keep the roads passable so the kids can get to and from the school building(s)?
This is not a troll, I'm completely serious. I don't understand why you wouldn't have to go to school on a day with heavy snow. Can somebody (preferably sombody polite) fill me in? Thanks.
Honestly, people here need to chill out on this one. The guy wasn't asking "I want what I've got now, but for free!! How can we do that?" He was thinking a ways into the future of wireless, and wondering what challenges we would face with an ad-hoc pervasive wireless mesh network model.
The concept is very interesting, and the questions he asked were reasonable. What would we come up against, and how might be solve it? What would such a network look like? And instead of switching into "long term what-if" mode, you all just told him he was a 13-year-old kid who wants everything for free, and he's a moron.
If the concept is so stupid, why are there mesh network projects right now? People are actually out there designing the first steps of what this guy is asking, and when we see stories about them, the community here thinks it's the coolest thing ever. But when then guy basically asks about a future in that direction, you rip into him.
So... geez, chill out. Open the mind a little, spend some time thinking about things that may seem absurd at first glance. Even after hashing through it a little in your head, it may STILL be absurd, but there may be some nifty concepts related to it, or some interesting ideas that might give insight to one of today's problems.
Blasting the dude and the question as a knee-jerk reaction doesn't get anybody anywhere, and only shows your own small-mindedness.
I recently had an experience like this. I was talking with a bunch of people on-line through the limited Yahoo Groups Chat, and they wanted a better way to chat. Somebody suggested "mirc".
I'm on a Linux box. There is no mIRC. There are many IRC clients, however. It's a minor point, but I mentioned it because they sounded stupid when they would ask me "Are you in mirc now?" "No, I'm in IRC, though." "Huh?"
"You still don't get it, do you? He'll find her. That's what he does. That's all he does! You can't stop him! He'll wade through you, reach down her throat, and pull her fucking heart out!"
"Listen! And understand! That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with! It can't be reasoned with! It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead!"
I have nothing to add, really, but I just wanted to say that this is an excellent post. Positive and very informative. Almost makes me turn on the "I'm willing to moderate" flag so I can give points to posts like this. =)
The workloads of the remaining 5% are specialized enough that a synthetic benchmark is unlikely to be a good predictor.
This is correct, and thus the CPU benchmarks should be timed runs of various things that high-CPU people actually do. Encode a range of WAVs to MP3, encode a range of MPGs to DivX, render a range of scenes in a 3D engine or something, and so on.
They key would be to have a standard set of WAVs and MPGs and whatnot, and run the same version of the encoders with the same run-time flags every time. Thus you'd get a proper comparison between CPUs in any given test, and also proper relative performance to previous tests. Every year or so, publish a new standard version of the encoders with the proper flags to use, and you've got updated benchmarks.
This question is completely off-topic, but I'm hoping somebody will read it and fill me in.
Why is RAR so popular with on-line file-sharing people? Why the break from ZIP, which I thought has been the standard archive format on Windows for about a decade now?
I don't mind RAR, of course, I just wonder why it's making such a come-back in this genre. Thanks.
I think the point here it not to hook you up with local people so you can chat with them, but so you can MEET them.
For example, I live in an apartment building, and almost never see the other people on my own floor, not to mention the floors below me or the buildings around me. The desired use case is for me to fire up this program and "discover" that a guy just one building over also likes building model airplanes, or 5-6 people in the complex all watch Smallville every week... so we can gather together, in person, and do these things together.
When considering new technology, I always try to imagine a super-advanced version and how it would work. In this case, imagine that we could all just know some basic information about the people around us, just by looking at them. You might walk into a bar with some friends to have a beer, and glance around the room, and see a woman who also runs Linux and re-builds old cars, JUST LIKE YOU! So you walk over and strike up a conversation.
TiVo knows that I make more than $155.88/year, but I haven't given them an indication of how much more.
Actually, you do give them your ZIP code, which could be used to infer property value and, thus, mortgage and property taxes in a rough way. And you also give them which cable line-up you have, which they can correlate directly to how much you pay for cable, which may give them an indication of your disposable income. With those two factors cross-referenced, I'm sure they could place most of their subscribers accurately withing a $20k range.
That being said, I worry not about the info in this particular article. I thought they were already doing this.
You do know that advertising is what pays for TV programming, broadcasting, etc., in the USofA, don't you?
Yes, we're all aware of that. In addition, many of us would like to be able to make the decision to not participate in that arrangement. Where are the alternate methods of getting our video entertainment? Movies, sure, and hence DVDs and whatnot. Although those are less commercial-free these days, they remain largely so, and I partake.
However, I choose not to waste 30% of my time being advertised at when I want to watch something on television. And it is 30%; an "hour" program contains 42 minutes of actual show.
So, I skip commercials. And I have a handy device to help me do it. I'm certainly not violating any agreement, since I have entered into none. And if we all do this, sure, we put pressure on "the way it works", possibly causing changes. Maybe my cable bill will go up; I'll decide if it's worth it, and if not, I'll cancel it and get my TV off the air. Maybe even that'll go away... then what?
Well, that's a fine question. What would happen at that point? The networks just give up and go home? I think not, TV makes them a lot of money, and they're going to try everything to keep making that money.
I'm actually rather excited to see what happens next. Maybe some kind of pay-per-show setup? We've already got that for movies, they'd just need to revamp the infrastructure and pricing a bit for normal shows, and LOSE THE COMMERCIALS. Maybe they'll produce shows straight to DVD? That would also be great, if priced reasonably.
The point being, yes, I know how it works, and I don't like it. Thus, I do something different, and if that causes "the system" to fail, then it SHOULD fail. And it will probably be replaced by something better, more in tune with what we actually want.
People who think Perl is great are totally ignorant of other languages, and have extremely bad taste.
Yea? Well, you smell, and your dog's ugly, too.
Doug
Re:I am sure TiVo is good technology...
on
Should Apple Buy TiVo?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
...but really, tell me exactly who is willing to buy a nearly $300 box and then pay $14 a month after that for it to just work properly, and for the the privilege for all of there TV viewing habits to be sold off to marketers?
<raises hand>
It's pretty obvious to me that you've never really used a TiVo, nor even looked into the privacy issue. First of all, "my info" is never sold to anybody; aggregate info is sold to networks. TiVo can look at its users' usage as an anonymous whole and say things like "this commercial was watched by 80% of the people" or "only 30% of TiVo owners recorded that show." This hardly gives the network any info about ME.
Second... simply put, TiVo will change the way you think about TV, and depending on how much TV you watch, can literally change your life. I just gave one to a friend as a wedding gift. She was worried she'd just turn into a couch potato, but she says it has had the opposite effect: instead of having to be home when a particular show is broadcast, she can arrange her own schedule and watch the show when she has time. TiVo has freed her from the shackles of network scheduling, and she spends more evenings out with her friends now.
But all that aside, it's just a better way to watch TV. How often to you bother to record a show so you can watch it later? With a TiVo, you can do it in seconds, and no worries about finding a tape or anything. It just there, and it just works.
Of course, in many instances, you only have to do that once. Hear about a new show coming up, might be worth watching? Set up a season pass. Your TiVo will record every episode, even if the network moves it around. You can do this weeks in advance, and only remember the new show when you see it in your TiVo list of shows. Even if the show sucks and you erase the season pass, at least you got to see it.
Of course, we use season passes for everything: grab all the episodes of the shows we like, or always keep a couple "I Love Lucy" on the list so we can watch them when we're doing something else in the living room.
Not to mention wishlists. I thought Amy Smart was pretty cute, so I told my TiVo to grab any sitcom episode that she was in. It found a couple Felicity and Scrubs episodes, which was cool. In fact, I so liked the Scrubs ep that I threw in a season pass for it; we'll see how some other ones are.
Many of these activities you cannot do with a VCR and a TV Guide, or it would take hours of poring over the text and programming the thing, not to mention the tapes. With the TiVo, it's all wrapped up in a truly easy-to-use on-screen GUI. It really is the beginning of the next generation of television.
At this very moment MS has the technology to just roll over TiVo within the year, they have the Xbox, WebTV, and Windows Media Player, toss all of this into box added with the usual MS marketing and you got a killer app. that will kill TiVo and all the other PVRs at the moment...
It was called Ultimate TV, and it bombed, and TiVo never even blinked. Thank you, please play again.
Disable page moving, page resizing, and bringing page to foreground.
This doesn't appear to work, at least not in Pheonix.
The ad opens when you click a link, so it's a valid new window. It apparently is created at the size of your screen, so there's no resizing or moving involved, and new windows are usually on top of others, so there's no raising involved.
I had to completely disable Javascript in order to get it not to come up. This does not bode well.
This brings another problem with BitTorrent - it doesn't work well unless clients are connected for a while after they finish the file. This could be "quick-fixed" by leaving the client open until it has sent at least one copy of the file out (or that many bits, your choice).
Seems to me that running Bittorrent inside the browser would be ideal for this. After the browser donwnloaded the inline image, it could keep the 'client window' open in the background and act as a source for a while. How long it does this could be set in the preferences, either a fixed time or a fixed amount of data served or some percentage or multiple of the original file size.
Many of those are incoming (NAT people won't work as well)...
I run the various Bittorrent clients (btdownloadgui.py, btdownloadcurses.py) from a Linux box behind a NAT, with no special ports open or forwarded, and I act as a server just fine. I regularly have the outgoing pipe of my cable modem completely saturated with Bittorrent traffic.
This large amount of sockets tends to make some of the cheaper commodity cards break.
As at least one other comment points out, that doesn't even make sense. It's possible that some OS's TCP/IP stacks can't handle an extreme number of connections, but that has nothing to do with the NIC.
And, of course, the client written into Mozilla could easily regulate the total number of connections to something reasonable. It already does exactly that for open HTTP connections.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, I don't live anywhere near Seattle either, but please allow me to tell you a small story
I recently lived in southern California, and daily traffic was pretty much as you describe it. In fact, it's so regular that if you know where you're going to work, you can pick where to live in order to minimize total daily traffic.
Even more recently, I moved to northeastern Illinois. I don't know how much you know about the midwest, but there are two season here: winter, and road construction. In addition, right around now, we seem to have a lot of storms, which seem to knock out power with disturbing regularity.
Now, I live fifteen miles away from where I work, and there are no fewer than five distinct routes from my house to my work. One route traditionally has less traffic, and gets me there fastest, so I take that by default.
However, just yesterday, one traffic light was unpowered and replaced by a stop sign. It took me an extra hour to get to work, due to the five miles of backed up traffic behind that intersection. Had I known about that beforehand, I could have taken a different route. As it was, I was already committed, and short of going all the way back home and taking a different route, I just had to sit through it.
My point being: in some areas of the country, there are MANY factors involved in traffic patterns. Is the 41 closed to one lane for inane construction? I'll take the 21, thanks. The 21 and the 60 both backed up because of construction at their intersection? I'll head over to the 45 and come in from the other side. This information would be priceless.
I'd spend $500 on a device like this one that showed the local roads in my area, in a heartbeat. Maybe more. And I'd be the most popular guy in my office near the end of every day.
Doug
I second his remark about the super-solid Linux server, and add that it also has a super-solid and mature Linux CLIENT. I played NWN natively on my Linux box, using TeamSound, with both the TS and NWN servers running on a Linux server, and my friends connecting to both with their Windoze clients. Not a single problem.
I've since used the Windows TS client to connect with friends while playing PlanetSide, again with the Linux TS server. Super solid. It also lets you choose from several audio codecs, which all generally sound good but let you choose how much bandwidth you use, as well.
Doug
It continues:
Doug
True, although interestingly enough, that is the implication. Note that they're only going after the people who share the music, not those who download it. Thus, the 'leeches' who download but do not share should be safe and sound.
Doug
He who shares. When you fire up KaZaa, you are explicitly handing over everything in your 'shared folder' to the Internet. If somebody grabs it, you essentially made the copy that the other guy took.
In your scenario, it would be trivial for you NOT to share your copyrighted material; just put it elsewhere. Keep your shared directory clean with only the GPL'ed parody songs, and you've got nothing to fear.
Doug
Or, install Gentoo. No library hell, keeps you up to date with the latest version of video and audio drivers and whatnot. I've installed NWN and UT2003 with no issues, and Winex was also a one-line install. I played EQ on Linux for a good while.
I agree that the quantity of games isn't there yet, but many of the problems you mention with Linux gaming have been solved, in at least one distribution, and that means the solutions will spread to the others.
If somebody came to me as asked "I want a gaming computer, what should I install?" I wouldn't tell them Linux, either. But to say that it's near-impossible to play games on Linux is also untrue.
Doug
Case in point: the overly-long rave/orgy/sex scene in the recent Matrix. What was that, ten minutes? No point whatsoever. Okay, Zion's filled with 'spirit', Neo has problems keeping it up because of these funky images of his honey falling to her death... that last is the only part that matters, and we already knew it.
How about the french guy's whole speech about the woman in the restaurant, making her eat the cake and zooming in between her legs? That meant nothing at all to the rest of the movie, or the rest of the guy's speech, for that matter. <snip>
Doug
Gentoo, baby! Gentoo!!
(runs off giggling...)
Doug
While your point seems logical, there are some glaring examples that disprove similar arguments. For example, Netcraft shows Apache running more than twice as many web servers as IIS, but when the exploits come around, which platform gets nailed?
All the recent worms I can remember use some sort of Windows hole to get in and then Outlook to spread themselves. You claim that's because Windows is far more common, but doesn't most email get routed by Unix boxen over the 'net? Why attack the endpoints when all the middle nodes are right there in front of you? Hack a Unix box, take over sendmail, and you have access to every piece of mail that passes through the machine. Why don't people do that?
The answer is that the endpoints, the Windows clients, are much easier to get into. MacOS X is built on top of BSD, which has a security track record that is way, way better than Windows. I believe you are incorrect, and if tomorrow everybody turned off their Windows boxen and turned on a Mac, you'd pretty much see the end of this kind of thing, at least for a long while.
Doug
Good lord. What on earth requires 17" of titanium plating??
Doug
(offtopic)
Having spent all my schooling years in California, I still have a surreal moment when I hear people talking about "snow days" in the context of something that actually happens sometimes.
I still don't get this. Aren't the schools heated? Are they trying to keep kids from freezing or cars from crashing on the way to the schools? Aren't there plows and salters and whatnot that keep the roads passable so the kids can get to and from the school building(s)?
This is not a troll, I'm completely serious. I don't understand why you wouldn't have to go to school on a day with heavy snow. Can somebody (preferably sombody polite) fill me in? Thanks.
Doug
Honestly, people here need to chill out on this one. The guy wasn't asking "I want what I've got now, but for free!! How can we do that?" He was thinking a ways into the future of wireless, and wondering what challenges we would face with an ad-hoc pervasive wireless mesh network model.
The concept is very interesting, and the questions he asked were reasonable. What would we come up against, and how might be solve it? What would such a network look like? And instead of switching into "long term what-if" mode, you all just told him he was a 13-year-old kid who wants everything for free, and he's a moron.
If the concept is so stupid, why are there mesh network projects right now? People are actually out there designing the first steps of what this guy is asking, and when we see stories about them, the community here thinks it's the coolest thing ever. But when then guy basically asks about a future in that direction, you rip into him.
So... geez, chill out. Open the mind a little, spend some time thinking about things that may seem absurd at first glance. Even after hashing through it a little in your head, it may STILL be absurd, but there may be some nifty concepts related to it, or some interesting ideas that might give insight to one of today's problems.
Blasting the dude and the question as a knee-jerk reaction doesn't get anybody anywhere, and only shows your own small-mindedness.
Doug
I recently had an experience like this. I was talking with a bunch of people on-line through the limited Yahoo Groups Chat, and they wanted a better way to chat. Somebody suggested "mirc".
I'm on a Linux box. There is no mIRC. There are many IRC clients, however. It's a minor point, but I mentioned it because they sounded stupid when they would ask me "Are you in mirc now?" "No, I'm in IRC, though." "Huh?"
Doug
IBM = Terminator
Doug
You sign things "Anonymous Cow"?
Doug
I have nothing to add, really, but I just wanted to say that this is an excellent post. Positive and very informative. Almost makes me turn on the "I'm willing to moderate" flag so I can give points to posts like this. =)
Doug
This is correct, and thus the CPU benchmarks should be timed runs of various things that high-CPU people actually do. Encode a range of WAVs to MP3, encode a range of MPGs to DivX, render a range of scenes in a 3D engine or something, and so on.
They key would be to have a standard set of WAVs and MPGs and whatnot, and run the same version of the encoders with the same run-time flags every time. Thus you'd get a proper comparison between CPUs in any given test, and also proper relative performance to previous tests. Every year or so, publish a new standard version of the encoders with the proper flags to use, and you've got updated benchmarks.
Doug
This question is completely off-topic, but I'm hoping somebody will read it and fill me in.
Why is RAR so popular with on-line file-sharing people? Why the break from ZIP, which I thought has been the standard archive format on Windows for about a decade now?
I don't mind RAR, of course, I just wonder why it's making such a come-back in this genre. Thanks.
Doug
I think the point here it not to hook you up with local people so you can chat with them, but so you can MEET them.
For example, I live in an apartment building, and almost never see the other people on my own floor, not to mention the floors below me or the buildings around me. The desired use case is for me to fire up this program and "discover" that a guy just one building over also likes building model airplanes, or 5-6 people in the complex all watch Smallville every week... so we can gather together, in person, and do these things together.
When considering new technology, I always try to imagine a super-advanced version and how it would work. In this case, imagine that we could all just know some basic information about the people around us, just by looking at them. You might walk into a bar with some friends to have a beer, and glance around the room, and see a woman who also runs Linux and re-builds old cars, JUST LIKE YOU! So you walk over and strike up a conversation.
That would be cool.
Doug
Actually, you do give them your ZIP code, which could be used to infer property value and, thus, mortgage and property taxes in a rough way. And you also give them which cable line-up you have, which they can correlate directly to how much you pay for cable, which may give them an indication of your disposable income. With those two factors cross-referenced, I'm sure they could place most of their subscribers accurately withing a $20k range.
That being said, I worry not about the info in this particular article. I thought they were already doing this.
Doug
Yes, we're all aware of that. In addition, many of us would like to be able to make the decision to not participate in that arrangement. Where are the alternate methods of getting our video entertainment? Movies, sure, and hence DVDs and whatnot. Although those are less commercial-free these days, they remain largely so, and I partake.
However, I choose not to waste 30% of my time being advertised at when I want to watch something on television. And it is 30%; an "hour" program contains 42 minutes of actual show.
So, I skip commercials. And I have a handy device to help me do it. I'm certainly not violating any agreement, since I have entered into none. And if we all do this, sure, we put pressure on "the way it works", possibly causing changes. Maybe my cable bill will go up; I'll decide if it's worth it, and if not, I'll cancel it and get my TV off the air. Maybe even that'll go away... then what?
Well, that's a fine question. What would happen at that point? The networks just give up and go home? I think not, TV makes them a lot of money, and they're going to try everything to keep making that money.
I'm actually rather excited to see what happens next. Maybe some kind of pay-per-show setup? We've already got that for movies, they'd just need to revamp the infrastructure and pricing a bit for normal shows, and LOSE THE COMMERCIALS. Maybe they'll produce shows straight to DVD? That would also be great, if priced reasonably.
The point being, yes, I know how it works, and I don't like it. Thus, I do something different, and if that causes "the system" to fail, then it SHOULD fail. And it will probably be replaced by something better, more in tune with what we actually want.
Doug
Yea? Well, you smell, and your dog's ugly, too.
Doug
<raises hand>
It's pretty obvious to me that you've never really used a TiVo, nor even looked into the privacy issue. First of all, "my info" is never sold to anybody; aggregate info is sold to networks. TiVo can look at its users' usage as an anonymous whole and say things like "this commercial was watched by 80% of the people" or "only 30% of TiVo owners recorded that show." This hardly gives the network any info about ME.
Second... simply put, TiVo will change the way you think about TV, and depending on how much TV you watch, can literally change your life. I just gave one to a friend as a wedding gift. She was worried she'd just turn into a couch potato, but she says it has had the opposite effect: instead of having to be home when a particular show is broadcast, she can arrange her own schedule and watch the show when she has time. TiVo has freed her from the shackles of network scheduling, and she spends more evenings out with her friends now.
But all that aside, it's just a better way to watch TV. How often to you bother to record a show so you can watch it later? With a TiVo, you can do it in seconds, and no worries about finding a tape or anything. It just there, and it just works.
Of course, in many instances, you only have to do that once. Hear about a new show coming up, might be worth watching? Set up a season pass. Your TiVo will record every episode, even if the network moves it around. You can do this weeks in advance, and only remember the new show when you see it in your TiVo list of shows. Even if the show sucks and you erase the season pass, at least you got to see it.
Of course, we use season passes for everything: grab all the episodes of the shows we like, or always keep a couple "I Love Lucy" on the list so we can watch them when we're doing something else in the living room.
Not to mention wishlists. I thought Amy Smart was pretty cute, so I told my TiVo to grab any sitcom episode that she was in. It found a couple Felicity and Scrubs episodes, which was cool. In fact, I so liked the Scrubs ep that I threw in a season pass for it; we'll see how some other ones are.
Many of these activities you cannot do with a VCR and a TV Guide, or it would take hours of poring over the text and programming the thing, not to mention the tapes. With the TiVo, it's all wrapped up in a truly easy-to-use on-screen GUI. It really is the beginning of the next generation of television.
It was called Ultimate TV, and it bombed, and TiVo never even blinked. Thank you, please play again.
Doug
This doesn't appear to work, at least not in Pheonix.
The ad opens when you click a link, so it's a valid new window. It apparently is created at the size of your screen, so there's no resizing or moving involved, and new windows are usually on top of others, so there's no raising involved.
I had to completely disable Javascript in order to get it not to come up. This does not bode well.
Doug
Seems to me that running Bittorrent inside the browser would be ideal for this. After the browser donwnloaded the inline image, it could keep the 'client window' open in the background and act as a source for a while. How long it does this could be set in the preferences, either a fixed time or a fixed amount of data served or some percentage or multiple of the original file size.
I run the various Bittorrent clients (btdownloadgui.py, btdownloadcurses.py) from a Linux box behind a NAT, with no special ports open or forwarded, and I act as a server just fine. I regularly have the outgoing pipe of my cable modem completely saturated with Bittorrent traffic.
As at least one other comment points out, that doesn't even make sense. It's possible that some OS's TCP/IP stacks can't handle an extreme number of connections, but that has nothing to do with the NIC.
And, of course, the client written into Mozilla could easily regulate the total number of connections to something reasonable. It already does exactly that for open HTTP connections.
Doug